By Ollus Ndomu
Warring sides in Ethiopia’s Tigray region yessed peace talks Wednesday, ending a two-year long period of brutal civil war which has killed several thousands and displaced millions in addition to causing the worst humanitarian crisis in the country’s history.
After 10 days of serious AU-led roundtable talks in South Africa, the Ethiopian federal government and the leadership of the northern Tigray region entered into an agreement to silence guns and cease hostilities in Africa’s 115 million-man country.
This historically groundbreaking peace agreement came a day before the second anniversary of the start of the war, on Nov. 3, 2020, when simmering tensions between Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the defiant Tigray region leaders burst into a full-fledged fire internal exchange which the PM as a “law and order” campaign.
PM Abiy had promised that the war would be swift, even bloodless but it quickly escalated into a grinding conflict characterized by grave atrocious acts including gang rapes, civilian massacres and the cut of food and medical supplies as a weapon of war.
According to live pictures carried by regional and international media, Getachew Reda, a senior leader in the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and Redwan Hussien, Mr. Abiy’s national security adviser signed the deal in Pretoria.
The latest peace agreement contains a plethora of provisions, including disarming fighters, permitting humanitarian supplies to reach Tigray — where five million people urgently need food aid — and bringing a measure of stability to Ethiopia.
“We have agreed to permanently silence the guns and end the two years of conflict in northern Ethiopia,” the two sides said in a joint statement.
But AU-affiliated mediators warned that the agreement was just the first step in what would most likely be difficult negotiations before a permanent peace could be achieved. It was unclear how the deal’s provisions would be monitored or carried out. And negotiators cautioned that forces inside and outside Ethiopia could yet derail the process and tip the country back into war, New York Times.
“This moment is not the end of the peace process,” said Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president, representing the African Union, “but the beginning of it.”
The deal came at a moment when Ethiopian federal forces were enjoying supremacy following weeks of sweeping advances across Tigray with the help of allied forces from the neighbouring state, Eritrea.
But it also came against a backdrop of loud warnings from the United States and the United Nations about the possibility of new atrocities in a war already scarred by widespread abuses, including ethnic cleansing.
“The situation in Ethiopia is spiraling out of control,” the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, warned last month.
The scale of fighting in Ethiopia rivals that of Ukraine, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Oct. 21, as almost half a million lives have been lost due military hostilities in the Tigray region region and the United States was “deeply concerned about the potential for further mass atrocities,” she said. Additional text by New York Times
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