It was among the century’s great feats of moral and political courage, the kind of bold action the Nobel Peace Prize was created to honor. On July 8, 2018, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ended his country’s state of war with neighboring Eritrea, reversing a seemingly intractable stalemate. Ahmed flew to the enemy’s capital for a surprise peace summit and committed to withdrawing his military from all disputed territory, the sticking point in a conflagration that killed over 70,000 people in the late 1990s, one of the world’s last major interstate wars, incidentally, and has warped the political economy of east Africa ever since.
A long-sealed border opened for the first time in 20 years. Families reunited. Flights between Addis Ababa and Asmara resumed. Ahmed, who had been Ethiopia’s leader for only three months, delivered a miracle of a kind that eluded India and Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinians. He had decided of his own initiative that a pointless and wasteful fratricidal conflict had gone on long enough and then did something about it. In return, he won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 11.
But the Ethiopia-Eritrean detente is less than what it once appeared to be. Ethiopian forces haven’t withdrawn from Eritrean territory, raising the alarming possibility that Ahmed lacks the power to make them do so. The borders are closed once again and dialogue between the governments is stalled. In practice, Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki has conceded almost nothing to the Ethiopians and hasn’t ended his regime’s practice of indefinite military conscription, meaning that his country is still essentially on a war footing.
The decision to award the 43-year-old Ahmed with the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize was clearly meant to incentivize the kind of bold, risky diplomacy on which he had embarked the previous year. But given the actual state of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the 2019 prize also invites reflection on exactly what the peace Nobel is for. If the award exists to promote models of responsible leadership, Ahmed is actually not all that safe or even all that wise a choice. If it’s meant to reward concrete action, then the committee is recognizing a decidedly mixed body of work, even if Ahmed’s record sprang from the most decent possible intentions.
Ahmed has been an energetic reformer, freeing political prisoners and expanding freedom of speech in what was recently a strict dictatorship. But Ethiopia might be in the midst of a slow-motion crack up. The last two years have seen a series of internal insurrections and regional insurgencies that threaten Ahmed’s near-term hold on power. Ethiopia produced an estimated 2.8 million internally displaced persons in 2018, the most such displacements resulting from conflict for any country that year, including Syria.
Ahmed is a genuine visionary and a democrat, and as the child of a Muslim-Oromo father, he has roots in a religion and ethnic group historically marginalized in the country. But his greatest accomplishments seem either fragile or incidental to larger issues. Just a few days before the award was announced, a reported 22 people were killed in ethnic clashes in the Amhara region, the site of a bloody failed coup against the regional government and locally-based national military command just weeks earlier. The day after Ahmed won, police blocked roads and arrested demonstrators to prevent a protest that a rival reformist leader had organized.
Ahmed’s career straddles the boundary between what is prudent and what is right. He’s facing an election in 2020 that has the potential to be the first openly contested vote in Ethiopian history but looms as a possible crisis point for the nation and region. Ahmed’s achievements will mean little if his country slips into even deeper chaos or if hardliners push him from power over the coming year. In a conceivable worst-case scenario, the failure of energetic and internationally popular yet politically reckless reformism could derail Ethiopia’s transformation and discourage would-be agents of change who hold power in other transitioning autocracies. Perhaps the Norwegian Nobel Committee hoped to strengthen Ahmed’s dicey internal position, but the prestige of the award will inevitably suffer if putschists decide they simply don’t care about whatever special status the Nobel is supposed to convey.
More than rewarding an actual political or humanitarian legacy, this year’s peace prize was a reflection of the committee’s particular hopes and values. Peace Prize laureates usually fall into one of a few distinct categories. Some of the least controversial winners are international organizations, since the European Union or the Red Cross are inevitably faceless bureaucracies regardless of whatever good or ill they do. Even less controversial, with the exception of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, that is, are the living saints, dissidents who sacrificed their comfort or freedom battling forces terrifyingly larger than themselves. There is never a shortage of such people because the human capacity for evil is virtually inexhaustible. In the Nobel committee’s most courageous decision of the past several decades, it gave the 2010 award to Liu Xiaobo, a celebrated pro-democracy Chinese writer and activist then serving an 11-year prison term for his role in the landmark Charter 08 manifesto.
In a year in which there has been a notable peace accord, it is common for representatives of both parties to win the prize, as last happened in 1998 after the Good Friday Agreement. This explains why Yasser Arafat and F.W. De Klerk are Nobelists, but the most questionable peace prizes go to politicians whom the Norwegian Nobel Committee likes for whatever reason. The most notorious such winner was first-year President Barack Obama, who seemed appropriately puzzled and embarrassed at his win. Egyptian Mohamed ElBaradei won in 2005 for his leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency but had obvious political ambitions back home and was exactly the kind of enlightened professional multilateralist that self-appointed arbiters of virtue in northern Europe might like to see in charge of any large country.
Time will tell whether Ahmed’s award presaged long-term peace or simply exhibited the committee’s fantasies about how the world works or should work. This year’s Nobel reflects the prize-givers’ assumption that they know what’s best for a mindbogglingly complex country, the politics of which are scarcely understood beyond its borders. One hopes they are proved right. We should all hope that Ahmed’s Nobel survives as something other than a strange footnote in a future tragedy.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
