Ethiopian Prime Minister tells Addis Ababa residents to hold arms, prepare to defend neighborhoods against Tigray

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed called on citizens in Addis Ababa to take up arms and defend themselves against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

The authorities told residents in Addis Ababa on Tuesday to register their arms and prepare to defend their neighborhoods against the Tigray forces, as they advance towards the capital.

“If achieving our objectives in Tigray will require that we march to Addis Ababa, we will. But we are not saying we are marching to Addis Ababa,” Getachew Reda, a spokesperson for the forces led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), told Reuters.

The call to arm up was followed by a declared six-month state of emergency after the TPLF claimed several towns in recent days.

“Our country is facing a grave danger to its existence, sovereignty and unity. And we can’t dispel this danger through the usual law enforcement systems and procedures,” said Justice Minister Gedion Timothewos reported by Reuters.

Since November 2020, Ethiopia began watching its destabilization with 35,000 Ethiopians suffering from famine and thousands dying.

Fighting continues to be waged between Tigray rebels and government forces, threatening a full-scale civil war that could disrupt the entire East African region.

Ahmed began mass recruitment of civilians to fight against Tigrayan rebel forces, a war he’s largely seen as responsible for, when he sent soldiers to arrest the elected leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front party (TPLF) on charges of rebellion in November 2020, because they had refused to hand over their regional autonomy to the centralizing government of Abiy.

His government sought to obliterate decades of ethnic rule enshrined in the country of more than 90 distinct ethnic groups. His actions are largely targeted towards the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an ethnic-based party that held the majority of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, an ethnic federalist political coalition in Ethiopia that ruled between 1988 and 2019 that Ahmed disbanded.