Who is Abiy Ahmed? A profile of Ethiopia's Nobel Peace Prize 2019 winning prime minister

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Luke O'Reilly11 October 2019

Ethiopia's prime minister may not have had the high profile of Greta Thunberg or Jacinda Ardern but his achievements are no less significant

Abiy Ahmed, 43, won the Nobel Peace Prize today for negotiating a successful peace deal with his country's long-time foe, Eritrea, last year.

Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war from 1998 to 2000, a conflict which is estimated to have claimed anywhere between 70,000-300,000 lives.

Eritrea was originally part of Ethiopia, but fought a war of independence from 1961 to 1991.

The peace deal, signed in July last year, ended a nearly 20-year military stalemate with Eritrea.

Abiy is from the Oromo, the nation’s largest ethnic group, which spearheaded the protests that forced his predecessor to resign.

The previous administration was dominated by Tigrayans, a small but powerful ethnic group.

Since taking office in April 2018, Abiy’s government has arrested or fired many senior officials - mainly Tigrayans - for corruption or rights abuses.

Abiy has pushed through reforms at home and abroad. His public renunciation of past abuses drew a line between his administration and that of his predecessor.

Ahmed (centre) holds hands with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki (second left) at a concert celebrating the end of the war. (Mulugete Ayene/AP)
AP

He appointed former dissidents to senior roles. Daniel Bekele, a former political prisoner and Africa director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, now heads the government’s human rights commission.

Birtukan Mideksa, who founded an opposition party and was jailed after a disputed 2005 election, now heads the electoral commission.

But ethnically tinged violence flares frequently, and systemic attempts to address past injustices have been slow.

It is unclear how much of the fractious ruling coalition - some form of which has been in power since 1991 - backs his reforms, or how durable those reforms would be without his leadership.

He has already survived one assassination attempt: a grenade thrown at a rally last year.

Ethiopia has been among Africa’s fastest growing economies for more than a decade. But uncertainty over Abiy’s ability to carry out all his reforms worries both citizens and the foreign investors he has been courting to develop the country’s antiquated telecoms and banking sectors.

Some observers say Abiy, a former military officer specialising in cyber intelligence, will sometimes bypass ministries because his reforms must maintain their breakneck momentum or become mired in bureaucracy.

Those reforms - including unbanning political parties, releasing imprisoned journalists and prosecuting officials accused of torture - have drawn ecstatic crowds at rallies.

“Abiy seems to have relied on his charismatic rule,” said Dereje Feyissa, a professor at Addis Ababa University. “The question is whether this is sustainable. Euphoria is subsiding.”

Asle Sveen, a historian who has written several books about the Nobel Peace Prize, told Reuters the deal made Abiy exactly the kind of candidate Alfred Nobel had envisaged for the prize.

“The peace deal has ended a long conflict with Eritrea, and he is very popular for having done this, and he is doing democratic reforms internally,” Sveen said.

But some benefits of the peace were short-lived. Land borders opened in July but closed in December with no official explanation.

“Last year’s rapprochement appears to have been partly due to the Eritrean president’s belief that Abiy’s rise marked the eclipse of Tigray’s ruling party, which had been his prime antagonist for more than two decades,” said Will Davison, an Ethiopia analyst at Crisis Group.

“But although it has lost power at the federal level, Tigray’s ruling party remains firmly in control of its own region, which includes a long border with Eritrea, partially explaining why relations between the two nations haven’t warmed further.”

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