By Professor John Harbeson
There is much more to the problem of the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigre region than the enormous multifaceted humanitarian crisis that the entire Tigre region now suffers. The 1995 Constitution endowed nine regions and two cities with a high degree of self-government, including establishment of regional militaries. The Tigre Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) attacked the national government’s military installations in the region last November. The national government’s armies fairly promptly defeated the TPLF, its former ruling coalition partner, and have largely prevailed throughout the region, but have left the entire Tigre region prostrate politically, economically and socially.
Notwithstanding intensive United Nations and Africa Union efforts, it has remained difficult to impossible for aid to reach the estimated two million people displaced by the war, some 60,000 now refugees in Sudan, perhaps two-thirds of the population in need of food assistance, the specter of famine looming, famine, and health and all other essential services spotty at best. Evidence has remained scant that claimed national government humanitarian assistance has made any significant difference.
Although the national government has appointed some interim officials to rule the region, there have been no evident steps taken to restore constitutional self-government to Tigray or give it back its place in the country under the Constitution, even as the country now prepares for general elections in early June, barely three months from now. The elections are to take place amidst pervasive instability at regional levels around the country, masking swirling conflict over the political definition of Ethiopia that remains very much at issue. Indeed, the bases of the country’s very existence as a polity continue to be hotly contested, its underlying fragility masked by the veneer of strong central administration and strong economic growth, earning it some circles the sobriquet of a “developmental state.”
The danger is that pervasive, unresolved ethnic conflict over those very terms at regional levels, and the resulting dangerous levels of political instability in what remains a fragile polity, is obliging the Abiy administration to “resolve” them by force. The more it does so the more it will undermine its own claim to democratic legitimacy, especially in the anticipated June elections.
For Ethiopia to establish a broadly acceptable present political definition of itself would seem to require, in the process, that it also reach understandings on the meaning of critical dimensions of its fabled history. In particular, to all outward appearances Ethiopia bears little if any resemblance to the empire as established more than a century ago by the conquests of Emperor Menelik II (1889-1913) that incorporated most of the country’s present-day territory and ethnic communities. During the 27 years that the country was governed by The Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) led the country, 1991-2018, it brought about unparalleled rates of economic growth while its constitutional dispensation vested a high degree of self-governing authority in ethnically defined regions. In so doing it vanquished much of the legacy of the preceding brutal military dictatorship (1974-1991), The four-party coalition, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) under its visionary leader, Meles Zenawi, until 2012 unquestionably brought apparent stability to the country for much of that time.
At the same time, an underlying reality has been that terms on which the conquered peoples were incorporated into the Ethiopian empire might consent to continue to remain together as one polity have never been democratically negotiated and defined. A historic opportunity to do so emerged after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie (1930-1974) when a strong grassroots movement for political and economic reform emerged, only to be suppressed by the brutal military dictatorship (1974-1991).
A second opportunity to define those terms occurred when the EPRDF came to power in 1991. The 1995 EPRDF-fashioned Constitution, which enshrined high degrees of self-governing authority for ethnically defined sub-regions of the country might have taken root by now, and still has very considerable popular appeal. But the EPRDF’s systematic, sustained authoritarian rule drained its operational meaning and, thus, undermined the legitimacy of that constitution in the eyes of many of the country’s peoples.
The bigger risk is not only that the country’s fledgling democratic momentum will prove ephemeral. Far more serious is the reality that continued lack of recognition that fundamental terms of ethnic political association remain indeterminate will endanger the future of the Ethiopian polity itself.
The third great opportunity to define terms for multi-ethnic cohabitation within post-imperial Ethiopia has occurred with Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power in mid-2018 amidst a wave of popular protest of historic proportions. The failure to negotiate peace terms with Tigre dramatizes the danger that not building on initial democratic measures to negotiate democratically constitutional terms for overall political association will have profoundly adverse consequences for the country.
The danger is that pervasive, unresolved ethnic conflict over those very terms at regional levels, and the resulting dangerous levels of political instability in what remains a fragile polity, is obliging the Abiy administration to “resolve” them by force. The more it does so the more it will undermine its own claim to democratic legitimacy, especially in the anticipated June elections.
The bigger risk is not only that the country’s fledgling democratic momentum will prove ephemeral. Far more serious is the reality that continued lack of recognition that fundamental terms of ethnic political association remain indeterminate will endanger the future of the Ethiopian polity itself. — Author is Professor of Political Science Emeritus as well as a professorial lecturer for the African Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University.
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