Ethiopia : Conflict with Tigray

When one thinks of Ethiopia, many images come to mind such as the skeleton of Lucy in a dusty museum in Addis Ababa, or King Solomon who left the Queen of Sheba pregnant with a lineage of Christian kings in the heart of Africa that European monarchs sought to help them in their fight against the Moor, first, and the Turk, later. This Christian king was idealised in the medieval figure of Preste Juan, from whom the Emperor Haile Selassie was a descendant, and who was therefore called the Lion of Judah, who reigned over misery, local rebellions, invasions by Italian Fascists, famine and other disorders until he was dethroned by a revolt of Marxist officers led by Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974.

Think of the Coptic churches of Lalibela carved into the rock, or Father Pedro Paez, a Madrid-trained Jesuit from Coimbra who spent his life in Ethiopia after being captured by Omani pirates in his first attempt to arrive from Goa and spend seven years as a slave in Muscat. They were tough people. Paez, who was also an architect and astronomer, wrote a monumental History of Ethiopia and discovered the sources of the Blue Nile even though three hundred years later the English Burton and Speke tried to take over the discovery. Today a plaque placed on the site by the Spanish embassy puts things right.

Things didn't get any better with Mengistu Haile Mariam who imposed a bloody dictatorship known as the Derg and presided over a seventeen-year civil war (1974-1991) in which 750,000 people died as a result of the so-called "Red Terror". Mengistu was in turn deposed in another coup in 1991 when the USSR disappeared and lost the support it gave him... The new president, Meles Zenawi, concentrated on economic development while attending to the various ethnic groups that make up the country by setting up a federal structure that recognised "the right to self-determination". Only everything was more theoretical than real because the federated regions were only free to do what They wanted as long as their wishes coincided with those of the central government and this explains, for example, the still recent revolt in Oromia, Ethiopia's most populated region, in 2016.

And it is precisely from the Oromo ethnic group that the current prime minister Abyi Ahmed, leader of the People's Democratic Revolutionary Front, came to power in 2018 and promised reforms and free elections, released political prisoners and made peace with Eritrea. These promises gave her the Nobel Peace Prize a year later, perhaps a little prematurely as was also the case with Barack Obama. Abyi's initial goodwill is not negligible, certainly, but it was not enough because her mandate has not been problem-free by any means, and now these problems have just exploded with the revolt of the People's Front for the Liberation of Tigray (PFLT) against her government.

The reason is that Abyi is a man who comes from the intelligence services, is used to being in charge and does not resist well being challenged on his decisions. He came to power with the support of a broad coalition that also included the FPLT, but it is clear that he was not comfortable with the limitations that this imposed on him, and so he created a new party to suit him and removed the Tigray people from power. He then postponed the elections with the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic. The PFLT then responded by making elections on its own in the region of Tigray and, not content with that, attacked a military base of the Ethiopian army and massacred its soldiers and there everything was messed up: Instead of seeking dialogue and a negotiated solution, Abyi sent its planes to bomb the rebel region and dissolved the Tigray government, thereby gaining strength and threatening to spread to other regions of this country, which is the great power in the Horn of Africa, the second largest in the continent by population (110 million inhabitants, after Nigeria alone) and has many different ethnic groups and languages. The difference between the revolt in the Oromia region in 2016 and the current one in Tigray is that Tigray has military capacity and experience and could have dragged the country into a civil war that other ethnic groups and regions could have joined and even affected countries

The country's neighbours are Sudan, Egypt, Kenya and Eritrea itself, which could intervene in favour of the Addis Ababa government in view of the good relations between President Isaiah Afewerki and Abyi himself. Therefore the Addis Ababa government has cut short and invaded Tigray and occupied its capital (with less resistance than expected) while part of the population fled to neighbouring Sudan and the humanitarian agencies condemned the suffering of civilians. With Abyi, as with Aung Suu Kyi in Myanmar, many are wondering if the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize was not a little hasty.

This is not the only problem Abyi has on her plate, as for some years now there has been a growing dispute with Egypt over the huge "Renaissance" dam that Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile, which is vital for generating the electricity Ethiopia needs for its development, but which Cairo fears could leave the Nile without water, when that river is literally the blood that runs through the veins of one hundred million Egyptians who live on its banks and drink and water with its waters. Tempers are running high in both countries and the United States has been trying to mediate this problem for some time to find a solution and prevent the blood from reaching the river and never better.

Jorge Dezcallar Ambassador of Spain