The never-ending, continuing war in Ethiopia

Another October coming up, and still the Nobel Peace Prize Committee refuses to give Donald Trump his prize. They even gave one to Barak Obama, who was Black and a Democrat and had only been in office for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, they ignore a man truly worthy of the prize, a man who ended eight wars last year alone. (He said so himself.)

Unfortunately the prize committee has a long record of backing the wrong person.

They gave it to Aung Sang Suu Kyi of Myanmar, who defended the Rohingya genocide: “I don’t think there is ethnic cleansing going on,” she said.

They gave it to former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who ordered the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

And in 2019 they gave it to Abiy Ahmed, then and still today the prime minister of Ethiopia. He promised to break the cycle of internal wars that have devastated the country since the vicious tyranny of the Marxist ‘Derg’ regime was overthrown in 1991, and probably that really was his original intention. It just hasn’t worked out that way.

Ethiopia has the second-biggest population in Africa (140 million), and there are at least 10 ethnic groups with more than a million people. It was a real African empire, never colonized for long by any European power, but that means that every other one of those groups was conquered at some point in the past by the ruling imperial group, the Amharas.

All of the larger sub-Saharan countries of Africa have many ethnic groups, but all the others had a foreign conquerer to unite against. Ethiopia never had that, so it’s a much harder country to govern.

The emperors spent their reigns putting down constant rebellions. The Derg who overthrew the last emperor in 1974 could not quell the resistance either, despite a years-long ‘Red Terror’ that killed up to a million people. And the resistance movement, being organized on an ethnic basis, then split into warring factions in the early 1990s.

The best organized of those factions, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), established an effective military and political dominance over its rivals even though there are only about 10 million Tigrayans, making them the third-biggest ethnicity numerically. And they stayed on top for a quarter of a century, despite many attempts to dislodge them.

Enter Abiy Ahmed, a child soldier in the war against the Derg, a veteran of the war with Eritrea, an elected member of parliament, and perhaps most importantly a man of Oromo heritage. The Oromo are the biggest (but traditionally marginalized) ethnicity, so as the TPLF’s power gradually declined, the rival groups made Abiy prime minister.

That was when the Norwegians gave him the peace prize, but when he got home his first job was to bring half a dozen ethnic militias under control and turn them into an obedient army. That could not be done without fighting, and within a year the TPLF, the Tigrayan militia, was at war with Abiy’s federal government.

That war ended in 2022 with the TPLF defeated and an estimated 600,000 Tigrayans dead, but the country is already sliding back into another war. This time the neighbouring country of Eritrea (a truly dreadful dictatorship) is in alliance with the TPLF, and another six ethnic militias inside Ethiopia have also effectively declared war on the central government.

Just the names says it all: the Amhara Fano National Movement, the TPLF, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples’ Liberation Movement and the Gumuz Peoples’ Democratic Movement.

It will take a lot of killing to unify this country.

Sorry, am I shocking you? Tribalism (also known as nationalism) is the strongest and worst hunter-gatherer tradition we have carried forward into our much more complicated present, and Ethiopia has a very bad case of it. The first task is to turn it into a single Ethiopian nationalism. Let Abiy keep his Nobel, so long as he kills as few people as possible.

Just for fun: Have you noticed the curious lack of detail in the news reports about the treaty that Trump has just signed with Denmark and Greenland? It actually gives the United States no land or rights in Greenland that it didn’t already have in the original treaty signed by Harry Truman in 1951.

Trump never reads documents, but surely someone in his office will notice what was done and alert him. Isn’t this dangerous trickery?

Not to worry. Nobody who works for Trump will tell him he’s been had. It’s more than their job’s worth. After all, he’s still talking to Benjamin Netanyahu after being suckered into attacking Iran.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. The previous book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available.