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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Suddenly Ethiopia appears on the edge of the abyss of the civil war, threatening the stability of one of the most strategic regions in the world, the Horn of Africa, and the fracturing of one of the most powerful and populous countries in Africa.
But the crisis in Ethiopia, a key US security ally, has been ongoing for months, and “it was like watching a train crash in slow motion,” Dino Mahtani told the International Crisis Group this week. Now Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for sweeping political reforms, faces the most acute consequences of the country’s recent power shifts.
Here are the main reasons for the international alarm:
WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
Two things happened early Wednesday morning: communications were cut off in the heavily armed northern region of Tigray in Ethiopia, and Abiy announced that he had ordered troops to respond. to an alleged deadly attack by Tigray forces on a military base there. Both sides accused each other of starting the fighting.
And they both stepped up the pressure on Thursday at the end. The Ethiopian army said it was deploying troops from all over the country to Tigray, and the Tigray leader said the fighter jets had bombed parts of the regional capital. “We are ready to be martyrs,” he said. Casualties were reported on both sides.
Some experts have likened the confrontation to an interstate war, with two large, well-trained forces and few signs of retreating. Ethiopia is one of the most armed African nations and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front dominated the army and government of Ethiopia before Abiy took office in 2018. It has a lot of conflict experience from Ethiopia’s border war with the ‘Eritrea, alongside the Tigray region, and the International Crisis Group estimates that the TPLF paramilitary force and local militia have around 250,000 troops.
With communications still down, it is difficult to verify both sides’ account of events on the ground.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Ethiopia’s ruling coalition named Abiy prime minister in 2018 to help calm months of anti-government protests, and quickly won praise – and the Nobel Prize – for opening up political space and holding back repressive measures in the country of some 110 million and dozens of ethnic groups. groups. But the TPLF felt increasingly marginalized and withdrew from the ruling coalition last year.
The TPLF opposes the delay in the elections in Ethiopia, blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic and Abiy’s prolonged term in office. In September, the Tigray region voted in a local election that the federal government of Ethiopia called illegal. The federal government later moved to divert funding from the TPLF executive to local governments, angering the regional leadership.
On Monday, Tigray Debretsion leader Gebremichael warned that a bloody conflict could break out.
WHAT COULD HAPPEN NOW?
The conflict could spread to other parts of Ethiopia, where some regions have called for greater autonomy and deadly ethnic violence led the federal government to reinstate measures, including arresting critics.
Addressing these fears, Ethiopian army deputy chief Birhanu Jula said of Tigray on Thursday: “The war will end there.”
Some governments and experts urgently call for dialogue on Tigray, but a Western diplomat in the capital, Addis Ababa, says that “the message of the Ethiopians is that, if you talk about a dialogue, you identify the two sides, but government, that is a renegade group. ‘”. Ethiopia’s proposed goal is to crush the TPLF, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity, and “if I say I’ll crush you, is there really room for any negotiation?”
The TPLF before the fighting said it was not interested in negotiating with the federal government and called for the release of the detained leaders as a precondition for talks. There must be inclusive dialogue, observers say, but a statement late Thursday from a group of former US diplomats and military experts for the US Peace Institute warned it won’t go far “while many of the top political leaders of the prison.”
WHAT DOES IT MEAN BEYOND ETHIOPIA?
Few regions are more vulnerable than the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia’s neighbors include Somalia – Ethiopian forces would have begun to withdraw from that country to return home – and Sudan, which is facing its massive political transition. Neighboring Eritrea has shown few signs of openness after making peace with Ethiopia in 2018, and its government and that of Tigray are not getting along.
A region where Abiy played a high-profile peacemaker role is now at risk.
Observers warn that a conflict could suck these countries and others not far from Africa’s most strategic military outpost, tiny Djibouti, where several global powers including the United States and China have their only military bases on the continent. The Horn of Africa is also a short water crossing from Yemen and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.
Ethiopia was already causing concern over a dispute with Egypt downstream over a huge dam Ethiopia is nearing completion on the Blue Nile. Although there have been concerns about military action, “I would like to think that Egypt is a responsible enough actor to realize that the fragmentation of Ethiopia is fundamentally so bad for regional security,” former US diplomat Payton Knopf , a senior adviser to the United States Institute of Peace, said this week.
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