“Africa is not underdeveloped. Africa is over-exploited.”

As the world focuses on presidential elections and trade wars, several African nations have been struggling through revolutions with varying motives and methods. From environmental causes to rape awareness, in regions like the Ivory Coast down to South Africa, these are the main revolutions that have been re-shaping the continent in 2020.

Part 3: The Tigray Crisis in Ethiopia. #TigrayGenocide

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a leader who was once praised by the international community for a reformative agenda, is now facing the looming threat of civil war. In November of this year, long-standing tension between Abiy and leaders from Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray have reached a boiling point. Tigrayan forces and the military have clashed on several occasions, resulting in hundreds of dead and tens of thousands fleeing west to Sudan.

Earlier in November, Abiy claimed that Tigray forces had conducted an attack against a national military base, responding by sending troops to the affected area. This area is governed by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a political group whose influence in the country has significantly decreased over the past years. Days after this military response, Abiy said that the military had effectively bombed Tigray and destroyed weaponry near Mekele, the regional capital.

A few days after this announcement, there was a brutal knife-and-machete attack in Mai-Kadra, a situation where it is still unclear which party is responsible. Hundreds of people were killed, with Deprose Muchena, Human Rights Watchdog’s East and Southern Africa director, confirming that the majority were day laborers with no clear ties to the conflict at all. The group has since urged both groups to prioritize the safety of civilians and demanded the government to reestablish communication with the region.

On November 14, missiles were fired by Tigrayan forces at targets in Eritrea. The regional president of Tigray, Debrestion Gebremichael, claimed that Eritrea had sent tanks and military troops over the border and into Tigray as a form of support for the Ethiopian government and that the rockets were merely retaliation. The amount of hostilities has created mass displacement in the region.

Tension between both parties is not new and has been in place ever since Abiy came into position in 2018, something that decreased the national authority of the TPLF. As Prime Minister, Abiy disassembled a ruling coalition led by the TPLF and instead created the Prosperity Party. According to Jason Mosley, a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Center, this move basically gave birth to the idea that the TPLF either had to join the Prosperity Party and submit to Abiy, or to not do so. TPLF went with the latter.

In 2019, Prime Minister Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in normalizing relations with Eritrea, a country that shares a border with the Tigray region. Eritrea was actually part of Ethiopia but gained independence after a 30-year long struggle in 1993. From the years 1998 to 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea engaged in a devastating war that destroyed entire communities and claimed thousands of lives, remaining enemies for another 18 years.

If the conflict in Ethiopia persists, it could very well destabilize the entire region and create mass displacement, according to Payton Knopf, senior adviser at the United States Institution of Peace. Sudan, Ethiopia’s neighbor to the west, is undergoing an extremely delicate political transition and deep economic crisis, yet has seen the arrival of over 33,000 Ethiopians fleeing the struggle. Worst-case scenario, Ethiopia could become the setting for “what could be one of the largest refugee exoduses we’ve ever seen,” according to Knopf.

Currently, tens of thousands of Ethiopians have fled from Tigray and gone to Sudan, and the United Nations has predicted that over 200,000 people will have fled in the coming six months. According to this same data, around 6,000 refugees have been entering Sudan every day, and 31,000 have crossed by November 20th. Even prior to the conflict, Tigray already had around 200,000 refugees and asylum seekers.

Aid groups have been unable to help in Tigray, and journalists have also been prevented from reporting on the situation in the region. Several NGOs have asked the Ethiopian on numerous occasions to secure access for them to enter Tigray and provide the necessary supplies to civilians who have been stranded by the struggle. The UN has called for a ceasefire so “humanitarian corridors could be established to allow civilians to flee safely.”

The decision the Tigrayans made to launch missiles into Eritrea made the problem reach an international scale. On the other hand, many experts have said that it is highly unlikely the Eritrean government will choose to engage in the conflict directly. Mosley said that if Eritrea does choose to get involved in the struggle, it could bode badly for Abiy, seeing as it “makes him look like he needs the Eritreans to control his own territory.”

Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has deemed the situation as a “full-scale humanitarian crisis.” Many countries have been calling on Abiy to initiate peace talks. Officials from neighboring countries like Uganda and Kenya have continually asked for dialogue in order to resolve the conflict.

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