Peace talks to end the devastating Tigray standoff in Ethiopia have begun in South Africa, a South African government spokesman said on Tuesday. This is the most significant effort to date to end two years of fighting that could have killed thousands.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, said talks led by the African Union that began Tuesday were expected to continue until Sunday. Delegations from the Ethiopian government and the Tigray government arrived in South Africa this week.
“These talks are in line with South Africa’s foreign policy objectives of a secure and conflict-free continent,” Magwenya said.
Former Nigerian president and AU envoy Olesegun Obasanjo, former South African Vice President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta are facilitating the talks with the support of the United States, whose envoy Mike Hammer picked up Tigray’s delegation in a U. S. military. Sunday of airplanes.
The clash has dramatically replaced the fortunes of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who went to war with his country’s northern Tigray region less than a year after receiving the prize for making peace with neighboring Eritrea. Eritrea’s government has long regarded the rulers of Tigray, who ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Abiy came to power, as enemies.
The peace talks, led by Ethiopia’s national security adviser Redwan Hussein and Tigray forces spokesman Getachew Reda and Gen. Tsadkan Gebretensae, begin when allied forces from Ethiopia and Eritrea seized some urban spaces in Tigray in recent days.
These come with the cities of Axum, Adwa and now Adigrat, according to a humanitarian source who spoke on condition of anonymity because it was legal to speak publicly.
The Tigray region, home to more than five million people, is again cut off from the world through new fighting that began last August after months of calm in the fighting that allowed fighters to add two of the largest armies in Africa. continent – to regroup.
All combatants have committed abuses, according to United Nations human rights researchers who recently called the Ethiopian government “starving civilians” a weapon of war. According to an unpublished first study shared by its authors with The Associated Press this month, young children in Tigray die in their first month of life at a rate 4 times higher than before the war cut off access to maximum medical care.
Relief convoy movements have “remained stalled” since Aug. 24, the U. N. said this week. “Please, government, please (Tigray authorities), for the sake of your own people, come to a positive conclusion or at least open a channel. “of peace,” U. N. refugee leader Filippo Grandi said Tuesday on a stopover in neighboring Kenya.
The war that erupted in November 2020 has also spread to Ethiopia’s neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, putting thousands of people at risk. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s economy, once one of Africa’s fastest-growing, has taken a hit.
Academics and fitness have estimated that thousands of people have died from fighting and deprivation, and the United States has begun preventing about a million casualties.
“Too many lives have already been lost in this conflict,” the chairman and senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote with several colleagues in an open letter to the Ethiopian prime minister this week, urging “an unimpeded cessation of hostilities and humanitarian aid before Array and for the duration of the negotiations.
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Associated Press editor Cara Anna in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed.
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