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From: TT
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1 of 3 | Photo: Mulugeta Ayene / AP / TT
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sees victory in Tigray. Tigranian opponents, however, say they will continue the fight.
Ethiopia’s prime minister announces victory in Tigray, but the Tigranian forces do not appear to have surrendered.
It is feared that the bloody battles of recent weeks will turn into a protracted guerrilla war.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of people have died in the Tigray conflict since federal forces entered the region nearly a month ago.
This weekend, they captured the region’s capital, Mekele, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is victorious. According to him, the Tigre Popular Liberation Front (TPLF) has almost been defeated.
– Our constitution was attacked and it did not take us three years, it took three weeks, he says in a four-hour speech in parliament, where he draws a parallel between the offensive of government forces and the civil war in the United States in the decade of 1860.
– Our army is disciplined and victorious.
Say it’s a fight
However, TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael has a different opinion. It is said that he fled in the direction of South Sudan, but he himself says that the fighting is progressing outside of Mekele. It also says that the TPLF forces captured a group of Eritrean soldiers on the Ethiopian side of the northern border.
Information about the war is constantly being divided. The TPLF claims that the government forces attacked Mekele from the air causing great devastation and deaths, which Abiy Ahmed denies. The Prime Minister claims that not a single civilian has been injured.
– Even if we have a larger capacity, we will not use it. We are not the military junta (which he calls the Tigran government). We behave responsibly, he says.
Hospitals in the city have been filled with injured patients, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Hundreds of people are said to have been killed in a massacre in the city of Mai-Kadra in early November and both sides accuse each other of being behind it.
According to the TPLF, the government forces are supported by Eritrean soldiers, which Eritrea has denied. Rockets have been fired from Tigranian soil at the Eritrean capital, Asmara.
Eritrea plays a role
The federal government justified its military intervention in Tigray by saying that the TPLF carried out a deadly attack on government soldiers. That attack, says the TPLF, is not behind.
The situation was already tense in the compromised federation of Ethiopia, where there are around 80 ethnic groups and a total of ten regions preparing for great autonomy. Abiy Ahmed was elected the country’s leader in 2018 with the ambition to unite the country.
Last year, the Prime Minister received the Nobel Peace Prize for having succeeded in unfreezing long-standing relations with neighboring Eritrea. The governments of the two countries find a common enemy in the TPLF. An obsessive tigray is seen as a geographic and metaphorical gap between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
For a long time, the TPLF was a ruling party in the coalition governments that preceded the government of Abiy Ahmed. The prime minister has singled out the movement as a scapegoat when necessary and said it tries to ignite the country’s internal contradictions.
Do you take a position on the mountain?
TPLF leaders have vowed not to surrender while federal forces are on Tigranian soil. The movement has experience of guerrilla warfare against an Ethiopian core power, as this is how it contributed to the overthrow of the country’s autocratic communist regime in 1991. There are mountains and border areas in the region that serve the purpose.
– Although it is not clear how much Tigranian forces have been exhausted by the conflict, armed resistance to federal power may well be supported by large sectors of the regional government and the party apparatus, including local armed groups, as well as other nationalist factions. Tigranians. Will Davison, an analyst at International Crisis Group, told Reuters.
More than 45,000 people are estimated to have fled the fighting to Ethiopia’s neighbors.
Access to the Internet and the telephone network has been restricted and outsiders have not been given access to Tigray. Therefore, it is difficult to get an independent picture of what is happening. The Addis Ababa government has urged the outside world not to get involved.
– We may be poor, but we are not a country that is haggling for our independence. Threatening Ethiopia for money will not work, says Abiy Ahmed.
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