THE ETHIOPIA PROBLEM
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| Ethiopia's soldiers in Mekelle, capital city of Tigray, after they captured from TPLF forces, March 2021/Getty images |
By: Mohamed Garad
About one hundred and sixteen
years after the Tripartite
Treaty
of 1906 in which the imperialists
of Great Britain and France formally recognized “the independent African empire
of Ethiopia,” Ethiopia proves to be an unresolved colonial empire that is
burning in all its corners.
The world’s deadliest war is
happening in the Tigray region, core region of Ethiopia’s State. Ethiopia’s
National Defense Forces (E.N.D.F) and neighboring Eritrean military with the
help of the Amhara regional militia called Fano are waging a full-scale war
against the Tigray Defense Forces (T.D.F), a coalition forces led by Tigray
Liberation Front (T.P.L.F), a former leading member of the ruling coalition of
Ethiopia between 1991 to 2018.
The atrocities of the war in
Tigray are catastrophic and devastating. So far, the death toll of the war
is more
than half a million according to
independent academic works, most of them civilians. The United Nations report
warns about the likes of the Rwanda genocide could happen in Ethiopia. An investigative report of the United Nations
International Commission of Human Rights Experts released on Thursday,
September 22, 2022, concludes that atrocities that mount war crimes &
crimes against humanity have been happening in Tigray since the start of the
war in November 2020. Now, Tigray region is under a full-scale siege in which
the entire region is blocked off from the necessities of life putting hundreds
of thousands at risk of dying because of starvation. Such an act is by
definition a collective punishment, and the UN report finds widespread
use of extrajudicial killings, rape, sexual violence, and starvation of the
civilian population as a method of warfare committed in the region.
The UN report categorically
accuses Ethiopia’s government of committing crimes against humanity in Tigray
while “the Tagrayan forces have committed serious human rights abuses, some
amounting to war crimes.” As this essay is to be published, such a brutal war
is at its height and no reliable signs are showing it will end soon.
Ethiopia’s deadly war in the
north isn’t the only shocking reality in the country at the present. An equally
brutal but less covered war has been going on in the Oromia region even before
the war in the North started. Independent human rights organizations reported grave
human rights violations committed by Abiy Ahmed's soldiers in Oromia under the
government’s pretext of fighting against insurgency, the Oromo Liberation Army,
OLA since early 2019. A single phone rung of a participant in a public
gathering organized by the government caused him to be shot in front of the
mass gathering in the Oromia region according to Amnesty International. In such a situation, one can imagine what might have
been happening in the darkness and out of the public eyes. A complete state of
terror and manslaughter in most parts of Oromia is at the present more or less
a reality. A similar report finds human rights violations in the Amhara region
as well.
The above are just a few
descriptions of Ethiopia’s present gloomy situation. Mass upheaval, grievances,
and denial of basic human and democratic rights are the norms across Ethiopia.
A prime example is the Somali region, the historically war-ruined region and
most contested region in Ethiopia which is relatively the most stable place in
Ethiopia at the present simply because people have forgone their most
fundamental rights to give peace every chance at least temporarily. Naturally,
peace doesn’t last long in such a situation. The essay of Faisal Roble gives a great perspective on the
present situation in the Somali region.
Ethiopia is on a such deadly
path while it's being led by the 2019th Nobel Peace Laureate, an extraordinary
paradox and a major contradiction to the solemn meaning and the spirit of the
world’s highest peace award. The laurels of the 2019 Nobel Peace Award have
been strained by the blood of the people Ethiopia calls its citizens as the
recipient of the Nobel is leading the war that caused war crimes and crimes
against humanity in his own country.
Factors that have ripped off
Abiy Ahmed from the standard Nobel Peace manners and ideals and putting the
masses of Ethiopia into what can be described as a violent blackhole that sucks
and brutalizes everything in and around it are generic. They emanate from the
formation, nature and character of Ethiopia and its State. Ethiopia is founded
on the basis of colonialism and its State is a lethal pure colonial product in
which even the world’s highest peace award didn’t only fail to save it from
self-afflictions but became one of its latest victims.
The entirety of the African
States suffer generic foundational flaws as they are all birthed by a colonial
womb. But Ethiopia is an exception. The womb of the colonial expedition that
formed Ethiopia is resisting to deliver a non-colonial State(s). The long
overdue labor became devastating perennial wars with human miseries. The
ongoing brutal war is just one of them and will not be the last if a real
resolution is not injected into the colonial mother. However, Ethiopia's
refusal to take a dose of effective resolution became its conundrum which
deprives Ethiopia peace and has caused liberty and basic human dignity to have
eluded the masses. Observers of the horn and students of Ethiopian politics
call that conundrum “the question of nations.”
The formation of Ethiopia
through colonial expeditions started at the partition of Africa. An ambitious,
cruel but tactically successful king of a small kingdom located in the
north-central plateau of president day Ethiopia, known to be Menelik II,
informed the invading European imperialists that he will not sit idle but will
be a part of the colonial crusade. He wrote a letter to the European powers in
1891 and famously stated, “if powers at distance came forward to partition
Africa, I don’t intend to be an indifferent spectator,” claiming the lands of
his neighboring African nations and referring their people “sea of pagans”, a
pure colonist’s slander. Securing weapons from the colonizers through
conspiring, he conquered neighboring medieval African nations one after the
other. “European imperialism met its match in this corner of Africa,” John Markakis writes in his book “Ethiopia: the last two frontiers.”
Markakis is a leading political historian and retired professor of African
Studies at the University of Crete who devoted a large part of his career
studying Ethiopia’s politics and history.
Though the British empire
ceded part of Somalia, the present-day Somali region, to Ethiopia in the treaty of November 29, 1954,
the rest of Ethiopia was formed through such a colonial mechanism. The highly
promoted myth that Ethiopia is the only African country that resisted
colonialism is unreal as Ethiopia never had its present shape before
colonialism but was formed out of the exact act of colonialism. In that sense,
Ethiopia is the only African country that colonized and still occupies its
fellow Africans to this day. Colonialism isn’t a race but an act and an African
who conquered and occupied others is a colonizer in all senses.
One with a rational sense
might argue Menelik’s brutal expansion wars were simply an act of State formation
seeking validation from Charles Tilly’s famous remark of "War made the
State, and the State made war,” However, Tilly’s remarks can nowhere be applied
to the case of Ethiopia. In plain language, while Tilly was referring to the
rise of National States in Western Europe, Ethiopia’s rise in the 20th
century was more than 80 distinct nations of which two—Ahmara-Tigray—forcefully
conquered and occupied the rest. In that regard, the wars that made Ethiopia
defy Tilly’s observation in western Europe as Ethiopia’s case involved the
forceful incorporations and occupation of vast distinct nations, a prime
example of empire building. Europe is full of empire-building literature and
that’s where Ethiopia perfectly finds its place.
Successive Ethiopian rulers have
all tried to resolve the fault lines of the empire they inherited, the
question of nations—nations that were forcefully conquered and
incorporated. All have failed to resolve. Abiy Ahmed is the worst of all in
that regard. Their common failure denominator is blind disregard of the reality
and the use of violence to resolve big political problems.
The imperial regime (1889
–1974) reacted with an assimilationist State architect which tried to
forcefully assimilate the entire population of the conquered nations into the
Amhara national identity and culture to preserve the empire, but that only
fueled wars and the regime finally failed. The successive Derg regime
(1974–1991) established a tyrannical socialist state to subdue the resistance
and preserve Ethiopia but suffered a violent and un-ceremonial downfall. The
EPRDF regime (1991–2018) implemented a tyrannical regime that contravenes its
constitution and rule of law to suppress the struggle for justice and freedoms
but suffered the same fate as its predecessors. Even the current leader who is
a Nobel Peace Prize recipient failed to break the vicious cycle of wars &
violence but ultimately became a victim of the violent cycle. All presided over
murderous campaigns but failed to achieve peace, justice and freedom.
When Abiy Ahmed came to
power, many hoped for a departure from the past and a genuine resolution of the
conundrum. But Abiy Ahmed took the worst turn. He adopted “medemer”,
an Ahmaric term for “synarchy” as his guiding philosophy to govern Ethiopia,
but “medemer” has neither historical nor scientific roots to
prove any rightness or relevance but proved to be a terrible fiction that
widely opened the pandora’s box. Abiy’s “medemer” fully
ignored Ethiopia’s historic mistakes of oppression, downplayed major
differences of history, culture, ethnicity and called for the ones of Ethiopia
that all should conform to the views and the culture of one nation, the Amhara
nation. Such a view resonated anger in the minds and hearts of the masses and
ignited violence across the board. The brutal war of attrition in Tigray is
fundamentally a result of a clash of views and identity. The same is true
elsewhere in the empire.
As the result of “medemer”, the
entirety of Ethiopia convulsed into a brutal war of annihilation.
At the present, “medemer” ignited
Ethiopia’s State into a suicidal club. There are major waves of brutal wars
that led war crimes and crimes against humanity, civil unrest, economic
bankruptcy and political turmoil which are threatening Ethiopia’s sole
existence once again. While the prime minister’s views ignite violence, his
unwavering lust for power and tyrannical approach are crimping the last
vestiges of Ethiopia’s tyrannical State into its final death spiral. Thus, fear
of the worst will be real and if Ethiopia continues this path, it will either
perish in its fight to preserve its colonial empire and tyrannical State order
or will commit the worst genocide of all. Either way, the continuity of the
historic oppressive Ethiopia is unlikely and post-war Ethiopia will unlikely be
the same again in shape and character. So why not spare the human lives now and
force this aimless war to stop now?
To resolve the current
situation of the Ethiopia problem, the answer key is:
1. Prime minister Abiy Ahmed must resign. His presence in power seems too toxic and a danger that Ethiopia can’t afford. The prime minister neither enjoys genuine popular support nor appealing ideological thoughts. His coercion power is ineffective, devastating and potentially genocidal. It’s the time that the Nobel Peace Laureate should adhere to common sense and humanistic values and go.
2. The fundamental cause of Ethiopia’s longstanding problems is colonialism. Decolonization is the right antidote. Set an agreeable and true representative interim gov’t and start the decolonization process peacefully now. One way to a sustainable mechanism that ensures the territorial integrity of present-day Ethiopia is by adopting a confederation State formula in which the central State power is limited only to foreign policy, defense, and printing currency. The result is a new stable, peaceful, and thriving multi-cultural multi-national democratic Ethiopia. The ultimate effective resolution of the Ethiopia problem is to grant a free and fair referendum for all nations to voluntarily decide either for full sovereignty or set a new union that respects and upholds the history, values, and aspirations of all nations. The alternative is no longer the continuity of an oppressive Ethiopia but massive bloodshed and possible genocides with the final outcome of disintegrated Ethiopia.
Mohamed Garad is an entrepreneur and independent researcher who studies the political history, economics and politics of the Horn of Africa region.
