It is rare that I meet my friend Hone Mandefro without at least momentarily discussing the conflict in Ethiopia, his country of origin. It’s that Hone is writing a doctoral thesis at Concordia University which deals with the development of the country. He is also a director of the Amhara Association of America (AAA), a group that seeks to defend the interests and human rights of the Amhara people, one of the largest ethnic minorities in the country. ‘Ethiopia. The violence there, necessarily, lives in him.
Tuesday evening, Hone sends me a series of articles from major international media. At least 200 people were massacred last weekend in the Oromia region. The AAA believes that there are nearly 600 casualties in total — Amharas. Several local representatives and witnesses accuse an underground militia, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), of being responsible for the massacre. Meanwhile, the OLA denies responsibility and instead blames the violence on the Ethiopian government. What is happening ? I call Hone to understand. So let’s start at the beginning.
Towards the end of the 1970s, in a context of great economic crisis, the traditional Ethiopian monarchy was overthrown and a communist government, supported by the USSR, took power. Like many other communist governments, the new powers in place are tackling poverty through major land reform. In particular, force is used to move populations to new regions of the country, and to redistribute land.
This government fell in 1991, along with the USSR. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, active since the 1983-1985 famine in the region bordering Eritrea, forms a broad coalition with other regional organizations to draft a new constitution for the country. In 1994, the founding document was signed, which established a system of “ethnic federalism”. “The rights of many Ethiopians had been trampled under the more centralizing political systems,” Hone explains.
“We therefore sought to create strong regional governments, associated with the dominant ethnic group in each region, which then controls the land and local political power. »
From 1995 to 2018, Ethiopian political life was dominated by the party which had put forward ethnic federalism, with strong support in the Tigray region, in particular. But when a new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, came to power in 2018, he distanced himself from the doctrine. In the north, the political reorientation is causing discontent and a rebel group, the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), is getting organized. The authorities in Addis Ababa send their troops to the region, and since then a large part of the country has been transformed into a war zone. We could say, coldly, that we are dealing with a political conflict, or certainly an ideological one, on the need for centralization, decentralization, or even secession in a country. But on the ground, the violence is nameless. Several local and international observers report massacres and sexual crimes committed against civilians in the Tigray region, at the hands of the Ethiopian army, and the government is accused of cutting off food to local populations, causing famine and disease.
During this time, both the TDF and the Ethiopian government are allegedly attacking the Amhara populations who live along the road between the capital and the country’s northern border. And by declaring a state of emergency, the authorities in Addis Ababa have also filled the country’s prisons with political prisoners, in an attempt to calm the unrest.
Other factions dissatisfied with the central government have also taken advantage of the conflict in the north, which has lasted for more than two years, to increase their own activities. This would be the case of the OLA, which is accused this week of having massacred an Amhara community living in the region where the Oromos are the dominant ethnic group. This would be the latest in a very long series of attacks against the Amhara populations, which are particularly numerous to have been relocated, during the communist period, in regions where they now hold very little political power. .
In short, while in the north, a region is in open conflict with the central government, in the west, the violence is directed against a local minority. Behind both types of conflict, the same idea is at play: that each region of Ethiopia should be completely dominated by the ethnic group associated with it. A strong Addis Ababa government threatens ethnic federalism. The sheer reality of the country’s diversity, which does not break down as neatly as one would like into homogeneous regional blocks, also undermines this ideal.
What would a solution to the conflict look like? The answer depends, of course, on the Ethiopian one is talking to. The Prime Minister’s supporters obviously want him to stay in place – especially since talks should be started with the rebels in the north. But for many civilians in Tigray, the violence perpetrated by the Ethiopian army will be impossible to forget. And for many Amharas, the Ethiopian government is complicit in ethnic cleansing, looking the other way as attacks on regional minorities are repeated.
Hone, for his part, believes that conflicts may be punctuated by periods of calm, but that they cannot be truly resolved in the presence of such a divisive constitutional order. He would like Ethiopia to begin a political reflection on its future, advocating an arrangement where the country’s diversity would be protected, without rigid lines being created around ethnic affiliations. He believes that Canada, like the rest of the international community, could play an important supportive role in such a process — without dictating the terms.