InvestigationBy building a motley coalition of foreign allies, the prime minister has turned a conflict rooted in Ethiopian political history into a global conflict. With this support and deliveries of drones playing a decisive role, he managed to push back the Tigrayan rebels, at the cost of floods of bloodshed and without assurance of leading the country to peace.
The moment, finally, had come. At the end of November 2021, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, left the federal capital, Addis Ababa, threatened by a push by the rebels of the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), to go to the Afar region, in the northeast from the country. On this front, one among others of the civil war started a year earlier, the man knows then that he is playing his all. His continued power, even the future of his nation.
This trip is not a simple review of the troops, nor a media stunt. On social networks, the Head of State announced that he was going “to mobilize the armed forces and lead them to the front”, calling on Ethiopians to ” get up “ and to join the fight, each at their own level, in a form of total war. Already, the mobilization has been in full swing for several months. Public opinion is white-hot, especially in Addis Ababa, which is organizing its defence. So far, the government army, supported by various regional militias and “special forces”, has not managed to stem the advance of the Tigrayan forces and their Oromo allies. But the situation is about to change. If he thus goes as close as possible to the fighting, wearing a military fatigues, it is because the 45-year-old Prime Minister is preparing an ambitious counter-offensive, armed with new weapons, new allies, a new context… On the Afar front, the rebels will finally be pushed back. Then admit defeat on the other “central” front, towards the capital. The TDF had approached almost 200 kilometers from Addis Ababa: they will not go further.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing?
This is not exactly the expected accomplishment of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In 2019, the distinction crowned the efforts of a leader who had promised, as soon as he came to power in April 2018, to change everything: reform Ethiopia, free political prisoners and extract power from its ideological gangue, after twenty years of governance aligned with the model of the Chinese Communist Party – repression included. Access to the highest functions of this Oromo (the most important group, in number, of Ethiopia), former lieutenant-colonel of the intelligence services of the army who created the national agency of electronic surveillance of the country, left also foresee a geopolitical shift favorable to the United States, which could hope to regain a foothold in Ethiopia to counter Chinese influence there. Was his Nobel Prize justified? Was it hastily awarded to a warrior wolf hidden under a reforming lambskin? After all, didn’t the peace he had concluded with Eritrea then allow him to wage war – with the help of Eritrean troops – against a region of his own country, Tigray, and against Tigrayan officials, sworn enemies of Asmara? In these critical days of November 2021, Abiy Ahmed does not care about these considerations. He is then rather in the process of competing, if it had existed, for the Nobel Prize for war. Only, had he had a choice?
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