Peter I Augustus
Banned
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.
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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