Abiy Ahmed, leader of theEthiopia and Nobel Peace Prize winner who did not hesitate to use war to restore order in a region of his country, are your hours numbered? The future cannot be known, but it is certain that the man whom all the capitals of the world had applauded in 2018 as the unifier of the country, the one who had earned the Nobel Peace Prize by putting an end to the thirty-year war with Eritrea, is increasingly in trouble. The Tigrinya rebels and their Oromo allies, according to local sources, are at the gates of the capital Addis Ababa, after conquering two crucial cities along the way, Dessie and Kombolcha, and blocking every passage towards Djibouti, a strategic port and hub for supplies of the capital.
It was the prime minister himself who confirmed the drama of the situation, declaring the state of emergency and addressing an appeal to the nation that leaves no doubts: "Use any type of weapon to block the destructive thrust, to turn it upside down and bury it", wrote Abiy, inviting all Ethiopian citizens to take up arms and fight to defend the country. “To die for Ethiopia – she said – is a duty for all of us”.
What happened in recent weeks because Abiy's enemies - the Tigrayans, who live in the north-eastern region of the country, on the border with Eritrea - after gaining the upper hand in their territory, broke through the lines and descended towards the capital ?
The decisive push toadvanced tigrinya seems to have been the alliance they signed in August with other rebels, the Oromo, who, like them, pursue the independence of their region, theOrormia, the most densely populated of Ethiopia as well as the one where the country's capital is located.
It was precisely the leaders of the Oromo rebels who announced that they were planning an advance towards Addis Ababa. The newspaper reported it Somali Guardian, according to which the OLA (Oromo Liberation Army), the military wing of the Oromo Liberation Front, has positioned its soldiers north and east of the capital, with the intention of encircling it. The Tigrayans, on the other hand, maintained that they were not interested in taking the capital and that they only wanted to break the siege of their region. But “if the achievement of our goals in tigray will demand the march on Addis Ababa, we will do it,” as the TPLF spokesman said.
The Ethiopian conflict appears at this point more and more a dramatic misjudgment of Western capitals, who believed (or wanted to believe) that Abiy was just practicing”a police operation" in Tigray, to punish the region that had disobeyed the order to postpone the election date, due to the Covid pandemic, as had the rest of the country. The use of tanks and not of the law hadn't impressed the world's chancelleries too much, we know we are in Africa. And not even when the borders were closed to journalists and humanitarian organizations did the world become aware of what was happening inside the country. The prime minister preferred to believe that he had promised that everything would be over in a few weeks.
Instead the police operation has turned, in a country of ancient ethnic hatreds, into civil war. With the classic corollary of violence, rapes and refugees. The United Nations has provided some numbers: at least 400 people risk dying of hunger because the aid never entered the country or was seized. While 2,7 million are internally displaced persons, thousands are refugees. AND a very serious famine is looming.
What to do now? Concerns have been raised. US Secretary of State Antony blinken he said he was alarmed after the conquest of the two cities on the way to the capital. While the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has invited both parties to sit around a table "to begin negotiations for a ceasefire without preconditions". And the European leaders have called for an immediate end to the food blockade imposed on Tigray by the central government.
But at this point - as Uoldel Chelati Dirar, professor of African history and institutions at the University of Macerata comments for ISPI - it seems highly unlikely that the fighting will give way to a negotiated solution. It is more likely that the Tigrinya forces and their Oromo allies - who control, as local sources say, all the strategic centers and supply routes, while the central government is perched in Addis Ababa and in southwestern Ethiopia - dot the victory on the field. And once the capital falls, history is rewritten. Which could look like the past: to each his own piece of power. After all, Ethiopia as a unitary country has never existed.
