Tigray’s Threat to Stability in East Africa
Robert Cole
In the spring, I wrote a post for this blog entitled “Has Abiy Ahmed Failed Ethiopia?” about the worsening conflicts there following an uprising in Tigray and concerns of similar violence among Amhara and Oromo populations who have long chafed against the authority of the government in Addis Ababa. I ended that post with the hope that Ethiopia would learn from the troubles it faced and that its leader, Abiy Ahmed, would live up to the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded. Unfortunately, none of that has happened. Since that post in February, the violence in the region has only intensified, leaving untold thousands dead and Tigray gripped by widespread famine, according to the UN. Both the rebel TLPF and the Ethiopian government have been accused of horrific atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war, and there is no obvious route to resolving the conflict.
Though this situation has gotten only limited coverage in international media, the threat to broader regional security has garnered even less attention. Tigray does not exist in a vacuum and the violence there threatens to ignite instability in multiple neighboring countries as well as significantly raising the threat of a broader regional war. Also discussed in my February post was the looming threat of war over Nile water rights between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. The threat of such a war has hardly diminished since then, and Tigray represents a potential flashpoint for the beginning of such a conflict. The situation is at least partially driven by domestic politics in Sudan and Egypt, both of which have powerful militaries that are interested in an external war to justify their political power. Indeed, Sudan has already used the chaos in Ethiopia to re-occupy disputed border territory late last year. More recently, Sudanese troops drove off an Ethiopian counter-attack, with Sudanese General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan stating that the incident justified the military’s power a week after a military coup attempt in Khartoum.
The Ethiopian focus on Tigray in the north has also taken the focus away from Somalia in the east. Ethiopia has been the leading force in the African Union’s mission there fighting al-Shabaab, and Ethiopia’s need to commit resources to Tigray has significantly diminished its presence. The government has also taken steps to disarm ethnically Tigrayan soldiers within its own armed forces, further weakening its ability to effectively engage in counterterror operations in Somalia. When combined with American withdrawals in the region, there is a significant risk that the fragile Somalian government in Mogadishu will fall to al-Shabaab militants, creating another major problem both for Somalia’s neighbors in Ethiopia and Kenya but also for internationally significant trade in the Gulf of Aden.
It should be evident that the world ignores the Tigray conflict at its own peril. While the US has taken steps to sanction officials responsible for some of the violence, these unilateral measures will likely accomplish little. A broader coalition of leaders from across the region and the world must unite under a shared path to peace to prevent what is presently a contained if horrific conflict from spinning out of control at great cost to everyone. Such unity would be extremely difficult, but bringing an end to the present violence would be an accomplishment truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.