THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 41
largest hydroelectric facility on the Af-
rican continent. It has been under con-
struction since 2011, and when it is
complete, in two and a half years, it
will transform life in Ethiopia.
Approaching it from the nearest air-
strip, you come first to a secondary
dam, which extends for three miles
across an otherwise untouched jungle
valley. Not far upstream, the main dam
is squeezed between two great hills: a
concrete wall nearly five hundred feet
tall, with the river spewing through in
a roiling wash of muddy water.
When I visited, the project man-
ager, an amiable engineer, reeled off
statistics. When the dam is finished,
it will contain 10.7 million cubic me-
tres of concrete, making it “more than
three times the size of Hoover Dam.”
Beyond the dam, an immense reser-
voir was filling, gradually submerg-
ing a string of jungle mountains; it
will eventually be fifty miles wide and
a hundred and fifty miles long. In the
massive structure where the turbines
are embedded, billboards on the walls
were emblazoned with slogans: “Af-
rican Pride,” “History in the Mak-
ing,” “Unity.”
The dam project began under the
T.P.L.F.; Debretsion Gebremichael,
who now leads the insurgency from
Mekelle, was in charge. But Abiy has
made it his own, and it has been a tre-
mendous source of national pride. Mil-
lions of ordinary citizens helped pay
for it; in Addis, every construction
worker and schoolteacher seems to
have made a contribution. The dam
has also received essential support, in-
cluding engineering and infrastructure,
from Europe and from China. (Haile-
mariam Desalegn, who was the Dep-
uty Prime Minister as the project got
under way, suggested that he preferred
aid that came without conditions: “We
like the Chinese way of doing things,
because they don’t say, ‘Do this, don’t
ple who don’t want this to calm down,”
he said. “Some are Tigrayan and Am-
hara extremists. And there are Oro-
mos, too, who are killing Amharas and
also other Oromos.”
The senior U.S. official explained
that when Abiy and the Tigrayans
agreed to a truce, in March, it was under
pressure from the Americans. Each
side had its own interests in mind. “The
government of Ethiopia wanted reën-
gagement with the West, mostly for
economic reasons, and the T.P.L.F. be-
cause of the humanitarian situation,”
the official said.
Abiy seems cornered. He can’t get
Western money without reconciling
with the Tigrayans—but, even if he
wants to make peace, his Amhara and
Eritrean allies won’t agree to it. The
Eritrean President, Isaias Afwerki,
would be a formidable enemy for Abiy;
at seventy-six, he is one of the most
ruthless and determined political sur-
vivors in the world. In mid-September,
a report from the Swedish consulate in
Asmara noted that the Eritrean Peo-
ple’s Army had summoned all active
members to report, “without discrim-
ination of age or background or health
status.” It added that anyone who failed
to report would “suffer consequences
including their residential houses being
closed, family members being thrown
out of their houses, family members
being detained.”
Other forces are massing, too. The
Tigrayans have evidently mobilized all
of their available fighters. Mulugeta, the
former T.P.L.F. member, estimated that
the Ethiopian government had assem-
bled as many as half a million troops in
the region; other reports suggest that
Abiy has commandeered Ethiopian Air-
lines flights to move recruits to the front.
Last week, a large Eritrean force
crossed the border into Ethiopia. Re-
ports from the region describe intense
fighting on at least five fronts. “What’s
happening here is a civil war,” the se-
nior Western official told me. “I believe
there’s a totally compelling logic not to
fight, but they’ll do it anyway.”
O
n the Blue Nile, two hundred miles
from the Tigrayan border, is
Abiy’s most consequential project: the
Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a
five-billion-dollar behemoth that is the
do that.’”) All around the structure,
workers in jumpsuits and hard hats
hustled from job to job, on foot and in
giant trucks.
Even before the conflict with Tigray
began, the dam was inflaming regional
tensions. Sudan and Egypt rely on the
Nile for most of their water, and they
fear that the dam will limit their sup-
ply; there were skirmishes at the bor-
der and bellicose warnings from Egypt,
which has Africa’s most powerful mil-
itary. Abiy insisted on going ahead.
“No force could stop Ethiopia from
building a dam,” he said. “If there is
a need to go to war, we could get mil-
lions readied.” Construction is now
nearly complete. Thirteen enormous
turbines are being tested before they
are switched on; during my visit, the
second was about to go online. When
the dam is complete, it will double the
electrical capacity of Ethiopia, where
half the citizens now have no access
to power.
Abiy is betting that the dam, and
the scores of other projects he has in-
stituted, will one day seem like the
culmination of a great plan, in which
the war is just a distraction. In his
book, he advocates “striving to make
a new today, rather than being stuck
in the past.” But Berhane Kidane-
mariam, the former diplomat, sug-
gested that Abiy was merely stum-
bling from one contingency to the
next. “I don’t think he really is trying
to help one ethnic group or the other,”
he said. “He doesn’t have a strategy.
He wants to be seen as a reformist,
but he is not. Power and money are
what motivate him. He isn’t even re-
ally anti-T.P.L.F. When he attacks
them, he just uses it as an instrument.”
On one of my visits to the palace,
Abiy told me that his real motivation
was to aid his neediest citizens. “I am
for poor people,” he said. “If I can save
the life of a thousand poor people, that
is the reason, not to see good news on
the BBC, or whatever.” Despite all the
strife in the country, he was certain of
his place in his people’s hearts. “When
I leave office, I am one hundred per
cent sure—one hundred per cent sure—
that millions of Ethiopians will cry,”
he said. “They will not say, ‘Oh, we are
happy he left.’ You will see it. People
will see what I left.”
