Judging the Tigray Genocide Backwards

Alex de Waal and Mulugeta Gebrehiwot‘s misguided critique

Over the past few years, a particular explanation of the 2020–2022 Tigray war has been gaining acceptance among prominent analysts. It begins by acknowledging—sometimes forcefully—that Ethiopian and Eritrean forces committed mass atrocities.

From there, responsibility for the catastrophe increasingly shifts to the political judgment, strategic choices, and internal failures of Tigray’s leadership, especially the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

This reading, endorsed by commentators such as Alex de Waal and Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, presents itself as a tough-minded realist critique. Yet it rests on three core problems that distort historical understanding and carry troubling moral implications. It evaluates decisions made under extreme uncertainty through post-genocide hindsight. It diverts attention from the intent and conduct of perpetrators to the behavior of those who resisted them. And it is shaped by political alignments inside Ethiopian and Tigrayan politics that subtly guide blame.

Taken together, this framework makes annihilative violence appear reactive and resistance seem provocative.

Hindsight Trap

Central to this critique is the claim that the TPLF led Tigray into a supposedly preventable disaster. Mulugeta asserts that “in 2020, the TPLF led Tigray into the war—a war not of its own making, but a war it could have avoided or at least prepared for.”

The formulation appears balanced, acknowledging external aggression while assigning decisive strategic responsibility to Tigray’s leadership. Yet analytically, it shifts the causal burden onto the society that became the target, relying on the hindsight trap: once a disaster occurs, it seems obvious what choices should have been made.

It echoes a common criticism by opposition voices that wrongly interprets Tigray’s pre-war military displays—despite limited preparedness—as acts of delusion and bravado rather than deterrence.

From 2018 onward, the Tigray regional government faced growing pressure. Its budget was controlled by Addis Ababa, and security cooperation with federal institutions was dismantled. At the same time, Tigrayans endured sustained political and media campaigns questioning their legitimacy and loyalty.

In this climate, public displays of resolve—mobilizing veterans, holding military parades, and emphasizing constitutional autonomy—were meant to discourage war, not provoke it. The goal was to convince Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government that invading Tigray would be too costly politically and militarily.

Daniel Berhane documented this tense pre-war atmosphere, noting how prominent Tigrayan figures were repeatedly asked whether they would “forget Tigray” if offered positions in Addis. This reflected deepening mistrust and suggested the federal arrangement itself threatened Tigray’s survival.

While the deterrent posture ultimately failed, this does not mean Tigray’s strategy was irrational. It revealed an opponent willing to absorb extraordinary costs and ignore norms of warfare and international law. Deterrence fails when one side values destroying its opponent more than avoiding losses.

Second, this critique assumes foresight that neither the TPLF nor the international community possessed ¹. Critics accuse Tigray’s leadership of failing to predict the full-scale Eritrean invasion and ensuing atrocities, but this miscalculation was widely shared.

The International Crisis Group’s “Crisis Alert” of 5 November 2020, used by policymakers and analysts, discussed Eritrea’s involvement mainly in terms of border security and support for federal forces. It did not warn of a full Eritrean invasion deep inside Ethiopia.

Most revealingly, General Tsadkan Gebretensae—now a prominent voice in the chorus alleging TPLF ill-preparedness—spoke to journalist Tom Gardner for his book The Abiy Project just days before the war began. Tsadkan expressed² his conviction that large-scale Eritrean intervention was irrational and unlikely, stating that President Isaias Afwerki “knows an adventure inside Ethiopia would be the end of him.” This reflected broader assumptions shaped by recent history, including the 2000 international backlash that limited Ethiopia’s advance on Asmara.

The real failure was collective expectation. Many believed boundaries still existed—that a cross-border invasion with mass atrocities would provoke decisive international consequences. Faulting Tigray’s leadership for trusting an unenforced international system misattributes responsibility.

Distorted Lens

Analysis is not neutral, and critiques of the TPLF are shaped by long-standing political divisions.

De Waal’s 2021 article, “Gen. Tsadkan Gebretensae: Ethiopia’s Tigray Rebel Mastermind,” elevates Tsadkan as the central architect of the Tigrayan campaign, overstating his individual role while downplaying the collective decision-making of the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF).

His more recent statements, in which he expresses sweeping criticism of Tigray’s wartime leadership, reinforce this contrast: the disciplined general Tsadkan versus a rigid, politically driven leadership under Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael. This framing aligns closely with postwar political realignments, where Tsadkan and figures like Getachew Reda have positioned themselves as reformist alternatives to the current TPLF leadership.

Mulugeta writes with the undeniable moral authority of someone who endured the siege of Mekelle, yet his perspective is deeply shaped by his long-standing estrangement from the TPLF leadership since 2001 and his ongoing hostility toward post-Meles political directions. His critiques align with a circle of exiles—Tsadkan, Siye Abreha, Gen. Abebe Teklehaymanot—who have long criticized the TPLF and, after Pretoria, aligned with the federal government.

These alignments shape their reading of the November 2022 Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA). Both portray Pretoria, an asymmetric agreement, as a return to peace while blaming the TPLF for failing to reform or democratize. Mulugeta writes that “Tigray’s own leaders have turned a truce into a defeat… Again, it squandered the opportunity.”

This overlooks how the agreement was structured. Pretoria imposed immediate obligations on Tigray, including disarmament and TDF dissolution, while federal commitments—territorial restoration, reconstruction, political dialogue, withdrawal of Eritrean forces—were left open-ended.

The federal government used this leeway to continue the siege—blocking humanitarian aid, withholding reconstruction funds, manipulating regional finances to enforce political compliance, and maintaining occupation of Western Tigray. Judging Tigray’s governance as if conditions were normal confuses coercion with voluntary discretion.

Victim Blaming

The most consequential flaw is shifting moral and analytical responsibility from perpetrators to those resisting.

First, it sanctifies perpetrators’ pretexts. De Waal cites the September 2020 regional election—declared illegal by Addis Ababa—and the reappointment of former intelligence chief Getachew Assefa as “provocations” making war inevitable.

Treating these actions as root causes risks turning political triggers into justifications for genocide, obscuring the deeper structural hostility³. It mirrors the Ethiopian government’s narrative: Tigray held an election; war followed; atrocities ensued. Genocide and systematic crimes are not caused by electoral calendars or appointments.

Mulugeta claims that during the 2021 military reversal, “the people of Tigray organized a resistance… The TPLF followed the people. The victory…was a people’s victory.” De Waal similarly argues that “the people saved the party.” While rhetorically compelling, this downplays the organizational structures that enabled sustained military survival.

The bravery of farmers, students, and youth volunteers was vital, but without decades of institutional backbone—cadre networks, veteran fighters, command experience, and coordination—the resistance would have been scattered and tragic. The TDF was not a spontaneous militia. It was a rapidly organized army of special police, former ENDF soldiers, veterans, and civilian volunteers coordinated by experienced commanders.

This clarifies the partnership between popular mobilization and institutional memory; both were essential.

Most troubling, the narrative revives a pattern suggesting victims could have avoided catastrophe by behaving more “reasonably.” Greater restraint—accepting federal ultimatums, postponing elections, sidelining hardline leaders—might have spared Tigray the worst.

This framework places responsibility on victims, normalizing aggressors’ red lines while portraying self-defense as reckless. As Frantz Fanon observed, such reasoning casts the resisting population as dangerous and compliant intermediaries as wise. The result is not an explanation of violence, but a moral lesson for the victims.

The Devil’s Due

Examined outside hindsight and victim-blaming, charges against the TPLF reveal tragic dilemmas under near-impossible constraints.

Critics note severe governance failures, corruption, and shadow economies ^{4 5} in postwar Tigray. Assigning these primarily to Debretsion’s leadership mistakes consequence for origin. The TPLF, as Tigray’s main resistance organ, was itself targeted⁶. Mid-level bureaucracy was destroyed through killing, displacement, or imprisonment. Financial resources were frozen. Institutional continuity was shattered. The social contract was violently dismantled.

Expecting orderly governance to emerge from such devastation misunderstands genocidal destruction. Current dysfunctions reflect predictable decay of a society under mass trauma and external pressure. Survival fosters illicit or informal economies; the remarkable fact is the endurance of social cohesion and public trust.

Yet when we move beyond the lens of retrospective blame, the TPLF’s conduct after the Pretoria Agreement reveals a more complex and deliberate strategic pattern. The leadership faced intense pressure—and enticing incentives—to join Abiy Ahmed’s federal campaign against Amhara Fano in 2023.

While compliance might have offered short-term tactical advantages, particularly regarding Western Tigray, it would have morally compromised the region, recasting the war as an ethnic proxy conflict and leaving Tigray’s fate in the hands of Addis Ababa.

Refusing participation reflected a longer strategy: preserving autonomy, avoiding instrumentalization, and maintaining legitimacy. Combined with cautious diplomacy with neighbors to reduce isolation, this shows constrained decision-making, adaptation, and strategic restraint under existential pressure.

The Right Questions

De Waal, Mulugeta, and their followers raise important points about the risks of closed decision-making and the heavy burdens of leadership. Yet they ask the wrong question: “How could Tigray’s leaders have better avoided or survived a genocide?” Framing the problem this way inevitably leads to the wrong conclusion—that the victims’ compliance, rather than the perpetrators’ actions, should be the measure of judgment.

A rigorous analysis must start with: “How was this genocide planned, mobilized, and executed? Why did a sovereign state allow a hostile army to slaughter its citizens? Why did the international rules-based order fail to prevent or punish these acts?”

Answering requires focusing on perpetrators—their intent, capabilities, and enabling structures—while recognizing constraints on those under siege and avoiding hindsight’s clarity. Analysts must remain aware of frameworks that subtly shift responsibility from annihilators to the resisting.

Until this shift occurs, understanding of the Tigray war remains incomplete. Even the most critical commentary risks normalizing its darkest truth: in the face of calculated extermination, survival itself is tragic, and judging those who endure is never simple or obvious.

1 Assertions that the TPLF leadership miscalculated Eritrean involvement overlook how international perceptions were shaped by coordinated misinformation from Addis Ababa and Asmara. Diplomatic signaling around the 2018 peace agreement emphasized a transactional settlement—granting Eritrea Badme and Ethiopia access to Assab—while portraying Tigrayan opposition as obstructionist (Tesfa, Van Reisen, and Smits 2024). This framing reinforced expectations that Eritrean engagement would remain limited, even as Eritrean forces penetrated deep into Tigray—a reality formally acknowledged only in December 2020, when the U.S. described it as a “grave development.”

2 Similarly, there was a collective misreading of the Ethiopian National Defense Force’s role in Abiy’s genocidal campaign. In The Abiy Project (pp. 278), Getachew Reda—who has since positioned himself as a critic of what he now calls strategic miscalculations—expressed the same expectation shortly before the war, asserting that “the army would simply refuse to do Abiy’s bidding.” The failure to foresee the military’s full co-option, therefore, was not an isolated error of Debretsion or the current TPLF leadership, but a shared misjudgment.

3 Vaughan, in Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War, shows that calls for TPLF conciliation ignore a context shaped by ethnicized state propaganda, alliances with anti-federalist forces, and Abiy’s quasi-imperial vision—factors that made incorporation into the Prosperity Party unacceptable to the TPLF and many Tigrayans committed to self-determination.

4 Tom Gardner notes, in The Abiy Project p. 315, that Tigrayan leaders during the war relied on gold to procure armaments.

5 An insider source cited in The Reporter notes that the Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) had refused to supply gold to the central bank until wartime budgets owed to Tigray are disbursed. According to the source, the TIA lacks alternative revenue streams, while military commanders rely on gold revenues to sustain the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), creating resistance to transferring gold to federal authorities

6 Throughout the war, Tigrayan opposition parties made a deliberate strategic choice: to preserve their legal status by formally distancing themselves from the armed resistance. Only the TPLF committed itself openly and institutionally to the military struggle, and it alone absorbed the full punitive response of the federal state. No opposition party faced comparable consequences. It indicated precisely whom the federal government regarded as the principal threat capable of organizing and sustaining Tigrayan resistance. Following the Pretoria Agreement, this distinction became even clearer. Opposition parties were swiftly granted recognition by the National Election Board of Ethiopia after publicly disavowing any prior involvement in the TPLF-led armed struggle. The TPLF, by contrast, remained in legal and political limbo.

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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Main photo: Victims of the Mahibere Dego massacre being escorted by Ethiopian soldiers to the site of their execution, January 2021. Source: Social media.

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