A peace agreement was signed on Wednesday, November 2, in South Africa between the Ethiopian government and the rebels of Tigray – a secessionist province in northern Ethiopia. A peace of principle after two years of an atrocious war and almost without witnesses.
>> Five things to know about the forgotten war in Tigray, northern Ethiopia
On November 4, 2020, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched his troops to attack the province of Tigray, which had entered into rebellion against the central power. Abiy Ahmed – Prime Minister since spring 2018 – had meanwhile put an end to the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, a state located on the northern border of the rebel province. In this war, the Eritrean government will quickly become Ethiopia’s best ally, taking the Tigray insurgents in a pincer movement. This Ethiopia-Eritrea rapprochement that had taken place two years earlier, and which had subsequently crushed the rebels in Tigray, had obviously not been well analyzed. In 2019, a year before storming the separatist province, Ethiopian Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize, precisely for his reconciliation efforts with Eritrea.
The starting point of this conflict is essentially ethnic divisions, the leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front accusing Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of marginalizing them through his reforms, in a country where belonging to an ethnic group is inseparable from politics. As for the war itself, it has often gone under the radar because it is difficult to approach. Northern Ethiopia is both off-limits to journalists and extremely dangerous.
But the testimonies leave no doubt about the horror of the fighting. The American humanitarian agency US Aid speaks of a balance sheet “staggering”. The International Crisis Group describes this war as “one of the deadliest in the world”. Up to 500,000 dead, according to the American ambassador to the United Nations. Linda Thomas-Greenfield explains that the scale of the fighting rivals what is seen in Ukraine. Accounts of summary executions and rapes lead Amnesty International to say that all parties are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of people plunged into near-starvation conditions.
According to specialists, the peace agreement is due to the economic exhaustion of Ethiopia, at the end of its resources to fight this war. Inflation exceeds 40% and foreign investors alone capable of restoring the country no longer risk it. And then there was the mediation led by the African Union, and the pressure from Washington – which is not officially involved – which acts tirelessly and contributes massively to humanitarian aid. The large Ethiopian diaspora in the United States is taken into account by the Biden administration. The framework agreement which has just been found and must now be applied speaks of the cessation of hostilities but also of methodical and coordinated disarmament, which will perhaps be difficult to make the combatants of Tigray accept. It is the African Union that will have to ensure the implementation of this peace plan.