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By Professor Mefkereseb Goytom Hailu

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

The fortnight of 11–16 May reshuffled the diplomatic surface of the Ethiopian moment faster than any comparable interval since 2018. An IMF benediction on macroeconomic reform. A presidential visit from Paris bearing investment and geopolitical hedging. The specification by this publication of a reported five-point US-mediated rapprochement framework touching Eritrea, ports, borders, and mutual disengagement. All of it compressed into five days.

The warm lighting of this fortnight creates a risk that the Ethiopian polity executive, parliament, citizenry will mistake tactical diplomatic movement for the resolution of a strategic question. That mistake would be fatal. This essay argues why, and it does so in language that refuses the comforts of ambiguity.

Mefkereseb Goytom Hailu makes a single, uncompromising claim: Ethiopia, as a nation, does not exist without Unity and Red Sea Sovereignty. Not as policy objectives. Not as negotiating positions. As constitutive facts the foundations on which everything else depends. The argument runs deeper: that the four singular interests of Ethiopian strategy (Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based democratic economic development, the GERD) are not separate items to be traded against one another, but a single architecture in three layers. Foundations → Means Engine. None is severable without collapsing the whole.

What the next House of People’s Representatives must do, therefore, is not to manage this architecture through diplomatic channels. It is to legislate it. To write it into the supreme law of the federation in language that no transient diplomatic arrangement, no change in external alignments, no shift in an incumbent’s calculus can erode. Not through a memorandum of understanding. Not through an executive agreement. Through standing constitutional mandate that anchors the four interests to the Ethiopian state itself, not to the particular leaders who happen to occupy office at any given moment.

The essay that follows sets out both the urgency of that work and the technical constitutional package required to accomplish it. It does so in the language of constitutional law, of federal architecture, of strategic analysis, and of something harder to translate: the register of someone who has spent his analysis on this question and has arrived, in this moment, at clarity about what matters.

This is the seventh and concluding piece in Mefkereseb’s series on Ethiopian strategy, geopolitics, and constitutional foundations. Readers are invited to engage with the full argument. The work is unfinished. The work is doable. The work cannot be subcontracted. And as the author makes clear the choice to begin it is closing quite rapidly.

The full essay, “National Unity and Red Sea Sovereignty: Ethiopia Must Pay the Price Now,” appears at the following address:

The Editors
16 May 2026

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By Professor GIRMA BERHANU

For more than half a century, Ethiopians have endured cycles of drought, famine, and mass starvation. A German scholar who devoted his career to studying Ethiopia’s long history of devastating famines once observed that one factor driving the catastrophic death toll — particularly in the northern regions — was cultural: a profound sense of dignity and pride that made people ashamed to beg, even as they faced death.

An American senator who visited the famine-stricken areas, including the notorious camps at Korem, was arrested by the eerie silence of the dying. He watched men, women, and children standing patiently in line for food distribution and remarked with quiet awe, “What grace, what discipline.” He reflected that in his own country, people reduced to such desperation might erupt in chaos. Ethiopians, by contrast, absorbed their suffering in silence — with a composure that was both humbling and heartbreaking. This silence persists, but the geography of catastrophe has shifted.

What we are witnessing today is something historically without precedent: famine and starvation unfolding inside Addis Ababa itself — not in remote villages or drought-scorched highlands, but in the streets of the capital. And it is happening with a cruelty all its own. The dying do not look like the famished of humanitarian crises past. They are well-dressed, composed, outwardly dignified — good-looking men and women walking slowly toward death in pressed clothing, in broad daylight, past skyscrapers and manicured city parks. Far from being a natural disaster, this is a man-made one.

As part of this ongoing investigation, I sought access to the institutions that absorb this hidden catastrophe. I approached hospitals across Addis Ababa and conducted interviews with the directors of morgues where unidentified bodies are held. The findings are staggering: at a single hospital, a minimum of ten bodies collected from the city’s streets arrive every day. Many are never claimed. The municipality buries them in silence — as invisibly as they died.

This study is an indictment. It seeks to strip away the gleaming façade of a city marketed as a symbol of African modernity and expose the system behind the spectacle: an ethnic apartheid structure that has engineered extreme inequality into a mechanism of death. In today’s Addis Ababa, the divide between the privileged and the dispossessed is no longer merely economic — it is the difference between living and dying. This is the city that the skyscrapers were built to hide.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY

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On the thirty-sixth anniversary of the coup d’état that almost toppled Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian Tribune examines the fatal miscalculations of the officer class, the cascading logic of internal betrayal, and the historiographical void that has erased these generals from national memory.

On This Day: Thirty-Six Years Since the Failed Coup

16 May 1989 (8 Ginbot 1981 EC): The Officers Who Challenged and Fell

The institutions of a dictatorship reveal themselves most clearly at the moment of their rupture. On the morning of 16 May 1989, when a faction of senior military officers gathered in the Ministry of Defence to plot the removal of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian military hierarchy fractured along a line that would prove both revealing and tragic: the distinction between formal authority and actual power.

Major General Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, presided over a war room consumed by debate: should the dictator’s aircraft be intercepted before clearing Ethiopian airspace? Should decisive, irreversible action be taken? Or should caution prevail, institutional norms be respected, civilian lives protected? The paralysis that followed that debate became the coup d’état epitaph. Within hours, Mengistu’s aircraft cleared the border. The window of opportunity slammed shut. And a conspiracy that had assembled the rank and authority to seize the state found itself, quite suddenly, fighting for survival instead of power.

What followed was a cascade of failure and fratricide. In Asmara, Major General Demissie Bulto and his senior staff were executed by their own troops. In Addis Ababa, Major General Merid Negussie and Major General Amha Desta took their own lives. Thirty or more senior officers were killed, imprisoned, disappeared into the interrogation apparatus, or hunted down and shot whilst fleeing. The coup that was meant to challenge Mengistu’s dictatorship instead became an occasion for the dictatorship to purge its own officer corps with ruthless efficiency.

Yet for three and a half decades, this history has been largely erased from Ethiopian public memory. There are no memorials. There are no sustained historical investigations. The names of the officers who died whether by suicide in the Ministry of Defence, execution by their own soldiers in Asmara, or torture in the interrogation centres of the Derg regime have faded into silence. Only the families of these men carry the memory, and even that memory is constrained by the political interests of successive Ethiopian regimes that have found it inconvenient to memorialise a failed coup attempt.

This silence is not accidental. It is the product of choices: the choice of the post-1991 EPRDF regime to construct a narrative in which the Derg was uniformly villainous and the insurgencies uniformly heroic, a binary that left no room for the complicated reality of officers who were simultaneously perpetrators within the dictatorship and, in their final acts, challengers to it. But a complete historical reckoning demands more complexity, more honesty, more willingness to grapple with the actual mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes function and ultimately decay.

The coup of 16-18 May 1989 failed militarily, but its historical significance lies precisely in its failure. It revealed the Derg regime to be institutionally vulnerable, dependent on terror to maintain control even over its own officer corps. It demonstrated that a significant faction of the military hierarchy had concluded that Mengistu’s dictatorship was unsustainable. And it contributed, however indirectly, to the regime’s eventual collapse by forcing the Derg to consume resources and institutional energy in internal purges rather than in effective counterinsurgency operations against the TPLF and EPLF.

The following essay undertakes a systematic examination of the coup attempt: its strategic miscalculations, the cascading failures in command coherence, the internal betrayals that sealed its fate, and the purges that followed. It offers no heroes, no redemptive narrative. It asks, instead, that we remember these officers not as saviours but as complex historical actors whose attempt to challenge the regime they served, however imperfectly executed, deserves to be part of the permanent historical record.

On this thirty-sixth anniversary, the names of Major General Merid Negussie, Major General Demissie Bulto, and the thirty or more officers who died in the coup attempt and its aftermath deserve remembrance. Not to celebrate them, but to complete the historical record. Not to deny their complicity in the Derg regimes brutality, but to acknowledge the full complexity of how authoritarian systems function and how, finally, they come to an end.

The Editorial Board

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Paralysis in the War Room

At the precise moment when Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam’s aircraft crossed Ethiopian airspace on 16 May 1989, the architects of his potential overthrow sat in a Ministry of Defence conference room consumed by a debate that would define the coup’s fatal trajectory. Major General Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, presided over a military hierarchy fractured not by ideological conviction but by competing calculations of legitimacy, institutional consequence, and moral restraint.

The strategic divide was stark. One faction emboldened, decisive, willing to absorb the costs of decisive action advocated for the immediate termination of the dictator: either an air strike against the presidential aircraft or a forced landing in Asmara, where Mengistu could be detained and presented as a fait accompli before international and domestic audiences. This was the language of revolution: swift, irreversible, the kind of action that forecloses negotiation and establishes new facts on the ground.

The opposing faction seized upon a different calculus: the protection of civilian lives on the departing aircraft, the preservation of Ethiopian Airlines’ international standing, and an implicit recognition that shooting down one’s own head of state, however, despised carries a reputational cost that transcends the immediate political moment. This was the language of institutional stewardship, of officers conscious of their role as custodians of state apparatus rather than revolutionary architects.

The debate itself is instructive. It reveals a military officer corps that had not yet crossed the psychological threshold required for successful coup execution. Revolutionary movements, whether they succeed or fail share a common prerequisite: the willingness of the conspirators to burn the bridges behind them, to commit acts of such magnitude and moral weight that retreat becomes impossible. The hesitation over Mengistu’s aircraft was not a failure of nerve alone; it was symptomatic of deeper institutional ambivalence about the legitimacy of their own enterprise.

By the time this internal debate reached its conclusion, the window of opportunity had sealed. Mengistu’s aircraft cleared Ethiopian airspace. The coup, as a coherent political project, was already hollow not yet defeated militarily, but spiritually compromised by its own architects’ inability to commit fully to the violence required to see it through.

The North Moves on False Intelligence: Major General Demissie Bulto and the Asmara Gambit

In Asmara, the commander of the Second Revolutionary Army, Major General Demissie Bulto, operated on faulty intelligence. Receiving early signals from the capital that Mengistu had been successfully removed, he mobilised with a speed and decisiveness that should have been the template for Addis Ababa. Demissie seized the local radio station and broadcast a declaration: the regime had fallen. The regime was history. The revolution was underway.

The tactical logic was sound. With Mengistu apparently neutralised in the capital, Demissie deployed the elite 102nd Airborne Division southward aboard Antonov transports under the command of Major General Kumlachew Dejene. The strike force was meant to consolidate control of critical infrastructure the state broadcaster, telecommunications hubs, airports, the military nerve centres that had sustained Mengistu’s grip. This was the operational implementation of what the war room in Addis Ababa had theoretically imagined: the seizure of state apparatus before the regime could reconstitute itself.

But Demissie and his subordinates were executing a plan based on a fiction. The war room in Addis Ababa had not moved decisively. Mengistu was not neutralised; he was airborne and returning. And by the time this reality became clear in Asmara, the 102nd Airborne was already committed, already in transit, already the vanguard of a coup that had no head, no political leadership, no coherent command structure to support its operational objectives.

This is the anatomy of military collapse under pressure: a coalition of conspirators, each operating on partial intelligence and optimistic assumptions, each believing that the others have secured their sector of the plan. When one component fails when the war room in Addis Ababa paralysed itself over the question of whether to shoot down an aircraft the entire edifice becomes a series of isolated uprisings with no centre of gravity.

The Architecture of Betrayal: Tesfaye Wolde Selassie and the Internal Compromise

Colonel Tesfaye Wolde Selassie, the Minister of State Security, became the coup’s executioner. His betrayal was not merely tactical; it was symptomatic of a deeper institutional reality that the conspirators had failed to address: the security apparatus of the Mengistu regime, despite its brutality and paranoia, maintained layers of counterintelligence so dense and so ruthlessly enforced that penetration at the highest levels was nearly impossible to conceal.

Tesfaye’s role illuminates a fundamental weakness of the coup: it was an officers’ plot without the structural capacity to neutralise the security state. The Derg regime, whatever its military incompetence in the field against the TPLF and EPLF, had constructed an internal security apparatus that was exquisitely sensitive to elite deviance. Every senior officer was monitored, every coalition watched, every meeting of consequence filtered through informants whose survival depended on their vigilance.

Tesfaye’s tip-off to loyalist forces particularly to Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade activated the regime’s immune system. The conspirators, for all their rank and institutional position, had not grasped a fundamental reality about authoritarian militaries: position and loyalty are not synonymous. A general can command troops in theory and still be isolated politically. A colonel controlling the presidential guard can be more consequential than a major general commanding distant garrisons.

This asymmetry of power between titular military rank and actual control over coercive assets destroyed the coup. By the time Mengistu’s aircraft touched down in Addis Ababa, the conspirators in the Ministry of Defence had already lost control of the narrative, the capital’s security apparatus, and any credible claim to legitimacy based on institutional authority. What remained was isolated pockets of resistance, each cut off from the others, each fighting a battle already lost at the level of strategic coordination.

The Deaths in Addis Ababa: Suicide, Execution, and the Collapse of Authority

The suicides of Major General Merid Negussie and Major General Amha Desta occupy a particular place in the emotional and political archaeology of this failed coup. These were not desperate men acting under threat; they were senior officers who, in the privacy of the Ministry of Defence, chose to end their lives rather than face capture and interrogation. The choice itself speaks to their understanding of what awaited them: not trial, but torture; not imprisonment, but systematic annihilation.

Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, turned his service pistol on himself in the same conference room where, hours earlier, he had presided over the debate about whether to shoot down Mengistu’s aircraft. The irony is almost unbearable: the man tasked with exercising command authority over the coup’s execution ended his life in the very space where his paralysis had become institutionalised. His suicide was, in some sense, the final acknowledgement of that institutional failure a recognition that the decision not to act decisively had cascading consequences that could no longer be reversed or reframed.

Amha Desta, the Air Force Commander, followed Merid into death by similar means. The symmetry of their deaths both senior officers, both taking their own lives within hours, both in the Ministry of Defence suggests a shared understanding of their fate and a collective decision that death on their own terms was preferable to the machinery of Mengistu’s interrogation centres.

Major General Fanta Belay, the Minister of Industry, attempted a different strategy: flight. For four days he evaded security forces, hiding deep within the Ministry of Defence compound a bunker of sorts, a man trapped in the very institution he had tried to seize. But physical hiding could not obscure institutional vulnerability. He was discovered, arrested, and days later killed under “mysterious circumstances” inside the Maekelawi central investigation prison. There is nothing mysterious about Maekelawi; it was the Derg’s primary torture centre, a facility whose existence was synonymous with the regime’s capacity for systematic brutality.

Major General Aberra Abebe, the head of military operations and a key instigator, chose armed resistance. He shot and wounded Major General Hailegiorgis Hailemariam, the Minister of Defence, when the latter entered the compound to negotiate with the mutineers. Aberra managed to escape the initial security cordons, scaling the compound wall and vanishing into the capital’s urban landscape. For months he eluded the regime’s manhunt a fugitive general in his own capital, reduced to hiding with relatives, stripped of his institutional position and his ability to exercise command. When he was finally cornered by police at a relative’s house in Addis Ababa, he died as so many of the conspirators did: attempting to escape over another wall, gunned down in flight.

These deaths suicides, executions, killings “under mysterious circumstances,” men shot while fleeing tell a coherent story about the Derg regime’s approach to institutional deviance: there was no mechanism for peaceful resolution, no institutional pathway for the conspirators to surrender with dignity or to expect trial and imprisonment. The regime’s logic was absolute: eliminate the threat, erase the evidence, move forward as though the attempted coup had been merely a temporary disruption of order rather than a fundamental challenge to the regime’s legitimacy.

The Purge in Asmara: Fratricide and the Collapse of Command Coherence

In Asmara, the mutiny sustained itself for three days before the logic of defeat became undeniable. But the manner of its final collapse soldiers of the 102nd Airborne Division executing their own commanders reveals something deeper than mere military defeat: it was the complete disintegration of command authority and the triumph of survival instinct over institutional loyalty.

Major General Demissie Bulto and his senior staff were executed in what the historical record tersely describes as “a hail of gunfire.” The clinical language obscures the reality: soldiers shooting their commanders, junior ranks eliminating officers whose authority they had accepted hours or days earlier. This is not the behaviour of a military unit following orders; it is the behaviour of men attempting to survive by eliminating evidence of their own participation in the coup attempt.

The soldiers of the 102nd Airborne faced a choice with no good options: they could remain loyal to their commanders and face execution as coup conspirators, or they could betray those commanders and attempt to escape culpability by demonstrating their own loyalty to the regime through fratricide. The choice, from a pure survival standpoint, was clear. The result was that the senior leadership of the coup Demissie Bulto, the Brigadier Generals who commanded the divisions and corps, the colonels and lieutenant colonels who formed the officer corps of the northern rebellion were systematically eliminated by the very troops they commanded.

This moment the killing of Demissie and his staff by their own soldiers crystallises the fundamental instability of military conspiracies that do not command overwhelming support from the rank and file. When enlisted men and junior officers must choose between loyalty to their immediate commanders and survival, when that choice is made under conditions of imminent defeat and the knowledge that the regime is about to reassert total control, the outcome is inevitable: the officer corps becomes expendable, a sacrifice made to preserve the lives of men with no choice in the conspiracy.

Major General Kumlachew Dejene, who had flown in with the 102nd Airborne as the operational commander, managed to escape. As communications collapsed and the Asmara operation disintegrated into chaos, he went into hiding. Unlike Demissie and the other senior commanders, Kumlachew possessed the mobility and perhaps the connections necessary to flee the country. He eventually secured asylum in the United States, becoming the sole surviving general of the coup’s upper echelon a survival purchased, perhaps, by his ability to separate himself from the final catastrophe in Asmara and to extract himself before the killing began.

The Cascade of Names: Eighteen Officers Executed in Asmara

The list of eighteen officers executed in Asmara from Brigadier General Afework Wolde Michael, the Chief Emergency Administrator for Eritrea, down through the hierarchy to Captain Getahun Girma, the Special Assistant to the SRA Commander represents the institutional destruction of the Second Revolutionary Army’s officer corps. These were not minor figures; they were the senior administrators and operational commanders of the Derg’s military presence in the north.

Brigadier General Taye Balakir, the Chief of the Revolutionary Police in Eritrea, was executed. Brigadier General Tadesse Tessema, Head of Operations of the SRA, was executed. Brigadier General Worku Chernet, Head of Politics, was executed. The catalogue continues: Brigadier General Nigussie Zergaw (Asmara Air Force Commander), Brigadier General Kebede Mehari (Administration), Brigadier General Tegene Bekele (Operations), each one stripped of rank and institutional position and killed in the final purge.

What is striking about this list is not merely its length but its comprehensiveness. These were not marginal officers whose elimination left the military apparatus intact; these were the senior administrative and operational cadres of the northern command. Their elimination in a single purge represented the systematic decapitation of one of the Derg’s major military organisations. The fact that they were killed by their own troops in Asmara rather than by loyalist forces under Mengistu’s direct control suggests something even more destabilising: the regime did not need to send execution squads to the north. The collapse of command authority was so complete that soldiers and junior officers, facing the choice between their commanders’ failure and their own survival, chose survival through fratricide.

The Arrests in Addis Ababa: Institutional Capture and the Machinery of Interrogation

The twelve senior officers arrested by Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade in the Ministry of Defence on 18 May 1989 represent a different category of fate. Unlike their counterparts in Asmara, they were taken alive captured, imprisoned, subjected to the machinery of interrogation and state control that the Derg had perfected over seventeen years.

Major General Hailu Gebre Michael, Commander of the Ground Forces; Major General Worku Zewde, Commissioner of the Police Force; Major General Alemayehu Desta, Deputy Commander of the Ground Forces these were men at the apex of the military hierarchy, officers whose positions placed them at the intersection of power, intelligence, and command authority. Their arrest was not merely a military matter; it was a political event that signified the regime’s absolute control over even the most senior echelons of the officer corps.

The question of what happened to these men after their arrest is less explicitly documented in the historical record than the deaths in Asmara or the suicides in the Ministry of Defence, but the silence itself is instructive. Men of this rank and position, arrested by the Derg regime, were not released. They were not tried in open proceedings. They entered the machinery of the interrogation state and disappeared into it either executed in secret, or maintained in imprisonment until the regime itself collapsed in 1991, or eliminated in the final purges that preceded the EPRDF’s military victory.

The arrest of these twelve officers demonstrated a fundamental asymmetry within the coup attempt: while the conspirators had sufficient military rank to pose a threat to the regime, they did not have sufficient control of the coercive apparatus to neutralise that threat before it materialised. Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade a unit of perhaps a few hundred men proved more decisive in determining the coup’s fate than the combined command authority of a dozen generals.

The Cascade of Failure: Why the Coup Collapsed and What It Reveals About the Derg’s Vulnerability

The 18 May coup attempt failed not because of military incompetence in the tactical sense, but because of institutional fracture at the moment of maximum consequence. The conspirators possessed rank, they possessed command positions, they possessed access to military assets. What they lacked was coherence: a unified strategy for the moment of execution, a shared understanding of the costs they were willing to bear, and a command structure resilient enough to sustain operations when the initial plan collapsed.

The fatal decision the decision not to shoot down Mengistu’s aircraft reveals the deeper problem. This was not a decision imposed by external circumstances; it was a choice made by the coup’s senior leadership in the Ministry of Defence war room. The choice to preserve civilian lives, to protect Ethiopian Airlines’ reputation, was a conscious prioritisation of institutional norms over revolutionary necessity. In the context of an attempted coup d’état, such prioritisation is fatal. A revolution that cannot commit fully to the violence required to succeed is not a revolution; it is an institutional grievance masquerading as a coup.

Once that decision was made once the window of opportunity passed and Mengistu’s aircraft cleared Ethiopian airspace the coup was already lost in the only way that mattered: politically. The subsequent military operations in Addis Ababa and Asmara were not the execution of a coherent plan but the unravelling of an already-compromised enterprise. Demissie Bulto in Asmara and the junior conspirators in the capital were executing a plan that had already been abandoned by its senior architects. They were acting on outdated intelligence. They were trying to consolidate a victory that had never materialised.

And yet, the coup’s failure should not obscure its historical significance. The attempt revealed the Derg regime to be profoundly vulnerable not in its external military capacity (which would be challenged more effectively by the TPLF and EPLF in the field), but in its internal cohesion. A significant faction of the senior officer corps, including the Chief of Staff and major operational commanders, had concluded that the Mengistu regime was unsustainable and that military coup was the appropriate response. This was not a fringe conspiracy; this was an institutional challenge to the regime’s legitimacy mounted from within the military hierarchy itself.

The regime’s response systematic execution, torture, the elimination of an entire generation of senior officers was not a sign of strength. It was a sign of desperation: a dictatorship forced to destroy significant portions of its own officer corps to maintain control. Every senior officer killed in the purge that followed the coup was a military asset eliminated, a command position vacated, a potential source of resistance to the regime removed through extrajudicial killing rather than institutional reform or political compromise.

The Unspoken Consequence: How the Coup’s Failure Enabled the Insurgencies

The 18 May coup attempt, though it failed militarily, had a profound and paradoxical effect on the Derg regime’s capacity to resist the insurgencies that would ultimately destroy it. The purge that followed the coup eliminated a significant portion of the officer corps precisely at the moment when the TPLF was consolidating its military position in the north and the EPLF was preparing for the final phase of the struggle for Eritrean independence.

By executing or imprisoning the commanders of the Second Revolutionary Army and the senior staff in Addis Ababa, the Mengistu regime decapitated its own northern command structure. The officers who replaced Demissie Bulto and the other purged commanders were not chosen for their military competence; they were chosen for their loyalty—which is to say, for their demonstrated unwillingness to challenge the regime’s authority regardless of the military consequences. A military force led by politically reliable officers rather than competent commanders is a military force in decline.

Moreover, the regime’s need to deploy units to suppress the coup attempt and to maintain security in Addis Ababa reduced the military resources available for the counterinsurgency effort in the north. Troops that might have been deployed against the TPLF were instead employed in hunting down fugitive generals and suppressing residual pockets of dissent. The regime’s institutional energy, in the months following the coup attempt, was directed inward toward purges, interrogations, the elimination of suspected coup sympathisers rather than outward toward the insurgencies that were systematically expanding their control of territory.

The TPLF and EPLF did not defeat the Derg regime primarily through superior military technology or overwhelming numerical advantage; they defeated it through the regime’s progressive institutional decay and its inability to sustain a coherent counterinsurgency strategy in the face of internal threats. The 18 May coup, though it failed, accelerated that decay. It revealed the regime’s vulnerability, it forced the regime to consume resources in internal purges, and it demonstrated to military officers throughout the hierarchy that challenging Mengistu’s authority however disastrously was at least a conceivable option.

By 1991, when the TPLF entered Addis Ababa, the Derg’s officer corps had been devastated by purges, mutinies, and the cascading effects of seventeen years of civil conflict. The regime that fell was not defeated by an overwhelmingly superior insurgency; it was a regime that had systematically destroyed its own institutional coherence in the pursuit of absolute internal control. The coup of 18 May 1989, in this sense, was not an aberration but a symptom of a decay process that was already well advanced and that would prove terminal.

The Historiographical Void: Why We Have Forgotten Thirty Generals

Thirty-six years have passed. The officers executed in Asmara are dead. The generals who shot themselves in the Ministry of Defence are dead. Kumlachew Dejene, the sole survivor of the coup’s senior leadership, resides in American exile. Mengistu Haile Mariam, still living in Zimbabwe, remains unaccountable for the seventeen years of his brutal regime a dictatorship that would eventually claim perhaps 100,000 lives through war, famine, and political terror.

And yet, the names of these officers thirty-six generals and senior officers whose deaths were directly caused by their attempt to challenge Mengistu’s regime have largely vanished from Ethiopian public memory. There are no memorials. There are no official ceremonies of remembrance. There is no sustained historical scholarship examining their institutional roles, their strategic miscalculations, their personal trajectories from senior rank to execution or exile.

This historiographical void is not accidental. It is the product of specific political choices made in the post-1991 era. The EPRDF regime, which succeeded the Derg and governed Ethiopia until 2018, had no interest in memorialising a failed coup attempt by Derg officers. Such memorialisation might have complicated the EPRDF’s narrative of absolute moral clarity a narrative in which the Derg was uniformly villainous and the insurgencies uniformly heroic. The existence of officers who had attempted to overthrow Mengistu, who had died in that attempt, who might have been portrayed as victims of a dictatorial regime they had tried to challenge, would have complicated that narrative.

Moreover, there is the uncomfortable question of institutional continuity. Some of the officers who survived the coup some of the conspirators who were arrested but not executed eventually made their peace with the post-1991 regime. Some may have entered the EPRDF’s own military hierarchy. To memorialise the coup would have been to force uncomfortable questions about the relationships between the old regime’s officer corps and the new regime’s security apparatus. It was easier, politically and institutionally, to let the names fade.

And so the void persists. Families of the executed officers have their memories, their private grief, their understanding of what was lost. But the public record is thin. The historical scholarship is sparse. The names appear in documents archived in foreign institutions but are absent from the dominant narratives of Ethiopian history that are taught in schools, discussed in media, enshrined in official memory.

What the Coup Reveals About Military Authority and Revolutionary Change

The failed coup of 18 May 1989 illuminates a fundamental reality about military hierarchies under authoritarian rule: institutional position—rank, command authority, access to resources—is not synonymous with power in the moment of revolutionary change. The coup’s conspirators possessed almost all the traditional markers of military authority: they were generals and brigadier generals, they commanded major units, they had access to troops and equipment. Yet they were defeated by a captain commanding a presidential guard unit and a colonel in the security apparatus.

This inversion of hierarchical authority reveals the distorting effects of authoritarian centralisation. In a normal military structure, the Chief of Staff outranks a captain and can issue orders that the captain must obey. But in the Derg regime, as in many authoritarian militaries, the formal hierarchy was subordinate to a parallel hierarchy of loyalty and personal proximity to the dictator. Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s control of the Special Protection Brigade mattered more than Major General Merid Negussie’s formal position as Chief of Staff because proximity to Mengistu was the true basis of power.

This is not a new insight in the study of authoritarian militaries. It is a pattern repeated across multiple regimes: from Latin American juntas to Middle Eastern militaries to post-Soviet security states. But it is a pattern that bears repeating, particularly in the context of the coup’s failure. The conspirators appear to have miscalculated the extent to which formal military authority had been hollowed out by the Derg’s system of personalised control. They believed that their rank and command positions would be sufficient to overcome regime resistance. They did not fully account for the fact that Mengistu had spent seventeen years constructing a security apparatus that was explicitly designed to prevent officers from translating formal authority into effective power against the dictator.

The Ethics of Institutional Resistance Under Dictatorship

The coup of 18 May raises a set of difficult ethical and political questions that Ethiopian historiography has largely avoided. These officers men like Merid Negussie, Amha Desta, Demissie Bulto, Aberra Abebe were senior figures in a regime that had committed atrocities. They had commanded forces engaged in counter-insurgency operations that involved aerial bombardment of civilian areas, mass violence, systematic torture. They were not innocent men victimised by a dictator; they were beneficiaries of and participants in a brutal dictatorship.

And yet, they attempted to overthrow that dictatorship apparently motivated, at least in part, by dissatisfaction with Mengistu’s personalised control, his military incompetence against the insurgencies, his destruction of military discipline and institutional coherence. This creates a moral paradox: we can acknowledge the coup plotters as complicit in the regime’s brutality while also recognising their attempt to challenge it as an important institutional act.

This paradox is important because it reflects a deeper truth about authoritarian systems: they typically collapse not through the virtuous resistance of entirely innocent actors, but through the defection of insiders who have been participants in the regime and who have come to believe that the regime is no longer sustainable or defensible. The coup of 18 May was not a popular uprising; it was an institutional challenge mounted by men who had benefited from the regime and who had only belatedly come to the conclusion that its continuation was untenable.

This does not absolve them of responsibility for their prior participation in the regime’s brutality. But it does suggest that any serious historical reckoning with the Derg era must grapple with the internal decomposition of the regime—the process by which even senior officers came to conclude that Mengistu’s dictatorship had become insustainable. That reckoning cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of clear-cut heroes and villains. It must account for the ambiguity of men who were simultaneously perpetrators and, in their final acts, challengers of the system they had helped to sustain.

Conclusion: The Vanished Generation and the Incompleteness of Ethiopian Memory

Thirty-six years after the 18 May coup attempt, the names of the officers who died in that attempt remain largely absent from Ethiopian public consciousness. This is not because their deaths were insignificant; it is because their significance has been obscured by the political interests of successive regimes and the historiographical choices of the scholars who have documented the Derg era.

The coup itself was a failure—militarily, politically, institutionally. The conspirators miscalculated. They hesitated at the crucial moment. They operated on faulty intelligence. They were betrayed by men in their own ranks. And they died by suicide, by execution, by killing in flight, by torture in interrogation centres as a consequence of those miscalculations and that failure.

Yet the coup’s failure should not obscure its historical meaning. It revealed the Derg regime to be institutionally vulnerable, dependent on terror to maintain control over even its own officer corps. It demonstrated that a significant faction of the military hierarchy had concluded that Mengistu’s dictatorship was unsustainable. And it contributed, however indirectly, to the regime’s eventual collapse by forcing the Derg to consume resources and institutional energy in internal purges rather than in effective counterinsurgency operations against the TPLF and EPLF.

The families of these officers the wives and children of executed generals, the relatives of men who shot themselves in the Ministry of Defence, the dependents of officers who vanished into the interrogation system carry this history in memory even as the public record has largely forgotten it. This remembrance is important, not because it absolves the coup plotters of their complicity in the Derg regime’s brutality, but because it preserves a more complex and honest understanding of how authoritarian systems function and how they ultimately decay.

Ethiopia’s national memory remains incomplete as long as this history remains obscured. A reckoning with the Derg era that acknowledges only the regime’s external enemies the TPLF, the EPLF, the popular resistance to dictatorship while ignoring the internal decomposition symbolised by the failed coup is a reckoning that fails to confront the full complexity of how the regime actually functioned and ultimately collapsed.

On this thirty-sixth anniversary, the names of Major General Merid Negussie, Major General Amha Desta, Major General Demissie Bulto, and the thirty or so other officers who died in the coup attempt deserve to be more than footnotes in foreign archives or entries in genealogical records of private family grief. They deserve to be part of the public historical record not as heroes, but as complex actors whose attempt to challenge the regime they served, however flawed and ultimately disastrous, revealed fundamental truths about the nature of the dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.

That remembrance is not a betrayal of the insurgents who ultimately defeated the Derg. It is, rather, a completion of the historical record an acknowledgement that authoritarian regimes do not collapse through the actions of their external enemies alone, but through the internal contradictions that force even their most privileged functionaries to conclude that the system is no longer defensible. The coup of 18 May 1989 was one such moment of internal reckoning. Its failure was tragic. But its historical significance demands that we remember it honestly, in all its ambiguity and complexity, as part of the larger story of how Ethiopia’s military dictatorship ultimately came to an end.

——————-//——————-

The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this essay on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the 18 May 1989 coup attempt in recognition of the officers whose attempt to challenge the Mengistu regime, however imperfectly executed, remains a significant moment in Ethiopia’s institutional and political history. The names of those who died whether by their own hand, by execution, or by fratricide deserve to remain in the public record as a reminder of the human costs of dictatorship and the institutional fragility of authoritarian rule.

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How Great Powers Play Kingmakers While Pretending to Promote Democracy

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Last week, the United States State Department Bureau of African Affairs released a carefully-worded statement regarding ‘productive and wide-ranging meetings’ with the Ethiopian delegation, led by Foreign Minister Gedion Timotheos, for the U.S. Ethiopia Bilateral Structured Dialogue. The language was immaculate. The conversations were constructive. The commitment to regional stability was shared.

One might imagine that somewhere in a mahogany-lined conference room, genuine regional breakthroughs had been negotiated. That misunderstandings had been clarified. That the intractable geopolitical problems of the Horn of Africa, water security, humanitarian catastrophe, Iranian regional influence, had moved measurably closer to resolution.

What actually transpired was an exhibition in diplomatic theatre of such refined quality that it merits examination not as a breakthrough, but as a perfect specimen of how great-power politics operates in the twenty-first century Horn of Africa. Every phrase was chosen to signify commitment without prescribing action. Every topic was discussed in a manner that guaranteed continued disagreement. Every statement of ‘shared values’ masked fundamentally incompatible interests.

And in this theatre, one must understand, lies the actual story of how the region will continue to be shaped, not by democratic impulses, not by humanitarian concern, but by the cold calculus of strategic advantage.

The Language Game: What 'Constructive Dialogue' Actually Means

Begin with the statement itself. The US-Africa Bureau noted that discussions covered three primary areas: the Nile River and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Sudan peace efforts, and Red Sea maritime security. Each merits unpacking, for what is unsaid is often more revelatory than what appears in print.

The GERD: Five Years of ‘Constructive’ Stalemate

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam represents one of the continent’s most significant infrastructure projects a 74-billion-cubic-metre reservoir designed to generate approximately 15,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually, critical to Ethiopia’s industrialisation and energy security.1

It is also, from Egypt’s perspective, an existential threat. Cairo, which depends on the Nile for approximately 95 per cent of its freshwater supply, has consistently argued that rapid filling of the GERD’s reservoir threatens downstream water availability.2Sudan, caught between the two, worries about both dam safety and water flow management.

Since 2020, there have been numerous diplomatic initiatives. The African Union has hosted talks. International mediators have proposed frameworks. Egypt has threatened military action. Ethiopia has proceeded with dam operations. And the United States, which has no water in the Nile but considerable diplomatic influence in Cairo, has expressed repeated ‘concern’ while offering no binding mechanism to resolve the dispute.

That the US and Ethiopia were having ‘constructive conversations’ about the GERD tells us precisely nothing about what either party actually wants. It is diplomatic code for: ‘We disagree profoundly, but we are both rich enough and powerful enough to afford politeness.’

The substantive positions have not moved in five years. Ethiopia’s development imperative is non-negotiable. Egypt’s water security is non-negotiable. Sudan’s vulnerability is non-negotiable. No engineering marvel or diplomatic formula resolves this contradiction; it can only be managed through sustained tension punctuated by occasional bilateral meetings in which everyone affirms commitment to shared principles while doing nothing whatsoever to address the actual dispute.

The dam will continue to operate. Egypt will continue to protest. The US will continue to express concern. And water will continue to flow downriver, indifferent to all concerned parties.

Sudan: Peace Brokerage as Performance Art

Sudan is currently experiencing civil war of a magnitude that has produced one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian catastrophes. The conflict, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under General al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has displaced over 6 million people, created widespread famine conditions, and generated credible documentation of systematic sexual violence, mass killings, and scorched-earth tactics.3

What is particularly instructive is the external backing. The SAF receives support from Russia (primarily through Wagner Group provision of military advisers and air support), Egypt (out of concern regarding Nile water security and strategic positioning), and various Gulf actors. The RSF, meanwhile, has received documented support from the United Arab Emirates, which has provided unmanned aerial vehicles, weapons, and financial backing, while simultaneously maintaining diplomatic relations with all parties.4

Now observe the remarkable fact: the United States, which claims commitment to humanitarian values and ceasefire achievement, has not imposed meaningful economic sanctions on the primary external backers of the RSF (the UAE) or the SAF (Egypt and Russia). Why? Because stability or the appearance of it is valued more highly than accountability.

When the US speaks of ‘international efforts to facilitate a humanitarian truce and achieve durable peace in Sudan,’ what it is actually performing is concern. Ethiopia is being positioned as a broker precisely because it has just enough leverage (refugee flows, regional diplomatic weight, Nile basin politics) and just little enough direct stake to be plausibly neutral. This is geopolitical exploitation dressed in humanitarian language.

Prime Minister Abiy will nod, will pledge engagement, will host talks that produce nothing. And this serves Western interests perfectly, because engagement preserves the fiction of concerned diplomacy while placing no actual pressure on the parties capable of ending the war.

The Red Sea: Where Geography Becomes Geopolitics

Here we arrive at what the bilateral was actually about, and why the press releases about GERD and Sudan served as diplomatic cover for a far more significant conversation.

The Suez Canal processes roughly 12 per cent of global seaborne trade approximately $1 trillion in annual goods traffic. The Strait of Bab al-Mandab, which connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, is the funnel through which this commerce flows. A functioning Bab al-Mandab means the global economy circulates. A disrupted Bab al-Mandab means shipping reroutes around the Cape of Good Hope, adding two weeks and significant costs to every container.5

For the past eighteen months, the Houthis—formally the Ansar Allah movement, operationally an Iranian proxy force have been attacking commercial shipping in these waters with increasing sophistication. Between November 2023 and May 2026, they have launched over 100 missile and drone attacks on vessels transiting the Red Sea, forcing major shipping companies to reroute around Africa at substantial cost.6

The Houthis provide a stated rationale: opposition to Israeli operations in Gaza and claimed support for Palestinian liberation. The actual mechanics are considerably more straightforward: they are supplied with advanced weaponry by Iran, trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel, and directed toward targets that maximize disruption to Western-aligned shipping while demonstrating Iranian regional reach.

The United States response has been predictable: naval deployments, multinational coordination, attempts to intercept weapons shipments. This is strategically equivalent to deploying an umbrella against a monsoon. The Houthis have proven resilient because they operate with Iranian backing, have access to Iranian inventory including cruise missiles and drones, and face minimal consequence for attacks given Iran’s geopolitical importance to multiple regional actors.

Ethiopia’s Geography as Strategic Asset

Ethiopia’s value to the US bilateral is not military. Ethiopia’s armed forces, while capable, are not blue-water naval assets. What Ethiopia provides is something considerably more valuable: geography and regional influence.

Ethiopia sits astride the Horn of Africa, controlling territory adjacent to Yemen, Eritrea, Sudan, and the Red Sea corridor itself. Through various entanglements (including the contested relationship with Eritrea, which was resolved via the 2018 peace agreement and continues to be complicated by border tensions and port access questions), Ethiopia can theoretically influence regional power dynamics.

More directly: if the US can ensure that Ethiopian strategic orientation remains sufficiently Western-leaning, then Iran is denied a potential regional base. If Addis Ababa remains aligned with Gulf partners like the UAE and Saudi Arabia rather than gravitating toward Tehran, the balance of power in the Red Sea and broader Horn of Africa tilts away from Iranian influence.

This is not about securing Ethiopia as a devoted ally. This is about option denial ensuring that Ethiopia remains unavailable to Iran.

And this is precisely where Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s strategic mastery becomes apparent.

Abiy’s Game: The Art of Strategic Non-Commitment

Abiy Ahmed has mastered a particular form of twenty-first-century statecraft: the art of being simultaneously everyone’s ally and no one’s tool.

When the US wishes to discuss Red Sea security, Abiy listens attentively and offers support. When the UAE offers investment and development partnerships, Abiy is receptive. When China proposes infrastructure contracts (Ethiopia has received over $14 billion in Chinese financing for transport and energy projects), Abiy welcomes the engagement.7

When Russia offers military training and weaponry, Abiy accepts. And when Iran which has historically supported Ethiopian nationalism as a counterweight to Arab hegemony extends diplomatic overtures, Abiy does not slam the door.

This is not inconsistency. This is statecraft of a sophisticated order. Ethiopia’s actual power setting aside military capacity derives from optionality. As long as Ethiopia remains genuinely available to multiple suitors, genuinely unwilling to permanently commit to any single power, it retains negotiating leverage with all of them.

This was precisely the calculation evident in Abiy’s March 2026 visit to the UAE—a carefully choreographed affair that signalled alignment with Gulf interests without actually foreclosing other options.8

The visit occurred against the backdrop of Iranian strikes on UAE infrastructure and Ethiopian Airlines’ crisis (the latter being an episode that exposed Ethiopia’s vulnerability in contested airspace and the international community’s complicated relationship with Iranian regional activity). Abiy’s presence in Abu Dhabi was read by various actors as strategic positioning—but read differently by each audience.

To the US and Gulf allies, it suggested Ethiopian alignment against Iranian influence. To potential Iranian interlocutors, it demonstrated that Addis Ababa was available for negotiation. To Chinese investors, it showed that Ethiopia would maintain relationships across ideological and geostrategic divides. To Russian partners, it illustrated that Ethiopia’s choices were not predetermined.

This is the genuine achievement of Abiy’s statecraft: not the cultivation of a single powerful alliance, but the maintenance of genuine ambiguity regarding Ethiopia’s ultimate alignment. And the bilateral with the US last week was structured precisely to preserve that ambiguity while appearing to move closer to Western alignment.

The Contradiction: Democracy Rhetoric, Stability Practice

Here we arrive at the central dishonesty that no power in Washington, Brussels, Cairo, or Addis Ababa is willing to articulate plainly.

The US is genuinely committed to regional stability. The US is also, in some contexts, genuinely committed to democracy promotion. But these two commitments are fundamentally and irreconcilably incompatible in the Horn of Africa, and have been for at least a decade.

The Abiy Case Study: Reform Rhetoric, Authoritarian Reality

Abiy came to power in April 2018 on a substantial wave of reform rhetoric. He was young, born in 1976, making him 42 at the time of the bilateral in question. He was educated, English-fluent, and had signalled commitment to political opening, prisoner releases, and democratic transformation. For roughly two years, the Western world was genuinely excited. Here, it seemed, was an African leader who might actually modernise governance while remaining pro-Western.

Then came the Tigray war.

In November 2020, following tensions with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Abiy launched a military offensive that rapidly escalated into full-scale civil war. The documented evidence of what followed is harrowing: systematic sexual violence, mass killing of civilians, systematic starvation tactics, ethnic cleansing operations in western Tigray by militia forces aligned with Ethiopian federal troops.9

Estimates of conflict-related deaths vary widely from the UN-associated figures suggesting 600,000+ deaths to lower estimates in the 70,000-100,000 range. Regardless of which figure one accepts, the scale is catastrophic. Sexual violence was documented as systematic by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and independent journalists.10

And the Western response was to… continue security partnerships, military aid, and diplomatic engagement.

The US did not impose meaningful sanctions. European countries issued statements of concern while maintaining trade and development relationships. The World Bank, which suspended some Ethiopia programs, did not fundamentally alter its engagement.

Why? Because stability or the appearance of it was judged more valuable than accountability. Because a functioning, pro-Western authoritarian government in Addis Ababa was more strategically important than sixty thousand Tigrayan deaths.

This is not unique to Ethiopia. This is the fundamental operating principle of Western strategy in the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond: ally with autocrats when necessary, express concern about human rights in private communications, and pivot to ‘stability’ language when atrocities become too well-documented to ignore.

It is not cynicism to observe this. It is realism. And it is precisely this realism that the bilateral dialogue was structured to preserve.

Eritrea, Iran, and the Temptation of Regime Change Fantasy

At this point, some analysts may propose an apparently logical solution: if Abiy presents such problems, why not simply support genuine democratic alternatives? If Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki is hopelessly authoritarian and Iranian-aligned, why not back the opposition movement Andinet for regime change? If democratic alternatives exist, surely the answer is democratisation rather than continued authoritarianism?

This is where ideology collides decisively with geopolitical reality.

The Regime-Change Precedent: Learning Nothing From History

The notion that great powers can externally impose regime change in favour of democracy has been tested extensively in recent decades. Iraq (2003), Afghanistan (2001), Libya (2011), attempted coups in Syria (2011-2012). The success rate approaches zero.

What invariably follows external regime change is: state collapse, civil war, humanitarian catastrophe, and the installation of a different autocrat—often more brutal than the predecessor, who is at least nominally grateful to his external sponsors. Iraq descended into sectarian violence that killed hundreds of thousands. Afghanistan was handed to the Taliban. Libya became a failed state. The consistent pattern is unmistakable.

Now, imagine the US and its allies decided to back Eritrean opposition for regime change. What would transpire? First, military intervention destabilising the entire Red Sea region further, with immediate implications for shipping security that the operation was ostensibly meant to protect. Second, a civil war explicitly framed accurately as a proxy war for Western interests. Third, IF successful, a government that discovers within eighteen months that popular electoral legitimacy and the security arrangements necessary to satisfy Western interests are often incompatible.

Fourth, a genuinely democratic Eritrea might choose differently from what external sponsors prefer. It might be more nationalist, more protective of sovereignty, less amenable to foreign military bases, more inclined toward regional Arab solidarity, less dependent on external sponsors.

Fifth, within ten years you would be having the same ‘structured dialogue’ with a new Eritrean strongman, now chastened by the experience of regime change and therefore potentially moreauthoritarian than Isaias.

The uncomfortable reality that no one in power wants to articulate: the countries of the Horn of Africa will likely remain authoritarian (or democratic in name only) for the foreseeable future, not because the populations lack democratic aspirations, but because the regional and international power dynamics make genuine democracy electorally destabilising and strategically inconvenient.

And so the bilateral dialogue continues. Everyone nods about shared values. Everyone expresses commitment to democracy. And everyone knows, with perfect clarity, that none of this is true.

What's Actually at Stake: Iran, the Emirates, and Regional Balance

Beneath the diplomatic theatre lies a genuine strategic competition: the contest for regional influence in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa between Iranian and Western-aligned powers.

Iran’s regional strategy operates through multiple vectors:

1. Proxy forces (the Houthis in Yemen, potentially aligned actors in Iraq, Syria)

2. Economic and security partnerships with regional states (historically Ethiopia, potentially Eritrea)

3. Provision of military training, weaponry, and technical expertise to allied movements

Western strategy (led by the US and Gulf partners) aims to deny Iran regional dominance through:

1. Maintaining strong relationships with established Gulf partners (Saudi Arabia, UAE)

2. Ensuring that rising regional powers (Ethiopia, Eritrea) remain unavailable to Iran

3. Maintaining naval presence and commercial shipping security in the Red Sea

The bilateral dialogue with Ethiopia serves all three objectives simultaneously. By demonstrating continued US engagement, it signals to Abiy that Western partnership remains valuable. By emphasizing Red Sea security concerns, it highlights the Iranian threat. And by discussing regional stability, it creates the framework for greater coordination on containing Iranian influence.

None of this requires that democracy actually advance. None of this requires that accountability for atrocities actually materialise. All it requires is that Ethiopia remain strategically available to the West rather than gravitating toward Iran.

What then will emerge from the bilateral structured dialogue? Almost certainly, a joint communiqué affirming shared commitment to regional stability, democracy, human rights, and peace. There will be specific mentions of ‘constructive progress’ on technical issues. There may be announcements of expanded development partnerships or security cooperation.

And substantively, very little will change.

The GERD will continue to operate. Egypt will continue to protest. Sudan will continue to convulse. The Houthis will continue to attack shipping. And every few months, there will be another bilateral dialogue, another press release, another reaffirmation of commitment to shared values that no one actually believes.

This is not cynicism about international relations. This is a clear-eyed assessment of how power actually operates in the twenty-first century. Democracy rhetoric serves as diplomatic cover for strategic partnerships with authoritarian governments. Human rights concerns are expressed loudly in public and abandoned quietly in private. Stability is valued more highly than accountability.

The bilateral structured dialogue will continue. Abiy will continue his masterful fence-sitting, extracting maximum benefit from all sides. The US will continue to speak of commitment to democracy while supporting an authoritarian government. The GERD will continue to flow. And the theatre will continue, because the alternative actually addressing these contradictions, actually choosing between values and interests requires honesty that the international system cannot afford.

References

1. World Bank estimates; see ‘Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Developmental Impacts and Regional Implications’ (2021).

2. Egyptian government statements and UN documentation on Nile water security concerns.

3. UNHCR Sudan Crisis Reports, May 2026; World Health Organization casualty estimates.

4. New Arab, ‘UAE Weaponry to RSF: Following the Trail,’ November 2023; Reuters investigative reporting on UAE arms provision.

5. IMO shipping data; Suez Canal Authority traffic reports, 2024-2026.

6. US Naval Forces Central Command records; Houthi attack documentation, 2023-2026.

7. World Bank China-Africa financing database; Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports on Belt and Road Initiative in Ethiopia.

8. See Ethiopian Tribune analysis, ‘Abiy’s UAE Visit: Strategic Hedging in a Contested Red Sea,’ March 2026.

9. Human Rights Watch, ‘World Report 2022: Ethiopia’; Amnesty International findings on Tigray conflict (2020-2022).

10. UN Commission of Inquiry on the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (2021); International Crisis Group casualty estimates (2023).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editor
Ethiopian Tribune
April 26, 2026

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By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Forward

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

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

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

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

Synopsis: Permissive Disorder & the Corridor War

I. The Geopolitical Architecture Shifts

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

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

II. Two Blocs & the Recognition Weapon

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

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

III. Sudan & Yemen as Transmission Belts

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

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

IV. Eritrea: The Launching-Pad Thesis

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

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

V. The Four Interests Under Pressure

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

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

VI. Fragmentation as Defeat

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

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

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

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

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Sovereignty, Development, and Democratic Unity in the Age of Transactional Geopolitics

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

March 23, 2026

EDITOR’S FORWARD

In moments when a nation stands at the hinge of history, clarity becomes a civic duty. Dr. Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s sweeping and meticulously argued essay, “The Spirit of Adwa Must Carry Ethiopia Through: GERD and the Red Sea,” arrives precisely at such a moment when Ethiopia’s sovereignty, developmental trajectory, and democratic future are being tested simultaneously at home and abroad.

From its opening pages, the article insists on a truth too often neglected in elite political discourse: Ethiopia’s future belongs to its young. As the author writes, “listen to the younger generation the nation is theirs to inherit.” With nearly 65% of Ethiopians under thirty, this is not a rhetorical flourish but a demographic fact that demands institutional response. Dr. Hailu’s insistence that Gen‑Z and Gen‑α must not merely be consulted but empowered is one of the most consequential interventions in contemporary Ethiopian political thought.

Yet this work is not a generational manifesto alone. It is a panoramic examination of the forces shaping Ethiopia’s sovereignty from the self-financed triumph of GERD, described as “a national narrative converted into steel and megawatts,” to the long arc of geopolitical engineering that rendered Ethiopia landlocked in 1993. The author does not shy away from naming the historical actors involved, nor from articulating Ethiopia’s legitimate and peaceful claim to restored Red Sea access.

Crucially, the article refuses the false binary that has long distorted Ethiopia’s public sphere: that one must choose between defending national sovereignty and demanding democratic accountability. Dr. Hailu argues instead that sovereignty without democracy is brittle, and democracy without sovereignty is hollow. As he notes, “The conclusion… is democratic accountability through democratic institutions… not the fragmentation of Ethiopia’s sovereign position.”

This is a work of scholarship, but also of civic courage. It confronts the country’s internal fractures ethnic violence, contested territories, democratic regression without surrendering to fatalism or cynicism. It situates Ethiopia’s challenges within global patterns of coercive mediation, transactional geopolitics, and great‑power opportunism. And it offers a strategic doctrine rooted in Adwa: principled resistance, coalition-building, technological ambition, and the disciplined use of national power.

Above all, this article is a call to responsibility directed at leaders, institutions, and especially the young Ethiopians who will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions. As Dr. Hailu writes in one of the essay’s most resonant lines, “Stand with Ethiopia on GERD. Stand with Ethiopia on the Red Sea… and ensure that it is the youngest Ethiopians who hold the pen—because it is their story, and it always was.”

The Ethiopian Tribune is proud to present this work. It is not merely an article; it is an invitation to think, to argue, to build and to imagine Ethiopia not as a nation trapped by its past, but as one propelled by its youth, its ingenuity, and its unbroken sovereign will.

The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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