Over the previous four years, the multiethnic Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition government, in which Abiy had been a senior official, had been waging a brutal crackdown on the young demonstrators defying its autocratic rule.
Prime minister Abiy’s liberal democratic rhetoric; his admission that the EPRDF’s violence could be likened to terrorism; his appointment of a gender-equal cabinet and a respected elder stateswoman, Sahle-Work Zewde, as president; his apparent pragmatism – all played marvellously with western audiences.
But in the absence of firm direction from Washington during the Trump years – the then national security adviser, John Bolton, told me he doubted the president had even read his own administration’s Africa strategy – the embassy in Addis Ababa was given a free hand to cultivate Abiy as it saw fit.
Jon Lee Anderson, a reporter for the New Yorker who was one of only two foreign journalists to be granted a proper interview with the prime minister in these years, would later be struck by how Abiy became most animated when talking about the US and the time he had spent there, on and off, in the early 2010s, when his wife and children had moved to Denver.
The economic agenda that Abiy announced shortly after taking office proposed that the government would open state-owned telecoms, electricity and logistics, as well as the highly profitable national airline, to foreign investors for the first time.
In the weeks that followed Abiy’s ascent, such disputes led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands in southern Oromia – comparable figures to those in Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis a year earlier, which had attracted a global outcry and an investigation by the international criminal court (ICC).
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