From the Editor

The Solvent and the Shore

An editorial foreword to Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s “Medemer, Oromummaa and Red-Sea Sovereignty: Is Abiy Making Ethiopia an Island of Enemies?”

On 5 October the Prime Minister’s Office announced that the administration sworn in that morning would be known as the “Medemer Government”. Our contributor had already finished asking what Medemer is for. The coincidence is not his doing, but it tells the reader why this instalment matters: the word that names the government is the word this essay sets out to examine.

Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu warned us, in the note that accompanied the manuscript, that his argument kept being overtaken by the news it was trying to describe. He was not exaggerating. Between the first draft and the last, war resumed in the north on 23 September; on 1 October Addis Ababa closed its embassy in Asmara, declared ten Eritrean diplomats persona non grata and expelled an Egyptian diplomat, and Asmara severed relations; Mekelle changed hands again; and on 4 October the leaders of Egypt, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan met at New Alamein and declared the governance of the Red Sea the exclusive business of its littoral states. Every one of those events now sits inside the essay, and each strengthens the question in its title.

What distinguishes the piece is not its anger, which is considerable, but its method. Faced with the charge, now common across the opposition, that Medemer is the civic dress of an Oromummaa project, MGH does not chant it. He traces where the narrative came from, lays the case against the charge at full strength, and insists that the political entrepreneurs who trade in Oromummaa are not the Oromo people. Nor does he spare the history: on the authority of Oromo historians themselves, he names the sixteenth-century record of assimilation, domination and elimination for what it was, ethnocide, while refusing to make it an indictment of any people. He concludes that the remedy is the same whichever reading is right. His sharpest pages are on how this government actually works: a cabinet assembled for dependence rather than competence, a decision-making circle that appears on no organigram, and a Prime Minister who tells Parliament his own ministers have been under surveillance. His prescription is institutions first, with democracy as their capstone, and he spells it out in six commitments that no election could deliver on its own.

Changing the ruler changes a stone. Judge every proposal by one question: does it change the ingredients and the process, or only who stands at the fire?

Readers will find the second pillar, on the sea, the most consequential and the most contested. MGH argues that Ethiopia’s claim to the Doumeira–Rehyto–Beilul–Tio corridor rests on history and on a right never lawfully surrendered; that it expressly does not extend to Massawa; and that Eritrea’s continuing military presence on Ethiopian soil has already engaged Ethiopia’s right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. From that he draws a sequence that ends, failing a treaty, in securing and incorporating the corridor. Many readers, Eritrean readers above all, will reject that conclusion, and international lawyers will dispute its premises. We publish it because it is argued rather than asserted, because it is sourced and bounded, and because the author himself names the precondition Ethiopia does not meet: a settled house. A state that moves without one, he writes, opens a fifth front rather than recovering a corridor. As always, the views are the author’s own, and our pages are open to a reasoned reply.

MGH writes that he can find only three explanations for a nation that quotes, as its operating manual, a constitution designed to divide it: that we are lying to ourselves, that we are deluded, or that we are quite mad. He will return next week with the fifteenth and final instalment of this series, which promises to gather the parts and set out what is to be done. We are grateful, once again, that he has chosen these pages to discharge what he calls the obligation of a citizen to say what he sees.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Medemer, Oromummaa and Red-Sea Sovereignty

Is Abiy Making Ethiopia an Island of Enemies? — Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD), October 2026

The question

The preceding instalment documented what Abiy Ahmed’s government does. This one asks what it is for, and what it has done to Ethiopia’s place in the world. The argument stands on two pillars that the author holds to be inseparable: national unity, which he argues the government has dismantled at home, and Red-Sea sovereignty, a just claim he argues it has squandered abroad. Measured against the four interests this series has defended throughout — national unity, Red-Sea sovereignty, development anchored in democracy, and the GERD as the engine of industrialisation — he finds the government has damaged every one.

The first pillar: Medemer, Oromummaa and the soul of the state

MGH sets out the unionist charge that Medemer’s civic language conceals an ethno-national project, then states the opposite case with equal force: Asafa Jalata and other Oromo nationalists regard Abiy as an enemy of Oromummaa, and his army has fought the OLA and bombed Oromo farmers since 2018. Both readings cannot be literally true. He is precise about his own position, which is neither. He does not say this government serves the Oromo people; he says it was built on one regional machine, governs through it, and is licensed by the Constitution. The common factor is personal power rather than an ethnic programme, and it hardly matters which reading wins, because an ethnic-based Constitution will reward whoever captures the centre.

His target, he insists, is a racket that farms in the name of a people, not the people in whose name it farms. Anyone who moves from “this machine governs through an Oromo political network” to “the Oromo are the problem” has, he writes, “abandoned the argument of this series and joined the other side of the racket”. The Oromo farmer bombed in Wollega stands on his side of that argument, not the government’s.

The political entrepreneurs who trade in Oromummaa are not the Oromo people, and the Oromo people are not their property.

That distinction is not, however, an absolution of history. MGH traces the making of Oromummaa through Asmarom Legesse’s anthropology of Gadaa and the popular narrative fixed by Tesfaye Gebreab’s fiction, and sets the benign textbook account of moggaasaa (adoption before the Abbaa Gadaa, protection for the weak) against the fuller record documented by Mohammed Hassen, the leading Oromo historian of the expansion. That record is “a sequence of assimilation, domination and elimination”. Those who submitted were adopted and then held as gabbaro, clients and serfs on land they had owned; Damot, Bizamo and Gafat were broken; the Gafat language is extinct; and the Gaturi survive “only as an entry in Mohammed Hassen’s pages”. His verdict is a single word: “That is not a migration. It is assimilation enforced by conquest, and the modern name for the deliberate extinction of peoples as peoples — language, lineage, memory — is ethnocide.”

What keeps this analysis rather than slander, he argues, is that it runs in both directions and ends in a remedy rather than a grievance. The same historian wrote of Conquest, Tyranny and Ethnocide against the Oromo; Mekuria Bulcha writes of genocidal violence in the making of the Ethiopian state. “Everybody’s ancestors are victims; everybody’s ancestors are perpetrators; and under this Constitution every one of those graves earns a dividend.” That dividend is the racket. His remedy is legal and prospective: that forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing and incitement to either be crimes “whoever commits them and whichever people they are committed against — the Gafat in the seventeenth century, the Amhara and Somali of Wollega in ours”. It is a law against conduct, not against Gadaa or any people’s heritage.

On Gadaa itself his position is one of symmetry. It is “heritage, not a constitution”, and it “belongs in the museum, the university and the community — not in the ministry”. A state of 130 million cannot be governed by age-sets any more than by the Fetha Nagast, and financing that pretence from the national budget is “as objectionable as the old state’s making one church and one language the condition of belonging”, just as treating the national flag as a provocation is. It is that symmetry which keeps the argument out of the ethnic quarrel altogether.

The most original section examines how the government works. The Prime Minister’s statement to Parliament that his ministers were under classified surveillance is read not as a quirk but as the signature of a structure: a cabinet that represents rather than governs, a shadow chain of command first built by the TPLF, and a ruler who must watch ministries that answer to someone else. The cabinet purge since 2019, he argues, selected for dependence rather than ethnicity or faith, removing everyone with a base from which to refuse. Hence his prescription: not “remove the man”, not “hold an election”, but institutions first, and he offers six commitments — a cabinet that is the government, a merit civil service, intelligence under statute, courts that can rule against the state, secure property, and independent numbers.

You cannot beat a man you have not studied.

An island of enemies

A table lists nine fronts open simultaneously as the article went to press, five of them armed and three turned into diplomatic ruptures within a week. MGH revisits his earlier essay on “chaotic equilibrium” and concludes that September and October 2026 have settled the question: the method did not master chaos, it manufactured it. A credible sea strategy, he argues, would have begun with a settlement at home and a published legal case; what exists instead is rhetoric that has turned a legitimate interest into a regional alarm. He offers, explicitly as inference rather than proof, the observation that this government has profited politically from every war it has fought while the nation has lost by each.

The second pillar: the legitimacy of Red-Sea sovereignty

The longest part of the essay sets out the historical record from Aksum to 1890 in two tables, and argues that the coast was lost in 1991–93 without the consent of the Ethiopian nation. It takes the Eritrean counter-case from its most serious authors, conceding Massawa outright and confining the claim to the Doumeira–Rehyto–Beilul–Tio corridor, with Assab at its centre. It then turns to security: the former Emirati base at Assab, the 2024 Asmara summit, and the El Alamein Joint Declaration of 4 October, which MGH calls the most important sentence written about the Red Sea in a decade because it defines Ethiopia out of the sea without ever naming it.

On the law, he argues that Eritrea’s continuing military presence on Ethiopian soil is an armed attack that has already engaged Article 51, that the proxy case must be argued second and proved with a published dossier, and that, failing a treaty, Ethiopia would be entitled to secure, hold and incorporate the corridor. He is equally clear that force confers no title, that Massawa is not claimed, and that one of six preconditions is unmet: a settled house. “Five of six is not a plan,” he writes; “it is a temptation.”

Resistance, objections and the conclusion

Invoking Adwa, MGH calls for resistance to the constitutional order rather than to any people, under three rules: national not ethnic, lawful and evidential, and siding with none of the ethnic entrepreneurs — a category in which he places Abiy, Zemene Kassie, Debretsion Gebremichael and Jal Marro alike. Arms, he insists, are reserved for the defence of the nation and its outlet to the sea, never against fellow Ethiopians. He then states seven objections at full strength, in his critics’ own voice — among them the charge that his analysis of Oromummaa is ethnic slander dressed as analysis, that Eritrean independence closed the matter, and that this is Amhara nationalism in a citizen’s vocabulary — concedes what is true in each, and answers the rest.

The conclusion meets the government’s economic defence on its own ground. The reform is real — the float, IMF and World Bank support, falling inflation — but the development is theatre: a birr that has lost three-fifths of its value, rising poverty, debt service more than three times the education budget, and corridor projects that evict without compensation. The deepest cost, he argues, appears on no ledger: the belief that an Ethiopian is an Ethiopian before he is anything else.

A nation can be invaded and remain itself. It cannot be taught that it never existed and remain itself.

The fifteenth and final instalment, to follow next week, will set out the road from here.

The full article, with its three tables and 111 references, follows below. ↓

Analysis

The Red Line That Moved

Abiy Ahmed says the ministers he dropped this week were under scrutiny for a year. The public record supports part of the case against them. What it does not yet show is a single referral to a prosecutor.

By E. Frashie ·October 2026

When Abiy Ahmed presented his first cabinet in April 2018, he drew a line. Graft and maladministration, he told lawmakers, were “a red line that has to be enforced.” Eight years and several reshuffles later, he returned to the House of Peoples’ Representatives on 8 October to begin his second full term with a new Council of Ministers, and with his own account of why some of the old one had gone.

The House approved the new cabinet unanimously: twenty-two ministers and a returning Deputy Prime Minister, Temesgen Tiruneh. Seven ministers kept their portfolios and ten newcomers joined. Among those who did not return were four whose departures now carry more than routine significance: Belete Molla at Innovation and Technology, Muferiat Kamil at Labour and Skills, Kassahun Gofe at Trade and Regional Integration, and Alemu Sime at Transport and Logistics.

The Prime Minister was unusually candid about how he had arrived at the list. “ሌብነትን በሚመለከት ሁሉም ሚኒስትሮች እና ሚኒስትር ዴኤታዎች ቢያንስ ላለፈው አንድ ዓመት ከፍተኛ ሚስጥራዊ ክትትል ሲደረግባቸው ነበር,” he told the House, according to the transcript published by Tikvah Ethiopia. On the matter of theft, every minister and state minister had been under top-secret surveillance for at least the past year. The monitoring, he said, was backed by intelligence and covered their activities at home and abroad, their children, their wives, their uncles and every wealthy person they dealt with. “The reshuffle,” he added, “was not done for nothing.”

Each minister was then made to defend himself against what was said about him, and the Prime Minister read the charges out as they had been put: you are suspected; you drink; you have improper ties with the rich; you scheme rather than support; you do not follow things up; you are never in the office. A minister need not be a thief himself, he said. Failing to control theft around him, ignoring tip-offs, or clinging to an attitude of “don’t come near me, don’t touch my area” had counted against him too.

Then came the most revealing passage of the session. Some of the complaints, he acknowledged, might have been nothing more than grievance or accusation, and in some cases sufficient evidence had not been found. “But those with any tendency of suspicion,” he said, “whether in themselves or around them, we did not make cabinet members.”

It was a remarkable admission, twice over. A head of government told Parliament that the state’s intelligence services had spent a year watching not only his ministers but their wives, their children and their uncles. On whose legal authority, under what oversight and with what safeguards that was done is a question in its own right, and one the House did not ask. And he conceded, in the same breath, that some of those left out were left out on suspicion where the evidence fell short.

He named none of the ministers who had failed. He did not need to. Within days, Meseret Media, citing government sources, had published a detailed account of the grounds for removing four of them, and it maps onto the Prime Minister’s own list almost point for point: improper ties to the rich, failure to police theft and, in one case, drinking.

The Tribune has tested Meseret’s claims against the public record. A consistent pattern emerges. In every case there is a documented failure that Parliament, the Auditor General or the press had already recorded. In every case, the alleged conduct that would turn a failure into a crime rests, for now, on unnamed sources. And in no case has any authority announced a charge.

The audit nobody prosecuted

The case against Belete Molla is the best documented. Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Expenditure Management and Control found a budget gap of more than half a billion birr at his ministry, together with unauthorised reallocations, payments outside legal provisions and inflated salaries, and gave the ministry fifteen days to account for them. Belete conceded before the committee that audit deficiencies had occurred. The Federal Auditor General separately found that the ministry had completed only eleven per cent of its planned projects.

The ministry also administered the World Bank’s $200 million Digital Foundations project, and it is there that Meseret Media’s government sources place the gravest charges. According to Meseret, money from the facility was used to pay high monthly advisory fees, in dollars, to individuals whose qualifications bore no relation to the sector. It cites a veterinary doctor retained on an annual salary as a digital consultant, and another adviser paid $120,000 a year who, Meseret says, spent most of his time in the United States.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the Digital Foundations fees (from 08:07)

Meseret further reports that the ministry awarded a contract worth 21 million birr, without a tender, to a company whose owner had drawn public attention for importing a Tesla Cybertruck free of duty. None of these specific allegations has been publicly confirmed by the ministry, the World Bank or any investigating body, and the Tribune has not independently verified them. The audit findings, by contrast, have been public for months.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the 21 million birr contract (from 08:58)

The brokers’ bill

Under Muferiat Kamil, the Ministry of Labour and Skills drafted an overseas employment bill that would have required recruitment agencies to lodge bonds of between $50,000 and $250,000 in blocked accounts, prompting open resistance from the agencies’ own federation. A separate ministry directive confining agencies to four named banks was challenged as straying into territory reserved by law for the National Bank. In Parliament, one MP told the minister plainly that overseas employment was in crisis.

Meseret Media’s account goes considerably further. It reports that two senior officials serving under the minister, the chief executive of Foreign Employment, Ermias Tekle, and the head of the Labour Market Information System Project Office, Birhanu Adal, were arrested by security forces in connection with human trafficking. Meseret also describes the ministry’s draft proclamation as an attempt to make the ministry the sole registration body, reducing licensed agencies to brokers, and to double the mandatory agency bank guarantee from $100,000 to $200,000 under the ministry’s direct control. The Tribune has found no official confirmation of the arrests, and the published draft reported by Addis Fortune sets the bond on a sliding scale rather than at a single figure. If the arrests occurred, the public is entitled to know who was charged, with what, and in which court.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the proclamation (from 10:16) · the arrests (from 19:10)

A red line that ends at the door of the cabinet room is not a red line at all.

Plates from an unnamed supplier

Alemu Sime’s ministry oversaw the national switch to new vehicle licence plates. Motorists objected loudly to the price, with Addis Fortune reporting fees of around 56,000 birr at the capital’s licensing bureau. The ministry imported roughly four million plates from a Chinese manufacturer whose identity officials declined to disclose. According to Meseret Media, after the public outcry over the plates, intelligence services monitored possible direct ties between the minister and the foreign supplier. Meseret’s sources also accuse him of inappropriately close dealings with investors, alleging that he accepted holiday gifts of cattle from them and told them he expected a diplomatic posting to China. None of these claims has been confirmed, and the Tribune has not verified them. The refusal to name the supplier of four million state-mandated plates, by contrast, is a matter of record, and it should be answered whoever now holds the portfolio.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the investor ties and the plate supplier (from 17:23)

Queues, and the 658

Kassahun Gofe presided over a fuel market in chronic disorder. In December 2024, as queues stretched through Adama and Hawassa, he insisted there was no actual shortage of supply. By March this year, with Middle Eastern imports disrupted, his ministry reported that 658 people, officials among them, had been detained over illegal fuel trading. Meseret Media links him directly to the disruption. According to its sources, rather than allocating market share among distributors by logistical capacity, he favoured a single, less experienced company for personal gain, and the dispute grew heated enough to play out in front of the Prime Minister’s macroeconomic adviser, Girma Birru. Meseret also links a mid-June accident in Addis Ababa involving an excavator to widespread rumours of drinking, a point it ties to the Prime Minister’s own remarks about officials who drink. These allegations are unproven, and the Tribune has not verified them. But the contrast it draws is already on the record: hundreds detained at the pump, and no minister so much as questioned in public.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on fuel distribution (from 06:22)

Removal is not accountability

The Prime Minister closed with a warning to the new cabinet. Its members, he said, had come through a month and a half of training and repeated examinations, sleeping no more than two or three hours a night, and what awaited them was “an era of suffering” in which sleep and idle joking would not be permitted. “ሥልጣን ኮፊያ እንጂ ጭንቅላት አይደለም,” he said: power is a hat, not the head. And the rule was simple: “Work, and if we do not work, leave.” It was meant as a show of resolve. It also marked the limit of his ambition. A hat is taken off; it is not put on trial. The sanction he named for failure, and for theft, was departure. He did not mention prosecution.

None of this establishes guilt, and this newspaper does not assert it. That is precisely the point. If the government has spent a year assembling evidence of embezzlement, procurement abuse and links to trafficking, that evidence belongs before the Attorney General and the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, not in a parliamentary speech followed by briefings to friendly outlets. And where, as the Prime Minister himself conceded, the evidence fell short, a public account of misconduct by unmistakable implication is a verdict delivered without a trial.

Either way, due process is owed twice over: to the citizens whose money, fuel and livelihoods were at stake, and to the former ministers themselves, who are entitled to answer the case against them in a forum that can test it. A quiet reshuffle satisfies neither.

The Tribune is putting four questions to the Office of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General and the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. Has any of the four former ministers been referred for investigation? Have the arrests at the Ministry of Labour and Skills been confirmed, and on what charges? Who manufactured the new licence plates, and under what contract? And what has become of the misspent sums identified at the Ministry of Innovation and Technology?

In 2018 the Prime Minister promised that corruption would not be tolerated. A promise of that kind is measured not by who leaves the cabinet, but by who is made to answer for what happened while they sat in it.

Right of reply: The Ethiopian Tribune invites Belete Molla, Muferiat Kamil, Kassahun Gofe and Alemu Sime to respond to the allegations reported by Meseret Media and referred to in this article. Any response received will be published in full and without editing.

Analysis · Ethiopia

A Cabinet for a War It Will Not Name

Executive continuity, coercive federalism and the second northern war in Ethiopia

By E. Frashie  The Ethiopian Tribune · 8 October 2026

I. Introduction: a government formed under fire

The sequence of the past fortnight tells its own story. On 23 September, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and allied armed groups from Amhara and Afar launched a multi-pronged offensive against federal forces, returning northern Ethiopia to large-scale war.^[1] On the night of 30 September, an explosion struck the headquarters of the Ethiopian National Defence Force at Tor Hailoch in Addis Ababa; its cause and authorship remain officially unexplained.^[2] On 3 October, federal and allied forces entered Mekelle without a fight, after TPLF leaders and fighters abandoned the city.^[3] On 5 October, parliament re-elected Abiy Ahmed as prime minister.^[4] Three days later, it approved his cabinet unanimously.^[5]

A cabinet formed in such circumstances is more than an administrative act. Its composition reveals how a government understands the crisis it governs, and what it prefers to leave unsaid. The list approved on 8 October is notable less for its novelties than for its silences. It places a former peace minister at Defence and an opposition leader from a war-affected region at Peace. It keeps the foreign minister who authored Ethiopia’s case against Eritrea. And it hands the national purse to a planning technocrat at the moment war begins to consume it.

This article reads the cabinet against the record. Its sources are the official appointment list as reported by The Reporter, the analytical work of the International Crisis Group, statements of the United Nations and foreign governments, wire reporting from AFP, Reuters and AP, and the coverage this publication has built since the Pretoria settlement began to unravel. Where a claim rests on a single source or remains contested, it is identified as such.

II. Context: from Pretoria to the Alliance for Survival

The Pretoria Agreement of November 2022 ended the deadliest war of the century so far, but it ended it through military pressure rather than political compromise. Crisis Group has described the settlement as leaving “open wounds”: a TPLF that regarded the deal as lopsided, an Eritrea excluded from the table, and a Western Tigray left under Amhara control with its displaced population in camps.^[1] This publication traced the deal’s slow collapse through the summer, culminating in our coverage of the August fighting.^[6]

The decisive rupture came in late April and early May 2026, when the TPLF ousted Tigray’s interim administration and reinstalled Debretsion Gebremichael. It followed with a conscription drive and open talk of removing the prime minister.^[1] Addis Ababa answered by cutting federal transfers and fuel, and with a growing drone campaign. When Ethiopians voted on 1 June, Tigray did not: the TPLF had been banned as a party and the region’s residents were excluded from the poll.^[7] Days later, the French journalist Augustine Passilly was expelled after reporting that Tigrayans were being forcibly recruited.^[7] Our election coverage, including E. Frashie’s dispatches from polling day and our analysis of first-past-the-post seat distortion, documented a contest that produced a commanding majority from a narrowed field.^[8]

On 20 September, seven armed groups announced an Alliance for Survival pledged to overthrow the government: the TPLF, the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front and two organisations from Benishangul-Gumuz.^[9] For readers of these pages the development had a precedent. Our earlier work on the so-called “Tsimdo” coalition, including Dr Sosina Tadesse’s rebuttal, examined Addis Ababa’s claim that a TPLF faction and Asmara had formed a hostile alliance.^[10] The Alliance for Survival is a declared coalition; Eritrea’s role within it remains alleged by Addis Ababa and denied by Asmara.^[11]

“The Alliance for Survival is broad but shallow: its members share little beyond opposition to the prime minister.”

Crisis Group places primary responsibility for the September escalation on the TPLF, which launched the ground assaults, while recording the TPLF’s claim that it was responding to a federal drone barrage on 22 September.^[1] That attribution matters. It gives Addis Ababa a measure of diplomatic cover it lacked in November 2020, and it shapes how the new cabinet can present its mandate abroad.

III. Reading the cabinet

The security portfolios

The most telling appointment is the move of Mohammed Idris from the Ministry of Peace to the Ministry of Defence.^[5] In institutional terms, the official charged with dialogue and reconciliation now commands the war effort. One reading is pragmatic: the government wants a defence minister fluent in the political management of insurgency. Another is less reassuring. It suggests that, in the government’s own conception, peace has become a function of security.

His successor at Peace is Musa Adem, chairman of the Afar People’s Party.^[5] The choice is geographically pointed. Afar is now a front line: TPLF and ARDUF fighters reportedly took the towns of Aba-Ala and Erebti in the first week of fighting.^[9] Placing an Afar party leader in charge of peacebuilding may be read as an attempt to anchor Afar politically to the federal centre. That is an inference from timing and geography, not a stated rationale.

A further move deserves note. Abraham Belay, a Tigrayan who led the federally appointed Tigray administration during the last war and later served as defence minister, has left the ministerial ranks to head the Nuclear Commission.^[12,13] Whatever its administrative logic, the reassignment removes from cabinet one of the federal government’s most prominent Tigrayan figures at the very moment the war returns to Tigray.

Diplomacy

Gedion Timothewos remains foreign minister.^[5] It was Gedion who, in October 2025, wrote to the UN Secretary-General accusing Eritrea and a hardline TPLF faction of preparing for war, and who in February 2026 accused Asmara of deploying troops on Ethiopian soil.^[14,15] Eritrea dismissed both as fabrication.^[15] His retention signals continuity in the external narrative: that the war is the product of foreign subversion as much as domestic rebellion. On 1 October Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara and Eritrea severed diplomatic ties in response.^[16]

The economic team

Fitsum Assefa, for eight years Minister of Planning and Development, becomes Minister of Finance. She replaces Ahmed Shide, now Speaker of the House.^[5] Her former ministry has been renamed the Ministry of National Strategy, and logistics has been split from transport into a ministry of its own.^[12]The Reporter notes that the new finance minister inherits foreign-exchange reform, complex debt restructuring and continuing negotiations with international financial institutions.^[12]

Those negotiations now proceed in wartime. In January, Crisis Group cited Ethiopia’s need for continued IMF support as a reason to hope Addis Ababa would avoid new hostilities.^[17] That restraint has failed. The birr registered an average bid of 160 in a September central-bank auction.^[18] The new government targets a tax-to-GDP ratio of 9.62 per cent for 2026/27, a narrow base from which to finance a war.^[19] British and German travel advice both report nationwide fuel shortages.^[20,21] And American aid, on which Ethiopia long depended, was sharply reduced in 2025.^[22]

Inclusion and its limits

The government has presented the cabinet as inclusive. Nine of the 22 ministers are women, about 41 per cent. Musa Adem of the Afar People’s Party and Professor Birhanu Nega of EZEMA come from parties that contested the June election, and the cabinet includes the first federal minister from the Harari Region.^[5] These are real features of the list.

“Inclusion of those who participated is not the same as inclusion of those who contested.”

Yet the parliament that approved this cabinet was elected in a poll that The Reporter describes as marked by opposition boycotts, and in which Tigray did not vote.^[12,7] The new executive is therefore being constructed without the representatives of the region over which the war is being fought. Inclusion of those who participated is not the same as inclusion of those who contested. For a federation whose founding bargain was regional self-rule, that gap is not a technicality.

IV. The war the cabinet inherits

Militarily, the federal position has improved sharply in a week. Government forces retook Alamata on 28 September and, by 4 October, were patrolling Mekelle and guarding its key institutions.^[9,3] Residents described relief at the lull, alongside the absence of police and fear of looting.^[3] Communications and electronic banking began returning to much of Tigray the same weekend.^[23]

The precedent is not encouraging. In November 2020, federal forces also took Mekelle quickly; Tigrayan forces retook it the following year. Debretsion has already signalled a guerrilla strategy, saying the TPLF will strike “wherever we choose”.^[3] A war of attrition in rural Tigray, rather than a decisive victory, is the more plausible near-term path.

The war has also reached the capital. Beyond the Tor Hailoch blast, three diplomatic sources told Reuters of explosions overnight, and a source linked to the opposition alliance claimed drone strikes on military targets in Addis Ababa; Reuters could not verify the claim.^[24,2] The national intelligence service has banned drone flights over the city indefinitely. The UK and German governments now warn of possible attacks on military installations, including in Addis Ababa.^[20,21]

The humanitarian cost is mounting. On 7 October, the UN reported that one of its agency warehouses and several NGO depots in Tigray had been looted, with food, seed, fertiliser and water pumps lost.^[23] A week earlier, 19 aid workers trapped by the fighting reached Gondar by the only viable road; some 240 UN staff and 1,700 NGO personnel remained in Tigray.^[25] The International Rescue Committee ranks Ethiopia fourth on its 2026 Emergency Watchlist of countries most at risk of humanitarian deterioration.^[26]

Regionally, the alignments have hardened. On 4 October, Egypt’s President al-Sisi, Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki, Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan met at El-Alamein. Their joint statement called for non-interference in the internal affairs of states and opposed “unilateral measures” harming downstream countries, an apparent reference to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.^[3] Addis Ababa accuses Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of backing the rebels; all three deny it.^[11] Ethiopia and Egypt have expelled each other’s diplomats.^[3]

V. Discussion: coercive federalism and the problem the map cannot solve

Read together, the appointments and the battlefield point to a single governing logic. The federal government is consolidating its executive, retaining its diplomatic line and treating the Tigray question as a matter of security first. This is coercive federalism: the authority of the centre is reasserted by force within a constitutional order that formally guarantees regional self-rule. Its weakness is not military. It is political, because territory recaptured without a settlement must be held, and holding it requires consent the cabinet has not sought.

Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s capstone essay for this publication carries a question for its title: Cui bono?^[27] It is the right question to ask of a war the cabinet will not name. The government gains a rally effect, a fresh mandate and a measure of international sympathy, after Crisis Group placed primary responsibility for the escalation on the TPLF and the US ambassador voiced disappointment at its offensive.^[1] TPLF hardliners, whose position this publication examined in its coverage of US visa restrictions, gain a cause that defers questions about their own governance of Tigray.^[28] Regional rivals gain leverage over Ethiopia on the Nile and the Red Sea. Those who lose are the displaced, the conscripted and the taxpayers who will fund the war.

“Territory recaptured without a settlement must be held, and holding it requires consent the cabinet has not sought.”

Nor has the war resolved the disputes that caused it. Western Tigray remains contested; our study of Carlo Conti Rossini’s cartography traced how colonial-era maps still shape that dispute.^[29] Voices for negotiation exist within the Ethiopian political class, as our analysis of Lemma Megersa’s peace appeal recorded.^[30] Crisis Group’s prescription remains the most concrete available: African leaders, including Olusegun Obasanjo, William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta, should press both sides towards direct talks, with Saudi Arabia restraining Asmara, Khartoum and Cairo, and the UAE restraining Addis Ababa.^[1]

VI. Conclusion: three tests for the new government

The new cabinet will be judged on three tests. The first is military: whether the defence ministry pursues the TPLF into a rural guerrilla war, with the civilian costs that northern Ethiopia knows too well. The second is political: whether the peace ministry under Musa Adem opens any channel to the armed opposition, or functions as an adjunct to the security effort. The third is economic: whether the finance ministry can keep the reform programme and its external financing intact while the state pays for war.

In November 2020 the fall of Mekelle was presented as the end of a law-enforcement operation. It proved to be the start of a two-year war. The cabinet sworn in this week has inherited that lesson, along with a recaptured city. Whether it learns from it will define the term it has just begun.

References

1. International Crisis Group, “Arresting the Dangerous Descent Back into War in Northern Ethiopia”, Statement, 25 September 2026. https://www.crisisgroup.org/stm/africa/ethiopia-eritrea/arresting-dangerous-descent-back-war-northern-ethiopia
2. AFP, “Explosion overnight at Ethiopian army HQ in capital”, Ahram Online, 1 October 2026. https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/577953.aspx
3. AFP, “Ethiopian forces take control of Tigray capital Mekelle”, Kuwait Times, 5 October 2026. https://kuwaittimes.com/article/50973/world/ethiopian-forces-take-control-of-tigray-capital-mekelle/
4. Sisay Sahlu, “Parliament Re-Elects Abiy Ahmed as Prime Minister”, The Reporter, 5 October 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/53219/
5. Sara Solomon, “Ethiopia Unveils New Cabinet Reshuffle”, The Reporter, 8 October 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/53263/
6. The Ethiopian Tribune, coverage of the August 2026 Tigray fighting and the collapse of the Pretoria Agreement, August 2026.
7. Committee to Protect Journalists, “Ethiopia expels French journalist Augustine Passilly after reporting trip to Tigray”, 12 June 2026. https://cpj.org/2026/06/ethiopia-expels-french-journalist-augustine-passilly-after-reporting-trip-to-tigray/
8. The Ethiopian Tribune, June 2026 general election coverage, including E. Frashie’s election-day dispatches and analysis of first-past-the-post seat distortion, June 2026.
9. International Crisis Group, CrisisWatch: Ethiopia, September 2026. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/ethiopia
10. The Ethiopian Tribune, coverage of the “Tsimdo” coalition question, including Dr Sosina Tadesse’s rebuttal, 2026.
11. Associated Press, “Ethiopia’s army chief accuses Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of supporting Tigray rebels”, 28 September 2026. https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/ethiopias-army-chief-accuses-eritrea-sudan-egypt-supporting-136825185
12. Mintesinot Nigussie, “Government Overhauls Ministerial Mandates as Cabinet Reshuffle Looms”, The Reporter, 7 October 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/53254/
13. AFP, “Abiy replaces defence, peace ministers in new Ethiopia cabinet”, October 2021. https://pakobserver.net/abiy-replaces-defence-peace-ministers-in-new-ethiopia-cabinet/
14. Addis Standard via AllAfrica, “Ethiopian Federal Police Allege Eritrean Link in Ammunition Seizure Amid Tensions”, January 2026. https://allafrica.com/stories/202601230022.html
15. Reuters via Polity, “Eritrea calls Ethiopia’s accusations of military aggression ‘deplorable'”, 9 February 2026. https://www.polity.org.za/article/eritrea-calls-ethiopias-accusations-of-military-aggression-deplorable-2026-02-09
16. Reuters, “Eritrea severs diplomatic ties with Ethiopia after Addis Ababa orders closure of embassy in Asmara”, Daily Maverick, 2 October 2026. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-02-eritrea-severs-diplomatic-ties-with-ethiopia-after-addis-ababa-orders-closure-of-embassy-in-asmara/
17. International Crisis Group, “10 Conflicts to Watch in 2026”: Ethiopia and Eritrea, via AllAfrica, 2 January 2026. https://allafrica.com/stories/202601020222.html
18. Bruck Getachew, “Average bid registers 160 Birr in latest Central Bank Forex Auction”, The Reporter, 10 September 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/52705/
19. Mintesinot Nigussie, “New Government Targets 9.62 percent Tax-to-GDP Ratio amid Structural Economic Reforms”, The Reporter, 6 October 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/53235/
20. UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Ethiopia travel advice, updated 7 October 2026. https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/ethiopia/safety-and-security
21. Auswärtiges Amt, Äthiopien: Reise- und Sicherheitshinweise, Stand 8 October 2026. https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/service/laender/209504
22. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Ethiopia. https://www.ecoi.net/de/dokument/2136212.html
23. Mintesinot Nigussie, “UN Warns of Aid Disruption in Tigray Following Looting of Humanitarian Depots”, The Reporter, 7 October 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/53257/
24. Reuters, “Explosions heard overnight in Ethiopia’s capital, diplomatic sources say”, The Star, 1 October 2026. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2026/10/01/explosions-heard-overnight-in-ethiopia039s-capital-diplomatic-sources-say
25. UN Department of Safety and Security, “Trapped by Fighting in Northern Ethiopia, 19 Humanitarian Personnel Make It Out by Road”, 6 October 2026. https://www.un.org/safety-and-security/en/news/trapped-fighting-northern-ethiopia-19-humanitarian-personnel-make-it-out-road
26. Mintesinot Nigussie, “Ethiopia Ranks Fourth on Global Crisis Watchlist as Conflict Threatens SDG Gains: IRC Report”, The Reporter, 3 October 2026. https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/53167/
27. Mefkereseb G. Hailu, “Cui Bono?”, The Ethiopian Tribune, 2026.
28. The Ethiopian Tribune, “A Lever, Not a Hammer” and “The Twig and the Phantom Carrot”, coverage of US visa restrictions on TPLF hardliners, 2026.
29. The Ethiopian Tribune, study of Carlo Conti Rossini’s cartographic legacy and the Western Tigray boundary dispute, 2026.
30. The Ethiopian Tribune, analysis of Lemma Megersa’s peace appeal, 2026.

E. Frashie writes long-form analysis for The Ethiopian Tribune.

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE · EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Abiy’s Drones Pouring Hell Over a Divided House

The Constitution Is Guilty of More Murder — Our Unity and Red-Sea Sovereignty

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

When we published Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s twelfth article in September, we described it, as he had, as the close of his series. We were wrong, and gladly so. In a letter to this desk, MGH explains that each time he has set down his pen, events have handed it back to him. This month they did so with unusual force: seven armed movements allied against the government on 20 September, the north returned to war three days later, Mekelle changed hands again, and Ethiopia broke with Asmara and Cairo within a single week. A writer who has spent a year warning that a divided house cannot defend itself could hardly stay silent while the house burned.

This is the thirteenth article, and the first of three that will now conclude the series, appearing on successive Sundays. MGH tells us he may miss a church service or two to meet that schedule. We trust our readers will forgive him, and that his priest will too.

The article begins as a response to Yihenew Ewnetu’s study of drone warfare, Aerial Terror, published in Borkena. MGH welcomes it as the start of a criminal record and then does something rare in our discourse: he treats a fellow writer’s work as a case file in preparation, checking its sources, reconciling its figures and correcting its attributions, so that it can withstand the scrutiny of those paid to discredit it. Readers who care about accountability should read that section closely. It is a lesson in how evidence survives contact with a hostile reader.

“Accountability must fall on persons, not on the nation.”

But the record, he argues, names the wound and not the disease. His diagnosis is the one he has pressed throughout the series: the 1995 Constitution, which makes ethnicity the title to power, land and security, and so turns every grievance into a war. He is unsparing with everyone. The government bears the heaviest guilt, but the new alliance, the oligarchs, the clergy and above all his own class, the intellectuals, are each held to account.

The Tribune does not endorse every judgement in the essays we publish, and readers will find much here to argue with. That is the purpose of the platform. We publish this article because it insists on two disciplines our public conversation badly needs: that every civilian death be recorded, whoever caused it, and that the argument be about the rule-book rather than the latest ruler.

Synopsis

A criminal record, and the diagnosis behind it. MGH accepts that the drone strikes on markets, schools, clinics and churches are real, and that those which killed civilians are crimes whose chain of command runs to the Prime Minister. The task is to turn the record into a case file fit for international forums, and to ask the question the study does not: why a state turns its air force on its own villages.

The war that returned. He sets out the events of late September and early October, and identifies three new features: the government’s drone monopoly is gone, an internal war became an interstate crisis within days, and the political theatre continued regardless. A victory at Mekelle, he warns, settled nothing in 2020 and will settle nothing now.

From study to case file. The most technical section audits the drone study against its sources, re-anchoring expert quotations, correcting attributions, questioning cost estimates, extending the strike record to include Gedeb, Abbay Giyorgis and Hintalo, and insisting on the correct legal language: war crimes and crimes against humanity, not a genocide charge that cannot yet be proven.

Who benefits, who pays. The benefits of the drone war fall to a governing party, its command and foreign suppliers; the costs fall on the dead, millions of children out of school, destroyed clinics and a collapsing birr. He is candid about what he cannot verify, and about his own position as a diaspora investor.

The road to accountability. Ethiopia is not party to the Rome Statute, so the road to The Hague runs through a Security Council veto or a future government’s consent. Meanwhile, he urges the African Commission, a restored UN commission of experts, universal jurisdiction and targeted sanctions, on the principle that accountability must fall on persons, never on the nation.

The racket’s four estates. Returning to the framework of Cui Bono?, he indicts the political cadre, the oligarch, the pulpit and, at greatest length, the intellectual, whose “five disguises of complicity” keep every argument inside the constitutional ring.

The citizens’ Constitution and the Alliance for Survival. He proposes a constitution that makes the individual Ethiopian sovereign, with administrative boundaries, an indivisible union and one army under civilian and judicial control. He engages Yonas Biru’s assessment of the new alliance, agreeing with its warnings but arguing that a reformed ethnic federation would buy only a decade, and declines to take sides among those he calls ethnic entrepreneurs.

Objections and conclusion. He answers eight objections at full strength, closes with a reading of the comparative literature on ethnofederalism, and ends with an eight-point warning and the question that has run through the whole series: can Ethiopians stop fighting over the country long enough to build it together?

Read the full article here:

Thea13_drones_unity_mgh.pdf

next instalment, Medemer, Oromummaa and the Soul of the Nation, follows next Sunday, and the series concludes the week after.

The Editor

ANALYSIS

The War That Found the Capital

Within a single week, Ethiopia’s conflict moved from the northern front to the skyline of Addis Ababa and the desk of its Foreign Ministry. The fronts now run from southern Tigray to the Afar lowlands, and the capital is no longer insulated.

By E. Frashie
The Ethiopian Tribune · 1 October 2026

Shortly after midnight on Thursday, residents of central Addis Ababa heard what the city’s authorities had spent the previous afternoon preparing for. Diplomatic sources told Addis Standard of explosions at around 12:30 and 1:15 a.m., in areas near the headquarters of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces and the site believed to house the Meshualekia 4th Division. Residents reported ambulances and fire engines moving through the streets afterwards. An intelligence official confirmed to the Associated Press that there had been three blasts in three different locations, and declined to say more.

Hours earlier, the National Intelligence and Security Service had banned the flying of drones of any kind over the capital and its surroundings, indefinitely, and announced the deployment of anti-drone systems to protect its airspace and critical infrastructure. A source linked to the opposition alliance fighting federal forces in the north told Reuters that the alliance had struck the military’s headquarters with drones. Reuters could not verify the claim, and neither the Prime Minister’s office, the federal government nor the military has yet offered an account of what happened. If the claim is borne out, it would be the first known drone attack on the capital by forces opposed to the government.

Before the day was out, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it was closing Ethiopia’s embassy in Asmara and declaring ten Eritrean diplomats persona non grata, with 48 hours to leave the country, accusing Eritrea of “direct and indirect acts of hostility and belligerence”. In a separate notification to the Egyptian Embassy, it ordered an Egyptian diplomat to leave within the same period. By evening, Eritrea had severed diplomatic relations with Ethiopia altogether, and Cairo had expelled an Ethiopian diplomat in return.

A drone ban, a night of explosions and diplomatic ruptures with both Asmara and Cairo, all within 24 hours. Whatever the final account of Thursday’s blasts, their political meaning is already plain. The war that Addis Ababa has long experienced as a distant affair, reported from the Amhara highlands, rural Oromia or Tigray, has arrived, at least psychologically, at the capital’s door, and it now carries a regional dimension that the government itself has chosen to make explicit.

A National War

It is tempting to describe this as Tigray sliding back into war. That would be wrong on two counts. The country has not been at peace since the Pretoria Agreement of November 2022: the Fano insurgency in Amhara has been fighting federal forces since 2023, and the Oromo Liberation Army’s war in Oromia is older still. Nor is the fighting now under way a Tigrayan affair. The coalition calling itself the Alliance for Survival brings together the TPLF, the Amhara Fano National Movement and the OLA, alongside armed groups drawn from the Somali, Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz areas. Its fronts this week ran from southern Tigray to the Afar lowlands and the Amhara highlands, where the army claims to have killed more than 270 fighters. A war fought across half a dozen regions, with drones reportedly reaching the capital, is a national war.

Seven Days in the North

The facts on the ground, as far as they can be established through a communications blackout, are these. Telecom providers reported major disruption to phone and internet services in Tigray from Friday 25 September. Over the weekend, the Tigray Peace Force, a militia aligned with the federal government, and pro-government outlets reported that federal forces had taken Alamata, the southern Tigrayan town that serves as a supply hub for troops, fuel and food on the road towards Mekelle. ACLED, the conflict-monitoring project, recorded the takeover. The cost to civilians was severe. Hospital sources and residents told the BBC that more than 50 civilians had been killed in three days of fighting, including children only days old, and that patient numbers at the Korem and Alamata hospitals had more than doubled within 48 hours.

The alliance answered in Afar. Tigrayan forces took Erebti after heavy artillery fire on Sunday and pressed on towards Afdeera, displacing an estimated 150,000 people. The strategic logic is unmistakable: the road through Afar is the corridor to Djibouti, through which passes almost all of Ethiopia’s international trade, its fuel included. The same day, a drone struck the headquarters of Tigrai TV in Mekelle, while the TPLF’s seizure of the region’s main airport had already forced the suspension of flights. Reuters described the fighting as the largest escalation of violence in the country since the end of the 2020–22 civil war.

Almost every figure in this account is contested or unverified, and that is itself part of the story. Neither the government’s tallies of enemy dead nor the alliance’s battlefield claims can be independently tested while Tigray is cut off and its own broadcaster has been struck from the air. An information vacuum of this kind does not stay empty for long.

“The rest of the country could burn; the capital was to be insulated. This week punctured that assumption.”

The Capital Discovers Its Exposure

For much of the past three years, Addis Ababa has lived beside its country’s wars rather than inside them. The insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia brought checkpoints, sporadic road closures and periodic waves of arrests, but the capital’s official story was one of transformation: corridor projects, new boulevards and glass towers, a city remade as the showcase of a developmental state. The rest of the country could burn; the capital was to be insulated. This week punctured that assumption in three ways.

The first is the air. The drone ban is, in effect, an official admission that the authorities regard the capital’s airspace as vulnerable. A security source told the Cairo-based Mada Masr that the measure followed a 27 September attack on Harar Meda Air Base at Bishoftu, some 35 miles from the city, in which two soldiers were said to have been killed, along with strikes on Kombolcha airport and near Bahir Dar. That account rests on a single anonymous source and remains unconfirmed. But the government’s own conduct, from the ban and the anti-drone deployment to its silence after the blasts, suggests that it takes the threat seriously.

The second is the supply line. Addis Ababa is a landlocked capital whose fuel, medicines and imported goods arrive overwhelmingly by the Djibouti road. An offensive in Afar aimed at that corridor is not a peripheral manoeuvre; it is a lever on the price of petrol and bread in Bole and Piassa. For a city that has already absorbed a steep depreciation of the birr since the 2024 float, the prospect of interrupted supply is a more immediate fear than any battlefield map.

The third is information. The capital’s residents now face, in milder form, the same predicament as Tigray’s: they hear explosions and see ambulances, and are then met with official silence. Rumour fills whatever space official communication leaves empty. A government that has spent years managing the national narrative with great care now finds that narrative hard to manage in its own capital.

The Governing Elite and the Regional Rupture

Thursday’s expulsions must be read against the arc of the past eight years. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s 2018 rapprochement with President Isaias Afwerki earned him the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, and during the 2020–22 war Eritrean troops fought alongside federal forces in Tigray. The Pretoria Agreement, negotiated without Asmara, began the unravelling of that partnership. This week marked a further, formal stage in its collapse.

The ministry did not specify what the ten Eritrean diplomats had done, saying only that their activities threatened national security and breached the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Ethiopia itself stopped short of severing relations, closing its statement by affirming the historical and people-to-people ties between the two countries. Asmara did not reciprocate the restraint. Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel said that expelling the diplomats, among them Eritrea’s chargé d’affaires, amounted in effect to closing its embassy in Addis Ababa, and Eritrea’s foreign ministry announced that it was severing all diplomatic ties, warning of what it called “all the negative corollaries that this entails”. The two governments that signed a celebrated peace in 2018 now have no formal channel between them.

The Egyptian expulsion is narrower but no less pointed. The Foreign Ministry declared Ahmed Moharam Ahmed Soliman, a member of the Egyptian Embassy’s diplomatic staff, persona non grata, without giving a reason or identifying any conduct. Egypt answered in kind, declaring a counsellor at the Ethiopian embassy in Cairo persona non grata and giving him 48 hours to leave, according to the state-affiliated Al Qahera News. Relations between the two capitals have been strained for more than a decade by the dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. What is new is that Addis Ababa has now taken concrete action against Egyptian personnel at the same moment as it accuses Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of supporting the TPLF-led opposition alliance, accusations all three governments deny.

The ministry did not link any of the expulsions to the overnight explosions, and The Tribune draws no such link. But the measures give formal weight to accusations previously voiced by the military. Field Marshal Berhanu Jula has accused Eritrea of backing the alliance and alleged support from Sudan and Egypt, while Afar’s regional leadership has told Al Jazeera that Eritrean forces are fighting inside the region, a claim not independently confirmed. Ethiopia’s internal war is being drawn, step by step, into the rivalries of the wider Horn and the Nile basin.

For the governing elite, the dilemma is acute. Barely three months after a general election that the ruling Prosperity Party presented as a decisive mandate, the state faces a multi-front insurgency, a broken relationship with Asmara, a fresh confrontation with Cairo and an exposed capital. Washington lifted its atrocity-linked sanctions on Ethiopia and Eritrea only weeks ago, declaring the underlying national emergency over; that judgement already looks premature. Every option open to Addis Ababa carries a price. Escalation against Eritrea risks an interstate war layered on top of a civil one. A negotiated settlement would mean engaging an alliance some of whose members the government has, at various times, designated as terrorist organisations. Holding the line means a long war of attrition fought, increasingly, within earshot of the capital.

The drone ban and the silence after the blasts are themselves expressions of that anxiety.

“A state confident of its position explains what happened; a state unsure of it restricts and waits.”

The Fog of Claims

Every party to this war is now fighting partly through its claims. The government announces counts of enemy dead that cannot be checked; the alliance claims drone strikes on the capital that the government will neither confirm nor deny; regional officials report foreign troops on Ethiopian soil without independent corroboration. With Tigray cut off from phone and internet services and its broadcaster struck from the air, the gap between what is asserted and what is known has rarely been wider.

That gap carries real consequences. Civilian deaths in Alamata and displacement in Afar risk being lost beneath the louder contest over battlefield gains, while unverified claims harden into accepted fact before anyone can test them. For now, the most reliable picture is the one assembled slowly from hospital staff, residents, diplomats and conflict monitors, and it is a picture of a war that is widening rather than one approaching resolution.

What to Watch

Three questions will shape the coming days. The first is whether the government acknowledges what struck near its military installations on Thursday night; silence cannot be sustained for long in a capital that heard the explosions. The second is whether the diplomatic ruptures stay diplomatic. With the 48-hour deadlines expiring on Saturday and Eritrea warning of negative consequences, the question is whether Asmara, Cairo or Khartoum moves from words to deeds, and whether Addis Ababa does so first. The third is the Djibouti corridor. If the alliance’s push through Afar disrupts supply to the capital, the war will cease to be an abstraction for the residents of Addis Ababa and become part of their daily lives.

The capital’s governing class has long assumed that Ethiopia’s wars could be managed from a distance. This week it learned otherwise. With the fighting now reaching the Djibouti corridor, relations with Asmara and Cairo and, on Thursday night, the capital itself, the question is no longer whether the war can be contained to the periphery, but whether anyone in Addis Ababa has a plan for ending it.

Note on sources: This analysis draws on reporting by Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Addis Standard, Mada Masr, Ahram Online, Radio Tamazuj and EFE, on ACLED conflict data, on statements and notifications by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs dated 1 October 2026 as carried by ENA and EBC, and on statements by Eritrea’s foreign ministry and Egyptian officials quoted by Al Qahera News. Claims attributed to the federal government, the opposition alliance and regional authorities could not be independently verified at the time of writing, owing to the communications blackout in Tigray and restricted access to the conflict zones. The Tribune will update this piece as confirmation emerges.

SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM · COMMENTARY

Seven Brothers in Arms, One Blackout, and a Press Told Where Not to Look

A week after Ethiopia’s armed opposition announced its intention to topple Abiy Ahmed, the world’s newsrooms have filed story after story. At home, the regulator has filed a ban.

By Sewasew Teklemariam

26 September 2026 · Meskerem 16, 2019 E.C. · The Ethiopian Tribune

It was a Sunday-night broadcast, as these things so often are. On 20 September, Zemene Kassie of the Amhara Fano National Movement — whose fighters spent 2020 to 2022 marching beside the federal army against Tigray — sat before the cameras of Tigrai TV and read a joint statement on behalf of seven armed movements. They declared that they bore “the historic responsibility of overthrowing this regime”. They called themselves the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival. The name is long; the ambition is short: remove the Prime Minister and install a transitional government.

Within three days, Tigrayan forces had taken the airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire. Within four, flights to Lalibela were suspended as fighting reached the approaches to the rock-hewn churches. By Friday, the telephones of Tigray had fallen silent. Ethiopia, which spent nearly four years assuring everyone that the Pretoria Agreement had closed the book, found the book reopened — by the world’s press, if not by its own.

The world has noticed

Consider the ledger. Reuters broke the alliance story on 21 September and has since filed on the airport seizures, on Lalibela, on the overnight detention of veteran Tigrayan commanders, and on the blackout. That copy has travelled by syndication from US News in America to CNBC Africa, the Sowetan in Johannesburg, Business Recorder in Karachi and ThePrint in Delhi. Al Jazeera has published at least seven pieces in six days, from the founding statement to a question-and-answer explainer and an opinion column warning that this front may go the way of 2021’s short-lived nine-group coalition. AFP’s reporting from Afar, sourced from humanitarian workers on the ground, has run in Euronews, the Oman Observer and the Taipei Times.

The Associated Press produced a five-point explainer. CNN asked what had changed. NPR warned of a return to full-scale war. DW declared the battle lines redrawn. Foreign Policy led its daily World Brief with Ethiopia. The BBC reported panic-buying in Mekelle and noted that the region’s cash machines have not worked for months. Asharq Al-Awsat, Türkiye Today, Anadolu, Kenya’s KBC and Azerbaijan’s AnewZ all carried the story to their own audiences.

Diplomacy followed the headlines. The UN Secretary-General pronounced himself gravely concerned, named the three captured airports, and warned against a broader and more devastating conflict. The African Union Commission chairperson urged immediate de-escalation and direct talks, and dispatched Olusegun Obasanjo once more. The EU insisted differences be settled by dialogue. London condemned attacks by Tigrayan forces in Afar and southern Tigray, rejected the alliance’s stated aim of removing the federal government, and redrew its travel map. Washington’s ambassador said he was disappointed in the TPLF leadership, and the US Embassy barred its own staff from Tigray and Afar.

By this column’s count — a snapshot, not a census — at least twenty international outlets on four continents have reported the crisis in a single week. The appendix below lists them.

The world is reading about Ethiopia’s war. Ethiopians, increasingly, are reading about it in the world’s newspapers.

Darkness — and who switched it off

On the night of 24 September, telecommunications across Tigray went down. NetBlocks recorded a sub-national shutdown; Ethio Telecom services were cut entirely, while Safaricom’s smaller network limped on. It would be satisfying — and, given this government’s record in 2020–22, entirely plausible — to lay the blackout at Arat Kilo’s door. The evidence of this week does not allow it. Reuters, citing four people with knowledge of the matter including a diplomat, reports that it was the TPLF that ordered both operators to cut service, possibly to deny federal drones the mobile network. NetBlocks itself says its data cannot establish who pulled the plug. Neither the Prime Minister’s office nor the operators have commented.

Sewasew records the correction because this publication does not trade in convenient villains. But let no one mistake the point. People who lived through two years of severed lines, blocked cash and famine-like conditions are once again in the dark — and, with cash machines already dead, now cut off from the digital payments that had replaced them. A blackout ordered by self-declared liberators is exactly as dark as one ordered by the state.

Nor is the dark confined to phone masts. Reuters reports that Lieutenant General Tadesse Werede, the former commander of Tigrayan forces and former head of the interim administration, was detained overnight along with three other veteran officers who had voiced doubts about a return to war. An Alliance for Survival, it seems, does not extend survival to dissent within its own ranks.

Meanwhile, at home

The day after the announcement, the Ethiopian Media Authority suspended Tigray Television indefinitely, citing incitement and threats to national security. It went further: every digital, broadcast and print outlet in the country was forbidden to use the channel as a source or to reproduce its content, on pain of legal and administrative measures. Pause on that. The founding statement of the most consequential armed coalition in Ethiopia since 2021 was broadcast on that channel. An Ethiopian journalist who wishes to quote it from its source now does so at personal risk.

This did not arrive from nowhere. In February the same Authority revoked the registration of Addis Standard; in April its managing editor, Million Beyene, was taken from the newsroom and held incommunicado for nearly two weeks; in August its editor-in-chief, Yonas Kedir, was detained and beaten and its offices raided. Wazema Radio lost its licence. All nine of DW’s Ethiopian correspondents were suspended last October. Three Reuters journalists were refused accreditation. An AFP reporter was stopped from flying to Tigray in February. Four journalists who covered the Amhara conflict have spent close to three years in detention and, according to CPJ, could face life imprisonment or death. Reporters Without Borders places Ethiopia 148th of 180.

When readers ask why Ethiopian media show no interest in this war, Sewasew must issue a correction. Interest is not the problem. Permission is.

In fairness, the domestic record is not blank, and to say so would insult those still working. The Reporter covered the suspension of flights to Tigray and the Tigray TV ban. Addis Standard, publishing while it contests its revocation in court, reported the alliance’s formation. Ethiopia Observer carried the UN statement. Wazema reports by newsletter. Tigrayan outlets such as Kulu Media and UMD Media are documenting the blackout with commendable care about what they cannot verify. But these are narrowing spaces — increasingly online, increasingly in exile, and read by a fraction of the population.

The broadcast mainstream, where most Ethiopians actually get their news, belongs to the state and its allies. Media monitors documented earlier this year how EBC, Fana and their stablemates had settled on a single frame for Tigray: the TPLF as the sole spoiler of peace, the government as patient and dialogue-minded. The army’s claim this week of 272 Tigrayan fighters killed in Amhara arrives in that ecosystem unverified — and no domestic reporter is at liberty to go and check.

The juxtapositions write themselves. On the day the alliance was announced, the state news agency’s English service offered readers Getachew Reda’s counsel that dialogue was the only way to prevent the disintegration of — Sudan. On 24 September, as fighting spread through Afar, the Prime Minister was in Djibouti launching a petroleum infrastructure project; the President was addressing the UN General Assembly in New York. The government will say, fairly, that it has its own National Dialogue. Sewasew will observe that a dialogue is hard to hold when one side of the conversation has been taken off air.

Dialogue, it appears, is an export commodity: prescribed for Khartoum, rationed in Mekelle.

A word of caution about the brothers

Sewasew is nobody’s cheerleader, and readers deserve the other half of the ledger. This is an alliance of former enemies. Fano and the TPLF both claim Western Tigray, which Amhara forces have administered since the last war. At least one listed member, the ONLF, has reportedly denied joining. The federal government alleges Eritrean financing; Asmara denies it; the founding statement does not mention Eritrea at all. And history is not encouraging: the nine-group front proclaimed in November 2021 lost its Afar member within two months and its Benishangul member within a year, before the TPLF signed at Pretoria alone. Analysts at the International Crisis Group say it is not yet clear the groups can fight together at all.

What is clear is the price of failure. The last war cost an estimated 600,000 lives. Every party now reaching for the rifle — in Addis Ababa, in Mekelle, in the Amhara highlands and the Oromia forests — knows that number. None of them will be among the civilians who pay it.

Following the smoke

Tonight the Demera will be lit across the country, and tomorrow is Meskel. We tell our children that Empress Eleni found the True Cross by following the smoke. This week the world followed the smoke — from Mekelle’s airport to the hills above Lalibela — and reported what it found. Ethiopia’s own newsrooms have been told to watch the bonfire in the square and nothing beyond it.

እንኳን ለመስቀል በዓል በሰላም አደረሳችሁ።

May you reach the Feast of the Cross in peace. This year, the words “in peace” are doing a great deal of work.

Appendix · Media Monitor, 20–26 September 2026

A non-exhaustive snapshot of international coverage compiled by the Tribune desk. Syndicated wire copy is grouped under the originating agency. Dates are publication dates as shown by each outlet.

Domestic and diaspora coverage noted this week includes The Reporter, Addis Standard, Ethiopia Observer, Wazema, Kulu Media, UMD Media and The Habesha. Coverage by state broadcasters was not independently audited for this appendix.

ANALYSIS · HORN OF AFRICA

The Diplomacy of Convenient Silence

As war returns to northern Ethiopia, every capital speaks the language of Pretoria. Beneath the shared vocabulary, the positions could hardly be further apart.

By E. Frashie  |  25 September 2026

Within hours of Tigrayan forces seizing the airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire on 23 September, the statements began to arrive. The African Union urged restraint. The European Union asked for de-escalation. The United Nations Secretary-General warned of a wider war. Washington declared itself disappointed. Read side by side, they share a vocabulary — dialogue, restraint, the Pretoria Agreement — and almost nothing else.

That shared vocabulary is the diplomatic story of the week. The fighting now running along three fronts, from the Kobo–Tumuga line on the Amhara border to the Tonsa–Megale axis on the Afar frontier, has not produced a unified international response. It has instead exposed how far the principal outside actors have already chosen sides in a conflict they publicly insist must be settled at the table.

Washington: from sanctioner to partner

No actor has moved further than the United States. Its ambassador in Addis Ababa, Ervin Massinga, placed the blame squarely on the TPLF leadership, which Washington sanctioned earlier this year, calling the offensive a poor decision and an “unwinnable fight”. He warned that the United States holds further tools to sanction leaders who escalate, and reserved a pointed line for the remaining members of the new Alliance for Survival: they would be wise not to follow.

The statement did not arrive in a vacuum. In the space of a single week, the State Department removed Ethiopia from the ITAR §126.1 list, ending the presumptive denial of defence exports to the country’s security forces, and allowed the 2021 national emergency underpinning sanctions on Eritrea to lapse. Washington said the Eritrea decision was taken “to advance US regional interests” — interests now defined by the war with Iran and by the value of Red Sea shipping while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

The result is a policy pulling in two directions at once. The United States is re-arming the federal government while rewarding the very neighbour Addis Ababa accuses of bankrolling the rebels. Both moves make sense through the lens of the Bab al-Mandeb. Neither has much to do with the Pretoria Agreement the ambassador invokes.

“Everyone speaks the language of Pretoria. No one with real leverage is spending it to save the agreement.”

The African Union: guardian of a deal it cannot enforce

The AU Commission chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, issued the most detailed institutional statement, and it is notable for what it names and what it omits. It specifies the seizure of the three airports and the detention of federal personnel by the TPLF, and it voices concern about new political and military alliances. It says nothing of the drone strikes on Tigray that preceded the offensive and that the regional government cites as its reason for going to war.

Youssouf reaffirmed Pretoria as the cornerstone of peace, asked the AU High Representative for the Horn, Olusegun Obasanjo, to re-engage the parties urgently, and called on Ethiopia’s neighbours to refrain from actions that feed the escalation — an unmistakable, if unnamed, reference to Eritrea. IGAD added its own call for de-escalation. The AU is headquartered in Addis Ababa; its ability to speak even-handedly about its host government has been questioned since 2020, and it is about to be tested again.

Brussels and New York: the language of equidistance

The European Union called for immediate de-escalation and a renewed commitment to the permanent cessation of hostilities, insisting that differences be resolved through dialogue rather than force. António Guterres went further on the humanitarian dimension, asking all parties to protect civilians and guarantee unhindered aid access, and warning against a “broader and more devastating conflict”.

Neither has apportioned blame, and that equidistance is itself a position. Some regional outlets have reported that the United States, the EU and the AU are jointly threatening sanctions. On the public record, only Washington has done so.

Asmara: the party no one names

Eritrea is the actor most discussed and least named. It is absent from the alliance’s founding statement, as the Oslo scholar Kjetil Tronvoll has observed, and it is absent from the AU’s. Yet Addis Ababa places it at the centre. The prime minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, said the alliance’s members had long been collaborating with Eritrean financial backing, and that their announcement was “only attesting to what the Ethiopian government has been alleging time and again”. Getachew Reda, the prime minister’s adviser on East African affairs, has gone further, accusing Eritrea and Egypt of running a proxy campaign through the TPLF, Fano and the OLA. Asmara has consistently denied supporting Ethiopian armed groups.

What Asmara has not hidden is its satisfaction with Washington. Its information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, said the 2021 sanctions had never been justified and welcomed the Trump administration’s remedy. Eritrea thus enters this war with its international standing stronger than at any point in five years.

Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi: the Red Sea proxy map

Beyond the Horn, the war slots neatly into an alignment already visible in Sudan. The analyst Martin Plaut describes Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia as backing the Sudanese Armed Forces and Eritrea, while the United Arab Emirates, and to a lesser degree Israel, maintain ties with Ethiopia and the Rapid Support Forces — links that all parties officially deny. Jawar Mohammed, once among Abiy’s closest allies, sketches a similar map of the alliance’s patrons.

Egypt’s interest is structural. Cairo regards the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as a threat to its water supply, and two of the alliance’s constituent movements come from Benishangul-Gumuz, the region in which the dam stands. Egyptian commentary this week has framed the fighting less as an Ethiopian affair than as a danger to Sudan and the Red Sea. For these capitals, public statements reveal far less than the alignments they are accused of maintaining.

Addis Ababa: pre-empting the narrative

The federal government has run a diplomatic campaign of its own. According to a report published this week, Addis Ababa warned Western foreign ministries days before the coalition was announced — a sign that it knew what was coming and meant to frame it first. Since the fighting began, Abiy has kept a conspicuously low profile, travelling to Djibouti to announce an economic partnership rather than addressing the nation on the war. Getachew Reda, asked about the alliance’s prospects, told state media he does not lose sleep over it.

Jawar reads the restraint as deliberate: the federal government, he argues, is limiting its engagement in order to demonstrate to foreign partners that the TPLF started the war. On the evidence of the American statement, the strategy is working. The army, meanwhile, says dozens of TPLF fighters have been killed and many more detained.

The inversion of 2021

The contrast with November 2021 is stark. Then, nine anti-government groups announced their coalition in Washington itself, the State Department urged Americans to leave Ethiopia, and Western envoys pressed Abiy towards unconditional talks. Today, a comparable coalition has been met by an American ambassador who blames the rebels and a Treasury that has just lifted sanctions on their alleged patron. The opposition has changed — Fano, the federal army’s ally in 2020, now fights beside the TPLF — but the world around it has changed more.

What the ledger leaves out

Missing from nearly every statement are the civilians. The Tigray regional government says the drone strikes of 22 September hit schools in Alamata; those claims have yet to be independently verified. A drone strike on 20 September destroyed an aid lorry carrying more than 41 tonnes of food. Aid workers in Afar are already moving supplies to the newly displaced. Only the UN Secretary-General has placed humanitarian access at the heart of his message.

The diplomatic posture of the world’s major actors is, in short, a contest over who fired first — because that answer will determine who is sanctioned, who is armed and who is forgiven. In that contest, Pretoria has become less an agreement to be defended than a vocabulary to be cited. The people of Tigray, Afar and Amhara, who paid for the last war, stand once again outside the ledger.

◆

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Memory at the Crossroads

On Professor Girma Berhanu’s “Remembering Ato Eshete Moges Amid the Current Political Realignment in Ethiopia”

Readers of this publication have met Ato Eshete Moges before. In December 2021, and again in an essay this Tribune carried in April 2024, Professor Girma Berhanu told the story of a Fano leader who, as TPLF forces pushed south towards Shewa Robit in the closing weeks of that year’s offensive, refused a second withdrawal. At Salaysh, some fifteen kilometres from the town, he and his son Yitagesu stood their ground at their home against the advancing TPLF fighters, and both died there. Eshete’s last telephone call, as Berhanu recounted it, was to report that his son had been killed and that he himself was surrounded.

Nearly five years on, the forces that killed them and the movement that mourns them have put their names to the same founding statement. On the evening of 20 September, Zemene Kassie, chairman of the Amhara Fano National Movement, read out on Tigrai TV the proclamation of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival — the coalition this publication has followed under the name Tsimdo. Seven organisations, among them the Amhara Fano National Movement, the TPLF, the OLA and the ONLF, alongside Afar, Benishangul and Gumuz movements, pledged to remove the Prosperity Party government and to install a transitional administration under a charter. Of all the pairings the alliance contains, it is the one between Fano and the TPLF, enemies in the war of 2020–22, that has drawn the sharpest scrutiny.

It would have been easy — and for a writer so closely identified with the Fano cause, perhaps expected — to answer that pairing with a denunciation. Professor Berhanu has written something harder. He declines both to bless the alliance and to mock it. He insists that historical grievances be documented rather than turned into collective accusations against any people. And he makes the memory of Eshete and Yitagesu a test rather than a weapon: not what the dead would condemn, but what principles those who invoke them must be able to state. The eight questions he sets out — on shared objectives, civilian protection, accountability for past abuses, and the danger that a military coalition becomes a contest for the palace — are the questions every member of this alliance should now be asked. None has yet answered them in public.

Not what the dead would condemn, but what principles those who invoke them must be able to state.

A word on timing. The essay was finalised in the days before the formal declaration, and its closing section rests on the OLA’s statement of 17 September, in which the organisation said it was neither involved in nor a component of the emerging alliance, while describing cooperation among opposition forces as a “procedural consensus”. Three days later the OLA was named among the seven founders. Its framing has moved with it: the procedural label now describes its participation rather than its absence, and it has demanded that Fano disown an armed faction in Wollega. We do not read this as weakening the essay. The distance travelled between a press release and a signature in the space of three days is, if anything, the clearest illustration yet of Berhanu’s warning that claims of unity can outrun the consensus beneath them.

The Tribune publishes this essay because it refuses both of the easy scripts on offer — betrayal on one side, unity on the other. Its call for a civic Ethiopian political community, in which the state belongs to its citizens rather than to any ethnic claimant, and for a civilian and representative transition rather than a handover between armed factions, comes from within the constituency with the strongest claim to feel betrayed. That is precisely what gives it weight.

Berhanu closes not with a policy but with a folk verse of the Fano tradition, in which the singer grieves that Fano went home without taking leave, and would have seen him off however wearied. It is a lament for a departure that came too soon. The question it leaves is the one the essay asks of all of us: what the living owe to those who did not come back — and whether that debt is to be paid in vengeance, or in principle.

ፋኖ አገሩ ገባ፥ ሳይሰናበተኝ፣
እሸኘው ነበረ፥ ምንም ቢታክተኝ።

“Fano went home without taking leave of me; I would have seen him off, however it wearied me.” — traditional Fano verse quoted by the author (Tribune translation)

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

SYNOPSIS

In this essay, Professor Girma Berhanu of the University of Gothenburg reads the September 2026 Alliance for Survival through the memory of Ato Eshete Moges and his son Yitagesu, who died fighting TPLF forces near Shewa Robit in 2021. He neither condemns nor endorses the coalition. Instead he argues that reconciliation which suppresses memory is fragile, and that alliances between former adversaries must be judged by the principles that govern them rather than by the enemy they share.

Berhanu distinguishes Fano as an armed formation from Fano as a moral and political tradition, and argues that if the latter is claimed, questions of legitimacy, accountability and historical memory become unavoidable. He calls for past abuses to be documented rather than attributed collectively to ethnic communities, and sets out the questions any credible coalition must answer: its shared objective beyond opposition to the government, its governing institutions, its safeguards for civilians, its approach to responsibility for past violence, its conception of citizenship, and its protections against a post-victory struggle for dominance.

His wider case is for a civic conception of Ethiopia in which political authority derives from citizens rather than from ethnic ownership of the state, and for any transition to be civilian, representative and constitutionally grounded rather than a transfer of power between armed factions. Drawing on Jeff Pearce’s critique of the alliance and on the OLA’s “procedural consensus” statement, he closes with a question he declines to answer for the dead: what would Eshete Moges say — and what should the living learn from those who died?

Remembering Ato Eshete Moges Amid the Current Political Realignment in Ethiopia

By Professor Girma Berhanu

University of Gothenburg

1. Introduction

Recent reports indicate that several armed groups that have been engaged in conflict with the Ethiopian government in different parts of the country have announced an alliance aimed at challenging the government in Addis Ababa. The reported coalition brings together Fano forces in Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), and several smaller groups under what has been described as an alliance for survival. The groups have accused Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government of presiding over war, mass destruction, poverty, and other forms of political and humanitarian crisis, and have argued that Ethiopia faces a serious risk of further fragmentation.

I do not dismiss the possibility that political realignment and dialogue among previously antagonistic actors could contribute to a pathway toward peace. Nor do I intend to mock or prematurely judge the emerging alliance. Political conflicts of this magnitude are rarely static, and former adversaries can, under certain circumstances, become partners in pursuit of shared political objectives. At the same time, however, political alliances cannot be understood solely through their immediate strategic calculations. They must also be examined in relation to historical memory, collective trauma, political legitimacy, and the expectations of the communities whose interests the actors claim to represent.

It was in this context that I found myself thinking about Ato Eshete Moges, a Fano leader who died in the Shoa Robit area alongside his son, Yitagesu Eshete. His death, and the circumstances surrounding it, remain deeply significant to me. I was particularly struck by the historical paradox presented by the possibility that a movement associated with his legacy might now cooperate with actors whom many Amhara communities associate with earlier violence and conflict.

This is not an argument that reconciliation is impossible. Nor is it an assertion that historical grievances should make political cooperation permanently unacceptable. Rather, it is an argument for historical consciousness. Reconciliation that simply suppresses memory is fragile; reconciliation that acknowledges past violence, establishes accountability, and articulates clearly defined political principles has a stronger intellectual and political foundation.

For many Amhara families, the violence associated with the conflicts of recent decades remains an unresolved historical experience. Accounts of massacres, displacement, destruction of property, sexual violence, and other alleged abuses have contributed to profound mistrust among communities. These experiences cannot simply be erased by the emergence of a new political configuration. At the same time, historical claims and allegations concerning responsibility for particular acts require careful documentation and should not be transformed into collective accusations against entire ethnic or political communities.

The central questions, therefore, are not simply whether former adversaries can cooperate, but under what conditions such cooperation could become credible and sustainable. What principles would govern the alliance? What mechanisms would address historical grievances? What safeguards would exist against renewed conflict? How would competing political objectives be reconciled? And, perhaps most importantly, what guarantees would be available to the communities whose histories and sacrifices are being invoked in the name of political change?

These questions are particularly important when the memory of individuals such as Ato Eshete Moges continues to shape the political imagination of those who identify with Fano.

2. Ato Eshete Moges: Memory, Sacrifice, and the Meaning of Fano

This article also serves as a commemoration of Ato Eshete Moges and his son, Yitagesu Eshete. Their deaths have acquired symbolic significance within narratives of Fano resistance and sacrifice. Yet commemoration should not simply reproduce heroic mythology. It can also provide an opportunity to examine the values, political assumptions, and historical interpretations that are attached to the memory of those who died.

The purpose of remembering Eshete is not to glorify war or violence. Nor should sacrifice be romanticised as though armed conflict itself produces political or social progress. Rather, the significance of his story lies in the questions it raises about responsibility, family, community, political commitment, and the moral costs of conflict.

The memory of Eshete can therefore be understood as part of a broader political and moral narrative surrounding Fano. In that narrative, Fano is presented not merely as an armed formation but as a social and political consciousness associated with resistance, community responsibility, self-determination, and opposition to perceived injustice. Whether one accepts this interpretation in its entirety or not, it is important to recognise that political movements acquire meaning not only through their organisational structures but also through the collective memories and symbols through which supporters understand them.

This distinction is important at the present historical juncture. If Fano is understood only as an armed organisation, then alliances can be assessed primarily in terms of military and strategic interests. If, however, Fano is understood also as a political and moral tradition, then questions of historical memory, political principles, legitimacy, and accountability become unavoidable.

The legacy of Ato Eshete Moges consequently raises a difficult question: what does it mean for a movement to preserve the memory and principles associated with those who sacrificed their lives while simultaneously entering political relationships with former adversaries?

The answer cannot simply be found in loyalty to the past, nor in an unquestioning embrace of the present. It requires a critical engagement with both.

Commemoration should not simply reproduce heroic mythology.

3. The Spirit of Fano and the Problem of Political Identity

One dimension of this discussion concerns the meaning attributed to the term “Fano.” The concept has been interpreted differently across historical periods and political contexts. It has been used to describe forms of local resistance, community mobilisation, armed struggle, and broader political consciousness. Consequently, treating Fano as a single, historically uniform entity risks overlooking significant changes in its composition, objectives, and political context.

A more productive approach is to examine the principles that different actors associate with Fano. These may include resistance to perceived oppression, community protection, political autonomy, sacrifice, solidarity, and a commitment to particular understandings of Ethiopian national identity.

The challenge today is to determine whether these principles can provide a coherent political foundation in a rapidly changing environment. Political movements inevitably confront pressures to compromise, form alliances, and adjust their strategies. Such adaptation is not necessarily evidence of betrayal. At the same time, strategic flexibility without clearly articulated principles can create uncertainty about the movement’s political identity and long-term objectives.

This is where the memory of Ato Eshete becomes particularly relevant. His story can be interpreted not simply as a narrative of military courage but as an opportunity to ask what political and ethical commitments should guide those who claim to inherit his legacy.

If Fano is to function as more than an armed formation, it requires a clearly articulated political philosophy. Such a philosophy would need to address questions of citizenship, equality, political representation, minority rights, territorial governance, accountability, and the relationship between ethnic identity and Ethiopian national citizenship.

The issue, therefore, is not whether Fano should cooperate with others in principle. Cooperation can be politically necessary. The more fundamental question is what kind of cooperation is compatible with the movement’s stated principles and with the interests of the wider population.

4. Historical Memory and the Possibility of Reconciliation

The prospect of cooperation among actors with deeply conflicting histories presents a broader theoretical problem. Political reconciliation requires more than a temporary convergence of strategic interests. Durable reconciliation generally depends on some degree of mutual recognition, accountability, institutional guarantees, and a shared understanding of the political future.

Historical memory plays an important role in this process. Communities do not enter political alliances as blank slates. They carry memories of violence, displacement, loss, and betrayal. These memories can influence political behaviour long after the immediate conflict has ended.

For this reason, political actors who seek reconciliation must confront rather than simply suppress historical grievances. The alternative is an unstable form of cooperation in which unresolved memories remain beneath the surface and can be activated when political circumstances change.

The question is particularly sensitive in Ethiopia, where political conflict has repeatedly intersected with competing understandings of ethnicity, citizenship, territory, state power, and national identity. A political coalition that brings together organisations with substantially different conceptions of these questions therefore requires more than a declaration of common opposition to the incumbent government. It requires a transparent account of what political order the coalition seeks to establish.

This is also why the memory of Ato Eshete Moges matters. His story represents, for many people, a particular history of sacrifice. That history cannot simply be detached from contemporary political choices. At the same time, historical memory should not become an obstacle to the possibility of reconciliation. The task is to create a political framework in which remembrance and reconciliation are not treated as mutually exclusive.

Reconciliation without memory is fragile; memory without reconciliation can become a permanent source of conflict.

5. The Present Crossroads

The current political moment presents Ethiopia with profound uncertainty. Political realignment may create new opportunities for negotiation, but it may also produce new tensions when organisations with incompatible objectives attempt to operate within the same political framework.

The central issue is therefore not whether cooperation is inherently legitimate or illegitimate. It is whether the actors involved can establish sufficient agreement concerning the political principles that would govern their cooperation.

Several questions deserve particular attention:

• What is the shared political objective beyond opposition to the current government?
• What institutional arrangements would govern the coalition?
• How would disagreements among participating groups be resolved?
• What guarantees would protect civilians and communities from renewed violence?
• How would responsibility for past abuses be addressed?
• What conception of citizenship would underpin the proposed political order?
• How would ethnic, regional, and national political interests be reconciled?
• What mechanisms would prevent a military coalition from becoming a struggle for political dominance after a change of government?

These are not merely strategic questions. They concern the foundations of political legitimacy.

A transition that simply replaces one concentration of power with another would not resolve the structural problems that have contributed to Ethiopia’s recurrent conflicts. A sustainable political settlement would instead require institutions capable of protecting citizens regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation.

6. Towards a Civic Conception of Ethiopian Political Community

My own concern is ultimately broader than the fate of any single political organisation. Ethiopia’s political future cannot be secured through competing claims of ethnic ownership over the state. The country belongs to its citizens, and political authority should derive from citizens rather than from exclusive claims that the state belongs to one ethnic group or another.

This principle does not require the denial of ethnic identity. On the contrary, a democratic political order must be capable of accommodating linguistic, cultural, historical, and regional differences while maintaining equal citizenship.

The challenge is to develop a political framework in which ethnic identity and national citizenship are not constructed as mutually exclusive alternatives.

Any future transitional arrangement should therefore be carefully considered. If a transition is required, its legitimacy would depend in part on its independence from the direct control of armed organisations, its civilian character, its representativeness, and its commitment to constitutional and democratic principles. Its purpose should be to establish the conditions for peace, equality, development, accountable government, and democratic participation rather than merely transferring power from one armed or factional group to another.

Ethiopians living abroad also have an important role to play. That role should include critical engagement with information, support for peaceful political processes, documentation of human-rights concerns, and resistance to misinformation. Diaspora political engagement is most constructive when it contributes to informed public debate rather than reinforcing polarization.

7. Final Reflections: What Would Ato Eshete Say?

A recent article by Jeff Pearce, Fano and Forget: The Betrayal of an Ideal, raises serious questions about the reported political realignment and its implications for the identity and historical memory of Fano. Pearce argues that an alliance involving actors associated with previous violence against Amhara communities risks undermining the principles the movement claims to represent. His argument is one interpretation of the current political development, but it reflects a broader concern: can strategic political alliances coexist with historical memory, political principle, and accountability?

As I am finalising this text, Addis Standard has reported an important clarification from the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) regarding the emerging alliance among Ethiopia’s opposition armed groups. The OLA has characterised the initiative as a “procedural consensus,” rather than a substantive political agreement, emphasising that it does not constitute a common position on Ethiopia’s political future or authorise any participating group to speak on behalf of others.

In a press release issued on 17 September, the OLA explicitly stated that it was neither involved in nor a component of the emerging alliance. At the same time, it acknowledged a broader pattern of cooperation among opposition forces, describing a process “stretching from west to east and from south to north.” The distinction is important. It suggests that coordination among opposition forces may be expanding, while the extent to which this coordination represents genuine political convergence remains unresolved. The OLA’s statement therefore highlights a central tension within Ethiopia’s opposition landscape. There may be growing recognition of the need for coordination, but procedural cooperation should not be mistaken for agreement on political objectives, governance arrangements, accountability, or a shared vision for Ethiopia’s future. In a fragmented political environment, claims of opposition unity can easily go beyond the actual level of political consensus.

The question that remains for me is therefore deeply personal, but also profoundly political: What would Ato Eshete Moges say about this emerging political configuration?

We cannot know the answer. Yet the question itself matters because it forces us to confront the uneasy relationship between historical memory and political expediency.

Remembering Eshete should not mean perpetuating a culture of revenge. Nor should honouring his memory require rejecting every possibility of political reconciliation. Rather, his memory can serve as a reminder that political movements are ultimately judged not only by the alliances they form or the power they acquire, but also by the principles they uphold when political circumstances change.

If there is a meaningful legacy to be drawn from his story, it should be one of responsibility: responsibility toward family and community, responsibility toward the wider society, and responsibility for the political consequences of one’s choices.

Ethiopia needs neither the romanticisation of armed struggle nor the erasure of historical suffering. It needs a political order grounded in equal citizenship, accountability, constitutional government, peaceful political participation, and respect for human dignity.

The central challenge, therefore, is to move beyond the politics of inherited grievance without erasing the history that produced those grievances. Reconciliation without memory is fragile; memory without reconciliation can become a permanent source of conflict. The difficult task is to hold the two together—to remember without reproducing hatred, and to pursue reconciliation without demanding historical amnesia.

As I think of Ato Eshete Moges and his son, Yitagesu, I am left not with a simple political answer, but with a question that deserves serious public reflection:

What should the living learn from those who died, and how should that memory shape the political choices we make in the present?

ፋኖን እወዳለሁ፥ ፋኖንስ አልጠላ፣
ተኳሽ እወዳለሁ፥ ተኳሽም አልጠላ፣
ሲደክመኝ አርፋለሁ፥ በጎፈሬው ጥላ።

ፋኖ አገሩ ገባ፥ ሳይሰናበተኝ፣
እሸኘው ነበረ፥ ምንም ቢታክተኝ።

References

Berhanu, G. (2022). Fano: A living saviour of the Amhara people and the Ethiopian spirit. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(1), 112–119. https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.91.11537

Eurasia Review. (2025, September 19). Ato Eshete Moges: A lion among men whose courage blazed like fire across Fano. https://www.eurasiareview.com/19092025-ato-eshete-moges-a-lion-among-men-whose-courage-blazed-like-fire-across-fano-oped/

Eshete Moges, Yitagesu Eshte: Valorous father and son paid in life together. (n.d.). Gazette Plus. https://share.google/PUtbTNy7VJp4Bzbxo

Fano: A mass outrage for Amhara existence, justice and Ethiopian unity. (n.d.). https://share.google/166WApR72QNn7zfTb

Pearce, J. (2026, September 20). Fano and forget: The betrayal of an ideal. Jeff Propulsion. https://jeffpropulsion.substack.com/p/fano-and-forget-the-betrayal-of-an

The story of fatherhood in the war field of Shewarobit—Ethiopia. (n.d.). The Voice of Africa. https://share.google/PuPVK59lQEIQ7yEqQ

Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.

Gazette Plus. (n.d.). [Article title not provided]. https://share.google/ePqSYE9DwKp9sDwAb

YouTube. (n.d.). [Video]. https://youtube.com/watch?v=uwKCTed332Y

ANALYSIS

Two Fronts, One Army

As Abiy Ahmed forms his new government, he faces a rebel alliance in the field, rumours of disloyalty in his own barracks, and a national dialogue report that offers another way out. What he does to guard against one threat may weaken his defences against the other.

By E. Frashie

The Ethiopian Tribune · 22 September 2026

When the House of Peoples’ Representatives opens its new term in the coming weeks, Abiy Ahmed will do what every Ethiopian prime minister does at the start of a mandate: name a government. The last time he did so, in October 2021, after an election held in the middle of a war, he used the occasion to place twenty institutions under his own office, among them the National Intelligence and Security Service and the Information Network Security Agency. The cabinet he names this time will tell us more than any parliamentary speech about how he reads the danger now facing him. That danger has two faces, and they point in opposite directions.

The threat in the open

Late on Sunday 20 September, Zemene Kassie, chairman of the Amhara Fano National Movement, read a founding statement on the TPLF-controlled Tigrai TV. It announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, a coalition of seven organisations: the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (Ugugumo), the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement and the Gumuz People’s Democratic Movement. Its declared purpose is to remove what it calls the Prosperity Party’s personalist and dictatorial regime and to install an inclusive transitional government.

There is no doubt about the coalition’s reach. Its members claim constituencies in six of the country’s twelve regional states, and in Amhara and Oromia they are already at war with the state. Its cohesion is much less certain. Fano fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF in 2020–22, and Amhara and Tigray still both claim Western Tigray. Within a day of the announcement, OLA figures were describing their participation as a procedural consensus, not submission to a unified military command. The founding text commits members to resolve their differences according to the “freely expressed will” of their peoples. Applied to Wolkait, that formula would divide the alliance’s two largest partners.

Addis Ababa’s first responses were predictable. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, told Reuters that the groups had long been collaborating with Eritrean financial backing. Asmara has denied such accusations before, and no evidence has been published. On Monday the Ethiopian Media Authority prohibited news outlets from using Tigrai TV as a source.

The threat in the barracks

The second threat is harder to see. For some time, claims have circulated on social media that elements of the officer corps are prepared to move against the Prime Minister. Some of these claims are attributed to the exiled Oromo politician Jawar Mohammed. The Tribune has not been able to verify them, and nothing in this analysis depends on their being true. Rumours of disloyalty in the barracks shape a ruler’s behaviour whether or not they are accurate. In a system as personalised as Abiy’s, the perception of a threat is a threat in its own right.

The rumours also carry a politics of their own. In July, according to a ZeHabesha summary of a TikTok discussion, Jawar warned against coalitions formed only to topple Abiy without first agreeing on what would replace him. A transition managed by the army and a victory by an armed alliance are very different outcomes. Those who talk up the first may be positioning themselves against the second.

Nor is the idea alien to Ethiopian history. The Imperial Bodyguard moved against Haile Selassie in 1960. The Derg dismantled the monarchy from within the armed forces in 1974. Senior generals tried to remove Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1989. And in June 2019, on the night of the killings in Bahir Dar, the Chief of the General Staff, Se’are Mekonnen, was shot dead in Addis Ababa. Every Ethiopian ruler has had reason to watch his own officers.

“Every lock he fits against his generals is a weight he hangs on his soldiers.”

The coup-proofing dilemma

Political scientists call it coup-proofing. A ruler rotates his commanders, divides the chain of command, promotes loyalists over the able, and builds parallel forces that answer to him alone. Each measure makes a coup harder, and each makes the army worse at fighting. Abiy must now do both at once: field an army strong enough to hold Amhara, Oromia and the Tigray frontier, while making sure that no part of it is strong enough, or united enough, to turn on him.

The precedent he will least want to hear is 1989. After the failed coup, Mengistu purged his senior officer corps and later had a number of its generals executed. The army that remained was loyal, and it was hollow. Within two years it collapsed before the EPRDF. The lesson is not that Abiy faces the same fate. It is that a regime which answers an open threat and a hidden one with the same instrument, a more tightly controlled army, can win the second contest and lose the first.

What the new government is likely to do

The first and most visible move will be at the top of the security state. Expect changes at the Ministry of Defence and in the general staff, and possibly further agencies brought under the Prime Minister’s office on the 2021 model. Expect, too, another round of promotions. Abiy has used mass promotion before to widen the pool of officers who owe their rank to him personally, and a larger pool of generals is a smaller risk from any one of them.

The second will be legal. The ban on Tigrai TV looks like an opening move, not a final one. The government has declared states of emergency before, nationally in November 2021 and in Amhara in August 2023, and it has designated armed movements as terrorist organisations, including the TPLF in 2021 before the designation was lifted after Pretoria. A designation of the alliance as a whole would make contact with any of its members a crime. That would reach far beyond the fighters, to intermediaries, diaspora organisers and journalists.

The third will be an effort to split the alliance. Its seams are visible, and Addis Ababa knows where they are. The ONLF can be reminded of its 2018 agreement, and the smaller Afar and Benishangul movements can be courted locally with offers of posts and budgets. Tigray’s own divisions give the government room to manoeuvre, as does the existence of Fano factions outside the AFNM. With the OLA, the government has already shown in its separate 2024 agreement with a breakaway commander that it prefers to peel off factions rather than negotiate with movements. Every member that signs a separate peace weakens the claim that the alliance speaks for Ethiopia’s peoples.

The fourth will be to externalise the threat. By naming Eritrea as the alliance’s paymaster, Addis Ababa converts a domestic insurgency into foreign aggression. That is useful for rallying nationalist opinion, and useful for binding an uneasy army to a common enemy. It is also dangerous. Combined with the government’s long-running rhetoric about access to the Red Sea, it builds a momentum towards interstate war that may prove easier to start than to stop.

The fifth will be aimed at those who spread the rumours. If talk of disloyal commanders worries the palace, it will act against the people spreading it. Jawar Mohammed was charged once before, in 2020. Renewed proceedings against him in absentia, pressure on Oromo Federalist Congress figures still inside the country, and action against journalists who amplify the claims are all plausible.

Finally, there will be the language of dialogue. The government will continue to present the National Dialogue as the peaceful route that the alliance has refused. It may repeat the gesture of 2021, when three opposition figures were brought into the cabinet, while keeping every security portfolio in trusted hands. Whether the dialogue amounts to more than language depends on what the new government does with the Commission’s report.

The Commission’s offer

The new government will not start from a blank page. The National Dialogue Commission was due to hand its report to the outgoing parliament before 22 September. It followed a 38-day conference in Addis Ababa at which more than 4,000 delegates debated over 400 agenda items under eight pillars: nation-building; government structure and electoral systems; federal cities; religious affairs; institution-building; social and economic questions; corruption and good governance; and peace-building. The full text has not yet been published, and the Commission insists that its recommendations are advisory, not binding. But the proposals reported to have emerged from it add up to the most coherent alternative yet placed before Abiy to the path of coercion described above.

The first is electoral: a move from first-past-the-post to proportional representation. Under the present system the Prosperity Party took 438 of the 486 seats decided in June. Under a proportional system, parties that now win nothing would win something, and the arithmetic of armed struggle would change. A movement that cannot win a constituency outright has little reason to lay down its arms for an election. A movement guaranteed a share of seats has more. It is also a reform that peaceful opposition parties and civic movements have pressed for years. Adopting it would reward those who chose the ballot over the gun, and show that non-violent pressure can change the rules.

The second is constitutional. Amending the 1995 constitution is the demand that unites the government’s critics and divides them at the same time. Amhara nationalists want to revise the ethnic federal settlement and Article 39, while Oromo, Somali and Tigrayan movements regard that same article as the guarantee of their existence. Like proportional representation, constitutional reform belongs to the vocabulary of peaceful protest. It was the largely non-violent demonstrations of 2015–18, the movement that brought Abiy to power, that first put the 1995 settlement openly in question. Opening the constitution through dialogue would answer the protesters in the streets, not only the fighters in the field. The alliance has avoided the question, and so, carefully, has the government. It should also be said plainly that a constitutional door opened in the name of dialogue can be walked through in either direction. Before the election, critics alleged that Abiy wanted to amend the constitution to create a presidential system. A reform that entrenched the executive would serve none of the Commission’s purposes.

The third concerns cities: metropolitan governments for the country’s major urban centres. This goes to the heart of the contest over Addis Ababa, in which Oromo nationalists assert a special constitutional interest, and over the control of fast-growing regional towns. Giving cities their own governance, instead of treating them as trophies of whichever ethnic region surrounds them, could take one of the most combustible questions off the battlefield. It would also be fiercely resisted by those who regard Oromia’s claim to the capital as settled and non-negotiable.

The fourth speaks most directly to the events of this week: that the armed movements now gathered in the Alliance for Survival be invited into talks within the framework of the Pretoria agreement. Pretoria was a bilateral deal between the federal government and the TPLF. Fano was not at the table and has never forgiven its exclusion. Extending that architecture to Amhara, Oromia and the other regions would turn a two-party ceasefire into something closer to a national settlement. The Commission has itself argued that armed groups belong in the dialogue. The question is whether a government that has just called the alliance an Eritrean project can bring itself to negotiate with it.

The fifth looks outward: negotiations with Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Egypt. Each relationship is a potential front. With Sudan there is the al-Fashaga border; with Mogadishu, Somaliland and sea access; with Asmara, an unfinished peace; with Cairo, the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Abiy told the BRICS summit this month that Ethiopia would seek sea access only through negotiation. If he means it, regional diplomacy is also domestic security, because a neighbour at peace with Addis Ababa has less reason to finance its enemies. The remaining pillars, from religious affairs and institution-building to corruption and the economy, lack the drama of these five but would matter as much to whether any settlement lasted.

“The best coup-proofing is a settlement that leaves the generals nothing to rescue the country from.”

This is where the Commission’s offer meets the barracks. Coups in Ethiopia have always been presented as rescues: of the nation from a failing emperor, of the revolution from a failing Derg. A government that opened talks with its armed opponents, reformed the electoral system and made peace with its neighbours would leave any ambitious officer without a story to tell. In effect, the Commission has handed Abiy a political alternative to coup-proofing. It is not the only option on his desk. The Reporter reported last week that Washington has lifted the arms embargo it imposed during the Tigray war, which makes the military route cheaper. Whether he takes up the report or shelves it will be decided in the same weeks as his cabinet.

The Mengistu question

Mengistu Haile Mariam hangs over this moment in two ways, and either could describe what Abiy does next. The first Mengistu went to any length in the name of Ethiopian unity. From the Derg’s early slogan, Ityopia Tikdem, “Ethiopia First”, to national call-ups, a war economy and the purge of his own officers, he justified everything as the defence of an indivisible state. A leader convinced that he alone stands between the country and disintegration can persuade himself that almost any measure is warranted. The alliance, by warning that Ethiopia is at risk of breaking apart, has handed him that argument.

The second Mengistu is the one who left. In May 1991, with his army broken and the EPRDF closing on the capital, he flew to Zimbabwe, and his departure hastened the end of the war. Most Ethiopians remember it as flight, not sacrifice, and his motives were his own. But the precedent stands: an Ethiopian ruler concluded that the state would outlast him only if he went. Abiy, too, could decide that national unity is better served by his leaving than by his staying. Such an exit could be negotiated through the very transitional process that the alliance demands and the Commission’s report points towards, and it could be made on his own terms instead of an enemy’s.

“The first path, taken too far, ends on the second — on worse terms.”

This newspaper does not predict which course he will choose, and there is no public sign that he contemplates the second. But the two paths share a premise: that the unity of Ethiopia outranks any individual, including the one in the palace. They differ in who pays. On the first, the price falls on soldiers and civilians; on the second, on one man’s ambition. The lesson of 1991 is that a ruler who follows the first path too far may find himself left with only the second, and on far worse terms than he could have had.

The hidden price

Each of these measures has a cost that will not appear in a communiqué. Emergency powers mean mass detentions, and mass detentions in Ethiopia have tended to fall along ethnic lines. Designation and media bans narrow the space for the reporting that might tell the public what is happening in its name. The drone strikes already recorded by conflict monitors in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia fall on communities, not only on combatants. And an army reorganised for loyalty is an army less able to protect civilians from anyone at all.

What to watch

The signs will come quickly. Watch who is named Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff, and whether more of the security apparatus moves under the Prime Minister’s office. Watch for a state-of-emergency proclamation and for any terrorist designation of the alliance. Watch for unexplained retirements, transfers or arrests of senior officers. Watch for a separate deal with any single member of the alliance. And watch the temperature of Addis Ababa’s language towards Asmara. Above all, watch whether the Commission’s report is published in full, and whether the new government’s first programme adopts any of it or merely thanks the Commission for its work.

In July, Abiy told lawmakers that even if others joined the TPLF, the government did not have “an iota of fear” for Ethiopia’s sovereignty. A government that fears nothing has no need to fortify its own barracks. The cabinet he now presents, and what he does with the report on his desk, will show which of his two fronts he fears more, and whether, in guarding against one, he leaves the other open.

E. Frashie writes long-form analysis for The Ethiopian Tribune.

When Intellectualism Gives Way to Cadre Politics: A Warning to the Ethiopian Political Landscape

Professor Girma Berhanu

17 September 2026

Synopsis

Editorial Foreword

Every liberation movement eventually faces a question it would rather not ask: at what point does the discipline needed to win begin to resemble the order it set out to defeat? Ethiopian history answers this with painful clarity. A generation of students who called for freedom in the 1970s watched the language of revolution harden into a culture of denunciation. In that culture, the wrong question could make someone an enemy of the people, and intellectuals became functionaries of the line.

Professor Girma Berhanu, a long-standing contributor to these pages, writes because he sees that pattern stirring again. He does not write as a detached observer. He states plainly that Ethiopia needs fundamental political change, and he does not question the legitimacy of the grievances behind the Amhara struggle. What he questions is something more fragile and, in the long run, more decisive: the right to think aloud within a movement without being labelled for it.

His essay is notable for its restraint. He does not claim knowledge he lacks. He explains, with a candour that is rare in today’s polarised climate, why he has not rushed to pronounce on the alliances now dividing the diaspora. Some readers will find that restraint frustrating. We would suggest that it is the point of the essay. Where information is fragmented and interpretations are hardened by loyalty, the honest answer is often “not yet.” A movement that cannot hear that answer without suspecting treachery has already lost something it will need later.

Unity is not uniformity, criticism is not betrayal, and the freedom a struggle promises must first be practised within it.

The Ethiopian Tribune has spent many years documenting how the present government treats dissent: the arrests of journalists, the targeting of communities and the shrinking space for independent speech. We would be failing our readers if we held the state to that standard and exempted those who seek to replace it. Our commitment to accountability does not depend on who holds power or who seeks it.

We publish this essay not as a verdict on any organisation or alliance, but as an invitation. It asks readers to accept that unity is not uniformity, that criticism is not betrayal, and that the freedom a struggle promises must first be practised within it.

— Endex, Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

When Intellectualism Gives Way to Cadre Politics

My years of engagement in social activism and human rights work have taught me an important lesson: a freedom struggle cannot sustain itself when independent intellectual thought is replaced by political conformity. Yet this is precisely the danger I increasingly perceive in the Ethiopian political landscape today.

The distinction between intellectuals and political activists is becoming increasingly blurred. More troubling still is the growing influence of what might be described as a cadre mentality—a political culture in which ideological loyalty takes precedence over independent judgement, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and questioning the dominant political line can be interpreted as betrayal.

This tendency is particularly concerning in the current debate over the direction of the Amhara struggle. Questions concerning political strategy, alliances, negotiations, military cooperation, relations with other Ethiopian constituencies, and the future political order of Ethiopia are far too consequential to be determined by political loyalty or factional pressure. They require serious intellectual examination, open debate, evidence-based reasoning, and the courage to challenge prevailing assumptions—even when such challenges are uncomfortable.

An intellectual is not a cadre. An intellectual’s responsibility is not to defend a political organisation, faction, leader, or predetermined political line. Rather, it is to interrogate ideas, examine evidence, identify contradictions, consider alternative interpretations, and assess possible consequences. Political activists and organisations have a legitimate role in mobilising people and pursuing political objectives. However, intellectuals should not be reduced to instruments for legitimising decisions that have already been made. Their role requires a degree of critical distance, even when they share the broader political aspirations of a movement. Straddling the roles of prophet, critic, political activist, and scientist, intellectuals defy easy categorisation. They often portray themselves as “free-floating” and independent of universities, political parties, and state power. Yet the reality frequently falls short of this ideal. Intellectuals across different historical and political contexts have not always lived up to their claims of autonomy and have often confronted difficult tensions between intellectual independence, political commitment, institutional interests, and social responsibility.

In this article, I wish to venture into the complexity of intellectual life and examine these tensions critically. What does it mean to be an intellectual? How can intellectual independence be maintained in politically charged environments? And what happens when intellectuals become too closely aligned with the organisations, movements, or power structures they are expected to scrutinise? These are large and complex questions, and the space available here does not allow me to address them in their full breadth. Instead, I offer some reflections on the tensions and dilemmas that lie at the heart of intellectual life.

When intellectuals become extensions of political organisations, intellectual independence is compromised. When disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty, genuine debate becomes increasingly difficult. And when political conformity replaces critical thinking, a liberation movement risks reproducing some of the very authoritarian practices and political cultures that it seeks to overcome.

When political conformity replaces critical thinking, a liberation movement risks reproducing some of the very authoritarian practices and political cultures that it seeks to overcome.

This is not merely an intellectual problem. It is also a political and strategic problem.

The Amhara struggle cannot afford to silence critical voices at a moment when it faces difficult and consequential choices. Military alliances, political partnerships, relations with other Ethiopian constituencies, and competing visions for Ethiopia’s future should all be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. No organisation, leader, intellectual, or political faction should claim a monopoly over what constitutes the correct political line.

A freedom struggle worthy of the name must create space for disagreement. It must distinguish between criticism and betrayal, between independent analysis and political advocacy, and between intellectual responsibility and political discipline.

There is a profound lesson in the history of authoritarian political systems: when political loyalty becomes the principal measure of intellectual legitimacy, independent thought begins to erode. When independent thought is weakened, political movements become more vulnerable to strategic errors, internal authoritarianism, groupthink, and manipulation.

The objective, therefore, should be larger than winning arguments within a particular political camp. It should be to protect the intellectual and political space necessary for a genuine struggle for freedom, democracy, dignity, and self-determination.

The Amhara struggle needs organisation, but it also needs independent minds. It needs political activists, but it must not turn intellectuals into cadres. It needs unity, but unity must not mean uniformity.

It needs unity, but unity must not mean uniformity.

The future of the struggle—and potentially the future of Ethiopia itself—depends, in my view, on preserving this distinction.

I also want to be clear about my own position. I believe Ethiopia needs fundamental political change, and I support political processes that can contribute to a more democratic, accountable, inclusive, and just political order. However, supporting political change does not require me to endorse every political or military actor, alliance, strategy, or claim presented in its name. Political change and political conformity are not the same thing.

Recently, I have become increasingly aware of the intense polarisation surrounding the alliance between the Amhara Fano and other armed groups. I do not claim to know enough about these developments, nor have I involved myself deeply enough in all of the political and military dynamics, to take a definitive position on every aspect of these alliances. People from different parts of the world have nevertheless asked me why I have not been more explicit or vocal in taking a position.

My answer has consistently been that I am observing the situation carefully. It is difficult to position oneself when information is fragmented, interpretations are deeply polarised, and numerous actors are involved, often with different interests, objectives, and strategies. The result is considerable uncertainty and confusion.

My reluctance to take a premature position should therefore not be interpreted as indifference to political change. On the contrary, it reflects my conviction that positions on matters of such historical importance should be informed by evidence, context, careful analysis, and intellectual integrity rather than by political pressure or group loyalty.

What concerns me particularly is the extent of labelling, personal attacks, and verbal abuse surrounding these debates. When people become afraid to ask legitimate questions or express disagreement openly, the quality of political deliberation suffers. Such an environment is dangerous for any movement that aspires to contribute to democratic transformation. I have empirical observations that support this concern. In what began as a friendly or comradely WhatsApp group, I have noticed an increasing level of intensity and, at times, striking animosity in response to questions or alternative viewpoints. What I would describe as Mashemakek—the immediate belittling, dismissal, or rejection of an idea, accompanied by labelling the questioner or inquiry itself as an obstacle to be avoided—has become increasingly visible.

I have also observed what appears to be an emerging discourse of personality cult, expressed in ways that are deeply concerning and, at times, embarrassing. It is troubling to see political reverence and unquestioning loyalty re-emerging in a context where one might have assumed that such political practices had been relegated to the past. We had perhaps believed that we had moved beyond this kind of political culture decades ago.

I therefore distinguish clearly between support for political change and uncritical support for particular political actors. A movement that cannot tolerate independent thought, critical inquiry, and internal disagreement will struggle to build the genuinely free society it claims to seek. Political transformation requires more than a change of government or political leadership. It also requires a political culture in which disagreement, scrutiny, accountability, and independent thought are protected.

Ethiopia is at a delicate historical juncture, and the future of the Amhara people is likewise being shaped by developments whose consequences may be profound. This calls for greater transparency, intellectual honesty, and a carefully considered path forward. We need to examine the available evidence, engage with competing interpretations, and distinguish political claims from ideological positions and empirically grounded analysis.

My conclusion is therefore straightforward: I support political change, but I do not believe that political change should require intellectual conformity. Let intellectuals, researchers, journalists, and other independent thinkers engage openly with evidence, historical context, competing perspectives, and difficult questions. Political activists and political organisations have their own legitimate roles, but those roles should not replace independent intellectual inquiry.

The distinction is crucial. One can support the necessity of political transformation while remaining critical, cautious, and intellectually independent of the actors who claim to represent that transformation. For me, this is neither neutrality nor political indifference. Rather, it is a commitment to intellectual independence at a moment when independent thinking is particularly important. For sustainable organisational growth and genuine democratic transformation to take place, freedom movements must actively cultivate feedback, tolerance, and humility. Rather than demanding blind loyalty or ideological uniformity, a healthy political culture should encourage constructive criticism, create space for internal disagreement, and cultivate the intellectual humility to recognise that no single faction holds a monopoly on truth.

By prioritising evidence, protecting independent thought, and allowing room for disagreement, a movement can guard against the emergence of internal authoritarianism and, in doing so, help lay the intellectual and democratic foundations for the freer society it seeks to build.

A genuine freedom struggle must be capable of accommodating disagreement within its own ranks. It must be strong enough to tolerate questions, confident enough to confront criticism, and mature enough to recognise that political unity cannot be built by suppressing intellectual diversity.

The struggle needs committed people—but it also needs people who are free to think.

Short Summary

The article argues that Ethiopia’s political transformation requires independent intellectual thought, open debate, and critical scrutiny—not political conformity or cadre mentality. It distinguishes support for fundamental political change from uncritical loyalty to particular political actors or alliances, while calling for greater transparency, evidence-based analysis, and space for disagreement, particularly within the Amhara political struggle.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus (P. Collier, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1984)

Coser, L. A. (1970). Men of ideas: A sociologist’s view. Free Press. (Original work published 1965)

Konrád, G., & Szelényi, I. (1979). The intellectuals on the road to class power. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Kurzman, C. (2008). Democracy denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the fate of democracy. Harvard University Press.

Leonard, M. (2008). What does China think? PublicAffairs.