This is an opinion column. The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of The Abay Times.
Ethiopian Airlines resumed flights to Mekelle on Sunday. Among the passengers quoted by the Ethiopian News Agency was Ashenafi Solomon, stranded in Addis Ababa during the suspension, who spoke about interrupted trade, access to medicine and the hope that peace would last. Anyone able to get home has reason to welcome the flight. But there is something exhausting about being asked, yet again, to celebrate the restoration of an ordinary journey.
Abiy Ahmed took his oath for another term on October 5. The government begins a new term; the country returns to a familiar war. We are discussing Tigray again, confrontation with Eritrea again, and whether the latest military gains will hold. Before asking Ethiopians to invest their hopes in another victory, the prime minister owes us an account of why his previous victories and agreements have left the country here.
The reversal of alliances ought to make that question unavoidable. Fano fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF in the last Tigray war. So did Isaias. Fano subsequently turned its guns against the federal government; the Amhara Fano National Movement now shares an opposition coalition with the TPLF and the OLA. Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of supporting that alignment and sending troops across the border. Eritrea denies the allegations. A government now confronting one former wartime partner as an insurgent enemy and another as an alleged external aggressor cannot call this merely a succession of unrelated emergencies.
That does not establish that Abiy caused every rupture. Fano leaders, the TPLF and Isaias make their own decisions and bear responsibility for them. But governing means more than explaining why each opponent is unreasonable. The federal government chose its wartime partnerships, negotiated the peace and undertook to restore order. Their repeated breakdown belongs in an assessment of its performance. The public should not be expected to remember every battlefield success and forget what followed it.
The wars have accumulated rather than yielded to a national peace. Conflict with the OLA continued in Oromia. The northern war ended in Pretoria in 2022, but fighting with Fano escalated in Amhara in 2023. Now large-scale fighting has returned to Tigray while relations with Eritrea threaten something wider. This is a concrete record against which to judge a government's promises of stability. A truce in one region cannot stand for peace in Ethiopia while people in another remain caught in an armed conflict.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission's latest annual report, covering the year to June 2026, describes civilian killings, arbitrary detention, kidnappings and disappearances across several regions. These are the conditions in which people have to travel, earn a living and raise children. They should trouble a government more than criticism of its reputation. We cannot keep treating insecurity as the background to national progress, something citizens must endure until the next campaign delivers its promised result.
The TPLF has no right to exploit that frustration as a claim to political innocence. The African Union condemned the seizure of civilian airports in September as inconsistent with the Pretoria Agreement. The rights commission's report also describes forced recruitment in Tigray. A party that invokes its people's survival must answer for decisions that again put their lives and livelihoods at risk. Nor can its reconciliation with Fano simply put aside the territorial disputes and displacement that helped make the previous war so destructive. Those questions remain, even when yesterday's enemies find a common opponent.
