Read on Twitter
You are surprised? To the TPLF leadership THREAD 1. You establish a system of governance where ethnic identity is the sole register to acquire power and extract wealth
2. This same structure plays off the ethnic “elite” of various groups against each other in a bid maintain your dominance
3. Much of what the political elite “sold” in the political marketplace was a history of grievance and resentment which all too often translated into demonizing the “other”
4. Even worse, you franchised the states monopoly of violence to these ethnic regions by arming “special forces/militias” that could easily be mobilized against the Federal Defense Forces or for horizontal strife against minorities
5. The very system you engineered began to harvest the seeds of its own destruction in 2 major ways: a) ethnic majoritarianism came of age emboldened with regional state bureaucracies, the vernacularizarion of some ethnic languages and resurgence of cultural nationalism
6. But b) the same system fueled sentiments of ethnic marginalization, disempowerment and resentment against the TPLF elite, its military and intelligence too brass and business empire especially among Oromo and Amhara elites
7. For the last two and half years, no major rethink of your ideology and praxis. If anything, you employed the very infrastructure you designed, to pressure the central government - albeit pushing the country to the brink of total “war of all against all”.
8. Given how viscerally opposes you were to any dissent and sharing of political power in your years of incumbency; you had 2.5 years to pause and rethink novel ways of finding amicable ground both for the Tigrayan public and Ethiopians
9. Instead you doubled down on brinksmanship, ethnic pogroms and violence against civilians, and sheer defiance to the center.
10. And....you are “surprised” by what is currently unfolding?
Postscript: This thread is written following a convo with a previous TPLF stalwart who confided to me that the folks in Mekele were “surprised” that the Abiy administration would take military measures.
