The Ethiopian Cable

With northern Ethiopia and Eritrea teetering on the brink of a return to full-scale conflict, the grim morass that has become Tigrayan politics shows no sign of easing. Recent days have again been dominated by accusations and counter-accusations by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Mekelle and the deposed Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) leader Getachew Reda from Addis over violent clashes in Southern Tigray

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Tigray war and the third since the signing of the Pretoria agreement. Five years since Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara militias, and an invading Eritrean army launched a joint offensive that would leave between 300,000 and 600,000 Tigrayans dead and over 120,000 women and girls raped.

The Afar have had more than their fair share of grievances. A marginalised minority in three countries today, the Cushitic, largely agro-pastoralist people were once organised into Islamic Sultanates that stretched along the Dankalia coastline, profiting from the wealthy littoral trade of salt and enslaved people on the Red Sea. But Italian, French, and Ethiopian partitioning shattered the image of the 'Great Afar' in the late 19th and 20th centuries, wreaking irreparable havoc on these constellations and interfering with Afar kinship structures—primarily split into the Asaimara (Red) and Adoimara (White) groupings.

Over two decades after the contested 2004 Oromia-Somali Regional State (SRS) referendum, the restive boundary refuses to fully quiet. The longest internal boundary in Ethiopia, it stretches over 1,400 kilometres down to the Kenyan border and has been the site of intermittent violence for years, peaking between 2017 and 2019. And in mid-July, after a period of relative calm, clashes broke out once again, displacing over 250,000 people in just a couple of months. Coalescing around several intersecting issues, the violence has flared amid unilateral moves from the SRS administration to redraw over a dozen new districts as part of its 'internal' administrative map, regarded as a clear provocation to Oromo nationalists in an attempt to solidify control over disputed territories.

During the 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian war, such were the political and cultural affinities between the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) that it was routinely described as 'Brothers at War' by onlookers. In one attempt to "make sense" of how their alliance soured, Kjetil Tronvoll and Tekeste Negash borrowed the phrase for their book's title, outlining the collapse in ties post-Eritrean independence and the resulting bloody inter-state conflict between the two Tigrinya-speaking peoples. Yet barring the 'second front' within the Somali Regional State (SRS), it remained essentially a contained conflict, a pointless war that left tens of thousands dead. Today, however, with war seemingly on the horizon again between Addis and Asmara, the constellation of actors and alliances is markedly different to 1998-2000, and there is little suggestion that any replay of this conflict could be easily contained.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front's (ONLF) attack on the Chinese-operated oil exploration site in Abole in April 2007 was arguably the single most consequential event of the decades-long insurgency. Coming shortly in the wake of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, 65 Ethiopian workers and 9 Chinese engineers were slain in the dawn raid, with the ONLF justifying the attack by arguing that "foreign companies who exploit the wealth of the Ogaden while our people are killed, starved, and displaced are legitimate targets." Nearly two decades later, the reverberations of the attack —and the subsequent government crackdown —are still keenly felt in the peripheral Somali Regional State (SRS).

Yesterday, the head of the UN's atomic watchdog, Rafael Grossi, stressed the alarming status of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on the Dnieper River in Ukraine, which has been without power for several days. Having been seized by the Russian military in 2022, Moscow has repeatedly stoked fears of nuclear fallout-- and the spectre of the Chernobyl disaster-- by cutting off electricity as it has sought to consolidate its hold over the plant.

On Saturday, PM Abiy Ahmed promoted dozens of military officers to senior positions within the Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF), rewarding a tranche of loyalists and allies further to cement his grip over the security organs of the state. Four Lt. Generals have been made the rank of full General-- Desta Abiche, Yimer Mekonnen, Alemishet Degfie and Diriba Mekonnen. Two more have been promoted to Lieutenant General, 17 to Major General, and 43 to Brigadier General. Coming shortly after the exit of Central Bank Governor Mamo Mihretu, further changes are still anticipated within diplomatic and political circles by the prime minister in the coming days.