Hope is still thin, but it is there. On December 21, the leader of the rebels in Tigray, in the north of the country, wrote to the UN secretary general to propose an immediate end to the fighting. This is a first gesture, after a year of clashes in this country of 110 million inhabitants, twice the size of France. Ethiopia is the economic giant of East Africa.
Debretsion Gebremichael, the leader of the rebels, claims that his soldiers have withdrawn provinces conquered in recent months, in order to promote a cease-fire. And he asks the UN to take back control, and to convince Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019, to accept this end to the fighting.
There have been many attempts at mediation in recent months: the United States, the UN, the African Union and Ethiopia’s big neighbor, Kenya, all have tried and broken their teeth. . Pessimism had become de rigueur, so much so that in recent weeks, Western countries have evacuated most of their nationals from the country. At the very end of the year, this unprecedented outstretched hand of the rebel leader therefore allows us to hope again.
It is urgent, because the humanitarian situation is catastrophic: the rare information coming from the field is very worrying. They are rare, because the press and NGOs are almost prohibited from entering the combat zones. In this region of Tigray alone, in the north of the country, at least 400,000 people are threatened with famine. 10 million people are food insecure, according to the UN. Agriculture, a major resource of the country, is devastated.
The conflict has claimed thousands of lives, and displaced more than 2 million Ethiopians. Hundreds of thousands of them fled to neighboring Sudan. The fact is that only a ceasefire could allow the delivery of essential emergency humanitarian aid to the area.
But the Ethiopian power will not necessarily accept this cessation of hostilities, because its troops are advancing on the ground. Government forces were in retreat just a month ago. So much so that many predicted the rapid fall of the capital, Addis Ababa. The rebels of Tigray, supported by the forces of another ethnic group, the Oromos, were only 200 kilometers from the city.
Everything was reversed after the acquisition of drones by the government of Abiy Ahmed: Chinese and Turkish drones of long range, and also Iranian, of shorter range. In a few days, at the beginning of December, they reversed the course of the war, especially since the rebels do not have air forces. For a week, the government army has been progressing rapidly. It has taken over key cities, Lalibela, Kombolcha, Alamata, so many strategic crossroads on the northern route.
The withdrawal of the Tigray forces is therefore more of a military defeat than of a desire to promote a ceasefire, which looks like a dressing up. The risk is that in the face, the power now seeks to push its advantage, and refuses the end of hostilities.