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EDITORIAL: Ethiopia, Somalia need attention just like Ukraine

Saturday March 26 2022
United Nations

Members of the United Nations and African Union peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) look on as Sudanese internally displaced people stage a sit in to protest against the end of their mandate, in Kalma camp in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, on December 31, 2020. PHOTO | AFP

By The EastAfrican

On March 19, a cargo plane carrying 30 tonnes of food aid donated by the United Arab Emirates landed in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia’s war-weary region of Tigray. It was the first shipment from a package worth some $83 million that the UAE has committed to the emergency response to the crisis in the Horn of Africa.

The event also marked the early yields of a tenuous ceasefire that has allowed humanitarian agencies to respond to a crisis whose magnitude and exact toll in lives lost may never be known. But it also raised the hope that the conflict in Tigray has not been completely orphaned by the events in Ukraine, which for now, are the more compelling occupation for the major keepers of world peace.

It might not be obvious to many people that the Horn of Africa is in dire straits. Drought and armed conflict have conspired to push millions of people to the edge of certain death. In Tigray, a blockade by the Ethiopian military, which has only recently eased with the opening of humanitarian corridors, has been described as a genocide in the making by some commentators.

Ethiopia and Somalia are grappling with systematic violence, drought, hunger and sexual violence. War in Africa should not be normalised. Until now, Tigray has been under a blockade, and could not receive aid. As the adults struggle to cope, children are getting stunted by undernutrition and mothers are losing their newborns to ill health and hunger. In Somalia, critics of the unrelenting violence and human rights violations are becoming victims of targeted killings from both sides.

Even as the UAE’s intervention responds to real needs and must be applauded, it reveals a depressingly familiar pattern. Save for a couple of military interventions that have reversed the tide in Somalia, Mozambique and the Central African Republic, by and large, Africa lacks coherent internal structures to respond to and resolve conflict and related emergencies.

As Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has said before, it is embarrassing that African leaders are quick to jet into Western capitals for talks about African problems while displaying little appetite for internal dialogue. It is even more disturbing, in the case of the Tigray crisis, that the African Union, which is hosted in Addis Ababa, has been largely impotent as part of Ethiopia burned. That speaks to the need for Africans to become the primary brokers and keepers of their own peace. Somalia, Mozambique and the Central African Republic debunk the idea that Africans are incapable of making meaningful interventions in African crises.

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What is at stake now is Addis’s unilateral ceasefire. It is important that it holds, that it is not exploited by opportunistic actors but used as the honeycomb on which a durable peace can be built. The African Union needs to assert itself and rise to its role by creating early-warning systems and mechanisms for early engagement in disputes.

A further meltdown in Ethiopia is untenable. It has serious ramifications for the peace and security agenda in Eastern Africa. International actors continue to be important partners in African peacebuilding, but that is largely because Africa’s disconnected polities and economies mean that a deep sense of loss is absent when one member state goes down. That is why deeper economic integration is central to building durable peace on the continent.

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