‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’

Juvenal

To die nobly is to perish ‘In a grand or impressive manner.’1

Civilisations, throughout the ages, have constructed notions of ‘honourable death’, which has elevated those who die for high ideals, with honour. Although enacted in varying forms, the core ideal was able to transverse continental boundaries and can be found in a diverse range of cultures. Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote, ‘How can man better die than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’ And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest and for the wife who nurses his baby at her breast?’ The Victorian baron, sitting on the imperial Supreme Council of India, perhaps reflected on the demise of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British Raj, as British guns echoed through the sub-continent and Indians perished in their thousands. Rather than sail home in dishonourable retreat, from the Mad Mahdi who arrived with fifty thousand Mahdist troops, Charles Gordon chose to remain and face overwhelming odds. ‘Better a ball in the brain than to flicker out unheeded’, uttered Gordon of Khartoum nobly, before then having his head ignobly dislodged and placed upon a spike by the Muslim conquerors.

During the First Opium War, the Qing Army suffered an embarrassing defeat against a small British force of two thousand men, in which Chinese soldiers ‘gazed around in stupid and motionless amazement’ as British guns rang. When Zhenhai fell and the British guns fell silent, Governor-General Yuqian did what honour and tradition demanded, ending his own life with a dose of poison after unsuccessfully attempting to drown himself in shame. The Historian, Julia Lovell, wrote ‘In death as, in life, Yuqian was the ideal Confucian warrior super-hero: killing himself rather than submitting to his enemies.’ If the act itself is not sufficiently imbued with honour, the lofty principles which manifest in suicide are axiomatically infused with nobility.

Similarly, in the ancient Greco-Roman world, suicide could be considered a noble end to one’s life. Shakespeare, immortalising the most famous suicides, placed in the mouth of a Cleopatra forced to bow before Roman power, ‘Rather a ditch in Egypt. Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud lay me stark naked.’ Her Roman lover, Mark Anthony, militarily encircled and politically outmanoeuvred by Octavius Caesar, accepting death as a price for defeat pleaded ‘Let him that loves me strike me dead,’ in Shakespeare’s magus opus. To die at one’s own hand then, instead of that of another, was considered a noble end. To be in control of your own fate, to remain unconquered by enemies, after valiantly resisting their overwhelming force has been an acceptable form of death for millennia. A nobility can evidently be found in varying forms of dying, when accompanied by lofty ideals, high emotion or national honour.

“The Death of Cleopatra,” painted in 1892 by Reginald Arthur

National honour and lofty ideals certainly pervaded the mind of Emperor Menelik II, Ethiopian King of Kings, when he decided that the time had arrived to sound the war drums in 1895. His rases journeyed to the new capital Addis Ababa, the ‘New Flower’, to answer the call. ‘Assemble the army, beat the drum’ Menelik commanded as the Italians, seeking colonial acquisitions, under the leadership of Oreste Baratieri sought to bring the emperor back to Rome in a cage, rekindling the days of yore beneath the Caesars. Baratieri held the province of Tigre, pushing forward from Italian Somaliland, seeking to inflict a fateful blow upon the ancient empire.

Emperor Menelik and Empress Taitu led seventy thousand Ethiopian soldiers toward the invader and on the 1st  March 1896, the famed Battle of Adwa took place. The Italian performance on the battlefield was a disaster, the Ethiopian forces winning a spectacular victory with the emperor’s magnolious coup de main. Barartieri’s telegram to Rome, following the battle, informed the world that European soldiers fled the battlefield, from their African opponents, ‘as if mad’, dispensing with their rifles to ‘avoid emasculation’. When the smoke cleared and the Ethiopian exclamations ceased, over four thousand Italians were dead, two thousand had been taken prisoner, and over seven thousand native Italian imperial servants had been slain.

Yet, the Ethiopian army had paid a heavy price for a stunning victory. The face of Empress Taitu, upon surveying the seven thousand dead imperial soldiers, ‘usually so luminous, was now dark with tears’. Those Ethiopians who perished did so for national honour, the lofty ideal of a free Ethiopia and high emotion was displayed by the indomitable empress at this grand display of honourable death. In an age that considered Africa beneath global standards of humanity, those Ethiopians who fought and died on the battlefield of Adwa showed themselves to be members of an ancient fraternity that transcends national boundaries.

Emperor Menelik II

When the Ethiopian Government declared war on the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), on the 3rd November 2020, there was lofty talk emanating from the prime minister, Mr Ali. “Our defence forces … have been ordered to carry out their mission to save the country,” Mr Ali informed the citizens of the old nation, after an attack by regional Tigray forces on Federal Troops. The incident had resulted in the death of “several martyrs”, forcing Mr Ali to declare that “The final point of the red line has been crossed. Force is being used as the last measure to save the people and the country.”1 High ideals uttered by a man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 ‘‘for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.’’1 Yet, almost two years into the civil conflict, we can conclude that Mr Ali has presided over an unforgivable debacle which has saved neither the people, nor the country.

Two million people, at a minimum, have been displaced from their homes, five hundred thousand have died from either violence or hunger, and the UN has declared that 90% of the population of Tigray is at risk of starvation.1 Hundreds of thousands of unregistered Ethiopians have crossed the border into neighbouring Sudan and Eretria. Sexual violence, a reprehensible mainstay of African culture, has unsurprisingly been weaponised and used with impunity by both sides in the war. According to the UN, ‘About half a million children are estimated to be lacking food in Tigray, including more than 115,000 severely malnourished.’1 According to Human Rights Watch (HRW) 2.3 million Ethiopians are ‘in need of assistance.’1

In Africa, high ideals are unveiled as repugnant lies overnight and even death is deprived of honour.

Abiy Ahmed Ali with smiling cronies

This article does not intend to examine the full extent of the civil conflict, or its political origins, which are covered extensively elsewhere. For the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to list the chapter headings of the UN Joint Investigation into Alleged Violations of International Human Rights, Humanitarian and Refugee Law Committed by all Parties to the Conflict in the Tigray Region of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.1 Any not well acquainted with the conflict, seeking clarity, can surely receive it from the content page alone, introducing the reader to a perverse world of base savagery, human suffering and violations of a plethora of international laws:

Attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and other protected persons and objects (7 pages)Unlawful or extra-judicial killings and executions (3 pages)Torture and other forms of ill-treatment (4 pages)Arbitrary detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances (4 pages)Sexual and gender-based violence (7 pages)Refugees (4 Pages)Forced displacement of the civilian population (4 pages)Internally displaced persons (3 Pages)Restrictions on freedom of movement (4 pages)Freedom of expression and access to information (4 pages)Pillage, looting and destruction of property (3)Denial of access to human relief (4 pages)Economic, cultural and social rights (5 pages)Children (3 pages)Older persons and persons with disabilities (2 pages)

The list reads as chapters for an academic book, investigating warfare in the ancient world, the historical work encompassing the campaigns Babylon, Mesopotamia, Persian, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome, which occurred before the birth of Christ. One would expect to find pages enlivened by early civilisations, despotic emperors, ancient cities, chariots upon the battlefield, the famous marching phalanx, horseman wielding bronze swords, sandaled soldiers thrusting spears and populations at the mercy of lawless armies. Alas, instead of the battlefields of Hellas or Asia Minor, the reader of the report, will find themself transported from the cotemporary world to Africa, where time itself is defied and the blundering generals conduct warfare as if lodged in a sadistic trance somewhere between 3BC and the Battle of Actium. With disdain for life a prerequisite to become an African leader, it is little wonder that the UN, in using an alphabetical sequence for the chapters of the report, was forced to use fifty-three percent of the alphabet when listing the chapters of woe.

Returning to Mr Ali, the responsibility for the list above lies solely with the prime minister. Conducting the war as a deranged imposter in Menelik’s old clothes, believing himself an Ethiopian monarch of old, presiding over life and death across all Ethiopia, Mr Ali is fully immersed in age of African bloodletting. A year into the war, with a regional political party, exposing the fragility of the federal governments armed forces, the TPFL were advancing on the capital itself. Authorities in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa pronounced an edict from the deranged emperor. ‘‘All residents must be organised by blocks and neighbourhoods to protect peace and security in their home area in coordination with security forces, who will coordinate activities with community police and law enforcers,”1 commanded an imperial servant. Mr Ali, feeling his throne threatened demanded that ordinary people, ‘‘all sections of society’’ with or without military training or experience, take up arms and died happily for their emperor.

Perhaps haunted by the ghost of an emperor that majestically defeated Italian forces at Battle of Adwa, Mr Ali, residing in The Menelik Palace, summoned the divine right of monarchs to demand the entire population die for royal folly. None was to be exempt. The quasi-imperial servant returned hurriedly to present another farcical edict, “There will be recruitment and organising of the city’s youth to work in coordination with security forces to protect peace and security in their area,”1 it was grotesquely announced. The deranged emperor, with his power at stake, summoned his inner emperor, and from his throne forced children to the frontlines of a civil war to preserve his own position. The call for Vladimir Putin to face a trail for war crimes echo across the globe. Yet, the Russian President has summoned no ‘youths’ to his army, such an act would be unthinkable to even Europe’s bête noire. What is unacceptable globally is accepted gleefully in Africa.

‘Many children were killed or injured in the hostilities or subjected to sexual violence.’ The report states, concluding that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that these are violations and abuses of international human rights law, some of which directly attributable to the parties to the conflict.’1 The investigation into the conflict, compiled in the report, concluded three months before Mr Ali summoned mothers from their homes and children from their cots to fight his war. What then can be reasonably believed now that Mr Ali has been unveiled as deranged?

While men, women and children perish upon the battlefield, those who attempt to flee are subjected to sexual violence and for those who remain the spectre of famine stalks the land and death by starvation awaits. The World Food Programme announced that 9.4 million Ethiopians face hunger and ‘‘more than 80 percent (7.8 million) of them are behind battle lines.”1 Yet, Mr Ali, undeterred by the suffering of his imperial subjects, stated “we won’t give in until we bury the enemy,” with a monarchical flick of the wrist. With another piece of anachronistic theatre, he announced that he would be leading the embattled army of sandaled soldiers, housewives and children from the battlefield itself. “Those who want to be among the Ethiopian children who will be hailed by history,’’ Mr Ali stated raved, ‘‘rise up for your country today. Let’s meet at the battlefront.”1

It takes a special kind of insanity to force children to fight in a war in the twenty-first century, advertise that fact and believe that somehow posterity will hail the shameless Ethiopian civil conflict as a great historical occurrence. ‘‘Never, till now, I think’’, Thomas Carlyle mused in the nineteenth century, ‘‘did the sun look down on such a jumble of human nonsense.’’ The jumble of nonsense the African sun is forced to down upon, two centuries later, surpasses any annus horribilis the nineteenth century could conjure. One can only wonder with shame what Victorian commentators would make of a prime minister upon a battlefield, schoolgirls embellishing a national army, and soldiers of the army engaging in mass acts of rape on the national population.

The United Nations and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report investigated the preferred crime of sexual violence on the populace. The Ebony Muse has highlighted this nefarious proclivity continually, the Ethiopian conflict has again brought to light the use of sexual violence against black women, children and men. ‘Nearly half of the survivors that the JIT interviewed were survivors of gang rape.’1 The report accuses both sides of Gender Based Violence (GBV), including the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Those fleeing have been left at the mercy of armed soldiers, and citizens made soldiers by the deranged emperor, in a land where the enforcement of the law is a distant memory. ‘The evidence collated by the UN shows some to have been deliberately infected with HIV. Many are pregnant.’1 This topic needs no embellishment, the conclusion reached in the report will suffice, ‘Victims reported being subjected to rape, including the penetration of the vagina with foreign objects. Given the stigma and trauma attached to sexual violence, the JIT believes that the prevalence of rape was likely much higher than that documented by the JIT. Based on the information available to it, there are reasonable grounds to believe that violations of international human rights and humanitarian law related to sexual violence, including rape, have been committed by all parties to the conflict and require further investigation. Some of these may further constitute war crimes and, in view of their widespread and systematic nature, crimes against humanity.’1

If all sides are complicit, then Mr Ali must take ultimate responsibility as prime minister. The deranged emperor has presided over this pitiful war, as only a blundering general could, leading to one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. After almost two years, an estimated half a million Ethiopians have died, 850,00, 6.8 million are in need of humanitarian assistance,1 4.4 million are facing water shortages, and drought now stalks the land threatening an untold number with death from starvation.

The historical tradition of honourable death does not in any way exult the fate of those starve to death, die of thirst or rape. If to die nobly if to die impressively, it is clear that nobility has long deserted old Ethiopia, for each death in this war has been enshrouded in ignominy. Mr Ali was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the olive branch held out to Eritrea, the old province from which Batatieri made his move, a nation that has played a role in the repulsive acts of war.1 Each of Mr Ali’s political decisions must now be viewed through enlightened lenses. Could it be that that the deranged emperor made peace with Eretria knowing well he would use their malevolent army to murder, abuse and rape his own population and in return received a noble peace prize? The award has not been so debased since it was scandalously handed to militarist Obama. Like Charles I of England, the deranged emperor debased his office with an invitation to foreign forces with malefic intent; unlike England, Ethiopia has no Cromwell to relieve the country, or continent, of tyranny with a swift single stroke. And thus, we would do well to survey the field of black leaders and ask uneasily who will guard us from this mass of blundering generals. For it seems to Negrodom that ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here’.

Abiy Ahmed Ali The ‘Deranged Emperor’

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