u/Timely-Tap-8435

I don’t think this needs to be explained in depth for anyone with a basic understanding to our movement, but alas I’ve decided I need to write this piece for good measure to ensure the story of how Selaisse actively dismantled any Amhara ethnonationalist base and left us on the backfoot we find ourselves in today is revealed, while our openly hostile political rivals had decades to formulate their dogma.

 

Haile Selassie was not an Amhara nationalistic man, but a feudal autocrat who used everyone, including Amharas. Conveniently there's a story that Somali nationalists, Oromo nationalist historiography, Tigrayan and Eritrean nationalist narratives tell that portray Haile Selassie as the "Amhara king", the ethnic champion of a "Neftegna" ruling class. It's a good story for those movements, as they can portray their own struggles as liberation from Amhara domination. However, it fails to stand up to further questioning. Haile Selassie was no Amhara nationalist. He was a centralizing autocrat, who in his fifty-eight years of rule, eliminated all opposition power centers, including Amhara regional lords, and centralized everything around his person. He slaughtered Amhara patriots, torched Amhara peasants, starved Amhara and Wollo provinces and siphoned off resources to Shoa and Eritrea and operated a court where loyalty to himself, not any ethnicity, was the only thing that counted.

 

The man he hanged: Belay Zeleke

If Haile Selassie, a Ethiopianist, was an Amhara ethnonationalist then Belay Zeleke is exactly the person that Haile Selassie should have celebrated. By the time Addis Ababa was retaken, Belay was one of the many guerrilla leaders of the Arbegnoch, who organized the resistance against Italy from 1936–1941, commanding tens of thousands of fighters in over twenty major engagements. He is considered to be one of the most effective patriotic leaders of the total resistance.

 

When Haile Selassie came back from exile, he put the Amhara hero in a paltry position, he declined in protest and he was arrested when he continued to rule the territory he had liberated. In Addis Ababa, Belay and his own brother were tried and sentenced in January 1945, and were hanged after Belay pledged to submit them on condition of being pardoned. They are not the way a monarch treats his champion of the ethnic citizens. How a despot deals with any commander whose own allegiance is not the same as his.

 

Interestingly, that is also the reason that none of the brigades and regiments in the Fano brigade service exist today that are named after Haile Selassie. Fano units are named after other Arbegnoch patriots, Amhara martyrs of resistance and self-defense, and not after the emperor who killed one of his own. If an Amhara nationalist leader were to be honored by Amharas as an icon, it's what you would expect to see. It’s for this reason Selaisse is ignored while Menelik, Tewodros, Zeleke, Ras Amoraw, and Yekuno Amlak are idolized among the modern fano movement in divisional nicknames but not Selaisse.

 

Bombing of Gojjame Farmers ‘68

Peasants revolted in the districts of Gojjam, Mota and Bichena in 1968 over new tax and land-measurement policies of the imperial government. Selassie responded by dispatching troops to the villages that summer and launching an air force campaign that dropped bombs on several villages and burned homes, a campaign that historians claim was designed to "scare the population into submission”. Many hundreds of people lost their lives. After months of defying the Emperor, the political cost of granting his demands was finally too high in December and the Emperor backed off and cancelled tax arrears. It was one of several such incidents; the Woyane rebellion in Tigray in 1943 was dealt with with British bombers and peasant rebellions continued throughout the 1940s-70s in Wollo over the same issues :  the dispossession of land, the imposition of taxes, the disregard of the peasantry as a constituency served by the state instead of a resource to be extracted from.

An emperor that rules for the benefit of "his" ethnic group will not send bombers against "his" farmers to make them pay taxes. Haile Selassie's rule was by no means an ethnic favoritism. It was a medieval personal-loyalty patronage, given and taken from all ethnicities, that is why it continued to create enemies among the ethnicities it had supposedly "pampered”.

 

Ethnic favouritism in attempts at creating a new elite

Following the UN-brokered federation in 1952, Haile Selassie gradually misappropriated Eritrea's autonomy, dismantling the elected Eritrean government in 1955, introducing Amharic as the language of schools and courts in 1958, prohibiting opposition parties in 1961, and then by the end of 1962, forcing Eritrean federalists to accept the abolition of the federation. He had groomed parts of the Eritrean elite to help him in this endeavor: those who sat in the federal administration and helped to relax Eritrean autonomy from within. The prize of this co-optation was the Eritrean Liberation Front, established in 1960 as this centralization process was in full swing, and by seventeen years the Eritrean war of independence that outlasted the life of the emperor. He did this by deliberately breeding a particular class of Eritrean unionist elite, and promoting them to the front of the crowd. Close to equally devout Christian and Muslim, Tigrinya-speaking unionists were disproportionately enrolled in the government bureaucracy, diplomatic missions, and significantly, university seats in Addis Ababa, which were documented by contemporary observers of Eritrea at that time. Business patronage mirrored this: men such as Haregot Abbai, Eritrea's first mayor (from 1963 to 1974), who was an Eritrean businessman and Asfaha Woldemikael, who ran Eritrea's federal administration from 1955 until 1962 when Haile Selassie dissolved it, were elevated to a position of patron-client authority. Even Haile Selassie promoted Eritreans to the highest positions in the imperial state itself: Eritrean Gen. Aman Andom was a member of the Imperial Senate by Selassie's own appointment. None of this was ethnic solidarity with Eritreans as a people, just the same animus of patronage that he had in all his other places, for which he purchased the loyalty of a particular elite, in order to crush the autonomy of the broader population it was drawn from.

 

The most obvious example among all of them is Tadesse Birru from Shoan Oromo. He was a Shoan Oromo who came from the Shoan system he gently fostered in his regional favouritism and had been promoted to Colonel General in Haile Selassie's Imperial Army, the head of the elite Fetno-Derash special forces, head of the national police modernization, and played a leading role in crushing the 1960 coup attempt — a very "pampered," decorated member of the imperial establishment. He set up the Mecha and Tuluma Self-Help Association for the development of Oromo in 1966–67, which was banned by the regime and he was jailed. He escaped and started to fight with arms in Shoan and is commemorated to date as the father of modern Oromo nationalism; his fighters merged into what now is known as Oromo Liberation Front. The emperor was not responsible for Tadesse Birru's demise due to some rival ethnic project; he nurtured him and broke him and the reaction was the emergence of the OLF.

The destruction of the Amhara warrior aristocracy and stunting Amhara nationalism with it

 

The ethnonationalist narrative requires Haile Selassie to be the enabler of the Amhara (Shoan) feudal privilege. Indeed his entire project after 1941 was to challenge the authority of the “neftegna” landed nobility that this story represents as standing in opposition to him. He abolished the hereditary system in favor of centrally appointed governors, who answer only to him; he established a national army and gendarmerie to replace the old feudal levies; he maintained the imperial treasury as a part of his own household and not as a restraint on his power. Even lords of the Amhara people who may have opposed the emperor independently, such as at Gojjam, Begemder, and Wollo, were either marginalized and/or suppressed, as was the case with Belay Zeleke. Haile Selassie's system was not "Amhara rule. It was the rule of one man, clad in the fairytale of the medieval Solomonic myth, in which the traditional Amhara aristocracy was hollowed out to eliminate other sources of power.

 

Development went along the same lines of neglect for Amhara regions. Shoa, the home of the country's only university, of industrial investment, of the modern state, was the central area, and Addis Ababa;  Gojjam, Gonder, and Wollo, majority Amhara areas, were over-taxed for grain, and under-taxed for industrial investment; and were exposed to just those famines and revolts described above.

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