Ethiopia’s civil war—by far the worst conflict in terms of casualties and refugees in the world at present—is far from over, despite a peace accord between two of the combatant powers.
The Tigray Popular Liberation Front (TPLF) has almost certainly secreted large quantities of weapons in caches around the Tigray region, as it has done before, and will almost certainly resume a guerilla war of secession once its cadres have regained strength. At the same time, the Marxist Oromo separatist movement—which traces its origins to the 1960s—has continued to escalate its own genocidal (by definition) war against Ethiopia.
Significant deaths of Ethiopians, particularly Amhara people, continue at the hands of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and its associated fighting groups almost daily.
The Nov. 2 “Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities” brokered by the African Union (AU) and mediated by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in Pretoria, South Africa, was described by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as a promising start. It was just that: a “promising start.”
It by no means spelled an end to the complex web of conflict challenging Ethiopian unity for many years.
The U.N. secretary-general described the Pretoria agreement between the Ethiopian government and the TPLF as an accord between the government and the “Tigray.” The reality was far from that. It was an accord between the government and the TPLF, a radical Marxist military organization that in no way represented the population of the Tigray region, one of the many victims of the TPLF in recent years.
Moreover, while international observers noted that the accord did not include the government of the neighboring state Eritrea—which had provided military support to the Ethiopian government—none mentioned that the accord also failed to include the OLF, the TPLF’s key military ally.
The OLF and its forces continue to wage a full war against the Ethiopian government, particularly against the Amhara population and all Ethiopians who espouse “Ethiopian” unity or support the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Most reporting indicated that the Pretoria accord ended “two years of fighting,” but the TPLF’s separatist war had lasted longer than that. As many as 500,000 people may have died in those past two years due to the TPLF’s resumption of its war against Ethiopia.
The TPLF had been a radical Marxist military force fighting for the secession of the Tigray region from Ethiopia during the long period that another radical Marxist government—the Dergue—had controlled Ethiopia following the 1974 coup against Emperor Haile Selassie I. The Dergue collapsed when its sponsor, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), collapsed in 1990-91. At that time, the TPLF force found itself in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, with two battalions of Sudanese armor. Dergue leader Mengistu Haile Mariam fled to Zimbabwe on May 21, 1991. He remains there still.
The United States, preoccupied at the time with the collapse of the USSR, sent its assistant secretary of state for Africa, Herman Jay (“Hank”) Cohen, to Addis. He essentially told the TPLF that the secessionist group was now in charge of all of the Ethiopian Empire, which they had sought to leave. The TPLF, which represented a small minority of the Tigrean population (itself then only 6 percent of the entire Ethiopian population), found that it needed to cobble together and control a government for all of Ethiopia, which it did on May 27, 1991. Its first act was to agree to the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia, which finally occurred with Eritrea’s declaration of independence on May 24, 1993.
The TPLF was able to control Ethiopia until 2018. It was lucky to have lasted even that long. Its wartime leader, Meles Zenawi, had used extreme measures to ensure control of the government, but he died in 2012, and the TPLF drifted after that. By 2018, it had lost direction and walked away from governance, handing power to then-Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, from the Wolayta ethnic group of Southern Ethiopia, who was named interim prime minister on Aug. 21, 2012.
He was from a minority ethnic group and, for most Ethiopians, represented a break from the TPLF, but he lacked a power base. He resigned on April 2, 2018, paving the way for an Oromo-dominated government under Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed Ali to assume control. Abiy quickly restructured the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) into a more representative national party, the Prosperity Party, on Dec. 1, 2019.
The main difference between the EPRDF and the Prosperity Party, apart from not being avowedly “revolutionary,” was that the TPLF had evaporated from the coalition. The TPLF, in effect, had “gone back to the bush.” It was only later that the post-Meles TPLF leadership decided they wanted to return to power in Ethiopia or somehow get a separate Tigrayan nation-state.
The TPLF had, in its reawakened agenda, the support of the U.S. Joe Biden administration. Many of the Biden national security officials had served earlier in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations and had—during the Obama administration—created a strong working relationship with TPLF leaders. The United States had then sought the use of the Ethiopian airfield at Arba Minch in southern Ethiopia as a base for several General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) from 2011 to September 2015. The Reapers were used for intelligence and strike missions in neighboring Somalia.
For this, the United States paid heavily. The Obama administration paid the TPLF in cash, and training and weapons for the TPLF militia. Thanks to these resources, the TPLF was later, when it was out of office, to mount its offensive against the Ethiopian government. The irony was that the Biden administration—which featured many of the same officials as the Obama administration—continued to support the now-outlawed TPLF against the Ethiopian government. And those officials worked hard to persuade U.S. allies in Europe to similarly support the Marxist insurgents against the pro-Western Abiy government.
This enabled the TPLF to win international support and to fight far longer than otherwise would have been possible.
The 2020-22 fighting, however, saw the TPLF become comprehensively eclipsed by the government forces, mainly when they were able to use Turkish-supplied Bayraktar TB-2 UCAVs and other less-effective UAE-, Russian-, and Iranian-provided UCAVs. The TPLF’s soft-skinned, vehicle-borne thrusts into Amhara and Afar regions soon found that they had an adversary they could not defeat, and they began to retreat, once again, to Tigrean territory, mainly around the Tigray capital, Mekele.
What was significant about the TPLF’s revived insurgency was that it had enormous stockpiles of U.S.-supplied weapons and cash. To this was added a large supply of trucks, which the U.S. State Department insisted the Ethiopian government should provide to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged Tigray population.
The aid, in fact, went to the TPLF, which also kept the trucks provided to transport the aid. These they used to mount their lightning offensives into Amhara and Afar territories.
Just as the Dergue had collapsed when its sponsor, the USSR, collapsed, so did the TPLF collapse initially when the Obama administration left office. Its brief resurgence in 2021, supported by sympathetic old friends in the Biden administration, collapsed when U.S. allies gradually withdrew support for a policy that would have left them without influence in Ethiopia and over the Red Sea’s vital trade route.
Fast forward to October 2022: numerous senior TPLF “generals” were observed discreetly leaving the battlefield in Tigray and going to South Africa. At first, it was thought they were seeking asylum as the war went increasingly badly for the TPLF. Instead, it was to give weight to the negotiations in Pretoria, which would require the combatants to agree to what amounted to the surrender of the TPLF. The Nov. 2 accord was the result.
It was quickly followed on Nov. 12 by a further agreement, signed in Nairobi, Kenya, spelling out the terms of implementing the peace accord. The complete disarming of TPLF forces was to begin on Nov. 15 and be completed within one month. “Disarmament of heavy weapons will be done with the withdrawal of foreign and non-ENDF (Ethiopian National Defense Force) forces from the region,” the declaration said.
Lt.-Gen. Tadesse Werede Tesfay, commander-in-chief of the TPLF militia—which had restyled itself as the “Tigray Defense Forces”—had participated in the Nairobi settlement with ENDF Chief of General Staff Field Marshal Birhanu Jula. There was consensus that, in fact, the disarming would begin once it was assured that troops from neighboring Eritrea had left the Tigray region. The Nairobi document was titled the “Declaration of the Senior Commanders on the Modalities for the Implementation of the Agreement for Lasting Peace Through Permanent Cessation of Hostilities,” and it did not refer to the Eritreans by name but rather “foreign forces.”
It was expected that difficulties in reassuring the TPLF that the Eritrean forces had left the battlefield could be used as a reason to delay disarmament compliance. It was also expected that the TPLF had already begun caching arms in the mountains of Tigray to guarantee future options.
Kindeya Gebrehiwot, the head of the Tigray External Affairs Office, said on Nov. 12 that Eritrean troops were still “killing, kidnapping, and shelling” in areas such as Shire and Adi Daero, both in Tigray. It may have been so, although the TPLF information operations have been consistently misleading.
A team of monitors checking violations was to begin work by Nov. 22. It would include representatives from the Ethiopian government, the TPLF, the African Union, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).
It was expected that once “normalization” had been achieved, Tigrean combatants could be welcomed again into the ENDF. The Abiy government had, during the past two years, been forced to purge most officers of the Defense Force who were Tigrean or had owed their positions to the TPLF. This followed a series of sabotage of government operations by Tigrean or pro-TPLF officers who had remained in the ENDF. Only after that purge that the ENDF began to comprehensively win on the battlefield.
Winning the confidence of the Tigrean population would be more difficult and time-consuming. The Tigrean civilians suffered from the reality that the TPLF virtually held them hostage, conflating the government’s war with the TPLF as a war against the Tigrean people.
But it was likely to be equally difficult for the Amhara and Afar populations, in particular, to rebuild trust in the Abiy government, given that they felt abandoned by the predations of the TPLF and the OLF forces during recent years. Abiy will need to reaffirm that his Oromo links will not overwhelm his pan-Ethiopian promises.
