From Nobel peace prize to civil war: how Ethiopia’s leader beguiled the world

i’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Abiy Ahmed.” The message flashed up from someone I had been told to call Napoleon. It was the middle of 2023, six years after I had first arrived in Ethiopia, and one year after I had left, in the midst of a war which was tearing it apart. Ethiopia was lurching from crisis to crisis, and behind each of them loomed one figure larger than any other: the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.

Napoleon was in the US. He had known Abiy when the two of them had worked together as cyber-intelligence officers in the 2000s. A mutual contact had prepared him for my call, and assured me that he was ready and willing. Just one day earlier, Napoleon had told me himself, via text message, that he would share with me what he knew of the character of the man who, five years earlier, had won control of the Ethiopian state. Now, though, Napoleon was having second thoughts. When I tried to ring, he blocked my number.

The closer someone had been to Abiy, it seemed, the less likely they were to talk about him. Even those living far away in safe countries in the west were often too afraid to speak with me. Some would read my messages and then block my number. A few would reply, promising to schedule an interview, only to disappear. Many would not answer my calls at all.

Over the six years I had been living and working in Ethiopia, I had tried to speak with as many people as possible who had known and worked with Abiy. Despite the appearance of openness that characterised his early days in power, almost everyone agreed he was an enigma. Later, as their lives, and those of all Ethiopians, were profoundly altered by the political decisions he made, many sought further explanations: who is Abiy, really, and what does he want?

When he came to power in 2018, Abiy was feted in the west as a liberal reformer, one who would shepherd an Ethiopia bedevilled by factional politics and competing identities into a democratic future. As the first national leader in Ethiopia’s modern history to identify as Oromo, the largest but historically underrepresented of the country’s many ethnic groups, Abiy was thought to be a unifier after years of fracture.

He was also hailed as a visionary peacemaker. In July 2018, Abiy struck a historic peace accord with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s smaller neighbour which had seceded in 1993 and then – between 1998 and 2000 – fought a bloody border war that claimed as many as 100,000 lives. For his role in this, the new prime minister was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2019. The Nobel committee’s chair praised not only Abiy’s peace deal with Eritrea, but also his domestic reform efforts, including the release of tens of thousands of prisoners and the return of once-banned opposition groups. Accepting the prize at a ceremony in Oslo, Abiy declared war “the epitome of hell for all involved. I know because I was there.”

But the world got Abiy wrong.

Little more than a year later, one of the worst wars of the 21st century erupted in Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region. For much of the preceding three decades, Tigray’s authoritarian ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), had held pre-eminent power in a national coalition government. Abiy, too, had been part of the coalition – but over time had grown resentful of his Tigrayan superiors (the Tigrayan ethnic group comprises just 6% of the population of Ethiopia). The war, which ended in late 2022, would be fought over conflicting ideas of Ethiopia but also over the raw matter of power. Abiy was not solely responsible for this catastrophic conflict – which some have described as a genocide – but he was arguably more to blame than anybody else. He may go down as the most controversial recipient of the Nobel peace prize since Henry Kissinger.

Yet Abiy is no conventional authoritarian demagogue either. He came to power with a certain vision of the country he wanted to see, though that isn’t to say he had a clear policy programme or a rigid ideological agenda for achieving it. He could be deceptive and dishonest, allowing different constituencies to believe whatever they wanted about him, however contradictory. He conflated his own fate with that of the nation, believing himself to be indispensable. He deployed rhetoric that was often hateful, xenophobic and violent. But his mission in government wasn’t only amassing power and enriching himself. It was also about remaking Ethiopia in his own image.

Fortunately for Abiy, there were powerful states that were all too happy to enable him. One of the first was the US. Another was the United Arab Emirates, whose ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan wanted – and still wants – to expand the UAE’s regional influence throughout the Horn of Africa and the broader Red Sea region. So after he took power, Abiy was lavished with investment, diplomatic backing – and, most importantly, arms.

Between 2018 and 2020, Abiy moved to limit the power of the TPLF – the best organised and most equipped obstacle to his political project – in the country’s federal government, economy and security apparatus. Tensions between his government and Tigrayans rapidly mounted. Thinly veiled hate speech, much of it targeting Tigrayans, spread. Again, though, warning signs were downplayed.

“It was obvious [that he was against] not only the TPLF but also the Tigrayan people,” said a former interim prime minister, Tamrat Layne, who met with Abiy shortly after he took office. “I was trying to advise him from the beginning to handle the TPLF situation in a wise way, not to use force of arms … but he was always telling me: ‘They are nothing’, ‘They don’t have a place in Ethiopia’, things like that … It was like a revenge thing.”

By 2020, even senior allies had urged him to reconcile with the TPLF in order to head off a violent conflict. But Abiy doubled down. The TPLF, and by extension Tigrayans, were increasingly singled out as the sole source of Ethiopia’s ills. Abiy’s government openly accused the Tigrayan ruling party of waging a campaign of violent national sabotage. Even power cuts or water shortages were now laid at the Tigrayans’ door.

Over the border in Eritrea, Afewerki was preparing for war: reorganising the Eritrean Defence Forces, stocking up on arms from Russia, digging trenches and stepping up conscription. Eritrean media ramped up anti-TPLF propaganda, accusing it of agitating against Abiy’s peace agreement. Authorities warned repeatedly that the TPLF planned to invade Eritrea and repeat the horrors of the 1998-2000 war.

Ethiopian soldiers started deploying on the Eritrean side of the border. Abiy ratcheted up the economic pressure on Tigray, turning what had for many months already been a loose blockade of the region into a fast-tightening chokehold. Ostensibly to fight corruption, but really to strangle the TPLF’s finances, the federal government had introduced new currency notes in September 2020, forcing everyone to hand their old money into the banks. Now it went even further, halting budget payments to Tigray entirely – a move decried by the TPLF as a “declaration of war” – and suspending welfare payments to farmers there. Support for the region’s efforts to fight the locusts then decimating Tigrayan agriculture was slashed.

Civil war erupted on 3 November 2020. Over the following days, the first glimpses of its horrors began to emerge: refugees streaming into Sudan, columns of militiamen brandishing rusty Kalashnikovs, wobbly videos of corpses under plastic shrouds. “This is about to get very fucked,” a shaken foreign researcher texted me as word of the first massacres reached us. Later, the fighting would spread to other regions, and almost reached the capital, Addis Ababa. By the time the rest of the world had awoken to the disaster unfolding, it was too late.

After two years and at least 600,000 deaths, mass rape and ethnic cleansing, Ethiopia’s Tigray war came to an end, but the peace is extremely fragile. Conflict has created widespread famine and catastrophic economic damage. In Amhara and Oromia, the two largest regions, rebellions against Abiy’s government are still raging – and the response of his security forces is often no less brutal. Yet the US and the EU are seeking to gradually bring him in from the cold. Last year, the Biden administration determined that the Ethiopian government is no longer engaging in a “pattern of gross violations of human rights”. Western and African officials alike act as if Ethiopia were a problem solved. But it is far from it.

Ethiopia’s messianic prime minister sought to transcend his country’s difficult history – to wipe away the complexities of identity, ideology and nation-building in a single stroke and build afresh. But instead he has been consumed by it. Under his highly idiosyncratic and personalised style of rule, Abiy has heightened what sociologists might call the Ethiopian state’s “structural contradictions” to the point of collapse. As the country’s disrupter-in-chief, who took a sledgehammer to an already delicate set of political arrangements, Abiy is the prime catalyst for the country’s spectacular unravelling.

This is an edited extract from The Abiy Project: God, Power and War in the New Ethiopia, published by Hurst and available at guardianbookshop.com