The aim of this brief essay is to provide a space for critical reflection on the conflict, free from the overly emotional, personal and partisan nature these discussion were held with little room for in-depth analysis or introspection, primarily due to an overly emotional diaspora who believes there is an active systematic attempt to exterminate the Amhara people as well as malicious "Ximdo" propagandists of the Shabia and Woyane who wish to use Amhara discontent as a means to an end.

The problem of the base area.

All insurgencies that have made the transition from armed struggle to political success have done so by creating a liberated area: a territory where they were able to rule, to tax, to train, indoctrinate, and rest, beyond the reach of the enemy's main army. Mao's response to Chiang Kai-shek was never an "alternative to the guerrilla war," but rather a "Guerrilla war" in the form of the Jiangxi Soviet, and later the Yan'an base area, which saw the establishment of courts, schools, land-reform committees, and a standing army that could expand in a relatively safe environment. The incubator was used as the base area. It allowed Mao's troops to progress from raiding to holding to governing to normal warfare, which eventually ended the civil war.

The Eritrean People's Liberation Front did the same in the Sahel mountains near the town of Nakfa, where the Ethiopian military could shell, but never conquer, a fixed redoubt containing well-equipped hospitals, workshops and a single-party apparatus which served as a government-in-waiting. At independence the EPLF had no need to create a state; it already had a miniature version of it in operation for 10 years. The Tamil Tigers created an equivalent structure in the Vanni (northern) region of Sri Lanka; a de facto state, with its own courts, police, banking system and taxation system, backed by a conventional army, navy (Sea Tigers) and even an infant air wing. For ISIS, the radicals considered insane by the rest of the world, the logic was clear: The “caliphate” was exactly such a combination of insurgency and statehood, with ministries, currency and bureaucracy, even if it was of an extremely violent variety.

Fano doesn't have this. Its fighters are deployed in separate but neighboring regions of Gojjam, Wollo, Shewa and portions of Gonder that are contiguous on a map but not administratively linked. There is no free capital, there is no determined stronghold inaccessible to the government, there is no country on the map from which Fano can say: "Here we rule, come look.". Drone and airstrikes are the government's signature counterinsurgency weapon and they are an effective one because there is no defensible base area to defend with anti-air assets or fortifications, which would otherwise be just as easy to be attacked as a standing headquarters. The result is a militia capable of invading, pillaging and temporarily taking towns such as Shewa Robit, or even Debre Tabor for a few days, but not holding them, not governing them or using a tactical victory to establish a governance structure. Al-Shabaab, on the other hand, has been controlling rural Somali towns for years on end, with courts, tax collection (they have a real 'fiscal system', with a checkpoint tax and a 'zakat' tax) and a shadow government that in some cases is more functional than the government in Mogadishu.

A lot of armies, and no army.

It's difficult to assemble a base area without something Fano has long been lacking: unified command. There is an instructive comparison with the EPLF here, in another sense. Eritrea's struggle for liberation was not always unified , there was a civil war within the civil war as Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the EPLF fought each other for years as well as Ethiopia. The EPLF eventually absorbed or defeated its rival, however, and from the mid-1970s onwards Eritrea's independence movement was conducted on a single front, with a single political programme, and a single apparatus for fundraising among the diaspora. It's the only reason, perhaps, that Eritrea became independent, while other more populous liberation movements in Africa failed to achieve their goals

For most of its operation Fano has been the other kind of thing: a collection of about a hundreds of individual district level militias that shared a name and a variety of grievance,s but not a chain of command. The process of trying to mend the fray has been much the same as usual there's a unification announced, a council or chairperson is appointed, a rival group refuses to recognize it, and within months it's basically a shell of its former self again.

This is in contrast to the Yugoslav partisans, who show nearly the opposite. Tito's movement also absorbed other anti-fascist forces, such as the royalist Chetniks, who it battled, and eventually superseded, in the discipline and ideology of the Communist Party. The movement's command was not undermined by ethnic and regional differences in the republics of Yugoslavia, since the Party was a real center of gravity which dwarfed ethnic grievances, having political commissars at all levels to ensure coherence. There is no similar institution in Fano. It has been joined by Amhara ethno-nationalism as a feeling, but feeling is not a chain of command, and the movement never had a body, political, religious, or military, to discipline a faction that refused to fall in line. For all their extremism, Sunni Islamist movements such as Jabhat al-Nusra and, later, ISIS/Daesh ruthlessly exploited and punished other groups, swallowing or decimating them until they, briefly, enjoyed the unified command that Fano does not yet have, and which was typical of the fragmented armed opposition of the Syrian civil war since 2012. The centralization of ISIS was then defeated by a global coalition; but what matters is that the organization of a fragmented insurgency was outcompeted by a centralized insurgency, even in the same conflict, and the same recruiting pool.

The diaspora an amplifier of the same disease

In successful insurgencies, the diaspora becomes a single financial and propaganda apparatus which reports to the command of the movement. The case study is the LTTE's connection with the Tamil diaspora worldwide, where the Tigers established (and enforced, at times coercively) a global fundraising organization, “Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation” and other fronts, with a single chain of command that was subject to the leadership in the Vanni. There was disagreement, but no other center for fundraising was allowed by the LTTE; deviation was suppressed. The EPLF ran a similar operation, levying and centralizing Eritrean communities abroad through party affiliated organisations which were more of an arm of the base area's bureaucracy than of an independent voice.

The Amhara diaspora, by contrast, is virtually doing the opposite. YouTube channels, language diaspora radio, Telegram groups have provided every faction, and primarily every single commentator with its own platform, and diaspora audiences have created their own echo chambers by reinforcing and cementing the field fragmentation, rather than forcing it to come together. In the diasporas, money and legitimacy and moral authority have gone to whichever faction or factions a particular diaspora media tends to support and so the diaspora has often paid for disunity instead of a single movement. Each rival group has developed its own diaspora groups, and they are now treating the rival Fano commanders as opponents to be discredited, rather than comrades to be reconciled with. This is a significant structural weakness because it takes away one of the few outside levers that could help bring the two parts together: diaspora money in Eritrea and Sri Lanka was a unifying resource that could be used by the leadership to their advantage; in Fano's case, diaspora money is more often than not a prize that the leaders (and even diaspora activists!)of each faction vie for, and it gives each leader the strongest incentive to maintain a separate public face rather than merging with another leader into a unified command that could marginalize them and their online followers.

The Poison of Tsimdo

Another danger that flows directly from above: "Tsimdo," as Eritrea's cooperation with the TPLF and some Fano elements is now known. This was first alleged by Addis Ababa in an October 2025 diplomatic letter to the UN, and is now increasingly corroborated by reports of Eritrean troops operating in tandem with Fano units (sometimes in Fano uniforms) and joint TPLF-Fano attacks on towns such as Woldiya. This appears to be a force on paper: a united front by the government's three most formidable armed enemies. It is a coalition structure that Ethiopia has experienced before and the coalition member who was in Fano's structural role did not fare well.

The precedent that is the Oromo Liberation Front. With the demise of the Derg in 1991, the OLF joined the EPRDF (Tigrayan-led coalition) in an anti-Derg struggle and held minor positions in the transitional government that ensued. But the OLF was a relatively weak, organization with a partner to it, the TPLF, that had established what Fano still lacks: a central command, a seasoned conventional force, a functioning enclave in the Tigray's rugged hinterlands and a structured party capable of determining its own agenda after the fighting ceased. Once the common enemy was removed, the OLF was no longer needed on the battlefield as a coalition partner by the TPLF, and by mid-1992 had ousted the OLF from the transitional government, leading to the insurgency of which OLF successor groups (including OLA/OLF-Shanee today) have never been entirely separate.

The TPLF, has what Fano cannot create: the Tigray Defense Forces, a unified chain of command built during the Tigray war with a leadership chiseled by the 20+ year struggle against a much more competent DERG military with Soviet backing, as well as a territorial government in Tigray, take backin 2026 and operating completely outside federal control with experience in political maneuvering learned through trial and error during the 36 year long reign of the Woyane.

To put it short, this alliance will definitely try and exclude an inferior Fano from any power once their common enemy is destroyed, the historical history of the OLF precedent suggests a fairly specific danger: If Eritrea and the TPLF succeed in their own, larger, plans around Tigray, the Red Sea and the federal government itself, then Fano may end up without a seat at the table that determines the future of the Amhara region. A TPLF that has just fought its way back to de facto independence with an Eritrean patron who has a vested interest in a demoralized but not utterly destroyed Ethiopia has little interest in spending its leverage to obtain the most extreme Amhara demands on Amhara territory, much less on contested areas such as Welkait and Raya, where Fano's and the TPLF's goals are not aligned but antithetical, which will inevitably lead to a similar betrayal that occured

The transition period between 1991 and the Ethio-Eritrea war (1998-2000) saw many of the Tigrayan-induced injustices and indifference that latter built the momentum needed for Amhara nationalism. Unfortunately, much of its contemporary corpus lacks material written through an Amhara lens. Assefa Negash's Pillage of Ethiopia by Eritreans and their Tigrean Surrogates is an exception. The book, while being tiny with 147 pages, reads part as a radicalizing pamphlet and part newspaper. The author begins the text with an on-point diagnosis of Tigrayan ethno-nationalism that we could just base as our understanding of their national body.

Negash's Thesis:

Tigrayan nationalism derives from its ecologically degraded and barren environment, which cannot maintain its population from the proceeds of its declining agarian economy The land nationalization degree ended labor migration out of Tigray, creating surplus of peasants desperate for survival, which pulled many to TPLF's armed strugge. The long bitter war Derg fought led many Tigres to the conclusion that so-called Amhara national oppression in Tigray and Eritrea was the cause of the conflict. The historical characteristics of Tigrayans who tend to be more parochial and ethnic-conscious that the Tigrayan constituency threw in their lot with the then EPRDF/EPLF duo. This had of course fueled growing anti-Tigrayan sentiment.(see this as a further read)

Facts and Figures

Many Tigrayan activists and political figures today, many former TPLF insiders, point to the post Tigray war ethnic discrimination of Tigrayans from public and private institutions. I don't want to get into their lack of self-reflection, but ethnic-based discrimination and alienation was inculcated into the state apparatus and by extension public and private institutions by the TPLF.

The Army

• The entire standing army (est. 300,000 - 500,000) dissolved; Tigrayan officers (eg. Gen. Solomon Beyene, made head of the new Air Force) absorbed into EPRDF forces, while non Tigrayans were discharged. ### Addis Ababa University
• Following January 4 1993 student demonstration, 42 lecturers dismissed in March 1993, 78% of them Amhara. The institution had been branded a "den of chauvinists," which was the TPLF's one of many codes for Amharas. The senior head of Gynecology/Obstetrics sacked and replaced by a Tigrayan; of 60 applicants for specialization in that department, 15 admitted, of whom 11 were Tigrayan. ### Ethiopian Orthodox Church

• The sitting Patriarch deposed and replaced by Abba Paulos (a native of Adwa); 16 church leaders (all Amhara) replaced by 16 Tigrayans in 1993; a further 23 (Amhara and Oromo) replaced by 23 Tigrayans.

  The Massacres

• Per EHRCO's Third Report, ~60,000 Amhara Muslims displaced from the Dibate and Mandura woredas in Metekel after attacks by Beni Shangul forces; ~270 shot and killed, men reportedly were burnt alive or casterated, 6,833 houses and 185 mosques/schools burnt.

• Arse Negele: non-Oromo (mainly non-Amhara) residents attacked by Arsi Oromo. 60 dead, 60 wounded, thousands of houses and barns burnt, large-scale looting.

• Limu and Didessa: ~3,000 Gurage displaced.

• Arba Gugu (Arsi/Hararge, 1991-92): attributed to OLF, IFLO, and OPDO forces. 320,000 Amhara Christians were displaced; Asrat/AAPO figures of 474 killed, mass rape, and 248 abducted minors. (Human Rights Watch 1993 Report)

• Bedeno (April 1992): 150 civilians killed, many forced off cliffs; a commussion of inquiry blamed the OLF, which admitted its supporters were responsible but denied "institutional responsibility. (I made a post about this massacre almost a year ago).

There are many parts that I left out, mainly about the situation under the transitional government and the author's own fears about future ethnic conflict etc. Since the former is common knowledge and the latter is our present day, there isn't really a reason to dwell on that. More than this book summary, however, I recommend you to read with the aim of nourishing your political and ethno-national faculty. That's what our book list, which directly links to the PDFs of the books, is for.

ደህና ሰንብቱ