Who Is Really Responsible For the War On Tigray?

The war on Tigray had been going on officially for two years (with conflict persisting after the peace agreement was signed). Two years of sleepless nights, two years of isolation, two years of anguish, two years of wondering how little our lives are worth to the rest of the world. Over 600,000 civilians in Tigray killed, 120-130k sexually assaulted, mass destruction and looting of everything in what decent people say amount to genocide. We all know this but what's a little unclear is how did it all begin and what were the true motives behind it.

A common misconception is that the war began with TPLF attacking a federal military installation, and that provocation solely ignited the deadly conflict but of course this is a half truth, they attacked the federal base as an act of self defense after quite literally being surrounded by Eritrean and Amhara militia and the Ethiopian National Defense Forces who had long prepared to invade. This narrative that they attacked first therefore they're fully responsible is delivered to audiences primed to view TPLF (and Tigrayans in general) as rebels, insurrectionists and terrorists.

But to truly understand how we got here we have to first acknowledge the vast power imbalance between the Ethiopian government , their allies and TPLF, but more importantly we have to understand the history of anti-Tigrayan prejudice that plagues Ethiopia.

People in the Ethiopian government and their allies have been promulgating hate speech towards Tigrayans as an ethnic group. They have been referred to as “cancer”, “weeds”, “rats” and “terrorists”. Tigrayan officials in civilian positions and military leaders who served their country were removed from all government positions. The military in particular had excised so many of its main and experienced leaders. Some have been falsely imprisoned, some have even been murdered. Open discrimination of Tigrayans naturally only accelerated in April 2018 when Abiy Ahmed became prime minister.

Abiy Ahmed was a young fresh faced member of the EPRDF government who appeared to have a vision of pan-Ethiopianism and was brought to power in April 2018 but its unclear who exactly his international backers were. Particularly, because he came to power on the shoulders of the Oromo-Amhara youth movement, again with unclear origins.

His time in office thus far seems to be defined by an intense hostility towards TPLF and arguably Tigrayans in general. He then began to want to revive the centralized, unitary government that was overthrown in 1991 which the regional state of Tigray strongly opposed. After a while he begun to see the Tigrayan people as the biggest obstacle to his broader ambition of creating a unitary state.

He went on to win a Noble Peace prize in 2019 for a peace treaty with longtime Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, which seemed like an insanely positive development as Eritrea and Ethiopia have been warring from Eritrea's inception but the world had no idea what their real interests were and who their common enemy was.

Both men decided that the war on Tigray would avenge their greivances, Afwerki had a long held vendetta against TPLF, partly because TPLF was a dominant part of the ruling party during their feud with Ethiopia for decades and because many in the Eritrean leadership saw Tigray as the one ethnic group impeding their desired regional dominance. So, since they share a burning hatred for TPLF and Tigrayans they mutually decided to invade Tigray.

According to the New York Times article of December 15, 2021, entitled The Nobel Peace Prize that Paved the Way to War “New evidence shows that Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, had been planning a military campaign in the northern Tigray region for months before war erupted one year ago, setting off a cascade of destruction and ethnic violence that has engulfed Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country.”

The preperation to invade Tigray was lengthy and substantive, it was methodically planned by Abiy Ahmed, Amhara officials, and Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki. There was a significant disinformation campaign targeting Tigray and Tigrayans. Most of the roads that were connecting Tigray and the rest of Ethiopia were blocked for close to two years prior to the war. Investors and politicians were discouraged or outright banned from visiting Tigray. He immediately detained all Tigrayan members of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF). He recruited mainly Amhara special forces and militia (although other ethnic groups were involved as well), as well as outside forces from Eritrea, Somalia and drones from the United Arab Emirates to wage war on Tigray.

The end game was Tigray itself, the Eritreans had plans to take a large swath of territory that extended from Shire, Adwa, etc. The Amharas were to claim Humera and the entirety of Western Tigray. If all went according to their plans there would be no more Tigray to pose a danger to existing Amhara hegemony.

Then, perhaps most interestingly, we have the U.S role in the tragedy. Many people, especially those entrenched in leftist politics, understand that the U.S has been involved in a number of coups abroad. For example, the CIA enlisted people in Iran to partake in street riots in order to eventually remove Mohammed Mossadegh for nationalizing the oil industry. Also to give off the illusion that the popularly elected prime minister was hated by his own people to give cover to his removal. In Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz was also overthrown at the behest of the U.S this time for nationalizing land and distributing it to peasants. This act of land reform was seen as a threat to the interests of the United Fruit company who owned a considerable amount of land in Guatamala.

And then we have the highly destructive Oromo-Amhara youth uprising in Ethiopia that led to the installment of Abiy Ahmed. You see, what seems to tie it all together was the fact that the Chinese were helping Ethiopia achieve double digit economic growth and the country was beginning to be viewed as the Chinese entry point into Africa which was seen as a grave threat to U.S/Western hegemony.

When fighting did erupt on November 3, 2020, the U.S. government (according to some observers), in some ways, endorsed the offensive by the Ethiopian government and its Eritrean allies. Certain officials in the Trump administration were distorting the cause of the war to tarnish and blame TPLF for the war and hide Eritrea's involvement. One notable example is diplomat Tibor Nagy, who was one of the voices that continued to blame TPLF for attacking the Northern command while denying all of the facts that led to it.

Despite Tibor Nagy’s claim that Eritrea was pulled into the war after the TPLF fired missiles into Eritrea on November 14, 2020 and internationalized the war, the fact of the matter is Eritrea's army was mobilized on the shared border for months and entered Tigray via Tsorona and occupied Gerhu Sernay on November 3, 2020, even before Abiy Ahmed’s army fired the first shot. Furthermore, the city of Humera, in Western Tigray, was shelled relentlessly by Eritrean forces for two days on November 9, 2020.

We believe this information has been available to Mr. Nagy through his institutional contacts in the U.S government but he is going out of his way to misrepresent reality. His continued attempts to obfuscate Ahmed as the initiator of the war, and all the crimes that have followed has been unconscionable.

Beyond that, Biden warmly embraced him in the oval and you see photos upon photos of Secretary Blinken smiling and hugging the dictator knowing full well that he and his compatriots are responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide. As a Tigrayan it makes my blood boil.

There are so many forces and so much meticulous effort as well as negligence that allowed the genocidal war on Tigray to take place. Abiy Ahmed believed that he could commit genocide and nothing would happen and he was right. It shatters the heart to know that our lives mean so little that a war could be waged on innocent civillians, an entire regional state can be shut out from the world and world leaders will smile, shake hands and make small talk with the man who vowed to wipe us out. Its hard to have hope in such circumstances, but hope is all we have to hang on to.