Michela Wrong
One of the turning points was the death of Meles Zenawi, the enlightened, highly intelligent prime minister of Ethiopia in 2012. He died very young, aged 57, of leukemia. It removed a key actor from the game. His successor didn’t hang around very long, and the influence of the TPLF started waning, having always been the dominant player in the EPRDF coalition running Ethiopia.
The idea that young people would be desperate to leave the country that the EPLF fought so hard to establish is desperately sad.
The TPLF was now on the back foot. It had lost its charismatic leader and had been in power for too long in most people’s judgment. It was increasingly unpopular. Its ideas about ethnic federalism were being challenged and were seen by many as a sham. Abiy Ahmed took over as prime minister. He comes from the Oromo community, which had particular issues with the TPLF and the way in which Ethiopia was being run at that stage.
Abi Ahmed was a former intelligence officer. He was a young, charismatic, Pentecostal figure, talking the talk about political reform as well as saying that ethnic federalism hadn’t worked and Ethiopia needed to unite as a nation. He appeared to be doing a lot of very important things.
At that stage, Ethiopia was in a near-permanent state of emergency. There were endless curfews and thousands of people had been rounded up and jailed. Abiy released thousands of political prisoners and exposed the track record of torture that had been practiced in detention centers under the TPLF and the EPRDF. He welcomed home exiled dissidents who were campaigning against the TPLF. He also prosecuted high-ranking TPLF insiders who had become pretty corrupt by that stage.
Most significantly, Abiy reached out to Isaias and said, “Okay, we’re going to deal with this border issue — you can have Badme. It’s ridiculous to have this ‘no war, no peace’ situation — we must cooperate.” There was a very important summit where the two men met in Asmara and Isaias was invited to Addis Ababa. It was the first time in two decades that there had been a summit between these two leaderships, and they reestablished diplomatic relations.
Because of that overture, Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, which now looks like a very ironic award, given how much war he has presided over since then. There have certainly been calls for it to be rescinded. After the summit, what remained of the TPLF was increasingly at odds with Abiy. The hard-liners within that movement, who had been sacked, disgraced, and humiliated in public, retired to Tigray in the north.
Abiy started work on centralizing his Prosperity Party. Then there was a spat with the Tigrayan leaders over the staging of elections. Abiy said that they couldn’t stage elections because Ethiopia had been hit by COVID-19. In Tigray, the TPLF went ahead and staged elections without him. That was already a very autonomous gesture.
In November 2020, as relations between the TPLF and the central power in Addis Ababa were getting worse and worse, the TPLF attacked the northern command in Tigray. There were mass arrests and lots of Ethiopian commanders were killed in the attack. The Tigrayans said that Abiy’s government was bolstering the northern command because it was planning to attack them, so they had just carried out a preemptive strike. People in Addis Ababa, on the other hand, saw this as a stab in the back — as if you had invited people to a dinner party and then slaughtered them.
That marked the beginning of the Tigray War, which Abiy has always been reluctant to call a war. He called it a “law enforcement operation” — he’s a bit like Vladimir Putin in that respect. Eritrea’s involvement in that war was pivotal. Abiy was also facing a challenge in the south from the Oromo Liberation Army, so his forces were stretched, but the Eritreans were there to give him a helping hand in Tigray by sending in their troops. Ethiopian troops also went in via Eritrea to attack the TPLF, which found itself the subject of a pincer movement.
Eritrea’s involvement in the Tigray War was pivotal.
A lot of people, myself included, assumed at the start that the TPLF would be defeated very quickly. In fact, they staged an extraordinary military campaign at the beginning. Having lost territory, they regained it. They knew the terrain in their region, and they had a track record of military efficiency, whereas the Ethiopian government was sending in people who didn’t know the terrain, relying on sheer manpower, and seeing a lot of its soldiers killed.
There was a point when it even looked as if the TPLF might start advancing on Addis Abba, and Abiy ended up ordering a mass mobilization. But eventually the tide of the war turned, probably because the Ethiopian army started using drones that it had purchased abroad. They seem to have made all the difference.
One of the most shocking things for people like me who’ve been watching this war from afar is the behavior of the Eritrean army in Tigray. Isaias repeatedly used the phrase “game over” when talking about the TPLF. He gave the impression that he wants to crush the TPLF and totally eradicate it from the landscape. If that involves killing thousands and thousands of Tigrayans, that doesn’t bother him in the slightest.
There have been atrocities on all sides — everyone agrees on that. But you have seen the Eritrean soldiers accused of taking part in massacres and of using gang rape as an instrument of war. They have been accused of engaging in systematic pillaging, looting hospitals, and burning crops so that Tigrayan farmers won’t be able to feed their people. Tigray is a country that is always hungry and in need of famine relief.
This scorched-earth approach was very shocking to someone like me, who knows from history that the EPLF prided itself on the way it treated civilians and prisoners of war. The impression it gives is that these youngsters who spent years drilling in the Sahel were let off the leash. They’ve been brainwashed into hatred of Tigrayans, who are seen as the traditional enemies despite the fact that so many of them are distantly related to Eritreans and they have the same religion and cultural references. They’ve just been let off the leash by their commanders and told, “Do as you will.” That was very depressing and shocking.
We now have a peace deal that was signed in Pretoria last autumn. One of the problems with that deal is that it doesn’t seem to include any reference to Eritrean forces on the ground in Tigray. Until that issue is addressed, we don’t know if the Eritreans are going to be withdrawing or staying put.
The Ethiopian government was using humanitarian aid and food aid as a weapon, cutting off access as a way of bringing Tigray to its knees.
It has been a very costly war. We know that people have starved inside Tigray. We don’t know in what numbers because the press hasn’t been given access to that area. The Ethiopian government was using humanitarian aid and food aid as a weapon, cutting off access as a way of bringing that province to its knees. We may never know quite how many people have died in Tigray during the war.
Abiy Ahmed emerges as a victor, but he’s also been morally diminished by what has taken place over the last few years in Tigray. He’s definitely seen his international reputation trashed. Looking at Isaias, you have to say that he has played the long game. He was someone who, from what I understand, always thought that Eritrea should be the dominant, hegemonic player in the Horn of Africa, despite its tiny size. It appears that he has now gotten his way, because Eritrea emerges from this war as a kingmaker — the tail that’s wagging the enormous dog that is Ethiopia.
This tiny little country really seems to be able to make or break power in Ethiopia. Back in the 2000s, at the end of the Badme War, when Eritrea was being treated as a pariah state, I don’t think anyone imagined that it would emerge as such a key player in the Horn of Africa. It is a very good and very sad example of that old proverb “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” That seems to be what Isaias has been doing over the last few years.
Source link : https://jacobin.com/2023/06/eritrea-isaias-afwerki-elf-ethiopian-conflict
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Publish date : 2023-06-03 07:00:00
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