Consumed by his rage at the humility he suffered when he
decisively lost the war with the then TPLF
EPRDF government of Ethiopia
back in the late 1990s, Isaias played into the hands of the shrewd Ethiopian
leader at the time, Meles, who applied a strategy of isolating Isaias in the
world stage thus rendering him impotent. Isaias fell into the trap and
developed a siege mentality that kept him in a perpetual state of no
He spent every waking moment
of his life in the last twenty years in plotting to get “even” by destroying
the Woyane, basically by ruining Tigray and its people (a recently released
secret recording of a senior Isaias official laying out in black and white the
strategy on how that can be accomplished crystalizes this fact)
1
. In
the process, Isaias cultivated and supported organizations that he believed
will destabilize Ethiopia (or ‘Woyane’, for him) including terrorist groups in
Somalia thus earning constant reprimands and sanctions by the UN. It was with
this in the background that the TPLF’s grasp of power in the Federal government
gradually waned due to persistent opposition in the other regions but
especially in the Oromiya region and Abiy came into power. Isaias was overjoyed
that the Woyane were no longer in power as evidenced by his statement “Game
over, Woyane” soon after.
Still, it is unlikely that
he knew how pliable a leader he will be faced with in Abiy but most certainly
did not expect that he will, to his incredulous surprise I am sure, end up the
puppeteer in a master
