Abiy’s Drones Pouring Hell Over a Divided House
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THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE · EDITOR’S FOREWORD
Abiy’s Drones Pouring Hell Over a Divided House
The Constitution Is Guilty of More Murder — Our Unity and Red-Sea Sovereignty
By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)
When we published Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s twelfth article in September, we described it, as he had, as the close of his series. We were wrong, and gladly so. In a letter to this desk, MGH explains that each time he has set down his pen, events have handed it back to him. This month they did so with unusual force: seven armed movements allied against the government on 20 September, the north returned to war three days later, Mekelle changed hands again, and Ethiopia broke with Asmara and Cairo within a single week. A writer who has spent a year warning that a divided house cannot defend itself could hardly stay silent while the house burned.
This is the thirteenth article, and the first of three that will now conclude the series, appearing on successive Sundays. MGH tells us he may miss a church service or two to meet that schedule. We trust our readers will forgive him, and that his priest will too.
The article begins as a response to Yihenew Ewnetu’s study of drone warfare, Aerial Terror, published in Borkena. MGH welcomes it as the start of a criminal record and then does something rare in our discourse: he treats a fellow writer’s work as a case file in preparation, checking its sources, reconciling its figures and correcting its attributions, so that it can withstand the scrutiny of those paid to discredit it. Readers who care about accountability should read that section closely. It is a lesson in how evidence survives contact with a hostile reader.
“Accountability must fall on persons, not on the nation.â€
But the record, he argues, names the wound and not the disease. His diagnosis is the one he has pressed throughout the series: the 1995 Constitution, which makes ethnicity the title to power, land and security, and so turns every grievance into a war. He is unsparing with everyone. The government bears the heaviest guilt, but the new alliance, the oligarchs, the clergy and above all his own class, the intellectuals, are each held to account.
The Tribune does not endorse every judgement in the essays we publish, and readers will find much here to argue with. That is the purpose of the platform. We publish this article because it insists on two disciplines our public conversation badly needs: that every civilian death be recorded, whoever caused it, and that the argument be about the rule-book rather than the latest ruler.
Synopsis
A criminal record, and the diagnosis behind it. MGH accepts that the drone strikes on markets, schools, clinics and churches are real, and that those which killed civilians are crimes whose chain of command runs to the Prime Minister. The task is to turn the record into a case file fit for international forums, and to ask the question the study does not: why a state turns its air force on its own villages.
The war that returned. He sets out the events of late September and early October, and identifies three new features: the government’s drone monopoly is gone, an internal war became an interstate crisis within days, and the political theatre continued regardless. A victory at Mekelle, he warns, settled nothing in 2020 and will settle nothing now.
From study to case file. The most technical section audits the drone study against its sources, re-anchoring expert quotations, correcting attributions, questioning cost estimates, extending the strike record to include Gedeb, Abbay Giyorgis and Hintalo, and insisting on the correct legal language: war crimes and crimes against humanity, not a genocide charge that cannot yet be proven.
Who benefits, who pays. The benefits of the drone war fall to a governing party, its command and foreign suppliers; the costs fall on the dead, millions of children out of school, destroyed clinics and a collapsing birr. He is candid about what he cannot verify, and about his own position as a diaspora investor.
The road to accountability. Ethiopia is not party to the Rome Statute, so the road to The Hague runs through a Security Council veto or a future government’s consent. Meanwhile, he urges the African Commission, a restored UN commission of experts, universal jurisdiction and targeted sanctions, on the principle that accountability must fall on persons, never on the nation.
The racket’s four estates. Returning to the framework of Cui Bono?, he indicts the political cadre, the oligarch, the pulpit and, at greatest length, the intellectual, whose “five disguises of complicity†keep every argument inside the constitutional ring.
The citizens’ Constitution and the Alliance for Survival. He proposes a constitution that makes the individual Ethiopian sovereign, with administrative boundaries, an indivisible union and one army under civilian and judicial control. He engages Yonas Biru’s assessment of the new alliance, agreeing with its warnings but arguing that a reformed ethnic federation would buy only a decade, and declines to take sides among those he calls ethnic entrepreneurs.
Objections and conclusion. He answers eight objections at full strength, closes with a reading of the comparative literature on ethnofederalism, and ends with an eight-point warning and the question that has run through the whole series: can Ethiopians stop fighting over the country long enough to build it together?
Read the full article here:
next instalment, Medemer, Oromummaa and the Soul of the Nation, follows next Sunday, and the series concludes the week after.
The Editor
I read it and fiund it interesting! The root cause is the constitution and unless it is abolished, the conflict situation remains alive and well.