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Ethiopia is a country in East Africa, and–as I’m sure you already know–they are home to one of our fellow ISSEA schools. The capital of Ethiopia is Addis Ababa, and the country’s official language is Amharic. Famous for being the place where the coffee bean originated, Ethiopia has a wide range and variety of resources like livestock and honey.
Ethiopia is currently fighting an ongoing civil war that began on November, 4 of 2020. The conflict started when Abiy Ahmed–the Ethiopian Prime Minister and a member of the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group–“ordered a military offensive against regional forces in Tigray” (the northernmost regional state in Ethiopia). For more than two decades, the political scene in Ethiopia has been influenced by the Tigrayans, who make up around 70% of the population. The Tigrayans started their own party called The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in the 1980s and fought a war to seize control of the government.
In 2019, Abiy Ahmed dissolved the coalition government as it was giving autonomy to regions instead of properly governing them. However, TPLF refused to join Ahmed’s new party. Both sides of these conflicts designated “each other as ‘illegitimate’” and have since caused the conflict that we now see occurring in Ethiopia. The International Community School of Addis Ababa (ICS) has since suffered the effects of the war as many of the students were evacuated to neighbouring countries or home countries to evade potential dangers that the civil war poses. This has raised a few questions regarding the participation of ICS in upcoming ISSEA sports events; although all ISSEA schools hope that ICS can attend, the question still remains to be answered.
