Stirring Another Man’s Stew

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Stirring Another Man’s Stew
The Ethiopian Civil War and the “Ethiopian Miracle” 1974-present
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“A man should not stir another man’s simmering stew while his own stew is burning.”
-Ethiopian proverb

Preface

The first time is, for anything, the hardest, so the saying goes. This, is my first timeline, but here I go regardless.

The Ethiopian Civil War, as it was in OTL, is not a particularly well documented conflict, perhaps due to the fact of the general unpleasantness of the major players involved. It is especially hard to find information of the war between the end of Mengistu Hailemariam’s Red Terror in the late 1970’s and the rather sudden rise of the Tigrayan and Eritrean People’s Liberation Fronts. Indeed, for a great time Wikipedia’s article on the topic was no longer than one sentence, yet this was a time that changed the course of Ethiopian and regional society, indeed, history, irreversibly.

I have had to conduct a great deal of research, both online and in print, on this topic, and yet what I have found give me a good idea of events at best and a vague impression at worse, or yet, a feeling that the whole idea is just too unlikely. The fact that this timeline will focus on the efforts of an otherwise obscure resistant movement, and later, obscure statistics will mean that this timeline will contain a great deal of speculation and at times pure fiction. I have tried my best to make observations of OTL events and occurrences and tried to base my inventions on those, and I feel the general course that the war took in reality lends itself to a relative degree of randomness, if there’s no better way to put it.

Please, don’t hesitate to point out inaccuracies or implausiblities (I made that word up) in my writing, especially as I start to update on the various butterflies that have occurred in the timeline.

Just do me one favor. Would you mind posting, even if it is to say “this positively sucks.” And now, may I present to you… Stirring Another Man’s Stew.

 
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Prologue
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From Capital Weekly [1]

2 August 2010
Opinion: A request that’s no more or less
Ermias Tadesse

Later this week (at least the week this magazine says it’s from), Ethiopia will celebrate 25 years of freedom and democracy, prosperity and the triumph of tradition and rule of law, and so forth. We- or those soldiers lucky enough to participate in the annual show of our ever increasing military strength- also take the time to remember who exactly we triumphed over by stomping over a generic, hammer-and-sickle emblazoned red flag on the Mangad Mengist. If I sound somewhat cynical about the whole thing, it’s because I am, albeit not one of those radical types who is cynical about the whole system. I’m your run-of-the-mill, Amharic-speaking, Injera-eating, Allah-worshiping (any problem with that?) patriotic Ethiopian.

So why am I so fed up? I’ll tell you why. For a younger person like me, who was born while the Civil War was in full swing, I was born in an already unpleasant country that was becoming even more so by the day. Heck, I nearly joined the one million who died during the 1983 Red Famine. Yet when I was three, something wonderful happened. I, a naïve South Shewan toddler, didn’t quite know what happened, but even at that that age I knew it was something magnificent. A grand old fatherly looking man was now appearing a great deal on television and was speaking on the radio, and another whole corps of greying men that were perpetually surrounding him. I welcomed their replacement of the shouting, frantic man with the mustache in the blue suit that had preceded them.

Over time I realized that these men all had names, and that the shouting man was Mengistu Hailemariam, who was to be perpetually detested and reviled, the grandfatherly man was the rightful Emperor, Amha Selassie I, who was to be loved and praised (only according to his merits, our teachers added rather unconvincingly), and the greying men were his government, who we were to respect as fighters who fought for our country (I didn’t know exactly how at the time) but soon went away and whose successors we could think anything about.

Anyone who lived during those days, from the meanest baby to the most isolated Methuselah could tell those were days of great change, and while we weren’t certain, we guessed there were good. A great deal of money, we were told, was pouring into our country and being put to good use. I didn’t understand how, but I did know the grey-haired men were behind my father receiving a great deal of money to build a three-story store in Ziway. Soon, every building was 4 stories tall, Highway 6 (soon renamed Ashānāfinat Godana- that’s Victory Avenue for you non-natives), our school had strange machines that made images appear many times larger than they were on walls, we owned an automobile, and a strange, long, machine that shared the name of, but had nothing to do with, the contraption known as a train promised to take us to Addis Abeba in three hours.

Much yet has changed since then, and much more will probably change from now, but I have one request for our nation. Today politicians, particularly those to the right-of-centre, bemoan how little our young people know of their history (which is many times more most of their European peers do), how clueless they are of tradition (ditto),and how ignorant they are about our country’s central place throughout time (which is greatly exaggerated.)

The more xenophobic ones rant to worrying mothers and outraged fathers about what sordid things their son is doing to that ferenji Australian girl who he seems to be innocently talking to all the time at the Massawa beach (which is not exactly the best place to enforce moral rigidity). It is these politicians who do not understand.

It is these politicians who use the events of the Civil War to impose their agenda, whatever that happens to be, upon the people of Ethiopia, particularly its young, who they see as a threat to the status quo- you cannot deny that there was little fundamental difference in the governments of Bulcha, Tamirat, and Hailu. It is instead the young people who carry on the legacy of the Teranafit- freedom and personal liberty. Something to think about this weekend.
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[1] An OTL magazine, founded after the POD but likely to have been founded anyways.

 
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Please, don’t hesitate to point out inaccuracies or implausiblities (I made that word up) in my writing, especially as I start to update on the various butterflies that have occurred in the timeline.
Hmm... wouldn't 'implausibilities? be a likelier modification?

It seems we now know the name of the 'otherwise obscure resistant movement'*... Teranafit, eh?
* I thought that would have been resistance movement, but I might be mistaken
 
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