As we enter the new year, one of the most important conflicts on the minds of many policy and decision-makers will continue to be the developing situation in Ethiopia after an African Union-backed ceasefire was signed in the waning days of 2022. 

How long the Ethiopian Civil War has been going on depends on what perspective you view it from. For some, it began in 2020, when Abiy Ahmed suspended elections in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray provinces, and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF, the main party in the region) responded by defying the central government which led to an escalation of force on both sides culminating in the Ahmed government deploying federal troops to Tigray to restore order which resulted in the TPLF staging an uprising. And indeed, this is where much of the heavy fighting began. 

However, for longtime observers of the conflict, the history of instability in Ethiopia goes back much further than that- specifically back to 1974, when the conflict first began in Ethiopia. In that year, Haile Selassie (the last Emperor of Ethiopia) was deposed in a Communist revolution and the Derg, a Communist military junta under Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, took over the Ethiopian administration.

Despite being able to take control of the government and the army, the Derg failed to consolidate their authority across the country, and in response, royalists and various ethnic militias took advantage of the power vacuum that rose up against the Derg government. To add fuel to the fire, the government of Somalia sensed Ethiopia’s weakness and attempted to annex the mostly Somali-speaking province of Ogaden. 

It was during the Somali invasion that the Derg made further connections with other members of the Communist world, principally the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies, and Ethiopia was flooded with weapons, aid, and even the help of the Cuban army. With these resources, Ethiopia was eventually able to drive Somalia out of Ogaden and made deep connections with the USSR that would make it the most closely aligned Warsaw pact state in Africa at the time. 

However, neither Somalia nor the royalists were the principal threat to the Derg’s control. The various ethnic militias in Ethiopia were by far the biggest worry in the mind of Colonel Mariam and were the principal protagonists of the conflict. In almost every region of Ethiopia, from Amhara to Afar to Tigray to Oromiya, some sort of rebel group formed claiming to represent the interests of that region in fighting the Derg. Several of these rebel groups eventually formed a coalition called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which was principally led by the TPLF and their longtime leader Meles Zenawi. The TPLF operated in the country’s Tigray region and was primarily composed of people of the Tigray ethnicity

Towards the 1980s, the authority of the Derg (later rebranded into the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia) would slowly wane as intense famine set in and as the collapse of the USSR cut off their largest supplier of aid. The EPRDF took advantage of the situation and engaged in an offensive in 1991 which brought them all the way to Addis Ababa, at which point they overthrew the government, forced Colonel Mariam to flee to Zimbabwe, and established a transitional government.

The newly appointed President Zenawi wasted exactly no time reorganizing the government how he saw fit. He signed into law a new constitution in 1995 organizing Ethiopia into several new federal state entities based on ethnic and linguistic lines. However, he also took some less pleasant steps to consolidate his rule- it is alleged that he imprisoned many government opponents during his time as interim president. When the TPLF (which had demobilized into a political party) and its EPRDF allies (its coalition) were easily elected due to boycotts of the election by the opposition, Zenawi consolidated his power further. He gave key government positions to TPLF officials, most of whom were his former comrades in the struggle and almost all of whom were ethnically Tigrayan. The result of this was political domination of the Tigray in a country where less than 5% of the population were ethnically Tigray. 

Ethiopia under Zenawi, now the Prime Minister under the new parliamentary system, was an authoritarian state. The TPLF ruled with an iron fist. His government and its various regional affiliates curtailed freedom of speech and expression, imposed forced labor on its people, and used surveillance systems originally implemented on the Derg to monitor rural communities. Ethiopia definitely developed and grew (particularly the Tigray region and its capital, Mekele) but the people suffered. 

One particular challenge to the TPLF’s authority was the renegade province of Eritrea. The compromise of Ethiopia’s constitution of 1995 was that it provided for Ethiopia to be constructed as a voluntary union- theoretically, any province has the right to secede if it wants to. The first region to ever try to take advantage of this option was Eritrea. Eritrean rebel forces (under the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front) had been members of the EPRDF and were instrumental in toppling the Communists. Therefore, although Zenawi and the TPLF tried to delay it until 1993, they did technically owe it to the Eritrean rebels to allow an independence referendum, and when they did eventually hold one it passed overwhelmingly. 

The EPLF and its leader Isais Afwerki then went on to create an authoritarian one-party state under the EPLF. Human rights in Eritrea then and now are in such a reduced state that today they are known as Africa’s North Korea. Afwerki is still the President of Eritrea today. 

Any goodwill established by the Eritrean government with the TPLF and Ethiopia ultimately disappeared in 1998, when border skirmishes between the two countries led to an all-out war, which created suspicion and animosity that led up until the current day. Although the two were able to end the conflict in 2000, border clashes and skirmishes would continue intermittently for the next two decades. 

The TPLF, their coalition, and Zenawi would go on to rule Ethiopia for the next 17 years before Prime Minister Zenawi died suddenly in 2012 while in office. His right-hand man Halemariam Desalegn was appointed Prime Minister in his place, but like most handpicked successors throughout history, was too weak to manage the delicate ethnic balance in Ethiopia, and the Amhara and Oromo ethnicities (who combined make up the overwhelming majority of Ethiopia’s population) began to grow anxious. Protests broke out across Ethiopia against the Desalegn administration. Due to his poor handling of the situation, Desalegn decided to resign as Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

This marks the beginning of the meteoric rise of current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. As the leader of the largest party within the TPLF, the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization, he was voted in as Prime Minister following the resignation of Desalegn. Ahmed then set about making big changes to the Ethiopian government, earning him an international reputation as a reformer. He signed a peace deal with Eritrea, freed political dissidents, loosened restrictions on the media, ended Tigray's domination of Ethiopia’s military, arrested several generals on charges of corruption, and most controversially, removed many TPLF officials from their top postings. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Eritrea

Perhaps the most controversial thing that Abiy Ahmed did was dissolve the EPRDF coalition, and reorganized its constituent parties (as well as several smaller parties that had not been included) into one single brand new party- the Prosperity Party. The TPLF, unsatisfied with Ahmed’s performance as head of the TPLF, refused to join. For the first time in over two decades, the TPLF lost their power and were placed firmly in the opposition. 

Ethiopia was certainly not exempted from the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world in March 2020 and suffered just the same as much of the rest of the world. In response, Abiy Ahmed decided to postpone the next Ethiopian federal election, which was scheduled for 2020. This angered many in the TPLF, who thought that Prime Minister Ahmed was trying to cling to power longer than his mandate allowed him to. 

Despite the election being officially postponed, Tigray officials held their own elections in defiance of the central government. In response, Ethiopia withheld federal funding from the region. This set off a back-and-forth that eventually led to members of the TPLF’s paramilitary wing allegedly attacking military bases in the Tigray region. 

On November 4th, 2020, Prime Minister Ahmed ordered federal troops to enter the Tigray region in order to re-establish order. By the end of the month, Ethiopian forces had captured Mekele from the TPLF and Prime Minister Ahmed proclaimed victory. However, the violence continued as the TPLF held out in the countryside and used devastating rocket attacks. The situation was complicated by the intervention of Eritrean troops into the northern parts of Tigray, allegedly to secure the border and prevent spillover. Eritrea also still maintains a deep seated distrust for the TPLF after the border war of the late 90s, further prompting their government to act. 

From very early on, the civilians in the Tigray region saw devastating consequences as a result of the war. The conflict in the region restarted Ethiopia’s brutal cycle of famines, causing over 350,000 people in Tigray to experience it. The UN placed blame for the famine on the Ahmed government for withholding aid and using famine as a weapon of war. Ethiopian forces also showed a callous disregard for human life, with Ethiopian airstrikes killing many Tigrayan civilians. To make matters worse, ethnic violence and massacres were conducted throughout the region, particularly by militia and regional forces from the neighboring Amhara province that Ethiopia had been working with. No less than 5 days into the conflict, these militias conducted a massacre in the town of Mai Kadra of ethnic Tigray civilians, which killed hundreds. This devastating cycle of conflict forced many Tigrayans to attempt to flee the country via western Tigray and Sudan. 

Tigray forces conducted retaliatory attacks (mainly via the use of artillery and rockets) against the Amhara region and Eritrea’s capital, Asmara. Eritrea responded by marching towards the town of Axum and conducting a retaliatory massacre that killed hundreds of innocent civilians. Amharan forces also retaliated, pushing into western Tigray and seizing territory there. This caused significant backlash from the west, which slapped fresh sanctions on Eritrea on top of the ones already in place. 

All of these factors would strengthen the resolve of Tigray forces who would launch a new offensive in June 2021, retaking the capital Mekele and pushing Amharan militias back in the west and south of the country. They were so successful that they were able to enter the neighboring Afar region by July 2021 and by November made a significant push towards the capital by capturing the towns of Dassie and Kombolcha by. The TPLF also seized the railway linking Addis Ababa to Djibouti, Ethiopia’s coastal neighbor and pushed into the neighboring Afar province. 

These two victories were of critical importance to the TPLF and threatened the stability of the Ethiopian government. Ethiopia is landlocked, which means it depends on its neighbors for supplies, and if it cannot conduct trade with those neighboring countries (the only stable of which is Djibouti), then importing and exporting becomes very difficult due to the fact that most of Ethiopia’s neighbors are unstable and in the midst of violent conflict, or are closed dictatorships. Additionally, the capture of Dessie and Kombolcha in the Afar region represented a significant push towards Addis Ababa, which caused the government to go into a full-on panic, declaring a state of emergency, and calling for civilians to arm themselves and defend the capital if the TPLF reached the city. The government began rounding up ethnic Tigrayans and TPLF “sympathizers' ', in what was expected to be a reprisal if the TPLF reached the city. 

The government launched a counteroffensive which found some success, but by this point the conflict was starting to wind down. In April 2022, a three month ceasefire was declared which finally allowed aid to reach Tigray. However, hostilities resumed in August. Further progress was made when in September 2021, the TPLF agreed to withdraw from the Afar region in order to negotiate for a ceasefire. All the while, airstrikes across Tigray continued and damaged many civilian areas include causing hundreds of civilian casualties, however fighting on the ground had largely slowed as the Tigray announced they were willing to observe an immediate ceasefire. Progress towards negotiations continued as the TPLF and Ethiopian government began peace talks and eventually signed a “Permanent Cessation of Hostilities” in South Africa in November 2022. 

However, this agreement leaves several matters unattended to. First and foremost, Eritrea was never a party to the agreement, meaning that they still may or may not decide to actually leave Tigray and end their campaign of terror there. Additionally, many of the Amhara regional forces deployed to the region were also not represented in the agreement, and multiple Amhara community leaders said that they cannot necessarily be expected to follow the agreement since no Amharan delegates were present. There was even evidence that Fano, the main Amhara militia group involved in the fighting in Tigray and a former ally of Prime Minister Ahmed, began fighting the government’s efforts to demobilize, leading the government to institute a crackdown in the Amhara region as early as May 2022, thus potentially destabilizing the Amhara region as well. The Amhara community may also be angered by the peace deal that Prime Minister Ahmed signed with the TPLF, which restores Tigray’s borders to their pre-conflict size. Many Amhara, including those in Fano, claim that the fertile regions around western Tigray should be a part of the Amhara region. Whether or not the Amhara accept this or not remains to be seen. 

Additionally, questions continue to be raised about Ethiopia’s perennially unstable Oromiya region, which has been plagued by a quiet insurgency under the Oromo Liberation Army since the Ethiopian Civil War ended and may be breaking out into increasing violence again. Sectarian violence between members of the Oromo regional government forces, the Oromo Liberation Army, and Fano have led to deadly clashes between each other that have not only killed members of those organizations, but have resulted in deadly ethnic based violence against civilians in retaliation for various attacks. 

The situation on the ground remains unstable, despite the majority of the fighting having died down. Right now, the agreement between the TPLF and the Ethiopian federal government seems to be holding. They agreed the borders of Tigray would be restored, and that hostilities would cease between both sides, which has so far happened. As of now, it seems that Eritrean forces have at least begun a withdrawal from the country. However, it is unclear what the future of the region may hold, and what role exactly the TPLF will play in creating an interim administration for Tigray, and in returning a state of normalcy to Tigray. The TPLF is still technically designated as a terrorist organization by the federal government, and whether or not the government will decide to reverse that designation is still unclear. It is almost certain that Prime Minister Ahmed will have to work with the TPLF in some capacity to achieve that aim, but in order to do that they must disarm- a step that the TPLF and their various paramilitary allies have yet to take. 

The big questions for 2023 will be as follows: will the peace agreement hold, will the TPLF disarm, what will the place of the TPLF be in the re-establishment of a state of normalcy in Tigray, will the empowerment of the Fano and the spillover of ethnic violence into Amhara and Oromiya lead to further escalation of conflict in those regions, and will that (if it happens) mean the destabilization of or potentially the end for the Ethiopian state?