Ethiopia: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Prime Minister Urges Civilians to Join War on Ethnic Minority

Ethiopia’s government on Tuesday called on citizens of the East African country to join the Ethiopian federal defense forces in fighting Tigrayan separatists in northern Ethiopia despite Addis Ababa’s official announcement of a ceasefire in June, Voice of America (VOA) reported.

“Now is the right time for all capable Ethiopians who are of age to join the Defense Forces, Special Forces, and militias to show your patriotism,” the office of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said in a statement issued August 10.

Abiy won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts toward achieving “peace and international cooperation” with Ethiopia’s neighbor, Eritrea. The leader worked to end a 20-year military stalemate between the two nations caused by a 1998-2000 border war.

A separate war between Ethiopia’s national government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a militant separatist group, began in late 2020. Addis Ababa accused forces loyal to the TPLF of launching an attack on a federal military base in Mekelle, the capital of the separatist Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on November 4, 2020, before initiating a full-scale military campaign against the TPLF.

The conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of people both in Ethiopia and neighboring regions and left roughly four million people “facing emergency or crisis levels of food insecurity,” according to the United Nations.

“Troops from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor to the north, and Amhara, a neighboring region to the south of Tigray, also entered the conflict in support of the Ethiopian government,” VOA recalled on Tuesday.

Ethiopia’s government declared an “immediate, unilateral cease-fire” in Tigray on June 28 after nearly eight months of continuous fighting with the TPLF. Addis Ababa said the cease-fire would last until the end of a crucial planting season in Tigray, or through September. The temporary armistice “will enable farmers to till their land, aid groups to operate without any military movement around and engage with remnants (of Tigray’s former ruling party) who seek peace,” Ethiopia’s government said in a statement.

The TPLF ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades, from about 1991 to 2018. Representatives of Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and Amhara, worked to elect Abiy Ahmed, who is of mixed Oromo-Amharic heritage, as prime minister of Ethiopia’s coalition government in 2018. Abiy quickly removed most TPLF members from leading posts within the country’s government. The TPLF, which formed in 1975 based on Marxist-Leninist ideology, now claims to exclusively rule Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. Addis Ababa says it dissolved Tigray’s TPLF government and that a provisional administration of the Ethiopian federal government has the only legitimate mandate in Tigray.

Amnesty International alleged on Tuesday that Ethiopia’s military, along with allied forces from Eritrea and Amhara, committed sexual war crimes against ethnic Tigrayans during the recent war. The human rights group’s report claims that “women and girls” in Tigray “were subjected to sexual violence by members of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), the Eritrean Defense Force (EDF), the Amhara Regional Police Special Force (ASF), and Fano, an Amhara militia group.”