Ximdo is a people’s peace movement that has been growing in the war- and famine-plagued Horn of Africa for several months now. The word comes from the Tigrinya language, used by Eritreans and Ethiopia’s Tigrayans. It has a number of meanings, but the best is “coexistence and cooperation” between peoples, peacefully—like when two cows are harnessed side by side to plow a field.
Its first manifestation was the work of Eritrean activist and entertainer Awel Seid, and it took place exactly where the Eritrean and Tigrayan borders meet, with Awel sitting on the Eritrean side and Brother Berhane, a prominent Tigrayan peace activist, on the other. It was a direct, non-governmental, people-to-people peace movement between Eritreans and Ethiopian Tigrayans, who have been at war—or in a “no war, no peace” state—for almost all of the last 27 years.
Since the first “Ximdo” took place, the idea has spread, with Awel Seid hosting Ethiopian Afars and Eritrean Afars in a peace program.
Attempts are now being made to have Ximdo bring the Afars and Tigrayans together. There is even talk of efforts to have Amharas and Tigrayans sit and talk peace between their peoples. The hope is that it will spread to include Afars and Somalis in Djibouti and continue across the Horn of Africa.
You must understand that a civil war has been raging in Ethiopia since the end of 2020, with the TPLF—the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the de facto government of Tigray and previously of Ethiopia for 34 years—attacking the Ethiopian government of PM Abiy Ahmed and, eventually, its neighbours in Amhara, Afar, and even Eritrea. I will never forget those evenings when TPLF rockets landed near our home in Asmara, Eritrea, where we were living at the end of 2020.
Many Ethiopians use the word “genocide” to describe the TPLF and, later, the Abiy Ahmed army’s invasion of Amhara and Afar. In the actual fighting alone, some 500,000 Tigrayans—mainly child soldiers—were mowed down in human waves during TPLF assaults. Tens of thousands more were killed in the fighting, victims of indiscriminate artillery fire and massacres by the TPLF, and later by the Ethiopian army under PM Abiy. Millions were driven from their homes and left to starve in makeshift refugee camps.
Today the Amhara FANO/Patriots fighters, alongside others, are locked in a death struggle with what remains of the Ethiopian government of Abiy Ahmed, with the only thing keeping his regime afloat being the cash and weapons supplied by the “Cancer of Africa,” the United Arab Emirates.
The Tigrayans—both TPLF supporters and opposition forces—are beginning to take up more active resistance against the Abiy regime, finding themselves with more reason to work with their erstwhile Amhara enemies in FANO than with the Abiy forces. So Ximdo between Amharas and Tigrayans, something almost unthinkable earlier this year, is now entirely possible.
Ximdo will be needed even more in the future once the Abiy regime is defeated and driven out of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian empire of Emperors Menelik and Haile Selassie will dissolve, and new countries will be born, with names like Amhara, Tigray, Afar, Oromia, among others. New borders will have to be drawn, disputed lands resolved, and “cooperation and coexistence” will be essential if peace is to take root. With guaranteed foreign interference in this new explosion of independent countries, the best hope for peace is Ximdo—like two oxen plowing side by side.
