For the first time, the United Nations Security Council has called for an end to hostilities in Ethiopia, encouraging the warring parties to seek a “durable ceasefire.”
Thousands of people have been killed and more than 2.5 million people have been displaced as a result of the year-long fighting between federal government troops and Tigrayan forces. According to the UN, up to 7 million people in Tigray, Amhara, and Afar need assistance, including 5 million in Tigray, where an estimated 400,000 people are living in famine-like conditions.
A Security Council meeting that had been scheduled for Friday has been delayed for early next week, just days before it was to take place.
Instead, the 15 members of the UN’s most powerful council “expressed great concern regarding the spread and intensity of military clashes in northern Ethiopia” in an unified press statement.
The Security Council further encouraged all parties to avoid “inflammatory hate speech and incitement to violence and divisiveness,” and to “stop hostilities and seek a permanent ceasefire.” Members of the council also demanded that humanitarian supplies be delivered without hindrance and that public services be restored, among other things.
Diplomats claimed the members had been negotiating a statement for several days and had finally reached an agreement with Russia on the text.
“There had been disagreement, we hear, over a draft statement calling for a pause of hostilities that had been drafted principally by Ireland and Kenya,” Al Jazeera’s Mika Hanna reported from the UN headquarters.
“We realize that Russia, in particular, objected to some of the language in this specific statement,” the president of the Security Council said, “but the president of the Security Council did emerge and read the statement,” the council’s second in a year. Mexico’s UN Ambassador Juan Ramón de la FuenteRamrez, the council’s November president, was “at pains to emphasize his position that the Security Council was not divided on this subject,” according to Hanna.
Months of political tensions between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and the leaders of Ethiopia’s former ruling party, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), erupted into war in November 2020.
The Tigrayan forces, who have formed an alliance with the Oromo Liberation Army, claim to have taken control of key cities along a major highway leading to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and have threatened to march on it. The Tigrayan troops have been accused by the Ethiopian government of inflating their territorial gains.
Much of northern Ethiopia is cut off from the outside world, and journalists have limited access, making combat statements difficult to verify independently.
The federal armed forces on Friday urged to retired soldiers and veterans to rejoin the military, setting a November 24 deadline for registration, amid mounting international worry about the risk of an all-out war in Africa’s second most populous country.
The government also proclaimed a six-month state of emergency last week, and municipal authorities in the capital encouraged residents to register their guns and prepare to protect their neighborhoods.
The US embassy in Addis Ababa issued a statement on Friday advising all US nationals to leave the country “as soon as possible,” describing the security situation as “extremely unpredictable.”
