Ethiopia is once again in the grip of renewed violence, with a recent government attack on a market resulting in the deaths of at least 64 civilians. This is a country that has always been at the heart of global humanitarian concerns, and the events of this week are not about to change that. Ethiopia is divided into ten regional states, of which Tigray is one, and it is in the northern part of the country border with Eritrean and Sudan. In September 2020, local group the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – which dominated Ethiopia’s government until their removal from Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s party in 2019 – held regional elections in the Tigray region, despite the constitutional postponement of the national elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The TPLF was formed in 1970s and was Tigray’s longest administrative party after the downfall of the Derg regime.
This rebel organization has been fighting for Tigray people until later merged with other rebel groups from ethnic Oromo, Somali, Afar, and Eritreans in the 1980s which have played a great role in overthrowing the Derg regime (Bedaso, 2021). The TPLF has been ruling the country until 2018 and was demised by federal armed force and declared as a “terrorist organization” by the Ethiopian parliament in late November 2020. The civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopiawas born out of a political discrepancy between TPLF and the federal government of Ethiopia. It has a connection with the fight over a “political vision” for future Ethiopia. The tension had been ongoing even before Abiy Ahmed came to power, century aged (ibid). Tensions between the TPLF and the national government escalated, and eventually resulted in a conflict, following an alleged attack on a major Ethiopian Army base. On 4 November 2020, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister ordered military action against the TPLF, with fighting breaking out across the region. The conflict has now led to hundreds of thousands of people being displaced; some within Tigray, finding shelter where they can in host communities. Others have made the journey over the border to Sudan, where they are now refugees. An estimated 4.5 million people are in need of assistance (OCHA, 2021).
Today the use of coercive violence in state-making is widely condemned. The internal and regional dimensions of the Tigray crisis in Ethiopia shows how the consolidation of the central government is seen to be conditioned by the elimination of internal rivals. The operation in Tigray against the senior leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is an example of an effort at state consolidation and an attempt to move away from the longstanding and divisive ethno-nationalism-driven political reality that the TPLF leaders are seen to represent (Ylönen, 2021). This article will then study the roots as well as the various local implications of this conflict before focusing more internationally on the actors at work, but also the inscription of the conflict in international law.
A multifaceted conflict
The violence in Tigray today is largely a result of the political decay in Ethiopia for decades now. TPLF had monopolized the political landscape in Ethiopia for the last 27 years since 1991 and never cared to democratize the country or at least changed the political environment. It is precisely this pre-1991 regime that is now calling for its return to power. The ideological fight between multi-ethnicity recognition and unitary power continued: the current crisis is born out of a legacy of restoration of past Ethiopia on one hand, and it seems revenge undertaken both by Abiy and Isaias on the other hand (de Waal, 2021). In April 2018, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) selected Mr. Ahmed to be the interim Prime Minister with the mission of bringing peace and harmony to the ethnically fragmented Ethiopia. During the first few months of his rule, Mr. Ahmed introduced some far reaching civil liberty reforms and released political prisoners. In July 9, 2018, he concluded a peace accord with the Eritrean tyrant, Mr. Isaias Afwerki, who had been ruling the Eritrea with an iron fist since 1993. This persuaded the Nobel Prize Committee to grant Mr. Ahmed the 2019 Nobel Prize on Peace on October 11, 2019 (Abai, 2021). Despite neighbourhood between Tigray and Eritrea and their ethnic similarity, Mr. Ahmed did not involve Tigray and its leader Mr. Debretsion Gebremichael in peace negotiations. The lack of transparency and denial of Tigrayan participation, suspected the latter to consider the pact as a conspiracy between Ahmed and Afwerki to eliminate the TPLF (Reisen et al., 2019).
Ethiopian population is composed of more than 70 ethnic groups: Oromo (34.49%), Amhara (26.89%), Somali (6,20%), Tigrayans (6.07%), Sidama (4.1%), Gurage (2.53%), Welayta (2.31%), Hadiya (1.74%), Afar (1.73%) etc. (Beken, 2012). The Ethiopian constitution of 8 December 1994, has provided for a far-reaching decentralization based on ethnic diversity. It guarantees “free cooperation between equal Ethiopian peoples” (ibid). Ahmed failed to acknowledge that Ethiopia, like many African nations, is a diverse multi-ethnic society. He even regularly meets withIsaias Afeworki of Eritrea, and Amhara nationalists to threaten Tigray regional leaders and its border. Relations between the Tigray region and Eritrea were very tense, without open conflict, but without real peace either. This contributed greatly to the deterioration of trade between Tigray and Ahmed. Rather than establishing sustainable means of cohabitation between communities and ensuring the stability of his country, the leader Ahmed preferred to send the army and police to deal with the “rebels” from 2018 to 2019. According to the Guardian, in Oromia’s Guji district the unrest had driven 80,000 people from their homes by the start of the year 2020 (the Guardian, 2020).
Mr. Ahmed’s term of office was up to October 5, 2020. He suspended the national election in August in the pretext of Covid-19 and postponed it for nine to 12 months. The Tigray regional state government officially rejected the move by the federal government as illegal and conducted its regional parliamentary election on September 9, 2020 (Yi Song, 2021). Abiy Ahmedconsidered Tigray regional parliament election illegal. Both are calling each other “illegal and unconstitutional” by pointingfingers at each other. The war, among others, rooted in opposing visions about future direction of Ethiopia. While, Mr. Ahmed advocates, a centralized state with power at the hands of the prime minister, the TPLF supports amultinational federal policy with cultural, linguistic, and economic autonomy for the states, as explicitly expressed in the Ethiopian constitution. The government’s establishment of the Administrative Boundaries and Identity Issues Commission on 20 December 2020 can be considered as a manifestation of this difference. The Commission was directly responsible to the prime minister who was mandated to look into the reasons behind identity and border conflicts and suggest solutions to parliament (Abai, ibid).
Abiy Ahmed officially declared war on the Tigray region by November 4, 2020, after the allegation that TPLF attacked the Northern command located in the Tigray region on the account of “pre-emptive self-defense”(Reuters, 2020). The federal government defense force declared victory after overtaking the regional capital, Mekelle on November 28, 2020 (International Crisis Group, 2021). However, this victory was only illusory and the war itself has never really ended since, regularly causing new civilian casualties.
International interventions
The process of political transformation following Abiy Ahmed’s ascent to power enabled the new administration to reorient Ethiopia’s foreign policy and improve its external relations in the region. While the relationship with Ethiopia’s great power backers, the United States of America (the US) and China, remained largely unchanged, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, with the US lead, played an important role in facilitating the rapprochement between Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the US was interested in mending fences with Eritrea seemingly to find alternatives for its military base in Chinese-dominated Djibouti, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, driven in part with longstanding affinity with Eritrea, seek greater influence in the Horn of Africa through strategic investment (Ylönen, ibid). The challenge to the new administration mounted by the TPLF leadership forced it to increasingly rely on allies within and outside Ethiopia. The rapprochement paved way for a tripartite alliance among the leaders of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia and cemented cooperation among the three states. Abiy’s efforts in the region, improving inter-state relations in the Horn of Africa, especially with Eritrea and Somalia, and mediating in the intra-state crises in South Sudan and Sudan, earned him international appreciation. The Tigray operation has revealed the extent of the federal government’s international support. Despite the outcry of international organizations, humanitarian agencies, and human rights bodies, the great and regional powers, including the US, China, and Middle Eastern states, most of which back the Ethiopian government, appear to have given a silent approval to the operation (ibid). Here we will look at the different international actors involved in this crisis and propose an analysis of their behavior.
First, we will begin with the European Union. Already on 16 December 2020Brussels announced it would postpone some € 90 mln in aid to Ethiopia “over its failure to grant full humanitarian access to Tigray”, but by passing over any issue on who started the war and who brought about the misery (Marks, 2020). On 16 February 2021 there was a surprising call by the EU Commissioner for international partnerships Ms. Jutta Urpilainen to develop a ‘coordinated response’ to see if aid and loans to Ethiopia should be frozen and blocked by all donors (Chadwick, 2021). More recently on11 March 2021, the EU decided to again reprimand Ethiopia, threatening to block further development aid and punish the country for alleged human rights abuses during the military operations against the TPLF in Tigray, among them leveling the claim that the government forces had specifically targeted civilians in the conflict-although the harshest words hereby were for the presence and alleged deeds of Eritrean army units (Abbink, 2021). We can read that “The Council is extremely concerned by the numerous testimonies as to possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, extra-judicial killings and other serious human rights violations and abuses. The EU calls for these actions to end immediately and for perpetrators to be brought to justice”. The EU and assorted humanitarian aid agencies apparently first wanted to put Ethiopia in the dock before really scaling up their own aid. On 22 March 2021 the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell followed it up with yet another great statement, saying the EU is “…ready to activate all our foreign policy tools against those responsible for human rights violations”, referencing to the Tigray conflict (ibid).
We can then look at the case of the United States. On 27 February 2021 the new US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken gave out a statement called ‘Atrocities in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region’, being “…gravely concerned by reported atrocities and the overall deteriorating situation in the Tigray region of Ethiopia” (ibid). Nevertheless, the blame lies entirely with the Ethiopian government and on Eritrean army units and Amhara regional forces, not a word about the TPLF camp. This Blinken statement also called for the ‘withdrawal of Amhara special forces’. This follows the utterings of pro-TPLF sources, human rights reports and even recent International Crisis Group memos, where the ‘atrocities of Amhara forces’ are presented as facts (https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/ethiopia/167-finding-path-peace-ethiopias-tigray-region). On 10 March 2021, Secretary Blinken gave ‘testimony’ to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and stressed the need to ‘stop ethnic cleansing’ in the Tigray region, based on information in a USA ‘secret report’. However, on 18 March 2021, he announced that the US would provide Ethiopia with an additional $52 mln in humanitarian assistance for Tigray, bringing the total pledged USA aid sum to $ 153 mln. The United States is now clearly showing its willingness to establish a dialogue with the country through the Biden’s ‘special envoy’ Sen. Chris Coons. This idea of moving towards ‘political dialogue’ seems to be a standard phrase in the diplomatic jargon, but in this context it is not clear what it means. One can be sure that the Ethiopian government and the public at large will never agree to a ‘dialogue’ with a rump-TPLF or its remaining leaders after the sabotage and crimes that they were seen to have committed (ibid).
At the UN Security Council the conflict was first raised in a 24 November 2020 meeting. There “…members emphasized the importance of de-escalating the conflict, expressed concern about the impact of the fighting on civilians, and underscored their support for regional engagement to resolve the conflict”. There was no mention of the clashes that had once again erupted in November, demonstrating a kind of ostrich policy similar to that initiated by the USA. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission report of 10 February 2021 reported 108 cases of rape in two months; the Tigray Region Women’s Affairs bureau mentioned 524 reported cases between November 2020 and February 2021 only from Meqele, Adigrat and surrounding areas (Addisstandard, 2021). However, the views of the UN Secretary General A. Guterres and his ‘chief relief coordinator’ Mark Lowcock were still in line with the gullible mainstream: claims that there “… is an orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing across parts of Tigray, with large numbers of witnesses reporting that Eritrean soldiers and Amhara militias are responsible”.
Violations of international law
The occurrences of war crimes and crimes against humanity are extremely numerous in this conflict, and it will be a question here of drawing up a non-exhaustive list of them, all of them appearing as vain as impossible. To begin with, the Ethiopian government appears to be the aggressor of the rebels in the Tigray region. Article 33 of the United Nations Charter has provided for the peaceful settlement of the most serious conflicts before considering armed interverntion: “The parties to any dispute […] shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.” Mr. Ahmed deliberately ignored this international provision and began his war propaganda against Tigrayan people, while there was no condition whatsoever to “endanger the constitutional order.” He declared war on the most stable and peaceful state government that had been legally elected by 98% of Tigrayans’ votes. There was no emergency situation to compel him respond by militarily power. Ahmed rejected peaceful negotiations and refused all appeals for mediation by independent people and agencies: from the African Union, Canadian, British or American Foreign Minister. Mr. Ahmed’s war against people of Tigray is devoid of any legal basis. It is an unjust war of fratricide with the sinister capacity of setting ethnic groups in Ethiopia against one another. It is also a crime against peace that was defined by the principle of the Nuremberg Trial (Boot, 2002). This is all the more unacceptable in view of the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The murders organized by the regime are no longer to be proven, which can also be considered an act of extermination. Even more seriously, these mass killings have caught the civilian population in their net. Ethiopia ratified all 4 Geneva Conventions in 1969 and is also a party to Protocol II to the Conventions that guarantees further protections for combatants and civilians during non-international armed conflicts. Since 2018, there have been countless air strikes against civilian homes in the city of Mekelle, including the bombing of residential areas and hotels (Aljazeera, 2020). There are also barrage and artillery fire still in civilian areas and ground strikes absolutely prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL). This constitutes a serious crime of non-discrimination between the civilian population and the combatants. Since the beginning of the conflict, the Tigray regions have remained largely cut off from the rest of the world with food, medicine, clean water, fuel and other basic necessities desperately needed for war-affected and displaced population (Abai, ibid). The article 23 of the 4thGeneva Conventions Relative to the Protection of Civilian Person provides that state parties “shall allow the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores” and it should be done “as rapidly as possible”. This is reiterated in the Rule 55 of the International Committee of the Red Cross: “parties to a conflict must allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of impartially distributed humanitarian relief for civilians in need” (HRW, 2020). Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stipulates that each worker must be able to access his or her workplace and that no one must block this route. Ethiopia is thus violating one by one the international treaties to which it belongs. Let us recall here that Ethiopia is a party to core human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Ethiopia is also party to regional human rights treaties, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Union Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. Many children in Tigray also bear the brunt of these clashes. If they do not lose their families or homes, they are no longer able to attend school or participate in any social life. This deprivation is against customary international law including the UN Convention of the Right of the Child (CRC), Ethiopia is a party to Article 24 of the CRC obligate the state parties to guarantee “right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health” and the article 27 stipulates that “States Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.”
During this conflict, we also witnessed the forced displacement of people, heavy casualties and destruction, mass displacement of 100,000 people from Tigray, 55,000 refugees in Sudan. According to Article 7 (d) of the Rome Statute for ICC, “Deportation or forcible transfer of population means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present”. Before crossing the border, refugees spent days on the run, facing starvation, being stopped by armed groups who robbed their belongings. Many hid for long hours in bushes to avoid being spotted. They entered Sudan with nothing but clothes in their back. 50% of refugees in Sudan are children with inadequate means to survive. They suffer from physical and mental health complications. (Abai, ibid). We also note the mistreatment of nearly 100,000 Eritrean refugees in refugee camps in Tigray where they suffer abuses denounced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): a great number of them have been killed, recruited, kidnapped and forcibly returned to Eritrea by the Eritrean forces in Tigray with the consent or acquiesce of the Ethiopian army. Following the intensification of conflict in Tigray, a number of Eritrean refugees managed to escape Tigray. Ethiopian government spared no time to forcibly return them to the Tigray camps, deliberately neglecting the risk to their life and security. The forcible relocation of Eritrean refugees is a blatant violation of the principle of non-refoulement enshrined in the article 33 of the Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees as well as the non-degrogable right of every human person not to be return to torture.
Since taking office in 2018, the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has also pursued a policy of massive discriminations against oppositional ethnic groups including and specifically Tigrayans and their leadership. He removed many Tigrayans from government and security posts and arrested many in the pretext of rights abuse and corruption (ibid). Elsewhere in the country, ethnic profiling of Tigrayans has reached an alarming point. The Ethiopian police is seeking the list of ethic Tigrayans all over the country in an attempt to arrest and persecute them as “traitors” (ibid). Article 7 (h) of the Rome Statute for ICC has classified “persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender” as a crime against humanity. According to article 4 (a) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Decimation (ratified by Ethiopia on 23 June 1976), it is “an offence punishable by law… all acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any race or group of persons of another color or ethnic origin” (ibid).
The war crimes and crimes against humanity under the background of political and ethnic confrontation are thus well proven and are damning concerning the Ethiopian government. This is not to suggest that the TPLF camp is not to blame, quite the contrary, but we have chosen here to focus on one side rather than another. But the international communities must not underestimate this conflict as only a local issue. The conflict now ‘constitutes international civil war’ (Floyd, 2021). This urgent humanitarian need necessitates Ethiopia need serious national dialogue, backed up by international communities. If this is not managed sooner, the upcoming election would add worse, and already fragile Ethiopia would fail into a war zone, mass starvation, security vacuum, and place of no return. It is obvious the region has never got peace for decades and if peace is not restored in Ethiopia, the peace process in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea would not succeed. The disagreement has already started between Ethiopia & Sudan (Gavin, 2021), Between Ethiopia & Egypt over Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project. It is therefore urgent to:
– To provide humanitarian assistance in Tigray as soon as possible. The UN report shows about 4.5 million people in Tigray alone need emergency food aid (Walsh & Dahir, 2021). The displacement in the Metekel Zone of Benishangul Gumuz, Wollega, and Guji zone of Oromia and other parts of the country is also severe and needs emergency humanitarian food aid. A dialogue must therefore be established with the Ethiopian government to put an end to the blockages in the region to allow such missions to be deployed.
– Stop the conflict, including by excluding military forces from the Tigray region. The presence of Eritrean military forces in Tigray is illegal and a breach of international law. They violated the territorial integrity of the country. That is invading the country’s territory. The presence of Amhara regional state military presence in the Tigray region is also unconstitutional and a violation of regional autonomy (Bedaso, ibid).
– To call for a national dialogue, supervised by international bodies. Please note that this does not mean encouraging interference from an outside country, but rather ensuring that peace negotiations are conducted properly. The extreme political differences have never been mediated, and this is potentially dangerous for Ethiopia. The all-inclusive national dialogue is vital if Ethiopia to continue, not only between federal and Tigray regional administration but among all nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia (ibid). This dialogue must also take into account and attempt to overcome the ethnic divide. Ethiopia is currently under two main ideological group competitions. Those who advocate for ethnic-based nationalism and pan-Ethiopians/unitarist. Both should never be underestimated. This ideological difference could give minimized and resettled via national dialogue and agreement, however, Abiy himself who came to power based on the so-called ‘reform’ already took it aside. He merged the regional state parties and made one unified party, Prosperity Party. This is the little step before abolishing ethnic federalism (ibid).
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By Mahmoud Refaat: The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
