In the birthplace of the armed struggle that propelled Ethiopia’s ruling coalition to power 27 years ago, there is growing anger as the country’s new prime minister stages a crackdown on the region’s once-powerful leaders.
Although the Tigrayans who inhabit the craggy hills are only a small minority in a country of more than 100 million, they have dominated its power structures since 1991, when the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) drove a Marxist military regime from power.
Now many leading Tigrayans are being detained or sidelined as Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attempts to draw a line under past abuses.
Photo: Reuters
One adviser to Abiy told reporters that the prime minister has sacked 160 army generals for actions he said amounted to “state terrorism.”
In Mekelle, capital of the Tigray region, and in nearby villages, a siege mentality is taking hold among people who say they feel under attack.
The frustration could pose a threat to the 42-year-old prime minister as he urges people to back “reforms, not revolution.”
At street coffee stalls in Mekelle and in fields outside the city, Tigrayans said they would not stand by as national figures disparaged their region and history.
“There are efforts to corner the people of Tigray, but we don’t believe that’s going to work, because we are steeped in the tradition not just of defending ourselves, but also rising up to whatever challenge,” said Getachew Reda, a senior Tigrayan politician and EPRDF member who served as communications minister under Abiy’s predecessor.
Reda accused Abiy, a member of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, of selective justice.
Tigrayans were angered when 60 officials, many of them from their region, were detained for suspected human rights abuses and corruption, he said.
These included senior executives at the army-run METEC industrial conglomerate.
“Abiy controls the international narrative, but not necessarily the country,” Getachew said.
Abiy addressed the accusation in a statement on Wednesday last week, saying: “Just like we don’t blame a forest for what a single tree has done, we don’t blame or point our fingers at any tribe for the crimes individuals committed.”
Abiy, too, hails from the EPRDF. He served in the military in Tigray as a teenager and speaks the Tigrinya language. However, he has taken a wrecking ball to the institutions the ruling coalition had used to control the country.
In a speech last month, Abiy said the three years of anti-government protests that helped bring him to power in April showed that Ethiopians no longer tolerate “backwardness and injustice.”
“It is with this understanding that we have been continuously undertaking different reforms in the past months to change our political culture, system and institutions,” he said.
This is popular with many Ethiopians who resented Tigrayan domination of institutions such as the federal police, which violently repressed the protests.
Other larger ethnic groups accused Tigrayans of imposing a federal system based on ethnic identity to “divide and rule.”
Decentralized government has allowed the creation of large regional police forces, including in Tigray. The region also has a history of civilians — mostly farmers who own guns — joining militias to defend the group’s causes.
Officials in Mekelle said there was no attempt to build up these regional forces, but security is a growing concern, as seen at checkpoints where Tigray police search vehicles and people for weapons before allowing entry to the city.
Many Tigrayans said they were worried about a surge in ethnic violence elsewhere in the country that has forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes since Abiy took office.
Although Tigray has been largely unaffected — unlike other regions, it is not home to significant numbers of people from other ethnic groups — residents told reporters that Abiy was not doing enough to stop the bloodshed elsewhere.
Several said they had family members who abandoned jobs and businesses to return to Tigray for fear of reprisals, though there have been no reports of major attacks against the community.
“I can’t judge whether Abiy directly hates us Tigrayans or is just using techniques to get power over us,” said a 19-year-old woman who runs a coffee stall.
“If he doesn’t accept to have discussions with our leaders, we know our history,” she said.
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