Tigray’s rebel authorities said they would attend peace talks in Ethiopia next week, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promised that fighting “will end and peace will prevail.”
The government has also stated that it will participate in African Union-organized talks in South Africa on Monday, as diplomatic pressure mounts for an end to nearly two years of bloodshed.
This comes as the United Nations Security Council meets behind closed doors on Friday to discuss the escalating crisis in Africa’s second-most populous country.
The African Union’s Peace and Security Council met on Friday and was briefed by its Horn of Africa envoy, Olusegun Obasanjo, who is expected to mediate the talks.
Since the AU failed earlier this month to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table, international pressure for a ceasefire has grown, and fighting in embattled Tigray has intensified.
As Ethiopian forces and their Eritrean allies seized a string of towns in Tigray, sending civilians fleeing, the government vowed this week to seize airports and other federal sites from rebel control.
Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who dispatched the army into Tigray in November 2020 to depose the region’s dissident authorities, declared that the war “would end and peace would prevail.”
“Ethiopia will be peaceful; we will not fight indefinitely,” he told an audience at the opening of a civil project outside Addis Ababa .
He also called for the return of humanitarian aid to Tigray and the withdrawal of Eritrean troops from Ethiopia.
The meeting of the AU’s 15-member Peace and Security Council behind closed doors was the first since violence flared up again in August.
The continent-wide bloc was “widely perceived as responding inadequately to this situation,” but was working to ensure talks began next week as planned, according to a briefing note issued by the AU-focused Amani Africa think tank on Friday.
The earlier-cancelled talks were to be mediated by Obasanjo and supported by former South African deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta.
However, the meeting never took place due to logistical issues.
