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WikipediaThe Four Constitutions of Ethiopia
The Four Constitutions of Ethiopia Full content here. Introduction: A brief history of the constitutions of Ethiopia For most part of its history, Ethiopian governance was guided by two key…
Can the Somali region speak?
Ethiopia Insight | Tobias Hagmann | Ethiopian Somalis must reject politically motivated, shallow historical narratives and produce a new story that accurately captures their lived experiences.
The author dedicates this article to the memory of Ahmed Ali Gedi ‘Borte.’
Many years ago I conducted an interview with a leader of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). At the time, Ethiopia’s Somali regional state was often referred to as ‘region 5’ or kilil amist.
When I asked the ONLF leader about ‘region 5’, he became irritated and said: “My home is not a number!” I thought he was just being nationalistic as ONLF members often refer to the Somali inhabited parts of Ethiopia as ‘Ogadenia’ rather than the Somali regional state, its official name. Much later, I realised that he was right. Who wants his or her home to be a number? Who wants to live in a place whose name has been externally imposed?
Admittedly, geographical names are never neutral. Most Africans had their names and identities imposed on them by European colonialists. But what if a society or a community never gets to choose its name? This has been and continues to be the case for Somalis living in today’s Somali regional state of Ethiopia.
In the case of Ethiopia’s Somali population, this conundrum goes far beyond geographical or territorial designations. Rather, it reflects a crisis both of representation and self-representation. In spite of ethnic federalism and a constitutionally guaranteed right to political self-determination, Somalis in Ethiopia never had the chance to decide on their political fate. Equally important, they rarely had the opportunity to write or narrate their own lives, history, and experience.
This enduring crisis of self-representation is maybe best formulated as a question, namely: Can the Somali region speak? Here, I am referring to the famous essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with the provocative title ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ published in 1983. Her text is a classic contribution to post-colonial theory, which criticizes the continued dominance of Western knowledge in the representation of non-Westerners.
What does Spivak mean when she asks: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ By subaltern she refers to social groups – peasants, lower-caste individuals, women, and so on – who have continuously been subordinated. Their history and collective experience have mostly been represented by others – by colonizers, by national elites, by intellectuals.
They are often ‘spoken about’ but are rarely allowed to ‘speak for themselves.’ Their agency and subjectivity are denied because others constantly speak for and about them.
When I ask ‘Can the Somali region speak?’ what I mean is: can the people who live in this part of Ethiopia speak for themselves? Can they represent themselves? Can they define and shape their own narrative? So the question really is: has the Somali region ever spoken for itself? Or, has it mostly been others who have spoken for the Somali region and its inhabitants?
In their modern history, Somalis living in Ethiopia’s southeastern lowlands never had the opportunity to speak for themselves. Instead, it has been outsiders who have named, claimed, and defined the Somali region’s inhabitants. The outsiders speak about Somalis in such a way that goes in line with their political geopolitical interests.
Opposing historiographies
Why is it that Somalis in Ethiopia have struggled to speak for and represent themselves? One reason is that the Somali region has been the object of two opposing national historiographies since the late 19th century.
By historiography I mean both popular stories and academic writings that are told and written about a particular community, society, or nation. In its broadest sense, historiography includes the official history that is taught in schools, but also stories that are passed on from one generation to the next. In essence, I mean the historical interpretations that most members of a given society agree upon, often uncritically.
On the one hand, we have Somali historiography and the Somali studies tradition. Their accounts describe the Somali region – often referred to as Ogaden – as Somali territory colonised by Ethiopian highlanders, but also by British and Italian powers. In this narrative, the ‘Somali region’ is a territory that, in reality, is part of Somalia and the Somali people.
The region is memorised as a place of suffering and repression by successive Ethiopian regimes, from Haile Selassie to the TPLF and the former regional president Abdi Mohamed Omar ‘Iley’. The Somali region is seen as a place of displacement and the home of rich natural resources – from frankincense to oil and gas – which foreigners want to loot. From the viewpoint of Somali historiography, the Somali region of Ethiopia is a space of repeat victimisation.
On the other hand, we have Ethiopian historiography and Ethiopian studies, which for a long time promoted what historians call ‘the great tradition.’ The ‘great tradition’ offers an almost transcendental tale of the Ethiopian monarchy and nation-state, emphasising the country’s past and future glories. Writings by Ethiopian historians, soldiers, and administrators reveal a completely different view of the Ogaden and of today’s Somali region.
Their stories portray the region as a place of hardship for habeshas. They describe Somalis as rebellious people who are “always fighting” and on whose loyalty the Ethiopian state cannot count on.
They saw and often still see the Somali region as a land of nomads who need to be civilised and modernised by the Ethiopian state bureaucracy through sedentarization, development, planning, and administration.
In this narrative, the Somali parts of Ethiopia have to be defended to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity – in particular against neighbouring Somalia. But its inhabitants can never be fully trusted.
Which one of these two opposing historiographies of Ethiopia’s Somali region should we listen to? Which one is more accurate? Which one captures the past and present of this part of the world better?
Many readers familiar with the region will have their opinions on this. I want to argue that both historiographies make some important points, but both are also seriously deficient, reductionist, and ideological. Neither one of them does justice to the real history of the people of the Somali region.
Both historical traditions treat the Somali region as a periphery, which is of interest only as long as it is relevant to the political centre. The Somali region has been and still is a double periphery – peripheral to both Ethiopia and Somalia. At the end of the day, both historiographies are the by-product of either the Somali or the Ethiopian nationalist project. Too often, they are not based on local people’s lived experiences or family histories. Rather, they tell the story of the Ogaden, now the Somali region, from the vantage point of male leaders with a particular political agenda.
Both historiographies of the Somali region silence the lives and struggles of normal people such as rural folk, women, minorities, and generally less powerful groups. As a result, both have prevented the emergence of a historiography of the Somali region that is thought, written, and told not from the viewpoint of Mogadishu or Addis Ababa, but from the viewpoint of Gode, Jigjiga, Degehabur and Shilabo, Afdheer and Qabridehar, Gora Babagsa, Kelafo, Wardheer, Fiq, Shinile, and so on.
Silencing the ‘Somali region’
Some might argue that history is always contested. Or that what matters most are not historical facts, but how history is used in present-day politics. In other words, what really matters is who can make his or her history count and whose history is being discounted or swept under the rug. My argument here is that both Somali studies and Ethiopian historiography have swept a large part of the lived experiences of Somalis in Ethiopia under the rug.
Like the rest of Ethiopia, the region underwent one regime change after the other – from Haile Selassie to the Derg and then the recent Abdi ‘Iley’ dictatorship under the EPRDF. All regimes created and popularized new political narratives based on a selective and clearly instrumentalist interpretation of the region’s past. These narratives further complicated the writing and telling of local histories that did not comply with these state-sanctioned historiographies. The absence of independent research and academic institution further compounded this problem.
Some examples may highlight how important aspects of the Somali region’s political history have been silenced and overlooked by these two historiographies.
First, both have offered stereotypical accounts of the position of Ethiopian-Somali elites vis-a-vis the Ethiopian state. Rather than simply being for or against the central government, Ethiopian-Somali elites have gone through repeat cycles of compromise, partial acceptance, growing distrust, and full rejection of the Ethiopian state. A good illustration of this is the armed struggle against the Imperial government, which started in 1963 and was led by Makthal Dahir.
The Ogaden leader and his colleagues were former district commissioners working for the Haile Selassie administration before they took up arms. The Somali government of Aden Abdullah Osman supported the rebels initially until it agreed to a truce with Haile Selassie, leaving the insurgents in a limbo. The ONLF underwent a similar pattern of cooperation with the new Ethiopian government in the early 1990s followed by armed opposition between 1994 and 2018 and, today, a reintegration into the political system as a registered regional political party.
Both Somali and Ethiopian historiography have failed to account for this uncomfortable in-betweenness that has been the hallmark of Ethiopian-Somali political elites. When insurgents of the Western Somali Liberation Front started to mobilize against the Derg, the Somali government of Siad Barre again intervened to assist them. But, its agenda did not always align with the priorities of the WSLF.
An eyewitness of the time whom I interviewed in 2012 about the 1977/1978 Ethiopian-Somali or Ogaden war told me: “When the liberation movement reached Degehabur, the Somali army planted the Somali flag. The WSLF lost its temper and told them: ‘Stop planting your flag there and don’t start collecting taxes!’”
Many in the WSLF were eventually frustrated by the Somali government. The latter had helped them, but also internationalised and instrumentalised their rebellion. Somali state media like Radio Mogadishu and Radio Hargeisa covered the Ogaden war with vivid interest. But locals from the region were rarely on the airwaves. Instead, Somali military generals spoke on their behalf. This demonstrates how, historically, both the Ethiopian and the Somali governments have sought to appropriate and speak on behalf of the Ogaden (today, the Somali region).
Internal conflicts and contradictions
A second shortcoming of the Somali and Ethiopian historiographies of Somalis in Ethiopia is their unwillingness to consider internal differences and tensions.
The Somali region does not have a single historical and socio-political narrative. Rather, there are multiple – at times competing – narratives, which reflect divergent historical trajectories and experiences of its people. The region’s population is not just ‘Somali’. It consists of various social groups: from urbanites to agro-pastoralists, from livestock producers to traders, and from ancient inhabitants to newcomers.
Many of its inhabitants have multiple loyalties, family ties, and allegiances. Communities are thus not homogenous. The northern parts of Somali region, in particular Shinille and the Jigjiga lowlands, have a different political history to the Ogaden heartland. The southern and western parts of the region also have distinct historical features.
Ethno-national discourse always seeks to suppress internal contradictions. The longstanding conflict between the ONLF and the Ethiopian government was often portrayed as the latest edition of an age-old confrontation between Somalis and Ethiopians. This was true at the initial stages of the war when ethnic Somalis predominantly fought against non-Somali troops of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces.
However, for a decade – roughly between 2008 and 2018 – the conflict was between Somali special police members sponsored by the government and ethnic Somali that supported ONLF.
This conflict was in many ways a civil war among members of the Ogaden clan family, pitting supporters of the regional president and strongman Abdi ‘Iley’ against his enemies. These internal conflicts and tensions among the Ogaden, but also between many other clan lineages in the region, are an uncomfortable topic for Somali historiography. They are regularly glossed over given the perceived political imperative to present a unified front vis-à-vis the Ethiopian state and its representatives.
If Ethiopian historiography casually overlooks the repressive legacies of the Ethiopian state in its Somali periphery, Somali historiography ignores the ambiguous agendas of Ethiopian-Somali leaders past and present.
These examples demonstrate that there is a good chunk of Somali region history that contradicts, or at least complicates, both Somali and Ethiopian historiography. Admittedly, political instability, repression, and remoteness have for a long time made independent research very cumbersome. This has rendered the emergence of a more nuanced and more empirically founded historiography very difficult. Basic ethnographic and historical accounts of the Somali region have yet to be written. To this day, the rural histories of the region – the histories of pastoralists, in particular – remain undocumented and unwritten.
Letting the Somali region speak
It is tempting to think that Somalis in Ethiopia have simply been unlucky with regard to their geography, that their home will always be the double-periphery of Somalia and Ethiopia, or that the region will always be stuck in its unfortunate colonial history.
Others will argue that Ethiopian-Somalis’ difficulties in speaking for themselves are largely the product of an oral society with low levels of formal education. Some will point out that much of my critique and analysis is not specific to Somalis in Ethiopia, but that it applies in equal measure to many of Ethiopia’s historically marginalized groups, reflecting imperial legacies of the Ethiopian nation-state that remain unresolved today.
These reservations confirm that the history of Somali region and its people has not been told yet. They call for a paradigm shift in documenting and narrating the experiences of Somalis in Ethiopia. Their histories need to be told again, told anew, told on the basis of solid empirical data, and told from a different vantage point. The Somali region is not a periphery, it is a centre. It is at the heart of the Horn of Africa, connecting highlands and lowlands, sea ports and inland cities, Islam and Christianity, and various ethnic groups.
A new history of the Somali region of Ethiopia needs to be written from this vantage point of centrality. It needs to make the voices of its men, women, children, and elderly heard. It will have to tell the story not of one people, but the stories of many people – of camel herders, female traders, khat sellers, school girls, farmers, administrators, returnees, rebels, investors, daily laborers, poets, and many others. It will have to tell stories of the powerful and the powerless, of joy and grief, of hope and despair. It will have to break free from the tropes of the existing politicised narratives.
Importantly, this new historiography of the Somali region will have to be written by intellectuals from the region and its neighbouring territories. Rewriting the histories of Somalis in Ethiopia is not a purely academic exercise. It can help pave the way for a new political imagination that is liberating. A political imagination that allows Somalis in Ethiopia to finally speak up, to make themselves heard, and to be heard.
Uganda, Ethiopia, Egypt… the hidden cost of internet blackouts
African Report | Communication technology is a double-edged sword. It can empower people to access and share information globally, or be used as an instrument of political and economic control. While hopes were raised by the Arab Spring a decade ago, the years since have seen multiple internet blackouts in many African countries.
In the past ten years, the practice of jamming cyber communication has become a new tool by certain nations and governments.
Perhaps the most famous example of all is Egypt during the Arab Spring in 2011. For five days, the Egyptian government shut down all internet communication, to disrupt the 2011 protests.
Eventually, this cost the Egyptian economy $90m, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Had the blackout gone for a whole year, it would have put a dent in Egypt’s GDP of around 3-4%.
“Most of the blackouts were across the entire [country] so it affected every person, business, and organisation. They were not targeted on particular institutions but affected everyone in that place,” says Darrell M. West, the vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institute.
Mohamed Basiouny, an owner of a cyber cafe confirms what West says, adding that the shutdown did trickle down to impact everyone: “Cyber cafes [were] playing a central role at the time so, it was not just kids fooling around on the internet. ” Like many others, Basiouny’s business relied on internet communications. “No internet, no money – it’s as simple as that,” he adds.
Ethiopia’s blackout history
In the same vein, the Ethiopian government cut off internet across most of the country after the fatal shooting of musician and activist Hachalu Hundessa.
The singer is affiliated with the Oromo movement that took down the previous prime minister.
The blackout took place on 30 June 2020 and went on for 23 straight days, interfering with Ethiopians’ rights to access information and muzzling any vestige of freedom of expression.
As for the country’s economy, NetBlocks estimated the losses to surpass Br3bn ($102m). Later in the year, the northern region of Tigray witnessed another blackout as Ethiopia’s prime minister and Nobel peace prize laureate Abiy Ahmed announced a “red line” had been crossed by the TPLF leadership.
The ensuing internet blockage curtailed media coverage of the Tigray region that saw thousands killed or displaced. Businesses largely reliant on internet connections and communication also suffered the financial consequences of being shutdown during the conflict.
“These shutdowns are not, and will never be, haphazard. They are well planned and specifically targeting the people in question. In this instance, it is the people of Tigray and their businesses,” says IT consultant and former employee at the Ethiopian Chamber of Commerce and Sectorial Associations (ECCSA), Samuel Maasho*.
According to Maasho, Abiy was intentionally targeting the region’s gold producer and a huge textile factory, both of which funnel funds to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. “This alone can paralyse a whole country, let alone a region like Tigray,” he says.
New tactical response
The scale of such practices is a much bigger problem today than it was a few years ago says West. According to his research in 2016: “Many of the shutdowns are occurring on a nationwide level as opposed to what used to be in local communities. Shutdowns are being put in place to quell political protests, stop coverage of human rights abuses, and to limit some economic activities.”
Similarly, Ramy Raoof, a privacy and digital security researcher and tactical technologist at Amnesty International, sees internet shutdowns more as a tactical response, than a tool itself, to have instant control-impact.
“Internet shutdowns are by design unsustainable, technically speaking, and it’s meant as a temporary response with either gradual shutdown or gradual restoration. And even during blackouts the states sometimes only apply 80-90 % of shutdowns because they might want to keep national institutions online to avoid financial disasters,” he tells The Africa Report.
Alternatives for businesses?
Beyond building a reliable system based on offline practices or returning to old habits from phone calls to fax machines, one has to wonder, is there a more sustainable alternative?
“All the tips and approaches the activists would engage with, such as international sim cards, satellite phones and connections, are highly dependent on the context,” says Raoof. “The telecommunication infrastructure works differently [de]pending on the ownership. So infrastructure ownership determines how surveillance and controls take place. In many scenarios these tips are valid momentarily for a limited amount of time until those frequencies are also targeted/shutdown.” He points to the example of Egypt in 2011 when the internet crackdown targeted different parts of the communications infrastructure at different times.
“The whole point of internet shutdowns by governments is to keep individuals and organisations from communicating,” says West. He echos Raoof’s concerns, adding such alternative tools would need to be available to all, otherwise they would be futile.
One example to spark answers are how bigger companies can manage to avoid the worst of the crackdowns.
“We were never impacted,” says *Ahmed Bayoumi, operations manager at one of Egypt’s towering outsourcing call centres, in reference to the internet blackout in 2011. “The government cut off the internet for networks and domestic internet providers. But big corporations like ours that are based on leased lines or direct cables were not impacted,” recalls Byoumi.
Following from that experience, one of the projects he set up in 2015 involves using a microwave tower that is fed directly from the mother source. “This tower is linked to a Synchronous Transport Module 1 (STM1),” he explains. It allows companies to remain connected despite any government-imposed blockage, but it comes with a price tag. STM1 is a network transmission of around 155.5Mbit/s and costs about LE12m ($768,296).
For those companies that cannot afford such access, it’s a lose-lose situation: “It’s very costly for small enterprises. Imagine paying for a marketing campaign via Facebook. And suddenly the internet stops. You can’t possibly retrieve that money,” he adds.
World Bank questions Ethiopia’s stance in telecoms competition
Capacity | The World Bank has warned the government of Ethiopia not to take measures that hinder the development of telecoms in the country.
It is criticising the restriction of digital financial services to Ethiopian firms and nationals and a ruling limiting investment by independent cell tower companies, obliging the new entrants to use the infrastructure provided by Ethio Telecom.
This “may slow down network roll out, particularly in rural areas”, warns Ousmane Dione (pictured), the World Bank’s country director for Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan in a hard-hitting blog published by the bank.
Dione, who has been with the bank for more than 16 years, took on his present role in August 2020, just as the present government of Ethiopia was advancing its plans to licence new operators in the country and to sell a stake in Ethio Telecom.
The World Bank has a key role in this process, points out Dione. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the bank, is assisting the Ethiopian Communications Authority (ECA) with the licence awards. “The World Bank itself is supporting the partial privatisation of Ethio Telecom and the strengthening of ECA as an independent sector regulator.”
The ECA has set 5 April as its deadline for bids for the two new licences. A number of companies have said they are interested in either new licences or in stakes in Ethio Telecom. Airtel has said it will not bid.
“The two new operators would compete with Ethio Telecom in mobile communications, internet and other telecom services,” says Dione in his blog.
“Ethiopia is one of the last countries in the world to have retained a state-owned monopoly provider of telecom network and services, a market which is dominated by the private sector in most countries.”
He says: “Opening the market to private sector competition, and foreign investment, is expected to bring lower prices, higher quality of service and more choice for consumers. It will also lay the foundations for Ethiopia’s future digital transformation.”
But while Ethio Telecom has the most to gain from the expansion of the digital economy, “it is also at risk from losing market share if it fails to compete effectively”, he says. The government of Ethiopia appears to be trying to shelter Ethio Telecom from competition, he notes. “This seems to be the motivation behind policy announcements that seek to restrict the operation of digital financial services to Ethiopian firms and nationals. But this may slow down innovation and investment in the market and may actually hinder Ethio Telecom’s own ambitions to attract a strategic investment partner from abroad.”
He suggests that “a better strategy would be to encourage Ethio Telecom to compete on equal terms with the new market entrants in providing mobile money services, without ownership restrictions”.
In the cell tower market, he advises that “Ethio Telecom will need to collaborate as well as compete with the new entrants. But this is best done by allowing for open commercial negotiations in which the new entrants can make rational decisions whether to build their own infrastructure or buy capacity from Ethio Telecom.”
The government’s policies will allow the state company to charge high prices, and that “will end up harming the company”, he says.
“The new operators will be Ethio Telecom’s biggest customers if prices are set fairly, through market competition,” says Dione. “Ethio Telecom has the potential to become a regional powerhouse, but only if it is well-prepared for the competitive environment.
How to Stop Ethnic Nationalism From Tearing Ethiopia Apart
Foreign Policy | The 1994 Ethiopian Constitution celebrated self-determination, but it laid the groundwork for today’s violence. Devolution could offer a way out.
On Nov. 28, 2020, Ethiopia’s military took control of Mekele, the capital of Tigray region, after a monthlong fight with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Before the conflict, the Tigray region under TPLF rule was edging toward de facto independence. After the TPLF lost its hegemonic position in Addis Ababa in 2015—where it had dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition for decades—it relocated political and bureaucratic personnel to Mekele. When national elections were postponed due to COVID-19, the TPLF rejected the constitutionality of the decision and went ahead with its own regional election, which it won handily.
Then, it declared that it no longer recognized the federal government as legitimate, and it successfully thwarted the appointment of a new head to the Ethiopian army’s Northern Command, effectively apportioning to itself the most heavily armed section of the National Defense Force. This was followed by a coordinated, preemptive attack on the Ethiopian army’s Northern Command in the early hours of Nov. 4 that enabled the TPLF to take control of the army headquarters in Mekele and several other bases. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed quickly appeared on TV to launch a military operation to dislodge the TPLF from Tigray.
The conflict in Tigray is not merely a political squabble between the TPLF and Abiy’s Prosperity Party, but a struggle for sovereignty between the federal government and a regional state. This is also not the first time the federal government went to war to reclaim control of an intransigent regional state. In August 2018, the federal government undertook an armed operation to dislodge Abdi Mohamoud Omar (also known as Abdi Ilay), the then-president of the Somali regional state—leading to many deaths and the displacement of civilians, especially ethnic minorities.
Ethnic federalism has made Ethiopia a more fragmented, polarized, and conflict-plagued country.
Ethiopia’s constitution, which was ratified in 1994 under the auspices of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which was dominated by the TPLF, is unique in endowing sovereignty upon the country’s nations and nationalities. Its position is also radical because it allows an unqualified right for self-determination, up to secession, to Ethiopia’s more than 80 ethnic groups. This has raised the stakes in federal-regional disagreements, and potentially increased the risk of conflict by allowing secession to be a bargaining chip in political disputes.
For its supporters, the ethnic-based federal system represents a triumph for the age-old quest of Ethiopia’s disenfranchised ethnic groups for autonomy and self-rule. The federal system is seen as the answer to the “question of nations and nationalities”—a school of political thought that critiqued and rejected sociopolitical domination by Ethiopia’s northern Christian elites, mainly ethnic Amharas and, to a lesser degree, Tigrayans. Ethnic federalism was intended to create a new dispensation that ensured that the political, cultural, and economic rights of all ethnic and religious groups are equally respected.
But the turmoil of the past few years has also exposed the limits of Ethiopia’s experimentation in ethnic federalism. Even its ardent supporters cannot conceivably deny that ethnic federalism has raised as many questions as it has answered, and that it has made Ethiopia a more fragmented, polarized, and conflict-plagued country.
The endorsement of the Marxist-Leninist notion of self-determination in Ethiopia’s constitution was all the more puzzling in light of historical developments at the time of its inception. In the early 1990s, just as Ethiopia’s constitution was being drafted, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia—two federations that had enshrined ethnic self-determination in their respective constitutions—were going through violent episodes of disintegration.
The TPLF and other architects of Ethiopia’s constitution could not have missed the ominous signs on open display; They most likely considered their own country’s eventual breakdown as an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, outcome. The bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, which was attended by bitter interethnic wars, was also a red flag for what self-determination could entail in a multiethnic mosaic like Ethiopia. It was already clear from the 1984 national census that only 30 of Ethiopia’s 580 woredas (districts) at the time were actually monolingual ethnic islands.
In reality ethnic identities are fluid and overlaid, and ethnic territorial jurisdictions are often overlapping and contested.
The constitution’s endorsement of the right to self-determination is based on the contentious supposition that ethnic groups can be neatly subdivided into mutually exclusive categories, each with a claim to a distinct territorial homeland. In reality ethnic identities are fluid and overlaid, and ethnic territorial jurisdictions are often overlapping and contested.
Even in Tigray, the only regional state that nominally existed before the current constitution, regional boundaries were entirely redrawn upon the creation of new administrative units in 1994. Much of the current West Tigray and North West Tigray zones (Welkait, Humera, Tsegede, and Tselemte) and some parts of South Tigray (Raya Azebo) were apportioned from the former provinces of Gondar and Wollo, which were mainly inhabited by Amharas.
These territories, which roughly make up one-third of present-day Tigray, are vigorously contested by Amhara nationalists as their own—a dispute that contributed to the involvement of the region’s special forces in the recent war in Tigray. Had Tigray under the TPLF proceeded with secession, it would have only been a matter of time before it descended into an intractable border war with the rest of Ethiopia, just as Eritrea did after winning its own de facto independence in 1991, which was formalized through a referendum in 1993.
The 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian border war, which led to the death of more than 100,000 people from both sides, helped entrench the TPLF’s rule in Ethiopia, but it also severely weakened Eritrea, sowing the seeds of a deep-seated animosity between the TPLF and Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s authoritarian president. At the peak of the Tigray conflict in November 2020, the TPLF fired a series of rockets at the capital of Eritrea, accusing it of sending in its army to Tigray, an allegation that Eritrea denies but is supported by recent independent reports.
One of the most devastating effects of Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism is its utter failure to protect minorities. For instance, the 1994 constitution created a new region called Benishangul-Gumuz as one of Ethiopia’s nine (now 10) administrative regional states, as a homeland to the Benishangul and Gumuz ethnic groups. The region’s constitution affirms that the region “belongs” to five native ethnic groups: the Berta, Gumuz, Shinasha, Mao, and Komo. Other important minorities like Amharas, Oromos, and Agaws, who make up at least 40 percent of the region’s population, are treated as second-class citizens without a right to create their own (ethnic) parties for legitimate political representation.
The failure to safeguard minorities extends to all regional states, leaving minorities in a precarious situation where they live with a constant fear of eviction. A narrative of “natives” versus “outsiders” and a political discourse grounded in ethnic grievances inevitably feeds into cycles of violence. In times of political change and instability, such as the period since 2015, ethnic tensions have boiled over, making minorities victims of brutal killing, eviction, and displacement.
The number of these incidents is despairingly too great to count but includes recent episodes where Amharas were displaced by the thousands in Oromia, Oromos were displaced from Somali region, Tigrayans were violently evicted from Amhara region, as well as a perpetual violence in Benishangul-Gumuz region that has brought death and destruction to hundreds from all ethnic groups. These tragic events have not only traumatized millions but also frayed the tender threads of trust and social capital that have held communities together for centuries.
Moreover, in its fixation on ethnic autonomy, the current constitution has severely impaired, perhaps intentionally, the political power of urban centers—which are ethnic melting pots and thus do not fit the ideological straitjacket of ethnic purity. Since the constitution defines land as a property of ethnic groups, cities without a specific ethnic identity have been left without land, and hence without a right to statehood.
The capital, Addis Ababa—despite being the economic and political hub of the country with far greater population that four of the original nine regional states—is constituted as a federally administered enclave that, according to the constitution, is located “within the State of Oromia.” In a country where ethnic identity has become the most fundamental variable of political and economic organization, multiethnic urban centers like Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa are reduced to being staging grounds of political influence among competing ethnic parties rather than being able to administer themselves.
The experiment in ethnic federalism has led to the formation of powerful, militarized, ethnic regional states that harbor old grievances against one another, along with unresolved border disputes that could ignite conflicts at any time. Unless the power of these regional administrations is checked proactively, there is tangible risk that they could be drawn into devastating conflicts that will wreak havoc not only in Ethiopia, but also in neighboring countries, each of which shares at least one ethnic group with Ethiopia.
Boundary disputes between ethnic regions are hard to resolve, because almost all ethnic boundaries are artificial concoctions that lack historical precedents. Prior to the creation of these boundaries in 1994, Ethiopia’s many dozens of ethnic groups seldom had administrative boundaries entirely based on ethnic affiliation. Administrative boundaries were typically porous as people freely moved across geographies, especially in the lowlands, where people followed a mobile, nomadic lifestyle. None of the regional states of the federation existed in their current form and many, such as Amhara and Oromia regions, ever historically existed as separate, independent entities, within Ethiopia or outside. The top-down manufacturing of ethnic nations, complete with sovereign territorial boundaries, has begotten simmering border disputes that threaten to plunge the country into a civil war.
Even from the perspective of ethnic rights, the current system has not enabled the majority of the country’s ethnic groups to exercise the right to self-rule. An arbitrary nomenclature of ethnic classes has been used to allow certain ethnic groups to be organized as autonomous regional states, while denying the same right to other groups of similar population size.
The current system has not enabled the majority of the country’s ethnic groups to exercise the right to self-rule.
The constitution, for example, lumped together around 20 million people of no less than 50 ethnic groups within a region called Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP), while allowing the creation of a Harari regional state in Harar City, with a population of less than 300,000. Hararis were accorded statehood despite making up only 9 percent of the population, purportedly in recognition of the unique historical and religious significance of the city of Harar, which is fully encircled by Oromia, a massive region with close to 40 million inhabitants. These size differences create asymmetric power relations among competing administrative polities and the associated political entities that administer them, leading to political, administrative, and economic imbalances.
A highly exclusionary ethnonationalism will create persistent risks of volatility and violence, which could undermine democracy by making authoritarian positions more palatable on the grounds of peace and security. It also creates the risk of major ethnic groups—the Amhara and the Oromo—forming alliances that co-opt smaller ethnic groups, leading to a political settlement that is neither inclusive nor progressive.
It is clear that Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism needs a major overhaul in order to sustain a peaceful electoral democracy. Without a reform, the system remains a risk to itself and the country, as ethnic rivalries could easily descend into cycles of violence that will endlessly repeat the traumatic experience of the past five years.
Fixing Ethiopia’s broken federal system will require a constitutional reform that establishes new checks and balances to mitigate the risk of ethnic politics exploding into downright violence. One potential approach would be a referendum on political devolution that elevates administrative zones to the level of administrative states, thus replacing regions. Zones, which are currently the second-tier administrative units after regions, are typically inhabited by a distinct majority ethnic group.
The elevation of zones to state-level members of the federation can ensure ethnic self-administration, which would be in keeping with the constitutional emphasis on autonomy and self-rule. At the same time, it would significantly reduce the likelihood of major military or political clashes between neighboring regions, and between regions and the federal government. It would also lead to zonal states that are relatively uniform in size, facilitating a more fair and equitable sharing of political and other forms of power across them.
More importantly, having zonal states as main administrative units would be a significant step toward ensuring self-rule among dozens of nations and nationalities. This solution would, for example, automatically resolve the contention in SNNP, where Wolayta Zone and 10 other ethnic zones are demanding the right to statehood. It will also put to rest many territorial disputes including the ones over Welkait, Humera, Tsegede, Tselemte, and Raya, in which the Amhara and Tigray regional states are pitted against each other.
Ethiopia has more than 60 zones, and having so many first-tier administrative units can introduce many administrative challenges. This, however, is a technicality that can be resolved through procedural mechanisms. Kenya, for example, has adopted 47 counties as its major administrative units after a constitutional change that was enacted following the 2007 post-election violence. The devolution of administrative power to county governments has improved governance quality and given more voice and power to citizens. A Council of Governors, comprising the administrative heads of the 47 counties, coordinates collective action over issues that cut across counties.
Political devolution does not have to lead to the dissolution of the current regional states.
This political devolution does not have to lead to the dissolution of the current regional states. The regions, which can be seen as collective associations of major ethnic groups, can be reformed to serve as traditional, cultural entities charged with cultural stewardship and the pursuit of interethnic harmony.
Many African nations have similar traditional structures parallel to formal political structures. For example, Nigeria and Ghana each have dozens of traditional chiefdoms and kingdoms that do not have official political power but wield considerable influence as stewards of traditional ethnic cultures. If supported by proper governance mechanisms, the presence of parallel administrative structures could enrich and promote cultural interaction, reducing the risk of interethnic political conflict. It can also help redefine the meaning of ethnic “territorial homeland” to its cultural rather than political connotation, reducing the risk of border friction between ethnic groups as well as the disenfranchisement of minorities.
The violent end of the TPLF-dominated era has demonstrated the perils of organizing political power along ethnic lines. The episode also presents an opportunity to rethink Ethiopia’s political system and remake it to accommodate competitive politics. Without reform, Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism holds the seeds of endless conflict that will undermine the country’s very existence.
Devolution of political power to zonal states could offer a path out of the current conundrum and reduce the risk of a catastrophic conflict among militarized ethnic regional states. If approved at the ballot box and executed effectively, such a change can help usher in a democratic system in which the rights of individuals and ethnicities are balanced. It could also lead to a more sober, secular, and constructive political discourse that focuses on building communities rather than tearing them apart.
Conflict in Tigray: Implications for Ethiopia’s International Standing
Charged Affairs | Since Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assumed office in April 2018, experts have optimistically predicted the country’s emergence as a regional power. Factors such as a large population, rapid economic growth, and a reform-minded head of government seemed to support this proposition, until recent instability in federal relations threatened an upset to Ethiopia’s position as an emerging power.
After the federal government’s recent incursion into the Tigray region of Ethiopia and subsequent fighting, reports suggest that several thousand citizens are dead and upwards of 40,000 are displaced. The conflict has drawn attention from the African Union and various other international actors. The crisis in Tigray is not an isolated event, but a manifestation of the security threats and political instability plaguing Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy in his campaign for national unity. Should Addis Ababa fail to resolve Ethiopia’s underlying grievances, Ethiopia risks losing both its position as a regional power and its cache as an international partner.
Violence in Tigray commenced in early November 2020 when Abiy ordered federal troops into the region. While the invasion was ostensibly a reaction to looting by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), most observers agree that the military action was intended as punishment after regional leaders held elections last September in defiance of a federal ban. Abiy declared victory on November 28th after federal troops took control of Tigray’s capital, Mekelle. However, fighting in the region remains heavy. International observers have also raised concerns of war crimes after Ethiopian armed forces threatened to target civilians.
At the heart of this contest between Abiy and the TPLF is a debate around Ethiopian governance and the extent to which Addis Ababa should exercise centralized control. The Tigray conflict has highlighted Ethiopia’s unique system of ethnic federalism, which gives semi-autonomous power to the country’s states, each of which was created along ethnic lines. Since this system was first implemented in 1995, certain ethnic groups – notably the Tigray – have enjoyed a degree of political control disproportionate to their demographic representation.
Abiy’s 2018 election marked a challenge to Ethiopia’s status quo. As the country’s first Oromo prime minister, an ethnic group which is demographically dominant but historically marginalized, Abiy has prioritized the blurring of ethnic lines. His program of “Ethiopianization” envisions a unified national identity that would take precedence over ethnic divisions. But after enjoying 15 years of special advantages achieved through their political clout, powerful ethnic groups fear losing their superior position to homogeneity. The resulting discontent has destabilized Ethiopian governance, as regional leaders fight to maintain their power and autonomy while Abiy tries to solidify central control.
The degree of violence seen in Tigray and the seeming intransigence on both sides of the federalism debate has led some analysts to warn of a broader civil war in Ethiopia. These fears are likely overblown. Two months of intense conflict in Tigray have strained TPLF resistance, and no other state in Ethiopia has the economic or military assets to successfully launch a revolt at this scale. However, it is clear that tensions between Addis Ababa and powerful regional contingents are not going away.
Although it received the most press coverage, what happened in Tigray is not an isolated event. Amhara’s attempted regional coup and the Sidama region’s vote for autonomy from the Southern Nationalities, Nations, and People’s Region, both in 2019, represented earlier challenges to Abiy’s anti-federalist agenda. Nationwide, escalating violence from ethnic paramilitary groups has also threatened Ethiopianization. In the face of continuing resistance, Abiy must be prepared to use force to retain control over the country. Tigray demonstrated his military willingness towards this end, and recent purges of opponents from top positions have shorn up his political might. Abiy should also realize that ruling under martial law may seriously jeopardize Ethiopia’s position as a regional leader and international power.
Ethiopia has some natural advantages that set it up as a regional power, including its size and resource wealth. But the country’s leadership has also sought out an expanded role in recent years: Addis Ababa hosts the African Union headquarters; the country’s National Defense Force coordinates and oversees multilateral peace and security operations in the region; and Ethiopian heads of government have mediated conflicts among neighboring states. Today, as Kenyan-Somali ties disintegrate and the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia generates ill-will in the region, strong leadership over the Horn of Africa is more important than ever.
The Tigray situation is already having harmful effects on regional relations. Federal troops came into direct conflict with Ethiopia’s western neighbor after patrol operations “ambushed” Sudanese forces. The burdens that come with mass refugee flows also threaten regional ties, as Tigrayan civilians surge over the border into Sudan and Eritrea. Perhaps the most serious consequence for Ethiopia’s position in East Africa, however, are the indirect effects of Abiy’s battle for centralized control. The guarded militarism inherent in this fight against state autonomy does not lend itself to legitimate leadership, raising the potential for increased distance from neighbors and regional institutions.
Of even greater concern to world leaders is the risk that an Ethiopian implosion could disrupt international security operations in the Horn of Africa. Prime Minister Abiy and his predecessors have operated in close partnership to American and European powers in counterterrorism and anti-piracy initiatives. With terrorist capabilities surging in the region and piracy ramping up off the coast of Somalia, international actors depend on capable, stable partners like Ethiopia. Unless Abiy finds a peaceful and sustainable solution to conflict over federalist governance, Ethiopia will lose its position as that go-to ally
Tigray Opposition Parties Assert 50,000-Plus Civilian Deaths
Associated Press | Cara Anna — A trio of opposition parties in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region estimates that more than 50,000 civilians have been killed in the three-month conflict, and they urge the international community to intervene before a “humanitarian disaster of biblical proportion will become a gruesome reality.”
The statement posted Tuesday does not say where the estimate comes from, and the parties could not immediately be reached. Communication links remain challenging in much of the region, making it difficult to verify claims by any side.
No official death toll has emerged since the fighting began in early November between Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the Tigray region who dominated the government for almost three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018. Each side now views the other as illegitimate.
The opposition parties say the international community should ensure the immediate withdrawal of fighters including soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, who witnesses say are supporting Ethiopian forces. The parties also urge an independent investigation into the conflict, dialogue, more humanitarian aid and media access to “cover what is happening.”
Civilians throughout Tigray, a region of some 6 million people, have been dying from targeted attacks, crossfire, disease and lack of resources, according to witnesses. Even some of the new administrators appointed by Abiy’s government have warned that people are dying of starvation as vast areas beyond main roads and towns still cannot be reached.
The opposition parties assert that the hunger is man-made as cattle have been killed and raided, crops burned and homes looted and destroyed. The statement was signed by the Tigray Independence Party, the National Congress of Great Tigray and Salsay Weyane Tigray.
Their statement accuses Ethiopia’s government of “using hunger as a weapon to subdue Tigray since it has been obstructing international efforts for humanitarian assistance.” Ethiopia’s government, however, has asserted that aid is being delivered and nearly 1.5 million people have been reached.
The United Nations and others have pressed for more humanitarian access and a solution to a complicated system of clearances with a variety of authorities, including ones on the ground.
“In 40 years (as) a humanitarian, I’ve rarely seen an aid response so impeded,” the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, tweeted on Monday.
U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi after a visit to Tigray told reporters on Monday that the situation is “extremely grave.” He said his team had heard a “very strong appeal” from appointed authorities in Tigray and Ethiopian ministries for more international help, and he pointed out that the U.N. works in “northern Syria, in Yemen, in areas of high insecurity.”
The Tigray region hosted 96,000 refugees from Eritrea before the fighting, and Grandi said he had spoken to some who were caught in the crossfire and then resorted to “eating leaves” after being cut off from support for several weeks. Others were forcibly returned to Eritrea by Eritrean forces, he said. It was not clear how many.
Two of the refugees’ four camps remain inaccessible, and “most likely there is no refugee presence here anymore,” he said. Citing satellite imagery, the U.K.-based DX Open Network nonprofit this week reported further destruction at the Hitsats and Shimelba camps in recent weeks by unnamed armed groups, with humanitarian facilities among those targeted.
Up to 20,000 of the refugees have been “dispersed” into areas where humanitarian workers don’t have access, Grandi said.
The U.N. refugee chief also called for an independent, transparent investigation into alleged abuses. “The situation is very complex,” he said. “There has been a lot of crossfire, a lot of violations on all sides,” including Tigray-allied fighters.
Rising tension as Ethiopia and Sudan deadlocked on border dispute
Al Jazeera | Bickering over contested farmland along the border has in recent weeks deteriorated into armed clashes.
Age-old territorial claims are threatening to embroil Ethiopia and Sudan into armed conflict, as bickering over disputed strips of farmland in recent weeks has boiled over into the most serious escalation of border tensions in years.
The uptick in skirmishes initially involving militias from the two countries saw the neighbours’ national armies intervene – and by mid-December, both countries had massed soldiers along the frontier in the al-Fashaga region.
Last month, Sudan closed its airspace over the region alleging that an Ethiopian fighter jet had infiltrated Sudanese airspace.
Al-Fashaga, where the contested farmlands at the heart of the dispute lie, runs about 100 square miles (259 square kilometres) along the joint border of Ethiopia’s northwestern frontier and eastern Sudan.
For decades, farmers from both countries have harvested crops with little care for border markings in the area amid sporadic flare-ups.
Attempts to properly demarcate the border date back to a treaty signed in 1902 between then British-ruled Sudan and Ethiopia. But the ambiguity along certain border points left the issue unresolved and demarcation has remained a sticking point between the two countries, particularly since Sudan gained independence in 1955.
The flashpoint of the recent bickering was a December 15 ambush, reportedly carried out in the area by Ethiopian militia backed by Ethiopian soldiers.
The attack is said to have killed several Sudanese military officers, and it provoked a rare condemnation from Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who said on Twitter Sudan’s forces would be prepared to “repel” military aggression.
With his country already engulfed in a brutal war in its northern Tigray region, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed responded with a reconciliatory call for calm. “Such incidents will not break the bond b/n our two countries as we always use dialogue to resolve issues,” he said in a tweet.
But Sudan struck back, mobilising soldiers towards contested areas and announcing that it had retaken them by New Year’s day.
“Our military is engaged elsewhere, they took advantage of that,” Ethiopian military chief General Birhanu Jula said of Sudan’s recent military manoeuvres.
“This should have been solved amicably. Sudan needs to choose dialogue, as there are third party actors who want to see our countries divided,” he added, strongly hinting at Egypt, with whom Ethiopia is engaged in a diplomatic spat over the construction of a massive hydroelectric power dam on the Blue Nile River.
Egypt says the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project threatens the water supply and livelihood of its farmers downstream. Thinly veiled accusations that Egypt coerced Sudan into its heavy-handed military approach were largely fuelled by Egypt’s issuing a statement last month backing Sudan in the affair.
Despite Sudan finding itself at odds with Ethiopia over GERD amid seemingly stonewalled tripartite efforts on reaching an agreement on the dam’s construction, Khartoum and Addis Ababa have generally enjoyed warm ties. In 2019, Abiy acted as a mediator between Sudan’s military and pro-democracy leaders in an attempt to ease the political crisis that gripped the country in the wake of the removal of longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir.
Since early November, Sudan has allowed more than 50,000 Ethiopians fleeing the country’s war in Tigray to shelter at refugee camps in its territory.
But both countries have made notable shifts in policy regarding the border dispute.
Previous Ethiopian administrations were far more accommodating of Sudan’s territorial claims. In 2009, Ethiopia’s former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi relinquished control of strips of land on the border to Sudan, as part of agreements that caused an uproar in Ethiopia when made public.
Despite Ethiopia’s concessions, Sudan’s al-Bashir made no concrete effort to militarise its border and prevent the odd raid into its territory by Ethiopian militia.
But under Abiy, Ethiopia appears to have backtracked on past agreements and could yet stake a claim for some of the coveted farmland. Sudan’s tolerance, meanwhile, has thinned considerably amid the rising tensions, which have sparked calls for de-escalation.
Saudi Arabia has reportedly offered to help reconcile the feuding parties, while UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab recently met officials from both sides and urged them to sort out their differences.
“The UK is a friend to both countries,” Raab’s office said in a statement sent to Al Jazeera. “We want to see the tensions settled not just for Ethiopia and Sudan, but also for the region as a whole.”
While the diplomatic community’s efforts are yet to be exhausted, Raab’s call for roundtable talks has received a lukewarm response.
“We are thankful for the mediation offers, but Sudanese forces needs to vacate our land and return to their territory,” Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Dina Mufti told assembled press in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, last week. “When this occurs, we will gladly attend roundtable talks.”
Sudan denies it is occupying Ethiopian territory.
Gridlocked, the two states remain perilously close to a breakout of fresh hostilities. Experts believe that domestic political wrangling in both countries might be behind their somewhat uncompromising stances. Meanwhile, the possibility of domestic political foes interpreting any concessions on al-Fashaga as weakness and the odds of provoking the ire of each country’s nationalist camp could further fuel the standoff.
“Ethiopia is reticent about the al-Fashaga crisis because it touches on Prime Minister Abiy’s grip on power and the interests of the Amhara [Ethiopian region bordering al-Fashaga], his only ethnic support base,” said Rashid Abdi, a researcher and Horn of Africa analyst.
“Whereas in Sudan, a new conflict could complicate the political transition and sow divisions. The army can use war as excuse to reconsolidate power and edge out the civilians,” he added.
Ethiopia’s Long War
London Review of Book | Maaza Mengiste
I have a hazy childhood memory of soldiers breaking into our house. They had come to question my grandfather, who they believed was hiding someone they wanted to arrest. It was not long after the start of the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia that would depose Emperor Haile Selassie and install a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam. The new regime, which called itself the Derg, was hunting down dissidents deemed ‘enemies of the state’. There were nightly gun battles near our home in Addis Ababa between rebel groups and government forces.
I was standing next to my grandfather in the dining area when the door burst open and three soldiers forced their way in. I remember one of them distinctly. He was slender-faced and young, his eyes so wild that he, too, might have been scared. My mind has superimposed his face on the other two men, so that when the memory arises, as it often does, the soldiers are identical triplets screaming at us in unison. My grandmother shouted for me and my grandfather shoved me behind him. I was shaking and I remember his hand reaching back to steady me as I pressed against his leg. I watched the young soldier advance. He pushed my grandfather aside and dropped to his knees on the ground in front of me. He had a downy moustache on his upper lip. He bent close, smiled, and all harshness left his voice: ‘Is there someone else here?’
There was someone else in our house, a stranger hiding in a small room that was normally used for storage. I had been forbidden from going near there, but that hadn’t stopped me. One day, when the door had been left slightly ajar, I peeked in and – if memory serves – made eye contact with an injured man, wrapped in bandages. I knew the answer to the soldier’s question, but I also knew that wasn’t what I should say. I shook my head. The soldiers left and went to another house. In the silence that followed, my grandparents embraced me and assured me we were safe. Then they both insisted we would never talk about what had happened. And we didn’t. I never learned who the man was, or what happened to him.
In the years since, I’ve tried to make sense of that moment. My grandparents are dead. My parents weren’t at home when it happened. There is no one left but me to carry the memory, which has grown heavier over the years. I have had to wade through the many events that separate it from everything that came afterwards. The revolution swept through my family. Some relatives were jailed, others were killed. The Derg didn’t allow funeral rites for those it called enemies. Silence and fear worked together to keep grief so contained that it was not until the summer of 2005, while driving with my mother in Addis Ababa, that I learned I had three uncles who died during the revolution. We were stuck in traffic behind a police truck. Several young men, a few of them with bruised and beaten faces, stared at us from the back of the open bed. ‘I have seen so many of these,’ my mother said. Then she told me about her brothers and the games they used to play. Later, when I asked her to tell me more about her favourite brother, she sang a childhood song, tears running down her face.
A few years ago, I went to see the African Union’s new headquarters in Addis Ababa, an impressive building with a grand auditorium, funded by China. It has a memorial to victims of human rights abuses, which acknowledges that the AU is built on the site of Akaki Prison, Ethiopia’s central jail, known as Alem Bekagn, or ‘Goodbye to the World’. The date of its construction is unclear, but it outlasted a succession of rulers: fascist, monarchical, dictatorial and authoritarian, until it was permanently closed in 2004 under Meles Zenawi. It gained notoriety in 1937 during the Italian occupation, when an assassination attempt on Marshal Rodolfo Graziani led to the retaliatory Yekatit 12 massacre. An estimated 30,000 people were killed during these brutal reprisals. Unknown numbers of innocent people were imprisoned, tortured and executed in Akaki or sent from there to concentration camps.
The details we have from that period come from personal recollections and family stories, but these accounts were largely set aside in 1941, when Haile Selassie reclaimed the throne and the occupation ended. He directed Ethiopians to look to the future, to forgive the Italian invaders and leave the past behind. There was no reckoning with the aftermath of the war. There was no attempt to address – and perhaps alleviate – the deep social and ethnic divisions that continued after the Italians had left and were exacerbated by each successive ruler. Haile Selassie used the prison to hold criminals and political opponents, as did the Derg. (Meles Zenawi used another notorious detention centre, Maekelawi.) The memorial’s website correctly calls it a ‘citadel of oppression’, but despite the decades of deaths and disappearances at Alem Bekagn there has been no attempt at reparative justice to honour those incarcerated there, only the relentless narrative of national progress and uncolonised independence.
Ethiopia has seen nothing comparable to the work that took place in Rwanda after the genocide or in South Africa under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The perpetrators of the worst crimes of the Derg era have not been properly punished. The stories from this period have been suppressed – partly out of fear and trauma, but also as a consequence of a culturally accepted unwillingness to show weakness. The weight of historical trauma can feel overwhelming. After the Italian occupation and the Derg years, it was easier just to keep moving forward, as my family and so many other families have done. But then in 2018, Abiy Ahmed was named prime minister and with him came unprecedented optimism and the possibility of reconciliation through political reform. To understand the momentousness of that moment, and the disappointment that has followed in its wake, requires a confrontation with the past.
In the 1970s, early in the revolution, Meles Zenawi, then a medical student at Addis Ababa University, fled to Tigray to continue the struggle against the Derg. He joined the armed resistance that was solidifying around a political ideology grounded in ethno-nationalism – the nascent Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The civil war lasted more than fifteen years; by the time the Derg was overthrown in 1991 the country was shattered – socially, economically, culturally. At least half a million people had been killed. Untold thousands had been imprisoned or had gone into exile, and millions more had lived in fear, suspicion and under constant threat of violence. A decade and a half of censorship and the total suppression of dissent had brought the press to a standstill and constrained all natural expressions of grief, anger and other emotions.
Meles, who led the transitional government set up in 1991, was prime minister from 1995 until his death in 2012. The TPLF dominated a four-party, multi-ethnic coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Under Meles, Ethiopians saw economic progress and greater freedoms. But those years were tainted by the uneven distribution of wealth, increasing ethnic strife, and government crackdowns on the media, political activists and civil society.
In the months before the 2005 elections, the EPRDF and the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy, among others, waged a vigorous and heated campaign across the country. There were televised debates, and the final week witnessed huge rallies. Some polling sites in Addis Ababa were forced to stay open for 24 hours to accommodate the vast queues. On the evening of 16 May, while results were still being counted, Meles declared a thirty-day ban on large gatherings and took direct control of police and militia forces. The EPRDF claimed it had won a majority; the opposition insisted it had won more seats than the official tally. Amid allegations of electoral fraud, young people in cities across Ethiopia defied the ban and demonstrated.
Protests swept the country. On 6 June, government forces arrested thousands of demonstrators, most of them students, in Addis Ababa alone. On 8 June, security forces opened fire on large groups of unarmed protesters, killing at least 22 and wounding more than a hundred. Crackdowns continued, and later that summer, when my mother and I were stuck in traffic behind that police truck full of young men who had clearly been beaten, we were certain we were staring at political prisoners. It wasn’t surprising that the events of 2005 should have taken us back to the Derg years, or that those young men should have reminded my mother of the brothers she had lost. By November, at least 200 people had been killed, 800 wounded and 30,000 arrested, including leaders of the opposition. Thousands fled Ethiopia, many paying traffickers to take them to Libya where they would try to find a way to cross the Mediterranean and enter Italy alive.
Meles’s successor in 2012, Hailemariam Desalegn, faced a vocal and unflinching movement that demanded greater representation and rejected the EPRDF’s development plan for Addis Ababa, which would have encroached on Oromo ancestral land and villages. The Oromo people, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, have also been one of its most marginalised and politically underrepresented. The protests, led by young Oromo people, were largely peaceful; they were met with excessive and lethal force. The government crackdown included more restrictions on media freedom. Through it all, the protesters refused to back down, their defiance gaining them worldwide attention. In early 2018, Hailemariam Desalegn resigned.
Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo, was elected by parliament to become the next prime minister. The 41-year-old former lieutenant colonel (and gifted orator) was heralded as a reformist. He released thousands of political prisoners, including journalists and opposition party members. He took steps to improve the relationship between government and opposition groups. He increased the number of women in the cabinet and acknowledged the widespread use of torture by previous administrations. Under his leadership, a truce was declared between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It was an unprecedented series of reforms, unfolded at blinding speed in a country that often moved at a creeping pace. As I watched from New York, where I live, the irony of Ethiopia’s opening up politically as America descended into Trumpism wasn’t lost on me.
In 2019, Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the twenty-year conflict with Eritrea; within a year, he was in the middle of a new clash with the TPLF, a struggle between the former political power and its successor. After gaining office, Abiy dissolved the EPRDF coalition and merged its constituent groups to form a new Prosperity Party. The TPLF declined to join. The power of regions such as Tigray is enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution, written by the EPRDF in 1994, in order to protect ethnic groups in the event of authoritarian rule. Elections were due to be held in August 2020 but they were delayed last May, in the midst of the worsening pandemic (they are now scheduled for June 2021). The TPLF accused Abiy of governing illegitimately and in September went ahead with unconstitutional regional elections. Tensions grew. The Tigrayan regional government prevented a general appointed by Abiy from taking up his post. Some members of parliament proposed designating the TPLF a terrorist organisation, though so far this has been rejected by the government as a whole.
On 4 November, in response to a TPLF attack on government troops in the Tigray region, Abiy began a military operation against the TPFL. The date seemed familiar. I looked through some old notes and saw that on 4 November 1935, 120,000 Italian troops were advancing towards Mekelle, the Tigrayan capital. Tigray had also been the site of the Battle of Adwa in 1896, when Emperor Menelik II defeated Italy’s first attempt at colonisation. The city – and the region – were symbolic for Mussolini. He was determined that his country’s wounded pride should be satisfied there. The northern highlands of Ethiopia are rocky and mountainous, the population stubborn. Though Mussolini declared victory in 1936, the war wasn’t over. Ethiopian fighters took to the mountains, living in caves and carrying on a guerrilla war that eventually ousted the Italians in 1941.
It is likely that some of the residents of the northern highlands who experienced life under the Derg would have remembered, either from direct experience or family accounts, the bloodshed inflicted by the Italians forty years earlier. It is also likely that some of those who are experiencing today’s conflict carry with them memories from the Derg years. To understand what is happening now requires a long lens, but Ethiopia’s pride in its uninterrupted national durée, as evidenced by references in the Bible, the Iliad, Herodotus’ Histories and other ancient texts, can be an impediment to reckoning with that history. It is not enough simply to preface accounts of the current conflict with ancient historical descriptions.
As the fighting continued last November, refugee camps were filling up. Amnesty International reported a massacre of Amhara civilians in Maicadra by Tigrayan militia, which was followed by news of other civilian massacres, Tigrayan and Amhara. Eritrean soldiers were said to have joined the conflict. Scattered accounts of sexual violence against women and girls hinted at more systematic crimes. The government’s communications blackout made it nearly impossible to ascertain exactly what was happening. In the absence of verifiable details, journalists relied on eyewitness testimony from refugees that painted scenes of horrifying cruelty and humiliation. Some of those accounts were refuted on social media. The present seemed to be as confounding as the past. There could be no doubt, however, about the mass displacements and the terror of ordinary people caught in circumstances beyond their control.
Abiy has stressed repeatedly that this is a conflict, not a war, yet in many respects it has proceeded with all the destructive force of war. The federal government has declared victory in Tigray and some of the one million displaced residents of the region are returning home, though others still feel unsafe. Telephone and internet connections have been partially restored. Security has been tightened and international humanitarian convoys have begun to distribute aid. There is an attempt to return to normal, but in the aftermath of this conflict, other conflicts simmer, waiting to erupt. What exactly is normal?
Everything is at stake in discussions of Ethiopia’s political present; not only our future, but our past. What might justice look like? At such a volatile moment, it seems impossible – and naive – to plead for multilateral discussions, to imagine the potential benefits of negotiation. Yet it is difficult to conceive of another way forward that does not, sooner or later, include more bloodshed. Dialogue would be an unprecedented response to conflict in a nation that has built its identity on confrontation and conquest. It would require the audacity and the optimism of Abiy’s early rule. It would require hope and the willingness and courage to delve into the past. Otherwise, what do we do with all that history – all that rage, all these memories? A young soldier with a slender face. Bruised and beaten men in the back of a truck. The site of a prison, a plaque on a wall. A new conflict shrouded in silence. The question is not where to begin, but how.