Tigray rebel authorities said on Friday they would attend talks next week aimed at ending the war in Ethiopia, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed vowed fighting “will end and peace will prevail”.
The government has also announced that it will take part in talks in South Africa organized by the African Union on Monday, as diplomatic pressure mounts for an end to the nearly two-year bloodshed.
“Our delegation will attend,” Kindeya Gebrehiwot, a spokesman for rebel authorities in Tigray, said in a text message to AFP when asked if they would attend the table on Oct. 24.
It comes behind closed doors on Friday ahead of a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the deepening crisis in Africa’s second-most populous country.
The AU Peace and Security Council also met on Friday and was briefed by its envoy to the Horn of Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo, who is expected to mediate the talks.
International pressure for a ceasefire has mounted since the AU failed to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table earlier this month and fighting intensified in embattled Tigray.
The government vowed this week to remove airports and other federal sites from rebel control as Ethiopian forces and their Eritrean allies captured a number of towns in Tigray and forced civilians to flee.
Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who sent the army to Tigray to oust the region’s opposition authorities in November 2020, said the war “would end and there would be peace”.
“Ethiopia will be peaceful, we will not continue fighting endlessly,” he told an audience on Thursday at the opening of a civil project outside Addis Ababa.
“Ethiopia will be peaceful, we will not continue fighting indefinitely. I hope the day is near when we stand with our Tigrayan brothers to work together for development.”
– ‘Great company’ –
Fighting resumed in August, shattering a ceasefire and halting aid in Tigray, a region of six million people lacking food, medicine and other life-saving supplies.
Fighting has intensified in recent weeks, alarming civilians and aid workers trapped in the war zone and calling for a ceasefire worldwide.
A humanitarian source told AFP on Friday that heavy fighting was raging between the north Tigray towns of Shire and Axum.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the UNSC and AU meetings “demonstrate the international community’s deep concern about the situation” and the need to end the violence.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, he also reiterated his calls for humanitarian aid to Tigray to be resumed and for Eritrean troops to withdraw from Ethiopia.
The meeting behind closed doors of the AU’s 15-member Peace and Security Council was the first since violence erupted again in August.
The continental bloc was “widely perceived as ill-adapted to this situation” but had been trying to ensure talks got underway as planned next week, AU-focused think tank Amani Africa said in a briefing note on Friday.
The talks, which broke down earlier this month, were set to be brokered by Obasanjo and backed by South Africa’s former Vice President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Logistical problems were blamed for the fact that this meeting never took place.
The conflict began nearly two years ago when Abiy accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the region’s ruling party that opposed the central government, of attacking army camps.
The TPLF dominated Ethiopia’s ruling political alliance for decades before Abiy took power in 2018, marginalizing the party.
