(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Park Se-jin = From Nobel Peace Prize winner to war leader.
These are conflicting evaluations that follow Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (50), who was once praised as a reform leader produced by Africa.
Analysis suggests that the background of his two faces as a symbol of peace and the person responsible for the civil war is his obsession with making divided Ethiopia into one strong nation.
Abiy was born in August 1976 in a small village in Oromia Province, western Ethiopia.
His father was a Muslim from the Oromo tribe, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, and his mother was a Christian Amhara tribe.
He grew up in an environment that could be considered a microcosm of Ethiopia, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country, and became a member of the Pentecostal Church.
In 1991, when he was a teenager, he joined an Oromo armed group fighting against Mengistu Haile Mariam's military regime. After the collapse of the regime, he underwent military training and joined the National Defense Force in 1993.
He served as a UN peacekeeper in Rwanda in 1995 and participated in the border war with Eritrea from 1998 to 2000 as a communications and intelligence officer.
While serving in the military, he studied computer engineering and also took a cryptography course in South Africa.
Afterwards, he participated in the creation of the Information Network Security Agency (INSA), a cyber security and intelligence agency, and served as an executive. He took off his military uniform as a lieutenant colonel in 2010 and entered the Federal Assembly.
In 2017, he received a doctorate from Addis Ababa University with a thesis that studied traditional methods of resolving religious conflicts.
Abiy, who served as Minister of Science and Technology and leader of the ruling coalition's Oromo party, became Prime Minister at the age of 41 in April 2018, when the country was shaken by anti-government protests and a state of emergency.
The changes at the beginning of his inauguration were unconventional. It freed thousands of political prisoners and opened the way for foreign dissidents and armed groups to return home.
Media controls were relaxed, half of the cabinet was filled with women, and a Ministry of Peace was created.
The country also began opening up the economy by allowing private participation in state-run sectors, including telecommunications.
In particular, he reached out to Eritrea, which was in a state of 'neither war nor peace' after the border war.
In July 2018, the Joint Declaration on Peace and Friendship was signed with President Isaias Afewerki in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize the following year for his contribution to resolving the border dispute with Eritrea.
Abiy, who was 43 years old at the time, emerged as a young African leader drawing attention from around the world.
However, the seeds of conflict were growing in domestic politics.
After the collapse of the military regime in 1991, Ethiopia established an ethnic federal system that granted broad autonomy to ethnic regions.
The Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a Tigrayan political party, led the ruling coalition and exercised enormous influence in politics and the military for about 30 years.
Abi believed that ethnic power structures divided the people.
In 2019, the ruling coalition was disbanded and the major participating parties, excluding TPLF, were combined to launch the Prosperity Party.
The idea was to strengthen the central government's centripetal power by integrating coalitions of ethnic political parties into one political party.
TPLF accepted this as an attempt to weaken national federalism and centralize power.
Amid ethnic clashes and power struggles, political openness also retreated, leading to arrests of opponents and journalists again, Internet blockades, and emergency measures.
In 2020, when the central government postponed general elections due to COVID-19, TPLF pushed ahead with local elections in Tigray.
Both sides denied each other's legitimacy, and in November of that year, the civil war began when the federal government launched a military operation following an attack by TPLF troops on the federal army's Northern Command base.
Abiy declared it to be a short-term military operation to restore law and order, but the civil war continued for two years.
The government army and TPLF, as well as the Eritrean army and local armed forces that participated in the war on the government's side, were criticized for committing serious human rights violations, including massacres of civilians, sexual violence, and looting.
The death toll from fighting, starvation, and disease is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
As the possibility of rebels advancing on the capital Addis Ababa in 2021 increased, Abiy donned military uniform and headed to the front line to appeal to the public to participate in the war.
The civil war effectively stopped in November 2022 when the Ethiopian government and the TPLF signed a cessation of hostilities agreement in Pretoria, South Africa.
Abiy was the leader who ordered the military operation, but he was also the party who chose negotiations and stopped large-scale fighting.
Afterwards, armed conflict continued in Oromia and Amhara regions.
In particular, the policy of integrating special forces from each state into the federal military and police caused opposition in the Amhara region, leading to a conflict between the central government and local armed forces.
The paradox is repeated that the idea of โโcreating an integrated nation actually stimulates anxiety and resistance in the local community.
Abiy also focused on economic development and raising the country's status.
Ethiopia joined BRICS in 2024 and completed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Africa's largest hydroelectric power facility, the following year.
The route to the sea was also considered a key national task. Ethiopia, with a population of over 130 million people, lost its coastline when Eritrea, once a federation, gained independence in 1993, becoming the world's most populous landlocked country.
Abiy defines the right to stable access to the sea as a 'issue of existence' for the country and is taking diplomatic steps to secure maritime passage.
The signing of a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland for the use of the coast in 2024 sparked opposition from Somalia, and relations with Eritrea, which led to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, are also deteriorating again.
Although he emphasizes that he will secure maritime passages through diplomatic efforts, tensions in the region have not subsided.
In this situation, Abiy's third term was virtually confirmed as the ruling Prosperity Party secured an overwhelming majority of seats in the general election last June.
He is scheduled to lead state affairs for another five years after going through the formal election process for the new parliament in October.
Last August, after the general election, two opposition party figures and an opposition lawyer were arrested on charges of plotting terrorism, and the opposition party protested, calling the charges groundless.
The world is paying attention to how Prime Minister Abiy, 50 years old this year, will solve the tasks of embracing political opponents and resolving regional disputes.
