Editor’s Foreword

The Analyst Who Came Back to Thank the Women

Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu swore his last essay was his last. He has broken that promise and the Ethiopian Tribune is the better for it.

He wrote to tell us he had meant it. A man does not break his word lightly, and MGH does not break his at all or so we had every reason to believe. We took him at that word when he sent us what he called his last piece, and we would have honoured his silence. What we did not anticipate was the one force capable of returning a man of his discipline to the page against his own resolve: not vanity, not the itch of an unfinished argument, but conscience. He could not, he tells us, forgive himself for keeping a promise while the danger he sees so clearly gathered, unanswered, on the horizon.

Regular readers will know the shape of that danger, for he has charted it these six months with the cold instruments of his trade the Abraham Accords, the Red Sea, the June election, Arsi, and now the alignment Ethiopian officials have learned to fear by a single word: Tsimdo. A soldier, he reminds us, knows the non-triviality of war: its weight, its cost, the faces of the dead. The ethnic entrepreneur what this newspaper’s readers now recognise as the monkey habit, knows only its profits, and prices them in other people’s children. He sells the war he will never fight. Someone, MGH decided, had to say so plainly before the bill came due.

Yet it is not the danger that gives this essay its unusual warmth, and it is worth marking plainly what sets it apart from everything he has sent us before. For half a year MGH has written as a defence strategist, in the registers of engineering, mathematics, economics, and governance. This piece began not with a strategy paper but with a song — Yehager Kasma, “The Nation’s Anchor,” conceived and led by Sayat Demissie and sung by the veteran Kuku Sebsebe amid a company of the country’s finest voices, released in May 2021 as the north slid into the worst of the war. It was, in effect, a plea from women to both sides to stop. It was ignored, as he documents, while the men with the guns sang their own songs.

His argument is one this newspaper has long held and rarely seen stated with such rigour: that the capacity for communal love, forgiveness, and shared sacrifice is not lost from Ethiopian society but latent, abundant, and conserved chiefly by our mothers; that a nation survives not by winning its quarrels but by repeatedly choosing to let go of its pain rather than nurse it into war; and that the women who carry this wisdom are no sentimental supplement to his four singular interests but the human substrate the kasma, the unseen peg driven into the joint without which none of them can stand. He sets that wisdom in the long company of peace-making women, from the siiqqee-bearers of the Oromo and the shimgilina elders of the highlands to the women in white in Monrovia and the mothers in silence in the Plaza de Mayo and he does so, characteristically, without conscripting a single artist to a faction.

The conclusion is simple and, we think, unanswerable. Ethiopia need not fight itself; there is no internal quarrel worth a single kilometre of that road. If Ethiopians must fight at all, let it be for the one cause that belongs to all of them, the sovereignty of the nation and its rightful access to the sea, and even then by peaceful means first, with force the genuine last resort it ought always to be. Between the refusal of the senseless war and the defence of the nation’s life lies, as he has it, the whole of sound statecraft.

We are grateful to Dr Hailu for the patience of his argument and for the grace of breaking a promise in order to make it. The full nineteen-page essay with its diagram of the four interests and the substrate beneath them, its cross-cultural evidence, and its careful answers to the objections a serious reader will raise, is longer and richer than any foreword can hold. We commend it to our readers in full.

— The Editor
The Ethiopian Tribune