Ethiopia and Tigray Region .. The full story of the verdict of armed conflict

The developments now underway between the Tigray region and the central government in Addis Ababa, which have reached the point of armed clashes, which put the unity of the second largest African country in terms of population at stake, or slide into the furnace of a conflict in which ethnicities are used, and this will be an earthquake that strikes all countries of the century African countries due to the ethnic and geographical overlap between them;

Which makes the security of each closely linked with the other.

In this article, we try to understand what is happening on the territory of the Tigray region, one of the ten regions of Ethiopia, whose population represents about 6% of the total population of the country, whose number exceeds 100 million people, distributed among about 80 ethnic groups.

Will the conflict between the central government and the Tigrayans lead to the secession of their region from Ethiopia?

(Reuters)

From history ...

when the situation deteriorated during the rule of the left-wing dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, and led to the spread of multiple famines that killed about 8 million people in the country, then armed opposition to the Mengistu regime began;

But until 1988 it was like isolated islands.

It remained more like armed groups that belonged to a specific nationality fighting through small operations, and the only exception was the Tigrayan People's Front, as it was more organized and had external alliances, most notably the alliance with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.

In 1988, a conference was held in a region inside Sudanese territory, which included representatives of 14 armed Ethiopian organizations. These organizations announced that they would fight together to topple Mengistu, and the coalition leadership was given to Tigray.

Because their forces were the most trained, armed and organized.

The coalition continued to fight for 3 years, and when it approached the overthrow of Mengistu in 1990, the London Conference for the Ethiopian Opposition was held under US-British sponsorship in order to organize opposition groups under one banner. The participants agreed again on the leadership of the Tigrayans, despite the presence of traditional leaders of tribal groups among the participants in addition to For military and political forces.

Tigrayans remained in control of the state in Ethiopia from the presidency to senior positions until the coming of Abiy Ahmed (Reuters)

Alliance of the

peoples of

Ethiopia

after a

few months ,

entered the

Alliance Front , the

peoples of

Ethiopia, which included the

then 14 organized forces, and seized power and set up

(Tamerat to Aineh) as president on 28 May / May 1991 ,

a national Tigray, then his successor Melis Zenawi in 1995 after leave the

Constitution of the

Republic of

Federal Ethiopia.

Zenawi held the position until his death in 2012, which made the Tigrayans rule Ethiopia for more than 20 years under the banner of an alliance controlling its joints, in addition to Meles Zenawi was able to control the contradictions within the coalition, which made even those who complain about the Tigray's control from other groups conceal the matter, The protest situation did not end over the Tigrayans' control until after the death of Zenawi and the election of his predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, who belonged to the Southern Ethiopia Peoples Alliance.

The Tigrayans considered a series of recent decisions by Abi Ahmed a target for them and a prelude to a confrontation with them (Reuters)

How did Abi Ahmed climbed?

After Hailemariam Desalegn took power, ethnic groups, led by the Oromo - the ethnic group that represents around 40 percent of the country's population - began to get upset with the way power-sharing in the central framework.

The incident of the central government granting some Oromo lands (south of the capital Addis Ababa) to investors represented the spark that sparked popular protests that continued to subside and escalate again during the years from 2015 to 2017, which forced Desalegn to resign, and alliances began to be woven to support candidates within the Central Council of the Alliance. And the one entrusted with choosing the prime minister, the Oromo Liberation Front surprised everyone by replacing its president (Lama Magrasa) with the former army intelligence colonel, Abiy Ahmed, who obtained Amheru support despite the opposition of the Tigrayans, and their representatives in the council voted against Ahmed.

Did he target Ahmed Al-Tigray?

As soon as the new prime minister ascended, he presented himself as a reformist man to the world, so he released a number of political prisoners, opened a measure of freedom to the press, and stressed that he wanted to fight corruption, and he called 2018 in Ethiopia the year of reconciliation.

To understand more, we need to look at a series of basic steps that have taken place in the past few months:

-

: "Abi Ahmed" called for an urgent solution to a border dispute between the Ethiopian regions of Oromia (south) and Somalia (southeast), which subsequently ended a border crisis between them that has been inflamed since September 2017, which caused deaths and displacement. Hundreds of Oromia to neighboring Harar province, according to the federal government, and the two regions are semi-autonomous, and they follow the Ethiopian Confederation.

-

: Parliament voted by

majority to lift the

state of

emergency imposed in the

country on February 16 / last February.

-

Abiy Ahmed made the first change to the chief of staff and the director of the National Intelligence and Security Service, in the first of its kind in 17 years, a point that the Tigrayans considered as a target for them as a nationalist, given that the Chief of Staff and the director of the Security and Intelligence Service since the arrival of the Ethiopian Peoples Front To power in 1991, it was their share.

-

it announced that the

Ethiopian opposition in Eritrea to

abandon armed resistance, and the

suspension of

its military activities.

She said that this step comes within the framework of the "encouraging steps" taken by the Ethiopian Prime Minister and the "significant positive developments" he has made in the country.

At the beginning of last June, Abiy Ahmed accompanied two senior leaders of the opposition "Oromo Liberation Democratic Front", which is based in Eritrea, on his return flight from Cairo.

-

The Ethiopian Parliament removed the armed opposition movements Qannoub Sabat, the Oromo Liberation Front, and the Ogaden Liberation Front, from the list of terrorist groups in the country that the government announced in June 2011.

Parliament also approved, in an extraordinary session held on 20 July, a general amnesty law for individuals and groups under investigation, or those convicted of treason, undermining the constitutional order and armed resistance.

-

Berhanu Nica, "head of the opposition Qanbot Sabat" movement, returns to Ethiopia from the United States, accompanied by more than 250 leaders and members of the movement, after nearly 13 years he spent fighting the Addis Ababa government from Eritrean lands.

A week before that date, fighters from the Ethiopian opposition coalition, consisting of the "Qanbot Sabat" movement and the "Ethiopian National Front", returned to the country.

Abiy Ahmed's reconciliation with Eritrea constituted one of the most important files of tension with Tigray (Reuters)

Reconciliation with Eritrea in

addition to foreign reconciliation with neighboring Eritrea after a rupture since 1998, the date of the outbreak of the war between them as a result of a dispute over a border region, which was one of the turning points in the Tigray's relationship with Abiy Ahmed, due to the deep differences between them and the ruling Popular Front regime in Eritrea led by Afwerki, And the war in the border region between Tigrayans and Eritrea, and Abiy Ahmed's announcement of his agreement to Eritrea's handover of the disputed area in the Badme Triangle, in implementation of the judgment of the International Court of Justice issued in 2002 and a peace agreement signed in the same year between the two countries in Algeria.

Postponement of the elections .. Was it backward?

The dispute escalated between Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray region when Parliament approved a request from Abiy Ahmed to postpone the general elections that were scheduled for June 2020, and to extend the term of the Prime Minister that ended in May, which was scheduled to take place last August. The Tigrayans considered unconstitutional, and the Speaker of Parliament, Soraya Ibrahim, a Tigrayan, announced her resignation during a speech festival in the capital of the Tigray region (Macli), and said, "I am not ready to work with a group that violates the constitution, it is a dictatorship in the process of formation."

Ibrahim's resignation was followed by other resignations, and the Tigrayan People's Front held its conference in June 2020, during which it announced that it would organize elections in the region unilaterally as scheduled last August, and asked the Central Elections Committee to supervise its elections.

Fears reach such an extent that the Tigray region demands secession from Ethiopia, as stipulated in the 1995 constitution (Reuters)

The Tigrayan elections,

after organizing them and the participation of about 2.7 million voters, the central government refused to recognize them, considering them illegal and unconstitutional, and the Tigrayan government responded that it did not recognize the central government as an unconstitutional body.

The central government’s decision in September 2020 to halt remittances from it to Tigray represented the most severe escalation between the two parties, and the region considered it a declaration of war against it.

In the last week of October 2020, the Tigray region called on the international community to intervene in the crisis, and then appended that to announcing that it was under a military threat from the central government, which described what was happening in Tigray as an insurgency.

On the second of November, armed clashes began between the two sides, with each side accusing the other of starting them.

Has the divorce began between Addis Ababa and McKee?

For the first time in the country's history, a direct armed confrontation takes place between a region and the central government, and what increases fears that the Tigray region may go a step beyond the confrontation and decide to separate from the central state of Ethiopia.

In fact, some people take another direction that the region may decide to use the right granted to it by Article 39 of the 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia, which stipulates the meaning (Each of the people of Ethiopia has the right to self-determination and unconditional separation).

Is Sudan in the crosshairs?

Developments in the Tigray region have become a major threat to security and humanitarian crises in Sudan, as the region limits two of the Sudanese states (Kassala and Gedaref), which are already troubled.

Because of the spread of tribal conflicts in them, and the region supervises the Sudanese agricultural area of ​​Fashaqa, parts of which are controlled by Ethiopian militias.

Smuggling of weapons and human beings is also spread along the border strip between Sudan and the region, and it seems that the state of security liquidity in the Tigray region will further complicate the situation in Sudan and threaten stability in the states of Kassala and Gedaref, which may help groups that practice these illegal activities to increase their activity .

On the humanitarian side, if the clashes develop, it is expected that hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians will flee into the Sudanese territories, which will create a humanitarian crisis in light of complex economic conditions with which the inflation rate in the country reached 212%, according to government statistics.

Other than Sudan, Eritrea, the northern neighbor of Ethiopia, will be greatly affected in light of Tigray's accusations that it represents part of the arrangements made by Abiy Ahmed to confront their region.