Gebray Zenebe holds
his 15-year-old daugh-
ter, Beriha Gebray. She
was shot in the face
by Eritrean soldiers
south of Mekele. It
took Gebray two days
to find transportation
to the closest hospital.
“Now it’s the season
for planting,” he says,
“but we are sitting
here treating our chil-
dren, so what will there
be for our children?”
Beriha is now blind.
reduced food insecurity. But, like the regime it
had challenged, the EPRDF was repressive—
stifling dissent, limiting free speech, and
imprisoning and torturing political opponents.
And, like the regime before it, this one was
eventually at odds with Eritrea, which had been
annexed by Ethiopia in 1962. In 1993 Eritrea
declared independence. By 1998 the two for-
mer allies were at war over a disputed border, a
standoff that lasted 20 years.
Federalism didn’t ease internal tensions
either. In 2014 protests erupted in Oromia, Ethio-
pia’s most populous state, over the government’s
plan to seize land to expand Addis Ababa, the
national capital. Ethnic Oromos had long felt
marginalized and persecuted; the annexation
of their state’s territory was tinder to their griev-
ances. The protests spread elsewhere, including
to Amhara, where the boiling point was a land
dispute with Tigray. After a brutal crackdown
and increasing clashes between governmentcounterinsurgency leading to a catastrophic
famine. From 1983 to 1985 hundreds of thou-
sands of people died of famine in Ethiopia, many
of them in Tigray. The counterinsurgency failed:
Aided by Eritrean forces, rebel groups from
Amhara and Oromia united under the banner
of a TPLF-led alliance called the Ethiopian Peo-
ple’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)
and toppled Mengistu in 1991.
THE EPRDF took control of the country and
established a system of ethnic federalism
dividing Ethiopia into semiautonomous states
demarcated along ethnic lines. The bond
between politics and ethnicity was tightened.
In practice, power was still centralized. The
TPLF, representing just 6 percent of Ethiopia’s
population, settled in as the dominant political
force in the ruling EPRDF coalition with Meles
Zenawi as prime minister. The new govern-
ment dramatically improved the economy and
92 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC