No mercy for the defeated in Ethiopia's civil war
The absolute information blockade imposed by the government of the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, makes it impossible to check the military mapping of a war that Ahmed himself, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, considers has entered its final phase. The rebels of the People's Front for the Liberation of the Tigray (PFLT), the region that is insubordinate to Addis Ababa's orders, declare themselves ready to immolate themselves "until the invaders are driven out", according to Debretsion Gebremichael, leader of the PFLT and former comrade of Abiy Ahmed in both the army and the Ethiopian secret services.
Gebremichael's troops speak only of resistance and of perishing rather than surrendering, but they do not deny the fall of the main cities in a region with scarcely five million inhabitants, 4.5 percent of Ethiopia's current overpopulation with its almost 110 million souls. Checking out parts of one side and omissions on the other, it is taken for granted that Adigrat, Aksum and Adwa have come under the control of the federal troops. This leaves Mekele, the capital of the region, which has just over half a million inhabitants, and where Abiy Ahmed's tanks are heading with the intention of encircling it. Its military spokesman, Colonel Dejene Tsegaye, on the Ethiopian public television station ETV, has called on the civilian population to withdraw its support for the "illegitimate authorities of the [Tigray] Governing Board", with a threatening warning: "There will be no mercy afterwards".
The FPLT has tried in every way to internationalise the conflict, which arose from an attack on federal army military bases after it was ordered to give up its insubordinate attitude and hold regional elections in contravention of the Addis Ababa orders. It has since launched rockets at Asmara, the capital of neighbouring Eritrea, with the aim of involving it in the conflict, while encouraging a mass exodus towards Sudan, also with the intention of stirring up Khartoum's feelings about Addis Ababa, which are quite excited about the dispute arising from the setting up of the giant Renaissance Dam, which Sudan, and particularly Egypt, consider will drain up to 80 percent of the waters of the Nile, which are vital to both countries.
Abiy Ahmed has sidestepped this internationalisation and refused to accept any mediation, the latest from the African Union, whose current president, the South African Cyril Ramaphosa, is planning a team of technicians and diplomats to negotiate a military de-escalation first and a possible agreement later. For the time being neither of these things is in the spirit of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, whose behaviour appears to be more in keeping with ending this war with the total submission of the Tigray, the region which in the recent past had the greatest influence of all the ethnic minorities within Ethiopia's federal government.
It should be recalled that Ethiopia is one of only two countries in the world to recognise the right to secession (Article 39.1 of the 1994 Constitution), together with the Archipelago of Saint Kitts and Nevis (Article 115 of the 1983 Constitution). On the basis of this provision, the government of Addis Ababa would therefore be violating the implementation of this right by its autonomous region of Tigray.
The United Nations Security Council itself, in addition to addressing the implications of this civil war for the whole Horn of Africa, is preparing to address, even collaterally, the extent of this Ethiopian exceptionality, which "mutatis mutandis" already has its antecedents in the division of Crimea into Ukraine, to immediately integrate into Vladimir Putin's Russia, and that of the implosion of the Soviet Union itself, whose constitution also guaranteed on paper the right to secession of the many peoples and nations that made up the largest country on the planet, even though, as is well known, Moscow sent those who dared to claim that alleged right to the Gulag Archipelago.