Over the past week, as many have been distracted by the U.S. elections, an extraordinarily dangerous unraveling has picked up speed in Ethiopia. Months of simmering tensions between the leadership of the Tigray region and the central government in Addis Ababa boiled over into open military conflict, threatening to tip the country into outright civil war. Ethiopia's crisis jeopardizes not just the security of 110 million people, but the stability of the region and the promise of a more assertive, more capable African influence on global affairs.
For decades, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) was first among equals in Ethiopia's ruling coalition. But when Abiy Ahmed of the Oromo Democratic Party became Ethiopia's prime minister in 2018, it marked a shift in relative power among the coalition's ethnically-based components. Domestically and internationally, Prime Minister Abiy's ascension came to be understood as a corrective measure intended to address popular dissatisfaction about political repression, access to resources and opportunity, and the perception that an ethnic minority (Tigrayans constitute roughly 6% of Ethiopia's population) enjoyed the lion's share of power and influence in the country's federal government. Tigrayans came to feel unfairly targeted by the new government's personnel and policy choices, declined to join the successor party to the old ruling coalition, and then this fall chose to proceed with their own regional elections in defiance of a federal decision postponing planned elections due in part to the COVID-19 crisis.
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