CETRI
That advantage is disappearing.
As Reuters reported on September 21, seven armed organizations have now formed an alliance aimed at removing the Prosperity Party government. It brings together former enemies, including the TPLF and the Amhara Fano National Movement, alongside the Oromo Liberation Army and organizations from other parts of Ethiopia.
Number seven is not the most important part. What matters is that forces that recently fought one another have decided not to make each other the immediate enemy.
They do not have to love each other. They do not have to agree on Ethiopian history or even on the ultimate shape of the country. If they can stop killing one another, postpone their disputes and concentrate on the political order they all oppose, the balance changes immediately. For years, Abiy’s opponents weakened one another for him. That is precisely the advantage Tsimdo threatens.
This is what I was trying to describe earlier this month in “Tsimdo and the Changing Politics of the Horn.” Tsimdo is a Tigrinya farming image: two oxen yoked together. They remain separate animals, but for a particular task they pull in the same direction. My argument was that these forces did not need one ideology or one commander to create a combined strategic effect.
Events have already moved considerably further. What was an emerging convergence is becoming an organized political front. There is now a formal coalition, identifiable leadership, a common immediate objective, and, importantly, discussion of an inclusive transitional government. This continues the shift I described in “Former Enemies, a Common Adversary” and later in“Pretoria Cannot Explain Ethiopia Anymore.”
The symbolism of Zemene Kasse announcing the alliance on Tigrai TV is enormous. Fano and Tigrayan forces were killing one another only a few years ago. Their disagreements have not magically disappeared. Yet a prominent Fano leader went onto a Tigrayan television station to announce that they were now part of the same front. The federal reaction was immediate: as Reuters reported, the Ethiopian Media Authority barred other domestic media from using Tigrai TV as a source.
The participation of the OLA is just as significant. Abiy came to national power through an Oromo political opening. Oromia was the political terrain from which he emerged. Now an important Oromo armed organization is part of a front with Tigrayan, Amhara and other organizations seeking to replace his government.
This is why the repeated warning that removing Abiy will fragment Ethiopia misses what is happening in front of us. Ethiopia is already fragmenting under Abiy.
Tigray fought a catastrophic war with the federal government. Amhara is engulfed in armed rebellion. The OLA continues to fight in Oromia. Relations with Eritrea have deteriorated dangerously. Organizations from several other parts of the country have now joined the same opposition framework.
The coalition did not create those fractures. It emerged because the fractures were already there.
For years, European governments have treated a strong center in Addis Ababa as the best protection against Ethiopian disintegration. I have challenged that assumption repeatedly. It confuses the survival of Ethiopia with the survival of the political order controlling Addis Ababa.
The fear behind it is understandable. Ethiopia contains unresolved national, constitutional and territorial questions. Nobody should romanticize what a chaotic collapse would mean. But there is another possibility Western diplomacy has been much slower to confront: the center itself can become an engine of fragmentation.
Abiy speaks the language of Medemer, national unity, and reconciliation. But his own rhetoric tells another story.
During the Tigray war, he called Tigrayan forces “weeds” and a “cancer.”Amnesty International documented that language in discussing the broader dehumanization of Tigrayans during the conflict. Once political opponents become weeds or cancer, the language has moved beyond disagreement. Weeds are uprooted. Cancer is cut out.
Then came the extraordinary Beshasha remark. After federal forces withdrew from Mekelle in 2021, Abiy boasted about what had happened to the Tigrayan capital. TheWorld Peace Foundation records him saying that he had “reduced Mekelle” to Beshasha, the small town where he grew up.
Mekelle was not an abstraction. It was a city whose population had endured war, deprivation and the destruction of an economy. To speak proudly of reducing it was a language of humiliation, not reconciliation.
The same pattern appeared in relation to Eritrea. Geeska documented Abiy warning in a private speech that he could turn Eritrea into “Gaza” if provoked. By then Gaza had become a global image of enormous destruction, displacement and civilian suffering. Using it as a threat against an entire neighboring country speaks for itself.
More recently, Abiy went to Gojjam and invoked the nineteenth-century violence of Emperor Yohannes IV, reminding an Amhara audience of suffering associated with a Tigrayan emperor. History itself deserves serious discussion. But history is never invoked in a political vacuum. At precisely the moment when Amhara and Tigrayan forces were beginning to find common ground, the prime minister chose to remind Gojjam of an old grievance against Tigray.
Put these statements together: weeds and cancer, Mekelle reduced to Beshasha, Eritrea turned into Gaza, Yohannes IV resurrected in Gojjam. Different audiences, different enemies, but a recurring vocabulary of fear, humiliation, historical grievance and destruction.
There are disturbing historical echoes here. One lesson from Rwanda is what can happen when the distinction between an armed political enemy and an ethnic population begins to disappear and when political adversaries are described through metaphors of contamination and eradication. Ethiopia is not Rwanda. But Rwanda taught us that such language should never be dismissed as harmless political theater.
Tsimdo is moving in the opposite direction.
It does not ask Amhara and Tigrayans to forget what they did to one another. It does not require Fano, the OLA and the TPLF to discover that they suddenly share one ideology. It asks something more practical and, at this moment, more important: must yesterday’s grievances continue to decide who kills whom today?
That is why some of the reactions to Tsimdo are so revealing.
Jawar Mohammed has presented himself as an opponent of Abiy. Yet while discussing Tsimdo recently, I heard him say plainly: “We own the air.”
That statement stayed with me.
Who is “we”?
And what kind of answer to a political coalition is “we own the air”?
The federal government certainly has a formidable advantage in drones, aircraft, and conventional weaponry. But owning the air is not the same thing as owning the political outcome.
Saudi Arabia should know.
I explored this history in “To Understand the Houthis, Begin With Yemen.” The Houthis cannot be understood simply as an Iranian creation. Their resilience comes from Yemeni history, social organization, local grievances, tribal relationships, repeated wars and their extraordinary capacity to adapt. Iranian support enhanced their capabilities, but it did not create their social base.
Saudi Arabia “owned the air” over Yemen too.
Riyadh entered the war with vastly greater wealth, modern aircraft, advanced intelligence, and overwhelming technological superiority. It bombed the Houthis for years. The Houthis survived. They adapted. They developed new military capabilities and eventually became capable of threatening Saudi Arabia itself and international shipping around the Red Sea.
Recent events have made the lesson even harder to miss. Reuters reported on September 21 that Houthi forces are again advancing in strategically important areas near the Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb. Years of overwhelming air superiority did not settle the underlying political contest.
Ethiopia is not Yemen. Tsimdo is not Ansar Allah. But strategic lessons are relevant. Aircraft can destroy equipment and punish concentrations of fighters. Drones can make conventional warfare extremely costly. They cannot govern every village. They cannot manufacture political legitimacy. They cannot eliminate political grievances. And they cannot make several armed constituencies accept a political center they have decided to resist.
Nor does air superiority remove economic vulnerability.
Ethiopia is a landlocked country dependent on remarkably narrow trade arteries. The World Bank calls the Addis-Djibouti corridor Ethiopia’s economic lifeline: more than 95 percent of Ethiopia’s import-export trade by volume passes through it. Roads carry most of that commerce, and the Addis-Djibouti railway is another important part of the same logistics system.
This is not an argument for attacking civilian infrastructure. It is an argument against confusing technological superiority with strategic invulnerability. A state can possess sophisticated drones while remaining politically fragmented, economically exposed, and dependent on a small number of functioning corridors connecting it to the outside world.
The significance of the seven-organization alliance is therefore larger than the question of who has more drones. A government can concentrate on its military resources against one rebellion. It faces a very different problem when resistance exists across several regions, and former enemies stop tying one another down.
That is what makes Tsimdo potentially transformative.
Abiy’s changing alliances tell their own story. Eritrea was indispensable to his war against the TPLF and is now treated as a threat. Amhara forces fought alongside the federal army in that same war and later became the targets of federal military operations. Oromo political mobilization helped create the opening that brought Abiy to power, while Oromia became one of the main theaters of armed resistance to his government.
Yesterday’s allies repeatedly become today’s enemies.
Eventually yesterday’s enemies began comparing notes.
That is what we are seeing now.
And there is another reason for hope. The new alliance is not speaking only about removing Abiy. It is already talking about an inclusive transitional government. The groups themselves say they want to establish such a transition.
That matters.
There will be enormous work to do after Abiy. Questions of territory, federalism, constitutional arrangements, security, displaced populations and relations among Ethiopia’s nations cannot be solved by replacing one man. But the fact that these organizations are already talking about a transitional process rather than simply military victory is encouraging. It suggests an understanding that defeating an adversary is not enough. Ethiopia will need a political settlement broad enough to prevent another group from capturing the center and beginning the cycle again.
Perhaps that is the deeper promise of Tsimdo.
It begins with something modest but extraordinary: people who recently regarded one another as mortal enemies deciding that they do not have to remain enemies forever.
They can postpone some disagreements. They can negotiate with others. They can stop killing one another. They can begin discussing what comes next.
For years, the fragmentation of Abiy’s opponents was one of his greatest political advantages. Now those opponents are discovering that their differences do not have to prevent cooperation.
That should force Ethiopia’s international partners, particularly Europe, to rethink an assumption that has shaped their approach for too long. The choice is not between Abiy and fragmentation. Fragmentation has advanced while Abiy has been in power.
The more important choice is between continuing to equate Ethiopia with a coercive center and beginning the much harder work of constructing a political arrangement in which the center belongs to everyone.
Tsimdo does not answer all those questions.
But for the first time in a long while, some of Ethiopia’s bitterest adversaries are beginning to ask them together.
That is the reason for hope.
And as for owning the air: Saudi Arabia owned the air over Yemen too.
