The Loom of Time, page 20
“How do the seven million Tigrayans themselves feel?” Abdeta asked me rhetorically. “They feel humiliated. After all it was they and the TPLF who defeated the Dergue in 1991, and in the 1998–2000 war defeated Isaias Afwerki’s Eritrean army. But now Tigray is decimated, and Isaias’s Eritrean army has tried to dominate Tigray, as an ally of Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia.” The factories, the universities, health systems, and so forth in Tigray have ceased functioning, he told me. “But the Tigrayans, with their tradition of guerrilla war, will never accept subjugation.”
Thus, Ethiopia was at an impasse.
“My fear,” Abdeta told me, “is that if Ethiopia collapses there will be no constituent parts to build back upon, since the individual provinces here are more numerous and not as ethnically well delineated as were the various states of Yugoslavia.”
History often turns on a hinge, I thought, and it is interesting to speculate how differently Ethiopia might have developed had Meles Zenawi not died at the relatively young age of fifty-seven. Meles, unlike Isaias Afwerki, made the transition from a guerrilla leader into a statesman, organizing Ethiopia’s politics into a system of ethnic federalism while making himself useful to the West. He thus set the context for the country’s many years of sustained, double-digit economic growth rates. It was under Meles that Ethiopia achieved a sensible fusion of security and economic development, even if the human rights situation left much to be desired. But even in that respect, some say he was about to liberalize at about the time he passed away. Meles bested Isaias on the battlefield in Eritrea and yet didn’t get into a ruinous war in Tigray like Abiy, a war that threatened the country’s very stability.
Not only Meles Zenawi but Haile Selassie, too, was not an unreasonable leader for his time and situation: the situation being that Ethiopia constitutes a vast trail of languages and ethnic groups, riven by high mountains, forests, and rugged deserts, overlaying both Africa and the Middle East. Given these facts, it has been extraordinary how well Ethiopia has held together over a century that has seen foreign occupation and destabilizing technological development. Girmachew Alemu, another Addis Ababa University professor, told me that of all the Ethiopian leaders in the modern era, only Mengistu Haile Mariam, between 1974 and 1991, could fairly be characterized as an extremist. And that was partly dictated by the Cold War, as the Soviets, Cubans, and East Germans propped up his regime of famine, collectivization, and mass murder. Girmachew, as a little boy in the Mengistu era, remembers teenage bodies lined up in the streets of the capital with placards hung around their necks, identifying them all as traitors and counterrevolutionaries. Striking a middle path of governance—halfway between the demons of tyranny and anarchy—is hard in any case, and particularly in light of Ethiopia’s geographical and cultural challenges. But except for Mengistu, this country has thus far produced no monsters.
* * *
—
Getachew Diriba, an economist and development expert, insisted on talking to me about Ethiopian history, the “millennia-long confluence of Arab and African, and feudalism and religious Orthodoxy.” Ethiopian history “paralleled the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, with close ties between the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, Yemen, and Jerusalem.” It was Menelik II who unified the Horn of Africa and ended the period of the warring princes by moving Ethiopia bodily south, to encompass the Oromos as part of his great kingdom. Warming to his point, Getachew said, “Ethiopia may all along have been feudal, but feudalism, with its formal social and political relationships, did indeed constitute an institutional basis and was therefore a defense of Ethiopian identity against Portuguese, Italian, and other invasions and incursions.” It was feudalism, however disparaged it may have been, that allowed Ethiopia to be more organized than its African neighbors.
Feudalism did not really end in Ethiopia until the fall of Haile Selassie and the coming to power of the military under Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974 and 1975. It was a broad social upheaval, led by students and workers, that had undermined Haile Selassie’s feudal kingdom of nobles and vassals. But Mengistu and the military were able to take advantage of the semi-chaos since they were the only ones in the society who were truly well organized—in the same way that the Egyptian military had returned to power in the aftermath of the Arab Spring because it had remained the only organized force in Egypt.
Of course, what has afflicted Ethiopia and the entire African Horn, then and now, Getachew explained, has been the various ethnically based liberation movements: Tigrayan, Eritrean, Oromo, and so on. Yet all these movements, he went on, were heavily influenced by Marxism and the radical politics of Western universities beginning in the 1960s. And now these same movements were mixed up with Western-style identity politics. In other words, and this was Getachew’s principal theme, it has partly been ideas and ideologies filtering in from the West and the Soviet Union (in the cases of both Mengistu and the TPLF) that has helped sunder a former feudal society for the past fifty years. Ethiopia, like much of the Middle East, has historically been a victim and playing field of ideas and ideologies ultimately rooted in the West. We truly live in a global world, in other words, Getachew suggested, where the West and the Greater Middle East cannot wholly be separated from each other. We in the West think we have helped these societies with our development aid, when in fact it has been our insidious cultural and political influence that has helped undermine previously stable orders. Decades of African coups have roots in the process of modernization itself, whose origins lay in the West.
* * *
—
Lencho Letta, in his seventies, was a founding member of the Oromo Liberation Front, who split with that rebel group years back to form the Oromo Democratic Front. The latter group is dedicated to working within the Ethiopian federal system to solve the problems of the Oromos, the heavily Muslim and Protestant evangelical Africans that demographically dominate southern Ethiopia.
“The Oromo question is a colonial one,” Lencho told me. “That’s because Ethiopia has been an empire. When I traveled to the United States as a student in the 1960s, my passport said, ‘Empire of Ethiopia.’ But already in the 1960s, the various Ethiopian student movements, strongly influenced by Marxism,” an implant ultimately from the West, “were declaring that the issues dividing the country were neither ethnic nor racial, but were only issues of class, and would be solved as such.”
The student Marxists had a point. The Oromos were landless peasants, since all of the land in Ethiopia in the last years of the emperor had been going to the crown, to the Amhara armies, and to the Orthodox church. Lencho emphasized that one cannot exaggerate how much ideological influence the student and labor movements had in Ethiopia in the 1960s and 1970s. “When Mengistu came to power he hadn’t a clue! All he wanted was power, simple.” He and the military provided the organizational element that the students lacked, adopted the students’ ideologies, and then in turn crushed the students. “The Ethiopian revolution of the mid-1970s was like the French Revolution,” as well as like the Russian Revolution, one might say. “It posed individual identity in class terms only, and completely crushed the aristocracy associated with the emperor. Ethiopia went directly from imperial rule to the dictatorship of the proletariat, from one form of dictatorship to another.” It was very much a European-style experience, with echoes of the guillotine and Lenin’s phrase “all power to the soviets.”
“What about Ethiopia now?” I asked Lencho.
He was silent for a moment, then said, “I am not optimistic. I am worried.”
After another silence, with a reference to Abiy Ahmed’s centralizing regime, Lencho said, “Whoever wants to end the multinational federation will undo Ethiopia.” Ethiopia, in other words, had long been an empire for a specific reason: because of its geographically vast and multiethnic character, which has not gone away. And accepting this variety of peoples was key to solving the Oromo problem of poverty and underrepresentation.
Echoing Donald Levine, Lencho said, “The Amharas and Tigrayans believe in their civilizational supremacy and in their thousands of years of written history, so neither will ultimately accept Oromo leadership. That is still the dilemma.”
* * *
—
Solomon Ayele Dersso headed the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Thus, he looked at Ethiopian history from a humanitarian perspective. “The emperor granted people a degree of freedom,” he began. “But it was a matter of benevolence on the emperor’s part. In his mind, human rights were something that were only his to give. They were not inalienable.” It was only in the latter years of Haile Selassie’s reign, with the growing strength of trade unions and youth organizations and their demands, that human rights came to be seen as God-given, not the ruler’s to give or take away, Solomon explained. “There was such great hope in 1974 with the end of the feudal and land tenure system. The military hijacked it all and suspended the emperor’s constitution, ruling by decree.” In 1991, with the Tigrayans under Meles Zenawi driving Mengistu into exile in Zimbabwe, “a certain blossoming of civil society followed in the next decade, before a reversal in the 2000s.” Solomon said that a lot had to do with the influence of the West. The West had won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. No longer were African leaders like Mengistu propped up by the East Bloc. Democracy and globalization were in the air in the 1990s and Ethiopia benefited. But the attacks of September 11, 2001, initiated the War on Terror, which was easily abused by regimes such as Ethiopia’s in order to please the Americans. The next big surge in terms of expanding freedoms did not really come until the beginning of Abiy Ahmed’s regime in 2018 and 2019. But international praise destabilized him. “Abiy Ahmed was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for what was in reality a war pact,” Solomon said, exasperated. Only the most naïve of people could think that the 2018 Ethiopian accord with Eritrea was anything but a war pact, given Isaias Afwerki’s reputation and aims regarding Tigray.
Solomon said that Ethiopia was still in a post-1991 situation. The political settlement of that year has come to an end with nothing definite and comprehensive yet to replace it. Abiy Ahmed’s transition to democracy was still uncertain since the ethno-national issues had yet to be settled. Elections weren’t enough.
* * *
—
Just before I left Addis Ababa at the end of June 2021, Tigrayan forces recaptured the provincial capital of Mekelle on the heels of retreating government forces. It was a grave setback for Abiy Ahmed, who the previous November had confidently predicted that he would bring Tigray under state control within a matter of weeks. The war now threatened to move from the north of the country to the west and northwest, with Amhara militias taking on the Tigrayan rebels themselves. Would Abiy’s Prosperity Party, which had relatively little historical tradition or pedigree, begin to unravel? Would Isaias Afwerki, whose Eritrean forces were rampaging in Tigray, accept defeat? To maintain a semblance of control in the north, would Abiy have to draw government forces away from their fight against the Oromo insurgency in the south and from guarding the western frontier against Sudanese incursions? These were just some of the questions swirling around the Ethiopian capital when I met one of the country’s leading political scientists, who preferred to remain anonymous.
At this moment of defeat for the government, it was a good time for him to reflect on Abiy himself. What and who, in the end, was the Ethiopian leader in 2021?
“Abiy, a Pentecostal, is at root a Christian idealist. He thinks that he was appointed by God to save Ethiopia. Like liberal internationalists in the West, he believes in human agency. As a consequence, he underestimated geography, culture, geopolitics, and all of the other deterministic forces of fate. In this sense he is a mirror of global elites themselves. Like them, he fails to comprehend the intractable nature of many wars and conflicts—the reason why he has failed in Tigray. Abiy is a product of his time, just as Mengistu was a product of his.” The political scientist suggested that just as the internationalist Davos mindset had helped produce Abiy, the Cold War had helped produce Mengistu, a tyrant backed by the East Bloc.
Never has there been such a moment when “Ethiopia, as an idea, was being so contested,” he said. He explained that the government collapse in Tigray came amid other deepening cleavages in the society.
“Since 1991, there has been a creeping Islamization here, a mushrooming of the Ikhwan sensibility among the 34 percent of the population that is Muslim. There is still little sense of a Muslim Umma or political community, owing to the centuries of feudal Christian domination. But it has been growing. At the same time, the Orthodox Christians have become more religious. Religious identity has been reinforcing the existing ethnic divisions.”
In the midst of upheaval, power usually devolves to the most organized force in politics. But what if there was no powerful and organized force? I thought to myself. For example, the Ethiopian military was weak. It lacked the ideology and corporate identity of the Egyptian and Turkish militaries. The military here did not constitute a class like those other militaries, the political scientist said. When Ethiopian officers went off duty, they didn’t socialize with their fellow officers and their families, but with their own ethnic compatriots. Societal divisions, rather than being alleviated, were reproduced inside the military itself. Thus, Abiy’s sudden, perceived weakness in the wake of the Tigray collapse potentially opened an abyss that no one was sure how to fill. In fact, many of the people who had voted for Abiy in the recent elections did so out of fear of what might come next, without him.
* * *
—
In all their fervency and subtle variations, the myriad voices I had heard in Addis Ababa did have a common theme, though. Ethiopia, more than a state rather than less of one, with strong echoes of revolutionary and evolutionary political processes that bore similarities to France, Russia, and Yugoslavia, had over the span of the decades been struggling with the question of what, exactly, it was—an empire, a multinational federation, or a centrally controlled state. Yet, in this crooked and complex history, the possibility of avoiding abject tyranny on one hand and sheer anarchy on the other seemed, nevertheless, promising. The political scientist’s analysis that raised the possibility of anarchy here did not in the end make me a pessimist. For my impressions of the capital after a thirty-six-year absence were not altogether negative. The very first-world efficiency of the airport and national airline, the well-functioning infrastructure, and the rigor of the bureaucracy in general testified to the accumulation of centuries and millennia of a state identity, built originally on a sturdy multiethnic feudalism. Ethiopia, as viewed from the grandeur of Menelik’s palace; or as viewed from the institutions that kept Addis Ababa an efficiently running city, lacking the chaos of some other parts of Africa; or as viewed from the Ethiopian diaspora in the West that was pouring money into real estate in Addis Ababa, seemed too substantial to fall apart at the center.
But simply because I could not imagine it falling apart did not mean that it wouldn’t, or couldn’t, happen. Indeed, barely weeks following my visit to Ethiopia, the Tigrayan rebels had advanced far south, capturing towns along the way, which brought them almost within range of Addis Ababa. The specter of state collapse suddenly arose in people’s minds, before the government, employing drones provided by Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, finally beat back the rebels. It was a signal lesson for me. Mistakes occur in analysis often not by a failure of reason, but by a failure of imagination. You can know something is possible without actually believing it. I knew it was possible for Ethiopia to slide into anarchy but I did not really believe it. Had it not been for the drones, what I couldn’t believe might actually have happened. In geopolitics and the understanding of our world, the most powerful tool is imagination. It was an idea that would recur at the end of my journey through parts of the Greater Middle East, a region that, as Ethiopia portended, could become more unified by technology and yet at the same time be at war with itself.
And the factor of imagination was tied to time itself. I had captured Ethiopia during a specific moment in time only. For example, a tenuous peace agreement between Ethiopia and Tigray, negotiated in late 2022 in South Africa, caught me by surprise. Who knows where it might lead?
