On the Crisis of Political Membership and the Betrayal of a People

To the TPLF leadership, and to those who still believe they carry the burden of the Tigrayan struggle with honesty and discipline, I write this note not out of bitterness, but out of pain. It is a pain rooted in memory, in observation, and in the bitter confirmation of something that some of us understood long before it became visible to the broader public. What we are witnessing today is not an accident, and it is not simply the result of recent political disagreements. The betrayal that now wounds Tigray did not begin yesterday. Its foundations were laid years ago, when standards within the movement began to shift, and when political membership increasingly came to be measured not by ideological clarity, sacrifice, discipline, and moral seriousness, but by academic appearance, polished language, institutional convenience, and the ability to look modern in the eyes of outsiders.

I say this with full awareness of its weight, because I was present during that period. I saw, from close range, how certain individuals entered the political sphere and how they were elevated. I worked alongside some of them at Mekelle University in the late 1990s and early 2000s. From that time onward, it was already possible to see that some of these people did not possess the inner qualities required of a member of a revolutionary political organization. They may have had eloquence, educational credentials, or a certain public confidence, but they lacked the deeper political character that matters when history becomes unforgiving. They lacked the discipline to subordinate self to cause, the courage to stand firm when the cost becomes real, and the moral seriousness required to carry the burden of a people’s struggle. What surprises many today does not surprise those of us who observed these tendencies long ago. The only surprise is how long it took for the contradictions to ripen fully and reveal themselves so openly.

This problem cannot be reduced to the personalities of a few individuals. That would be too easy, and it would miss the real lesson. The deeper problem lies in the evolution of the cadre recruitment and political formation process itself. At some point, especially from the late 1990s onward, the movement began to drift away from a culture that identified and cultivated those who could truly carry the people’s burden. Increasingly, it became attracted to those who looked administratively useful, academically presentable, or socially acceptable within emerging urban and institutional settings. In the process, ideological education weakened. Political formation became thinner. The ethic of self-sacrifice, which had once defined the struggle, gradually gave way to personal ambition, career calculation, and the desire for recognition. The result was not immediately visible, because such people can function well enough in stable periods. They can speak, organize meetings, write documents, and appear convincing in comfortable settings. But when the movement enters a historical storm, when sacrifice is demanded, when loyalty is tested not in slogans but in consequence, their internal emptiness becomes impossible to hide.

That is what we are witnessing now. The issue is not simply that some individuals have politically diverged. Political divergence, by itself, is not always betrayal. The real issue is that people who were never properly forged in the ethics of collective struggle have now become vulnerable to external manipulation, personal inducement, and psychological dependency on power. That is why it should surprise no one that some of them can now be courted, accommodated, and sweetly rewarded by Abiy Ahmed, the very man whose government oversaw and weaponized the genocidal war against Tigray. This is not merely irony. It is a revelation of political character. Abiy has shown repeatedly that he understands how to neutralize weakness. He does not always destroy opponents directly. Sometimes he absorbs them, repackages them, and turns them into instruments of his own design. For that strategy to succeed, however, there must first exist a type of person who can be repurposed in this way. That is exactly the type of political membership that a revolutionary party should never have allowed to grow within its own ranks.

This brings us to the most important question, who should be a member of such a party in the first place? This question is not organizational only. It is existential. A party like the TPLF was not created as an ordinary electoral machine or a platform for career advancement. It emerged from a history of sacrifice, clandestine struggle, discipline, and the willingness to bear burdens that could cost one’s life. In such a movement, a member is not simply someone who agrees with the general line or occupies a formal position. A member must be someone who has internalized the party’s core principles deeply enough to live by them under pressure. That includes respect for democratic centralism, not as a decorative phrase, but as a discipline of political conduct. It means debate must be real, but once a collective decision is reached, loyalty to that decision must also be real. It means that one does not abandon responsibility simply because one’s personal preference did not prevail. It means that one must be prepared, when the historical moment demands it, to sacrifice personal comfort, status, ambition, and even safety for the survival of the collective cause.

The martyrs of the Tigrayan people understood these things, not because they memorized them in theory, but because they lived and died by them. Those who gave their lives anonymously in the mountains, in the trenches, and in the darkest years of struggle did not do so in order for the movement they built to become a ladder for political opportunists in times of peace. They fought for dignity, for justice, and for the right of a people to defend itself and determine its future. To invoke their legacy while tolerating the rise of shallow, self-regarding political actors is not merely an organizational mistake. It is a moral failure.

For this reason, the current crisis should be treated as a moment of reckoning. The TPLF must revisit not only its present internal conflicts, but the long arc of how it came to produce, tolerate, and elevate political actors who were structurally incapable of carrying its historical mission. It must ask hard questions about its recruitment culture, its internal standards, its methods of political formation, and its understanding of what kind of person deserves to carry the title of party member. The issue is not whether a party should modernize or adapt. Every political organization must do that. The issue is whether adaptation was allowed to mutate into dilution, and whether modernization became an excuse for lowering standards of conviction, humility, discipline, and commitment.

The danger is especially great because betrayal in our context does not always come wearing the language of betrayal. It often arrives clothed in the language of reform, democratization, institution-building, and pragmatic transition. Those words, in themselves, are not the problem. They can carry legitimate political meaning. But in the hands of people who lack grounding in the struggle and loyalty to the people’s core interests, such language becomes camouflage. It becomes a way of appearing progressive while advancing outcomes that leave Tigray weaker, more exposed, and more vulnerable to hostile agendas. This is why the behavior of certain figures after Pretoria was so revealing. Rather than standing clearly and firmly with their people on the urgent and existential issues of the moment, the removal of occupying forces from all Tigrayan territory, the restoration of constitutional borders, the safe return of displaced people, and the preservation of TDF as the shield of Tigray’s dignity and security until the agreement was fully implemented, they discovered a sudden enthusiasm for institutional language detached from the realities of power. They began speaking as if disarmament, political restructuring, and administrative transition could occur in abstraction from the unresolved threats surrounding Tigray. That was not courage. It was not strategic sophistication. It was a failure to understand, or perhaps a willingness to ignore, the deadly sequence of power in which Tigray was still trapped.

Some may say these individuals were in the struggle, that they were present during difficult periods, and that this alone entitles them to political legitimacy. But presence is not the same as political character. Being near history is not the same as carrying it. Some stood close enough to the fire to speak about it later, but not close enough to be transformed by its demands. When the most difficult questions emerged, they did not reveal themselves as disciplined reformers trying to strengthen the people’s cause. They revealed themselves as liabilities, polished in language but hollow in historical commitment.

This is why the question before the TPLF is larger than factional dispute. It is a question of political anthropology, what kind of human being can be trusted with the burden of a people’s struggle? If that question is not answered honestly, then no amount of structural reform, congress resolutions, or rhetorical correction will be enough. The movement will remain vulnerable to future betrayals because it will continue to produce or tolerate people who mistake proximity to struggle for ownership of it.

History is watching, but more importantly, the people are watching. The people of Tigray have paid too much, buried too many, lost too much land, dignity, and continuity, to entrust their future to those who entered the movement as administrators of image rather than custodians of sacrifice. If this moment is to mean anything, it must mean that the TPLF begins again from first principles, not from convenience, not from elite accommodation, but from the question that should have guided it all along, who is truly fit to bear the title of a member in a party built by the blood, discipline, and hopes of a people under siege?