When Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, launched an attack on the restive region of Tigray in his country’s north last November, he promised it would be a swift victory for his forces. The goal, Abiy said, was to punish leaders of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) for an attack on a federal military installation.
A year later, the Prime Minister’s confidence in his troops looks misplaced. The conflict is still raging and there is no end in sight. The TPLF has made a stunning comeback after it was initially beaten back into the hills, and taken key cities including the regional capital of Mekelle.
Now the rebels have set their sights on Addis Ababa, the national capital that is home to 5 million people and the headquarters of the African Union. The TPLF and its allies are threatening to block roads into the city and to throttle road and rail networks that link Ethiopia, a landlocked country, to shipments from Djibouti.
Although Abiy’s government has refused to officially acknowledge the TPLF’s advance, it declared a six-month state of emergency on Nov.2, granting security services sweeping powers to arrest anyone deemed to be in support of the rebels. People of Tigrayan descent in the capital are being targeted, with police arresting 16 people who work for the United Nations and their families.
From bad to worse
And so what began as a regional conflict stands on the precipice of becoming a full-blown civil war engulfing the capital. Many are fleeing the city. The U.K. has urged its citizens to leave; so has America. This week, Zambia became the first African nation to begin airlifting its citizens out of Ethiopia.
Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, now speaks in tones threatening ethnic cleansing — promising, for example, to “bury” his opponents, in a post censored by Facebook. The TPLF, for its part, says it is convinced of victory and has no intention to dialogue.
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