ANU Response to Dr. Abraham Belay’s Statement: Accountability Cannot Be Selective
The Agaezi National Union (ANU) notes Dr. Abraham Belay’s recent statement calling for an end to oppression, forced recruitment, and the suffering of the people of Tigray. While these concerns deserve serious attention, ANU believes that any genuine call for justice must begin with accountability for all political leaders who exercised power during the Tigray conflict, including those who held the highest positions within the Ethiopian federal government and the TPLF leadership.
ANU rejects any attempt to rewrite recent history by presenting former decision-makers solely as critics of the current crisis while avoiding scrutiny of their own political responsibilities.
Dr. Abraham Belay served as Ethiopia’s Minister of Defence during one of the most devastating periods in modern Ethiopian history. Regardless of how one assesses the origins or conduct of the war, it is impossible to separate discussions of accountability from the responsibilities attached to that office. ANU therefore maintains that public officials who exercised command authority during the conflict should be subject to independent, impartial, and transparent investigations wherever credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian law or human rights abuses exist.
Similarly, accountability cannot stop with one individual. ANU argues that the political and military leadership of the TPLF—including figures such as Debretsion Gebremichael, Fetlework Gebre-Egziabher (Monjorino), Getachew Reda, Alem Gebrewahid, Addis Alem Balema, and other senior officials who exercised political authority—must likewise be held accountable for decisions taken before, during, and after the conflict. Justice cannot be selective; it must apply equally to all leaders whose actions contributed to the tragedy experienced by the people of Tigray and Ethiopia as a whole.
ANU further rejects narratives that portray the suffering of the people of Tigray as the responsibility of only one side. The war inflicted immense human suffering upon civilians, destroyed homes, infrastructure, religious institutions, schools, hospitals, cultural heritage, and livelihoods. The victims were overwhelmingly ordinary civilians—not political leaders. Any meaningful process of reconciliation must therefore place the rights and dignity of civilians above the competing narratives of political elites.
From ANU’s perspective, one of the greatest tragedies is that ordinary Tigrayans have repeatedly paid the highest price while successive political elites have largely remained in positions of influence. Mothers buried their children, families lost their homes, young people lost their futures, and entire communities were displaced, while many political leaders continued to compete for power. ANU believes this pattern must end.
More fundamentally, ANU argues that the current crisis cannot be understood solely through the lens of recent political events. It is rooted in the ideological project introduced by the TPLF during the late twentieth century, which redefined Ethiopia primarily as a collection of competing ethnic nationalities rather than as one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations. According to ANU, this ideology weakened the shared Geʽez Ethiopian civilizational identity, institutionalized ethnic polarization, and transformed self-determination from a principle of democratic local self-government into a doctrine capable of legitimizing political fragmentation.
ANU therefore reaffirms its commitment to the Ancient Ethiopian Civilizational State. Ethiopia is not merely a constitutional arrangement established in the modern era; it is a civilization that has endured for more than two millennia through shared institutions, historical continuity, cultural interaction, and common sacrifice. The preservation of that civilizational state requires equal citizenship, constitutional democracy, accountability under the rule of law, and the rejection of ethnic politics as the organizing principle of the state.
ANU believes that genuine peace will not emerge through competing political narratives or selective historical memory. It requires equal accountability, independent justice, reconciliation based on truth, and a renewed commitment to rebuilding a united Ethiopian civilizational state in which no political organization, military commander, or government official is above the law.