By Dr. Dawit Tesfay, Institutional Policy & Post-War State-Building Researcher, Horn of Africa Geopolitical Review (HAGR)
“Every tyranny contains within it the seed of its own image. The revolutionary who does not build accountable institutions does not escape the system he destroyed. He inherits it.”
PREFATORY ASSESSMENT
There is a particular kind of historical irony that is not merely ironic. It is tragic in the precise classical sense—the protagonist carries within themself the very flaw that destroys them, and the audience, watching it unfold, cannot look away because they already know how it ends.
Ethiopia has lived this tragedy twice in living memory. The first time, the victims were the millions who suffered under the Derg’s Marxist military dictatorship—the Red Terror, the forced villagization, and the conscription drives that sent untrained students to die on fronts their commanders had already lost in their own minds. The second time, the victims are the people of Tigray—the very population whose sons and daughters bled to bring the Derg down—now subjected, by the organization that liberated them, to a system of political control, forced conscription, and institutional predation that mirrors its predecessor with a fidelity that should disturb every serious student of Ethiopian history.
This analysis does not make that comparison carelessly. It makes it because the evidence demands it—and because the failure to make it clearly, loudly, and without diplomatic softening is itself a form of complicity with the cycle that keeps repeating itself.
I. WHAT THE DERG WAS — AND HOW IT ENDED
To understand what the TPLF has become, you must first understand precisely what the Derg was—not as a historical backdrop, but as an institutional template.
The Derg — the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army — seized power in Ethiopia in 1974 following the collapse of Haile Selassie’s imperial order. It presented itself, in its early months, as a corrective force: an end to feudal exploitation, a beginning of genuine national development, and a revolution on behalf of the Ethiopian masses. That framing had real purchase. The old order had been genuinely brutal, genuinely unjust, and genuinely incapable of reform from within.
What the Derg built, however, was not liberation. It was the replacement of one extractive system with another—more ideologically coherent in its rhetoric, more systematically violent in its practice, and ultimately more catastrophic in its consequences. Under Mengistu Haile Mariam, the regime perfected the art of using the language of collective welfare to justify the concentration of power in the hands of a military elite accountable to no one. The Kebele system of neighborhood surveillance, the Red Terror campaigns that killed tens of thousands of political opponents, the forced resettlement programs that uprooted millions — all of it was framed, without irony, as revolutionary necessity.
And when the end came, it came with a particular ugliness that tells you everything about what the regime actually was.
By early 1991, the Derg was collapsing. The EPRDF—with the TPLF as its dominant military force—was advancing on Addis Ababa. The Soviet Union, the regime’s primary external patron, had disintegrated. The army that had terrorized a nation for seventeen years was hemorrhaging territory, personnel, and legitimacy simultaneously. And in this moment of terminal decline, the Derg did what all dying patrimonial regimes do: it reached for coercion as a substitute for legitimacy.
In April 1991, with rebel forces closing on the capital, the Derg enacted emergency laws and mandatory conscription decrees of desperate breadth. Students were pulled from classrooms. Untrained civilians were handed weapons and sent toward fronts that professional soldiers had already abandoned. Curfews were imposed. Martial law was extended. The regime that had ruled through fear attempted, in its final weeks, to rule through fear alone—stripped of ideology, stripped of economic function, stripped of any claim to serve the people it was conscripting into its last futile defense.
It did not work. It never works. On May 21, 1991, Mengistu boarded a plane to Zimbabwe. On May 28, EPRDF forces entered Addis Ababa. The Derg was finished.
The TPLF had won. Ethiopia, it was promised, would be different now.
II. THE PROMISE AND ITS SYSTEMATIC BETRAYAL
The TPLF’s origins were genuinely revolutionary in the meaningful sense of that word. Founded in 1975 by a generation of Tigrayan students radicalized by both Marxist ideology and the lived experience of Tigrayan marginalization under successive Ethiopian central governments, the organization built its early legitimacy through genuine grassroots organization, genuine military discipline, and a genuine — if ideologically rigid — commitment to transforming the political order it was fighting against.
The fighters who defeated the Derg were not mercenaries. They were not conscripts swept up in Giffa raids. They were, in significant numbers, volunteers who believed in something — who accepted extraordinary personal risk in service of a political vision that promised their people dignity, representation, and a share of national power commensurate with their historical contribution to Ethiopian civilization.
That generation deserves acknowledgment. Their sacrifice was real.
What was done with that sacrifice is the tragedy.
Between 1991 and 2018, the TPLF — operating through the EPRDF coalition as the dominant federal power — had twenty-seven years to build the inclusive, accountable institutions that would have justified and honored the liberation struggle. Twenty-seven years to establish an independent judiciary. Twenty-seven years to develop a free press. Twenty-seven years to build civil society organizations capable of holding power accountable. Twenty-seven years to dismantle the patrimonial logic of the system they had replaced and substitute something genuinely different.
They did not do it. They made the opposite choice, systematically and deliberately, at every institutional fork in the road.
The EFFORT conglomerate — the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray — became the primary vehicle through which TPLF-aligned elites captured the commanding heights of the Ethiopian economy. Established nominally to fund Tigrayan reconstruction after the liberation war, EFFORT evolved into a vast party-controlled business empire spanning banking, manufacturing, transport, and construction, operating with preferential access to state contracts, credit, and regulatory protection that no independent competitor could match. This was not development. It was the conversion of public institutional power into private organizational wealth — the definitional core of patrimonialism.
The security apparatus operated without meaningful civilian oversight, conducting surveillance, detention, and, in documented cases, torture of political opponents, journalists, and civil society figures across the country. The Ogaden, Oromia, and other regions experienced TPLF-dominated federal security operations that bore no resemblance to the rule-of-law state the liberation struggle had promised.
And within Tigray itself—the population whose sons had bled most for the TPLF’s victory—the organization’s relationship with ordinary people hardened over time from a liberation movement into a political monopoly. Alternative political voices were marginalized. Civil society operated under constant organizational pressure. The Giffa system—the forced conscription mechanism that would become internationally documented during the 2020–2022 war—did not emerge suddenly from wartime necessity. It was the mature expression of an organizational culture that had always understood the Tigrayan population as a resource to be managed rather than a constituency to be served.
By 2018, when Abiy Ahmed’s rise ended TPLF federal dominance, the organization had not built a different Ethiopia. It had built a more technologically sophisticated, economically integrated, and internationally legitimized version of the same extractive political system it had fought to destroy.
The Derg would have recognized the architecture immediately.
III. NOVEMBER 2020 AND THE LOGIC OF THE LAST DITCH
The TPLF’s decision to attack the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defense Force on the night of November 3–4, 2020, was not, whatever its tactical rationale, a decision made by an organization confident in its relationship with the population it governed. It was a decision made by a leadership that had, over the preceding two years, watched its federal power dissolve, its organizational networks come under pressure, and its members face accountability proceedings—however politically motivated some of those proceedings were—for the first time in decades.
It was, in the language of political science, a preemptive authoritarian strike—an attempt to use military force to reverse a political decline that the organization’s own conduct had made inevitable. And it initiated a war whose costs fell, with crushing asymmetry, not on the TPLF generals who ordered it, but on the Tigrayan civilians who had no part in the decision and no capacity to influence it.
The giffa (ግፋ) system during the war requires direct confrontation in any serious analysis. Young men were taken from their homes in organized military sweeps. Tigrayan communities in Addis Ababa and other cities were subjected to ethnically targeted detention. Fighters were deployed with training and equipment that bore no relationship to the intensity of the combat they were ordered to enter. The casualty rates among conscripted Tigrayan fighters were, by all credible accounts, staggering — and they were staggering in ways that reflected not the fog of war but the deliberate organizational choice to treat human lives as expendable tactical inputs.
This is what the Derg did in April 1991. It is what dying patrimonial regimes do. They conscript. They coerce. They send the least powerful people in the society to die in defense of an organizational arrangement those people had no voice in creating and derive no benefit from preserving.
The parallel is not rhetorical. It is structural. It is the same institutional logic operating thirty years later, wearing different ideological clothing, destroying different lives, generating the same historical pattern of a liberation movement consuming the people it claimed to liberate.
IV. THE EMERGENCY LAWS PATTERN: COERCION AS TERMINAL SYMPTOM
Political science has documented with considerable consistency what happens when patrimonial regimes face existential threats. The response follows a recognizable sequence, and that sequence is itself diagnostic—it tells you not just what the regime is doing but where it is in its institutional lifecycle.
In the early stages of crisis, patrimonial regimes attempt to buy loyalty—distributing resources, making concessions, and bringing potential opponents inside the tent. When that fails, they shift to intensified surveillance and targeted repression of opposition figures. When that fails, they reach for mass coercion—emergency laws, martial enforcement, and conscription drives—as a substitute for the legitimacy they can no longer generate through any other means.
The Derg’s April 1991 emergency decrees were a terminal symptom, not a survival strategy. No analyst who examined them seriously believed they would work. They were the institutional equivalent of a drowning man’s final thrashing—proof not of strength but of the complete exhaustion of every alternative.
The TPLF’s post-Pretoria emergency military postures—the continued operation of giffa-style conscription logic, the resistance to genuine demobilization, and the deployment of fighters into foreign conflict theaters—follow the same diagnostic pattern. They are not signs of organizational vitality. They are signs of an organization that has lost the capacity to generate voluntary compliance and is therefore falling back, as patrimonial organizations always do in their terminal phase, on coercion as its primary governing instrument.
Emergency military laws and martial enforcement do not save patrimonial regimes. This is not a political opinion. It is one of the most thoroughly supported empirical findings in the comparative study of authoritarian breakdown. They fail because they treat the symptom — declining compliance — without addressing the cause, which is always the same: the withdrawal of genuine popular consent from an organization that has demonstrated, through its conduct, that it serves its own interests rather than those of the people it governs.
The Derg discovered this in May 1991. The lesson was written in the blood of the conscripts it sent to die in its defense in the weeks before Mengistu’s flight.
The TPLF’s current leadership would benefit from reading that lesson carefully. History, in this region, does not offer the same lesson twice without consequences.
V. THE CYCLICAL TRAGEDY AND HOW TO BREAK IT
The most dangerous conclusion to draw from this analysis is a fatalistic one—that Ethiopian political history is simply condemned to cycle through liberation movements that become the tyrannies they displaced, that nothing structural can interrupt the pattern, and that the only question is which organization will wear the oppressor’s clothing next.
That conclusion is wrong. And it is important that it be wrong, because fatalism in the face of structural injustice is not neutral. It is a political position that serves the interests of those who benefit from the cycle’s continuation.
The cycle is not inevitable. It is produced by specific, identifiable institutional conditions — and those conditions can be changed.
What breaks the cycle is not the arrival of better leaders, though leadership matters. Individual character operating within extractive institutional environments eventually bends toward extraction. What breaks the cycle is the construction of institutional constraints that are strong enough to impose real costs on leaders who choose organizational self-interest over public accountability—regardless of their individual character.
Independent judiciary. Free press. Genuine civil society organizations with the legal protection and organizational capacity to hold power accountable. Electoral mechanisms with real rather than nominal competitive integrity. A military and security apparatus under genuine civilian oversight rather than party control. These are not Western impositions. They are the institutional prerequisites for any political system — of any ideological character — that intends to serve its population rather than consume it.
The TPLF never built them during its twenty-seven years of federal power. The question now before Tigray — before the civil society organizations, the diaspora intellectual community, the emerging political forces that are not the TPLF — is whether this post-war moment, devastating as it has been, can become the occasion for building what was never built before.
The Aksumite Empire, at its height, was not great because it had great kings. It was great because it built systems — institutional, monetary, legal, diplomatic — capable of outlasting any individual king and sustaining civilizational complexity across generations. That is the model. That is what Tigray’s renaissance requires. Not a better version of the TPLF. Not a leadership transition that preserves the same organizational logic under new faces. But a genuine institutional rupture—an honest reckoning with what the TPLF became and a disciplined, long-term commitment to building something structurally different in its place.
VI. THE JUDGMENT
Thirty-five years ago, the TPLF entered Addis Ababa as liberators. The people who greeted them had endured seventeen years of one of Africa’s most brutal military dictatorships. Their hope was not naive. It was earned through suffering and paid for with blood.
What the TPLF did with that hope is the central political tragedy of modern Tigrayan and Ethiopian history. It is a tragedy not because the organization was always corrupt or always dishonest—it was neither in its origins. It is a tragedy because the organization made choices, decade by decade, that gradually and then decisively prioritized its own organizational survival over the welfare of the people it governed. It built the institutions of control and starved the institutions of accountability. It treated the Tigrayan population as a resource and called it representation. It sent young men to die in wars of its own making and called it liberation.
The Derg did all of these things. The TPLF watched the Derg do them and then, having won the war against it, reproduced the same institutional logic under different ideological branding.
That is not coincidence. It is the predictable consequence of what happens when a liberation organization wins political power without building the institutional architecture that converts political victory into genuine public service.
History in this region does not forgive that failure indefinitely. The Derg’s emergency decrees of April 1991 did not save it. The TPLF’s post-Pretoria coercive postures will not save it either.
What will determine Tigray’s future is not whether the TPLF survives. It is whether, from the wreckage of this cycle, the people of Tigray can build institutions strong enough to ensure that no organization—whatever its origins, whatever its promises—can do this to them again.
That is the work. It is the only work that matters now.
Dr. Dawit Tesfay
Institutional Policy & Post-War State-Building Researcher
Horn of Africa Geopolitical Review (HAGR)
Independent Regional & International Geostrategy
Security · Political · Legal · Institutional Affairs Analysis
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