Diplomatic efforts continue, with the United Nations and the African Union calling for immediate ceasefire talks. However, deep-seated mistrust between the warring parties poses a significant obstacle to meaningful negotiations. The international community remains vigilant, urging all sides to prioritize humanitarian relief and work towards a sustainable resolution.

The current civil war in Ethiopia began in November 2020 when the TPLF attacked security forces because of disagreements with the ruling EPRDF/Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front over how the nation should be ruled. The Tigray area has feuded with the central government for centuries. This time, the complaint was that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had reorganized the ruling EPRDF as the Prosperity Party, and the TPLF saw this as an effort to reduce Tigrayan power in the government. The TPLF refused to join the Prosperity Party and sought to take control of the government.

The fighting dragged on because the EPRDF has a large country to administer. Ethiopia's current population is 123 million. The armed forces and national police are spread thin. The armed forces have 162,000 personnel and a billion-dollar-a-year budget, less than 1% of GDP. The TPLF had a Tigray militia force that could call on up to 100,000 armed men but could not move them around because nearly all were armed only to defend their villages or neighborhoods. The army was joined by an Amhara militia. Most of the fighting and casualties occurred in Tigray. The Tigray forces threatened to drive on the capital, Addis Ababa. That sort of thing is not unknown in Africa, where lots of pickup trucks, a few good roads leading to the capital, and poorly organized security forces make a threat to drive on the capital something that can happen.

The TPLF was aided by another rebel group, the OLA/Oromo Liberation Army in western Ethiopia, formed in 2018 when the larger OLF/Oromo Liberation Front made peace with the central government. The OLA has only a few thousand members, and not all of them are willing or able to take up a weapon and join an effort to advance on Addis Ababa. But it doesn’t take much of an armed force equipped with rifles, pistols, and machine guns in a few dozen motor vehicles to pose a threat, at least in the electronic media, to the national government. The OLA made peace while the TPLF kept fighting.

Other factors were at work, including the slow arrival of electronic media in Ethiopia. Telegraph, telephones, wireless telegraph, radio, TV, cell phones with TikTok, and the internet all eventually arrived but are still not widely available to many Ethiopians. A decade ago, there were about half a million internet users, but now it is 20 percent of the population and perhaps more because many more people can afford to spend time at Internet Cafes. This is a common way the Internet expands, but it was slower in Ethiopia because the central government quickly imposed controls on cell-phone use by making a government-approved SIM card mandatory. Individual satellite phones required government permission to enter the country.

Another problem is literacy; only about half the adult population can read. Many cannot read well because they had only a few years of schooling and left to work after gaining basic literacy in one of the three main languages used by the Amhara, Tigray, and Oromo regions. That explains why the Amhara get most of the blame for the decades of communist Derg Party dictatorship. Now an Oromo prime minister, backed by many Amhara, is seeking to reduce the power of ethnic politics in Ethiopia. A noble goal, but many people in Tigray and Oromia see this as another oppressive scheme coming from the center. That is Addis Ababa and its highland plateau, which has always been the center of the kingdom/empire/republic, surviving by introducing new ideas to keep Ethiopia competitive against potential foreign threats. With more literacy and a smattering of electronic media, the rebellions are being organized and defeated more quickly. Accusations of ethnic atrocities travel faster and with more impact, with subsequent clarifications that diminish or invalidate the initial claim.

Apparently, Ethiopian forces avoided that threat by using drones and smaller quadcopters to monitor the roads, as well as the armed opposition and their condition. The government also armed some of its non-combat air force aircraft to provide air support. Government forces have been advancing down the key highways and chasing the rebels out of roadside towns they had occupied. The rebels reply that this is part of their plan and they will strike back soon and crush the government forces. That’s not how it works when the rebels are die-hard splinter groups from larger ethnic rebel organizations that made peace with the central government. The current plan is for government change to depend less on ethnic differences and animosities.

Over a million have died so far, most of them civilians. Many more civilians fled their homes temporarily to avoid violence or looting. The local damage and refugees were often the result of ethnic violence in communities nowhere near the armed rebels and government forces. This is the ethnic problem the proposed government program wants to overcome. Ancient practices often resist change, which is why they still exist. Reforms have been generally agreed on for generations, but local politics and paranoia have long been obstacles that can flare into violence quickly and then dissipate. Electronic communications and media make it happen more quickly than in the past, but not much more effectively.

Claims of much higher casualties have been made, but verifying them is difficult and time-consuming in Ethiopia. Politicians and community leaders on both sides have kept talking because the fighting will not be decisive unless the three major ethnic groups agree. The TPLF and OLA are not going to get to Addis Ababa, and the security forces are not going to end the violence in Tigray or Oromia by force. A negotiated settlement is still underway, and the fighting has subsided but not ended, because the TPLF's main demand is that Prime Minister Ahmed resign.

The two rebel groups got to within a few hundred kilometers of the capital and admit they were supplied by what they could steal along the way. Foraging is an ancient logistics method, but it has limits, especially when government forces have a more modern resupply system. The government has easy access to foreign suppliers, who can use air freight services to get what they need quickly. The travel disruptions have hurt many Ethiopians who want nothing to do with this fight. The fighting has reduced vital supplies of food and other essentials along the few paved roads that can handle heavy truck traffic. More remote communities that depend on food aid are going hungry for reasons they don’t fully comprehend.

Tigrayans have a reputation as determined and skilled fighters, but they were part of Ethiopia because they were outnumbered in a country that has long been the only Christian-majority state in North Africa and the only African state or region that escaped European colonization. In the 1930s, the Italians tried and failed to turn Ethiopia into a colony. This war against the only Christian kingdom in Africa drew widespread criticism at the time.

Ethiopia is an ancient Christian kingdom that survived for so long because it has some of the best farmland in the Sahel, a semi-desert region south of the Sahara Desert that extends across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The Ethiopian plateau gets plenty of rain and contains one of the Nile River's main sources. Deserts and semi-desert grasslands surround this lush plateau.

Most Ethiopians converted from ancient faiths to Christianity in the 4th century. Four hundred years later, the new and expanding Islamic caliphate attacked and eventually seized the coastal Eritrea region but could not get much further for a long time. In the 1400s, the Ottomans made some more damaging attacks on Abyssinia, so more than five centuries after that, the ancient Christian kingdom became something of a legend in Europe because ancient Abyssinia no longer had access to the sea, and messages, such as letters from European kings and emperors, failed to reach the Abyssinian emperor. For a long time, it was unclear if the legendary Christian State still existed.

After 1492, European ships with new technology began appearing off the East African coast. One of these Portuguese expeditions reestablished links with the Abyssinian emperor and even provided crucial assistance when another Muslim army threatened them. Centuries of Muslim attacks had left a mark and left Abyssinia/Ethiopia with a 30 percent Muslim minority. The threat of Muslim armies from the east led Abyssinian emperors to seek allies to the west; thus, the lowland Oromo became part of the empire, and most were converted to Christianity. The Oromo were culturally similar to the Amhara and speak a related but different language. The Amhara and Oromo are the Christian majority, although only about half of Oromos are Christian, and the Oromo are the largest minority. The Tigray people live north of the plateau and are the last of the larger Christian population along the Red Sea coast that was lost to Islam.

In the early 1500s, Europeans encountered a new, more powerful Ethiopian empire founded in the 1200s by the largest highland group, the Amhara. Both Tigray and Amhara people shared the plateau, but the Tigray were always more advanced economically and culturally because they were closest to the ancient Nile kingdoms. The Tigray passed on what they learned to the more numerous Amhara, who became culturally and politically dominant in the 1200s. The Tigray are about six percent of the population, and nearly all are Christian, with the highest education rate and personal incomes in Ethiopia. The more recently acquired Somalis in Ogaden province, bordering Somalia, also make up about six percent of the national population. The Oromo are 34 percent and the Amhara 27 percent. The Amhara have long led a coalition with the Oromo and Tigray.

Prime Minister Ahmed is Oromo and a Protestant Christian. His father was an Oromo Moslem while his mother was an Oromo raised in the ancient Orthodox Christian religion. Ahmed believed the country needed more Ethiopians and fewer people who saw themselves first as Tigray, Amhara, Oromo, or Somali. The Amhara have long been the traditional source of national political leadership. That custom eroded because the Amhara formed the communist Derg government that replaced the monarchy in the 1970s.

Ethnic politics has crippled Ethiopia since the monarchy was overthrown in 1974 and replaced by the Derg, an even more repressive and dictatorial communist group that also exploited ethnic rivalries and survived with massive support from Russia. That support was all gone by 1991, and the democratic EPRDF took power. EPRDF included many former Derg factions, such as the TPLF. The many ethnic parties and their militias struggled to agree on a new constitution and how a democratic Ethiopia would be governed. The first national elections were held in 1995. One faction, Eritrea, controlled the tiny coastline Ethiopia had access to and gained independence in 1993 via a national referendum. While Eritrea was now independent, there were still disagreements about where the border should be, and in 1998 this led to a ruinous, for both countries, two-year war. Eritrea still has not recovered, but the EPRDF gained national support for how it handled the war and negotiated its end.

The EPRDF kept winning elections, and some ethnic groups claimed the elections were not honest. Foreign observers found no massive fraud and supported EPRDF claims that dissatisfaction with the voting stemmed more from some ethnic groups not gaining as much national support as they expected. The TPLF was the most powerful and persistent critic of the new Prosperity Party, calling it even more unfair to Tigrayans. Tigray is considered the source of the ideas and cultural practices that led to the formation of the Abyssinian kingdom, then empire, and the larger Abyssinia that finally became known as Ethiopia in the 20th century. The older entities known as Abyssinia were much smaller than 20th-century Ethiopia.

Even after it reorganized as the Prosperity Party, the EPRDF remained a multi-ethnic coalition dominated by Amhara, Oromo, and Tigrayan people who had long dominated national politics. The Prosperity Party was meant to negotiate ethnic disputes more effectively without risking civil war. Despite the religious differences, ethnic groups drive conflicts.

Ethiopia is 67 percent Christian, 31 percent Muslim, and the rest are smaller, often older religions. The largest religion is the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox, with 43 percent of the population, while other Christian sects make up 24 percent. That is less than the Oromo, who make up 34 percent of the population, followed by the Amhara at 24 percent and the Tigray at 6 percent. The unity of these three groups keeps Ethiopia united, and when they cannot agree, trouble follows. When the three groups agree, peace follows, and they continue seeking an agreement to end the civil war that began in 2020 and continues to fester. The situation remains fluid, and updates are expected as new developments unfold.

James F Dunnigan