Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. A year later, his army was implicated in human-rights atrocities.Photograph by Alex Welsh
But Abiy has other funders who are less concerned with human-rights violations. On a helicopter trip to Awash National Park, a swampy wilderness east of Addis, he travelled with a group of Emiratis, whom he introduced vaguely as “friends.” Abiy had built a lakeside tourist resort in the park. The water was disconcertingly infested with crocodiles, but the landscape was ruggedly beautiful, and the developers had erected kid-friendly animal statues around the grounds. The resort was one of half a dozen that Abiy was having constructed in Ethiopia; the idea was to seek international partners that would run them as concessions, and to use them as hubs to develop the countryside.
Over dinner, at a long table by a swimming pool, we listened as Abiy spoke about how Ethiopia could be useful to its allies. For one thing, he suggested, Ethiopia could “fight their wars” for them. He had noticed that Westerners no longer seemed eager to send their sons into combat, but Ethiopians were good fighters, he said, and did not have the same qualms.
The Emiratis mostly kept to themselves, but an amiable man named Fahad Abdulrahman bin Sultan introduced himself as the head of the U.A.E. Red Crescent Society. Bin Sultan told me that Ethiopia could become a tourist hub, if it was developed properly. It has abundant water, and it is convenient to the Arabian Peninsula (“really hot at this time of year”). Abiy, he said, was a visionary: “If he can have ten years in power, Ethiopia will be transformed, like Egypt was with Sisi.” He didn’t seem bothered by Sisi’s fierce repression of his political opponents.
In Ethiopia, the Emiratis are a less significant presence than the Chinese, who have been in the country for more than a decade. In Addis, Chinese laborers in overalls are ubiquitous: expanding the international airport; working around the clock on the parkland known as Friendship Square and on the spaceship-like planetarium; finishing up the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, an undulating spire that is among the tallest buildings in Africa. Roads and bridges are being constructed throughout Ethiopia, and the Chinese play a key role in almost all of them. No country holds more of Ethiopia’s external debt than China. “The Ethiopians still haven’t figured out how they’re going to pay down the debt, which is a problem,” a U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in the Horn of Africa told me.
Abiy occasionally fretted over how much money he was borrowing. “If you are a really good person,” he told me, “pray for me for just one thing—that I can manage our debt.” He told me that he would like to work more with Western companies, but that the Chinese had been useful. “The Americans should step up their role here,” he said. “But, if they don’t come, there are others, you know, who are interested.”
Ethiopia’s relationship with the United States was a preoccupation for Abiy. During a helicopter trip through the countryside, he turned away from the view and declared how much he “loved” the U.S. “Really,” he said. “America is a beautiful country. And the Americans are very good people. And I know the country, maybe better than some Americans! I’ve driven from Washington all the way to California.” In the mid-two-thousands, Ethiopia became a regional ally of the U.S., sending troops to invade Somalia to fight Al Shabaab, an insurgent group linked to Al Qaeda. After Abiy’s time in the military, he worked for the government in cybersecurity and intelligence and spent some time in U.S. training programs. “In the Iraq War, I fought with them,” he said. “I was the one who would send intelligence from this part of the world to the N.S.A., on Sudan and Yemen and Somalia. The N.S.A. knows me. I would fight and die for America.”
Abiy gave a disgusted wave of his hand. “Then these guys came.” He was referring to the Biden Administration. “They don’t know who their true friends are,” he said. Since the war began, “they made the mistake of talking publicly and down to me. Samantha Power announced she was coming to Ethiopia and was going to meet me. Without even consulting me! That’s not the way it’s done. So I didn’t see her, and she left very upset. Now there is a different approach—they know they must behave respectfully.” (U.S. officials have said that Abiy’s office ignored their attempts to schedule a meeting.)
Even though Abiy was desperate for American investment, he couldn’t bring himself to be too reverent about its politicians. He told me that he had “taken a big intake of breath” when he heard that Joe Biden had fallen off his bicycle. “I wish he acted his age,” he said. He went on, “Obama was good at making inspiring speeches, but he made more promises than he could fulfill.” Abiy grimaced when I asked about Donald Trump. “He did a lot of damage to America’s image. Let’s not even talk about him in the same way as the others.” Without discernible irony, Abiy said that he was concerned by the tumultuous condition of the United States. “America’s politics have been ruined by entertainment culture and media, which is why its politicians are always trying to behave as if they are in a drama,” he said. “The world needs America, but it needs it to be stable, and for its system to reflect institutional continuity.”
Jeff Feltman, who served as the U.S. special envoy to the Horn of Africa until this spring, told me that he was familiar with Abiy’s complaints, and with his habit of discounting the evidence of war crimes. “I had the same tour as you,” he said. “Abiy was saying what a man of vision he was, that the U.S. simply did not understand him, that he was trying to move Ethiopia into the future, and that Tigray was just a distraction. The charm offensive didn’t work.” A current senior U.S. official put it succinctly: “We’d like to support the P.M.’s economic domestic program, but we can’t until there are no more human-rights atrocities.”
Abiy’s war with the Tigrayans had a brutal second act. In June 2021, days after the election in which he secured his second term, the T.P.L.F. launched a lightning counter-offensive, retaking its capital, Mekelle, and parading thousands of captured Ethiopian soldiers through the streets. Abiy was humiliated. Almost overnight, his army had been routed and Tigray had been lost. There was even talk among some Tigrayans of seceding from Ethiopia.
The conflict settled into a dismal stalemate. Abiy’s government sought to isolate Tigray, cutting off its electricity, communications, air links, and food supplies. The United Nations warned of widespread starvation, and called for humanitarian relief to feed four million of Tigray’s roughly six million people.
Last fall, in an effort to break the siege, Tigrayan forces went on the offensive again, overrunning several Amhara cities and marching to within a hundred and twenty miles of Addis Ababa. Hoping to rally a patriotic defense of the capital, Abiy travelled to the front, where he was photographed in fatigues alongside his soldiers. As the international community urged the Tigrayans to withdraw, Abiy’s forces struck, with the help of drones, reportedly supplied by Turkey, Iran, and the U.A.E. By Christmas, the Tigrayan forces had retreated.
With the Tigrayans trapped in the north, Abiy seemed to be looking for a way to de-escalate. Gabriel Negatu, an influential Ethiopian businessman who lives in Washington, D.C., but remains close to Abiy, told me that the offensive had been halted for financial reasons; the war was costing hundreds of millions of dollars. “That was why the P.M. pulled back,” he said. “Also, he didn’t want to be responsible for two to three million Tigrayans starving, possibly to death, because they hadn’t been able to plant seeds.” Abiy thought that a long-term occupation of Tigray was unsustainable, Negatu said. But parts of the military felt that he had given up the fight too soon. His Amhara allies and the Eritreans were angry, too; they wanted to finish off the T.P.L.F.
Abiy’s aides insisted that he was still seeking unity. “The P.M. believes our strength lies in our diversity,” one told me. But, as the conflict grew more intense, Abiy began referring to T.P.L.F. members as “the cancer of Ethiopia,” and as “devils” and “weeds.” Even though he made a show of distinguishing between the T.P.L.F. and ordinary Tigrayans—the “weeds” and the “wheat”—the country’s ethnic factions understood that the constraints on conflict were gone. Both the Amhara and the Tigrayans continued to fight over territory. Oromo nationalist groups were increasingly restive.
This summer, militias in the countryside carried out a spate of massacres. In the first, in mid-June, hundreds of ethnic Amhara civilians were killed in Oromia; among the victims were women and children who were shot or burned alive. When I raised the slaughter with Abiy, he brushed aside the news. He said that there were always people “up to mischief” in the countryside, and that he knew how to deal with them.
When a second massacre took place, a few weeks later, the brutality became harder to ignore. Abiy blamed the violence on a militia called the Oromo Liberation Army, which was allied with the T.P.L.F. But the O.L.A. denied involvement, saying that the killings had been carried out by government-allied militias, while soldiers from the Ethiopian Army stood by. Ascertaining the truth was impossible, because the government had restricted access to the areas. (There were few international media outlets in Ethiopia; correspondents from The Economist and the Times, among others, had been expelled.)
After the second massacre, Abiy appeared in parliament, where legislators questioned him. “When is your government going to stop this?” one demanded. “Why is it difficult for you to hold those responsible accountable?”
Abiy was evasive. “Terrorists are operating all over the world,” he said, reeling off statistics of recent killings in the United States. “Without stopping their children dying in their cities, they are talking about our agenda.” He said that he was hearing a lot of “prescriptive” solutions from people, and added loftily, “I should point out that the government has more information than the general public.”
Abiy began a long soliloquy, praising Ethiopia’s military history and its moral traditions: “We still respect our elders and love our families. But they only want to talk about poverty, killings.” Working himself into a rant, he suggested that he was surrounded by antagonists, held at bay by his security forces. “You don’t see the terrorists shooting at this House, because we have protected it,” he said. “There are those who buy people within our structures. We are working hard to identify them. We have arrested five thousand people. This is not just based on hearsay—this is based on information.” It was as if Abiy were speaking not to his peers but to his opposition. “What we want to tell our enemies is that the government of Ethiopia believes in this country’s resilience, and in reform, and, if necessary, will make sacrifices,” he said. “This country cannot be destroyed.”
During my time in Ethiopia, I stayed at the Hilton, near Abiy’s palace. The hotel is owned by the government, and the employees evidently knew that I was an official guest; the doormen saluted whenever I came and went.
The local people I spoke with seemed conscious that they, too, were under scrutiny. Any criticism of the government was couched in wary hypotheticals: “Some might say that things have gone off track.” There were a few exceptions. A cabdriver exploded with outrage when I told him that I was headed to the national human-rights commission, which he insisted had become a government propaganda outlet. A young woman I met trembled with anxiety as she described living in Addis. She was part Tigrayan, she explained, and had changed her name to disguise her ethnicity. During the T.P.L.F.’s offensives, Abiy’s government had placed Tigrayans in internment camps—many of them makeshift facilities in schools and municipal buildings. She avoided armed security men in the streets, for fear that she’d be asked for I.D. and taken away.
Even non-Tigrayan residents had reason to be concerned about surveillance. Under the T.P.L.F.-led government, Abiy had helped found what is now called the Information Network Security Administration, which oversaw cybersecurity in a country where the state tightly restricted life online. Feltman, the former U.S. special envoy, told me, “Everyone knows that in Ethiopia the walls have ears.”
When I visited the Ethiopian Artificial Intelligence Institute, the director showed me the country’s first domestically built robot. A large female-looking figure wearing a traditional dress, it rolled out on wheels and delivered a short speech of welcome. It was hard to concentrate on the technology. At the back of the room, a wall-size screen displayed an image of my own face, pulled from photographs online.
The director explained that the center was involved in everything from language and mining to national security. It was also working on a voice-identification system—“important for intelligence, for identifying terrorists trying to conceal their identities.” A command center had been established at the federal police headquarters, led by Abiy’s former chief of intelligence, where monitors showed live feeds from cameras at intersections around the city. “Since we built it, traffic crimes have gone down,” the director said. Of course, it was also useful for intelligence and crowd control: “If people are gathering, we see it.” Ethiopia’s main partner in the project was the U.A.E., which maintains one of the world’s most aggressive systems of citizen surveillance.
At the Information Network Security Administration, the director, a burly man named Shumete Gizaw, showed me an Ethiopian-made drone, equipped with a fearsome gun. “Good for agriculture—but it also can have a military use,” he said. As Shumete walked me through the facility, he kept up a running commentary about how the T.P.L.F. had “ruined Ethiopia” through corruption and expansionist tendencies. “They deliberately destroyed our social fabric, built up over millennia, making everyone suspicious of one another,” he said. “They are the original troublemakers. We are unlucky, brother.”
In April, the U.S. State Department released a dire statement on the ongoing siege in Tigray: “We note with the utmost alarm that thousands of Ethiopians of Tigrayan ethnicity reportedly continue to be detained arbitrarily in life-threatening conditions.” Abiy insisted that the Americans had it all wrong. “I am a real peacemaker,” he said. “I love peace. But the outsiders, they don’t understand what happened to us.” Throughout Ethiopia, Abiy’s allies contended that the T.P.L.F.—“the junta”—had hoodwinked the West into believing that Tigrayans were the real victims of the conflict. They argued that the T.P.L.F. had victimized the Ethiopian people for twenty-seven years, and was plotting to retake control of the country.
In early July, I flew to the Afar region, a wedge of desert that adjoins Eritrea and Tigray. Afar, the country’s most inhospitable corner, had become one of the battlegrounds of the conflict, with local militias joining the fight against Tigray, and the T.P.L.F. striking back.
My escort was the main federal emissary to the region, Hassen Abdulkadir, a tall man with a commanding presence. He brought me to meet Afar’s leaders in Semera, the regional capital—a cluster of flat-roofed brown buildings set in a bleak landscape of thornbushes and dunes, where the Awash River flows past in a muddy channel. On the edge of town, camel herders camped in small groups, avoiding the heat of the day, when temperatures climbed above a hundred and ten degrees.
The head of Afar’s disaster-relief effort, Mohamed Hussen, complained that his people were being neglected: “Whenever we have international visitors, they ask us how we can support Tigray, but they don’t ask us about our needs.” An ongoing drought and recent flooding had combined with a locust blight to displace more than half a million of the Afar people, Mohamed said; the T.P.L.F.’s military incursions had displaced six hundred thousand more. Mohamed accused the T.P.L.F. of destroying health facilities and water systems, as well as hundreds of schools and homes. In a truce accord declared in March, the Tigrayans had agreed to withdraw from Afar, but, regional officials maintained, they were slow to comply; hundreds of thousands of people were living in displaced-persons camps. As in other regions stricken by the conflict, a majority of Afar’s residents were in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.
To discuss the situation, I met the president of Afar, Awal Arba, at his palace, a boxy modern building the color of sand. There was trash strewn around the grounds, but his offices had been given an Abiy-style makeover; in an air-conditioned conference room, a gleaming white table was surrounded by white leather chairs.
Awal, wearing a safari suit and a patterned fez, thanked me for “coming to hear from the Afar people directly, rather than just relying on hearsay.” Then he began to rail against the T.P.L.F. “When they were in power and had the ability to loot from the nation, they called themselves Ethiopians,” he said. “Now, having taken all the heavy weapons with them to the north, they call themselves Tigrayans.” Awal alleged that the T.P.L.F. had attacked women and children, and he showed me gruesome pictures of victims with severed limbs, or with their guts spilling out. In Afar, he said, “we may attack each other, but never do we attack women and children.”
This spring, the federal government had agreed to allow food convoys through to the besieged Tigrayans in Mekelle, and Afar became the primary corridor for relief. Awal and his men cast the agreement as an act of generosity toward their aggressors, calling their region “the humanitarian center of gravity.” But the senior U.S. official, who helped negotiate the deal, said, “We had to convince the Afar to let the relief through,” while “dramatically increasing our food assistance to Afar and Amhara.” Awal warned that even this contingent arrangement might not last. “The T.P.L.F. are still preparing for war,” he said. “And, if a single bullet is fired, the humanitarian access stops, and they’ll be the ones responsible.”
News of the war passed through the region via a word-of-mouth network called the duga, Awal explained: “The Afar know everything through the duga system, even if they don’t have the Internet.” Now, he said, I had been brought into the duga, and he urged me to spread word of what was happening there. But there were limits to what the Afar wanted conveyed.
After the meeting, I was riding with Hassen, Abiy’s emissary, when he stopped the car and pointed out a fenced-in encampment, guarded by soldiers. Inside were a few hundred tents in a dusty field, where children and women clustered around cook fires. They were Tigrayans, who had lived in rural areas of Afar. When the war began, the authorities had brought them to the camp, ostensibly to protect against attacks by what Hassen described as “people sent by the T.P.L.F.” I asked Hassen if we could go inside and talk to them, but he rejected the idea. “All they will do is complain, and that will be unpleasant,” he said.
In mid-September, I talked with the T.P.L.F.’s primary spokesman, Getachew Reda. The conversation didn’t last long; soon after picking up, Getachew said that it wasn’t safe for him to be on the phone. After he had made a call a few days earlier, a drone strike targeted his home in Mekelle. “It was a direct hit,” he said. “I don’t know how I survived.” Afterward, he tweeted about the attack, and a second strike quickly followed. “It destroyed what was left of my house and killed more people, including security men and some of my neighbors.” Nine people had died in all.
Other Tigrayans were more forthcoming. Mulugeta Gebrehiwot is a former senior member of the T.P.L.F. who left the party over political differences but has advised Tigrayan forces in the field. From Mekelle, he told me he believes that Abiy and the Eritreans intend to “conquer” Tigray, with consequences that are “too horrific to imagine.” The ordinary people of the region had no choice but to fight back, Mulugeta said: “Left with no options other than survival, even a donkey can kill a hyena.”
Most of the international observers I spoke with believe that Abiy’s soldiers and the Eritreans have committed violence on a greater scale than the Tigrayans, but none of the partisans in the conflict seem to have avoided brutality. A recent U.N. report described war crimes and human-rights violations on both sides. In addition to the widespread starvation caused by the siege, Abiy’s forces and allies had killed and raped civilians, and carried out scores of air strikes on civilian targets, including one on a displaced-persons camp in which some sixty civilians died. The Tigrayan forces, the report said, had committed “large-scale killings of Amhara civilians, rape and sexual violence, and widespread looting and destruction of civilian property.” The senior Western official told me, in disgust, “They’re all as bad as each other.”
On one of my trips with Abiy, he brought along his predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, and I pressed him on the war in Tigray. Hailemariam chose his words carefully, describing the conflict as “complicated.” The T.P.L.F., he argued, was like other liberation movements that had seized power and held it: “They can’t conceive of not being in control anymore.” Hailemariam suggested that the besieged Tigrayans had no way out but to fight: “Eighty per cent of their people depend on the government for support, and there is a lack of food. The youth are turning to banditry, robbing trucks. The T.P.L.F. don’t have any resources to help the situation.” He added, “What the Tigrayans do have is a big army, and a lot of people willing to die. Dying is their only solution.”
For Abiy, Hailemariam was perhaps his most significant link to the previous government. Yet Abiy disparaged him, over lunch at the palace: “He never expected to be P.M. He was picked because he was from a minority, and both the Tigrayans and the Amhara wanted someone without a constituency they could control.”
With the conflict deepening, Abiy also seems to lack a substantial constituency of his own. Abraham Belay, a Tigrayan who is Abiy’s defense minister, said that he had struggled to negotiate with both sides. “I have been trying my best to become a middleman,” he said. But the Amhara extremists rejected him for being a Tigrayan, and the Tigrayan hard-liners called him a banda, a traitor. “There are people who don’t want this to calm down,” he said. “Some are Tigrayan and Amhara extremists. And there are Oromos, too, who are killing Amharas and also other Oromos.”
The senior U.S. official explained that when Abiy and the Tigrayans agreed to a truce, in March, it was under pressure from the Americans. Each side had its own interests in mind. “The government of Ethiopia wanted reëngagement with the West, mostly for economic reasons, and the T.P.L.F. because of the humanitarian situation,” the official said.
Abiy seems cornered. He can’t get Western money without reconciling with the Tigrayans—but, even if he wants to make peace, his Amhara and Eritrean allies won’t agree to it. The Eritrean President, Isaias Afwerki, would be a formidable enemy for Abiy; at seventy-six, he is one of the most ruthless and determined political survivors in the world. In mid-September, a report from the Swedish consulate in Asmara noted that the Eritrean People’s Army had summoned all active members to report, “without discrimination of age or background or health status.” It added that anyone who failed to report would “suffer consequences including their residential houses being closed, family members being thrown out of their houses, family members being detained.”
Other forces are massing, too. The Tigrayans have evidently mobilized all of their available fighters. Mulugeta, the former T.P.L.F. member, estimated that the Ethiopian government had assembled as many as half a million troops in the region; other reports suggest that Abiy has commandeered Ethiopian Airlines flights to move recruits to the front.
Last week, a large Eritrean force crossed the border into Ethiopia. Reports from the region describe intense fighting on at least five fronts. “What’s happening here is a civil war,” the senior Western official told me. “I believe there’s a totally compelling logic not to fight, but they’ll do it anyway.”
On the Blue Nile, two hundred miles from the Tigrayan border, is Abiy’s most consequential project: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a five-billion-dollar behemoth that is the largest hydroelectric facility on the African continent. It has been under construction since 2011, and when it is complete, in two and a half years, it will transform life in Ethiopia.
Approaching it from the nearest airstrip, you come first to a secondary dam, which extends for three miles across an otherwise untouched jungle valley. Not far upstream, the main dam is squeezed between two great hills: a concrete wall nearly five hundred feet tall, with the river spewing through in a roiling wash of muddy water.
When I visited, the project manager, an amiable engineer, reeled off statistics. When the dam is finished, it will contain 10.7 million cubic metres of concrete, making it “more than three times the size of Hoover Dam.” Beyond the dam, an immense reservoir was filling, gradually submerging a string of jungle mountains; it will eventually be fifty miles wide and a hundred and fifty miles long. In the massive structure where the turbines are embedded, billboards on the walls were emblazoned with slogans: “African Pride,” “History in the Making,” “Unity.”
The dam project began under the T.P.L.F.; Debretsion Gebremichael, who now leads the insurgency from Mekelle, was in charge. But Abiy has made it his own, and it has been a tremendous source of national pride. Millions of ordinary citizens helped pay for it; in Addis, every construction worker and schoolteacher seems to have made a contribution. The dam has also received essential support, including engineering and infrastructure, from Europe and from China. (Hailemariam Desalegn, who was the Deputy Prime Minister as the project got under way, suggested that he preferred aid that came without conditions: “We like the Chinese way of doing things, because they don’t say, ‘Do this, don’t do that.’ ”) All around the structure, workers in jumpsuits and hard hats hustled from job to job, on foot and in giant trucks.
Even before the conflict with Tigray began, the dam was inflaming regional tensions. Sudan and Egypt rely on the Nile for most of their water, and they fear that the dam will limit their supply; there were skirmishes at the border and bellicose warnings from Egypt, which has Africa’s most powerful military. Abiy insisted on going ahead. “No force could stop Ethiopia from building a dam,” he said. “If there is a need to go to war, we could get millions readied.” Construction is now nearly complete. Thirteen enormous turbines are being tested before they are switched on; during my visit, the second was about to go online. When the dam is complete, it will double the electrical capacity of Ethiopia, where half the citizens now have no access to power.
Abiy is betting that the dam, and the scores of other projects he has instituted, will one day seem like the culmination of a great plan, in which the war is just a distraction. In his book, he advocates “striving to make a new today, rather than being stuck in the past.” But Berhane Kidanemariam, the former diplomat, suggested that Abiy was merely stumbling from one contingency to the next. “I don’t think he really is trying to help one ethnic group or the other,” he said. “He doesn’t have a strategy. He wants to be seen as a reformist, but he is not. Power and money are what motivate him. He isn’t even really anti-T.P.L.F. When he attacks them, he just uses it as an instrument.”
On one of my visits to the palace, Abiy told me that his real motivation was to aid his neediest citizens. “I am for poor people,” he said. “If I can save the life of a thousand poor people, that is the reason, not to see good news on the BBC, or whatever.” Despite all the strife in the country, he was certain of his place in his people’s hearts. “When I leave office, I am one hundred per cent sure—one hundred per cent sure—that millions of Ethiopians will cry,” he said. “They will not say, ‘Oh, we are happy he left.’ You will see it. People will see what I left.” ♦
Source: Dehai Eritrea Online