Can Tigray Afford to Put Ethiopia First?

Before Tigray decides what it owes Ethiopia,
it must decide what it owes itself.

There is a case for putting Ethiopia first. It is not a weak case. It deserves to be stated honestly before it is examined.

Ethiopia remains Tigray’s largest market. It remains the framework within which Tigray’s trade, its infrastructure, its financial relationships, and its administrative connections operate. Ethiopia remains the diplomatic shield within which Tigray’s demands for Pretoria implementation have some international standing. Ethiopia remains the state recognized by the international system, whose collapse or fracture would create security vacuums and regional instabilities that Tigray, landlocked and still recovering from war, cannot easily manage.

All of this is true. I grant it fully.

And none of it answers the question.

Because the question is not whether Ethiopia matters to Tigray. It does. Profoundly. The question is: which Ethiopia is being asked to be put first? And what exactly is Tigray being asked to sacrifice in order to preserve it?

There is a second question underneath that one, and it is the more important of the two.

Not: which Ethiopian structure serves Tigray best?

But: what does Ethiopia reveal about itself when Tigray refuses to accept permanent territorial injury?

Tigray’s goal is not to redesign Ethiopia. It is to recover what was taken from it: its occupied territories, its displaced population, its organized capacity, its strategic options. How Ethiopia responds to that insistence will reveal what kind of Ethiopian structure is actually available. The struggle over Western Tigray is not downstream of Ethiopia’s future political structure. But it is one of the pressures, among many, that will help determine what that structure eventually looks like.

I do not want to argue against a caricature of the Ethiopia-first position. I want to argue against its strongest version.

The strongest version goes like this.

Tigray’s long-term survival depends on operating within a regional environment that is not catastrophically unstable. A collapsing Ethiopia would not liberate Tigray. It would endanger it. Tigray’s trade routes run through Ethiopian territory. Its energy infrastructure is integrated into Ethiopian grids. Its displaced populations need an Ethiopian political process that can enforce their return. Its territorial claims require an Ethiopian state that can compel Amhara regional actors to comply. A functioning Ethiopia is therefore not a gift Tigray makes to Ethiopians. It is a precondition for Tigrayan recovery.

Moreover, the alternative being implicitly proposed — strategic decoupling, northern reorientation, independent capacity-building — is not yet real. It is aspiration. The northern configuration is a direction, not an arrangement. The Red Sea relationships are potential, not operational. TDF is a deterrent, not an economy. Until those alternatives exist in practice, Tigray needs Ethiopia more than it needs to demonstrate that it does not need Ethiopia.

Finally, the international environment strongly penalizes actors who appear to threaten territorial integrity. The same community that documented Tigray’s suffering chose, ultimately, to preserve Ethiopian state coherence rather than enforce Tigrayan rights. A Tigray that maneuvers too visibly toward strategic independence will find itself diplomatically isolated at the moments when engagement would matter most.

This is a serious argument. I have felt its weight.

Now let me examine it.

The first part, that Ethiopian stability benefits Tigray, is true under one condition: that the Ethiopia being stabilized is one in which Tigray’s fundamental interests can be secured. Without that condition, stabilizing Ethiopia means stabilizing the arrangement that produced Western Tigray’s occupation, the siege of Tigrayan civilians, and the ethnic cleansing of communities whose return remains unachieved. That is not a benefit to Tigray. It is an institutionalization of Tigray’s worst recent outcomes.

The second part, that alternatives are not yet real, is accurate as a description of the present. It is not an argument against building those alternatives. It is the strongest possible argument for building them urgently, rather than continuing to invest in a framework that has consistently failed to secure Tigray’s most fundamental interests.

The third part, that the international environment penalizes strategic independence, is true. But the same international environment failed to protect Tigray when Tigray was operating entirely within the Ethiopian framework. The diplomatic cost of independence-adjacent positioning must be weighed against the strategic cost of framework-dependency that has not delivered.

To understand what is being asked of Tigray now, we need to understand what TPLF built and why.

The EFDRE constitutional order was not an accident. It was a strategic bet — arguably the most consequential political decision in Tigray’s modern history.

The bet was this. Tigray’s national question could not be secured by Tigray alone. A small highland region surrounded by larger, more populous neighbors could not rely on its own power indefinitely. But if the constitutional order recognized the national question of all peoples simultaneously — if Oromia, Amhara, Somali, Afar, and Tigray each had recognized territory, language rights, self-governance, and the formal right to self-determination including secession — then Ethiopia would no longer be an imperial center pressing a single identity onto diverse peoples. It would become a negotiated federation of equals.

There was a specific logic to why TPLF invested in recognizing Oromia’s national question and empowering Amhara as a federal political unit. It was not an oversight. In a system where every major national question is satisfied within the constitutional framework, no nation has an incentive to disrupt the arrangement. Tigray’s security would come not from Tigray’s strength alone but from a system where no nation needed to dominate another because all national questions had been answered within the same framework. Satisfying the national questions of others was itself the mechanism through which Tigray’s security was supposed to be guaranteed.

This is why the bet was serious rather than naïve. And for a period, it worked. Tigray governed itself. Its language was official. Its boundaries were constitutionally recognized.

But the constitutional project was implemented through a highly centralized party structure. EPRDF was not simply a coalition of equals: it was a vanguard organization in which TPLF maintained discipline over the whole. The constitutional guarantees of self-determination coexisted with a political architecture that depended on that discipline for its coherence. When the organizational discipline weakened, the tension was exposed. The constitutional text remained. The political coherence that had held it together did not.

The bet contained a consequence its architects could not fully anticipate. The constitutional reorganization that recognized and formalized national territories also consolidated demographic and political weight. Oromia became a political entity of sixty million people, constitutionally organized and eventually electorally dominant. Amhara became a consolidated political identity of fifty million, with its own territorial claims and grievances. When EPRDF discipline weakened, the constitutional architecture no longer produced equilibrium. It produced a competition over who would dominate the center. And in that competition, Tigray, six million people, landlocked, northern, associated with the previous governing order, was structurally disadvantaged.

The EFDRE constitution gave Tigray formal rights. It did not give Tigray the power to enforce them when a stronger coalition decided those rights were inconvenient.

The EFDRE constitution was TPLF’s answer to the national question. The question now is whether that answer has survived the political forces it helped create.

Underneath that lies a harder question this article cannot yet fully resolve: can the structure be repaired, or has the structural imbalance become self-reinforcing? Serious people believe restoration is possible, and their position deserves engagement, not dismissal. But engaging it honestly requires asking whether the assumptions behind the original bet still hold. A federal restoration that returns to 1995 constitutional text without addressing the structural imbalance that emerged within that text would not be stable. It would be the same bet, placed a second time, against changed odds.

There is something that connects the Western Tigray question to a longer pattern in Ethiopian political history, and I think it deserves to be named.

Throughout successive Ethiopian governments, a recurring logic has treated certain territories not as constitutional facts but as security variables. The argument goes: this territory, in the hands of this people, at this political moment, creates risks that cannot be accepted. The imperial government used it. The Derg used it. Elements of the current dispensation have used it. The federal constitutional project was supposed to replace that logic entirely. It was supposed to say, as its foundational premise, that Ethiopia becomes more secure when peoples govern themselves, not when their identities and territories are managed from the center on grounds of political convenience.

If Western Tigray cannot be returned because Tigray is considered politically inconvenient or strategically dangerous, the problem is no longer simply Pretoria’s incomplete implementation. It means the constitutional premise itself is being refused. It means the federal promise has been withdrawn not by amendment but by practice. And it means that any conversation about Tigray’s place in Ethiopia must begin with that withdrawal, not with arguments about administrative procedures or political timing.

This is why the question of Western Tigray is not only a territorial question. It is a test of whether the constitutional order still accepts Tigray as a legitimate self-governing people.

There is a distinction that the Ethiopia-first argument consistently blurs, and I want to name it directly.

Stability is a conflict frozen. The violence is suspended. The political process is running. From a distance, things look calm.

Settlement is a conflict resolved. The displaced have returned. The territorial questions have been answered through legitimate process. Accountability has been established. The conditions that produced the conflict have been structurally addressed.

Pretoria has arguably delivered some stability. It has not delivered settlement.

Western Tigray remains occupied. The displaced remain displaced. The forces that committed atrocities have not faced accountability. The conditions that made 2020 possible have not been structurally changed.

When someone argues that Tigray should put Ethiopia first for the sake of stability, the right response is: stability toward what end? A stability that serves settlement is worth supporting. A stability that substitutes for settlement is not something Tigray can afford to prioritize.

Stability is not settlement. That distinction is the most important this article makes, and it is the one I want readers to carry when they leave.

Tigray does not reclaim Western Tigray by waiting for the right Ethiopian structure to appear. It reclaims Western Tigray by creating the pressure that forces the existing structure either to implement Pretoria, transform itself, or reveal itself as an enemy of Tigray’s survival.

Western Tigray is not merely the issue through which competing Ethiopian futures are judged. It is the pressure point through which those futures will reveal themselves.

Tigray’s insistence on restoration of occupied territories, its insistence on the return of displaced populations, and its refusal to normalize permanent territorial loss are among the pressures through which Ethiopia’s actual capacities and intentions will be revealed. What Ethiopia becomes next depends on many forces simultaneously: internal political dynamics, regional pressures, international engagement, and how each part of the Ethiopian political system responds to the others. Tigray’s pressure is one of those forces. How the federal center responds to it will reveal whether the current arrangement can change, or whether the conditions are being created for a different Ethiopian configuration altogether.

That is not the same as saying Tigray determines Ethiopia’s future. It is saying Tigray’s choices are not politically neutral — they are one of the variables shaping an outcome that no single actor controls.

When I think through what might emerge from that pressure, I see five possible paths. None of them is a menu option. They are possible consequences — what happens depending on how the forces interact.

The first and least destructive path is that the federal government, under sufficient pressure from Tigray, from other regions, from international actors, and from the accumulated costs of non-implementation, implements Pretoria in a way that genuinely restores Western Tigray and enables IDP return. If this occurs, Tigray can then engage the question of its long-term relationship with Ethiopia from a position it has never yet occupied: as a party whose claims were honored rather than deferred.

The second path opens when sustained pressure from multiple directions makes the current centralization project impossible to sustain. Tigray’s resistance, resistance from Oromia and Amhara, economic contradictions, international frustration — these accumulate until the constitutional federal question reopens not by choice but by necessity. Restored federalism becomes politically unavoidable rather than merely desirable.

The third path emerges when the center simply cannot hold. Not through deliberate design but through exhaustion of the federal project’s capacity to impose itself across multiple fronts simultaneously. Regions acquire de facto autonomy the center can no longer deny. Tigray needs to be positioned to benefit from such a moment. It cannot produce it alone.

The fourth path is transition — a moment when accumulated contradictions produce conditions for a new political settlement to be negotiated. What Tigray secures in that transition depends entirely on what condition it is in when the moment arrives. A coherent Tigray shapes the terms. A fragmented one receives them.

The fifth path must be named directly, because it is the danger case. The federal center may attempt to crush Mekete and impose its preferred version of Tigray. This path has already been attempted once, at catastrophic cost. It can cause tremendous harm. It cannot produce durable political resolution. Tigray has demonstrated that it can absorb existential military pressure and maintain organized resistance. A second coercive attempt would be catastrophic, but its outcome would not be permanent pacification. The possibility of this path is the strongest argument for ensuring Tigray maintains the organized capacity that makes it appear too costly to choose.

When Tigrayan figures argue for Ethiopian stability, they are not all arguing for the same thing, even when they use the same words.

Some are arguing to preserve Ethiopia as a state — its basic territorial and administrative integrity. This is legitimate. But it does not require supporting PP’s political project. Ethiopia as a state and Ethiopia as Abiy Ahmed’s specific political reorganization are not the same thing. You can want the former without endorsing the latter.

Some are arguing to preserve constitutional federalism — the 1995 framework under which Tigray’s rights were formally protected. This is also legitimate. But it must grapple with the question the previous section raised: would restoring the constitutional text restore Tigray’s security, or restore the structural conditions that made Tigray vulnerable in the first place?

Some are arguing to preserve the current political process — Pretoria, the diplomatic conversations, the international engagement. This is the most defensible minimal position. But process without mechanism is not progress. It is the appearance of progress, which may actually reduce the pressure for real progress by giving international actors a reason to wait and see.

Tigray must be clear about which of these it is actually being asked to support before it decides whether the investment is justified.

The critique is not enough on its own. Let me say what I actually believe Tigray should do.

Tigray-First is not isolationism. It is not immediate secessionism. It is not hostility toward Ethiopia or toward Ethiopian peoples. A Tigray that cuts itself off from Ethiopian markets, from Ethiopian political processes, and from the diplomatic framework the international community has invested in would harm itself as much as anyone.

What Tigray-First means is that Tigray’s unresolved national questions become the organizing priority of strategic decision-making. It means Tigray evaluates every proposed arrangement, every diplomatic engagement, every political investment against the question of whether it advances or defers those priorities. It means Tigray refuses to accept that Ethiopian political stability is a precondition for Tigrayan national recovery — rather than the reverse.

The priorities are four, and their sequence matters.

The first is the restoration of occupied territories. Western Tigray’s return — not eventual, not in principle, but through a verifiable, operationally defined process with timelines, accountability mechanisms, and consequences for non-delivery. This is not one of several issues. It is the test against which every proposed arrangement is evaluated.

The second is the return of displaced populations. The actual, verified return of displaced Tigrayans to their homes, with security conditions, property rights, and administrative authority sufficient to make return real rather than symbolic. Not statements of support for eventual return. Actual return.

The third is the preservation and reform of Tigray’s organized capacity. Mekete — the organized political, military, administrative, and social framework through which Tigray has defended its survival interests — must be preserved and reformed simultaneously. Not because it is beyond criticism. Because a Tigray without organized capacity has no leverage on any of the five paths. Reform must come from within and must produce greater accountability, greater inclusiveness, and greater strategic effectiveness. But reform from within is the only reform that does not create the vulnerability of the fifth path.

The fourth is the expansion of strategic options beyond dependence on any single Ethiopian arrangement. Build economic relationships that reduce exclusive dependency on Addis Ababa. Build diplomatic relationships that give Tigray standing independent of its position within the Ethiopian political process. Maintain the northern orientation as a strategic possibility. Develop the institutional capacity that would make Tigray’s choices real rather than theoretical.

Tigray’s future political status — federalism, confederalism, statehood, independence, or something not yet named — is a later question. It is a question for Tigrayans to answer freely, under conditions of security rather than duress, after the first three priorities have been addressed. A Tigray that debates its long-term political status while its people are still displaced and its territory still occupied is debating the destination before it has secured the ground to stand on. The sequence is not incidental. It is the difference between a strategic program and an ideological gesture.

I want to say something directly to Tigrayans who are tired.

Not tired of Tigray. Tired of the emergency. Tired of the sacrifice that has no visible end. Tired of politics that never seems to deliver ordinary life. Tired of burying the next generation in arguments that were supposed to have been resolved already.

That exhaustion is legitimate. It is not weakness. It is what happens to a people that has survived what Tigray has survived and has not yet been allowed to recover. And I understand that when someone says “enough — let us have peace, let us rebuild, let us stop mobilizing” — they are not betraying Tigray. They are expressing a human need that Tigray’s political leadership has not yet found a way to satisfy.

But I want to ask a question in return.

What does peace look like without Western Tigray? What does rebuilding look like when your neighbors have not come home? What does ordinary life look like when the conditions that produced the emergency have not been structurally resolved?

Tigray-First is not a call for permanent mobilization. It is the opposite. It is the argument that the fastest path to ordinary life — to rebuilding, to recovery, to the next generation not inheriting an unresolved emergency — runs through securing the minimum national conditions first. A peace built on normalized loss is not a peace that holds. It is a pause before the next cycle.

The four priorities are not an agenda for endless struggle. They are the preconditions for the struggle to end.

The international community does not prefer justice over stability. But it does not prefer PP over federalism either. Western actors support the avoidance of instability — and these are not the same thing.

If PP’s project produces the instability it is currently generating in Oromia, in Amhara, in Tigray, and in the Red Sea corridor, Western actors may recalculate. They have no ideological commitment to Abiy Ahmed. They have a structural commitment to avoiding regional disruption.

For Tigray, this means the Western preference is not a permanent ceiling. It is a constraint that operates as long as the current framework appears more stable than the alternatives. Tigray’s task is not to persuade the international community that Tigrayan justice matters more than stability. It is to demonstrate that Tigray’s demands — Western Tigray, IDP return, constitutional restoration, enforceable guarantees — are themselves prerequisites for the regional stability those actors actually want.

That is a different diplomatic argument, and a stronger one.

Use the international community tactically: for legitimacy, for documentation, for economic pressure that makes non-implementation costly. Maintain independent strategic capacity that does not depend on Western permission to function. The line between tactical engagement and strategic dependence is the line between an actor that shapes its environment and one that is managed by it.

Let me be precise about what the northern orientation means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean alignment with Eritrea. The PFDJ regime participated in Tigray’s destruction. A tactical engagement with Asmara, if and when mutual interest makes it available, must be approached with cold assumptions: strategic self-preservation, not friendship or trust.

It does not mean hostility to Ethiopia. Tigray’s geography connects it to both the Ethiopian highland interior and to the northern corridor toward Eritrea, Sudan, and the Red Sea. These are not competing orientations. They are complementary strategic dimensions.

What the northern orientation means is that Tigray should not depend exclusively on the Ethiopian center as its sole connection to the regional and international environment. A Tigray that can only access markets, diplomacy, energy, and strategic relationships through Addis Ababa is a Tigray that can be managed by whoever controls Addis Ababa. A Tigray that has developed relationships in other directions has options. And a Tigray with options negotiates differently than a Tigray with none.

Geography does not wait for political convenience. Tigray sits at the intersection of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the Red Sea corridor. That location creates strategic relevance that does not disappear because the current political configurations are unfavorable. The task is to position Tigray to benefit from that relevance when conditions allow — not to pretend the relevance exists where it currently does not.

Building northern options is the longest-term of the four priorities. It expands Tigray’s strategic horizon beyond the immediate national tasks of territorial restoration and IDP return. It is the insurance that ensures Tigray’s future is not permanently bounded by what any single Ethiopian government decides to permit.

Every political project asks for sacrifice today in exchange for promises tomorrow. The question is whether the promise has been secured.

Tigray has already made this exchange once. At Pretoria in 2022, Tigray accepted significant costs, including the ceasefire of its military operations at a moment of strategic advantage, in exchange for promises about what would follow.

Pretoria did deliver something real. The ceasefire ended active bombardment. The political space that followed allowed some degree of Tigrayan institutional recovery, internal debate, and continued engagement with international actors. A Tigray debating its future is in a better position than a Tigray under siege.

But the ceasefire and the political space were the minimum conditions for pursuing the substance — not substitutes for it. The substance was Western Tigray, IDPs, constitutional order, enforceable guarantees. Accepting the minimum as sufficient would mean accepting stability in place of settlement.

Tigray paid the costs. The minimum was delivered. The substance was not.

Before Tigray pays again — before it accepts the costs of any further sequencing that asks it to defer its fundamental demands — it must identify the mechanism that secures the promised delivery.

That mechanism is not currently visible. What Tigray needs is a combination of things. Sustained diplomatic pressure that makes non-implementation costly. Internal capacity that maintains deterrence and the ability to sustain that pressure over time. Strategic patience that resists the normalization of delay. And regional positioning that prevents Addis Ababa from treating Tigray as having no viable alternatives.

These are not guarantees. They are the only mechanisms available that do not require Tigray to simply trust that promises will eventually be honored.

The lesson of Pretoria is not that Tigray should stop making agreements. It is that Tigray should not make agreements whose delivery mechanism is not secured. That is the mortgage problem. Tigray has already paid once for promises that were not secured. It cannot afford to pay again.

The Ethiopia-first argument is not wrong to note that Ethiopia matters to Tigray. It is wrong to treat that observation as a sufficient answer to the question of how Tigray should invest its strategic leverage.

The original constitutional bet was designed to protect Tigray by protecting everyone. It did not protect Tigray when a stronger coalition decided that Tigrayan political power was more threatening than the constitutional framework’s protection of it. The stability Pretoria has produced is real. The settlement it has not produced is what Tigray most needs.

Tigray does not wait for the right Ethiopian structure to appear. It presses for restoration of what was taken — and in doing so, it becomes one of the forces through which Ethiopia’s future structure is revealed. The five paths described in this piece are possible consequences of many interacting pressures, of which Tigrayan persistence is one. What Tigray puts first shapes what options remain available to it.

If Tigray puts Ethiopia first — stabilizing the current arrangement before its own national questions are resolved — it accepts the substitution of stability for settlement. It accepts a mortgage on promises whose mechanism has not been secured. It accepts a reduced version of itself as the price of diplomatic access to a framework that has not demonstrated the ability to deliver what it has promised.

If Tigray puts itself first — organizing its strategic decisions around the four priorities of territorial restoration, IDP return, organized capacity, and expanding options — it does not abandon Ethiopia. It engages Ethiopia from a position of clarity rather than dependence. It uses the Ethiopian framework tactically while building what it needs to exist independently of any single Ethiopian government’s goodwill.

The question before Tigray is not whether Ethiopia matters. Ethiopia will matter for a very long time. The question is whether Tigray’s future should continue to depend on promises that others may or may not honor. A people that has paid the price Tigray has paid cannot afford to build its future on hope alone. It must build it on capacity, on leverage, and on choices of its own. And it must hold clearly in view what those choices are ultimately for: not endless struggle, but the recovery, the rebuilding, and the ordinary life that Tigrayans have earned and have not yet been permitted to have.

Putting Tigray first is not hostility toward Ethiopia. It is the precondition for any future Ethiopian arrangement that actually deserves Tigray’s investment.

Stability is not settlement. That is where the argument begins. What Tigray puts first is where it ends.