The country’s erratic prime minister continues to fan the flames.
After eight months of failing to treat the war, atrocities, and famine in the Tigray region of Ethiopia with the seriousness that they deserve, the United Nations Security Council is finally meeting on the crisis as early as this week. What has occasioned this is the military triumph of the Tigray Defense Force over the Ethiopian army.
For the resolution of the crisis — indeed, for the very survival of Ethiopia — the Security Council must deal directly with the TDF, which is the armed wing of the former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF.
In two weeks of fierce fighting in June, the TDF defeated the Ethiopian army, with a decisiveness and speed that surprised even its own commanders. Driven by a fierce determination to free its land from the brutalities of occupation, led by veterans with surpassing military skill, and now armed with its enemies’ weapons, the TDF inflicted irreparable losses on the Ethiopian National Defense Force. The Tigrayan resistance captured or put out of action more than half of the Ethiopian army’s combat capabilities. The Eritrean army — the Ethiopians’ formidable ally — is withdrawing its units from the town it occupied in northern Tigray, and the regional militia of Amhara that overran western and southern Tigray may well flee rather than fight.
Focused on the human rights atrocities and the humanitarian disaster in Tigray, the media and diplomats entirely missed the story of the war itself. Everyone knew that the official line of the government in Addis Ababa — that a “law enforcement operation” needed just a bit more effort to round up the “remnants” of the former TPLF — wasn’t true. But few understood quite how strong the armed resistance was growing.
The number one reason why the guerrillas were so numerous, determined, disciplined, and bold was that their sisters and daughters had been raped, their farms and houses had been burned, and they themselves faced torture and murder if caught by the occupiers.
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