Today, Explained - The peacemaker’s civil war

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

An ethnic conflict in Ethiopia has thrown the Horn of Africa into disarray and could upset order on the continent. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Election night in the United States, November 3rd, didn't deliver results, but it still sucked the air out of the room. The entire world was watching to see if it was going to be Joe Biden or the guy who lost. And with all that focus on just one country, it's a great time to start a war. To Ethiopia, where Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has announced a, quote, final military operation against the defiant Tigray province in coming days.

For two weeks now, Ethiopia has been at war with itself. The federal government versus the northernmost region of the country. The regions ruled by the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF. The TPLF is the party in power up north, but it used to run the entire country. Then the new guy showed up. The TPLF, all old guards have continuously mounted wars, covert and overt attempts to undermine the people of Ethiopia and our new administration. This conflict isn't just bad news for Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is the second largest country in Africa with over 100 million people. And it's also the city head of the African Union. It's bad news for the region. Ethiopia is bordered by Somalia, is bordered by South Sudan and Sudan, countries that are prone to violence. Bad news for the region is bad news for the continent. So if Ethiopia is not a stable country, then there's potential for terrorist splinters

to sort of get into the wider region and into the continent from there. And bad news for the continent is bad news for the world. Samuel Gebre, you've been covering this conflict in Ethiopia for Bloomberg News. How did it begin? So just to take it from the top, there has been a rift between the central government and the Tigray government.

With several instances that showed Ethiopia was going towards conflict at some point. The key event that happened was... Ethiopia's federal government launched the offensive against forces of the Tigray People's Liberation Front blaming them for an attack on a military base. We've seen air bombardments. Hundreds are reported to have been

killed. We've seen rockets being launched into a neighboring country, Eritrea. A close ally of Ethiopia's federal government. The figures of injuries going to the hundreds, if not thousands. Aid groups say 25,000 people have now fled to Sudan since fighting broke out. They spoke of the heartbreak of leaving their homeland. I left my mother in a church. She's an elderly woman.

My brother is blind. We left him there as well. There's no food or water. Everyone ran away. And on the way, we found murdered people with weapons and axes and knives. That's why we ran. What were we to do? We want to save ourselves.

And I know there's this communications blackout and the world doesn't have much access to Tigray right now. But people outside Ethiopia are calling this a civil war. Is that how Ethiopians are talking about it? It depends on who you ask. The government in Addis, that's the capital of Ethiopia, would say this is just them trying to restore law and order. And if you ask Tigray, they say this is the central government trying to eliminate them. Cowering the people of Tigray into submission by force. So depending on who you ask, the definition has actually been argued over.

But if you have rockets being launched into a neighboring region, I don't know how else you describe a war. How are the people in the country reacting? Well, most of the population is opposed to war, as expected, right? But the TPLF, having left having more or less led the country since 1991. You can say they have created enough enemies in the country, they have created enough hatred in people for the heinous acts that they committed over those 27 years, which have been documented by the likes of the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Many Ethiopians live in fear. The current government, the only one since 1991,

runs the country with an almost complete grip on power, controlling almost all aspects of political, public, and often private life. The majority of the people had been victims of this rulership. So the Tigray region doesn't really have empathy from the rest of the population. So no one wants war, but the Ethiopian people are not exactly protesting the government for attacking the TPLF? More or less, yes. The majority of the population in Ethiopia has gotten to a point where they would be okay to see TPLF gone. It is sort of going to war for the sake of peace. The population wants to get rid of TPLF because the TPLF has

created havoc across the country, and the citizenry would be happy to let that go. But that potentially means thousands more dead and a refugee crisis that will upset the region. Is anyone going to intervene? One of the easiest solutions or the realistic solution is for the central government to win the war and have the TPLF leaders and bring them to court because attempts by regional leaders and international

bodies for mediation have failed. The Prime Minister has said that he is not interested in mediation because this is an internal conflict that he would like to not involve other countries. Over the past two days, the federal forces seem to be getting closer to the capital of Tigray, and if they manage to, then it means the objective will be met and the war will be over. But it could mean some brutal circumstances for Tigray. Two things, yes. It could mean there will be loss of life in hundreds, maybe in the thousands of them. We've already seen nearly 30,000 people fleeing to Sudan,

so it's already creating a humanitarian crisis. But even in the long run, if the Tigray leadership technically loses the war, they will keep fighting. They will try and create insurgencies for God knows how long in Ethiopia. And they have said that publicly, unless the federal government stops, then the country will disintegrate in their own words. So there's really no winner in this situation. After the break, the guy in charge of this war, he's the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Samuel, help me understand how this conflict really gets started between the Ethiopian government and this northern region, Tigray? How long ago do tensions begin? So to understand what happened in the past two weeks,

we need to go back to at least to the coalition, it's called the EPRDF. And in the EPRDF, there was a preeminent party, the TPLF, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, with three other ethnic political parties. And the reason they government in 1991. So in 1991, TPLF comes into power. So for those 27 years, the economic growth of the country was amazing. Ethiopia's economy has grown at a faster rate than any other African country in the past 10 years.

But locally, the political space and the economic space was dominated by TPLF members so the Ethiopian population was not really happy with the TPLF leadership. As one farmer in the Amhara region told me in July of 2014, we do not like the government but we always vote for them. We have to because we get our seeds and fertilizer from them. During times of drought we get food aid They rigged elections, won 99% of seats, and five years later improved on that and won 100% of seats, which led to protests that began in 2015 and did not stop until the TPLF had to try and sort of reform itself to stay in power. But it doesn't really work, right? Because a few years later, the TPLF is replaced by the current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. Exactly. Many people expected him to be another puppet prime minister with the TPLF still holding control,

but then he surprised everyone. He came in on a wave of reforms. Since taking office in April 2018, Mr. Abiy has ended a state of emergency, freed political prisoners, and got parliament to lift a so-called terrorist ban on opposition groups. Recently, he shifted his focus to Ethiopia's economy,

pledging to open up the country to foreign investment. But at the same time, he was slowly alienating the TPLF from the leadership, from businesses, from political positions, and they were getting a bit agitated and it was getting a bit clear. And all this climaxed when in December 2019 he more or less merged this EPRDF, the ruling coalition party, into a singular national party which he called the Prosperity Party and invited

other parties to join as well, except the TPLF did not join this party. So they more or less became from the ruling party to the opposition within a span of less than two years. How has he been received internationally? Since Prime Minister Abiy came to power, one of the first things he did was to make a peace deal with Ethiopia's archenemy, Eritrea. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war from 1998 to 2000 that left around 80,000 people

dead. And since then, the two Horn of Africa countries have been locked in hostilities for two decades. And him making this peace deal gave him this international image as the peacemaker. And he went on ahead to try and mediate in South Sudan. He is helping with conflict in Somalia. He mediated between Eritrea and Djibouti. So he's internationally known as this man of love, man of peace, man of mediation. So all this culminated with him finally getting... The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019

to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. Peace is a labor of love. Sustaining peace is hard work. Yet we must cherish and nurture it. So what does it mean? How is it being received that this guy who's been preaching love and unity at home and abroad, who received the Nobel Peace Prize,

is now at the center of this civil war who's brutally suppressing people in the north of Ethiopia? It sounds confusing, right? Yeah. But if you ask the Ethiopian government, they will tell you this is not a war. This is, in quotes, restoring the rule of law in Ethiopia. And the reason is Ethiopia is ravaged with conflict from the north, the east, the south, and the west. And the finger always points at TPLF from the government.

Since Abiy came into power, he's accused the TPLF of trying to commit regional coup in Amara region, throwing a grenade at him, massacring people in several regions. So this was building up in the country for the past two and a half years. And the central government would say, in actual sense, we have been very patient with the TPLF. We've given them enough time to reform and to change, but they have not.

The key incident followed the postponement of elections in Ethiopia in March 2020. Tigray went ahead with regional elections despite a ban from the federal government. And won 99% of the seats. Abiy postponed the polls citing the coronavirus pandemic, but the TPLF says he delayed them to stay in power. How does that work? How does one region hold an election when the rest of the country isn't? Exactly. It is a very confusing situation to be in. And the central government said any attempts to hold elections in Tigray would be unconstitutional. The central government responded

by cutting budgetary subsidies to the Tigray region. And that was the point where the Tigray government said that amounts to a declaration of war. And from then on, it had been a very tense situation between the Tigray government and the central government, with both saying they do not recognize each other. We got a lot of people alleging illegitimate election hijinks in the United States right now. I imagine this one region having its own election didn't go over well in the country? Definitely not. The rest of the country had accepted, to some extent, to postpone the elections. COVID-19 seemed to be a legitimate reason.

And it was clear that Tigray region going ahead with the election was more of defiance to the central government's rule. Samuel, I mentioned at the top of the show that this all began the night of the U.S. election when perhaps there was, you know, a sense that the world's attention was elsewhere. Is the world now paying attention to what's going on in Ethiopia, this conflict that could upset the stability of the entire Horn of Africa? Yes, the world is definitely paying attention now. If this goes wrong, it could be one of the worst wars. As of now, we've seen the UN, the AU, nations like China, Russia, are all paying attention. because given the geographic location of Ethiopia, its proximity to Somalia and Djibouti, Djibouti which has a lot of military bases including the US and China, stability in Ethiopia is important not just for East, but for global superpowers, the likes of the US and China. So far, we've seen several statements coming out of the United Nations. The issue was also

pushed to the Security Council. African leaders have tried to send mediators into the country. And the prospect of having hundreds of thousands of refugees going from northern Ethiopia through Sudan to Europe has definitely got the world's paying attention, you said the government, Prime Minister Ahmed, doesn't want the world's help with this. From where we stand now, the best-case scenario is for this war to end soon, meaning either the government wins. That's the best-case scenario,

and that seems to be what international bodies and world powers, including the U.S., seem to be watching and waiting for. Samuel Gebre is a Bloomberg reporter covering Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. Today Explained.