Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray war.INTRODUCTION LAND, POWER AND EMPIRE Sarah Vaughan and Martin Plaut

Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray war.

INTRODUCTION LAND, POWER AND EMPIRE 

Sarah Vaughan and Martin Plaut

 During the night of 3/4 November 2020, the first shots were fired in a brutal war between the government of the regional state of Tigray and the government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. On this single fact most accounts agree, but on little or nothing else. The dominant narrative of the war, pushed strongly by government spokespersons in Addis Ababa, is that it was a limited ‘law and order’ operation by the federal government and its allies to arrest a small group or ‘junta’ of rogue Tigrayans (soon labelled ‘terrorists’) in the northern regional state: the leaders of its ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The war was—in the Ethiopian federal government’s view—the fault of this ‘traitorous gang’, an ‘illegal clique’ who had ‘treasonously’ attacked units of the Ethiopian national army stationed on their northern border with Eritrea. Seeing ‘a red line crossed’, the federal government then moved to ‘save the country and the region from spiralling into instability’. The narrative of prime minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has been simple, clear, pervasive and persuasive. From the first hours of the war, it was repeated endlessly and, on the face of it, seemed to be widely believed by many Ethiopians and international observers: but, like the claim that the ‘operation’ would be completed within three weeks, the narrative was false. It disguised more than it illuminated. The Ethiopian government and its allies’ occupation and devastation of Tigray in November and December 2020 had been long in the preparation and gestation. What the government portrayed as a treasonous plot by a faction in Tigray can also be seen as the result of the long-held ambition of their opponents to eliminate the Tigrayans as a political force. This plan, conceived at least partly in Eritrea, was further developed after 2018 together with Ethiopia’s newly appointed prime minister, Abiy, and others from Ethiopia, and also involved the government of Somalia. From the first, the conflict was more than just an Ethiopian civil war: Eritrean and Somali troops participated in the fighting. Their preparations were low-key, and some aspects of military planning were carefully concealed, although the rhetoric was not. What the Ethiopian premier insisted was a ‘domestic matter’ would soon be seen for what it was: a war involving international combatants from two neighbouring states, which at times threatened to embroil other Horn neighbours, including Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti. Close observers knew that war was coming—and just how devastating it would be. Six months before it erupted, veteran Tigrayan exile and former military strategist Siye Abraha warned from the US that, if fighting were to start, it will be a full-fledged war. No one will have any idea where it will end. We can already see the interference of foreign forces in our country and the war of words being waged on social media. We are seeing it daily, are we not? If we once allow real bullets to be added on top of this verbal violence, our entire country will degenerate into a cheap bar for the amusement of all our most meddling and insolent neighbours. We will be inflicting harm on one another not just with words on social media but with kalashnikovs. Anyone who thinks it is safe to play with this kind of fire, counting on their tanks and heavy weaponry to be able to come out on top, will themselves get burned. These aren’t idle words: my warning is based on my personal experience of war, and what I know of the current situation in our region.1 Siye was right. The outbreak of hostilities came as a surprise to few close observers, but the ferocity of the onslaught was unexpected and appalled many. The war had been carefully prepared over several years, but its causes drew on wellsprings of bitterness and resentment deep in collective memories of the history and politics of the region. Many accounts would have it that the TPLF were simply ‘bad losers’: piqued to see their star waning after they had been displaced from power at the centre in 2018, and jealous of the neo-liberal ‘reforms’ and ‘peace-making’ of the new prime minister, Abiy, a popular national leader and soon also a Nobel laureate. But the drivers of the war reach back far beyond the immediate period. In the minds of its protagonists they were entangled in long-standing patterns of power, land and empire across—and beyond—the Ethiopian state. This book explores these historical memories and resources and their continuing relevance and remobilisation during the Tigray war. These apparently deep and intertwined roots make this a particularly intractable conflict. The war has brought a complex—and shifting—constellation of allies into play on either side. Running centrally through the motivation for war is a profound dispute over the nature of the Ethiopian state and the balance of power across it: should Ethiopia be centralised at the national level, or decentralised and devolved to its constituent peoples, and how? Where should the balance of power lie? This argument itself has a long history—and it mobilised interpretations of the history of a much longer period. Complicating this central power struggle are a number of other dynamics: contemporary land hunger and the creation of opportunities—and ‘historical’ excuses—for its forcible annexation; the desire for revenge and score-settling for past injustices, real or perceived; perceptions of the betrayal of promises of ‘reform’ or ‘inclusion’ under a new government established in 2018; and deeply entrenched historical stereotyping and socio-cultural prejudice. The sustainable resolution of the war depends on the emergence of a new equilibrium in the constellation of power, in the control of land, and in the shape of the Ethiopian empire state. Given the degree of controversy and polarisation that had become associated with each of these issues, this kind of outcome was increasingly hard to envisage in 2022. The weight of Ethiopian history suggests that settlement of such disputes could be (and usually was) ‘enforced’ by military means (at least for a cycle of thirty to fifty years). As a result, a negotiated consensus remained vanishingly unlikely throughout 2021 and into early 2022. This book is about a current war and a long history. It situates the Tigray war in the context of an oscillating pattern of political power in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: a pendulum swinging between centralising and decentralising influences over many decades—arguably in flux over millennia. One factor that distinguishes several of these areas of the Horn from much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is their close ties across the Red Sea. Several of the region’s cultures and languages are tied to the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Middle East. Parts of what are now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea were relatively unusual in having developed written languages and records over time. These allowed its elites and historians to trace (or reinvent) the roots of power back through the centuries in a way few other sub-Saharan African societies have been able to. It meant that rights and lineages could be traced and disputed down the generations, with apparently long-held divisions smouldering for years before being reinvented, reignited and fought over. History is never over in Ethiopia, and the brutality of its contestation is a remarkably persistent pattern across enduring ‘frontiers of violence’.2 Richard Reid has explored ‘how force of arms was an extension of polity and economy, and a very practical instrument for construction as well as destruction; and how war was understood and interpreted, how military culture came to be imbued in society, and how the past was remembered in military terms’.3 Like Reid, the analysis of this book is ‘interested in both war as fact and war as image, war as policy alongside war as constructed truth’.4 The argument is not that Ethiopia’s violent history led inexorably to the Tigray war: it did not. It is rather that their different interpretations of Ethiopia’s history tended to lock the antagonists of the war into particular patterns of relations with one another. The point is not that one needs to understand Ethiopia’s history in order to understand Ethiopia’s Tigray war. Rather, one needs an understanding of the multiple ways in which different aspects of Ethiopia’s history have been differently understood by the contemporary parties to the war; and of how and why these different understandings made them antagonists. In a country as large, populous and diverse as Ethiopia, with such plural understanding of the significance of its history, generating this understanding is a complex business. This book is structured into five distinct parts designed to increase the accessibility of this intricate story. Part One, ‘History’, recounts controversies over the essentials of Ethiopia’s long history which are centrally implicated in Ethiopians’ various understandings of the war in which the whole country is—to one degree or another—now embroiled. Part Two, ‘Living Memory’, examines the most recent cycle of political history, the evolution of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) federal period from 1991 to 2018, during which the protagonists emerged. Part Three, ‘Path to War’, discusses the whirlwind drama of frenetic domestic change and regional political upheaval as tension mounted during the first two and a half years of Abiy Ahmed’s premiership, from April 2018 to November 2020. Part Four, ‘War’, gives a detailed account of the outbreak of the conflict, and of the 14 months of military activity during 2020 and 2021. Finally, Part Five, ‘Impact of War’, looks at the devastating damage to society and economy primarily (but not only) in Tigray, at the humanitarian crisis caused by the way the war was waged, and at its diplomatic fallout internationally. Tigray was a focus of empire during the early Axumite period (roughly 100–940 CE) when a growing trading power was centred on the towns of Yeha and Axum at the heart of the region. This apparently more centralised pattern of power dissipated, fractured and re-coalesced over the centuries. One focus of this fissiparous pattern shifted to Gonder, with Tigray again at the margins. In the nineteenth century a series of gradually centralising emperors again began an incremental process of consolidation away from the highly decentralised constellation of power of the so-called Era of Princes (1769–1855). Tigray was intimately involved in the processes by which the modern Ethiopian empire state was formed and its current borders established. After Emperor Tewodros’s suicide (r. 1855–68), Tigrayan emperor Yohannes IV (r. 1869–89) then consolidated Abyssinia’s western flank, defeating the Mahdist forces of Sudan in 1885.5 After his death, power shifted south to the province of Shewa from where Emperor Menelik II (r. 1889–1913) transformed the empire, producing approximately the borders of Ethiopia familiar today. Menelik had observed the imperial ambitions of European powers, and in a decade of military campaigning (1879–89) he expanded his direct and indirect rule over vast swathes of territory to the west, south and east of the highlands. Menelik’s Amhara and Oromo forces moved south-east and south-west to conquer the southern plateau and lowland peripheries, incorporating myriad Oromo, Southern and pastoral communities within Ethiopia’s borders. In so doing he incorporated dozens of new peoples, with very different traditions. Many of his new subjects were Muslim, with cultures far removed from those of the predominantly Christian Orthodox highlands. Some had traditionally been enslaved by highland Ethiopians and were treated with the racism that slavery brings with it. The empire thus forcefully established ‘sowed the seeds of future conflicts’.6 Meanwhile, in the north, in March 1896, Ethiopian forces inflicted on Italy one of the few defeats by an African power on a European state at the famous battle at Adwa, blocking further Italian encroachment. Nevertheless, on 2 May 1889 Menelik II signed the treaty of Wuchale which recognised Italian rule over the coastal region of Eritrea. This saw the Tigrigna-speaking population of the northern highlands bifurcated along the Mereb River. The northern half remained—as Eritrea—under Italian occupation. The southern half, Tigray, became a new periphery broadly external to Ethiopia’s centre of power for the next century. After the Second World War, Haile Selassie I (r. 1930–74) pushed through a second process of modernisation and centralisation which further curbed the power of the regional aristocracy and landowning classes that the nineteenth-century expansion had established. Under his rule Ethiopia also experienced a second Italian attempt to conquer Ethiopia (1935–41), which was eventually defeated with British help during the Second World War. In both Italian attempts to invade Ethiopia, Eritrean troops—known as ‘askaris’—fought alongside the Italians. They were conscripts, but their role in these wars was not forgotten. A second chapter on history (Chapter 2) looks at the emergence of twentieth-century challenges to the empire. Emperor Haile Selassie moved incrementally in the middle decades of the twentieth century to undermine a compromise Ethio-Eritrean federation that had been cobbled together in the post-war period, and resentment began to coalesce as Eritrea was re-annexed. In 1961 the first shots were fired in Eritrea’s 30-year struggle for independence. During the feverish period of Marxist politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, emancipation and self-determination slogans swept like a contagion through Ethiopia’s growing student movements. A new and radical generation of activists agreed on the need for reform of a ‘feudal’ socio-economic order, which would return land rights ‘to the tiller’. They disagreed violently over the prominence and power to be given to the different ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ identities which made up the population. This visceral divide has riven Ethiopian politics ever since. Rigid centralisation under the ageing emperor saw politics stagnate in the late imperial period, but the ‘creeping coup’ of 1974 brought a very different centralist government to power. The Derg (r. 1974–91), a military committee, espoused Marxism as a vehicle for mobilisation—domestically, but also in its post-1977 alliance with the Soviet Union. Radical land reform did much to diffuse popular opposition in rural areas, especially in the Oromo areas and the south of the country. Meanwhile an intensification of the Derg’s ‘Ethiopia first’ (Etyopia tikdem) rhetoric of pan-Ethiopian unitary nationalism and centralised control exacerbated a series of subnational conflicts. Nationalist and ethno-nationalist movements gradually gained momentum in different parts of the empire state: in Eritrea (annexed by Ethiopia in 1962 after a decade of federation), but now also in the Somali and Afar areas of the lowland east, in parts of Oromia, and along the far western borders with Sudan, in Sidama, and in Tigray. The present Ethiopian state is a peculiar combination of African and European norms. On its northern Abyssinian plateau it evolved over the longue durée from a series of indigenous and long-standing political communities at its centre, very much along the lines of European states. At the peripheries, meanwhile, its borders look just as much the arbitrary result of nineteenth-century imperial expansion as elsewhere in Africa: in this case, competition between Emperor Menelik II and his Italian, British, French or Anglo-Egyptian neighbours.7 Communities living on Ethiopia’s peripheries straddled these arbitrarily drawn borders. In the context of Cold War competition, many drew on support from the neighbouring states of the Horn, breathing new life into a well-entrenched mantra according to which ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Compared with the rest of the African continent, the Horn of Africa is home to a particularly high concentration of secessionist and irredentist claims. Many of these were fed by the unique history of modern Ethiopian state formation.8 Cold War competition made matters worse as the US and the Soviet Union juggled allies, and Eritrean anti-colonialism was infectious. During the late 1970s and 1980s the remote mountainous areas of rural Tigray were home to a number of different kinds of movements all fighting the Derg government: remnants of the aristocracy seeking a return to the imperial order; a pan-Ethiopianist leftist opposition grouping; and the ethno-nationalist TPLF. Tigray and other parts of the north of Ethiopia experienced a devastating famine, greatly exacerbated—if not caused—by the manner of the Derg’s counterinsurgency strategy against the rebels. By the end of the 1980s the TPLF had forged an alliance with other groupings under the banner of the EPRDF. As support for the Derg from the Soviet bloc now began to fail, and the army was left reeling from an attempted coup in 1989, the military pendulum swung away from the centre. The EPRDF fought its way south in a tactical alliance with the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) of Isaias Afwerki. In coordinated EPRDF and Eritrean offensives, Asmara fell to the Eritreans on 24 May 1991; four days later Ethiopian rebel troops, supported by Eritrean artillery, captured Addis Ababa. With Eritrea seceding de facto in 1991 (de jure after a referendum in 1993), the new EPRDF-led government in Addis Ababa now adopted a system of federalism based on the ‘self-determination of nations, nationalities and peoples’ in the Leninist phrase. Part Two of this book looks in closer detail at this most recent cycle of Ethiopia’s political history: the period well within living memory, from 1991 to 2018, during which the contemporary protagonists of the Tigray war began to evolve and their grievances deepened. Chapter 3 looks at the period from 1991 to 2012. Ethiopia’s system of multinational or ‘ethnic’ federalism drew together representatives of many of the various language groups across Ethiopia which had—to one degree or another—opposed the Derg government. However, it excluded members of the Derg’s Workers’ Party of Ethiopia (WPE), along with key pan-Ethiopian nationalist organisations that had opposed them. These groups joined the new Eritrean government in condemning the federal arrangement as a system of ‘divide and rule’ that would weaken the Ethiopian state, along the lines of the former Yugoslavia, which in the early 1990s was disintegrating in violent fashion. The Derg’s imperial opponents and its victims had fled abroad during the 1970s; Derg officials now fled the EPRDF’s new federation, consolidating a vociferous and sustained diaspora opposition chorus. Two blocs of domestic opposition to EPRDF and to federalism gradually emerged through the 1990s. Pan-Ethiopianist nationalists loathed the imposition of the federal arrangement, deriding it as intrinsically divisive and as undermining the narrative power of Ethiopia’s ancient history. Meanwhile, several of the other ethno-nationalist groups which had also fought the Derg and also supported the federation were manoeuvred out of power by the ruling party in the 1990s. They complained that federal practice fell far short of constitutional principle; that it was in effect ‘fake’, serving as a cover for continued control by the centre, now under an EPRDF apparatus dominated by Tigrayan politicians. Important ethno-nationalist groups representing the Oromo, the Somali and the Sidama left government and returned to armed opposition. By the early 2000s, the pan-Ethiopianist bloc launched a concerted process of political mobilisation in an attempt to unseat the ruling EPRDF. In highly contested elections in 2005, its parties won an overwhelming majority of seats in Addis Ababa and a number of other multi-ethnic cities, and a large number of seats also in Amhara and in the Gurage zone of the Southern region. Believing that the ruling EPRDF had stolen what it claimed was an overall national victory, pan-Ethiopianist opponents boycotted parliament, and the standoff ended in violence, mass arrests and prosecutions. Key nationalist leaders finally went abroad and joined their militant ethno-nationalist colleagues in ‘armed struggle’, in many cases based in Eritrea. Barely five years after Eritrean independence, relations between the new government in Asmara and the EPRDF Ethiopian government had soured and erupted into another brutal round of bloodletting along the northern border (1998–2000). In the cold-war standoff that followed the Ethio-Eritrean war, EPRDF’s political adversaries won military training and logistical support from an Eritrean government hostile to Addis Ababa and Mekele. Asmara had been stung by its military defeat in 2000; it seethed over Ethiopia’s refusal to cede the contested border town of Badme under the Algiers accords; and it resented the imposition of UN sanctions in 2009, in which it saw the hand of the TPLF-led Ethiopian government. Eritrea emerged as a third vehement opponent of federalism and of the TPLF, working consistently to undermine both. Chapter 4 examines the period after the unexpected death of the Tigrayan EPRDF leader and prime minister, Meles Zenawi, in 2012. Between 2012 and 2018 the cohesion of the EPRDF began to dissolve and, under weaker leadership, differences between the four constituent fronts began to emerge. Mutual recrimination and jockeying between Amhara and Tigrayan politicians became particularly vicious—even if kept mostly away from the public eye. Claims about land and border disputes between the two regions were remobilised, and exacerbated tensions between the two blocs. Arguably the most significant of the policy problems of federalism began to become pressing: its static allocation of land between ethnically defined federated units. As Ethiopia’s economy and its population grew, pressure on arable land intensified, and nowhere more visibly than in and around the land-poor and densely populated regions of the old Abyssinian north. This included commercially valuable fertile land in the western peripheries (Gambella and Benishangul-Gumuz), but also—and explosively—in the border areas of western and southern Tigray. As demography and economy shifted, the federal dispensation did not. Ruling politicians in Amhara began to see this as a potential focus for shoring up their popular support in the region, which the 2005 elections had exposed as shaky. Political mobilisation in several of the EPRDF-administered regions had been relatively cautiously managed during the 1990s and 2000s. It now began to take on an overtly and competitively ethnicised tone, as regional politicians sought shortcuts to bolster their constituencies as power at the centre began to fracture. Amhara’s EPRDF ruling politicians faced new challenges from ethno-nationalist competitors, eventually including a new National Movement of Amhara (NAMA). A newly ethnicised vision of Amhara interests emerged, at variance with an older generation of nationalists who had elided their interests with the Ethiopian empire state. Meanwhile, after 2014, Oromo street protests began to spread, driven by a combination of savvy diaspora social media agitation and tacit facilitation from Oromo ruling party politicians. Like their Amhara peers, they were newly keen to flex their muscles and leverage their large constituency at the centre of the country, no longer constrained by a powerful Tigrayan premier. By early 2018 a moribund, weakened centre and a fragmenting ruling EPRDF had no answers to the groundswell for change. Part Three of the book (‘Path to War’) looks at the extraordinary convulsion of the politics of Ethiopia and the Horn after the appointment of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister in April 2018. Chapter 5 describes the dramatic series of revolutions in domestic politics; and Chapter 6 examines the new international military alliances which paved the road to war just over two and a half years later. By the time Ethiopia’s prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn (2012–18) resigned in February 2018, the rise of Oromo nationalism meant that his successor could only be an Oromo, and Abiy rode to power on this carefully cultivated wave. In a remarkable irony, however, the appointment of the new prime minister served also to elevate the interests of pan-Ethiopian nationalists, who quickly returned from exile. They brought with them highly effective satellite TV and radio broadcast outlets, which now began to transmit a long-standing diaspora barrage of anti-TPLF and anti-federal narratives into the homes of millions of Ethiopians. These entrenched division and whipped up prejudice and hostility. The new prime minister’s facility with language meant that he was able to win over different constituencies with different narratives. Ambiguity became confusion as his rhetoric became more unitary and nationalist. Ethno-nationalist competitors and supporters of federalism who had also returned were gradually marginalised, jailed or manoeuvred out in a series of dramatic shifts through 2019 and 2020—especially but not only in Oromia. When a new unitary national ruling Prosperity Party was formed in late 2019, ‘pro-Federalist’ opposition began to coalesce around the TPLF, which refused to join it. The TPLF had increasingly drawn in its horns after 2018, members returning to its home region as its influence at the centre decreased and its record and leaders were attacked. From the start of the new government a sustained campaign of scapegoating the TPLF leadership for the collective sins of the EPRDF period embittered relations. When the federal government and Tigray government fell out over the legality of postponing elections beyond the constitutionally defined term, Addis Ababa cut funding flows. Meanwhile, there had also been a seismic shift in the geopolitics of the Horn. The new prime minister upturned a regional political constellation which had persisted since the 1990s, forging alliances with Asmara and Mogadishu and, in the process, releasing the Eritrean regime from a decade of international sanctions. The new constellation united three heads of government known to favour strong centralisation over the more devolved arrangements which had persisted in Somalia and Ethiopia—three antagonists of the TPLF and the system of federalism they had instituted. In February 2018 Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki declared ‘game over!’ for the TPLF, which he loathed, and the new tripartite alliance set about bolstering its military and security cooperation. The stage was set for a showdown. Ethiopia’s war in Tigray is the latest in a long series of rounds of competition for control of the Ethiopian state, and between centralising and decentralising forces. Tracing the roots of these conflicts in what has gone before, however, does not mean that the war that erupted in November 2020 was unavoidable or somehow dictated by history. Nor was this return to violence inherent in a system of federalism which recognised the self-determination of ‘ethnic’ or linguistic groups. As the discussion of history in Part One of the book illuminates, the thoroughgoing politicisation of Ethiopia’s multiple identities had long been a feature of the country’s political evolution, since before the modern empire state was established in the nineteenth century. Rather, the war that erupted at the beginning of November 2020 was the result of active choices by contemporary politicians in Ethiopia and its neighbours in the Horn. The new upsurge in the manufacture and mobilisation of ‘ethnic hatreds’ may draw on perceptions of deep historical division, but it was set in train by the contemporary calculations of political elites. Things could have been otherwise. Part Four of the book gives the first detailed account of the fighting itself: the military trajectories of the war from the beginning of November 2020 until the end of the following year. A pair of chapters look at the two major phases of the ebb and flow of the military conflict. Chapter 7 describes the Ethiopian federal government and its allies’ rapid defeat and subjugation of Tigray in the last two months of 2020, and a gradual fightback from the Tigrayan forces which saw federal forces ousted from much of eastern and central Tigray by the end of June 2021. A second military phase (Chapter 8) saw an equally dramatic ebb and flow of military fortunes, as forces loyal to the Tigray government gradually pushed south into Afar and Amhara in the second half of the year, occasionally linking up with federalist allies. They came within a hundred miles of the capital Addis Ababa, before abruptly pulling their forces north again in late November 2021, in the face of overwhelming airpower, particularly from Addis Ababa’s newly purchased armed drones. If the war was widely expected for many months before it began, its consequences have been extraordinarily devastating, particularly (but not only) for the civilian population of Tigray. The exceptionally damaging civilian impact of the war seems to have been, at least in part, a function of the way in which it was waged: with extremist calls to erase even the memory of the TPLF and ‘those who resemble them’ beyond the recovery of later researchers. Part Five of the book explores three aspects of the concrete impact of the war in Tigray: its socio-economic devastation (Chapter 9); the deliberate starvation of its population by means of a strategy of siege warfare (Chapter 10); and the fallout in terms of diplomacy and advocacy (Chapter 11). At the beginning of 2020, an anonymous author had commented: Victory is virtually impossible in the likely Ethiopian scenario of multi-dimensional infighting among relatively symmetrical forces. We would be fighting each other, brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. The costs would be astronomical in human and material terms. And, the bigger risk is not just the collapse of Ethiopia as a federation, but a perpetual state of war where no faction can win. We are seeing that in Libya and Yemen, we see it in Syria, in Afghanistan, and in other places.9 Hugo Slim has recently observed that ‘most people experience war as poverty rather than as battle … It is the civilian, not the wounded soldier, who stands at the centre of the moral frame we put around war.’10 In Tigray, civilians have experienced both violence and impoverishment in quick succession: a devastatingly brutal period of military occupation, characterised by extrajudicial executions of civilians, systematic rape, ethnic cleansing, and the wholesale destruction and looting of the means of survival; followed by a year (at the time of writing in mid-2022) not just of poverty but of starvation, as the Ethiopian government subjected the region to what the United Nations called a ‘de facto blockade’. But these desperate civilians have not been at the centre of the moral frame placed around the war by the international community. Their experiences have been silenced and ‘invisibilised’—rendered ‘ungrievable’11—by Ethiopia’s systematic media, telecommunications and internet blackout. If nothing else, this book is an attempt to understand something of the disaster that has befallen them. 

After the Battle of Adwa, the Amharic language became entrenched as the language of administration of the Ethiopian empire state, under its new Shewan rulers. The main impact of the cession to Italy of Mereb Melash was politically to divide and to weaken the Tigrigna-speaking highlanders vis-à-vis their Amharic-speaking neighbours to the south, removing them from the centre to the edge of the polity, while the centre of power had shifted far to the south. For the time being, little otherwise changed in what was now a relatively peripheral and impoverished part of the empire: Tigrayan elites retained local powers under Menelik II, and traditional arrangements governing land and taxation were barely modified.

PART ONE HISTOR

Expropriation and militarism: The empire in the south Menelik’s movements south, meanwhile, were often brutal and widely overturned existing land and property arrangements. Tedla Haile, writing in 1930, set out three alternative imperial approaches to the southern peoples: enslavement and expropriation, assimilation, and indirect rule.50 Areas that succumbed to Menelik’s forces regained a degree of autonomy based on a form of indirect rule by existing elites and annual fixed tribute. Those which had put up a fight against incorporation saw the imposition of so-called gabbar-malkagna51 relations transferred from the north. The heavily extractive Abyssinian system of multiple appropriation of labour and ‘surpluses’ was extended south, but divested of the complex arrangement of hereditary land tenure ‘safeguards’ which had underpinned (and moderated) it in the north. The conquered lands now ‘came under the jurisdiction of Menelik’s generals, providing them with the source for both their wealth and their military strength … Officials and retainers of the governors were then assigned a number of gabbar commensurate with their rank … rang[ing] from 5 to 100.’52 Not content with the expropriation of labour, surplus produce, and (gradually) land from the newly created southern gabbars, the new ruling class also took labour in the form of slaves. A long-standing endemic slave trade was given new impetus by the extension of Ethiopia’s borders: ‘in the absence of effective and responsible administration, Menelik II’s incorporation of new areas only tended to accentuate the predatory tendencies of the ruling class and the soldiery’.53 Each of these strategies had implications for the constellation of subjugated language and ethnic groups in relation to the state and state power. Some newly incorporated groups were targeted for slave-raiding,54 while others were reduced to tenant-farmer or serf-like status, the full implications of which emerged only later in the twentieth century, when land began to be appropriated in large volume. The practical effects of the abrupt changes in the system of land rights were obscured and (initially) mitigated because those who took land needed peasant labour, so that the process did not immediately result in widespread alienation. The elites of some incorporated groups, meanwhile, emerged as minorities whose status, livelihood and culture became increasingly entwined with the emergent cultural, religious, military and political dominance of the Shewan Amhara Christian aristocracy.55 Those who wished to join the ranks of the powerful were required to demonstrate their loyalty to the empire by means of a specific set of cultural credentials. Although many members of the new ruling class were not from Shewa, they were increasingly required to behave as if they were, conforming closely to a set of stereotypical cultural features and markers. These included fluency in the Amharic language, adherence to Orthodox Christianity (often involving the change of Muslim or other personal names to Amharic ones with a Christian meaning), and the general adoption of a set of norms of Abyssinian codes and styles.56 Assimilation was not a matter of choice. It was sanctioned in ways which made it essential: ‘public office, the economic benefits of the state, land and property rights [were] all denied to non-believers’.57 Whereas in the north, religion had proved a ‘unifying ideology, [it] now became a divisive factor in the multicultural state.’58 Woven around this hegemonic cultural core, a reinvigorated series of myths of origin and legitimacy of the state was now fashioned from the ‘ancient’ fabric of the conquering polity’s long ancestral lines on the highlands. Where its resources proved threadbare, traditional warp was supplemented with elaborately manufactured new strands of weft. It was around this time, for instance, that the narrative of the Solomonic origins of the imperial dynasty in the fourteenth-century epic Kebra Negast (Glory of Kings) was revived and reworked to stress the primacy of Shewa. All manner of imperial paraphernalia was introduced in the period in question, including much now commonly regarded as ancient in origin.59 Such refashioning and fabrication have, of course, complicated contemporary perceptions of Ethiopia’s own historical continuity. Throughout, the consolidation of the new political project was underpinned by state violence. Richard Reid concludes that during the imperial period culminating with Menelik, ‘a dangerously potent militarism had been created which would not easily be undone. It seems possible to suggest that the region has hardly demobilized since the early nineteenth century.’60 Why does this matter now? The dynamics and interpretation of imperial expansion remain controversial. There are two central controversies. Did Menelik’s conquests reunite territories which had previously (and, by implication, properly) formed a part of, or at least rendered tribute to, historical Abyssinia, or should they be considered as acts of colonial aggression no more justified than the adjacent projects of aggrandisement undertaken by Europeans? Secondly, and relatedly, should these conquests be lauded as key to the survival and consolidation of an independent African giant, a beacon for nationalist aspiration across the continent? Or should they be decried as evidence of African complicity in an extractive form of ‘dependent colonialism’,61 whose iniquities have yet to be reversed, leaving us today with the few disgraceful remnants of unfinished, albeit ‘internal’, colonial business? These questions—less queries of historical fact than calls for normative judgements about legitimacy, justice and the ‘proper’ reparation of damage—have been debated for several generations in Ethiopia. Answers to them often serve as shorthand means of marking out the respondents’ positions on a host of political issues, including their views of the TPLF, and of the system of ethnic or multinational federalism they introduced in 1991: they are still at the centre of debate about the war in Tigray. They rely on the accumulation of ‘confirmatory’ historical evidence either way, in support of competing nationalisms. Given the complexity of the historical processes involved, there is, of course, no shortage of material to bolster any number of interpretations associated with the two views. The current account is less concerned with assessing the validity of each claim than with tracing the processes by which the questions, and the views which prompt them, emerged. If those fighting for or against ‘self-determination’ vis-à-vis the Ethiopian empire state in the recent period had an important external audience, so too did Tewodros II, Yohannes IV and Menelik II before them, surrounded by European colonial ambitions. ‘Performative’ statements about Ethiopia’s antiquity and extent—that is, claims which attempt to bring into being what they assert—have a long history in the region. Performative success was—as ever—greatly enhanced by the perceptible exaggeration of the right and proper ‘natural’ truth of what was claimed. Fuelled by Menelik II’s rhetoric and the enthusiasm of the Church, the tradition took root that imperial expansion sought only the rightful return to highland populations of areas from which they had been expelled during the period of Ahmed ‘Gragn’ (r. c.1526–42) and the subsequent Oromo incursions (usually dated from movements into Bale beginning in the 1520s). It seems clear that Menelik pushed the frontiers of the Ethiopian state to areas beyond the reach even of the renowned medieval empire-builder Amda Tseyon (r. 1314–44) or the maximal limits ruled by Zera Yacob (r. 1434–68), but this fact did nothing to shake the belief in ‘rightful reunification’. Polemical emphasis on modern Ethiopia’s continuity with the ancient polity correlates with what is often a ‘perennialist’ focus on the continuity of Abyssinian cultural norms and socio-economic circumstances—one which sees them as natural, enduring, axiomatic. Not surprisingly, therefore, it also draws on academic assertion of such continuities, particularly where these assertions are incautious enough to lend themselves to the interpretation that both the particular set of continuities selected for analysis and their cultural contents are in some sense ‘right’ in virtue of their ‘truth’—‘valid’ in its widest sense.62 Donald Levine’s later work rejects the ‘erroneous view that before the conquests of Menelik II in the late nineteenth century the other peoples of Ethiopia had lived independent and self-sufficient lives’, apparently not least on the circular grounds that this view ‘fails to provide any leverage for getting at the properties of the larger Ethiopian system directly’.63 Thus, by positing ‘Greater Ethiopia’ as a ‘single societal system’64 and documenting pan-Ethiopian traits common to its groups of citizens, Levine is able to prove it to be such. The work is something of an exemplar of the performativity of categorisation. Yet, these narratives were used to critique federalism in the 1990s (Chapter 3), were revived in the 2016–18 period (Chapter 4), and were fostered again under the new government from 2018 (Chapter 5). There is nothing inevitable about the evolution of conventions, whatever the weight of ‘logic’ of the circumstances in which they evolve. Even those few slices of the history of the populations of an area as large as modern-day Ethiopia that have been researched and documented are rich enough to resource any number of interpretations. The interpretations which have survived and dominated have done so primarily because they have had influential patrons. This remains true at the time of writing in 2022, as history is again energetically rewritten. In the next part of the imperial period, a rapidly centralising and bureaucratising state under Haile Selassie I was the most influential of these patrons. Equally energetic new processes in the early twentieth century further served to inflame resentment of some members of Ethiopia’s populations at the perceived ‘ethnocratic’ rule to which they were subject.65 Centralising empire: Solomonic nationalism, occupation and post-war consolidation In the period from the 1890s to the early 1930s, successive Ethiopian governments under Menelik II (r. 1889–1913), Iyasu (r. 1913–16), Zewditu (r. 1916–30) and Haile Selassie I (r. 1930–74) worked to establish the legitimacy and integrity of the situation in which the multi-ethnic empire was ruled and ‘unified’ under an Abyssinian state. Commentators have speculated as to whether the brief period of Lij Iyasu (designated emperor but uncrowned between 1913 and 1916) might have set the country in another direction. His reign, ‘one of the most enigmatic in Ethiopian history’, seemed to indicate the potential for a different approach—particularly to the empire’s relations with its many Muslim subjects.66 The moment rapidly passed. The five-year period of Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941, and British involvement in the disposal of Italy’s colonial possessions during and after the Second World War, now also set new precedents. Both powers mooted a range of alternative administrative and sovereign arrangements. Italian occupation had a powerful impact on the subsequent relationships between ethnic groups and the state. The disruptions of Italian Imperial East Africa First of all, the Italian conquest undermined the ‘divine’ Solomonic credentials of two generations of Abyssinian rule, by demolishing its inevitability. The ignominious circumstances of Emperor Haile Selassie’s flight into exile in the UK in 1936 compounded this. Secondly, the Italian occupation presented many of Ethiopia’s subject peoples with an alternative experience of imperial rule, from which a number drew comparisons unfavourable to the emperor’s return. A third factor exacerbated the trend: an Italian policy of divide and rule ‘to facilitate the conquest’ deliberately sought ‘to foment internal discord and warfare’, pitting Ethiopia’s subject races against the Amhara regime. Italy actively offered a range of inducements from the 1936 Maichew campaign onwards.67 Italian hopes rested on Ethiopia’s non-Amhara and Muslim populations: thus ‘Oromo oppression under Amhara domination became the central theme of Italian propaganda and of de-Amharization campaigns. Amharic was displaced as the legal language; and Arabic, Oromonya [sic] and Kaffinya were taught in schools.’68 Italy’s efforts had mixed results. Oromo ‘nobles and ordinary people were perplexed and disoriented’ by the conquest and remained ‘mistrustful’.69 Apparently more reliable was the response from Ethiopia’s Muslims when Mussolini sought to present himself as a regional champion of Islam. Poor relations with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church were guaranteed, but this was also partly a function of Italian attempts to curry favour with Ethiopian nationalist sentiment by removing the Church from the orbit of Alexandria.70 Meanwhile, Muslims ‘gave the Italians unconditional help in return for the Italian government’s support of their religion and institutions’. Occupation saw an intensive programme of mosque construction and schemes for the establishment of centres of Islamic study and propaganda.71 As a result, Ethiopia’s Muslim and non-Abyssinian populations occasionally recount with nostalgia the relatively favourable conditions they or their antecedents enjoyed during the Italian period. New Italian infrastructure drove roads into previously inaccessible areas, anddrilled wells among pastoralist groups, particularly to the benefit of Somalis in the Ogaden. It impressed many. Some communities were unenthusiastic about the return of Abyssinian imperial rule, but there were also doubts and new ideas among those who resisted Italian rule. A republican patriot movement, for instance, ‘argued for the unity of all patriots … [and] advocated a federalist approach to accommodate the diversity of Ethiopia’s constituent regions’.72 Encouraging such views was a fourth significant factor: Italian imperial administrative arrangements drew a strong correlation between sovereign units and language areas. When the territorial governorships of Italian Imperial East Africa were established, ‘ethnic principles were applied in dividing the territory’.73 ‘The main Italian concern was the elimination of the Amhara’s claim to superiority over other populations. [They] framed the division of Ethiopia into Governorships in such a way that [this] hegemony was eliminated. Employing Amhara in government offices and using the Amharic language in non-Amhara territories was prohibited’.74 Rather, the occupation administration sought to take account of ‘traditional laws, customs, religion, and language’ following ethnicity when possible, although ‘the principle of political opportunism prevailed, rather than the ethnic one’.75 The echoes in 1990s federalism of the Italian occupation of the 1930s have (perhaps unsurprisingly) drawn little or no comment.76 Parallels with occupying fascism were hardly likely to enhance the legitimacy of the incoming transitional government. Nevertheless it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Italian period (itself within living memory in 1991) provided important and widely experienced precedents. This must have had a bearing on the continuing evolution of the politicisation of ethnicity during the post-war period. Centralised Abyssinian rule was no longer the only option, the single ‘prominent solution’, but had to be explicitly fostered and bolstered to ex-clude the alternative political constellation, which the Italians had elaborated all too clearly. The possibility of alternatives to centralised Shewan Amhara rule did not neatly disappear with the defeat of the Italians—simultaneously proving and exacerbating the impact of these precedents. A fifth factor which drove nationalist investigation of alternatives to the restitution of Shewan imperial rule was a thread of ambivalence in Italian and British policy-making, alternating so-called ‘Shewan’ with ‘Tigrayan’ policies. The Italians, in the run-up to the invasion, had pursued a twin-track policy, attempting to sow disaffection among the Tigrigna-speaking populations, while adopting a conciliatory approach to the Ethiopian government. The post-Italian British involvement (military administration in Eritrea and ambiguous dealings in Ethiopia)77 saw continued administration of Tigray from Asmara rather than Addis Ababa, thereby perpetuating this ambivalence.78 Divergence between the British Foreign Office and War Office meant that British policy wavered between the restitution of centralised rule from Addis Ababa and the amalgamation of Tigray with Eritrea, thereby establishing a so-called Greater Tigray.79 Meanwhile, Eritrean politics in the decade from 1941 up to its federation with Ethiopia in 1952 saw intense and fragmented political activity and lobbying in support of a multiplicity of potential fates for the various parts of Eritrea.80 This left a legacy of Eritrean suspicion of dismemberment. The next two chapters explore aspects of the continuing relevance of these complexities in the relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea and between Tigray and Eritrea. Tremors from the occasionally violent post-war uncertainties continued to affect Ethiopia long after the Italian period. Already in 1936 western Oromo leaders (perhaps with British connivance) had forwarded a petition to the League of Nations for a separate protectorate pending independence. A revolt then shook eastern Tigray in 1943 (see the next chapter). The British continued to administer the rich Haud pastureland inside the Ethiopian border, exacerbating violent conflict over grazing access between the Ogaden and other Somali clans, until as late as 1954. It took what Richard Greenfield has called ‘two decades of intrigue’ for Haile Selassie to attain anything like the autonomous, stable, centralised arrangement he sought.81 Many of the fault lines exposed during the period of the Second World War and its aftermath remained problematic long after his fall. Curbing the old regional elite: Imperial centralisation … The underlying strategy of Haile Selassie was a centralising one,82 continuing the tradition of the great centralising emperors from 1855 onwards.83 He finally succeeded ‘in realizing the unitary state of which Tewodros had dreamt’.84 In his role as regent during the reign of Zewditu, when he was known as Ras Teferi, he had already accumulated a range of powers, embarking on a power struggle with the traditional elites. In the period up to 1930 he met and faced down early challenges to his increasing powers from the regional aristocracy—including in Tigray. Days after the coronation of Zewditu in February 1909, for instance, Ras Welde Giorgis was crowned king of Gonder and ‘for the sake of his kingship, authority over the [imperial] Tigre province was added for his enhancement’.85 The point still rankles.86 A year after his coronation as negusa negast (king of kings), in 1931 Emperor Haile Selassie declared a new constitution which ‘set up the juridical framework of emergent absolutism’.87 It gave him power to appoint and dismiss the nobility, to administer justice, and to grant land and other honours. The nobility lost their authority in foreign relations, the acquisition of arms and warfare.88 Curbs on the power of the regional elites continued in the post-war period, as Haile Selassie negotiated the complicated fallout from the pattern of Ethiopian aristocratic collaboration, betrayal and resistance of the Italian period.89 Haile Selassie ‘continued where the Italians left off’ in reducing the power of the regional aristocracy to ‘dependence on the centre’.90 Although he used the aristocracy to ‘maintain connections between the central government and the more traditional sectors of the state’,91 the emperor conferred few titles, and allocated positions of greatest influence to those he had himself raised to high office. A new regional administration established after 1941 provided for 14 new provinces, around 100 counties (awraja), and 600 districts (wereda). During this process of reorganisation, a number of geographical territories were reallocated, especially those that had been associated with Tigrayan regional elites seen as ‘traitorous’ after collaborating with the Italians. The most noted traitor was Haile Selassie Gugsa, later tried for his fascist collaboration. A few years later, other areas of Tigray were also brought under the control of neighbouring provinces. The areas of Welkaiyt and Tsegedé, which, according to his son, had been administered by Ras Seyoum Mengesha of Tigray, were brought under Gonder province in 1948. They remained part of this formal dispensation until the federal arrangement was introduced in 1991 (see Chapter 3).92 Similarly, Kobo, which had also been under the administration of Ras Seyoum Mengesha, was given to the heir to the throne, Asfaw Wossen, and formed part of Wollo from 1949.93 For the first time in Ethiopia’s history, Haile Selassie had succeeded in curtailing the power of Ethiopia’s regional elites and, with it, the autonomy of its regions. A professionalised national bureaucracy and army performed the functions traditionally carried out under shifting alliances of decentralised fiefdoms nominally subservient to the ‘king of kings’. In an era of modernisation, Haile Selassie needed educated administrators to fill these structures. His reign now saw the dramatic expansion of education in Ethiopia, in what was perhaps the single most important socio-political transformation of the period. ‘The Emperor is certainly the hub of the government, but he is far from being the whole of it; for to further his policy of centralisation, and to carry out the new and complex tasks involved by modernisation and administrative expansion, he has had to recruit a ruling class of administrators and politicians—aptly termed “the new nobility”’.94 … and bureaucratisation: Educating a new elite After the Battle of Adwa, Ethiopians had begun to go abroad for education or to mission schools in neighbouring Sudan and Eritrea. The first modern school in Ethiopia was opened in Addis Ababa in 1908, followed in 1912 by Alliance Française schools in Dire Dawa and the capital. In 1925 the Teferi Mekonnen School in Addis Ababa was established, and more schools now opened in different parts of the country. Growing numbers of Ethiopians were sent abroad during the 1920s, later becoming an educated class prominent in the expanding state administration. The development of education also ‘disseminat[ed] ideas of change’.95 The intellectual ‘exuberance and vibrancy of the 1920s’ initially saw collaboration between emperor and intellectuals in ‘a fascinating experiment in social and political reform’.96 This was an experiment to which the Italian invasion and occupation put a stop. While many of the older generation of intellectuals went into exile, a majority of its younger members were executed by the Italians, creating ‘a generation gap in the intellectual and political history of the country’ and contributing to ‘the drab intellectual climate’ of the post-war period, in which ‘the educated elite saw its mission as one of loyal and dedicated service rather than engagement in social and political critique’.97 Meanwhile, the old power structure of the regional aristocracy was still in place. As a result, ‘the first fifteen years after the Liberation were dominated by divisions between largely traditional forces, notably the nobility, and the personal protégés of the Emperor’.98 This situation gradually shifted as educated politicians worked their way through the ranks of government, and by the early 1960s ‘most of the important ministers [were] men with advanced education’.99 The emerging bureaucracy, including the Ministry of Land Reform and Administration and the Ministry of Finance, worked with the emperor to provide ‘the major forces representing the centralisation of the political sys-tem’.100 The educated elite, however, had not ‘scaled the “commanding heights” of the political system, which are still held by a man who, whatever his claims to be a moderniser, is very far from them in outlook; and they have not so far provided that driving force which is what the government most obviously lacks.’101 The middle decades of the twentieth century, after the liberation from Italian occupation, saw a series of regional or local rebellions in different parts of Ethiopia: the weyane or rebellion in eastern Tigray in 1943; the eruption of Bale (south-east Oromia) between 1963 and 1970; the uprising in Gojjam (western Amhara) in 1968; disturbances in Yejju in Wollo in 1948 and 1970; and the uprising in Gedeo (in the south) in 1960. While these disturbances are often bracketed together, in fact they have little in common in respect of origin, cause, duration, form or participants. Few drew, at the time, on an explicit or widely shared ethnic rationale,102 but the precedent of local resistance to central rule offered resonant resources to subsequent generations of ethno-nationalists. The weyane in Tigray (further discussed in Chapter 2) seems to have arisen when administrative corruption and greed ignited a situation of existing instability and insecurity, and one awash with weaponry in the wake of the Italian defeat. Gradually a new class of young people had the education and experience to begin to understand the iniquitous basis on which the imperial state was established. When these individuals also happened to be assimilated members of the ethnic groups most disadvantaged by the arrangement (as they increasingly were), they began not only to understand it, but to resent it. Two factors seem to have operated as triggers for a shift in the nature of their opposition to the imperial regime. These were the attempted coup of 1960, and the annexation of federated Eritrea, effectively completed with the imposition of Ethiopian law the previous year. While the coup attempt of Mengistu and Germame Neway was relatively easily suppressed at the time, and Haile Selassie succeeded in having the Asmara parliament vote away its own autonomy, the notion of traitorous perfidy in the north persisted through the post-war period. Seeds of a different level of dissatisfaction had been sown in each case. Of the various groups among whom these seeds took root, the growing body of students at Haile Selassie I (later, Addis Ababa) University was the most important. If the period from the mid-1850s marked the rise of a series of centralising emperors, which brought the decentralised pattern of the Era of Princes to an end, the late 1960s saw the emergence of modern political forces demanding the reconstitution of the imperial state along more decentralised lines that recognised sub-state identities. These critics saw that the imperial state was founded on an ‘explosive … correlation of ethnic, cultural and class differences that made it inherently unstable’,103 and Haile Selassie’s attempts at centralisation, bureaucratisation and militarisation ultimately failed to satisfy them. The forceful criticism of these new political groupings has had a long legacy: the era of Haile Selassie continues to evoke contradictory attitudes. For some it was a period of peace and national unity, a golden age by contrast with the upheavals and violence that followed, when Ethiopian was governed skilfully and with a light hand, and its inherent conflict and contradiction were kept at least relatively under control. For others, it was a period of repressive feudalism, built on injustice and inequality, when government was dedicated to the service and glorification of a single man, and opportunities to secure peaceful reform were spurned.104 The ongoing polarisation between these two different views has, if anything, become as important as their validity: they have become badges of political identity to be defended rather than perspectives to be debated. The emergence of new political forces, their opposition to the ageing emperor in the late 1960s and 1970s, and their defeat of the authoritarian centralised state led by the military regime at the beginning of the 1990s, form the focus of the next chapter.