The Ethiopian Ministry of Education has announced the beginning of the reconstruction process of more than 70 schools destroyed by the war between the Ethiopian Army and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
The reconstruction will be financed by the World Bank (WB), the German charity Menschen für Menschen and the Ethiopian Diaspora Trust Fund (DTF), and will begin in the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar, also affected by the conflict.
The Ethiopian Minister of Education, Professor Berhanu Nega, has assured that the schools will be built in compliance with the relevant standard and with the necessary infrastructure, according to statements reported by the ‘Addis Standard’.
The announcement comes after the meeting held on Friday between the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, with a delegation of the TPLF for the first time since the signing in November last year of the peace agreement in Pretoria (South Africa) that set the guidelines to resolve two years of the violent conflict that has devastated the north of the country.
The conflict in Tigray erupted in November 2020 following a TPLF attack on the army’s main base in Mekelle, after which the Prime Minister’s government ordered an offensive against the group following months of political and administrative tensions, including the TPLF’s refusal to recognize an electoral postponement and its decision to hold regional elections outside Addis Ababa.
The TPLF accused Abiy of whipping up tensions since his arrival to power in April 2018, when he became the first Oromo to accede to office. Until then, the TPLF had been the dominant force within Ethiopia’s ruling coalition since 1991, the ethnically-supported Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The group opposed Abiy’s reforms, which it saw as an attempt to undermine its influence.
The ensuing conflict became one of the most brutal in the continent’s recent history. The African Union (AU) mediator for Tigray, Olusegun Obasanjo, estimated in a recent interview that some 600,000 people may have died during the war, an estimate roughly corroborated by international experts on the conflict.
Ethiopian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, estimated to the same media that the death toll would be around 100,000.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
