areas. (There were few international
media outlets in Ethiopia; correspon-
dents from The Economist and the Times,
among others, had been expelled.)
After the second massacre, Abiy ap-
peared in parliament, where legislators
questioned him. “When is your gov-
ernment going to stop this?” one de-
manded. “Why is it difficult for you to
hold those responsible accountable?”
Abiy was evasive. “Terrorists are op-
erating all over the world,” he said, reel-
ing off statistics of recent killings in
the United States. “Without stopping
their children dying in their cities, they
are talking about our agenda.” He said
that he was hearing a lot of “prescrip-
tive” solutions from people, and added
loftily, “I should point out that the gov-
ernment has more information than
the general public.”
Abiy began a long soliloquy, prais-
ing Ethiopia’s military history and its
moral traditions: “We still respect our
elders and love our families. But they
only want to talk about poverty, kill-
ings.” Working himself into a rant, he
suggested that he was surrounded by
antagonists, held at bay by his security
forces. “You don’t see the terrorists
shooting at this House, because we have
protected it,” he said. “There are those
who buy people within our structures.
We are working hard to identify them.
We have arrested five thousand peo-
ple. This is not just based on hearsay—
this is based on information.” It was as
if Abiy were speaking not to his peers
but to his opposition. “What we want
to tell our enemies is that the govern-
ment of Ethiopia believes in this coun-
try’s resilience, and in reform, and, if
necessary, will make sacrifices,” he said.
“This country cannot be destroyed.”D
uring my time in Ethiopia, I stayed
at the Hilton, near Abiy’s palace.
The hotel is owned by the government,
and the employees evidently knew that
I was an official guest; the doormen sa-
luted whenever I came and went.
The local people I spoke with seemed
conscious that they, too, were under
scrutiny. Any criticism of the govern-
ment was couched in wary hypotheti-
cals: “Some might say that things have
gone off track.” There were a few ex-
ceptions. A cabdriver exploded with
outrage when I told him that I was
headed to the national human-rights
commission, which he insisted had be-
come a government propaganda out-
let. A young woman I met trembled
with anxiety as she described living in
Addis. She was part Tigrayan, she
explained, and had changed her name
to disguise her ethnicity. During the
T.P.L.F.’s offensives, Abiy’s governmenthad placed Tigrayans in internment
camps—many of them makeshift fa-
cilities in schools and municipal build-
ings. She avoided armed security men
in the streets, for fear that she’d be asked
for I.D. and taken away.
Even non-Tigrayan residents had
reason to be concerned about surveil-
lance. Under the T.P.L.F.-led govern-
ment, Abiy had helped found what is
now called the Information Network
Security Administration, which over-
saw cybersecurity in a country where
the state tightly restricted life online.
Feltman, the former U.S. special envoy,
told me, “Everyone knows that in Ethi-
opia the walls have ears.”
When I visited the Ethiopian Arti-
ficial Intelligence Institute, the director
showed me the country’s first domes-
tically built robot. A large female-look-
ing figure wearing a traditional dress, it
rolled out on wheels and delivered a
short speech of welcome. It was hard
to concentrate on the technology. At
the back of the room, a wall-size screen
displayed an image of my own face,
pulled from photographs online.
The director explained that the cen-
ter was involved in everything from lan-
guage and mining to national security.
It was also working on a voice-identi-
fication system—“important for intel-
ligence, for identifying terrorists trying
to conceal their identities.” A command
center had been established at the fed-
eral police headquarters, led by Abiy’s
former chief of intelligence, where mon-
itors showed live feeds from cameras at
intersections around the city. “Since we
built it, traffic crimes have gone down,”
the director said. Of course, it was also
useful for intelligence and crowd con-
trol: “If people are gathering, we see it.”
Ethiopia’s main partner in the project
was the U.A.E., which maintains one
of the world’s most aggressive systems
of citizen surveillance.
At the Information Network Secu-
rity Administration, the director, a burly
man named Shumete Gizaw, showed
me an Ethiopian-made drone, equipped
with a fearsome gun. “Good for agri-
culture—but it also can have a military
use,” he said. As Shumete walked
me through the facility, he kept up a
running commentary about how the
T.P.L.F. had “ruined Ethiopia” through
“The mirrors really do make this apartment look bigger.” corruption and expansionist tenden-