From Nobel Peace Prize to war criminal in two years

Just two years ago, Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, was hailed in centers of global power like a moderate and reformist peacemaker. In Europe it was used as an example for all other African countries. In his country, he has become a kind of “rock star”. At 43, won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for emptying his country’s prisons of political prisoners, making peace with opposition groups and ending the state of war with neighboring Eritrea. But this moral and political capital has been spent in record time. Today he is considered a war criminal.

Abiy sparked an armed conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region that sparked a horror of rapes, massacres and ethnic cleansing. After months of fighting, the specter of famine hangs over Tigray, in a country where two decades of impressive economic development had seemed to banish the threat of hunger. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed, most of them Tigers, 1.7 million people have been internally displaced and more than 60,000 have fled to neighboring Sudan. International organizations are already talking about the world’s worst food crisis in the last decade.

And what Abiy called a “public order operation” against a “criminal clique” turned out to be a resounding military failure. after eight months of fighting, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray (TPLF) returned to Mekelle this week, the capital of the province, which is a devastating setback for the central government.

Ethiopia is a delicate cocktail of ethnic groups and decentralized militias of the federal government in Addis Ababa. And there is the root of everything. The conflict erupted when Abiy’s government decided to postpone the legislative elections, scheduled for August 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The TPLF, an ethnic political and military organization in Tigray that dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition for decades – until the arrival in 2018 of Abiy, an Oromo ethnic group, who ousted them from power – held unilaterally his own elections in the region, claiming that Abiy was an illegitimate leader. The federal government refused to recognize the results and the finance ministry stopped distributing funds to the regional government of Tigray. In response, the TPLF attacked a military base of federal troops. It was a call to war for Abiy. On November 4, 2020, he ordered the army to advance on Tigray.

The offensive led to atrocities like the one committed in the town of Togoga during which Ethiopian army bombed street market at height of human trafficking killing dozens. Tiger refugees who fled to Sudan report the use of rape as a weapon of war and the massacres of civilians. Journalists and humanitarian agency personnel are prohibited from entering the area. The telephone and internet networks are also cut. UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock has denounced that the Ethiopian army is “starving the people of Tigray” by blocking supplies and looting. “Food is definitely used as a weapon of war.”, he assured.

In addition to the federated Ethiopian troops, Eritrean forces act in the region, who have a long fight with the forces of the tiger, despite the peace agreement signed by Abiy which won him the Nobel. And there are also militias from Amhara, another Ethiopian region of a different ethnicity and traditional rival to the Tigrinos.

When Abiy became Prime Minister following the resignation of his predecessor and the protests that rocked the country in 2018, embarked on an ambitious list of reforms. He released nearly 60,000 political prisoners, including all journalists, from jail, lifted the ban on opposition political parties, previously classified as terrorist groups, apologized for police brutality, and introduced a government made up of women and representatives of certain minorities, including the first female president in Ethiopian history, regardless of the fact that she is a figure without more political weight. “We need democracy and freedom”, he said in his inaugural speech. This whole reformist process was to lead to Ethiopian elections “more free, fairer and more credible” of the country’s history, according to Abiy himself. Initially scheduled for August 2020, and delayed by the Covid, they finally took place on June 21. As might be expected, the Abiy Prosperity Party won by a huge majority, in an election where 30% of the country’s territory did not vote, many ethnic groups were unable to present candidates and the European Union refused to send observers due to lack of guarantees.

Everything in Ethiopia has to do with ethnicity. Abiy was born in a small town of Oromia, a former independent state far from the center of Ethiopian power. His father was an Oromo and Muslim farmer. Abiy was the thirteenth child of his fourth wife. The Oromos, who make up about 35% of Ethiopia’s 117 million people, have long felt marginalized, having been colonized at the end of the 19th century by Emperor Menelik II.

Abiy, he was a child soldier, fought in the later stages of the guerrilla uprising to overthrow the so-called Derg regime, supported by the Soviet Union. TPLF Tigray guerrillas led the rebellion. Abiy fought alongside them and learned the Tigrine language. After the fall of the Derg in 1991, Abiy worked in the intelligence and communications services, becoming a senior member of the formidable security apparatus. The TPLF held power for the next 27 years as a leading member of the four-party Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Ethiopia has become a police state despite rapid economic development. For many Ethiopians, it was intolerable that the Tigrinos, who make up only 6% of the population, wield so much power. Tensions erupted in 2018 after years of protests in which thousands of people died.

The ruling EPRDF was looking for a new leader. The option of Abiy appeared, who was then a parliamentarian, and who as Oromo could help ease ethnic tensions. At first, Abiy did not disappoint. Speeches in which he admitted the use of torture by the regime electrified the country. After meeting Isaias Afwerki, the Eritrean dictator, he struck a lightning peace that sparked scenes of jubilation as families separated for years were reunited. “Abiymania” broke out, although several members of the entourage close to the new leader have warned of the flaws in his character. They believed it was a messianic that he was convinced that he would fulfill the prophecy of his mother who had told him that he would be “a new king”. Part of this was seen in his enormous Pentecostal devotion, He said he consulted God on all his decisions and rejected any earthly advice.

Things started to deteriorate when ethnic rivalries, long suppressed by the EPRDF, erupted, displacing 2 million people. In Abiy’s region of origin, Oromia, there was a violent uprising. The they still adorn Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled Ethiopia between 1930 and 1974 and is considered by Rastafarians as the redemptive messiah. The Prime Minister held responsible all the leaders of the TPLF, whom he accused of stoking the flames of ethnic hatred and he started to call them “hyenas”. It all ended in the current crisis and in enormous uncertainty about the country’s future. A situation that destabilizes the entire region of the so-called Horn of Africa which includes Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia, in addition to the sphere of influence with Kenya, the two Sudan and Uganda. Jeffrey Feltman, recently appointed ambassador to this region by the government of Joe Biden, put it this way: “Ethiopia has 117 million people. If tensions and civil strife in Ethiopia and Tigray continue to escalate, the crisis in Syria will look like child’s play”.

“War creates bitter men. Merciless and savage men ”, Abiy said in his speech when he received the Nobel Prize. Premonitory on your part. Hope you reread the words you wrote. Maybe they will make you think. For now, the violence continues despite the fact that he claims to have withdrawn troops from Tigray to pacify the country, six million of his compatriots are in despair with hunger and Abiy is locked up and embittered in his government palace.

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