Nizar Manek and Natalia Paszkiewicz, May 7 2020
London Review of Books blog
The refugee camp at Hitsats, an hour’s drive through the mountains from the town of Shire, in the Ethiopian province of Tigray, consists of simple block structures with corrugated iron roofs. Skinny cows congregate in the shade of the buildings, oblivious to the humanitarian agency traffic lumbering past. Tigray lies along Ethiopia’s border with Eritrea, and Hitsats now accommodates at least 12,000 Eritreans, fleeing the regime in Asmara. Last August, during the rainy season, the number stood at 34,000. New refugees were arriving daily, following a 2018 peace deal between the two countries, which threatened to choke off prospective Eritrean asylum seekers.
Abiy Ahmed, the new Ethiopian prime minister, had rolled out a policy conceived under his predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, to bring Issayas Afeworki’s Eritrean regime in from the cold, after years of intermittent war. The Ethiopians also wanted to guard against the activities of opportunistic outsiders who had established military bases on the Red Sea littoral, in Djibouti, Somalia and Eritrea.
(865 words)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/may/down-with-issayas!-down-with-abiy!