Secret meetings with a dictator. Clandestine displacement of troops. Months of silent preparations for a war that was intended to be swift and bloodless.
Evidence that has emerged recently indicates that Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, had already been planning a military campaign in the northern Tigre region of the country, months before war broke out a year ago, unleashing a flood of destruction and violence that took over the country that has the second largest population in Africa.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner who was recently seen in military fatigues commanding troops at the front, Ahmed insists the war was imposed on him — that insurgents fired the first shots in November 2020 when they attacked a federal military base in Tigre, massacring soldiers in their sleep. This account became an article of faith for the prime minister and his supporters.
In reality, it was a war that Abiy Ahmed chose to fight and that began to be planned even before the Nobel Prize in 2019 — a prize that transformed the prime minister for some time into a global icon of non-violence.
The achievement was largely a result of the unlikely peace agreement reached with Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s authoritarian leader, just months after coming to power in 2018. The agreement ended two decades of hostilities and war between neighboring and rival countries, inspiring great hopes for transformation in the region.
Instead, the Nobel encouraged Ahmed and Afwerki to secretly plot a path that would lead to war against their mutual opponents in Tigre. This is said by current and former Ethiopian government officials who spoke anonymously, to avoid reprisals or protect their family members who still live in the country.
In the months before the fighting began, in November 2020, Ahmed deployed troops near Tigre and sent military cargo planes to Eritrea. Behind closed doors, his advisers and generals discussed the pros and cons of a conflict. Those who disagreed with the idea were fired, interrogated at gunpoint or forced to leave.
Still dazzled by the Nobel, the West ignored those warning signs, officials said. But, ultimately, it was the West that helped pave the way for war.
“From that day on, Ahmed has come to think of himself as one of the most influential figures in the world,” says Gebremeskel Kassa, a former senior Ethiopian administration official now in exile in Europe. “He felt that he had a lot of international support and that if a war started in Tigre, nothing would happen. And he was right.”
The Prime Minister’s Spokesperson, Eritrea’s Minister of Information and the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not answer questions for this report.
The quick and easy military victory that Ahmed promised did not materialize. Over the summer, Tigre’s insurgents expelled Ethiopian troops and their Eritrean allies. In November, they reached 250 kilometers from the capital, Addis Ababa, prompting the prime minister to declare a state of emergency.
More recently, the pendulum has moved in the opposite direction, with government forces retaking two strategic cities that had been captured. It is the latest turn in a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of people dead and pushed hundreds of thousands into starvation conditions.
Analysts say the path taken by Ahmed, from peacemaker to battlefield commander, is a cautionary tale of how the West, eager to find a new hero in Africa, has so deeply mistaken this leader.
“The West needs to make up for its mistakes in Ethiopia,” says Alex Rondos, former EU chief diplomat in the Horn of Africa region. “The West has wrongly evaluated Ahmed and has empowered Afwerki. It is now a question of whether it will be possible to prevent a country of 110 million people from disintegrating.”
When he was awarded the Nobel, Ahmed, an ex-military man, drew on his own experience to describe the horror of war eloquently. “War is the epitome of hell,” he told a distinguished audience gathered in Oslo. “I know that because I already went there and back.”
To his foreign admirers, the haughty speech was further proof that he was an exceptional leader. In his first months in power, he freed political prisoners, lifted controls imposed on the press and promised free elections in Ethiopia. His peace agreement with Eritrea, a rogue state, represented a huge and unlikely advance for the Horn of Africa, a region mired in conflict.
Still, the five-member Norwegian Peace Committee knew it was taking a risk by betting on Ahmed, according to Henrik Urdal of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, who reviews the committee’s decisions.
The 41-year-old prime minister’s sweeping reforms were fragile and easily reversible, the expert says, and the peace with Eritrea was based on Ahmed’s relationship with Afwerki, a ruthless and war-hardened autocrat. “My partner and comrade in peace,” Ahmed said in Oslo.
In making its choice, the Nobel committee hoped to encourage the Ethiopian leader to move further along the path of democratic reform, according to Urdal.
But even then there were signs that the peace agreement was not all that it seemed. Its initial fruits, such as daily commercial flights between the two countries and the reopening of borders, were reversed in a matter of months. The promised trade pacts did not materialize and, according to Ethiopian officials, there was little concrete cooperation.
Unreconcilable Visions Lead to War
From his early days in power, Abiy Ahmed has seen the TPLF (Tiger People’s Liberation Front) as a threat to his authority, possibly even his life. The insurgents had preferred another candidate for prime minister, and Ahmed is said to have told friends he feared that security officials in Tigre were trying to assassinate him.
At the prime minister’s residence, soldiers were posted on every floor to stand guard. He expelled Tigre Ethiopians from his security team and created the Republican Guard, a unit under his direct control — handpicked and sent for training in the UAE, a powerful new ally who also had close ties to Eritrea, according to a former official.
The still-unexplained murder of then Ethiopian military commander General Seare Mekonnen, a tiger shot to death by a bodyguard in June 2019, has heightened tensions.
The feud was also fueled by deep political differences. Weeks after receiving the Nobel, Ahmed created the Prosperity Party, which embodied his vision of strong, centralized government. But the idea was strongly rejected by millions of Ethiopians who yearned for greater regional autonomy, particularly the tigres and members of Ahmed’s own ethnic group, the Oroma.
In September the tigers held a regional election, openly defying an order from the prime minister. The latter moved troops from the Somali and Oroma regions near Tigre.
In a videoconference in mid-October, Ahmed told ruling party leaders that he would intervene militarily in Tigre and that it would only take three to five days to remove leaders from the region. The information is from Gebremeskel, a former senior official now living in exile.
On November 2, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, issued a public appeal to both sides to “stop provocative military displacements”. The following night, Tigre forces attacked an Ethiopian military base, describing the action as a pre-emptive strike.
Eritrean soldiers invaded Tigre from the north. Special forces from Amara arrived from the south. Ahmed fired the army chief, General Adem Mohammed, and announced a “police operation” in Tigre. The ruinous civil war had begun.
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