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Tags: Addisstandard, Africa, Ethiopia’s ‘Miraculous’ Economic Growth: Dancing While Standing Still, The failed State's Collapsing Economy
TPLF Ethiopia’s regime’s economic record, the growth of poverty, pollution, disease & Garbage in Finfinnee (Addis Ababa), picture, 20 July 2016.
Ethiopia’s ‘Miraculous’ Economic Growth: Dancing While Standing Still
By J. Bonsa, Addis Standard, 20 July 2016
The 25th episode of “Ginbot 20” was on show in Addis Abeba on May 28th. This is a melodramatic event, an anniversary of the 28th May 1991 when the EPRDF rebel forces ousted the Military regime. Ethiopians have much to celebrate as far as the demise of theDerge regime was concerned. Perhaps this is the only element that unites public opinion toward this anniversary.
But May28th is celebrated with a mixed feeling. For some it is a “victory day”, a military success, a day to remember the lives lost during the civil war, and the dawn of Ethiopia’s renaissance. For others, it is a day when all hopes and promises brought about by that victory day have already been shattered one by one; a day that left Ethiopia under the iron fist of a group no less dictatorial than the regime they deposed. Such rare admissions are beginning to be heard even from among critics within the EPRDF inner circles.
In order to seek legitimacy, it has been customary for EPRDF to engage the general public by propaganda campaign, often contrasting their achievements in socio-economic progresses with those under their predecessor. At a press briefing he gave to state media on the eve of May 28, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn claimed, once again, that the economic policy and the multi-party system introduced by the current regime has brought about tremendous socio-economic progress. He stressed specifically that Ethiopia’s agriculture has been “growing at all levels and market oriented farmers were created and these are vital for the advancement of the economic policy of the country”.
In this piece, I will focus on Ethiopia’s economic success story and examine its validity. I will then highlight broader claims related to multi-party system. Unless stated differently, most data and charts presented in the subsequent sections are taken from the World Bank Development Indicators database.
GDP growth rate
The jury is still out on the credibility of Ethiopia’s double digit GDP growth rate. On the one hand, government official data have presented double digit growth for more than a decade. The official version has often been reflected in flagship reports regularly published by the multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF.
On the other hand, analysts have utilized credible empirical evidences to raise serious questions about the validity of the official data. For instance, in its March 2nd 2012 issue, the Economist warned that Ethiopia’s GDP growth figures cannot be taken seriously:
“Just how sustainable is Ethiopia’s advance out of poverty? This is a vexed topic among bankers and others in Ethiopia who hold large wads of birr, the oft devalued currency. Despite hard work by the World Bank, oversight from the International Monetary Fund, and studies by economists from donor countries, it is not clear how factual Ethiopia’s economic data are. Life is intolerably expensive for Ethiopians in [Addis Abeba], the capital, and its outlying towns. Some think Ethiopia’s inflation figures are fiddled with even more than those in Argentina. Even if the data are deemed usable, the double-digit growth rates predicted by the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi look fanciful.”
In another piece, published on London School of Economics blog, I have provided compelling empirical evidences to suggest that at least agricultural GDP was substantially inflated. The best way to confirm whether or not the growth figures were factual is to triangulate it by examining other economic variables closely related to it. Now let us shift our attention from growth rate based discussion and anchor the policy debate on change in the size of the economy during the post 1991 period.
GDP per capita
It proves useful to begin by examining changes in GDP per capita since it combines changes in the sizes of two variables – economic and demographic.
Real GDP per capita changed from $129 in 1991 to $315 in 2014. “Real” because the influence of inflation is filtered out. Thus, if Ethiopia’s GDP was equally divided among all citizens, then income of every Ethiopian would have more than doubled between 1991 and 2014. I will return to the likelihood of equitable distribution.
But is the doubling of income per person such a big deal, given what we know about Ethiopia’s potential growth? Here I am not talking about abundant national resource endowments. The analysis here is confined to opportunities offered by the exceptionally high rates of capital inflows, the official development assistance and aid (ODA).
Ethiopia received $1.7 and $3.5 billion respectively in 1991 and 2014. The cumulative total inflow was $53.6 billion. Real GDP in 2014 was only $30.6 billion, that is less than two-third of the total ODA. In other words, Ethiopia’s GDP is only a fraction of the amount of its cumulative ODA.
A dollar injected into any economy would have a multiplier effect, that is to say “the capacity of new money to initiate chain reactions – generate jobs and hence income as it keep circulating in the economy”. There is a ripple effect emanating from it, like a piece of stone thrown onto a still water, causing a motion in some predicable way in all directions. The size of the multiplier would depend on productive utilization.
The World Bank estimates the sizes of such multipliers to range between two and five. Hence, the $53.6 billion should have generated between $107 billion and $268 billion. The sum of Ethiopia’s GDP over the entire period comes to about $320 billion. We normally expect ODA to constitute a small fraction of the size of an economy. Above all, ODA is meant to boost GDP, not to replace it. Clearly, there is something seriously bizarre about the way ODA has been utilized in Ethiopia. GDP does not rise even proportionately with ODA, let alone in multiple of it.
In order to put matters in perspective, I would draw a parallel with South Korea which is known for using ODA for recovery from the Korean War as well as to propel itself onto a sustainable growth path. It is estimated that the total amount of ODA [South] Korea received from foreign countries was US$12 billion. As economic policies took effect, however, the dependence on foreign grant assistance lessened. In less than ten years, South Korea’s economy grew so rapidly that the United States decided to phase out its aid program to Seoul. Starting from late 1980s, South Korea graduated from recipient to donor status.
This means South Korea achieved so much with less than a fourth of the ODA Ethiopia received. In a nutshell, the size of Ethiopia’s GDP (and GDP per capita) should have expanded by a multiple of what has been reported, as miraculous achievement at that!
Structural transformation
The livelihood of about 85% of Ethiopia’s population is supported by agriculture. Economic development in such countries is accompanied with two concurrent changes: the size of GDP, and the composition of GDP. The latter means the structure of the economy changes from predominantly traditional, rural and agricultural to modern, urban and industrial. This is what is called structural transformation. The art of devising sound economic development policy lies in balancing these two changes, without necessarily putting one ahead of the other.
EPRDF initially indicated a policy commitment to give priority to the Agricultural sector, when “Ethiopia had formally adopted Agriculture Development Led Industrialization (ADLI)as its development strategy in 1994”. Through ADLI, agriculture was supposed to pave the way for industrialization.
However, enabling agricultural policy instruments such as fertilizer subsidy were withdrawn just three years into the launch of ADLI. Government affiliated companies used “strong-handed promotion of the credit-fertilizer packages… [A]gricultural output continued to fall behind population growth.” Agricultural Extension and credit-fertilizer have been extensively used “as a means of control over smallholder producers”.
This culminated onto yet another bold program called the Growth and Transformation Program (GTP). This involved major departure from the previous policy commitment to small holder agricultural development. Small holder supports have largely become an exercise in trivia e.g. teaching farmers how to sow teff in rows! Horticulture and large scale farming have got precedence over small holder farming. However, large scale farming caused incalculable damages to the livelihoods of farming households who are evicted from their ancestral lands.
The above chart (Fig.1) displays a litmus test of Ethiopia’s economic success story. I plotted the share of various economic sectors in aggregate GDP (1991-2014). Clearly, the relative shares of the industrial sector and manufacturing subsector are both stuck at around 10% and 4% marks respectively. Each barely moved from where it was in 1991!
Agriculture’s share was about 60% in 1991 but it dropped to around 40% in 2014. The initial share of services was about 30% in 1991 but now it increased to 40%. The sharply contrasting shapes of the lines give the impression that the service sector expands almost exclusively at the expense of the agricultural sector. Since almost nothing happened to the share of the industrial sector, it follows that any transformation that has occurred is only between agriculture and services. De-industrializing advanced economies can afford to specialize in services, but certainly this should not apply to a traditional economy.
The external sector
The preceding sections have focused on the structure and performance of the domestic economy. Now I proceed to examining how sectoral policy bias in the domestic economy has adversely affected the external sector. Rhetoric aside, EPRDF has never favored commodity producing sectors, that is why agriculture shrank and industry stagnated.
However, the construction and service sectors have grown considerably as a direct consequence of favorable policy toward them. This is a cocktail of catastrophic policy blunder – promoting non-tradable services (non-exportables) and discriminating against tradable commodities (or exportables). Critically, the sectoral policy bias is inevitable outcome of regional development policy bias, for instance, against the now decaying coffee growing regions such as Jimma.
Fig. 2 displays the outcome of these policy blunders. It shows an ever widening gap between earnings from exports and payments for imports. In 1991, the external sector gap was only $305 million, but it rose to $8.1 billion, a gigantic 27 fold increase. The balance of payment deficit has been growing every year by more than the initial amount. So, the regime has nothing to celebrate as achievements in export promotion.
In addition to generous ODA, Ethiopia has received exceptional treatment in debt cancellations. These assistances and grants should have helped close the external sector gap displayed in Fig. 2. One would not expect a piling up of external debt stocks. The fact is Ethiopia’s debt is hitting the roof, as shown in Fig. 3. It is incomprehensible why this happens. In 1991, the Derge regime left behind a debt stock of $8.8 billion. It was thought such a high debt pile was scandalous. The matter seems to have gotten from bad to worse under the EPRDF regime. Now the size of debt stock has doubled, currently standing at $16 billion. This constitutes 31% of GDP (both in current prices).
Income distribution
At this juncture, it is appropriate to refer back to the nearly two and a half fold real increase in GDP per capita. I have provided tangible evidence to suggest that Ethiopia’s GDP could have increased by a substantially greater magnitude if internal and external resources were utilized effectively and efficiently. Be that as it may, it is essential to know to what extent all Ethiopians have experienced fairly balanced and equitable changes in their incomes.
Income distribution has been the least studied aspect of the Ethiopian economy. Of course, there is abundant literature on poverty metrics. But they often rely on household survey data which are conducted under the auspices of government officials. Results from a few thousand persons are, more often than not, hastily generalized to arrive at “amazing and almost miraculous sounding conclusions”. For instance, IMF’s recent report on Ethiopia concluded: “Unlike other rapidly growing economies, the country has not experienced a significant increase in inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, even as poverty reduction occurred at a rapid pace”.
However, given what Ethiopians know about their country’s situation, it is mind boggling to read such statements from a reputable multilateral agency. In any event, it is not a difficult task to triangulate the issues and establish some balance in the argument. A report compiled by the World Bank in 2005 states that “real wages in Oromia declined by 36% followed by Amhara (31%).” This refers to wages of civil servants.
EPRDF has an explicit policy to keep wages low in all sectors, public or private, in order to attract foreign investment. For instance, in a recent interview, PM Hailemariam reiterated that “to achieve our advantage in light manufacturing, we have kept such costs low. This … starts with government wages. If you make government wages large, it impacts and inflates the market.” Perhaps it is fair to say that inflation is the only economic variable that has been persistently growing in double digits in Ethiopia. Now given that the government has such an explicit policy to keep nominal wages low, how can real wage even stagnate or stay at the same level, let alone grow?
The civil servants and other fixed income groups, although their livelihoods have stagnated or worsened due to the wage policy, are actually in a relatively better off positions compared to the 85% of rural farming households. The declining wage of the civil servants supports not just the employee and his/her immediate families in cities but also their extended families often residing in rural areas. The fact that rural farming households depend on their salaried relatives living in cities confirms that actually their income and hence livelihoods are in a worse situation compared to those of their relatives earning fixed income.
This in turn tells us that the lion’s share of the cake, per capita GDP whose size more than doubled, must have gone to a tiny section of the population who depend neither on farming nor on wage income. After all, it is reported that “Ethiopia is creating millionaires at a faster rate than any other country on the continent.”
Fallacy of composition
Economic policy discussion on Ethiopia’s success story is becoming a philosophical debate in a fallacy of composition. To begin with, for proponents of the EPRDF regime whether or not the success story does actually exist is proving to hinge more on faith than evidence. Although I have not covered it in this piece, the contradictions in Ethiopia’s political economy start with the governance system. In addition to “achievements in economic progress”, PM Hailemariam stated that EPRDF established a multi-party system as well as “a government structure which accommodates diversity and entertains the rights of nations and nationalities”. In fact nothing could be further from the truth.
NPR journalist, Gregory Warner, paraphrased the late PM Meles Zenawi’s speech in 2005 and stated that EPRDFwaits until the opposition assemble and grow legs, that is establish leaders and constituency. They then cut off those legs and make the head (the leader) float on air with no root to give semblance of multiparty democracy in the country. Continue the same vicious policy over and over until the opposition is fully dismantled. It is by using such diabolically smart tactics that EPRDF “wins” elections. In fact, it is nonsensical to talk about multi-party democracy existing in Ethiopia.
Some overzealous reporters have hailed Ethiopia as “African Lion”, presumably to draw a parallel with Asian Tigers. However, one can only draw an analogy with a sick lion which cannot hunt and kill to feed itself, and always on a lookout to scavenge for leftover from other carnivore.
EPRDF officials and some gullible foreign analysts are seriously discussing that the country will join the middle income group by 2025 but manufacturing has barely moved from where it was 25 years go. There are compelling empirical evidences emerging from reviews of progress in GTP I achievements that indicate nothing miraculous can happen in the remaining nine or so years. Similarly, the EPRDF claims a dramatic fall in the poverty rate and improvements in living standards of Ethiopians but there are equally compelling evidences to suggest that the benefits of economic growth must have gone to only a tiny group of elites.
At every “victory day” anniversary, the EPRDF reminds Ethiopians that the country has turned into a paradise. Yet, youth unemployment in Addis Abeba alone is at least around 30%, according to a December 2014 research paper by Beshir Butta Dale. Ethiopia’s youth are departing in droves to different parts of the world. At least half a million have migrated to Saudi Arabia in recent years alone. Between 2008 and 2012, about 164 thousand Ethiopians have migrated to the USA. These provide some clues to obtain rough estimates of the total size of labor force that have migrated over the years to different destinations, including other Middle East Countries, South Africa, and Europe, and including those who perished along the way in the deserts and high seas.
In the finale of Francis Spufford’s novel, Red Plenty, set in the Soviet Union, and referring to Khrushchev’s angry remarks while in retirement: “Paradise … is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of [s**t] is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social order? What kind of paradise?”
ED’s Note: J. Bonsa is an economist by training. He can be reached atdinade0612@gmail.com
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.
Tags: Addisstandard, Africa, ANALYSIS: MA’EKELAWI! WHY IS ETHIOPIA STILL RUNNING A ‘TORTURE CHAMBER’ FROM THE PAST?, Ethiopia, Ethiopia's Torture chamber, Ma'ekelawi, Oromia/Ethiopia: Human rights defender says attacks on Oromos are ethnic cleansing war crimes., The tyrannic Ethiopia, Torture, Torture: a word commonly associated with Oromo political prisoners
In Piassa, an area many consider to be the heart of Addis Abeba, rests the Ethiopian Federal Police Force Central Bureau of Criminal Investigation, otherwise known by its Amharic name, Ma’ekelawi (Amharic for central). Notorious for the sever torture detainees are subjected to inside its enclosures, Ma’ekelawi is a time defying institution which has been in use for more than half a century in Ethiopia, sadly for the same purpose.
During the dark days of the Marxist Derg regime between 1974 and 1991, Ma’ekelawi served as a place where thousands of dissenters were exposed to cruelties including disquieting torture and arbitrary killings. More than three decades down the line many of those who survived Ma’ekelawi live a life overshadowed by what happened when they were incarcerated, struggling to fully overcome the experience as they carry the burden of the darkest chapters in their lives.
Today nowhere is that history of horror visibly displayed than at the Red Terror Martyr’s Museum around MesqelSquare in central Addis Abeba. The Museum’s motto, “Never Ever Again”, speaks volumes about the atrocities committed inside Ma’ekelawi throughout the 17 years in power of the Derg regime.
The Red Terror Martyr’s Museum was built by the current regime in Ethiopia in honor of the people who perished during its predecessor’s infamous Red Terror campaign of 1977-1978. An estimated number of more than half a million Ethiopians were killed during that brutal campaign; and many of the victims have gone through the terrible experience of life at Ma’ekelawi.
For the survivors of the campaign, the Red Terror Martyr’s Museum is a place where solace and comfort can be sought. Some survivors who were approached by this magazine found talking about the horrendous experience they had gone through inside the fortress of Ma’ekelawi too much to bear, rendering our attempts to get their stories futile.
Fast forward, decades later and a completely different government that has ‘democratic’ written all over it, and that waged a civil war against a regime which partially depended on what happened inside Ma’ekelawi to extend its grip on power, the story of Ma’ekelawi remained intact.
Wofe-Lala – Derg’s favorite torture method
‘Chambers of horror’
Other than its frightening name, a great number of present-day Ethiopians know little about either the physical structure or the torture techniques applied inside Ma’ekelawi. But a 2013 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report titled:“They Want a Confession: Torture and Ill treatment in Ethiopia’s Ma’ekelawi Police Station,” revealed a chilling account. It documented in detail the scale of human rights abuses, unlawful investigation tactics, and detention conditions practiced between the years of 2010 and 2013. It accuses investigators of using coercive methods including several ways of torture to extract confessions, statements, and other information from detainees. Depending on their compliances with the demands of investigators, the report said, detainees are punished or rewarded with denial or access to water, food, light, and other basic needs.They are also subjected to sever physical tortures involving beatings and punishments by stressful positions such as hanging them with their wrists tied to ceilings, or being made to stand with their hands tied above their heads for several hours.
The US State Department’s annual Human Right Report on Ethiopia, which was released in April this year, also admits that “there were credible reports police investigators used physical and psychological abuse to extract confessions inMa’ekelawi. Interrogators reportedly administered beatings and electric shocks to extract information and confessions from detainees.”
Both reports have been corroborated by several detainees (past and present) who were interviewed by Addis Standard for this story. (See selected stories here and here).
Many of them refer to Ma’ekelawi as “chambers of horror.”
“For many of the detainees Tawla Bet is a place of heartache, guilt and moral dilemma”
Inside the ‘Chambers of horror’
Ma’ekelawi has three different blocks with conditions significantly differing amongst them. Based on the locations and the facilities inside; the three blocks are known as Siberia, Tawla Bet & Sheraton.
‘Siberia’
The worst of the three blocks is called Siberia for none other than the cells’ freezing temperature. Siberia alone has between seven and 10 cells at a time, all ranging from 16 to 25 square meters in size. (The number of the cells can go up and down depending on the number of detainees received at a time. And when detainees overwhelm the block, the management converts rooms that serve as storage places or communal rooms into detention centers).
One of the cells in Siberia, cell number 8, is partitioned into four separate cells and is used to keep detainees in solitary confinement. The rooms are just big enough to accommodate a mattress to sleep and a bucket to urinate on. They have no window and no light inside, which is why they are called “Chelema Bet” (Amharic for Dark House).
The rest of the Siberia block hosts communal cells, which are lined up along a long corridor facing one another. They do share similar features with “Chelema Bet”: the rooms are naturally dark except for a dim fluorescent light hanging on a barred, small window near each ceiling. The metal doors have small peepholes, often covered on cardboard, and are kept locked for 24 hours. Detainees inside these communal cells are allowed to have just 10 minutes of access to daylight per day. The only other stuffs in each communal cell are mattresses, a bucket and a few food bowls. Up to 20 detainees (sometimes more) are forced to share each of the communal cells, which are not more than 4X5 square meters in size.
At one end of the corridor there are five filthy toilets and a shower located adjacent the toilets, all for communal use. While showering is allowed once a week, accessing the toilet is restricted to 15 minutes at a time, twice a day; and as if that is not enough discomfort the toilets don’t have doors to give detainees the privacy they need.
‘Tawla Bet’
Tawla Bet (Amharic for wooden house), is where those who are coerced to testify against fellow detainees are kept as prosecutors’ key witnesses. For many of the detainees Tawla Bet is a place of heartache, guilt and moral dilemma; many of them are brought into a point of mental breakdown to testify against fellow detainees under sever duress.
Tawla Bet is also where female detainees are kept. Although most of the regulations are similar with Siberia, the doors in Tawla Bet cells can stay open during daytime, allowing detainees to sit at their doorstep and sometimes move from one cell to the other, a precious asset inside the two blocks.
‘Sheraton’
Named after Ethiopia’s luxurious hotel, Sheraton is a block in which detainees are indulged with a movement as well as access to lawyers and relatives. They can also watch television – mainly broadcast of the state TV programs – at daytime. Detainees who went through interrogations in Siberia and Tawla Bet and are waiting to be officially charged are the primary occupants of the Sheraton block.
The political element
Amha Mekonen, a prominent defense attorney who has represented some of the high profile defendants in recent years – including the much publicized case of Zone9 bloggers – is no stranger to the stories of Ma’ekelawi detailed in the HRW report. “Defendants who are detained at Ma’ekelawi often complain that they are subjected to inhuman treatments,” he tells this magazine. “Some of the defendants even manage to convince courts that they indeed have been abused and assaulted.”
One key problem Amha sees with Ma’ekelawi is that “the division initiates investigation without actually having any real ground to suspect that there is a crime that warrants an investigation. Many say this happens when the case is politically motivated. I am not sure whether that is true or not. What I am sure is the fact that there are instances when the division begins investigation without having sufficient evidence,” he says.
But for the HRW’s report the political element in Ma’ekelawi’s conduct is not easy to miss. The facility is the first stop for the majority of the country’s opposition politicians, journalists, protest organizers, and alleged supporters of ethnic insurgencies once all are taken into police custody, the report says.
Article 6/1 of the Ethiopian Federal Police Commission Establishment Proclamation 720/2011 gives the Federal Police the duty to prevent and investigate any threat and acts of crime against the Constitution and the constitutional order, security of the government and the state and human rights offenses. As a result the majority detainees in Ma’ekelawiare suspected of committing Federal offenses.
Furthermore, Ethiopia’s introduction in 2009 of the infamous Anti-Terrorism Proclamation (ATP) has made Ma’ekelawian important site for the detention and investigation of most of the politically sensitive cases, according to the HRW report. The provisions included in Ethiopia’s ATP seriously undermine basic legal safeguards against prolonged pre-charge detentions. Thus, once accused of offenses under this law, the facilities at Ma’ekelawi automatically become home to the majority of detainees in preparation for their trials, according to the report.
As of late the facility is overcrowded, Amha says. “I heard that they are transferring some of the detainees to Addis Abeba Police Commission nearby,” he says. “This shows that they are overwhelmed with cases. It might be criminal cases or something else. It might be something the government wants to suppress. It can be politically motivated,” Amha opines, but Tsegaye Ararssa, a Melbourne-based legal scholar, is unambiguous in his assertion: “the fact that the larger proportion of detainees are political prisoners and prisoners of conscience indicates that something is wrong with the way the politics is run in that country,” he told this magazine in a written interview.
One of the factors that made living conditions inside Ma’ekelawi hellish has always been the disproportionately big numbers of people forced to stay in a single room. “We hear that around 12 sometimes up to 15 people are detained in a cell which is no wider than 4 meter square,” says Amha.
Recently, Bekele Gerba, first secretary general of the opposition Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) – and who is going through life at Ma’ekelawifor the second time – made a passionate plea at a federal court that he and 21 other detainees were forced to stay at a “4×5 meter cell that included a toilet”.
The Constitution: Ma’ekelawi’s first victim
The operations inside Ma’ekelawi are not only against basic human rights but are at odds with the Supreme Law of the land, the constitution, as well as other laws the country governs itself by, according to Amha. For Tsegaye the essential purpose of Ma’ekelawi is “regime security not human security” and as such it has become an institution that flouts the rights and security of citizens that are otherwise guaranteed in the country’s constitution.
Article 19 (2/5) of the Ethiopian Constitution, for example, asserts that people under police custody should not be forced to make confessions or make admissions which could be “used in evidence against them”. It nullifies any evidence obtained under coercion as inadmissible in the court of law. And article 24 of Proclamation No. 720/2011 prohibits the police from committing, “any inhuman or degrading treatment or act.”
In addition, regulation on the Treatment of Federal Prisoners 138/2007 (art. 3/1) clearly states that “no discrimination on grounds of gender, language, religion, political opinion nation/nationality, social status or citizen,” while art. 3/2 of the same Regulation guarantees “respect to [the detainees’] human dignity unless restricted by the penalties imposed on them.”
Nonetheless detainees at Ma’ekelawi are not only refused access to lawyers and relatives, but are subjected to tortures. “[Similar] tortures we have been hearing in the Derg period such as hanging a bottle of water on male genitals, electric shock, beating, being forced to stand for a long time, and other forms of prolonged interrogations,” are committed against detainees, says Amha, adding that defendants also experience self-incrimination and coercion to testify against co-defendants. “What is more astonishing is the level of details and [organized narratives] we find on those confessions. It is as if they were [composed] by someone with a literary background. No one in his right mind incriminates himself in that manner,” Amha says.
Tsegaye reinforces Amha’s point. “In Ethiopian detention centers fact is not found, or discovered, as such; they are made. They are created in the course of the ‘investigation’”.
Many detainees are brought from remote areas all over the country. For them the pain is twice as much. “They are separated from their social background and support system. There might even be a language barrier. I am not sure ifMa’ekelawi is equipped with proper translation mechanism during interrogations,” says Amha. “And what is worse is after having gone through painful and life-altering months or even years at Ma’ekelawi, they might be acquitted and walk free,” he adds.
According to Tsegaye, “the fact that detainees come from afar disconnects them from their family and their support system thereof. But more importantly such distance from one’s place of residence becomes a barrier to access to justice. Physical distance, cultural distance, and linguistic distance are the three major barriers to access to justice,” Tsegaye said, adding that when a detainee is far removed from his/her own place of residence it “makes it more difficult to gather evidence even for the investigator.” But because the main focus is on “infliction of pain on the ‘suspect’ rather than finding facts, often this fact is neglected.”
To ease this problem, if not to solve it, Amha suggests that other criminal investigation facilities should be established in regional states. Further explaining on this, Tsegaye says that in principle regional states can – and perhaps should – have their own system of criminal investigation. But their power would be confined to the crimes over which they have jurisdiction. (The States have legislative competence over criminal matters that are not covered by the federal criminal code.)
As per Proclamation No. 25/1996 (and its amendments since), the State Supreme Courts have jurisdiction over cases that were meant to appear in the Federal High Court, according to Tsegaye. “State High Courts would adjudge cases that are normally under the jurisdiction of the Federal First Instance Court. This practice suggests that, to this extent, the Ethiopian federal system is merely an executive/administrative federal system. (That is to say, it is a federal system where the federal government has a legislative power whereas the States have an executive/administrative power. The State institutions enforce or execute federal laws), Tsegaye explains.
Back to a lingering past
On February 26, 1977 44 prisoners were picked from Ma’ekelawi and were taken to the outskirts of the city where they were executed and buried in a mass grave, Babile Tola, a survivor of Ma’ekelawi, recounts in his book, “To Kill a Generation: the Red Terror in Ethiopia.” The youngest of the 44 was only 17 while many of them were aged between 17 and 26. The story of the secret mass execution was brought to light thanks to two prisoners who managed to jump and escape out of the police van on their way to their execution. One of them was the young Hilawi Yosef, who subsequently joined the armed struggle against theDerg regime.
After putting the stories during the armed struggle behind him Hilawi Yosef served in several senior positions in the incumbent’s government. Asked by this magazine to relate his story of the Ma’ekelawi Hilawi, who is currently serving as Ethiopia’s Ambassador to Israel, declined to return our email, but his story was narrated in Babile Tola’s historical book, as well as Girmaye Abraha’s “Yemiyanebu Egroch” (Amharic for “The feet that weep”), an apparent reference to the tortures that leave detainees’ feet bleeding.
In addition to Ambassador Hilawi Yosef, several other officials in the current government have been, at one point or another, detained at Ma’ekelawi during the Derg regime. It is a fact that leaves Ma’ekelawi’s current victims mystified and in endless search for answers on the logic of keeping and running an institution that many died fighting against.
So why is Ma’ekelawi still running?
For Tsegaye, the core reason for its existence as the prime source of state terror is the fundamental insecurity of the Ethiopian state. “There lacks to be a political will to demolish this prime example of the apparatus of state repression,” he says. The US state department report revealed that majority of mistreatments happen in “Ma’ekelawi and police stations rather than federal prisons.”
Amha carefully points at the existence of other facilities as a viable alternative to (at least) replace the deteriorating physical infrastructure of Ma’ekelawi, but agrees with Tsegaye that lack of political will is what is holding the change back. “You can find the evidence to that within a walking distance. The newly built Addis Abeba Police Commission has a much better criminal investigation block and facility. If there was a political will, the same improvements could have been done to Ma’ekelawi.”
However, Amha says he doesn’t have any problem with the existence of a Federal Criminal Investigation facility. “My problem is with how it is being operated. [Also] for symbolic reasons, I would prefer it if it is somewhere else because of the horrible memories associated with that place.”
Tsegaye argues that the structure and even the name of Ma’ekelawi should have been altered to “reflect the changed politico-administrative structure of the country. Taking account of the federal set up, the name could have changed into ‘Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation’. That it hasn’t changed even in name already betrays the virtually non-federal political culture and the political practice of the country to date.”
Tsegaye is of the view that if there was a serious thinking into it, such a change – the change from a unitary system to a federal one – would have offered an “opportunity to move away from the dastardly, imperial, and barbaric practices that [Ma’ekelawi] represents and is a symbol of.”
One obstacle that hindered this change, according to Tsegaye, is the fact that Ma’ekelawi has never been put to the light of political and legal accountability. “It has never been publicly criticized (for its misdeeds) in representative political institutions (such as Parliamentary Oversight Committees); its power, finance, and personnel have never been put to a transparent audit system; the legal foundation of that institution, its competence (such as the matters it has jurisdiction over), its jurisdiction, and its responsibility framework has never been publicly accounted for.”
Aside from the visible lack of political will (see our editorial here), lack of skill in crime investigation is yet another factor that contributes to the brutal handling of detainees under police custody, Tsegaye adds. “Criminal investigation is a science, a profession in its own right. Detection requires a distinct set of skills that have to be put to use in the investigation of a particular crime.” From his stint as a lecturer at the Police College, Tsegaye remembers “being told that no one was trained in criminal investigation.”
Tsegaye is under no illusion that judging from its ultimate purpose as a tool of repression, its ideal location in the heart of Piassa (comforted by a general silence), and the total information blackout on the purpose and everyday conduct of the injustice inside its fortress, the current government is, unfortunately, poised to continue running Ma’ekelawi,despite it being a “monument of state barbarity” and a “primary institution that serves as the true face of the repressive regimes – past and present.”
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.
Tags: #OromoProtests, Addisstandard, Africa, Ethiopia, Exam leaks, EXAM-LEAKS: DISORIENTATING AND OVERPOWERING A LEVIATHAN, Oromia, Social movement
EXAM-LEAKS: DISORIENTATING AND OVERPOWERING A LEVIATHAN
The Oromo activists achieved yet another spectacular victory by catching the Ethiopian regime off-guard and disturbing the “order” it set for the country’s youth. The leaking of the Ethiopian national examinations prior to the exam date greatly tarnished the self-imagery of the government while at the same time boosting that of its present-day nemesis, the Oromo youth activists. It has now pitted it against its yet another adversary, the Muslim activists.
For one thing, the leaking of the exam proved to be a surprising incident of sudden defeat of a government with a record of accomplishment of ignoring popular demands. It lately learnt the lesson—in the hard way—that the “terrorists” that it despises and over whose demands it was well prepared to ride roughshod can actually force it to submit to their wills (this time, of postponing exam dates).
Incidentally, such a victory could never—as it used to be in the past—provide the government the chance to reclaim its loss as an opportunity (as was the case with the rescinding of the Addis Abeba Master Plan, for instance, which the government tried to portray as a sign of its willingness to respond to people’s demands). The change in the exam dates came very late and only after the eerie leak of the exams and was thus clear manifestation of the government’s not only utter but also un-reclaimable defeat.
Secondly, the leaking of the exams catapulted Oromo activists as reliable co-owners of the destiny of their rebellious brethren in the country. In authoritarian settings, daring non-violent protesters, at least in the short-run, throw their whole lot into the hands of the regime they decry. The consequences for activists of their rebellious activities are to a huge extent controlled by the regime and are very much subject to the coercive apparatus of the state as long as the government has direct access to those activists. Activists do not necessarily own their fate; nor do they necessarily own the fate of their comrades. They plunge themselves gallantly into the unknown (or the bitter known, actually) in order to see something bright in the long-run. That is why we usually hear, among some Ethiopian detractors of the Oromo protests, that “some diasporic Oromo activists lead a happy life in the West and agitate the poor Oromo inside the country to rebel against the government with detrimental consequences to the protesters. The far-away activists do not come to their rescue in the event when the regime takes action against these poor fellows”. That assumption/assertion has now been blown apart. The leading Oromo activists—whether inside or outside the country—have proven themselves to be co-owners (the government still having a share, of course) of the fate of their rebellious comrades-in-protest. These activists do not simply “encourage” the Oromo youth in the country to launch anti-regime protests, only to abandon them later on to be devoured by the regime as and when it likes. By surprisingly forcing the regime to cancel exam dates, the activists have stood out clearly as the students’ reliable protectors of their academic security.
The government thus humiliatingly agreed to set another date for the exam. However, – and this is the third untoward consequence of the exam leak – by doing that, the regime, knowingly or otherwise, clashed not only with a fundamental rights of another section of the population but also with a much-cherished and much-celebrated idea in post-1974 Ethiopia. The secularization of the Ethiopian state and the equality of all religions was one of the few achievements of the otherwise controversial revolutionary turn of events in the country’s recent past. Part of the achievement was the official and equal status given to all religious holidays, including the Muslim ones. By announcing a new exam schedule that flagrantly clashes with an important Muslim holiday, the current government stood to commit an additional crime of historic proportion. It was also poised to clash once again with another major adversary, the Ethiopian Muslim activists, who, just like the Oromo activists, have been protesting government violation of their constitutional rights and had been the torch-bearers of a sturdy show of non-violent social movement before the Oromo protests erupted.
Apparently sensing an impending backlash, the regime once again made a flip flop and excepted the Eid day from the exam schedule. But it insisted that students will sit for exams while fasting and immediately after the holiday. This is, needless to say, in blatant disregard for the interests of Muslim students who wouldbe forced to write exams on an empty stomach and thus with much reduced power of concentration and productivity. The morrow of a major holiday would also not be appropriate for writing exams given the environment of festivity and socialization on that day that are obviously at odds with the atmosphere of tranquility and stability that sitting for exams naturally requires. Moreover, students would not be in a mood to make the most out of their holiday while their minds are preoccupied with exam-related stress and final preparation. Thus, exams dates fixed during periods of fasting and around holidays would no doubt be of grave concernfor Ethiopian Muslims, who most likely won’t allow the exams to come to pass sitting idly. If the regime insists to go by its plan for “Plan B” as it exists at present, it is only paving a more fruitful opportunity for Oromo and Muslim activists to intensify the struggle hand-in-hand towards the realization of free Ethiopia.
Ed’s Note: Yasin Muhe is a Lecturer at the Addis Abeba University (AAU). He can be reached at: tukejigsa@gmail.com
Posted by OromianEconomist in Africa, Ethiopia's Colonizing Structure and the Development Problems of People of Oromia, Afar, Ogaden, Sidama, Southern Ethiopia and the Omo Valley, Oromia, Oromo.
Tags: #OromoProtests, Addisstandard, Africa, Decolonizing Development, endigenous people, FROM SURVIVANCE ALL THE WAY TO RECONSTRUCTION: THE OROMO PURSUIT OF EQUALIBERTY, National Self Determination, Oromo, Self determination, we don't have self-rule in Oromia state.
FROM SURVIVANCE ALL THE WAY TO RECONSTRUCTION: THE OROMO PURSUIT OF EQUALIBERTY
- Introduction
A lot is happening in our part of the world. The last five months have been immensely eventful. We witnessed a series of tragic events unfolding successively one after the other, each more saddening than the one preceding it. These are truly hard times. Such times signal the urgency of prudent action. Reflexive action is the imperative of the time.
Over the weekend, when I was asked to comment on the ongoing Oromo protest in Ethiopia, I chose to reflect on the Oromo pursuit of social justice and political freedom, the pursuit of what Etienne Balibar calls ‘Equaliberty.’[1] In particular, I chose to reflect on the four critical phases of the Oromo struggle for national emancipation in order to express, if I can, solidarity with the national awakening we see in Oromia today. Specifically, I focused on the phases of survivance,[2] resistance, recovery, and reconstruction.
The primary aim for me personally is to pay attention and to remember and re-member. It is to pay tribute to the people, young and old, who have given and are giving their all in this most recent iteration of the Oromo national struggle for emancipation. The broader aim is to encourage all of us to look ahead into the future, where the Oromo will build walls of connection serving as a force for good in the region. It is aimed at encouraging us into the redemptive work of transformation of the entire Horn of Africa Region through a just peace, a peace that honours the ideals of Equality and Liberty (social justice and freedom). It is directed towards invoking what Ruti Teitel calls ‘Humanity’s Law,’[3] the law that emerged in consideration of the global inter-connectedness in the 21st century – and the law that enhances accountability for one’s actions in all corners of the world. I will argue that the success of this ongoing resistance, which some rightly call ‘Oromo National Awakening,’[4] depends on its capacity to engage with the world responsibly and re-constructively within the framework of Humanity’s Law.
- Phases of the struggle for National Emancipation
Since the time of their incorporation into Ethiopia in the 19th century, the Oromo have undergone four phases in their expression of indignation and resentment to the hegemony of the Ethiopian state nationalism. These phases can be summarized as follows: a) Survivance; b) Resistance; c) Recovery; d) Reconstruction. I hasten to add that there is hardly a clear demarcation between these phases as they not only flow into one another but also overlap. At times, they occur simultaneously. When they do so, or whenever any two of these happen together, as in the current Oromo awakening, the more successful they become, the more explosive in their intensity, the more powerful in their impact. When they come coevally, they tend to birth a rupture, even a revolution.
Let us have a quick look at what each stage involves.
- Survivance: Insisting on Presence
At this stage of reckoning with loss and lamenting humiliation, the Oromo was engaged in a quiet performance of Oromumma in the privacy of their homes and/or in the non-penetrated spaces of the rural environment. Among other things, this stage is marked by a quiet resistance to cultural and physical extermination. It was a season of adaptation and adjustment, a season of quiet retreat into one’s own way of life. It is a season of practising Oromumma in the non-public space (in the privacy of the home and in the isolated corners of unpenetrated Oromo hinterland). In urban areas, the Oromo tried to resist assimilation even as they performed a politics of passing and invisibility, making a gesture towards assimilation. In the rural areas, where the State was unable to penetrate the society, the resistance took the form of distancing oneself from the state. A typical practice in this regard is avoiding state schools for fear of being subjected to a repressive pedagogy of assimilation and erasure of their Oromo identity. The time from incorporation into the Ethiopian imperial state in the late 19thcentury to the 1960s can be characterized as a time of survival and of practising survivance.[5]
This is the stage of refusal to be governed. This is the stage of saying NO, overtly and covertly. In its covert form, it sought to disperse the benefits of modern education and basic infrastructure among the Oromo without calling it an Oromo movement. This is what one sees in the early activities of the self-help association known as the Matcha-Tulama Association (MTA). Of course, this kind of covert resistance is undergirded by a keen sense of awareness of oneself as an Oromo and of appreciating the uneven distribution of basic social services in the empire.
The most overt form of resistance started in the acts of rebellion and organized armed resistance in the 1960s. The age of resistance that started with the MTA movement in urban areas of the centre was corroborated by the Bale Oromo resistance also charting out the route (also in part contributing) to the subsequent Ethiopia-wide social upheaval and revolution of 1974. The more mature phase of resistance, of course, took shape only after the formation of the Oromo Liberation Front in 1974 to launch an armed struggle.
Fast forward, when the military regime was eventually toppled by forces of the periphery in 1991, this phase of overt resistance came to a close only to start after a season of recovery. The Oromo self-assertion as a self-determining agent to have a role in the reconstitution of the Ethiopian state as a democratic, human rights-sensitive, caring and compassionate polity committed to multi-foundationalism, plurinationalism, and just peace[6] was met by a military reprisal under an insecure Ethiopian regime that was reluctant to lose power for the sake of transforming the polity on democratic and humanitarian bases. The transition to democracy faltered and ultimately got derailed altogether. The politics remained militarized. The state crisis continued to deepen. When the OLF left the transition, the transitional pact signed among various liberation fronts collapsed. The hope of transformation was deferred.
The Oromo self-assertion came to be viewed as a threat to the national security of Ethiopia. Oromumma became a securitized identity. The Ethiopian prisons and detention centres started to be congested byOromos charged with the non-existent crime of being ‘anti-peace elements’ (the incipient form of what later became the discourse of terrorism). The politics of co-optation and patronage had led to the creation of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) to rule Oromia on behalf of the Ethiopian regime, which was now under the tight grip of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). In order to secure a semblance of legitimacy in Oromia, however, the regime adopted the OLF’s program of recovering the Oromo language (Afaan Oromo), Oromo identity, Oromo culture, Oromo history, and all there is in between.
The seeds of recovery were already in the phase of resistance. However, the actual work of recovery started to bear fruit as it was intensified even in the midst of a violent repression unprecedented in a long time. While the Ethiopian regime utilized its good relations with the international community to malign the Oromos as terrorists and to exclude them from the public space, the Oromo took solace in the possibility of using their language, practising their culture, and manifesting their identity in public—albeit only to a limited extent. Later on, this act of taking comfort and pride in using language, expressing culture, and manifesting identitycame to express itself in the cultural turn the Oromo resistance took in the face of the increasing closure of the public (political) space.[7]
This phase was a stage of ‘drawing breath.’[8] Although at first it appeared a moment of loss and defeat, it actually became a moment of recovery. It is amoment of finding our way back to our Oromo selves. It proved to be a moment of experiencing resilience in its full bloom. Almost like a national recess, it served as a season of rehabilitating the Oromo self, recovering and projecting Oromo subjectivity. It was a moment of reclamation of voice for the Oromo.
In particular, it was a season of recovering the language, the identity, the history (the narrative, the memories, and the stories), the culture, and the cultural institutions of the Oromo. It was a season of refurbishing our way of being in the world, a moment of re-presenting ourselves, counteracting the forced absence of the Oromo from the Ethiopian public scene. It was a moment of imagining home from exile. In short, it was a season of restoring dignity to the Oromo (even in the darkness of the unprecedented state terror from 1992-todate).
The fourth phase is probably the most critical of all. This stage marks the season for the Oromo to take their legitimate place in the world. It is a stage of reconstituting the Oromo self in the context of a globalized world infinitely interconnected with other peoples. It is a season of reconfiguring the Ethiopian state. The work at this stage can be nothing but transformative. It is a work of engaging with Ethiopia, the horn region, the African Union, the middle-east, and the wider world. It is a moment of projecting an Oromo self that intervenes in the world as a force for good, as a responsible regional actor, as a responsible ‘international citizen.’
At this stage, as a people, the Oromo shall hopefully overcome the brokenness of our past, the deep fractures in our relations with the other peoples of Ethiopia and the Horn. In particular, the Oromo must pay attention to the Ethiopian State with a view to engagement for its genuine transformation. The Oromo pursuit of justice must be complemented by a responsible pursuit of democracy, if only to harness the political power needed to transform the state. Oromo pursuit of equality in citizenship can be a rallying point for all of the ‘other’ peoples (who inhabit the Southern and the peripheral half of Ethiopia). This demand for equality is at its root a question of justice, but we have now learnt the bitter lesson that justice is the function of (mainly legislative and judicial) power. The task of reconstruction cannot be done without pursuing some form of transformative power. The Oromo quest for equaliberty becomes a synthesis of individual rights on the one hand and the right of collectivities (as well as classes and other categories) to universal social equality. In a sense, this self-conscious and reflexive pursuit of power is a pursuit of a ‘strong democracy.’[9] Pursuing a strong democracy in a country such as Ethiopia, pursuing transformative power in this context, requires a huge sense of responsibility to reckon with the other (all the Ethiopian others) with an eye on reconfiguring the terms of citizenship, to reconstruct the state, and to transfigure the state-society relationship. This process of pursuing and achieving transformative power is an engagement in the task of redemption (a process of turning the essentially illegitimate into legitimate). [10]
Granted, it is a painful task. It requires looking at historical evil squarely in the eye, reckoning with its impacts, accounting for it, remembering it, but choosing to forgive.[11]It requires an agonistic engagement with our plurinationality and the complexity thereof. It comes with cost and sacrifice. For the Oromo, the price of equaliberty is a sense of national responsibility. This is because the work of reconstruction in Ethiopia demands nothing less than redemption. From theological discourses, we know that redemption requires sacrifice that invests in the belief that the future will be different from the past. It is a process that unleashes anguish as we try to undo injustices of the past and hope for a fairer and more just future.
Transformative engagement with Ethiopia requires consideration of several concrete political realities such as international debts, borders, and military engagements in the neighbouring countries and in the UN Peace-keeping mission fields. More importantly, it requires a serious look into the trade, investment, and development partnerships that Ethiopia has gone into and the obligations that flow therefrom. The Oromo also needs to engage creatively and imaginatively with the institutions of the Ethiopian empire. One has to have a clear idea of what to do with its repressive security, intelligence, military, police, and prison institutions. One also needs to have a clear idea of what to do with abused constitutional institutions and arrangements (parliaments, elections, federalism, self-determination rules, constitutions, ‘rule of law,’ etc). The most urgent and pressing challenge that the Oromo needs to counter directly is the arrest and eradication of the intermittent famine that is caused and mismanaged by successive Ethiopian regimes.
In the endeavour to transform the state-society relation, the Oromo needs to change the hierarchic, centralized, and authoritarian political culture of the country. When it comes to the issue of handling plurinationality and the demand for ethno-cultural justice, the Oromo needs to appreciate that there will be no post-EPRDF moment in some ways and find more practical and just ways of satisfying legitimate national aspirations at all levels. For this, the Oromo needs to empower citizens, preparing them for the democracy to come both within Oromia and in the wider Ethiopia. One needs to prepare people for making an informed sovereign choice in the deliberations on sensitive issues of self-determination and constitutional secession. Throughout, one needs to beware of what we inherit: huge amounts of international debts; an interlocked and inter-dependent but conflicting and volatile neighbourhood; chronic poverty; malfunctioning institutions; budding corruption in a bubble economy;a generally neo-liberal-capitalist global society; a US-driven civilizational cleavage in the ‘war against terrorism’; a deeply divided society; a society that is traumatized by decades of state terrorism; etc.
In the work of reconstruction, the Oromo ought to enact wholeness, connectedness, into the future. The Oromo now ought to become the people of promise, the people of hope. The Oromo ought to draw on their traditional values and institutions to actively pursue justice. They only need to remember that they are a people of legality (seera and safuu), a people of egalitarian rule (Gadaa), a people of peace (nagaa), a people of substantive justice (sirna dhugaa fi haaqaa), and a people of reconciliation (araara). In all this, they act from the space of brokenness they inhabit as a people who know, from lived experience, what it means to be oppressed. In engaging with the world from the position of brokenness and suffering helps the Oromo create that moment of inter-subjectivity, the space in-between, born out of the historic vulnerability.As Hannah Arendt reminds us, this place in-between is where the world is constituted. “The world is between people,”[12] she once said.
At this stage of the national struggle, the Oromo engage in the act of rebuilding. We build walls of connection, solidarity, humanity, and co-equal/human responsibility. It is at this historical stage that the Oromo takes advantage of the contemporary world’s law. Ruti Teitel calls this body of global law ‘humanity’s law.’[13] It is composed of the trinity of international human rights law, the law of war (humanitarian law), and international criminal justice. The first is chiefly a protective body of law (firmly rooted in the fundamental human dignity and worth). The second is more a remedial type of law that gets activated in times of crisis as people conflict (going to war or engaging in other forms of political violence) and mistreat each other (in the context of war). The third is focused on ensuring responsibility for atrocities beyond one’s national borders. In this third category of law, the Oromo sees the International community as a truth bearing witness and a potential ally in the pursuit of their equaliberty. The third category, being mainly a post-sovereignty regime of law, also helps us overcome the weaknesses of traditional state-centred institutions of human rights and humanitarian law. It is this nature that makes it suitable to the concerns of sub-national entities that were routinely ignored or abused by the complicity of the national and the international actors whose conducts are anchored in the notion of sovereignty.
The Oromo of the 21st century, the brave new generation that is living this moment of awakening, has the task of reconstruction by paying attention to and taking advantage of the contemporary humanity’s law. Humanity’s law helps us achieve human rights, peace, and justice, all three of them together. This in turn consolidates just peace in the entire region. For the Oromo, apart from allowing us to engage the international (which was often neglected in the struggle although the latter was always attendant to our oppression from colonial times to cold war, and further on to this neo-liberal ‘global-capitalist’ age), helps us pursue equaliberty, i.e., both equality and liberty. The historic Oromo quest for freedom and social justice will then be achieved within this framework.
In the course of reconstruction, the Oromo engage in self-transcendence. They live out the imperative of paying attention as an act of solidarity with all oppressed people around them. They reach out to all their neighbours, especially the humble and the lowly. And these are in abundance in the region, be it in Ethiopia or in the wider Horn region. Without reaching out to these and working together with them, Oromia can hardly achieve freedom, justice, or peace.
- Pursuing Equaliberty: The Imperative of Resistance, Recovery, and Reconstruction
The Oromo pursuit of equaliberty in the framework of humanity’s law, unlike what its detractors maintain, is not a quest for power. Nor is it just a quest for thin democracy as experienced in electoral practices. It is primarily a quest for social justice in a democratic environment that is grounded in a sense of responsibility for the protection and elevation of human dignity. In this process, the Oromo is going to go beyond resistance and self-recovery to achieve reconstruction with an eye on reconciliation. This is necessitated by the fact that both freedom and justice, both liberty and equality, are intensely relational. No time is more suited than now for us to proclaim, in the spirit of Ubuntu, that “I am because we are.” No place needs this spirit in abundance more than do Oromia and its neighbourhood.
- After the Oromo Protest: the Imperative of Reconstruction
In the past few years, we have witnessed among the Oromo the simultaneous operation of the logic of recovery and resistance–sometimes alternately, sometimes simultaneously. The stronger the repression, the more powerful the momentum of the resistance. The generation that benefitted from the cultural rehabilitation has come of age to demand their right in their own terms. In the last five months we have become fortunate to see a generation that is mentally emancipated, a populace that knows how to conduct itself in the face of adversity, a people who act cohesively with a unity of purpose. We have seen the persistence in resistance.
We have seen a people determined to insist on justice. A people who turned (economic and electoral) despair into hope, loss (of land and livelihood) into gain, (electoral and military) defeat into (a genuinely substantive political) victory.
We have witnessed a people who, with their resilience, exposed the moral and political bankruptcy of a conceited regime. We observed a self-mobilized, self-directed, grassroots movement that virtually shamed and humiliated a seemingly invincible regime. We have seen people expose the limits of deceptive politics whose legitimacy is shored up through using election as a war by other means. We have seen a people who tested the limits of political double-speak. We have seen a people who exposed the true nature of the regime. They have rendered a region totally ungovernable. They have forced the regime to impose a military rule.[14]
We have seen a movement that conducted itself responsibly vis-à-vis other peoples even in the face of provocation and manipulation by the regime to foment horizontal conflicts.
This is an indication of the fact that the Oromo public is now ready to engage the wider Ethiopia, the entire region, and the world re-constructively, transformationally, redemptively within the framework of humanity’s law. The success of this National Awakening is to be completed when its leaders demonstrate thecapacity to make the generation to begin again, to start afresh, to remake the neighbourhood, to build new walls of interdependence, even from the ravages of our oppressed Oromo lives. The success is said to be complete when the Qubee Generation demonstrates its capacity to write a new history by emulating the Phoenix that “rises out of the ashes”, to go beyond the ruins imposed on it by a century of injustice to make a difference in the region.
For this, we need to start paying attention to connectedness, inter-dependence, and the need for acting in solidarity with others. After all, as Simone Weil reminds us, paying attention is an act of grace, the ultimate expression of solidarity. Like all the other peoples in Ethiopia, the Oromo ought to start learning to see through others’ lens. We have a fear to dispel. We have a trust to build. We have the responsibility to enchant the generation into hope and a better future.
- Conclusion
The current Oromo awakening reminds us that the Oromo have survived. The age of being seen as an unwanted presence, as a vestige of a regrettable past in Ethiopia, is substantially on the decline. The work of national self-recovery has borne fruits.TheQubee generation is already here to make a difference.The children have arrived. Resistance has matured, especially in the way it conducts itself horizontally. But in the main, it has restored agency to the Oromo public, who in turn have made Oromia totally ungovernable to the regime. Mental emancipation has been achieved.
People now know how to act, and can act, even in desperate conditions. What remains now is to start engaging wisely with the world around us in the task of reconstruction. Prudence suggests that we can take advantage of humanity’s law. Prudence also suggests that we be mindful of the fact that in our times, lawful engagement is a necessity. Yes, law, too, can be effectively—albeit discerningly—be used as a spectre of resistance and a useful means of reconstruction. We need to remember that more often than not, law is deployed as ‘war by other means.’ It is this interlocked deployment of law in/and war that David Kennedy calls lawfare[15] (war by legal means), and perhaps rightly so. The flip side of this is that law can be deployed to build connections, relations, and peace thereof. I hope the Oromo national awakening will make optimal use of thislawful form of engagement with the world.
ED’s Note: Tsegaye Ararssa is from Melbourne Law School. He can be reached at:tsegayenz@gmail.com. The article was prepared as a remark for the ‘RIGHT TO FREEDOM’ event organized by Oromo Support Group Australia, 16-17 April 2016, Melbourne Australia
End Notes:
[1] Etienne Balibar, Equaliberty:Political Essays, Tr. James Ingram. (Duke University Press, 2014).
[2] The term ‘surv
‘Survivance’ is used among scholars working on the issues of First Nations (also known as indigenous peoples). I came across the term for the first time in the work of Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Nebraska, 1999). The term means a lot more than mere survival. According to Vizenor, “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry.” In Derridan sense, survivance of course refers to “a spectral existence that would be neither life nor death.” The Oromo struggle in its first iteration soon after the conquest was more like survivance, especially in its quest for active presence in the Ethiopian polity.
[3] Ruti Teitel, Humanity’s Law (Oxford University Press, 2011). Teitel identifies three important components that constitute ‘Humanity’s Law’: International Human Rights Law; Laws of war (traditionally known as humanitarian law, i.e., the law IN war and the law OF war); and International Criminal Justice (following the creation of the International Criminal Court via the Rome Statute). Humanity’s Law, Teitel argues, is the new framework of understanding ‘transitional justice’ in the context of changing global relations. I follow her tack and suggest that this law lays the framework for solidarity and responsibility in an increasingly interdependent world.
[4] I am indebted to Nageessaa Oddo Dube for this phrase. Nageessaa used the phrase in his recent speech televised by Oromo TV on 16 April 2016, also available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF4SskY660A.
[5] One notes, however, that the formation of the Western Oromo Confederation in 1936 and its act of approaching the League of Nations for membership, or alternatively seeking a British Protectorate instead of submitting to the Italian invaders, was an early and short-lived expression of overt resistance to the hegemony of the Ethiopian empire and an assertion of Oromo subjectivity in the international system of the time. See Ezikiel Gebissa’s ‘The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936,’ 9 Northeast African Studies 3 (2002), 75.
[6] A commitment also inscribed in the 1991 Transitional Charter of Ethiopia and later in the preamble of the 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia. To an extent, this undelivered promise of the constitution was what made the political elite of Ethiopia’s South (including the Oromo) ambivalent in their reaction to the constitution. It was also this promise that TPLF used to co-opt several Southern nationalists.
[7] This increasing use of songs, cultural events (such as Irrecha), exhibitions, etc to express political disaffection is recently referred to as the ‘cultural turn’ in the trajectory of Oromo national struggle. See Ezekiel Gebissa, “Land, Life, and Leadership” [?] (Dec 2015, OSA Extraordinary conference on the Master Plan).
[8] Alison Phipps, ‘Drawing Breath: Creative Elements and their Exile from Higher Education’ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 9(1) (2010), 43.
[9] Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (20thanniversary ed) (University of California Press, 2004).
[10]This is inspired by a thought in Richard Dehmel’s poem, Transfigured Night (Verklarte Nacht) (1998) in which the conception of a child by an adulterous wife is transfigured by the light of love, also represented by the moonlit night, to bring infinitely more joy and rejuvenation to the husband. I like to suggest that this kind of redemptive transfiguration helps us overcome ‘constitutional original sins’ in order for us to go beyond the original constitutive wrong.
[11] An imperfect but useful institutional model in this regard is presented to us in the example of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
[12] Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Harvest Publishers, 1970).
[13] Ruti Teitel, Humanity’s Law (Oxford University Press, 2011). See also her ‘Humanity’s Law: Rule of Law for the New Global Politics,’ (2002) 35 Cornell Journal International of Law(2), 356. Teitel tries to work out a new framework of accountability at the global level by going beyond her earlier work on Transitional Justice (Oxford 2000). This framework, I hope, will be useful for the Oromo both to pursue justice for the atrocities experienced and to engage with their neighbours responsibly. Coming as they do out of a long and deep crisis situation, the Oromo can also use this framework for building a sustainable peace grounded in justice and truth.
[14] Contrary to what many people assume, what exists in Oromia now is not Martial Law. It is a pure military rule devoid of any semblance of legality that one sees even in Martial law (a rule under the command of the highest military official that suspends or deposes political leaders because of a constitutional crisis or utter incompetence on the part of civilian political governance). In Ethiopia, what we see is an illegal dismissal of the state’s civilian administration by a Command Post chaired by the Federal Prime Minister who ordered, again illegally, eight divisions of the Army to “take a merciless and final measure” on protestors.
[15]David Kennedy, ‘Laware and Warfare’ in Cambridge Handbook of International Law, eds. James Crawford and Martti Koskenniemi (2012), 159, and David Kennedy,Of War and Law (Princeton University Press, 2006).
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Tags: #OromoProtests, Addisstandard, Africa, OPINION: TAKING OUR VOICE SERIOUSLY, Oromia, Oromo
OPINION: TAKING OUR VOICE SERIOUSLY
By Hailegabriel Gedecho, Addisstandard, 22nd March 2016
My starting point for this short reflection is my discomfort with friends and acquaintances who question (and dismiss) the morality of supporting (to use their pejorative expression‘mafafam’) Oromo Protests from overseas. As most of these critiques reside in Ethiopia (where public display of solidarity with Oromo Protests is meant risking torture, incarceration, and of course one’s life), the claim of immorality of Ethiopian diaspora showing solidarity with Oromo protesters may be interpreted as either a fear of tyranny or a disguised yearning for an Ethiopia where public display of resistance does not cost one’s freedom or life.
But there seems to be more to this argument than the fear or yearning that I alluded to above. If you push a bit further and ask why they are not themselves doing the support (if the morality of protests overseas is the issue as they claim), they end up telling you ‘order’ must be managed or Oromo Protests must first be reframed as ‘Ethiopia Protests’. So, for them, order (whatever that means) and fetishizing Ethiopia are the litmus tests of the morality of protests against the Ethiopian state. As a corollary, one can legitimately assume these people don’t care if the Ethiopian state kills, dispossess, disempowers, and denigrate Oromos as long as ‘order’ is maintained and fetish Ethiopia is thereby performed. In this piece, I will try to explain why, in many ways, the silence these resident Ethiopians seek from their overseas friends is ethically more troublesome than the solidarity (often expressed through social media outlets such as Facebook) that Ethiopians in overseas show to the victims of state terrorism in Ethiopia.
The participation of Ethiopians overseas in protests has more often involved social media activism. Although the effects of this social media activism cannot be contradicted, it is hardly the cause or the primary instigator of the Oromo Protests on the ground. In a country where internet access is limited to only less than 5% of the total population (the majority being Addis Abebans who are not apparently interested in the protest), the impact of social media activism in fuelling Oromo Protest is negligible, more so in rural Oromiya where we are witnessing the protest. Oromo Protest has its origin within Ethiopia and is related to developments there. The impossibility of the protesters’ demand to be expressed through other less explosive spaces of resistance and the eternally undemocratic and imperial nature of the Ethiopian state and its development model are its major contributors. The social media activism by the diaspora cannot be implicated in this, unless one wants to easily buy into the dull rhetoric of the Ethiopian government blaming every wrong on ‘external forces’.
Instead, complementing the voice of the subaltern in spaces where their participation is marginal (e.g. social media) is morally satisfying. As can be easily noticed, the social media is a space of its own dynamics. Though it can generally be open to all, there is every possibility that sympathisers of the violent Ethiopian state dominate the social media discussion of current affairs in the country. This makes the active complication of the suffocating state-sponsored discourses of developing, democratizing, and modernizing Ethiopia urgent. Those who perform their resistance on social media may at least vindicate the causes of the subaltern (such as the Oromo protesters) by exposing the state’s pretentiousness vis-à-vis its politically and economically marginal communities.
Of course, there is an additional reason why Ethiopians overseas should do the social media activism. Unlike their brothers and sisters at home (who are paying dearly for asking legitimate questions), Ethiopians overseas are removed from the immediate threat of state reprisal for echoing these questions. Although doing the easy thing in a virtual space cannot compensate for the pain suffered by victims of state terrorism, it is at least a blameless (as well as useful) thing than remaining silent about the injustices perpetrated by the Ethiopian state.
Another thing which seems to obsess the silent supporters of injustice relates to vocal diaspora activists and their increasing popularity. It is often argued resistance from afar is cowardice and meaningless. In their eyes, the brave is the one who dare to challenge the government from within. Admittedly, those who do their protest in Ethiopia are brave. But, their bravery cannot and should not be measured against the alleged spiritless-ness of vocal diaspora activists. In fact, numerous foreign-based Oromo protesters know what it means to challenge the Ethiopian state from home. They have experienced the brutality of the Ethiopian state for having done that.Their bodies and souls unalterably inscribe experiences of torture and other inhuman and degrading treatment under the Ethiopian state that rendered them homeless in the first place. Hence, they have every reason to fear the brutality of the evil state, least for having part of their family back at home. This fear is not illegitimate and cannot be ridiculed as cowardice, not least by sympathisers of the violent state who often rationalise their desire for status quo in terms of fear of the unknown post-Oromo protest future.
Interestingly, some admit the Ethiopian state has always (perhaps unsurprisingly) justified its excessive violence in terms of the ‘need to maintain order’. It is unclear how one can ethically and consistently claim the primacy of order (which assumes the sincerity of state’s monopoly of violence to supress any protest) as well as suggest that those who languish in Ethiopian prisons (as a result of their participation in creating ‘disorder’) are morally more righteous than runaways who make the talk from overseas.This is just like saying: ‘come and face the power of the ruthless state or don’t tarnish Ethiopia’s hard won image of stability and development by channelling the legitimate question raised by the people of Oromiya through social media outlets’. Local elites who do not want their privileged life disturbed and their demand for silence from their equally privileged friends abroad may be interpreted as a desire to normalize the violence the majority is living under in Ethiopia. If anything, the diaspora can contribute (as well as it does) in exposing the façade of development and stability that the Ethiopian state and its sympathisers deploy to invisibilize the multidimensional structural violence in the country. There is no wrong in siding with the powerless, even if that would ‘disturb’ the imperial peace of the privileged that charge the diaspora for the continued mess at home.
For me, this is not the time to worry about the good image of Ethiopia or the Oromoness of the protest. Whether the protest is framed as Ethiopian or Oromo protest it is irrelevant as long as what is at stake is an issue of social justice. Those who suspend their support to Oromo Protest because of its framing as “Oromo” cannot be more ethically wrong than this. If they sincerely believe Oromo questions are Ethiopian questions, they should have done the framing themselves and join the struggle under the banner ‘Ethiopia Protests’ instead of demanding the Oromos to reaffirm the primacy of Ethiopia (which they cannot for legitimate reasons) or wanting the likes of me (who is not an Oromo by the way) keeping silent about the plight of the Ethiopian subaltern.
I don’t understand why it is morally right to keep silent about injustices while at the same time complaining about the ‘disturbing voice’ of Ethiopians overseas that rightly believe they are supporting the cause of justice and channelling that voice to those who care to hear. Those who don’t care to hear can continue complaining about the disturbing voice. Should I worry for incidentally disturbing the privileged and the complicit in violence? No. Those who worry much are those who have something to lose (like the ruling EPRDF) or those who want the continuity of violence. And, they are the reasons why I should take my otherwise insignificant but disturbingly resistant voice seriously.
Ed’s note: Hailegabriel Gedecho former assistant professor at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia. He now studies law at University of Melbourne, Australia
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Tags: Addisstandard, Africa, ETHIOPIA SHOULD STOP KILLING, MAIMING AND INCARCERATING ITS PEOPLE’S QUESTION, Oromia, Oromo, OromoProtests2016
ETHIOPIA SHOULD STOP KILLING, MAIMING AND INCARCERATING ITS PEOPLE’S QUESTION
EDITORIAL, ADDISSTANDARD, 9 FEBRUARY 2016
It is happening again, sadly. The government in Ethiopia is back to its signature of killing, maiming and jailing its own people because they are exercising their chance of rejecting state excesses using the only means available: taking to the streets to protest.
Ethiopia is a country that has effectively obliterated several channels that normally help foster a healthy communication between citizens and the state .The sorry state of independent media and civil society organization is distressing; and every day lived experienced of Ethiopians and their contacts with authorities at any level is alarmingly toxic.
Authorities in Ethiopia should have therefore been the last ones to get started by the idea of citizens taking to the streets to make their grievances heard. Alas, that is not to be.
Hundreds and thousands of students and residents in more than 100 cities and towns in Oromiya Regional State (Oromiya for short), the largest and most populous state in Ethiopia, are in and out of the streets since early Nov. last year. Like every experience when Ethiopians were out on the streets protesting state excesses, every day is bringing heart breaking stories of Ethiopians suffering in the hands of security personnel. Since Nov.12th 2015, when the first protest broke out in Ginchi, a small town 80km west of Addis Abeba, countless households have buried their loved ones; young university students have disappeared without a trace; hundreds have lost limbs and countless others are jailed
Ethiopians are once again killing, miming and jailing Ethiopians.
The immediate trigger factor is the possible implementation of the infamous Addis Abeba and Surrounding Oromiya Special Zone Integrated Development Plan, popularly known as ‘the Addis Abeba Master Plan.’
The federal government claims it is a plan aimed at only creating a better infrastructure link between the capital Addis Abeba and eight towns located within the Oromiya Regional State Special Zone. But the reason why it is having a hard time selling this otherwise fairytale like development plan is the same reason why it is responding heavy handedly to any dissent against it: it is what it wants to do.
The current protest is led by the Oromos, who are the largest ethnic majority in Ethiopia. In all the four corners of the Addis Abeba surrounding localities, Oromos also make up the single largest majority whose way of lives have already been affected by mammoth changes Addis Abeba has been having over the last Century.
They are rejecting the central government’s top down plan because they are informed by a merciless history of eviction and dispossession. Several researches show that over the last 25 years alone about half a million Oromo farmers have unjustly lost their farmlands to give way to an expansion of a city that is xenophobic to their way to being.
Not the first time
Sadly, this is not the first time Ethiopians are pleading with their government to be heard in regards to the so-called ‘Master Plan.’ The first protest erupted in April-May 2014 when mostly Oromo student protesters from universities in Ambo and Jimma in the west, Adama in the east and Medaawalabu in south east Ethiopia, among others, expressed their disapproval of the plan. Like today, they have resorted to communicate with authorities the only way they possibly can: take to the streets to protest. And like today authorities have responded the only way they have so far responded to Ethiopian voices calling for justice: killing tens, maiming hundreds and incarcerating thousands.
As of 1991, when the current regime first came to power, students, mostly Oromo students, have staged several protest rallies calling for justice. Each time the end result has been nothing short of a disaster.
Although the 2014 Oromo students protest marked the first of the largest protest against the central government, a not so distant memory of Oromo students’ protests and subsequent crackdowns reveal a disturbing history of state brutality gone with impunity. To mention just two, in late ‘90s Oromo Students at the Addis Abeba University (AAU) protested against a systematic expulsion of hundreds of Oromo students, who, authorities claimed, had links with the then rebel group, Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). But many of those who protested against the dismissal of their dorm mates soon joined the growing list of expulsion; hundreds of were also jailed. Today mothers speak of their kids who have disappeared without a trace since then. And in early 2000 Oromo students have taken to the streets to protest against the federal government’s decision to relocate the capital of the Oromiya regional state from Addis Abeba to Adama. Many of them were killed when police opened fires in several of those protests, including the one here in Addis Abeba.
Although in 2005 the federal government decided to relocate the capital of Oromiya back to Addis Abeba, fifteen years later Ethiopian prisons are hosting hundreds of students who were jailed following their protest against the decision in the first place; hundreds of them have left the country via Kenya and have become homeless in foreign lands. Less mentioned are also the lives that have been altered forever; the hopes that were dashed; the students’ quest to study and change their lives that were cut short; a country that is deprived of its young and brightest; and family fabrics that were shattered.
State impunity and all that
Following the 2014 Oromo students’ protest and the killing spree by the federal and the regional state police, Abadula Gemeda, speaker of the house of people’s representatives and former president of the Oromiya regional state, promised to bring to justice those who were responsible for the killing.
But two outstanding experiences explain why Abadula’s words were mere rhetoric. And the government in Ethiopia should address both if it wants to remain a legitimate representative of the people it claims to govern.
First, so far no one who represents the government has been held accountable for the killings, maiming, disappearances and unjust incarceration for countless Ethiopians following protest crackdowns. No matter how excessive the use of force by its security agents against unarmed protesters is, the government knows (and acts as such) it can simply get away with it, as it did several times in the past. This is wrong. A state that has no mechanism to hold its rogue agents accountable for their excesses is equally guilty.
In addition to that, in what came as a disturbing twist, the government has adopted a new strategy aimed at portraying itself as a victim of public vandalism. It is rushing to clean itself of the crimes committed by its security agents. Using its disproportionate access to state owned and affiliated media currently the government is presiding over the stories of victimhood more than those whose lives have been destroyed by it. In an act of shame and disgrace to the profession, these state owned and affiliated media are providing their helping hands to complete the act of state impunity.
Second, the central government’s first answer to the repeated cries of justice by Ethiopians is to communicate with them through its army. Like in the past, in the ongoing protests by the Oromo, which have largely focused on cities and towns within the Oromiya regional state, protesters are not only facing the regional state’s security apparatus but also the merciless hands of the federal army reserve. This is an act that not only trespasses the country’s constitutionally guaranteed federal arrangement but also makes the horrific crimes committed by necrophiliac security agents against protesters to get lost in unnecessary details, hence go unpunished.
Public protests in the past and the manner by which the current government dealt with them should teach the later a lesson or two. But the first and most urgent one is that it should stop killing, maiming and jailing its people’s questions.
In addition to the unknown numbers of those who have been killed by the police and the army in the wake of the ongoing protest, cities have seen their hospitals crowded with wounded Ethiopians of all ages; hundreds of individuals, including senior members of the opposition Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), are already thrown into jails without due legal process. In clear violation of the constitution by none other than the state most of them are held incommunicado in places unknown to their loved ones.
In the wake of his release after serving four years in prison, Bekele Gerba, the prominent opposition figure, told this magazine in April last year that prison was “not a place one appreciates to be, but I think it is also the other way of life as an Ethiopian.” Sadly, Bekele is once again thrown in to jail because that is Ethiopia does to its people’s questions. But an end to this is long overdue.
The elders who traveled from East Hararghe Zone
OromianEconomist 
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