A five-month truce which had brought an uneasy peace to the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia has been broken with government and Tigrayan rebels of the TPLF clashing around the town of Kobo. Each side blames the other for the renewed fighting and the failure to engage in promised peace talks.
The truce, which followed fighting that started in November 2020 after months of tensions between prime minister Abiy Ahmed and regional leaders, had allowed the resumption of desperately needed international aid convoys to Tigray’s capital, Mekelle.
But fuel shortages made it difficult to distribute supplies and the region is teetering on the verge of famine, with nearly half of its six million people in “severe” need of food aid and most of the rest needing substantial food aid, according to the World Food Programme.
The head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called the Tigray crisis “the worst disaster on Earth” and accused Western nations of ignoring the suffering there, adding, “maybe the reason is the colour of the skin of the people in Tigray”.
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Abiy Ahmed’s, government and the TPLF have been locked in a war of words in recent weeks over peace talks. The government wants negotiations to be led by the African Union’s Horn of Africa envoy and former Nigerian leader Olusegun Obasanjo, but the latter is not trusted by the TPLF, which insists basic services must be restored to Tigray and that land held by the government in western Tigray must be restored before dialogue can begin. It wants outgoing Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, to mediate. Special envoys from the EU and US have also been engaged; they have visited Tigray and urged the immediate resumption of a truce.
There is no immediate sign that the fighting is spreading. But most analysts, and many Ethiopians, fear the clashes could spiral again into a full-blown conflict. Meanwhile the humanitarian crisis goes from bad to worse, fuelled by the denial of access by aid convoys.