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INCAPABLE OF SUSTAINING WEEDS  
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Tom Stevenson
January 25, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ What are​ the major wars of our time? Ukraine and Gaza, of
course. But what about Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan? Most of
these are civil wars with very large numbers of fatalities. This is a
review of "Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War" _

Map of Ethiopia showing Tigray Region, Wikipedia

 

Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War 
by Martin Plaut
[[link removed]] and Sarah
Vaughan [[link removed]].
_Hurst, 459 pp., £25, February 2023, 978 1 78738 811 6_

What are​ the major wars of our time? Ukraine and Gaza, of course.
But what about Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan? Most of these
are civil wars with very large numbers of fatalities. But they inspire
much less interest than Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine or
Israel’s attack on Gaza. The war in Syria received years of diligent
consideration, if only because the principal crimes were carried out
by designated enemies of the US and UK. On the few occasions when
the British government was forced to defend its co-sponsorship with
the US of the catastrophic Saudi intervention in Yemen (including
its supply of at least £23 billion worth of arms), it offered up
paper-thin arguments but was met with little criticism. The attitude
to Yemen has been affected ignorance, but the conflicts in Myanmar,
Sudan and especially Ethiopia have been greeted with something closer
to indifference. None of them greatly increases the risk of global
thermonuclear war, so the stakes are lower than in Ukraine. But that
alone can’t explain the almost complete lack of interest.

The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region began in November 2020, and
featured a long list of massacres interspersed with bloody battles. In
the periods when the battlefields were quiet, Ethiopian forces were
busy blockading the Tigray region as part of a deliberate strategy to
induce famine. One might have expected, given the 1980s famine that
gave rise to Live Aid, that man-made famine in Ethiopia would have a
special poignancy. Yet no one paid much attention. In October 2022,
just before the peace accord was signed, a team at the University of
Ghent estimated that between 385,000 and 600,000 civilians had been
killed over the two years of war, most as a result of famine –
figures comparable to or higher than the death toll over a decade of
war in Syria. The facts were known. But wasn’t Ethiopia the land of
famines? What were a few more corpses floating down the Tekeze?

With the exception of a brief threat to the Ethiopian capital, Addis
Ababa, in November 2021, the war was only of interest to a few
specialist staff at foreign ministries. The idea that there are
‘forgotten’ wars raises the question of who is doing the
forgetting. Certainly not the participants or their civilian victims.
The conflict was made easier for the world to ignore by the Ethiopian
government’s refusal to grant access to the media or aid workers;
the UN repeatedly requested access and was usually denied. This was
a strategy clearly intended to limit international scrutiny. What was,
on the ground, a tremendous din of atrocities was transformed into a
quiet war, out of sight and out of mind.

Until war broke out, the big story in Ethiopia had been the remarkable
rise to power of its prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. In 2018, the
‘reformist from Oromia’ suddenly came on the scene, a champion of
freedom of expression, a well-dressed peacemaker leading a democratic
awakening. After three decades of rule by the Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), most of it under the
formidable former leader of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front
(TPLF), Meles Zenawi, Abiy appeared to represent a decisive break with
the old order. The international reception was glowing: media reports
spoke of ‘Abiymania’ and in 2019 he was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize. Within three months he had signed a tripartite agreement with
Eritrea and Somalia, an agreement that would help him prosecute the
coming war.

Abiy’s government disingenuously claimed that the war began when
Tigrayan regional leaders – enraged by their loss of influence and
power – launched an assault on the integrity of the state in
September 2020 by refusing to abide by the decision to postpone
regional elections, ostensibly in the interests of pandemic
management. On 3 November, TPLF forces attacked federal army
outposts in Tigray. The TPLF leadership insisted that it was
responding to an attempt by Ethiopian special forces to remove the
regional government by coup de main. The government story that
the TPLF started the war out of the blue is unconvincing:
the TPLF’s decision to press ahead with regional elections was
clearly an act of defiance, but it was also clear that the dispute was
a pretext for war. Since July, Ethiopian satellite television stations
had been calling for a joint Ethiopian and Eritrean military operation
in Tigray. That is precisely what happened, and too quickly to be a
response to the TPLF seizure of army outposts. Rather than starting
the conflict, Tigray’s regional government correctly perceived that
war had begun.

The question of how and why the war broke out goes far beyond the
events of a few days in early November 2020. Sarah Vaughan and Martin
Plaut’s book represents the first serious attempt at an account of
the conflict. They show that the war, which is mostly described in the
later chapters written by Plaut, can’t be explained without an
account of Ethiopia’s recent political history, which is principally
provided by Vaughan. Together they make an overwhelming case that the
Ethiopian government’s description of the war as a ‘law and
order’ operation against a disobedient and jilted political party is
simply false. In fact, it represented something much more significant:
a power struggle over the nature of the Ethiopian state, driven to
near genocidal heights by ‘calls to erase even the memory of
the TPLF and “those who resemble them”’.

The state​ founded by Menelik II in the late 19th century, and
dominated in the early 20th by Haile Selassie, was run as a
hereditary empire in which emperor and church owned a majority of
land. Political power was mostly held by a caste of Amhara, from the
north-west highlands. But did this represent the dramatic resurgence
of a historical Abyssinia made whole by the reincorporation of
truculent highlanders, or was it just another repressive modern
empire? Competing versions of this political-regional conflict would
play out on 21st-century battlefields.

The question was confounded by the two major Italian invasions of the
1890s and the 1930s. The first invasion led to Italian defeat; the
second, which ended in the Italian occupation of Tigray and Eritrea
between 1935 and 1941, was justified on the basis that it aimed to
liberate Oromo, Tigrayans and Muslims from Amharic-speaking Christian
domination – a line of thinking familiar from more recent
Anglo-American claims about the liberation of Hazaras and women in
Afghanistan. With this excuse, the Grenadiers of Savoy massacred
hundreds of Ethiopians in caves using arsine shells and mustard gas.
For Selassie, the lack of a powerful national centre meant that
Ethiopia risked predation by outside powers. His solution was to adopt
Amharic as the national administrative language and to attempt to
suppress sub-national identities. This was particularly difficult in
the northern areas of Tigray and Eritrea. In 1943 he put down a
Tigrayan peasant uprising, the Woyane rebellion, with some help
from RAF bombers strafing Mekele. But Selassie’s project also
provoked a reaction in favour of what Vaughan describes as ‘the
reconstitution of the imperial state along more decentralised
lines’, class and ethnicity chief among them.

Resistance to centralisation was most acute in Eritrea, which was
formally incorporated into the Ethiopian state in 1962. Its near
constant struggle for independence resulted in perhaps a quarter of a
million deaths over thirty years. But beyond Eritrea, the nations
remained enduring facts in Ethiopian society. In 1974, Selassie was
overthrown after a major drought-induced famine by the Derg,
officially the Provisional Military Administrative Council
– _derg_ means ‘committee’ – a small group of army officers
adhering to Marxist-Leninist principles. In theory nationalities were
better tolerated under the Derg than in the Selassie period. But it
was no coincidence that the best organised resistance to the Derg,
which held power between 1974 and 1991, came from the Eritrean
People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the TPLF, which was founded in
1975. In 1991, the TPLF’s victory began a new era in Ethiopian
history.

Its triumph was the result of battlefield acumen, political nous and
luck. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which had provided uneven
support for the Derg, certainly helped. But the TPLF had secured
important allies: the EPLF, which seized Asmara and declared an
independent Eritrea in 1993, and the groups that would come, with
the TPLF, to make up the EPRDF: the Southern Ethiopian People’s
Democratic Movement, the Oromo Democratic Party and the Amhara
Democratic Party. Given the nature of this coalition, it was
unsurprising that the new political settlement was based on federal
power-sharing. The charter signed in 1991 sought to establish a
settlement among the country’s ‘nations, nationalities and
peoples’. But drawing the internal boundaries was fraught. As in
1974, political rupture in Addis Ababa resurrected regional
insurgencies. The new government pursued a repressive campaign against
the nationalist Oromo Liberation Front. The Somali region was
prevented from holding a referendum on secession despite a clear
democratic mandate. The EPRDF’s detractors, whether pan-Ethiopian
or regional nationalists, saw it as a front for Tigrayan domination.

While multinational federations were disintegrating in Europe during
this period, in Ethiopia a new system of ethno-regional federalism was
established. The EPRDF system stressed autonomy, regional government
and self-determination, and lasted for almost three decades. Its
executive committee was composed of 36 members, with equal
representation from the four parties, though the TPLF held the
balance of power. The impetus for the federal system came principally
from Tigray, and for the bulk of this period the TPLF held the prime
ministership under Meles Zenawi, who was of Tigrayan and Eritrean
heritage. Other TPLF figures held many of the key national security
and military positions, but the multinational character of Ethiopia
was at least nominally reflected in its government and constitution.

The post-1991 Ethiopian state was politically repressive but
development-minded. Elections were non-competitive (and in 2005
fraudulent) but public works spending – especially on roads,
railways and electrification – led to GDP growth of 11 per cent
year on year between 2004 and 2014. Child mortality fell dramatically.
Life expectancy went from a miserable 45 to 65. There were no famines
of the kind seen in the 1970s and 1980s. But a federalism premised on
ethnicity rather than regional geography alone was bound to produce
problems. Significantly, the government failed to establish cordial
post-secession relations with Eritrea. In 1998 this culminated in a
bloody border dispute which, though the fighting ended two years
later, was never completely settled. Vaughan’s assessment is that
Meles was a ‘remarkably astute’ leader who delivered an economic
boom and alleviated poverty, but at the cost of all the contradictions
of vanguardism.

Like any multinational federation, the EPRDF was susceptible to the
criticism that its focus on ethno-regional autonomy stymied the
development of a national identity. Meles claimed to be creating ‘a
democratic developmental state’, but the reality was quite
different. After the 2005 elections, the EPRDF’s political
opponents, some of whom had based their campaigns on ethnic slurs,
were jailed and protesters rounded up or killed. When the dust
settled, Meles doubled down on public works and set about greatly
expanding the reach of the party into local
neighbourhoods. EPRDF membership grew to more than six million (in
Tigray almost a fifth of the population joined). Sometimes party
cadres were parachuted into remote areas where they were received as
overbearing outsiders. But Ethiopia’s overt rejection of Washington
consensus economics in favour of public investment-led growth had its
advantages.

When Meles​ died in 2012, the premiership passed to Hailemariam
Desalegn, a civil engineer from Welaiyta, in the south of the country.
Desalegn was a compromise candidate whose tenure saw a series of
splits in the party and its wholesale loss of authority.
The EPRDF was challenged at national level by both Pan-Ethiopianists
and ethnonationalist forces, notably the National Movement of Amhara.
Local politics began to be dominated by ethnic partisanship as regions
raised their own militias. The 2015 elections were farcical, even
compared to those in 2005. There was widespread civil unrest.
Sustained protests in Oromia led to a state of emergency being
declared there in 2016. By 2017, the Oromo and Somali regional
militias were skirmishing on the inter-state border. The Amhara
regional government renewed its claims to Western Tigray. Most
significant, in November 2017, the leaders of the Oromo and Amhara
parties held a party conference without the TPLF, at which the
president of the Oromia region, Lemma Megersa, called for a new
‘Ethiopianism’. Criticism of the TPLF became more ethnically
tinged. In effect, the EPRDF had fragmented. And because the party
was integral to the functioning of the state, the political crisis
that arrived in 2018 was unavoidable.

The 2016 Oromo uprisings had posed a major challenge to the existing
distribution of power, but they were also a reaction to the imbalances
in Ethiopia’s development. The EPRDF had imposed a market economy
with a developmental state on a predominantly agrarian society. In the
2010s, Meles had made attempts at industrialisation, but with little
success. In its place, the EPRDF relied on infrastructural
mega-projects, which required the expropriation of large amounts of
land. The growth of Addis Ababa led to the ravenous consumption of
what had been rural land, creating a constituency of disgruntled
former landowners, most of them Oromo. The state of emergency
suppressed the protest movement for a while. When it re-emerged in
late 2017 the situation became uncontrollable, and in February 2018
Desalegn resigned.

Abiy Ahmed portrayed himself as an insurgent, even though he had been
prominent in the new generation of EPRDF leaders. But he was Oromo,
and had come out early in support of the protest movement. In March
2018 he won election as EPRDF chairman partly on the strength of
that record. His charisma, along with his commitment to Pentecostal
Christianity, meant he had plenty of support. Once in office, Abiy
needed to present himself as a break with the past while keeping
enough of the political class onside to allow him to govern. He lit on
two solutions. The first was to adopt something close to the
pan-Ethiopianist position on the configuration of power between
central government and the regions. In place of decentralisation the
watchword would be _medemer_, or ‘synergy’. The second was to
target the TPLF as an illegitimate force that had to be excised from
political life. The EPRDF would be reformed, but without the TPLF,
which was held responsible for all of its past failings.

Many of Abiy’s early initiatives were popular. The state of
emergency was ended and political prisoners were released (though some
would soon end up back in prison). Dissidents including the leaders of
the 2005 protests and of the militant party Ginbot 7, were offered
amnesty and returned from exile in Eritrea. Among the educated middle
class, support for the Abiy project was strong. The establishment of a
new Republican Guard signalled a more centralised political order. In
November 2019, the EPRDF was rebranded as the Prosperity Party. Abiy
brought in former World Bank officials as advisers and began to
privatise state-owned industries (the latest target is Ethio Telecom).
The IMF declared that he had ‘created space for a more inclusive
political dialogue and ... taken steps to bring stability to the
region’. Exaggerated stories that the new Ethiopia was planting
billions of trees to save the climate were lapped up in Washington and
Brussels.

The Tigrayan political elite was represented as an insidious ethnic
dictatorship, and opposition to Abiy’s ‘reforms’ framed as
Tigrayan plotting. But Abiy’s ambitions weren’t limited to
eliminating the TPLF as a political force. In 2018 he removed the
presidents of the Somali, Gambela and Afar regions. There were
outbreaks of ethnic violence from the Somali/Afar border all the way
to Benishangul-Gumuz in the west. The (Tigrayan) former head of the
army, General Se’are Mekonnen, was assassinated. Abiy also turned on
the Oromo movement that had supported his rise. Military operations in
the west of the region stretched to extrajudicial executions. The
killing of the Oromo musician Hachalu Hundessa sparked riots; the
government’s response was an internet blackout and a round of
arrests. The icon of the 2016 protests, the Oromo activist Jawar
Mohammed, was hauled into court on terrorism charges. In 2019
considerable intercommunal violence in the Amhara region resulted in
at least 130 deaths.

Outside Ethiopia, Abiy was still being treated as a liberal reformer,
the toast of the World Economic Forum. The Ethiopian ambassador to
Washington explained in April 2019 that any problems were merely
‘side effects’ of Abiy’s vision. But as Vaughan writes,
‘beneath the attractive veneer of speedy reforms’ Ethiopian
politics had become poisonous. By 2020, any remaining senior Tigrayan
political figures had left Addis for what they believed was the safety
of Mekele, where the TPLF still had strong support. Invited to write
an essay in the _Economist_ in September 2020, Abiy talked of
democracy and the need for a ‘pluralistic political order’. Before
the end of the year he had launched the country into a full-scale war.

The assault​ on the Tigray region came from the Ethiopian army to
the south and the Eritrean army (with some Somali reinforcements) to
the north, assisted by regional security forces from Amhara province
to the south-west. Two million people were forcibly displaced in the
first few weeks. Systematic looting was widespread and
the UN recorded more than two thousand cases of sexual violence in
the first eight months. Doctors without Borders documented attacks on
hospitals and health facilities across Tigray, some of which were
occupied by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. In June 2021, an
Ethiopian government airstrike on the village of Togoga killed 64
people. In the historic city of Aksum, the Eritrean army massacred as
many as four hundred people, whose bodies were transported for burial
‘five to ten at a time’ in carts driven by local volunteers.
Refugee camps at Hitsats and Shimelba were destroyed in fighting
between Eritrean and Tigrayan forces and then razed by the Eritrean
army. A UN building was burned to the ground.

Within months, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network reported that
most of Tigray was experiencing a food emergency, as it still is.
Tigray’s three rivers (the Tekeze, Giba and Mereb) ought to provide
more than enough water, but more than half the delivery infrastructure
– wells, pumps, dams – was destroyed in the fighting. The
hydropower station on the Tekeze was attacked. Phone lines and
electricity supplies were cut. A fuel shortage paralysed Mekele, where
dregs traded at $60 a litre. Foreign journalists were expelled. Abiy
attempted to defund the UN International Commission of Human Rights
Experts on Ethiopia, set up to investigate human rights violations. It
was thanks to the few local journalists who were able to report from
Mekele during the war that any information reached the outside world.

Abiy’s reputation abroad held up in part because he knew what
American and European leaders wanted to hear. But they had also been
impressed by the normalisation of relations with Eritrea – which won
Abiy the Nobel. After twenty years of conflict, it was understandable
that a peace deal would be well received. Yet there was little
analysis of how and why the diplomatic breakthrough had come about.
The deal had been helped along by the US assistant secretary of
state for Africa, Donald Yamamoto, who conducted shuttle diplomacy
between Asmara and Addis in the spring of 2018.
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, had made it clear
that UN sanctions on Eritrea could be lifted if a peace deal were
achieved. Under the deal Ethiopia ceded its territorial claims against
Eritrea and hostilities were formally ended. Was the simple fact that
the TPLF wasn’t in power enough to end decades of conflict?

There’s a strong possibility that the deal with Eritrea and the
subsequent war in Tigray prosecuted by Addis Ababa and Asmara
weren’t unrelated. Abiy and Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s president,
began to meet regularly – more than a dozen times in two years. In
January 2019 they travelled together to Humera-Omhajer, the triple
border crossing between Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, for a meeting
with the Tigrayan leader, Debretsion Gebremichael. What happened at
the meeting is unclear, but Isaias later admitted that after the
Humera-Omhajer summit he began preparations for the war in Tigray.
Plaut tracks meetings in early 2020 between Abiy, Isaias and the
president of Somalia, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, which he argues were
the basis for a military alliance. Farmaajo sent between five and ten
thousand Somali troops to Eritrea in advance of the war.

Unlike Ethiopia, Eritrea experienced economic stagnation after 1991,
as well as comprehensive political repression. In an earlier
book, _Understanding Eritrea: Inside Africa’s Most Repressive
State_ (2017), Plaut tried to explain why the EPLF and TPLF, which
came to power in the same year, took such different paths. The
critical factor, he suggested, was the character of Isaias, who has
led the EPLF since 1987 and been president since 1993. Under him,
Eritrea became an autocratic martial state. It seems clear that he
wanted to settle scores with the Tigrayans: in Asmara the memories of
the 1998 border war had never faded and Isaias blamed the TPLF for
the UN sanctions imposed on Eritrea in 2009. When Desalegn resigned
in 2018, he gloated that it was ‘game over’ for the TPLF. By
2020, Tigray was sandwiched between the government in Addis, Eritrea
and Amhara – which didn’t hide its desire to relitigate its claims
to the regional border area in western Tigray. In July 2020 Abiy
visited Eritrea’s main military training facility in Sawa. Isaias
inspected the troops at Ethiopia’s air force base south-east of
Addis. Abiy’s claim that the war was a messy security operation
caused by the TPLF attack on northern command posts is laughable.

For​ the first five months of the conflict neither the Ethiopian nor
Eritrean governments admitted that the Eritrean army was involved. Yet
it moved en masse, cutting off access to Sudan to the west and
annexing some territory for good measure. With their Somali
reinforcements, Eritrean forces advanced from the border towards Adwa.
Amhara militia entered Tigray from the south-west. Tigrayan forces
were surrounded. The Ethiopian assault on Mekele on 28 November met
with little resistance and within 24 hours the city had been taken.
Tigray’s regional government opted for a strategic retreat to the
hills. There was a high cost in civilian casualties, with systemic
sexual violence perpetrated by the advancing forces.

Tigrayan military action was at first limited to taking pot shots at
Eritrea and Amhara using missiles seized from the Ethiopian army’s
northern command. When Mekele fell, Ethiopian forces installed a
puppet governor. But the war spread across the entire region, with
Tigrayan forces continuing to operate out of towns and villages. From
the constellation of towns south and west of Mekele their forces could
ambush government troops moving along the main roads. There seems
little doubt that Tigrayan forces conducted massacres of their own in
the west of the province. In Mai Kadra hundreds of civilians were
killed with machetes and small arms. Plaut expresses doubts about
these events, noting the difficulty of investigating the site, but the
evidence that exists all points in the same direction. Village
massacres, not only perpetrated by the government, became a grim
feature of the war.

The TPLF had retreated, but it had not capitulated. Ethiopian
government forces entrenched themselves in Mekele, but by the spring
of 2021, TPLF forces were organised enough to contest pitched
battles across Tigray. They were also able to strike at Amhara militia
positions across the regional border. These small successes aided the
general mobilisation announced by the TPLF leadership at the
beginning of the year. Tigrayan forces were suddenly reinforced by
large numbers of volunteers to the newly formed Tigray Defence Forces
(TDF). The initial assault was primarily carried out by Ethiopian
infantry in ill-fitting fatigues, now the Tigrayan response would be
fought by a popular army of hastily trained civilian recruits: tanners
and shopkeepers, peasants and doctors, whipped into shape in the hills
west of Mekele.

By the end of May, the tide had begun to turn in Tigray’s favour.
Its first major victories over the Ethiopian army took place in June,
when the TDF repeatedly routed the Ethiopian army on the road
between Agbe and Yechila, capturing large amounts of artillery. This
was hard fighting but it made attacks on larger towns in central
Tigray possible. Ethiopian forces in Mekele and the interim regional
government there began to plan an exit, burning documents and
withdrawing security forces from the city. Within a week the TDF had
taken control of much of the highway north and south of Mekele. On 28
June they triumphantly re-entered the capital, marching captured
Ethiopian soldiers through the central streets to jeering crowds.

Retaking Tigray was a great victory, but the region remained
surrounded and the humanitarian situation dire. Cut off from essential
supplies and services, their only option was to try to break the
siege. Tigrayan forces headed south and won battles against tired
Ethiopian and Eritrean troops. After capturing Alamata,
the TDF crossed the Tekeze into Amhara. Another detachment headed
east into the Afar flatlands. By the end of July they were fighting
across north-central Ethiopia. Buoyed by their successes,
the TDF headed south towards Addis, winning battle after battle.
Again the fighting was hard: in Chenna, Tigrayan forces massacred
civilians, executing many who were already held in custody. They blew
through Ethiopian federal and Amhara forces at Weldiya and captured
the airport at Lalibela. In Addis there was panic. Among the Tigrayan
leadership the talk was of overthrowing the government and trying for
a repeat of 1991.

With the TDF bearing down on the town of Dessie north of Addis, the
capture of which had led to the fall of the Derg in 1991, there
appeared to be a real threat to Abiy’s government. In late November,
the TDF surged towards Debre Sina, 75 miles from the capital, but it
would go no further. Plaut endorses the view that drones supplied to
the Ethiopian government by China, Iran and Turkey were critical in
halting the advance. Most of the Tigrayan troops were approaching
Addis down a single road, the A2, and it was easy for Ethiopian forces
to strike them from the air with Mohajer-6, Bayraktar TB2 and
Chinese Wing Loong drones. But there are other possible explanations.
The TDF advance forced the Ethiopian army into a mobilisation of its
own, significantly increasing its numbers. The Tigrayans were
overstretched. Ethiopian forces were now able to counter-attack from
Afar in the east. It’s possible that old DshK machine guns were just
as important as drones. And the balance of forces was not in the
Tigrayans’ favour. The TDF was forced into a full retreat.

The Ethiopian government re-established the siege to devastating
effect. The level of destruction was already considerable. Hospitals
and clinics had been destroyed or looted. Tigrayan forces had
sabotaged the airport at Aksum by digging trenches in the runway. In
Tigray itself food became scarce even for the most privileged; doctors
tried to keep the hospitals running while having to queue for food
parcels. The UN kept complaining that the famine was a ‘stain on
our conscience’ which could easily be remedied if the Ethiopian
government lifted the blockade. Instead, Abiy expelled UN workers.
Flights by the UN’s airline, UNHAS, were suspended in October
2021. In March 2022 the Ethiopian government finally announced a
‘humanitarian truce’, but according to the Tigray regional
government only a small amount of food aid actually came through. At
least 400,000 people were facing famine.

While the blockade continued, the Ethiopian government was preparing
for another major assault. In August 2022 Abiy tried to bring the war
to a conclusive end. One Ethiopian general claimed that more than
130,000 were killed in battle over the next ten weeks. Plaut says the
Eritrean forces adopted ‘a scorched earth policy of comprehensive
destruction and looting’. Heavy artillery was used to bombard
Tigrayan towns indiscriminately. Ethiopia’s sixth and eighth
commands, together with three divisions of Amhara special forces and
thousands of Amhara militia, attempted to overrun the southern front.
In September, government forces launched a full-scale offensive in the
south of Tigray. The city of Shire was taken by government forces with
ground forces and Soviet-made field artillery. The TDF was beaten
back from Adwa and Aksum and into a full retreat. Plaut says the
losses on both sides were ‘extraordinary, with tens of thousands
killed and wounded’.

Ethiopian and Eritrean forces did not occupy Mekele again, but the
Tigrayans were forced to sue for peace. In the usual fashion, warring
factions went quickly from claiming that negotiation with the enemy
was treachery to admitting its necessity. On 2 November 2022,
representatives of the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan political
leadership signed a ‘permanent cessation of hostilities agreement’
in Pretoria. The TPLF had to accept unfavourable terms. It was
forced into a symbolic acknowledgment that it had had no right to call
regional elections. Federal military forces would return to Tigray,
and the TPLF agreed to surrender its heavy weapons, acquiescing on
condition that Eritrean and Amhara forces withdrew from the region,
but Eritrean soldiers were still in northern Tigray months after the
Pretoria agreement was signed. All the same, there was no new puppet
government in Mekele. And, despite Abiy’s wishes,
the TPLF leadership didn’t end up in prison.

During​ the Tigrayan war, neither side had access to what military
analysts call Group 1-3 UAVs, the class of reconnaissance drones that
has proved so effective in Ukraine, allowing troop positions and
artillery batteries to be quickly located and targeted, resulting in
slow-moving advances and stalemate. In Ethiopia, things moved much
faster. Massed armies met in major battles along shifting fronts.
Militia raided freely. Civilians in captured villages and towns were
exposed to the excesses of armed divisions. It’s still impossible to
know exactly how many people were killed.

In December 2021, the UN commissioned a team – Kaari Betty
Murungi, Steven Ratner and Radhika Coomaraswamy – to investigate
violations of international humanitarian law during the war. But the
Ethiopian government refused them access to anywhere except Addis
Ababa, and the Eritrean government refused to engage at all. Tigray
was subject to a communications blackout, which made it difficult even
to conduct remote interviews. The UN team nonetheless found evidence
of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Amhara, Tigrayan forces
had executed civilians (Human Rights Watch found that Amhara militia
members had systematically killed or evicted hundreds of thousands of
people in western Tigray). After an Ethiopian airstrike on the
marketplace in Togoga in June 2021, the army had prevented ambulances
from reaching the area. The residents of Humera and the surrounding
area had been forcibly displaced to a refugee camp in Dedebit. In
January 2022 a drone strike on the camp had killed about sixty
refugees, leaving ‘dismembered bodies and human flesh hanging from
trees’. These were just a few of the atrocities found by a
circumscribed investigation.

The UN Security Council had for the most part been uninterested in
what was going on until the Tigrayan advance on Addis Ababa in
November 2021, when it called for a cessation of hostilities. China
and Russia backed Abiy. The US was very supportive of Abiy at first.
In the early days of the war, when the Eritrean army was rampaging
across the north, it condemned the Tigrayans for trying to
‘internationalise the conflict’. The UAE, over which the US has
influence, supported and armed Ethiopia and Eritrea through the
war’s critical phases. Under Biden, minor sanctions were imposed on
some Ethiopian, Eritrean and TPLF officials. But the war was never a
priority for the US government. In September 2021, Abiy published an
open letter to Biden complaining about the world’s failure ‘to
openly and sternly reprimand the terrorist group [the TPLF] in the
same manner it has been chastising my government’. Meanwhile, one of
his advisers was giving speeches calling for the ground in Tigray to
be made incapable of sustaining ‘weeds’.

The EU appointed a special envoy, the Finnish foreign minister Pekka
Haavisto, but Europe for the most part confined itself to boilerplate
statements of concern; its attention was focused on the war in
Ukraine. The British government’s special envoy for famine
prevention, Nick Dyer, visited Tigray in May 2021. Laudable – but it
did nothing to prevent the blockade. Plaut is wrong to describe these
limited moves by the international community as constituting a
full-blown ‘attempt to halt the war’. The African Union dispatched
observers to Ethiopia’s 2021 elections even though they were being
held during a civil war. In the middle of the war the US State
Department published its country strategy for Ethiopia, which declared
that the conflict had ‘not altered the strategic logic of a healthy
and vibrant US-Ethiopia partnership’. In March last year, Antony
Blinken visited Addis to reaffirm relations with Abiy now that the
dust had settled. There was, Blinken said, to be a new ‘commitment
to partnership’. This month Ethiopia joined BRICS.

In Tigray, the damage has been deep. More atrocities have been covered
up than investigated. Farmers lost cattle and crops. The power supply
to the region remains unreliable. In its final report before the
investigation was unceremoniously terminated, the UN noted that
‘the conflict in Tigray has not ended, with Eritrean troops and
Amhara militias engaging in ongoing violations.’ Getachew Reda, who
signed the armistice agreement in Pretoria, heads Tigray’s interim
administration. During the war, exigency tempered discontent with the
politically exhausted TPLF, but now it is being challenged by other
Tigrayan political groups, which hold Reda and the TPLF partly
responsible for the destruction. Federal government security forces
have returned to Tigray, and international media are still largely
prevented from reporting. There are restrictions on Tigrayans
travelling out of the region. Last May, the World Food Programme
suspended food aid to Tigray after disbursements were stolen. Hundreds
have died of starvation since then.

A central argument in Vaughan and Plaut’s account is that
Eritrea’s role in the conflict has been underestimated. That’s
true – but we should not underplay the extent to which this was
Abiy’s war. Plaut writes that Eritrea gained ‘a remarkable level
of influence over the Ethiopian domestic political sphere’. What
neither he nor Vaughan appears to have anticipated was that Abiy would
spread the war across the rest of Ethiopia. Without help or prodding
from Eritrea, Abiy has since conducted major campaigns in Oromia, Afar
and Amhara. On 4 August 2023, he declared a six-month national state
of emergency. After fighting with Amharan militia against the
Tigrayans, Ethiopian government forces have now turned on them. Abiy
is trying to incorporate regional military forces into the national
security apparatus, but this has proved impossible without violence.

The Abiy project has disinterred old antinomies that have their own
destructive logic. Rather than a balanced multinational federation, or
a recentralised federal state, Ethiopia has become the site of a
series of regional conflicts. Abiy emerged from the war emboldened.
Last summer he announced plans for a new $10 billion presidential
complex, intended to fulfil a prophecy, made by his mother, that he
would become the seventh king of Ethiopia. On 13 October he declared
that the country had a right to port access to the Red Sea. By 2030,
he said, Ethiopia’s population would be 150 million, 25 per cent
more than it is now; it wouldn’t do for them to live in a
‘geographic prison’. What he had in mind was unclear: a port
access agreement, or a slice of land leading to the sea? On 1 January,
he signed a memorandum with the breakaway regime in Somaliland,
trading diplomatic recognition for ‘access’ to the port of
Berbera. The Somalian government, which had supported Abiy in Tigray,
recalled its ambassador and on 8 January its president, Hassan Sheikh
Mohamud, travelled to Asmara for discussions with Isaias. Neither of
them was happy about Abiy’s talk of ‘geographic prisons’. Not
satisfied by continuous conflict within Ethiopia, Abiy seems to want a
regional crisis.

TOM STEVENSON is a contributing editor at the _London Review of
Books_ where he writes about energy, defence and international
politics. He has reported from Ukraine, the Middle East and North
Africa for the _LRB_, _Times Literary Supplement_, _Financial
Times_ and the BBC.

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