How regional war, electoral consolidation, diaspora uprising, and conflicting visions of national identity threaten to unravel the Horn of Africa’s oldest continuous state

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune columnist

The crisis engulfing Ethiopia in May 2026 cannot be understood as a collection of discrete problems requiring separate solutions. Rather, what is unfolding is a systemic collapse operating simultaneously across multiple registers:-military, political, ideological, and civilisational. These crises are not incidental to one another; they are structurally interconnected, each amplifying the others in ways that threaten to push Ethiopia past a point of reversibility.

At the military register, Sudan’s accusations regarding drone operations and training camps have created a situation in which border escalation has shifted from possibility to probability. Intelligence agencies across multiple countries now accept as baseline reality that Ethiopian territory is being used to facilitate military operations within Sudan, whether through formal government decision or through tolerated proxy activity. The physical evidence—satellite imagery of the Benishangul-Gumuz camp, recovered drone components, convoy tracking data remains technically ambiguous but strategically significant. Neither country has incentive to permit clarity to emerge. Sudan benefits from internationalism of the conflict. Ethiopia benefits from maintaining plausible deniability. This ambiguity, far from creating space for negotiation, instead creates space for escalation: both sides can claim vindication, both sides can justify further military preparations, and both sides can point to the other’s actions as justification for their own.

More fundamentally, the regional realignment orchestrated by Cairo has positioned Ethiopia at the intersection of pressure from three directions simultaneously. From the west, Sudan’s armed forces, supported by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are consolidating control of the Blue Nile region and preparing for potential cross-border operations. From the north, Eritrea once an ally, now reimagined as an adversary has repositioned itself as a node in a regional coalition opposed to Ethiopian interests, supplied by Iran, financed by Saudi Arabia, and coordinated militarily with Cairo. From the east, Somalia increasingly falls under Egyptian influence, presenting a potential third pressure point. These are not coincidental alignments. They represent a deliberate strategic architecture constructed by Cairo and validated, through its silence or acquiescence, by Washington.

At the political register, the machinery of electoral authoritarianism operates with ruthless efficiency. Opposition leaders are imprisoned on dubious charges. Independent journalists are disappeared from streets and held incommunicado. Media outlets are raided. Civil society organisations face restrictions. All of this occurs whilst the government insists upon its commitment to democratic governance and invites international election observers to witness what is, in reality, a managed electoral process designed to produce predetermined outcomes. The elections scheduled for 1 June 2026 function not as a mechanism for determining government but as a mechanism for legitimising continued Prosperity Party monopoly on power. International observers, faced with a process that is technically procedurally correct but substantively constrained, will likely issue sufficiently ambiguous reports that will allow the government to claim vindication whilst allowing critics to point to the absence of genuine competition. The elections will thus serve simultaneously as a demonstration of commitment to democracy and as a mechanism for consolidating authoritarianism a feat that is possible precisely because electoral procedures and democratic governance have become decoupled from one another.

What makes the political crisis particularly acute is that it is occurring at precisely the moment when the government faces its greatest military vulnerability. The federal army is stretched across multiple insurgencies Oromia, Amhara, parts of Somali region and now potentially facing significant military pressure on the western border with Sudan. The government’s response to this vulnerability is not strategic reassessment but rather tightening of internal control: imprisoning opposition leaders who might challenge resource allocation decisions, silencing media who might scrutinise military spending or strategy, constraining civil society that might ask uncomfortable questions. This is a classic pattern of authoritarian response to weakness: when external pressures increase and internal capacity decreases, the instinct is to consolidate power rather than to build coalition or seek alternative approaches.

At the ideological register, competing visions of what Ethiopia is and what it should become have moved from background context to foreground crisis. The vision articulated by the Prosperity Party centres on technocratic modernisation, pan-Ethiopian identity (as opposed to ethnicity-based federalism), and the pursuit of development through infrastructure projects such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. This vision has real appeal to significant portions of Ethiopia’s urban professional classes and to international investors and development institutions. But it has also generated profound alienation among other constituencies who view the Prosperity Party’s approach as a means of centralising Amhara-dominated control, marginalising regional interests, and undermining federalism as a mechanism for protecting minority and ethno-linguistic rights. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, despite its defeat in the civil war, continues to command loyalty among portions of the Tigray population and operates as a pole of alternative political possibility. The Oromo Liberation Front, though excluded from electoral competition and designated a terrorist organisation, continues to attract support among segments of Oromia’s population. And now, emerging as a new force, are movements seeking to reconnect Ethiopia to visions of earlier historical configurations whether through Tigrayan intellectuals and activists articulating expanded conceptions of Tigrayan or “Geez” civilisational identity, or through Eritrean diaspora movements exploring the possibility of reunification under democratic rather than authoritarian auspices.

The Agaezi National Union Party’s perspective, articulated from within diaspora and intellectual circles, represents one such competing vision. The ANU’s analysis emphasises what it terms the “Geez Civilisation” and argues that the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia constituted a catastrophic historical fragmentation engineered through foreign intervention and facilitated by TPLF-EPLF collaboration that should be characterised as treason against the greater Geez national project. From this perspective, the TPLF’s inclusion of Article 39 rights to self-determination and eventual secession in Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution represents a continuation of the fragmentary logic that enabled Eritrea’s separation. The ANU argues that restoring access to the Red Sea, preventing further territorial fragmentation, and rebuilding a unified Geez civilisation should be central to Ethiopia’s strategic vision. This analysis explicitly rejects what it characterises as “landlocked, periphery and minority secessionist” visions and calls for a “public national constitution (not party or government based memorandum)” that prioritises national unity and territorial integrity over ethno-linguistic federalism.

The significance of this perspective lies not in whether it commands majority support it does not but in the fact that it represents a genuine intellectual and political current within Ethiopian and diaspora circles that is gaining articulation and visibility at precisely the moment when competing visions of Ethiopian identity and statehood are being contested most sharply. That multiple, incompatible visions of what Ethiopia should be, how it should be governed, and what its territorial and civilisational boundaries should be, are all being advocated simultaneously, and that none of these visions appears capable of achieving hegemonic consensus, suggests that the political crisis extends beyond the question of whether the June 1 elections are free and fair to the more fundamental question of what constitutional and political framework Ethiopians themselves desire.

The Eritrean dimension of this crisis presents one of the most historically significant developments in the region in decades, yet it remains poorly understood by international observers and inadequately covered by international media. The realignment of Eritrea from Ethiopian ally to regional adversary has occurred gradually over the past three years, but it has accelerated dramatically in 2025 and 2026. The mechanism of this realignment is straightforward: Eritrea’s government, faced with the delegitimation that peace with Ethiopia produced the loss of the external enemy that had justified internal militarisation and authoritarianism has chosen to reposition itself as a regional player aligned with Egypt and opposed to Ethiopia. This choice has been validated through material incentives: Saudi Arabia has provided financial support, Iran has established supply line access through Eritrean territory, and the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea has signalled American acceptance of this alignment.

Yet simultaneously, and largely invisible to international analysis, the Eritrean diaspora representing approximately one-third of Eritrea’s entire population has mobilised around the Eritrean Blue Revolution, a pro-democracy movement that has begun to explore the possibility of reunification with Ethiopia under a federal democratic arrangement. The symbolism of the blue flag, representing the federation era of 1952 to 1961, is significant: it suggests that a democratic future might involve not continued independence but rather a reimagined federal relationship with Ethiopia, one that would operate under democratic governance rather than under Eritrean or Ethiopian authoritarianism. This possibility, were it to gain traction, would fundamentally alter the regional configuration that both Cairo and Asmara are currently constructing.

The convergence of Ethiopian pro-democracy movements and Eritrean pro-democracy movements in shared space particularly in Addis Ababa, where the January 2026 Eritrean Blue Revolution gathering occurred represents a potential axis of political transformation that both the Prosperity Party and the Eritrean regime have incentive to prevent. That imprisoned Ethiopian opposition leaders and disappeared Ethiopian journalists represent precisely the sort of political constraint that preempts such convergences is not coincidental. The government’s crackdown is not simply about winning the June 1 elections; it is about preventing the emergence of a political configuration that could threaten fundamental regime interests through the combination of internal democratic movements and diaspora mobilisation.

The Tigray situation presents perhaps the most acute existential threat to Ethiopian territorial integrity and government legitimacy. The region that was the epicentre of a civil war killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions remains, eighteen months after the nominal cessation of hostilities, in a state of political limbo. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, unable to obtain a party licence to participate in the June 1 elections, operates in a legal and political grey zone. The population remains largely displaced, unable to return to homes, unable to participate in normal economic activity, unable to engage with the political process. The interim administration that the federal government imposed remains administratively incompetent and politically alienating to large portions of the Tigray population. TPLF intelligence networks, dispersed and degraded but not eliminated, continue to operate. And reports suggest coordination between TPLF elements operating from Sudan and Eritrean military forces through the arrangement variously referred to as “Army 70” or the “Tsimdo arrangement.”

The ANU perspective on Tigray is particularly significant here. The ANU argues that Tigrayan identity should be understood as part of the greater Geez civilisation and that Tigrayan interests should be served through reconnection to a unified, unitary national state rather than through autonomy within a federated framework. From this perspective, the TPLF’s assertion of Tigrayan interests through federalism and ultimately through secession (which the ANU characterises as the logical endpoint of ethno-linguistic federalism) represents a betrayal of the greater Geez civilisational project. This analysis suggests that a reconstituted Ethiopia, rebuilt on the foundation of Geez civilisation and committed to territorial integration and Red Sea access, would better serve both Tigrayan and broader Ethiopian interests than would continued federalism or outright separation.

Whether this vision is appealing to the Tigray population itself remains an open question. What is clear is that the Tigray population is deeply alienated from the federal government, deeply traumatised by the civil war, and increasingly engaged with both internal Tigrayan political movements and external Eritrean political movements through kinship networks and historical connections. The possibility of Tigray mobilising around a pro-TPLF political programme, combined with Eritrean mobilisation around the Blue Revolution, combined with broader Ethiopian pro-democracy mobilisation, presents a scenario in which convergent political movements could simultaneously challenge Prosperity Party dominance and Eritrean regime consolidation. That this possibility seems to preoccupy government strategists is evident from the intensity of the crackdown on political opposition and independent media.

The international context that frames these domestic crises is one in which the United States appears to be accepting, or at least not actively resisting, Egypt’s strategy for regional hegemony. The Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea, justified on Red Sea strategic grounds, implicitly endorses Eritrea’s alignment with Egypt and Sudan against Ethiopia. The absence of American pressure on Egypt to cease its regional encirclement strategy suggests American acquiescence. The failure of the United States to use its leverage with the Ethiopian government to insist upon minimum standards of democratic conduct freedom for opposition leaders, protection for journalists, genuine electoral competition suggests an American calculation that Ethiopia’s strategic position is sufficiently weak that the United States need not invest diplomatic capital in defending Ethiopian democratic governance. From a realpolitik perspective, this may be rational: if Ethiopia is going to be constrained by Egyptian regional hegemony in any case, why expend diplomatic capital fighting battles that cannot be won?

But this calculation appears to discount several possibilities that could alter regional dynamics significantly. The first is the possibility of successful convergence between Ethiopian and Eritrean pro-democracy movements, creating a unified force substantially more difficult for Egypt to manage than either separate movement would be. The second is the possibility that genuine democratic transformation in either Ethiopia or Eritrea could trigger cascading transformation in the other, creating a fundamentally altered regional configuration. The third is the possibility that the very intensity of external pressure on Ethiopia could trigger internal mobilisation in ways that the government cannot control. The fourth is the possibility that the June 1 elections, rather than producing the legitimation that the government seeks, instead produce a legitimacy crisis that international observers cannot finesse through ambiguous language.

The question of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam sits beneath much of this regional tension, though it is rarely explicitly discussed in coverage of the immediate crises. The dam fundamentally alters water flows in the Nile system, reducing downstream availability for Egypt and Sudan. For Egypt particularly, the GERD represents an existential threat to national survival in ways that international law, diplomatic negotiation, and technical solutions have thus far failed to address. Egyptian strategic responses have thus necessarily taken the form of regional containment: preventing Ethiopia from emerging as sufficiently powerful to resist Egyptian pressure. Supporting Sudan’s armed forces, aligning with Eritrea, leveraging Somalia through military presence in AUSSOM, developing partnerships with Saudi Arabia to constrain Iranian influence in the region all of these strategic moves can be understood as components of a broader strategy to ensure that Ethiopia remains constrained and unable to fully exploit the advantages that the GERD provides.

It is from this perspective that the ANU’s emphasis on Red Sea access becomes strategically significant. If Ethiopia were to gain reliable access to Indian Ocean shipping through either Eritrean or Sudanese Red Sea ports, its economic and strategic position would be transformed. This is precisely what Cairo wishes to prevent. Egypt’s regional strategy is thus fundamentally about ensuring that Ethiopia remains landlocked, economically dependent, and politically constrained unable to pursue independent strategic interests, unable to fully exploit the GERD’s potential, unable to emerge as a regional power. The ANU’s vision of a reconstructed Ethiopia with access to the Red Sea through reunification with Eritrea, or through some other territorial reconfiguration, thus represents precisely the strategic nightmare that Egyptian planners most fear.

The convergence of these multiple crises military pressure from Sudan and Eritrea, political crisis manifested in electoral authoritarianism and opposition imprisonment, ideological contestation over what Ethiopia is and should be, the Tigray political limbo, the GERD strategic tension with Egypt, and now the emergence of diaspora movements that could potentially alter regional dynamics creates a situation of genuine systemic instability. None of these crises appears susceptible to solution through the mechanisms currently being pursued. Military preparations in Sudan and Eritrea will not produce Ethiopian capitulation; they will produce Ethiopian military mobilisation and further regional escalation. Electoral management and opposition imprisonment will not produce political legitimacy; they will produce legitimacy deficits and post-election contestation. Continued ambiguity regarding the training camps and drone operations will not produce de-escalation; it will produce further miscalculation as both sides act on differing interpretations of the evidence. The attempt to govern Tigray through interim administration without genuine political incorporation will not produce stability; it will produce continued alienation and continued risk of renewed conflict.

The question that now faces Ethiopia and the international community is whether the convergent nature of these crises will be recognised and addressed holistically or whether, through habit and institutional inertia, the international community will continue to treat them as separate problems a military conflict with Sudan, an electoral process in Ethiopia, a political situation in Tigray each requiring separate solutions and separate diplomatic tracks. If the latter approach continues, then the trajectory toward regional war becomes increasingly probable. If a more holistic approach were pursued one that recognised that military escalation in Sudan/Eritrea, political legitimacy deficits in Ethiopia, diaspora mobilisation for democratic transformation, and competing visions of Ethiopian identity are all components of a single systemic crisis then alternative pathways might become visible.

Such pathways might involve: genuine space for opposition political competition in advance of the June 1 elections; a serious negotiated settlement for Tigray that involves genuine political representation rather than interim administration; a diplomatic track focused on de-escalation in Sudan that does not require Ethiopian capitulation but does require acknowledgment of underlying security concerns; serious engagement with the Eritrean Blue Revolution and with Eritrean pro-democracy movements as legitimate actors in regional politics rather than as marginal movements to be suppressed; and a fundamental reconsideration of the GERD’s regional implications and the development of a framework that addresses Egyptian water security concerns without requiring Ethiopian subordination.

Whether such a holistic approach is possible remains deeply uncertain. The political actors involved—Prosperity Party leadership in Ethiopia, SAF leadership in Sudan, Eritrean regime leadership, Egyptian strategists all have incentive structures that favour continued escalation or continued management of current tensions rather than fundamental transformation. The international community, particularly the Trump administration, appears to have accepted, explicitly or implicitly, an outcome in which Egyptian regional hegemony is established and Ethiopian power is constrained. And the cascading nature of the crises means that each moment that passes without fundamental reorientation increases the probability that some triggering event a military escalation that spirals out of control, an electoral outcome that is contested violently, a Tigray political crisis that reignites will push the region past a point of reversibility.

What remains clear is that the June 1 elections cannot function as a resolution of Ethiopia’s political crisis. Whether they succeed in producing a compliant parliament that legitimises Prosperity Party rule, or whether they fail in this objective and instead produce contested results and post-electoral violence, the underlying problems will remain unaddressed. The military pressure from Sudan and Eritrea will not abate. The diaspora movements for democratic transformation will not disappear. The Tigray political limbo will not resolve itself. The competing visions of Ethiopian identity and national purpose will not achieve consensus. And the regional configuration orchestrated by Cairo, validated by Washington, and now being operationalised by Sudan and Eritrea will continue to constrain Ethiopian options and continue to amplify regional instability.

The tragedy of the moment is not that the outcome is predetermined but that the mechanisms for addressing the systemic nature of the crisis recognition of interconnection, willingness to pursue transformation rather than incremental management, openness to alternative regional configurations appear largely unavailable to the political actors most capable of producing them. Instead, what is likely is a continuation of tactical escalation and crisis management, with periodic moments of acute danger when miscalculation produces unintended military escalation, until some catastrophic event forces a fundamental recalibration of the entire regional system.

Whether that recalibration comes through democratic transformation, military defeat, or some other mechanism remains unknowable. What is knowable is that the current trajectory, if maintained, appears increasingly likely to produce outcomes substantially worse than the crises currently being managed.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Foreword

It is with considerable gratitude that the Ethiopian Tribunepresents the final instalment of Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s four-part analytical series on the Abraham Accords and their implications for Ethiopian sovereignty, geopolitical positioning, and national strategy. Over the past months, this series has established itself as the most rigorous and unflinching examination of the architecture reshaping the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn region combining legal-historical analysis, strategic assessment, and an uncompromising focus on the conditions required for Ethiopian agency.

This final instalment, “Assab, Sovereignty, and the Endgame,”moves beyond architecture into operational reality. It addresses what Parts 1–3 have prepared: the political, military, and diplomatic conditions under which Ethiopian sovereignty is recovered; the enduring legal foundations on which that recovery stands; the closing strategic window that demands urgent action; and the binary choice that now confronts the Ethiopian state and people.

What This Instalment Addresses

Internal Constraints and Public Accountability. Hailu opens with an ultimatum addressed directly to the Ethiopian people and the Ethiopian government emerging from the June 2026 election. Sovereignty is not produced as a by-product of external alignment; it is produced by populations that demand it and discipline themselves to defend it. The “monkey habit of ethnic entrepreneurship” the operational mechanism by which external opportunities are squandered through factional competition remains the binding constraint on Ethiopia’s four singular interests. The path forward runs through civic discipline, not elite pronouncement.

The Legal Foundation: Residual Rights and Continuous Chain. Part 4 reasserts the legal record established in Part 3 with load-bearing clarity: Italy never held absolute sovereignty; Resolution 390(V) explicitly preserved Ethiopian sea access irrespective of Eritrean political status; the OAU’s uti possidetis principle, applied to its founding moment with Eritrea as Ethiopian territory, locks Eritrea in as Ethiopian territory; the 1993 abandonment was performed ultra vires by an unmandated transitional government; and the Algiers Agreement, by addressing only the land boundary, preserves rather than extinguishes Ethiopian residual rights.

The Government Policy Track: Alignment and Divergence. Hailu conducts a rigorous reading of four substantial policy-track articles published in the Horn Review between November 2025 and April 2026 the most extensive Ethiopian articulation of maritime sovereignty since 1991. He identifies six critical strengths: maritime recovery is reframed as a state imperative; the legal record on Italy’s non-sovereignty is established with rigour; Resolution 390(V)’s protective function is correctly characterised; the 1962 incorporation is defended as restoration rather than annexation; the 1993 referendum is named for its constitutional illegitimacy; and the “depoliticisation” of landlockedness is correctly diagnosed. He simultaneously identifies four critical weaknesses: the AU’s complicity in 1993 goes unnamed; settlement options are hedged toward conciliation where assertion is required; Eritrean independence is accepted as settled while challenging only its conditions; and Saudi engagement reproduces a supplicatory frame. The interpretation is stark: if the government fails to extend the policy track beyond these stops-short, the inference becomes unavoidable that the government may not have been serious about recovering sovereign sea access in the first place.

The Mature Strategy: Political, Diplomatic, and Military Tracks. Hailu then presents the strategic synthesis required across three concurrent tracks. Politically: a civic mandate anchored across multiple regional constituencies and won on a programmatic platform that includes explicit positions on the four singular interests, giving the resulting government legitimacy to pursue sovereign sea access as a national project. 

Diplomatically: offence, not defence converting the Hexagon’s southern arc into a central strategic partnership; engaging bridge actors from positions of leverage rather than supplication; and confronting the AU and UN multilateral forums with the legal record of Italian-claim contingency, OAU complicity in 1993, and the ultra vires character of the TPLF-led abandonment. Militarily: credible deterrence and prepared option conventional capability, asymmetric capability, and doctrinal preparation sufficient to seize and hold the Doumeira–Beilul corridor through the “attack, hold, and negotiate” formula.

The Convergence Point: 2027–28. The military strategist’s calendar (the closing window) and the politician’s calendar (the construction curve of civic compact, macroeconomic depth, and global-capital integration) converge at 2027–28. At that point, if political, diplomatic, and military preparation is sustained, Asmara faces a choice between negotiated settlement that preserves Eritrean political existence on terms that include Ethiopian sovereign access, or confrontation that the strategist has prepared to win. This is the moment of maximum Ethiopian leverage.

Eritrea’s Path: Coexistence or Parasitism. Hailu addresses the Eritrean question with historical honesty and strategic clarity. Both populations were brutalised; the 1993 separation was not popular consent but rebel-group imposition; Eritrea’s current garrison-state offers its own population no future. The post-operation settlement envisaged preserves Eritrean separate political existence while establishing economic relationship with Ethiopia that addresses Eritrea’s developmental crisis. The objective is sovereign Ethiopian access to the sea alongside sovereign Eritrean access both nations benefiting from the recovery of a coastline that was never legitimately surrendered.

The Binary Choice. The instalment concludes with the operative ultimatum: if the conditions are met civic mandate, sustained diplomatic offence, military preparation, macroeconomic stabilisation, and leverage-based engagement with regional partners then sovereignty is recovered and the four singular interests become attainable. If any condition is abandoned, the geopolitical architecture amplifies the internal fractures; GERD becomes a factional prize; the coastline remains permanently lost; and Ethiopia’s demographic trajectory produces fragmented territory governed by competing oligarchies that external patrons exploit. The choice is binary and operational: bananas for the few and dismemberment for the many, or sovereignty for the nation and prosperity for the generations that follow.

The Election Analysis Ahead

Dr. Hailu has indicated his intention to return with a companion article examining the June 2026 election as the constitutional moment at which the political track is operationalised. That analysis examining the election’s conduct, possible outcomes, the programmatic test for every candidate, and the meaning of a Pan-Ethiopian mandate promises to be as rigorous and uncompromising as the series that precedes it. The Tribune looks forward to bringing that perspective to its readers with the same analytical independence and strategic clarity that has defined this four-part examination.

This series stands as the most comprehensive independent analysis of Ethiopian sovereignty, Horn of Africa geopolitics, and the Abraham Accords architecture available to English-language readers. It is offered to the Ethiopian public and to scholars of the region as a contribution to the urgent and necessary conversation about what sovereignty means, what conditions make it attainable, and what price is paid when it is abandoned for the comfort of dependency.

—The Editors —

Read the Full Article

Part 4/4: Assab, Sovereignty, and the Endgame

Available as PDF via the link below

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

How South Africa Forgot Those Who Fought for Its Freedom

By E. Frashie Ethiopian Tribune columnist

I. Introduction: A Nation Haunted by Historical Amnesia

South Africa today is witnessing a meticulously organised resurgence of xenophobic violence. The evidence is chilling in its precision.

At least five Ethiopians have been killed in Johannesburg in recent weeks, with four of the victims shot within 48 hours. On one occasion, three were shot inside a McDonald’s in the Johannesburg Central Business District, victims between 30 and 45 years of age who were having breakfast when the gunman entered and opened fire. CCTV footage reveals execution-style shootings. Police investigations stall. Vulnerable communities live in persistent fear.

Yet this same nation once depended fundamentally on the solidarity, sacrifice, and military expertise of Africans beyond its borders none more symbolically powerful than Ethiopia, the country that trained Nelson Mandela and sheltered the ANC’s armed struggle throughout its most perilous decades.

Among those who shaped that history stands a man whose contributions to South Africa’s liberation should be carved into the moral foundation of the post-apartheid state: Asnakew Sisay Tegegne — known to liberation fighters as ‘The General.’ Today, Ethiopians who might have looked to this legacy for protection are instead being hunted on the streets of Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. This is not merely a security crisis. It is a profound betrayal of history.

II. The Forgotten Ethiopian Who Trained the ANC

Born in 1954 in Azezo, Gondar, Asnakew Sisay grew up in a household steeped in patriotism and Pan-African conviction. His father, Shambel Sisay Tegegne, was a decorated officer under Emperor Haile Selassie. His mother was known for community service and moral leadership. From this soil emerged a young man who believed that African liberation was indivisible — not a series of isolated national struggles, but a unified continental imperative.

The Making of a Commando

• Military and intelligence training

• Strategic studies in guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency

• Hand-to-hand combat instruction

• Resistance organising and clandestine operations

• Years of political imprisonment as a teenager for anti-colonial activism

By the late 1970s, as liberation movements across southern Africa intensified their campaigns, he was selected to train liberation fighters from across the continent a position of extraordinary responsibility and trust.

Training the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe Fighters

In Zambia, at military camps including the Gondar Military Camp, Asnakew became one of the key instructors for:

• Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC

• SWAPO fighters from Namibia

• Southern Sudanese liberation groups

• Somali resistance units

He trained more than 2,000 fighters in close-quarters combat, topography and infiltration techniques, survival skills, sabotage methodology, and political education the ideological foundation without which armed struggle becomes mere violence.

He worked closely with Chris Hani, who served as chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe and was tasked to establish ANC military bases in Tanzania and Zambia during the liberation struggle. To the fighters, Asnakew became known simply as ‘The General.’ To Latin American comrades operating in southern Africa, he was ‘Comandante.’ To Ethiopia, he remained a son carrying the torch of Pan-Africanism into exile.

III. Ethiopia’s Gift to South Africa Now Erased from Memory

When Mandela was released in 1990 and apartheid formally collapsed in 1994, Asnakew returned home. He never sought international acclaim. He never demanded public recognition or monuments. He continued serving Ethiopia in civil society, education, and national development work, operating with the quiet dignity characteristic of those who fought not for glory but for principle.

But South Africa’s political memory grew selective.

Today, many South Africans particularly the youth mobilised by contemporary xenophobic movements — do not know:

• That Mandela received military and political training in Ethiopia

• That Ethiopian officers shaped the ANC’s military doctrine and operational strategy

• That Ethiopia sheltered, armed, fed, and educated anti-apartheid fighters for three decades

• That Ethiopian taxpayers funded liberation movements long before the international community offered support

This amnesia is not accidental. It is politically convenient for those who wish to scapegoat immigrants without acknowledging the continent’s historical bonds of solidarity.

IV. The Rise of Black Apartheid: Vigilantism Repackaged as Populism

In the vacuum created by economic despair and political fragmentation, a new class of populist actors has emerged. Operation Dudula, a vigilante group that has evolved into a political party, mobilises its base around the slogan ‘Put South Africa First,’ using rhetoric that blames migrants for unemployment, crime, and service delivery failures.

Operation Dudula morphed from an online social media campaign propelled by the #PutSouthAfricansFirst hashtag into a xenophobic movement with real-world consequences. The digital-to-physical pipeline is direct: online incitement produces offline violence.

These populist actors do not speak of Ethiopia’s sacrifice. They do not acknowledge Mandela’s training in Addis Ababa. They do not invoke the memory of Asnakew Sisay. Instead, they tell economically desperate South Africans:

• “Foreigners are taking your jobs.”

• “Immigrants are criminals and drug dealers.”

• “We must reclaim our communities from outsiders.”

This rhetoric is carefully calibrated. It does not explicitly call for murder — but it creates what activists call ’emotional permission’ for violence to flourish. It normalises the idea that foreigners are legitimate targets for vigilante action.

The Political and Social Media Infrastructure of Violence

According to Witwatersrand University’s Xenowatch, xenophobic attacks resulted in 669 deaths, 5,310 looted shops, and 127,572 displacements between 1994 and March 2024. The rate of incidents has accelerated sharply in recent months.

According to Human Rights Watch, there were 59 reported incidents of xenophobic discrimination in 2024 and 2,946 individuals displaced as a result. But these figures capture only reported incidents. The true toll is substantially higher, as many attacks go undocumented, victims lack access to reporting mechanisms, and police investigations are routinely stalled or discontinued.

Social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube have failed to adequately moderate xenophobic hate speech, with campaigns like Operation Dudula first emerging online before catalysing real-world outbreaks of violent protests, vigilantism, arson, and murder.

V. The Human Cost: Ethiopians Under Fire Voices from the Community

The Recent Wave of Killings

An estimated 500,000 Ethiopians live in South Africa. In recent weeks, this population has experienced what they describe as a coordinated campaign of targeted violence.

In Johannesburg alone:

• Ethiopians have been shot in restaurants whilst having breakfast

• Executed on sidewalks in broad daylight

• Killed in their shops during business hours

• Targeted for extortion by vigilante groups

• Left largely unprotected by law enforcement

In Durban, six people of Ethiopian origin were killed in alleged xenophobic attacks over a single week, with victims killed in separate incidents, mostly during daylight hours, by South African nationals. One victim was doused in kerosene and set alight.

Victim Testimony and Community Voices

Yonas Fikru, an Ethiopian businessman in Durban, said he knew all six victims all men in their twenties who used to frequent his shop. He described attackers who “just come, steal and attack. They killed them without stealing anything from them. They just came and killed them.”

Tegegne Aboye, another member of the Ethiopian community in Durban, said locals have attempted multiple times to report incidents to police but “it always falls on deaf ears.” He expressed despair: “We see our brothers getting killed, doused with a three-litre jerrican of kerosene, and no one is helping us when this happens. We haven’t seen anyone sticking up for Ethiopian citizens here.”

The silence from law enforcement compounds the trauma. The Ethiopian Embassy in Pretoria released a statement advising Ethiopians to document and report incidents of violence and attack, and said it has requested the South African government to provide security protections to Ethiopians living in the country and to investigate the recent killings. But diplomatic statements, whilst necessary, cannot substitute for state protection.

School Violence and Children at Risk

The violence has extended into educational spaces. Members of Operation Dudula have stormed schools to forcefully eject children of other African nationals and block them from attending classes. Disturbing anti-immigrant videos circulating on social media show chaotic scenes of fear and tension, with schoolchildren in uniform seen running for safety as confusion rises. In one widely circulated clip, a visibly distressed child could be heard crying as his mother attempted to calm him, with her voice laced with fear and confusion. Moments later, gunshots rang out, sending pupils and bystanders scrambling.

Children some as young as five or six are now experiencing xenophobic violence as a routine feature of their schooling.

The Silence and Inaction of State Institutions

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has expressed grave concern over recent incidents of xenophobic violence perpetrated against nationals of other African countries in South Africa, noting a pattern that includes the 1998 killing of three foreign nationals in Johannesburg, the August 2000 killings in Cape Town, the May 2008 nationwide attacks resulting in over 60 deaths, 1,700 injuries and 100,000 displacements, and ongoing incidents in the 2020s linked to groups such as Operation Dudula.

This is not a new problem. It is a recurring crisis to which the South African state has consistently failed to respond with adequate investigation, prosecution, or prevention.

VI. The Moral Contradiction: Rights Preacher, Injustice Practitioner

South Africa positions itself as a global defender of human rights and continental peacemaker. The country has filed cases at the International Court of Justice. Its government issues statements condemning injustices in other nations. It presents itself as a beacon of post-conflict reconciliation and constitutional democracy.

But inside its own borders:

• Migrants are hunted with impunity

• Refugees are scapegoated for systemic economic failure

• African solidarity the very principle that sustained the anti-apartheid struggle is treated as a quaint historical artifact

• State institutions fail to investigate, prosecute, or prevent organised violence against vulnerable populations

This contradiction is not sustainable. A nation cannot preach justice abroad whilst tolerating systematic injustice at home without fundamentally compromising its moral authority.

VII. Accountability and Justice Denied

In November 2025, a South African High Court judgment confirmed that Operation Dudula perpetrated intimidation, harassment, incitement to violence and hate speech on grounds of nationality, social origin or ethnicity. The court interdicted Operation Dudula and its leaders from demanding that any private person produce identity documents to demonstrate their right to be in South Africa, and from making public statements on social media platforms that constitute hate speech.

This is welcome. But a court order alone does not stop violence. Implementation and enforcement remain uncertain. Advocacy groups note that whilst police have made arrests, those who sought to inflame tensions on social media and the masterminds remain largely untouched. The infrastructure of incitement persists.

VIII. Conclusion: Remembering “The General” in a Time of Forgetting

Asnakew Sisay Tegegne represents the best of Ethiopia’s Pan-African legacy a man who risked his freedom, his safety, and his life so that South Africans could one day live free from the terror of apartheid. He asked for nothing in return except acknowledgment that African liberation is a shared struggle, and that the bonds forged in struggle impose obligations.

Today, Ethiopians in South Africa are being killed in the very country he helped liberate. They are being killed by their neighbours. They are being killed with impunity. They are being killed whilst a state with a constitution that explicitly protects the rights of non-citizens fails to protect them.

This is not merely a tragedy. It is a betrayal of history, of Pan-Africanism, of the very principles that animated the anti-apartheid struggle.

If South Africa wants to genuinely honour its liberation struggle, it must:

• Protect African migrants and refugees with the full force of law

• Conduct prompt, thorough, and impartial investigations into all reported incidents of violence

• Identify, prosecute, and sanction all perpetrators, including those who organise or incite violence

• Reject populist scapegoating and address the real drivers of unemployment and inequality through structural economic reform

• Teach its youth particularly those born after 1994 the true history of African solidarity and continental struggle

• Implement the court order against Operation Dudula with rigour and consistency

And Ethiopia as a nation, as a government, as a diaspora community must reclaim its narrative. It must remind the continent that its sons and daughters, like Asnakew Sisay, paid the price for Africa’s freedom. It must demand that South Africa honour its commitments to human rights and African brotherhood not merely in rhetoric, but in practice.

History remembers those who fought for justice. It must also remember and condemn those who are dying because justice has been forgotten.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL FORWARD

In the arc of modern Ethiopian politics, a pattern emerges with unsettling consistency: the language of democracy deployed to mask its systematic hollowing. From the Derg’s ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ through the EPRDF’s carefully constructed ‘revolutionary democracy’ to the present era of purported liberalisation under Abiy Ahmed, the gap between nominal democratic form and authoritarian substance has only widened.

What makes this trajectory instructive—indeed, urgent—is not merely the Ethiopian example. Professor Girma Berhanu’s examination of democratic fragility and fascistic drift offers a sobering anatomy of how political systems ostensibly founded on popular sovereignty can be quietly remade from within. His analysis, grounded in the historical lessons of Weimar and attentive to contemporary risks in ostensibly liberal democracies, poses questions that demand our attention: How do democratic institutions erode? What conditions permit authoritarian actors to weaponise democratic freedoms? And critically, what vigilance do societies require to prevent such capture?

The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this essay as a contribution to precisely this kind of vigilance. Berhanu reminds us that democracy is not self-sustaining; it is a deliberately maintained practice, constantly imperilled by economic dislocation, institutional weakness, and the calculated exploitation of democratic freedoms by those hostile to democratic limits. The warning is not apocalyptic but pragmatic: recognise the mechanisms. Understand the patterns. Act to preserve the guardrails.

For Ethiopian readers especially, the stakes are familiar. We know what the erosion of democratic norms looks like. The task ahead is building a political culture where neither the language nor the substance of democracy can be so carelessly discarded.

—The Editors—

When Democracy Weakens: Fragile Political Cultures and Fascistic Drift

By Girma Berhanu

Professor, Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg

Introduction

The three political regimes I am familiar with in Ethiopia have all used the term “democracy” in their official names or ideological framing. However, in each case, the reality has differed significantly from the label.

The military regime known as the Derg adopted the name People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Despite including the word “democratic,” it was in practice a one-party authoritarian state. There were no free elections, and the government relied heavily on repression, including the period known as the Red Terror. The name suggested democracy, but the system clearly was not.

During the EPRDF era (1991–2019), the ruling coalition introduced what it called “revolutionary democracy.” Elections were held and multiple political parties formally existed. However, one coalition dominated political life for decades, whilst opposition groups and independent media faced significant restrictions. Ethiopia was officially a federal parliamentary republic, with a powerful Prime Minister and a largely ceremonial President. In practice, however, power was highly centralised.

This period also introduced an ethnic federal system that divided the country into regions based on ethnolinguistic identity. Critics argue that this structure entrenched divisions and created a hierarchy in governance, with certain groups holding disproportionate political influence.

In the recent period (2019–present) under Abiy Ahmed, initial reforms appeared to expand political freedoms. However, the situation has since deteriorated. The government has been involved in multiple internal conflicts, including wars affecting Tigrayan and Amhara populations. Thousands of intellectuals, activists, and political opponents have reportedly been imprisoned, raising serious concerns about human rights and political freedoms. Across all three periods, the regimes did not genuinely function as democracies, despite using democratic language or structures. This highlights a broader issue: in politics, labels do not necessarily reflect reality. When the term “democracy” is repeatedly used without corresponding democratic practice, it risks losing its meaning and credibility. This raises an important question: is democracy itself becoming less relevant, or are political systems increasingly exploiting its language whilst undermining its substance?

Applying “How Fascism Works” to Contemporary Sweden: The Sweden Democrats in Focus

Reading How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley has deepened my concern about how fascism can take root within democratic systems. In the book, Stanley identifies ten key pillars that enable authoritarian movements to thrive, often by dividing societies into “us” versus “them.” His analysis feels especially relevant today, as it highlights how fragile democratic cultures can become when these tactics go unrecognised.

Stanley draws clear parallels between historical fascist movements and contemporary political trends, demonstrating that these strategies are not relics of the past. Instead, they are being repurposed and adapted within modern democracies. He stresses the importance of recognising these patterns early in order to resist their influence and protect democratic institutions.

By understanding how fascism operates—through division, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth—individuals and societies are better equipped to defend civil rights and democratic values. Stanley’s work is therefore not only a critical examination of history but also a timely warning and a call to vigilance in the present.

Developments in countries such as the United States, Hungary, and India are often cited by scholars and commentators as warning signs of democratic backsliding, where institutions, norms, or freedoms face increasing pressure. The United States, long seen as a leading democratic power and global actor, is not immune to these concerns. Debates about polarisation, institutional trust, and the resilience of democratic norms raise important questions about its future direction.

Rather than suggesting that democracy is disappearing, these developments point to how it can be strained, contested, and reshaped. This makes the need for awareness, accountability, and civic engagement all the more urgent.

Even here at home in Sweden, I worry about the rise of the Sweden Democrats (SD). The party has documented roots in extremist milieus, including skinhead culture and strongly anti-immigrant rhetoric. According to the party’s own historical review (often referred to as a “white paper”), some of its early figures had connections to nationalist and far-right movements.

When Jimmie Åkesson, the current party leader, joined in the mid-1990s, SD was described as carrying a heavy ideological legacy. The historian Tony Gustafsson characterises the party’s early environment as a mix of nationalist, xenophobic, and, at times, openly extremist ideas. He also links the party’s origins to Bevara Sverige Svenskt (BSS), which has been described by researchers as a racist and far-right campaign organisation. Many of the party’s early representatives had direct or indirect ties to BSS, and some were associated with neo-fascist or National Socialist movements.

In its early years, the party was also marked by incidents involving Holocaust denial, antisemitic rhetoric, and hostile portrayals of immigrants and refugees. Over time, SD has sought to distance itself from these elements and rebrand its image, but debates continue about how to interpret its history and current political direction. With elections approaching in Sweden, there is concern amongst some observers that SD could make significant gains. This moment is seen by many as an important test for the country’s political landscape. Regardless of political position, it underscores the importance of public engagement, critical discussion, and vigilance in safeguarding democratic values.

What is Democracy?

Until I moved to Sweden, I thought democracy was mainly about elections and majority rule. It took me several years to grasp its broader conceptual foundations, as well as the importance of institutions and their real-world implications. Over time, I spoke with many people—especially young people I worked with on school assignments—about how they understand democracy. Most described it in terms of majority rule and free elections; a few mentioned freedom of speech. This pattern revealed something important: one of the most neglected areas, both in education and in public discourse, is a deeper understanding of democracy—what it actually entails and how it can be sustained. Many respondents could name voting as a core feature, but were less able to explain how a functioning democracy operates in practice or to articulate its underlying principles. A fuller picture includes several interdependent elements: free and fair elections; the rule of law, where everyone—including those in power—is bound by the same legal framework; the protection of fundamental rights such as speech, press, and religion; mechanisms of accountability that hold leaders responsible; and participation that extends beyond elections, including civic engagement and public deliberation. Democracy is not only a system of governance; it is also a set of values. It rests on the belief that people should have a meaningful say in decisions that affect their lives, that power must be limited and shared, and that disagreement is not a threat but a condition of political life—one that requires negotiation and compromise. The reality, however, is that these principles are neither automatic nor self-sustaining. They depend on institutions that function effectively and on citizens who understand, value, and actively uphold them.

I have often debated with myself whether democracy can become fertile ground for fascistic tendencies. Some argue that democracy itself does not inherently produce fascism, but that under certain conditions it can be weakened and exploited, allowing authoritarian movements to rise. Whilst this is a thoughtful distinction, I still find it somewhat unsatisfying when I look at real-world developments.

Observing political dynamics in the United States, I feel a growing concern about how individuals with significant financial resources, combined with simple and emotionally powerful political messaging, can rise to power and shape policies with far-reaching consequences. The influence of money, media, and rhetoric can sometimes overshadow more complex and thoughtful political debate. For example, there have been reports that Donald Trump has actively engaged with oil industry leaders and encouraged investment aligned with his political agenda. In the case of Venezuela, he has promoted the idea of major U.S. oil companies investing heavily in the country’s oil infrastructure, even promising favourable conditions and security for such investments. At the same time, U.S. policy towards countries like Iran has also been closely tied to energy strategy and geopolitical interests, including sanctions and control over oil flows. However, these developments are not solely about individual motives or simple cause-and-effect relationships. They reflect a more complex system where economic interests, geopolitical strategy, and domestic politics intersect.

What remains troubling is how easily democratic systems can be influenced by wealth, simplified narratives, and polarisation. When political discourse becomes dominated by fear, identity, or economic promises to powerful groups, it risks sidelining broader societal interests—especially those of vulnerable populations. This raises a difficult but important question: how can democratic societies ensure that political power serves the public good rather than narrow interests? If these trends continue unchecked, democracy may not collapse outright, but it can gradually be reshaped in ways that undermine its core principles.

Take the Weimar Republic as a classic example. It was a democratic system, yet it collapsed and gave way to Nazism under Adolf Hitler. This did not happen because democracy “naturally becomes fascist,” but because of a convergence of pressures: severe economic shocks such as the Great Depression, chronic political fragmentation and instability, weak institutional safeguards, and a widespread loss of trust in democratic governance. Anti-democratic actors also exploited democratic procedures—elections and constitutional appointments—to gain power from within. A similar dynamic can be seen in the rise of Benito Mussolini, who came to power through a mix of political manoeuvring and elite backing within a formally constitutional framework.

What is going on, then? Democracy institutionalises participation and competition, which means extremist movements can operate within it. When institutions are fragile or public trust erodes, such movements can win power through legal means and then begin dismantling democratic constraints from the inside. This dynamic is often described as democratic backsliding or authoritarian capture.

Thinkers have long warned about these vulnerabilities. Alexis de Tocqueville cautioned that democracies could drift towards forms of “soft despotism,” where popular sovereignty gradually yields to centralised authority claiming to act in the people’s name. Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of totalitarianism, highlighted how mass atomisation and the breakdown of intermediary institutions can create fertile ground for such movements. More recently, Jason Stanley argues in How Fascism Works (2020) that illiberal actors strategically exploit democratic freedoms—especially freedom of expression—to erode pluralism and normalise exclusionary politics.

Still, the idea that democracy can fail and be replaced by fascism—but does not inherently produce it—can feel unsatisfying. It may seem, especially when looking at historical and contemporary examples, that the very openness of democracy creates vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The challenge, then, is not to see democracy as inevitably leading to fascism, but to recognise that without strong institutions, civic awareness, and accountability, it can become fragile enough to be turned against itself.

Strong Institutions, Public Trust, and Respect for Democratic Norms

If democracy is often seen as the fairest and most legitimate form of government—giving citizens the power to choose their leaders and shape their societies—how can it be defended so that it is not undermined by forces that seek to destroy it from within? History shows that public faith in democratic governance can weaken during times of severe economic crisis. Periods marked by hyperinflation, widespread hardship, and social disillusionment often lead people to view democratic systems as ineffective and incapable of addressing their needs. In such conditions, political instability creates openings for more extreme movements.

In the Weimar Republic, this dynamic was clearly visible. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained support by exploiting fear, frustration, and uncertainty. Through persuasive propaganda, appeals to nationalism, and promises of renewal, Hitler was able to build a broad base of support. Over time, democratic institutions were gradually dismantled, and Germany transitioned into a totalitarian regime. This case illustrates how democracy can be undermined not only by external threats, but also through internal erosion. When trust declines, institutions weaken, and political actors exploit divisions, the system can begin to turn against itself. Some observers see elements of this pattern in contemporary politics, including in the United States, whilst recognising that such risks can emerge in many different contexts. The lesson is not that democracy inevitably fails, but that it requires constant protection—through strong institutions, an informed public, and a commitment to democratic norms—to withstand pressures from within.

To help address vulnerabilities within democratic systems and demonstrate resilience, courts, state officials, and other institutions must remain prepared at all times to uphold the rule of law and ensure the peaceful transfer of power through fair elections. At the same time, mass media—and increasingly digital technologies—play a powerful role in shaping public opinion and influencing electoral outcomes, sometimes in ways that contribute to confusion, polarisation, or misinformation. To safeguard democracy, societies need to build strong democratic traditions, robust institutional checks and balances, and a deeply embedded culture of constitutionalism and civic norms. These factors together can help prevent democratic breakdown.

These examples highlight a central lesson: democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires active participation, trust in institutions, and a shared commitment to rules and norms. When economic hardship, political polarisation, or misinformation weaken these foundations, democratic systems become more vulnerable to internal stress and exploitation.

In conclusion, democracy remains one of the most effective systems for representing the will of the people, but it is not without risk. The historical experience of Germany and the contemporary challenges seen in many democracies today demonstrate that democratic systems must be continuously protected and strengthened. Rather than assuming democracy will endure on its own, societies must recognise its fragility and actively work to preserve it.

—

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Education at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Education and Special Education.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

EDITOR’S FORWARD: PART 3 — ETHIOPIA’S INTERNAL CONSTRAINT

The third instalment of Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s analysis arrives at the moment when Ethiopia’s strategic arithmetic becomes most urgent and most brutal. Parts 1 and 2 traced the architecture that has created, paradoxically, the most favourable external environment Ethiopia has faced in its modern history—the convergence of Israeli technology, Emirati capital, American security infrastructure, and demographic weight at a single strategic node. Yet that architecture, Hailu argues, can only be converted to national gain by a state capable of negotiating as a unit. A fractured Ethiopia finds in that same architecture the most efficient mechanism for dismemberment that the country has yet faced.

This instalment turns inward, but not to domestic policy abstracted from strategy. It does the opposite: it demonstrates that the internal and external are inseparable. The ethnic federalism that converts diversity into zero-sum bargaining, the personalist governance that substitutes leadership for institutions, the patronage networks that convert national assets into factional prizes, these are not merely unjust. They are the fracture lines through which external competitors penetrate Ethiopian strategic space. Every day that ethnic entrepreneurs mobilise constituencies against one another, they are simultaneously constructing the entry points for Cairo’s encirclement, for proxy cultivation, for the dismemberment that begins not with invasion but with the subtle repositioning of factional clients.

The author’s central concept the “monkey habit of ethnic entrepreneurship” will strike some as provocative. It should. It is meant to. The term names a specific political economic phenomenon with identifiable actors, predictable behaviours, and measurable costs. It is not a metaphor for poor manners but an operational mechanism: the conversion of identity into a tradable asset, the manufacture of grievance, the cultivation of victimhood narratives that locate every problem outside the constituency and every solution within the entrepreneur’s gift. The author demonstrates that ethnic entrepreneurs from rival groups are functionally allies, dependent on each other for the perpetuation of the inter-group mistrust from which they profit. They constitute a guild.

The analysis extends to the June 2026 election as a constitutional moment. This is not an endorsement of any candidate or party, nor is it naïve about the constraints under which the vote will be held. It is instead a recognition that elections offer something that no other mechanism currently available to Ethiopians provides: a moment in which voters can articulate, through their choices, whether the next political phase will be organised around programmes or around identities. The choice is not between Abiy Ahmed and an imagined optimum but between coalitions whose composition and mandate will determine whether the policies pursued afterward can be Pan-Ethiopian or will revert to ethnic-bargained variants of the same failed dispensation.

The article grapples unflinchingly with the Red Sea sovereignty question tracing the legal chain from Wuchale through Resolution 390(V), documenting the AU’s foundational hypocrisy, exposing the constitutional irregularity of the 1993 Eritrean referendum and the 2000 Algiers Agreement. It does so not as an exercise in historical recrimination but as the foundation for a strategic argument: that the window for recovering sovereign maritime access remains open while Egypt’s encirclement is still consolidating, and that the geopolitical moment that makes such recovery conceivable will not remain open indefinitely. The analysis of “attack, hold, and negotiate” as a strategic option is presented with equal weight to the political preconditions that make such an option survivable. The reconciliation lies in timing: the strategist’s calendar (dictated by deteriorating military balance) and the politician’s calendar (dictated by civic consolidation requirements) converge around 2027–28.

Yet the core argument remains domestic. A country whose internal politics is organised on ethnic lines cannot conduct a war of recovery that requires the cohesion of all major constituencies. Tigrayans will not fight for an Oromo-coded leadership’s coastline; Amhara will not accept casualties for a state perceived as having abandoned them; Oromo will not mobilise enthusiastically for an objective they perceive as Pan-Ethiopian but excluding their concerns. The military operation might succeed at the front; it would lose at home. This is why internal unity is not sentimental aspiration but the binding constraint on every external objective.

The article’s treatment of Abiy Ahmed as a political actor neither saint nor villain but a figure whose trajectory reveals the operational mechanics of the monkey habit will be controversial. The argument is narrower and more strategic than either supporters or critics commonly advance: in a country whose institutional infrastructure remains weak, whose opposition parties remain organisationally thin, whose civic ecosystem is still recovering from constraint and war, the choice presented to Ethiopians is not between Abiy and a robust civic alternative. It is between Abiy and what would actually emerge if he were defeated which, on present evidence, is not a Pan-Ethiopian civic coalition but a fragmentation contest among ethnic-entrepreneur factions whose combined effect would be to deliver to the balancing coalition (Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Somalia) precisely the porosity it is working to engineer. The argument for engaging Abiy strategically rests on the absence of a credible alternative; the argument against permitting any leader unconditional power rests on the institutional discipline that civic citizenship requires.

The economic dimensions Birr depreciation, foreign-exchange scarcity, inflation, the compression of household real incomes receive analysis not as technical problems to be solved by experts but as the medium through which political outcomes are produced. Economic discontent is being channelled through ethnic categories. A young Amhara man unable to find work interprets his predicament as Oromo capture of the federal economy. A young Oromo man unable to find work interprets the same condition as elite betrayal of his constituency. A Tigrayan trader unable to access foreign exchange interprets the situation as deliberate federal punishment. These interpretations are not wholly fabricated; each contains elements of truth. But all of them mistake structural macroeconomic conditions for ethnic conspiracy, and ethnic entrepreneurs profit from the conversion.

The author’s fear, articulated in his transmission note, deserves reflection. He fears that the nation is not prepared to stave off the storms hurling upon it. That fear is justified. The encirclement is not theoretical 15,000 Egyptian troops in Somalia, military access at Assab and Doraleh, the Sunni leadership contest pressing Ethiopia’s Muslim communities as one more potential fracture line, Eritrea’s emergence from isolation. The window is closing. Whether Ethiopians recognise it and act on it is the question on which everything turns.

This instalment represents the most rigorous analysis of Ethiopia’s internal constraint yet to appear in these pages. It will anger some. It will clarify for others. It will provide to those Ethiopians still persuaded that their country’s future is worth fighting for the intellectual foundation on which that fight must rest: that a unified Ethiopia pursuing civic citizenship is not a luxury reform to be deferred until conditions are easier, but the most urgent strategic action available to Ethiopians today. The window for civic consolidation is open now because the external environment is favourable. It will close when one or more external actors decides that a fragmented Ethiopia serves its interests better than a unified one.

Part 4 will address the decisive question: Assab, the sovereign coastline, and the endgame examined as a sovereignty-and-deterrence problem that demands both international mediation and domestic civic consolidation.

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

Part 3 examines the internal dynamics that make institutional coherence possible or impossible.

Author: Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)
Date: 26 April 2026
Series: The Abraham Accords — Part 3 of 4
Topic: Competition and Permissive Disorder in the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn

The Editor
Ethiopian Tribune
April 26, 2026

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

1

100 %

Sad

0
0 %

Excited

0
0 %

Sleepy

0

0 %

Angry

0
0 %

Surprise

0
0 %

“`

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0

0 %

Sad

0
0 %

Excited

0
0 %

Sleepy

0

0 %

Angry

0
0 %

Surprise

0
0 %

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Forward

Part 2 of Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s four-part series on the Abraham Accords arrives at a geopolitical moment that demands neither theological certainty nor nationalist bombast, but rather cold strategic assessment. The article’s central proposition is deceptively simple: permissive disorder the condition in which great powers retreat and middle powers compete without constraint has transformed the Red Sea corridor into a contested zone where Ethiopia’s four survival interests (GERD, maritime sovereignty, economic development, and internal unity) are simultaneously elevated in strategic value and endangered by competitive forces beyond Addis Ababa’s control.

The analysis contained here is not a brief for any political faction, nor a rejoinder to another editorial position. It is an effort to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground: the movement of military infrastructure, the manipulation of recognition as a corridor instrument, the fracturing of the Saudi–UAE partnership, and the acceleration of Sudan and Yemen as transmission belts for Middle Eastern rivalry into Horn politics. The author assembles the evidence with a clarity that should trouble anyone whose primary concern is Ethiopian sovereignty and institutional coherence.

Most significantly, the work articulates what we have long argued in these pages: that Ethiopia’s maritime claim to the Doumeira–Beilul coastline is not an emotional or nationalist indulgence. It is a matter of self–defence. A nation of 130 million cannot afford to permit its most strategically sensitive frontier to remain under the control of a garrison state whose survival depends on external patrons. Eritrea’s weakness is not a reason for Ethiopian complacency; it is a launching pad that any hostile power, Egypt, any actor seeking a platform to threaten GERD, can exploit at will.

This is what institutional credibility looks like in a competitive geopolitical system. It is not negotiable with ethnic coalitions or factional bargaining. The Tribune publishes this work because it advances the conversation we must be having: how does a unified Ethiopia navigate a disorder not of its making?

Synopsis: Permissive Disorder & the Corridor War

I. The Geopolitical Architecture Shifts

The Abraham Accords, validated by Operation Epic Fury (the February 2026 US–Israeli campaign that degraded Iran’s military capacity), have produced a structural reordering of the Horn’s geopolitical landscape. This is not a settled hierarchy but a competitive system in which middle powers exploit great-power distraction to advance their positions through ports, recognition diplomacy, security outsourcing, and sub-state partnerships.

Permissive disorder operates as both opportunity and trap. It widens the menu of external partners and corridor options; it also raises the cost of miscalculation, because no great-power referee exists to mediate escalation. The United States has not abandoned the Horn; it has been restructured through the convergent alignment, producing a partisan presence that amplifies rather than moderates competition. Europe is absent, and Russia and China offer optionality without security guarantees. In this environment, institutional coherence becomes the premium asset.

II. Two Blocs & the Recognition Weapon

The competitive structure is characterised as overlapping blocs: the convergent alignment (Israel–UAE–India–Ethiopia, operationalised through Somaliland) and the balancing coalition (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Somalia’s federal government, Eritrea). These are not fixed; they are transactional, mediated through commercial entities and security contractors rather than formal treaties.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland (December 2025) demonstrates that recognition has become a policy tool within this architecture—one that re-prices risk and re-ranks partners. For Ethiopia, this precedent is double-edged: it validates the principle of boundary revision in the Horn and creates a framework Ethiopia can invoke for its own maritime claim, while potentially internationalising disputes and deepening proxy alignment logic.

III. Sudan & Yemen as Transmission Belts

Sudan and Yemen are not peripheral. They function as transmission belts through which Middle Eastern competition propagates into Horn corridor politics. Sudan’s civil war demonstrates what happens when a state fragments under permissive disorder: each faction attracts a different external patron, corridor assets become prizes in a proxy war, and state capacity evaporates. Yemen’s Houthi campaign directly determines shipping economics and the strategic salience of African alternatives (Berbera, Assab, Lamu).

For Ethiopia, this is not theoretical. Higher insurance premiums, longer routing, and supply-chain delays compress fiscal space and raise the urgency of corridor diversification. The Berbera option (through the Somaliland MoU) and the Assab option (through sovereign coastline recovery) are not merely desirable; they are necessitated by a Red Sea security environment rendered structurally unstable.

IV. Eritrea: The Launching-Pad Thesis

Eritrea occupies a position analytically distinct from any other Horn actor. It is not a competitor; it is a vulnerability node—a weak state whose weakness makes it a threat to Ethiopian sovereignty. With a population below four million, an economy among the least productive in Africa, and a political system dependent entirely on the narrative of permanent threat from Ethiopia, Eritrea is a launching pad that any hostile power can lease, co-opt, or exploit.

Egypt’s reported interest in establishing military presence on the Eritrean coast illustrates the threat directly. An Egyptian naval or air facility at Assab, positioned within approximately 500 kilometres of GERD, would place precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles within striking range of Ethiopia’s most consequential infrastructure project. This is why sovereign sea access is, for Ethiopia, a matter of self-defence before it is a matter of economics.

V. The Four Interests Under Pressure

Ethiopia’s four singular interests—GERD, Red Sea sovereignty, economic development, and internal unity—provide the analytical framework. GERD benefits from the alignment of winners, but it is not merely a foreign-policy asset; it is the engine of Ethiopia’s structural transformation. Red Sea sovereignty is the self-defence imperative: the 180–200 kilometres of coastline from Doumeira to Beilul must be recovered. Economic development requires converting the mutual economic dividend into tangible outcomes: agri-industrial processing, manufacturing, infrastructure, technology education.

Internal unity is the binding constraint on all three. Permissive disorder does not create Ethiopia’s ethnic fractures, but it amplifies them catastrophically. When external coalitions compete, they prefer counterparties who can deliver concessions quickly; this selects for elite bargaining and reinforces extraction unless institutions impose transparency. If Ethiopia cannot present a unified position at the bargaining table, it cannot protect GERD, cannot recover its coastline, and cannot absorb the investment that the alignment of winners offers.

VI. Fragmentation as Defeat

The emerging geopolitical architecture does not mechanically determine Ethiopia’s fate; it raises the payoff to cohesion and the cost of fragmentation. If Ethiopia fragments, each successor entity inherits weaker corridor bargaining power, higher transaction costs, and higher susceptibility to patronage capture. Eritrea’s weakness becomes an invitation to hostile powers. GERD becomes a contested asset. The coastline remains lost. The alignment of winners becomes a patron–client trap rather than a partnership of equals. Conversely, a unified Ethiopia—governed through civic institutions rather than ethnic bargaining—can protect GERD, recover its coastline, absorb investment at scale, and function as the dominant power in the Horn–Red Sea region that its demography, geography, and economic trajectory destine it to become.

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

Part 3 examines the internal dynamics that make institutional coherence possible or impossible.

Author: Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)
Date: 19 April 2026
Series: The Abraham Accords — Part 2 of 4
Topic: Competition and Permissive Disorder in the Gulf–Red Sea–Hor

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %

By Professor Girma Berhanu

Editorial Foreword

On Dehumanisation, Imagery, and the Long Shadow of Scientific Racism

The Editors  •  Ethiopian Tribune  •  April 2026

There are moments when an act of casual cruelty illuminates, with terrible clarity, the architecture of a deeper malice. When the sitting president of the United States shares an image depicting a Black former president and his wife as primates, the instinct of many is to reach for the vocabulary of aberration: reckless, impulsive, beyond the pale. The Ethiopian Tribune does not share that comfort. What such an act reveals is not an anomaly but a continuity the latest expression of a visual and rhetorical tradition whose roots run through the slave ships, the colonial exhibitions, and the pseudoscientific lecture halls of the 19th century.

It is in that spirit that we publish this essay by Professor Girma Berhanu, a scholar whose career has been devoted to the intersection of education, identity, and political violence. Writing from Sweden, where a social services department recently deployed imagery of apes in hijabs as a pedagogical tool for marginalised youth, Professor Berhanu asks the question that polite discourse prefers to skirt: not merely that such representations are offensive, but why the ape, and why it retains its power to wound across centuries and continents.

The answer, as Professor Berhanu traces with care and rigour, lies in the particular violence done to Darwin’s theory of evolution by those who required a scientific patina for their politics of hierarchy. Evolution taught that humans and apes share common ancestry; Social Darwinism translated that into a ladder, with some peoples assigned rungs closer to the animal kingdom than others. The insult, in this reading, is not merely abusive, it is a claim about ontological status, about who belongs fully within the category of the human.

For readers of this publication, the stakes are not abstract. Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa have endured their own encounters with the racialising gaze of empire, their own experience of being rendered primitive and pre-modern in the visual and textual archives of colonialism. The dehumanising logic that Professor Berhanu analyses is the same logic that framed African sovereignty as inconceivable and African suffering as natural. To understand it is to understand something essential about how power legitimises itself.

Professor Berhanu closes with a challenge that is also an obligation: legal remedy is insufficient. What is required is a transformed pedagogy, one that equips young people, and particularly those most targeted by such imagery, to read the visual world critically. The Ethiopian Tribune endorses that challenge unreservedly. Journalism, at its most purposeful, is itself a form of that literacy: naming the structure behind the slur, refusing to let cruelty pass as comedy.

“The insult carries no scientific weight. Its power lies elsewhere: in centuries of conditioning, in the grammar of empire, in the persistent human will to construct a hierarchy of the human.”

— The Editors, Ethiopian Tribune • April 2026

Synopsis

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

This essay examines the historical and cultural origins of the “ape” insult as applied to racialised groups, tracing a line from the misappropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory through 19th-century scientific racism to the visual propaganda of the present day. The author’s inquiry is prompted by three concurrent incidents: a social media post by the US president deploying primate imagery against a Black former head of state and his wife; a legal complaint in Sweden over educational material depicting marginalised youth as apes; and the persistent reality of monkey chants directed at Black footballers in European stadiums.

Berhanu situates these incidents within a broader argument about visual culture and power. Drawing on bell hooks, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, he argues that the biological falsity of the insult is precisely the point: its force derives not from science but from centuries of cultural conditioning that deliberately confused the shared common ancestry of humans and apes with a racial hierarchy in which some peoples were placed “closer to the animal.”

The essay addresses the Swedish school curriculum’s emphasis on visual literacy, argues that images are neither neutral nor trivial particularly when directed at already marginalised communities and calls for an educational and institutional response that goes beyond legal prohibition. Berhanu’s conclusion is that dismantling the cultural infrastructure of dehumanising representation requires historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deepened public commitment to human dignity.

Approx. 1,050 words  •  Academic essay / Op-ed  •  Author: Prof. Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg  •  Cleared for publication

Essay

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

A few weeks ago, two boys who are enthusiastic about football asked me a difficult question: why are Black footballers insulted in stadiums with monkey chants, images of apes, or even by fans throwing bananas? Why apes of all animals? At the time, I struggled to respond. I tried to explain, in my own way, the role of history, human hierarchies, the theory of evolution, and scientific racism. Yet I felt inarticulate, as if I had not fully captured the depth and cruelty of the issue.

Since then, I have reflected more deeply. One recent incident involved a social media post by the president of the United States, who shared an image depicting a former president and his wife as apes or monkeys. After pressure from members of his own party, the post was deleted. But what was the intended message? That they look like apes, think like apes, or are somehow less evolved?

Public reaction followed a familiar pattern: initial shock, followed by quick dismissal. Many people brushed it aside as a childish or impulsive act, ignoring the deeper structural, institutional, and historical precedents behind such imagery. Yet we know that presidential communication is rarely accidental; it is often carefully crafted within inner political circles.

Around the same time, I revisited How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which examines how authoritarian politics divide societies into “us” and “them.” While I cannot explore his full argument here, his framework helps us understand how dehumanising language and imagery function politically.

A third incident occurred closer to home, Sweden. The newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reported that Lars Arrhenius was pursuing a legal case concerning educational material used by a social services department in north-east Gothenburg. The material, titled Angry Apes, was intended as a pedagogical tool for young people facing social challenges. It included images such as an ape wearing a hijab and other apes in a sweater labelled “Orten” (the neighbourhood).

The material was widely criticised and later withdrawn. A complainant argued that it “clearly contains racist and discriminatory images” and risks creating an exclusionary environment for children and youth. It is difficult to understand how associating already marginalised young people with apes could be considered educational. My purpose here is not to enter the legal debate, but to examine the cultural message embedded in such representations. Where does this deeply pejorative association between certain groups and apes originate?

We live in a visual culture. Images shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves. Yet many people lack the tools to critically interpret visual representations. As bell hooks observed, it is troubling that mass media increasingly uses powerful imagery for specific effects, whilst simultaneously encouraging us to believe that these images are insignificant.

Even the Swedish curriculum (Lgr 2011) emphasises that images play a crucial role in how people think, learn, and understand the world. Visual literacy is essential for democratic participation. Whilst powerful images can serve as effective pedagogical tools, degrading representations — particularly those targeting marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, women, disabled individuals, and LGBTQ+ communities — can reinforce harmful stereotypes and produce lasting damage.

To understand the enduring power of the “ape” insult, we must turn to history. Many of us learned about racism and colonialism in school, often alongside the ideas of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin’s work in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man revolutionised biology, his ideas were widely misunderstood and misused.

Evolution does not claim that humans descended from modern apes. Rather, it posits that humans and apes share a common ancestor. However, this nuance was lost in public discourse. The simplified claim that “humans came from apes” made it easier to weaponise the comparison. Calling someone an “ape” came to imply that they are primitive, less intelligent, or less civilised.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, these distortions merged with scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Thinkers misused evolutionary ideas to construct racial hierarchies, falsely claiming that some groups were “closer to apes” than others. As The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates, such pseudoscientific claims were used to justify colonialism, slavery, segregation, and the dehumanisation of non-European peoples.

This history helps explain why the “ape” insult persists today. Biologically, humans are primates; the insult has no scientific basis. Its power lies instead in centuries of cultural conditioning, visual propaganda, and racial hierarchy. The question, then, is not only why the insult exists, but how we confront it. How can we protect new generations — especially Black, Indigenous, and other racialised communities — from such deeply dehumanising representations? What role should schools play? What responsibilities do media and political institutions carry?

Legal measures alone are not enough. What is required is a broader transformative agenda: one that promotes historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deeper understanding of human dignity. Only then can we begin to dismantle the cultural foundations that allow such insults to persist.

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %