Ex Minster of Peace says the war on Tigray was a strategy to reshape the ENDF - Wegahta Facts
A former senior official in Ethiopia’s ruling Party has said the 2020 attack on the army’s Northern Command, was deliberately orchestrated to justify a purge of ethnic Tigrayans from the ENDF.
Ato Taye Dendea, former Minister of Peace of the FDRE and senior member of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity party, said in an interview with Horn Observer, recorded prior to his arrest, that the government intentionally provoked the war to remove Tigrayans from the ENDF.
“Do you think it is TPLF who started the war? It is us who deliberately started it,” Taye said in Affaan Oromo during an interview with Horn Conversation. “We had no other way to single out ethnic Tigrayan members of the national army.”
The Ethiopian federal government has long maintained that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front initiated the war by attacking Northern Command bases in November 2020.
That narrative formed the basis for a full-scale military campaign on Tigray, which lasted two years and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, mass displacement, and widespread human rights abuses and destruction.
Taye’s remarks appear to confirm what critics and rights groups have claimed for years that the war was used as a pretext for a politically motivated ethnic purge.
His comments also align with a previously leaked and verified audio from Brigadier General Tesfaye Ayalew.
A senior military commander of the Ethiopian National Army, who was heard saying the military had to “clean out our insides” referring to the dismissal, disarming and detention of more than 17,000 ethnic Tigrayan soldiers.
“Even if there may be good people among them, we can’t differentiate… so we excluded them from doing work. Now the security forces are completely Ethiopian,” he added in the leaked recording, which was later verified by international outlets.
Rights groups and UN experts have repeatedly reported widespread ethnic profiling of Tigrayans across Ethiopia following the starting of the war on Tigray.
Many ethnic Tigrayans were dismissed from their jobs, detained without charges, or disappeared.
Listen to his remarks between 1:22:44 and 1:23:47 in the full interview posted by Horn Conversation.
Posted Jun 13, 2025, 10:41 PM UTC