The Price Paid to Hold a Country Together
Tigray played a pivotal role in defeating Ethiopia’s dictatorship in 1991 and shaping the federal system that followed. Although the EPRDF’s rule deserves scrutiny, its failures cannot justify collective blame against Tigrayans. The subsequent war inflicted documented mass killings, sexual violence, starvation, and displacement on civilians, creating a profound betrayal of the promise of shared citizenship. Ethiopia’s unity must rest on equal protection, historical truth, and accountability—not on any community’s suffering or silence.
- Tigray, historical memory, and the betrayal of a shared political promise\*
When Ethiopia’s military dictatorship collapsed in 1991, the suffering that brought it down had not been evenly distributed. Years of resistance, displacement, hunger, and bereavement had already transformed communities across the country. Tigray stood at the center of that struggle, contributing an extraordinary share of its military organization, political leadership, and human sacrifice.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front was pivotal to the EPRDF coalition that defeated the Derg. Eritrean liberation forces and other Ethiopian movements also played important roles. Recognizing those contributions does not diminish Tigray’s place in history; it makes that history more honest. The dictatorship’s defeat emerged from several struggles, but Tigrayan resistance was indispensable to the political order that followed.
Victory, however, presented a challenge that battlefield success could not resolve: how could a country fractured by authoritarian rule, unequal citizenship, and competing national aspirations remain together?
Under Meles Zenawi and the EPRDF, federalism became the proposed answer. Its underlying promise was that Ethiopia could preserve a shared political future by recognizing the identities and rights of its constituent peoples. From this perspective, federalism was more than an administrative arrangement. It was an attempt to make unity negotiable, rather than something imposed through force.
That promise deserves examination without romanticizing the government that advanced it. The EPRDF concentrated power, constrained political competition, and failed to fulfill many of its democratic commitments. These failures belong in any serious account of its legacy. But accountability for a governing coalition cannot legitimately become an accusation against an entire people. Human Rights Watch documented both the coalition’s federal restructuring and its continuing political dominance.
A farmer in Tigray was not the government. A child in Mekelle was not a political party. Neither inherited guilt because powerful officials shared their ethnic identity.
This distinction became the central moral boundary that Ethiopia’s political conflict crossed.
As relations between the federal leadership and the TPLF deteriorated during Abiy Ahmed’s rise and rule, the danger extended beyond disagreement over institutions, elections, or constitutional authority. It lay in making Tigrayan identity itself appear politically suspect.
The mechanism of collective blame is devastatingly simple. A party becomes synonymous with a population. A population becomes synonymous with a threat. Once those substitutions take hold, civilian suffering can be represented as a necessary cost of national renewal.
Historical memory becomes especially vulnerable in such an atmosphere. Contributions once recognized as part of a shared struggle are recast as evidence of manipulation. Sacrifice is reduced to ambition. Every grievance against a former administration is gathered into a case against the community associated with it.
Criticism of the TPLF was legitimate. Treating Tigrayans as collectively answerable for its decisions was not.
The war that began in November 2020 exposed the catastrophic consequences of abandoning that boundary. United Nations investigators documented mass killings, widespread sexual violence, deliberate starvation, forced displacement, and arbitrary detention. Their findings identified war crimes by multiple parties and crimes against humanity committed by Ethiopian federal forces and their allies, including Eritrean forces. Violations by Tigrayan forces also require accountability; they cannot excuse crimes against Tigrayan civilians.
The destruction reached beyond the moment of an attack. Restrictions on essential supplies and the devastation of civilian infrastructure undermined the ordinary conditions through which people survive. A hospital without medicine, a household without food, and a displaced family without shelter experience war through the progressive disappearance of safety.
The UN commission’s detailed investigation described measures depriving civilians of necessities that supported healthcare, water, sanitation, shelter, education, and food. Such deprivation can constitute starvation as a method of warfare.
These findings demand more than expressions of concern. They demand investigation, preservation of evidence, prosecution where warranted, and meaningful remedies for survivors.
They also give gravity to allegations of genocide. That legal question requires careful examination of the acts committed and the specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. The documented findings of war crimes and crimes against humanity should not be presented as an established genocide judgment. Equally, legal precision must never become an excuse for minimizing suffering or postponing protection.
The historical rupture remains profound: a region whose people helped bring down dictatorship later endured devastating violence involving the state their struggle had helped reconstruct.
Yet Tigray’s right to protection does not depend on proving that it once saved Ethiopia. Historical sacrifice strengthens the indictment of betrayal; basic human dignity establishes the obligation. Even a community with no celebrated contribution to national history would possess the same right to life, security, and equal citizenship.
International responses must be judged against that obligation. Investigations and public condemnation mattered, but acknowledgment without effective protection or accountability left survivors carrying burdens that statements alone could not relieve.
Holding a country together cannot mean demanding that one community surrender its safety so that others may call the result unity. A durable political settlement requires truth about the past, justice for violations, restoration of civilian life, and institutions that protect people regardless of who governs.
Tigray’s dead must not disappear into a convenient national story. Its survivors must not be asked to purchase peace with silence.
A country honors its unity when every community can belong without fear—and when the state accepts that no claim of national survival authorizes the destruction of the people within it.