Ethiopia Fears New Civil War, Loss of Its Aid

When four bombs went off in hotels and restaurants here earlier this month, wounding at least 18 people, the significance of the first explosions heard in the city since last May’s battle to overthrow the nation’s dictator was lost on almost no one.

To many, they marked what could be the start of Ethiopia’s new civil war.

The air of tranquillity that prevailed after rebels of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front marched into the capital--after the flight of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam--has now largely evaporated. Armed rebel soldiers still patrol the streets amid increasing tension.

Interviews with Ethiopian government officials, diplomats and relief workers suggest that the country is now closer to renewed civil war than at any point since the rebels entered the capital last May 28.

“We’re nearer the whole thing falling apart than we ever have been before,” says a prominent Western diplomat closely monitoring the situation.

At risk is not only the peace and stability for this stricken land of 50 million people, the second-largest in Africa, but also millions of dollars in development and relief aid.

The United States, the European Community, the World Bank and other multilateral aid organizations are poised to begin within several months a $500-million development program for the country. It would be the largest such program in Ethiopia since Marxist rebels overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

But relief officials here say the program could collapse overnight, if fighting breaks out. “Most of the donor community would take a walk,” a Western relief official said. “Half of them have their bags packed already.”

The core problem is an intensifying conflict between the two most important groups in the transitional government: the EPRDF (or Democratic Front) and the Oromo Liberation Front. As the group that seized Addis Ababa from the former government and that controls the only organized army in the country, the Democratic Front dominates the transitional government’s representative assembly.

But the Oromo Front represents the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. The Oromo account for 40% to 60% of the population, occupying a band stretching from the far east to the west of the country. Disorganized, rural and Islamic, the Oromo to this day cherish a century-old resentment over having been deprived of power in a land they dominate numerically.

“Between them, they could rule the country forever,” says one diplomat familiar with both the Oromo party and the Democratic Front.

During an eight-month honeymoon period, leaders of the ragtag band of victorious rebels had managed to convene a nationwide political conference, establish a transitional governing assembly with more than two dozen regional and ethnic groups represented and implement some rudimentary political and economic reforms.

But both the Democratic Front and the Oromo group have a visceral mistrust of each other.

The Oromo Front believes the Democratic Front is out to exterminate it, and many in the Democratic Front believe the Oromo are hindering government consolidation to buy time to strengthen their own army in a bid for secession. The Democratic Front blamed the April 3 bombings in Addis Ababa on the Oromo group and warned it not to cause more trouble.

The two groups are at odds over many things. The key argument is over how many fighters from the Oromo group are to be admitted to the Democratic Front army, as the government tries to form a national defense force out of the small rebel groups that participated in Mengistu’s overthrow.

The Oromo party was thought to have had as few as 4,500 fighters at the time of the overthrow. More recently, it has claimed as many as 40,000. This is an indication, some observers say, that the group has been rearming demobilized Mengistu soldiers in eastern Ethiopia.

Officials of the Oromo group deny that, saying that earlier estimates failed to count all of their soldiers. “The numbers are very elastic,” Lencho Lata, deputy secretary of the Oromo Front, said in an interview in Addis Ababa. “We have had standing brigades, but also many guerrillas.”

Diplomats and others who have tried to mediate between the two groups tend to blame much of the trouble on the obstreperous Oromo, whose party “comes into the whole situation with an incredible chip on their shoulder,” says a Western diplomat who has met with both groups. “They have an ingrained inferiority complex that comes to the fore so quickly.”

But the same diplomat believes that the conflict has been exacerbated by “calculated acts by both parties.”

Over the last month, the Democratic Front and the Oromo group have traded serious charges about each others’ conduct in the countryside. On March 30, the Democratic Front accused the Oromo Front of blowing up two bridges on the main road between Addis Ababa and Jijiga, 350 miles east, a key staging center for aid to more than 1 million refugees and displaced persons settled near the Somali border. Some 100 relief trucks were stranded by the act.

The government also charged the Oromo group with having mined the railroad linking Ethiopia to the neighboring port of Djibouti, rendering the line unusable. The government said the Oromo Front and another Oromo group had staged an attack on the ancient city of Harar, in the east, but that it was repulsed.

In return, the Oromo Front asserted that Democratic Front troops fired into a crowd of peace marchers in Jijiga on April 6, killing 200 and wounding another 300. The claim could not be immediately confirmed.

These charges have been accompanied by a heightening of rhetorical heat. On March 30, the Democratic Front warned the Oromo party in a public statement that “our patience is running out, and the time for us to choose between war and peace is fast approaching.”

For its part, the Oromo group disclaims responsibility for the attacks. Lencho said much has been blamed on his group. “We’re now the scapegoat. But this is part of (the Democratic Front’s) preparing the ground for dealing with the (Oromo group) militarily. They believe they can carry off a fast military victory. Whether they can carry it off is not known, but it triggers this fear and suspicion in the minds of the Oromo.”

The conflict in the transitional government has already affected security in outlying parts of the country, particularly in the east and southeast, where the Democratic Front has been unable to project its military power to stop a wave of banditry and political turmoil interfering with the delivery of emergency aid to millions of refugees and displaced persons.

On April 1, for example, the United Nations halted all relief work in much of the southeast after Lourenco Mutaca, head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Harerge province, was murdered in broad daylight in the town of Gode. Mutaca was the second U.N. refugee worker to be killed in less than a month and the 15th relief worker slain in Ethiopia in the last seven months.

“It’s getting impossible to work at all in that region,” said Mohammed Nizar, Mutaca’s immediate subordinate, after he arrived back in Addis Ababa. Aid distribution in the region is hampered by continual fighting among tribal and political factions, he said, “and the government authorities do nothing to intervene.”