A war that begins in Ethiopia | The faith of the government …

As if to show that the ghosts of the past don’t go away if they aren’t resolved, Ethiopia is experiencing a conflict that already feels like a civil war in everything but the name. Technically, the central government sent a military force to a province where there was an attack on a barracks by armed militias. But behind the language of official communications hides a violent division between political allies never at ease and the revival of a secular conflict between those of the north, those of the south and the Oromo, the ethnic group of the Ethiopian prime minister.

The immediate antecedent to the conflict is the decision of the government of Tigray province to call elections that the central government did not allow. Tigray is governed by the Tigriña People’s Liberation Front, one of the essential allies of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The Front was an ever-tense alliance between various sectors united by their hatred of the military government of the Derg, which overthrew Emperor Haile Selasie in 1974 and plunged the country into a spiral of paramilitary violence and terror never seen before. The Front was the political umbrella for the civil war that ultimately ended with the exile of Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1991.

In nearly thirty years, Ethiopia has restored some semblance of democracy, had for the first time since World War II thirty years without famine, and even had little-known trials for crimes against humanity in which it was sentenced to prison for genocide. to 73 soldiers. The country has experienced a population boom and has become the second most populous in Africa, after Nigeria.

Ethiopia recently declared itself a federal republic, seeking to solve a very common problem in Africa, that of regionalism and the weak national identity of countries often armed on a colonial map. This is not the case with Ethiopia, the only country on the continent not to be a European colony and the only one to reject by arms a colonialist invasion. This event was so shocking that until the 1960s the only African embassies on this planet were the Ethiopian embassies. With the defeated invaders being Italians, Benito Mussolini explicitly retaliated in 1936 by invading the country and slaughtering by air, with poison gas, anyone who opposed it. The occupation ended in 1940 when an Ethiopian army in exile, local guerrillas and a small British congingent took over the country.

But despite its unity in the face of the colonial invader and a political tradition spanning two millennia, Ethiopia continues to have real ethnic divisions. One of the oldest occurs between the Oromo ethnic group and the Tigrinya, traditional enemies of the endless dynastic wars of the old empire. To this are added the inhabitants of the desert regions south of Addis Ababa, the capital, which make up the provinces of Bale, Sidamo and Harague but are lands conquered at the end of the 19th century with a Somali and Muslim ethnic identity.

The problem between Tigray and the central government is not so much ethnic – the Tigrines themselves joke that they are indistinguishable from the rest of the inhabitants of the Massif Central – as it is political. Ethiopia has a strong centralist tradition in which it is difficult to delegate powers to provinces, inherited from centuries of imperial rule in which local governors were at best local feudal lords and at worst sent from the throne without consultation. nor compliance. The empire’s historical sagas tell of the endless battles between Tigrinas, Wollo, Oromo and other groups in shifting alliances with dynasties and contenders for the throne.

The current Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, elected in April 2018 at just 41 years old, seemed to want to decompress the situation and allow a political solution after the long government of Hailemariam Desalegn. Ahmed launched a forceful battery of political and economic reforms, made peace with Eritrea after twenty years of cold war, received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for this gesture and has been an effective mediator in the conflict for the independence of Sudan. from South. He also freed thousands of political prisoners and legalized the opposition parties banned by Desalegn.

Despite the country’s relative prosperity, Ahmed made no progress in reforming the federal system. And although he is the first prime minister of the current Muslim oromo ethnic group, he has not relieved regional tensions. In fact, once in power, he created his own party, the Prosperity Party, thus shattering the Front that had brought him to government.

On Wednesday, Ahmed made the firm decision to order a military offensive against Tigrian forces accused of attacking a barracks. On Thursday, the House of People’s Representatives, MPs, approved a six-month state of emergency that gives the central government carte blanche for its military operations. Ahmed said the operations already carried out were “a success” and ignored calls for caution from the UN and the United States.

The Tigrian version of events is completely different. The president of the Tigray region, Debrestion Gebremichael, had already denounced Monday that the federal government was planning an attack as a sanction for the holding of legislative elections in September. Addis Ababa banned the electoral law as part of the pandemic measures and declared the elections illegal.

What the central government did immediately was to cut the internet and phone lines in Tigray province, so it is not known how many casualties the fighting has already caused. But there are already columns of refugees who have lost what little they had and warnings from the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Amnesty International.