30 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
AREPORTERAT LARGE
THE PALACE GATES
Is the Prime Minister of Ethiopia rebuilding his country or tearing it apart?
BY JON LEEANDERSON
A
t the wheel of an armored Toy-
ota Land Cruiser, trailed by a
car full of bodyguards, Prime
Minister Abiy Ahmed drove me around
Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
With a politician’s pride, he pointed
out some of his recent civic projects: a
vast park and a national library; a hand-
icrafts market; a planetarium, still under
construction. Throughout the city were
government buildings that he’d built
or remade: the federal police headquar-
ters, the Ministry of Mines, an artificial-
intelligence center, the Ministry of
Defense. In the Entoto Hills, above
Addis, he had established a complex
of recreational areas to showcase his
Green Legacy Initiative, aimed at mak-
ing Ethiopia a pioneer in sustainable
agriculture and renewable energy. He
boasted of having planted eighteen
billion trees. “If in five years the world
does not recognize what we have done,”
he said, as he negotiated a turn, “then
I am not your brother.”
It was all part of his vision, he ex-
plained, to transform his country into
a modern state. Ethiopia is Africa’s sec-
ond most populous nation, with the
largest economy in East Africa. But it
is ethnically fractured, with more than
eighty distinct groups, many of them
beset by old enmities and overlapping
territorial claims. Abiy came to power
in 2018, promising to heal the country’s
divisions. A former soldier and intelli-
gence officer, he was born to parents
from Ethiopia’s two main religious com-
munities—his mother from the Ortho-
dox Christian majority and his father
from the sizable Muslim minority. His
guiding principle was medemer, an Am-
haric term meaning “synergy,” or “com-
ing together.”
Abiy, at forty-six, could be mistaken
for a prosperous real-estate agent: me-
dium height, trimmed goatee, and a
wardrobe of khakis, casual shirts, and
gold-rimmed Cartier sunglasses. He
projects the self-assurance of a moti-
vational speaker. Soon after taking
office, he published a best-selling book
about the transformative power of med
emer, which is sold at roadside stalls,
alongside volumes by Tony Robbins
and Jordan Peterson. In conversation,
Abiy does most of the talking, but he
demands constant feedback. It is not
enough to nod along with him; he
wants to know what you think, if only
to disagree.
Abiy writes in his book that human
beings have a “direct existential need”
to be free of massacres and wars, and
not long after his election he delivered
a surprising advance. For two decades,
Ethiopia had been in a hostile stand-
off with its neighbor Eritrea—the lin-
gering aftereffect of a war that claimed
as many as a hundred thousand lives.
Abiy forged a peace deal, which ended
the standoff and earned him a Nobel
Peace Prize, in recognition of his ef-
forts to “promote reconciliation, soli-
darity and social justice.” At the Nobel
ceremony, in Stockholm, he invoked
both the Bible and the Quran: “Before
we can harvest peace dividends, we must
plant seeds of love, forgiveness, and rec-
onciliation in the hearts and minds of
our citizens.”
But the spirit of reconciliation did
not flourish in Abiy’s Ethiopia. In No-
vember, 2020, just eleven months after
he was awarded the Nobel, violence
erupted in Tigray, a rebellious region
in the north. Abiy’s army became em-
broiled in a conflict that involved grue-
some ethnic killing, gang rapes, and
mass executions. Hundreds of thou-
sands of Tigrayans were soon on the
brink of starvation, while others poured
across the Sudanese border to find ref-
uge in hastily built camps.
The violence has sparked an inter-
national argument about Abiy. His
supporters say that he is a modernizer,
whose only mistake was that he moved
too fast to overturn Ethiopia’s corrupt
old order. His critics accuse him of start-
ing an ethnic conflict in order to favor
his political allies; some demand that
his Nobel be revoked, and warn that
the unrest that has attended his time
in office is spreading through the re-
gion. But, as Abiy and I toured Ethio-
pia, he seemed to want to talk about
everything but the conflict that had en-
gulfed his country. From inside his mo-
torcade, it was as if there were no war
going on at all.
I
n “Crabs in a Bucket,” a forthcom-
ing book, the Somali author Nurud-
din Farah likens Ethiopian politics to a
destructive Groundhog Day. Farah, who
is seventy-six, grew up in a part of So-
malia that was ceded to Ethiopia by the
colonial British after they ousted the
Italians in the Second World War.
“Think of a demolition site when you
think about Ethiopia, a country under
constant rebuilding, one whose laws are
often dismantled to accommodate the
new ruler, and whose peoples’ nerves are
frequently shredded before another re-
gime gains power, only to demolish what
has gone on before,” Farah writes. “Ethi-
opian leaders are famous for telling big
and small porky pies to their fellow cit-
izens and to the rest of the world; they
know how to start conflicts that lead to
wars, not how to resolve conflicts.”
Farah’s assessment is bleak, but the
past half century of Ethiopian politics
largely supports it. In 1974, a military
faction called the Derg seized power,
overthrowing the emperor, Haile Se-
lassie. The Derg’s leader, Colonel
Mengistu Haile Mariam, presided
over a murderous purge, known as the
Red Terror, intended to remake the
country as a Communist stronghold.
Mengistu had several dozen rivals ma-
chine-gunned at the national palace,
and subsequently held a ceremony in
the newly named Revolution Square,
