The Hardest Question: Why Are We Destroying Our Own?
There is a peculiar cruelty in watching a people turn their sharpest weapons upon themselves. The essay that follows refuses to look away from it.
Professor Girma Berhanu writes as both a student of the affliction and one of the wounded by it. What he offers is not a reaction to a passing controversy but the distillation of several years of ethnographic observation — the reckoning of a man who has watched the pile-ons gather, absorbed the insults, and counted the reputations dismantled by people who claim to be defending the very cause they are hollowing out. The question he cannot put down has been pressed on him by a Tigrayan friend and an Oromo colleague alike, and he confesses he has never answered it well: why do those who call themselves Amhara so often turn on other Amhara with a ferocity they rarely muster against their actual adversaries?
The Tribune publishes this reflection because that question has become impossible to avoid. As Fano’s struggle for Amhara survival, dignity and security intensifies, so too does a corrosive war within — waged not on any battlefield but on YouTube channels and social-media timelines, where activists, journalists, intellectuals and rising leaders are discredited long before anyone in government need lift a finger.
The author is careful to draw the distinction the movement so often forgets: between criticism and sabotage, between disagreement and character assassination, between honest rivalry and collective self-destruction. Not every attack is an act of infiltration, and healthy movements need dissent as much as they need discipline. But when a cause devours its own potential leaders as a matter of routine, the failure ceases to be a private grievance. It becomes a political one.
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The Ethiopian Tribune
Editorial Foreword
There is a peculiar cruelty in watching a people turn their sharpest weapons upon themselves. The essay that follows refuses to look away from it.
Professor Girma Berhanu writes as both a student of the affliction and one of the wounded by it. What he offers is not a reaction to a passing controversy but the distillation of several years of ethnographic observation the reckoning of a man who has watched the pile-ons gather, absorbed the insults, and counted the reputations dismantled by people who claim to be defending the very cause they are hollowing out. The question he cannot put down has been pressed on him by a Tigrayan friend and an Oromo colleague alike, and he confesses he has never answered it well: why do those who call themselves Amhara so often turn on other Amhara with a ferocity they rarely muster against their actual adversaries?
The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this reflection because that question has become impossible to avoid. As Fano’s struggle for Amhara survival, dignity and security intensifies, so too does a corrosive war within waged not on any battlefield but on YouTube channels and social-media timelines, where activists, journalists, intellectuals and rising leaders are discredited long before anyone in government need lift a finger.
The author is careful to draw the distinction the movement so often forgets: between criticism and sabotage, between disagreement and character assassination, between honest rivalry and collective self-destruction. Not every attack is an act of infiltration, and healthy movements need dissent as much as they need discipline. But when a cause devours its own potential leaders as a matter of routine, the failure ceases to be a private grievance. It becomes a political one.
We offer no tidy resolution to the question that will not leave him alone manipulation, opportunism, jealousy, inherited trauma, a factionalism baked into the culture. We offer the question itself, sharpened, and the discomfiting possibility it leaves in its wake: that the gravest damage to the Amhara cause may one day prove to have come not from its enemies, but from within.
— The Editors
Synopsis
A first-person reckoning with a habit the Amhara movement has never managed to break: the destruction of its own. The author himself a frequent target of the abuse he describes, asks why Amhara so readily turn on fellow Amhara, and who ultimately benefits when the movement’s leaders, institutions and media are dismantled from within. Drawing a hard line between legitimate criticism and coordinated character assassination, he warns that no cause can build a future while it devours everyone who sees things differently, and pleads for a unity sturdy enough to hold disagreement without letting it curdle into mutual ruin.
The Hardest Question
Why are we destroying our own?
By Girma Berhanu
Professor, Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg
There’s a question I keep getting asked and one I’ve never been able to answer well myself:
Why do people who identify as Amhara so often turn on other Amhara with such ferocity?
A Tigrayan friend put this to me once. I had nothing convincing to say. An Oromo colleague asked the same thing later, and once again I came up short.
Why does it feel like we’re bent on tearing each other apart?
The pattern isn’t subtle. Well-known activists get torn apart publicly on social media. People who are now behind bars faced months, sometimes years, of vilification before they were ever arrested. Promising Amhara leaders new voices and seasoned ones alike get humiliated, discredited, and dragged through the mud as a matter of routine. I won’t name names; the list would go on far too long.
I’ve lived this myself.
Some of the ugliest insults and most brutal attacks I’ve faced haven’t come from political rivals they’ve come from people who claim to be defending the Amhara cause. Social media and YouTube have become powerful weapons, and not only for political advocacy: they’re used just as readily to wreck the reputations of fellow Amhara. Some days it feels like we spend more energy tearing into each other than confronting the people actually responsible for our suffering.
Every Amhara should find that troubling. And it raises questions that are hard to sit with.
Who gains when Amhara leaders are picked apart, one by one?
Who gains when Amhara organizations, media outlets, and civic institutions are hollowed out from the inside?
Who gains when every rising leader is attacked before they’ve had a real chance to contribute anything?
Could it be that some of this is driven by people loyal to the Prosperity Party people working to widen our rifts, weaken Fano, sap the morale of the Amhara population, and ultimately gut the Amhara political cause?
I’m not claiming that anyone who criticizes an Amhara activist or leader is doing the government’s bidding. Real disagreements exist. Fair criticism matters. Personal friction and political differences are bound to happen in any movement.
But at some point, criticism turns into sabotage.
At some point, disagreement turns into character assassination.
And at some point, political rivalry turns into collective self-destruction.
Telling one from the other demands political maturity and moral courage.
While we’re busy tearing each other down, our opponents hardly have to lift a finger. We’re finishing the job for them.
If Fano is truly fighting for the Amhara people’s survival, dignity, and security, then dismantling every Amhara institution, media outlet, intellectual, activist, and rising leader from within isn’t just a private grievance. It’s a serious political failure.
Every healthy movement needs criticism, yes — but it also needs discipline. It needs room for disagreement but also political maturity. It needs accountability, but accountability looks nothing like fabricated accusations, public shaming, and coordinated character assassination.
No movement survives if it wipes out everyone who sees things differently. And no people can build a future if their greatest gift is devouring their own potential leaders.
So I come back to the question that won’t leave me alone:
Why are we so brutal toward our own?
Is it political manipulation? Infiltration? Opportunism? Personal rivalry? Jealousy? Inherited trauma? A factionalism baked into the culture?
Or have we just forgotten that, whatever divides us, we’re ultimately fighting for the same people’s survival and future?
Now is not the moment to destroy one another.
The Amhara people need builders, not wreckers. They need leaders, not cult figures. They need principled criticism, not character assassination. More than anything, they need a unity sturdy enough to hold disagreement without letting it curdle into mutual ruin.
If we don’t learn this now, we may one day realize that the worst damage to our cause never came from our opponents at all.
It came from us.
Girma Berhanu is Professor in the Department of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg. This essay draws on several years of ethnographic observation and documented reflective writing.
