Ethiopia Crisis Builds To Violent Conclusion, East Africa Stability At Risk

The situation in the Ethiopian region of Tigray is nearing a violent conclusion, as gov't forces are set to launch what Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed calls the 'final phase' of the army's operations that have lasted for several weeks.

• Ethiopian forces are set to launch an assault on the Tigrayan capital Mekelle, a city of 500k.
• The conflict sparked in September as the dominant party in Tigray, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) under its leader former Ethiopian Deputy PM Debretsion Gebremichael, refused to delay regional elections at the behest of Addis Ababa. This was followed by the central gov't cutting funding to Tigray in October, which the TPLF said amounted to 'a declaration of war'.
• The conflict is not recent, with long-running ethic tensions evident between the Tigrayan leadership and the Oromo-dominated gov't of PM Ahmed. The TPLF also holds Ahmed in poor regard due to the peace deal he reached with the gov't of Eritrea in 2018 (which won Ahmed the Nobel peace prize). Tigray borders Eritrea and has not buried the hatchet with its neighbours in the same way as the gov't in Addis Ababa.
• In a wider regional context, a prolonged conflict in Tigray could undermine stability in and around the Horn of Africa. Reports have emerged of rockets being fired into Eritrea, while tens of thousands of refugees are believed to have crossed into Sudan to escape the violence.
• Ethiopia, the second most populous African country with 114mn people, has in recent years proved a bastion of stability which in turn brought in much sought-after investment into the region, notably from China. This despite a long-running low-level civil war within South Sudan to Ethiopia's west, a destabilising revolution in Sudan to the northwest in 2019, and the constant presence of Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab in near-failed state Somalia to the east. Should the Ethiopian gov't be drawn into a long-running guerilla war in Tigray it could threaten both continues domestic and regional investment.

Source: BBC