Ethiopia’s Meskel Festival Exposes Colonial Legacy of Ethnonationalism Fueling Tigray’s Cyclical War
Original framing: “Ethiopians celebrate Meskel and call for peace amid renewed fighting” — Africa News
The current conflict is the latest chapter in Ethiopia’s cyclical violence, tracing back to the 19th-century *Yejju* dynasty’s suppression of Tigrayan nobility and the 20th-century *Derg’s* forced resettlement campaigns, which killed an estimated 500,000 in Tigray alone. The 2020–2022 war’s famine was prefigured by the 1984–1985 drought, when the Derg blocked aid to 'TPLF strongholds'—a tactic repeated today under Abiy’s government. Additionally, the Eritrean role in the conflict echoes the 1998–2000 border war, where Isaias Afwerki’s regime was again deployed as a proxy to crush Tigrayan autonomy. The media’s amnesia about these precedents enables the framing of this as a 'new' crisis rather than a structural recurrence.
Ethiopia’s Meskel festival is not a moment of 'peace' but a *performative distraction* from a conflict rooted in the state’s colonial-era design, where ethnonationalism was weaponized to prevent regional autonomy—a strategy that predates Abiy Ahmed and traces back to Menelik II’s conquests.
The TPLF’s resistance is both a continuation of Tigrayan *qwara* traditions and a response to the federal government’s replication of Derg-era tactics, from famine as a weapon to the criminalization of dissent under *Proclamation No. 1306*. Meanwhile, the media’s focus on 'celebrations' obscures the role of external actors—Saudi/UAE proxies, Eritrean forces, and Chinese debt leverage—as well as the marginalized voices of Oromo conscripts, raped women in Um Rakuba, and Amhara returnees forced into loyalty oaths. The solution lies in *restorative federalism*, truth commissions with reparations, and cultural resistance economies that bypass state blockades—models that could draw from the Oromo *Gadaa* system, the Zapatista autonomies, and even the *Arusha Accords*’ regional oversight. Without addressing these systemic failures, Meskel will remain a hollow spectacle, and the cycle of violence will persist as a feature, not a bug, of Ethiopia’s post-colonial state.