Your post reminded of a story I read at the beginning of the conflict and I sometimes wonder if the father and son fought on the same front ever.
Ethiopia crisis: ‘a political mess that makes fathers fight sons’(Financial Times)
David Pilling in London and Andres Schipani in Gondar, Ethiopia
NOVEMBER 18 2020
The conflict in Tigray is the biggest test of Abiy Ahmed’s premiership and threatens to spill over into neighbouring countries
Gashaw Koye, a 42-year-old farmer from Amhara dressed in crisp new battle fatigues, met his wife from the neighbouring region of Tigray more than two decades ago. Now, as part of an army mustered by Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, he is preparing to fight Tigray’s regional government.
It is bad enough that Mr Gashaw may have to battle people from his former wife’s northern homeland. Worse, among the soldiers fighting for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, is the couple’s 21-year-old son, Amanuel.
There is little love lost between the regions of Amhara and Tigray, which have long-running land disputes along their shared border. That animosity is now part of a broader national conflict in Ethiopia, a country of 110m people in the Horn of Africa.
“I am going to have to fight the terrorists of the TPLF for the good of Ethiopia,” says Mr Gashaw, referring to the regional party that ran the country for almost three decades but is now considered by some to be a rogue force.
“This means I may have to fight my own son.”
Militiamen from Amhara, including Gashaw Koye in the shawl, travel over the regional border to the northern area of Tigray to fight against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front © Eduardo Soteras/AFP/Getty
He is speaking as dozens of militiamen like him, most brandishing AK-47 rifles, clamber aboard buses and trucks in the city of Gondar, to be transported across the border to Tigray.
“This is what Ethiopia has become,” says Mr Gashaw, stroking his own well-worn rifle. “A big political mess that makes fathers fight sons.”
Crisis and conflict
The political crisis that has set Ethiopian against Ethiopian began in the early hours of November 4 when Mr Abiy launched what he called “a law enforcement” operation — replete with air strikes and ground troops operation — against the TPLF.
The prime minister, an army intelligence officer when the TPLF was running the country, said he was left with no choice after the Northern Command of the federal defence forces based in the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle were attacked “when they were at their most vulnerable, in their pyjamas”.
With the eyes of the world focused on the US election, Ethiopian forces bombed arms depots and other targets in Tigray. The army, together with militias and regional special forces, began a ground attack that Mr Abiy says has already “liberated” large parts of Tigray from the TPLF.
The conflict has quickly spread. On Saturday, the TPLF slammed rockets into Asmara, capital of Eritrea, a neighbouring country, after accusing the secretive state, which broke away from Ethiopia in the early 1990s, of siding with Mr Abiy. The TPLF has also fired missiles at the airport in Amhara’s capital, Bahir Dar, and at Mr Gashaw’s home town of Gondar.
This is the gravest crisis of Mr Abiy’s tumultuous two-and-a-half-year premiership — one that has already included the award of a Nobel Peace Prize for concluding a peace deal with Eritrea, an assassination attempt and an attempted coup. It threatens to scupper any chance of credible democratic elections next year, which had already been made harder by the arrest of senior opposition figures.
The fear is that war in Tigray could trigger a humanitarian crisis and widespread ethnic and political violence in a country that, although deeply divided, had been regarded by many as a model of economic progress in Africa.
Some even fear that it could precipitate a Yugoslavia-style break-up of Ethiopia along ethnic lines.
The country, with a history of independent states stretching back three millennia, is divided into 10 ethnically defined regions, each with their own distinct language, culture and history.
“There are eerie similarities with Yugoslavia, except Yugoslavia imploded,” says Payton Knopf, senior adviser to the Africa programme at the United States Institute of Peace. “If you do see fragmentation in Ethiopia . . . it won’t just collapse in on itself, but it will become a black hole that draws in all of its neighbours.”
Continue reading
https://www.ft.com/content/b888c23a-45e ... 17cc23e202