Once the great hope of Africa, Ethiopia is descending into chaos before our eyes

One of the great tragedies of the 21st century could be unfolding before our eyes. A country that just a few years ago was the great hope of Africa and one of the largest recipients of UK aid is descending into chaos.

An army of battle-hardened rebels are pressing towards the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, to oust the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel peace prize winner and until recently a darling of the West. 

It looks like a fight to the death. A final rebel offensive could be weeks, if not days away. Conversely, the rebels – whose supply lines are stretched – could be crushed. Either outcome would spell disaster for the ethnically-fractured nation, which until recently, was one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. 

The country of 115 million risks tumbling into a Yugoslavia-style breakup, unleashing a humanitarian catastrophe that would be felt across eastern Africa, the Middle East and Europe.  

Ethiopia hit rock bottom in the 1980s when the Derg, a Marxist dictatorship, helped plunge the nation into a devastating famine. Michael Buerk's landmark reporting for the BBC grabbed the world's attention, prompting the launch of LiveAid.

In the 1990s, the Tigrayan's People's Liberation Front (TPLF) led a coalition of rebel groups to oust the Marxist dictatorship.

The Tigrayans are just one of more than 80 ethnic groups in Ethiopia but despite its small size, the group has played a huge role in Ethiopia’s modern history and dominated the country’s politics for almost 30 years up to 2018. 

For much of that time, Ethiopia grew at an extraordinary pace, averaging 9.4 per cent growth a year for the last decade. Its vast workforce, tourism income from its medieval religious sites, as well as flower and coffee exports all helped the nation progress. However, it is still one of the poorest on earth, with a per capita income of $850, according to the World Bank.

The country has benefited hugely from Western support, especially from the UK and the US, which favoured the TPLF-dominated authoritarian government over the previous Derg regime. From 2010 to 2015, the UK spent more than £1.3bn on aid to Ethiopia. 

But major abuses of power, such as a "one-to-five" policy that saw volunteers spy on five other people in their community, led to widespread dissent. A wave of protests swept the current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to power in 2018. 

Mr Abiy, a young, smooth-talking, former spy chief, promised to liberalise society and the economy, releasing thousands of political prisoners and lifting media restrictions. The West fell head over heels in love with the fresh-faced PM and in 2019 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a long-running conflict with Eritrea which had cost the lives of about 100,000 people. 

Investors from the US to China began eyeing Ethiopia as the world's next great manufacturing hub, while commentators talked earnestly about the country dragging the troubled region up by its bootstraps.  

But in November 2020 everything began to fall apart. A power struggle between Mr Abiy's federal government and old TPLF elites boiled over into all-out war. Mr Abiy teamed up with Eritrea's dictator Isaias Afwerki to crush the heavily armed TPLF forces in a devastating pincer movement.

For the last 12 months, Tigray has been locked in bitter fighting, hidden in the shadows behind communications blackouts. Thousands if not 10s of thousands are thought to have been killed, and millions pushed to the brink of famine. Many observers now see Mr Abiy as an unhinged megalomaniac driven by religious fervour. "We will bury this enemy with our blood and bones" for the glory of Ethiopia, Mr Abiy said recently. 

But the Tigrayan rebels weathered the storm, waging a guerrilla war that seems to have beaten back two of the largest armies in Africa. The powerful Ethiopian army and its allied ethnic militia from the neighbouring Amhara state have taken heavy casualties from the bloody year-long civil war. While reporting restrictions make battlefield positions difficult to verify, federal defences seem to be falling apart. 

The main rebel force is now thought to be at most 200 miles north of the capital – roughly the distance from London to Manchester – on a crucial highway connecting the landlocked nation to Djibouti, a small country that handles about 90 per cent of its neighbour's trade. As the rebels have advanced south, they have formed alliances with eight other opposition groups to dethrone Mr Abiy.

The US, the UK, the United Nations and the African Union are all desperately trying to find a diplomatic solution to stop the rebels’ advance on the capital. But after months of starvation, heinous abuses and crazed rhetoric, it seems unlikely that diplomacy will yield anything. 

The Tigrayan rebels are backed into a corner. To the north, they are hemmed in by legions of Eritrean conscripts. To the south, they face the federal army and militias that have been blocking much-needed aid. One rebel official told The Telegraph earlier this month that if the aid blockade on Tigray was not lifted, Tigrayan forces would either have to press forward to break it and oust Mr Abiy or face slowly being bled and starved to death. 

Anticipating an offensive on Addis Ababa, the US has told its citizens to leave the country as soon as possible and has started to evacuate embassy staff. The British government has followed suit, telling all UK citizens to go while commercial flights were still available and getting some non-essential staff in Ethiopia back to the UK. 

Six months ago, Jeffrey Feltman, the US special envoy for the Horn of Africa, warned if the civil war spread from the country's north, Ethiopia would make "Syria .. look like child's play." Unless urgent action is taken to bring all sides to the negotiating table, these words may soon ring true. It may already be too late. 

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