Ethiopia: no Eritrean ethnic cleansing against the Irob
An endless war is underway in Ethiopia and, unfortunately, without any news. Or rather with a lot of false and partial news. There isn’t a day in which social media doesn’t pour an enormous quantity of facts and opinions online, leaving the reader, but also those who write professionally, with the task of understanding and, above all, checking the sources.
Yes, because the conflict started in Tigray in 2020 by the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) against the federal government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in office since 2018, has had, from the beginning, a second front, the media one.
Thus, until the conclusion, which was not the case, in 2022, those in the West who followed the news of the war in Tigray incurred manipulations and interests behind the facts reported. Let’s be clear, in Tigray, a region inhabited by six million people, there were many deaths, it is said six hundred thousand, perhaps more. Many civilians have been displaced from a region always on the edge of subsistence and now plunged into the nightmare of hunger.
At a certain point, in fact, aid no longer reaches the population. It is said that the Addis Ababa government is to blame for deciding to use hunger as a weapon. Instead, if the aid does not arrive, the responsibility lies not with the federal soldiers’ checkpoints but with USAid, which explains that such aid would not reach the population because the TPLF steals it and divides it up. For this reason the international organization stopped the trucks with the loads.
A year after the start of the conflict, reports from international agencies came out accusing the federal, Eritrean and Amhara soldiers, i.e. the coalition against the TPLF, of carrying out massacres in Tigray, thefts, rapes and murders of civilians. Reading them, however, many contradictions emerge, starting with the witnesses, interviewed via telephone in an area without connections unless they have satellite phones, or interrogated in refugee camps in Sudan, without asking whether they were TPLF soldiers on the run. Articles are published on the Axum massacre with statements from a “Coptic priest” who turns out to be an Ethiopian activist living in America. And so on. “Mona Lisa” also comes into the picture. For Italian newspapers she is “a Leonardo-esque girl who has lost an arm but not her dignity”. She is actually a young woman but she is also a TDF soldier (Tigray Defense Forces) as his father will declare on television.
The problem is that an agreement was signed in Pretoria in November 2022 which, instead of stopping the war, started a second phase, between the federal army and the Amhara whose representatives did not participate in the peace negotiations, nor did Eritrea. Both believed that at that time there was no basis for an agreement with the TPLF.
It was said of Eritrea that it entered the conflict to silence, once and for all, the TPLF, its sworn enemy since the time of Meles Zenawi. Without adding, however, that, at the beginning of the conflict, when the TDF soldiers killed the federal soldiers and plundered the national armaments reserve located in Tigray, they also bombed Asmara, the Eritrean capital.
However, after the peace agreement, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed asks regional governors to demobilize local armies so that all soldiers become part of the federal army. Few governors do this. Certainly not the Tigray which maintains the TDF nor the Amharas whose strongest weapon is now the Fano, a militarily organized movement determined to defend its people so that the TPLF can no longer organize ethnic cleansings like that of Mai Kadra in November 2020, when the doors of the homes of the Amhara to be killed were marked with scarlet paint.
On the political conflict between Tigray and Amhara, which is the nucleus of this second phase of clashes, it is necessary to open a parenthesis. In 1995 the Ethiopian Constitution, created by the then Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, provides an article according to which “every nation, nationality and people of Ethiopia has the right to self-determination, including the right to secession”.
This becomes the basis of the political thought of the TPLF which considers all peoples who speak Tigrinya to be Tigrinya, not just those who reside in Tigray. Thus, while the party becomes head of the government coalition, despite representing a minority ethnic group, the Amhara, a much larger ethnic group, become the enemies to be fought, the oppressors of a bygone era.
Therefore the fertile territories of Wolkait, Gondar, Raya and the Wollo province, until then Amhara, become part of Tigray, which takes the name of Western Tigray and is the region where the fighting is taking place today. After having supported the Addis Ababa government in the first phase of the war against the TPLF, the Fano occupy ninety percent of the contested region.
The Amhara Prosperity Party still governs in Raja and Wolkait Tsegede areas. Local sources, however, say that it is only a matter of time that the Fanos will win because they have the support of the population.
In the same area there has been news of a new “ethnic cleansing” in recent days. This time it was the Eritrean soldiers who attacked a population living in the neighboring Irob region.
“Tigray is a black hole,” says an Ethiopian activist living in Italy, “there are separatist movements in the Agame area, who claim that their territory is now occupied by Eritrea. In reality they feel betrayed by the TPLF which would have abandoned them to their fate.”
The majority of these people are Christians, many also Catholics. This is why the news of the Eritrean attack comes from Catholic sources. “Missionaries are good people who bond with the local population. They share their mentality, they often speak the language… in Tigray, when missionaries were interviewed during the conflict, we realized that they were involved. Their political analyzes must be taken with caution, which is why they should not be the only source,” says a Tigrayan woman contacted by telephone about the events.
The current problem refers to the question of the borders between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
In 1991 Eritrea became an independent state. A few years later, however, in 1998, a new clash with Ethiopia began, right in the Tigray area where the 2020 war began.
In 2000, the Algiers agreements, to define peace between the two countries, established a commission with the task of establishing the borders. Two years of studies, many maps and two hundred and fifty maps lead to the demarcation thanks to the Italian colonial maps of 1900, 1902 and 1908.
The recognized border between the two countries, to simplify, is that marked by the course of the Mareb, Belesa and Muna rivers. The area below is divided into two, one to the north, once called “Acchele Guzai” becomes Eritrea, the other to the south, called “Agame” when it was “under Abyssinian control” becomes Ethiopia.
“The Irob province has historically never been part of the former Eritrean colony, the inhabitants have always been Ethiopians. The occupation (ed, current) therefore violates the old African rule that the borders of independent states must reflect the colonial ones”. So he writes Future, forgetting, however, that the EEBC commission (Eritrea – Ethiopia Boundary Commission) twenty-two years earlier had decided that the Irob district is Eritrean, that it is not an “administrative province of Tigray”, because the administrative activity in this district was less on the Ethiopian side compared to the Eritrean side.
Abandoning past history to return to the present day, last May 8th in Rome, at the Farnesina, it took place the “Italy-Africa entrepreneurial dialogue”, following the January conference that launched the Mattei Plan. In the opening speech the Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani he said he “believes a lot in Italy’s privileged relationship” with Africa. “We are his natural interlocutors” she said, adding that it will be a “win-win relationship” that will favor their growth.
Among the many African countries with which Italy will resume economic but also cultural relations and support for the education of young people, there is Eritrea where a visit by the Italian government is scheduled for June.
Regarding the situation in the region, a senior United Nations official confirmed to us that Eritrea, in this period, is believed to be the only stable country that acts for peace. For example, the welcome given to the Sudanese refugees, whom the Eritrean population considers brothers, is fundamental.
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