Piercing the Heart of Ethiopia

Jay Ramesh

Two years ago, Ethiopia was on the verge of becoming one of the economic powerhouses of Africa. Prime minister Abiy Ahmed had calmed ethnic tensions and was spearheading reforms to liberalize the Ethiopian economy and open up the heart of Africa to the world. Today, the country sits on the brink of destruction with rebels ready to advance on the gates of the capitol.

So what happened? How did Ethiopia fall so far from the light?

On the night of November 3, 2020, the Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF), a party that controls the northwestern Ethiopian province of Tigray, took over the Ethiopian government’s military bases. The organization had previously expressed concerns about Abiy’s political and economic reforms, accusing him of trying to centralize power and thus destroy Ethiopia’s federal political system.

In response, Abiy sent in contingents from the Ethiopian army to destroy the growing rebellion in Tigray. However, many officers in the army were Tigrayans that sympathized with the TPLF, and thus some military units defected and began attacking Ethiopian loyalist troops. 

To deal with the escalating conflict, Abiy sent in militia fighters from Amhara, a province just south of Tigray. These militia troops have been accused of committing mass human rights violations such as mass killings and sexual assaults against civilians. Eritrea, Ethiopia’s former enemy, also sent troops into Tigray to fight their old TPLF enemies. Eritrean troops have also been accused of committing human rights violations, and many disguise themselves in Ethiopian uniforms.

The TPLF fled to the mountains with an estimated paramilitary force of 250,000 troops. However, it has made large gains across northern Ethiopia since June of 2021, destroying several Ethiopian divisions. The rebels have now taken over the majority of the Tigray region and advanced into central Ethiopia.

On November 2, 2021, almost a year to the day after the conflict first erupted, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency. After taking the strategically valuable towns of Dessie and Kombolcha, the rebels are only 235 miles away from the Ethiopian capitol of Addis Ababa. There aren’t many government forces left to stop them.

Prime minister Abiy asked that the citizens of Addis Ababa mobilize, register weapons, and prepare to defend the city. Though there is a media blackout throughout much of the war-torn regions, leading to military updates being hard to verify, Abiy wouldn’t call for a mobilization in the capitol 235 miles away from the frontlines unless the situation was dire.

It’s important to remember that although the TPLF controls the Tigray region, it is not an ethno-nationalist group. They wrestled control of Ethiopia away from the brutal marxist “Derg” government in 1987 and ruled the country for nearly three decades. They do not seek Tigrayan independence: rather, they seek to retake power over Ethiopia and reimplement the federal system that allowed them to retain strong control over the region. The TPLF has announced that, if they were to succeed in taking over Ethiopia, they would implement a new interim government, but it is unclear as to whether Ethiopia would be able to continue as a democracy or slip back into authoritarianism. 

As of the time of this writing, the TPLF is poised to strike hard and strike deep at the heart of Ethiopia. The government is already under pressure to end the conflict via US sanctions for human rights violations, and its future looks bleak. Hostilities with Egypt and Sudan over the Nile River and Aswan Dam mean that if the government wants foreign support from its neighbors (without the attached human rights violations), it would have to make extremely unfavorable concessions to appease these governments. 

If the government falls, the country could easily descend into a civil war that could spill out and destabilize its neighbors and the Horn of Africa as a whole. Human rights sanctions mean that Ethiopia cannot count on western support, and as the situation grows worse, it may turn to China and Russia for covert aid at minimum. The future of Ethiopia and its 115 million citizens hangs in the balance as the TPLF plans its next moves.