{"id":20133,"date":"2022-11-03T12:40:59","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T12:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/cheers-for-agreement-in-ethiopia-but-there-is-still-a-long-way-to-go-news-urix-foreign-news-and-documentaries\/"},"modified":"2022-11-03T12:41:00","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T12:41:00","slug":"cheers-for-agreement-in-ethiopia-but-there-is-still-a-long-way-to-go-news-urix-foreign-news-and-documentaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/cheers-for-agreement-in-ethiopia-but-there-is-still-a-long-way-to-go-news-urix-foreign-news-and-documentaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheers for agreement in Ethiopia – but there is still a long way to go – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It was a surprising and happy outcome of the peace talks in South Africa. A few days later, the delegations from the Ethiopian government and the Tigray Liberation Front came out of the negotiation room, together with mediator Olusegun Obasanjo. Now prime minister and peace prize winner Abiy Ahmed can talk about peace again, instead of renting a war. The start of a new Ethiopia? Obasanjo, the former president of Nigeria and the African Union’s envoy to the peace talks, was able to announce what he called “the start of a new era for Ethiopia”. He said that the parties had agreed to stop the war and start mutual disarmament. In Tigray, services will return again, and it will be open for emergency aid to a starving people. Around 5 million people in Tigray lack food. Many have died of starvation or diseases they have not been given medicine to treat. It is these people who can be the happiest now. The news is also pleasing for the rest of the country, which has had to spend a lot of the community’s money on waging war, at the same time as the prices of goods have risen. So the question is. What happens now? The agreement provides for basic services and humanitarian aid to enter Tigray. The parties themselves say that they need time to build trust. According to the plan, this will happen by stopping all forms of war and at the same time promoting mutual disarmament. If trust is good enough, perhaps peace talks can turn into peace negotiations, where the goal in the long term is to point out a common direction. This is what may be the new start for the country, as the peacemaker Obasanjo talked about. The agreement is full of good intentions, but the deadline is tight and the obstacles are many. If the agreement is to actually create major change on the ground, fine words must be translated into action. And it must happen quickly. What about all those who were not in South Africa? Some of the biggest obstacles are that peace in Ethiopia is also dependent on completely different groups than those who met for peace talks in South Africa. Amhara and Afar are two other states in Ethiopia, and they are both neighboring states to Tigray. They have long been in conflict with Tigray, and they particularly disagree about who should control some fertile border areas between the states. North of Tigray lies Eritrea, which has long been the main opponent of the Tigray Liberation Front (TPLF). That is why Eritrea has also sent soldiers to the war that has been going on in Tigray for the past two years. Many have had to flee from the fighting in Tigray. Photo: Ben Curtis \/ AP As if that wasn’t enough, we also have the state of Oromia. Groups there have allied themselves with the TPLF. They have had a common enemy in the central government of Ethiopia, and the politics of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Many have pointed out that the peace negotiations in South Africa should include more, and especially Amhara, Afar and Eritrea, if lasting peace is to be achieved. Now time will tell whether the other parties to the war will respect that an agreement has been reached to stop fighting. And if the government’s former partners continue waging war, will Abiy Ahmed do everything he can to stop them? There are many questions to which there are still no answers, but the two parties who met each other in South Africa clearly said yesterday that they are serious about the commitments they have entered into. Are the political disagreements resolved now? Much of the reason why the war broke out in Tigray is about disagreements about how Ethiopia should be organized and governed. Should there be a lot of power at state level, as there has been in recent decades. Or should power be concentrated more centrally in the capital Addis Ababa? TPLF, which had the most power in the entire country until Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took over, has been very negative that the new Prime Minister will centralize power. Abiy wants to unite the country and create a common Ethiopia. But it has not been so popular in a country where different powerful groups have ruled different states. Abiy’s desire for change met with so much resistance in Tigray that it even ended in a bloody conflict. The parties disagree about who started the war, but regardless of who started, the outcome has been bloody and deadly. Abiy Ahmed has big dreams and visions. But not everyone in Ethiopia likes them. Photo: Mulugeta Ayene \/ AP The new peace agreement does not mention this with a single word, and it is unclear whether Abiy Ahmed must now change his political plans and dreams, or whether he will continue to work on implementing the reforms he has promised for. He himself calls the South Africa agreement a victory in the war against TPLF and the army in Tigray. But in that case the victory has come at a high cost, in the form of an even more divided country, an economy that is pointing downwards and several hundred thousand dead compatriots. Governance and decentralized power structure are, regardless, topics that will continue to create conflict in Ethiopia, a country with a common and proud history, but also a country with different peoples and opinions. The war in Tigray has created many bad memories, created hatred and led to death. Not all wounds will be able to heal again, but with yesterday’s agreement, one may be able to avoid new wounds being created.
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It was a surprising and happy outcome of the peace talks in South Africa. A few days later, the delegations from the Ethiopian government and the Tigray Liberation Front came out of the negotiation room, together with mediator Olusegun Obasanjo. Now prime minister and peace prize winner Abiy Ahmed can talk about peace again, instead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10,1485,204,3791,203,395,16,202],"class_list":["post-20133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-agreement","tag-cheers","tag-documentaries","tag-ethiopia","tag-foreign","tag-long","tag-news","tag-urix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}