Abiy’s democratic revolution mustn’t go up in civil-war smoke

Abiy’s democratic revolution mustn’t go up in civil-war smoke

A year after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali (pictured)was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopia is sliding stridently into a second civil war. Urgent mediation is needed to forestall a catastrophe that is likely to ripple through the volatile Horn region.

On November 4, 2020, Abiy declared war on the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), for what Addis Ababa described as months of “provocation and incitement” and “threatening the sovereignty of Ethiopia”.

Abiy described his war on Tigray euphemistically as “large-scale law enforcement operation” with “clear, limited and achievable objectives: to restore the rule of law and constitutional order”.

In reality, however, this has plunged Ethiopia into a civil war between the federal troops and Tigray’s paramilitary forces. The war has eerie echoes of its first Ethiopian Civil War from September 1974 to June 1991, which Ethiopian-Eritrean anti-government rebels waged against the Marxist junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam and which left at least 1.4 million people dead.

The meltdown started long before Meles Zenawi, who died in 2011. First, the Tigrayan elite dithered on crafting a clear strategy to support a strong non-Tigrayan leader who could protect them after Zenawi. Three years of protests and unrest forced Zenawi’s successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, to resign on February 15, 2018 as Prime Minister and Chairman of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).

The rise of Abiy in April 2018 as the first Oromo Premier in more than 200 years, and his reforms, quickly pushed them to the margins of power in Addis Ababa.

Three factors led to the escalation of the dispute. On November 21, 2019, Abiy engineered the merger of three of the four ethnicity-based parties in the governing EPRDF into the Prosperity Party (PP), squeezing the TPLF out of the ruling party for the first time in 30 years.

Second, after Covid-19 struck, Abiy postponed the elections, which were due in August, sparking a constitutional dispute with TPLF and other opposition parties.

The Tigrayans called for a convention to discuss the future of Ethiopia, which came through as an affront against Abiy. Matters came to a head on September 9, when the Tigray region defied Abiy and held its own election. In response, Abiy’s regime declared Tigray’s leadership unlawful, and Tigray declared it would no longer recognise his administration after October, when its mandate expired. The federal government announced it would redirect budgetary allocations to Tigray, which TPLF described as “tantamount to an act of war”.

The government seemed determined to use military force to bring the Tigray region to heel.

Addis wonks insist on use of the military “to eliminate a threat posed by the TPLF”. A six-month state of emergency was imposed in Tigray and the federal parliament declared Tigray’s ruling party a terrorist group.

The government strategy is to “shock and awe the Tigrayan forces and to make it impossible for them to retaliate”. But a quick, surgical and definite victory for Abiy is no more than a pipedream. The Tigrayans are a battle-hardened minority – about 6 per cent of Ethiopia’s 109 million people – with a deep sense of grievance, the mix that makes for a protracted and bloody war.

Today, Tigray has a large paramilitary force and local militia trained and armed to the teeth, estimated at perhaps 250,000 troops. Ethiopia’s Northern Command in Tigray, which has more than half the military’s personnel and mechanised divisions with a large proportion of Tigrayan officers, has, for all intents and purposes, collapsed.

And Tigray’s leadership appears to enjoy the overwhelming support of approximately six million people. Its leaders have announced that “we are ready to be martyrs” .

The war has all the makings of a lose-lose scenario. Ethiopia hopes the “war will not come to the centre, it will end there [in Tigray]”. However, even if federal forces removed the TPLF leadership in Mekele, they would probably mount sustained armed resistance as they did with Mengistu’s military junta. Again, secession might increasingly become attractive to the Tigray region.

The civil war casts a dark shadow over regional peace. It may create a perilous vacuum in Somalia, where 4,395 Ethiopian troops are deployed as part of AMISOM to fight the Al-Shabaab.

Allied Eritrean forces also reportedly moved to Tigray’s Northern border. In retrospect, Abiy’s pact with Eritrea in the Eritrean–Ethiopian War was not a peace treaty, but a shrewdly executed military deal against a common enemy: the TPLF. This fact eluded the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which honoured Abiy “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”.

The big question is whether Eritrea will enter the war to support Abiy. Warring factions in the neighbouring Sudan could also enter the war, either in support of Abiy, Tigray or Afwerki. Sudan has closed its border with northern Ethiopia due to the tensions. The war comes amidst a flaring face-off with Egypt and Sudan over filling of its Grand Millennium Dam on the Nile.

IGAD, the African Union and international partners should insist on a ceasefire and a comprehensive national dialogue.

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Peter Kagwanja  is  a Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute