The current government in
Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), often
claims the multi-national constitutional federalism that it introduced a
quarter century ago answered the country’s age-old question – famously known as
the ‘national question’ – once and for all.
Ethiopia’s constitution, the government further claims, is
multi-foundational by its nature and adequately addresses the politics of
recognition and inclusion for Ethiopia’s long marginalized nations; better yet
it guarantees the right to self-determination up to secession. States are now
autonomous and free from the yolk of a centralized state and the notion of “one
country, one people, and one language”, a notion that had violently governed
Ethiopia’s oppressed mass for at least a century.
Today’s Ethiopia is a ‘federal democratic republic’ of nine autonomous
national regional states: Afar, Amhara, Benishangul-Gumuz, Gambella, Harari,
Oromiya, Somali, Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR) and
Tigray. All of them home to an incredibly diverse and free people, so the story
goes.
For the last two decades, therefore, anyone who questions the accuracy
of these narratives is labeled as an outright enemy of this unique polity, a
polity born out of its people’s age-old grievances where “unity in diversity”
is the order of the day.
Trouble in paradise
But a five month persistent protest by the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest
ethnic group, for whom the inaugural of a multi-national constitutional
federalism was a long awaited victory, which started in Nov. 2015 has laid bare
the otherwise flawless narrative Ethiopians have believed in for more than two
decades. What began as an opposition against a The Addis Abeba Master Plan,
which was, by any legal standard, prepared in a clear violation of the
fundamental principles of federalism, led to historical questions that the
Oromo of a federated Ethiopia continued demanding an answer for, including the
questions of national identity, of economic injustice and land ownership as
well as a genuine political representation.
However, a look back at just the last eighteen months alone reveals
that the Oromo are not the only ones that seem to be haunted by the re-opening
of the old wounds that Ethiopians thought were treated two decades ago.
Incidents that resulted in the killings of hundreds, mass arrests and
disappearances as well as displacements of thousands of Ethiopians in the hands
of the state security apparatus show that the questions of national identity,
the urge for self-administration and equitable use of resources (mainly land)
and lack of adequate political representation have re-emerged afresh in five
out of the nine independent regional states in the federated Ethiopia.
The ever restive Gambella
Home to around 200, 000 people, the Nuer, Agnuak, Apana, Mezhenger, and
Komo are the main indigenous peoples of Gambella. But it is also home to other
ethnic groups from the country such as the Amhara, Oromo and Tigray. According
to a 2007 census, of the total ethnic composition in Gambella the Nuer consists
40%, followed by the Agnuak who make up 27%, Amhara 8%, Oromo 6%, Mezhenger
5.8%, Keffa 4.1%, Mocha 2%, and Tigray 1.6%, as well as other ethnic groups
mainly from various regions in Southern Ethiopia who constitute 5.5%.
Unlike the triumphant declaration of a constitutional federalism
however, Amharic, which is the mother tongue of neither the Nuers, nor the
Agnuaks, is the working language of the State.
Historically, Gambella is a region prone to ethnic conflicts. The 2003
unprecedented massacre of more than 400 Agnuaks in the hands of government
security forces and ‘highlanders’, according to the HRW, left Gambella stuck in
crisis watch list of several international organizations including the United
Nations.
What happened at the end of January 2016 can therefore be easily taken
for the usual sporadic skirmishes between the two dominant ethnic groups; it
involved both and covered vast areas in the region, touching villages from
Abobo to Itang, Gog to Jor, and a refugee camp in Pugindo, as well as a prison
cell in the capital, Gamebella town. By the government’s account 14 people,
including Gatdet Gony, Deputy Head of the Transport and Road Development
Office, were killed in the clash. Several other accounts put the number as high
as 50.
The federal government quickly dismissed the cause as a simple
confrontation between two men from both tribes, but the cumulative fear by the
Agnuaks about the Nuer’s political dominance (which is often alleged to be
supported by the federal government) and near absolute control over resources
by the Nuer plays a significant role in instigating these conflicts.
Gambella’s small nuisances
While the rest of Ethiopia was welcoming the Ethiopian New Year of 2007
on Sept 11, 2014 with jubilant festivities, Meti, a small town in Godere
District in Mezhenger Zone of Gambella was struggling to contain a chaos that
besieged the villagers. Around 8 AM that morning a group of men broke into a
prison located in Kebele 01 and released several inmates who then went door to
door to residences of the ethnic Mezhengers, killing many including women and
children, according to charges brought against the perpetrators.
The Mezhenger consider people who came from various parts of the
country, mostly from the highland areas of the North and Central Ethiopia and
had settled there as ‘highlanders.’ Some of these ‘highlanders’ had lived in
the district for decades.
Although the flare ups of many of these conflicts always come in the
form of petty individual confrontations between the ethnic Mezhengers and these
‘highlanders’, the fundamental problem is one that Ethiopia’s two decades old
constitutional federal dispensation failed to address effectively.
The Mezhenger zone is one of the three zones in Gambella bordering in
its southeastern part the Sheka and Bench Maji zones of SNNPR, as well as the
Agnuak of Gambella and Illubabor of Oromiya to the north. Endowed with abundant
natural resources it is a region where the long arms of the federal government
easily tampers with. The area is home to large scale tea plantations owned by
foreign companies and fertile lands contracted to both local and foreign
companies without much say from the Gambella regional state.
A recent report by Fortune newspaper, a private
weekly, revealed that “Nearly 100 commercial farming investors in Gambella are
losing thousands of hectares of land because the region leased by mistake lands
under federal jurisdiction.” When asked to comment on the issue, Gatluak Tut
Kon, president of the Gambella regional state, told the newspaper, “You should
talk to the federal government. I wish to give no comment on the case.” For
many who believed in the principles of constitutional federalism that Ethiopian
officials claim to have instilled, this was no ordinary news headline.
Critics also lament that the demands of the Mezhenger people to want to
forcefully evict “highlanders” from their native land comes from the insecurity
of resource distribution and a sense of political exclusion. They were always
Ethiopia’s marginalized periphery.
Konso, Qucha, Wolkait, Qimant and all that demand
Following the creation by
the SNNPR regional state of the Segen Area Peoples Zone in March 2011, the
Konso community in the south was staging peaceful protests for the last 10 months. The Konso people fear the creation of the new zone forces them to lose
their “right to self-administration and their right to advance their culture,
language and national identity, enshrined in the constitution.”
The response from the regional government was similar to the response
the federal government often avails to contain similar demands elsewhere:
deploying the region’s Special Forces who asnwered the community’s constitutionally
legitimate demands with violence.
Although to a lesser extent, the Qucha people, who also reside in the
SNNPR regional state, are demanding a similar question: the right to
self-administration. Forty elected representatives of the community have come
to Addis Abeba at the end of 2014 and have raised the question of national
identity and self-rule with the House of Federation.
In the north of Ethiopia the Qimant people in the Amhara regional
state, north of Gondar, also demand what the Konsos and Quchas were demanding
for years. A recent conflict that flared up in Nov. 2015 between the Qimant
people and the regional administration is believed to have resulted in the
death of several community members of the Qimant people.
However, contrary to the people of Konso and Qucha, (and rather
uncharacteristic of the regime), the Qimant peoples’ demand for
self-administration was addressed in March 2015 when the Amhara Regional state
granted them a status of nationality and ruled that they can exercise self-administration.
According to the ruling, the Qimant have a right for self-administration in 42
Kebeles in the adjacent Armachiho and Chilga Districts. They can also enjoy the
full rights of developing their language as well as their culture.
In north western Ethiopia, the simmering question of national identity
by the Wolkayit community has recently reached a new peak. In what’s largely
believed to be a forceful decision by the federal government, the Wolkayit
people are to stay under the Humera Zone of the Tigray regional state. It is a
decision that quashed the community’s two decades old demand to join the Amhara
regional state, as they identify themselves as Amharas. A few weeks into the
protest the people of Wolkayit were paraded in front of the national TV
carrying placards that declared all their questions, including their questions
of identity, as have been answered once and for all.
But as the bumpy road continues to stretch from the North to the South
to the West (and seem to grow by frequency as well as magnitude) the first –
and perhaps most uncomfortable – step would be to probe if Ethiopia, where the
concept of “unity in diversity” avails itself for all to indulge on an equal
footing, was ever born in the first place.
Worry or not worry?
Ezekiel Gebissa, a Professor of History and African Studies at
Kettering University, argues that the constitutional federalism the incumbent
introduced doesn’t originally belong to it; it dates back to “the Ethiopian
student movement” of the early seventies.
Prof. Ezekiel Gebissa
At the pinnacle of the student movement the question of national
identity took center stage, especially among the movement’s leaders such as
Walelign Mekonnen. Walelign’s prescription of self-administration up to
cessation for the politically marginalized became the rallying factor for the
would-be guerrilla fighters, who later defeated the Marxist Derg regime, Prof.
Ezekiel explains.
Although the Derge tried self-administration based on different regions
called ‘autonomous provinces’, it was a system that didn’t save the center from
an eventual collapse. With the coming to power in 1991 of the ruling EPRDF,
therefore, having constitutional federalism was not an option but a necessity,
according to Ezekiel.
Tamrat Kebede, Executive Director of InterAfrica Group, a think tank,
agrees. In addition, he sees the country’s journey from an absolute
monarchy through military dictatorship to a constitutional federalism as “a
quantum jump”. He believes that with the coming into power of the EPRDF
questions of national identity and self-determination were put to the test for
the first time. Himself a former member of the seventies’ student movement,
Tamrat argues that as much as the questions were debated and discussed, the
approach was purely theoretical.
Tamrat Kebede
Both Tamrat and Ezekiel find the government’s claims that the current
constitutional federalism has answered Ethiopia’s age-old questions as
exaggerated.
A careful look at the lingering cases of the Konso, Qucha, Wolkait and
Qimant reveal the uncanny similarity each community’s approaches share to put
their constitutionally guaranteed demands to the attention of the federal
government; they all invoked legal mechanisms enshrined in the structures of
the constitutional federalism. “The skeleton of the structure is in place. But
putting it into policy is one thing, implementing it is another,” Ezekiel says.
When the Konso people began to protest the demotion of their
administrative area from the status of Special District to a mere District,
they formed a representative committee to advance their demand for
self-administration and managed to collect signatures from more than 5% of the
community, well above the constitution’s requirement. The committee then
appealed to the Federal House of Federation here in Addis Abeba but the House
sent the people (and their questions) back to the regional government.
Similarly the Qucha people, who are currently administered under the
Gamo Gofa zone of the SNNPR, say that they are not ethnic Gamos, as the current
arrangement dictates; they are their own nationality – Qucha. Qucha District,
which is home to the Qucha people, has close to 150, 000 people, according to
the 2007 national census.
And a committee gathered to address the question by the Wolkait people
has written a letter on December 2015 to the House of Federation demanding
proper response to their question of identity. The committee says that the
Wolkait’s right to work and learn in their own language as well as their right
to promote and advance their culture have been suppressed in the past,
including the 20 plus years of the rule by the EPRDF.
But these glitches do not make Tamrat of InterAfrica Group lose faith
in the constitutional federalism Ethiopia is following. In his interview with
this magazine Tamrat says practicing a complex federal system such as that of
Ethiopia’s will “inevitably run into enormous constraints and challenges.”
“[such a system] entails decentralization; it is sensitive; it requires
capacity, both in human terms and resource terms, which are not all readily
available when you launch into such a complex arrangement,” Tamrat said.
Prof Ezekiel shares Tamrat’s view: adjusting the system itself as
needed, “requires a careful, thoughtful, deeply concerned implementation” he
says. But Ezekiel is critical because that never happened in the last two
decades. “The question that brought the very existence of Ethiopia into a
country was never fully answered”.
The reason for this, according to Ezekiel, lies in the undemocratic
nature of the incumbent. Once in power the EPRDF “thought that they could do
whatever they want; they could engineer any outcome; they could muzzle dissent;
they could decimate opposition and tell the politically marginalized
nationalities on the highland and on the lowland that ‘you have a constitution,
your questions have been answered and you have no other question’”.
He believes that the questions raised now in different parts of the
country are indeed not “new questions”. “They are the same questions” he told
this magazine. However he doesn’t “believe for one minute that questioning the
very foundation of the federal arrangement is the answer. It is whether it
should be implemented or not.”
Darkness before dawn?
Analysts who follow Ethiopia closely argue that recent incidents happening
in all corners of the country: the demands for economic justice,
self-administration and national identity are symptoms of a disease far deeper
than the current government dares to admit. Tamrat is one of them.
“These signs should force us to question what it is that we are not
doing right,” he says, “or why is this structure we have created to precisely
avoid these kinds of problems creating these problems? Could it be that we
issued rights that are not being exercised? Have we not prepared ourselves for
the manner in which they are to be exercised? That could very well be,” he
says.
For him the recognitions of the identity and equality of nationalities
as well as the rights to exercise self-administration up to the level of
cessation manifests “strong rights which demand fair resource sharing, fair
political participatory process, needless to say a democratic culture, in the
absence of [which] they are bound to erupt.”
Ethiopians’ questions of national identity and the demand for self-rule
are re-emerging frequently because they have never been answered in the right
way, argues Ezekiel. “Ethiopia is still a one party state” in which not only
its marginalized but also a great many are simply excluded from the political
process. And it is not just a theoretical exclusion, he said, “it is a
totalitarian control of the assets of the state to give permanency to the
exclusionary politics that the regime has put in place.”
The ruling party, Ezekiel further said, “uses the state resources to
co-opt the military, the security apparatus and the business class” to “create
a total hegemony of structure and discourse” and to “emasculate the very
constitution it celebrates.” The ruling party also puts an executive
manned by “ill-educated party cadres that simply parrot the leaders’
pronouncements without any understanding of the complexities of implementing
[federalism] policies.” The trajectory of this direction is one that’s “leading
to calamity.”
Ezekiel believes that the disastrous handling by the federal government
of almost all of these incidents (such as disarming regional police,
intervention without due parliamentary process, committing crimes with an
absolute sense of impunity and several other signs showing excessive control of
the federal government against these national regional states) show that the
party that likes to take total credit for creating Ethiopia’s constitutional
federalism is becoming the system’s enemy number one.
Tamrat too shares Ezekiel’s concerns. The government’s ways of handling
public resentments, which include the application of excessive force, does not
manifest proper and competent handlings.
Campaigners and activists say the recent widespread public protest in
Oromiya, which saw the federal army being quickly deployed, left more than 400
killed, twice that number injured, and thousands incarcerated. The federal army
roamed many of the streets where protests broke out; and the whereabouts of
hundreds of people remains unknown.
Members of the Konso community said that several of their people,
including their leader, are incarcerated or have unjustly lost their jobs
following their demand for self-rule, although many of them were released since
the writing of this story.
According to a December 2015 letter addressed to the House of
Federation by a committee gathered to discuss the question of the Wolkait
people, there were about 116 people whose whereabouts were unknown because they
raised “a question of identity.”
Going to the
Qucha community in the South, in January 2015 the Gamo Area High Court has
sentenced 27 members of the community to up to 16 years imprisonment for
allegedly instigating violence and causing damage on people and properties
fourteen months earlier. According to the charges presented against them, they
were trying to operate illegally to forcefully obtain a status of nationality
for the Qucha community. And to advance their cause, the charges add, they
attacked residences of Kebele officials.
For Tamrat, some of the challenges the country is
struggling with currently require an expanded political space, “to be debated,
to be discussed, to [bring forth] appropriate responses. I see a deficit in
that regard,” he says.
The government’s dogmatic obsession with the
constitution is another “often overlooked” aspect for Tamrat. For the
incumbent, the Constitution is non-debatable, fixed entity, probably because it
mistakenly equates “the Constitution for law and order. So whenever it says the
constitution [is beyond any discussion], it is actually saying that law and
order are [beyond any discussion].”
Yet, the Constitution is an embodiment of a document
that entails the compromise of different views and it is not static, argues
Tamrat; it could be and should be amended when issues demand so. In fact “there
is a provision that stipulates its own amendment” because amendment was “an
envisaged process.” Article 104 clearly states the legality of “initiation of
Amendments.”
“Any proposal for constitutional amendment, if
supported by two-thirds majority vote in the House of Peoples’ Representatives,
or by a two-thirds majority vote in the House of the Federation or when
one-third of the State Councils of the member States of the Federation (by a
majority vote in each Council) have supported it, shall be submitted for
discussion and decision to the general public and to those whom the amendment
of the Constitution concerns,” the Article reads.
A change towards democracy is a must if the country is
to avoid regrettable tragedy, Ezekiel says. “People at the top of the
government must know that the status quo is not sustainable”, he argues,
“because there is too much discontent, too much dissatisfaction, a lot of
desperation, a lot of deprivation,” Ezekiel said, adding that the government
must stop listening to the reverberation of its own voices and understand that
this is not a sustainable path.
“It should begin by decriminalizing dissent, open up
the political space, expunge the draconian laws that are muzzling the press,
start from the freedom of the press, release political prisoners. These are the
measures the government could take in order to win the good will of the
public,” Ezekiel said. “This is not an option, this is an imperative. The
window will close sooner or later. But, would the government be able to see
that? Well, I always say absolute power dements more than it corrupts.”
No turning back
Several Ethiopian critics of the government assert
that the fundamental problem of the recent conflicts that besieged several
areas is the constitutional federalism itself. According to these critics, it
focuses more on differences than unity. Some fear it may even lead to an
eventual disintegration of the country. A return to the old unitary system of
administration is an idea whose appeal seems to gain increasing popularity
among many Ethiopians. But it is an idea both Tamrat and
Ezekiel strongly disagree with.
“The [current] federal arrangement was a response to a
historic question of nationalities,” Ezekiel says, “to deny that there is a
question of nationalities is to deny the sun rises in the East.” The country,
according to him, has tried the unitarists as well as the assimilationists
track for decades and it actually led to “proliferation of centrifugal forces”.
Thus, “the claim that says we need a unitary state is a flight of fancy that
collides with reality.”
Tamrat adds “a unitary government has not yielded the
desired, harmonious and peaceful relationship. We can’t go back to a unitary
system that’s held by force. We have travelled enough distance in this federal
system in which national senses of identities have taken a right recognition
and it is this right recognition which is manifesting itself as demands of
right.”
But back in the power corridors of the government in
Ethiopia exhausting propaganda is being relentlessly produced and aired through
state affiliated media claiming that the federal arrangement not only answered
the ‘national question’ but also put the burning question of land ownership,
and the nation’s quest for self-rule, which saw the previous two regimes
toppled by the will of the people, to their final resting place.
But to put Ezekiel’s words in this context, this one
too seems “a flight of fancy that collides with reality.”
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