Four years after the Pretoria Agreement ended a war that killed some 600,000 people, Ethiopia is at war again. On 20 September, seven armed and opposition movements, from Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, Afar, the Somali Region and Benishangul-Gumuz, formed the Alliance for Survival and vowed to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government. Three days later, Tigrayan forces seized the airports of Mekelle, Shire and Axum, and fighting spread into Afar and Amhara.
The world is reacting as it always does: calls for de-escalation, appeals to return to Pretoria. Both are necessary. Neither is enough. Ethiopia has been at war with itself, in one region or another, for most of the last sixty years. Each time, a ceasefire or a military victory has paused the fighting without resolving its cause. That cause is the unanswered question of whether Ethiopia's peoples belong to the state by choice or by force.
The two sides answer that question in opposite ways. The federal government presents itself as the lawful authority defending constitutional order against insurgents, and accuses Eritrea of bankrolling them. The Alliance says the state itself has become the main source of insecurity and calls for an inclusive transitional government. What the Alliance has not yet agreed on is what comes after. Its founding statement defers the hardest questions, including western Tigray, the future of ethnic federalism and the place of Oromo nationalism, and some of its members fought on opposite sides only four years ago.
The danger does not stop at Ethiopia's borders. Relations with Eritrea have collapsed over Addis Ababa's demand for access to the Red Sea through Assab, and each side accuses the other of arming its enemies. On the western frontier, Sudan's civil war has turned the Blue Nile borderlands into a contested corridor for weapons and fighters, next to the very region whose movements have just joined the Alliance. Egypt, the Gulf states and Turkey all have stakes in the outcome. A war that draws in Eritrea and Sudan would threaten one of the world's busiest shipping lanes and send refugees into every neighbouring state.
To understand why force keeps failing, we must be honest about history. Ethiopia's modern borders are not the natural frame of an ancient nation. They were largely drawn through Emperor Menelik II's conquests of the south and west in the late 19th century, and fixed by treaties he signed with Britain, Italy and France between 1897 and 1908. While European powers took the strategic coastlines, Ethiopian emperors subjugated the peoples of the interior: Oromo, Somali, Afar, Sidama, Berta, Gumuz and many others, none of whom was asked whether they wished to belong.
The victory at Adwa in 1896 is rightly celebrated as a defeat for Italian colonialism. But it did not free the peoples Menelik had conquered; it secured his empire over them. Nor did Ethiopia's rulers see themselves as part of Africa's wider struggle. When the Haitian pan-Africanist Benito Sylvain invited Menelik to lead an association for the advancement of the Black race, the emperor reportedly replied that he was not a Negro but a Caucasian. Decades later, Haile Selassie told the Nigerian nationalist H. O. Davies that Ethiopians saw themselves not as Africans but as a “mixed Hamito-Semitic people.”
Every attempt since to hold this state together by the barrel of a gun, from Haile Selassie to Mengistu to today, has ended in another war. The one moment the country pulled back from collapse was 1991. The Derg had fallen, its army had been dismantled, and Eritrea was leaving. What kept the rest of Ethiopia together was a promise: ethnic federalism, and Article 39 of the constitution, which guarantees every nation, nationality and people the right to self-determination, up to and including peaceful separation through a referendum. Without that promise, Ethiopia would most likely have ceased to exist in 1991.
The problem since then has not been the principle, but the refusal to honour it. Under both the EPRDF and the Prosperity Party, a dominant party at the centre has controlled the regions, so self-rule has existed on paper while power stayed in Addis Ababa.
The way out begins with a ceasefire and an inclusive transitional government, brokered by the African Union and IGAD. It must bring in the ruling party, the Alliance's members, unarmed opposition parties and civil society, with a limited mandate: restore humanitarian access, demobilise forces, return the displaced, and lead a genuine constitutional dialogue ending in free elections. No armed movement, in government or in opposition, should inherit power by force alone.
That dialogue must keep the federation and make it real, with freely chosen regional governments, fair sharing of resources, and firm protection for minorities in every region. Where a people, after a fair and internationally supervised process, still chooses to leave, Article 39 should be honoured rather than crushed. Disputed territories such as western Tigray, Metekel and the Afar–Somali border must be mediated before any vote, or secession will repeat the violence it is meant to end.
Critics will say this risks dismantling Ethiopia. It may change Ethiopia. But it is the denial of self-determination, not its recognition, that has repeatedly brought the country to the brink. Scotland and Quebec voted to stay precisely because they were free to go. A union its peoples choose will be far stronger than one they are forced to accept.
And separation, where it happens, need not mean walls. The peoples of the Horn share rivers, pastures, ports, languages and faiths that no border can divide. A settlement built on consent could become the foundation of a Horn of Africa community with open borders, shared access to the Red Sea, joint management of the Nile and a common market. Europe's nations built a union only after they stopped trying to conquer one another. The Horn can do the same, but only if its peoples are first allowed to decide their own future.
Abdurahman Sayed is a political analyst and founder of the Horn of Africa Centre for Regional Integration.
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