What Can a Coalition Born of Fear Actually Deliver?

These forces did not come together because they discovered a shared national purpose. They came together because they had been beaten separately, and because none of them could take the centre alone. The name they chose 'survival' is honest in one sense only. It is their own survival as armed projects. The country and the public were placed second.

Look at who is standing in the same photograph. These are not partners with the same idea of Ethiopia. They are exclusionary organizations that have spent years hiding behind ethnicity, cursing one another, and treating one another as enemies. The poison did not leave them. They coated it with honey and borrowed the oldest line in politics: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The hypocrisy is not a side detail. It is the alliance. Fano fought with the national army against the TPLF in the 2020–22 war a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. OLA and Fano have accused each other of killing civilians. They still have competing claims over land. Within a day of the announcement, even the ONLF name on the list split in public: one statement joining, another denying. An alliance that has not persuaded itself is now asking the public to believe it will persuade a nation.

Why start a war you can not win?

The sequence after the announcement was not defensive. The TPLF had already discarded the Pretoria interim arrangement and installed its own administration in Tigray. Then it joined this coalition. Then Tigrayan forces seized federally controlled airports in Mekelle, Aksum and Shire. Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights. Fighting opened on the Tigray–Amhara and Tigray–Afar borders, with Tigrayan units and Fano operating in the same theatres. Announce a project to take the state. Seize the airports. Push the front outward. That is how a war is started.

Starting it does not mean they can win it. Everybody watching the last northern war already knows the ending if the method is the same. In late 2021, Tigrayan forces came within roughly 200 kilometres of Addis Ababa. They did not take the capital. Air power turned the columns around. That toolkit is larger now, not smaller. Drones can find a convoy. You can not overthrow the goverment in three weeks. A government that can see a column from the sky is not the government of 1991, and this is not a march that ends with a palace and a new flag.

Even the fantasy version falls apart. There is no unified command worth the name, no shared map of the country after “victory,” and no answer to the only military question that matters inside a coalition of former enemies: whose soldiers go first? If one group is spent to save another, the alliance splits on the road. If they somehow reached the centre, the next war would be among themselves. By every serious measure cohesion, air power, a common programme, public trust they cannot finish what they have opened.

So why open it?

Power. Because a war they cannot win can still be useful to them. Not to the public. To them. An alliance that does not trust itself does not need a victory. It needs leverage. It needs to look large enough to bargain, to stay armed, to keep its leaders relevant, and to trade other people’s lives for a seat at a table it could not earn at the ballot.

“Let us overthrow the government together; the affairs of the country and the people can be discussed after victory.” That sentence is the entire programme. There is no programme after that sentence. A transitional government promised by men who do not trust one another is not a settlement. It is a postponement. When the common enemy is gone, the old hatreds return.

Casualties will be counted. They always are. The last time this method was tried, the graves were already full and the constitutional questions were still unanswered. What this coalition can actually deliver is therefore not a new Ethiopia. It is irreplaceable harm to the country and the people, a wider front, and a bargaining chip for power-hungry organizations that put themselves first and called it survival.

That is the foundation of their struggle. Not the law. Not the public. The fear of men who could not win alone, and who have now agreed to gamble the country so they might matter together. A coalition born of fear can deliver fear. It cannot deliver a country.

Peace to Ethiopia!