 For more videos and people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The Tigray People's Liberation Front or TPLF first came to power in Ethiopia in 1991. It remained in power for almost 30 years until 2018. During this period, TPLF committed various atrocities and human rights violations across the country. Throughout its regime and even now during the current civil war in Ethiopia, the TPLF has enjoyed support from the United States and the European Union. Why have the Western powers supported TPLF all this time? What has been the history of TPLF's rise and fall from power in the country? Ilia Samare, editor of Horn of Africa TV, explains. For nearly three decades, the TPLF, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, once it seized power in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in 1991, it became a client state of the West, a very loyal client state to fulfill the orders of Washington, basically. A regional proxy force that the West could send to Somalia to invade, to retire, to launch an aggressive border war, to crush all the opposition within Ethiopia. And so that's the task that it has been fulfilling. You have to remember the United States has this military project in Africa called AFRICOM, the Africa Command. And they have a base in Djibouti and Ethiopia during the time of TPLF in power was a trusted ally of the West. It invaded Somalia in 2006, ostensibly to extend the war on terror against al-Shabaab terrorists, but it was to put Somalia in check. Somalia was beginning to reconstitute at that time under the Union of Islamic Courts some semblance of stability and reconstruction of the state that has been in shambles was beginning to return. And the TPLF invaded this time. Eritrea was the only country in the region to oppose this invasion of TPLF of Somalia in 2006. And for that, essentially Eritrea was punished by having sanctions imposed on it, US engineered sanctions at the United Nations Security Council. So once the TPLF was overthrown from power, you can say in 2018, due to massive popular uprising that have had it with this tyrannical minority rule of the TPLF, we must not forget that the TPLF was a minority of a minority. It hailed from a region that only constituted 5% of the Ethiopian population and it did not represent the Tigrayan population as such. It was a narrow click, a narrow kleptocratic click that ruled in the name of Tigray. Tigray itself is a minority in Ethiopia, 5% of the population. So the only way TPLF could rule Ethiopia was through ethnic politics, ethnic federalism it called it, but pitting one ethnic group against the other, vertical polarization, sectarianism, divide and rule between instigating ethnic clashes, inter-ethnic clashes, inter-religious clashes. In that way, this tiny minority click was able to rule for 27 years with impunity in Ethiopia. All throughout this 27 years, it was fully backed and supported by the United States and the European Union financially, politically, militarily and diplomatically. During this 27 years also, we must not forget, it committed horrendous atrocities inside Ethiopia, massacres in the Oghadir and Somali region, genocide in the western region of Gambela, in Oromia, in Amhara, all over Ethiopia. There were human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also invaded Eritrea in 1998 and 2000, ostensibly under border clashes, but eventually this was supposed to have been resolved. The issue when Algiers peace agreement between the two countries decided that the border issue would be settled by arbitration court at the hey. Now when the arbitration court rendered its verdict in 2002, as prior agreement, it was to be finally unbinding. Eritrea accepted the ruling of the arbitration court, Ethiopia, TPLF regime rejected this. So for these reasons, sanctions were imposed on Eritrea to punish it. And as I mentioned earlier, eventually resentment and unrest spread all over Ethiopia, initially in the Oromia region called Oromo protest, but spread rapidly throughout Ethiopia from 2015 to 2018, three years of continuous unrest, until eventually this brought down the era of minority rule of the TPLF. And from within its EPRDF umbrella organization, Abiy Ahmed was elected as reform prime minister. And what he did in 2018 upon coming to power, the first thing he did was to resolve the conflict with Eritrea through peaceful means. He accepted the decision of the boundary ruling and the peace agreement and made a trip to Eritrea several months after he came to power. And so once this was resolved, this was not to the liking of Western patterns of TPLF. A new era began to emerge of peace between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, an era of stability, peace and cooperation. And as I said, this was not to the liking of the patterns of the TPLF regime, which by this time had fled to its home base in Tigray, the northernmost province. And from 2018 up to 2020 for two years, it continued to reject the peace, peace overtures by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. Many peace delegations were sent to reconcile the TPLF and bring it back to the phone, but the TPLF remained belligerent. It spread chaos and ethnic conflicts all over Ethiopia because remember it controlled the security apparatus for 28 years. So it had cell networks throughout Ethiopia. It had tremendous wealth at its disposal that it had looted during its kleptocratic regime. Some say upwards of 50 billion dollars were stolen from Ethiopia by the TPLF. And so with this vast wealth at its disposal, it was able to buy mercenary proxy forces within Ethiopia and try to disrupt and destabilize Ethiopia, to make Ethiopia ungovernable for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. The final straw that broke the camel's back came when elections were postponed, national elections due to COVID pandemic, but TPLF would not accept the national election board's decision to postpone the elections for some time until it was safe to conduct national elections. So it went ahead and carried out its own elections in the region and called the central government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali illegitimate and it began to mobilize, to ratchet up, to beat the war drums. And in two years time, by the way, it trained upwards of a quarter of a million of special forces, militias, and irregular armed units. So by the beginning of November 2020, it undertook a massive pre-emptive attack on the northern command in the Tigray region, the northern command of the federal army bases. It attacked during the night and killed several thousands. Some estimate up to 6,000 Ethiopian soldiers were killed. The remaining fled to Eritrea. About 10,000 ethnic Tigrayans switched sides, of course. It captured the strategic heavy weaponry, rocket missiles, and what have you. And so this was an act of treason that no country could tolerate. No country on earth would tolerate such kind of treasonous insurrection from within. So the Prime Minister Abiy and the parliament declared the TPLF a terrorist organization and undertook counter-attack, which had repulsed the TPLF, cleared it from the capital, and they went and hid in the bushes, in the wilderness. But after several months of conflict and war in the region, the federal government, as I mentioned earlier, decided to declare a unilateral humanitarian inspire and withdraw from Tigray to give peace a chance at all. But during this period, must be remembered, the United States and the European Union allies continuously were supportive of the TPLF. They were putting all kinds of pressure on the federal government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. And it is this situation that eventually led to the declaration of unilateral ceasefire by the Ethiopian government. But once having declared ceasefire and withdrawn, as I mentioned earlier, the TPLF emboldened and corroded by its patterns, Western patterns, decided to expand the military operations and go all the way to Alisababat to overthrow the government. So this is the stance of Western governments that have been igniting the conflict, emboldening the TPLF under the guise of humanitarian intervention and food aid. They have been feeding the war machine of the TPLF ascension. And now that the TPLF is again being routed, the call for negotiation we hear from the West that has been completely silent. And at the same time, the psychological warfare, the war by media, by Western corporate media has been intensified to an unprecedented degree. This information during the past months was unbelievable, incredible. I mean, they were manufacturing defeats, manufacturing false information that the TPLF was literally on the gates of Alisababat, just the outskirts. And pressuring foreign embassies to flee the capital of Alisababat, some African countries did withdraw from the capital, but many remain. And this is the situation where we are right now. The TPLF has been completely exhausted. It's all its troop strength. It's arsenal. It is fleeing. It's on the retreat, on the verge of defeat. And at this time, we hear once again the call for negotiations.