የማርኮ ሩቢኦና የጎንደር አደባባዮች ግልጽ መልእክት፣ በአፋብን ታጣቂዎች ላይ የሕግና የዲፕሎማሲ አደጋዎች፣

በዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ (የፖለቲካና ስትራቴጂክ ጥናት ክፍል)

ከትግል ሞራል ወዴት?

መግቢያ፦ የሞራል ልዕልና መሸርሸር እና የትረካዎች ፍጭት

በኢትዮጽያ ውስጥ የአማራ ሕዝብ በደረሰበት የዘር መድሎና ጭፍጨፋን ለመመከት የጀመረው የሕልውናና የፍትሕ ተጋድሎ ከተጀመረበት ጊዜ አንስቶ ዋና መታወቂያው፣ ሕዝባዊ ቅቡልነቱና የዓለም አቀፍ ድጋፍ ማግኛ መሠረቱ «የሞራል ልዕልና» (Moral High Ground) ነበር። ይህ ትግል የሕዝብን ሕልውና የማስከበር፣ ታሪካዊ አጽመ-ርስትን የማስመለስና የማስከበር፣ ፍትሐዊት ሀገር የመገንባት ታላቅ ዓላማ ያነገበ እንጂ፤ የሕዝብ ሀብትና የሲቪል ተቋማትን የማደምደቅ አውዳሚ የሽብር መስመር አልነበረም።

በቅርቡ በጥቅምት 7 ቀን 2019 ዓ.ም (October 17, 2026) ጥዋት በጎንደር፣ በወሎና በሌሎች የአማራ ክልል ከተሞች የተካሄዱትን ሕዝባዊ እንቅስቃሴዎች አስመልክቶ በሁለት አጽራረ-ትረካዎች (Counter-narratives) መካከል ፍጭት ሲደረግ ይስተዋላል። በአንድ በኩል የብልጽግና አገዛዝ የካድሬ መዋቅሩንና አምባገነናዊ ግፊቱን ተጠቅሞ እንቅስቃሴውን «የብልፅግናና የቀይ ባሕር አጀንዳ ድጋፍ» አስመስሎ ለዲፕሎማሲ ጥቅም ለመሸጥ ሲራወጭ፤ በሌላ በኩል ደግሞ ራሱን «አፋብህን» ብሎ የሚጠራው ስብስብና የፅምዶ አራጋቢዎቹ በተለያየ የሶሻል ሚዲያ እና በዓለም አቀፍ ድልድዮች በኩል ሕዝቡን «በግዳጅ የተሰበሰበ የፖለቲካ ሰለባ» አድርገው በመሳል የራሳቸውን የከሰረ የፖለቲካ ውድቀት ለመሸፈን ይሞክራሉ።

ነገር ግን በመሬት ላይ ያለውን ታሪካዊ፣ ወታደራዊና የመልከዓ-ምድር ፖለቲካ (Geopolitical) እውነታ በአፅኖት የሚመረምር አካል የሚደርስበት ድምዳሜ ግልጽ ነው፦ ይህ አጋጣሚ የአገዛዙ ድጋፍ ሳይሆን፣ ከሕወሓትና ከቀጣናዊ ኃይሎች ጋር ጥምረት በመፍጠር የአማራን የህልውና ትግል አሳልፈው በሸጡት የ«ፅምዶ aka ትብብር» ደላሎች ላይ የተቃጣ የቀጥታ ሕዝባዊ ቁጣ፣ ማግለልና የስህተት ዋጋ ነው!

ሕዝብ የራሱ የሆነ የአስተውሎት እና የትዝብት ማሕደር አለው፤ በተለይ የአማራ ሕዝብ የአማራ ፋኖን ትግል በቅርበት ሲከታተልና ሲታዘብ ወደ ትግሉ ሲቀርብና ሲርቅ ማስተዋላችን ያለፉት የ3 ዓመት ተኩል ታሪካችን ነው። ሕዝቡ በእውነት ይህንን ሰልፍ ለማድረግ ያስገደደው የብልፅግና ሥርዓት ተመችቶት ሳይሆን፣ ያመናቸው ልጆቹ ስለከዱት የመጣ ቁጣ መሆኑን በጥልቀት መመርመር ግድ ይለናል። በተለይም በጥቅምት 7 ቀን 2019 ዓ.ም (October 17, 2026) ጥዋት ላይ በጎንደርና በወሎ አደባባዮች ላይላዩን ሲታይ የብልፅግና የድጋፍ የሚመስል እውነታው ግን በፅምዶ ደላሎች ላይ የተቀጣጠለው ሕዝባዊ ቁጣና ማግለል ከተከናወነ ከሰዓታት በኋላ፤ በዚያው ዕለት ምሽት የአሜሪካ የውጭ ጉዳይ ሚኒስትር ማርኮ ሩቢኦ በአዲስ አበባ የተፈጸመውን የድሮን ጥቃት የተገንጣይ ሐይሎች ‘የሽብር ድርጊት’ ሲሉ መኮነናቸው፤ የሕዝቡ አስተውሎትና ቁጣ ከዓለም አቀፉ የዲፕሎማሲ መድረክ አቅጣጫ ጋር የተጣጣመና ቅደመ-ግንዛቤና ቅድመ-አስታውሎት ያለው መሆኑን ያረጋግጣል።

1. የካይሮው ድብቅ ስብሰባና የ10ሺህ ፋኖ ጥያቄ ሴራ

በቀጣናው የተዘረጋውን አደገኛ የመልከዓ-ምድር ፖለቲካዊ ወጥመድ ነጥቦቹን በማያያዝ ስንመረምረው የሚከተሉት ጥብቅ ስትራቴጂካዊ እውነታዎች ይገለጣሉ፦

1.  የ10ሺህ አማራ ፋኖ ተዋጊዎች ጥያቄ (Instrumentalization)፦ ሕወሓት «ፅምዶ/ትብብር» በተባለው መዋቅር አማካኝነት ቢያንስ 10,000 የአማራ ፋኖ ወጣት ተዋጊ እንዲቀርብለት ለበላይ አካላቱ (ለግብፅና ኤርትራ) ጥያቄ ማቅረቡና ጥያቄው ወደ አፋብህን መውረዱ ይገመታል። በራሱ ሕዝባዊ ቅቡልነት ያጣውና የሰው ኃይል እጥረት ያጋጠመው ሕወሓት፣ የአማራን ወጣት በ«ትብብር» ስም ለራሱ የፖለቲካ ህዳሴና ወልቃይት/ራያን የመያዝ አጀንዳው «ቅጥረኛ ወታደር» (Proxy Agent) አድርጎ ለመጠቀም አቅዷል።

2.  አማራን የጦር አውደ-ግንባር (Battleground) የማድረግ ሴራ፦ በግብፅ፣ ኤርትራ፣ ሱዳንና ሶማሊያ መሪዎች ደረጃ የተካሄዱት ድብቅ ውይይቶችና ስትራቴጂካዊ ውሳኔዎች ዋና ዓላማ፣ ጦርነቱን ተገፍቶ ወደ አማራ ክልል እንዲገባ ማድረግ ነው። የቀጠናው ኃይሎች «የአማራን ሕዝብ በዚህ ጦርነት ማውደም ከተቻለ፣ ዳግም ኢትዮጵያ እንደ ሀገር ማንሰራራት አትችልም» የሚል ስትራቴጂያዊ ግምገማ በማስቀመጥ አማራን የውክልና ጦርነት ማገዶ ለማድረግ አቅደዋል።

3.  መሠረተ-ልማቶችን የመደምሰስ አጀንዳ፦ ጦርነቱ በክልሉ ውስጥ ሲፋፋም ሕዝቡ እንዲፈናቀል፣ ትልልቅ ድልድዮች፣ የኤሌክትሪክ ስቴሽኖች እና ዋና ዋና የሲቪል መሠረተ-ልማቶች እንዲወድሙና ሕዝቡ ለውጭ ኃይሎች ጥገኛ እንዲሆን መታቀዱን መረጃዎች ያመላክታሉ።

2. የሞራል ልዕልና መሸርሸር፦ ከ«ሴቶች ረሽነናል» እስከ «የሲቪል አውሮፕላን ድብደባ»

የፅምዶ ደላሎች በሕዝቡ ዘንድ የተተፉበት ምክንያት በመሬት ላይ በፈጸሙት የክህደት ቁማር ብቻ ሳይሆን፣ በከባድ የሞራል፣ የዲፕሎማሲና የሰብአዊ መብት ውድቀታቸው ጭምር ነው፦

ቀደም ሲል የአፋብን ቃል አቀባይ የሆነው አስረስ ማረ በጥር 2018 (Jan 3, 2026) ለዓለም አቀፉ ሚዲያ (BBC አማርኛ) ወጥቶ «ሴቶችን ረሽነናል» በማለት የፈጸመው ያልበሰለ፣ የሕግ ግንዛቤ የጎደለውና የትግሉን ሞራላዊ ማማ ያወረደ ከባድ የፖለቲካ ስህተት ስናስታውስ፤ በመቀጠል ደግሞ በ«ፅምዶ» መረብ ውስጥ ባሉ የአፋብንና የፅምዶ የሶሻል ሚዲያ አራጋቢዎች በጥቅምት 2026 (October 1, 2026 በTikTok Live) በተናገሩት የሽብር ፕሮፖጋንዳ «የኢትዮጵያ አየር መንገድ ቦይንግ (Boeing) አውሮፕላን አየር ላይ ተመቶ ይውደቅ» የሚለው ጥሪ የዚያው የአስረስ ማሬ የከሰረና አደገኛ መንገድ ቀጥተኛ ተቀፅላ መሆኑን ያሳያል! እንደገና ባሳለፍነው ሳምንት የሕወሓት ጥበቃ ልምና፦ አስረስ ማሬ የሕወሓት ፕሮፖጋንዲስት በሆነው ሪዕዮት ሚዲያ በመቅረብ «የሕወሓት (TPLF) አመራር እንዳይፈርስ የትግራይ ወጣቶች ሕወሓትን ይታደጉ» ብሎ ሲለማመጥ መደመጡ፣ አፋብን ድርጅቱ በአማራ ስም የተቋቋመ «የአማርኛ ተናጋሪ ወያኔዎች» መሆኑን አረጋግጧል።

የእነዚህ 3ቱ እንደምሳሌ የተጠቀሱ አደገኛ ንግግሮች ብቻ መዋቅራዊና በሕዝብ ስነ-ልቦናዊ ትስስር ብሎም በትግሉ ላይ ያደረሰው ጉዳት እጅግ የከፋ መሆኑን በግል ያሳያሉ፦

●  የሕግና የሞራል ውል ማጣት፦ አስረስ ማሬ በወቅቱ የፈጸመው ተራ የቃላት ስህተት አይደለም፣ ግልጽ ወንጀል ነው! የዓለም አቀፍ ሰብአዊ መብት ሕግን (IHL) የሚጥስ እንደነበር ሁሉ፤ ዛሬም በቲክቶክ «ቦይንግ አውሮፕላን አየር ላይ ይመታ» የሚለው ጥሪ በ1971ዱ የሞንትሪያል ስምምነትና በ1944ቱ የቺካጎ ስምምነት (Article 3 bis) መሠረት ፍጹም «የዓለም አቀፍ አቪዬሽን ሽብርተኝነት» (Incitement to Aviation Terrorism) የሚያስደምድም ከባድ ወንጀል ነው።

●  የሲቪል አቪዬሽን ላይ ያጣጣረ የጋራ የሽብር ጥሪ፦ በትግራይ ክልል ይፋዊ ደብዳቤ ላይ «በሲቪል አቪዬሽንና በበረራዎች ላይ እገዳ እንዲደረግ» ከተላለፈው ጥሪ ጋር በተቆራኘ መልኩ፣ የፅምዶ አራጋቢዎች በቲክቶክ «የኢትዮጵያ አየር መንገድ ቦይንግ አውሮፕላን ይመታ…» እያሉ የሽብር ጥሪ በማስተላለፍ የሀገር ሀብትንና የሲቪል ተቋማትን ለመደመሰስ ያቀዱት ሴራ ይፋ ሆኗል።

●  ለብልፅግና አገዛዝ የሚሰጥ የፕሮፓጋንዳ ካርድ፦ አገዛዙ በዓለም አቀፍ ዲፕሎማሲ መድረክ «ተቃዋሚዎቼና ፋኖዎች የሕግ የበላይነት አፍራሾችና የሽብርተኞች ስብስብ ናቸው» የሚለውን የሐሰት ትረካ ለማስረገጥ ሲታገል ነበር። የአስረስ ማረ ዓይኑን ያፈጠጠ የወንጀል መግለጫ እና የቅርቡ የቦይንግ አውሮፕላን የይመታ ጥሪ ለአገዛዙ ይህንኑ የሐሰት ካርድ በእጁ አሳልፈው የሰጡ የከሰሩ መንገዶች ናቸው!

3. የአማራ ፋኖ ይህንን የሽብር ቅስቀሳ በጊዜ ካልመከተ የሚገጥመው መዋቅራዊና ዓለም አቀፋዊ የሕግ አደጋዎች

የአማራ ፋኖ ‘አፋብን’ ወይም ‘ትብብር’ በሚል መረብ ውስጥ በስሙ የሚደረገውን የሲቪል ተቋማት የመደምሰስና የሽብር ቅስቀሳ፣ ብዙ ሚሊዮን ሕዝብ በሚኖሩበት፣ በርካታ አለምአቀፍ የዲፕሎማቲክ ተቋማት በሚገኙበት ትልልቅ ከተምች ላይ የሚፈፀም የድሮን ሆነ የቦንብ ጥቃት በይፋ ሰብሮ ካላወገዘና ራሱን ካላጠራ፣ በዓለም አቀፍ ሕግና የፖለቲካ ሳይንስ መርሆዎች መሠረት የሚከተሉት ከባድ አደጋዎች ይደቅኑበታል፦

1.  በዓለም አቀፍ ደረጃ በ«ሽብርተኝነት» የመፈረጅ አደጋ (Terrorist Designation)፦ በዓለም አቀፍ የፀረ-ሽብርተኝነት ሕግጋት (UN Security Council Resolutions) መሠረት፣ የሲቪል አቪዬሽን ጥቃት ማስፈራሪያዎችን በዝምታ ማለፍ ወይም ይሁንታ መስጠት አንድን የታጠቀ ሐይል ከ«ነፃነት ታጋይነት» (Freedom Fighters) ቀይሮ ወደ «ሕገ-ወጥ የሽብር ቡድን» (Violent Non-State Actor / Terrorist Entity) ደረጃ ይከተዋል። ይህ ከተከሰተ ደግሞ የፋኖ እንቅስቃሴ በዓለም አቀፉ ማህበረሰብ፣ በዓለም አቀፍ አቪዬሽን ድርጅት (ICAO) እና በምዕራባውያን ሀገራት ዘንድ በይፋ ታግዶ ሕጋዊ ቅቡልነቱን ያጣል።

2.  የዲያስፖራውና የገንዘብ እንቅስቃሴ መታገድ (Financial & Assets Sanctions)፦ የሽብርተኝነት ቅስቀሳን በጊዜ አለመመከት በውጭ ሀገር የሚኖሩ ደጋፊዎችን፣ የፋኖ አስተባባሪዎችንና የገንዘብ አሰባሳቢዎችን አደጋ ላይ ይጥላል። የፋትፍ (FATF) እና የዓለም አቀፍ ባንክ ሕጎች በሽብርተኝነት ጥሪ ከተጠረጠሩ አካላት ጋር የሚደረግን ማንኛውንም የገንዘብ ዝውውር ስለሚያስቆሙ፣ የዲያስፖራው የፋይናንስና የዲፕሎማሲ ድጋፍ ሙሉ በሙሉ ይዘጋል።

3.  የመሪዎች በዓለም አቀፍ ፍርድ ቤት መጠየቅ (Universal Jurisdiction & Command Responsibility)፦ በዓለም አቀፍ የወንጀለኞች ፍርድ ቤት (ICC) እና በዓለም አቀፍ የሰብአዊ መብት ሕግ መሠረት «የዕዝ ኃላፊነት» (Command Responsibility) የሚባል መርህ አለ። የፋኖ መሪዎች በስማቸው የሚደረገውን የሲቪል አውሮፕላን የይመታ ጥሪ በይፋ ካላወገዙ፣ ወደፊት በሚፈጸም ማንኛውም ጥፋት በዓለም አቀፍ ሕግ «የሽብር ድርጊት አጋሪና ተባባሪ» (Complicity in Terrorism) ተደርገው በዓለም አቀፍ የእስር ትዕዛዝ ሊፈለጉ ይችላሉ።

4.  የሕዝባዊና የፖለቲካ ቅቡልነት ማጣት (Loss of Domestic Legitimacy)፦ የአማራ ሕዝብና የኢትዮጵያ ሕዝብ የሚታገለው የሕግ የበላይነትና ፍትሕ እንዲሰፍን እንጂ ሀገራዊ የጋራ ሀብት የሆነው የሲቪል ተቋማት እንዲወድሙ አይደለም። እንዲህ ያሉ ጥሪዎችን አለመመከት የሕዝቡን አመኔታ የሚያሳጣና ትግሉን የብልፅግና አገዛዝ ለሚያካሂደው በእነሱ አጠራር «የሕግ ማስከበር» ትረካ ተጋላጭ ያደርገዋል።

4. የታሪክ ቁስል፣ የፋኖዎች መከዳት እና የሕዝቡ አስተዋይነት

የአማራ ሕዝብ የሕልውና ትግል ሲጀመር፣ የሸዋ፣ ጎንደር፣ የወሎና የጎጃም ፋኖዎችና ሕዝቡ የያዙት መሠረታዊ አቋም የፀና ነበር፦ «ከሕልውናና ከርዕዮተ-ዓለም ገዳዮቻችን ከሕወሓትና ከኦነግ ጋር አንሰራም፣ ብልፅግና ጋርም አንደራደርም፤ የሕዝባችንን የፍትህ ጥያቄና አጽመ-ርስትና ደም ለፖለቲካ ቁማር አናውልም!» የሚል ፅኑ አቋም እንደነበራቸው ይታወቃል፤

ይሁንጂ በተለይም ከአፋጎ አመራሮች የነበረው የፖለቲካ ብልሽት አካሄድ ስር ሰዶ በአንድነት ስም አፋብን የሚል ድርጅት ከመሰረቱ በኋላ፣ ከአማራ ሕዝብ የዘወትር ጠላቶች ጋር ጥምረት በመፍጠር ትግሉን በድለላ አሳልፈው ለቀጠናው ቁማር ሽጠውታል፣ እነ ዘመነ ካሴና አስረስ ማረ በአፋብህን ስም ከሕወሓት ጋር ጥምረት ሲፈጥሩ፣ የመጀመሪያዎቹ ተከጅዎችና ሰለባዎች ከርዕዮተ-ዓለም ገዳዮች ጋር አንደራደርም ያሉ የጎንደር ፋኖዎች ነበሩ። ይህ የክህደት መንገድ የጀመረው ቀደም ብሎ እንደሆነ ግን ከዚህ ላይ ልብ ማለት ግድ ይላል። አፋብህን/ፅምዶ የሕወሓትን የ50 ዓመት መዋቅራዊ የዘር ማጥፋት፣ የወልቃይት፣ የጠገዴ፣ የጠለምትና የራያ ወረራ «እንደ ተራ የቀደመ የታሪክ ቅሬታ» አቅልሎ በማቅረብ፣ የአማራን ሕዝብ የሕልውና፣ የክብርና የዕጣ-ፈንታ ጉዳይ ለሕወሓትና ለውጭ ኃይሎች የውክልና ጦርነት «ማገዶ» ለማድረግ የሄደበት መንገድ በታሪክ ፊት ትልቅ ክህደት ሆኖ ተመዝግቧል።

እዚህ ላይ በግልጽ ሊሰመርበት የሚገባው ዋናው ነጥብ፦ የፅምዶን ደላሎች በስራቸው ማጋለጥ ሆነ መውቀስ ወይም የአማራ ፋኖን የትግል ጉዞ ብልሽት ማረም በጭራሽ የብፅግና አገዛዝን መደገፍ አይደለም! ሕዝቡ ይህ አገዛዝ ብቻ ሳይሆን ይህንን ስርዓት ኢትዮጵያውያን በሙሉ ሊታገሉት የሚገባ አጥፊ ሥርዓት መሆኑን ጠንቅቆ ያውቃል።

ነገር ግን የፅምዶ ደላሎችና የፖለቲካ ደናቁርት ስብስቦች በፈጠሩት ክህደት፣ ትርምስና የትግል ግርዶሽ ምክንያት፣ ሕዝቡ ሙሉ አቅሙን በአገዛዙ ላይ እንዳያሳርፍ እንቅፋት ሆነዋል። አገዛዙ የወሎ፣ የጎንደርም ሆነ የመላው አማራ ወዳጅ ሊሆን እንደማይችል ግልጽ ነው። ዛሬም እንደትናንቱ የሕዝቡ ብቸኛ ወዳጁ የራሱ አንድነታዊ አቅም፣ የራሱ ወታደራዊና ፖለቲካዊ ጥንካሬ ብቻ ነው! ከዚህ አገዛዝ ሰላምና ፍትሕ መጠበቅ መጨረሻው መጠፋፋት በመሆኑ፤ ሕዝቡ ከፊቱ የተደቀኑ ሁለቱንም አደጋዎች የሚያከሽፍበትን መንገድ «ድርብ መከላከል» መርህ ለመከተል የሰከነ ምልከታ ማድረግ ይኖርበታል።

●  አገዛዙን መመከት፦ በአማራ ሕዝብ ላይ የተደቀነውን መንግስታዊ ጥቃትና አምባገነንነት በራሱ ሉዓላዊና ገለልተኛ የመከላከል አቅምና መዋቅር ይመክታል፣ ይህንን ለማድረግ ከወዲሁ ከጠላት የፀዳ አማራዊ አደረጃጀትን የመመስረትና የማፅናት ሀላፊነት አለበት።

●  ደላሎችንና ቅጥረኞችን መከልከል፦ የሕዝቡን ፍትሐዊ ትግል ለሕወሓትና ለውጭ ኃይሎች የውክልና ጦርነት አጀንዳ አሳልፈው የሸጡትን የ«ፅምዶ/አፋብህን» ደላሎች በይፋ መቃወሙን እየገለፀ ይገኛል። ይህ የሚያሳዬው ቢያንስ አማራ በሚለው የወል ስሙ ከዚህ በላይ እንዲነገድበት አለመፍቀዱን ነው።

6. «ሕዝብ Dynamic ነው!» — እውነተኛው ፋኖ ሊወስደው የሚገባው አስቸኳይ እርምጃ

ሕዝብ ወይም ማህበረሰብ የማይቀየር ግዑዝ ሳይሆን፤ እንደ ሁኔታው፣ እንደ መረጃውና እንደ ድርጊቱ አስተሳሰቡን፣ አቋሙንና አሰላለፉን በየጊዜው የሚቀይር፣ የሚማርና የሚወስን ሕያው አካል ነው»። «ሕዝብ Dynamic ነው!» ሕዝብና ታጋዩ ወጣት በፖለቲከኞች ወይም በማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ደላሎች እንደፈለጉ የሚነዱ «ዕውር ተከታይ» (Blind Follower) አይደሉም! ሕዝብ የራሱ የሆነ የትግል መቁጠሪያ ካላንደር አለው፣ ብዙ የፖለቲካ መሪዎች፣ የፓርቲ ካድሬዎች ወይም የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ተፅዕኖ ፈጣሪዎች (Influencers) ሕዝብን እንደፈለጉ የሚነዱት፣ ያመነውን ነገር ሁሉ አምኖ የሚቀበልና የያዘውን አቋም የማይቀይር «የዋህና ተከታይ» አድርገው ያስባሉ። ነገር ግን «ሕዝብ Dynamic ነው» ሲባል ሕዝብ የራሱ የሆነ የአስተውሎት፣ የትዝብትና የመመዘኛ ሚዛን አለው ማለት ነው። ዛሬ አንድን ኃይል ወይም መሪ ደግፎ አደባባይ ስለወጣ ብቻ ነገም ቢሆን ያንን አካል ይደግፋል ማለት አይደለም። ሕዝቡ በስሜት አይነዳም፤ የአንድ አካልን ስህተት ሲያይ ወደ ሌላኛው አረመኔያዊ አገዛዝ አቅፍ ውስጥ አይገባም። ይልቁንም ሁለቱንም አደጋዎች (የአገዛዙን አምባገነንነት እና የደላሎችን የሽብር/የቅጥረኝነት አጀንዳ) እኩል በመገምገም የራሱን ገለልተኛና ሉዓላዊ አቅም የመገንባት ጥበብን በሐይል ሚዛን ይተገብራል።

በመሆንም በዚህ ሰአት ግራ በመጋባት ገለልተኛ መሆን አይቻልም ቢያንስ ለሕዝብ የሚቆረቆሩና ለሕዝባቸው ክብር ያላቸው የአማራ ፋኖዎች ያጡትን ሕዝባዊ ድጋፍ መልሰው ለማግኘት ቢከብዳቸው እንኳን በቅኔ ብልፅግናን በመደገፍ የተነሳባቸውን ሕዝባዊ የተቃርኖ ቁጣ ማብረድ ግድ ይላቸዋል በመሆኑም በ«ፅምዶ» መረብ ውስጥ ያልገቡ እውነተኛ የፋኖ አካላት፣ መሪዎችና ታጋዮች የሚከተለውን አስቸኳይና አንገብጋቢ እርምጃ መውሰድ አለባቸው፦

1.  የሽብርተኝነት እንቅስቃሴንና የሽብር ፕሮፖጋንዳን በይፋ ማወገዝ፦ በስማችሁና በትግላችሁ ስም በማህበራዊ ሚዲያ በፅምዶ ዲጅታል ሰራዊት በደላሎች የሚደረጉ የሲቪል ተቋማትና የሕዝብ ሀብት የማውደም የሽብር ጥሪዎችን «የእኛን ፍትሐዊ ትግል አይወክሉም» በማለት በጥብቅ መግለጫ በይፋ አውግዙ!

2.  የትግሉን የሞራል ልዕልና ማስከበር፦ ትግላችሁ የተበደለውን ሕዝብና የሀገር ሀብት የማዳን እንጂ የሀገር ሀብት የማድቀቅና የሽብርተኝነት እንዳልሆነ ለዓለም አቀፉ ማህበረሰብና ለሕዝባችሁ በግልጽ አስታውቁ።

3.  «የድርብ መከላከል» (Double Defense) መስመርን መያዝ፦ አማራ በራሱ ፍትሐዊ መርህ፣ በጥብቅ ድርጅታዊ ዲሲፕሊንና በማዕከላዊ ዕዝ ሥር በመደራጀት ሁለቱንም አደጋዎች (የብልፅግናን አገዛዝ እና በትብብር ስም የፅምዶ ደላሎችን የውድመት/የሽብር አጀንዳ) እኩል የመመከት የጸና አቋም ያዙ!

ማጠቃለያ

የአማራ ሕዝብ ትግል እንደ ወንዝ ነው — ቆሻሻውን፣ የጠላት ቅጥረኞችን፣ የ«ፅምዶ» ደላሎችን፣ በስሙ የሚነግዱ ባንዳዎችን ሁሉንም ወደ ዳር ገፍትሮ ጥሎ፥ ትክክለኛ የአማራ መሰረታዊ ጥያቄዎችን አነግቦና ንጹሁን የነፃነት መስመር ይዞ ይጓዛል!

ዛሬ በወሎና በጎንደር የተስተዋለው ሕዝባዊ ቁጣና ማግለል በሌሎች የአማራ ከተሞችና በሌሎች ክልሎች እንደሚስፋፋ ሙሉ ለሙሉ እርግጠኛ መሆን ይቻላል። ይህ አጋጣሚ ለፅምዶ ደላሎች የተቃጣ የማይቀረው የስህተት ዋጋ ነው! ሕዝቡ ይዞት የሚወጣው የባነር መልዕክት ብልፅግና ለመደግፍ ሳይሆን የአፋብንን ክህደት ጉዞ ለመበቀል የተደረገ ቅኔያዊ ሰልፍ መሆኑን መረዳት ግድ ይላል።

በየጫካውና በየቀጠናው ያላችሁ እውነተኛ የፋኖ አርበኞች ሆይ፣ በስማችሁ ከሚደለቀው የሽብር ፕሮፖጋንዳ፣ የከሰረ መንገድና በስማችሁ የሚነገደውን የቀጠናው ሽብር ንግድ በቁጣ ሰብራችሁ በመውጣት፣ የትግላችሁን ሞራላዊና ሕጋዊ አሸናፊነት በፅናት አስክበሩ!

ድል ለአማራ ሕዝብ!

ፍትሕ፣ እኩልነትና ነፃነት ለኢትዮጵያ ሕዝብ!

The Ethiopian Tribune · Reflective Essay

Why Do Some Amhara Elites Collaborate Against Their Own People?

Political Opportunism, Elite Co-optation, and Political Self-Sabotage in Ethiopia

Professor Girma Berhanu

Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg

Abstract

Why do some Amhara political elites cooperate with authorities whose policies are perceived by many Amharas as threatening their collective interests and security? This paper examines elite collaboration in Ethiopia from the establishment of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)-led government in 1991 to the political transition following Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power in 2018 and the subsequent conflict in the Amhara region.

Drawing on scholarship on ethnic federalism and authoritarian governance, comparative political theory, and conversations with two former senior Amhara regional officials, the paper explores five explanations for elite collaboration: political and economic opportunism, elite co-optation, fear and coercion, ideological divergence, and the pursuit of political survival. It also examines the psychological mechanisms of obedience, conformity, and moral disengagement, alongside the historical and institutional conditions that may contribute to political fragmentation.

The paper asks whether recurring patterns of elite accommodation reflect individual choices, institutional incentives, historical experiences, or broader social and political dynamics. It rejects the assumption that collaboration demonstrates an inherent cultural disposition toward self-sabotage. Instead, it argues that elite behaviour must be understood through the interaction of personal interests, political institutions, social networks, and unequal power relations. Ultimately, the paper seeks to explain the apparent divergence between the priorities of some political elites and the security, rights, and aspirations of the communities they claim to represent.

1. Introduction: The Problem of Political Collaboration

Why do some Amhara political elites collaborate with political authorities whose actions are perceived by many Amharas as harmful to their community?

This question concerns the relationship between individual ambition, political power, collective identity, and public responsibility. It became particularly significant following the establishment of the EPRDF-led government in 1991 and the political transition associated with Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power in 2018.

The 1995 Constitution reorganised Ethiopia around ethnolinguistically defined regional states and recognised the self-determination rights of nations, nationalities, and peoples. Supporters viewed ethnic federalism as a means of addressing historical inequalities and accommodating diversity. Critics argued that it institutionalised ethnic divisions, weakened shared citizenship, and generated new forms of exclusion.

For many Amharas, concerns included political representation, territorial administration, and the security of Amhara communities living outside the Amhara regional state. Scholarship by Jon Abbink and Ketemaw Muluye provides useful starting points for examining these debates.

Expectations that the 2018 political transition would address longstanding grievances gradually gave way to renewed tensions between the federal government and Amhara political movements. In 2023, fighting escalated following the government’s decision to integrate regional special forces into the national security structure. Fano forces resisted this process, and the conflict intensified. The International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch have documented the conflict’s political and humanitarian dimensions. The reported atrocities against civilians are deeply appalling and demand urgent international attention. Yet the scale of the humanitarian crisis affecting the Amhara population remains insufficiently recognised in international discourse. Reports that approximately six million children have been out of school over the past four years, alongside allegations of widespread discrimination against Amhara people, raise profound concerns about the protection of fundamental rights, access to education, and equal treatment. These claims warrant rigorous documentation and sustained international scrutiny.

This raises a fundamental moral question: how can individuals and institutions committed to human dignity, justice, and equality justify collaborating with political forces accused of contributing to the persecution and suffering of a vulnerable population? At a time when civilian protection and the prevention of mass atrocities should be paramount, silence, indifference, or uncritical collaboration risks undermining the very principles that international solidarity and human rights are meant to uphold. The suffering of the Amhara people deserves serious attention, impartial investigation, and recognition grounded in evidence—not neglect or selective concern.

Within this context, allegations that some Amhara political figures have cooperated with federal authorities against Fano or other Amhara political movements have generated intense controversy. Their motivations remain important questions for investigation. Do they seek personal advancement or material benefits? Are they motivated by fear, ideological conviction, or political survival? Do they believe accommodation offers a more effective route to peace and influence than resistance?

This paper examines these questions without assuming that every political alliance constitutes betrayal or that Amhara political opinion is uniform. Its central concern is why some elites accommodate powerful authorities even when their decisions may conflict with the interests of significant sections of the communities they represent.

The suffering of the Amhara people deserves serious attention, impartial investigation, and recognition grounded in evidence — not neglect or selective concern.

2. Historical and Institutional Context

The political order established after 1991 reshaped the incentives facing Ethiopia’s political elites. Regional institutions were organised substantially around ethnic identity, while the EPRDF maintained extensive influence over political competition and regional administrations.

As Abbink’s analysis suggests, ethnicity became central to political discourse and institutional practice. This arrangement sought to recognise historically marginalised identities but also generated disputes over representation, territorial boundaries, and competing conceptions of citizenship.

Critics of the federal system argue that Amharas were sometimes treated as representatives of historical domination rather than as a diverse population with distinct political interests and rights. Such claims require examination against constitutional provisions, historical records, and the experiences of affected communities. A balanced analysis must distinguish the stated objectives of ethnic federalism from its institutional operation and consequences. The transition of 2018 did not automatically eliminate established political networks, habits of governance, or patterns of elite accommodation. Yohannes Gedamu’s work on ethnic federalism and authoritarianism provides a framework for investigating how institutions and elite relationships can persist across changes in political leadership.

The relevant question is whether dependence on central authority, access to state resources, and restricted political competition create incentives for some Amhara elites to accommodate the government rather than challenge its policies. This possibility deserves systematic investigation rather than an assumption that collaboration reflects a distinctive cultural weakness.

3. Elite Co-optation and Political Opportunism

Elite co-optation occurs when powerful authorities incorporate influential individuals or groups into governing structures to secure cooperation, weaken opposition, or neutralise challenges to their power. The incentives may include public office, political recognition, access to resources, personal protection, and influence over local administration.

Under authoritarian or highly centralised political systems, accommodation may be individually advantageous even when it imposes costs on the wider community. Resistance can lead to imprisonment, dismissal, economic hardship, or physical danger, whereas cooperation may preserve an individual’s position and influence. Yet similar political behaviour can reflect different motivations: personal ambition, ideological conviction, strategic calculation, or fear and coercion.

This framework offers a useful analytical lens for examining political alignments in Ethiopia. Among the public figures whose political conduct and relationships with political power may warrant closer scrutiny are Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam, the late Professor Endrias Eshete, Professor Dagnachew Assefa, Deacon Daniel Kibret, Demeke Mekonnen, Dr. Degu Andargachew, Genet Zewdie, Dawit Yohannes, and former Fano leaders who have defected or surrendered to government forces. This list is not exhaustive, and space does not permit a discussion of all the individuals who might merit consideration.

These individuals occupy different positions and have distinct political histories. Their inclusion in this discussion should not be interpreted as a conclusion that they have all been co-opted by the authorities. Rather, each case requires independent and evidence-based examination of public statements, political appointments, relationships with government officials, and actions following changes in political allegiance. Such an approach is essential to distinguish documented conduct from political interpretation, speculation, or accusation.

Dr. Degu Andargachew, for example, is perceived by some observers as having sought to reconsider, or even atone for, aspects of his previous political conduct. This interpretation, however, should be assessed critically against his own public statements, documented actions, and subsequent political engagements. Ultimately, the objective should not be to condemn individuals on the basis of their affiliations alone, but to examine their conduct, the principles they uphold, and the consequences of their political choices for the pursuit of justice, accountability, and the protection of the Amhara population.

I find it difficult to reconcile what I perceive as instances of personal advancement taking precedence over collective political interests. Nevertheless, political disagreement or cooperation with the government does not, by itself, establish betrayal, opportunism, or personal enrichment. The task is to determine whether, and under what circumstances, elite co-optation helps explain particular political decisions.

Nor is my inquiry dependent on establishing the ethnic identity of every individual mentioned. I have not sought to verify anyone’s ancestry, nor do I regard ethnic identity as a prerequisite for analysing political conduct. My concern is with the broader dynamics of elite accommodation, political alignment, and the incentives shaping individual choices within Ethiopia’s political system. Ultimately, the central question is how personal ambition, political survival, institutional dependence, and access to state resources influence elite behaviour across successive administrations—and whether these incentives create a persistent gap between the interests of political elites and the communities they claim to represent.

A useful investigation would ask:

• What benefits, if any, followed an individual’s political realignment?
• Did the individual change their public position after entering government?
• Did their decisions weaken independent political organisation?
• What consequences did their actions have for the communities they claimed to represent?
• Did they remain accountable to those communities?

Political opportunism also extends beyond appointments. Material incentives may include access to public contracts, business opportunities, or preferential treatment. Establishing such connections requires documentary evidence, including procurement records, asset disclosures, and beneficial ownership information. Wealth or political association alone does not prove corruption.

Status and recognition can be equally influential. Former opposition figures may find renewed authority attractive after losing influence within their original movements. Conversely, defections and surrenders by Fano members may reflect military exhaustion, internal divisions, disillusionment, fear, strategic calculation, or genuine changes in political conviction.

The central analytical task is to distinguish these explanations rather than treating every change of allegiance as evidence of selfishness.

4. Fear, Coercion, and Political Survival

Political collaboration may also occur under conditions of coercion. Threats, detention, surveillance, intimidation, economic pressure, and risks to family members can limit an individual’s freedom to oppose those in power.

Human Rights Watch has documented serious abuses and restrictions affecting civilians and political actors in Ethiopia, including during the conflict in the Amhara region. This broader context makes coercion a relevant explanation, although it does not establish the motives of any particular individual.

Three overlapping categories can help clarify the issue:

1. Voluntary collaboration: Cooperation based primarily on personal interests, political convictions, or anticipated benefits.
2. Strategic accommodation: Cooperation based on the belief that resistance is ineffective, unsustainable, or likely to cause greater harm.
3. Coerced collaboration: Cooperation shaped primarily by credible threats or severely restricted choices.

These distinctions matter morally as well as analytically. An individual who cooperates under threat should not automatically be judged in the same way as someone who voluntarily exchanges political support for personal advancement. Without reliable evidence about individual circumstances, however, these explanations remain hypotheses rather than established conclusions.

5. Ideological Divergence and Elite Detachment

Shared ethnic identity does not guarantee shared political priorities. Some Amhara elites may prioritise national unity, constitutional continuity, or the avoidance of civil war, while others emphasise regional autonomy, protection from state violence, territorial claims, or support for armed resistance. For example, a politician opposing Fano may believe that armed struggle will prolong instability and endanger civilians. A supporter of Fano may argue that resistance is necessary because existing institutions have failed to provide security and accountability. Neither position, by itself, proves loyalty or betrayal.

A deeper problem emerges when political elites develop interests that diverge from those of the wider population. Their careers, security, economic opportunities, and influence may depend on institutions that ordinary people experience differently. Under such conditions, preserving elite access to power may take precedence over public accountability. This concern is particularly serious when Amhara communities experience violence, displacement, and insecurity while some of their political representatives appear more concerned with maintaining their positions than addressing those conditions.

Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics offers a possible framework for examining how political power shapes whose lives are protected, whose populations are exposed to violence, and whose suffering receives inadequate recognition. Applied cautiously to Ethiopia, the framework could help investigate state protection, political vulnerability, and accountability during the Amhara conflict.

The key questions are whether political institutions adequately protect Amhara communities, how political elites respond to threats against their constituents, and whether their decisions reinforce or challenge existing patterns of vulnerability. Decades of political marginalisation and recurring violence have left many Amhara feeling increasingly insecure in their own ancestral homeland—as though they were “dead men walking” in a land to which they have deep historical ties. This situation raises difficult questions about the role of individuals of Amhara origin who, through their political affiliations, decisions, or actions, may have contributed to or legitimised conditions that perpetuate the vulnerability of their own communities. Addressing these questions requires careful examination of documented evidence, individual responsibility, and the distinction between political disagreement and complicity in practices that undermine the safety and dignity of a population.

Ian Buruma’s (2023) The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II provides a valuable point of departure for exploring the complex moral and political dilemmas associated with collaboration under oppressive conditions. Through historical accounts of individuals navigating occupation, deception, and survival during the Second World War, Buruma invites readers to reflect on the often-blurred boundaries between accommodation, complicity, opportunism, and self-preservation. These dilemmas also resonate with contemporary Ethiopia, where the political conduct of individuals of Amhara origin who align themselves with state authorities merits critical and evidence-based examination.

Nevertheless, historical comparisons must be approached with caution. Political alignment alone does not establish complicity, just as opposition to a government does not automatically demonstrate moral integrity. Rather, the central questions concern individual agency, the constraints under which political choices are made, and the consequences of those choices for vulnerable communities. Of particular importance is the extent to which individuals enable, legitimise, resist, or challenge practices that threaten the security, dignity, and fundamental rights of their own communities. Ultimately, the issue is not simply whether individuals collaborate with those in power, but how their decisions should be understood in relation to political responsibility, moral accountability, and the protection of human life.

6. The Psychology of Collaboration

Political psychology offers additional explanations for why individuals may cooperate with authorities whose actions conflict with their stated moral commitments. Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience to authority, Solomon Asch’s experiments on conformity, and Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement provide useful conceptual starting points. Although these studies cannot directly explain Ethiopian political behaviour, they identify mechanisms that merit investigation.

Obedience to authority. Individuals operating within hierarchical institutions may defer responsibility to superiors or justify their actions as official duties. Such reasoning can weaken their sense of personal responsibility for harmful consequences.

Conformity and group pressure. Political actors may align with colleagues, party leaders, or influential networks to preserve professional advancement, social belonging, or personal safety. Others may genuinely share the prevailing position, making it important to distinguish conformity from conviction.

Moral disengagement. Individuals may justify harmful conduct by presenting it as necessary, minimising its consequences, transferring responsibility to superiors, or portraying opponents as undeserving of protection. These mechanisms can operate among government officials, opposition leaders, armed groups, and their supporters.

These theories should generate research questions rather than serve as diagnoses of particular individuals. Establishing their relevance requires examining public statements, decision-making processes, institutional pressures, and the consequences of political choices.

7. Is Political Self-Sabotage Embedded in Amhara Culture?

Recurring political divisions may create the impression that self-sabotage is embedded in Amhara culture or collective psychology. Such a conclusion, however, risks confusing the behaviour of particular elites with the characteristics of an entire population. Political fragmentation, factionalism, and collaboration with powerful authorities occur across societies. Moreover, elite conduct is not necessarily representative of popular values. Where institutions reward accommodation and punish opposition, similar behaviour can recur without requiring an explanation based on an inherent cultural disposition.

Family histories and inherited political narratives may influence loyalties, social networks, and expectations of leadership. They do not establish that collaboration or moral weakness is biologically or culturally inherited. A more productive approach would investigate how historical experiences, institutional incentives, political networks, and social expectations shape elite behaviour. Relevant questions include how communities understand political loyalty, what consequences follow from opposing powerful authorities, and whether institutions reward accountability or personal access to state power.

My concern is not that Amharas possess an inherent tendency toward self-destruction, but that recurring patterns of elite accommodation and political fragmentation may undermine collective security and political representation. Explaining these patterns requires evidence about specific decisions and their consequences, not generalised judgments about a people’s character.

My concern is not that Amharas possess an inherent tendency toward self-destruction, but that recurring patterns of elite accommodation and political fragmentation may undermine collective security and political representation.

8. Conclusion

Why do some Amhara political elites collaborate with authorities whose policies are perceived by many Amharas as harmful to their collective interests? This paper identifies several plausible explanations: personal ambition, material incentives, elite co-optation, fear and coercion, ideological divergence, political survival, and psychological mechanisms such as obedience, conformity, and moral disengagement. These explanations are neither mutually exclusive nor equally applicable to every individual. Collaboration may represent opportunism in one case, coercion or strategic accommodation in another, and genuine political disagreement in a third. Distinguishing among these possibilities requires case-specific evidence and careful attention to the consequences of political decisions.

Drawing on scholarship, comparative perspectives, and conversations with two former senior Amhara regional officials, this paper proposes an institutional and historically grounded approach to understanding elite behaviour in Ethiopia. Its central argument is that recurring political fragmentation should not be attributed to an inherent cultural defect. Instead, it should be investigated through the interaction of political institutions, historical experiences, social networks, individual incentives, and unequal power relations.

Ultimately, the critical question is whether political elites remain accountable to the communities they claim to represent. Understanding why that accountability sometimes breaks down is essential to explaining elite collaboration and identifying the political conditions under which representation can better protect public security, rights, and collective interests.

References

Abbink, J. (2011). Ethnic-based federalism and ethnicity in Ethiopia: Reassessing the experiment after 20 years. *Journal of Eastern African

Studies, 5*(4), 596–618.

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. *Psychological Monographs:

General and Applied, 70*(9), 1–70.

Asmamaw, B. T. (2026). Half a knife: An Amhara resistance writer’s reckoning. Baye Asmamaw.

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.

Buruma, I. (2023). The collaborators: Three stories of deception and survival in World War II. Atlantic Books.

Gedamu, Y. S. (2021). The politics of contemporary Ethiopia: Ethnic federalism and authoritarianism. Routledge.

Human Rights Watch. (2024). World report 2024: Ethiopia. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/ethiopia

Human Rights Watch. (2024). “If the soldier dies, it’s on you”: Attacks on medical care in Ethiopia’s Amhara conflict. Human Rights Watch.

International Crisis Group. (2023, November 16). Ethiopia’s ominous new war in Amhara (Africa Briefing No. 194).

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harper & Row.

Muluye, K. (2020). The formation of Ethiopia’s federation and its implications for the Amharas’ quest for recognition and boundary demarcations. Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Harvard University Press.

Epilogue

The poem captures the tragic fate of a rural Ethiopian woman, particularly an Amhara woman, whose life is consumed by endless labour—from the strength of youth to the frailty of old age. She grinds grain day after day, sustaining others while her own dreams, dignity, and aspirations remain buried beneath the dust of the grinding stone.

Like Sisyphus, she is condemned to an endless cycle of toil, with no meaningful reward, no recognition, and little hope of escape. She does not even know the name of the prime minister, while political elites who claim to represent her rise to power, enjoy privilege, and live in luxury in her name. The distance between her suffering and their prosperity exposes a painful contradiction between political representation and the lived realities of ordinary people. Perhaps the poem’s most devastating revelation is that, while she spends her life grinding grain, time quietly grinds her down. By the time she looks into the mirror, she can no longer distinguish the flour in her hair from the gray of old age. She has spent a lifetime feeding others, only to discover that life itself has consumed her. And those who speak in her name have risen, while she remains where she has always been—beside the grinding stone, forgotten by the very world her labour sustains.

The epilogue is a reflection on Bewketu Seyoum’s Amharic poem “ስትፈጭ የኖረች ሴት” (“The Woman Who Spent Her Life Grinding”).

Professor Girma Berhanu is a professor in the Department of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg and a regular contributor to The Ethiopian Tribune. The views expressed are the author’s own. Individuals named in this essay are invited to respond; replies will be considered for publication in full.

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Conclusion — A Mirror to the Nation

Past, Present and the Future

Unite and Reclaim the Sea, Secure the Dam, Fight Poverty Not Each Other

Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD) · Final article of the series

Editor’s Foreword

In March, Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu opened his series in these pages with “The Spirit of Adwa” and a premise that has run through every article since: when a new generation speaks, a nation must listen. Seven months and fourteen articles later, he closes it with the longest and most ambitious piece we have published from him.

The length is deliberate. A conclusion has to gather fourteen arguments into one and answer the questions they left open. Readers who followed only part of the series will find the whole of it here: the Abraham Accords and the “permissive disorder” of the Red Sea, the June election, the racket of four estates, the drones over Amhara, the Oromummaa debate and the case for Assab. Each is set against what has happened since. Readers who followed all of it will find the author testing his own forecasts against the record, and changing his view where eight years of evidence have changed it.

When the powers of the region redraw the map around us, will Ethiopia be a party to the drawing or a line on someone else’s page?

Dr Hailu does not ask to be agreed with. He sets out what would prove him wrong and invites his critics to show it. Many will disagree, some fiercely. His inbox through this series is testimony enough to that. We publish him because the questions he asks are the ones Ethiopia cannot avoid: what holds a nation together, what the sea is worth, and what kind of constitution 130 million citizens deserve.

As with every contribution, the views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Ethiopian Tribune. Replies are welcome, and we will publish the serious ones.

We thank Dr Hailu for the series, for his patience with our edits, and for the reminder in his covering letter that the time to mature as a nation is now.

— The Editor

Synopsis

The final article of the series asks one question: how does a nation of 130 million, at war with itself and cut off from the sea, stop fighting its past and start building its future? It answers in five parts.

Part I — The Fourteen Articles as a Mirror

The author restates the series as a single architecture: national unity and Red-Sea sovereignty as the foundations, broad-based development anchored in democracy as the means, and GERD as the engine. He checks the series’ spring forecasts against the autumn’s events — the Houthi hold on the Bab al-Mandeb, the rupture with Asmara, the seven-party Alliance for Survival and the New Alamein declaration on Red-Sea governance. He sets out the documented record of the Abiy years, traces how a narrative casting the Amhara as the nation’s offender passed from Cairo and the liberation fronts into the 1995 Constitution and has since turned on its authors, and examines FANO’s place inside the new alliance, proposing six commitments any coalition must meet before victory, not after.

Part II — Red-Sea Sovereignty and the Constitution

He reconstructs the legal chain by which Ethiopia lost its coast between 1991 and 2018, weighs the case for and against the claim to the Doumeira–Rehyto–Beilul–Tio Corridor, and states plainly where it is strong and where it is not. He sets out four courses open to the nation and their price. He then turns to the 1995 Constitution: why Article 39 cannot be amended away, three routes to a replacement, the guarantees a citizens’ constitution must offer every community, and eleven safeguards against a new tyranny of unity.

Part III — Democracy and Development

Sovereignty is not prosperity. Using a binding-constraints method, the author follows Ethiopia’s productive chain and identifies where it actually breaks: land tenure, the industrial parks, a dam with too little grid behind it, a tax take of around seven per cent, and a school system that enrols almost every child but teaches too few of them. Each is given a target, a timetable and a measure.

Part IV — The Obligation to Our Citizens

Thirteen obligations, and the order in which they must be met: peace at home and a new constitution first, the sea claim reserved and codified at once, and its recovery last.

Part V — The Responsibility of the Intellectuals

Drawing on Zera Yacob, Benda, Said, Sen and Locke, he calls Ethiopia’s educated class to peace, the rule of law and development, names the only two wars he believes an intellectual may defend, and closes with an appeal to the young Ethiopians who will inherit the outcome.

RIGHT OF REPLY

The Luxury of Abstract Moralising in a Theatre of Existential Warfare: A Realist Critique of the ‘Collective Intelligence’ Thesis

By Mareshet Yimer Meshesha

Editor’s note: The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this response to Professor Girma Berhanu’s essay “Ethiopia’s Cycle of Self-Destruction: A Crisis of ‘Collective Intelligence’?” under its right of reply. The author writes in a personal capacity as a civic supporter of the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM). The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Tribune. References are as supplied by the author. Professor Girma has been offered the opportunity to respond.

The contemporary political crisis in Ethiopia has generated a vast library of diaspora commentary, but few pieces encapsulate the profound limitations of detached academic analysis as clearly as Professor Girma Berhanu’s recent essay, “Ethiopia’s Cycle of Self-Destruction: A Crisis of ‘Collective Intelligence’?” Writing from an analytical distance, Professor Girma constructs an elegant framework attributing generations of engineered warfare, state-sponsored atrocities, and systemic regional destabilisation to a generic deficit of collective intelligence among the nation’s political elites. He defines this intelligence as the capacity of individuals and institutions to learn from historical experience, anticipate long-term consequences, and build sustainable structures for peaceful coexistence.

While this thesis is wrapped in the sophisticated vocabulary of civic moderation and liberal peacebuilding, it ultimately offers a simplistic and structurally blind diagnosis of a brutal, calculated conflict. To reduce a war of existential survival to an intellectual failure or a national learning disability is an act of profound reductionism. It treats the deliberate, weaponised operations of a predatory state apparatus as if they were merely an accidental breakdown of political reasoning.

A rigorous counter-analysis of this thesis reveals three fatal flaws that render abstract peace frameworks entirely useless when confronted with the material realities of asymmetric warfare.

1. The Fallacy of Structural “Both-Sidesism”

In its introductory foreword, The Ethiopian Tribune commends the essay for naming few names, arguing that this omission obliges every reader to apply the author’s diagnosis honestly to their own side before pointing to the failings of the other. While such an approach provides an appealing veneer of editorial neutrality, it functions in practice as a dangerous moral equaliser. By erasing the specific identities of the perpetrators, this framework creates a false equivalence between predatory state elites — who deploy heavy artillery, drone strikes, and state-backed ethnic cleansing against civilian populations — and the indigenous resistance forces, such as Fano, fighting against total erasure on the ground.

One cannot resolve a deep-seated structural quagmire by diagnosing the jailer and the prisoner, the perpetrator of massacres and the victims, the displacer and the displaced, the invader and the invaded, the oppressor and the oppressed with the same generalised intellectual deficit. The defensive mobilisation of the Amhara people was not a choice born of an inability to negotiate; it was an inevitable material reaction to decades of hostile ethno-linguistic cartography, the codification of their marginalisation in the 1995 constitution, and the forced annexation of ancestral lands like Wolkait-Tegede. To demand that a civic or an armed resistance movement share the blame for a war of self-defence under the guise of examining its own failings is a profound distortion of political reality.

2. War as an Operational Mechanism, Not an Institutional Failure

Professor Girma’s thesis assumes that the ruling elites in Addis Ababa continue to choose coercion because they fail to realise that the subjugation of one group breeds long-term insecurity for the entire country. This interpretation completely misreads the rational, predatory incentives of authoritarian state retention. The Prosperity Party regime does not suffer from a failure of political reasoning. It uses managed instability as its primary tool for its own survival and unbridled power.

Controlled chaos has allowed a centralised dictatorship to fracture cross-ethnic civil alliances, justify sweeping emergency decrees, and prevent a unified national civic consciousness from taking root. War, in this context, is not a breakdown of governance. It is the governance. The ruling elites are not acting out of ignorance or a lack of foresight. They are highly rational, short-term maximisers of power who understand that fracturing the populace ensures their own monopoly on violence. Treating a calculated strategy of state survival as a mere intellectual misunderstanding is a luxury only available to those who do not face the immediate threat of physical liquidation.

“War, in this context, is not a breakdown of governance. It is the governance.”

3. The Mirage of Paper Safeguards and the Lesson of August

The essay concludes with standard liberal prescriptions, arguing that durable peace requires institutions that protect political participation, safeguard fundamental rights, and provide credible mechanisms for resolving disputes. This argument enters a logical loop that ignores the fundamental premise of statecraft that institutions do not exist in a vacuum, and that they are maintained by a physical balance of power. One cannot build credible mechanisms when the adversary commands the military, special forces and militia, controls the treasury, the judiciary, and operates the drone fleets.

This analytical blindness was vividly illustrated in Professor Girma’s August 2026 article, “The Hardest Question: Why Are We Destroying Our Own?” In that reflection, the author offered a detailed ethnographic critique of media infighting, YouTube pile-ons, and character assassination among diaspora activists, lamenting it as a form of collective self-destruction that devours potential leaders. While those observations are accurate for toxic digital spaces, the fatal error lies in attempting to copy-paste the logic of internet drama onto a material, territorial armed conflict raging in large parts of Ethiopia.

History has already delivered its verdict on paper safeguards that lack ground-level enforceability. The Pretoria Agreement of 2022 did not collapse because of a psychological failure to cooperate; it collapsed because it was a soft contract that bypassed the structural realities of territorial justice and lacked any physical enforcement mechanism on the ground. Similarly, previous opposition movements like Kinjit in 2005 and Arbegnoch-Ginbot 7 in 2018 were systematically dismantled or disarmed precisely because they engaged in the fatal incrementalism of trading hard tactical leverage for vague, elite-driven promises of institutional reform.

The Realist Determination

Ethiopia’s interlocking crises will never be solved by elite seminars on collective intelligence or diaspora appeals for mutual empathy. True political intelligence is not the abstract desire for cooperation; it is the cultivation of independent material power capable of enforcing justice.

Peace is not the mere absence of tension. It is the presence of structural justice. True stabilisation will only emerge when a disciplined vanguard establishes an unassailable defensive shield across its core operational zones, secures its ancestral borders under permanent administration, and dictates the terms of a genuine national transition from a position of independent strength. Until the material balance of power is fundamentally altered on the ground, paper safeguards remain a mirage, and appeals for abstract peace will continue to ring hollow to those who are fighting simply to exist.

References

1. Atrocities and Summary Executions in Merawi (February 2024): Documented door-to-door summary executions of at least 45 Amhara civilians by Ethiopian state security forces following clashes with Fano. Source: Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Press Statement, February 2024; Amnesty International Report, “Ethiopia: Urgent Investigation Needed into Merawi Mass Executions,” February 2024.
2. Targeted Attacks and Massacres in Arsi Zone, Oromia (2023–2024): Systematically documented door-to-door targeted killings of Orthodox Christian and ethnic Amhara minorities by armed actors operating within regional structures. Source: Human Rights Watch World Report 2024 (Ethiopia Chapter); Amnesty International Briefing on Civilian Protection Failures in Oromia, late 2023.
3. Mass Incarceration and Forced Evictions in Benishangul-Gumuz and Addis Ababa Outskirts: Documented structural targeting and forced displacement of Amhara populations under the guise of law enforcement and corridor development. Source: Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) 165th Special Report; Amnesty International Call to Halt Forced Evictions, 2024.

Mareshet Yimer Meshesha is an independent political analyst writing on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa from a structural-realist perspective, with a focus on constitutional engineering and asymmetric conflict. He writes as a civic supporter of the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM) and is a member of civic groups concerned with the Amhara popular movement for self-defence and structural justice. He holds no official membership or role within the political or military structures of the AFNM.

From the Editor

The Solvent and the Shore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Medemer, Oromummaa and Red-Sea Sovereignty

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

The question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You cannot beat a man you have not studied.

An island of enemies

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

The second pillar: the legitimacy of Red-Sea sovereignty

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

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

Resistance, objections and the conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis

The Red Line That Moved

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

By E. Frashie ·October 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audit nobody prosecuted

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

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

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

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

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

The brokers’ bill

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

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

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

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

Plates from an unnamed supplier

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

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

Queues, and the 658

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

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

Removal is not accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE · EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Abiy’s Drones Pouring Hell Over a Divided House

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

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full article here:

Thea13_drones_unity_mgh.pdf

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

The Editor

ANALYSIS

The War That Found the Capital

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

By E. Frashie
The Ethiopian Tribune · 1 October 2026

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

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

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

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

A National War

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

Seven Days in the North

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

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

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

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

The Capital Discovers Its Exposure

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

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

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

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

The Governing Elite and the Regional Rupture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fog of Claims

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

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

What to Watch

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

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

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

ANALYSIS · HORN OF AFRICA

The Diplomacy of Convenient Silence

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

By E. Frashie  |  25 September 2026

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

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

Washington: from sanctioner to partner

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

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

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

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

The African Union: guardian of a deal it cannot enforce

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

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

Brussels and New York: the language of equidistance

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

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

Asmara: the party no one names

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

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

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

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

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

Addis Ababa: pre-empting the narrative

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

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

The inversion of 2021

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

What the ledger leaves out

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

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

◆

ANALYSIS

Two Fronts, One Army

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

By E. Frashie

The Ethiopian Tribune · 22 September 2026

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

The threat in the open

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

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

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

The threat in the barracks

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

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

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

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

The coup-proofing dilemma

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

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

What the new government is likely to do

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Commission’s offer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mengistu question

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

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

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

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

The hidden price

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

What to watch

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

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

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