Ethiopia Purges Thousands of Officials as Civil War Drags On

Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party (PP) recently dismissed 2,574 officials from leadership positions as part of a major political reshuffle amid Ethiopia’s ongoing civil war, the Addis Standard reported on Wednesday.

Ethiopia’s Addis Standard magazine reported the development on March 16, writing:

The deputy president of the ruling Prosperity Party (PP), Adam Farah said that the party dismissed 2,574 officials following the party’s pre-congress evaluation. A total of 108,258 officials were evaluated, according to him, and measures of different levels were taken against more than ten thousand of them.

In a statement posted to the Prosperity Party’s official Facebook page on March 15, Farah confirmed the organization had terminated “2,574 of the 10,658 people who were targeted [for evaluations].”

The remaining 8,084 party members “were given severe and light warnings, demilitarization, and relocation,” he added.

Farah said Prosperity Party members chosen for evaluations were assessed for “professional ethics, service personality, work ethic and other competency criteria.”

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed established the centrist Prosperity Party in December 2019 as a successor to the former Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The Prosperity Party was formed by merging three former member parties of the EPRDF as part of Abiy’s effort to move Ethiopia away from decades of ethnic federalism.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was the dominant member of the EPRDF for nearly 30 years prior to the Prosperity Party’s founding. The TPLF was the only former EPRDF member to refuse to join the Prosperity Party in December 2019. This disagreement between the TPLF and Ethiopia’s federal government contributed to tension that ultimately triggered a civil war between the two entities approximately one year later.

Abiy launched an air and ground offensive against militant forces associated with the TPLF — a separatist group based in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region — in November 2020. Addis Ababa ordered the operation in direct response to an attack on a federally administered military base in Tigray on November 4, 2020, by forces allied to the TPLF.

The TPLF established itself in the mid-1970s as “a small band of insurgents who became a guerrilla army,” the Guardian recalled in November 2020. The group soon launched a successful anti-government rebellion against Addis Ababa and “eventually ruled Africa’s second-most populous country for almost 30 years.”

The U.K. newspaper observed that the TPLF had seemingly returned to its militant roots, writing:

The TPLF was formed in 1975 at a time when hundreds of millions of people across Africa and the Middle East were demanding revolutions and liberation. Among those in Ethiopia calling for both were a dozen young men from the mountainous northern region of Tigray. Inspired by Marxist-Leninism, a profound sense of national identity, and the utopian slogans of the time, they imagined a brave new world for their country.

Only a year earlier, Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, had been deposed and murdered by hardline Marxist army officers, who immediately set about imposing a harsh authoritarian rule. In Tigray, there had long been resentment at the power of the centralised Ethiopian state. Many remembered the Tigrayan armed revolt of 1943, which had been brutally put down. This time, the TPLF leaders vowed, they would triumph.

Through the late 1970s the TPLF grew steadily. By 1978 the party had around 2,000 fighters, according to CIA estimates at the time. Two years later it could mobilise twice as many, the agency said.

The TPLF remains engaged in a civil war with Ethiopia’s federal government. The conflict has caused a major humanitarian crisis that has seen an estimated two million people displaced within Ethiopia and thousands more forced to flee to neighboring countries, such as Sudan.