By David Yeh
Introduction
Just days ago, Ethiopia staged air shows featuring borrowed UAE fighter jets to mark the so-called 90th anniversary of its Air Force. Bands played. Officials boasted. Speeches thundered about patriotism, modernization, and national pride, even sneering at neighbors still flying older MiG-21s. The spectacle was wrapped in flags and slogans, sold as proof of resilience and as a pillar of regional stability.
But for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who once lived under Ethiopian bombs, this was not a celebration. It was a provocation. It was pageantry built over mass graves.
What was presented as a milestone was, for its victims, a reminder, that an institution with a long record of bombing cities, markets, and families is now asking to be applauded without accounting for what it did from the sky.
What is being marked is not simply an institution’s longevity. It is the normalization of a history in which air power was repeatedly turned against cities, markets, mosques, churches, and families. It is the sanitizing war crimes and crimes against humanity, of a record that includes napalm, cluster bombs, and the deliberate terrorizing of civilian populations. To applaud this legacy without reckoning is not patriotism. It is moral fraud.
This anniversary is not about aviation history. It is about historical laundering. It is an attempt to rebrand an institution that, at some of its most consequential moments, functioned not as a guardian of peace but as an engine of civilian destruction. The Ethiopian Air Force was not merely a military force. In Eritrea and elsewhere, it became an instrument of collective punishment, a way to rule from the sky when control on the ground had failed.
When governments celebrate institutions without naming their victims, they are not honoring history. They are burying it. And when they turn atrocity into pageantry, they are not preserving memory. They are insulting it.
Behind the parades lies a truth that no flyover can erase: for decades, the Ethiopian Air Force did not just fight wars. It bombed societies. It turned cities into warnings. It made civilians into targets. That is the legacy being celebrated. And that is why this anniversary is not a moment of pride. It is a moment of reckoning that the Ethiopian state is determined to avoid. To celebrate that legacy without reckoning is not patriotism. It is historical amnesia.
The Myth of a Continuous 90-Year Legacy
The claim of an uninterrupted 90-year lineage collapses under basic historical scrutiny. Ethiopia’s early aviation in the late 1920s and early 1930s consisted of a handful of light, non-combat aircraft. By 1935, Ethiopia had no meaningful air force. Italy’s invasion dismantled what little capacity existed, placing Ethiopian skies under the control of the Italian Regia Aeronautica.
There was no Ethiopian Air Force during the years of occupation. The institution modern commemorations pretend existed continuously simply did not.
Even after aviation capabilities were reestablished in the late 1940s, thanks to the Swedes, and African American and Russian mercenaries, air power was not primarily shaped as a neutral defensive force. Over time, it became a central instrument of internal repression and counterinsurgency, often with devastating consequences for civilians. Continuity is not just overstated. It is manufactured.
Markets, Mosques, and Homes: The Deliberate Targeting of Eritrean Civilians
During the Eritrean War of Independence (1961–1991), the Ethiopian Air Force crossed a decisive moral threshold. It ceased to function primarily as a battlefield force and became a weapon against civilian targets.
Soviet-supplied MiG-23 fighter-bombers and other aircraft were routinely used in ground-attack missions employing napalm or phosphorus, cluster munitions, and high-explosive bombs. According to Africa Watch and contemporaneous reporting, strikes repeatedly hit towns, marketplaces, refugee encampments, schools, mosques, churches, and residential neighborhoods, places where civilians, not combatants, were the main presence. This was not incidental. It was systematic.
From Nakfa to Agordat, from Ariereb to Molki, from Mendefera to Massawa, Afabet to Halhal, Mensur to Anseba and Barka were turned into targets. The objective was not simply to engage fighters. It was to terrorize communities, women and children, collapse local economies, and punish civilians for living under liberation-movement control. Air power was used to make normal life impossible, to force people into hiding, to drive commerce underground, and to turn fear itself into a governing tool. This was not counterinsurgency. It was collective punishment.
In 1977–1978, after the Derg lost control of most Eritrean towns and cities, the Ethiopian regime shifted tactics. Unable to hold territory on the ground, it turned its air force against soft targets. Civilians became the objective. What followed was not sporadic excess, but a campaign of terror from the sky.
Across Eritrea, towns and marketplaces were deliberately bombed. On July 11, 1977, Digsa was struck, killing 27 civilians and wounding 133. Mendefera, a provincial capital, was bombed at least thirteen times in less than a single year. The pattern was unmistakable. On Orthodox Christmas Eve, January 6, 1978, Ethiopian aircraft attacked the central market while residents were shopping for the holiday, killing 52 civilians and wounding scores more. In March, a mosque was hit with cluster munitions, leaving around 70 dead and wounded and burning 80 to 90 homes. On April 5, 1978, two adjacent houses sheltering families in bomb bunkers were destroyed; the bunkers collapsed, killing 32 members of two families and their relatives. A week later, another raid killed 25 more. In that period alone, at least 170 civilians were killed in Mendefera.
The campaign continued in later years. On October 2, 1984, Ethiopian aircraft bombed Molki on a market day, killing 42 civilians. In Arerib, between December 1985 and January 1986, another 20 civilians were killed in air raids. In Afabet repeatedly bombed in 1988, 1989 and on April 3–4, 1990, air attacks killed 67 civilians and wounded 125 more.
These were not battlefield engagements. They were strikes on daily life, markets, homes, mosques, and entire neighborhoods. The objective was not to defeat fighters. It was to terrorize communities, collapse local economies, and punish civilians for living in areas no longer controlled by the regime.
Taken together, these attacks form a consistent pattern. The Ethiopian Air Force did not merely operate in combat zones. It systematically targeted civilian towns, marketplaces, and places of worship. Air power was used as a weapon of collective punishment. This was not collateral damage. It was war crimes.
Eritrean civilians were turned into targets, and everyday life into a battlefield. The bombing of markets, homes, and religious sites was designed to break society itself, to rule not by military victory, but by fear from the sky.
Massawa: When the Air Force Turned on a City
No episode exposes this policy more clearly than Massawa in 1990. After the city fell to the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the Ethiopian Air Force did not pursue a conventional military strategy. It turned its firepower on the city itself. Using napalm or phosphorus, cluster bombs, and demolition munitions, Ethiopian aircraft repeatedly struck residential neighborhoods, crowded streets, warehouses, port facilities, and food supplies. These were not precision strikes. They were attacks on a civilian port city.
In April 1990, waves of bombardment killed around 150 civilians and wounded more than 330. Independent witnesses and medical personnel confirmed that many strikes occurred when EPLF fighters were no longer present. The pattern was unmistakable: the targets were civilians. Children were pulled bleeding from collapsed buildings. Families sheltering outside town were burned by incendiary weapons. Food aid was set ablaze. Homes were reduced to rubble. Relief ships were threatened. The goal was not to retake Massawa militarily. It was to punish it, to make civilian life unlivable.
Massawa was not collateral damage. Massawa was a message. When the army failed on the ground, the population would pay from the sky.
Incendiaries, Cluster Bombs, and Indiscriminate Warfare
Across Eritrea in the late 1970s, and 1980s the Ethiopian Air Force employed napalm or phosphorus and cluster munitions in ways that produced deep burns, mass casualties, and enduring civilian trauma. Cluster bombs, designed to scatter lethal submunitions over wide areas, are inherently indiscriminate. Their use in towns and villages virtually guarantees civilian death. These were not defensive tools. They were weapons of terror.
There are also contemporaneous reports alleging the use of chemical agents in northern Eritrea, including the Sahel. Multiple independent accounts described gas attacks causing burning eyes, painful skin, and extreme thirst. Africa Watch documented testimony from Eritrean civilians, who described aerial and artillery attacks in May 1988 that released gas consistent with chemical irritants. Their use against civilians underscores how completely restraint had collapsed.
At the same time, evidence pointed to external suppliers enabling this campaign. Investigative reporting in the Sunday Times and the New York Times, citing U.S. officials and leaked congressional materials, strongly suspected that Israel supplied Ethiopia with cluster munitions and technical assistance. Africa Watch concluded that the evidence was substantial and warned that these transfers actively facilitated gross human rights abuses.
What emerges is not the record of a disciplined air force constrained by humanitarian law. It is the record of an institution willing to deploy the most indiscriminate weapons available against civilian populations, and to rely on foreign suppliers to sustain that brutality.
A Pattern That Did Not End with Eritrea
The Ethiopian Air Force’s atrocities were not confined to Eritrea. Under Mengistu, air power was repeatedly turned inward against Ethiopia’s own civilian population. Across Tigray, Wollo, Shewa, Gondar, and Wollega, air raids became routine instruments of terror between 1988 and 1991. The June 1988 massacre of more than 1,000 civilians in the market town of Hauzien, Ethiopia stands as one of the most extreme expressions of this policy. Other major towns were also bombed.
Ironically, the Ethiopian Air Force’s first decisive use of air power was not in defense against a foreign invader, but in an internal power struggle. In 1930, aircraft played a critical role in securing victory at the Battle of Anchem in Gondar, helping crush the rebellion of Ras Gugsa Wale. That aerial intervention directly paved the way for Tafari Makonnen’s consolidation of power and his eventual coronation as Emperor Haile Selassie I.
The Battle of Anchem, fought on March 31, 1930, marked the first recorded instance of Ethiopian aircraft being used to bomb Ethiopian forces. Gugsa Wale’s army was targeted from the air, setting a precedent that would echo across the next century: air power as a tool for internal political control.
Gugsa Wale, a Yeju Oromo noble, was married to Empress Zewditu and was the nephew of Taytu Betul, the wife of Menelik II. He rejected Tafari Makonnen’s legitimacy as regent and heir, viewing him as a usurper who had no right to succeed. Gugsa’s rebellion aimed to remove Tafari, restore Empress Zewditu as the sole claimant to the throne, and position Gugsa himself, as her husband, to become emperor.
The rebellion failed. Air power tipped the balance. And in doing so, it established an enduring pattern: from its very first combat use, Ethiopian military aviation was deployed not to protect civilians or defend borders, but to settle political disputes from the sky.
Again Haile Selassie turned air power on his own rural population, using military aircraft to suppress peasant revolts against taxation and land policies, most notoriously in Gojjam in 1968. Two decades earlier, the same logic of ruling from the sky was already firmly in place. During the 1943 Woyane rebellion in Tigray, Emperor Haile Selassie called in the British Royal Air Force to crush the uprising. RAF aircraft bombed civilian areas, including the regional capital, Mekelle. On October 14, 1943 alone, 54 bombs were dropped on the city. Hintalo and Korbetta were also struck, with at least 62 bombs dropped between October 7 and 9.
This was not battlefield support. It was aerial collective punishment, an early demonstration of how air power would be used to discipline civilian populations rather than protect them. This was not counterinsurgency. It was collective punishment from the air, an early precedent for a pattern in which aerial power was used to crush dissent by turning civilian towns into targets.
More recently, in Tigray, Oromia and Amhara, independent observers, journalists, and human rights organizations have documented air raids and drone strikes on towns and civilian areas. Hospitals, schools, markets, and residential neighborhoods have been hit. Civilian deaths, injuries, and mass displacement have followed. The technology has changed. The pattern has not.
Air power continues to be used in densely populated areas with foreseeable and repeated civilian harm. The humanitarian consequences, documented by the UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, mirror earlier eras with chilling familiarity.
The Anniversary as Historical Laundering
Against this record, the 90th anniversary narrative is not just incomplete. It is a form of historical laundering. By focusing on resilience, modernization, and service, official celebrations erase the civilian graves beneath the runway. They repackage a fragmented and violent past into a tidy patriotic story that avoids moral reckoning.
There may well be individuals in today’s Ethiopian Air Force who serve with professionalism and personal courage. Their service, however, does not require laundering the institution’s past or celebrating a legacy built in part on the bombing of civilian populations. What is far more revealing is whom the Ethiopian state chooses to elevate as a “hero.”
Colonel Bezabih Petros, recently praised by Abiy Ahmed and memorialized with a monument in Hossana, is held up as a model for youth. But his claim to fame is not the defense of civilians or the protection of his country. It is repeated participation in missions that targeted civilians.
In the mid-1980s, Bezabih was shot down over Sahel while flying bombing missions. His MiG was destroyed, he parachuted safely, and he was captured by the EPLF. He was held as a prisoner of war for years, treated humanely, and released after Eritrea’s independence in 1991.
That could have been the end of the story. Instead, in June 1998, at the opening of the Eritrea–Ethiopia war of 1998-2000, he reportedly returned to the cockpit, lured by promises of money and status, to carry out bombing missions against Asmara, Eritrea’s capital and civilian city. He flew again. He was shot down again. He lost another aircraft. Once more, his mission was not to engage enemy forces on a battlefield, but to strike a populated city. That this man is celebrated, publicly praised, and held up as a symbol of “heroism” speaks volumes about what the Ethiopian Air Force, and the political leadership that glorifies it, chooses to honor. This is not the language of defense. It is the culture of impunity.
When pilots who bomb cities are commemorated, and when leaders urge youth to “follow their example,” the message is unmistakable: civilians are fair game, and atrocity can be rebranded as patriotism. That is not honor. It is indictment. Honoring service is not the same as sanctifying history.
Conclusion: What Is Being Celebrated?
There is a difference between remembrance and propaganda. If Ethiopia’s Air Force is to be remembered honestly, it cannot be through parades alone. It must be remembered for what air power became in critical moments: a tool of terror, a mechanism of collective punishment, and a weapon turned against civilian life, most infamously in Massawa and across Eritrea during the struggle for independence.
The true question is not whether Ethiopia has an Air Force worth respecting today. The question is whether it is willing to confront how that force has been used in the past, including the use of napalm, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate bombing of civilian cities.
There is little to celebrate in a legacy that includes burning children, bombed markets, destroyed ports, and a city turned into a warning. A nation that honors its institutions without confronting their atrocities does not preserve history. It falsifies it. True commemoration requires truth. Until that truth is faced, fully and publicly, the 90th anniversary is not a milestone of pride. It is a monument to what remains unaccounted for.
And in that history, the sky was not a shield. It was a weapon.
Sources
- Janhoy ena Derg, Yaltenegeru merara tarikoch (in Amharic. ጃንሆይ እና ደርግ ያልተነገሩ መራር ታሪኮች), Tesfaye Gebreab, Horn of Africa Book Club, 2018.
- Gefi, Zantat Temokuro Ghedli Volume 8 (in Tigrigna. ግፍዒ ዛንታት ተሞኩሮ ገድሊ ቅጺ 8) Solomon Berhe, Henok Tesfabruk, and Tesfaalem Yemane editors. Hdri Publishers, 2017.
- Ethiopia: Bombing of Civilians and Civilian Targets by the Air Force. Africa Watch, July 1990
- Eritrea: Region in Rebellion, National Geography Vol 168, no 3. Spetember 1985.
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