Ethiopia begins negotiations with the OLA rebel group

April 23 (Reuters) – Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the rebel Oromo Liberation Army will begin peace negotiations in Tanzania on Tuesday, the two sides said.

This is the first time that the Ethiopian government has officially said that it will negotiate with the Office of Legal Affairs, which has been fighting the government from time to time for decades.

“Negotiations with Oneg Shene will start the day after tomorrow in Tanzania,” Abiy said on Sunday, using another name for OLA.

The Office of Legal Affairs said the government had accepted his group’s terms for peace talks.

“This is a decisive and positive step towards establishing lasting peace in the region,” the Office of Legal Affairs said in a statement early Monday.

However, the OLA objected to referring to him as “Shene”, saying the name misrepresented his “identity and goals”.

OLA is a banned splinter group of the Oromo Liberation Front, a previously banned opposition party that returned from exile after Abiy took office in 2018. The group’s grievances are rooted in the alleged marginalization of the Oromo people and neglect of the federal government.

The Office of Legal Affairs and the federal government blame each other for a number of attacks in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, the country’s most populous, in which dozens of civilians have been killed.

In February, the state-appointed human rights commission said at least 50 people were killed in an attack it blamed on the SLA.

In October, the SLA and another Oromo group blamed the Ethiopian government for carrying out airstrikes that they said killed a number of civilians.

“The people of Ethiopia and the government desperately need these negotiations,” Abiy said at a ceremony honoring the previous peace agreement reached between the federal government and forces in the Tigray region, where fighting broke out in November 2020 and ended in November 2022.

The fighting between the OLA and the federal government is separate from the fighting in Tigray, but the OLA forged an alliance with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 2021.

(Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw) by Einat Morsi. Editing by Christina Fincher

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