At least 600,000 people will have died in the war that began in 2020 between the Ethiopian army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray, estimated this Sunday the African Union mediator for the conflict in that region of Ethiopia.
Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also the former president of Nigeria, said in an interview with the Financial Times that his estimates point to at least 600,000 deaths in the conflict, recalling that, during the signing of the ceasefire agreement in Pretoria, South Africa, In November of last year, the Ethiopian authorities congratulated themselves on ending a conflict that, until then, had killed “a thousand people a day.”
The conflict in Tigray erupted in November 2020 following an attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray (TPLF) on the main army base, located in Mekele.
The attack came after months of political and administrative tensions, including the TPLF’s refusal to accept the postponement of the elections and the holding of regional elections outside of Addis Ababa.
The government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed responded to the attack with a crackdown on the group.
The TPLF, which has been the dominant force in Ethiopia’s ruling coalition since 1991 – the ethnically based Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front – accuses the prime minister of stoking tensions since he came to power in April 2018, when he became in the first oromo (the leader of Ethiopia). largest ethnic group) to take office.
Groups of international experts heard by the Financial Times newspaper considered that Obasanjo’s estimate could be “approximately correct”.
This is the case of the researcher at the University of Ghent (Belgium), Tim Vanden Bempt, who calculates that the number of civilian deaths alone oscillates “between 300,000 and 400,000”, whether due to the atrocities of war, famine or lack of access to medical care.
Ethiopian officials, who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity, however, considered these estimates to be exaggerated, noting that the conflict must have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths.
The head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Daniel Bekele, urged prudence in the estimates, considering that “the total number of deaths will probably never be known” in the conflict.
Source: TSF
