The welcome news of a cease-fire in the seventeen-month civil war in Ethiopia that is apparently holding well enough to permit the arrival of desperately needed humanitarian relief for the Tigre region presents another profound and unique opportunity that may go unrecognized and unaddressed. To the best of my knowledge, neither prime minister Abiy’s government nor any civil society or international organization has done anything to take advantage of the end of fighting to propose a fully inclusive process to define and establish a truly post-imperial Ethiopian state. The necessity explicitly to undertake this process, while unique to Ethiopia, has important if less immediately observable implications for other global south countries in Africa and elsewhere.
As fundamentally important as this task is, defining a post-imperial Ethiopian state has been overshadowed by other equally compelling and more immediate priorities.
Without question, the immediate priority is to mount a comprehensive, multifaceted humanitarian relief process to alleviate the suffering of perhaps two million residents of the northern region of Tigre, which has been the main theatre of the war. The Ethiopian government’s announcement of a humanitarian truce of indefinite length is an encouraging initiative to stabilize the cease-fire. But as the humanitarian effort gets off the ground, close behind comes the obligation to bring to account those responsible for massive human rights assaults that may amount to war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and/or crimes against humanity.
A particular focus is a region of western Tigre long-contested by the Amhara and Tigre regions. Still, the charges do not absolve the armies of Abiy’s federal government of responsibility.
Abiy has called for a “national dialogue” to bring peace to his country, but the offer is drained of real meaning because he has explicitly excluded those parties and communities that have taken up arms against his government since he came to power and, in any event, it is not clear how the agenda might be constructed or the process conducted. This initiative has taken place against the background of the predecessor Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front government (EPRDF) of Meles Zenawi and his interim successor (1991-2018). It established a constitution that responded to the brutality of the prior military regime and the loss of Eritrea by establishing an ethnic confederal state. Under its still extant provisions, all ethnic communities were to enjoy a high degree of self-government up to and including the possibility of secession by a defined process. Arguably, this constitutional dispensation might have gained long-term legitimacy had the EPRDF not systematically transgressed and overridden its provisions by its radically centralized authoritarian rule.
Thus, in the wake of civil war with the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) along with significant uprisings elsewhere in the country, at a bare minimum, all parties and communities would need to reaffirm their adherence to this constitution as part of a sustainable peace agreement. But Abiy’s Prosperity Party has appeared to signal that it prefers a less decentralized state, ironically perhaps more in keeping with the views of the country’s second-largest Amhara community than with those of his own Oromia region, the most populous and his home. At present, there appears to be no agreement on even the need for a process to broker this classic, familiar constitutional dispute well-known to many countries.
Ethiopia’s current ambiguous constitutional circumstances barely mask a much deeper problem unique to Ethiopia. On the one hand, as one of the world’s oldest and never conquered states, Ethiopia’s name became almost synonymous with African independence when its armies defeated an invading Italian imperial intrusion In 1896. This achievement enabled the country’s last emperor, Haile Selassie I (1930-1974), to earn the respect even of African independence leaders, many of whom were of a polar opposite African socialist persuasion, resulting inter alia in the African Union (formerly the Organization of African States) being located in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
On the other hand, most of the ethnic communities now part of Ethiopia were incorporated into the Ethiopian empire by the conquests of its penultimate emperor, Menelik II (1889-1913). It is unclear on what bases, terms, conditions, or to what extent they have acquired reasons, other than their shared history of being conquered, to be governed together as one state. Half a century since Haile Selassie was deposed and under two authoritarian ruling regimes, apparent answers to this question have not surfaced. This is the fundamental question a post-civil war national dialogue must address. Nationalist movements for independence elsewhere in Africa generally seem to have given their peoples reason to remain in their colonially defined polities, weak and fragile though they have remained. Ethiopia has never experienced a comparable nationalist movement for the same purpose.
Thus, a post-imperial Ethiopian state remains elusive and at risk. (
— Prof Harbeson is a professor of Political Science Emeritus and a professorial lecturer for the African Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University.
Email your news TIPS to Editor@nairobilawmonthly.com, and to advertise with us, call +254715061658 anytime of the day
