Glimpses of Green Even In War: Tigray

Part 1: Tigray

The evil of modern states is their power to decide who eats.

Russel Lawrence Barsh, ‘The Nature and Power of North American Political Systems,’ American Indian Quarterly (1986)

 

In mid-February, heads of state and government of the African Union (AU) convened at the organization’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. High on the agenda  was a “food crisis” exacerbated by the epic impacts, on both supply and prices, of the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The summit host, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, told delegates  “we need to critically assess why one third of the hungry people are in our continent,” when Africa, “with 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land in our backyards…is not only well able to feed itself, but can become a bread basket of the world.” Ethiopia, he added, was showing the way: “our ambition to begin exporting wheat this year has already materialized,” a “great achievement” raising hopes “we can strongly contribute to global food supplies through exports and otherwise.”

There was just one thing wrong with this rosy picture: it was painted—in the presence of global guests including UN Secretary-General Antonió Guterres—by a leader on whose orders hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians had been deliberately starved to death since November 2020 in a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure: a war making a grim mockery of the summit’s review of progress toward implementing the ‘Master Roadmap’ of the AU’s Peace and Security Council to ‘Silence the Guns’ across the continent. (To add insult to more-than-injury, the AU’s ‘Theme of 2022’ was ‘Nutrition’.)

The scene of these crimes against humanity was the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, bordering the totalitarian dictatorship of Eritrea, itself a vengeful participant in the conflict. In November 2022, a trumpeted but tentative ‘peace deal’ was signed in Pretoria, South Africa, effectively a set of ‘poison pills’ swallowed by a Tigrayan leadership undefeated militarily but desperate to prevent more mass-displacement, mass-rape, mass-destruction of lives and land.

To be clear, after Tigray was invaded from both north and south—ostensibly in ‘protest’ at September 2020 regional elections held, during the pandemic, against the central government’s wishes—the Tigrayan Defense Forces (TDF) were also guilty of atrocities, particularly in the push to recapture the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, in June 2021. But as a joint investigation by the UN Human Rights Office and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (covering the first eight months of the fighting) documented, the clear majority of crimes were committed by the aggressors—the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) and Eritrean Defense Forces (EDF)—and their unleashed array of irregular militia allies.

 

When, visiting Ethiopia in mid-March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the “cessation of hostilities as a major breakthrough…saving lives,” he was correct only in the sense of a change of key, from ‘major’ to (comparatively) ‘minor’ violence. For as Tsedale Lemma, founding editor of the Addis Standard, told Democracy Now!, as Blinken was blandly lauding progress the government was still withholding budgetary support for Tigray, “civil servants are not being paid,” no new regional administration has been established, a range of services (including telecommunications and banking) remain disrupted, access for humanitarian supplies and workers remains patchy, and a “verification mechanism” to monitor disarmament (on all sides) has yet to materialize. There has been zero accountability for outrages perpetrated by Ethiopian or Eritrean forces (or their accomplices); and even worse, Eritrean forces “remain on the soil of Tigray” and continue “to be implicated in atrocities and rape.”

Days before Blinken’s visit, Foreign Policy revealed the shelved existence of a 2021 US State Department legal determination that the depredations of Ethiopian forces in Tigray, acting at the direction of the Ahmed leadership, constituted genocide. Why would such a finding be allowed to gather dust? Because, as Lemma notes, it “requires you to follow through”—denounce and ostracize the guilty regime —“and the US currently is more focused on “winning Ethiopia” before it can be poached as a strategic “partner [by] competing powers from the Middle East, and Russia and China.”

Not for the first time, Ethiopia’s reputation as a ‘bastion of stability’ in the Horn of Africa is proving a curse, ironically destabilizing the nation. When Prime Minister Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for “his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea” (part of Ethiopia until 1993), his citation anticipated the “many positive side-effects” of a “peaceful, stable and successful Ethiopia.” In January 2022, as the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Death, Famine, War, and Conquest’—trampled Tigray, a mortified Nobel Prize Committee referred to “the justifiable expectations” generated by Ahmed’s pact with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, adding forlornly that as “a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize,” Ahmed “has a special responsibility to end the conflict.”

Yet were those ‘expectations’ really justified? Many observers, within and outside Tigray, immediately guessed that the rapprochement would prove, to quote Yosief Ghebrehiwet, “the ‘peace’ that delivered total war.” Indeed, he argued, “there were three entities that saw the ‘peace pact’ for what it really was on day one: as a very rare opportunity…to sandwich Tigray…and then finish it off.”

The ‘entities’ were “Abiy of Ethiopia, Isaias of Eritrea” and “nationalists” from Ethiopia’s majority Amhara ethnic group. The PM and the nationalists resented (in often racist ways) Tigray’s power and prosperity, viewing it as a threat to Ethiopia’s ‘integrity’ as a nation-state. Isaias—his loathsome regime propped-up by western corporate interests, including the Canadian mining giant Nevsun Resources—also sought Tigray’s destruction, primarily in revenge for the TDF’s lead role in the 1998-2000 Ethiopia-Eritrea war. Once this formidable, threefold alliance was in place, Ghebrehiwet wrote, so was a drastic ‘solution’ to the Tigrayan ‘problem’: a total “war that aims to wipe out the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and its army; to destroy Tigray’s developmental structure; to obliterate much of its cultural heritage; and to dismember its domain.”

In the basic sense, then, of an ongoing assault on Tigrayan identity, Magdalene Abraha was surely right to use the present tense in a Guardian article written weeks after the Pretoria ‘peace’ deal: “a war is raging that has cost more than an estimated 600,000 lives.” Reports suggest half a million dead by March 2022: 50-100,000 from ‘direct killings’ (bombs, bullets, mines, etc.); 100,000+ from disease, neglect, and the collapse of health care; 150,000 to 200,000 from starvation. The war’s “victims,” Abraha writes:

…have borne witness to shocking human rights abuses and, tragically, civilians have been deliberately targeted. Tens of thousands of women have been raped. … A population of more than 6 million people, under a government blockade, has been pushed towards mass starvation… Though it is far deadlier than the war in Ukraine, the western media have mostly ignored it.

 

 

It wasn’t just the blockade that drove the hunger, but the scorched-earth despoliation of a land-base more than capable of feeding those six million resourceful people. As the World Peace Foundation’s Feteien Abay and Biadgildn Demissie wrote in May 2022, in “the three decades prior to the war, Tigray had made substantial gains in agriculture and natural resource conservation using strategies of soil and water conservation, genetic conservation, reforestation and rural and urban electrification.” Yet “all those gains have been shattered,” with “81% of farming households…affected through wide-ranging destruction such as looting, burning, and destruction of crops and farm implements.”

The ‘three decades’ refers to the breathing space enjoyed by Tigrayans (and most Ethiopians) following the overthrow of pro-Soviet military dictator Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, head of the dreaded ‘Derg’ (Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army) which from 1974-1991—under the guise of a ‘scientific socialism’ that was neither—forced farmers onto nationalized, monocultural maize-for-export plantations exhausting both the soil and (it was hoped) resistance to its rule. “Famine and suffering,” historian Muktar Ismail writes, “remained prevalent throughout Mengistu’s rile as he employed a ‘drain the sea to catch the fish policy’ to defeat the armed rebellions” in Tigray, Eritrea, and elsewhere, an anti-ecological crusade “leading to an estimated one million deaths,” many in the Great Famine of 1984-5 that inspired the ‘Live Aid’ concert, a noble venture but one perhaps acting to confirm a false impression of a nation unable to feed itself.

The Mengistu nightmare, ending with the fall of the Soviet Union, was followed by a bold experiment in ‘ethnic federalism,’ decentralizing the state and allowing local cultures to flourish. As part of this renaissance, Tigray enjoyed a Great Regreening, propelled by both traditional and new techniques. The region’s farmers—well known, as Abay and Demissie note, “for being excellent seed conservators”—“also showed themselves to be early adopters of new agricultural technologies that enhance productivity”. As scholar Mistir Sew documents, from 1991-2018—a “period” which “saw impressive human and economic development along with improved food security and advancements in social welfare”—“vulnerability to hunger decreased and poverty declined from 48 to 29 percent.” This timespan makes ghastly sense of the comment attributed, by numerous witnesses, to members of Amhara militia groups rampaging through Tigray in 2020-22: “Tigrayans ate for 27 years and that’s enough.”

Details of the deeds behind these words are provided in a joint report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from April 2022, ‘“We Will Erase You from this Land”: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleaning in Ethiopia’s Western Tigray Zone’: a dossier of evidence that, with malice aforethought, “depriving Tigrayans of means of survival” was central to the war effort. In mid-November 2020, for example, as the onslaught began:

Aregawi, a relatively well-off farmer and beekeeper…spent 10 days in detention, where he was tortured. After his release, he discovered that all his harvest, livestock, and personal property had been looted. ‘They didn’t even leave a cup to drink water from,’ he said. ‘They stole 50 quintals (5000 kilograms) of my honey, 70 quintals of millet, 20 quintals of sesame…and 150 oxen.’ With nothing left, Aregawi felt he had no choice but to flee to Sudan.

Sixty thousands Tigrayans, so far, have escaped to Sudan, while around two million—a third of the population—have been internally displaced. Sometimes, however, no exit was possible: in June 2021, Neguse, from the looted village of May Woine, told one of the report’s authors by phone: “We don’t have food and other freedom. We want to move to any other place that is safe. … There’s no food. I have no words.”

 

This idea of food as a freedom seems to me fundamental to any discussion of people’s power over their own lives—their “ownership,” to quote Keir Hardie, a founder of the British Labour Party, “of the means of existence.” So to do fuller justice to the tragedy of Tigray, it is important to highlight examples—drawn from the analysis of Abay and Demissie—of the ‘land of food and freedom’ that bloomed during ‘the years Tigrayans had enough to eat’:

• In October 2020, weeks before the War-Dam burst, Haregu Gobezai, an ‘uneducated’ mother of six, received the ‘Impactful Rural Women in Agriculture’ Award from the ‘African Farmers Stories’ project, for establishing organic fruit farms on “12 hectares of barren and neglected land” through “silt deposition and organic fertilizer application,” allowing “seven varieties of mango trees to meet different demands of consumers” (while employing 13 permanent, and 50-60 part-time, workers).
• The Irob community of northeast Tigray achieved a startling “conversion of steep mountain gorges into fertile farmland,” including extensive orange groves, a “world-class example of land reclamation and soil conservation.” (Alas, “not only the farmers but also their trees fell victim to the war.”)

Most famously—and influentially—the village of Abraha-We-Atsbaha received the UN Equator Prize for Sustainable Dryland Management in 2012 for transforming “nearly tree-bare cover into a world-recognized forest cover,” in the process restoring “its water table reservoir to a significant level.” The success was due in part to a local leader, Ato Gebremicheal—a “non-formally educated farmer” known as Abaháui (‘Father of the Fire’)—who resisted plans to resettle a community long-dependent on World Food Program assistance. “Who would want to live permanently as a beggar,” Abaháui responded, mobilizing collective efforts to build mountainside terraces and ‘percolation trenches,’ halting soil erosion and replenishing groundwater. And in an ecological blink-of-an-eye, as related by the Tigray Community Association in Washington, DC, “many things…changed”:

The groundwater table has risen from 15 meters’ to 3 meters’ depth in the dry season. Today, a green ribbon of irrigated plantations winds through the valley, visible even on satellite pictures. The villagers now cultivate vegetables, fruit and maize even in the dry season—often in such quantities that they can sell the surplus on the local markets.

In June 2021, environmentalist George Monbiot wrote that both “the scale” and significance of innumerable “works” like those in Irob and Abraha-We-Atsbaha “is astonishing”:

“Every fit person over the age of 18 spends 20 days a year on collective projects to rehabilitate the land. Entire landscapes, torn apart by gullies and sheet erosion, have been remodelled. The stone and soil moved by hand must amount to millions of tonnes.” And “this might explain an extraordinary finding: the greenest places in Tigray are those with the highest population density. Because of the vast effort involved, these works would have been impossible with fewer hands.”

There “have been,” Monbiot acknowledged, “other places” where “population growth has been accompanied by environmental repair”—including in Kenya and South Africa—but “Tigray is the outstanding example” of “restoration works” producing “a huge reduction in soil erosion and water loss.” Thus, he marveled, when in 2015-16 “a major drought struck, the system helped avert famine.” And here again we see the link between food and freedom, for as Monbiot concluded, the fundamental “reason” for Tigray’s green “success is local control and enthusiasm for the programme: people feels it belongs to them.”

After the genocide of 2020-22, how many Tigrayans now feel they belong to Ethiopia? In January this year, Amsmelah Yohannes Teklu, a former senior advisor at the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, wrote that “over the last two years, the devastating war…has caused me to reconsider my identity,” though it was previously “considered taboo” to do so, “partly because many generations of Tigrayans have made significant contributions to Ethiopia.” Yet not only did those “contributions…not protect us from the atrocities committed against our community,” they lay at the root of the “widespread hostility among Ethiopian nationalists toward Tigray,” a seemingly unappeasable objection to Tigray’s influence and affluence.

Citing a vile phrase—“trust a Tigrayan only after you bury him”—which he describes as “the mantra that has gripped Addis Ababa and beyond,” Teklu concludes that “it is difficult to live in a country where your nationality is constantly called into question,” where “your life as a Tigrayan is not worth more than an animal’s,” where “nobody takes responsibility if you are killed at any time, at any place,” even “burned alive if you come into contact with Ethiopian soldiers or their brutal allies.”

Food, freedom, and land are the three, intersecting dimensions of Tigrayans’ long—and, for three decades, spectacularly successful—resistance to distant, central authorities intent on denying them ‘ownership of the means of existence.’ In next month’s ‘War & Peace’ column I turn my admiring attention to another struggle to ‘see green’ amidst the black and white of war: the revolutionary experiment in ‘social ecology’ and ‘democratic self-governance’ underway in Rojava in north and east Syria.

 

Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton and the Canadian Pugwash Group. He may be reached here.