28 - Putin-like Compatriots Elsewhere, III: the War in Tigray and Ethiopia
Pre-dating the conflagration in Ukraine, Ethiopia has for more than a year been using Putin-like tactics to attempt to beat its rebellious Tigray region into submission. Last year it bombed the capital city of Tigray, shelled other towns, and killed thousands of civilians. About 60,000 Tigrayans fled across the nearby border with Sudan. Crops were destroyed, and food supplies halted. An estimated 2 million Tigrayans in 2021 and until this week in 2022 have been hungry, with many dying. In January, the UN declared the prevailing situation in Tigray was “a humanitarian disaster.” And now the rains have again failed to fall, preventing teff (the staple grain) and wheat from germinating. Famine conditions are imminent.
Fortunately, and unexpectedly, ten days ago Tigray and Ethiopia agreed to a ceasefire. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food supplies finally arrived in Mekele, the capital of Tigray, after being blocked for many months by Ethiopian government restrictions.
This is another senseless war, again driven by personal vanity, a misguided ego, and the false idea that victory would come swiftly and easily and a strong-man’s supposed acumen would be demonstrated, for the world to see and citizens to applaud.
In Ethiopia’s case, too, the war was ironically propelled by the award in 2019 of the Nobel Peace Prize to Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s young prime minister. He had forged a peace with neighboring (dictatorial) Eritrea. (Ethiopian heads of state are usually referred to by their first names.)
In November 2020, Abiy declared that Tigrayan regional leaders and – by extension – all Tigrayans, had undermined his authority and had to be punished. After the Tigrayan regional government defied the central government and held a vote for its local legislative assembly, Abiy opted to show Tigray who was boss, and invaded the small northern region of Tigray. Only 6 percent of the 110 million Ethiopians are Tigrayans, but Abiy decided that their very existence threatened his control of all of Ethiopia. Abiy’s Oromo group is the largest, with 34 percent of the population. Abiy turned to ethnic cleansing to cement his rule.
Quickly, Ethiopian troops, with complementary assistance from the large Eritrean army, overran Tigray and forced its leaders to flee into the province’s mountain fastnesses. The Ethiopians destroyed historical monuments, including the famed stelae of third century Axum, and eventually declared victory in early 2021. A few months later, Tigrayan officers and soldiers who had earlier served in the Ethiopian army and seen combat against Eritrea and in Somalia against Muslim insurgents, reorganized themselves, gained arms, and freed their province from government control. Indeed, they grew sufficiently powerful as a fighting force to carry their counter attack into the neighboring Afar and Amhara provinces and to march on distant Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.
The revitalized Tigrayan army reached within 120 miles of Addis Ababa in July, threatening Abiy’s hold on the capital. But the Ethiopian army eventually acquired effective Turkish drones, counterattacked, and forced the Tigrayans to retreat. By October 2021, after heavy fighting, the lines of war were again near or just outside Tigray’s original borders. But, as in Ukraine, a local fighting force with strong ties to a civilian population had held its own against a much larger and better equipped national army. The Ethiopian army no longer dares enter Tigray.
Because Abiy cut cell telephone service and the internet in Tigray, no one really knows how many Tigrayans were “cleansed” by the Ethiopian army, and how much of Tigray has been destroyed. However, smuggled reports indicate that thousands have died in combat and collaterally. About 4.5 million of Tigray’s 6 million inhabitants desperately needed emergency food aid throughout 2021, and some starved. According to Human Rights Watch, Ethiopian Federal forces committed crimes against humanity in Tigray: “murder, enforced disappearances, torture, deportation or forcible transfer, rape, sexual slavery and other sexual violence, persecution, unlawful imprisonment, possible extermination, and other inhumane acts.”
Abiy’s soldiers executed a 71-year old well-respected former foreign minister. Forty-seven of 167 prominent Tigrayans on a “most wanted” list were also murdered. Mothers and children were bayoneted. Widespread raping was alleged, especially in Mekele, the provincial capital. In 2020 and 2021, government troops scoured the jagged Tembien mountains for the remaining Tigrayan leaders, taking no prisoners.
Far from Tigray, Abiy systematically harassed Tigrayans, once the mainstay of the country’s army, its air force, and sections of the civil service. The head of Ethiopian Airways, a Tigrayan, was refused permission to fly. Abiy’s government also made it extremely difficult in 2021 for Tigrayans to continue commercial pursuits in Addis Ababa and other cities and towns. A major pogrom ensued
There was little doubt that ethnic cleansing was one of Abiy’s goals. The underlying cause of this sudden public hostility to Tigrayans stemmed from the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 by a Marxist military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, a vicious dictator who drove Ethiopian deeper into poverty than ever before and embarked upon a Stalinist-inspired agricultural program.
Meles Zenawi, a charismatic Tigrayan, created a revolutionary guerilla force in the Sudan and, in 1991, led the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to a series of striking military victories against Mengistu’s army. Thereafter – and this is the backstory – Meles and a cabal of (mostly) Tigrayans ruled Ethiopia in a quasi-democratic fashion, rigging elections (especially in 2005), but gradually uplifted the lives of all Ethiopians, including the largest two ethnic components of Ethiopia, the Oromo and the Amhara.
Yet, the Oromo and other ethnic groups felt discriminated against by Tigrayans under Meles. After Meles died unexpectedly in 2012, he was succeeded by Hailemariam Deselegn, an Ethiopian from a minor ethnic group in the southern part of the nation who was beholden to the Tigrayans who had ruled with Meles. After protests by Oromo erupted in 2017, Hailemariam transferred power in 2018 to Abiy, an Oromo who had fought with Meles and the EPRDF against Mengistu and who was a trusted ally in the Tigrayan-led government.
All went well thereafter. Abiy freed political prisoners, opened relations with Eritrea (Ethiopia and Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s repressive president, had been estranged since the two countries fought a fratricidal war in 1998), and promised to modernize a country that is slightly less than three times the size of California. Then Abiy decided to put the Tigrayans in their place.
Ethiopia’s intrastate conflict is not yet resolved. The truce may not last. There is no trust between the warring parties; Abiy has not yet indicated that he wants to reconcile with Tigray’s leaders. Nor has he and his government indicated how they intend to cope with an increasingly likely severe drought, crop failures, and the strong possibility that millions of Ethiopians, Tigrayans, and Somali will soon contend with shortages of food and a ghastly refugee-making and hungry-making natural climate change catastrophe --- all compounded with the loss of wheat and barley shipments from Ukraine and Russia.
The governments of Tigray and Ethiopia remain at loggerheads. War could resume at any moment, especially if Abiy halts relief convoys once again. Envoys from the U.S. and the African Union are intent on forging a permanent peace, feeding the numerous hungry, and finding a means to draw Tigray harmoniously back into the greater Ethiopia. Having failed at extermination, Abiy remains the problem, but could become or could come to accept that only reconciliation with Tigray can keep Ethiopia whole.