Abiy Ahmed Ali

Indonesia was in fact a co-founder of the non-aligned movement, and Indonesia is balancing its relations with China, Russia, India, and the United States.

Moreover, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, also attended the BRICS summit in India, and Ethiopia has now become a full member of BRICS.

This is important because South Africa, one of the co-founders of BRICS, is of course a major economic player on the African continent, but Ethiopia is also a major up-and-coming African power, and Ethiopia has the second largest population in Africa.

And Nigeria, which has the largest population on the African continent, is also now a member of BRICS.

The Tigray had dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades, and their rule had become extremely unpopular, which led to massive protests in 2015 and the resignation of the Prime Minister at the time.

This paved the way for Abiy Ahmed, the nation's current Prime Minister, to rise to power, and once he took charge, he launched a concerted effort to reduce the TPLF's influence.

We're obviously glossing over a lot of the history here, and if you'd like to learn more, we have several episodes in the archives here on Warfront, so do check those out if you like.

After this episode, of course.

But the most consequential development of all was the recent announcement by a rebel commander named Zemena Kasi, not the leader of the TPLF, but the leader of the strongest of the militias collectively known as the Fano.

The Fano and Zamhara are ethno-nationalists organized into fighting forces that are currently engaged in their own battles against the government.

During a rare sit-down interview with Swiss outlet Le Temps, Cassis announced that months of negotiations with seven other armed groups had concluded and they had formed an alliance called Tsimdo, with one goal, to remove Abiy Ahmed from power.

What makes this alliance particularly noteworthy isn't the ambition, although it's important to note that the alliance members all believe that they're able to succeed.

He's very young, no.

And of course, it's important to remember that Abiy Ahmed was the source of enormous hope only seven or eight years ago.

This is the leader who made peace with Eritrea, with the dictatorial leader of Eritrea, Isaias of Werki, and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts there.

In, I think, 2019.

really strengthened his relationship with the United Arab Emirates, which has become probably his most important foreign backer.

The UAE now plays a huge role in Ethiopian foreign policy and support to the country and so on, investment opportunities.

And so Abiy Ahmed is really a great survivor and has proven to be, I would say, quite a material leader.

He's really... he's really made a virtue out of being quite unpredictable.

a very big war.

In November 2020, the Ethiopian federal government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the same man who won the Nobel Peace Prize the year before, launched a military offensive against the Tigray People's Liberation Front.

What followed was one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century, largely invisible to Western news cycles.

Muchas personas mueren en Tigray.

El gobierno etíope no quiere Tigray independiente.

Not independent, no, and that tension goes back decades, actually further than that.

The TPLF, the Tigrayan political movement, dominated Ethiopian federal politics for nearly 30 years before Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, and systematically dismantled their influence.

The war was, at least partly, about that reversal.

France 24 cannot independently verify those claims nor any casualty numbers.

But on the Ethiopian government side, certain members, such as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's advisor, Getachew Reda, have condemned and blamed the TPLF and called on them to rethink their actions for the future of Tigray.

Since these clashes, we've seen reports of hundreds fleeing across the border into Sudan to shelter from any further escalation of conflict.

It comes after a week-long mass media campaign by the state-run Ethiopian media condemning the TPLF and inflammatory comments from the TPLF in the same week against Addis Ababa, which caused concern that such an outbreak could take place.

These tensions have been brewing for months between these two parties, particularly after the TPLF forcibly removed the interim president of the region who was appointed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and replaced him with a more hardliner leader as well when the entire region was excluded from the general elections.

And subsequently, I spoke to eyewitnesses there who witnessed forced recruitment and forced conscription by the TPLF among young Tigrayan men, causing a mass exodus of the region.

The Ethiopian government accuses the TPLF of creating an anti-Ethiopia alliance named SIMDO, which is a Tigrinya word for alliance or engagement.