“If you want an example of someone who is small, but who unfortunately found a small opportunity to get to a big position, and is causing big problems, look no further than @AbiyAhmedAli.” ~ @reda_getachew in 2021
A Coalition Worth Watching, and Not Only in Ethiopia
If the communiqué and accompanying announcement are authenticated as presented, the Ethiopian Popular Forces Coalition for Survival is the most consequential political development in Ethiopia since 2018, and its implications are continental rather than merely national.
Its significance lies less in ideological convergence than in the breadth of political agency it assembles. The Amhara Fano National Movement (#AFNM), the Oromo Liberation Army (#OLA), the Tigray People's Liberation Front (#TPLF), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (#ONLF), the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (#ARDUF), the Benishangul People's Liberation Movement (#BPLM), and the Gambella People's Democratic Movement (#GPDM) have stood on different sides of Ethiopia's long constitutional argument, and they are not claiming to have settled it. They appear instead to have made a narrower and more urgent calculation: that survival precedes the settlement of those disputes. That is not a small thing. It is the first serious attempt in a generation to build a bridge across Ethiopia's political divides rather than to win across them.
The participation of the #Amhara_Fano_National_Movement, chaired by #Zemene_Kassie, places organized Amhara agency inside a national framework for the first time in years. The participation of the #TPLF is telling in a different way. Abiy Ahmed rose within the very order the TPLF built and dominated, and he is now engaged in dismantling it. When a ruler turns on the political formation that produced him, other actors are entitled to read the lesson: no constituency in the country is exempt.
The language of the communiqué repays attention. "Coalition for Survival" is not the vocabulary of reconciliation; it is the vocabulary of necessity. The proposed sequencing follows the same logic: removal of the existing political order, an inclusive transitional arrangement governed by a transitional charter, cessation of hostilities, restoration of internal security and regional relations, and only thereafter a constitutional dialogue on Ethiopia's unresolved structural questions. This is strategic deferral, an effort to bracket what cannot presently be resolved rather than to pretend it has disappeared. It is among the more plausible architectures available to deeply divided societies, and one that African states, the African Union, and regional bodies have reason to study rather than dismiss.
The regional stakes are considerable, and Eritrea sits at their centre. Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for the rapprochement with #Eritrea. Eritrean forces then entered the northern Ethiopia war on his side, and they are widely understood to have been decisive in averting what Abiy himself and senior Ethiopian commanders have since described as the largest state collapse in the country's modern history. Since October 2023 he has reversed that posture in no fewer than six major national addresses, asserting a sovereign Ethiopian claim of access to the #RedSea. A leader who was honoured for making peace with a neighbour, was rescued by that neighbour, and now places that neighbour's coastline in question has established a pattern that no state in the Horn can afford to read charitably.
The pattern repeats elsewhere. Ethiopia's 2024 memorandum with Somaliland produced a serious confrontation with Somalia over sovereignty and territorial integrity. More consequential still is the accumulating documentation, including open source research compiled by Yale University, of training camps, supply routes, and drone activity connected to Ethiopian territory in support of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (#RSF), the force that grew directly out of the #Janjaweed militias of Darfur. A United Nations backed investigation has documented Ethiopian nationals among RSF fighters and the external networks sustaining that war, and Abiy Ahmed's alignment with the United Arab Emirates across this theatre has been reported extensively in the mainstream press. A government that lends territory and logistics to the successors of the Janjaweed has told the region something about itself.
What can be assessed, and what I have examined at length elsewhere, is the scale of loss. The war in Northern Ethiopia alone produced casualty estimates ranking it among the deadliest conflicts anywhere in the world this century. Set beside the wars in Amhara, Oromia, and Afar, the mass displacement, the famine conditions, and the collapse of basic civilian protection, the human cost of the past seven years bears comparison with any comparable period in modern Ethiopian history, including those the country remembers as its darkest.
Against that background, the appearance of historically divided movements beneath a common framework cannot be dismissed as another opposition communiqué. The notable fact is not that these actors have resolved their differences. It is that they have concluded that the danger before them is greater than the distance between them, and that they have chosen a sequenced, charter based path rather than a purely military one. If the coalition proves durable rather than declaratory, September 20, 2026 may be remembered as an inflection point, and as a template other African transitions will examine.
@_AfricanUnion@US_SrAdvisorAF@AfricanUnionUN@nytimesworld@UN_HRC@HRL_YaleSPH
#Ethiopia #Eritrea #RedSea #HornOfAfrica #AfricanUnion #Sudan #Somalia #Abiy_Ahmed
Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission (ENDC) has issued a stern warning to delegates. Read more.
https://t.co/aJs7N98svu #Ethiopia#News#NationalDialogue
For centuries, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has been a guardian of civilization; preserving ancient Judeo-Christian traditions and sacred works such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, or “Little Genesis,” while isolated from much of Christendom. Ethiopia also offered refuge to the earliest followers of Islam, helping preserve a faith not its own. Today, as political forces seek to weaken and dismantle this historic institution, defending the Church means defending Ethiopia’s spiritual inheritance and an irreplaceable part of humanity’s shared heritage.
@soldierofchris@OrthodoxHistory@OrthodoxUnion@Orthodox_Way1@ocaorg@Orthodoxy2019@UN_HRC@UNHumanRights