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:
- 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.
- 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
Email: [email protected]
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Mohamed is an independent Researcher, entrepreneur, co-founder & president of Iftiin Institute of History and the co-founder & CEO of N & H Trucking.
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