Ethiopia’s army and air force are again (after a summer’s truce) attempting to annihilate what is left of Tigray, a rebellious northern province of 5.2 million (of the country’s 120 million) people. Ethiopia has also invited Eritrea, which borders Tigray, to attack the province from the north. Their pincer movement seeks to crush Tigrayan dissidence fully.
Ethiopian aircraft are bombing hospitals, refugee centers, and kindergartens in Mekele and other cities and towns within Tigray. The Ethiopian army is conducting ground offensives, too, and arming Amhara (a larger Ethiopian ethnic group) so that it can attack Tigray from the southwest. Eritrea, a dictatorship with a massive army of conscripts, is advancing on Tigray directly from the north and also through Afar, an Ethiopian province east of Tigray.
According to recent New York Times’ account, “Eritrean troops have pounded Tigray with artillery barrages from across the border and captured the Tigrayan town of Shiraro, where recent satellite images showed hundreds of marching soldiers and lines of artillery field guns. In an unusual move, several thousand Ethiopian soldiers have been flown into Eritrea to help with the assault.”
United Nations and American efforts to halt the spreading conflict have so far failed. Likewise, an African Union sponsored mediation endeavor that involves former presidents Olsegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya has stalled, although Eritrean and Ethiopian delegates were originally scheduled to meet in South Africa this week.
Ethiopia and Eritrea were sworn enemies during a bitter war between 1998 and 2000. But now Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea are united in their antagonism to everything Tigrayan. Both resent the way in which Tigrayans governed Ethiopia and also disdained Eritrea from 1991 to at least 2012, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a Tigrayan, unexpectedly died.
Meles had led a multi-year military movement of Ethiopian exiles to oust a cruel Marxist movement called the Derg. Under Mengistu Haile Mariam, a sometime military officer, it had ended what was a storied regime ruled by Emperor Haile Selassie, whom Mengistu killed in 1974.
All Ethiopia was thrilled to see the end of the Derg, and celebrated the victorious military effort led by Meles. He was a very savvy, clear-minded, autocrat who was also a no-nonsense modernizer who sought to advance and educate a populous, poor, and disadvantaged country (by African standards). The soon to be fully functional Grand Renaissance Dam across the Blue Nile, Africa’s largest hydropower facility, is a testament to his vision.
Meles’ war against the Derg had been won largely, but not exclusively, because of the Tigrayan troops that he had trained and motivated. When the Derg was defeated, Meles governed the restored country largely through Tigrayan associates. Meles argued that the Tigrayans were more competent and reliable than persons from Ethiopia’s other eighty ethnic groups. To some perceived extent, he marginalized the Amhara and the Oromo, Ethiopia’s two largest ethnicities.
Abiy fought alongside Tigrayans against the Derg and was seemingly loyal member of the ruling class, despite his Oromo origins and his religious Pentecostalism (separating him religiously from the Coptic Christians who are dominant). Likewise, Isaias fought alongside Meles from the beginning of the revolution against the Derg and later felt that he had received too little recognition for his leadership from Meles after the Derg were overthrown. Hence the fratricidal war in the late 1990s and Isaias’ subsequent seeming hatred of everything Tigrayan.
After Meles died, the remaining Tigrayans running the country installed Hailemariam Deselgn, from a minor ethnic group, as prime minister. They could effectively control him. In 2018, after Oromo protesters agitated against the Hailemariam government, the Tigrayans turned to Abiy, a putatively reliable colleague and an Oromo. They thought that he would maintain the governance status quo, as Hailemariam had done. But Abiy had other ideas.
Abiy won his Nobel Peace Prize (as we wrote in “28 – Putin-like Compatriots Elsewhere, III: the War in Tigray and Ethiopia,” April 12) in 2019 for brokering peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia after twenty hostile years. Air, rail, and road traffic between the two neighbors resumed, and Ethiopians and Eritreans were finally able to visit each other and reunite with relatives. But now observers also suspect that the entente that Abiy forged enabled the two rulers to begin to conspire to humble their mutual enemy – the Tigrayans who had lorded over them for so many years.
Abiy and Isaias saw their opportunity in late 2020, when Tigray insisted on holding a popular vote within the province that Abiy had forbidden, ostensibly because of Covid-19. That, plus some questionable skirmishes that Abiy claims Tigray began, led to an Ethiopian invasion of Tigray from the south and an Eritrean invasion from the north. Thousands of Tigrayans were killed and raped and towns and historical sites ravaged. Much of Tigray was pulverized. Sixty thousand Tigrayans fled into neighboring Sudan, perhaps 1 million were displaced internally, and agricultural supplies and farming activities were disrupted.
Abiy refused to let journalists or investigators into Tigray. He also prevented foreign food aid from reaching the people starving in Tigray. A few months later, in 2021, Tigrayan soldiers regrouped, overcame the Ethiopian conquering army, and marched on Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s distant capital. After several months on the move, however, in July 2021, Abiy obtained drone aircraft from Turkey and used them to repulse the Tigrayan forces, who retreated back to Tigray.
But hunger within Tigray grew because Abiy refused to permit UN World Food Program or USAID convoys to make their way to Tigray. More people died. Now, two years after the intrastate war started, Abiy apparently has again enlisted Isaias to help him finish squashing Tigrayan pretensions.
As I wrote in April, Abiy is Putin-like in his attempt to create a national enemy (and a national disaster) to feed his own ego needs and his obviously long-standing resentment of Tigrayan overlordship.
The renewed military campaign of the last month or so has displaced 500,000 Tigrayans, deepened the hunger that is a constant for multiple thousands of Tigrayans, destroyed food convoys, and left hundreds dead. What is happening in Tigray mirrors Ukraine, and with similar humanitarian concerns. Abiy may be perpetrating genocide.
Just as the war in Ukraine is without strategic purpose, so the continued attempts to ensure the subservience of Tigray are equally senseless. Autonomy, much less secession, was not on the collective Tigrayan mind until Abiy invaded. Now, to succeed in establishing an enduring peace, African Union and American mediators must persuade the Tigrayans that they will be safe within Ethiopia, must persuade Abiy that he gains little in terms of Ethiopia’s future by trying to batter Tigray into punishing submission, and must compel Isaias (and Abiy) that the Eritreans are outlaws in Tigray. The future of Ethiopia is very much at risk.
I believe Alex de Waal is an expert on the Horn of Africa. His book on the subject was dedicated to Meles. The Grand Renaissance Dam is crucial to help lift Ethiopians out of poverty. But it needs to be part of a new Nile River Commission, just as the Mekong River Commission has facilitated co-operation among those Southeast Asian riverains. Linda Agerbak