Percy Zvomuya draws on Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan’s valuable new book Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War in a reading of the modern history of conflict in the Horn of Africa.
Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War
Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan
Hurst Publishers, 2023
I
Since 2018, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s attempts to make a radical break with his country’s immediate past has seen reforms touching on everything—the aesthetic, ideological, political, even the environmental. In a grand ecological move, his government claimed in 2019 that 350 million trees had been planted in a single day; the goal that year was to plant 20 billion trees.
When I visited Ethiopia in March this year, Abiymania, the craze that came in the wake of Abiy’s assumption of high office, had long petered out. But I was still surprised to see dozens of felled jacaranda trees laying on the verges of Bole Road as I drove from Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport to my hotel. Was the arboreal revolution already chopping down its own children? It was more complicated than that, I soon learnt. The prostrate trees were in the way of progress: bicycle lanes were soon to be built on the pavements to decongest the capital’s roads.
The crowning moment for Abiymania was undoubtedly Abiy’s receipt of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize—awarded for his role as peacemaker in breaking the twenty-year cold war with neighbouring Eritrea. However, in the period since the prestigious gong was handed down by the Swedish Academy, a lot has happened that you wouldn’t associate with a tree-planting man of peace. In November 2020, for example, a war broke out between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), resulting in the death of multitudes of people. According to a team of scholars at Belgium’s Ghent University, the casualties of the conflict number between 200,000 and 500,000. (Between 150,000 and 200,000 people starved to death; between 50,000 and 100,000 were directly killed; and more than 100,000 died due to lack of health care.) The former Nigerian president and the African Union’s envoy to the Ethiopian crisis, Olusegun Obasanjo, estimated the figure at 600,000. Whatever the actual number, these staggering counts are not the type of statistic you would expect from what Abiy called a small-scale ‘law enforcement operation’, which he promised, at the outset, would be ‘wrapped up soon’.
Most people don’t know about the Tigray War. The world’s ignorance derives mainly from Abiy’s refusal of access, during the conflict, to international media and aid workers, coupled with the indifference of the West. At the same time, media outlets like the Guardian and the New York Times did not run rolling coverage of the events, as they do with the present wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Another round of blood-letting in Africa is nothing out of the ordinary.
With Tigray sealed off from the world, the Ethiopian federal army, Eritrean forces, and Somali and local militias rampaged across the province. ‘Men were hauled out of their homes and shot at will. Monasteries dating back to the dawn of Christianity and mosques built at the time of the Prophet were shelled and destroyed … But the most terrible fate awaited the women of Tigray, who were systematically sexually abused,’ we read in the book Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War, jointly written by Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan. ‘Some were raped while their families looked on.’
I can see why Plaut and Vaughan’s book has been framed in this way, as an exploration of a war that—Africa old hands like Plaut and Vaughan aside, along with foreign affairs bureaucrats—most outside of Ethiopia didn’t see coming. ‘This book is about a current war and a long history,’ the two authors write of their approach, which recalls the Igbo saying that, if you want to investigate a murder, your inquiry should begin with the blacksmith who made the knife.
In the piece that follows, my reading of the modern history of conflict in the Horn of Africa—conflict that it is of signal importance that we understand—draws heavily on Plaut and Vaughan’s valuable book; most of the quotations in this piece are taken from it.
II
Ethiopia’s modern borders are roughly as old as the borders drawn by European powers at the end of the Berlin Conference in 1883–84. However, the towns of Axum and Yeha, in Tigray, were major trading hubs from around the year AD100 to AD940. What set the region apart from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa was how it adopted Christianity early on—the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s origins go back to AD330, well before the establishment of the Church of England in AD597—and developed written languages. Thus, ‘Tigray is seen by many as the cradle of Ethiopian civilization’. The region’s power and influence grew and fell over the centuries, until the reign of Emperor Menelik II between 1889 and 1913. He transformed the empire, producing the borders of Ethiopia we know today, by expanding his direct and indirect rule to the west, south and east of the highlands. Menelik’s Amhara and Oromo Christian forces brought under his control many new nationalities and tribes, some of them Muslim, others who practised traditional African spirituality, who spoke different languages. Before these significant changes, Ethiopia had been a largely uniform polity whose major languages, Amharic and Tigrigna, share a Semitic linguistic forebear, Ge‘ez. The burgeoning empire, the authors wryly note, was sowing ‘the seeds of future conflicts’.
At Adwa in 1896, Ethiopian forces did what no African kingdom had managed until then: they defeated a European power: the Italian army. But instead of completely expelling the Italians from the Red Sea coast, the Amharic-speaking Menelik II instead signed a treaty which bifurcated Tigrigna speakers and created the borders of modern-day Eritrea—a source of grievance among Tigray nationalists. As power moved to the south of Tigray, Amharic became the language of administration.
Haile Selassie inherited the Ethiopian throne in 1930 and soon found himself under attack from the Italians, who had not forgotten their humiliating defeat a generation before. Selassie fled to Britain, and Ethiopia fell under the occupation of Benito Mussolini. In the five years of Selassie’s absence, some important changes that would resonate later were implemented. For instance, languages other than Amharic—Arabic, Oromo and Kaffinya—were introduced in schools. To further break the sway of the Orthodox church, Mussolini built mosques in Ogaden. It’s clear that when Selassie eventually returned it was not to a unanimous hero’s welcome: he had to contend with rebellions in Tigray in 1943, in Oromia between 1963 and 1970, in the south in 1960 and in Amhara in 1968. The first shots in the three-decade war for Eritrean independence, meanwhile, were fired in 1961.
To his credit, Selassie expanded educational opportunities for his subjects—but it was students who began questioning the very idea of ‘Ethiopia’. In a famous paper, one such student, Walleligne Mekonen, argued: ‘Ethiopia is not really one nation. It is made up of a dozen nationalities, with their own languages, ways of dressing, history, social organisation and territorial entity.’ The doddering reign of Selassie ended abruptly in September 1974, when a group of 120 soldiers, known as the Derg (‘the Committee’), soon to be led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, aka the Butcher of Addis, toppled the emperor, executing him soon afterwards. The Derg had no political programme of their own, and so took inspiration from the Marxist rhetoric of the students and intelligentsia, whose communist posturing and revolutionary language they quickly adopted. The Derg nationalised both rural and urban land, thus destroying ‘the economic foundation of the imperial system’. The Orthodox Church was stripped of its official status, breaking the institution’s centuries-old grip over society. As during the Mussolini occupation, Islam was recognised. The Derg allowed languages other than Amharic for teaching and broadcasting. It appears Mengistu had been discriminated against by fair-skinned highlands elites, and he never forgot it: ‘In this country, some aristocratic families automatically categorise persons with dark skin, thick lips, and kinky hair as “barias” [slave in Amharic] … let it be clear to everybody that I shall soon make these ignoramuses stoop and grind corn!’ he reportedly said.
The Derg was opposed, chiefly, by the Eritrean nationalist rebels, who had been fighting the Ethiopian federal state for more than a decade. Not long afterwards, the Tigrignas joined the fight. From 1980, the TPLF joined with a multi-ethnic organisation, the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement, which later became the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). (The core groups of the EPRDF are the TPLF, the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement, the Oromo Democratic Party and the Amhara Democratic Party). In the nineteen-eighties, in an attempt to stave off the rebellion by the Tigrays, the Derg used famine as a weapon of war in the region. Estimates of the dead range between 300,000 and 1.2 million. The struggle ground on until 21 May 1991, when Mariam left the capital, Addis Ababa, intending to visit a military base in the country’s south-west. Instead, after a brief detour to Nairobi, the plane landed in Harare, Zimbabwe. Victorious rebels led by Meles Zenawi marched into Addis, bringing to an end seventeen years of Marxist authoritarian rule.
The departure of the Butcher of Addis triggered two major events: new rulers in Ethiopia, and the independence of Eritrea. As an honoured guest of Robert Mugabe’s government, Mengistu was accommodated in a villa in Harare’s northern suburbs, provided with a security detail, and put on a regular government stipend. He continues to live in Harare. Zimbabwe may seem an odd destination for an Ethiopian war criminal, but Mugabe’s officials said they were returning a favour to Mengistu: he had supported Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation against white minority rule in the nineteen-seventies.
III
I grew up in Mugabe’s heyday, the nineteen-eighties, when Ethiopia was a byword for failure. When trying to coax her kids to eat, my mother, like most matriarchs I knew, would invoke the spectre of famine: you can’t waste food, children are starving in Ethiopia. Under the leadership of Meles, the new government there set about trying to revive the country’s fortunes. Admittedly, he was working off a low base, as the economy and economic infrastructure he had inherited had been ravaged by war. Nevertheless, Ethiopia’s public works programme and the resulting rapid GDP growth rate of 11 per cent between 2004 and 2014 are not figures to be shrugged off. A centralist, Meles ran a developmental state that concentrated power in his office as prime minister; he whittled away the autonomy of the provinces, as rulers before him had done. And, as before, resistance developed: Meles’s centralising instincts were resisted, sometimes through guerrilla warfare, especially by the Oromo Liberation Front.
Although the TPLF had fought the Derg alongside the Eritreans (Meles himself was of Tigrigna and Eritrean heritage), war broke out between the erstwhile allies over a disputed border. The ‘brothers in arms’ had been united by a common enemy, but the organisations had fundamental differences when it came to strategy and ideology, as well as a ‘cultural disconnect’. Eritreans had advanced during the period of Italian occupation, becoming skilled workers and soldiers, leaving behind their cousins in Ethiopia, who had to travel across the Mereb River frontier to find work as casual labourers. The Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki was ‘incapable of working with the TPLF on an equal basis and still looked down on his [migrant labourer] cousins as a subordinate kind’.
However, as a bigger power with more resources, Ethiopia was able to defeat Eritrea comprehensively in the Eritrean–Ethiopian War, which ran from 1998 to 2000. The loss was a source of lasting bitterness for Isaias, who ‘was forced back into a struggle mentality that became the all-encompassing leitmotif of state and regime survival’. He turned his country inwards, transforming it into one of the most notorious security states in the world—the ‘North Korea of Africa’. Local opponents were arbitrarily arrested, and military conscription was extended indefinitely. The United Nations Human Rights Council called Eritrea’s ‘national service’ a form of slavery. To get back at its enemies in Addis, the Eritrean capital Asmara became a haven for opponents of Meles’s government. Isaias armed Ethiopian malcontents, and gave them military training and logistical support.
And then Meles, the man under whom Ethiopia had risen from being the poster child of famine to a blazing example of ‘developmental capitalism’, died suddenly in 2012. When a local editor was asked what he made of the accession of the compromise replacement from the south, Hailemariam Desalegn, he was dismissive: ‘A stone can continue to roll downhill under the weight of momentum, gravity and inertia for quite a while until it begins to hit bumps in the road.’ Hailemariam had solid academic credentials: a civil engineer by training, he was a devout Christian from the Wolayta ethnic group in the south. Under his leadership, Ethiopia continued to grow, but not at the dizzying rates recorded during his predecessor’s rule. In his final year as leader, the growth rate recorded during that period (2018–2019) was a miniscule 3 per cent.
But more worrying than lethargic growth was that the authoritarian state established by Meles was coming apart. Corruption was rife. There was fractiousness in the ruling party over ethnicity and regions. In 2014, protests began in Oromo over claims that the federal government in Addis Ababa was encroaching on their land. A state of emergency was declared and protesters were killed. There was also a boundary dispute between the regions of Amhara and Tigray, mutually hostile. It was in this climate that Hailemariam resigned.
IV
If Abiy, who is an ethnic Oromo, turned out to be the Tigray’s nemesis, it is partly because he felt slighted by TPLF leadership. When Hailemariam resigned in February 2018, his government had imposed yet another state of emergency: the province Oromia was again on fire. Oromia’s borders are contiguous with Addis Ababa, and in the city’s expansion, it was the land of the Oromo that was first to be gobbled up. To appease them, it made sense to elect a leader from that community, which, at around 34 per cent of the population, is Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. ‘Only an Oromo replacement for the outgoing prime minister could hope to quell the violence,’ Vaughan writes. But the TPLF leaders opposed Abiy’s candidacy and ‘a number of veteran politicians, in particular, insulted him to his face as lightweight, ignorant, arrogant and incompetent’. When Abiy reportedly told one TPLF veteran that if Meles were alive, he would have been his preferred candidate, the retort was: ‘You are no Meles.’
In the event, the TPLF were outmanoeuvred when the Amhara leadership pulled its candidate at the last minute and lent its support to Abiy, who duly won. Almost immediately, Abiy began rewriting history. The EPRDF period and the ruling party system, of which he was a major beneficiary (he had been a minister in Hailemariam’s government and, before that, a senior intelligence bureaucrat), writes Vaughan, ‘was now bracketed together with the Derg era as part of a fifty-year period of national “aberration” in which Ethiopia had lost its way, under the malign sway of foreign—Marxist—ideologies’.
In the new narrative, the EPRDF’s reign of twenty-seven years, during which the country experienced record growth, was now reclassified as a ‘period of darkness’. A charismatic Pentecostal Christian, Abiy has a flair for languages, and it was this gift that helped Abiymania spread across the continent and the world. (His good looks probably helped, too.) He set about to work. He rebranded the EPRDF, dissolving the alliance of parties, and in its place set up a new organisation called the Prosperity Party. Under Meles, Ethiopia had pursued an independent state-led development agenda, which had more in common with China than with the Washington Consensus. When Abiy invited former World Bank officials as advisers and began selling off parastatals, the Donald Trump administration quickly embraced him. He introduced many changes, from the ideological (including rehabilitating Haile Selassie) to the aesthetic, seducing W estern diplomats.
The state of emergency, a long-running feature of his predecessor’s rule, was lifted. An amnesty was extended to political prisoners. Exiled political opponents were invited back. It seems that even the Butcher of Addis was rehabilitated, when Hailemariam was pictured in the company of Mengistu while on a visit to Zimbabwe. But the Butcher didn’t dare take up the offer of amnesty; during Meles’s reign he had been convicted and sentenced to death. He preferred living in the ruins of Mugabe’s Harare than venturing back home.
The establishment of a new Republican Guard, in which Tigrigna-speaking soldiers were culled, suggested something more sinister. The purge of Tigrays also extended to the army, where up to 160 army generals were removed, and to the intelligence apparatus. Towards the outbreak of the war, as the ethnic rhetoric heated up, Tigrays living in other parts of Ethiopia started moving back to Mekelle. But the most striking development of this period was the end of the cold war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, a rapprochement that saw the border between the two states temporarily opened. This was perhaps the most important factor informing Abiy’s Nobel.
V
Isaias had always seen himself not as the leader of a tiny Red Sea state with a moribund hand-to-mouth economy, but as an elder statesman. Since coming to power, his meddling has been evident near and far. Eritrean forces fought Yemen over some islands in the Red Sea. Its army squared up with Djibouti over a border dispute. In the nineteen-nineties, Isaias sent troops to fight the Zairean kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko alongside Rwanda. He supported Sudanese rebels who were attempting to topple Omar al-Bashir’s government. He even backed the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
When the Tigrays’ hold on power in Addis unravelled, the canny, ruthless veteran leader must have chuckled. ‘What had begun as differences of strategy and tactics had evolved, particularly following the Ethio–Eritrean border war, into a burning hatred,’ writes Plaut. ‘Isaias was determined to rid himself of his Tigrayan adversaries.’
The war Isaias and Abiy soon began plotting was a logical consequence of their mutual antipathy towards the Tigrayans. The two schemers also brought Somalia into the alliance, with whom Eritrea had not had diplomatic relations for a decade and half. The Somali president, Mohamed Abdullahi ‘Farmajo’ Mohamed, sometimes joined the meetings, but it was the two senior leaders in the tripartite alliance who met the most—more than a dozen times in two years. Sometimes Abiy and Isaias met without note takers, just the two of them—men with a thirty-year age difference and little in common. Sometimes Isaias made unannounced visits to Addis to talk to Abiy. A European official later said: ‘I was as wrong as everyone on Eritrea and Abiy rapprochement. We failed to think regionally: that what looked like peace could actually increase insecurity for everyone.’
Eritrea had around 150,000 to 200,000 troops to complement Ethiopia’s army of about 135,000. Farmajo dispatched between 5,000 and 10,000 Somali troops to Eritrea to be trained. As the drums of war were being held up over the fire to tighten the membranes, the Tigrays weren’t sitting around. They were also preparing for the looming conflagration. The generals Abiy had fired were put in charge of preparations. At the start of the war the Tigray forces numbered a considerable 250,000 troops.
The ostensible reason for the outbreak of the Tigray War on 3–4 November 2020 was the defiant move by the TPLF regional administration to call elections in September 2020. The federal government had said the polls were illegal, but the TPLF went ahead anyway. Abiy justified his war by saying the regional government’s forces had launched a pre-emptive attack on the federal forces’ northern command base, seizing weapons and other heavy equipment.
VI
When the Ethiopian forces, backed by Eritrea and Somalia, attacked the regional capital of Mekelle on 28 November, they met little resistance, as the TPLF retreated into the surrounding mountains they knew so well. It was a return to the guerrilla warfare they had fought a generation earlier. ‘The mountains of the land are our fortresses,’ is a party slogan. They carried out sporadic attacks on Ethiopian and Eritrean troops, while recruiting new troops and planning a long campaign. The civilians they left behind were the target of systematic violence by their foes. And the cruelty was soon used as a powerful mobilising tool.
From the mountains, the TPLF eventually fanned out, reverting to conventional warfare, until Abiy was forced to admit on 4 April 2022 that his forces were battling the TPLF on eight fronts. After recapturing the capital Mekelle, the latter pressed on. One of their main aims was to break the siege. The defences erected in the north by the Eritreans were formidable, and so they opted to strike in the west, towards the border with Sudan. But even that gateway, a potential opening to the sea, was heavily defended. So they opted south, towards Addis Ababa. If they made it through some defences, their thinking went, it might be possible to link up with the Oromo Liberation Army.
It seemed that Addis Ababa might fall again, as it had thirty years before. In November 2021, a year after the war started, flights out of the city were sold out and an exodus was underway. Foreign embassies were issuing advisories to their nationals: ‘leave the country without delay’. If the Ethiopian highlands town of Debre Sina fell, Addis Ababa would be next. Yet just when a glorious victory for the TPLF was within reach, ‘the war was turned on its head’. Crucial to the federal forces’ victory were drones bought from China, Turkey and Iran, used for surveillance and attacks on TPLF armoured columns. The Tigrays sustained heavy losses and were forced to retreat to their enclave of Tigray which was, as before, back under siege. ‘We know that our people are dying in large numbers due to disease and starvation. The siege is tough. The people of Tigray have perhaps faced what it has never faced before in its history,’ the Tigray general Gebretensae Tsadkan said.
With his Tigray enemies defeated and forced to sign a humiliating treaty, one might think that Abiy would have finally become the man of peace his Nobel award enjoined him to be. But the logic of perpetual war soon turned him against other opponents in Amhara, Oromo, Afar, and further afield. A month before my visit to Addis Ababa, the Guardian reported that Ethiopian government troops had carried out a spate of killings in the province of Amhara, in which dozens of civilians were killed. (The Amhara militia fought the Tigrays together with federal government troops). Abroad, Abiy broke off with his Somali friends and signed an accord with the breakaway republic of Somaliland, in order to access the coastal state’s port of Berbera. He justified the move by saying landlocked Ethiopia wouldn’t live in a ‘geographic prison’. The Somali leader has since developed a closer relationship with Ethiopia’s old foe, Eritrea, and another traditional Ethiopian rival, Egypt. (Cairo doesn’t get along with its southern neighbour because of, among other reasons, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile, which limits the water reaching Egypt.) Abiy’s relationship with Isaias has also cooled. Earlier this month, Isaias met with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Somali leader Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and signed a treaty. A statement released at the end of the summit in October 2024 said the three had agreed to ‘enhance the Somali state institutions to confront various internal and external challenges and to enable the Somali National Federal Army to confront terrorism in all its forms’. It was also reported in September that Egypt had made arms shipments to Somalia.
In October 2020, while he was still president, Trump said that Egypt would ‘blow up that dam’. He was referring to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the single greatest infrastructure project since the fall of the Derg. The American election is a handful of days away. If the joker is returned to power, and a regional war breaks out around Ethiopia, will the country’s Nobel laureate find himself as free to wage war at home and abroad? Perhaps the next time, the world will be watching.
- Percy Zvomuya is a writer, reader, publisher, tree planter, editor and selecta. His writing has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, The Guardian, Chimurenga, Al Jazeera, the London Review of Books blog and the Johannesburg Review of Books.
