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Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said he had deployed forces to the western Benishangul-Gumuz region, a day after gunmen killed more than 100 people in the area, which has suffered regular ethnic violence.
Yesterday, the state-run Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said gunmen had killed more than 100 people in an attack at dawn in the village of Bekoji in Bulen county in Metekelzone, an area where numerous groups live. ethnic.
“The massacre of civilians in the Benishangul-Gumuz region is very tragic,” Abiy said on Twitter. “The government, to solve the root causes of the problem, has deployed a necessary force.”
Africa’s second most populous nation has been battling outbreaks of deadly violence since Abiy took office in 2018 and accelerated democratic and economic reforms that have loosened the state’s tight grip on regional rivalries.
Abiy and senior officials visited the region on Tuesday to call for calm after multiple deadly attacks in recent months, including the Nov. 14 assault in which gunmen attacked a bus and killed 34 people.
In a separate part of the country, the Ethiopian army has been fighting rebels in the northern region of Tigray for more than six weeks in a conflict that has displaced about 950,000 people.
The deployment of federal troops there has sparked fears of a security vacuum in other volatile regions.
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