Abiy recently got a PhD in peace and security studies from Addis Ababa University, but he’ll be concentrating on the “security” part for the foreseeable future.
By GWYNNE DYER
DECEMBER 5, 2020 21:20
ETHIOPIANS FLEEING from the Tigray region walk toward a river to cross from Ethiopia to Sudan earlier this week.(photo credit: REUTERS)Advertisement
‘Love always wins. Killing others is a defeat,” said Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in June 2018, shortly after surviving a grenade attack at a rally in Meskel Square in the capital, Addis Ababa. How was he to know that just 30 months after saying that he would have to stop loving and start killing?That’s the problem with being a reforming zealot who becomes prime minister: you have to deal with some really stubborn people, and sometimes it’s hard to shift them without a resort to force. That’s why Abiy launched an invasion of Tigray state on 4 November, and so far it’s been doing very well. Read More Related Articles
“The next phases are the decisive part of the operation, which is to encircle Mekelle using tanks, finishing the battle in the mountainous areas, and advancing to the fields,” Col. Dejene Tsegaye told the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation on November 22.Here we are only less than two weeks later, and the federal government’s troops have already captured Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, a city of half a million people. It’s not clear how many people were hurt or killed in the fighting, but it went so fast that the butcher’s bill can’t be all that high.In fact, it has all gone so well that Abiy’s soldiers are probably thinking they might be home in time for Christmas. When Dejene talked about “finishing the battle in the mountainous areas and advancing to the fields,” however, he was talking about the nine tenths of Tigray that has seen no federal government troops at all, or at most a brief glimpse as they passed through.Tigray is exactly the size of Switzerland, with about the same ratio of mountains to fields (although the mountains are somewhat lower). In other words, it is ideal guerrilla territory, and a high proportion of the seven million Tigrayans are rural people who know the land. Moreover, they have long experience in fighting the central government’s troops.That was the old central government, of course: the Communist dictatorship called the Derg, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, that murdered the emperor and ruled the country with an iron fist from 1977 to 1991.