ዘ ኢትዮጵያን ትሪቡን

የ«ጽምዶ» ቀጠናዊ ወጥመድ፣ የልደቱ አያሌው የታሪክ ግዴለሽነት እና የሕልውና ፖለቲካ ፍልሚያ

በሥልጣን ሽግግር ስም የርስት ወረራን ሕጋዊ የማድረግ አደገኛ የፖለቲካ ስሌት

በዶክተር ሶስና ታደሰ

(የፖለቲካና ስትራቴጂያዊ ጥናት ክፍል)

የአርታኢ መቅድም

የተቃውሞው ጎራ «የጋራ ጠላትን ለመጣል የሚደረግ ጥምረት ከሁሉም ነገር ይቀድማል» በሚል ሎጂክ እየተመራ ባለበት በአሁኑ ወቅት፣ አንጋፋው ፖለቲከኛ አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው «ጽምዶ እስከምን ድረስ?» በሚል ርዕስ ባቀረቡት መጣጥፍ የወልቃይት፣ ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምትና ራያ የርስት ጥያቄዎችን «ቀይ መስመር» ከማድረግ ተቆጥበን «በስልት (Mechanism)» ላይ ብቻ እንድንስማማ መክረዋል። ይህ ምክር—ከሕወሓትና ከቀጠናዊ ኃይሎች ጋር ስለሚደረገው «ጽምዶ» ጠቀሜታ ከሚናፈሰው ትርክት ጋር ተዳምሮ—በተቃውሞው ጎራ ውስጥ አነጋጋሪ ሆኗል።

ዘ ኢትዮጵያን ትሪቡን ይህንን የዶክተር ሶስና ታደሰ ምላሽ ለአንባቢያኑ የሚያቀርበው፣ በኢትዮጵያና በአፍሪካ ቀንድ ፖለቲካ ውስጥ ያሉ ወሳኝ የሕልውና ጥያቄዎች ግልጽ፣ በማስረጃ የተደገፈና ጠንካራ ክርክር ሊደረግባቸው ይገባል በሚል እምነት ነው። ጸሐፊው የአቶ ልደቱን መከራከሪያ ነጥብ በነጥብ በመሞገት፣ «በስልት እንፍታው» የሚለው አካሄድ በወታደራዊ ኃይልና በስነ-ሕዝብ ምህንድስና የተያዘን መሬት በዲሞክራሲያዊ ሽፋን ሕጋዊ የማድረግ አደጋ እንደሚያዘል ያትታሉ።

ከዚህም ባለፈ ጽሑፉ የ«ጽምዶ»ን ጥምረት እንደ ቀጠናዊ የጂኦፖለቲካ ወጥመድ በመፈረጅ፣ ከዓባይ ግድብ የበላይነት እስከ «ታላቋ ትግራይ» ራዕይ፣ ከግብፅና ከሱዳን የተኪ ጦርነት እስከ ጎንደር ስትራቴጂያዊ መከበብ ድረስ ያሉትን የስጋት ገመዶች ያስተሳስራል።

ትሪቡን በዚህ ጽሑፍ የቀረቡት ትንታኔዎችና መደምደሚያዎች የጸሐፊው መሆናቸውን እየገለጸ፣ ጉዳዩ በተመለከተ የተለያዩ አመለካከቶች ሊደመጡ እንደሚገባ ያምናል። ይህን ምላሽ የምናቀርበውም ውይይቱ በጭፍን ስሜት ሳይሆን በሰከነ ክርክርና በታሪካዊ ማስረጃ እንዲመራ ለማገዝ ነው።

ቅምር

በዶክተር ሶስና ታደሰ የቀረበው ይህ ጽሑፍ፣ አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው «ጽምዶ እስከምን ድረስ?» በሚለው መጣጥፋቸው ያቀረቧቸውን ሁለት ማዕከላዊ ሐሳቦች—ማለትም (፩) ብልፅግናን ለመጣል ከሕወሓትና ከቀጠናዊ ኃይሎች ጋር የሚደረግ «ጽምዶ» አዎንታዊ መሆኑን፣ እና (፪) የወልቃይትና የራያ ጥያቄ «ቀይ መስመር» ሳይሆን «በስልት» ሊፈታ እንደሚገባ—በጥልቀት ይሞግታል። ጸሐፊው መከራከሪያቸውን በአምስት ዋና ዋና ምሰሶዎች ላይ ያቀርባሉ፦

• •«የሽግግር ኦፖርቹኒዝም»፦ ልደቱ የአማራን መዋቅራዊ የሕልውና ትግል ወደ ተራ «የስልጣን ሽግግር» ጥያቄ ዝቅ በማድረግ የትግሉን ማዕከላዊ ግብ ያደበዝዛሉ።
• •የ«ስልት (Mechanism)» ማታለያ፦ «በስልት እንፍታው» ማለት በወታደራዊ ወረራና በስነ-ሕዝብ ምህንድስና የተያዘን ርስት በዲሞክራሲያዊ ሽፋን ሕጋዊ ማድረግ ሲሆን፣ የተጠቂውን ወገን ብቻ እጅ የማስያዝ (Asymmetric Disarmament) አካሄድ ነው።
• •የ«ፕሪቶሪያ» ተረት፦ ሕወሓት «አማራ ላይ አብረን እንዝመት ተብዬ እምቢ አልኩ» የሚለው ትረካ በወታደራዊ ሽንፈት የጠፋን የሞራል የበላይነት ለማስመለስ የተሰራ የስነ-ልቦና ፕሮፓጋንዳ ነው።
• •የ«ጽምዶ» የመጨረሻ ግብ፦ የፈረንሳዩን Africa Intelligence ዘገባ ዋቢ በማድረግ፣ ጥምረቱ የሀገረ-መንግሥቱን መበተን፣ የዓባይን የበላይነት ለግብፅ ማስረከብ፣ «ታላቋን ትግራይ» ማነጽ እና ጎንደርን በስትራቴጂ መክበብ ያለመ ወጥመድ መሆኑን ያሳያሉ።
• •«ተቤዥነት» እና «ድርብ መከላከል»፦ የልደቱ አካሄድ አማራን ወደ ተቤዥነት (Helplessness) የሚከትና ፋኖን ወደ ቀጠናዊ ቅጥረኝነት የሚያወርድ ነው፤ መፍትሔው በ«ብልፅግና»ና በ«ሕወሓት» መካከል መወተፍ ሳይሆን ከሁለቱም ወጥቶ በራስ አቅም መቆም (Double Defense) ነው።

ጸሐፊው በመደምደሚያቸው፣ ሕወሓትን የትግል «አጋር» የማድረግ ማንኛውም ሙከራ «ታሪካዊ ክህደት» መሆኑን አስምረው፣ አማራ አሸናፊ የሚሆነው በራሱ እውነት፣ መርህና ድርጅታዊ ጥንካሬ ላይ ሲመሠረት ብቻ እንደሆነ ይሞግታሉ።

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ሙሉ ጽሑፍ

መግቢያ፦ የ፴ ዓመታት ዝምታ እና የዛሬው «ፍትሐዊ» መካሪነት ተቃረኖ

አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው «ጽምዶ እስከምን ድረስ?» በሚል ባወጡት መጣጥፍ፣ የብልፅግናን አገዛዝ በፍጥነት ለመጣል በሚል ሽፋን ከሕወሓትና ከቀጠናዊ ኃይሎች ጋር የሚደረገውን «ጽምዶ» (ትብብር) እንደ አወንታዊ የፖለቲካ ክስተት ለማስቆጠርና የርስት ጥያቄዎችን «ቀይ መስመር አታድርጉ፣ በስልት (Mechanism) ብቻ እንስማማ» ብለው ለመምከር ሞክረዋል።

ይሁን እንጂ ላለፉት ፵ ዓመታት የወልቃይት፣ ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምትና ራያ ሕዝብ በሕወሓት የአፓርታይድ ስርዓት ሲጨፈጨፍ፣ ሲፈናቀልና ማንነቱ ሲካድ፤ አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው በሦስት አስርታት የፖለቲካ ዘመናቸው ለአንድም ቀን ድምፅ ሆነዋቸው አያውቁም።

ዛሬ ሕዝቡ በራሱ ደምና መስዋዕትነት ታሪካዊ ርስቱን ካስመለሰ በኋላ፣ አቶ ልደቱ «ወልቃይትና ራያን ቀይ መስመር አታድርጉት፣ ይሄ መመጻደቅ ነው» ብለው ለመሞገት የሚያስችላቸው ታሪካዊ ባለቤትነትም ሆነ ሞራላዊ የበላይነት የላቸውም!

እዚህ ላይ አንድ ሌላ ታሪካዊ ክህደት የፈጸሙበትን አጋጣሚ ማስታወስ እወዳለሁ። አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው፣ ሕወሓት በሁለተኛው ዙር ጦርነት ማለትም ከሰኔ ፳፻፲፫ ጀምሮ ወደ አማራ ክልል ወረራ መክፈቱን ተከትሎ፣ ከቀድሞው የኢሕዴን ሊቀመንበር ታምራት ላይኔ እና ከአቶ ያሬድ ጥበቡ ጋር በመሆን «ለሕወሓት የሰብዓዊ እርዳታ ኮሪደር ይከፈትለት» በሚል የማኀበራዊ ሚዲያ ዘመቻ ከፍተው እንደነበር ይታወሳል።

በወቅቱ በጥላቻ የነደዱ የሕወሓት ታጣቂዎች አቶ ልደቱና ታምራት ላይኔ የተወለዱበትን የላስታ ቀጠና፣ የጁን፣ ጋሸናን በወረራ ይዘው ወደ ጎንደር ጋይንት እየተሻገሩ ነበር። በዚያ አስከፊ የጦርነት ወቅት እነዚያ በጥላቻ የነደዱ የሕወሓት ታጣቂዎች ከቆቦ ጀምሮ፣ ወልድያ፣ ኩል መስክ፣ ላሊበላ፣ ጋሸና፣ ወገል ጤና፣ ደላንታ፣ መቄት ንጹሓንን በጅምላ እየፈጁ፣ የ፹ ዓመት አዛውንት ሳይቀር አስገድዶ መድፈር እየፈጸሙ ነበር።

ይህን ማስታወስ ያስፈለገው ዋና ምክንያት፣ እነ አቶ ልደቱ በወቅቱ ይህን የጦር ወንጀል ከማውገዝ ይልቅ፣ በትግራይ ሕዝብ ስም ለሕወሓት የሰብዓዊ ኮሪደር በሁመራ በኩል ይከፈትለት፣ ከሱዳን የውጭ እርዳታ እህሎች ይግቡ የሚል የሸፍጥ ቅስቀሳ ላይ ስለነበሩ ነው። በወቅቱ በነበረው ሁኔታ የሰብዓዊ እርዳታ ወደ ትግራይ መግባት ያልቻለው ሕወሓት በአማራ እና በአፋር ላይ ወረራ መክፈቱን ተከትሎ እንደሆነ ይታወሳል። እነ ልደቱ ግን የወልቃይት-ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምትና ራያ ብሎም መላው የአማራ ሕዝብ ጉዳይ ግድ ሳይሰጣቸው «በሁመራ በኩል የሰብዓዊ እርዳታ ኮሪደር ይከፈት» የሚለውን የማኀበራዊ ሚዲያ ዘመቻቸው ላይ ተጠምደው ነበር።

ይህ ታሪክ የመዘገበው እውነታ ነው። ይህ ክስተት ራስ-ጠልነት ካልሆነ በስተቀር የሰብዓዊነት መለኪያ ሊባል አይችልም።

እንዲህ አይነት የራስ-ጠልነት ታሪክ ያላቸው አቶ ልደቱ አሁን ደግሞ፣ ለአማራ የነጻነት ታጋዮች የባርነት ካምፕ የሆነውን «ጽምዶ» ዓላማው እንዲሳካ፣ የፋኖ ኃይሎች የርስት ጥያቄዎችን «ቀይ መስመር አታድርጉ፣ በስልት (Mechanism) ብቻ እንስማማ» ብለው ለመምከር ሞክረዋል።

ይህ አቀራረብ የአቶ ልደቱን ነባር የርስትና የማንነት ግዴለሽነት የሚያንፀባርቅ፣ የሕወሓትን መዋቅራዊ የጥፋት አቅም የሚያለሰልስ እና የአማራን ሕዝብ የሕልውና ትግል ወደ ሌላ የባርነት ካምፕ ለመንዳት የታለመ «የፖለቲካ አቋራጭ» (Political Shortcut) ነው።

፩. «ትራንዚሽናል ኦፖርቹኒዝም» (Transitional Opportunism)፦ የልደቱ አያሌው አዲስ የፖለቲካ ካርታ

የአቶ ልደቱ መከራከሪያ መሰረታዊ ስህተት የሚጀምረው ከፖለቲካዊ ግቡ አወቃቀር ነው። ልደቱ የኢትዮጵያን ችግር «የሥልጣን ላይ አገዛዝን የመቀየር» (Regime Change) አጀንዳ አድርገው ብቻ ያዩታል። ለአቶ ልደቱ አገዛዙ ከተወገደና «ሁሉን አቀፍ የሽግግር መንግስት» ከተቋቋመ የፖለቲካው ስራ ተጠናቋል።

ነገር ግን የአማራ ሕዝብ እየታገለው ያለው በቀላሉ የሥልጣን ተዋናዮችን ለመቀየር ሳይሆን፣ ላለፉት ፴፭ ዓመታት የተጫነበትን መዋቅራዊ የሕልውና አደጋ፣ የዘር ማጥፋትና የታሪካዊ ርስት ወረራ ለመቀልበስ ነው። ይህ ትግል አገዛዝን ለመጣል ብቻ የሚደረግ ሳይሆን ሥርዓትን ለመቀየር የሚደረግ ትግል ነው። የአማራን ሕዝብ ለሕልውና አደጋ ያጋለጠው ሥርዓት መዋቅራዊ ቅርጽ የያዘው ድኀረ-፲፱፻፹፫ በመሆኑ፣ ባለፉት ፴፭ ዓመታት የሕልውናው አደጋ የሆነውን፣ የአገር ባለቤትነቱን የነጠቀውን ሥርዓት ለመገርሰስ የሚደረግ ትግል ነው።

የአቶ ልደቱ ትረካ የሕልውና ጥያቄን ወደ ተራ «የስልጣን ሽግግር ፖለቲካ» (Transitional Politics) ዝቅ በማድረግ የትግሉን ማዕከላዊ አላማ ያደናግራል። ይህ እውነታ ዕድሜ ዘመናቸውን ከመላው አማራ ሕዝብ ድርጅት (መአሕድ) ጀምሮ ላለፉት ፴ ዓመታት በፖለቲካው ዓለም ከቆዩት አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው የተሰወረ ባይሆንም፣ ከ፲፱፻፷፮ ጀምሮ በአማራ ደም የሌሎች ሥልጣን ይቀደም የሚለውን ሀሳብ የሚጋሩ በመሆናቸው የፈጠሩት የትግል ትርክት ማዛባት እንደሆነ እንረዳዋለን።

፪. የ«Mechanism» (ስልት) ማታለያ፦ የርስት ወረራን በዲሞክራሲያዊ ሽፋን የማፅደቅ ሴራ

አቶ ልደቱ በጽሑፋቸው፦ «በወልቃይትና ራያ ጉዳይ አማራ ወይም ትግራይ ይሁን በሚለው መፍትሔ ላይ አሁን መስማማት የለብንም፤ ይልቁንም በምን ስልት (Mechanism) እንዲፈታ መስማማት አለብን» ይላሉ። «ቀይ መስመር» የሚሉ አካላትንም «ይመጻደቃሉ» በማለት ይነቅፋሉ።

ይህ መከራከሪያ መዋቅራዊ የሆነ አደገኛ የፖለቲካ ወጥመድ አቅፎ ይዟል፦

• •የ«Mechanism» አፓርታይድ፦ ሕወሓት በ፲፱፻፹ዎቹ በወታደራዊ ኃይል የወሰዳቸውን የወልቃይት፣ ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምትና ራያ መሬቶች ላይ የትግራይ ሰፋሪዎችን በማስገባት የስነ-ሕዝብ ምህንድስና (Demographic) ለውጥ አድርጓል። አሁን ላይ ቆሞ «በሕዝበ-ውሳኔ ወይም በሕገ-መንግስት ማሻሻያ እንፍታው» የሚል ስልት መቀበል ማለት፦ በወታደራዊ ወረራና በዘር ማጽዳት የተያዘን መሬት በዲሞክራሲያዊ ሽፋን ሕጋዊ (Legitimize) ማድረግ ነው!
• •የእጅ ማስያዝ አጣብቂኝ፦ ሕወሓት ዛሬም ድረስ «ወልቃይትና ራያ የትግራይ ግዛቶች ናቸው፤ አንዲት ስንዝር አትቆረስም» እያለ በሚፎክርበት ሰዓት፣ የአማራን ሕዝብ ብቻ «ቀይ መስመር አታብዛ፣ በስልት ተስማማ» ማለት—የተወረረውንና የተጠቃውን ወገን ብቻ እጅ ማስያዝ (Asymmetric Disarmament) ነው።

፫. «የፕሪቶሪያው ስምምነት» ተረት እና የሕወሓት የፖለቲካ ማደንዘዣ

ሕወሓት «በፕሪቶሪያ ወቅት ብልፅግና በአማራ ላይ አብረን እንዝመት ብሎ ጠይቆን እምቢ አልን» በሚል የሚያራግበው ትረካ፣ በወታደራዊ ተሸናፊነቱ ያጣውን የሞራል የበላይነት ለማስመለስ የተሰራ የሥነ-ልቦና ፕሮፓጋንዳ (Psychological Warfare) ነው።

በፕሪቶሪያ ስምምነት ወቅት (ጥቅምት ፳፻፲፭ ዓ.ም) ሕወሓት በከባድ ወታደራዊ ከበባና ውድቀት ውስጥ ነበረ። ከመቀሌ ውጭ ሁሉም የትግራይ ትልልቅ ከተሞች ተይዘውበት ነበር። መቀሌ በሰዓታት ውጊያ የመያዝ ዕድል እያለ፣ ሕወሓት የፈረመው «የፕሪቶሪያው ስምምነት» ለሕልውናው ሲል ተንበርክኮ እጁን የሰጠበት እንጂ፣ አቻ ሆኖ በጉልበቱ የፈጠረው ዕድል አልነበረም። በመቀጠል ኬንያ ላይ የተደረገው የከፋው አፍራሽ ስምምነትም አሁንም አማራን ለመጉዳት ያለመ እንጂ ከማዕከላዊ መንግሥት «አብረን እንዝመት» የሚል ድርድር ቀርቦለት እምቢ ያለበት አይደለም። እንዲያም ሆኖ፣ ሕወሓት ይህንን የሐሰት ትረካ በመንዛት የትግራይን ሕዝብ ለማጽናናትና የአማራን ትግል (ፋኖን) በስነ-ልቦና ለማደንዘዝ ሲሞክር፤ አቶ ልደቱ ደግሞ «የርስት ጥያቄን በ Mechanism እንፍታ» በሚል የፖለቲካ አቋራጭ ለዚሁ የሕወሓት ሴራ የንድፈ-ሐሳብ ከለላ ይሰጣሉ።

፬. የአፍሪካ ኢንተለጀንስ (Africa Intelligence) ዘገባ እና የ«ጽምዶ» የመጨረሻ ግብ

በወታደራዊ እና በደህንነት ጉዳዮች ላይ በልዩ ትኩረት የምርመራ ዘገባዎችን የሚያቀርበው የፈረንሳዩ Africa Intelligence መጽሔት ባወጣው አዲስ መረጃ፣ በካርቱም፣ ፖርት ሱዳን እና በትግራይ (አክሱም) ሚስጥራዊ ቦታዎች የተካሄደው «ጽምዶ» የተባለው ስብስብ ውስጣዊ ተቃረኖውና አደገኛ ቀጠናዊ ባህሪው ይፋ ሆኗል።

Africa Intelligence — “Distrust clouds Tsimdo, the growing anti-Abiy front” (01/06/2026)

ዘገባው ይፋ እንዳደረገው፦ «የጎጃም ክንፍ ከሕወሓት ጋር ለሚደረግ ጥምረት ይበልጥ ፈቃደኝነት ሲያሳይ፤ በአንፃሩ ለተከራካሪው የወልቃይት አቅራቢያ የሚገኘው የጎንደር ፋኖ ክንፍ ግን ይህንን ጥምረት በጽኑ ይቃወማል።» ይላል።

ልደቱ «ወልቃይትና ራያን ቀይ መስመር አታድርጉት፣ ይሄ መመጻደቅ ነው» የሚሉት የጎንደሩን የፋኖ ክንፍ ይመስላል። በርስቱ ጉዳይ ታሪካዊ ባለቤትነትና ሞራላዊ የበላይነት ያለውን የፋኖ ኃይል ከመሰረታዊ የትግል ዓላማው መስመሩን ለማሳት፣ አበይት የሆነውን ጥያቄ (Grand Cause) ወደ ንዑስ ጥያቄ የማውረድ ዓላማ ያለው አቀራረብ ነው።

ይህ ሁኔታ፣ በ፳፻፲፯ ዓ.ም በወቅቱ በነበረው አደረጃጀት የአማራ ፋኖ ብሔራዊ ኃይል የጎጃም ቀጠናዊ ትስስር ኃላፊ የነበረው ፋኖ የቆዬ ሞላ ከሕወሓት ጋር አብሮ ለመስራት ለማሳመን ከተጠቀመው ምሳሌ ጋር ይመሳሰላል። የፋኖ አመራሩ «የነ ወልቃይትን ጉዳይ አራት ኪሎ ከገባን በኋላ ሻይ ቡና እያልን በጋራ እንወስናለን» ነበር ያለው። እንዲህ ያለው ታሪካዊ የክህደት ንግግር በአቶ ልደቱ ጽሑፍ ላይ በምሁራዊ ሸፍጥ መልኩ ቀርቧል።

ጸሐፊው ወደ ጎን ገፍትረው ያለፉትና በ«ጽምዶ» ስም ሊተገበር የታሰበው የመጨረሻውና የታለመው ግብ (Ultimate Master Plan) ምንድነው?

1. የሀገረ-መንግሥቱን አከርካሪ መስበር፦ ኢትዮጵያን በደካማ የኮንፌዴሬሽን መዋቅር መበተን፤
2. የዓባይንና የሕዳሴውን ግድብ የበላይነት በተኪ ጦርነት (Proxy War) ለግብፅ ማስረከብ፦ በ፲፱፻፹፫ቱ የ«ፈለገ ግዮን» ሰነድ መሠረት መተከልን ማዳከም/መነጠል እና የተከዜ ተፋሰስን በሕወሓትና በሱዳን አል-ቡርሃን ቁጥጥር ሥር ማድረግ፤
3. የ«ታላቋ ትግራይ» ሕልምን እውን ማድረግ፦ ሕወሓት የወልቃይት-ሁመራን «የአማራውን የሆርሙዝ ቁልፍ» በመቆጣጠር፣ እስከ መተማና ቤኒሻንጉል ድንበር በመዘርጋት ትግራይን በ«ሶማሌላንድ ሞዴል» የመገንጠል አላማውን ማሳካት፤
4. የጎንደርና የአማራ ሕዝብ መከበብ (Strategic Encirclement)፦ ትግራይ እስከ መተከል፣ በደቡብ ደግሞ የ«ግዮን/ኮንፌዴሬሽን» ፍላጎት ያላቸው አመራሮች እስከ መተከል ሲመጡ፤ ሁለቱ አካላት በመተከል መስመር የቀጥታ ድንበር ይፈጥራሉ።

፭. የ«ተቤዥነት» (Helplessness) ስነ-ልቦና እና የ«ድርብ መከላከል» (Double Defense) ፅናት

አቶ ልደቱ «ብልፅግና ያጋረጠው አደጋ ከፍተኛ ስለሆነ ከማንም ጋር—እንኳንስ ከሕወሓት ጋር ይቅርና ከታሪካዊ ጠላቶች ጋር እንኳ መተባበር ይገባል» ሲሉ ይከራከራሉ።

ይህ አቀራረብ የሚከተሉትን ስትራቴጂያዊ አደጋዎች ይፈጥራል፦

• •የሥነ-ልቦና ስብራት፦ የአማራን ሕዝብ የሕልውና ትግል «በራሱ አቅምና መርህ መቆም አይችልም» የሚል ተቤዥነት (Helplessness) ውስጥ በመክተት፣ ሁልጊዜም ቢሆን ከሌላ አዳኝ ኃይል ጋር መጣመር እንዳለበት አድርጎ ያስባል።
• •ከነፃነት ታጋይነት ወደ ተራ ቅጥረኛነት፦ ብልፅግናን ለመጣል ሲባል ከሕወሓት ጋር መጠመድ፣ የአማራን የትጥቅ ትግል ለቀጠናዊ ቁማርተኞች መጠቀሚያ በማድረግ ፋኖን ወደ «ዳግማዊ ኢሕዴን» ደረጃ ዝቅ ያደርገዋል። ከዚያም ሲከፋ ፋኖን በሕወሓቱ «አርሚ ፸» ሞዴል የቀጠናው ቅጥረኛ ተዋጊ የማድረግ፣ ከሕልውና ታጋይነት አውጥቶ ወደ local agent ማውረድ ነው።
• •የመጥፋት አዙሪት፦ አንድን አምባገነን (ብልፅግናን) ለመጣል ሲባል፣ ሌላኛውን ሥርዓታዊና መዋቅራዊ ጠላት (ሕወሓትንና ኦነግን) ማጠናከር ከተቃጠለ ቤት ወጥቶ ወደ ተናዳፊ እባብ ጉድጓድ የመግባት ያህል አደገኛ ነው።

በጅቡና በእባቡ (በብልፅግናና በሕወሓት) መካከል የቆመ አካል ሊያደርግ የሚገባው «ከሁለቱ አንዱን የመምረጥ ግዴታ ውስጥ መውደቅ አይደለም፤ ከሁለቱ ከመሃላቸው መውጣት ነው!»

ከመሃል መውጣት ማለት ከትግል መሸሽ ሳይሆን፣ የሌሎችን የፖለቲካ አጀንዳ ከመሸከም ወጥቶ በራስ መርህ፣ በራስ አቅም እና በራስ ድርጅታዊ ጥንካሬ ላይ ቆሞ ሁለቱንም አደጋዎች እኩል የመመከት (Double Defense) ፅናት ማሳየት ነው።

መደምደሚያ

አቶ ልደቱ አያሌው ያቀረቡት «ጽምዶ እስከምን ድረስ?» የሚለው ጽሑፍ፣ የብልፅግናን አገዛዝ በፍጥነት ለመጣል በሚል ስም የወልቃይት-ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምትና ራያን ደም ዋጋ ወደ ጎን ገፍትሮ «በሂደት በ Mechanism እንነጋገርበታለን» የሚል ማደንዘዣ የሚያቀርብ ፖለቲካዊ አቋራጭ (Political Shortcut) ነው።

የአማራ ሕዝብ ባለፈው ግማሽ ክፍለ ዘመን የደረሰበትን መከራ የተረዱ፣ ይህን መዋቅራዊ የጥቃት መሰረት ከጥፋት ጥንስሱ (ሕወሓት) እስከ ውርስ አስቀጣዩ (ኦሕዴድ-ብልፅግና) ድረስ ያሉ ጠላቶችን ጠንቅቀው የተረዱ እውነተኛ ፋኖዎችና መሬት ላይ ያሉ የሕዝብ መዋቅሮች የ«ጽምዶ»ን ወጥመድ ውድቅ በማድረግ፣ የአማራ አላማ ያለውና በጥብቅ ዲሲፕሊን የሚገዛ አታጋይ ድርጅት በመፍጠር አማራ ሕልውናውን በክንዱ ያስከብራል። አማራን ማጥፋት የፖለቲካ እስትንፋሱና የሕልውናው መሠረት ያደረገውን ሕወሓት የትግል ‹አጋር› ለማድረግ የሚደረጉ የትኛውም ጥረቶች ታሪካዊ ክህደት ተብለው ይመዘገባሉ።

የአዋቂ አጥፊዎቹን አቶ ልደቱን ጨምሮ ነገ በታሪክ ፊት ለሚጠየቁ ሁሉ ማስታወስ የምንፈልገው እውነታ፡- ሕወሓት ትናንትናም ሆነ ዛሬ ጦር የሚሰብቀውና የሰበቀው አማራን ለማጥፋትና አጽመ-ርስቱ የሆኑትን ወልቃይት-ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምት፣ ራያና ኮረምን ለመውረር እንዲሁም ታላቋን ትግራይ ለመመስረት ብቻ ነው። የዚህ የጥፋት ኃይል አጋር ሆኖ መሰለፍ ጸረ-አማራነት ነው።

የአማራ ሕዝብ በአሁኑ ወቅት እየታገለው ያለው ለፍትሕ፣ ለሕልውናው መረጋገጥ፣ ለታሪካዊ ርስቶቹ መከበርና የሀገር ባለቤትነቱን በዘላቂነት ለማረጋገጥ እንጂ የሌሎች ስልጣን ፈላጊዎች ወይም የቀጠናዊ ኃይሎች መጠቀሚያ ለመሆን አይደለም።

በጥቅሉ የአማራ ሕዝብ አሸናፊ የሚሆነው አንዱን በዳይ በሌላ በዳይ ለመተካት ሲሮጥ ሳይሆን፤ በራሱ የእውነትና የፍትሕ ጥያቄ፣ በራሱ አማራዊ መርህ እና በራሱ በተስተካከለ ድርጅታዊ ጥንካሬ ላይ ጸንቶ የራሱን አሸናፊ መስመር ሲጠርግ ብቻ ነው!!

ድል ለእውነተኛ አርበኞች

ድል ለአማራ ሕዝብ!!

Editor’s Foreword

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune is pleased to publish “Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests,” by Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu (MGH). It is the capstone of a sustained series this masthead has carried across 2026 from the Adwa reflections and the four-part reading of the Abraham Accords through to the studies of chaotic equilibrium and the June election and it does what a capstone should: it gathers scattered threads into a single, load-bearing claim.

That claim is deceptively simple. For years MGH has set out Ethiopia’s needs as four singular interests arranged in three layers the Foundations of national unity and Red-Sea sovereignty; the Means of broad-based, democratically anchored development; and the Engine of the Renaissance Dam. Here he argues that these are not four problems but one, because a single machine lies beneath every failure, run for the benefit of a single elite. The essay’s instrument is the oldest question in political economy cui bono, to whose benefit and its central move is to take the “paradox of Ethiopianism” now circulating in our reconstruction discourse and carry it one step past where it halts. Where the paradox describes a tragedy that befalls the peoples, MGH insists it is a racket that profits someone, and asks the reader to name the machine rather than blame a people.

We publish it now because its subject is not academic. As it goes to press, the Pretoria settlement has effectively unravelled, the Tsimdo alignment gathers across the north, and the National Dialogue has announced a contested “consensus” on the status of Addis Ababa. This is precisely the terrain the essay maps, and it deserves a hearing on those terms.

Readers will recognise that the piece is in conversation with work beyond these pages Simeneh Zena’s “Paradox of Ethiopianism” and Abebe Woreta’s paper on Amhara unity chief among them and with contributors familiar to this masthead, including Professor Girma Berhanu, whose “Hardest Question” it engages directly, and the reporting on strangulation strategy our own bylines have pursued. It is, in the best sense, an argument built on ground others have cleared, and it credits them openly.

A word on temper. This is a polemic, and unapologetically so, but it is a disciplined one. Its gravest charges against named actors the atrocities catalogued in its ledger, the conduct of the state in Merawi, Arsi, and the drone campaign rest on the corroborating record of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and Ethiopia’s own human-rights commission, and MGH is scrupulous about symmetry: every colour’s hands are shown bloodied, and no people is spared. The author writes, as he says, as a nationalist and to no faction, and the sharpest of his claims about intent and beneficiary are offered as political-economy analysis, not settled fact. As always, the views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent an institutional position.

Read it, then, as it asks to be read not as a verdict on the Amhara, the Oromo, or the Tigrayan, but as an indictment of the machine that farms them all.

— Editor-in-Chief, The Ethiopian Tribune

The true line is not Amhara vs Oromo vs Tigray — it is the peoples against the racket.

Detailed Synopsis

“Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests”

Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu (MGH) · 16 August 2026 · 25 pp.

The argument in one line

Ethiopia’s four singular interests share a single enemy, and it is internal: a machine the ethnic-federal order run to pump fear, votes, land, and money upward operated by a four-estate elite according to one rule the author calls ethnic entrepreneurship. The essay’s task is to name that machine, decompose it, prove it, and set out what would break it.

The standpoint and the instrument (§§1–2)

MGH writes as a nationalist loyal to the whole nation and to no party, region, church, mosque, or office a stance he treats as licence to ask of every elite, his own group’s included, the question none of them wishes asked. He distinguishes his instrument, political economy, from moral philosophy: philosophy asks what a community needs, but a community is not an actor; its elites decide in its name, and their private interest is not its welfare. Switching to cui bono changes the shape of the predicament from a tragedy with no author into a business with beneficiaries.

He fixes three terms that recur throughout: the racket (also “the machine”) is the system; ethnic entrepreneurship is its operating rule a person’s claim to office, land, and protection resting on lineage rather than competence; and the elite of four estates (political cadre, economic oligarch, religious authority, and intellectual) are the operators who work the machine and divide its takings. Ethnic entrepreneurship is named as both the order’s deepest injustice and the engine of its incompetence: a system that rewards the shout over the skill will be led by its shoutiest men, not its ablest.

The essay places itself in an ongoing conversation, honouring Woreta’s diagnostic paper on Amhara survival and Zena’s “Paradox of Ethiopianism” as the finest reconstruction blueprint the discourse has produced. It departs from both at the same threshold: each reasons about communities as unitary actors. Drop that fiction insist that within each people elite and mass have divergent interests and the security dilemma no longer looks like weather that falls on innocents. It is farmed. The paradox is thus real as an experience and false as a necessity.

The machine, anatomised (§3)

Four established ideas, assembled, produce the Ethiopian machine: it is a limited-access order (North, Wallis, Weingast) in which ethnicity is the instrument of restriction; the thin line between government and protection racket (Tilly), selling protection against a danger it manufactures; grievance as the wrapper and rent as the product (Collier–Hoeffler; Fanon on the native bourgeoisie); and decay through ethnic outbidding (Rabushka–Shepsle), which hollows the centre. Run in every group at once, the rival entrepreneurs become “rivals in the shop window and partners in the back room” a cartel bound not by conspiracy but by incentive. MGH then refines the cartel into a predatory hierarchy: the estates do not only collude, they devour one another, illustrated by the TPLF’s documented record of consuming its allies over fifty years.

The charter (§4)

The racket, he argues, is not a habit but the law. The 1995 constitution constitutes it: Article 8 vests sovereignty in “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” rather than the citizen; Article 46 draws internal borders by language; Article 39 grants unconditional secession; Article 49 writes one group’s “special interest” over the capital into the founding text. No reform survives while the charter stands, so he proposes six changes vest sovereignty in the citizen; remove unconditional secession; write sovereign access to the sea into the text; free the land and guard the dam and grid; open the ethnic map to lawful review; and break the upper house’s veto on amendment ratified by ballot pledge and referendum so that “the citizen, not the cartel, holds the pen.” The National Dialogue is dismissed as “the chair consulting itself”: a body that recommends while the incumbent revises, excluding the very armed movements a settlement must end, and possibly a vehicle for turning a parliamentary system toward a presidency that could re-set term limits.

The demand side and the captured mind (§§5–7)

Honesty requires the demand side: the racket “does not stand on thin air it stands on us.” Its market is less the starving farmer than the comfortable, the online, and the diaspora patriot who “purchase the thrill of ethnic triumph with other people’s blood.” The one lever ordinary people hold is to withdraw custom the vote, the dollar, the shelter, the cheer, the son including protecting one’s own honest critics from the mob of one’s own group.

The essay marshals comparative scholarship (Horowitz, Bunce, Roeder, Hale, Cornell, Brubaker, Snyder; and, on Ethiopia, Abbink and Habtu) to argue that organising a state around ethnicity breeds division, not peace treating the case against ethnic politics as social science rather than Amhara nostalgia, while fairly noting Anderson’s dissent and conceding the fronts predate 1995. It then turns to the capture of mind: of memory (curated grievance), of number (a captured census, and the roughly three million “missing” Amhara), of origins (the Oromo shown as an ancient indigenous people, with both the “Madagascar” slander and the maximalist keñña pageant rejected as the identical move), of faith, and of the myth of invincibility Adwa honoured as a true glory but refused as an anaesthetic: “one cannot eat Adwa.”

In every community, the people receive the graves; the elite receives the rent.

The flashpoints (§§8–11)

Religion is named as the one fire that could bury the nation outright a war with no map, running through every household. MGH catalogues atrocities against both faiths: the targeted killing of Orthodox Christians in East Arsi since 2025 and the state’s slow response; the 2022 Gondar mosque attack; the 2023 Sheger demolitions and killings of Muslim worshippers. Addis Ababa is the “keystone of the keystone,” where a booming economy that will not descend to the wage-earner meets an ownership question the Dialogue has inflamed rather than defused; he grants Oromia’s genuine interests in water, land, and displaced farmers while rejecting ethnic ownership of a city that belongs first to its residents, then to all Ethiopians, and as the AU seat to Africa. The Tsimdo is “the racket’s war”: a pact of former enemies (Eritrea senior, TPLF and Fano junior, Sudan the rear base, with Cairo’s money), doomed by the irreconcilable claim to the western lands, and “suicidal” for Fano. To refuse it is the first concrete act of the vertical solidarity the essay commends.

The ledger and the head (§§11–14)

MGH reads the account “symmetrically, across every camp,” anchoring each entry in Amnesty, HRW, the UN, or the state commission (Mai Kadra, Axum, Tole, Gida Kiremu, Merawi, the drone strikes, Arsi, and the northern war), then draws the ledger down its columns: in every community the people receive the graves and the elite the rent. He refuses false balance on power the state kills with the only army and in breach of its unique duty to protect, so “the reddest hands today are the ruling party’s.”

“Fish rots from the head” locates the driver precisely. The chair the seat of the state belongs to whichever elite holds it: the TPLF for twenty-seven years, now the Prosperity Party under Abiy Ahmed, with an unmistakable Oromummaa tilt. Crediting real achievements (the opened society, GERD’s completion, Ethiopian Airlines, telecoms liberalisation, the Gode fertiliser complex), he nonetheless withholds the developmental crown: contracts flow by proximity not performance, the bureaucracy is chosen for loyalty not competence, and “no developmental state was ever built in a burning house” (Evans’s predatory–developmental distinction). Here he steps out of the seminar room to testify personally a designer of high-technology weapon systems now building a peaceful family enterprise in Ethiopia, refusing the diaspora forex leash and describing the honest builder taxed his time, money, and hope at the loan officer’s desk. He also questions the tourism-first road, arguing no large, populous country ever developed on tourism, and warns against letting the manufacturing base Meles laid decay while the capital is gilded. The boom the people cannot eat (§13) sets 9.2 per cent growth beside nearly 42 per cent poverty: not a growth problem but a transmission problem, and beneath that, capture. Section 14 grants that the government preaches unity and non-zero-sum access to the sea as eloquently as anyone its own “Breaking the Walls” broadcasts restate the essay’s thesis but cannot say the one word ourselves.

The synthesis, the cure, and the sea (§§15–19)

The synthesis (§15) marries the argument to the whole series: one machine corrodes unity, forecloses the coast, starves development, hollows democracy, throttles the engine, and steals the freedom political, economic, religious beneath them all. Democracy is defended not as the price of development but as “the arrangement in which losing an election is survivable”; the racket makes defeat unsurvivable on purpose.

The remedy (§16) is seven movements: take the rent off the ethnic label; make citizenship travel with the person; restore the three freedoms and forbid domination; settle Addis as a city of its residents; free the mind through schooling and honest history; convene a Dialogue that seats the “costly column” rather than the racketeers; and heal memory through truth and reconciliation that crowns no single people’s account. On force (§17), MGH is explicit: against Ethiopia’s own peoples there is no just war, and the rifle turned inward only feeds the machine; force is justified for one cause alone, once peaceful means are spent the retrieval and defence of Red-Sea sovereignty as self-defence under Article 51.

The sea (§§18–19) is saved for last as the cause that could unite all the rest. He argues the claim stands on right, not need access preserved by UN Resolution 390(V) and never lawfully surrendered by an unelected transitional government and sets peaceful access (a portfolio, not one port) as the priority, while declining to vow never to defend against a Tsimdo aggression. To Eritrea he offers a future rather than a threat: the same sea that is Ethiopia’s survival could be Eritrea’s future. The essay closes with two messages to the peoples, to withhold the belief that the poor man across the river is the enemy; to the elites, that all rackets expire when the marks stop believing and a final insistence: it was never Amhara against Oromo against Tigrayan; it is the peoples against the racket that farms them.

Read Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s full essay, “Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests,” here:

Read the full essay →foursingularinterests_no_paradox.pdf

The Ethiopian Tribune

Profile · Diaspora & Technology

The Daughter Ethiopia Expelled

Timnit Gebru left Addis Ababa as an enemy alien and became the conscience of an industry. What, exactly, is ours to claim?

By E. Frashie

Every few years the Ethiopian press rediscovers Timnit Gebru, and every few years it makes the same small error. She is announced as one of ours, a daughter of Addis Ababa who conquered Silicon Valley, a scientist whose name is set in Amharic and Tigrinya alike, a source of national pride to be filed beside the marathoners and the coffee. The claim is warm, and it is not quite honest. For the plain fact at the centre of her biography is that the Ethiopian state did not nurture Timnit Gebru. It drove her out.

She was born in Addis Ababa in 1982 or 1983, the youngest of three daughters. Her father, an electrical engineer with a doctorate, died when she was five; her mother, an economist, raised the three girls alone. Both parents were Eritrean! and in the Horn of Africa that single sentence is a fate, not a footnote. When the Eritrean–Ethiopian War erupted at the end of the 1990s, families of Eritrean descent living in Ethiopia became suspect by blood. Some of her relatives were deported to Eritrea and conscripted to fight. At fifteen, Gebru fled the only country she had known.

The journey out was not the triumphant emigration of legend. Denied a United States visa, she lived for a time in Ireland before she was finally granted political asylum in America a process she has described, without softening, as miserable. She joined her mother and sisters, who had gone ahead, and finished her schooling near Boston. The refugee, not the prodigy, is the first identity the record gives her.

The Ethiopian state did not nurture Timnit Gebru. It drove her out.

The ascent

What followed is the part the celebratory profiles prefer. She went to Stanford and stayed for three degrees of bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in electrical engineering, under Fei-Fei Li, one of the architects of modern computer vision. She designed circuits at Apple in the years around the first iPhone and iPad. Then, in 2018, with Joy Buolamwini, she published “Gender Shades,” the study that showed commercial facial-recognition systems misclassifying darker-skinned women at rates approaching a third, while erring on lighter-skinned men less than one per cent of the time. It was the paper that forced an industry to concede its mirrors were warped.

By the time Google recruited her, she was the most senior Black woman on its Ethical AI team and a co-founder of Black in AI, the network that has done more than any diversity office to change who sits in the room where these machines are built. She had arrived at the summit of the field she had been taught, as a refugee, to trust as a neutral meritocracy. She was about to discover it was neither.

The rupture and the money that was not hers

In late 2020 Gebru co-authored “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots,” a paper warning that ever-larger language models would launder bias, devour energy and mimic understanding they did not possess. Google’s management demanded she withdraw it or strip the Google authors’ names. She refused, set conditions, and left for a holiday. Her superiors announced they had accepted a resignation she says she never tendered. On 2 December 2020 she was gone. More than two thousand six hundred employees signed a letter of protest; directors and engineers resigned in her wake.

Here the Ethiopian Tribune must correct a figure that circulates in her name. Readers have seen the headline “Google pays $50 million” attached to Gebru’s story, and inferred a personal windfall. It is not so. That settlement, granted final approval in 2026, resolved a separate class action brought in 2022 by Black Google employees alleging systemic discrimination; Google admitted no liability, and the sum was shared across a class. Gebru’s case echoed through that litigation, but she was not its plaintiff and did not collect its proceeds. As for her own departure, no severance figure was ever made public. Anyone who tells you what Google paid Timnit Gebru to leave is inventing it. On a beat this contested, the absence of a number is itself the finding.

Anyone who tells you what Google paid Timnit Gebru to leave is inventing it.

What she built, and what it is worth

Exactly one year to the day after her firing, 2 December 2021, Gebru launched the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, DAIR, an independent body founded to conduct “community-rooted” research free of Big Tech’s hand. It opened with roughly 3.7 million dollars in commitments from the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Open Society foundations and the Kapor Center. It is a non-profit, not a company; its “worth” is measured not in a valuation but in the grants that keep it independent and those have continued, including a further half-million dollars in 2026 from a pooled philanthropic AI fund, alongside general operating support from MacArthur and Ford.

DAIR is deliberately small and deliberately awkward. It is building its own modest computing cluster rather than rent the cloud from the very companies it critiques. Its work runs along three lines: equipping marginalised communities with data to argue their own case; devising research methods that do not extract from the people they study; and imagining technological futures in which those people are designed for rather than around. From this base Gebru has become the field’s sharpest dissident coining, with the philosopher Émile Torres, the term “TESCREAL” to name the tangle of futurist ideologies she argues underwrite the race to build artificial general intelligence, a race she calls, flatly, a scam.

The accolades have accumulated in proportion to her heresy: Nature’s ten people who shaped science, the TIME 100, Fortune’s greatest leaders, the Carnegie Great Immigrants award, the BBC’s hundred women. A memoir, “Deep Unlearning,” is due from a major New York house, and a documentary, “Ghost in the Machine,” has carried her argument to cinemas. She is, by any measure, among the most influential people the Horn of Africa has produced this century.

The debt, and the return

Which returns us to the uncomfortable question of what she owes the country of her birth, and what it owes her. Gebru’s tangible contribution to Ethiopia is real but modest against her global weight: she sits on the board of AddisCoder, the programme founded by the mathematician Jelani Nelson that teaches algorithms and programming, free of charge, to Ethiopian high-school students. She did not merely lend her name; during her doctoral years, in 2016 and again in 2018, she returned to Addis to teach the cohorts herself. Hundreds of young Ethiopians have met the discipline through a scheme she helps steward.

It would be easy, it is the season’s reflex, to wish for more: a laboratory in Addis, a repatriated fortune, an institute on Ethiopian soil. But that wish quietly repeats the original presumption. It treats her as a resource the nation may draw upon, the same logic, dressed in pride rather than suspicion, that once treated her family as aliens to be expelled. Gebru does not owe Ethiopia her genius as reparation for having survived it.

She is a daughter of Addis and a casualty of Addis in the same breath.

The honest posture, then, is neither to annex her nor to ignore her, but to hold both truths at once. She is a daughter of Addis and a casualty of Addis in the same breath made by this city’s schools and unmade by this state’s wartime paranoia, and now returned to it, on her own terms, as a teacher rather than a trophy. The diaspora’s most consequential technological conscience was manufactured, in part, by one of the Horn’s ugliest wars. That is not a matter for national congratulation. It is a matter for national reckoning which, as ever, is the harder and the more necessary thing.

The Ethiopian Tribune · Established 2012

An Open Door onto a Wall

Ecobank spans more of Africa than any bank alive, and it will enter almost anywhere. Its refusal to cross into Ethiopia’s newly liberalised banking sector is the sharpest verdict yet on a reform built to be announced rather than completed.

By E. Frashie

There is a kind of silence that carries further than any refusal, and Ethiopia’s financial authorities are now living inside it. In March 2025, after more than half a century in which no foreign lender could hold so much as a single share in an Ethiopian bank, Parliament threw the sector open. The Banking Business Proclamation No. 1360/2025 permitted foreign institutions to establish subsidiaries, open branches, plant representative offices, and acquire equity in domestic banks. It was celebrated — most loudly by the government that drafted it — as a historic act of opening, the financial keystone of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s liberalisation agenda. More than a year on, the number of foreign banks to have actually walked through that open door stands at precisely zero.

Among the absentees, one name should unsettle Addis Ababa more than the rest. Ecobank Transnational Incorporated operates in more than thirty African countries; it is the nearest thing the continent possesses to a genuinely pan-African lender, an institution whose entire identity rests on entering the markets others deem too small, too poor, or too fraught. If any bank alive was built to walk into Ethiopia, it is this one. Yet Ecobank — which has kept a representative office in Addis Ababa since before the reform — has studied the terms on offer and chosen to remain in the doorway, watching.

That choice is not timidity. It is a reading, and a pitilessly accurate one, of what Ethiopia’s liberalisation actually is.

The queue of the reluctant

Ecobank’s wariness might be dismissed as the disposition of a single cautious firm, were it not so completely shared. The roll-call of interested-but-unmoved now reads like a directory of African and international banking. Kenya’s KCB Group, which has held a representative office in Addis since 2015, still speaks of full entry — and still, tellingly, hunts for a local partner and contemplates asking the regulator to exempt it from the ownership ceiling before it will file. Equity Group, Kenya’s most profitable lender, held talks with the Ethiopian Investment Commission and then declined to commit. Absa has bound its entry explicitly to a further easing of the rules. Standard Bank, Stanbic, Nigeria’s Zenith and FirstBank — all have circled, professed interest, and kept their capital at home.

When every prospective entrant behaves identically, the explanation is not to be found in the character of the banks. It is in the design of the invitation.

The reform was announced in 2025. It was engineered, across the year that followed, not to happen.

The forty-nine per cent ceiling

Begin with the arithmetic of ownership, because it is here that the door narrows to a slit. Proclamation 1360/2025 permits foreign capital, but only within a lattice of caps: a single strategic investor may hold up to 40 per cent of a domestic bank, a foreign juridical person up to 10 per cent, a foreign individual up to 7 per cent — and the cumulative foreign stake in any one bank may not exceed 49 per cent. At least 51 per cent must remain in Ethiopian hands, always and by law.

For a portfolio investor content to clip a dividend, this is tolerable. For Ecobank it is close to disqualifying. The group’s competitive advantage — the very thing it would bring to Ethiopia — is its “One Bank” model: a single technological and operational spine, developed centrally and pushed out uniformly across its network. That model presupposes control. A permanent minority position, subordinate to domestic shareholders and to a central bank that reserves sweeping discretion over boards and management, offers Ecobank all of the risk of Ethiopian entry and almost none of the command it would need to make that risk pay. The ownership cap does not merely tax foreign entry; it forecloses the specific strategy that makes a pan-African bank pan-African.

Consolidation before competition

Had the ownership architecture stood alone, it might have been read as caution. Set beside the regulator’s conduct over the past year, it reads as strategy. For the National Bank of Ethiopia spent the first year of “liberalisation” not clearing a path for foreign banks but fortifying domestic ones against their arrival.

The instrument was capital. The NBE raised the minimum paid-up capital demanded of every bank tenfold — from 500 million birr to five billion — with full compliance required by the end of 2026, forcing the smaller domestic lenders to scramble for fresh equity or fold into their larger rivals. Layered atop this came Directive No. SBB/95/2025, issued in November 2025, marching the sector towards Basel II and Basel III: the minimum capital-adequacy ratio lifted from 8 to 11 per cent, a Tier 1 floor of 7 per cent, and fresh capital charges for credit, market and operational risk — in an economy whose data infrastructure and supervisory capacity are, by the regulator’s own quiet admission, not yet equal to frameworks of such complexity.

The sequencing is the argument. A government impatient for foreign banks fast-tracks their licences. A government that wishes to be seen opening while it consolidates does exactly what Ethiopia has done: announce the opening, then spend the interval thickening the walls the new entrants will eventually have to scale. The reform is real on the page and deferred in practice, and the deferral is not an accident of bureaucratic slowness. It is the policy.

A government impatient for foreign banks fast-tracks their licences. Ethiopia has spent the year thickening the walls instead.

The macroeconomics of hesitation

Even were the regulatory door flung fully open tomorrow, the ground beyond it would give any prudent banker pause. Ethiopia’s headline growth remains formidable — the IMF projects real GDP expansion above 9 per cent — but the figure sits atop a structure of alarming fragility.

The 2024 float of the birr, undertaken to unlock IMF and World Bank financing, did what floats do: it revealed the currency’s true weakness. By January 2026 banks were selling dollars near 151 birr while the parallel market ran beyond 180 — a gap that is itself a confession that the “market-based” rate is not yet trusted by the market. That same depreciation drove the external debt-to-GDP ratio from 23.8 per cent in 2024 to 33.9 per cent a year later, as hard-currency obligations swelled in local terms. Inflation, briefly coaxed into single digits, crept back to 11.7 per cent by April 2026, with food prices rising faster still. Public debt approaches 52 billion dollars; the 2023 Eurobond default remains unresolved, with private creditors weighing legal action after rejecting a proposed haircut. And beneath the aggregates sits the market a retail bank must actually serve: a population whose poverty rate, the World Bank warns, may have climbed towards 43 per cent.

For a bank contemplating entry, these are not abstractions. They are the twin spectres of balance-sheet risk and blocked repatriation — the fear of earning profits in a currency one cannot reliably convert, and of lending into a consumer base too impoverished to sustain the growth the headline numbers promise.

The regulator’s tell

The most revealing evidence, however, is not in the directives but in the language of those who wrote them. The National Bank has fretted, openly, that foreign banks might “import economic crises” into Ethiopia, and has warned of their “cherry-picking tendencies” — the suspicion that international lenders will skim the profitable urban corporate custom and leave the developmental heavy lifting to the domestic sector.

Set that language beside the invitation and the contradiction becomes the story. A regulator confident in its opening does not, in the same breath, describe the guests it has invited as vectors of contagion. The vocabulary of Ethiopia’s banking authority is not the vocabulary of a market being opened; it is the vocabulary of a market being defended. Ecobank has simply taken the regulator at its word.

The wall behind the door

Here the banking file rejoins the larger pattern this newspaper has traced across every domain of Ethiopian governance. For the liberalisation, examined closely, is not producing a more open sector at all — it is producing a more concentrated one, and concentrated around the state. The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, state-owned, still commands more than half of all banking assets; the NBE’s own stability reporting has flagged the danger that reform is nudging state control back towards dominance rather than away from it. The private domestic tier is squeezed between the five-billion-birr capital wall and the Basel transition; the foreign tier is held at the threshold by the ownership caps and the sequencing. What emerges is not competition but a managed enclosure — an opening choreographed to leave the essential architecture of state and incumbent power precisely where it was.

This is the familiar Ethiopian manoeuvre, transposed from the political to the financial register. It is the form of liberalisation without its substance, exactly as the June 2026 elections offered the form of competition without its substance. The IMF receives its headline — a market opened after half a century — and the government retains every lever that matters. Reform becomes a performance staged for an external audience, its choreography designed to alter as little as possible behind the announcement.

Ecobank’s refusal, then, is worth more than a dozen ministerial communiqués. The bank engineered to enter the unenterable has looked past the rhetoric of opening, read the subtext of the caps and the capital rules and the regulator’s own anxious vocabulary, and concluded that the door leads not into the market but into a waiting room. Ethiopia’s banking sector, the proclamation insists, is open for business. For Ecobank and its peers, the more honest formulation is that it has been opened for announcement — and that the path beyond the threshold has been left, deliberately, unswept.

E. Frashie — The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune

Editorial Foreword

There is a peculiar cruelty in watching a people turn their sharpest weapons upon themselves. The essay that follows refuses to look away from it.

Professor Girma Berhanu writes as both a student of the affliction and one of the wounded by it. What he offers is not a reaction to a passing controversy but the distillation of several years of ethnographic observation the reckoning of a man who has watched the pile-ons gather, absorbed the insults, and counted the reputations dismantled by people who claim to be defending the very cause they are hollowing out. The question he cannot put down has been pressed on him by a Tigrayan friend and an Oromo colleague alike, and he confesses he has never answered it well: why do those who call themselves Amhara so often turn on other Amhara with a ferocity they rarely muster against their actual adversaries?

The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this reflection because that question has become impossible to avoid. As Fano’s struggle for Amhara survival, dignity and security intensifies, so too does a corrosive war within waged not on any battlefield but on YouTube channels and social-media timelines, where activists, journalists, intellectuals and rising leaders are discredited long before anyone in government need lift a finger.

The author is careful to draw the distinction the movement so often forgets: between criticism and sabotage, between disagreement and character assassination, between honest rivalry and collective self-destruction. Not every attack is an act of infiltration, and healthy movements need dissent as much as they need discipline. But when a cause devours its own potential leaders as a matter of routine, the failure ceases to be a private grievance. It becomes a political one.

We offer no tidy resolution to the question that will not leave him alone manipulation, opportunism, jealousy, inherited trauma, a factionalism baked into the culture. We offer the question itself, sharpened, and the discomfiting possibility it leaves in its wake: that the gravest damage to the Amhara cause may one day prove to have come not from its enemies, but from within.

— The Editors

Synopsis

A first-person reckoning with a habit the Amhara movement has never managed to break: the destruction of its own. The author himself a frequent target of the abuse he describes, asks why Amhara so readily turn on fellow Amhara, and who ultimately benefits when the movement’s leaders, institutions and media are dismantled from within. Drawing a hard line between legitimate criticism and coordinated character assassination, he warns that no cause can build a future while it devours everyone who sees things differently, and pleads for a unity sturdy enough to hold disagreement without letting it curdle into mutual ruin.

The Hardest Question

Why are we destroying our own?

By Girma Berhanu

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

There’s a question I keep getting asked and one I’ve never been able to answer well myself:

Why do people who identify as Amhara so often turn on other Amhara with such ferocity?

A Tigrayan friend put this to me once. I had nothing convincing to say. An Oromo colleague asked the same thing later, and once again I came up short.

Why does it feel like we’re bent on tearing each other apart?

The pattern isn’t subtle. Well-known activists get torn apart publicly on social media. People who are now behind bars faced months, sometimes years, of vilification before they were ever arrested. Promising Amhara leaders new voices and seasoned ones alike get humiliated, discredited, and dragged through the mud as a matter of routine. I won’t name names; the list would go on far too long.

I’ve lived this myself.

Some of the ugliest insults and most brutal attacks I’ve faced haven’t come from political rivals they’ve come from people who claim to be defending the Amhara cause. Social media and YouTube have become powerful weapons, and not only for political advocacy: they’re used just as readily to wreck the reputations of fellow Amhara. Some days it feels like we spend more energy tearing into each other than confronting the people actually responsible for our suffering.

Every Amhara should find that troubling. And it raises questions that are hard to sit with.

Who gains when Amhara leaders are picked apart, one by one?

Who gains when Amhara organizations, media outlets, and civic institutions are hollowed out from the inside?

Who gains when every rising leader is attacked before they’ve had a real chance to contribute anything?

Could it be that some of this is driven by people loyal to the Prosperity Party people working to widen our rifts, weaken Fano, sap the morale of the Amhara population, and ultimately gut the Amhara political cause?

I’m not claiming that anyone who criticizes an Amhara activist or leader is doing the government’s bidding. Real disagreements exist. Fair criticism matters. Personal friction and political differences are bound to happen in any movement.

But at some point, criticism turns into sabotage.

At some point, disagreement turns into character assassination.

And at some point, political rivalry turns into collective self-destruction.

Telling one from the other demands political maturity and moral courage.

If Fano is truly fighting for the Amhara people’s survival, dignity, and security, then dismantling every Amhara institution, media outlet, intellectual, activist, and rising leader from within isn’t just a private grievance. It’s a serious political failure.

Every healthy movement needs criticism, yes — but it also needs discipline. It needs room for disagreement but also political maturity. It needs accountability, but accountability looks nothing like fabricated accusations, public shaming, and coordinated character assassination.

No movement survives if it wipes out everyone who sees things differently. And no people can build a future if their greatest gift is devouring their own potential leaders.

So I come back to the question that won’t leave me alone:

Why are we so brutal toward our own?

Is it political manipulation? Infiltration? Opportunism? Personal rivalry? Jealousy? Inherited trauma? A factionalism baked into the culture?

Or have we just forgotten that, whatever divides us, we’re ultimately fighting for the same people’s survival and future?

Now is not the moment to destroy one another.

The Amhara people need builders, not wreckers. They need leaders, not cult figures. They need principled criticism, not character assassination. More than anything, they need a unity sturdy enough to hold disagreement without letting it curdle into mutual ruin.

If we don’t learn this now, we may one day realize that the worst damage to our cause never came from our opponents at all.

It came from us.

Girma Berhanu is Professor in the Department of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg. This essay draws on several years of ethnographic observation and documented reflective writing.

Editorial Foreword

on Professor Girma Berhanu’s

The Theatre of Power

Caligula, Abiy Ahmed, and the Politics of Personalisation

Professor Girma Berhanu returns to our pages with an essay that begins, disarmingly, in insomnia — a documentary on Caligula watched to three in the morning, and the recognition, unbidden and by his own account unsettling, of a pattern he has spent the better part of a decade trying to name. Readers who have followed his contributions will know the shape of that preoccupation. In The Many Faces of Abiy Ahmed, written when much of the world was still applauding a freshly minted Nobel laureate, he recorded an early and rather lonely disquiet. What follows here is not a departure from that argument so much as its deepening through an older mirror.

The device is the historical analogy, and the Professor is scrupulous about its limits. He does not claim that a modern prime minister governing under a constitution, however contested, is a Roman autocrat reborn; he insists, in as many words, that the comparison is “an analytical analogy rather than an assertion of historical equivalence.” He is equally careful with the sources on which the Caligula portrait rests — Suetonius and Cassius Dio filtered through Winterling and through Barrett and Yardley — noting that the ancient record is itself a construction shaped by bias and literary convention. This is the intellectual honesty that distinguishes the piece from the cruder equivalences — Hitler, Nero, Idi Amin — that circulate freely on social media and explain very little. Berhanu has reached for those figures before and found them wanting; here he explains why Caligula, of all the tyrants on offer, fits the contour he is tracing: the personalisation of power, the leader as performance, the state remade in the image of a single man’s sense of destiny.

The argument’s spine is well sourced. Tom Gardner’s The Abiy Project supplies the figures on the corridor developments; Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics furnishes the interpretive lens for a polity in which large populations are left exposed to violence and deprivation. Where the essay ventures onto contested ground it says so plainly. It treats the death of Simegnew Bekele — found shot in his car in July 2018 — as the established and still-unexplained fact it is, while flagging the persistent rumours about the Prime Minister’s family and his father’s death as speculation unsupported by credible evidence. We reproduce the piece in exactly that spirit: the distinction between the documented and the merely alleged is the Professor’s, and it is one this publication holds to.

The essay arrives at a pointed moment. Fighting has again broken out in the north, in fresh breach of arrangements meant to have ended it, and Berhanu writes with reports of a strike on a monastery still fresh — the human and cultural costs he catalogues are not historical but current. Yet his closing move is the one worth dwelling on. The real danger, he argues, is not the temperament of any single ruler but the system that permits personal rule to proceed unchecked: Caligula matters less as a “mad emperor” than as a case study in what follows when power is concentrated and accountability disappears. That is the durable thesis beneath the provocation, and it is why the analogy, for all its deliberate imperfection, earns its place.

Synopsis

In The Theatre of Power: Caligula, Abiy Ahmed, and the Politics of Personalisation, Professor Girma Berhanu uses the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula as an analytical lens through which to examine the premiership of Abiy Ahmed. Prompted by a late-night documentary, and drawing on the assessment of a senior former Ethiopian minister who independently arrives at the same comparison, Berhanu argues that the most revealing parallel between the two is neither cruelty nor extravagance in isolation but the personalisation of power — the substitution of a leader’s vision, image and sense of destiny for durable institutions.

He develops the case across several movements. The first traces the rise of personal rule, reading Medemer less as a governing programme than as an exercise in political branding, and identifying three competing personas — Abiy the Preacher, Abiy the Actor, and Abiy the Prince — whose contradictions expose the tension between democratic rhetoric and highly personalised authority. The second examines the marginalisation of rivals and the machinery of fear, pairing Caligula’s public spectacles of suffering with the quieter, institutionalised violence of the Ethiopian state, and treating the unexplained death of GERD engineer Simegnew Bekele as emblematic of a broader disappearance of independent figures from public life. The third turns to financial extravagance and symbolism, setting Caligula’s monumentalism beside the corridor projects, parks and urban demolitions catalogued in Tom Gardner’s The Abiy Project, and reading both as spectacle pursued while populations endure hardship.

Throughout, Berhanu is careful to bound his own argument: the comparison is an analogy, not an equivalence; the ancient sources are contested; and destructive leadership should not be reduced to armchair psychiatric diagnosis. Invoking Mbembe’s necropolitics, he closes on the essay’s central and most portable claim — that the lesson of Caligula is systemic rather than personal. The gravest risk lies not in any individual ruler’s temperament but in political orders that leave concentrated power without effective checks, a warning he reads as acutely relevant to Ethiopia’s present instability.

The views expressed are the author’s own. The Ethiopian Tribune publishes the essay as analysis and welcomes reasoned dissent.

History & Diplomacy  ·  #sweeth80

Eighty Years, and the Eighty Before Them

The Swedish embassy has marked eight decades in the Addis Ababa house the Emperor gave away in 1946. But Sweden had already spent eighty years in Ethiopia before that — and the friendship now being commemorated was built long before there was a legation to house it.

By Endex  ·  Editor-in-Chief, The Ethiopian Tribune

This past weekend, on the 134th anniversary of the birth of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Embassy of Sweden gathered at the National Archives in Addis Ababa — a near neighbour of its own compound — to mark a round number: eighty. A daughter of the late Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen rose to address the gathering; among the guests sat two of the Emperor’s grandsons, Prince Michael Mekonnen and his younger brother Prince Beede Mariam Mekonnen. The tag beneath the embassy’s announcement, #sweeth80, counts the years since 1946, when Haile Selassie gave the residence that Sweden’s ambassadors have occupied ever since — first as a gift to King Gustav V, and then, without ceremony, as the beginning of permanent diplomatic relations between the two countries.

It is a graceful anniversary, and an accurate one. But it marks the shorter half of the story. Sweden did not arrive in Ethiopia in 1946. It had, by then, already been there for eighty years.

The first Swedes came not with credentials but with scripture. The Swedish Evangelical Mission reached the northern highlands in 1866, and the presence it established would run, in one form or another, for a century and a half. Long before there was a flag over a gate in Addis Ababa, there were Swedish schools, printing presses and clinics across the highlands — and a slow accumulation of the mundane, durable familiarity out of which real relationships, as opposed to treaties, are actually made.

The soldiers came next, and their story is the one the anniversary tends to leave out. In 1934 the Emperor invited a delegation of five Swedish officers, led by Colonel Viking Tamm, to open his new military academy at Holeta — the Genet school — and to make officers of the young men who would command his guard. They had barely begun when Italy invaded in October 1935. The cadets they had trained were thrown into a war their teachers could not win; some of those same young men carried out the night raid at Lechemti in 1936 that annihilated an Italian column. The Swedish officers had come to build an army in peacetime and instead watched it march, half-formed, into catastrophe. It is not a triumphant chapter. It is, however, a true measure of how early and how deeply Sweden had been woven into Ethiopia’s fate.

No figure embodies that weave more completely than Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen. He first flew into Ethiopia in 1935 as a pilot for the Swedish Red Cross ambulance, lifting casualties out of the fighting under Italian aircraft and witnessing, at close range, the mustard gas Mussolini’s forces rained on villages and field hospitals. He never really left the country’s orbit. When liberation came, the Emperor asked him back — and from 1945 von Rosen built the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force almost from nothing, with Swedish instructors and Saab aircraft, earning the rank of colonel in the service of a foreign crown. He returned again in old age to fly famine relief, and he died at Gode in July 1977, killed during the Ogaden war in the country he had served for more than forty years. An airborne knight-errant, his biographer called him. Ethiopia was the cause he kept coming back to until it took his life.

Sweden was the European power that came to teach, heal, train and fly — and never once to rule.

Set against that history, the gift of 1946 reads differently. A house is a modest thing beside a war. But the Emperor’s gesture — handing a residence and its compound to the King of Sweden, and with it establishing a permanent Swedish mission — was the formal recognition of something that had been true in fact for two generations. Ethiopia opened its own mission in Stockholm the following year. The relationship carried for so long by missionaries, teachers and one stubborn count was, at last, given an address.

What followed was less dramatic and, in its way, more intimate. Sweden became one of the first countries in the world to make development cooperation a matter of state policy, and Ethiopia one of its earliest partners; the Ethio-Swedish Paediatric Clinic opened at the university in 1958. And in 1947 the Ethiopian government hired a Finnish-born Swede named Onni Niskanen to organise its physical education. Niskanen went looking for runners in the Imperial Guard and found a shepherd’s son named Abebe Bikila. In 1960, barefoot on the cobbles of Rome, Bikila became the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal, and repeated the feat in Tokyo four years later in world-record time. The most celebrated pair of feet in African athletics were trained by a Swede in the Emperor’s service.

This is the thread worth pulling, because it is nearly unique. Almost every relationship Ethiopia had with a European power in this period was, at bottom, a relationship about conquest — resisting Italy, managing Britain, balancing France. Sweden was the exception: a European kingdom that arrived to teach, heal, train and fly, and never once to rule. That is the light in which to read the house on the archive’s doorstep. It was not tribute paid upward to a great power. It was a gift exchanged between equals — one small proud nation to another — and it is the reason the anniversary feels warm rather than merely diplomatic.

Eighty years on, in a hall beside the house the Emperor gave away, one of his granddaughters rose to speak and two of his grandsons sat listening, while a European embassy laid its wreath for the man whose gift began it all. The number on the banner was eighty. The truer number is a hundred and sixty — and it was never really about the building at all.

■

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Perishing of Ethiopian Medical Doctors

Through the Lens of Achille Mbembe’s Theory of Necropolitics

by Professor Girma Berhanu · University of Gothenburg

Editor’s Foreword

Some essays are written to settle a question. This one is written to insist that a question be asked at all. Over the past three years, a quiet and terrible arithmetic has accumulated in the public domain: Ethiopian medical doctors disproportionately of Amhara origin dying in numbers their colleagues can no longer treat as coincidence. Some were shot by unidentified gunmen. Others died suddenly, of illnesses never publicly explained. In case after case, no independent investigation followed, and the families were left to bury both their dead and their questions.

Professor Girma Berhanu approaches this subject with the discipline it demands and the restraint it deserves. A scholar at the University of Gothenburg and a longstanding contributor to these pages, he refuses the easy consolations of certainty. Where others have speculated about vaccines, about coordinated campaigns, he draws a firm line between what is documented, what is alleged, and what remains unknown. He treats rumour as rumour and evidence as evidence, and asks the reader to do the same.

Yet this is not a detached study. Two years ago the author’s own cousin, an accomplished surgeon who had practised in Ethiopia, Greece, and Bulgaria was murdered while jogging near his home in Addis Ababa. His killers were never found. That loss sits beneath every measured sentence of this essay, and it is precisely the author’s refusal to let private grief overwhelm public reasoning that gives the piece its force.

To make sense of what he and his interviewees describe, Professor Berhanu reaches for Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics the theory that political power decides not only how populations are governed, but who is protected and who is left exposed to death. Read alongside Lauren Berlant’s notion of slow death, the framework lets him name something his informants feel but struggle to prove: the condition of healing others while living, in one physician’s chilling phrase, as a “dead man walking.”

The Tribune has followed the violence in the Amhara Region, the shrinking space for the country’s intellectuals, and the erosion of civilian protection across many issues. This essay belongs to that record. It does not deliver a verdict. It delivers something harder and more necessary a demand for the transparent, independent investigation that Ethiopia’s dead have so far been denied.

Synopsis

Drawing on interviews with five Ethiopian medical professionals at home and abroad, alongside public reporting and years of close observation, Professor Girma Berhanu examines a disturbing pattern: the deaths of Ethiopian doctors of Amhara origin killed in the region’s ongoing conflict, or dying in circumstances that were never explained.

The essay is careful about what it claims. It confirms that healthcare workers have been among the victims of violence: the World Health Organization condemned the fatal shooting of three health workers in North Mecha in April 2026; the outlet Ethio Focus has documented at least twenty-one health professionals killed or seriously injured in the Amhara Region; and Human Rights Watch has warned that such attacks may amount to war crimes. Individual cases anchor the abstraction — Getnet Misganaw, a health-centre head shot on official duty near “Sebat Minch”; Dr Tsegahun Sime, detained in Bahir Dar and reported dead hours later. But it stops short of asserting that all Amhara doctors are being systematically targeted for their ethnicity, insisting instead that motive and pattern remain open empirical questions.

Its analytical spine is Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the exercise of power not only through killing, but through the production of conditions in which certain populations are left chronically exposed to death. Through this lens the author argues that many Amhara medical professionals now practise their vocation in a state of persistent insecurity: healing others while fearing for themselves.

Professor Girma Berhanu situates the present within a longer history of exclusion from the dismissal of forty-two Addis Ababa University professors in the early 1990s to the recurring vulnerability of the Amhara educated class and draws on comparative atrocity studies, which show that educated elites are often among the first to be targeted. He advances no single conspiracy. He argues, rather, that the convergence of history, testimony, and documented harm is grave enough to demand what has so far been withheld: transparent, independent investigation.

Professor Berhanu’s complete essay follows below.

why-are-ethiopian-medical-doctors-perishing-2.docx