Tigrayans, Amhara, Oromo, Afar, Somalis of the Ogaden: armed groups with little in common have announced an alliance against Abiy Ahmed, months after his election victory.
It took nearly a year of quiet negotiations before the plan came into the open. On Sunday, September 20, seven Ethiopian armed movements announced the birth of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, whose stated ambition is to bring down Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and replace it with a transitional administration.
Around the table sit the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Fano movement, which holds the bush in Amhara, and the Oromo Liberation Army, active in Oromia since 2018. Smaller formations from the Ogaden, Afar, Benishangul and Gumuz have joined them. Zemene Kassie, the Fano leader, described the government in Addis Ababa as a « dictatorial and genocidal entity » pushing the country toward disintegration. The joint text promises a charter, a national dialogue and an end to the ongoing conflicts, but says nothing about how power would be shared or about the territories its signatories dispute.
The timing is hardly incidental. In June, Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party won 438 seats, roughly 90 percent of the results announced, when 274 were enough to govern. Yet no vote took place in Tigray, balloting was suspended or cancelled in several constituencies in Amhara and Oromia, and 143 polling stations never opened for security reasons. An overwhelming majority, then, but one that stops where the guns begin.
That these longtime enemies are sitting together is a political fact in itself. Fano fought alongside the federal army against Tigray during the war of 2020 to 2022, and Western Tigray, now administered by Amhara, remains an open dispute. The Pretoria agreement that ended that war is barely alive: the TPLF called it « effectively dead » in mid-July, and fresh clashes broke out in Tigray this month. For Ethiopian academic Eyob Tilahun, these groups share the conviction that they face an existential threat from the central government, and that feeling is what binds them.
What the union is worth remains to be seen. Specialists are cautious. Kjetil Tronvoll notes that nothing points to a joint military command, against a better-equipped federal army with an air force. Yohannes Woldemariam sees the rapprochement as significant, while expecting serious coordination problems among movements that have long fought one another. Some uncertainty also surrounds the makeup of the alliance itself: the leadership of the Ogaden National Liberation Front had denied any membership on September 17, and the Oromo Liberation Army has suggested it was describing cooperation rather than a formal framework.
The federal government had not responded publicly by Monday. Its silence leaves open the question that worries the entire Horn of Africa: what happens if three insurgencies, until now scattered, end up converging?