NAIROBI, Kenya
A year after civil war erupted between the Ethiopian government and its Eritrean and ethnic militia allies on one side, and soldiers hailing from the northern region of Tigray on the other, a once-unlikely scenario looks like a real possibility: the rebels could topple the government.
This past week, Ethiopia declared a state of
emergency amid fears that soldiers from the armed wing of the Tigray People's
Liberation Front, or TPLF, would march through the streets of the capital,
Addis Ababa. The federal armed forces have appealed to retired soldiers and
veterans to rejoin the military. And they have asked residents of
Addis Ababa to join the war effort with whatever weapons they have.
The TPLF, supported by the Oromo Liberation
Army (OLA) — a rebel group from Ethiopia's Oromia region — are a
bit more than 200 miles from the capital, but it could still take days or weeks
of fighting across mountainous and hostile terrain for them to close the
distance, the latest reports from inside the country suggest.
Saturday the U.S. State Department ordered
"non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members" to
leave Ethiopia. The White House has
declared the situation in Ethiopia "an unusual and extraordinary
threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,"
and the U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, arrived in
Addis Ababa on Thursday to push
for cease-fire talks.
Neighboring Kenya issued a plea to end what it calls a "nationwide social convulsion." China and Russia, who had been reluctant to weigh in on the conflict, joined a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an "end to hostilities."
On Friday, the TPLF and OLA signed an alliance
with seven other rebel groups. "Definitely we will have a change in
Ethiopia before Ethiopia implodes," Berhane Gebrechristos, a former
foreign minister and Tigray official, told reporters at a signing ceremony in
Washington, D.C.
For Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, it
has been a sharp turn of events. He's gone from freshly minted Nobel Peace
Prize laureate to international outcast in less than two
years. Abiy now faces grim prospects: continue a war that could easily spill
into the densely populated capital, a defeat at the hands of a renegade army or
a negotiated settlement that would severely weaken his position.
Before the prime minister came to power in
2018, the TPLF ruled Ethiopia for more than a quarter century and waged two
intensely bloody wars: a 15-year conflict that toppled a communist military
dictatorship and saw the country's Eritrean region win independence, and years
later a much shorter but brutal border conflict with the newly formed country.
One of Abiy's first moves was to extend an
olive branch to his Eritrean counterpart, President Isaias Afwerki, an overture
that led to the Ethiopian leader receiving the Peace Prize in 2019.
But there remains "a lot of bad
blood" between Eritrea and the Tigrayans, says Michelle Gavin, a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She says there's "a lot of
historical grievance coming from the Eritrean elite and [aimed] very
specifically at the TPLF from that era," adding that the Eritreans still
nurse a "sense of betrayal" over the years of violence.
A report released Wednesday by the Office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Ethiopian Human Rights
Commission blamed
all sides in the year-long conflict for atrocities including
extrajudicial executions, torture, rape and attacks on refugees.
While the U.N. did not come to a conclusion on whether genocide was committed, an internal U.S. report concluded that last November, forces allied with Ethiopia's government "deliberately and efficiently" rendered Western Tigray "ethnically homogeneous through the organized use of force and intimidation."
While all factions have committed violence
against civilians, Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's
Africa Center says the most egregious human rights abuses in Tigray have been
carried out by Eritrean soldiers. "They have tried to eliminate the
Tigrayans," he says, "and there's no telling what the Tigrayans might
be interested in doing if they were able to seize the upper hand against the
Ethiopian government."
Amnesty International says Eritrean
soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed civilians in the northern Tigrayan
city of Axum, "opening fire in the streets and conducting house-to-house
raids in a massacre that may amount to a crime against humanity."
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