BY SILEWUNET BEL
For nearly half a century, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has operated as both a liberation front and a regime in Ethiopia. The organization has been the sole political actor in the Tigray region, ruling it since 1983 and its dictatorship has literally brought Tigrayans to abject poverty and its military adventurism has put the people in a pickle!
The TPLF’s primary objective since its inception in 1975 has been to set free the people of Tigray from Ethiopia or the “Amhara imperialist” and to establish a greater Tigray state. This is due to both their historical mindset in Ethiopian politics and the ever-increasing widening gap between the elites of Amhara and Tigray, with which the group has been revolving all over, classifying the Amhara as the sole adversaries of Tigrayan existence and political influence. Following its takeover in 1991, the group is alleged to have murdered over 3 million Amhara, primarily in “western Tigray”.
In actual fact, the group has managed to accomplish hardly anything significant that essentially boils down to realizing its fundamental priorities in Ethiopia over the course of its fifty-year existence, other than perpetrating crimes against humanity that tarnish Tigrayan legacy and cause significant harm to Ethiopia’s cause in particular. The TPLF has had a detrimental impact across the whole of Ethiopia, notably on the Tigray and Amhara people. Its elites and figureheads ingrained enmity among ethnic groups through a divide and rule system, further dividing Ethiopian ethnics, under which the country suffered and lived in anguish until now. The group has viciously assaulted, pillaged, and humiliated Ethiopia and its people, which might most probably be summed by the most recently observed rounds of incursion in the Amhara and Afar regions.
For a plethora of other conceivable evidence and atrocities that amount to war crimes, the group has been designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including the United States Homeland Security National Database, since the 1980s, and by the Ethiopian parliament in 2021. Since the fighting started on November 3, 2020, the group has been explicitly working with co-terrorist organizations such as Somalia’s Al-Shabab, Shene and other sworn enemies of Ethiopia.
The TPLF-led EPRDF was a totalitarian regime until it was dethroned by a popular uprising in 2018. With its utter desire to gain back power in Ethiopia’s politics, Ethiopia has undoubtedly been forced to endure a bloody war as a result of the TPLF forces’ “pre-emptive attack or thunder-like strike” on Ethiopia’s national army stationed in the Tigray region, as one of the TPLF’s senior members described it. Since then, the group has been portraying itself as victims and underdog while holding the people of Tigray hostage in order to forcibly conscript them for yet another conflict with federal ally forces, which neither Tigrayan nor the rest of Ethiopia stand to benefit from.
After examining the facts which have been witnessed in the group’s existence in Ethiopian-Tigray political control, it isn’t justly objectionable to pursue the group’s total dissolution, which is the most important element toward ending the oppressive power structure in Tigray and the rest of Ethiopia, as well as for long-term peace and stability within the country and the Horn of Africa region. The TPLF has served its purpose and should be disbanded, or at the very least, shouldn’t be recognized as Tigray’s sole source of power.
As Ambassador Herman J. Cohen, a former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and the main person who was believed to be the right hand of the group in their seizure of power in Ethiopia, toppling the Dergue, himself believes, the “TPLF is over and should be dissolved.” He formerly said, “The US should concentrate on persuading the TPLF that after 29 years in power in Addis, they are rejected by the national population, and that peace is possible only after they dissolve their movement.” And later he went on to say that “it is time for the TPLF to accept the inevitable. The Abiy government has overwhelming military superiority. To save the Tigrayan people further hardship, the TPLF must cease to exist. “
To say the least, TPLF has no future, either ideologically or in reality. Its hangers-on should not waste time determined to bring the dead back to life. Its time has passed, its goal is out-dated, and the Albanian Marxist philosophy that underpins its existence really hasn’t evolved. So, the group can no longer be what its purpose is to exist and fulfil the promise it made to the people of Tigray. The group should not have a future at the helm of Tigray’s political power and its core leadership should either resigned or gone into exile.
This may not sound very appealing to anyone who learns that a political entity that claims to represent almost five million Tigrayans must cease to do so. Even so, the rationale behind that is, it has proven to be of no value to the people of Tigray aside from its military adventurism to secure political leverage at the cost of the blood of Tigrayans. Hence, it cannot be tolerated any longer as a belligerent, but somehow the group may have a future if it decides to surrender, disarm and operate as a peaceful political entity. Otherwise, no more!
Editor’s Note: The views entertained in this article do not necessarily reflect the stance of The Ethiopian Herald
The Ethiopian Herald September 30/2022
