By The Star Staff Writer
The Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front, or TPLF, has on Monday welcomed the election victory of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud just a day earlier, “warmly” congratulating the head of state and expressing a desire to dust up its old relations with him.
During his term between 2012 and 2017, President Mohamud had cordial relations with TPLF leaders, something that always angered many Somalis who suffered under the TPLF-led Ethiopia’s brutal, two year occupation of their country.
The TPLF-run government in Tigray regretted that President Mohamud’s defeat in 2017 had created a “negative externality in the overall instability of the Horn of Africa”. It claimed that Mohamud’s “historic comeback” over the weekend would reverse “the downward trend and reposition the Federal Republic of Somalia to a sustainable and inclusive future.”
“The government of Tigray would like to express its confidence in the incoming leadership and seize this opportunity to express its readiness to cooperate in the overall stability of the region building upon the excellent pre-existing relations,” said Debretsion Gebremichael, the Tigray region’s president, in a one-page letter addressed to President Mohamud on Monday.
Ethiopian forces, led by TPLF commanders, committed large scale massacres during their occupation. They particularly killed thousands of Somali civilians in the capital city, Mogadishu, where hundreds of thousands of residents were forced to flee from their homes.
Amnesty International accused Ethiopian forces of slitting Somali civilians’ throats, gouging out their eyes and gang-raping women.
“Those killed are often left lying in pools of blood in the streets until armed fighters, including snipers, move out of the area and relatives can collect their bodies,” said the rights group in a 2008 report.
A year earlier, the U.N. Monitoring Group accused Ethiopian forces of using phosphorous bombs that killed about 35 civilians in Somalia. The Ethiopian attack “lightened the whole of Mogadishu” and “melted” its victims, said the U.N. in its 2007 report.
Debretsion, the Tigray leader, referred to the five-year term of former President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed “Farmajo” as a “volatile political landscape”.
Debretsion’s spokesman, Getachew K Reda, also said President Mohamud’s victory could mean that the tripartite alliance of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea was “decidedly unraveling”.
“Let’s see what tomorrow has in store for” the Eritrean President, Isaias Afwerki, Reda tweeted on Monday.
The TPLF leaders’ elation is a part of a wider relief that coursed through some countries and organizations — whose interests lie in perpetuating chaos in Somalia — after the defeat of President Farmajo, who stood up to foreign countries’ and entities’ destructive involvement in the country.
For the last five years, President Farmajo has kept warm ties with Eritrea’s President, Afwerki, and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Minister Abiy Ahmed, whose government has been battling TPLF rebels for more than a year and a half.
On Monday, Prime Minister Abiy congratulated President Mohamud for his victory.
“I would like to congratulate former President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud on being re-elected as the President of the Federal Republic of Somalia,” Abiy wrote in a tweet.