The Fleeting Promise of a Peaceful Ethiopia

The morning after the 2020 presidential election, as ballots were still being counted in several battleground states and then-President Donald Trump drummed up dangerous conspiracy theories about the impending results, many Ethiopians in the U.S. woke up to distressing political news from back home, too. The Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, had announced a military offensive in Tigray, the northernmost region of the East African country. The six months since then have exacerbated the tensions that existed well before Ahmed’s tenure, but that many had hoped he would assuage. Now the political situation in Ethiopia is playing out with deadly consequences for civilians in the Horn of Africa, and with dire implications for those throughout the diaspora.

Shared minutes after internet and telephone services were shut down in much of Tigray, Ahmed’s Facebook post stated that he’d deployed federal troops to the area in the early hours of November 4 to combat ongoing aggression from the region’s insurgent political party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. He accused the TPLF of specific attacks on a federal defense camp, as well as vaguer offenses such as crossing the “final red line” and forcing his government to retain “a policy of extreme patience.” The prime minister characterized the military action as a targeted operation meant only to remove a small cadre of dissidents from power. And despite its clear rebuke of the TPLF, Ahmed’s original post included references to healing the nation and moving its people forward with a “calm spirit.”