German and French foreign ministers have come to Ethiopia to promote a November peace agreement between federal and Tigray authorities that would put an end to a violent two-year war.
Annalena Baerbock and Catherine Colonna met with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Thursday. This was part of their diplomatic work.
With the return of essential services to the Tigray region, more aid, and the first transfer of heavy weapons from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front to Ethiopia’s federal troops, the November agreement has made steady progress.
At this point, it is not clear if Eritrean troops plan to leave the area completely, but witnesses say that they left at least two Tigray cities in December.
The leaders of Europe will also meet with representatives of the African Union, which has its headquarters in Addis Abeba.
The AU mediated the Tigray peace agreement, and this month its monitors arrived in the region to oversee its implementation.
Germany and France also want to assist with the food insecurity brought on by the Horn of Africa’s record drought, as well as the tightening of grain supply and rising food costs as a result of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine.
The ministers will visit a World Food Program warehouse in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region during their two-day visit in order to see the wheat that Ukraine donated to fight world hunger.
The governments of Germany and France paid for the delivery of the much-needed grain and are likely to send more help to those living in Ethiopia’s worst-hit areas of the civil war.
Baerbock says that the goal of her trip was to help Ethiopia achieve “lasting peace and accountability for human rights atrocities.”
According to U.N. investigators, there is proof of rapes, torture, and extrajudicial killings, as well as other war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed by all parties to the conflict.
The Ethiopian government and its allies also used famine as a weapon of war, according to a U.N. report from September, which Ethiopia disagrees with.
According to research from Belgium’s Ghent University, between 385,000 and 600,000 civilians have died in Ethiopia since the war began in November 2020. These deaths were caused by fighting, hunger, illness, and a lack of access to medical care.
According to the U.N., millions of Tigrayans need humanitarian aid, and the war has displaced millions more.
