Abiy Ahmed: Nobel Prize Winner Who Started a War

In 2019, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stood in Oslo and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He'd ended a twenty-year war with Eritrea, freed thousands of political prisoners, and made his country believe things could be different. Fourteen months later, he launched a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of his own people.

This episode tells that story: the reforms, the Nobel Prize, the election that barely happened, and the Tigray war that the world mostly didn't watch. It asks a harder question too: what does it mean when the most recognizable peace award on earth goes to someone who, not long after, oversaw one of the deadliest conflicts of the twenty-first century?

Topics covered: Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Prize, the TPLF, the Tigray war, the 2021 Ethiopian election, Eritrea, and the question of whose suffering gets covered and whose doesn't.

Transcript

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December 10th, 2019, Aslo Norway. A forty three year old man walks onto a stage in a white tie and tells The Hole is full. The world is watching. He is handed the Nobel Peace Prize, the most recognizable award on earth. And he gives a speech that makes people cry. He talks about his mother, he talks about growing up poor in rural Ethiopia, about war, about loss, about the work of building something that lasts. He says, I come from a part of the world where the fire of conflict and war has burned for too long. His name is Abi Ahmed. He is the Prime Minister of Ethiopia. He has been in power for twenty months. He has already done something that many thought impossible. Ended a war with Ethiopia's neighbor, a terrier, that had dragged on for 20 years. The Nobel Committee calls him a decisive force for power. Fourteen months later, he will launch a war that kills hundreds of thousands of his own people. This is that story. To understand Abi Ahmad, you have to understand Ethiopia, and Ethiopia is not easy to understand. It is one of the oldest nations on earth, never colonized, home to more than 80 ethnic groups, and a federal system specifically built to try to manage that diversity. At the top of that system for decades sat one group, the Tigrinian People's Liberation Front, the TPL, who had led the rebellion that brought down the previous regime in 19 and had run the country ever since. By 2018, the TPLF's grip was loosening. Three years of street protests, mainly from the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, who had long felt locked out of power, had made the country ungovernable. The ruling coalition needed new leadership. They reached for someone unexpected. Abi Ahmed is Oromo. He grew up in a small town, served in the military, rose through the intelligence services, got a PhD. He is brilliant, charismatic, and mesmerizing in a room. When he took power in April 2018 at 41 years old, what came next was extraordinary. Within his first hundred days, he lifted the state of emergency, released tens of thousands of political prisoners, discontinued media censorship, legalized outlawed opposition groups and appointed women to half of his cabinet. To half of his cabinet. Later that year, for the first time in Ethiopia's history, a woman was appointed as the country's president. The reaction inside Ethiopia was something approaching euphoria. Crowds followed him in the streets. The term abenia entered the language. And then came Etheria. Ethiopia and Eritheria had been locked in one of Africa's most costly and most pointless conflicts for decades. A border war from 1998 to 2000 killed somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 people. Of a strip of contested territory neither country could really use. After a peace deal in 2000, neither side fully accepted. The country settled into a long Cold War. No formal fighting, but no real peace either. Closed borders, severed families, frozen in a mutual hostility. In June 2018, just two weeks after taking office, Abi made a phone call to Eritrea's president. Then he flew to Asmara, the first Ethiopian leader to set foot in Eritrea in 20 years. When he and Eritheria's president Afwarki embraced on the tarmac, people wept. Flights resumed between Addis Ababa and Asmara. Families separated for two decades were reunited at the border. A young man named Hagos, whose father had died in the conflict and who had never met his Eritarian relatives said, I didn't feel like an orphan anymore. The Nobel Committee awarded him the prize in October 2019. He was by almost any measure deserving of it. What he had done was real. The question, always the question with Abi, is what comes next. Here is something that did not get enough attention in all the coverage of Abi's rise. From the very beginning, people who knew Ethiopian politics were worried. The reforms were real, but they were also destabilizing. When you open a system that has been held together by force, things escaped. Ethnic violence across Ethiopia spiked in 2018 and 2019. As old grievances surfaced, millions of people were internally displaced, more than anywhere else in the world. The federal structure that had been managed through central control was suddenly looser, and not everyone was ready for that. And then there was the TPLF. When Abi dissolved the old ruling coalition and created a new party, the Prosperity Party, the TPLF refused to join. They went back to Tigray, their home region in the north, and ran it as a state within a state. They still controlled significant military assets, including a large chunk of Ethiopia's heavy weapons, which were stored in the Tigray region. Relations between Abi's federal government and the TPLF leadership grew colder and colder through 2019 and 2020. There was also the election. Abiy had promised a free and fair vote. Ethiopia's first true competitive election. It was scheduled for August 2020. Then COVID-19 hit and he postponed it. That created a constitutional problem. His mandate expired and Ethiopia had no clear mechanism for what came next. The TPLF decided to hold their own regional elections in Tigray in September 2020, in defiance of the federal government's instruction not to. Addis Ababa declared the results illegal. Tigray declared the federal government illegitimate in return. You can hear the crack forming. On November 4, 2020, Abi ordered federal troops into Tigray. His stated reason the TPLF had attacked federal military bases in the north, killing soldiers and attempting to seize weapons. Even TPLF later confirmed they launched that attack first. He called it a law enforcement operation. He said it would be over quickly. It was not over quickly. The federal election finally happened in June 2021, twice postponed, held in the shadow of an ongoing civil war, boycotted by major opposition parties and with no voting at all integrated. Abi's prosperity party won an overwhelming majority. The African Union called it credible. Critics called it something else. The election gave Abi a democratic mandate. What it could not do was give him peace. What happened in Tigray over the next two years was by most serious estimates the deadliest conflict of the 21st century. Estimates of the total death toll, combining combat deaths, famine, and deaths from the collapse of health care range 300,000 to 600,000 people. Some researchers put that figure higher. The war had multiple phases. In the early months, federal forces backed by Eritarian troops and Amhara regional militias drove deep into Tigray. There were massacres in the city of Aksum, one of Ethiopia's holiest sites. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Eritarian soldiers killed hundreds of civilians in November 2020, going door to door in what Amnesty International called a likely crime against humanity. Aid workers documented mass rape used systematically as a weapon. At least 120,000 women are estimated to have been sexually assaulted during the conflict. Food aid was blocked. Ethiopia's own human rights commission, alongside the UN, documented killings of civilians. Then the war was reversed. By June 2021, Tigranian forces had taken their regional capital, Mekele, and were marching south. At one point, coming within reach of Addis Ababa, the federal government declared a state of emergency. It was demanded of civilians to arm themselves to defend the capital. Then in late 2021, the Tigray Defense Forces retreated. In April 2022 came the final federal offensive. In November 2022, the two sides signed a cessation of hostilities in Pretoria. The Nobel Committee, an institution that almost never speaks about its past laureates, issued a formal public reprimand of Abi in January 2022. As Prime Minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, they wrote Bi Ahmed has a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace. As Prime Minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, they wrote, Abi Ahmed has a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace. It was an almost unprecedented rebuke. Germany's Haitian Peace Award, which Abi had also won in 2019, was formally withdrawn by its trustees. This episode would be easier to make if Abi Ahmed was simply a villain. He's not. He came to power with a vision of a unified, prosperous Ethiopia. His reform agenda was real. His belief in Pan-African dignity is real. The road from that vision to hundreds of thousands of deaths passes through choices. The choice to send the military in, the choice to let Iritaria forces operate in Tigray, the choice to block food aid. Whether those choices were forced by circumstances or freely made is the question Ethiopian historians will argue about for decades. Ethiopia today is not at peace. The Pretoria Agreement ended the Tigray War, but violence continues in the Oromia region, in Amhara, in Benisangul Gumuz. The country carries the weight of a conflict that the world barely noticed in a region that has been neglected by international media for as long as anyone can remember. Abi Ahmed still governs Ethiopia. He is still the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He gives speeches about African unity and continental development. He has not faced any formal international accountability for what happened in Tigray, and he probably never will. The man who stood in Oslo in white tie and tails, who talked about his mother and about fire burning for too long, I don't think that speech was a lie. What the episode forces us to ask is a harder question. Not whether a bee is good or bad, but whether the Nobel Prize Pea actually is. It is given on the basis of hope, on what a leader might become, not what they have proven. The committee said so themselves that the prize was meant to encourage. Sometimes that encouragement is vindicated. Sometimes the person receiving the prize is standing in a peace deal that is in fact a prelude to war. Peace is not a prize, it is a practice. You cannot receive it and then restore. Peace is not a prize, it is a practice. You cannot receive it and then store it. You have to keep choosing it every day when the alternatives are easier or more powerful or more satisfying. Abi Ahmed stopped choosing peace and hundreds of thousands of people who never stood in an Oslo concert hall, who never had the world's attention, who are still missing from the front pages of the newspapers that cover every European war in detail, they paid the price. I am Amadu. This is Learning Africa. Next time we go somewhere different. But the question stays the same. Who holds the power? Who suffers when it goes wrong? And what the rest of the world chooses to notice. We'll talk soon.