Ethiopia: The Once Peaceful Country Now Ruled By Warlords
Ethiopia. The home of coffee beans, honey, and churches carved from rock. In recent times, the friendly and usually safe haven for many refugees has been thrown into a conflict and chaos of its own; since November of 2020, fighting has continuously occurred between the northern forces of the Tigray region and the government, run by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. A power struggle between two equally cruel and powerful leaderships has led to war killing thousands and leaving Ethiopia in political limbo.
The start of this horrific conflict started over a year and a half before the actual fighting began. Current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was elected in April 2018 and quickly went about creating change across the country. His first acts worked to ease the people’s worries concerning how major political figures reportedly had stopped the country's transition to a more democratic government. Ahmed made several changes to help ease tensions between the government and its people from freeing political prisoners to the appointment of a gender-neutral cabinet. For just over the last twenty years, the Ethiopian political scheme had been ruled by four different ethnically based parties. The swing vote usually landed with the Tigrayans, who make up 7% of Ethiopia’s population, and their group TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front). During the 1970s and 1980s, the TPLF helped return peace to Ethiopia by overcoming a military junta and through this created a new coalition government in 1991. However, at the start of 2019, Abiy Ahmed dissolved the new coalition due to critics accusing it of holding back Ethiopia’s political growth. When TPLF rejected the chance to join Ahmed’s new Prosperity Party which resulted in further defiance from the TPLF toward the new government.
TPLF gained international attention when it held its own elections in September 2020, with Prime Minister Ahmed and the TPLF both calling each other out as illegitimate. TPLF went a step further by calling out the Prime Minister’s, “unprincipled,” relationship with the Eritrean president, Isais Afwerki, who helped the two countries sign a peace treaty in 2018. After the shocking start of elections in the Tigray region, the central government declared what they were doing was illegal and eventually suspended funding towards the Tigray region. The Tigray administration then announced the action was a declaration of war between the central government and the Tigray region. Tensions finally reached boiling point when Tigrayan forces reportedly attacked an army base to steal weapons. The Prime Minister later announced that Tigray had crossed a line and that the only way forward was through “military confrontation.”
Throughout months of fighting the Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed insisted that no civilians were being harmed by the conflict and that he had not used his Eritrean influence to bring in troops from their neighboring country. However, several news outlets have proved Ahmed’s claims are false and that they aren’t the only things he’s lying about. 1.7 million people have fled Ethiopia due to the atrocities being committed which range from looting and destroyed refugee camps to sexual violence, massacres, and extrajudicial killings. Mass graves are now a common sight in what is the worst exodus in Ethiopia for over two decades and with even UN relief trucks going missing it’s becoming more and more dangerous to enter Ethiopia.
As the atrocities continue to become worse and worse as the war is plunged into its eleventh month of fighting, many foreign nations are trying to help stop the conflict. The U.S. in particular first saw the events in Ethiopia as a worry after the US Secretary of State, Antony Blaken, described the situation in Ethiopia as a, “growing humanitarian disaster,” according to spokesperson Ned Price. In recent months the State Department announced new visa restrictions on government officials from Ethiopia and Eritrea along with the Biden administration imposing wide-ranged restrictions on their economic assistance to Ethiopia. However, the impact of these new restrictions from the U.S. and other foreign countries is still yet to be seen in Ethiopia as the fighting continues at a blistering pace. As the people of the Tigray region continue to be overpowered by the Ethiopian government and additional Eritrean forces, more and more people are dying by the day. The question is, will Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed realize the error of his ways? Or will the U.S. and other foreign forces be necessary to restore peace to what was once the refugee haven of North Africa?