The Ethiopian government announced on Thursday the launch of the “final offensive” against Mekele, the regional capital of Tigray. This is a portrait of a city cut off from the world.
Communications are severed; a few intermittent connections by satellite lines allow rare and sporadic news; life follows its course, harshly; food is lacking, prices are skyrocketing, money is rationed. Today, the three-day ultimatum issued by the government before launching its final assault has ended. The army warned it would be ruthless.
The concerns expressed by international partners regarding the humanitarian impact of this conflict have infuriated the authorities. While vehemently rejecting such foreign interference, leadership is displaying more moderation in its press briefings towards the civilian populations instructing them to stay away from strategic targets. Assuming these messages are received. Assuming one could flee from a town the army says it has surrounded. The final operation is presented as inevitable. Its speed of execution will be proof of its legitimacy. No mediation is allowed, as no humanitarian truce is possible without appearing as repudiation of this operation.
For lack of reporters on the spot, for lack of images due to discharged cell phone batteries, it is impossible to imagine today’s Mekele. Let us share a little about this great city, its cobbled streets, shaded by fragrant blue jacarandas and the semi-rural atmosphere of a city that only thirty years ago was but a garrison town surrounded by rustic villages. Originally Mekele was a fertile, open, and windy plain, surrounded by slight mountains on the eastern edge of the highlands. It stood at the junction point between the mountain bastions and the steep valleys of inner Tigray. Its roads connected to other Ethiopian territories and the outside world.
Two castles remain from the late nineteenth century, one that has become a state hotel, with its old-fashioned and dilapidated charm. The other, renovated and recently opened to the public, recalls the political destiny of this place, which had federated the territorial entities of Tigray before becoming the seat of the king of kings Yohannes IV, one of the rulers who unified Ethiopia and protected it from several external aggressions (from Egypt, Italy, Sudan). Today’s Tigrayans see themselves as heirs to this responsibility of the defending of the nation and do not understand the general acrimony against them. Not many have been beneficiaries of the preemption of positions of federal power and large national companies by the ruling elite. They have even felt neglected by those who have been making the weather in Addis Ababa for the past three decades.
As everywhere in Ethiopia, urban metamorphosis has been rapid. In just a few years, the economic boom framed by a planning policy has encouarged the construction of public buildings: university campuses, hospitals, an airport, and a stadium. The city has expanded by the opening of wide avenues lined by buildings with facades of glass to the outskirts of town where modest houses are built of chisled stone with tin roofs. At the far end of town, on the side looking inward from Tigray, a towering concrete column topped with a golden sphere celebrates the martyrs of the liberation movement who fought against the nationalist military tyranny of Mengistu Haile Maryam, overcame the cruel famine of 1984, and by allying with other peoples found a new federal project, long to put in place, imperfect, unequal, even inegalitarian, but proposing new mechanisms for the correction of deep territorial imbalances.
A city of memory, it is also a carefree city, a young city brought to life by the light hums of blue and white rickshaws that sneak everywhere. It is a clean city. Sidewalks become terraces where small stools are arranged casually, creating a space for drinking Ethiopian-brewed coffee in terracotta coffeepots. The public space is open, relaxed, nonchalant, but with the dynamism of a youth who had hoped to be able to emerge from the eternal repetition of the warlike ardor of the past.
Main image: Mekele city September 9, 2020, photo by Eduardo Soteras
This article was first published by Libération.
