Video & Multimedia
Related: About this forumWhy is Ethiopia facing civil war?
Why is Ethiopia facing civil war?
Nov 19, 2020
Guardian News
The Guardian's Jason Burke explains what sparked the conflict, why it threatens to destabilise the Horn of Africa and examines how the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, the continent's youngest leader, has gone from winning a Nobel peace prize to presiding over a bloody conflict against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)
Could Tigray conflict turn Ethiopia into a 'Libya of east Africa'?
Let's hope this one can be settled peacefully, perhaps with a little nudge from the Biden Administration!
Too much suffering, death and destruction going on around the world already with COVID-19 and other diseases, crime, hunger, climate change and resulting mass migrations.
KY........
DanieRains
(4,619 posts)It will stop.
cab67
(2,992 posts)Ethiopia is ethnically heterogeneous. That's why it used to have an emperor - the majority in Addis Ababa and surrounding area are Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who speak Amharic. There's a large Muslim minority, but they also speak Amharic, and when I've been there, I've seen little evidence of tension between Christians and Muslims. But other regions of the country are inhabited by people speaking different languages, some of which are completely unrelated to Amharic (which is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic).
There was an attempted coup in Ethiopia during my last visit in 2019. My colleagues and I noticed nothing - a few trucks with soldiers, and the internet was down. But we were in Addis; the whole thing happened in the Amhara region, and the effort was to overthrow regional rather than national officials. Ultimately, what's happening in Ethiopia is efforts by different regions to become fully autonomous or independent.
This is, in essence, what led to the restoration of an independent Eritrea in 1993, which had been part of Ethiopia (formally or de facto) since WW2.