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On 3 November, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced, on Facebook, that his government has started a military intervention in Tigray, a member state of the Ethiopian federation. For a month and a half, a combination of Amhara forces and the Ethiopian and Eritrean militaries have been attacking Tigray on multiple fronts.
Abiy alleged the cause for the war was Tigray’s strike on military bases in the region. Yet his recent “victory speech” to the expired parliament detailed preparations for war that began more than two years ago.
In response to his own question of “some people ask, why was the [military] measure not taken earlier, why this late?”, he said “one who understands the enemy’s capacity and regional alignment of forces does not ask this question,” explaining the federal government was not in a position to act earlier.
Additionally, Fikre Tolossa, a confidante of the premier, confirmed in a 7 November post that Abiy had long planned to attack Tigray. Fikre says he met Abiy a year ago and asked him why he was not taking measures against the TPLF. Abiy’s response was partly that Ethiopia did not have equal military capacity at that moment. In parliament, Abiy revealed how the federal military was recently strengthened, including adding drone capacity, and done covertly so that Tigray’s leaders were not aware.
Since the war began, heavy bombardment and shelling has rained down on Tigrayan cities. The region is being attacked on many fronts by the Ethiopian National Defense Force, the Eritrean military, Amhara security forces and militia, and special forces from Afar and other regions. There has been massive destruction of lives and property. Eritrean and Amhara elements have engaged in widespread pillaging and looting, including, according to multiple reports, prized cultural and religious artifacts.
Tigray is almost completely sealed off. Just before the war, internet, telephone and electricity lines to Tigray were cut by the federal government. It is also blockaded by road and air. All banks have been closed.
Tigrayans outside Tigray are being profiled and dismissed from their jobs. Tigrayans have been fired from the military, police, and other institutions, and remain interned in camps. All bank accounts opened in Tigray have been frozen.
Tigrayans have also been effectively barred from flying inside and outside the country. Even Tigrayans working in international organizations are not spared. Tigrayan peacekeepers in Somalia and South Sudan have been victims. Tedros Adhanom, Director General of the WHO, has also been targeted.
Journalists are not allowed to report from Tigray. There is no humanitarian corridor, only an agreement for aid agencies to provide assistance in areas the federal government controls. Before hostilities, Tigray had an aid-dependent population of around one million. Since the war, reports indicate another one million have been displaced.
More than 50,000 Tigrayans have fled to Sudan after the Amhara factions occupied western Tigray. If it were not for the blocking of fleeing Tigrayans by invading forces, the number would be higher. Eyewitnesses and Tigray’s government have reported massacres and evictions of Tigrayans, probably far outnumbering the well-publicized killings in Mai Kadra.
In western Tigray, Amhara administrators have been installed. The area is effectively being incorporated into the neighboring region. Huge billboards on towns proclaim the towns as such. The same has also been done in southern Tigray. The Eritrean army has hoisted Eritrean flags deep in Tigrayans areas, especially in areas surrounding Sheraro.
In a 4 December statement, Tigray’s government defined the war as an attempt to exterminate the Tigrayan people. That is no exaggeration—the war is on Tigray and Tigrayans. This reality may come as a surprise to those fixated on alleged Tigrayan minority rule during the federal era, but it does not to Tigrayans, and nor should it be to those who know Ethiopian history.
Competing national narratives
What are the historical and ideological causes and new developments and events that have led to this war on Tigray, and what are the aims?
Tigray is the origin of almost everything held dear by the Amhara national narrative for Ethiopia: 3,000 years of uninterrupted statehood, the Axumite and pre-Aksumite civilizations, the Ethiopic (Ge’ez) script, the entry point for both Christianity and Islam, the religious music of St. Yared, the land of the First Hijra, the many archeological sites and monasteries, the vast Ge’ez literature, and the battle of Adwa, to name some.
This history is, counterintuitively, a source of chronic political problems, both in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Prior to colonialism, Tigray was a hub of politics and power in Ethiopia and Eritrea, with, towards the end, Mekelle as the main political center. Back then both of them were known as Abyssinia. For a long time, Tigray, also as in the name of the kingdom of Aksum, has been a constant focus of political constituencies in today’s Eritrea and Ethiopia.
About Tigray’s central and constant presence, historian Richard Reid says “Tigray/Abyssinia is always the reference point, the entity however difficult to define in itself from which others are either ‘independent’ or to which they pay ‘tribute’. It is the shadowy imperium whose presence is constant, if more in the mind than in reality”. Tigray, by the force of its history and heritage, has been an integral part of the politics of Ethiopian and Eritrean nationalisms, even when it is not asserting itself.
After the martyrdom of Emperor Yohannes IV at the battle of Metema while fighting the Mahdist invasion, colonial Italy and an Ethiopian internal power struggle split this constantly existing reference point and political center into two: today’s Ethiopian Tigray and the Tigrinya-speaking part of Eritrea. This sundering was a political cardinal sin that continues to haunt Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The Italians were in search of a foothold in the area, and King Menelik of Shewa made a secret deal with them, inviting them to take more territory in order to divide Tigray and blockade Tigray proper from having access to arms. Tigray was, like now, attacked by allied Italian Eritrea and Menelik’s Amhara Ethiopia. At the expense of Tigray, two power centers emerged: Asmara of Italian Eritrea and Addis Abeba of King Menelik of Shewa.
The two centers imagined and embarked on two different nation-building projects that are, albeit differently, related to the Tigray/Aksum civilization.
The project centered in Asmara wanted to create a new national identity completely severed from Tigray/Aksum. The other one centered in Addis Ababa wanted to appropriate the Tigrayan/Aksum history as an Amhara history and to assimilate or eliminate the Tigrayan people. It envisioned an Amharized, centralized Ethiopia where Amharas are its legitimate rulers and to which everyone else should melt into. This was a departure from previous imperial Ethiopia, Niguse-negest—the king of kings—which was a loose empire with an emperor and different kings that pay tribute to the emperor but have almost all other power within their kingdom.
In an effort to boost these two national projects and to prevent Tigray’s rise, both Italian Eritrea and the new Amhara Ethiopia employed tactics to weaken and impoverish the region. The Tigrayan elite were blockaded and eliminated via arrests and by making them fight each other. Tigray was subjugated, impoverished, excluded and, eventually, neglected.
Over the years, as a result of the deliberate impoverishment and neglect and subsequent emigration, Tigrayans came to be seen as paupers and were subjected to derogatory names in both countries. In Eritrea, Agame, the name of the Eastern Tigray area, was changed into a derogatory word to refer to all Tigrayans. Tigrayans were also portrayed as treacherous and perfidious to the extent that a zigzag road was named Libi-Tigray (‘the heart of Tigray’) and it is still in use today. In Amharic Ethiopia, such derogatory terms as locusts, lice-infested, beggars, banda, and many more, were used to refer to Tigrayans, and are still employed today.
Read more: https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2020/1 ... rcurrents/