--- title: "Is Abiy Ahmed the Most Dangerous Man in Africa? Ethiopia on the Brink" description: "\"War is the epitome of hell for all involved.\" When those words echoed around an Oslo lecture hall in December 2019, it was still possible to believe that Ethiopia stood on the cusp of change, that a new era of freedom might be at hand. On the stage stood the leader of Africa's second-most populous nation, outlining a vision for regional harmony that had already ended a long-running border conflict with Eritrea and earned him the Nobel Committee's prestigious annual Peace Prize.\n\nAged just 43, Abiy Ahmed cut a reassuring figure. Ethiopia's first prime minister of Oromo ethnicity, his smart suit and boyish smile offered a warm contrast to the cold Norwegian capital, a symbol of his youthful energy and his promise of renewal. His words were reassuring too, the Nobel speech littered with homilies about how \"peace is a labor of love.\" Only with hindsight did those words come to seem loaded with irony.\n\nIn the years since that cold December day, Abiy Ahmed has overseen a series of civil wars that, taken together, count among the deadliest conflicts of this century. Tensions with neighbors have been ratcheted up to boiling point, even as the thin fabric holding Ethiopia's many ethnicities together has begun to fray. How did the country travel from Abiy the Nobel laureate to the figure who may yet unleash devastation across the Horn of Africa?\n\nThis analysis digs into Ethiopia's recent bloody history and asks whether Abiy Ahmed really is the most dangerous man on the continent.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Abiy Ahmed rose to power in 2018 on a wave of reformist optimism, freeing political prisoners, liberalizing the media, and striking a 2018 peace deal with Eritrea that won him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.\n- Ethiopia's ethnic federal structure, codified in the 1995 constitution, divides the country into ethnolinguistic states that hold paramilitary forces and a constitutional right to secede, an arrangement that fuels chronic instability.\n- The Tigray War (November 2020 to November 2022) killed an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people, more than the Syrian Civil War, with mass famine, blockade, and atrocities by federal, Amhara, Eritrean, and Tigrayan forces.\n- The November 2022 peace deal excluded Abiy's wartime allies, the Amhara and Eritrea, and left the status of Western Tigray unresolved, planting the seeds of fresh conflict.\n- A new insurgency erupted in 2023 in the Amhara region after Abiy ordered regional paramilitaries to disarm, pitting Fano militias against federal forces.\n- Abiy's revived claim to a Red Sea port, focused on the Eritrean port of Assab, threatens a wider regional war that analysts warn could collapse both Ethiopia and Eritrea.\n- With multiple armed factions locked in a zero-sum standoff, observers warn Ethiopia faces grave risks of nationwide civil war on a scale that could dwarf even the Tigray conflict.\n\n## From Protest Movement to Power: How Abiy Rose\n\nFor Ethiopians who lived through it, the 2010s protest movement that brought Abiy Ahmed to power was perhaps the defining moment of their lives. The country was coming off an incredible run of economic growth, but one marked by a shriveling of opportunity, in which a sclerotic political leadership failed to distribute the good times to all.\n\nFor almost three decades, Addis Ababa had been ruled by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, an umbrella party that included representatives of the country's biggest ethnicities. Forged from many of the groups that helped overthrow the Marxist Derg regime in 1991, it had initially promised a new chapter. But over time, some of Ethiopia's ethnicities came to feel increasingly marginalized. This was especially true of the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest minority, who in the mid-2010s began a series of protests that shook the EPRDF.\n\nIt was only when other groups, such as the Amhara, joined in that the nation's elite realized its position was untenable. In early 2018, the fallout led to the prime minister's resignation, followed by a backroom deal that quickly elevated Abiy Ahmed to power.\n\n## Medemer and the Quiet Revolution\n\nA mere 41 years old when he took office, Abiy was a somewhat obscure choice. The former minister for science and technology had previously worked in the military and done a stint overseeing cyber security. What he lacked in an impressive résumé, though, he more than made up for in other ways.\n\nA major one was his background. As an Oromo, Abiy could connect directly with the youth who had led the earliest protests, even if few expected him to be a simple conduit for Oromo grievances. With a Christian mother and a Muslim father, the new prime minister seemed a near-perfect choice to represent a new, unified Ethiopia. His guiding philosophy in those early days was Medemer, an attempt to forge a common bond across the country's many ethnicities and subsume division beneath a wider patriotism. As Abiy put it, \"I like to think of Medemer as a social compact for Ethiopians to build a just, egalitarian, democratic, and humane society by pulling together our resources for our collective survival and prosperity.\"\n\nThe other ingredient was his reformist zeal, expressed in his youthful energy and boyish smile. After decades of remote, out-of-touch elites, Abiy felt less like a breath of fresh air than a hurricane of change.\n\nThe early record was striking. As the BBC summed up his first years as PM, \"He released thousands of political prisoners, lifted restrictions on the independent media and invited the country's once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. He backed a woman to become president, created gender parity in the cabinet and established a ministry of peace.\" At the time, it felt like a quiet revolution, part of a wave of transformation sweeping the Horn of Africa. Just months after Abiy took power, pro-democracy protests toppled the longtime dictator in neighboring Sudan.\n\nBut it was events in Eritrea, to Ethiopia's north, that netted Abiy his Nobel Peace Prize. In July 2018, the new PM struck a deal with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, ending a long-simmering border conflict. To outside observers, it seemed that after decades of authoritarianism, Africa's east was experiencing its own democratic spring. Yet all was not well beneath the surface. Just as few who visited Sarajevo for the 1984 Winter Olympics sensed Yugoslavia's impending collapse, so could few of those applauding Abiy in Oslo have guessed the potent mixture of ethnic tension and cold calculation that would soon drown the country beneath a tidal wave of blood.\n\n## A Nation Built on Ethnic Fault Lines\n\nWith around 126 million inhabitants, Ethiopia is Africa's second-most populous state, behind only Nigeria in sheer manpower. It is also one of the continent's more diverse nations, with over 90 recognized ethnicities and language groups. The biggest are the Oromo, who make up over a third of the population, and the Amhara, who make up over a quarter. Behind them come the Somali and the Tigrayans, each comprising about six percent, followed by a litany of others.\n\nWhat makes Ethiopia unusual is the sheer extent to which ethnicity determines the shape of the state. Back in 1995, the post-Derg constitution divided the country into nine regions based on ethnicity. Since Abiy came to power, a series of referendums has removed one of those regions and added three new ones; the South Ethiopia Regional State and Central Ethiopia Regional State, for example, only came into being in 2023.\n\nThe result is that Ethiopia today consists of two autonomous cities, Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa, plus 12 ethnolinguistic states. Each not only has its own leaders and power bases but often its own paramilitary forces. They also hold the constitutional right to break away from Ethiopia, a fact that has helped fuel much of the tension straining the country.\n\n## The Shifting Balance of Power\n\nUnderstanding that tension requires a detour through Ethiopia's modern history and the ever-shifting balance of power between its major ethnicities. The first thing to grasp is that modern Ethiopia spent most of its existence with the Amhara at the top of the ethnic pile. Think of an iconic person or place in Ethiopia, and there is a good chance they are tied to the Amhara: Haile Selassie, the Amharic language, the UNESCO-listed rock-hewn churches. These groups were mostly in charge from 1855 to 1991. Even under the Marxist Derg who overthrew Haile Selassie, the Amhara dominated elite life.\n\nThat long era ended in the early 1990s when a coalition of ethnic militias finally chased the Derg from power. One of the key militias was the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Drawn from the Tigrayan minority in the north, the TPLF were so powerful after 1991 that they were able to make their kinfolk the new dominant force. Despite being just six percent of the population, Tigrayans dominated the coming decades. Their candidate, Meles Zenawi, led the country from 1991 to 2012, and their TPLF party wielded the real power within the EPRDF.\n\nIt was also the TPLF that oversaw the 1995 constitution. That controversial clause on secession was contentious because rival ethnicities feared the Tigrayans would expand their territory and loot the state before declaring independence if events moved against them.\n\n## Eritrea, the Lost Coastline, and a Frozen War\n\nIt was in this era that Eritrea split off from Ethiopia to become a separate state, capping a liberation struggle that had begun in the 1960s and ended with Eritrean partisans helping overthrow the Derg. The split created two problems. First, with Eritrea's exit, Ethiopia lost its Red Sea coastline, becoming the world's largest landlocked country by population. Second, it led to the Eritrea-Ethiopia War.\n\nCaused by disputes over the border, that war ran from 1998 to 2000, killed 100,000 people, and ended with a bitter, semi-frozen conflict on Ethiopia's northern frontier. The 2000 ceasefire granted a Boundary Commission the right to adjudicate the border. But when the commission partially ruled in Eritrea's favor, Addis Ababa refused to implement the changes, because Eritrea does not just border Ethiopia, it borders Tigray. By accepting the ruling, the TPLF would have been surrendering parts of their home turf, so they refused.\n\nWhen Abiy came to power in 2018, implementing the ruling became central to his peace deal with Eritrea. In return for tax-free access to Eritrean ports, Ethiopia would surrender its claim to contested border territories, something only possible thanks to the dethroning of the TPLF.\n\n## The Quiet Coup and the Birth of the Prosperity Party\n\nThat dethroning was a deliberate act by non-Tigrayan elites, in effect a quiet coup. Although the TPLF had overseen a huge economic boom, they had also sidelined, and in the eyes of many even oppressed, the Amhara and Oromo peoples. The fallout from the 2010s protests gave the other ethnic parties in the EPRDF cover to move against the Tigrayans and elevate the Oromo Abiy at their expense.\n\nAbiy soon took the plan to its logical extreme. In November 2019, the EPRDF was suddenly disbanded. In its place he founded the new Prosperity Party, an umbrella organization containing all of Ethiopia's major ethnic groups, with one exception. Their hold on power broken, the TPLF refused to join. Instead, they retreated to Tigray itself, where they remained in undisputed control. It was the brewing political conflict between the new Prosperity Party and the TPLF that would soon unleash Ethiopia's biggest military conflict in decades.\n\n## Ancient Hatreds and Mutually Exclusive Histories\n\nThat is the basic political setup, but it is far from the whole story. To make sense of the violence bearing down on Ethiopia, one has to go beyond statistics and backroom deals to a place that is uncomfortable even to mention: the country's endless web of ancient hatreds. Most of the groups involved do not consider one another mere rivals, like the English and the Scots. They consider one another bitter enemies, who will not hesitate to oppress, persecute, or kill if the opportunity arises. These fears are often rooted in history but are also practical, the product of lived experience.\n\nThe Amhara, for instance, do not dislike the Tigrayans simply because the TPLF replaced them as the elite in 1991. They are also deeply aware of the TPLF's 1976 founding manifesto, which, in the words of the Brussels International Center, \"called Amharas colonizers and the number one enemy needing to be eliminated.\" And they remember the history of Western Tigray, the region the Amhara call Welkait. From at least 1944, Welkait was Amhara land, a fertile oasis in arid surroundings that was key to their prosperity. Then the TPLF came to power, annexed Welkait into their homeland, and renamed it Western Tigray. Ever since, Amhara nationalists have been desperate to right what they see as a historic wrong.\n\nThat is only one side of the story. Talk to a Tigrayan, and they will produce maps dating to the 17th century that appear to show Western Tigray as part of their ethnic territory since time immemorial, along with documents claiming the Amhara elite engineered the great famine of the 1980s specifically to starve Tigrayans. This recurs throughout Ethiopia's modern story: the country no longer has a single history but a plurality of histories, based on ethnicity, all mutually exclusive, all serving to reinforce claims to land or superiority. Often these \"histories\" are relatively new; The New Humanitarian has documented how Welkait only became a cause célèbre among Amhara nationalists during the 2018 protest movement. Other times the grievances are all too real, bitter memories in which every group has played both victimizer and victim.\n\n## The Oromo Dream and the Cycle of Violence\n\nTake the Oromo. While the Tigrayans and Amhara loathe one another, the Oromo see them both as colonizers who took turns marginalizing and persecuting them. As a result, the Oromo have pushed harder for full autonomy than almost any other group. For their elites, the ideal outcome would be an Oromia, including the capital Addis Ababa, that functions almost as an independent state.\n\nYet it is not so simple as casting the Oromo as plucky underdogs. To fulfill the dream of an independent Oromia, Oromo extremists feel obliged to cleanse their land of other ethnicities, a huge problem given that both Oromia and especially Addis Ababa have large Amhara minorities. Since the fall of the Derg, Amhara in Oromia have been systematically murdered and driven into exile. In 2021 alone, some 3,300 Amhara were killed by Oromo paramilitaries. On the outskirts of Addis Ababa, Oromo construction workers demolish Amhara homes under false pretenses. More than half a million have fled in recent years as refugees from sectarian violence.\n\nAs a result, many young Amhara have been driven to join an ethnic militia known as Fano, which they perceive as a necessary self-defense force. Yet the Fano are implicated in ethnic killings of their own, of civilians in Oromia and in the Benishangul-Gumuz region.\n\nThe role of the federal government is equally complex and open to interpretation. For Amhara who fear Oromo extremists, Abiy is one of their persecutors, a leader under whom federal forces smash Fano militias but leave the Oromo be. Yet the main Oromo force, the Oromo Liberation Army, or OLA, itself an offshoot of a group Abiy made peace with in 2018, is in open rebellion against the government. And \"federal forces\" describes a government comprised of many ethnicities; there are Amhara, Oromo, and Tigrayans in the Prosperity Party who stand with Abiy against their own regions' ethnic militias. So shorthand like \"the Amhara fought the federal forces\" never means literally all Amhara.\n\nA final accelerant is local media. After ending many restrictions on journalists and liberalizing the landscape, Abiy presided over an explosion of ethnically based \"news\" networks that exist solely to pump out dehumanizing propaganda against rival groups. The upshot is a story with no clean good guys and bad guys but a gigantic mess in which everyone feels wronged, everyone has legitimate grievances, and everyone plays both oppressor and victim, each convinced they are locked in a zero-sum game where defeat could mean extermination. Ethiopia, at this stage, resembled a teetering Jenga tower made of dynamite, one sharp push from catastrophic collapse.\n\n## Pulling the Trigger: The Road to Tigray\n\nAlthough Abiy's Nobel win in December 2019 marked the high-water mark of his global popularity, back home the wheels were already coming off. While Medemer remained the priority on paper, on the ground ethnic divisions only deepened. In Oromia, OLA activity was ramping up against minorities. In Amhara, a coup attempt led to the death of the region's president and the assassination of the army's chief of staff. Meanwhile an insurgency broke out in Benishangul-Gumuz, an ethnically mixed state home to entire peoples beyond the main players. Beyond the Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayans, Eritreans, and federal forces, many more groups, such as the Afar or the Walqaytes, carry their own grievances, some swept into the coming collapse and others not.\n\nExternal pressures were mounting too. One of the few truly national projects, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project to dam the Nile, promised to modernize infrastructure but was raising tensions with Egypt. By the time Abiy collected his prize in Oslo, the liberal thaw that had marked his rise had vanished. In its place, the Prosperity Party reached for methods straight out of the old EPRDF handbook: mass arrests, jailing people including opposition MPs without charge, and silencing journalists. This only fed the spreading narratives of ethnic persecution. So many Oromo were arrested that young men joined the OLA's ranks in protest.\n\nThings grew uglier in 2020, when the Oromo musician and former protest leader Hachalu Hundessa was murdered in Addis Ababa. Oromo rioted across their region and the capital, leading to around 200 deaths. The Oromo were not alone in escalating. As the wider world fixated on the pandemic, Fano militias from the Amhara region launched a growing number of attacks on federal forces.\n\nWhen the decisive shove finally came, though, it arrived not in Amhara, Oromia, or Benishangul-Gumuz, but in the far north, in the region bordering Eritrea, hundreds of kilometers from Addis Ababa: Tigray.\n\n## The Election That Sparked a War\n\nIn the end, the trigger was an election, or rather the lack of one. With the pandemic sweeping the world, Abiy's government indefinitely postponed a general parliamentary election scheduled for 2020. This frustrated everyone, since democratization had been a key promise of Abiy's rise, with elections central to it. But in Tigray, the frustration reached another level. Outraged, the TPLF declared they would defy federal orders and hold the vote regardless, warning that any attempt to stop it would be an act of war. In September 2020, the vote went ahead, and unsurprisingly the TPLF won a resounding majority.\n\nNo sooner was it over than the first jolt came. In the wake of the TPLF's regional victory, Abiy accused the group of attacking government bases and looting their weapons. Even now the accusation remains controversial; some believe the TPLF was overreaching, others that Abiy was simply seeking a pretext to strike them. Whatever the truth, the result was the same. On November 4, 2020, Abiy ordered federal forces into Tigray on what was sold as a limited military operation but was anything but.\n\nIt was the start of the Tigray War, a two-year civil conflict among the deadliest fought this century, one that Pulitzer Center journalist Ann Neumann called \"as deadly as those [conflicts] in Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Crimea combined.\" At its height, one million men were fighting, with a thousand dying every single day. Overall, somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 are thought to have been killed, more than died in the Syrian Civil War, and quite possibly more than have died even in Russia's war on Ukraine. The conflict became the place where all those old ethnic hatreds finally boiled over, as Tigrayans, Amhara, Eritreans, and others sought to right historic wrongs, opening a new chapter written not in ink but in the blood of civilians.\n\n## Blockade and Famine: The True Face of the War\n\nThe speed with which the Tigray War went from \"limited military incursion\" to atrocity exhibition would have been spectacular had it not been so unremittingly awful. As federal forces advanced, the government cut all cell phone and internet service, blockaded roads, and patrolled borders with armed guards. The result was a 50,000-square-kilometer zone cut off from the outside world, with nothing allowed in or out, including food.\n\nThe federal blockade was so severe that it led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from famine. At its height, researchers at the University of Ghent estimated that between 437 and 914 people starved to death every single day. As the civilian toll climbed, Abiy displayed a messianic streak that deeply unsettled observers. As Kenya-based analyst Rashid Abdi told CNN in 2021, \"In the initial stages of the war, actually, he spoke openly about how this was God's plan, and that this was a kind of divine mission for him.\" If anything about the war was biblical, it was strictly Old Testament: a combination of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and a hyper-violent Tower of Babel, in which mankind is not merely divided but begins immediately killing all those who speak differently.\n\nAmong the killers were Amhara state paramilitaries and their Fano militias. Human Rights Watch released a shocking report during the conflict documenting, in page after unrelenting page, the atrocities Amhara forces carried out: door-to-door massacres in Tigrayan villages, the burning of farmland and slaughter of animals, piles of bodies so high that tractors were needed to drag them away.\n\n## A Carnival of Revenge: Amhara, Eritrea, and the TPLF\n\nYet the Amhara saw themselves not as perpetrators but as victims. In the conflict's opening days, Tigrayan militants descended on the village of Mai Kadra, near the Sudanese border, and hacked hundreds of Amhara civilians to death. Hours later, Fano forces avenged them by entering the same town and killing scores of Tigrayans. The Amhara role was not just revenge, though. It was also about righting a historical wrong, in this case the 1990s annexation of Welkait, since renamed Western Tigray. Over the course of the conflict, Amhara state paramilitaries and the Fano occupied Western Tigray and drove out the Tigrayans, while also seizing the southern part of Tigray that Amhara call Raya. This explains why the Amhara, who so distrusted Abiy, sided with him: the promise of Western Tigray, plus fear of what a TPLF victory might mean.\n\nThe Amhara region itself was not spared. In 2021, the TPLF rebounded, seized the initiative, drove federal forces into retreat, and invaded Amhara state. There, by one brief and brutal description, \"they destroyed hospitals, murdered civilians, and used sexual violence as an instrument of revenge.\" Similar acts were carried out by Tigrayan forces in the Afar region.\n\nBut the Amhara were far from the worst perpetrators. From the war's early days, an outside actor joined on Abiy's side. Now at peace with the Ethiopian state, Eritrea was more than happy to invade Tigray from the north. Over the war, President Isaias Afwerki's troops occupied border areas originally promised to Eritrea by the Boundary Commission, ultimately snatching 52 districts. The Eritreans, too, ended up as victims, first when civilians who had fled Afwerki's regime to Ethiopia were massacred in revenge killings by Tigrayan forces, and second when the TPLF counterattacked and drove the Eritreans back over the border, killing so many that Afwerki was forced to start conscripting middle-aged men.\n\nUltimately, only one side could prevail. While the TPLF's 2021 counteroffensive got within spitting distance of Addis Ababa, their forces were finally driven back with the help of Emirati and Turkish drones. The conflict officially ended on November 2, 2022. By then, over half a million were dead. Tigray lay in ruins, with the Amhara occupying Western Tigray and Eritrean forces holding territory in the north. The economy was shattered. With federal forces busy in Tigray, the OLA insurgency had run wild in Oromia, taking swathes of territory and even briefly allying with the TPLF during the 2021 counteroffensive. For all the damage, though, Abiy had won. The TPLF had agreed to disarm. All the Nobel laureate had to do now was manage the peace.\n\n## Losing the Peace\n\nIt takes a special kind of genius to produce a peace agreement that only makes things more unstable, yet that is exactly what happened at the end of the Tigray War. While the United States and international bodies like the African Union were relieved at the halt to the killing, the way Abiy made his deal with the TPLF alienated all his former allies and paved the way for greater ethnic tension within Ethiopia.\n\nAmong the most outraged were the Amhara. By the war's end, relations were already deteriorating between Amhara paramilitaries and federal forces. When the TPLF invaded Amhara state and carried out brutal massacres, most Amhara felt Abiy's government had failed to protect them, that federal forces had been more keen on shielding the capital than stopping the mass murder of their allies. During the war, the need to defeat the TPLF kept those tensions in check. Then came the November 2022 peace deal. Amhara and Fano officials were excluded from the talks, which ended with an agreement between Addis Ababa and the TPLF to resolve the issue of Western Tigray \"in accordance with the constitution.\"\n\nThat last phrase set alarm bells ringing, because a constitutional solution suggested Western Tigray must be returned to Tigray region. From the Amhara perspective, they had just fought and survived a brutal war to right a historical wrong and regain Welkait, and now Abiy's government was suggesting the price of peace would be handing this sacred land back to the Tigrayans. This was almost the opposite of Abiy's wartime position; as the fighting raged, the prime minister had repeatedly declared Western Tigray to be Amhara land.\n\nThe Eritreans were likewise excluded, despite their invasion from the north being a key factor in Abiy's victory. Like the Amhara, they felt abandoned during the fighting, in their case when Addis Ababa retreated without warning during the TPLF counteroffensive, leaving Eritrean forces to be massacred. Like the Amhara, they too felt they had fought and died to regain northern Tigrayan lands they considered historically theirs, lands the deal now suggested they, as foreign forces, should vacate. Unlike his allies, Afwerki harbored a more maximalist goal: the complete eradication of the TPLF as a fighting force.\n\n## The Timebomb in the Peace Deal\n\nSadly for Afwerki, the TPLF was one thing the peace deal inadvertently preserved. The agreement called for demobilization of Tigrayan forces. In the early days, many heavy weapons were handed over and hundreds of thousands of fighters sent to demobilization camps. But the process was badly mishandled. More than a year on, many remained in the camps, lacking adequate food or shelter and growing increasingly angry, while the TPLF still had some 270,000 fighters under arms. The one thing stopping them from reigniting the war was the promise of Western Tigray.\n\nThis is the landmine Abiy laid for himself. The only thing that convinced the TPLF not to fight to the bitter end was the implicit promise that districts of Tigray occupied by Amhara and Eritreans would be returned. On the other side, the only reason the Amhara and Eritreans fought with federal forces, rather than turning on them, was the promise of keeping those same lands, territories they historically believed to be theirs and had already shown themselves willing to take up arms to defend. As of late 2023, this paradox remained unresolved, a political bomb that could yet detonate and plunge Tigray back into war. Before reaching its full consequences, though, one major crisis the Western Tigray issue has already provoked demands attention: a brand-new insurgent war between Abiy's federal forces and the Amhara.\n\n## Instability Spreads to Amhara\n\nThe lasting lesson of these later chapters is just how destabilizing the Tigray War proved for the whole of Ethiopia. It was not merely a hyper-deadly two-year conflict but one whose consequences continue to threaten the country's foundations, especially given Abiy's strategic choices afterward. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Amhara region.\n\nThe instability began a mere month after the peace deal, when Amhara militias clashed with the OLA, killing hundreds. But things truly ignited in April 2023, when Abiy ordered that all regional paramilitaries and special forces either be integrated into the federal army or lay down their arms. Rather than obey, the Amhara region erupted in revolt. The reasons were obvious. To the north, the TPLF still had not disarmed. To the south, OLA militants in Oromia still held vast territory from which they organized attacks on Amhara civilians. By disarming, the Amhara felt they would leave themselves dangerously exposed.\n\nSo instead, many disappeared into the countryside, joining the smaller Fano militias and bringing their guns and wartime experience with them. The federal government responded in a way almost guaranteed to deepen Amhara fears. Worried about Fano attacks, Abiy set up roadblocks on routes into Addis Ababa. Amhara were barred from entering the capital. Their representatives, including some opposition MPs, were mass-arrested, even as the government moved to forcibly disarm the fighters.\n\nWhat followed was explosive but predictable. In August 2023, the brewing conflict became a full-on, extremely destructive war. In lightning assaults, Fano militias seized major sites in Amhara, including vital airports and the second-largest city. Although federal forces regained control, the Fano were not dismantled. They slipped back into the rural areas that form their base of support, and they are still fighting there. As in Tigray, federal forces have cut all communications, making information hard to get out, but what slips through is unrelentingly grim. In November 2023, a government drone strike targeted an elementary school, killing teachers and pupils alike. Days later, the UN reported that about 50 civilians had been killed over the preceding month. Many Amhara insist the violence is far worse than the outside world knows. Speaking to Deutsche Welle, Curtin University researcher Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes declared, \"I believe there is a genocide happening in Ethiopia and the world is not talking about it.\"\n\nFrom this perspective, Abiy is now doing to the Amhara what he so recently did to the Tigrayans: crushing them militarily to break their power base. For Amhara suffering under the federal assault, the assumption is that Abiy is acting on behalf of the Oromo and means to gift them Addis Ababa. For a group that, barely a year earlier, had helped Abiy's forces commit war crimes in Tigray, it is a dramatic reversal, epitomized by fears that the government will soon move to evict the Amhara from Western Tigray.\n\n## The New Northern Front\n\nThere is a reason for this abrupt shift, and it is not just Abiy trying to break all possible opposition. On the northern frontier, another conflict may already be in its early stages, one with the power to rip back open the barely healed wounds of the Tigray War.\n\nIn November 2023, Abiy began making veiled threats toward Eritrea, invoking Ethiopia's \"historic and natural right\" to a port on the Red Sea. He never named Eritrea, but the inference was clear: it was Eritrea that took Ethiopia's sea ports when it declared independence in 1993, most crucially the port of Assab. The 2018 peace deal Abiy struck with Afwerki was widely understood to include tax-free access to Eritrea's ports, with the tradeoff being Eritrea's claim to border areas in northern Tigray, areas where 40,000 Eritrean troops are currently stationed. But the poisoned peace that ended the Tigray War appears to have killed hopes of access to Assab. Recent troop movements and weapons deliveries to Ethiopia from the UAE suggest Abiy might be seriously considering an invasion of Eritrea to annex the port.\n\nThis should be seen not as a separate crisis but as one with the potential to compound the war in Amhara, sparking a kind of mega-crisis that could make the Tigray War look like a mere trifle. To win a war against Eritrea, Abiy would likely need the TPLF, and its 270,000 soldiers still under arms, on his side. Given that federal forces were committing war crimes against Tigrayans only recently, such a team-up might seem impossible, but shifting alliances are simply how things work in modern Ethiopia. While the Tigrayans were brutalized by the government, the deepest anger is directed at the Eritreans, perceived as particularly savage, not just murdering civilians but sexually enslaving captured women.\n\nIf Abiy goes to war with Eritrea, the TPLF might fight alongside him to reclaim occupied territory, territory occupied by Eritrea but also by Amhara forces. That means federal forces would first have to evict the Amhara from Western Tigray before joining the TPLF against Eritrea. But with Western Tigray still under their control, the Amhara militias have direct access to Eritrea, access a terrified Eritrean government, dreading invasion, might use to funnel weapons to the Amhara and fuel their insurgency. This is why the situation earns the clumsy but apt label of mega-crisis: it has the potential to reactivate every warring party and bitter grievance of the Tigray War, only shaken into a new configuration. As the National Interest wrote of a renewed border war, \"The last time Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war, the conflict lasted two years and cost an estimated 100,000 lives. The current war [could] potentially plunge the entire region into a crisis that results in both states collapsing.\"\n\n## A Mexican Standoff with Dynamite\n\nThe intention here is not merely to show how a new Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict could cause chaos, but to document how a series of decisions made since Abiy came to power has placed Ethiopia where collapse may be the most likely scenario, with multiple potential trigger points that could send society into freefall. The worst part is that, no matter what anyone does, at least one of those triggers may now be fated to be pulled.\n\nThe result is four major players inside Ethiopia, plus another in Eritrea, locked in a kind of Mexican standoff, a zero-sum game where everyone has a non-negotiable need but cannot secure it without inviting the others to fire in turn. The federal government needs the TPLF to help it potentially annex an Eritrean port, or at the very least to disarm. But the TPLF will do neither until Western Tigray is returned, as hinted in the peace deal. As The New Humanitarian has written, \"Diplomats fear the dispute over western Tigray could reignite the war if it is allowed to drag on and if the TPLF feel they have no option but to take it back by force.\"\n\nYet the government cannot hand over Western Tigray without first clearing it of Amhara forces, and if it tries, the Amhara militias may seek help from Eritrea. This is a major problem, since Abiy's troops are already bogged down with the insurgency in Amhara, where the local civilian population of over 20 million overwhelmingly supports the Fano and federal power has all but evaporated in the countryside. At the same time, the Oromo, through the OLA, seek greater control of Addis Ababa, a city completely surrounded by Oromia. But that vision is unacceptable to the Amhara, who have many kinfolk in the capital and fear a massacre like those that befell Amhara in Oromia. Finally, Eritrea stands off to the side, gun drawn, with its own dangerous goals: to keep occupying parts of northern Tigray and to use the Amhara insurgency to prevent an Ethiopian thunder run on its ports.\n\nOutside powers loom over all of it. The United Arab Emirates is clandestinely funneling weapons and money to Abiy's government, while Saudi Arabia may back Eritrea if interstate war breaks out, to thwart Abiy's ambitions.\n\n## Could Ethiopia Become the Next Yugoslavia?\n\nIt is an incredibly complex situation, made more so by the mutually exclusive nature of all these desires. The Amhara, Tigrayans, and Oromo each perceive themselves to be in a zero-sum game, where they can either get what they want or fail and be persecuted. That combination of desire, fear, and historical grievance is a powerful driver of war. The collapse of Yugoslavia, where a similar mixture produced utter carnage in the 1990s, offers an ominous precedent. What happened in Yugoslavia, however, may wind up looking like a firecracker next to Krakatoa if Ethiopia truly erupts.\n\nEthiopia's population is over 125 million. The Oromo and Amhara number tens of millions each, while the Tigrayans, smaller in number, hold outsize influence. As Crisis Group memorably put it, \"Given the competing but interlinked grievances in its three most powerful regions, Ethiopia faces grave risks to its overall stability.\" The dark vision is one in which a single trigger is pulled, with catastrophic consequences not just on the ground but among the elites, the nation dividing so sharply along ethnic lines that even Amhara and Oromo in the government or federal military turn on one another. As the group warned again, \"Unless it is arrested, a burgeoning power struggle between politicians from Ethiopia's two largest regions threatens even wider turmoil and even nationwide civil war.\" Should that come to pass, it would likely mean a conflict beyond anything seen even in Tigray, a scaled-up version of Bosnia's civil war with all the horror that implies.\n\nNone of this is inevitable. History is full of less-remembered moments, like the Annexation Crisis of 1908, when whole continents stepped to the brink of war only to tiptoe back at the last moment. Perhaps that is what will happen here. But this would be a tough balancing act even with a deft dealmaker in charge, and Ethiopia is currently led by a man who is less a master of conciliation than someone with a penchant for conflict.\n\nThat has been the theme throughout. While Abiy may have cut a reassuring figure onstage in Oslo, he has in reality overseen an era of bloodshed unmatched since the fall of the Derg in 1991, an era in which his philosophy of togetherness, of Medemer, has masked a sharp increase in ethnic division that could have catastrophic consequences for tens of millions. Is Abiy Ahmed the most dangerous man in Africa? Perhaps it is a little hyperbolic to say so. But he certainly has the potential to claim that title unless he treads very carefully. Back in 2021, an Ethiopian diplomat who quit in disgust at his government's war in Tigray, Berhane Kidanemariam, told CNN, \"Instead of fulfilling his initial promise, he has led Ethiopia down a dark path toward destruction and disintegration.\" Only the coming years will reveal whether that assessment is correct, and whether it really is the fate of the man who, not so long ago, won the Nobel Peace Prize, to ultimately destroy his nation in the fires of war.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Why did Abiy Ahmed win the Nobel Peace Prize?\n\nAbiy Ahmed was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize largely for the July 2018 peace deal he struck with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, ending a long-simmering border conflict between the two nations. In his early years as prime minister he also freed thousands of political prisoners, lifted restrictions on independent media, invited exiled opposition groups home, backed a woman for president, and created gender parity in his cabinet.\n\n### How many people died in the Tigray War?\n\nThe Tigray War, which ran from November 4, 2020, to November 2, 2022, is estimated to have killed between 600,000 and 800,000 people, more than died in the Syrian Civil War. At its height, one million men were fighting and around a thousand were dying every day. A federal blockade caused hundreds of thousands of famine deaths, with University of Ghent researchers estimating that between 437 and 914 people starved to death each day at the peak.\n\n### What is the dispute over Western Tigray and why does it matter?\n\nWestern Tigray, called Welkait by the Amhara, was Amhara land from at least 1944 but was annexed by the TPLF after it came to power in the 1990s and renamed Western Tigray. During the Tigray War, Amhara paramilitaries and Fano militias occupied the region and drove out the Tigrayans. The 2022 peace deal said the issue would be resolved \"in accordance with the constitution,\" which the Amhara fear means returning the land to Tigray, leaving the dispute a potential trigger for renewed war and the central landmine Abiy laid for himself.\n\n### Who are the Fano militias and why did they turn against the federal government?\n\nFano are Amhara ethnic militias that many young Amhara joined as what they regard as a self-defense force against Oromo paramilitaries and other threats. They fought alongside federal forces in the Tigray War but later turned against the government after Abiy ordered regional paramilitaries to disarm in April 2023, at a time when the TPLF had still not disarmed and OLA militants held vast territory in Oromia. In August 2023 the Fano seized major sites in Amhara, including airports and the second-largest city, before slipping into the countryside to wage an ongoing insurgency.\n\n### Could Ethiopia collapse into civil war?\n\nAnalysts warn it could. Crisis Group has cautioned that competing but interlinked grievances in Ethiopia's three most powerful regions pose grave risks to overall stability, and that a power struggle between politicians from its two largest regions threatens nationwide civil war. With four major armed factions inside Ethiopia plus Eritrea locked in a zero-sum standoff over Western Tigray, Addis Ababa, and Red Sea access, multiple trigger points could send the country into freefall on a scale potentially dwarfing the Tigray War.\n\n## Related Coverage\n- [Amhara Crisis: Is Ethiopia the Next Yugoslavia?](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/amhara-crisis-ethiopia-next-yugoslavia)\n- [Why Famine is Returning as a Weapon of War](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/why-famine-is-returning-as-a-weapon-of-war)\n- [Al-Shabaab's Unstoppable Advance Threatens Mogadishu](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/al-shabaab-unstoppable-advance-threatens-mogadishu-somalia)\n\n## Sources\n1. \n2. \n3. \n4. \n5. \n6. \n7. \n8. \n9. \n10. \n11. \n12. \n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/abiy-ahmed-most-dangerous-man-africa-ethiopia-collapse.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/abiy-ahmed-most-dangerous-man-africa-ethiopia-collapse datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/c4KghMF86Jk/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 036c0c75d6cd47335879b0ff4a246a986f9f1850a675722fe2b082089dc207c7 tokens: 11053 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/abiy-ahmed-most-dangerous-man-africa-ethiopia-collapse.md.summary.md --- "War is the epitome of hell for all involved." When those words echoed around an Oslo lecture hall in December 2019, it was still possible to believe that Ethiopia stood on the cusp of change, that a new era of freedom might be at hand. On the stage stood the leader of Africa's second-most populous nation, outlining a vision for regional harmony that had already ended a long-running border conflict with Eritrea and earned him the Nobel Committee's prestigious annual Peace Prize. Aged just 43, Abiy Ahmed cut a reassuring figure. Ethiopia's first prime minister of Oromo ethnicity, his smart suit and boyish smile offered a warm contrast to the cold Norwegian capital, a symbol of his youthful energy and his promise of renewal. His words were reassuring too, the Nobel speech littered with homilies about how "peace is a labor of love." Only with hindsight did those words come to seem loaded with irony. In the years since that cold December day, Abiy Ahmed has overseen a series of civil wars that, taken together, count among the deadliest conflicts of this century. Tensions with neighbors have been ratcheted up to boiling point, even as the thin fabric holding Ethiopia's many ethnicities together has begun to fray. How did the country travel from Abiy the Nobel laureate to the figure who may yet unleash devastation across the Horn of Africa? This analysis digs into Ethiopia's recent bloody history and asks whether Abiy Ahmed really is the most dangerous man on the continent. ## Key Takeaways - Abiy Ahmed rose to power in 2018 on a wave of reformist optimism, freeing political prisoners, liberalizing the media, and striking a 2018 peace deal with Eritrea that won him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. - Ethiopia's ethnic federal structure, codified in the 1995 constitution, divides the country into ethnolinguistic states that hold paramilitary forces and a constitutional right to secede, an arrangement that fuels chronic instability. - The Tigray War (November 2020 to November 2022) killed an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people, more than the Syrian Civil War, with mass famine, blockade, and atrocities by federal, Amhara, Eritrean, and Tigrayan forces. - The November 2022 peace deal excluded Abiy's wartime allies, the Amhara and Eritrea, and left the status of Western Tigray unresolved, planting the seeds of fresh conflict. - A new insurgency erupted in 2023 in the Amhara region after Abiy ordered regional paramilitaries to disarm, pitting Fano militias against federal forces. - Abiy's revived claim to a Red Sea port, focused on the Eritrean port of Assab, threatens a wider regional war that analysts warn could collapse both Ethiopia and Eritrea. - With multiple armed factions locked in a zero-sum standoff, observers warn Ethiopia faces grave risks of nationwide civil war on a scale that could dwarf even the Tigray conflict. ## From Protest Movement to Power: How Abiy Rose For Ethiopians who lived through it, the 2010s protest movement that brought Abiy Ahmed to power was perhaps the defining moment of their lives. The country was coming off an incredible run of economic growth, but one marked by a shriveling of opportunity, in which a sclerotic political leadership failed to distribute the good times to all. For almost three decades, Addis Ababa had been ruled by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, an umbrella party that included representatives of the country's biggest ethnicities. Forged from many of the groups that helped overthrow the Marxist Derg regime in 1991, it had initially promised a new chapter. But over time, some of Ethiopia's ethnicities came to feel increasingly marginalized. This was especially true of the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest minority, who in the mid-2010s began a series of protests that shook the EPRDF. It was only when other groups, such as the Amhara, joined in that the nation's elite realized its position was untenable. In early 2018, the fallout led to the prime minister's resignation, followed by a backroom deal that quickly elevated Abiy Ahmed to power. ## Medemer and the Quiet Revolution A mere 41 years old when he took office, Abiy was a somewhat obscure choice. The former minister for science and technology had previously worked in the military and done a stint overseeing cyber security. What he lacked in an impressive résumé, though, he more than made up for in other ways. A major one was his background. As an Oromo, Abiy could connect directly with the youth who had led the earliest protests, even if few expected him to be a simple conduit for Oromo grievances. With a Christian mother and a Muslim father, the new prime minister seemed a near-perfect choice to represent a new, unified Ethiopia. His guiding philosophy in those early days was Medemer, an attempt to forge a common bond across the country's many ethnicities and subsume division beneath a wider patriotism. As Abiy put it, "I like to think of Medemer as a social compact for Ethiopians to build a just, egalitarian, democratic, and humane society by pulling together our resources for our collective survival and prosperity." The other ingredient was his reformist zeal, expressed in his youthful energy and boyish smile. After decades of remote, out-of-touch elites, Abiy felt less like a breath of fresh air than a hurricane of change. The early record was striking. As the BBC summed up his first years as PM, "He released thousands of political prisoners, lifted restrictions on the independent media and invited the country's once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. He backed a woman to become president, created gender parity in the cabinet and established a ministry of peace." At the time, it felt like a quiet revolution, part of a wave of transformation sweeping the Horn of Africa. Just months after Abiy took power, pro-democracy protests toppled the longtime dictator in neighboring Sudan. But it was events in Eritrea, to Ethiopia's north, that netted Abiy his Nobel Peace Prize. In July 2018, the new PM struck a deal with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, ending a long-simmering border conflict. To outside observers, it seemed that after decades of authoritarianism, Africa's east was experiencing its own democratic spring. Yet all was not well beneath the surface. Just as few who visited Sarajevo for the 1984 Winter Olympics sensed Yugoslavia's impending collapse, so could few of those applauding Abiy in Oslo have guessed the potent mixture of ethnic tension and cold calculation that would soon drown the country beneath a tidal wave of blood. ## A Nation Built on Ethnic Fault Lines With around 126 million inhabitants, Ethiopia is Africa's second-most populous state, behind only Nigeria in sheer manpower. It is also one of the continent's more diverse nations, with over 90 recognized ethnicities and language groups. The biggest are the Oromo, who make up over a third of the population, and the Amhara, who make up over a quarter. Behind them come the Somali and the Tigrayans, each comprising about six percent, followed by a litany of others. What makes Ethiopia unusual is the sheer extent to which ethnicity determines the shape of the state. Back in 1995, the post-Derg constitution divided the country into nine regions based on ethnicity. Since Abiy came to power, a series of referendums has removed one of those regions and added three new ones; the South Ethiopia Regional State and Central Ethiopia Regional State, for example, only came into being in 2023. The result is that Ethiopia today consists of two autonomous cities, Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa, plus 12 ethnolinguistic states. Each not only has its own leaders and power bases but often its own paramilitary forces. They also hold the constitutional right to break away from Ethiopia, a fact that has helped fuel much of the tension straining the country. ## The Shifting Balance of Power Understanding that tension requires a detour through Ethiopia's modern history and the ever-shifting balance of power between its major ethnicities. The first thing to grasp is that modern Ethiopia spent most of its existence with the Amhara at the top of the ethnic pile. Think of an iconic person or place in Ethiopia, and there is a good chance they are tied to the Amhara: Haile Selassie, the Amharic language, the UNESCO-listed rock-hewn churches. These groups were mostly in charge from 1855 to 1991. Even under the Marxist Derg who overthrew Haile Selassie, the Amhara dominated elite life. That long era ended in the early 1990s when a coalition of ethnic militias finally chased the Derg from power. One of the key militias was the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Drawn from the Tigrayan minority in the north, the TPLF were so powerful after 1991 that they were able to make their kinfolk the new dominant force. Despite being just six percent of the population, Tigrayans dominated the coming decades. Their candidate, Meles Zenawi, led the country from 1991 to 2012, and their TPLF party wielded the real power within the EPRDF. It was also the TPLF that oversaw the 1995 constitution. That controversial clause on secession was contentious because rival ethnicities feared the Tigrayans would expand their territory and loot the state before declaring independence if events moved against them. ## Eritrea, the Lost Coastline, and a Frozen War It was in this era that Eritrea split off from Ethiopia to become a separate state, capping a liberation struggle that had begun in the 1960s and ended with Eritrean partisans helping overthrow the Derg. The split created two problems. First, with Eritrea's exit, Ethiopia lost its Red Sea coastline, becoming the world's largest landlocked country by population. Second, it led to the Eritrea-Ethiopia War. Caused by disputes over the border, that war ran from 1998 to 2000, killed 100,000 people, and ended with a bitter, semi-frozen conflict on Ethiopia's northern frontier. The 2000 ceasefire granted a Boundary Commission the right to adjudicate the border. But when the commission partially ruled in Eritrea's favor, Addis Ababa refused to implement the changes, because Eritrea does not just border Ethiopia, it borders Tigray. By accepting the ruling, the TPLF would have been surrendering parts of their home turf, so they refused. When Abiy came to power in 2018, implementing the ruling became central to his peace deal with Eritrea. In return for tax-free access to Eritrean ports, Ethiopia would surrender its claim to contested border territories, something only possible thanks to the dethroning of the TPLF. ## The Quiet Coup and the Birth of the Prosperity Party That dethroning was a deliberate act by non-Tigrayan elites, in effect a quiet coup. Although the TPLF had overseen a huge economic boom, they had also sidelined, and in the eyes of many even oppressed, the Amhara and Oromo peoples. The fallout from the 2010s protests gave the other ethnic parties in the EPRDF cover to move against the Tigrayans and elevate the Oromo Abiy at their expense. Abiy soon took the plan to its logical extreme. In November 2019, the EPRDF was suddenly disbanded. In its place he founded the new Prosperity Party, an umbrella organization containing all of Ethiopia's major ethnic groups, with one exception. Their hold on power broken, the TPLF refused to join. Instead, they retreated to Tigray itself, where they remained in undisputed control. It was the brewing political conflict between the new Prosperity Party and the TPLF that would soon unleash Ethiopia's biggest military conflict in decades. ## Ancient Hatreds and Mutually Exclusive Histories That is the basic political setup, but it is far from the whole story. To make sense of the violence bearing down on Ethiopia, one has to go beyond statistics and backroom deals to a place that is uncomfortable even to mention: the country's endless web of ancient hatreds. Most of the groups involved do not consider one another mere rivals, like the English and the Scots. They consider one another bitter enemies, who will not hesitate to oppress, persecute, or kill if the opportunity arises. These fears are often rooted in history but are also practical, the product of lived experience. The Amhara, for instance, do not dislike the Tigrayans simply because the TPLF replaced them as the elite in 1991. They are also deeply aware of the TPLF's 1976 founding manifesto, which, in the words of the Brussels International Center, "called Amharas colonizers and the number one enemy needing to be eliminated." And they remember the history of Western Tigray, the region the Amhara call Welkait. From at least 1944, Welkait was Amhara land, a fertile oasis in arid surroundings that was key to their prosperity. Then the TPLF came to power, annexed Welkait into their homeland, and renamed it Western Tigray. Ever since, Amhara nationalists have been desperate to right what they see as a historic wrong. That is only one side of the story. Talk to a Tigrayan, and they will produce maps dating to the 17th century that appear to show Western Tigray as part of their ethnic territory since time immemorial, along with documents claiming the Amhara elite engineered the great famine of the 1980s specifically to starve Tigrayans. This recurs throughout Ethiopia's modern story: the country no longer has a single history but a plurality of histories, based on ethnicity, all mutually exclusive, all serving to reinforce claims to land or superiority. Often these "histories" are relatively new; The New Humanitarian has documented how Welkait only became a cause célèbre among Amhara nationalists during the 2018 protest movement. Other times the grievances are all too real, bitter memories in which every group has played both victimizer and victim. ## The Oromo Dream and the Cycle of Violence Take the Oromo. While the Tigrayans and Amhara loathe one another, the Oromo see them both as colonizers who took turns marginalizing and persecuting them. As a result, the Oromo have pushed harder for full autonomy than almost any other group. For their elites, the ideal outcome would be an Oromia, including the capital Addis Ababa, that functions almost as an independent state. Yet it is not so simple as casting the Oromo as plucky underdogs. To fulfill the dream of an independent Oromia, Oromo extremists feel obliged to cleanse their land of other ethnicities, a huge problem given that both Oromia and especially Addis Ababa have large Amhara minorities. Since the fall of the Derg, Amhara in Oromia have been systematically murdered and driven into exile. In 2021 alone, some 3,300 Amhara were killed by Oromo paramilitaries. On the outskirts of Addis Ababa, Oromo construction workers demolish Amhara homes under false pretenses. More than half a million have fled in recent years as refugees from sectarian violence. As a result, many young Amhara have been driven to join an ethnic militia known as Fano, which they perceive as a necessary self-defense force. Yet the Fano are implicated in ethnic killings of their own, of civilians in Oromia and in the Benishangul-Gumuz region. The role of the federal government is equally complex and open to interpretation. For Amhara who fear Oromo extremists, Abiy is one of their persecutors, a leader under whom federal forces smash Fano militias but leave the Oromo be. Yet the main Oromo force, the Oromo Liberation Army, or OLA, itself an offshoot of a group Abiy made peace with in 2018, is in open rebellion against the government. And "federal forces" describes a government comprised of many ethnicities; there are Amhara, Oromo, and Tigrayans in the Prosperity Party who stand with Abiy against their own regions' ethnic militias. So shorthand like "the Amhara fought the federal forces" never means literally all Amhara. A final accelerant is local media. After ending many restrictions on journalists and liberalizing the landscape, Abiy presided over an explosion of ethnically based "news" networks that exist solely to pump out dehumanizing propaganda against rival groups. The upshot is a story with no clean good guys and bad guys but a gigantic mess in which everyone feels wronged, everyone has legitimate grievances, and everyone plays both oppressor and victim, each convinced they are locked in a zero-sum game where defeat could mean extermination. Ethiopia, at this stage, resembled a teetering Jenga tower made of dynamite, one sharp push from catastrophic collapse. ## Pulling the Trigger: The Road to Tigray Although Abiy's Nobel win in December 2019 marked the high-water mark of his global popularity, back home the wheels were already coming off. While Medemer remained the priority on paper, on the ground ethnic divisions only deepened. In Oromia, OLA activity was ramping up against minorities. In Amhara, a coup attempt led to the death of the region's president and the assassination of the army's chief of staff. Meanwhile an insurgency broke out in Benishangul-Gumuz, an ethnically mixed state home to entire peoples beyond the main players. Beyond the Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayans, Eritreans, and federal forces, many more groups, such as the Afar or the Walqaytes, carry their own grievances, some swept into the coming collapse and others not. External pressures were mounting too. One of the few truly national projects, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project to dam the Nile, promised to modernize infrastructure but was raising tensions with Egypt. By the time Abiy collected his prize in Oslo, the liberal thaw that had marked his rise had vanished. In its place, the Prosperity Party reached for methods straight out of the old EPRDF handbook: mass arrests, jailing people including opposition MPs without charge, and silencing journalists. This only fed the spreading narratives of ethnic persecution. So many Oromo were arrested that young men joined the OLA's ranks in protest. Things grew uglier in 2020, when the Oromo musician and former protest leader Hachalu Hundessa was murdered in Addis Ababa. Oromo rioted across their region and the capital, leading to around 200 deaths. The Oromo were not alone in escalating. As the wider world fixated on the pandemic, Fano militias from the Amhara region launched a growing number of attacks on federal forces. When the decisive shove finally came, though, it arrived not in Amhara, Oromia, or Benishangul-Gumuz, but in the far north, in the region bordering Eritrea, hundreds of kilometers from Addis Ababa: Tigray. ## The Election That Sparked a War In the end, the trigger was an election, or rather the lack of one. With the pandemic sweeping the world, Abiy's government indefinitely postponed a general parliamentary election scheduled for 2020. This frustrated everyone, since democratization had been a key promise of Abiy's rise, with elections central to it. But in Tigray, the frustration reached another level. Outraged, the TPLF declared they would defy federal orders and hold the vote regardless, warning that any attempt to stop it would be an act of war. In September 2020, the vote went ahead, and unsurprisingly the TPLF won a resounding majority. No sooner was it over than the first jolt came. In the wake of the TPLF's regional victory, Abiy accused the group of attacking government bases and looting their weapons. Even now the accusation remains controversial; some believe the TPLF was overreaching, others that Abiy was simply seeking a pretext to strike them. Whatever the truth, the result was the same. On November 4, 2020, Abiy ordered federal forces into Tigray on what was sold as a limited military operation but was anything but. It was the start of the Tigray War, a two-year civil conflict among the deadliest fought this century, one that Pulitzer Center journalist Ann Neumann called "as deadly as those [conflicts] in Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Crimea combined." At its height, one million men were fighting, with a thousand dying every single day. Overall, somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 are thought to have been killed, more than died in the Syrian Civil War, and quite possibly more than have died even in Russia's war on Ukraine. The conflict became the place where all those old ethnic hatreds finally boiled over, as Tigrayans, Amhara, Eritreans, and others sought to right historic wrongs, opening a new chapter written not in ink but in the blood of civilians. ## Blockade and Famine: The True Face of the War The speed with which the Tigray War went from "limited military incursion" to atrocity exhibition would have been spectacular had it not been so unremittingly awful. As federal forces advanced, the government cut all cell phone and internet service, blockaded roads, and patrolled borders with armed guards. The result was a 50,000-square-kilometer zone cut off from the outside world, with nothing allowed in or out, including food. The federal blockade was so severe that it led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from famine. At its height, researchers at the University of Ghent estimated that between 437 and 914 people starved to death every single day. As the civilian toll climbed, Abiy displayed a messianic streak that deeply unsettled observers. As Kenya-based analyst Rashid Abdi told CNN in 2021, "In the initial stages of the war, actually, he spoke openly about how this was God's plan, and that this was a kind of divine mission for him." If anything about the war was biblical, it was strictly Old Testament: a combination of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and a hyper-violent Tower of Babel, in which mankind is not merely divided but begins immediately killing all those who speak differently. Among the killers were Amhara state paramilitaries and their Fano militias. Human Rights Watch released a shocking report during the conflict documenting, in page after unrelenting page, the atrocities Amhara forces carried out: door-to-door massacres in Tigrayan villages, the burning of farmland and slaughter of animals, piles of bodies so high that tractors were needed to drag them away. ## A Carnival of Revenge: Amhara, Eritrea, and the TPLF Yet the Amhara saw themselves not as perpetrators but as victims. In the conflict's opening days, Tigrayan militants descended on the village of Mai Kadra, near the Sudanese border, and hacked hundreds of Amhara civilians to death. Hours later, Fano forces avenged them by entering the same town and killing scores of Tigrayans. The Amhara role was not just revenge, though. It was also about righting a historical wrong, in this case the 1990s annexation of Welkait, since renamed Western Tigray. Over the course of the conflict, Amhara state paramilitaries and the Fano occupied Western Tigray and drove out the Tigrayans, while also seizing the southern part of Tigray that Amhara call Raya. This explains why the Amhara, who so distrusted Abiy, sided with him: the promise of Western Tigray, plus fear of what a TPLF victory might mean. The Amhara region itself was not spared. In 2021, the TPLF rebounded, seized the initiative, drove federal forces into retreat, and invaded Amhara state. There, by one brief and brutal description, "they destroyed hospitals, murdered civilians, and used sexual violence as an instrument of revenge." Similar acts were carried out by Tigrayan forces in the Afar region. But the Amhara were far from the worst perpetrators. From the war's early days, an outside actor joined on Abiy's side. Now at peace with the Ethiopian state, Eritrea was more than happy to invade Tigray from the north. Over the war, President Isaias Afwerki's troops occupied border areas originally promised to Eritrea by the Boundary Commission, ultimately snatching 52 districts. The Eritreans, too, ended up as victims, first when civilians who had fled Afwerki's regime to Ethiopia were massacred in revenge killings by Tigrayan forces, and second when the TPLF counterattacked and drove the Eritreans back over the border, killing so many that Afwerki was forced to start conscripting middle-aged men. Ultimately, only one side could prevail. While the TPLF's 2021 counteroffensive got within spitting distance of Addis Ababa, their forces were finally driven back with the help of Emirati and Turkish drones. The conflict officially ended on November 2, 2022. By then, over half a million were dead. Tigray lay in ruins, with the Amhara occupying Western Tigray and Eritrean forces holding territory in the north. The economy was shattered. With federal forces busy in Tigray, the OLA insurgency had run wild in Oromia, taking swathes of territory and even briefly allying with the TPLF during the 2021 counteroffensive. For all the damage, though, Abiy had won. The TPLF had agreed to disarm. All the Nobel laureate had to do now was manage the peace. ## Losing the Peace It takes a special kind of genius to produce a peace agreement that only makes things more unstable, yet that is exactly what happened at the end of the Tigray War. While the United States and international bodies like the African Union were relieved at the halt to the killing, the way Abiy made his deal with the TPLF alienated all his former allies and paved the way for greater ethnic tension within Ethiopia. Among the most outraged were the Amhara. By the war's end, relations were already deteriorating between Amhara paramilitaries and federal forces. When the TPLF invaded Amhara state and carried out brutal massacres, most Amhara felt Abiy's government had failed to protect them, that federal forces had been more keen on shielding the capital than stopping the mass murder of their allies. During the war, the need to defeat the TPLF kept those tensions in check. Then came the November 2022 peace deal. Amhara and Fano officials were excluded from the talks, which ended with an agreement between Addis Ababa and the TPLF to resolve the issue of Western Tigray "in accordance with the constitution." That last phrase set alarm bells ringing, because a constitutional solution suggested Western Tigray must be returned to Tigray region. From the Amhara perspective, they had just fought and survived a brutal war to right a historical wrong and regain Welkait, and now Abiy's government was suggesting the price of peace would be handing this sacred land back to the Tigrayans. This was almost the opposite of Abiy's wartime position; as the fighting raged, the prime minister had repeatedly declared Western Tigray to be Amhara land. The Eritreans were likewise excluded, despite their invasion from the north being a key factor in Abiy's victory. Like the Amhara, they felt abandoned during the fighting, in their case when Addis Ababa retreated without warning during the TPLF counteroffensive, leaving Eritrean forces to be massacred. Like the Amhara, they too felt they had fought and died to regain northern Tigrayan lands they considered historically theirs, lands the deal now suggested they, as foreign forces, should vacate. Unlike his allies, Afwerki harbored a more maximalist goal: the complete eradication of the TPLF as a fighting force. ## The Timebomb in the Peace Deal Sadly for Afwerki, the TPLF was one thing the peace deal inadvertently preserved. The agreement called for demobilization of Tigrayan forces. In the early days, many heavy weapons were handed over and hundreds of thousands of fighters sent to demobilization camps. But the process was badly mishandled. More than a year on, many remained in the camps, lacking adequate food or shelter and growing increasingly angry, while the TPLF still had some 270,000 fighters under arms. The one thing stopping them from reigniting the war was the promise of Western Tigray. This is the landmine Abiy laid for himself. The only thing that convinced the TPLF not to fight to the bitter end was the implicit promise that districts of Tigray occupied by Amhara and Eritreans would be returned. On the other side, the only reason the Amhara and Eritreans fought with federal forces, rather than turning on them, was the promise of keeping those same lands, territories they historically believed to be theirs and had already shown themselves willing to take up arms to defend. As of late 2023, this paradox remained unresolved, a political bomb that could yet detonate and plunge Tigray back into war. Before reaching its full consequences, though, one major crisis the Western Tigray issue has already provoked demands attention: a brand-new insurgent war between Abiy's federal forces and the Amhara. ## Instability Spreads to Amhara The lasting lesson of these later chapters is just how destabilizing the Tigray War proved for the whole of Ethiopia. It was not merely a hyper-deadly two-year conflict but one whose consequences continue to threaten the country's foundations, especially given Abiy's strategic choices afterward. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Amhara region. The instability began a mere month after the peace deal, when Amhara militias clashed with the OLA, killing hundreds. But things truly ignited in April 2023, when Abiy ordered that all regional paramilitaries and special forces either be integrated into the federal army or lay down their arms. Rather than obey, the Amhara region erupted in revolt. The reasons were obvious. To the north, the TPLF still had not disarmed. To the south, OLA militants in Oromia still held vast territory from which they organized attacks on Amhara civilians. By disarming, the Amhara felt they would leave themselves dangerously exposed. So instead, many disappeared into the countryside, joining the smaller Fano militias and bringing their guns and wartime experience with them. The federal government responded in a way almost guaranteed to deepen Amhara fears. Worried about Fano attacks, Abiy set up roadblocks on routes into Addis Ababa. Amhara were barred from entering the capital. Their representatives, including some opposition MPs, were mass-arrested, even as the government moved to forcibly disarm the fighters. What followed was explosive but predictable. In August 2023, the brewing conflict became a full-on, extremely destructive war. In lightning assaults, Fano militias seized major sites in Amhara, including vital airports and the second-largest city. Although federal forces regained control, the Fano were not dismantled. They slipped back into the rural areas that form their base of support, and they are still fighting there. As in Tigray, federal forces have cut all communications, making information hard to get out, but what slips through is unrelentingly grim. In November 2023, a government drone strike targeted an elementary school, killing teachers and pupils alike. Days later, the UN reported that about 50 civilians had been killed over the preceding month. Many Amhara insist the violence is far worse than the outside world knows. Speaking to Deutsche Welle, Curtin University researcher Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes declared, "I believe there is a genocide happening in Ethiopia and the world is not talking about it." From this perspective, Abiy is now doing to the Amhara what he so recently did to the Tigrayans: crushing them militarily to break their power base. For Amhara suffering under the federal assault, the assumption is that Abiy is acting on behalf of the Oromo and means to gift them Addis Ababa. For a group that, barely a year earlier, had helped Abiy's forces commit war crimes in Tigray, it is a dramatic reversal, epitomized by fears that the government will soon move to evict the Amhara from Western Tigray. ## The New Northern Front There is a reason for this abrupt shift, and it is not just Abiy trying to break all possible opposition. On the northern frontier, another conflict may already be in its early stages, one with the power to rip back open the barely healed wounds of the Tigray War. In November 2023, Abiy began making veiled threats toward Eritrea, invoking Ethiopia's "historic and natural right" to a port on the Red Sea. He never named Eritrea, but the inference was clear: it was Eritrea that took Ethiopia's sea ports when it declared independence in 1993, most crucially the port of Assab. The 2018 peace deal Abiy struck with Afwerki was widely understood to include tax-free access to Eritrea's ports, with the tradeoff being Eritrea's claim to border areas in northern Tigray, areas where 40,000 Eritrean troops are currently stationed. But the poisoned peace that ended the Tigray War appears to have killed hopes of access to Assab. Recent troop movements and weapons deliveries to Ethiopia from the UAE suggest Abiy might be seriously considering an invasion of Eritrea to annex the port. This should be seen not as a separate crisis but as one with the potential to compound the war in Amhara, sparking a kind of mega-crisis that could make the Tigray War look like a mere trifle. To win a war against Eritrea, Abiy would likely need the TPLF, and its 270,000 soldiers still under arms, on his side. Given that federal forces were committing war crimes against Tigrayans only recently, such a team-up might seem impossible, but shifting alliances are simply how things work in modern Ethiopia. While the Tigrayans were brutalized by the government, the deepest anger is directed at the Eritreans, perceived as particularly savage, not just murdering civilians but sexually enslaving captured women. If Abiy goes to war with Eritrea, the TPLF might fight alongside him to reclaim occupied territory, territory occupied by Eritrea but also by Amhara forces. That means federal forces would first have to evict the Amhara from Western Tigray before joining the TPLF against Eritrea. But with Western Tigray still under their control, the Amhara militias have direct access to Eritrea, access a terrified Eritrean government, dreading invasion, might use to funnel weapons to the Amhara and fuel their insurgency. This is why the situation earns the clumsy but apt label of mega-crisis: it has the potential to reactivate every warring party and bitter grievance of the Tigray War, only shaken into a new configuration. As the National Interest wrote of a renewed border war, "The last time Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war, the conflict lasted two years and cost an estimated 100,000 lives. The current war [could] potentially plunge the entire region into a crisis that results in both states collapsing." ## A Mexican Standoff with Dynamite The intention here is not merely to show how a new Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict could cause chaos, but to document how a series of decisions made since Abiy came to power has placed Ethiopia where collapse may be the most likely scenario, with multiple potential trigger points that could send society into freefall. The worst part is that, no matter what anyone does, at least one of those triggers may now be fated to be pulled. The result is four major players inside Ethiopia, plus another in Eritrea, locked in a kind of Mexican standoff, a zero-sum game where everyone has a non-negotiable need but cannot secure it without inviting the others to fire in turn. The federal government needs the TPLF to help it potentially annex an Eritrean port, or at the very least to disarm. But the TPLF will do neither until Western Tigray is returned, as hinted in the peace deal. As The New Humanitarian has written, "Diplomats fear the dispute over western Tigray could reignite the war if it is allowed to drag on and if the TPLF feel they have no option but to take it back by force." Yet the government cannot hand over Western Tigray without first clearing it of Amhara forces, and if it tries, the Amhara militias may seek help from Eritrea. This is a major problem, since Abiy's troops are already bogged down with the insurgency in Amhara, where the local civilian population of over 20 million overwhelmingly supports the Fano and federal power has all but evaporated in the countryside. At the same time, the Oromo, through the OLA, seek greater control of Addis Ababa, a city completely surrounded by Oromia. But that vision is unacceptable to the Amhara, who have many kinfolk in the capital and fear a massacre like those that befell Amhara in Oromia. Finally, Eritrea stands off to the side, gun drawn, with its own dangerous goals: to keep occupying parts of northern Tigray and to use the Amhara insurgency to prevent an Ethiopian thunder run on its ports. Outside powers loom over all of it. The United Arab Emirates is clandestinely funneling weapons and money to Abiy's government, while Saudi Arabia may back Eritrea if interstate war breaks out, to thwart Abiy's ambitions. ## Could Ethiopia Become the Next Yugoslavia? It is an incredibly complex situation, made more so by the mutually exclusive nature of all these desires. The Amhara, Tigrayans, and Oromo each perceive themselves to be in a zero-sum game, where they can either get what they want or fail and be persecuted. That combination of desire, fear, and historical grievance is a powerful driver of war. The collapse of Yugoslavia, where a similar mixture produced utter carnage in the 1990s, offers an ominous precedent. What happened in Yugoslavia, however, may wind up looking like a firecracker next to Krakatoa if Ethiopia truly erupts. Ethiopia's population is over 125 million. The Oromo and Amhara number tens of millions each, while the Tigrayans, smaller in number, hold outsize influence. As Crisis Group memorably put it, "Given the competing but interlinked grievances in its three most powerful regions, Ethiopia faces grave risks to its overall stability." The dark vision is one in which a single trigger is pulled, with catastrophic consequences not just on the ground but among the elites, the nation dividing so sharply along ethnic lines that even Amhara and Oromo in the government or federal military turn on one another. As the group warned again, "Unless it is arrested, a burgeoning power struggle between politicians from Ethiopia's two largest regions threatens even wider turmoil and even nationwide civil war." Should that come to pass, it would likely mean a conflict beyond anything seen even in Tigray, a scaled-up version of Bosnia's civil war with all the horror that implies. None of this is inevitable. History is full of less-remembered moments, like the Annexation Crisis of 1908, when whole continents stepped to the brink of war only to tiptoe back at the last moment. Perhaps that is what will happen here. But this would be a tough balancing act even with a deft dealmaker in charge, and Ethiopia is currently led by a man who is less a master of conciliation than someone with a penchant for conflict. That has been the theme throughout. While Abiy may have cut a reassuring figure onstage in Oslo, he has in reality overseen an era of bloodshed unmatched since the fall of the Derg in 1991, an era in which his philosophy of togetherness, of Medemer, has masked a sharp increase in ethnic division that could have catastrophic consequences for tens of millions. Is Abiy Ahmed the most dangerous man in Africa? Perhaps it is a little hyperbolic to say so. But he certainly has the potential to claim that title unless he treads very carefully. Back in 2021, an Ethiopian diplomat who quit in disgust at his government's war in Tigray, Berhane Kidanemariam, told CNN, "Instead of fulfilling his initial promise, he has led Ethiopia down a dark path toward destruction and disintegration." Only the coming years will reveal whether that assessment is correct, and whether it really is the fate of the man who, not so long ago, won the Nobel Peace Prize, to ultimately destroy his nation in the fires of war. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Why did Abiy Ahmed win the Nobel Peace Prize? Abiy Ahmed was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize largely for the July 2018 peace deal he struck with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, ending a long-simmering border conflict between the two nations. In his early years as prime minister he also freed thousands of political prisoners, lifted restrictions on independent media, invited exiled opposition groups home, backed a woman for president, and created gender parity in his cabinet. ### How many people died in the Tigray War? The Tigray War, which ran from November 4, 2020, to November 2, 2022, is estimated to have killed between 600,000 and 800,000 people, more than died in the Syrian Civil War. At its height, one million men were fighting and around a thousand were dying every day. A federal blockade caused hundreds of thousands of famine deaths, with University of Ghent researchers estimating that between 437 and 914 people starved to death each day at the peak. ### What is the dispute over Western Tigray and why does it matter? Western Tigray, called Welkait by the Amhara, was Amhara land from at least 1944 but was annexed by the TPLF after it came to power in the 1990s and renamed Western Tigray. During the Tigray War, Amhara paramilitaries and Fano militias occupied the region and drove out the Tigrayans. The 2022 peace deal said the issue would be resolved "in accordance with the constitution," which the Amhara fear means returning the land to Tigray, leaving the dispute a potential trigger for renewed war and the central landmine Abiy laid for himself. ### Who are the Fano militias and why did they turn against the federal government? Fano are Amhara ethnic militias that many young Amhara joined as what they regard as a self-defense force against Oromo paramilitaries and other threats. They fought alongside federal forces in the Tigray War but later turned against the government after Abiy ordered regional paramilitaries to disarm in April 2023, at a time when the TPLF had still not disarmed and OLA militants held vast territory in Oromia. In August 2023 the Fano seized major sites in Amhara, including airports and the second-largest city, before slipping into the countryside to wage an ongoing insurgency. ### Could Ethiopia collapse into civil war? Analysts warn it could. Crisis Group has cautioned that competing but interlinked grievances in Ethiopia's three most powerful regions pose grave risks to overall stability, and that a power struggle between politicians from its two largest regions threatens nationwide civil war. With four major armed factions inside Ethiopia plus Eritrea locked in a zero-sum standoff over Western Tigray, Addis Ababa, and Red Sea access, multiple trigger points could send the country into freefall on a scale potentially dwarfing the Tigray War. ## Related Coverage - [Amhara Crisis: Is Ethiopia the Next Yugoslavia?](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/amhara-crisis-ethiopia-next-yugoslavia) - [Why Famine is Returning as a Weapon of War](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/why-famine-is-returning-as-a-weapon-of-war) - [Al-Shabaab's Unstoppable Advance Threatens Mogadishu](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/al-shabaab-unstoppable-advance-threatens-mogadishu-somalia) ## Sources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. <!-- youtube:c4KghMF86Jk -->