Former Nigerian president and AU envoy Olusegun Obasanjo has called on combatants in the Ethiopian conflict to silence their guns and to talk.
“Talks cannot deliver in an environment of escalated military hostilities,” he said in a statement released on Sunday through the AU.
The situation in the country has reached a stalemate with neither the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) leadership or the Ethiopian government willing to make the concessions needed for the war to be ended through dialogue.
Foreign companies started evacuating staff two weeks ago while Western missions advised nonessential staff and family members to leave Addis Ababa.
Zambia is so far the only African country to follow suit. SA, however, considers the security threat limited to the north of Ethiopia, “far from Addis where the diplomatic community is based”, a government official said. “Diplomats see the noise around evacuations as grossly exaggerated.”
Obasanjo travelled last week to Mekelle in the north of the country to meet TPLF leaders in his capacity as the representative in the Horn of Africa of the AU chair.
He said he also met the leaders of the Oromia and Amhara regions, and is set to meet the leadership of the Afar region when he returns to Ethiopia.
“I am optimistic that common ground towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict can be secured,” he said. Though everyone wishes for peace and stability, they differ about “the means by which they seek to achieve this essential objective”, said Obasanjo.
“Dialogue remains the only reliable and sustainable avenue to peace. There is no military solution to the conflict.”
Obasanjo’s statement follows a statement by Ethiopian foreign ministry spokesperson Dina Mufti that one of the conditions for talks would be for the TPLF to withdraw from the Amhara and Afar regions. They should also stop their attacks and recognise the legitimacy of the government, he said.
The TPLF, which appears stronger militarily and has reportedly advanced to within 400km of Addis, has resisted withdrawal. It is demanding the end of a humanitarian blockade on Tigray as 364 UN trucks with humanitarian aid have been stuck in Afar for almost a month.
Amnesty International also expressed concern about what it called targeting of Tigrayans by security forces in the capital, Addis Ababa, with “arbitrary arrests and mass detentions as part of an escalating crackdown”. People of Tigrayan ethnicity living there fear arrest, Amnesty said, despite reports that life apparently continues as normal.
Twenty-two UN staff have been arrested as well as 72 drivers contracted by the World Food Programme in Afar.
Obasanjo’s efforts have enjoyed the support of the US, which has been trying to assist peace efforts. US Secretary of state Antony Blinken “expressed his concern that the bellicose rhetoric on all sides of the conflict risks fuelling intercommunal violence”, the US state department said in a statement about Blinken’s phone conversation with Obasanjo last week.
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