Tesfaye Demmellash
In the space of just a year and a half, the Fanno armed rebellion against a predatory, invasive Oromo state is close to freeing Ethiopia’s Amhara region from the regime’s tenuous yet destructive and deadly grip.
An evident and credible existential threat to the Amhara people, whose support has been vital for the resistance, and the opportunity to bring about Ethiopia’s fundamental political change have fueled the Fanno movement’s phenomenal growth and development.
Now what? Would its leaders and planners take the historic opportunity and transition the armed movement into a transformative political force, or are they, perhaps, more inclined to stand off and “negotiate” their way into state power, utilizing military success as a bargaining chip?
The struggle must enter a broader, more strategic engagement space to advance further on the battlefield and beyond. Yet, politically addressing the structural threat to Amhara’s existence and Ethiopia remains challenging in organized thought and practice. Recent tensions and clashes within and around the Fanno regional forces are a symptom of the difficulty.
At the bottom, the national and political conditions under which the forces have taken shape and gained success in battle are chaotic, essentially formless, and unwieldy. As such, they have not only been an objective constraint on the Fanno movement’s direction and advancement but also a drag on developing its organizational cohesion and enhancing its agentic integrity and power.
So, suppose Fanno is to remain true to its declared strategic intention of dismantling the decades-old, chronically unstable tribal state, which poses a continuing existential threat to the Amhara people and Ethiopia.
In that case, the Amhara Fanno forces must pursue the fundamental change they seek from the inside out, moving from their agency’s inner space to the outer reaches of Ethiopian political transformation.
In this way, the Fanno movement looks back on itself based on a sound analytical grasp and a practical understanding of how far it has come in the fight against the crisis-ridden ethnic regime, meeting its internal challenges decisively and embarking on the road ahead, reshaping the struggle accordingly.
In moving forward along these lines, Fanno faces a pivotal challenge. Namely, overcoming fragmental tendencies within and among its regional ranks and shaping up its integral political agency as a critical first step in projecting the power of form creation and reversing the chaotic state of the Ethiopian nation.
The National Disorder to Overcome
Nothing better exemplifies the post-revolutionary era in Ethiopia than the shattering of national polity, culture, economy, and society. To the reigns of the TPLF and OLF mainly, the Ethiopian nation-state has been little more than a target of hostile ethnic take-over and predation, a storehouse of material, cultural, and institutional resources that Tigre and Oromo tribalists raid.
Not limited to politics, the resulting chaos has engulfed every other sector of Ethiopian society, including the state, the economy, the military, and educational and religious institutions. Far from exercising the power of form innovation and maintaining unity and stability, the Abiy regime has become a chief perpetrator of the disorder, a willful agent of ethnic division, conflict, and war in the country.
So, the Fanno forces operate in a chaotic national context deprived of its integrity and solidarity, one in which insular ethnic fragments serve to exile the Ethiopian whole to the life of its tribal parts and localities, marginalizing its center.
It is an ill-defined, variegated, and confusing context in which unscrupulous, shifty governmental and non-governmental actors, including diasporic elements and regional forces in the Horn of Africa, collude and collide. They utilize various means, including public power and institutions, social media, propaganda, banditry, extortion, and financial support from the diaspora. State and non-state actors, mainly Oromos, also engage in the all-too-common summary execution of innocents and other terrorist and criminal behaviors.
The line between the Abiy-led Oromo regime and the forces arrayed against it, essentially Fannos (including pretenders), is often blurred since the rebellion is not entirely free from the regime’s self-serving insinuation and manipulation. Yet the state, whose assertive, controlling acts can look, and often are, destructive and deadly, is nothing but a piled-up, rickety assemblage.
It is a shaky structure made up of undisciplined, marauding military units, often commanded by inept generals given to corruption, murderous proxy Oromo militia, and shamelessly servile Amhara political, bureaucratic, and ‘intellectual’ strata all too eager to collaborate with the tribal enemy.
Fanno freedom fighters thus confront a perverse, destabilizing form of “rule” presided over by the party of “Oromia,” often assisted by remnants of a treacherous, die-hard Woyane regional rogue regime inimical to the Amhara people and Ethiopian unity. The fighters contend with a destructive domination that is part and parcel of an internally gutted Ethiopian nation.
Abiy and the ruling clique around him, lacking in moral sensibility and intellectually fraudulent, thus “lead” an Ethiopia consumed by normlessness, a historic nation in profound socio-political disorder brutalized in its integrity and unity. Barely hanging on to power, the Abiy regime sits precariously astride resistant armed Amhara patriotic forces waging a heroic fight for existence, which it can neither entirely coopt nor suppress militarily.
The Fanno Rationale: Practice and Possibility
Fighters and supporters often see the Fanno movement as an armed struggle for survival, an immediate, critical existential fight for Amhara and Ethiopian salvation in which politics is sometimes regarded as a “luxury,” something extra.
I share the perception, but we may note that three distinct, seemingly divergent strands or orientations must interweave in a complex whole within the movement. Fanno comes into its own with a definite architectonic of thought and action, an animate political form or network more suitable for a broader transformative engagement.
A noteworthy thread in the movement is citizen soldiers’ practice of direct, tactical combat on the battlefield, utilizing the simple classical form of Fanno guerrilla warfare. Its priority and prevalence are born of the intense urgency of the need to save the Amhara people from the tribal regime’s genocidal attacks and from profound anxiety about the fate of Ethiopia under that violent regime.
Fanno warfare, with its righteous cause and clarity of purpose, has both the familiarity of a received tradition and the simplicity of present practice accessible to the Amhara people. It signifies a faithfulness to principle without ideological complexity, though loyalty is an ongoing achievement, not given once and for all.
So, Amhara citizen-soldiers assume specific attitudes, motivations, and dispositions for combat distinctively based on neither a complex of ideas nor an organized political program but on a foundation of an enduring cultural-historical practice that cuts across generations.
Fanno’s combat practicality may be open to innovative thought and political direction, linking broader, strategic goals to more immediate existential problems and concerns. However, individual leaders or groups cannot reduce the practice to their specific interests and motives or personal ambitions and partisan plans and projects. It is potentially more significant and far-reaching than all of these.
The second orientation in the Amhara Fanno warfare tradition that bears mention concerns the other side of battlefield instrumentality or use, namely, the valorization and pleasures of the warrior’s life. It is a desired and valued life form linked to needed local or national voluntary military service. It is not just a means, then, an effective way of warfighting, but an end.
This thread represents a warfare ethos marked by the romance of adventure and heroism in the face of danger that the Amhara values in itself. A straight line connects practical usefulness and intrinsic worth, but the two threads remain distinct and mutually reinforcing.
The third strand is the Fanno way of war, which is not divorced from what the Amhara people consider universal moral, spiritual, and humanistic norms, even during deadly conflict. It is an orientation that signifies submission to a baseline of such values, as Fanno forces’ humane treatment of captured enemy soldiers, often exceeding established international standards, amply demonstrates.
The Fanno warrior ethic thereby affords distance, allowing fighters room to practice moral goodness even as they confront a normless enemy on and off the battlefield known for its vile, indiscriminate, genocidal violence against the Amhara people.
Shaping Up Fanno Political Agency
Politics can be an essential tool and domain of the Amhara/Ethiopian existential struggle, as the Fanno forces do recognize. It is an indispensable sphere of ideas, organization, movement, and leadership.
It is not simply a field of action in which already integral actors play but where such actors take shape, fighting to establish and maintain their unity and produce distinctive agency systems.
Politics also affords a strategic orientation that could enable Fanno to dismantle the conflict-ridden, divisive tribal state in Ethiopia and lay the foundations for a new, more stable, unified, and democratic political order in the country.
However, it would be impossible to bring about such systemic change and ensure the Amhara people’s and Ethiopia’s survival if the Fanno forces were unwilling or unable to fight integrally and decisively for state power.
In pushing for structural change, the Fanno resistance must simultaneously build up its “actorness,” adjusting, extending, and coordinating the threads that make it into a broader, transformative political weave or order of thought and practice. It should integrate its inner orientations into a cohesive agentic system, framing these as the resistance’s organizing principles.
It would hardly be possible for the resistance’s constituent elements to cohere and work in dynamic concert without such framing. The battlefield’s most intense, direct tactical agency remains a political laggard. With little or nothing to channel it, to tie it cumulatively to a long-term struggle for fundamental change, it presently evinces limited strategic force and movement.
For instance, the Fanno warrior ethos that prioritizes a pattern of local, mainly disruptive, combat operations against the tribal status quo poses a challenge. Namely, employing the ethos as a transformative disciplinary mechanism through which Fanno works to develop its political unity, drawing its armed forces into a broader movement of systemic change.
Similarly, tension exists between the immediate romantic dispositions and pleasures of Fanno warriors’ combat lived experience and Fanno’s comparatively long-term strategic goals. Each may be desired or valued, but the movement must accord the latter pride of place.
Recent clashes within or around the Fanno regional forces, most notably involving Eskinder Nega’s highly controversial attempt to associate himself with and lead the rebellion, reflect gaps and tensions in the Fanno movement’s cohesion that point to its “internal” vulnerability.
Long popularly known and admired for a spiritual bent of mind, peaceful social activism, and democracy promotion, Eskinder somehow found his way into the top echelons of the Fanno armed forces and provoked divisions and clashes in their ranks. His actions, aimed at parlaying his name recognition, popularity, and control of diasporic financial resources into the leadership of the Fanno armed struggle, signify evidence of Fanno’s dangerous openness to misdirection.
Eskinder’s troubled and troubling intervention in the Fanno movement has made one thing evident. Namely, the movement must devote significant resources, time, and effort to develop and safeguard its integrity and unity.
The reason is that Fanno confronts actual or possible intervention by various individuals, groups, and media entities with varying motives and interests, including those seeking to steer the Amhara armed struggle toward their personal-cum-political purposes. Interventionists have often been indigenous elements and foreign backers unfriendly to the Amhara people, historically integral to Ethiopia.
Suppose the Fanno resistance can repel such subversive, Amhara, and non-Amhara elements and has the will to build up a transformative regional and national structure of action instead of seeking a “negotiated” share of power within the existing tribal-state system. How may it develop and secure such a fundamentally change-oriented political form of thought and action?
Politics touches reality and the world of vital human, social, and national issues, generating specific interests, perspectives, programs, decisions, and actions. It also traffics in form-creating symbols, understood broadly to include ideology, conceptual thought, and modes of collective identity or self-representation and self-assertion.
Symbolically mediated politics can provide Fanno fighters an ideological framework – a “disciplinary matrix” consisting of rhetorical devices, forms of discourse and thought, organizational techniques, and behavioral codes – through which they shape, strengthen, and manage their struggle. It can bolster the Fanno forces’ internal cohesion and leadership and enhance their external strategic reach and power, minimizing the movement’s reversibility while maximizing the prospects for lasting systemic change.
The Fanno movement’s unique political challenge is to create and sustain a structure of action that integrates an animating traditional Amhara warrior ethos with the dictates of a more complex, ideologically mediated present, at once existential and transformative struggle.
We may distinguish the present struggle from its inherited historical form and function and the recent Ethiopian revolutionary model that preceded and impacted it, directly or indirectly.
The present Fanno fighters differ from their forebears in seeking to realize a new operative meaning from a received warfare tradition. How may they do this in the context of today’s comparatively more involved struggle for existence?
The fighters do it by curbing conventional moralistic and sentimental impulses, embracing the Fanno warrior ethos or mentality less performatively or as a romantic conceit and more as a disciplinary political-cognitive tool.
They gain the new significance they need from the ethos by allowing what spurs their hearts to stimulate their minds. Instead of passively “receiving” the Fanno martial tradition as seemingly given once and for all, they view it as an evolving, dynamic practice relatively open to needed re-purposing or innovation.
The Fanno armed struggle also significantly diverges from the old extremist left model, whose adverse effects surround us today, most notably nationally corrosive identity politics and ideology and neo-feudal tribal regionalism.
Fanno’s declared intention of solving Ethiopia’s complex problems of socio-economic, cultural, and political change echoes the revolutionary era. However, differences exist between then and now.
Whereas the progressive militants of the recent past turned to Marxism-Leninism for vitalizing symbolic content, embracing a global, mainly Western, revolutionary ideology, the Fanno movement essentially relies on historical-cultural reference and present experience.
Tailoring political thought and agency to suit authoritarian desires and projects, the extreme left trafficked in “pre-cooked” ideas, tightly controlling their ritualized contents and significance. The Left’s appeal to ideology had so much power that it often assumed an oppressive, dictatorial position even if it allowed the circulation of liberationist content on its surface or proffered democratic ideals.
The Fanno struggle is not lacking in a place for innovative thought. Still, it has no truck with a foreign authoritarian worldview whose formulaic operative meaning and intended outcomes are far too preconceived. Instead, it brings its fighters into more active commerce with their ancestral heritage, rooting their present armed movement in a familiar martial-cultural idiom, turning a valued practice into a vital agentic power for existential resistance.
Let me restate and comment on my question at the beginning of this discussion: Would its leaders and planners advance the Fanno movement strategically, transitioning it into a transformative political force? Or, are they more inclined to stand off and attempt to “negotiate” their way into power, utilizing limited, mostly tactical military success as a bargaining chip?
I hope Fanno will remain true to its revolutionary promise, but there is cause for concern. Local leading figures and factions operate loosely in and around the Fanno struggle at home and abroad, which could hinder the movement from making a clean break with the ethnic-centered political system.
These individuals and groups include cast-off members of the Abiy regime, like Gedu Andargachew, seeking a political comeback riding the movement, perennial enablers of “transitional” power in the TPLF and OLF/Abiy eras, notably Andargachew Tsgie, who also served the state as “opposition” placeholders, and media figures – some of whom, like Meaza Mohammed, are favored and enabled by Western powers. They may push for a “negotiated settlement” with the profoundly perverse, anti-Amhara tribal autocracy. That outcome would greatly disappoint Amharas and all patriotic Ethiopians at home and abroad.
Some of Fanno’s more prominent leaders and regional and local constituent parts often stress the need to dismantle the existing, perennially conflictual, tribal state. They stress its undoing and replacement with a different, more stable, peaceful, and just political system as a necessity for the survival and flourishing of the Amhara people and Ethiopia.
However, these potential change leaders have yet to coalesce and turn themselves into a guiding nucleus within Fanno capable of disciplining themselves and their followers and directing the movement towards the sorely needed transformation, namely, creating a new political order.
Their disinclination or inability so far to do so points to a dangerous deficit of order within the Fanno struggle as a whole, conditions that seem to prioritize recursive, high-frequency battlefield activism over a structure of action and leadership geared toward long-term integral Fano Amhara/Ethiopian resistance.
A tactically nimble-footed approach lends essential regional autonomy, flexibility, and efficiency to the fight. Yet, such an approach makes little sense in the absence of overall guidance and direction of the movement.
The individual leaders and groups involved at the local and regional levels are often short on integrative symbolic, political, and organizational support systems and networks. Their heroic struggle is less well-endowed with vital order-creating strategic resources than it could and should be.
The conditions under which Fanno operates, marked by the acute urgency of existential armed combat, also appear to favor, in Antonio Gramsci’s words, a “war of maneuver” over a “war of position.” The former’s focal point is resistance against the state’s coercive military/police apparatus. The latter has more to do with a transformative, counter-hegemonic fight on the terrain of ideology, culture, institutions, and civil society.
In closing, I urge that the Fanno forces enhance their collective action structure and power through symbolic resources and capabilities, moving outward from within their ranks and the Amhara community to Ethiopian transformation.
As order-generating forces, symbols are not to be imposed on Ethiopian society, seen as a passive or neutral object on which a “revolutionary” subject works. Fanno needs to debunk decades of ill-conceived ultra-leftist thought and subjectivity bent on devaluing and undoing our national tradition. The movement must acquire new knowledge about symbols’ formative power and function.
Fanno’s political agency takes potent shape and content through the symbol, a vital constitutive feature of Amhara/Ethiopian historical existence. Symbolic form is present in diverse human and social activity domains as we organize it in thought, imagination, execution, and lived experience.
Such an organization allows various sense contents like feelings of hope and love of country and cognitive elements such as ideas, principles, and strategic thought to merge into an integral Fanno transformative action structure. Symbolic elements flow and fuse into one another while retaining their specific effects.
For instance, principle and strategy work together within Fanno to resist disorder in and around the movement’s ranks, guarding against performative posturing, empty rhetoric, ideological conceit, political opportunism, and personal or local leadership vagaries.
Principle requires that strategy remain integral to the Fanno struggle’s fundamental aspirations and goals. Strategy, conversely, calls for the principle’s recognition of the relative autonomy of the methods and means of achieving the intended ends in specific contexts and localities.
A critical recognition, finally, is that symbolic forms and contents are not “tools” or “devices” for Fanno forces to try and manipulate at will. Following our troubled revolutionary tradition, attempting to use them as such only neutralizes their suggestive vitality and power, their essential meaning and animate form for political action and subjectivity. It turns vibrant symbols into inert signs, even as we seem to privilege them over actual life.
Fanno does not create a structure of political action and then adds a set of symbols to it. Symbolic form makes up the action system; it is, or should be, an essential constitutive part of Fanno’s transformative political agency.
Editor’s note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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