During an African Union summit on humanitarian work in late May, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed affirmed his government’s “commitment to ensuring assistance reaches those afflicted by natural and manmade disasters,” and called on international partners to “scale up their support for humanitarian services across the continent.”
The statement drew the ire of some commentators, who regarded it as an empty promise at a time when Ethiopia itself is enduring a dire humanitarian crisis, particularly in the war-ravaged northern region of Tigray and the neighboring regions, Amhara and Afar, to which forces under Abiy’s command have contributed. Nevertheless, Abiy’s statement added some weight to the Ethiopian government’s recent rhetoric, which has slowly but markedly softened, suggesting its willingness to address the consequences of a civil war that, since November 2020, has pitted government and allied forces against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, a regional political party and rebel group.
There have been no large-scale confrontations between federal and TPLF forces since the end of November 2021, when a federal offensive forced TPLF fighters to retreat from large parts of Amhara and Afar that they had occupied for roughly five months. TPLF forces then reoccupied some of this territory in Afar, only to largely withdraw again at the end of April, on the back of the federal government’s unilateral announcement of a “humanitarian truce.” The federal government has also established a peace committee to propose pathways to end the conflict.
Ethiopia is undoubtedly far from putting the war in Tigray behind it. For one thing, the TPLF and Eritrea continue to sporadically exchange fire, and rhetoric along that fault line of the conflict remains high. The constant, smaller-scale face-offs between the TPLF and Ethiopia don’t bode well, either. Nevertheless, the truce has largely held so far, and the federal government’s previously tight restrictions on the movement of humanitarian provisions have markedly loosened—although the amount of aid reaching Tigray is still woefully insufficient compared to its needs.
The announcement of the peace committee and Abiy’s statement at the AU summit, if sincere, could signal a shift in the government’s posture toward peace. Since then, conversations between different parties have made progress “very slowly, but steadily,” according to the African Union’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo, who spoke to the BBC after a recent meeting with TPLF leadership.
The United States, meanwhile, appointed a new special envoy to the region, Mike Hammer, weeks after former envoy David Satterfield indicated his desire to resign. Hammer now has the unenviable job of reinserting the U.S. as a critical partner that can nudge the parties toward peace, support and coordinate international humanitarian aid, and ultimately play a hand in reconstruction efforts.
Of course, there is still a sizeable risk that the region could relapse into conflict, and the expected arrival of the rainy season threatens to complicate relief efforts even further. But the de facto truce and improvements in the humanitarian situation offer the greatest opportunity yet for a peaceful end to the conflict in the north. The warring parties and all international stakeholders—including the Chinese special envoy for the Horn of Africa, who has offered to mediate peace talks—would do well to seize this opportunity to bring an end to the conflict once and for all.
From Euphoria to Civil War
Ethiopia, for decades an anchor of peace in the Horn of Africa, is today a net exporter of instability. With the Tigray war—arguably Africa’s biggest civil war in recent history—and violent insurgencies in its Oromia, Benishangul Gumuz and Gambella regions, Ethiopia has become one of the most fragile countries in the world, riven by identity-based tensions. Meanwhile, the proliferation and weakening of the regular law enforcement system has led to thousands of deaths, mainly of civilians, and a prevalent sense of the state’s absence.
Runaway inflation, an overall dismal economic situation and climate change-induced droughts and disasters have exacerbated that fragility. According to a recent report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, in 2021, Ethiopia had the largest number of newly displaced people in Africa, with more than 5 million having been uprooted from their homes. Almost 26 million people in the country—nearly a quarter of its population—are reportedly dependent on humanitarian assistance. Conditions could get even worse in the coming months due to shortages of fertilizer and seeds and international supply disruptions of wheat, oil and other food items, caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Ethiopia, for decades an anchor for peace in the Horn of Africa, is today a net exporter of instability.This was not how things were supposed to go for Ethiopia. In April 2018, years of popular protests in Oromia and Amhara finally forced a reshuffle in the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, which was then dominated by the TPLF. The reckoning catapulted Abiy to the premiership, fueling euphoria and hope for a new vision for an inclusive, peaceful, strong and united Ethiopia. Abiy and the reformed EPRDF were expected to improve governance and rule of law, reignite the struggling economy and, most importantly, initiate a transition to an era of open, democratic and competitive politics.
But over time, the mistrust at the heart of Ethiopian political culture pushed the transition off track. Long-standing, competing political narratives about Ethiopian identity provided a familiar vocabulary for contestation between the various political parties and ethnic groups over the transition’s goals and how to distribute power.
The EPRDF, for its part, never quite recovered from the internal power struggles that preceded the transition. Tensions between the TPLF and Oromo and Amhara leaders worsened when politicians deployed heated rhetoric blaming their opponents for the failures of the past decades, including allegations of corruption and torture. Abiy, himself Oromo, began to go after Tigrayan leaders who had been accused of corruption and human right violations, and introduced broad measures to reduce the dominance of the TPLF in the political and security sectors.
But these moves exacerbated the concerns of TPLF leaders, who felt they had been wrongly and selectively targeted and excluded from political leadership. Abiy’s secretive handling of the 2019 Ethiopia-Eritrea peace process, which ended a decades long border conflict and ultimately secured the prime minister the Nobel Peace Prize, further weakened the TPLF’s trust in the federal government. Tigray lies along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, and while the Tigrayan party initially welcomed talks to resolve that conflict, it later criticized the process as exclusionary and the outcome as a “war pact” aimed at eliminating the TPLF.
The transformation of the EPRDF into the newly rebaptized Prosperity Party in late 2019 was, in retrospect, a turning point. The new party formally rejected the EPRDF’s formation as an ethnic coalition, presenting itself instead as a pan-Ethiopian formation. Some Oromo leaders and the TPLF, which subscribe to a corporatist, ethnic-based politics, criticized the new party as a move to centralize the federal government’s power, reversing gains toward ethnic self-determination. The Prosperity Party’s Oromo branch fractured, with violence intensifying in the Oromo region, while the TPLF simply refused to join, formalizing its divorce from the federal ruling class. It has been downhill from there.
In Oromia, the political instability ensuing from the infighting among Oromo political leaders generated violence among and against civilians, particularly targeted attacks on minority linguistic and religious groups. It also led to a resurgence of the self-proclaimed Oromo Liberation Army, or OLA, an armed insurgency.
Then, in 2020, the federal government’s postponement of national elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic was the final straw for many parties that had come to distrust the transition process. Some opposition groups, notably the TPLF, insisted that the postponement was illegal, and Oromo opposition groups demanded the establishment of a transitional government to pave the way for free and credible elections.
From there, instability began to worsen dramatically. In June and July 2020, the killing of a prominent Oromo singer sparked violent protests, leading to the detention of key Oromo and other opposition leaders and those with suspected affiliations with the OLA. In Tigray, the TPLF decided to go ahead with regional elections in September 2020, in open defiance of the federal government. That vote inspired a flurry of legislative disputes, risky brinkmanship and war rhetoric that ultimately degenerated into conflict in November 2020, when TPLF forces attacked the federal army’s Northern Command in Tigray.
The war has since seen several reversals of fortune. The federal government and its allies took control of the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, in just three weeks. But TPLF forces regrouped and forced a federal retreat in June 2021, with the notable exception of areas that have long been contested with Amhara. Shortly after, the TPLF launched offensives to occupy large parts of Amhara and Afar regions, until they were ultimately repelled in November 2021. Along the way, the war has seen all sides in the conflict commit unimaginable brutalities, triggering mass displacements and destroying costly infrastructure. The effective encirclement of Tigray by federal and Eritrean forces and their failure to facilitate humanitarian provisions from reaching the millions trapped inside have forced many to the brink of starvation. While humanitarian access has markedly improved in recent months, it remains woefully insufficient, and basic services remain inaccessible.
The story of the Ethiopian civil war is the story of all wars: It was rooted in mistrust and a struggle for power and dominance. But all it has accomplished so far has been to generate new grievances and degrade that trust even further.
Seizing the Momentum Toward Peace
The announcement of the humanitarian truce, improvements in the flow of humanitarian provisions, and the relative softening of the rhetoric may signal that the conflict has hit a nadir. The parties may have come to realize that a “war at whatever cost” attitude is untenable.
There are no guarantees, however, and the flickers of momentum toward peace must be proactively seized. In this regard, both the federal government and the TPLF should end their unhelpful propaganda, in which the government has characterized TPLF fighters as terrorists and the TPLF has characterized government forces as fascists and genocidaires. A legal determination of the nature of the violence each side has committed, and collective justice for it, should be part of a future peace initiative, rather than merely reduced to crude political labeling.
Both parties should also move quickly to transform the de facto truce into a comprehensive cease-fire. This would require mutual recognition and the removal of the federal government’s designation of the TPLF as a terrorist group. In addition to demonstrating the government’s commitment to peace, the removal of that designation is legally necessary to engage in a transparent peace process and enable cooperation for the steady resumption of basic services in Tigray as well as the reconnection of the Tigrayan economy with the rest of the country.
The ultimate goal of these initial talks should be to enable the inclusion of the TPLF and Tigrayans in the national dialogue process that was planned as a part of Abiy’s transition and the first steps of which are now being taken. This necessitates addressing opposition and TPLF concerns regarding the genuineness, inclusiveness and effectiveness of the dialogue. Two major sticking points would be the fates of the Tigrayan armed forces and of the contested lands between Amhara and Tigray. But these issues need not be resolved in advance of the transition’s dialogue process, as they are connected to the overall territorial, political and security future of Ethiopia, and are therefore central to the national dialogue.
Beyond Tigray, the shift away from war would also need to be pursued across the country. While the mandate of the newly announced peace committee has been discussed in the context of the war with the TPLF, it could also propose a comprehensive peace plan for the transition as a whole. Notably, the government may need to consider a negotiated end to the conflict in Oromia and the low-level insurgencies in other regions. Negotiation with the OLA could be politically treacherous, as the group has been accused of repeatedly massacring members of the Amhara and other minority groups. Most recently, it was implicated in the killing of more than 200 mostly Amhara people in Oromia this week. Nevertheless, a military solution alone is unlikely to address the deep grievances driving this and other conflicts. Moreover, in order to curb the proliferation of arms and armed groups in Amhara—which has been driven by fear of the TPLF, anger at the targeted killings of Amhara and perceived marginalization of the Amhara region—a political process will also be required there.
The parties in Ethiopia may have come to realize that a “war at whatever cost” attitude is untenable.The federal government should also reverse the repressive policies it has put in place over the past two years, ostensibly to maintain stability during the conflict. While public order is critical and justice needs to be served, using “law enforcement” to exercise brute force against protesters and carry out arbitrary arrests—including the detention of journalists and activists—will ultimately prove counterproductive to addressing the political disputes underlying the insurgencies across the country. As with the TPLF, the federal government should make genuine political efforts to silence the guns and bring armed groups into the dialogue process.
In a context of politicized violence and instability, as in Ethiopia, victory through force would only reset the countdown to the next round of war and instability, if indeed any of the current conflicts end with the “victory” of any one actor.
Hopes for a National Dialogue
Silencing the guns through negotiation is only half of the puzzle. If the scourge of war is to end for good, Ethiopia must make sure its national dialogue process genuinely enables common understanding, depoliticizes contested historical narratives and, crucially, builds a shared political settlement and constitutional framework.
In late 2021, the Ethiopian Parliament established the National Dialogue Commission and has already appointed members. Although the inclusivity and genuineness of the dialogue process so far has been heavily criticized by opposition and civil society alike, it is not irredeemable. In fact, Rahel Bafe, an opposition leader and chairperson of the Joint Council of Political Parties, and Jawar Mohammed, a prominent Oromo opposition leader, have both expressed hope that the dialogue will be inclusive, which they note is necessary for Ethiopia’s future.
Beyond the dialogue commission, if the lessons of the years after 2018 are any indication, securing a lasting peace may also require opposition and independent forces, civil society leaders and public intellectuals to speak and act in unison in support of the dialogue. In order for these groups to promote their policy prescriptions and exercise their freedom, Ethiopia first needs to settle on a broadly agreed-upon constitutional framework and establish healthy democratic institutions. It’s in their interests, therefore, to prioritize cooperation over competition.
The dialogue is also likely to face hurdles unless it’s backed by a committed government and patrons who can enable the process. In this regard, while her office lacks formal executive power, President Sahle-Work Zewde has the experience and position to promote the dialogue. Abiy’s support will also be critical—but trickier to negotiate. Abiy cannot simultaneously play the role of a patron and participant in the dialogue without presenting a perceived—or real—conflict of interest.
Abiy should therefore consider giving up the mantle of power at the conclusion of the national dialogue, which is expected to coincide with the end of his current term. Doing so would not only enhance public and opposition confidence in the process, but would also cement a legacy of peaceful alternation of power in the country. Of course, the prime minister and his supporters may be reluctant to agree to the proposal, arguing instead that his political future should be determined by the people, his party and—given Abiy’s religiosity—God. But by the end of his current term, Abiy will have served almost nine years, a length of time that would preclude him from serving a third term in a large majority of African countries. And stepping down would enhance the chances of sustainable peace.
Fundamentally, the transformation of Ethiopia into an arena of peace will require detecting and resisting the magnetic pull of mistrust that has historically characterized Ethiopian political culture. Mistrust, ultimately, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Checking this tradition—and the associated tendency to label competitors as mortal “enemies” that must be eliminated—will be critical to building a stable and democratic Ethiopia with a free marketplace of political ideas. So far, political will and wisdom have been in short supply, and there is no guarantee that these flickers of peace will brighten. Nevertheless, this could be the chance Ethiopia needs to finally straighten out its political discourse and broker a lasting peace among ethnic groups.