Troops from a “neighboring country” destroyed factories and universities during the conflict in Ethiopia in northern Tigray, an official of the region’s interim government said on Thursday in an apparent reference to Eritrea.
Tigray has been the scene of fighting since early November 2020, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced military operations against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and accused them of attacking federal army camps.
He declared victory after pro-government forces seized the local capital Mekele in late November and appointed an interim government to take over from the TPLF leadership. Fighting continued, however.
The presence of soldiers from neighboring Eritrea has been widely documented, but has repeatedly been denied by Addis Ababa and Asmara.
Alula Habteab, who heads the interim administration’s Department of Construction, Roads and Transport, has openly criticized Eritrean soldiers, as well as the surrounding Amhara region, for their actions during the conflict.
“There were armies from a neighboring country and a neighboring region that wanted to exploit the war’s goal of law enforcement,” he told state media.
“These forces did more damage than the war itself.”
He said troops from across the border had destroyed large factories in Tigray, such as the pharmaceutical factories of Almeda Textiles and Adigrat, and two large universities in Adigrat and Axum.
“Universities and factories that Tigray has been producing for the past 30 years have all been destroyed.”
In a rare reprimand from the interim government’s national army, he also accused the Ethiopian National Army of seizing ‘numerous properties’ belonging to the Tigray state government.
Tigray is one of ten semi-autonomous states separated mainly by ethnic lines in Ethiopia.
His former leadership, the TPLF, dominated the federal government for decades before Abiy came to power in 2018 and was accused of ousting them.
Under TPLF domination, Ethiopia waged a brutal border war with Eritrea in 1998-2000, followed by a long diplomatic stalemate.
Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 in large part because he began a rapprochement with Eritrea, whose president Isaias Afwerki and the TPLF remain bitter enemies.
There is also a history of enmity between Tigray and the neighboring Amhara region, over rural and political disputes, and militants from Amhara are widely documented to have fought alongside federal troops in Tigray.
str-fb / ri