The Tigray region ruled Ethiopia for over two decades, but the rise of the Amhara and Oromia regions led to a regime and ideological change in Ethiopia. These two regions were represented by the powerful prime minister, who is the head of government. 

The Rise and Ruling of TPLF 

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has a long and powerful history in Ethiopia. The TPLF was formed in 1975, a time when millions of people across Africa and the Middle East were demanding revolutions and fighting for liberation. After emperor Haile Selassie was murdered in 1975, harsh authoritarian rule was imposed. In the Tigray region, there had been a  long history of resentment toward the idea of the centralization of power within Ethiopia. Because of this, a dozen young men, inspired by Marxist-Leninism and nationalist sentiments, founded the TPLF. Throughout the late 1970s, the organization grew steadily and by the 1980s they mobilized approximately 4,000 fighters.

The TPLF was a ruthless group. They fought and destroyed rival rebel groups in Tigray and continuously downplayed their Marxist views. The rural and predominantly conservative Christian population of the Tigray region was the TPLF’s initial support base. Accordingly, the TPLF stressed the threat posed to local tradition and regional autonomy by the socialist policies of the authoritarian regime in the capital, Addis Ababa. 

By the end of the 1980s, the TPLF was the biggest and most effective rebel group among the coalition of Ethiopian armed rebel groups that had united under the name of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). This greater alliance was created with the sole intention of fighting the national authoritarian regime. On May 28, 1991, the EPRDF troops, with the help of like-minded Eritrean forces,  seized control of the capital and the regime collapsed.  

In place of the regime came the TPLF leader, Meles Zenawi. The army and intelligence services became dominated by Tigrayans, and government positions were given to former military leaders and close friends of Zenawi. Under the TPLF-dominated coalition government, there was the construction of a balanced ethnicity-based federal state in which each regional state was headed by a president elected by the state council and the individual cities were headed by a chairman, rapid development progress, massive infrastructure investment, and astonishing economic success.  However, the government also actively engaged in the oppression of the Oromo and Amhara ethnicities. These two ethnicities combined comprise approximately fifty to sixty percent of Ethiopians, which is in stark comparison to the six percent of the Tigrayans. In addition, the TPLF repressed their once allied Eritreans, launching Ethiopia into a war with Eritrea from 1998 to 2000.  

This war is estimated to have left as many as 100,000 people dead. In 2002, the village of Badme, which is on the border of the Tigray region of Ethiopia and Eritrea, was awarded to Eritrea by an international boundary commission created under a peace agreement between the two sides. Regardless of the deal, Ethiopia continued to maintain a nearly twenty-year military stalemate to avoid surrendering the town. Ethiopia did not give in and surrender this town until 2018.   

Even with these animosities from 1998 to 2000, the United States continued to back the TPLF-dominated government and called Ethiopia a “country of enormous consequence” for it. Ethiopia is viewed by the United States and some of its allies as a vital wall against the spread of radical Islam and terrorism in the Horn of Africa, which consists of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Additionally, Ethiopia has played a critical role in keeping the peace in Africa for many years.

The Ascent of an Underdog: Abiy Ahmed 

In 2012, Meles Zenawi died and his successor, Halemariam Desalegn, was too weak to manage the growing ethnic tensions. Discontent among the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups was growing and eventually, representatives of the two communities joined forces, pushed out the TPLF, and got  Oromo-Amharic politician Abiy Ahmed appointed as prime minister in 2018. 

Once appointed, Ahmed fired several TPLF officials, arrested generals on graft charges, and implemented other changes to counter the Tigrayan dominance left behind. For instance, political prisoners were freed from secret prisons, exiled dissidents were welcomed home, certain state enterprises were privatized, restrictions on the media were removed. A new party, known as the Prosperity Party, was created. This new party included many previously excluded ethnic groups, however, it shut out the TPLF. Ahmed’s most notable accomplishment was the peace deal with Eritrea in which he willingly gave up the village of Badme to Eritrea without any of the economic preconditions that the TPLF-dominated government had insisted on. This, in effect, resolved the almost twenty-year conflict, earned Abiy the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, and left the TPLF isolated. 

All of these changes by Ahmed were positively seen by the international community and Ethiopia at-large as advantageous and progressive. However, Tigray’s leaders saw Abiy’s reforms as an attempt to centralize power and destroy Ethiopia’s federal system. By the summer of 2020, tensions between Ahmed and the TPLF had risen further. The TPLF refused to hand over wanted fugitives or join the new political party set up by Ahmed. Additionally, the TPLF went ahead with illegal local elections in Tigray despite polls being postponed nationwide due to the coronavirus. The rift grew deeper in October when the central government suspended funding for and cut ties with Tigray. Tigray’s administration called this a “declaration of war.”  

The conflict came to a head in early November 2020, when Ahmed alleged that the TPLF raided units on federal military bases in Tigray, in which many national army officers were killed and substantial quantities of hardware were seized. Following this alleged raid, Ahmed immediately launched his offense with the promise of being swift and bloodless. The prime minister bolstered his forces by deploying militia fighters from Amhara, who swept into western Tigray amid accusations of civilian attacks. His troops captured the regional capital of Mekelle and he released a statement claiming stated: “We have completed and ceased military operations.” However, the TPLF and its armed supporters have fled to rural areas where sporadic fighting has continued. 

The Conflict Today

The war in Tigray has deepened ethnic tensions and created an immense humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 4.5 million people in urgent need of assistance. This conflict is spilling over into Eritrea and Sudan and could destabilize the entire Horn of Africa region. Debretsion Gebremichael, the leader of the TPLF, is urging the international community to intervene before a “humanitarian disaster of biblical proportion will become a gruesome reality.” They are also requesting that the international community withdraw fighters including soldiers from neighboring Eritrea who are supporting the Ethiopian forces. Gebremichael claims, “Abiy Ahmed invited forces, including the Eritrean army, and they are massacring the people of Tigray.” Gebremichael did not name the other countries allegedly involved in the conflict. Somalia has previously denied that its troops have been fighting alongside Ethiopia in the conflict. In addition, the TPLF has previously alleged that drones from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were being used to strike at its forces, but Ethiopia quickly denied those claims. 

The United Nations has been unable to completely assess the situation, but there have been accusations of sexual and gender-based violations and on top of that thousands have died, hundreds of thousands are at risk of starvation and the conflict continues. 

This ongoing conflict may have dire consequences, not just for Ethiopia but also for the Horn of Africa and other African nations. After all, it is possible that other minority ethnicities with differing ideologies in other African nations may follow the lead of the TPLF and rebel against their current governments. 

In the end, the TPLF is trying to regain some control in the federal government of Ethiopia and reinstall their ideology and regional autonomy; the current central government is trying to unify all regions of Ethiopia and make it a stronger nation. Only time will tell if the central government with the help of the international community can control this situation and help bring peace once again to Ethiopia.              

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If history has taught us anything beyond that conflict is inevitable, it’s that wars often prove self-correcting. In other words, a particular war can be so devastating that the pendulum then necessarily swings in the direction of peace and non-intervention. However, drone warfare—the warfare currently a la mode—is so much less visible and costly to its perpetrators, that it stands as a stark exception. Far from correcting itself, it seemingly has the capacity to self-perpetuate. The invention and proliferation of drone use might have made war too easy.

After the trauma of World War II, European countries realized continental integration may be the solution to mitigating the radical nationalism that had devastated the region. This led to the 1948 Hague Congress, and the creation of the European Movement International and the College of Europe, precursors of the European Union. After the French colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina proved significantly harder and bloodier for France than anticipated, referendums for independence were granted quickly—without conflict—to all remaining French colonies. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so destructive that it left in its wake an international understanding nuclear weapons should never again be used and, despite  their proliferation, they never have been. The Vietnam War triggered a more inward-looking America, reluctant to engage in costly intervention overseas.

Each case reflects the impact of popular fatigue with, and apprehension towards, any war after experiencing a particularly scarring one, in turn making a democratically-elected government more reluctant to engage in conflict for fear of losing popularity. Like European populations after World War II and French citizens after the colonial wars, the war in Iraq had this effect on the American public, which witnessed the considerable human and material costs of ill-considered foreign intervention.

The graph below depicts this phenomenon. In 2002, right before the invasion of Iraq, only 30% of US citizens agreed that the US should mind its own business internationally; this coincides perfectly with the fact that in 2002, only 32% of US citizens thought invading Iraq was a mistake. But almost immediately following the invasion, both those numbers began to increase. By 2013, 52% of US citizens wanted a more isolationist agenda, and 53% thought the war in Iraq was a mistake.

That those numbers essentially match reflects the impact of the Iraq War on public attitudes toward outside intervention. American citizens had begun to look at foreign policy solely through the lens of the Iraq war, and were thus far less interventionist.

But the post-Iraq era has been marked by a paradox—popular opinion opposes foreign intervention (hence the more passive attitude towards Syria and President Obama’s decision to resist calls for intervention), but drone warfare has risen dramatically.

Post-Iraq anxiety and war-weariness has failed to limit this particular form of warfare: in a New York Times article, Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, was quoted as saying that “an average of separate counts of American drone strikes by three organizations, the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Long War Journal, finds that 522 strikes have killed 3,852 people” since the Obama administration came into office. This is no “non-interventionist” policy.

No wars end all wars. But the speed with which we have transitioned from war-fatigue to war-footing is troubling, and it’s because drone warfare is different. Unlike in the past, with drone warfare there is no self-correction; no inherent ceiling or reason to believe the appeal will drop and the pendulum will swing back again.

War is meant to be difficult and costly; in fact, its difficulty and cost–in terms of lives lost, money expended, political capital expended–are the primary motives for deterrence. Drones have managed to essentially nullify these “inconveniences”. US lives are spared when unmanned drone-strikes are used rather than troop deployment, and targeted drone-strikes don’t come close to the fiscal costs of staging an Iraqi-style intervention. But it’s the last cost–the cost of political capital–that is probably at once the least talked about, and the most important.

General public angst and rejection of wars after a specifically disturbing one generally mean that a President and his administration notice and heed this ideological shift, and thus refrain from conflict, for the sake of re-election and public approval.

This novel and more sterile form of warfare explains another paradox: US popular stance on American foreign policy and their view of Obama’s job performance are directly at odds with one another. While polls indicate a continual increase in Obama’s approval rating, they have also shown a continuously growing reluctance to intervene abroad—all while large-scale drone use has expanded.

Though there are certainly other factors at work (Obamacare, economic growth, decrease in unemployment, etc. all could have contributed to the increasing approval rating), it is still hard to square Obama’s approval rating rising in parallel to his rising drone use despite growing non-interventionist popular sentiment. This in fact illustrates another way in which drones have made war easier to wage: it has allowed the governments to engage in covert warfare without much public recognition or understanding of the conflict.

Recently, persistent calls for transparency led the administration to release data on the number of civilian casualties from drone-strikes. The administration reported at least 64 innocent casualties (and at most 116). But this statistic fell far short of every single other thorough research report published by independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit organizations, with some extending up to at the very least 500 civilian casualties, demonstrating the real lack of public transparency in the US drone-program.

President Obama oversaw the historic Iran nuclear deal, began the process of lifting the embargo on Cuba, and withdrew tens of thousands of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. By almost any measure, he has been a strong foreign policy president, resisting the impulse to send troops abroad, and trusting in the good sense of the American people.

Which is precisely why this isn’t an attack on Obama’s presidency, nor on the use of drones in general. Drone-use is not inherently evil; to the contrary, in most respects its use has proved remarkably efficient in combating terrorists without risking hundreds of American lives, destroying or destabilizing entire countries, or generating an even greater number of innocent victims. But therein lies the problem. The proliferation of military drone-strikes may have just made war too easy. It was the tremendous, palpable cost of World War II, the French colonial wars, the bombing of Japan or the Vietnam War that prompted public wariness of conflict in the respective countries, thereby pushing the governments towards peace and non-intervention, at least temporarily. If war’s ceiling–the level at which a population yells “No More!”–is removed, then the pendulum will cease its backward swing. The price of drone warfare is invisible to those who prosecute it, while destructively tangible to those on its receiving end. It’s for this reason we must make sure not to remove war’s ceiling.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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Between September 1793 and July 1794, the National Convention of France operated a “Reign of Terror” defined by the mass execution of potential counterrevolutionaries in the name of national peace. One of the proponents of governing through terror, Maximilien Robespierre, argued: “terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible [and that]the government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” In other words, the government may suspend the inalienable rights of its citizens in times of crisis. The ends (peace) justify the means (terror).

On September 14, 2001, the United States Congress expanded the constitutional powers of the executive branch to include the legal authority “to retaliate against any person, organization, or State suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks on the United States, but also against foreign States suspected of harboring or supporting such organizations. Finally, the President may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.” Post-9/11 national security laws have allowed for a permanent retaliatory war with unclear operational and legal boundaries.

The “Global War on Terror” certainly requires an extraordinary military response; the list of “legal” military responses has grown to include drone strikes and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) missions on potential terrorists in foreign states, states which Congress has not declared war on. The president may suspend the constitutional rights of citizens (by Amendments V and VI of the US Constitution ) and non-citizens (by Articles 3 and 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), in the name of peace. Once again, the ends justify the means.

Criticism of this “paramilitary arm of the administration” is well publicized. However, a new report released last week by Amnesty International in conjunction with Human Rights Watch has brought the Obama administration’s policy on global terrorism into the spotlight. The organizations claim that several drone strikes have been a “clear violation of international humanitarian law,” citing the failure to apply due process before applying the “capital punishment” administered by a Hellfire missile. Further, “Amnesty International has serious concerns that this attack violated the prohibition of the arbitrary deprivation of life and may constitute war crimes or extrajudicial executions,” and that those responsible for ordering the aforementioned attacks (presumably President Obama and his military-intelligence team) should stand trial. (Note: The White House has challenged Amnesty International’s latest report, reiterating that all counterterrorism operations are “precise, lawful, and effective.”)

Drone strikes and JSOC missions are both morally and legally questionable as evidenced by the intentional killing of American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year old civilian living in Yemen, who was killed as punishment for his father’s (Anwar al-Awlaki) crimes and for who he might become—a terrorist made in his father’s image. Furthermore, these missions have a negative impact on America’s ability to effectively engage in diplomacy because of the anti-American distrust and resentment that grows in targeted regions.

I anticipate three defenses of President Obama’s drone policy and subsequent internal law and human right’s violations: (1) drone and JSOC strikes are effective in eliminating terrorist threats; (2) “terror” implies a murderous policy; and (3) war is ugly and why should the US government be indicted for trying to suppress terrorism? I would respond as follows:

(1) Yes, US drones possess deadly accuracy on selected targets and spare the endangerment of US troops in volatile regions such as the Afghani-Pakistani border. However, despite their precision, drone strikes, night raids, constant aerial surveillance—and most dramatically, the killing of innocent civilians—only fuel greater anti-American sentiment. Terrorism is as rampant and threatening as ever. Al-Qaeda and its global affiliates are expanding in spite of successful US operations to kill top commanders. America needs to “win hearts and minds”—drone strikes do not accomplish this goal.

(2) True, President Obama has never advocated the killing of civilians. In fact, he has publicly expressed regret about civilian causalities in war zones. But as in every conflict, civilians have died and the constant threat of a bellicose America is terrorizing people around the world. Exploded missile fragments can be found near kill sites in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan; to those finding these ordinances, the “Made in America” message is clear. Children in Pakistan have grown accustom to drone flyovers and are left wondering “am I next?” The CIA’s East African kill list has been contracted to Somali warlords. Perhaps the mother of all surprises has stemmed from Obama’s willingness to detain foreign journalists who speak out about errant American strikes. This is not a covert “Global War on Terror.” Citizens of Mali, Thailand, Panama, Yemen, and more than 70 other countries know all too well that they may become the next in a long line of unsuspecting victims, and from their perspective, America is to blame.

(3) Yes, war is ugly. Soldiers and civilians die at the hands of Allied and insurgent forces. Millions have been displaced. However, murdering—via drone strikes—over 400 innocent civilians in Pakistan is unacceptable, as is the murdering of American citizens abroad. And committing murder in the name of ending murder is nonsensical. But killing without oversight is undermining the very moral and legal fiber of the United States (not to mention bilateral relations with countries in which drone strikes have occurred) and international institutions such as the United Nations—the very institution established to end unchecked killing.

Civilians in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border refer to American JSOC forces as the “American Taliban.” In their eyes, America has become the very monster they promised to destroy. America has scarred and radicalized an entire generation, and as a result the number of “terrorists” will only grow. America’s “despotism of liberty against tyranny” must end, but how does a war like this end? Perhaps Yemeni political activist Abdul-Ghani Al Iryani’s advice is best: “In the fight against al-Qaeda and the extremism it represents, we can do it the easy way, by killing, and thus have to do it again and again, or the hard way and really solve the problem. To truly fight al-Qaeda and similar groups, we must deal with the root causes of its growth—poverty, injustice, lack of rule of law…and drone strikes.”

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff and editorial board.

Update 11/4/13: correction made to the caption for accompanying photograph.

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