While the ink on the peace deal with Tigray to end one of Ethiopia’s most brutal civilconflicts has hardly had time to dry, another conflict, this time with Amhara, has erupted into open warfare. It seems that the Prime Minister’s determination to centralise the country at the point of a gun has seriously backfired, writes Neil Ford.
Addis Ababa’s determination to centralise power has again come to the fore as a result of government efforts to disarm regional military forces in Amhara. Successive leaders have tried to forge the country’s diverse ethnic groups into a nation state but historic rivalries and disparate identities have made this an almost impossible task. Following on from the Tigray War, there are real fears that current fighting in Amhara will weaken rather than strengthen Africa’s second most populous country.
The Ethiopian Federation is divided into regional states roughly based on ethnicity and linguistics. Each currently has…
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