Troops from a “neighboring country” destroyed factories and universities during the conflict in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray state, an interim administration official in the region told state media on Thursday in an apparent reference to Eritrea.
Tigray has been the scene of fighting since the beginning of November 2020, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced military operations against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), accusing them of attacking federal army camps.
He declared victory after pro-government troops took the regional capital Mekele in late November and appointed an interim government to replace the leadership of the TPLF. The struggle, however, persisted.
The presence of soldiers from neighboring Eritrea has been widely documented, but has been repeatedly denied by Addis Ababa and Asmara.
Alula Habteab, who heads the interim government’s construction, highways and transport department, appears to openly criticize soldiers from Eritrea, as well as from the neighboring Amhara region, for their actions during the conflict.
“There were armies from a neighboring country and from a neighboring region that wanted to take advantage of the war’s objective of enforcing the law,” he told state media.
“These forces inflicted more damage than the war itself.”
He said troops across the border had destroyed large factories in Tigray, such as the textile factories Almeda and Adigrat, and two major universities in Adigrat and Axum.
“Universities and factories that Tigray has produced in the past 30 years have been destroyed.”
In a rare reprimand to the national army of the interim administration, he also accused the Ethiopian National Defense Force of having “confiscated several properties” that belonged to the state government of Tigray.
Tigray is one of 10 semi-autonomous states, widely separated by ethnic lines in Ethiopia.
His previous leadership, the TPLF, dominated the federal government for decades before Abiy came to power in 2018 and was accused of marginalizing them.
Under TPLF-dominated rule, 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 for initiating a rapprochement with Eritrea, whose president Isaias Afwerki and the TPLF remain staunch enemies.
There is also a history of enmity between Tigray and the neighboring region of Amhara because of political and land disputes, and there is ample documentation that Amhara militiamen fought alongside federal troops in Tigray.
str-fb / laughs