The Pretoria Peace Agreement
A podcast with Teklehaymanot Weldemichal and Meron Gebreananaye
Previously in the Cosmopolitan Globalist:
Claire—the other day, we published an article by Teklehaymanot Weldemichal and Meron Gebreananaye about the Tigray War and the Pretoria Peace Agreement. I invited them on the podcast, first, because I thought it would be interesting to you, but second, because this conflict simply needs more attention.
The Ethiopian federal government has failed so far to do many of the things it promised to do under the terms of the agreement. Eritrean troops and Amhara forces remain in Tigray. Tigrayans remain in concentration camps. Basic services have not yet been wholly restored. International agencies have not yet been given full, unobstructed access to the region. Millions are still unable to receive humanitarian aid and healthcare. Tigrayan civilians are still being kidnapped, killed, and disappeared. The media still has no access to the region.
As our guests explain, there are many things the international community—and the West, in particular—could be doing to pressure the Ethiopian government fully to adhere to the terms of the agreement. But the issue is clearly low on Western policymakers’ agendas. One reason for this is that people don’t hear about this conflict often enough.
The reasons for the lack of news coverage are all the usual ones. Moreover, the Ethiopian government has ensured there will be no news coverage by denying the media access to the area and arresting at least 63 journalists since November 4, 2020.
Ethiopia now ranks, with Ethiopia, as the worst jailer of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa.
Listen to the podcast, and if you feel moved by it, drop a note to your representative telling him or her that the issue concerns you, and you’d like him or her to follow it closely and exercise pressure on all parties concerned to uphold the commitments made in the peace agreement.
We’ve annotated the transcript of the podcast, below, with clarifications and references that you might find helpful.
Claire: Hi, this is Claire Berlinski with the Cosmopolitan Globalist Podcast. Today I have Teklehaymanot Weldemichal and Meron Gebreananaye here—Tekle and Meron—to discuss the article they recently wrote for us about the Pretoria Peace Agreement, which is, we hope, a step toward resolving the brutal conflict in Tigray.
I thought we’d begin by having you both introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, what you do, and your relationship to the conflict.
Do you want to start, Meron?
Meron: Hi, thank you very much for having me, Claire. My name is Meron Gebreananaye. I am Tigrayan. I just recently finished my Ph.D. at the University of Durham in the UK. I live in the UK right now. Since the start of this war, I’ve been involved in diverse advocacy efforts to bring attention to this war and to help document and preserve the accounts of atrocities that we’re hearing from Tigray.
Tekle: Hi, my name is Teklehaymanot. I’m also Tigrayan. I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. I finished my Ph.D. during the war.
Before the start of the war, I was doing my Ph.D., which focused on environmental policies in Kenya and Tanzania. But since the start of the war, I’ve switched topics, and I’ve been advocating, writing, and explaining what’s going on in Tigray to the rest of the world, through small papers and appearances in the media, and by providing analysis.
Claire: Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences, and the experiences of people in the Tigray region, during the conflict?
Tekle: This is a huge, massive catastrophic war where you have millions of people displaced, hundreds of thousands of people who have died.
The people I know personally have been affected heavily by the war. I have friends that have died, have been killed in the massacres. I have friends that had to join the struggle, the resistance against aggression. I have family and friends who have been displaced from different parts of the region, or displaced multiple times as the war goes on.
My own parents have been displaced several times. They lived on a small farm in a part of Tigray. They had to move multiple times from their home, which has been occupied by Eritrean and Ethiopian armies and allied militias. So yeah—it’s been personal for me. Everyone I know has been affected by it.
Claire: It must be all-consuming. It must be very hard to continue with your academic work.
Tekle: It is. I’m a postdoctoral fellow, and I have a topic that I’m supposed to work on, but it has been hard to do. Anything else, compared to the crisis at hand, seems meaningless. It seems very small. Even researching topics that are interesting, and topics that excited me before, aren’t exciting anymore. It’s difficult to focus on anything else.
Claire: Did you ever imagine that something like this could happen in that region?
Tekle: I was in Tigray in 2019, the summer before. I went to the village where my parents lived. I stayed there for a couple of nights. I stayed in Mekelle [the capital of the Tigray region]. I had a nice time with friends and siblings. And at that time, no one could ever imagine that the village of my parents would fall to a foreign army, that it would be attacked by drones, and tanks, and all kinds of weapons. I could never imagine that my parents would be displaced. So it came as a shock. I mean, you could never imagine something so horrific would happen in a place as peaceful as it was in Tigray.
Claire: And Meron?
Meron: I was born and I lived in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Before the start of the war, I’d been completely unaware of the political tensions and fractures that became abundantly evident after the start of the war.
The war came as an absolute shock.
And because my support structure, and my sense of who I was, was shaped around having been born in Addis, and identifying with that—with the start of the war and the extreme polarizations surrounding the war, the corrosive rhetoric, and then the atrocities that were visited upon the people of Tigray—it was extremely traumatic emotionally.
And as Teklehaymanot said, it became almost impossible to be interested in anything else. So, you know, you lose interest in your research, in your family. Everything becomes quickly meaningless, and you begin to doubt yourself. I began to doubt my understanding of my reality, because it was like—hold on. I completely misunderstood the context where I came from, what people I know personally, and people in Ethiopia, broadly, were capable of—in terms of hurting, inflicting pain against one another. So, it was just a shocking, shocking thing.
And then, immediately after the start of the war, we were assaulted with news from relatives. A lot of this is secondhand information, because from the fourth of November 2020, when the war started, there was an internet and telecommunications blackout on Tigray. It’s now beginning to be lifted, but hasn’t been completely lifted.
So, we’re hearing a lot of this information secondhand, and you’re not able to reach people. Our family members are not able to reach siblings and parents, and there’s this sort of communal agony, and inability to process.
At the same time, you have to galvanize, as a community, and try to begin to make sense of this so that you can start advocating and raising awareness about it.
So it’s just a constant struggle between processing it yourself and making sense of it so that others can understand. That’s been a central focus of my life for the last two years. I just finished my Ph.D. a few months back.
Claire: Congratulations.
Meron: Thank you very much. And I was very late. I finished much later than I would have according to the schedule I set for myself. But even so, it meant much less and brought me much less joy than it would have before the start of this war. Because the sense of who you are, your family, everything, has changed.
Claire: What has it been like to live at the same time in the West, where people don’t know this is happening?
Meron: It’s surreal. Because it consumes your life. Your entire world has been reduced to getting information, understanding, processing, and advocating. But every day, when you go out, nobody else knows what’s happening. You have to interact with people daily. You have to drop off your children at school. You have to interact with other parents and live your life, go to the university, and it’s like living in this sort of bubble of absolute horror that doesn’t impinge on the rest of the world at all.
It can be very dehumanizing. You’re always wondering, why is this pain not being felt by other people? Why is this pain not impinging at all? It’s surreal.
Claire: I’m sure. I was struck by what you just said—that you’ve been forced to reevaluate what you thought about everyone you lived with and their capacity for evil. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? How do you understand that? How did you not realize this about the people you lived among before? Do you think this is a capacity that every human being has?
Meron: Honestly, I don’t know. What I do believe is that war, and the emotions it raises, and also the absolute corrosiveness of the rhetoric introduced just before the war and throughout the course of the war—the absolute, divisive, “us against them/destroy or be destroyed” mentality, that unfortunately galvanized forces within the Ethiopian federal government …
Claire: Where did that come from? All that absolute vitriol and hatred? It’s obvious if you so much as publish an article about it. Your Twitter feed becomes filled with it. What’s the source of that unbelievable hatred?
Tekle: I can say this has historical roots in the country’s politics. Ethiopia is an empire. So, as an empire, it has engulfed communities—like ethnic groups and different cultural and religious groups—into it throughout history. And these were not peaceful inclusions. They were usually brutal. They were usually degrading to the people that were incorporated into the empire.
And while Tigray is one of the central blocks of the empire, it has also endured painful historical invasions by the empire, where entire villages and districts were emptied of people through genocidal campaigns, in the past. And these historical events come back, oftentimes, when there’s a lot of tension in the country.
One of those historical events was in the 1980s, when you had the Ethiopian Marxist junta that ruled the country from 1974, when Haile Selassie was deposed as the last emperor, to 1991, when the junta was kicked out of power by the coalition of forces.
One of the central elements of that coalition was Tigrayan forces under the TPLF, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. That struggle was between the imperial past—the country where you have a central authority, a central regime that brutally controls everyone—and regions wanting to be autonomous, regions wanting to have cultural, economic, and social autonomy from the center. And the Tigrayans led that struggle to some degree. That instilled a lot of grievances in the people who supported the military junta in the 1980s.
Claire: Who are the people who supported the junta?
Tekle: I don’t want to go finger-pointing on this, but you have urban Ethiopia, like Addis Ababa, that’s really pro- that kind of government. The urban section of the country is one thing. Then you have ethnic Amhara, which is the second-largest majority in the country, who have historically been aligned with the empire and has been, sort of, the arm of the empire.
Claire: So after the Derg fell, there was no lustration process. There was no truth and reconciliation process--
Tekle: I think that’s where things went bad. I mean, the fall of the Derg was supposed to usher in a new political dispensation in the country. It was supposed to be a period when you had reconciliation, when you had justice. But that didn’t happen.
So, people were excited, and they wanted to move on. And one of the ways of moving on is to form a government, a state structure that allows autonomy for the regions, the autonomy of the peripheries. And we had a 1995 constitution that kind of allowed that.
The constitution gave regions and ethnic groups the right to form their regional autonomous governments, and to have this federal structure, where the central government doesn’t dictate everything. We were supposed to be in that form of structure, which allowed autonomy.
But someone recently wrote that the EPRDF, the coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1995 to 2018 and which is the base of the current ruling party, bastardized that autonomy. It reduced it to the ethnic question—instead of to a question of autonomy, of center-periphery, and of course addressing the centralizing nature of the state.
So it became—people tend to talk about the fact that the federation is just an ethnic federation, not a question of autonomy. So as a result, the Tigrayans were often seen as the guardians of a decentralized, more autonomy-based kind of state. And that often triggered the hate toward Tigrayans from urban Ethiopia, from Ethiopians who ended up supporting a centralized form of government.
You could see this from reading the media, in the past. You could see those kinds of sentiments in the media. You could see those kinds of sentiments in protests. But it wasn’t until Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 that this became very apparent.
Abiy started galvanizing and mobilizing people around this hate toward Tigrayans. He started calling Tigrayans all kinds of names. He called us the “daylight hyenas,” he called us “insects,” “cancers,” he called us “weeds,” and all kinds of names that were meant to present Tigrayans as evil, inherently.
Claire: Is this even as he was receiving the peace prize?
Tekle: Yeah, exactly. I mean, months before, a year before [winning] the Nobel Prize, he was doing all that. He had been presenting Tigrayans that way since he came to power. And we have reports, and after-reports, indicating that he was leading the country in that direction.
Claire: That’s very shocking.
Tekle: And some human rights organizations voiced concerns regarding that.
Claire: Even as the Nobel Committee was deliberating, he was using what’s widely understood to be genocidal rhetoric?
Tekle: Even before that. And even when they were doing the assessment to award it to him. And even a few days before he came to Oslo, he did the same kind of thing—a lot of people were being arrested, basically, for being who they are. Because of their ethnic background. People were being attacked and a lot of killings were going on in the country.
Claire: It must have seemed very bizarre that he was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tekle: I even wrote a blog post the week before the award ceremony in Oslo, voicing my concern regarding giving him the award. It was wrong. And a lot of people were doing that, but nobody seemed to care at the time because he was this “West-friendly” “reformist.” All kinds of names like that were given to him. The West was overwhelmed by that image.
Claire: Why do you think they were so poorly informed about what was going on in Ethiopia? Was there very little reporting from there? Where were they getting their information?
Tekle: For the last fifteen, twenty years there had been this single narrative: that Ethiopia is ruled by an ethnic minority and it is an authoritarian state. Which is true—it is an authoritarian state, but about the “minority rule,” we Tigrayans have questions about that.1
The moment Abiy came to power, it seemed to everyone that the country was going to open up, it was going to reform itself. He was also promising everyone that he would reform. He would widen the political space. He would treat everyone equally—which was not the case.
And the media didn’t quite capture what was underneath this image-building process. The media was just picking on the simple stories that sell in the West. That is, “a reformist, young, charismatic prime minister has come to office.”
That was selling, and the Nobel Prize committee bought it. Everyone bought it. And for us—I mean, I’m a social scientist, I’m Tigrayanm, so I can see what’s going on, but I’d also be able to see what was going on even if I was an outsider. So for me, to follow the process—the way the media built this narrative about Abiy, his premiership, the way he was presented in the West—was painful.
Meron: Just to add to that—there was this sense that there was some unrest in Ethiopia in the years preceding Abiy. There was some unrest, and opposition to the governing coalition, the EPRDF. And like Tekle said, for a long time there was concern about some of the more oppressive practices of that coalition, the EPRDF. There was a lot of blame, at that point, toward the coalition in general and TPLF in particular, which was perceived to be the most powerful party in the coalition.
There was also the sense, in the West, of relief, because a lot of the protests were in the Oromo region of Ethiopia. The Oromo people are the largest ethnic community in Ethiopia. A lot of the protests against the EPRDF were centered in that region. And Abiy is an Oromo. When Abiy was appointed as head of the EPRDF, and then automatically became Prime Minister of Ethiopia—because we have to remember he was appointed chairman of the EPRDF; he was a member of the EPRDF all of his political career—there was this sense of relief that, “Okay, so now the majority is in power and the unrest will quiet down.”
There was an acclamation of the idea of majoritarian politics, without acknowledgement that it was still the same political structure that had existed for decades before that.
So there was this Abiy-mania, it was called, which took over, where everything Abiy did was received with adulation. There were very few questions being asked about his intentions and where he was intending to take the country.
Claire: I think probably also the focus was on the conflict with Eritrea, and people were paying less attention to the internal dynamics of the country. Is that right?
Meron: There was no conflict with Eritrea, or no active conflict with Eritrea at that point.
Claire: That’s why he received the Nobel Prize, isn’t it, for opening the border?
Meron: There was a “no peace, no war” type of situation, right? Whereby both borders were militarized, but there hadn’t been active war since the end of the Ethiopian war. I think it was in the early 2000s. But by beginning diplomatic relations with Eritrea, and signing what’s to date an undisclosed agreement with the Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, that’s how he won the Nobel Prize.
Nobody, to this day, knows the details of that agreement. And Isaias Afwerki heads infamously one of the most repressive regimes in the world. The North Korea of East Africa, that’s how Eritrea has been described.
And that’s essentially why he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Claire: Has anyone asked him to return that prize?
Meron: No. There hasn’t even been a sternly worded reprimand towards him, as far as we know.
Claire: That’s remarkable. It’s something that should happen. It’s irresponsible that they’re not using their prestige to demand that.
Meron: No, not even to rebuke him. Nothing.
And we’ve been advocating for the last two years, and we’ve even asked just for some sort of statement from them, decrying some of his actions—nothing.
At the very beginning of the war, there was a general statement saying that they were concerned by the outbreak of the war, a general statement of concern about the war, not about his actions in particular. And that was all, to my knowledge.
Claire: I want to talk a little bit about the way the conflict is covered in the media. The first thing to say about it is there’s very little coverage at all. But I also find it extremely difficult to understand exactly what’s happening, as I’m sure you do, because there’s no one allowed into the region, but also because of the intense claims and counterclaims. Both sides seem extremely sure, but they don’t agree about the facts.
For example, when I added to your essay, “The war began with the [TPLF] attack on [Ethiopian National Defense Force] bases,” you told me that you weren’t even sure that had happened, whereas [Ethiopians sympathetic to the federal government] have told me, “That was our 9/11.”
How can people be unable to agree on something like that? I mean, that’s not something you can really be mistaken about. How do you explain that?
Tekle: As you said, it’s extreme claims on both sides. And when it comes, for example, to the start of the war, we have a narrative that says, “The war broke out because [the TPLF] attacked the military base in the north, on the third night of November.” That has been an established, accepted narrative, always picked up by the media. That’s the first statement you see in all the newspaper publications, whether it’s about the massacres, or the campaign of rape against women and girls, or about hunger and mass starvation: It’s always that statement at the beginning, and ends up justifying what is to come. The massacre is justified by it.
And the regime has been keen on [that narrative]. It’s been effectively pushing that narrative. But for anyone to understand what happened on that night at the start of November, one has to follow what was going on in the weeks or the months before the start of November.
So, for example, the EU external office put out a statement on November 2, 2020, that’s two days, or the day before, the war broke out, saying that they were concerned about the military movements around the Tigray region. They were concerned that this was going on, and they were concerned about the kind of language that was being used by the different actors at that time. [The statement] was about the military movement along the borders of Tigray, by Eritrea, and the Ethiopian government along all the borders of Tigray. It was about the troop movements, like the flights that were moving troops to all the airports around Tigray. To just take the statement that the war broke out because there was an attack [on November 3] is to deny the fact that there were build-ups, there was already war before the actual shooting happened.2
Claire: That makes sense. A war doesn’t come out of nowhere. But did the attack actually happen?
Tekle: Yes. There are statements by the Tigrayan authorities that they had taken a preemptive strike on at least one of the command centers. So that’s accepted. But focusing on the first shooting of the guns takes attention away from what was going on in the country and the region during the months and weeks before the war started.
Claire: Who do you think are good, trustworthy sources for people to read if they want to understand what’s happening? The Nobel Committee was poorly informed by journalistic sources, and perhaps NGOs were as well. Who would you suggest people follow if they want to understand what’s going on?
Tekle: One thing the media and everyone needs to do is to push for actual investigations to happen. So that’s one thing we would like to see.
Claire: Who should be conducting the investigations?
Tekle: For example, the United Nations Human Rights Commission established an expert committee for Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government has been pushing, and trying to defund it, to get its funds cut by the United Nations General Assembly. That kind of commission is necessary. We need those kinds of committees to carry out the investigation. And those committees need to be independent.
Claire: This is related to something you told me, though: that the UN was simply accepting the Addis line about famine.3
Tekle: Yes. For example, I could now confidently claim that the entire UN establishment based in Ethiopia has been problematic throughout the war. We have officials openly coming out in public and repeating government talking points.
Claire: Why do you think they do that?
Tekle: For example, there was the former Ethiopian Minister of Women and Children who was part of the government, and resigned in September 2021. In her open statement to the public, she said UN officials in Addis are cuddling with the regime. She’s telling them they have been corrupt, they have been benefiting from being complicit, and they have been provided with financial and all kinds of support to do that. And that’s one fact that we should never miss.
The way Abiy established his government, the moment he came to power, he took a lot of people who worked for the UN and other multilateral organizations and he brought them into his cabinet. And these people have friends at those offices, they have friends in multiple organizations that they can easily influence. And now is you have a lot of friends that have friends who used to be friends of the president, the current president.
Claire: So why would you trust the UN to conduct an impartial investigation?
Meron: So not the UN, per se, but the International Commission of Human Rights Experts, which was instituted by the Human Rights Council. So it’s not the United Nations, the bureaucratic structure of the United Nations, but a special commission that was set up by the UN Human Rights Council, where nations have representatives, and which is answerable to that body.
And it’s this commission that the Ethiopian government has been trying to defund. It has tried that twice already, and it has thankfully failed.
But just to quickly circle back to a very important point that Teklehaymanot has raised, and that feeds into your question about the war of narratives that you’ve noticed on social media as well. Abiy Ahmed, and the government that he has, is not your grandfather’s dictatorial regime. It’s a very savvy regime. It knows how to play the narrative game. It has learned from some of the worst despotic governments in the world.
From the start of the war, they have sowed disinformation. They have threatened neutral actors. If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find reports of academics, journalists, and others being threatened. They have maligned and defamed people and they’ve used all sorts of underhanded tactics to make sure that any coverage of the Tigray war, if it is not pro-government, at least inserts the government counterpoint.
In many cases, the international media at least has tried to report atrocities, but the government works to “both-sides” it. And they’ve done that very aggressively. This is not by accident. It’s a very systematic effort.
And similarly, these tactics they’ve used against United Nations organizations—in one fell swoop, the Ethiopian government expelled, I think it was seven, or nine, high-level experts from Ethiopia in 2021, after the start of the war. It cleaned house, and the UN had no choice but to send other, more palatable, officials to Ethiopia.
And [the government] has similarly expelled diplomats, they expelled Irish diplomats because Ireland has been very active during its tenure on the UN Security Council, pushing for the war in Tigray, the genocide in Tigray, to be tabled before the UN Security Council, in a public meeting.
It’s incredible how aggressive the Ethiopian government has been in ensuring that its narrative is centered. A lot of what you see is emanating from that.
Claire: What is the government’s narrative? How does it explain starving the people of Tigray and not letting humanitarian aid in?
Meron: Essentially, it has characterized the Tigrayans as enemies of the state. When it started, they would argue that they’re [just] talking about the TPLF, but all Tigrayans have been characterized as a historical enemy of the Ethiopian state, intent on not just being against Abiy, but against Ethiopia, and Ethiopian-ness, and the essence of Ethiopian-ness, and Ethiopia as a state.
And they have this narrative of Tigrayans being aligned with historical enemies. These historical enemies tend to change. Sometimes, it’s “the West,” because there’s a history of Marxist-era narratives, and people recognize that—the jargon from that era. Other times it’s neighboring countries. But they have justified it by portraying Tigrayans as an existential threat to Ethiopia.
Claire: Surely this can’t be convincing to international observers. I mean, when they’re asked, “Why aren’t you letting humanitarian aid in,” [the government] can’t say, “Because we think Tigrayans are an existential threat to Ethiopia” and have anyone believe that, can they?
Meron: They have said that. I mean, to the Finnish foreign minister who was the European Union envoy to the Horn of Africa. During the beginning of this crisis, it was reported that that is, exactly, what they say. It hasn’t necessarily convinced the international community, but [the international community] hasn’t been motivated to act, in any decisive or meaningful manner, to address the violations, the weaponization of starvation and such. Other than a stern statement here and there.
Claire: What would it look like, in your view, if the international community resolved to address this effectively?
Meron: Ethiopia is a strongly aid-dependent country. Some sanctions mechanisms were in place. In early 2021 there was a mechanism that President Biden signed, an executive order that was intended to exert sanctions on any parties that protracted or escalated the war. That mechanism is there, but it has never been used.
And there are various other tools that the US and other members of the international community have that they can easily deploy, but haven’t felt compelled to.
Claire: Do you mean targeted sanctions or general sanctions?
Meron: Targeted sanctions. And even in terms of travel bans, in terms of Ethiopian government properties—like Ethiopian Airlines, which has been directly involved—I mean it has been evident, hard evidence—in supporting the war effort and protecting the war effort.4 Even in terms of sanctions against entities like that, there are a whole bunch of mechanisms available that were never used because aggravating Ethiopia—which was, for a long time, a lynchpin security ally for the US and others in the West—was just not done. I’m assuming. This is my assumption.
Claire: What has Ethiopia been providing the West that it feels is so important?
Meron: Well, it was a security ally in the War on Terror, at one point. For a long time, it was one of the most stable countries in a very volatile region and contributed to peace efforts, and things like that. It also hosts the African Union. Africa—especially now with the Russian war on Ukraine—there’s this impulse in the West to court Africa and African countries. So yeah, just a whole bunch of things that have pushed Tigray and the people of Tigray to the bottom of the line.
Tekle: What is Ethiopia providing the West? At the beginning of the war, there were a lot of European diplomats shuttling between Addis and Brussels and Addis and Khartoum and all the eastern Islamic African countries trying to contain the crisis, right? “Contain” is important here. One goal of containment was to make sure that the crisis ends within the Tigray region. So the rhetoric at the time was, “We don’t want this to escalate into a regional crisis where you have migration to the EU,” for example, right?
“We don’t want to destabilize the Horn of Africa, because that has a lot of potential for migration to the EU.” So one of the kinds of subtle agreement that I see is that the EU wanted Abiy to “contain” the crisis. By “containing,” they mean, “Whatever happens stays in the Tigray region. We don’t want to talk about ‘human rights’ and ‘protection’ in the region when Abiy is trying to contain it, because it will lead to a migration crisis.”
And another aspect is you have the geopolitical tension between the West and the rest of the world, like China, and Russia, and other powers that are emerging. And the funny part, or sadly funny part, is here you have the United States and the West providing so much financial aid, and providing funding through the World Bank and multilateral organizations. But those funds are being used to purchase weapons, deadly weapons from Iran, from China, from all the countries that are themselves under sanctions. There are Iranian weapons and drones used in Tigray. The [US] State Department confirmed that.5
That’s what makes it tragic.
Claire: So if people were more aware of the conflict, and if there were more public pressure on Western governments, you think that there are a series of measures that could be usefully implemented?
Tekle: Exactly. There are a lot of them.
Claire: Which means that the lack of media coverage really is a big problem.
Meron: Absolutely. Yep.
Claire: Why do you think the media has been so uninterested in the conflict?
Tekle: I think the media sort of follows politics in countries. For example, here, in the country where I live, there were frequent reports about the crisis at the beginning of the war. And that has a lot to do with how, for example, the minister of foreign affairs in Norway was responding to the crisis. At the beginning of the war, the minister of foreign affairs was more outspoken. The media followed what the minister of foreign affairs in Norway was doing. It became a topic among the Norwegian public and in its media.
But once the minister of foreign affairs stopped reporting or talking about the crisis, the media gave up.
I think there’s a threshold, there is a line, there’s an extent that the media can cover it without politics responding to it. So they kind of give up.
Claire: Well, I’m certain that when they read your [recent CG] article, many of our readers thought, “This is very tragic, but what can we do?” Can you provide me with a list of actions that would be helpful, including targeted sanctions, including using the prospect of—well, I suppose if these are Iranian weapons, then secondary sanctions are a prospect? What other levers do you think the West has besides targeted sanctions?
Tekle: I mean, there is always the Ethiopian government. Ethiopia, like Meron said, is dependent on a lot of financial and material support from the West. And we see, for example, some donor countries saying, “We could channel the resources not through the government, but through other actors.” But that, still, is giving the government more resources, or freeing resources for the government by providing it with other services.
So there’s still a need for Western governments and donors and citizens to demand to know where their resources are going, if they’re being used to purchase Iranian weapons. Demand investigations by a neutral UN agency.
Claire: That seems an extremely important priority, because we simply don’t know what’s happening.
Tekle: Yeah. For example, I mean, we are very few people abroad. There aren’t many Tigrayans.
Claire: Oh! I thought there were millions of you from my timeline.
Tekle: Well, because we’re loud. We have been loud for a reason. But there is only so much we can do. We don’t have the resources, don’t have the institutions to help us. So it’s always important that engaged citizens in the West help us, in terms of finances and resources to organize, and for example, to establish court cases. It should be possible to do that in the West.
Claire: Court cases?
Tekle: For example. To sue the government. It is possible to organize and support Tigrayan organizations, Tigrayan advocacy, and legal organizations to do that.
Meron: One of the things that we feel has happened is that there has been this pragmatic and cold calculation by Western governments: The Tigrayan people are a minority people in Ethiopia, and a very small minority. If this crisis is contained within that region, then they can afford to return to business as usual with Addis Ababa. And as quickly as possible. The desired outcome has been to return to business as usual.
And this is horrific, when you consider that there’s an unspoken agreement to turn a blind eye to a genocide of an ethnic minority, so long as it doesn’t expand and affect the rest of Ethiopia or the region. That is beyond horrific.
I feel if people across the world became aware of this, became aware even at this time—when a lot of people might be jaded, or might just be exhausted by the sheer extent of the horror that’s out there in the world—this would mean something, and people would be moved to act.
And one of the things is that because the Tigrayan diaspora is tiny, we don’t have the levers to engage elected leaders in the countries where we live. So, if only we had people engaging with their elected leaders to say, “We want to see justice, we want to see a fair and just resolution to this crisis, we want this to be investigated, we want to make sure that there’s accountability, we want to make sure that this goes beyond lip service in terms of making sure that civilians are safeguarded, that the Ethiopian government lives up to some of the things that it has promised that it will do—for example, ensuring that Eritrean soldiers withdraw from Tigray.”
Because right now a large part of Tigray is under occupation. Even as we speak the parts of Tigray where my family is from, in central Tigray and North Tigray, are under brutal occupation by Eritrea. There are millions of displaced people.
We can’t even begin to catalog the hell that Tigray has been turned into as a result of this war. We haven’t even begun to process that. This is just the tip of the iceberg. So, engaged citizen advocacy across Europe and in America would mean so much, and would make such a huge difference.
Claire: Now, from your article, I take it that you have very little hope for the Pretoria Peace Agreement—and it sounded as if you have good reasons for feeling that this is not an agreement with a huge prospect of success.
But in terms of engagement, what would you say are the benchmarks? At what point would you say that these measures to bring the government into compliance with it need to be in effect?
Meron: I’m sorry, in terms of when do you mean?
Claire: Well, the response you’re going to get [from Western officialdom] is, “Well, there’s just been a peace agreement, right? Why are you advocating for this, that’s already been solved.”
Now I understand why you don’t think it’s been solved already, but how much time would you say has to elapse before the international community is going to see it as a problem [again]?
Meron: I don’t think time needs to elapse. So for example, there are things that needed to have happened from Day One when this agreement was signed. And that is, for example, unfettered humanitarian access to all of Tigray. That does not require any sort of additional mechanisms to be in place to get food aid and medicine into a region of six million people, five million of whom are said to be in dire food insecurity, which is famine. It’s just that the UN bodies will not declare famine without political approval from the state. But five million people or more are in active famine. So that needed to have happened on Day One after the agreement was signed. It hasn’t happened and we are more than two months after.
Another thing is safeguarding mechanisms for the citizens, for the people of Tigray. For two years of active war, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, Eritrean forces, and regional militia from the neighboring Amhara region have been terrorizing civilians in Tigray. They’ve been committing horrific atrocities and everybody knows about this now. It’s not rumor, it’s not supposition. There is actual reliable information from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and even the UN Office of Human Rights. All of this is known, but there has been no safeguarding whatsoever to protect civilians from these armies.
And another thing is that right now, one aspect of the Pretoria agreement was a concurrent arrangement whereby the Tigrayan forces would hand over heavy armaments. I think that’s what you call them. And at the same time, all forces other than the Ethiopian National Defense forces will leave Tigray. Eritrean forces, Amhara forces, will leave the constitutionally-established territories of Tigray.
The Tigrayan forces have, as of yesterday I think, accomplished their end of that bargain. But to date, Eritrean forces, as I said, are deep within Tigray. Amhara forces are occupying large parts of Tigray, and you hear, daily, stories of people being killed, and women being raped in these areas. I think more than 3,000 people have been killed in Tigray by Eritrean forces since this peace agreement was signed.
So, I don’t know if there is a time lapse necessary for things like this to be enforced. And we are not seeing this. I’m not saying it might not be happening behind the scenes. There’s a possibility that there might be some pressure being applied. But it doesn’t seem to be bearing any fruit.
Claire: Something you pointed out was that the observers of the agreement are entirely from the AU, with no European or American observers. I’m wondering why that is?
Tekle: Yeah. There has been this throughout the war. Whenever you call for international intervention, like UN intervention, or European Union, or US intervention, there has been this push, by different governments, that this crisis requires “African solutions.” “African solutions for African problems.”
And that has been problematic because we know what the African Union’s position was toward this crisis. The African Union has clearly said that they support the war. They support the war on Tigray.
So, for example, the AU commission, I think it was a few weeks after the capture of Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, in November, 2020—the AU commissioner said the government took the necessary steps to maintain the territorial integrity and unity of the country.
Claire: Why would they support this war? Of what benefit is it?
Meron: Because the AU, like the UN, is established by and only recognizes states, it doesn’t recognize people. So for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and is made up of the heads of state, their allegiance is always with the state. Whoever has the levers of the state in Addis Ababa, or whatever capital.
And again, this is also a problem with the UN. They recognize sovereign states first, and the people are just subsumed within that. And it’s much worse in the AU because of the character and the sort of mutual—I don’t know how to say this politely, but sort of mutual support that some of the less democratic leaders have for each other.
Claire: You mean, they would like to have the freedom to do the same thing to their minorities if need be?
Meron: Absolutely. And they cover for each other as and when necessary, and this has happened time and again. This mantra of “African problems, solutions for African problems” has only served to give the rest of the world plausible deniability—in the sense of, “The African Union is taking care of it, so we don’t have to.”
Claire: That’s certainly going to receive a sympathetic reception from a growingly isolationist US and a very busy European Union.
Tekle: Yeah.
Claire: It’s a terrible situation and my heart goes out to you. I’m so sorry that this has happened.
Tekle: Thanks.
Claire: We only have a couple of minutes more. I’m wondering if there are any last things that you’d like to convey to people who are listening?
Tekle: One of the issues that we point out in the article is that part of the campaign against Tigrayans involves the mass arrest of Tigrayans in the rest of the country. That includes people who were members of the army, I think about 17,000 of them, and tens of thousands of civilians from across the country. And a lot of them are still in concentration camps where no humanitarian organizations can access them, not even the Red Cross.
So I think there is a need to push for that. Possibly for getting them released, but also for just gaining access to where they are for humanitarian organizations and human rights organizations.
So, I would like listeners, for example, to push for their governments and people they know to pressure the Ethiopian government to give access.
Claire: How responsive is the [Ethiopian] government to that kind of pressure, usually?
Tekle: It goes back to the same question. It depends on how governments in the West react to this situation. As it stands now, Western governments, for example the French and German governments, are trying to go back to normal in terms of diplomatic relations. Delaying those kinds of relations would probably push the Ethiopian government to reconsider what it’s doing.
Claire: That makes sense.
Meron I just wanted to add my voice, too, about the tens of thousands of forgotten Tigrayans in prison camps and concentration camps across Ethiopia who were not addressed by the peace agreement and seem to have fallen between the cracks. Advocacy on their behalf—and also the people of Tigray, who are still in need of humanitarian aid and access to healthcare.
Claire: Are there any aid groups on the ground that you particularly trust, where you feel confident that the aid money is going exactly where it’s supposed to?
Meron: The really active ones are the UN bodies, those are the bodies that the Ethiopian government has allowed.
Tekle: As you said, it has been very hard for other humanitarian organizations to do anything on the ground. I think the Red Cross is there. They have limited access to the region. There are small international organizations, for example, the International Rescue Committee has limited access to Tigray.
But there are also Tigrayans smuggling money to help people in the region, because banks are still suspended. So there are some Tigrayan organizations that people could, for example, donate to. And that can help people on the ground.
If access opens up, some government organizations are trying to collect resources and help people. And some of them have been helping illegally, helping hospitals and orphanage centers to run services.
Claire: Right. Okay. I’ll include, with the podcast, the link you sent me for people who want to contribute that way.
But it sounds as if the most important thing people can do is to let their representatives know that they want pressure to be put on the federal government to allow access to the entire country, to get Eritrean troops out of there, for a thorough and serious investigation, and for international observers to be able to help enforce the agreement.
Tekle: Yep. Yeah, I agree.
Claire: All right. Thanks very much for joining us. I feel that I understand the situation better for having spoken to you, and I hope our listeners will too.
Tigrayans, allegedly, were that minority.
i.e., “It is particularly difficult to obtain a clear picture of the humanitarian situation on the ground because UN offices in Ethiopia continue to copy and amplify the Ethiopian government’s claims about distribution of humanitarian assistance in Tigray.”
See: Ethiopian airstrike on Dedebit camp in Tigray killed dozens with Turkish-made drone; Ethiopia ups use of drone strikes in conflict, prompting worries about civilian toll; Is Ethiopia flying Iranian-made armed drones?; US: Iran sent Ethiopia military drones in 2021 in violation of UN resolution; Foreign drones tip the balance in Ethiopia’s civil war.
Thanks so much for this fabulous podcast. I am thankful that you were able to share and make others like me aware of this struggle.