More Cards, One Hand: መኸተ in a Season That Will Not Wait

Something important has changed around Tigray. Addis Ababa can no longer treat its crises as separate files, opening, delaying or containing them one at a time. The new alignments have given Tigray more room to act, but they have not made us secure. መኸተ must now bring these relationships under one disciplined national strategy, independent in judgment, careful in timing, and judged first by whether it protects our people through the deepening drought. Leverage that cannot keep food, water and life moving is not leverage for Tigray.

The alliance announced this week is not the beginning of the change around Tigray. It is confirmation that a change already underway has now taken an organised political form.

In Why Now? What Is Abiy Trying to Prevent?, I argued that Addis Ababa had survived by keeping its problems separate. It could deal with Tigray as one problem, Fano as another, the Oromo Liberation Army as another, and Eritrea as a separate state question. Its advantage was not that it had solved any of them. Its advantage was that it could decide the order in which to confront, delay, or negotiate with each one. I suggested that the pressure on Tigray might therefore be intended to force us to move before those separate pressures began to overlap.

They are now overlapping more openly. Seven armed organisations, with TPLF among them, have announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival. Whatever its weaknesses, and however far it may still be from a common political programme or an integrated military structure, its formation tells us that Addis no longer has the same freedom to keep every adversary in a separate room.

As I argued in Abiy Can Fall and Tigray Can Still Lose, temporary cooperation is not permanent friendship, and the removal of Abiy Ahmed cannot by itself define victory for Tigray. The question has moved forward. Tigray has recovered choices. Several relationships once discussed only as possibilities now exist in one form or another. The issue before us is no longer whether መኸተ has cards to play. It does.

The question is whether it can play them as one hand.

Material power is not distributed evenly in this contest, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. Addis Ababa holds the instruments of a recognised state: budgets, external credit, an air force, and the drones it has already used against us. Eritrea holds an experienced security establishment and a coastline that has suddenly become valuable to other people. Fano and the OLA hold real social and military depth in their own areas. Each of them holds something Tigray does not.

Tigray, for its part, retains an organised military capacity. It has a political organisation with long experience of both state power and armed resistance. It has recovered enough internal direction to engage several actors without formally surrendering itself to any of them. It has a legal and diplomatic position anchored in an agreement that the federal government signed and failed to implement in its central obligations. It sits inside the Ethiopia question, the Eritrea question, the Sudan question, and the wider Nile and Red Sea equation. It has relationships in several directions, a diaspora with access to capitals and institutions, and a population whose capacity to endure has already defeated calculations made by much larger powers.

Even the options Tigray does not control can change the value of the ones it does. The war in Sudan has altered security and economic calculations along the western border. The conflict involving Iran and Houthi forces has increased the strategic importance of the Red Sea and the African coast opposite Yemen. The lifting of American sanctions on Eritrea’s ruling party and military is another reminder that external powers rearrange their priorities when geography becomes more valuable than memory. Abiy Ahmed is seeking to present the post-election period and a new government as political renewal after an election that excluded Tigray and could not be completed in parts of Amhara and Oromia. None of these developments belongs to Tigray. But each changes the field on which Tigray’s own cards are played.

But none of them holds an uncontested advantage, and counting weapons alone produces a poor reading of the balance. Abiy has the greater destructive capacity, and also several active fronts, unreliable former partners, and a legitimacy problem that an election has not solved. Eritrea’s room to manoeuvre is narrowed by the same rivalries that have raised its value. Neither Fano nor the OLA can settle the future order by itself. Tigray’s advantage is of a different kind. We sit inside more than one of these questions at once, and none of these actors can settle its own position without taking Tigray into account. That is what gives us a wider range of usable options, so long as we do not mistake having options for controlling outcomes.

Our range is wide, but it is also shallow. Most of these cards depend on somebody else’s cooperation or restraint. Several can be closed by a single decision taken in Addis Ababa or Asmara, and the society that has to hold them has very little margin left. As I argued in The Next Mistake May Not Come From Weakness, recovered room to act is not an achievement in itself. It is a test of judgment.

Eritrea has a place in the changing balance, and working with it may serve Tigray’s interests at this stage. But cooperation does not mean that Eritrea created every alliance now taking shape, or that it directs them. Each force entered these arrangements because of its own grievances and interests. Some may speak as if everything began in Asmara and now moves under its command. Saying it repeatedly does not make it true. Tigray can work with Eritrea without giving it ownership of the relationship or control over Tigray’s decisions.

Tigray also enters this relationship after war, siege, Pretoria, and the internal fracture that followed. That experience does not make us immune to manipulation. It leaves us with no excuse to be manipulated in the same way again. Any relationship with Eritrea must therefore remain one card among several, governed by Tigray’s purpose, authority, and timing. Tigray did not survive one dependency in order to enter another.

There is one condition that must now govern how every card is played. The drought is no longer a warning about a difficult season ahead. It is already destroying the means by which our people would survive it. According to the latest data published in the TigrayInsights drought map, drawing on Tigray disaster authorities, 307 tabias across 37 woredas are in severe or catastrophic drought. Around 333,500 hectares of crops have failed, affecting 801,000 households. Some 3.5 million livestock are at risk, and 4,716 water schemes are not functioning. These are not figures to add at the end of a political discussion. They tell us how little room there is for a political mistake.

Political calculations are usually made in months. Drought can change the condition of a society in weeks. Once a family has eaten its seed, sold its last animal, or left its land in search of water, the damage cannot be reversed by a later diplomatic gain. Tigray’s people are not another card in the hand. They are the hand that holds every card.

It would be reckless to assume that Addis Ababa will leave this vulnerability untouched. A government that has already used siege, access, budgets, and armed force against Tigray may see the drought not only as a calamity, but also as a pressure point. The next blow may not look like the one that began in November 2020. It may come by closing a route, interrupting supplies, striking transport, tightening finance, or provoking Tigray into moving before it is ready. That last possibility is the one I described in August, when I argued that our timetable, rather than our retaliation, may be the real target. Drought can be made to do part of the work of war. Our strategy has to deny Addis that opportunity.

This changes the test applied to every political and military move. It is not enough to ask whether a move weakens Abiy, strengthens an alliance, or improves Tigray’s position in a future negotiation. We must first ask whether it protects our population through the months immediately ahead. Does it keep food routes open? Does it protect water, transport, and markets? Does it give farmers and pastoralists a better chance of preserving what remains? Does it reduce the ability of an adversary to turn hunger into leverage? A card that appears to increase our political leverage while exposing our people to famine has been played against Tigray.

The history with Eritrea makes this test unavoidable. In March 1985, when famine was emptying our villages, a disagreement between the EPLF and TPLF led the EPLF to close the key road from Tigray to Sudan, forcing refugees to use a longer and more dangerous route through Gonder. We should not use that history to claim that every present relationship must repeat the past. But we would be foolish to remember the language of cooperation and forget what happened when hungry Tegaru needed a road.

We are now being told that Eritrean ports are open to Tigray. I have not seen the terms of that assurance set out publicly. Then let it be tested quickly, quietly, and practically. A port is not open because someone says it is open. It is open when the first food reaches the people who need it. A limited shipment through an Eritrean port would tell us more than repeated declarations. If finance is the obstacle, the requirement should be stated and the resources mobilised. If Addis blocks the movement, its responsibility should be made visible. If Asmara retreats when practical arrangements are requested, then the assurance has answered its own question. The route that was closed in 1985 should now be opened.

This does not mean replacing dependence on Addis Ababa with dependence on Asmara. Eritrea should be tested, not trusted with Tigray’s survival. Every available route, source of finance, and channel of supply must be pursued so that no single government can decide whether food reaches our people. But if the present relationship with Eritrea is to be called strategic, its first proof should not be a statement about alliances. It should be whether that relationship helps prevent famine in Tigray. An alignment that cannot protect life when famine is approaching has not yet earned the name strategic.

Protecting the population does not require Tigray to abandon its leverage or remain paralysed by fear. It requires the correct order. The cards that open routes, deter attacks, and preserve food, water, and productive life must be played first. Any move that may close those possibilities must meet a much higher test. The drought has reduced our margin for error. A political miscalculation in the coming months would not remain inside politics. It could become a catastrophe for the people in whose name the politics is being conducted.

One relationship can be allowed to become more important than the national purpose it was meant to serve. One actor inside መኸተ can begin to treat a foreign or allied contact as a personal political constituency. A military understanding can develop faster than the political authority’s ability to control its meaning. A political promise can be made without those responsible for security knowing its consequences. An official, commander, or media figure can expose an unsettled position because being first to speak feels like influence. Several individually understandable actions can then leave Tigray with no single strategy at all.

This is why the present phase requires something more demanding than unity in public language. It requires integration of purpose across every command and political chain through which these new relationships pass.

The harder test is whether such discipline has reached every level at which military, political, and diplomatic contact now takes place. Every person entrusted with an official contact, or close enough to be treated as speaking for መኸተ, must know who can authorise what, which matters belong to which level, what must be reported, and what must remain unsaid. Not because secrecy is a virtue by itself, but because fragmented information produces fragmented policy. A partner who can obtain a different answer by moving from one Tigrayan official to another has already found a weakness inside our structure.

Cooperation outside will strengthen us only for as long as command inside remains stronger than the relationships being formed outside it.

The post-Pretoria period should have settled this lesson for us. The federal government left central obligations unimplemented. The period that followed also showed how costly it becomes when political and military readings separate, when outside actors acquire different points of entry into our internal disagreements, and when one national position cannot be protected through a difficult transition. The resulting fracture consumed years that Tigray did not have. We cannot afford a second version of that experience, this time inside a wider network of armed alliances.

No new alliance should enter Tigray’s structures faster than those structures can absorb and discipline it. This does not mean slowing every useful contact or approaching partners with suspicion. It means that relationships must remain instruments of a Tigrayan strategy. They must not become separate centres of influence inside it. A commander should not have one foreign policy, a political office another, an affiliated media figure a third, and a negotiator a fourth. Different responsibilities are necessary. Different national directions are fatal.

The same applies to media discipline. Tegaru should debate the political direction of መኸተ openly. The public has a right to know the purpose in whose name risks are being taken, the objectives Tigray is pursuing, and the interests that will not be traded. That is political accountability, and it is the line I defended in Abiy Can Fall and Tigray Can Still Lose. It is not the same as a right to know operational timing, negotiating positions, the content of confidential exchanges, disagreements that have not yet been resolved, or information given by partners in confidence. The information field is itself contested. Reuters reported that the federal media regulator has instructed Ethiopian outlets not to use Tigrai TV as a source. In such an environment, everything said by a Tigrayan with standing is collected, compared, and read for what it reveals.

The distinction must be understood especially by people whose words can be read as policy. A casual interview by an official is not casual. A Facebook post by someone close to command is not merely personal expression. A television discussion can expose priorities, anxieties, and internal differences even when no secret document is shown. Media discipline is therefore not separate from command discipline. In the present environment, it is one of its public forms.

This does not require a silent society. It requires a responsible structure. The wider public should be free to question, criticise, and think aloud. Those entrusted with national responsibility carry a different burden. They must know when speaking strengthens Tigray and when silence protects it. Not everyone who knows something needs to display that knowledge, and not everyone invited into a conversation has the authority to negotiate.

If this sounds excessively cautious at a moment when many Tegaru feel that the balance is finally changing, that is exactly why it must be said now. Discipline is easiest to demand when we are weak and afraid. It is harder when new partners arrive, confidence rises, and every development appears to confirm our analysis. Yet that is when indiscipline becomes most expensive. Our next strategic loss may not come because we lacked options. It may come because we revealed them too early, played them in the wrong order, or allowed different parts of our own structure to play against one another without intending to.

Nor should the language of having many cards be misunderstood as a call to use all of them. Some cards acquire value precisely because they remain in reserve. The military card is one. The relationship with Eritrea is another. Participation in an Ethiopian opposition alliance is another. Pretoria remains a legal and diplomatic card even after the federal government hollowed out much of its implementation. Engagement with international powers is useful even when their record teaches us not to depend on them. None should become Tigray’s whole strategy, and none should be discarded merely because it cannot deliver everything by itself.

The work of leadership is to know the sequence. Which card protects another? Which one buys time? Which one creates a better negotiating position? Which one should remain ambiguous? Which one can be traded for a concrete gain without closing choices needed later? And which apparent card is actually a dependency that another actor can withdraw at the worst possible moment?

These questions cannot be answered by public excitement around an alliance, nor by the fear of those who want it to fail. They have to be answered inside a functioning መኸተ structure anchored in the national purpose already stated. Tigray’s land, the return and security of its people, its capacity to govern itself, its recovery, and its freedom to decide its eventual political future are not cards. They are the reason the cards exist, and they are what I meant by fixed purpose and open destination. An instrument can be exchanged. The purpose cannot.

This is also how I would judge TPLF in the coming phase. Not by whether every alliance it enters survives. Not by whether Abiy falls on the timetable his opponents announce. Not by whether every tactical prediction proves correct. I would judge it by whether each move leaves Tigray with more usable choices, stronger internal cohesion, and less dependence on the decision of any single outside actor. I would judge it by whether the political direction and the military command continue to read the same map, even when partners try to pull them toward different destinations.

The formation of the new alliance is therefore important, but it is not the achievement. The achievement will be what Tigray is able to secure through the changed balance without allowing the alliance, Eritrea, Addis Ababa, Washington, or the urgency of the moment to take ownership of its strategy.

This should give us confidence, but not comfort. The more cards we hold, the less excuse we have for playing them carelessly, and the season now beginning will not wait for our politics to mature. The next proof of መኸተ will not be the number of alliances announced in its name. It will be whether Tigray can keep every useful relationship, military option, diplomatic opening, and political decision under one national purpose, while remaining politically clear to our people and operationally disciplined toward everyone else.

Tigray has more cards now. The responsibility is to play them as one hand.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！