After Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, ended a decades-long border conflict, he was heralded as a unifier. Now critics accuse him of tearing the country apart.

By Jon Lee Anderson 

The New Yorker.

September 26, 2022

Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. A year later, his army was implicated in human-rights atrocities.Photograph by Alex Welsh

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At the wheel of an armored Toyota Land Cruiser, trailed by a car full of bodyguards, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed drove me around Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. With a politician’s pride, he pointed out some of his recent civic projects: a vast park and a national library; a handicrafts market; a planetarium, still under construction. Throughout the city were government buildings that he’d built or remade: the federal police headquarters, the Ministry of Mines, an artificial-­intelligence center, the Ministry of Defense. In the Entoto Hills, above Addis, he had established a complex of recreational areas to showcase his Green Legacy Initiative, aimed at making Ethiopia a pioneer in sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. He boasted of having planted eighteen billion trees. “If in five years the world does not recognize what we have done,” he said, as he negotiated a turn, “then I am not your brother.”

It was all part of his vision, he explained, to transform his country into a modern state. Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous nation, with the largest economy in East Africa. But it is ethnically fractured, with more than eighty distinct groups, many of them beset by old enmities and overlapping territorial claims. Abiy came to power in 2018, promising to heal the country’s divisions. A former soldier and intelligence officer, he was born to parents from Ethiopia’s two main religious communities—his mother from the Orthodox Christian majority and his father from the sizable Muslim minority. His guiding principle was medemer, an Amharic term meaning “syn­­ergy,” or “coming together.”

Abiy, at forty-six, could be mistaken for a prosperous real-estate agent: medium height, trimmed goatee, and a wardrobe of khakis, casual shirts, and gold-rimmed Cartier sunglasses. He projects the self-assurance of a motivational speaker. Soon after taking office, he published a best-selling book about the transformative power of med­emer, which is sold at roadside stalls, alongside volumes by Tony Robbins and Jordan Peterson. In conversation, Abiy does most of the talking, but he demands constant feedback. It is not enough to nod along with him; he wants to know what you think, if only to disagree.

Abiy writes in his book that human beings have a “direct existential need” to be free of massacres and wars, and not long after his election he delivered a surprising advance. For two decades, Ethiopia had been in a hostile standoff with its neighbor Eritrea—the lingering aftereffect of a war that claimed as many as a hundred thousand lives. Abiy forged a peace deal, which ended the standoff and earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of his efforts to “promote reconciliation, solidarity and social justice.” At the Nobel ceremony, in Oslo, he invoked both the Bible and the Quran: “Before we can harvest peace dividends, we must plant seeds of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation in the hearts and minds of our citizens.”

But the spirit of reconciliation did not flourish in Abiy’s Ethiopia. In November, 2020, just eleven months after he was awarded the Nobel, violence erupted in Tigray, a rebellious region in the north. Abiy’s army became embroiled in a conflict that involved gruesome ethnic killing, gang rapes, and mass executions. Hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans were soon on the brink of starvation, while others poured across the Sudanese border to find refuge in hastily built camps.

The violence has sparked an international argument about Abiy. His supporters say that he is a modernizer, whose only mistake was that he moved too fast to overturn Ethiopia’s corrupt old order. His critics accuse him of starting an ethnic conflict in order to favor his political allies; some demand that his Nobel be revoked, and warn that the unrest that has attended his time in office is spreading through the region. But, as Abiy and I toured Ethiopia, he seemed to want to talk about everything but the conflict that had engulfed his country. From inside his motorcade, it was as if there were no war going on at all.

In “Crabs in a Bucket,” a forthcoming book, the Somali author Nuruddin Farah likens Ethiopian politics to a destructive Groundhog Day. Farah, who is seventy-six, grew up in a part of Somalia that was ceded to Ethiopia by the colonial British after they ousted the Italians in the Second World War. “Think of a demolition site when you think about Ethiopia, a country under constant rebuilding, one whose laws are often dismantled to accommodate the new ruler, and whose peoples’ nerves are frequently shredded before another regime gains power, only to demolish what has gone on before,” Farah writes. “Ethiopian leaders are famous for telling big and small porky pies to their fellow citizens and to the rest of the world; they know how to start conflicts that lead to wars, not how to resolve conflicts.”

Farah’s assessment is bleak, but the past half century of Ethiopian politics largely supports it. In 1974, a military faction called the Derg seized power, overthrowing the emperor, Haile Selassie. The Derg’s leader, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, presided over a murderous purge, known as the Red Terror, intended to remake the country as a Communist stronghold. Mengistu ­had several dozen rivals machine-gunned at the national palace, and subsequently held a ceremony in the newly named Revolution Square, in which he swore to eliminate “voracious feudalists, hired fascists, and running dogs” and smashed bottles filled with red liquid, symbolizing his enemies’ blood. Even as the country suffered one of its periodic droughts, Mengistu launched a Stalinist collectivization campaign, and hundreds of thousands died of starvation.

Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. A year later, his army was implicated in human-rights atrocities.Photograph by Alex Welsh

In 1991, the Derg was overthrown by a coalition of rebel militias; Abiy, who was then in the seventh grade, left school for a time to join the cause. When the fighting was over, the fiercest and most cohesive of the rebel groups, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, took charge of the governing coalition, and led the country’s politics for the next twenty-­seven years. The T.P.L.F., as it was known, imposed a program of economic modernization, which in time produced striking gains. For a decade and a half, the growth rate hovered around ten per cent, and Ethiopia became known among boosters as the China of Africa. But the real wealth went largely to those who were already rich, or to people connected with the government, which controlled much of the economy. And the leadership tolerated little dissent, imprisoning and torturing thousands of political opponents.

The problems of ethnic division also lingered. The Tigrayans came from a region in the north that contains ancient sites of civilization, and they thought of themselves as the heirs of a profound historical lineage. But they were a relatively small group, making up just six per cent of Ethiopia’s population, and they were trying to retain control of a fractious country.

“I liked this place better when it was a cat café.”

Cartoon by Joe Dator

In an effort to reset the balance of power, the T.P.L.F. split Ethiopia into semi-autonomous regions, encompassing the traditional territories of the main ethnic groups. The effect, a senior Western official told me, was to “seed the future with ethnic problems,” creating a system of eleven mini-states in near-perpetual tension. For much of the twentieth century, the Amhara, the country’s second-largest group, had dominated Ethiopian politics. Now the government gave the Tigrayans a portion of land that the Amhara regarded as theirs, provoking an enduring re­sentment. Just about everywhere an internal border was created, people felt that their traditional lands had been breached, and that they had been shut out of power.

In 2012, a non-Tigrayan became Prime Minister—Hailemariam Desalegn, a mild-mannered Wolayta who had trained as a water engineer. But Tigrayans still held key positions in the government, the armed forces, and the state-controlled economy. Ethnic militias clashed, and resentments festered.

There was particular discontent among the Oromo, the country’s largest group. As the government pushed to expand the capital city into surrounding Oromo villages, many people complained that their land had been seized without compensation. Protests broke out, and the unrest spread to other regions. In 2018, Hailemariam abruptly stepped down as Prime Minister, calling for “reforms that would lead to sustainable peace and democracy.” His departure gave Abiy his opening.

Abiy has an unshakable belief in his ability to overcome obstacles—not just to see the future but to shape it. “I used to tell all my friends thirty years ago that I was going to be P.M., and everyone took it as a joke,” he said, on one of our drives. “Then, once I became P.M. and I made peace with Eritrea, I asked my minister of foreign affairs, ‘Do you think I could get the Nobel?’ He said, ‘It’s true you have done everything you promised, but on this I am not sure.’ And then I won the Nobel.”

Before Abiy took office, he did not seem to outside observers like an obvious candidate for a country seeking radical change. He had spent his early career working within the ruling coalition. After rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the military, he went into politics in 2010, winning a seat in parliament. He served briefly as minister of science and technology before becoming vice-president of the Oromia region. By Abiy’s account, though, he was already agitating from the inside. “I was always telling the former P.M.s that I was going to replace them,” he told me. “You know, they can kill you for that—but I said it.”

When the position of Prime Minister opened up, Abiy’s candidacy offered a new vision for the country: shrinking the Ethiopian state to allow greater freedom and a more democratic system. It would also put an Oromo in charge of the country for the first time. In April, 2018, after a brief and contested shuffling of legislative leaders, parliament elected him to the job.

Within days of coming to power, Abiy moved to overturn the status quo. He began by releasing thousands of political prisoners, and decried the use of torture in Ethiopia’s prisons. He also ended a state of emergency imposed by the T.P.L.F. and launched an overhaul of the country’s security agencies.

The first months of his tenure were dizzyingly ambitious. He announced his intention to privatize state-owned enterprises, including telecommunications and aviation, and sought agreements to give his landlocked nation access to ports in Djibouti, Sudan, Somaliland, and Kenya. He went on to implement an economic plan, focussed on five areas: mining, information and communications technology, manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism. In the West, his advocacy of freedom—in politics and, especially, in the market—drew praise. The Financial Times called him “Africa’s new talisman.”

Abiy speaks about his initiatives with unwavering confidence. “I wanted to add value for my country, and I am doing it,” he told me. But his leadership was quickly met with violent opposition. Barely two months into his term, as he addressed a crowd in downtown Addis, an assailant mounted a grenade attack, in which two people died and scores were wounded. A group of policemen were arrested for failing to prevent the attack; Abiy’s sympathizers saw it as evidence that he had enemies on the inside. In June, 2019, the military attempted a coup in the Amhara region, killing the region’s president and the national armed forces’ chief of staff. Abiy carried on with his reforms, and increasingly worked to force T.P.L.F. members out of his administration. That November, he eliminated the governing coalition that the Tigrayans had led. In its place, he devised a new political vehicle, the Prosperity Party—essentially the same coalition that he had disbanded, except for the T.P.L.F., which refused to join.

The Tigrayan leadership decamped to northern Ethiopia. In the regional capital of Mekelle, the former national government became an alternate center of power, with much of the country’s bureaucratic expertise and a significant portion of its military force. In 2020, when Abiy postponed national elections, saying that covid-19 presented too great a threat, the Tigrayans defiantly held elections of their own. The T.P.L.F. received ninety-eight per cent of the vote, giving its chairman, Debretsion Gebremichael, control of the regional congress.

The war began two months later, with what the T.P.L.F. has described as both a “preëmptive operation” and a “legitimate act of self-defense” against forces that Abiy had mobilized around the region. Before daybreak on November 4th, Tigrayan soldiers attacked a key Ethiopian Army garrison near Mekelle. Within hours, Abiy’s warplanes and Army units were on their way to counter the attack and to seize Mekelle. After three weeks of fierce fighting, Abiy declared military operations “completed,” and Debretsion and his comrades vanished into the Tigrayan countryside.

But Abiy hadn’t fought by himself; his forces weren’t strong enough. Instead, he had made a kind of devil’s bargain. To take on the T.P.L.F., he had formed a military alliance with Eritrea, which has a powerful army and one of the world’s most repressive governments. He had also solicited support from Amhara militias. Both the Eritreans and the Amhara had old grievances with the Tigrayans. During the fighting, reports spread of gang rapes, and of widespread killings of civilians. The U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said that “ethnic cleansing” seemed to be taking place.

Abiy’s government heatedly denied the charge, but videos were circulating that appeared to show persuasive evidence of war crimes. One particularly gruesome video, from January, 2021, shows Ethiopian soldiers filming one another as they murder at least thirty residents of a village in central Tigray. The soldiers urge one another on as they lead captives—young men in civilian clothes—to a cliff and begin shooting. One man calls out to a comrade to shoot his victim again, because he is still moving; another tells his fellow-­soldiers, “Use no more than two bullets—two is enough to kill them.” In the end, the soldiers toss their victims off the cliff, shooting some of them again on ledges where they have fallen. The soldiers carry out the killings with an air of complicit glee. Their victims are eerily silent.

Finally, in March, 2021, Abiy acknowledged that the Eritreans had been involved in the fighting, and allowed that atrocities may have been committed. He promised, somewhat vaguely, to seek justice. Western observers were outraged, but Abiy’s constituents seemed not to care. Three months later, he held a national election—excluding Tigray—and easily secured a new five-year term. His slogan was “New Beginnings.”

Within the government, though, some of his loyalists were appalled. When Abiy took power, he had built an inclusive administration, with wo­men in cabinet positions and Tigrayans—those who weren’t loyal to the T.P.L.F.—occupying key posts. Among them was Berhane Kidanemariam, who served as second-in-command of the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, D.C. At the beginning, Berhane told me, he was hopeful that Abiy could bring the country together, but he quickly developed doubts. In July, 2018, Abiy visited the U.S., and spoke before a crowd of expatriate Ethiopians. As Berhane introduced him, the crowd began insulting him for being Tigrayan, and jeering at him to get off the stage. He hoped that Abiy would say something to calm things down. Instead, the Prime Minister went on with his speech as if nothing had happened. When Berhane registered concern afterward, he told me, Abiy chided him for being too sensitive.

Berhane reassured himself that it was an isolated incident. “I thought things would resolve themselves,” he said. But then the war broke out, and the news emerged that the Eritreans were fighting on Abiy’s side. “We were told to publicly deny the reports—but how could we deny it?” Berhane said. “That was a sign to me that the government would destabilize not just Ethiopia but the whole region.” When the videos of war crimes came to light, Berhane resigned from his post. For people who had believed in Abiy’s early promise, the videos felt like a betrayal. “I couldn’t control my feelings,” Berhane said. “I still can’t get it out of my mind.”

Abiy’s residence—a modernist mansion, with exercise machines on the lawn—is surrounded by relics of Ethiopia’s contested history. It sits at the foot of a hill where Emperor Menelik II, who ruled from 1889 to 1913, built his royal compound. Menelik was a canny, brutal Amhara who beat back the first Italian conquest of Ethiopia and went on to expand his empire by using European firearms against rival ethnic groups. He also brought the country its first automobiles, postal service, and electrical and telephone lines.

The palace where Menelik lived is also where Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie, grew up. Known as the King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Selassie was hailed as the culmination of a dynasty that, according to legend, had begun with the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He became a figure of global renown in 1936, when, after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, he gave an eloquent speech at the League of Nations, to warn of the rise of Fascism. Selassie was a crucial proponent of the anti-colonial pan-African movement and a vocal opponent of apartheid who was personally acquainted with Mao, de Gaulle, and Queen Elizabeth II. He was especially close with the U.S., and made state visits to every President from Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon; in October, 1963, John F. Kennedy drove with him past cheering crowds in the back seat of a gleaming convertible.

Cartoon by Harry Bliss

At the height of his reign, Selassie built the Jubilee Palace, downhill from his former home. One afternoon, Abiy took me there. The palace, he explained, was the centerpiece of his Addis Ababa renovation. In the basement, he ushered me past armed soldiers and through a doorway. Stretching out his arms, he announced, “This is the gold room.” It was filled with ornaments: goblets, candelabra, a pair of ornately carved thrones. Abiy opened a cabinet and handed me a hefty plate. With a thrilled look, he said, “Everything in here is gold.”

Abiy’s curators had catalogued more than two hundred thousand artifacts from the palace, and concrete-block storehouses had been erected to protect them during the restoration. There were globes of every size; elephant tusks; more thrones; the Emperor’s clothes, including white Chelsea boots and his uniform from the Second World War. Abiy gestured to an antique exercise bike and joked, “They thought only people nowadays worried about their weight.”

In the garages was the Emperor’s car collection: two hundred vehicles, from a horse-drawn hearse to antique Bentleys. Abiy pointed out an armor-plated Cadillac limo—believed to be among the last cars that Selassie bought before his overthrow—and guided me into the back seat. It had blue carpet, and a special footstool, customized to imperial specifications. (The Emperor was not a tall man.) Abiy gazed at Selassie’s seal—a crowned lion wielding a flag—and marvelled, “Everything has his emblem. Do you see?”

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