Tigray Archives

Tigray Orthodox Church — *^{Debre Selam Kidist Selassie Church before and after the War}*

The ongoing war in Tigray, the cradle of Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Christianity, might lead into yet another split of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church (EtOTC), this time into an Amhara-based Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church and a Tigray-based Orthodox Tewahdo Church, weakening further the second largest Orthodox Church after Russia and the largest church of the Oriental family. The first split of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church took place in 1994, when the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahdo Church (ErOTC) was granted autocephaly by the late Pope Shenouda III following Eritrean independence from Ethiopia on May 24, 1993 (Stéphan, Bonacci, & Persoon, 2014). If Tigray opts for secession from Ethiopia and establishes its own independent nation-state like the Eritreans, then Alexandria has no option but to grant Tigray Orthodox Tewahdo Church (TOTC) autocephaly. Both options, autocephaly or continuation as part of the Ethiopian Synod, entail immense challenges.

Ironically, the current Ethiopian crisis started to surface in April 2018, when Abiy Ahmed Ali became Prime Minister[1] of the second most populous African country after Nigeria. Immediately after Abiy Ahmed ascended to power, he released all political prisoners and granted amnesty to all disgruntled exiles to come back to Ethiopia, including opposition groups and their media outlets who were stationed in Europe and the United States. Some of these Ethiopian opposition groups had their army in neighboring Eritrea. After Abiy Ahmed and the Eritrean President, Isaias Afwerki, signed a peace agreement in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, on July 9, 2018, eight rebel groups returned to Ethiopia. Furthermore, Ahmed went all the way to the United States to convince Patriarch Abune Merkorios (an Amhara) and his synod to return home after 27 years in exile and reconcile with the Ethiopian Synod under Patriarch Abune Mathias. All these earned Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize of 2019. However, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which had dominated Ethiopia for the last 27 years, felt alienated by the velocity of transformations.

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Since the eruption of hostilities in November 2020 between federal and regional forces in Tigray, Ethiopia’s northern state bordering Eritrea, two major dimensions of the crisis have been at odds with each other. There is the armed conflict and its immeasurable human cost and trauma, and there is the reporting on this conflict. I have witnessed the arguments back and forth from Ethiopians outside Ethiopia, my primary lens of observation, that focus on who is at fault, whose agenda the reporting fulfills, and scrutiny over the extent and impact of the humanitarian conditions on the ground. The story about the story has taken precedence over the undeniable fact that people are suffering and dying and side-steps the heart of the issue: we are watching a country at war with itself.

As an Ethiopian-American, I felt at times mentally and emotionally paralyzed. It is a complicated story of political fragmentation, with seemingly endless competing narratives based on scattered information. I reached a personal impasse where offering coherent interpretation and analysis felt an impossibility. The recent news of a ceasefire only offers temporary relief for the innocent and vulnerable and more fodder for conflicting narratives that prevent clear heads out of this conflict.

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