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Dear Eskinder,
For more than thirty years, you chose to stand where standing carried consequences. You wrote when publishing meant prison. You warned about repression, ethnic targeting, and the future of Ethiopia and Amharas long before it was popular to do so.
You paid for that work repeatedly. You were imprisoned under TPLF, labeled a terrorist, and sentenced to eighteen years. Your equally resolute wife, Serkalem, gave birth to your son, Nafkot, while both of you were incarcerated. You lost your freedom, your safety, and any sense of normalcy, again and again. And still, you stayed.
You could have left, Eskinder. You had legal permanent residency in the U.S and every justification to walk away. Instead, you remained and continued the same work under a new regime that proved just as authoritarian as TPLF. You helped build Balderas and gave political voice to Addis Ababa residents who had none. You tried peaceful civic engagement when it was clear the process was designed to block you. You ran for election while in prison. You exposed the replacement of one ethnic hegemony with another. It brought you surveillance, detention, ridicule and beatings. You still stayed.
Long before this moment, you were already paying a price alongside many others who resisted TPLF rule. Long before it was acceptable, you were writing about the targeting and marginalization of Amharas in the 1990s. You helped form one of the earliest Amhara political organizations alongside Professor Asrat Woldeyes, when even naming the issue carried risk. When even the word Amhara was pejorative. You returned to that work years later, knowing exactly what it would cost.
When peaceful paths were closed entirely, after exhausting every other option, you joined and organized Fano. That choice, like the ones before it, came with consequences you did not avoid.
And now, after all of this, you are facing something different but no less painful. Not disagreement. Not criticism. Character assassination. Dehumanization. Insults that erase context, your history, and your sacrifice. Much of it coming from people who once worked with you, benefited from your credibility, or called you a colleague or even a friend.
Your recent decision to step away from leadership and support the struggle as a civilian was met with rage. You accepted unity without demanding anything else. You accepted the majority’s will and stepped aside respectfully. For that, you are being attacked.
I want to remind you of something that is often invisible in loud public debates and online spaces. Millions who do not speak out or organize campaigns on social media have followed your work for years with quiet respect. They understand the cost of what you did, your vision, your foresight, your expectations for institutional thinking, and your insistence on systemic change. They recognize the core of your ideology, your method, and your direction, and they are inspired by your courage and resilience. I am one of those millions. They may not speak often, as I do, but they recognize sacrifice when they see it, and they have not forgotten you. I hope you find solace in knowing that millions share your conviction.
For now on an official capacity, you have done your part. You have done more than most. You have given years, freedom, family, and safety. You have fought alongside many, and you have never claimed those sacrifices were yours alone.
I hope you live to see the fruits of what you helped set in motion. I hope you witness a just and democratic Ethiopia, and a future where the survival and dignity of the Amhara people are no longer in question. But whatever comes next, no one gets to pretend you did not show up. No one gets to reduce, erase or belittle decades of struggle and sacrifice. Insults and coordinated smear attacks will not obscure what was done or what it cost. Your work and your sacrifice stand on their own. Time, as it always does, will be the final judge and it will vindicate you, as it has before.
This letter is not written to defend you. It is written to thank you.
So, thank you for the years you gave, the risks you took, for staying when leaving was easier and for knowing when to fight, and when to step back. Thank you for every wound, every scar and every sacrifice.
And my gratitude to you cannot stand alone. I am also thinking of those who walked beside you, who paid for their commitment with prison, exile, and loss, and of those who were killed. I honor the martyrs whose lives gave this struggle its weight and whose sacrifice millions will not forget. Their endurance, like yours, belongs to the long road to freedom. Thank you for giving everything you had. This is not a farewell. I will leave you with these words of Nelson Mandela:
“There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.”
Amandla Awethu!
With respect,
H.Z
