A TPLF fighter mans a guard post on the outskirts of the town of Hawzen, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, May 7, 2021 (AP photo by Ben Curtis).
The interim government in the Ethiopian region of Tigray asked for federal assistance after a splinter faction of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, seized control of two major towns, including the second-largest in the region. The TPLF has administered Tigray for more than two years, since a peace deal ended the civil war in the region. (AP)
Our Take
It has been nearly two and a half years since the Pretoria Agreement ended the war in Tigray, a brutal conflict that pitted the TPLF against government forces backed by regional Amharan fighters and troops from neighboring Eritrea. The war killed more than 600,000 people and displaced millions more over two years. Still, until this week, the region had not seen major fighting since the peace agreement was signed.
The peace in Tigray, however, has always been fragile. Neither reconstruction efforts in Tigray nor transitional justice for the conflict have begun, despite promises for both. Perhaps most importantly, little to no effort has been made to address the underlying tensions that initially fueled the conflict, which initially grew out of PM Abiy Ahmed’s transformation of Ethiopia’s political landscape from a system of ethnic federalism dominated by the TPLF to a more centralized and nationalized structure.