The Loom of Time, page 18
The Ethiopian Miaphysite Church is no exception to this practical view of existence. Like Orthodox churches in the Balkans and Russia, the Ethiopian church is a national one, according to Levine, serving as a standard-bearer in warfare against Muslim, Jewish, and pagan peoples. Its social teachings, Levine says, are couched in terms “of practical justice, not universal love.” As with a Greek church, being inside an Ethiopian church makes us aware that we are, quite simply, no longer in the West. Nevertheless, there are profound differences between Greek and Ethiopian Christianity. For example, Ethiopian monks, even more than Greek monks, share a predilection toward living alone, in the wilderness, as anchorites, following the example of St. Antony in the utter desert of fourth-century A.D. Egypt. People often live scattered on hillsides, distrustful of those outside the immediate family circle. Levine wrote of a defining penchant for secrecy and intrigue among the Amhara. This was prescient, because nine years after he published Wax and Gold, a Marxist coup in 1974 toppled Emperor Haile Selassie, creating a shadowy and extremely secretive ruling “committee,” translated as the Dergue, which proceeded to carry out massive human rights crimes for many years, and killed tens of thousands, in the course of fostering revolutionary upheaval.[8]
While Levine’s insights may seem quite subjective, remember that it represents the research of a trained outsider with decades of experience living with the culture, looking and listening and asking the same questions for days, weeks, and months at a time in the field.
Yet one piece of thick description can appear to contradict another, in the search for some defining objective truth, if such a truth even exists. Levine, in observing how suspicious the Amharas can be of one another, nevertheless also notes a “sensuous camaraderie” demonstrated by an enjoyment of bodily contact, such as members of the same sex holding hands for long periods.[9]
Thick description at its best leaves one in awe, and yet with more questions than answers, since, as both Geertz and Levine emphasize, the truth is about making room for subtlety and ambiguity, and in the process accepting contradictions.[10] Indeed, the truth is often impossibly complex, and it therefore tests the clarity of the modern social sciences.
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I first traveled throughout Ethiopia and its borderlands in Eritrea, Somalia, and eastern Sudan in the mid-1980s, in preparation for my first book, Surrender or Starve (1988). The precipitating event for my project was the great Ethiopian famine of 1984–85. The major media ascribed the famine wholly to drought—to an act of God, that is, in which human beings were blameless in the days when climate change was not yet an issue or coined as a phrase. My ground-level research revealed something quite different, though: a violent ethnic war, aggravated by drought, in which the dominant Amharas and the Marxist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, were using the denial of food as a weapon against the opposition Tigrayans and Eritreans, even as the Marxist regime was forcing the Muslim Oromo population into collective farm communities that further reduced the food supply. It was in the course of this research that Ethiopia, categorized by both the U.S. government and the media as African, was revealed to me as, at least in part, an outpost of the Middle East.
The degree of precision involved in the prosecution of military battles and the collectivization effort, as well as in the denial of food to certain groups, was significantly greater than what I had experienced in other African countries. The conventional army and guerrilla campaigns of the mid-1980s in Greater Ethiopia, with their tanks and fighter aircraft, were more akin to the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1950s through 1970s than to violent struggles in West and Central Africa. And the ideological rigor of the Mengistu regime was of a much more precise caliber than that exhibited by leftist regimes in southern Africa, and more like that of the Soviet Union itself. Mengistu was turning Ethiopia into an African version of a Soviet East European satellite state. In my book I compared the Ethiopian regime’s campaign of food denial and collectivization to that of Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. More generally, I wrote that the Ethiopia of the 1980s was like a scene out of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago about the Russian Revolution, in which “millions were displaced, often caught between rival armies, and on the move.”[*]
The spectacle of a quasi-empire of nationalities threatened with dissolution, and consequently dragging down the larger region, that I had witnessed in the 1980s was very much evocative of the situation in the early 2020s, when Ethiopia’s internal conflicts raged across the face of the land in the country’s north. For Ethiopia was qualitatively different than many failed Middle Eastern states, in that instead of being less than a country, it was more than a country. It was an unwieldy empire rather than a flimsy geographical expression like Libya or Iraq. This continued to be Ethiopia’s dilemma. For ruling an empire, like ruling an institutionally flimsy state, required a hard hand at the top that, in turn, made democracy problematic. This was partly because, as the scholar and journalist Walter Russell Mead writes, the rules were few and the stakes for those vying for power existential.[11]
In 2018, Ethiopia and its former northern Red Sea province of Eritrea signed a peace treaty ending a decades-long frozen conflict, for which Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But that peace treaty was merely a necessary prelude to Abiy’s military assault in 2020 on the rebellious northern province of Tigray, which lay sandwiched between the Ethiopian heartland and Eritrea itself. What Western elites had seen as altruism in 2019 was really preparation for a war the following year. The new war between Ethiopia and Tigray ignited a refugee exodus in the hundreds of thousands from Tigray to neighboring Sudan. Abiy, as he is known, whose publicly stated goal was to liberalize Ethiopia—allowing elections and more free expression, all the while ejecting its overrepresented Tigrayan economic elite from the halls of government—was, nevertheless, above all about preserving the unity of Ethiopia at whatever cost. And he was using his assault on Tigray as a demonstration of what could happen to any province if it sought independence from the regime in Addis Ababa.
The war between the temporary Oromo-Amhara alliance presently ruling the country and the Tigrayans in the north, following many years of dramatic economic growth, was also an indication of how the development of literacy and nascent middle classes, rather than dampen the tendency for ethnic conflict, could also quicken it, by intensifying the contest for status and spoils within an increasingly wealthy and developing political system. After all, if economic growth and technological advancement were all there was to preventing violent conflict, World War I, which had occurred at the climax of the Industrial Age, never would have happened. The record is clear: economic and political development can feed nationalism and tribalism. This is especially true where there are difficult-to-gratify expectations, with European and Ottoman history offering prominent examples.[12]
The whole region trembled at this latest ethnic war in Ethiopia. Eritrea was hit by bombs dropped by Tigrayan forces. Sudan’s fragile regime was threatened by the large influx of refugees. Also on edge was Somalia, which depended on Ethiopian troops to keep the peace there. Egypt, on the other hand, vulnerable because of Ethiopia’s new dam on the Blue Nile that could disrupt Egypt’s water supply, wanted only for the conflict begun in Tigray to continue, in order to weaken the Ethiopian state generally. The conflict also reverberated geopolitically beyond the Horn of Africa. After all, the Horn of Africa lay astride the Red Sea, which linked the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean, and along which a number of states, including the United States, China, and Russia, had military bases. Ethiopia, part of the Greater Middle East, truly mattered.
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In an address before the parliament in Addis Ababa on November 30, 2020, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed formally thanked Eritrea, which had provided arms and logistical support for Ethiopia’s military takeover of the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle two days earlier. Indeed, there had been much bad blood between Isaias Afwerki’s Eritrean regime and the one next door in Tigray, ruled by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Between 1998 and 2000, Eritrea and Ethiopia—which was then led by the ethnic-Tigrayan and former TPLF leader, Meles Zenawi—had fought a major war. As far back as 1985, from my perch in Sudan and inside Eritrea and Tigray, I had personally witnessed the tensions between the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), in the course of their joint struggle to oust Mengistu’s Marxist Amhara regime in Addis Ababa. This was a battle over ethnicity and territory, as the participants on all sides were professed Marxists. The Tigrayans, especially, had historically enjoyed regional autonomy as well as key positions inside the Ethiopian state. But that all changed when Mengistu’s highly centralized Amhara-run regime consolidated power in the mid and late 1970s. Now in the late spring of 2021, the initial, short-lived success of the Ethiopian-Eritrean offensive against many towns in Tigray, including the capital of Mekelle, marked an historic setback for the TPLF, which had run Tigray for decades as the most stable and efficient part of Ethiopia.
Though Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was himself a Pentecostal, from the largely Muslim and Africanized Oromo population, his forces were mainly Amhara, thus hostile to Tigray. Indeed, the Amhara and Tigrayan elites, though sharing the same Semitic background and Christian Orthodox origins, have always competed for dominance. “Seen from an historical perspective, the conflict of the 2020s had little to do with the process of democratization, but rather with the return to power of the Amharas, who under Abiy Ahmed, a part Oromo, nevertheless controlled the key positions of the Ethiopian state,” explained Umberto Tavolato, a leading Italian analyst of the Horn of Africa.
The struggle of the early 2020s was epic in the sense that Tigray “served as a standard-bearer for other regions increasingly opposed to Abiy’s centralizing agenda,” Tavolato told me.[13]
Abiy Ahmed, like Mengistu, was a centralizer who wanted to do away with the system of federalism that had allowed a large degree of self-government for Ethiopia’s varied ethnicities. Though Abiy, unlike Mengistu, was theoretically a democrat rather than a Marxist, the result of his efforts might still be the same: a stronger state in the capital of Addis Ababa and weakened power for the provinces. But whereas Mengistu’s Stalinist approach had led to abject tyranny, Abiy’s approach of military offensives combined with national elections threatened anarchy for a country of 110 million people speaking eighty languages and dialects. (In fact, Ethiopia’s population included 40 million Muslims, more than in Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea.)
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But here was another way to look at the situation:
Tigray was becoming like the war in Afghanistan, a military adventure gone bad, eating away at Ethiopia’s resources. Abiy Ahmed’s desire to uproot the Tigray People’s Liberation Front from its home ground also meant removing Tigrayans from the intelligence services and other bureaucracies in Addis Ababa—from where this ethnic Tigrayan elite had been administering the country’s national security for many years. The Tigrayans had a sort of informal historical alliance with the numerically dominant Oromos (35 percent of the population), who also believed in ethnic federalism and for centuries were implicitly critical of Amhara nationalism. This Amhara nationalism was fed, in turn, by an aggrieved sense of lost territories. The Amharas wanted to centralize Ethiopia under their rule. In fact, the war in Tigray was a boon to the Amharas, who saw it as a chance to regain some of those lost territories. Thus, the war in Tigray was a prelude to the collision course that the Oromos and Amharas seemed to be on.
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Ethiopia, owing to its very political complexity and intrinsically fascinating geography and culture, has produced a plethora of area specialists. Quite a few, such as the late Maxime Rodinson of the Sorbonne, typically combined an expertise in both Middle Eastern and Ethiopian studies, on account of the rich connections between the two areas (Ethiopia being founded by South Arabians who had crossed the Red Sea).[14] Two of the greatest living area specialists on Ethiopia briefed me just before my trip. They spoke off the record because of their active involvement in Ethiopian affairs. They vented; letting off steam, that is. Their words and thoughts, which often dovetailed, continued to ring in my ears:
“How do you categorize the Ethiopian regime?” I started out. I did not need to ask a second question, as the two of them wouldn’t stop talking.
“The regime is a figment of one person’s imagination. Abiy Ahmed is a mad prophet. Abiy is like a figure skater doing pirouettes while the ice melts beneath him. He rejects ethnic federalism and wants a centralized government, which is impossible. Remember that Ethiopia is an empire, not an artificial state like Libya or Syria. To repeat, it is more than a state rather than less of one. And the empire is now in the midst of self-decolonization. Get ready for five new countries in the Horn of Africa….
“The West is complicit in what is occurring, since by giving Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 it reinforced his own sense of destiny. Abiy is a Pentecostal, which means he is like a Marxist, with a utopian idea of progress that is a challenge to the Orthodox divine and mysterious way. The Ethiopian Church, like the Orthodox churches of Russia and the Balkans, is a nationalistic church in which universal values are not necessarily emphasized….
“Eritrean operatives are all over Ethiopia. Isaias [Afwerki, the ruler of Eritrea] is now the boss behind the scenes. Isaias is a totalitarian genius. Isaias and Abiy want to re-create a Horn of Africa that in terms of power and organization is closer to the Arabian Gulf than to sub-Saharan Africa….
“It is Yugoslavia all over again, and it is happening now: a sprawling Christian Orthodox–led federation that is also an empire. Tito’s Yugoslavia was the last remnant of the Habsburg empire. Ethiopia’s Tito was Meles Zenawi, who ruled Ethiopia from 1991 until his death in 2012. In difficult situations, Ethiopian politicians still ask themselves, ‘What would Meles have done in this case?’ Meles was a minority Tigrayan just as Tito was a minority Croat and Slovene. The historically dominant Serbs in Ethiopia’s case are the Amharas, who will use Abiy, born to an Oromo father, to take back Ethiopia. Both the Serbs and the Amharas feel themselves to be aggrieved parties entitled to even more power. Yugoslavia descended into half a dozen or more pieces. Ethiopia could be much more of a mess….”
The Yugoslavia comparison was especially poignant for me, as I spent the 1980s, in part, covering the slow-motion dissolution of that country that the media in general only became aware of in the 1990s.
“Abiy has unwittingly unleashed irredentism all over the country. Whereas before there were pockets of insecurity, now there is general insecurity with banditry profuse and only pockets of security. There are constant small pogroms and extrajudicial killings. The national army is a pale shadow of itself. There are regional and special forces all over the countryside, with fighting between Oromo and Amhara militias. The Oromo Liberation Army is a few dozen miles from Addis….
“Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, located in northwestern Ethiopia, the building of which was begun by Meles in 2011, has turned thousands of years of history on its head. Ethiopia has now acquired strategic control of the headwaters of the Blue Nile. Egypt, which going back to the pharaohs was the stronger power along the Nile, must henceforth be dependent on Ethiopia….”
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Power, chaos, and absolutely no firm direction, I thought, keeping in mind that 70 percent of the Ethiopian population was under twenty-five, with no living memory of Mengistu’s Dergue even. What did the young population of Ethiopia want? What did they believe? And what was Ethiopia, by the way? Was it Yugoslavia on the brink of its demise? Was it a version of China from previous dynasties: that is, a vast landscape of interrelated ethnic and linguistic groups not yet united into a single state? Or was Ethiopia, as I alluded to earlier, the globalized world of the future, where we are all increasingly similar and experimenting with common governance, yet periodically at violent odds? All countries are fascinating in their own right, but Ethiopia is just more so.
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Fitsum Aregawi and Reshid Abdi were aid and development experts who traveled constantly throughout Ethiopia, and therefore had no illusions about the lack of security in a countryside where, for example, local militias often ruled, looking for people to kidnap. They were the first people I met after my arrival in Addis Ababa. They, too, interrupted each other and finished each other’s sentences. Reshid especially agreed with the comparison of Ethiopia to the former Yugoslavia. As Reshid explained, the constitutional and political changes of 1991 that immediately followed Mengistu’s seventeen-year-long Marxist tyranny diffused power into the hands of the country’s many ethnic groups, especially the Tigrayans, so that the Eastern Orthodox Amharas had become aggrieved in the manner of the Orthodox Serbs. The key variable in Ethiopia, both Reshid and Fitsum noted, was interethnic relations, not the mere holding of elections. Fitsum told me: “Everyone now wants political rights. That is what’s new here. Because of the battle against illiteracy, begun ironically by Mengistu, people know more about the history of their own ethnic group and are consequently conscious of having been marginalized. It is this empowerment—no longer are Ethiopians merely passive peasants—that is at the root of the current turmoil.” The population of 110 million was up in arms, it appeared. Again, this being a case of modernization and education leading to more instability, not less, at least in its initial phases. For on the other side of this disruption may lie more humane and technological societies.
