In the last six years, Ethiopia has moved from a hopeful moment of a democratic transition through a horrific civil war to the precipice of state collapse. The roaring economy of the previous two decades is now characterized by rising unemployment, runaway inflation, mounting debt, foreign currency crunch, declining investment, and credit flow difficulties. Horn of Africa’s anchor state and peacekeeping force has become a destabilizing force in northeast and eastern Africa, perceived as a regional troublemaker that must be contained. The key player in the diplomatic effort to devise an architecture of cooperation and dispute settlement in the Nile Basin has become a diplomatic pariah that violates such bedrock doctrines of international relations as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The dramatic change of fortunes started with Abiy Ahmed’s ascent to the premiership in April 2018. In power, the purportedly reformist leader began taking measures to restore the pre-1991 unitary state with centralized power. This move portended the destruction of the 1995 plurinational constitution that ensured the right of nations and nationalities to self-determination and established a multinational federal governance system. Ethnonationalist federalists who believed that the constitution and the federal arrangement had prevented the disintegration of the polity, accelerated economic growth, and occasioned relative peace in the Horn of Africa for nearly three decades resisted the moves.
The ideological clash between these forces culminated in a protracted civil war. By November 2021, the internecine conflict had become a grave international concern, prompting US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to warn that “Ethiopia risks implosion, an outcome that would be disastrous for the Ethiopian people and other countries in the region.”
Siege, Death, and Destruction in the North
Until the outbreak of the Russo-Ukraine War, the Tigray War was the most significant conflict in the world in terms of media attention and global concern. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) Director General, the conflict was “one of the longest and worst sieges by both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces in modern history”. The Tigray siege lasted 728 days, making it the fourth most prolonged siege in the twentieth century, after the Siege of Sarajevo at 1,425 days, followed by the 913 days-long Siege of Madrid and the 869 days-long Siege of Leningrad. As a siege of a region with major cities, towns, villages, hamlets, and homesteads, the Tigray siege is the most prolonged siege of an entire region in human history. In terms of its impact on human life, the most systematic death toll estimate in the Tigray war was compiled by a team led by Prof. Jan Nyssen of the University of Ghent, which put the number at 500,000 persons. Compared to the 80,000 deaths in the Ethio-Eritrea war of 1998-2000, the 233,000 deaths in the Yemen-Houthi conflict, and the 400,000 deaths in South Sudan's civil war, the half-a-million figure makes the Tigray War one of the deadliest wars in recent years in the Horn of Africa. The total loss of life in the Tigray as a percentage of the prewar population war stands at 14 percent, comparable to the Soviet Union’s 15 percent during the Second World War.
The Tigray War resulted in massive civilian or non-combatant deaths. Fourteen divisions of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (12,000 combatants), up to forty-four divisions of Eritrean Defense Forces (ca. 80,000), and other auxiliary forces conducted a total war in Tigray, destroying civilian infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals, factories, and other installations. The conflict caused $29 billion worth of damage and a productivity loss of $6 billion in the region. The war caused unspeakable destruction of lives and livelihoods, involving war crimes, various crimes against humanity, and gendered-baed violence.
A Hidden War in the South
Though the Tigray War was the deadliest and most destructive conflict in Ethiopian history, the first shots of the civil war were fired in Oromia. Ethiopian security forces were let loose against the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) in October 2019, more than a year before the Tigray War started in November 2020. An undeclared state of emergency was imposed, and western and southern Oromia were placed under Command Post military rule. In the military operations that ensued, heinous atrocities were committed with devastating effects on the lives, livelihoods, and liberties of the residents of the region. The command post rule was so loathsome that scores of young people fled to the mountains and joined the OLA.
In January 2020, the ENDF launched a full-fledged military campaign against the OLA. Directed by General Berhanu Jula, ENDF deputy chief of staff at the time, the operation involved eight ENDF divisions. It was conducted with no media in the region to report on it. Telephone lines were cut off, the internet was disrupted, and electricity was discontinued. From January 8 to February 8, 2020, a hidden war characterized by scorched earth tactics and collective punishment was conducted to wipe out the OLA military leadership and to dismantle the OLA military structure.
While the ENDF was bogged down in Tigray after November 2020, several contingents of federal and regional police, regional special forces, and private armed militias were deployed to conduct counterinsurgency operations throughout Oromia, particularly in the four zones of Wallagga, West, and North Shawa, and the Guji Zone in southern Oromia. With international attention focused on the northern front, a brutal campaign wreaked havoc throughout Oromia with impunity. In March 2022, having been evicted from Tigray in June 2021, four ENDF divisions were sent to western Oromia for the third round of operation.
The violence in Oromia succeeded only in strengthening the OLA and deepening the conflict. When the war in Oromia was ignited in October 2019, the OLA was perhaps 2000 men strong and was confined to the Ethio-Sudanese borderlands. The atrocity crimes perpetrated under command post rule drove thousands of youth to escape to OLA, augmenting the number of fighters to between 80,000 and 100,000 strong, and it is operating within a 50-mile radius of the Capital city, Addis Ababa.
The Dynamics of State Collapse
The Tigray War ended with the signing of the Pretoria Agreement in November 2022. A year after the agreement, the guns fell silent in Tigray, but peace did not prevail. The terms of the agreement have not been implemented fully. The truce between former combatants is holding, but the political problems that precipitated the war in the first place have not been resolved. Attempts to end the conflict in Oromia through negotiations have not succeeded. The war continues in Oromia.
Even worse, a new front has been opened in the Amhara region. The main reason for the conflict was the signing of the Pretoria Agreement, which promised that the existing constitution would be the foundation of resolving the contradictions that led to the war in the first place. The Amhara region was set to lose the territories it had conquered and annexed during the Tigary War. The federal government’s decision to federalize the regional state’s special forces was viewed as a conspiracy to disarm the Amhara region. The war the federal government declared on the Amhara forces is in its eighth month, with no end in sight.
The international community hopes a national dialogue is a viable “pathway to peace.” As proposed, the national dialogue lacks independence, transparency, and inclusiveness, which are critical to the success of any national dialogue. As a conflict resolution mechanism for post-conflict deeply-divided societies, the national dialogue could have created a national consensus before the beginning of the civil war. The dynamics of state implosion are set in motion. National dialogue seems “too little, too late.”
By Ezekiel Gebissa
Professor of
History and African Studies at
Kettering University in Flint,
Michigan. He can be reached
at: egebissa@kettering.edu
