ETHIOPIAN and Tigrayan leaders agreed to allow humanitarian access to the warzone and form a joint disarmament committee on Saturday, extending a truce agreed last week.

The commanders, who since Monday have been meeting in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, signed an agreement mandating disengagement from all forms of military activities.

Both parties have agreed to protect civilians and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the region of more than five million people.

The agreement states that disarmament will be “done concurrently with the withdrawal of foreign and non-[Ethiopian military] forces” from Tigray. Since the beginning of the war in November 2020, troops from Ethiopia’s northern neighbour Eritrea have assisted the government in fighting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the rulers of the Ethiopian region.

Ethiopia’s lead negotiator Redwan Hussein said the talks had established a conducive environment for ongoing peace negotiations and suggested that the next round would “most likely” be conducted in Tigray itself followed by a meeting in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Both sides blame each other for the outbreak of the civil war, which followed Tigray’s decision to proceed with elections the central government had ordered postponed because of the Covid pandemic.

The brutal fighting in Tigray, which spilled into Amhara and Afar regions as Tigrayan forces tried to break the military blockade of their region, reignited in August after months of lull that allowed thousands of lorries carrying humanitarian aid into Tigray.

The TPLF’s decades-long dominance of Ethiopia’s government, which ended with the election of Abiy Ahmed as president in 2018, means it is regarded with suspicion by central authorities who have accused it of seeking to re-establish national power.

A study by Belgium’s Ghent University last month found the war to be the largest ongoing conflict in the world involving up to half a million troops and a death toll estimated at between 300-600,000, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. Both sides have been accused of war crimes.

Phone and internet connections to Tigray are still down, and foreign journalists and human rights researchers remain barred, complicating efforts to verify reports of ongoing violence in the region.  Morning Star