The two-year war in northern Ethiopia resulted in approximately 100,200 deaths before an African Union-brokered ceasefire was reached in November 2021, a new report reveals. In comparison, the Ukraine-Russia war that began in February led to 81,500 deaths, the same source added.
I wouldn’t even say that it is because there is a war in Africa, but that it is a civil war between different Ethiopian political parties. How is the world supposed to encourage peace there?
You also have Ethiopia in a part of the world without that much strategic importance to major powers outside the impacts of building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. In contrast, the Ukrainie War is on NATO’s frontier and is a contribution of aggression of Russia against Ukraine.
The Eritrean army was in there too, though it took months to admit it. There was some very harrowing footage.
Politically, at some level the world tried to encourage peace insofar as asking them to respect human rights and to not genocide an ethnic minority.
The US government in particular organised a bunch of sanctions against the Ethiopian government, some of which are still in force.
Once the word “genocide” was being thrown around by observers, I would have liked to see a bit more action from the UN though.
But both countries were fighting together against the insurgency.
And outside of sanctions, what was the UN going to do? Send peacekeeping troops?
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There were so many deliberate civillian casualties that this went far beyond a war with insurgents. The Eritrean forces - who the government forces spent months denying were there - were also there to target Eritrean refugees (the regime is about as bad as North Korea).
You say that like you don’t think it would have been a reasonable option?
As this crisis unfolded, there were many reasons a UN peacekeeping force would have been a good option.
Particularly as the racial rhetoric ramped up, NGOs reported systematic rapes of minority women, and the nationwide ethnicity-based detentions began.
We now have a famine situation due to all the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure and crops.
We see that the African Union was able to intervene with a peace treaty. It didn’t seem like Ethiopia was willing to accept peacekeeping troops from any country while it did receive military support.
Peacekeeping troops that aren’t welcomed in a country is an invading army. It appears that diplomatic options were pursued to end the war, but it does not appear that Ethiopia would have accepted neutral troops prior to a peace treaty.
Yes, I agree, but I think this is because the muted regional and global reaction it got enabled it to continue that stance.
Which allowed it to further pursue its aims (weakening Tigray, sure, but it was essentially to fuse all national-level political parties together to create a de facto one party state prior to privatization reform).
The situation now, where the Ethiopian govt let it get to the point where the US and UN have both withdrawn food aid, creating fresh starvation deaths, speaks volumes.
The Rwandan govt prior to the Genocide would not have welcomed the UN either.