✞ The Destruction of Iyesus Azeba Seguday Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Adi Daero, Adiabo, Tigray, Ethiopia.
😠😠😠 ዋይ! ዋይ! ዋይ! 😢😢😢
💭 The residents are seen using it in its destroyed state. According to the church’s priests speaking in the video, the church is very old tracing its roots to the time when Christianity was introduced to Axum, Ethiopia in the 4th century.
Residents in the Northern Ethiopian city of Adi Daero, in Tigray scream in agony while searching for their families in the ash and trying to rescue people trapped under a rubble. A mother is heard shouting loudly “my son, my son, I lost him…”
This barbaric act was carried out last year on 27th of September 2022 – on the very day Christians celebrated the annual Christian Festival of the Meskel (which means “CROSS” in Ethiopic), marking the finding of the “True Cross” on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The festival is one of the major religious celebrations of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia.
👹 The Evil Nobel Peace Laureate Abiy Ahmed Ali Blessing a Foreign Invasion of Axumite Ethiopia is Treasonous on its Face
It’s tragic that the ‘PEACE PACT’ – actually a WAR PACT — that earned evil Galla-Oromo Abiy Ahmed Ali the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize allowed him to borrow Eritrean soldiers, U the Eritrean army UAE + Turkey + Iran drones, to conduct this genocidal war against Christian Tigray, Ethiopia„
👹 Kosovo 2.0 in the making. This is the evil did of Ahmed’s PP Oromos, Isaias’s EPLF, Debre Tsions’ TPLF and Amhara PP/ Fano.
➕ The Ark of The Covenant: Hurricane in FlorIDA – ADI rolf = ADI Daero-Massacre
💭 Florida (FL) – ADI rolf = ADI Daero (E) – ADOLF + ELF (Eritrean Liberation Front ‘Jebha’)
Eritrean war planes bombed ADI Dearo. ELF is a Jihadist group created by Arabs. USA + Canada + Europe + Israel + Russia + Ukraine + China supported UAE + Iran + Turkey drones massacring Orthodox Christians in Tigray, Ethiopia.
The DAY after the ADI Daero (The region of Ethiopia where The Ark of The Covenant is preserved) Massacre – this tragedy in Florida – ADI rolf = ADI Daero
💭 Catastrophic Destruction Leaving Hundreds Dead In Florida Hurricane Aftermath. Hurricane Ian ravaged the area and collapsed part of the Sanibel Causeway
💭 The Conspiracy of Silence: The world and its media outlets are of course silent on this story: Ethiopia: Christians Carpet Bombed by The Nobel Peace Laureate & His Foreign Mercenaries – over 50 children massacred.
🛑 The use of starvation of civilian populations as a method of warfare is prohibited by international law. But,Indeed shame on the international community There is no other situation in which 6+ million people have been kept under siege for over two years like in Tigray, where STARVATION and RAPE are used .
💭 Tigray Debate, Lord Alton, House of Lords 15. November 2022
Eritrean government response to the Minister of State for Development’s call for Eritrean soldiers to leave Tigray Province in Ethiopia, and the reinstatement of a truce and the beginning of peace talks.
💭 Congressman Brad Sherman‘s (D-CA) remarks during a House Foreign Affairs Hearing Assessing the Biden Administration’s U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa.
💭 ‘Nobel Jihad’ on Orthodox Christian Nations? | ‘ኖቤል ጂሃድ‘ በኦርቶዶክስ ክርስቲያኖች ላይ?
💭 Let’s Connect the dots…the following individuals and bodies had been ‘randomly and coincidentally’ awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee – four years in a row:
☆ 2019 Nobel Peace Prize to evil Abiy Ahmed Ali for a Pact of War vs Orthodox Ethiopia
☆ 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to WFP in anticipation of the following genocidal war (Nov. 2020) against Orthodox Tigray, Ethiopia
☆ 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Dmitry Muratov of Orthodox Russia in anticipation of the coming war (Feb. 2022) between the two orthodox brothers; Russia-Ukraine
☆ 2022 Nobel Peace Prize to Ales Bialiatski from Belarus and the Russian human rights organisation, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. – in anticipation of the coming nuclear war between the three orthodox brothers; Russia + Ukraine + Belarus
💭 Florida (FL) – ADI rolf = ADI Daero (E) – ADOLF + ELF (Eritrean Liberation Front ‘Jebha’)
Eritrean war planes bombed ADI Dearo. ELF is a Jihadist group created by Arabs. USA + Canada + Europe + Israel + Russia + Ukraine + China supported UAE + Iran + Turkey drones massacring Orthodox Christians in Tigray, Ethiopia.
The DAY after the ADI Daero (The region of Ethiopia where The Ark of The Covenant is preserved) Massacre – this tragedy in Florida – ADI rolf = ADI Daero
💭 Catastrophic Destruction Leaving Hundreds Dead In Florida Hurricane Aftermath. Hurricane Ian ravaged the area and collapsed part of the Sanibel Causeway
💭 The Conspiracy of Silence: The world and its media outlets are of course silent on this story: Ethiopia: Christians Carpet Bombed by The Nobel Peace Laureate & His Foreign Mercenaries – over 50 children massacred.
💭 Residents in the Northern Ethiopian city of Adi Daero, in Tigray scream in agony while searching for their families in the ash and trying to rescue people trapped under a rubble. A mother is heard shouting loudly “my son, my son, I lost him…”
The unEthiopian fascist Oromo regime’s and Eritrean air forces bombarded many towns in Tigray including Shire, Adi Daero and Mekelle.
Adi Daero Massacre, in Tigray Ethiopia, 27 September 2022
This barbaric act was carried out on 27 September 2022 – on the very day Christians celebrated the annual Christian festival of the Meskel (which means “CROSS” in Ethiopic), marking the finding of the “True Cross” on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The festival is one of the major religious celebrations of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia.
“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.”
☆ Increasingly, Abiy’s vitriol toward the TPLF appears to be a projection or his own mindset, and not rooted in reality.
☆ Abby treats anyone who does not agree completely with him as an enemy. Here, he repeats the experience of Erdogan, Turkey’s president.
☆ Rather than engage professionally, the Abby regime prefers to rely on trolls. Such tactics always backfire.
☆ That Abiy appears to have blessed a foreign invasion of Ethiopia is treasonous on its face.
☆ Abby embraces the attitude, l’état, c’est moi, but he is wrong. Ethiopia is a great nation. It is not a single man. Abby’s campaign in Tigray has been a disaster. It should mark the end of Abby’s rule, but that does not mean an end to Ethiopia – unless Ethiopians continue to follow Abiy on his suicide mission.
It has now been almost three years since the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Abiy Ahmed as the recipient of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.” Abiy received international plaudits. CNN called him a “modern day African leader.” Other African leaders congratulatedhim on twitter.
Terrence Lyons, a professor of conflict resolution at the Carter School, praised other aspects of Ethiopia’s tremendous progress under Abiy. He released political prisoners and opened political space. “Political prisoners were released, the repressive civil society law scrapped, and independent media rebounded. Exiled movements that had been labeled as terrorists – such as Ginbot 7, the Oromo Liberation Front, and the Ogaden National Liberation Front – agreed to end their armed struggles and returned to Ethiopia and registered as political parties,” Lyons explained. He continued to report that Abiy had strengthened civil society and laid the groundwork for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to explore the abuses of previous regimes. As important, Ethiopia began to meet its economic potential as an African giant.
From Promise to Pariah
Today, that promise is gone. The Nobel Committee may not be able to revoke its prize, but it chastised Abiy in a way that exceeded admonishments of other recipients whose commitmentto peace eventually waned.
Abiy and his partisans believe such criticism is unfair. He and his supporters grow frustrated that the international community largely discounts their narrative surrounding the start of the Tigray War and its conduct. Too often, this frustration manifests itself in either personal attacks or conspiracy theories, both of which exacerbate Abiy’s relationship with the broader international community. It may be satisfying to blame others, but it is immature. If Abiy wants to know how he lost the world, he need only consider his own actions.
Alas, he is unwilling to do this. Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to sit in on a conversation with an Ethiopian Cabinet-level official and ask him what lessons the Abiy government had learned from the past two years of civil war. After all, there are two major parties to the conflict, and to suggest the fault rests solely with Abiy’s enemies is not realistic. Even if Abiy believes truth is fully on his side, responsible political and military leadership should constantly assess and adjust tactics. Abiy’s does not, for the simple reason they do not acknowledge mistakes.
This could suggest many dynamics, none of which is good for Ethiopia. First, Abiy may truly be unable to recognize the error of his ways. He may have a messiah complex and believe that he can do no wrong. Second, Abiy may so terrorize those around him that they either self-censor or fear contradicting their boss. In a sense, this was the dynamic at play when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman allegedly ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist and Muslim Brotherhood activist Jamal Khashoggi. That many long-time visitors to Ethiopia report public fear approaching what Ethiopia experienced under the Derg should raise alarms.
Volume over Substance
Also contributing to the collapse of Abiy’s reputation has been the Ethiopian government’s over-the-top response to criticism and its ineffective diplomacy. Too often, Abiy and his regime substitute volume for substantive engagement. The Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, D.C. is a non-entity. Its diplomats are less active than those of countries a fraction of Ethiopia’s size.
Rather than engage professionally, the Abiy regime prefers to rely on trolls. Such tactics always backfire. They did not work for Somalia’s Mohamed Farmajo or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Rather, online polemics became self-defeating as the leaders themselves began to confuse paid and imaginary courtiers with legitimate opinions. Trolls seldom change the opinion of policymakers for the simple reason that the latter do not spend their time online, let alone on a platform prone to manipulation and dominated by anonymous persons.
For the Ethiopian government to use trolls to punish opinions it dislikes also backfires because it antagonizes rather than changes minds. If Abiy’s government believed in the justice of its cause, it should be able to use facts to cajole and convince rather than simply lob insults. Perhaps Abiy believed he could use trolls to attack diplomats, foreign analysts, and academics, and then conduct business as usual through official channels. This fools no one. When government-paid trolls throw fireballs, it reflects on all serving Ethiopian diplomats and ministers. It disqualifies them in the court of normal relations.
Perhaps one of the reasons for Abiy’s slash-and-burn diplomatic strategy is a mindset that exaggerates Ethiopia’s importance to non-Ethiopians. At its core, Abiy treats anyone who does not agree completely with him as an enemy. Here, he repeats the experience of Erdogan, Turkey’s president. The West once saw Erdogan as a moderate and a bridge-builder. But years of dismissing even mild criticism as evidence of affiliation with terrorist groups backfired. Rather than being silenced, Abiy’s critics, diplomats, and even his earlier cheerleaders began to question his grip on reality. He antagonized so many figures at home and abroad that today he can rely only on his own family.
It is also incorrect to adopt the “with us or against us” mindset for domestic politics. When Abiy supporters suggest criticism of his conduct of the Tigray war means affinity for the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), he appears paranoid if not a loon. That his supporters suggest criticism of Abiy and partiality toward the Tigryans is racist does Abiy no favors. It makes as much sense as suggesting that support for Ukraine over Russia is motivated by anti-white sentiment.
Confusing Propaganda with Reality
Abiy may be frustrated that the world in general and Washington, in particular, do not share his conclusions about the TPLF as a terrorist group. Arguments that the TPLF is to Addis Ababa what al Qaeda is to Washington are ridiculous. The TPLF was the dominant party in Ethiopia’s governing coalition from 1991 to 2018. While Abiy is correct that the TPLF committed human rights abuses during its rule – one in which he participated both as director-general of the Information Network Security Agency and later as a minister – simply reclassifying political rivals as a terrorist group and then growing angry when the international community does not follow suit is self-defeating. Even if the TPLF was a terror group, there is no justification for the collective punishment and mass starvation that Abiy has directed. Increasingly, Abiy’s vitriol toward the TPLF appears to be a projection or his own mindset, and not rooted in reality.
Abiy’s arguments fail to resonate in other ways. His supporters say the TPLF fired the first shots on Nov. 3, 2020, when Tigrayan forces attacked the Northern Command headquarters. But the speed and scale of the Ethiopian reaction suggest prior planning on Abiy’s part. This in turn leads foreign analysts to interpret Tigrayan action as pre-emption rather than aggression.
Allies also matter. To make peace with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki is one thing; to collaborate actively with him is another. That Abiy appears to have blessed a foreign invasion of Ethiopia is treasonous on its face. Abiy’s alliance with former Somalian President Mohamed Farmajo, a man who collaborated with Al-Shabaab and sought to extend his own term illegally, is almost as stigmatizing. Friends matter. Simply put, Abiy’s hatred led him to the disqualifying embrace of rogues. He may blame the outside world, but he took that journey of his own accord.
The Problem is Abiy, not Ethiopia
Abiy embraces the attitude, l’état, c’est moi, but he is wrong. Ethiopia is a great nation. It is not a single man. Abiy’s campaign in Tigray has been a disaster. It should mark the end of Abiy’s rule, but that does not mean an end to Ethiopia – unless Ethiopians continue to follow Abiy on his suicide mission. Here, an Iraq analogy is useful. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein slaughtered the Iraqi Kurds in the Anfal genocide. Rather than divorce Iraq completely, Iraqi Kurds still mark Iraqi Army Day each year on Jan. 6. To date, they realize Saddam was the problem, but see the Iraqi Army as an institution to respect.
A year ago, Abiy might have used external diplomacy to shield himself from accountability for his own actions. Today it is too late. He has condemned himself and Ethiopia to pariah status, and has become an impediment to both peace and to Ethiopia’s efforts to secure an influence commensurate with its size, history, and economic potential.
Abiy may persevere as Robert Mugabe did, but Ethiopia will pay the price, just as Zimbabwe did. The simple reality is the United States, European Union, and many African countries no longer see Abiy as redeemable. For peace and prosperity in Ethiopia, the only course of action is Abiy’s exit. If, when, and how that happens will be a question for Ethiopians only. The lone certainty is that Abiy’s legacy will be shaped less by his Nobel Prize and more by the revelations of a future Truth and Reconciliation Committee.
💭 Residents in the Northern Ethiopian city of Adi Daero, in Tigray scream in agony while searching for their families in the ash and trying to rescue people trapped under a rubble. A mother is heard shouting loudly “my son, my son, I lost him…”
Yesterday, ‘unEthiopian’ fascist Oromo regime’s and Eritrean air forces bombarded many towns in Tigray including Shire, Adi Daero and Mekelle.
This barbaric act was carried out yesterday, 27 September 2022 – on the very day Christians celebrated the annual Christian festival of the Meskel (which means “CROSS” in Ethiopic), marking the finding of the “True Cross” on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The festival is one of the major religious celebrations of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia.
👹 Evil Jihadist Abiy Ahmed Ali Blessed A Foreign Invasion of Ethiopia is Treasonous on its Face
It’s tragic that the ‘PEACE PACT’ – actually a WAR PACT — that earned evil Galla-Oromo Abiy Ahmed Ali the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize allowed him to borrow Eritrean soldiers, U the Eritrean army UAE + Turkey + Iran drones, to conduct this genocidal war against Christian Tigray, Ethiopia„
👹 Kosovo 2.0 in the making. This is the evil did of Ahmed’s PP Oromos, Isaias’s EPLF, Debre Tsions’ TPLF and Amhara PP/ Fano.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 25, 2022
🤯 In this video, at 6:09, Mrs. Merit Reiss-Anderesen named the evil monster first as ‘Prime Minister’ Abiy and then as ‘President’ Abiy Ahmed. She obviously gave another Nobel to him!
💭 When asked the Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, if giving Abiy Ahmed a Nobel Peace Prize, was a mistake, Merit Reiss-Anderesen answered:
“It’s an unprecedented situation that a Nobel Peace Prize laureate is involved in warfare.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 14, 2022
💭 “There’s a lot of areas we haven’t been able to access so we can’t assess what the humanitarian situation is.” 😠😠😠 😢😢😢
Steph Dujarric UN Spokesperson discusses the food, fuel and cash shortage that are adding to Tigray’s humanitarian crises.
“I’m looking at the clock right now. It’s just gone I think about 8:30 in the evening in Tigray. As we’re talking on this program. That means there are a lot of people, millions actually, who are likely going to bed hungry. It’s one thing not to be able to find food for yourself. It’s another thing altogether not to be able to find food for your children.” Zain Asher
In competition with among others Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, Abiy Ahmed has been named the worst head of state in 2021 by a panel of professors and researchers, on behalf of the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet.
An expert panel was put together by the newspaper to discuss and conclude: Who was the worst head of state in 2021?
👉 The final verdict: Abiy Ahmed. 😈
In 2019 he came to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for his “efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.” Two years later, Ethiopia is marred by civil war.
The New York times recently described the situation as “a year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.”
A wasted opportunity
While dictactors in general, like North-Koreas Kim Jong-un, suppress their people as a natural part of their leadership, 2021 has been a very active year for Prime Minister Ahmed, Morgenbladet writes.
“Abiy has done nothing to downscale the ongoing civil war in his country, because he wants to secure his own alliances and his own position. He is perhaps the most disappointing head of state of the year,” professor Carl Henrik Knutsen says to the newspaper.
Knutsen served in the newspaper’s expert panel on the topic.
“With the Nobel Prize in his pocket and the recognition that comes with it from international alliances, a lot was in place for Abiy to develop his country in a positive direction. He wasted that opportunity and seems to have put his own concerns over that of his citizens,” he says.
The worst of the bad
The expert panel consisted of Carl Henrik Knutsen, professor of political science at the University of Oslo, Lise Rakner, professor of political science at the University of Bergen, Helle Malmvig, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Dan Smith, Director at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“A truly bad head of state is an authoritarian and oppressive leader who undermines the political institutions in the country and concentrates all power in his own hands, at any cost,” according to Knutsen.
Discussions that included Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and the king of Saudi-Arabia, Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, finally narrowed down to a list of six nominees:
Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the UK
Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus
Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India
Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brasil
Michel Aoun, President of Lebanon
Abiy Ahmed, Prime Minister of Ethiopia
Watching people die during a pandemic
Questions that were discussed were whether the head of state has contributed to financial decline in their own country, supported or started a civil war and suppressed civil or political rights. Handling of the pandemic was also an important criterion.
“Leaders who are in denial, who with open eyes watch a large number of people dying during the pandemic and call information about this mortality “fake news” – I believe this is a form of genocide,” said Professor Lise Rakner.
On the more unusual suspect on the list, Boris Johson, Rakner has the following to say:
“The United Kingdom still have a free press, a stable legal system and an independent central bank, which means that Johnson cannot control things in any way he would like to. But if you had given Brasil to Johnson, a lot of things would have gone very wrong. What a clown.”
The violent solution
According to Dan Smith from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the most important criterion in deciding on the worst head of state in 2021 was starting an irresponsible war and using systematic violence. This is why Abiy ends up top, he says to Morgenbladet.
“Since the outbreak of the war, there have been obvious alternative ways of acting, but all of them have been rejected. Both sides have blocked a politically negotiated solution. Instead, Abiy has chosen the most violent solution,” he says.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Peace Prize, said Thursday that Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the honour in 2019, bore special responsibility for ending the bloodshed in Tigray.
“As Prime Minister and winner of the Peace Prize, Abiy Ahmed has a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the committee, said in a statement to AFP.
Northern Ethiopia has been beset by conflict since November 2020 when Abiy sent troops into Tigray after accusing the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), of attacks on federal army camps.
The fighting between forces loyal to Abiy and the TPLF and their allies has killed thousands of people and forced several million from their homes.
Spokeswoman Billene Seyoum responded to the committee’s comments, saying Abiy had already shouldered his responsibilities.
“The Prime Minister has indeed taken up this ‘special responsibility’ of ending the conflict waged on the state by TPLF and has been engaged in putting an end not only to the past year’s conflict but the destabilising activities of the TPLF, designated a terrorist organisation by parliament,” Billen told AFP.
Tigray is under what the United Nations calls a de facto blockade that is preventing life-saving medicine and food from reaching millions, including hundreds of thousands in famine-like conditions.
Millions of people have fled their homes since the conflict in Tigray erupted in November 2020
“The humanitarian situation is very serious and it is not acceptable that humanitarian aid does not get through sufficiently,” Reiss-Andersen said.
Speaking at a press conference, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth appealed for countries to press Abiy to allow aid to get through.
“The big threat there is the Ethiopian government’s blockade of humanitarian assistance that is desperately needed by millions of people in the region,” Roth told reporters.
“This is a classic case of collective punishment. This is not punishing Tigrayan military forces. It is punishing the people… in Tigray,” he added.
The conflict in Tigray has sparked calls to strip Abiy of the Nobel, but this is not possible under the award’s statutes.
The Norwegian committee said it could not comment on what factors were emphasised when the prize was awarded to Abiy beyond “the reasons given in connection with the award,” as the panel’s discussions are confidential.
In November 2020, Abiy’s government allowed Eritrean forces into Tigray as they together pursued the Tigray leaders after political tensions erupted into war. Some tens of thousands of people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands now face famine as Ethiopia’s government has kept almost all food and medical aid from Tigray since late June.
“Since the autumn of 2020, developments in Ethiopia have escalated to a comprehensive armed conflict,” the statement said. “The humanitarian situation is very serious, and it is not acceptable that humanitarian aid does not emerge to a sufficient degree.”
The conflict entered a new phase in late December when Tigray forces retreated into their region amid a new military offensive and Ethiopian forces said they would not advance further there.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 6, 2022
💭A Nobel Peace Prize should not shield the prime minister from sanctions for war crimes and rights abuses.
👉 Courtesy: Bloomberg
Could Joe Biden become the first American president to sanction a Nobel Peace Prize winner for war crimes and human-rights abuses? As the U.S. steps up efforts to end Ethiopia’s bloody civil war, it must reckon with credible reports that the government of the 2019 laureate Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed instigated the conflict and covered up gross abuses.
Biden’s envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, arrives in Addis Ababa today to advocate peace talks between the Ethiopian government and rebels in the northern region of Tigray. Now in its second year, the war has claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions. It is in a stalemate, with Abiy at a slight advantage: His federal forces have regained territory lost in early November but are unable to make headway into Tigray. The rebel leadership claims to have made a strategic retreat and has indicated a willingness to hold peace talks.
Abiy has ramped up air strikes, using drones acquired from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which have killed scores of Tigrayans. A land offensive would be much bloodier, for both sides. But the prime minister will likely want a thrust deep into Tigray before agreeing to any meaningful parleys. For one thing, this would give him the upper hand in any negotiations. For another, having portrayed himself as a military leader — in the time-honored fashion, he visited the frontlines dressed in fatigues — he needs something that at least looks like a victory.
Feltman’s first order of business should be to restrain Abiy. The prime minister has thus far been immune to persuasion and to punitive economic measures, such as the suspension of European aid and the blocking of duty-free access to the U.S. market. But these, in effect, punish all Ethiopians for the actions of their leaders.
More targeted measures are called for. Biden has threatened to use sanctions to end the fighting, but has only imposed them on the third party to the conflict — the government of neighboring Eritrea, which entered the civil war on Abiy’s side. It is time to call out and sanction Ethiopians, on both the Tigrayan and government sides, who have enabled or committed crimes and abuses.
Despite the hurdles put up by the government, human rights agencies and humanitarian groups have been tabulating offenses by all combatants. Even as officials in Addis Ababa talk up war crimes ascribed to the rebels, they have suppressed information of wrongdoing — including mass rape and the recruitment of child fighters — by government forces and allied militias. Fislan Abdi, the minister Abiy tasked to document abuses, told the Washington Post last week that she was told to sweep inconvenient facts under the carpet. She resigned.
That brings up the question of Abiy’s culpability. His government claims the rebels sparked the civil war when they attacked a military base, but it is now becoming clear that the prime minister had been preparing an assault on the northern region long before then. As the New York Times has reported, Abiy plotted with the Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki against the Tigrayans even as the two leaders negotiated an end to decades of enmity between their countries in 2018 — the deal that won Abiy his Nobel.
The prime minister was apparently counting on the Peace Prize to draw attention away from the preparations that he and Isais were making for war against their common enemy: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Although the Tigrayans are a minority in multiethnic Ethiopia, the TPLF ran the government for the best part of three decades before Abiy’s accession to power. The Eritreans blame the TPLF for the war between the countries. Abiy is from the Oromo, the largest ethnic group, which was long denied a fair share of power by the Tigrayans.
Since he became prime minister, Abiy has systematically marginalized Tigrayans in the central government. The civil war has provided cover for crimes by government officials and forces. In the most recent example, says Human Rights Watch, thousands of Tigrayans repatriated from Saudi Arabia have been subjected to abuses ranging from arbitrary detention to forcible disappearance.
Abiy is hardly the first Nobel laureate to have brought dishonor to the prize. But, for obvious reasons, American presidents are leery about deploying sanctions against those who have been ennobled as peacemakers.
George W. Bush considered sanctioning Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, joint winner in 1994, but eventually thought better of it. For all his recklessness, Donald Trump could not bring himself to sanction Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, winner in 1991, for her government’s gruesome treatment of the Rohingya minority, and targeted only the country’s military commanders. (Ironically, those same commanders would go on to overthrow the civilian government and imprison Suu Kyi.)
Biden might do well to follow Trump’s example and target senior Ethiopian officials while giving Abiy a Nobel pass. Still, if the prime minister doesn’t take heed, he may well find himself in an ignoble category all of his own.
Could it be that the international community – and particularly the Nobel Peace Committee – perhaps desperate as ever for an African hero, completely overlooked the many warning signs about Abiy’s background, character and intentions when he unexpectedly became Ethiopia’s prime minister in April 2018 and ostensibly embarked on a path of reform, somewhat liberalising the country’s autocratic politics and making peace with its hitherto implacable foe, neighbouring Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki.
J Peter Pham, distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington and recent US special envoy to the Sahel and before that the Great Lakes region, says if anyone was truly surprised by Abiy’s apparent about-turn after he got the Nobel Peace Prize, “it’s only their ignorance or naiveté they have to thank for that”.
As an expert on African security issues who was known to have influence with US policymakers, Pham enjoyed access to some of the highest officials of Ethiopia’s then-ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government and was introduced to Abiy when he was still deputy director-general 0f the little-known Information Network Security Agency (INSA).
“INSA was the prototype – you could say it was first in class or among the first in class and was probably, at the time, best in class – of the African intelligence agencies that snooped around the internet,” Pham said. “It deployed Chinese technology very early on – this was before 2010 – to ferret out dissidents on the internet. And not only did it eavesdrop on them in cyberspace, but it then used electronic trails to locate where they were physically. And the presumption was that someone would then ‘pay them a call’.”
Abiy also sat on the board of state-owned Ethiopian Telecom – “just to make sure the Ethiopian telecoms monopoly did its part in this great national cause”.
“And so when you have this authoritarian background, the notion of Abiy as liberal reformer is difficult to credit.”
They miscalculated because they thought they knew him and underestimated both his ambition and his willingness to turn on the very people and institutions that brought him to power.
He adds that Abiy did not come to power through an election, but was “chosen by barely 100 members of the EPRDF executive committee and council” to replace Hailemariam Desalegn in the middle of a political crisis of mounting regional political protest. And Pham notes that many of the reforms usually attributed to Abiy, including the freeing of thousands of political prisoners, began during the last months of Hailemariam’s tenure.
The EPRDF leadership chose Abiy to be the new prime minister over the more popular Lemma Megersa, the candidate of the Oromo “street” whose protests helped bring about the collapse of the ruling coalition’s nearly three decades of domination, because Abiy was considered by regime insiders to be a safer pair of hands.
“They miscalculated because they thought they knew him and underestimated both his ambition and his willingness to turn on the very people and institutions that brought him to power.”
The world wilfully ignored these signs, Pham says – or acted in bad faith. “No one who knows this history can possibly imagine this was a set-up for democratic transformation.”
Unlike Nelson Mandela, who had shown the political wisdom to take just political power – and leave the reckoning of the economic grievances for another day, Abiy had overreached. He not only took political power – and then turned against those who put him in power – but also went after their economic interests, particularly those of Tigrayan elites who had dominated Ethiopian politics since the toppling of the brutal dictator Hailemariam Mengistu in 1991 and used their political ascendency to secure lucrative businesses and other assets.
Pham acknowledges that many Ethiopians were upset by what they believed to be Tigrayans exercising disproportionate control over large parts of the economy, but suggested it was not prudent for Abiy to have attacked both their political and economic power at once.
And Abiy not only alienated the Tigrayans but other ethnic groups, which was why the Oromo Liberation Army is allied with the TPLF against him. And last week a broader political alliance formed to oppose him.
Will Davison, Ethiopia expert at the International Crisis Group, founder of the journal Ethiopia Insight and former longtime correspondent in Addis Ababa, also believes that Abiy’s belligerence after he won the Peace Prize should have come as no surprise to the international community.
Those who were surprised had misread the circumstances in 2018 when he came to power, including his peace deal with Afwerki and his political priorities.
The peace deal was not particularly transparent or institutionalised and seemed to be a very narrow arrangement between Abiy and Afwerki. Davison said Afwerki had rejected offers from previous Ethiopian leaders to unfreeze bilateral relations – demanding that Ethiopia first withdraw from the bloodily disputed border areas between them, which the UN had ruled were Eritrea’s.
Yet he had accepted the same offer from Abiy. Why? Davison suspects this might have been because Abiy had assured Afwerki that his old enemy, the TPLF, would no longer be a dominant force in Ethiopian politics, or even that it would be completely eradicated.
Davison also believes Abiy mishandled the inevitable power shift away from the TPLF especially. It had indeed had its day in the sun and could no longer be the dominant power.
But Abiy blamed them and the Tigrayan securocrats for almost all of Ethiopia’s problems, some justifiably but some not.
“And that fed into a disastrous political falling-out which culminated in the power struggle and the civil war.”
Davison added that Abiy should also have accommodated the Oromo nationalist demands that had been so prominent in bringing him, a fellow Oromo, to power.
These included greater autonomy for Oromia and for the federal state to give back to Oromia more from its own resources.
He also noted that politicians from across the board, including Abiy’s own erstwhile Oromo allies, such as Lemma, had objected to his creation of the more centralised Prosperity Party to replace the federalist EPRDF. This appeared to be a precursor to formally changing the federal constitution, and centralising government power in Addis Ababa.
The TPLF was the most prominent critic of those rejecting the Prosperity Party and in 2020, when Abiy postponed the elections, ostensibly because of Covid-19, the TPLF also became the most defiant opponent of that move and decided to go ahead with its own elections in Tigray, arguing that Abiy had violated the constitution by postponing the elections.
Davison does not blame Abiy entirely for the falling-out and then the war with the TPLF. He also accuses the latter of “pure constitutional brinkmanship. By rejecting the authority of the federal institution, they came up with their own provocative reading of the constitution which pushed, or at least gave the opportunity to those at the centre, to cast the region and the ruling party of Tigrayas unacceptably defiant of the constitutional order – as a rogue region, a state within a state seeking to return to federal power. This was a major contributor to the civil war.”
Even though the federal constitution did accommodate group rights, and the sovereignty and right to self-determination of nationalities and peoples, “ultimately it was an act of defiance by the TPLF of the federal government to take this approach”.
Pham fears that by misreading Abiy well before the civil war started, the international community lost its opportunity to exert some leverage over him, now, to end the war. “Those who bear a lot of the responsibility for this are those within the international community who not only ignored his authoritarian past – thus signalling that they were prepared to overlook abuses – but then exacerbated it by puffing him up with what amounted to adulation. Then, in their embarrassment, they compounded their errors by ignoring the warning signs that, despite the progress that Abiy undoubtedly presided over in some sectors, things were nonetheless going terribly wrong. And so they lost what chance there might have been to head off the dire situation we have today.”
And so he is not optimistic about current international mediation efforts because the international community had not only missed some opportunities, but had also lost credibility in the process with both Abiy and many of those now fighting him.
The only chance for a “smooth landing” in the conflict is for Ethiopians themselves to do what the international community failed to do: “cast aside wishful thinking and other fantasies, face up to reality – including the impossibility of ‘having it all’ – and begin a national dialogue without preconditions”
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