Ethiopia has been concluding plans to organise a referendum, in order to find out the status of a territory enmeshed in conflict by the country’s Tigray and Amhara regions, according to the defence minister today, August 22.
The government had also promised to dissolve what it tagged “unlawful administration” in the area led by the Amharas, probably risking further backlash from the ex allies in the country’s 2020-2022 civil war.
Abraham Belay’s, the Defence Minister’s comments will make it the government’s clearest statement to date, regarding its plans for the controversial territory, aka Western Tigray where a few of the most intense fighting of the war took place.
This statement however, is likely to fuel the Amharan complaints that the federal powers have turned their backs on Amharans, whose battalion captured the lands while giving military support to the Ethiopian National Defence Force, ENDF, against the insurgent rebellious Tigrayan forces.
These grievances have majorly been the root cause of the conflict that broke out late last month between the Ethiopian military and the local militiamen across Amhara, leading the authorities to declare a state of emergency.
Amhara nationalists have since rejected the referendum suggestion, calling it an unacceptable way to find out the status of the territory they had claimed they had ‘historical’ rights to.
Tigrayan officials had themselves, rejected Amhara’s claims to the land on the grounds that the federal constitution (drafted by a former Tigrayan-led federal administration in 1995) recognised those lands as belonging to Tigray.
