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Published 22nd September 2022

Vol 63 No 19

Ethiopia

Addis and Tigray return to the battlefields

Copyright © Africa Confidential 2022
Copyright © Africa Confidential 2022

Tigrayan and federal forces are blaming each other for scuppering the truce and they are right – both sides were planning for more fighting

Ahead of the resumption of fighting in early September, both Tigrayan and federal forces had repositioned their troops as tensions rose amid the faltering peace process. This followed a coordinated flurry of peace missions to Ethiopia, a month earlier, by senior officials from the United States, the European Union and the African Union.

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Advancing towards stalemate

Pic: henk bogaard / stock.adobe.com
Pic: henk bogaard / stock.adobe.com

Federal government forces are yet to make a military breakthrough despite sustained attacks on Tigray on multiple fronts

It is now clear that both the federal and Tigrayan forces used the nearly nine-month truce to quietly prepare for war. Despite maintaining a façade of commitment to peace, t...

Junta's double-talk on transition

Pic: Marcin / stock.adobe.com
Pic: Marcin / stock.adobe.com

Few believed Burhan's promise to hand over to civilians ahead of elections. And many fear that his deputy Hemeti is building a formidable power base

Two-and-a-half months on from General Abdel Fattah el Burhan's announcement that he and his fellow military officers were withdrawing from the political dialogue and would leave ci...

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THE INSIDE VIEW

African Union chairman and Senegal's President Macky Sall launched the most powerful critique at the UN General Assembly on 20 September on his continent's marginalisation in the international system. Africa 'does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War,' said Sall, alluding to the pressure from the west and Russia to pick a side as the war in Ukraine rages on.

Sall also sounded alarms about the way in which it has dominated the international agenda to the exclusion of al...

African Union chairman and Senegal's President Macky Sall launched the most powerful critique at the UN General Assembly on 20 September on his continent's marginalisation in the international system. Africa 'does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War,' said Sall, alluding to the pressure from the west and Russia to pick a side as the war in Ukraine rages on.

Sall also sounded alarms about the way in which it has dominated the international agenda to the exclusion of almost all other topics, many of them of critical concern to Africa such as climate-induced agricultural failures, migration and security crises, as well as conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Congo-Kinshasa and the Sahel. For all of those, the Ukraine war has diverted attention and resources from peacekeeping and disaster relief efforts.

It was time, said Sall, to re-energise multilateralism and reform international institutions, 'to deconstruct the narratives that persist in confining Africa to the margins of decision-making circles'. A key test of that will be the extent to which African states win agreement for their proposals at the UN COP27 climate summit in Sharm el Sheikh in November. With research showing that most developing economies are off-track in achieving all but two of the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, climate change and conflict were identified as two of the greatest threats.

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