Introduction
On April 2, 2018, Ethiopia witnessed a hopeful moment for political transformation. Within a few months, political prisoners were released, exiled political leaders returned, restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly were lifted, and promises to end the period of the rule of violence. The entrenched authoritarian system seemed to be in its last throes. The long struggle for popular participation in politics seemed to be afoot. With a constitution that enshrined greater protections for civil liberties, a federal structure designed to ensure power-sharing, and an experience of voting in several rounds of elections since 1995, it seemed there was a slim chance of a successful democratic transition.
Five years on, despondency has taken the place of optimism. The lives of opposition politicians, their families, and their supporters have become cheap. High-level civil and military officials, ethnonationalist political activists, and famous artists were assassinated or forced into hiding. Death, displacement, and destruction become ubiquitous. Security forces meticulously rounded up and massacred millions of civilians in the name of law enforcement. All kinds of brutality known in human history were committed in the context of deadly wars. Within a short time, Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister who assumed power as a “reformist,” had seized complete control over the political and civil society institutions and the airwaves and digital media, which he used for mass mobilization and to turn the population against political opponents. In this article, I intend to highlight the causes and consequences of the ongoing violence. First, I explore why the state resorted to indescribable violence and brutality to deal with opponents. Then, I examine the causes of the civil war. I argue that the incumbent made a calculated decision to ignite violence for political purposes, and the underlying causes are deeply rooted in the country’s history.
The Violence
The scale of the violence seen in the last few years is staggering. Western, central, and southern Oromia had been under an undeclared state of emergency (SoE) enforced by a military administration known as the Command Post. Beginning in January 2020, the Ethiopian military shifted to counterinsurgency action, conducting several rounds of military operations characterized by scorched earth tactics, reprisals allegedly for harboring sympathies for Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and collective punishments in which parents and siblings of suspected OLA fighters were either killed, imprisoned and their homes burned to the ground.
In Tigray, a total war was waged by a combined force of Ethiopian and Eritrean forces troops supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These forces turned Tigray into a wasteland, killing an estimated 1 million of its inhabitants and pillaging its resources. The Sidama, Konso, Wolayta, Benishangul Gumuz, and others were subjected to unspeakable violence for demanding to exercise their constitutional right to self-rule. Amhara regional state security forces killed hundreds of innocent Qimant, Agaw, and Oromo with the goal of cleansing them from the region.
Why did the Ethiopian state commit this level of violence against the very population it was supposed to protect? Some war theorists suggest that casualties are the unintended but inevitable side effects of an armed conflict. Others posit that the violence is driven by ethnic hate, discrimination, and political vengeance (Epps, 2011). Still, others argue that mass killing is the direct consequence of a nondemocratic regime whose actions are unconstrained by accountability (Mansfield & Snyder 2002). These positions may apply elsewhere but do not comport with the way the Ethiopian civil war unfolded in the different theaters.
In the civil war, indiscriminate violence resulted from a premeditated action aimed at annihilating the political opposition. The outbreak of the Tigray war on November 4, 2020, was preceded by acts of war, including road closure, suspension of federal budget grants, and unrelenting propaganda to demonize, defame and destroy Tigrayan leaders. In Oromia, the battle against the OLA started on September 15, 2018, on the day the Oromo Liberation Leaders (OLF) returned and were greeted with roadblocks, harassment of supporters, beating up of their political workers and killing of innocent civilians to blame them on the arriving opposition leaders. The repeated massacres of the Qimant and Oromo in the Amhara region are to remove them from the region. All of these violent events are planned and calculated actions.
In this sense, the indiscriminate violence by the Ethiopian regime is better explained in terms of intentional mass killing for political purposes. What happened in Ethiopia is geno-politicide,
“a deliberate killing of people by government” (Rummel, 1995:4). It is violence “intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a communal, political or politicized ethnic group.” (Harff, 2003:58). Despots have learned that mass indiscriminate violence is effective in neutralizing persistent opposition and consolidating their power. Under specific conditions of guerrilla conflict, in particular, high-intensity violence and genocidal acts are shown to be effective in starving an insurgency of its support. The practice is commonly referred to as the “drain the seas” approach (Valentino, Huth & Balch-Lindsay, 2004).
Ethiopian officials have never concealed that they would deploy the “drain the seas” tactic to fight insurgencies. In the mid-1980s, hundreds of thousands of Eritrean civilians were killed as a result of the Ethiopian government's intentional policy of starvation (De Waal 1991). In reference to the Tigray war, the Ethiopian prime minister stated that “the Derg government lost the war when it allowed a humanitarian corridor to be opened in 1984. The Derg’s opponents used this avenue to enter the conflict region and assisted the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in strategy development, training, weapons, and finance. This would not be repeated in 2021” (Sheger Daily, 2021). In a nutshell, the prime minister asserted that his forces would lay siege to Tigray and starve the population to surrender.
In early 2021, asked about why the Oromia government was unable to wipe out the insurgency in Oromia, Fikadu Tessema, Head of the Oromia Prosperity Party, stated at the Oromia State Council meeting: “The way to put an end to this is to deal with it like fish... to get rid of them completely, you will need to dry the oceans.” This was not just a threat or bombastic words meant to placate the state council. It is precisely what the security forces have been doing in western Oromia for the last five years.
What led to the intentional killing of massive numbers of civilians was the fact that the Ethiopian regime faced powerful, mass-based insurgencies in Tigray and Oromia. The ethnic differences between the combatants or the undemocratic nature of the regime may have intensified the killing. Still, the indiscriminate mass violence that characterized the civil war in Prosperity Party’s Ethiopia resulted from the regime’s deliberate choice of a counterinsurgency strategy of targeting the insurgents' base of support in the population.
The Causes
Observers who are unfamiliar with Ethiopia’s history and political culture characterize the violence as a byproduct of a political conflict between the Prosperity Party (PP) and its opponents, such as TPLF, the OLA, and other insurgent groups. The international media was full of these characterizations during the Tigray war. Others who are familiar with Ethiopia’s political scene characterize the civil war as emanating from an inherently ideological difference (Allo, 2020). In so far as the conflict is between political forces who seek to restore a unitary state and those who subscribe to a multinational federal structure of governance, it is plausible that the civil war resulted from ideological differences between federalists and unitarists.
These factors were triggers, but they were not the key causes of the devastating conflict in the country. A better understanding of the ongoing civil war requires a deeper insight into the history and the political culture of the country. I offer three plausible causes of the civil war.
Failure of State-building
Writing in the mid-1980s, at the peak of the crisis of the state in the Horn of Africa, John Markakis stated that the state is “the custodian of wealth and protector of privilege. The state is both the goal of the contest and the principal means through which the competition is waged (Markakis 1987, xvii). A quarter of a century later, he observed that “access to state power secures access to resources, and the reverse is also true. Thus, state power becomes the object of social conflict as well as the means by which it is waged (Markakis et al. 2021: 20). Apparently, conflict over state power is a fixture of Ethiopian politics.
As a multiethnic state, Ethiopia’s leaders were haunted by fear that, if they failed to homogenize the existing diversity, the state they were building would fragment along ethnic lines. On the other hand, given that their economic well-being depended on having state power, they limited access to state power to their ethnic group. The refusal to share power has been the source of marginalization of the majority of its people and the cause of the vicious cycle of violence that often leads to the collapse of a regime. Almost a century after it was founded, despite decades of state-building endeavors, the Ethiopian state was unable to address the country’s cultural diversity vis-à-vis power relations and economic justice.
In 1995, the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia was adopted, and a multinational federal state was institutionalized. The formula was the first genuine effort to address the nationalities question. But the TPLF “did not seriously entertain the idea of building alliances with existing southern parties and instead drove them largely out of existence” (Young, 1997:213). In its quest to consolidate power, the TPLF banished the OLF out of the political arena and out of the country.
With OLF’s departure, two visions of state-building competed in the political arena. The Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) or Qinijit adopted a platform that promised a liberal democratic state in which ethnic loyalty disappears through cultural assimilation and forces of modernity as an appropriate solution for Ethiopia’s quest for national integration and economic development. The ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) presented a political stance that claimed ethnonationalists’ demands had been accommodated, the nationalities question resolved, and the remaining task was to address the demand for economic justice through a developmental state economic policy. The ethnonationalists and their vision of self-rule in the regions and shared rule nationally were excluded from the political arena.
This planted the first seeds of discontent, which culminated in challenges presented by the Oromo protests of 2015-18. The popular protests brought the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO)to state power. In search of a governance philosophy, the OPDO (later Oromo Prosperity Party) turned to a retrograde view of a mythical Ethiopia that was great in the past. Tension emerged between the political forces that sought to move forward with the democratized federal state and the Prosperity Party’s vision of reverting to the unitary autocratic state of the imperial era.
The tension eventuated with a civil war that began in Western Oromia, then Benishangul, Qemant, Agew, and finally the Tigray War. No amount of negotiations, cajoling, or mediation could have prevented the unitarists from trying to eliminate the ethnonationalists using military power. The civil war is, in part, an inevitable outcome and a violent manifestation of the disastrous failure of the century-long state-building endeavor.
Faulty Design of Federalism
The multinational federal state structure that the 1995 constitution created was based on the linguistic distribution and settlement patterns in the country. In the case of the Amhara state, the regional state structure was formulated based on the spoken language without considering the actual settlement pattern of the nations and nationalities of the region. There was no constitutional basis for the creation of an Amhara regional state. At the time, the “Amhara” elite maintained that the Amhara identity had evolved to a shared Ethiopian identity and opposed the creation of an “ethnic” regional state. The Amhara regional state was created for a nation or nationality that did not self-acknowledge its existence and did not demand self-rule. The architects of the multinational federation imposed on the non-Amhara Agaw, Qemant, Oromo, Argoba, Gumuz, and others a state structure they did not recognize as theirs and an “Amhara” identity that they did not acknowledge.
Once created, the “Amhara” state became a politico-cultural framework for an Amhara identity to develop or even emerge anew. Amhara elites who strenuously opposed the use of the Amhara designation gradually decided to embrace it. One of the first projects of Amhara regional state officials was to erase the identity of the millions of Agaw, Qemant, Oromo, and Argoba who lived in the region. At the behest of the Amhara regional states, these ethnic groups were removed from the 2007 national housing and census record, showing only Amhara as the recognized identity. Fabricated census numbers were published, displaying the demographic size of the Agaw, Qemant, and others reduced to insignificance.
The state apparatus also provided the Amhara elite the opportunity to develop a capacity to mobilize the population. After the TPLF left its dominant position and an Amhara-Oromo dyarchy assumed federal power, the “Amhara interest” was defined in expansionist and genocidal terms. The regional state started to spend almost half of its annual budget on weapons, military logistics and training the regional state special force and several paramilitary armed groups allegedly to advance Amhara interest.
Armed with genocidal and expansionist ideologies, the state launched violent overt and covert attacks on the non-Amhara populations within the regional state. In 2019, Amhara regional forces attacked and committed untold atrocities, especially against the Qemant people, displacing more than 95,000 of them, killing and detaining hundreds, setting on fire, and destroying villages, crops, and animals. They burned 58 people at stake in Metema and five family members in Gondar, and Azezo Amhara paramilitary forces rounded up Oromo youth of the Oromia special zone and shot them dead on highways, dragged down wounded Oromo off ambulances, clubbed them to death and burned down rural and urban houses in the region. The purpose of the wanton violence is to convince the non-Amhara that they are unwelcome in the Amhara region.
Amhara state forces also made incursions into neighboring regional states with a declared intent of recovering “lost Amhara land” and protecting Amhara residents of other regional states. They frequently attacked across regional state borders and displaced hundreds of thousands of the residents in Benishangul-Gumuz, Afar, and Oromia regional states. Amhara forces and individuals spearheaded the genocidal war against the Tigray people, utilizing human and logistical resources they had come to control through the state structure. As such, the mistake of establishing an Amhara regional state in the early 1990s created the space to reconfigure an Amhara identity and an expansionist Amhara nationalism that has now become the source of destabilization in the country.
Failure of Democratization
One of the best-known findings in contemporary social science is that democracies do not tend to violate their citizens’ rights or wage war on their people. During tumultuous transitional periods, where democratic control is not yet firmly in place, mass politics mixes in a volatile way with authoritarian elite politics, and democratization suffers reversals. When this happens, countries could become more aggressive and war-prone and more likely to descend into conflict. Regimes that revert to autocracy after a failed democratization are much more likely to get into conflict than states that are not in transition (Mansfield and Snyder, 2002).
In 2018, there was a palpable reformist shift, but there was no illusion that ending authoritarian rule alone would guarantee a smooth transition to a consolidated democracy. Essential conditions that are often associated with greater chances of success of democratization were not firmly in place. The country did not have a large, educated middle class, an economy that performed well for all, and a relatively robust civil society that could support democratic participation. High levels of literacy, urbanization, and non-agricultural employment that are necessary for social mobilization did not exist. Ethiopia’s social and political realities did not have the best prospect for establishing a stable democracy.
Despite the strong array of forces against democratic transition, there were some reasons to hope for success. The country had a constitution that enshrined greater protections for civil liberties, a federal structure designed to ensure power sharing, and the accumulated experience of several, albeit deeply flawed, elections that were held every five years since 1995. It seemed there was a slim chance of a successful transition. But there were warning signs as well.
First, the transition was left to the leadership of elite groups left over from the old regime, many of whom had a particular interest in war and empire. As soon as he assumed the premiership, Abiy Ahmed and his OPDO cohort clandestinely started to vie for power and political survival with new elites representing rising democratic forces. OPDO’s old elite entered into a competition with the new democratizing political leaders to defend their threatened position and gain control over the Oromo political constituency through nationalist appeals. The OPDO’s main target at the time was the Oromo qeerroo constituency, which they sought to control through bribes, government jobs, and financial largesse.
The old elite took advantage of their positions in the government, which they retained posing as “reformists,” and began to create faits accomplis at the regional and federal levels. At the Oromia level, the OPDO elite resolved not to allow any political competition. They trained the Oromia Special Force and paramilitary armed groups, such as Gaachana Sirnaa (Defenders of the System), an assortment of armed units that operate in urban and rural areas. They unleashed them against opposition groups, such as the OLF and its former armed wing, the OLA.
At the national level, the old elite created a political situation that favored their dominance, such as controlling political agendas and shaping the content of information on broadcast media, agitating the population in ways that promoted upwelling of militancy in the populace against their political opponents. Then, the OPDO elite jettisoned electoral democracy while retaining their populist rhetoric. Their slogan of Ethiopia atfersim, lit. Ethiopia Never Disintegrates was not just a meaningless slogan. It was a message that democratization was secondary to the sort of unity that they intended to construct.
With weak political institutions to challenge the old elite, the democratizing forces were left with nothing to protect their cause. The various institutional constraints, including separation of powers, uncensored outlets, free and fair elections, and political accountability, caused the transitional processes that were supposed to culminate in democracy to be monopolized by the old elite. The advent of COVID-19 was immediately seized upon to scuttle the constitutional requirement of holding a regular election and pave the way for a return to autocracy. The escalating.
Rhetoric, particularly on the unitary side, perilously induced civil tensions, which eventually escalated into civil conflicts In this way, the hope of a democratic transition gave way to devastating conflict. Astute observers of Ethiopian politics have predicted that a bigger conflict is ahead if the transition is not managed programmatically. But the warnings were not heeded. There was a collective refusal to accept the reality that the group that took overpower as “reformists” weren’t democratizers. They had no intention of democratizing political institutions that would have asserted control over their drive for power. Had democratization succeeded, there would have been little chance for conflicts, much less the current Civil War. Political differences would be negotiated and resolved. The autocratization of the state allowed for the development of inter-ethnic mistrust, the promotion of exclusionary institutions, elite rivalry, domestic instability, and an ethnopolitically polarized society. The civil war is the direct consequence of the failure of democratization.
Conclusion
The indiscriminate violence and cold-blooded mass killing in Ethiopia no longer make sense to Ethiopians anymore. If the state that was supposed to protect citizens, unleashes indescribable violence against its citizens, the state itself becomes the enemy and incapable of keeping the polity intact. In this situation, everyone steps in to provide security protection for themselves.
The civil war left in place a government that believes indiscriminate mass killing of citizens is an effective “law enforcement” strategy. This has alienated many and set in motion the dynamics of state disintegration. Without returning to negotiated politics and willingness to forge a new political consensus on the future direction of the country, the dynamics of disintegration that have been set in motion would not only continue but accelerate.
By Ezekiel Gebissa
A Professor of History and African Studies at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. He can be reached at: egebissa@kettering.edu
