Africa-Press-Ethiopia The immediate and unmistakable consequence of the collapse of Libya in 2011 following the military intervention of the Western military alliance, NATO was chaos in the country. With the destabilization of Libya, arms and weapons from its unsecured armoury flowed across to the Sahel region and Nigeria, triggering brutal insurgencies, banditries and assorted criminalities that still bedevil the sub-region up to this day.
Following the flow of weapons, the then, low-level insurgency in North-Eastern Nigeria spiked and assumed a more serious intensity.
In the present time, the proliferation of light weapons has spawned an audacious criminal militancy in Nigeria, including insurgencies, banditry and kidnapping. In the Sahel including Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, the fallouts from the destabilization of Libya have created hotbeds from where extremist Islamic militancy has even linked up to the deadly ISIS in the middle East grown.
Without the NATO intervention, the Libyan internal conflict would have reached a negotiated and peaceful settlement and spared both the country, Sahel region and Nigeria, the brutal consequences it currently endures. Libya with its population of nearly 7 million pales into insignificance when compared with Ethiopia’s 110 million people with even far more significance to Africa.
Apart from being un-colonized by any European power, Ethiopia actually defeated Italy in 1896 at the battle of Adwa. And this effectively thwarted the campaign of the Kingdom of Italy to expand its colonial empire in the horn of Africa. Ethiopia is symbolically the capital of Africa, being host to the secretariat and headquarters of the African Union. While all African countries have equal importance and should be supported to resolve their conflicts, without the option of collapse, Ethiopia stands out and must never be allowed to collapse or disintegrate. The conflict in its Tigray region is an internal problem for which Africa should show concern and encourage amicably and negotiated settlement. External posturing and meddling in the conflict hold no prospect of amicable resolution and Africa’s initiative to mediate in the conflict with total regard to the sovereignty holds far better prospect.
Since November 4, 2020, a devastating armed conflict has been raging in northern Ethiopia. Developments in this war, which started with a well-prepared nightly assault of the then-ruling Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF[1]) on federal army bases in Tigray Regional State, are going fast. The war was expanded by the TPLF into areas outside Tigray, where major abuses on local inhabitants were perpetrated. No end is yet in sight to the fighting, which had expanded deeper into the Amhara Region to the important cities of Dessie and Kombolcha by early November 2021.
Although this conflict is primarily a domestic problem within an African state, there are ramifications towards neighboring countries, such as Sudan, Somalia and Egypt. As Walt (1996) has argued, revolutions or domestic turmoil in a country can have a disruptive impact on international relations.
Sudan has been maneuvering at the Ethiopian border and Ethiopia’s withdrawal of troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) force in Somalia has led to more terror activities by the Al Shabaab movement. But in turn, international relations can also have an impact on such a national crisis.