Why the war in Ethiopia goes on and on. – Politics

Solomon Alebachew points to the mountains on the other side of the valley, the peaks of a plateau in northern Ethiopia, they are magical landscapes, part of the Unesco world cultural heritage. It stands on a concrete viewing platform from which tourists normally admire the lush green hills and gorges. But now he is holding binoculars in his hand and is looking for the positions of the opponents on the other side. Around him stand about 30 men in camouflage suits with Kalashnikovs in hand, commanded by Solomon Alebachev. They are militias who normally work as farmers or park rangers, but now they have gone to war voluntarily and without pay. “It’s about survival,” he says, “we fight to the last drop of blood.” His men nod in a kind of holy seriousness.

It has now been almost a year since Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched an operation to restore “law and order” which has now turned into an uncontrolled civil war that threatens to tear Ethiopia apart. Probably tens of thousands of people have died, millions are displaced and starved. Abiy came to power as a reformer in 2018, after decades of authoritarian rule. At the beginning of his term in office he upset the country, released thousands of political prisoners, re-admitted banned media and promised democratic elections. He reconciled himself with Eritrea, the archenemy in the north and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. It now seems like a grotesque mistake. Which is not only due to Abiy.

For decades, Ethiopia was ruled by the Tigray ethnic group, who make up only about six percent of the population, but controlled all important positions in business and politics, which enriched themselves and threw critics into prison. But at some point the opponents became so many, hundreds of thousands of young people in particular demonstrated so persistently that the prisons were no longer sufficient. The regime faced a decision to stop the protest by force or to try to renew it from within. It appointed Abiy Prime Minister, the first of the Oromo people, the largest group of the population. He did manage to make peace with Eritrea, but not with the Tigray, whose elite refused to leave power.

In autumn 2020 the dispute escalated, Abiy turned off the money faucet in the Tigray region, the rulers of the TPLF there attacked a depot of the Ethiopian Federal Army. Since then the war has raged, sometimes Abiy’s troops are on the advance, sometimes the TPLF goes on the counter-offensive.

From national park ranger to warrior

A few kilometers from the viewpoint in the mountains of the Amhara region, corpses are still lying in the fields, bloated from the rain, some of them eaten by dogs. Maru Terefe was there when the fighters from Tigray were repulsed a few days ago. He worked as a ranger up here in the Simien Mountain National Park for almost ten years, watching the rare Ethiopian wolves and driving the farmers’ cattle out of the sanctuary. He was given an assault rifle to protect the tourists on their trips to the lonely waterfalls and steep gorges, although there was actually no real danger back then. So were the rules.

He only used his Kalashnikov a few times when they were practicing shooting or the cellular network had failed and he wanted to notify him of his replacement. A few days ago he really used it for the first time, killing people with it. “I liked my job, protecting nature. But now it’s war, now I can’t sit back and do nothing, it’s about survival,” he says.

It is a sentence that you can hear from many of the 80 or so ethnic groups in Ethiopia. The country is at war with itself, neighbors accuse each other of wanting to destroy it. The war is an elite war for power in the state. In one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, for many people, survival is actually a matter of survival, at least that’s what it feels like to them. Most Ethiopians live from subsistence agriculture, from what their fields yield, which are getting smaller with each generation because there are so many heirs in the family. Each war party promises the poorest to recapture lost territories, or those that have been disputed between ethnic groups for years. There is no end in sight, negotiations are not particularly popular.

In the mountains of Amhara, the reinforcements from Prime Minister Abiy roll in, buses full of soldiers, militias and special forces, you can hear the thunder of cannons and machine gun fire. The war seems to be going on inexorably.

The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday calling for an end to the fighting and sanctions against those involved on all sides. Pressure, however, as the past few months have shown, currently seems to be doing the opposite with the newly elected Prime Minister Abiy. A week ago the government expelled seven senior UN diplomats from the country, accusing them of doing propaganda for the TPLF. Ultimately, the UN representatives had just kept pointing out that the Abiy government was not allowing enough aid into the Tigray region, that out of a hundred trucks needed a day, a maximum of ten would arrive there.

For a long time, the TPLF had justified its offensives with a kind of self-defense, only in this way could it open an aid corridor for its population. In the mountains of Amhara, however, it is not about enabling aid convoys; for the TPLF it is about gaining as much land as possible, perhaps even conquering the capital Addis Ababa.

When the conflict began in November 2020, it was above all the troops of Prime Minister Abiy and his allies from Eritrea who committed cruel crimes against the civilian population in Tigray, human rights organizations speak of mass rape and indiscriminate shootings. In the meantime there are increasing reports of the offenses committed by the TPLF, which accepts the death and suffering of the civilian population in its offensives. “We fled on foot for three days when the TPLF came to our town and killed people with machetes,” says Tsega Desalegn, who is 37 years old and now with her children in a school in the town of Debark near the front lives. She gets around 15 kilos of wheat, some beans and oil a month. Compared to the situation in Tigray, this is almost luxurious. But ultimately Desalegn has to sleep in a narrow room with 30 people, without mattresses. She coughs almost continuously but has not seen a doctor in a year. The new school year will soon begin in Debark. She says: “We don’t know where we can go then.”