Former Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo, in the first update on the peace talks, also said on Wednesday that the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan authorities had agreed on “smooth, orderly and coordinated disarmament” along with “restoration of law and order”. “restoration of services”. ” and “unimpeded access to humanitarian supplies”. The deal marked a new “dawn” for Ethiopia, he said, speaking at a news conference. The war, which broke out in November 2020, has pitted regional forces from Tigray against the Ethiopian federal army and its allies, which include forces from other regions and from neighboring Eritrea. “It is now the responsibility of all of us to uphold this agreement,” the Ethiopian government’s chief negotiator, Redwan Hussein, said on Wednesday. Tigray’s rebels welcomed the deal and said they had made concessions. “We are ready to implement and expedite this agreement,” said the head of their delegation, Getachew Reda. “To address the pains of our people, we have made concessions because we need to build trust. “Ultimately, the fact that we have reached a point where we have now signed an agreement speaks volumes for the readiness of both sides to put the past behind them to forge a new path of peace,” Reda said. The conflict, which has at times spread from Tigray to neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, has killed thousands of people, displaced millions from their homes and left hundreds of thousands on the brink of starvation. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the ceasefire, according to a UN spokesman. “It is a very welcome first step, which we hope can begin to bring some comfort to the millions of Ethiopian civilians who have really suffered during this conflict,” the secretary-general’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told reporters.
Urgent need for help
Neither Eritrea nor regional powers allied with Ethiopia’s military took part in the talks in South Africa, and it was unclear whether they would abide by the agreement reached there. Eritrean forces have been accused of some of the worst abuses of the conflict, including gang-rapes, and witnesses have described killings and looting by Eritrean forces even during peace talks. Al Jazeera’s Fahmida Miller, reporting from Pretoria, said attention is now turning to how well the deal is being implemented. “We know that thousands of people have been killed, people have also been affected by the lack of food supplies and humanitarian aid in the Tigray region,” Miller said. “That’s really been a vital sticking point in terms of some of the difficulties that have come up over the last couple of years,” he added. Obasanjo, who led the African Union mediation team, said the implementation of the agreement would be overseen and monitored by a high-level African Union team. He praised the process as an African solution to an African problem and said the deal would allow humanitarian supplies to be restored to Tigray. A critical question is how soon aid can return to Tigray, where communications and transport links have been largely disrupted since the conflict began. Doctors have described running out of essential medicines such as vaccines, insulin and therapeutic food, while people are dying of easily preventable diseases and starvation. United Nations human rights investigators said the Ethiopian government was using “starvation of civilians” as a weapon of war. “We are going back to 18th century surgery,” a surgeon at the region’s flagship hospital, Fasika Amdeslasie, told health experts in an online event on Wednesday. “It’s like an open-air prison.” A humanitarian source said their organization could resume operations almost immediately if unrestricted aid access to Tigray was granted. “It depends entirely on what the government agrees to … If they actually give us access, we can start moving very quickly, in hours, not weeks,” said the source, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
