The Loom of Time, page 19
What did everyone yearn for? According to Fitsum and Reshid, “they yearned for a strong leader: a Mengistu but without the oppressive military machine; an emperor like Haile Selassie, but without the feudalism.” In fact, some taxi drivers had pictures of Mengistu and Haile Selassie together, even though the former had murdered the latter. That is because many Ethiopians wanted a highly centralized state that was, nevertheless, democratic. And that seemed impossible, Fitsum and Reshid both stressed, given the ethnic divisions and the sprawling size of this mountainous and teeming country that pointed toward a looser, federalized structure. I had heard all this before. But when you hear the same analysis repeated, you give it credence. The national elections that took place at the time of my visit in June 2021 could settle nothing in this regard, since rather than a contest between two visions of Ethiopia, a loosely federalized one and a highly centralized one, only the highly centralized one was represented by the candidates, assuring a victory for Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party.
“There is no going back to the old Ethiopia,” Fitsum and Reshid went on, “since this war of Abiy’s government against Tigray is a transformational war.” The Amharas, in their analysis, tied to Abiy, had shattered any hope of working in the future with the Tigrayans. The sheer bloodshed, the government-induced famine, and the massive human rights violations that had been occurring in 2020 and 2021 in Tigray had made that prospect impossible. If there were ever to be a true reconciliation with the Tigrayans, it would have to happen under a new Ethiopian leader, not under Abiy. Abiy had burned his bridges. He could have had an alliance with the Tigrayans, but now he had alienated them and made his government hostage to the whims of that mad Eritrean genius, Isaias Afwerki—with his absolutism and delusions of grandeur.
In fact, I had interviewed Afwerki twice: in 1986 in a cave during his guerrilla fighting days, and in 2002 in his presidential office in Asmara. But he had never stopped being a guerrilla fighter, a remote ascetic obsessed with conflict and domination.[15] Now he was the driving military force behind Abiy. Indeed, Isaias was a curse, the foreign enemy brought by Abiy who unified the Tigrayans against him.
The military alliance with Eritrea notwithstanding, the central Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa would never wholly defeat the Tigrayans, I was told. “The Tigrayans, more than any other group in Ethiopia,” Fitsum and Reshid emphasized, “were superior at forging a consensus that cascaded down to the lowest level of society.” The Tigrayan elite of the TPLF was literally one with its peasantry. This was a level of intensive social and political cohesion that had similarities only with the Viet Cong fighting the French and the Americans; with the Chinese Communists under then guerrilla leader Mao Zedong in the 1930s and 1940s; and with the early Israelis of the 1940s and 1950s—essentially the Israelis of the Palmach and Haganah days. “The TPLF has reinvented itself in this war. It has gone from Marxism to early Zionism. The Tigrayans no longer feel themselves to be Ethiopian.” Alas, Tigray, the key puzzle piece of the complex Ethiopian imperial jigsaw, had just been removed, threatening all of Ethiopia and by extension the Horn of Africa. Among the many extraneous, interconnected, and disintegrative forces at play that the two mentioned, by the way, were the radicalized Muslim lowlanders of Eritrea who now wanted to unite with Sudan, and the Amhara militias, taking advantage of the war in Tigray in order to recover lost territory all over western Ethiopia, hard up against the Sudanese and South Sudanese borders. If it all seems confusing, just keep in mind that every ethnic and religious dispute in Ethiopia is interlocked, albeit indirectly, with every other one, imperiling governance at the top.
I met with Fitsum and Reshid in the garden of the historic Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa, where I had stayed for several weeks thirty-six years earlier, while covering the Mengistu regime and the great famine of the 1980s in northern Ethiopia. Of course, the internal situation had greatly evolved since then, but in essence it was the same story as in the 1980s: an imperial-minded, repressive regime that was prosecuting a war in Tigray, and using the restriction of food supplies as a weapon. Ethiopia, then and now, was too large and diverse to be governed from a central point. Yet, at the same time, it was culturally and historically distinct from both the Arabs and the Africans on its borderlands.
Did hope reside with a new generation—with the tens of millions of Ethiopians born in the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century? I asked.
“No” came the definitive reply. The young might even be worse. “The young were being socialized and politicized by various ethnic and linguistic forces, mainly at odds with Addis Ababa, through the spread of local media all around the country.” Here modernism and postmodernism featured electronic social media that led to eruptions of localized military empowerment, which made it harder than ever to resolve political tensions at the top of the governmental pyramid in the capital city. But it was complicated. The young wanted jobs, and somewhat contradictorily, aspired to a mythical past. For example, among the attributes now being bestowed on Mengistu by those who had never experienced his pulverizing ideological state was that of a “unifier.” Ethiopia longed for unity, even though the individual actions of millions of Ethiopians argued for disintegration.
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In all of this, the West, especially the Americans, had grown disillusioned with Abiy Ahmed, that seemingly idealistic visionary, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who spoke constantly about human rights and democratic emancipation, but was now embroiled in a war in Tigray where his forces were committing human rights atrocities including rape and mass killings, and precipitating a famine. Abiy, it appeared, had gone downhill so far and so fast that the Americans felt momentarily betrayed. A foreigner in Addis Ababa with decades of experience in Africa, someone particularly well read in old diplomatic cables, explained it this way:
“It is amazing how often Americans become enamored with one African ruler after another, only to become disillusioned soon afterwards. When a new African ruler talks, preferably in English, about human rights, democracy, anti-corruption, and holding elections, the Americans are immediately lovestruck and taken in at first, whether it is with someone like [Robert] Mugabe in Zimbabwe, [Paul] Kagame in Rwanda, Salva Kiir in South Sudan, or now Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia. But initial hopes soon give way to bitter recriminations between Washington and those regimes. While all those men, in their own mind, are fighting for political survival amid the most complex ethnic, tribal, and regional forces, the Americans in almost an ideological manner reduce it all to issues of voting, human rights, and anti-corruption. What is ‘corruption,’ by the way? It is an alternative pathway to getting business done in a place where official institutions and bureaucracy are enfeebled and ineffective. Politicians and others in Africa have no 401(k) or other retirement plans. They have no cushy sinecures or consultancies or speaking tours awaiting them if they leave office. They have no safety net of any kind, physical or financial. They are reduced to cynical calculation, stealing, and using every angle, no matter how ruthless, to provide themselves and their families with security. What we label cynicism is for them pragmatism and survival.”
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There is another way to look at it, though. Hallelujah Lulie, an Ethiopian intellectual and former member of Abiy’s team, who was en route to Oxford for his postgraduate degrees when I met him, observed that the West initially praised Abiy Ahmed not out of naivete, but because of Abiy’s very real accomplishments in 2018 and 2019. “It was the most ambitious liberalization process in decades of Ethiopian history, featuring the release of many political prisoners, legal reforms, and dialogue with opposition leaders. The government has allowed itself to be rebuked by human rights commissions and other groups. The very fact of holding elections, as flawed as they are, is an achievement. Progress in history is often crooked, not straightforward.” Addis Ababa University professor Kassahun Berhanu concurred. “In a more ideal situation, without ethnic and national threats from Tigray, Eritrea, and other regions, Abiy would be an ‘exemplary democrat,’ ” adding that Ethiopians “don’t like weak leaders” in the midst of an ethnic maelstrom.
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Yugoslavia wasn’t the only historical model for Ethiopia that I kept hearing about in Addis Ababa. I also heard about Russia, from the late tsarist period through the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. In this model, the Shoan king Menelik’s conquest of Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent expansion of royal territory throughout large parts of the Horn of Africa, in addition to Africanizing this hitherto Middle Eastern imperial kingdom, bore similarities to the tsarist conquests throughout far-flung parts of the ethnically varied Caucasus and Central Asia. The overthrow and murder of Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie, by Mengistu bore similarities to the overthrow and murder of the Russian royal family by Lenin. The famine of the mid-1980s, as I’ve noted, bore similarities to the famine inflicted on Ukraine by Stalin. Following the strong rules of Mengistu and Meles Zenawi, Hailemariam Desalegn’s tenure as leader of Ethiopia from 2012 to 2018 proved to be short-lived, weak, and chaotic in the mold of Boris Yeltsin; while Abiy Ahmed, the erstwhile darling of the West, was in a very rough sense like the early Vladimir Putin, a strong ruler with his hands on an imperial state, wielding information and disinformation coupled with the use of the security services as a means of postmodern control. Abiy was also obsessed with his image and the rebranding of his party, making him the first real politician to ever rule Ethiopia. In Abiy’s first years in power, there were elements of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. Whatever one might think of those historical comparisons, Yugoslavia or Russia, the fact that people I spoke with constantly used them was an indication that Ethiopia constituted a polity distinct from all others in sub-Saharan Africa, where the written languages usually don’t go as far back in time, where governance often did not extend beyond the major cities, where the desert and forested hinterlands were in too many cases ruled by local militias, and where the political comparisons are usually with each other. Ethiopia, on the other hand, was emblematic of the Greater Middle East, an imperial world forever in a state of crumbling further.
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The imperial palace compound, the spiritual headquarters, as it were, of the Ethiopian state, sits on a vast, meticulously landscaped hill overlooking Addis Ababa: a series of whitewashed pavilions with high wooden arches conjuring up African, Indian, and Greek motifs. The confection of styles, all flowing together, expresses the rich cultural residue that marks this historic kingdom. The compound was built by Emperor Menelik II in 1897, following his defeat of the Italians and his elevation from king of Shoa to ruler of all Ethiopia. There is the throne room, where Emperor Haile Selassie received Queen Elizabeth II, French president Charles de Gaulle, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, and many others. I also visited the cellars, where amid the low, white-painted archways, members of the royal family and palace officials were murdered by Mengistu and his soldiers. As for Haile Selassie himself, he was strangled in his bed. In these cellars, my mind drifted to Haile Selassie’s timeless, eloquent appeal to the League of Nations in 1936, protesting the Italian fascist occupation of his country. As a boy, I remember watching Haile Selassie on television walking solemnly beside Charles de Gaulle in John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession, so much shorter in height compared to the French leader but equally grand in stature. Killing royalty is a bad business, I thought. It often brings to power far more vulgar and brutal forces. The murder of the Russian and Iraqi royal families led to decades of Stalinist and Ba‘athist rule. The palace complex, a half century removed from that nightmare, is now a place of peace and national pride. It is crowded with newly married Ethiopian couples, in white wedding gowns and tuxedos, having their pictures taken.
From the palace I took a taxi to the Holy Trinity Church, where outside in the rain I took off my shoes before a guard unlocked the door and ushered me into a darkness suffused with incense. Approaching the altar with its paintings of saints and apostles, I felt close to Greece, the Balkans, and Russia. To the left of the altar is an enclosure with two massive tombs of roseate granite, in ancient Aksumite style: the resting places of Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen Asfaw. Here church and state were fused. Ethiopia, I thought, was built on firm and mystical foundations: a bit like Russia and the historical Balkan nations, where Orthodoxy and nationalism worked together. The state here had a substantial quality. It should not be underestimated. For a moment I distrusted the analogy with the former Yugoslavia, a sprawling federation that had been held together by Marxist theory and Tito’s earthly charisma, which vanished after he died. Haile Selassie’s influence might be longer-lasting.
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Addis Ababa itself illustrated the struggle to maintain a semblance of tradition and sense of place amid roiling urban and postmodern forces that threatened disintegration. Loud Orthodox chants still echoed from microphones outside the churches into the streets. Otherwise, the rambling city of hutments and greenery, the big village actually, that I remembered from the 1980s was gone, unrecognizable. An immense number of trees had been cut down to make room for new buildings that were now already worn and mildewed. Rambling, corrugated iron slums and working-class neighborhoods edged up against concrete pillars holding up an elevated commuter rail system. Street children and destitute families huddled alongside highway underpasses, signs of a grim urban poverty. Beggars were relatively few, but street hawkers were many. There were whole squatter communities. But everywhere there was juxtaposition and an odd sense of what some scholars called Brazilianization—the clash of wealth and poverty, order and semi-anarchy. Yet the streets were clean and the roads well paved, much better than in New York City, in fact. People waited patiently in long lines, single file, for public transport: there was no pushing or shoving. The traffic was not intimidating and crazy like in Cairo. Streetlights operated and people waited to cross. The United Arab Emirates had supplied Abiy Ahmed with a few billion dollars in cash to make many urban improvements, including the planting of new trees and the creation of new parks to undo the damage of the unplanned urbanization of the previous decades. It can be the passage from dictatorship to quasi-democracy that leads to street crime, in this case threatening the city’s reputation as the safest in sub-Saharan Africa. It was all a mixture, with ATMs near ratty market stalls. The new gleaming skyscrapers—gated communities, banks, and office buildings—were often constructed with investment from either the UAE or China, which in a visual sense were the two most significant outside powers here. I passed Revolution Square, a vast semicircle now filled with cars, buses, and shops, where Mengistu had held mass rallies to welcome Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and other East Bloc luminaries. A small, futuristic glass enclosure contained an elevator that took you down to the large underground parking garage built by the Chinese. The Chinese had built the commuter rail, the gleaming skyscrapers of new banks, and the most beautiful of the new parks. While I sipped a macchiato with an Ethiopian friend at a patisserie on Revolution Square, my friend said that everywhere you look in Addis Ababa there are signs of the Chinese, as there were of the Soviets during the days of the Dergue and the Cold War. From the café table I people-watched. Muslim men and women in skullcaps and wraparound garments evoked the creeping Islamization that many here talked about. Addis Ababa, which used to be distinct, was much less so. It was one with cities throughout the developing and recently developed world. It was no longer pretty by any means. It was ugly, in fact. But it was full of action and vitality, with restaurants and café tables crowded with people, crammed between building spaces. This was no longer a traditional society, despite the headscarves and Orthodox chants, and it was, therefore, harder to rule and satisfy.
Brazilian-style urbanization, with its wealth and stark poverty and crazy energy, with its cutting-edge technology, rupture of tradition, and in some cases reinvention of religion in more ideological form, constituted the dramatic background noise to the challenge of civilized governance that formed the core of my inquiries in Ethiopia and elsewhere. Being either a dictator or a democrat was just harder than ever in the twenty-first century. Urbanized settings were more complex to organize than rural ones, their inhabitants easy to anger and more likely to complain. Social media benefited the extremes. The drift toward anarchy or the tendency to overcompensate through tyranny remained real possibilities in many places.
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I alternated meeting people with long walks and drives in Addis Ababa. Ethiopian politics offered layers of fascination. Rather than summarize it, or even distill it by way of a single plotline, I preferred to let each person I met approach it from his own point of view, so that I could communicate the whole story through a process of exploring different angles.
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Abdeta Beyene, a former chief of staff for the Ethiopian foreign minister, runs the Center for Dialogue, Research and Cooperation in Addis Ababa, an American-style think tank that does periodic work for the Ethiopian government. Abdeta offered me what was as close as possible to a bottom-line synthesis of the local political situation.
The real break in Ethiopian history, he explained, was not the cinematic rolling revolution of 1974 and 1975 when the military Dergue overthrew the emperor, but in 1991 when, in less exciting fashion, the Tigrayan-led new government crafted a modern federalized state, as opposed to the strong and arbitrary centralized regimes that had existed under both Haile Selassie and Mengistu. Meles Zenawi, the TPLF leader who led the new government here in Addis Ababa, had been brave in the sense that he put an end to Ethiopia’s 1998–2000 war with Eritrea, even though he had the upper hand and could therefore have fought on to outright victory. In this new system, crafted by the adaptable Meles, the various nationalities of Ethiopia maintained their historical identities, partly by their controlling everything from farmland to the local security apparatus in the various respective provinces. It was this system that Abiy Ahmed inherited when he came to power as prime minister in 2018 and proceeded to give Ethiopia a more centrally controlled character, helped by the building of roads and airports around the country in the time of Meles. The problem, however, Abdeta said, is that “Ethiopia cannot be a centralized state like China,” which represents a far more bureaucratically organized society. It was China, in fact, where bureaucracy as such first began in world history in early antiquity. Nevertheless, Abiy thought differently and, among other things, initiated a war with Tigray in order to bring the economically and militarily powerful province to heel. At this point, a government defeat in Tigray “has the capacity to ignite a general uprising” throughout the country. This is because Tigray and the Tigrayans represent not only a province but a powerful ethnic faction in Addis Ababa, so that the latest war has been in fact “a war over control of the central government itself.”
