Two weeks ago, the three major wars in the world were in Ukraine, Ethiopia and Yemen. Truces today silenced the guns and stopped the air strikes in two of these three countries. So far these are only temporary truces, but it can reasonably be hoped that they will become something more definitive.
The Ethiopian government’s declaration of a “humanitarian truce” on March 24 came as a surprise. Six months ago the rebels had advanced from their home province of Tigray, covering nearly half the distance from the country’s capital, Addis Ababa, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed looked on the verge of defeat.
The Tigrayans formed an alliance with another separatist movement, the Oromo Liberation Front, with which they were willing to form a physical alliance. The survival of Africa’s second largest country seemed to hang in the balance, and border wars, if Ethiopia split into a series of ethnic-based states, could have gone on for decades.
Starve the population
But the Tigrayans ran out of supplies, Abiy Ahmed stocked up on Turkish-made drones, and by the end of the year the front line was back north, bordering the Tigris. Here the Ethiopian army stopped, aware that taking the rebel province by force would result in many casualties on both sides, with no guarantees of success.
Tigray is a closed and surrounded territory, and Ethiopia’s blockade on all food supplies from the outside was the obvious solution. At the end of last month, at least two of Tigray’s seven million inhabitants were suffering from extreme food shortages, and virtually the entire population was constantly starving.
If the goal was to persuade Tigray to remain part of Ethiopia, however, the blockade had to end before large numbers of people starved to death. Abiy Ahmed has understood this, but it is still unlikely that he will declare a truce without some assurance from the Tigrinya leaders that they will respect it, and that real negotiations will follow.
The war in Tigray has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and has generated millions of displaced people, but there is now a real possibility that this 16-month conflict will end in a negotiated peace that will keep Tigray, at least formally, within the Ethiopian state. . It is an important element, because an effective secession of the Tigray would probably have generated other separatist movements in cascade.
The war in Yemen has been going on for longer (seven years now) and has been much more bloody (four hundred thousand deaths, which continue to increase). The international media usually portray it as a war between the “legitimate” Yemeni government and the Houthi “rebels”, with a series of Arab monarchies and dictatorships supporting the government and Iran supporting the rebels. None of this is true.
The Houthis are the militia of the tribes of northern Yemen, who rebelled when the Saudi-controlled regime tried to exclude them from their share of the country’s limited oil revenues (oil is all in the south of the country). Iran sympathizes with the Huthi tribes because they are, like Iran, Shia Muslims, but Tehran does not support them militarily, nor would it be able to.
The “legitimate” government is made up of a former Yemeni field marshal and politician named Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who was promoted eleven years ago to interim president (without elections) for a two-year transitional period. Hadi got his job by making a deal with the Saudis, who have always wanted a manipulable official in power in the turbulent country beyond their southern border.
Grim considerations
Hadi was simply trying to strengthen his position when he took away their share of the oil revenues from the Houthis, because he comes from the south himself. When the Houthis revolted and took control of a large swath of the country, he fled to Saudi Arabia, where he has spent most of his time ever since.
Since then, the Saudis and their friends in the Persian Gulf (backed by the West) have bombed Yemen, but their armies are mostly made up of poorly motivated mercenaries, who are therefore ineffective on the ground. The war has been at a standstill for years, and an almost complete blockade has driven almost the entire country to famine. Most of the 400,000 deaths were caused by hunger.
The two-month truce is therefore a blessing, even if for now it only allows the arrival of fuel, and not food, in the ports. For neither side is any principle at stake, but only squalid considerations of money and power. In theory, therefore, it should be possible to reach a lasting peace agreement, in which all share some of the (rather limited) wealth.
In Yemen, things are never that simple, but Western support for Saudi Arabia has dwindled since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became an unpresentable figure (the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and so on), and so everyone could be ready for an agreement by now. Otherwise, why a truce?
If it works, there will remain a great and dangerous war in Ukraine, but two of the three worst wars in the world will be over. Compared to a long and bloody past, that’s not a bad result.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)