Why Ethiopia is in a civil war
1,474,448
Published 2021-05-28
Subscribe to our channel! goo.gl/0bsAjO
In 2019, after ending Ethiopia’s decades-long war with its neighbor, Eritrea, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It seemed like a new beginning for Ethiopia. After decades of dictatorships and oppressive regimes, he appeared to finally be putting the country on a new path.
But less than a year later, Abiy had already launched a military attack — on Tigray, a regional state in his own country. When Abiy became prime minister in 2018, he had largely supplanted Tigray’s main political party, the TPLF, as the country’s center of power. Since then, tensions between Abiy and the TPLF had escalated quickly. The political rivalry led to a dispute over an election, which led to an alleged attack on a military base — and finally to Abiy’s deployment of the military.
Abiy promised to bring peace to Ethiopia; now he’s presiding over a war that exploded from dispute to devastation in a matter of weeks, and has no obvious end in sight. Much of Tigray’s territory has been captured by local armies and militias. Thousands have died or fled their homes. And many Ethiopians are left wondering how Abiy, a leader who promised a break with the past, brought them here instead.
Note: The headline on this video has been updated.
Previous headline: Why Ethiopia is invading itself
Sources and further reading:
Jen Kirby, Vox: www.vox.com/22370629/ethiopia-tigray-eritrea-amhar…
International Crisis Group: www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/ethiopia/b1…
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: www.acaps.org/sites/acaps/files/products/files/202…
Physical Geography Research Group: www.researchgate.net/lab/Physical-Geography-Resear…
Human Rights Watch: www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/11/ethiopia-unlawful-shel…
UNHCR: data2.unhcr.org/en/working-group/284
Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out www.vox.com/.
Watch our full video catalog: goo.gl/IZONyE
Follow Vox on Facebook: goo.gl/U2g06o
Or Twitter: goo.gl/XFrZ5H
All Comments (21)
-
“Dying by blood or by hunger.” Read more about Tigray's humanitarian and political crisis on on Vox: bit.ly/3g5fNuA
-
"Ethiopia is invading itself"...you know that you can call it a "civil war", right?
-
As an Ethiopian, it saddens me to see our situation being oversimplified and missunderstood like this
-
VOX: Abiy invited everyone to join the prosperity party, but the TPLF refused. VOX: Aboy’s government didn’t include all of Ethiopia. 🤣🤣🤣
-
Tigray: Starts war. Vox: Why did a man who wanted peace resort to war?
-
Hold on a minute. A corrupt political party turned out to be corrupt, left their original country in protest for being called corrupt. And the guy trying to bring them back into Ethiopia is the bad guy here? Heeh?
-
No country leader on earth would just let an armed uprising go unchecked in their country, I don't understand why this video is trying to paint the president in such a negative light for it when any other country would do the same. Just because the president won a nobel peace prize it doesn't mean that he's not allowed to respond defensively to armed threats.
-
Malcolm X said "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent.” Media has the power to influence minds, ideas, behaviors, and attitudes of the masses.
-
john: gets surgery vox: "why did john pay someone to stab him"
-
(whispers) "They never got Ethiopia" Ethiopia: "I'll just do it myself then"
-
Vox's explanations are normally pretty informative, but even as someone having no knowledge on the topic it's so easy to see that there's gaping holes in the story here.
-
1:47 it was ruled by the Amhara people ?? Just because the royal family came from the Amhara region , that doesn’t mean the average Amhara was seen as a first class citizen . If you were not part of the royal family , you are a nobody . Amhara or not . It’s like saying just because the royal family is from London , every person living in London was a first class citizen. If you are not part of the royal family then you were a nobody . I don’t think it’s fair to paint the entire Amhara people as the rulers when only a few hundred were .
-
"Ethiopia is at war with itself" It's called a "Civil War" my Lady
-
Imagine ruling the country with an iron fist which the TPLF did for nearly 30 years, being removed by popular protests, retreating to your regional state and deciding not to take orders from the Federal Government, finally taking over a military base after massacring several soldiers in their sleep, then play victim at the end.
-
2:00 They just fail to mention that Italy invaded Ethiopia through Eritrea and thats why they were allowed to control Eritrea after the war? That's a pretty significant event that is just unmentioned..
-
The title itself punctures the credibility of this video. Too opinionated, oversimplified and prejudiced, just like the rest of the western mainstream media.
-
What was he supposed to do? Hold hands with them and sing kumbaya?!
-
I like a lot of Vox's content but I found this video to be too oversimplified. I do not know a lot about Ethiopian politics but feel that this video does not give a well-rounded perspective on a clearly very complex conflict.
-
It’s surprising how the western media talks so much on Tigray but ignored the massacres and repression’s that the TPLF did in Oromo & Somali region. It is well documented, go search. Still Tigray ppl don’t deserve to be treated the same.
-
I'm Ethiopian & I would say there is 95% hole & 85% inaccuracy in this entire recollection of history. 9/10 Vox videos are well put together & informative but NOT this one. The inaccuracy & incompetence is not something to ignore. This is a very complex topic.
