The Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, met last Friday with a delegation of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) rebel movement for the first time since the signing last November of the peace agreement in Pretoria (South Africa) that set the guidelines to resolve two years of violent conflict that has devastated the north of the country.
In a brief statement published on Twitter after the meeting, the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor, Redwan Husein, explained that after the meeting, held in Halala Kela, in the southwest of the country, the Prime Minister approved a series of decisions aimed at restoring banking and transport links with the northern region of Tigray.
The intention, explained Husein, is to lay the foundations for «boosting trust» between the two sides and «facilitating the lives of civilians».
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)
