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Former Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin (real name Ambaye Mesfin), one of the officials targeted by the arrest warrants along with other leaders of the ruling party of the Tigray region after the military operation, was allegedly killed by the security forces on Wednesday.
Seyoum Mesfin had served for more than two decades at the head of the Foreign Ministry, as Foreign Minister from 1991 to 2010 and Ethiopia’s Ambassador to China from 2010 to 2018. He was said to have been a major player since the armed struggle of the TPLF. .
Born on January 25, 1949 in Azeba, the Agame district of Tigray, Seyoum attended his primary education at the Agazi school in Adigrat. He finished high school in 1967 and obtained a diploma in chemistry from the Bahir Dar Polytechnic Institute (1968-1971). Seyoum joined the then Haile Selassie I University in 1972, where he studied chemistry and physics until 1974. He was one of seven Tigrayn students who formed the Tigray Nation Progressive Association, which was later reduced to the National Tigrayan Organization.
After the armed forces seized power in 1974, Seyoum dropped out of college in his fourth year and in 1975 escaped from Addis Ababa to join a secretly formed Tigray political party, the Tigray Liberation Front (TPLF), changed from the association formed at the University. He was among the first group of TPLF fighters to be sent to the Eritrea People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) for military training in 1975.
Seyoum had been the head of the TPLF’s foreign affairs office since 1979 and had operated from its base in Sudan for 15 years. It is said that during his stay in Khartoum, his surname was changed to ‘Musa’.
In 1989, he became a member of the executive committee of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Party (EPRDF) and received the foreign affairs portfolio. After participating in the London Peace Conference in 1991 alongside Meles Zenawi and Berhane Gebre-Christos, Seyoum returned to Addis Ababa and assumed responsibility for foreign affairs in the Ethiopian Transitional Government.
Following the overthrow of the Derg, Seyoum traveled to Addis Ababa on a plane offered to him by then-Sudanese President Al-Bashir. The aircraft had a technical problem, when he learned the nature of the problem and the danger, he had thought of dying without seeing the fruit of his 17 years of struggle but the aircraft managed to land safely in Addis, he recalled in an interview.
In the general elections of May 1995, Seyoum won a seat in the House of People’s Representatives in the Tigray region in fifth position behind Meles Zenawi, Tewolde Wolde Mariam, and Alemseged Gebre Amlak and Sebhat Nega.
Seyoum Mesfin, who served as Foreign Minister from 1991 to 2010, had been one of TPLF’s stalwarts since the TPLF-led coalition, the EPRDF, took control of the country. When a split in the TPLF occurred in March 2001, following the outbreak of a border war with Ethiopia in May 1998, Seyoum was one of the central figures supporting Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
In March 2003, an independent border commission officially awarded the disputed city of Badme to Eritrea, but Seyoum held a press conference claiming that all the government’s territorial demands, including Badme, had been met, contradicting the statement of the commission. This had tarnished his credibility and this accusation that critics had used against him for many years.
Seyoum’s efforts to conclude a peace agreement during the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea and his mediation in the border dispute between Eritrea and Yemen in 1995 had largely been unsuccessful. So was his attempt to restore peace in Somalia in 1997 by facilitating the signing of the Sodere Accord between 26 Somali faction leaders.
Seyoum was also accused by his political opponents of the role he played in serious human rights violations perpetrated within the ruling EPRDF, in which the TPLF played a dominant role.
After Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power, Seyoum continued to serve in the Foreign Ministry and an advisor within the Prime Minister’s Office until 2019. However, he resigned and left for Mekele, reportedly unhappy with his position.
When tensions rose between the federal government and the TPLF, Seyoum had repeatedly criticized Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. In an interview, he even said that the Nobel committee was considering terminating the award it awarded to Abiy Ahmed. However, the committee said there was no provision in the Nobel statutes to rescind the prize once it was awarded.
Seyoum and other senior TPLF leaders remained in Tigray’s capital Mekele until the Ethiopian army captured the city, but were later reported to have fled to the mountains of the region. Federal authorities offered a reward a few weeks ago in exchange for information that could help locate the leaders, and on Wednesday, three TPLF officials, including Seyoum, were killed and five other party members were captured after they refused. to surrender to the military. said the government.
(Main photo: Seyoum Mesfin with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov).
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