The spectre of war, the agony of peace

 The contrast could not be starker. Samantha Power, the administrator of America`s aid agency, was given a red carpet reception when she arrived in Khartoum two weeks ago, for a four-day visit.

Mr Abdella Hamduk, the transitional prime minister, welcomed her to the “new Sudan”. The mantra in Sudan is “freedom, peace and justice”, lofty ideals American policymakers say they are determined to support after 30 years of estrangement with Sudanese authorities under Omar al-Bashir.

 A senior official in President Joe Biden`s Administration, Ms Power was warmly received by Sudanese Foreign Minister Mariam Al-Sadig and Chairman of the Sovereign Council, Lt. General al-Burhan.

In her own words, Sudan was one of the “more moving trips” she has taken in her career spanning over 30 years, first as a journalist covering the war in the Balkans. Ms Power was in Darfur 17 years ago, reporting on the conflict between rebels in the area and the Sudanese government, the latter accused of committing genocide on hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs.

 Her subsequent visit to Addis Ababa was not as welcoming, signalling the growing tension between the United States and Ethiopia over the civil war in the Tigray Regional State, and beyond.

A report released in July this year by the Department of State included Ethiopia in the list of six countries where genocide and atrocities occurred. For the first time this year, it is a report that provided direct detailed accounts of atrocities taking place in specific countries, including Burma, Ethiopia, China and Syria, according to Anthony Blinken, secretary of state.

 “These places represent some of the toughest foreign policy challenges on our agenda,” said Blinken.

 Food aid

 The signs of these challenges were reflected in a cold shoulder Ms Power received in Addis Ababa, who could not see the head of the state, President Sahlework Zewdie, or the government, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Not even Demeke Mekonnen, deputy prime minister and foreign minister, found the time to see her.

 The message was unambiguously clear. Addis Ababa was displeased with her statement while in Khartoum a day before she visited Ethiopia. Ms Power`s desire to see an opening of a humanitarian corridor to Tigray from Sudan touched a boiling political nerve centre.

 Despite advance messages, Ms Power would not see senior government officials; nonetheless, she had travelled to Addis Ababa and visited a warehouse where 58,000 tons of food aid provided by her agency was stored.

It is a fraction of humanitarian assistance needed to feed 5.2 million people displaced and hungry in Tigray, due to the war. It covers only 10 per cent of the need, hence Ms Power`s visit to Ethiopia, her first since appointed to administer the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

 Ms Power`s first visit to Ethiopia was in 2016, right after the Obama administration appointed her as an ambassador to the United Nations, but on a global campaign to secure the release of women political prisoners.

She could not have returned in a more ominous time for Ethiopia.

 The war had no sign of respite after its start in November last year. While in Sudan, she visited Hamdayet refugee camps where 54,000 Ethiopians fled for their lives, mainly from western Tigray. In comparison, they are better provided than their compatriots left inside, where full humanitarian assistance to all citizens in need has remained an issue.

 The warring parties continue with their recrimination as the cause of obstruction. Ms Power travelled to Ethiopia to find out for herself where the blame lies. But she was snubbed by Prime Minister Abiy, in a manner described by Rashid Abdi, a political analyst of the region, as a “great lapse of judgment.”

 Public health

 She met, however, with Lia Tadesse, Ethiopia`s health minister, attending the handing over of 1.2 million vaccine doses for Covid-19, the second delivery in a year. It is generous support from a country whose public health assistance covers almost half of Ethiopia's population.

The United States spends close to one billion dollars a year supporting humanitarian aid and public health and education programs. Since the war began, it has provided 350 million dollars worth of humanitarian aid, the largest among all donors.

 The highest-ranking government official Ms Power granted an audience with was Mufariat Kamil, the minister of Peace. She had to leave Addis Ababa unceremoniously a little past midnight on August 5, however. The Minister may have been generous in her statement that she found Ms Power`s visit an opportunity to clarify Addis Ababa`s position over the war in Tigray.

 Mufariat`s government maintains that the TPLF is the culprit in the genesis of the war; its leaders have continued to provoke the federal government and neighbouring regional states despite withdrawing its forces from Tigray after “a unilateral ceasefire” declared in July.

 But the region remains cut off from electricity, telephone, and Internet services. Banks are closed, and trade is discontinued. There has been no air and road transport linking Tigray to the rest of the country or the outside world.

 TPLF leaders, the ruling party in the region for 30 years, decry this as a deliberate blockade designed to starve the entire population off to submission. They declared their resolve to break through the blockade, taking their military engagements to the neighbouring regional states of Amhara and Afar.

 The international community and humanitarian agencies, too, protest the closed access to emergency aid provisions where thousands of trucks loaded with food ought to have made their way to the region daily. According to the UN Famine Early Warning System, Tigray is a region where the threat of famine was “minimal” in October last year, a sharp contrast to the “emergency” situation this season, a level-four status.

 There was a sigh of relief when 175 trucks with food and medicines made their way to Tigray through Afar, two weeks ago. But this was not enough where a minimum of 100 trucks was needed to enter the region daily, to rescue close to half a million people from starvation.

 With Addis Ababa and Meqelle accusing each other of obstruction of aid deliveries, Ms Power pleaded for all parties in the conflict to end active hostilities. She also demanded the armed forces in Tigray to pull out from the neighbouring regions, the same request she made of the Amhara regional forces to leave western Tigray and the complete withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Ethiopia`s territories.

 Humanitarian assistance

 “All parties should accelerate unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance to those affected by the conflict,” said Ms Power, speaking in Khartoum a day before her journey to Addis Ababa. “And the commercial blockade of Tigray must end.”

 However, nothing seemed to have infuriated authorities in Addis Ababa than her insistence on opening the western corridor bordering Sudan, dubbed by the west as a “humanitarian corridor”. By this, Ms Power landed on a political land mine Addis Ababa views as a matter of “do or die” in the war in Tigray.

 Western Tigray has been controversial since its inclusion in the Tigray Regional State when Ethiopia`s constitution incorporated nine regional states as the newly federated entities, in the mid-1990s. It is the only passage for Tigray to the outside world, an indispensable supply route for the Tigray Peoples` Liberation Front (TPLF) during the 17-year war against the military-Marxist regime of Col. Mengistu Hailemariam.

The inclusion of this area, incorporating the fertile plains of Dansha and Humera, rich with commercial sesame farms, into proper Tigray has been disputed by the Amhara Regional State. It is for them an ancestral land taken away without the consent of the local population, who speak both languages.

 Addis Ababa takes Ms Power`s demands for a humanitarian corridor through this area as an affront to Ethiopia`s sovereignty. It believes the call is a ploy designed to give armed forces in Tigray access to supplies both of material and weaponry. It would lift the siege off Tigray, freeing them from the current encirclement by allied forces hostile to the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), as the preferred to be called. Ethiopia`s authorities see it as an act of infringement of sovereignty, thus unacceptable.

 “We don`t entertain a drama against Ethiopia`s sovereignty and national interest,” said Prime Minister Abiy, a day after Ms Power returned to Washington DC. “Not now, and, not ever.”

Ms Power`s brief visit to Addis Ababa was preceded by a massive social media campaign against her and the country she represents. Pro-Addis Ababa voices lamented her role in the Libyan debacle, hence fearing she intends to repeat the same in Ethiopia. They put the nationalist pitch so high that they declared, “Ethiopia is not Libya or Syria.” Hundreds of thousands rallied in the capital Addis Ababa on August 8, decrying alleged foreign interference in the domestic affairs of Ethiopia.“Hands off Ethiopia, Power!” reads one of the slogans.

 Ms Power seems to understand the forcefulness of the rhetoric.

 “To see the hateful rhetoric and hate speech and the dehumanization of the people who are other, it is crushing,” she said during an interview with NPR right after her return from Ethiopia, referring to the vitriol in Ethiopia`s extremely polarized political environment.

 Making her message public ahead of her visit, Addis Ababa did see little relevance to grant her an audience. The Prime Minister and his foreign policy advisors believed there was nothing else Ms Power could convey to him, hence no use to encourage what they see as America`s callous behaviour. For a political culture that does not appreciate public admonishing from “friends”, Ms Power was not the first American official to burn bridges to Addis Ababa before crossing.

 Back in May, President Biden`s envoy to the Horn of Africa, Jeffery Feltman, infuriated Ethiopia`s leaders ahead of his visit to Addis Ababa. Feltman feared the mishandling of tensions in Ethiopia would have a prospect that makes “Syria look like child`s play by comparison.” Although not denied a meeting with Prime Minister Abiy, his visits to Ethiopia and Eritrea could hardly be described as a success, suffice the escalation of conflicts. Feltman`s brassbound statement, after all, was not unfounded.

 The Specter of War

 A couple of days before Ms Power`s visit, Prime Minister Abiy met with Martin Griffiths, head of OCHA, a UN agency known for hard-hitting reports on the human suffering in Tigray due to the war. Tigray was the first journey Mr Griffiths has made after taking over OCHA from Mark Lowcock; the latter repeatedly testified before the UN Security Council on the severity of the humanitarian toll and blockade to reach out to the most vulnerable.

 Mr Griffiths has found nothing different. Standing in a house in Hawzien, a small town northwest of Tigray, but shattered by artillery bombing, he declared, “Tigray`s tragedy needs to end now.”

 It is a call echoed Ms Power`s.

 “The US is watching, with great alarm, as a conflict that began in Tigray is now beginning to spread,” Ms Power tweeted while in Addis Ababa.

What was declared a “law enforcement operation” to capture TPLF leaders, disarm the regional forces, and install a provisional administration until elections were held has transformed into a full-blown civil war in less than a year.

After 30 years since the end of the last civil war in 1991, the spectre of war is haunting Ethiopia again. All sides have continued their full mobilization of the population under their control, with calls that include all able-bodied citizens to march to the battlefronts.

 The massive militarisation of the conflict is unabated.

Armed forces in Tigray have advanced hundreds of kilometres deep into the Amhara and Afar regional states. They threaten to broaden their attacks should the government in Addis Ababa fail to concede to their demands of lifting the siege, withdraw Amhara and Eritrean forces from Tigray, release federal funds, let detained politicians out of jails, and cease the harassment and arrests of native Tigrayans residing in the rest of the country.

 TPLF leaders have called for the formation of a transitional government through an “all-inclusive” dialogue, brushing aside the landslide electoral victory the incumbent Prosperity Party (PP) has gained in the recent national elections.

 Neither are those in the federal government agreeing with the regional elections held in September 2020 in Tigray, where the TPLF won a landslide victory. Addis Ababa sees the process as illegitimate and the outcome “null and void”.

 This mutual denial of recognition to one another was at the crux of the political crises that led to a militarized conflict. Prime Minister Abiy`s attempt to dethrone the TPLF from regional power had seemed to have gone his way before the TDF claimed they had routed the national army from a large part of Tigray and farther afield.

 The federal government believes it was in a unilateral ceasefire, hoping to give time for reflection for the TPLF and its allies to lay arms down. Addis Ababa says it wants to see farmers in the region not miss the rainy season for ploughing their lands. However, it showed no desire to respond to the demands from a political force parliament designated a “terrorist group.” The denigrating name officials and the media use about the TPLF and its allies is “junta”.

 The federal and regional leaders’ lexicon is the TPLF, and its allied forces are “cancers” to be removed and “weeds” uprooted.

 Forces allied under the Amhara Regional State continue to occupy western Tigray as a reclamation of “an ancestral land that was taken forcefully 30 years ago.” They are determined to fight to the end. Their leaders leave no room for a negotiated settlement with a political force they say should be “eliminated”.

 For all the parties in the intensely militarized conflict, the war is an existential affair. Each is not an adversary to negotiate with but an existential threat to be dealt with, in brute force. They fight for survival as social communities and the preservation of the historical Ethiopian state. Each has a strong conviction of winning the war, thus with hardly any interest to give peace a chance.

 The agony of peace

 The lukewarm efforts to mediate peace by well-intentioned outsiders have been frustrated by warring groups that see the settlement as a zero-sum engagement. Peace in Ethiopia has always been an imposition in the victor`s terms. It never was a negotiated product.

 Early on in the war in November, Prime Minister Abiy declined the mediation offer by AU`s chairperson at the time. South Africa`s Cyril Ramaphosa had sent three Africa former heads of state to Addis Ababa for no results. There have been no direct or indirect talks between leaders of the warring parties to date.

 The United States and the European Union have focused their energy not on mediating the parties but calling for a ceasefire, humanitarian access, investigation on atrocities and accountability of the perpetrators. The call for political settlement presupposes progress on these fronts.

 Like many, a mediator with leverage and credibility is one more casualty of this war. No party has the currency of impartiality in the eyes of all sides. Regional and international bodies, including the AU and IGAD, are tainted as partisans in the conflict.

 Domestic conflicts

 Ms Power feels the intensity of this. She tried to reassure Ethiopians of her country`s desire to see political solutions reached for domestic conflicts.

 “We seek to engage with you, and your government, on the basis of set values, not to play favourites or to pick sides,” she told a press conference held in Addis Ababa.

 The latest effort comes from IGAD`s Chairman, Prime Minister Hamdok, who offered the IGAD office for mediation. He has been on calls with regional leaders, including Kenya`s Uhuru Kenyatta. Prime Minister Abiy reportedly responded in a positive nod over possible mediation, speaking with Prime Minister Hamdok over the phone, according to people knowledgeable of the initiative.  

 However, Ethiopia sees this overture in suspicion due to another layer of conflict with Sudan over border disputes.

 They say war is opposed by imagination. It seems there is none around to imagine the unthinkable in stopping a raging war beyond the declaration of faith. Ms Power, for all her records in journalism, academia, diplomacy and policymaking, is not different in stating her faith to stop what she once described as “catastrophe.”

 “The conflict has brought harrowing attacks against civilians. It is impacting millions,” Ms Power tweeted in early August. “It has to end.”

 With the federal government lifting the ceasefire this week, and making calls for massive war enlistment of the entire population, Ethiopia awaits the prospect of further bloodshed on a large scale. Its government has called for total war.

 The agony of peace continued with Mr Feltman and his team planning to visit Addis Ababa next week to persuade the parties in the war to pause.

 Neither Addis Ababa and Bahir Dar nor Meqelle are listening. They have chosen to go eyeball to eyeball without either side intending to blink first. It is this shared belligerence that has brought the country to the brink it finds itself now.