Muslims and Liberals

Ethiopia’s liberal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been assured a second term in office as his ruling Prosperity Party has won the federal parliamentary election by a landslide, capturing 410 of 436 seats.

Elections to about a fifth of the seats have been delayed because of Covid-19, logistical problems and, in the case of Tigray province, a secessionist movement. 

Ethiopia has become a political laboratory in which Abiy is testing a high-stakes hypothesis. It’s that several dozen ethnic communities – a half-dozen of whom deeply estranged from one another – can be molded into a unified democratic nation. The Tigrayans under the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have posed the most potent of the challenges to his mission.

The TPLF had dominated the federal government for 27 years even though Tigrayans make up only 6 percent of the Ethiopian population. Traditionally militarist, they dominated the Ethiopian federal bureaucracy since an uprising overthrew the Communist Dreg regime in 1991. The TPLF then led the formation of a coalition of ethno-nationalist parties named Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Through the EPRDF, the Tigrayan party institutionalized its principle of ethnic communities’ rights to self-determination and even secession. The 1994 federal constitution underpinned that centrifugal framework.

But despite Ethiopia’s loosely federal constitutional structure, the TPLF maintained an iron grip on the federal government and unleashed a reign of terror, muzzling and persecuting critical voices. Human Rights Watch termed their wanton persecution as “crimes against humanity on unimaginable scale.” During 2016-2018 the long-festering protests against the TPLF repression under the cover of EPRDF, exacerbated. Led initially by the activists from Omoria, the largest enhno-nationalist region in the coalition, and Amhara, the second-largest, the protests overwhelmed the government. In February 2018 Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s beleaguered prime minister, resigned hoping to facilitate an end to the “unrest and political crisis.”

Several parties in the EPRDF coalition – especially the Omoro Democratic Party and Amhara Democratic Party – succeeded in picking the young, visionary Abiy Ahmed from Omoria as Hailemariam’s successor. Once in prime minister’s office, the reformist Abiy released thousands of political prisoners; lifted restrictions on the independent media; scrapped the anti-terrorism law, which was being used as a tool of oppression; ended the state of emergency, under which the TPLF was carrying on the witch-hunt of opposition activists; and invited the country’s once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. Among the leading political activists against whom Abiy dropped charges of anti-state activities were Jawar Mohammed, who has since turned into his fierce political rival; and Andargachew Tsege, who had been on the death row 24 hours before the prime minister met him in his office. Abiy stunned his country and the world by ending the decades-long war with Eritrea, which earned him the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Ethiopia is made up of 10 semi-autonomous federal states, organized along ethnic lines, and ethnic violence has soared in recent years. To pursue his liberal, nationalist agenda, Abiy led the formation of a new party, the Prosperity Party. Four of the EPRDF’s five political parties joined the Prosperity Party. The fifth, the TPLF, grumbling over its loss of three decades of domination of the Ethiopian government and politics, refused to join and began to organize Tigrayan activists into violence and rebellion.

The TPLF insurgency came to a head in November 2020 when armed Tigrayans attacked a federal military base in Tigray. The Abiy government dispatched a federal military force to subdue the rebellion, which was defeated by TPLF rebels. Apart from the Tigrayans, other ethnic groups are also carrying on violence and repression against rival ethnic groups. Amhara authorities annexed a vast part of western Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to seek refuge elsewhere in the country and in nearly Sudan. Clashes between the Afar and Somali ethnic groups have cost many innocent lives. Benishagul-Gumuz is home to a host of ethnic groups including the Gumuz, Berta, Shinasha, Mao, Kimo, and Fadashi. Conflicts among them have caused continual blood-letting. And so on and on.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest nations, replete with a proud history and many cultures. In early youth I was fascinated by the legend of the Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheva. Narrated differently in the Quran and the Old and New Testaments, the saga of the queen is highlighted by her visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem and returning home after conceiving his son. The Ethiopian dynasty of Menilek I, who Ethiopian believe was Solomon’s son by Sheba, lasted until 1974 when the last monarch of the Solomonic dynasty, Emperor Haile Selassie, was overthrown in a pro-Communist military putsch.

Apart from my intellectual interest in Ethiopian affairs, I have been intensely curious about the Nobel-laureate Abiy’s mission to remold the interminably feuding Ethiopian ethnic groups into a unified, democratic nation “where every Ethiopian,” he said, “moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” Abiy’s vision of Ethiopia reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding fathers, respectably, of independent India and Pakistan. Oxford-educated barristers. They set up their multi-ethnic, multinational states as Westminster-style liberal democracies. Pakistan fell apart when Bengalee ethno-nationalists seceded from the old Pakistan, complaining of relentless political and economic repression by Punjabi ethnic elites. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India has eclipsed Gandhi’s secularist political model. Hindus, however, make up 82 percent of the Indian population, and Hinduization has overlapped ethnic fissiparousness in the Hindu heartland of the Indian plains. Secessionist movements fester in several outlying non-Hindu regions, especially in the Muslim-majority Kashmir.

My question about Ethiopia: Can Abiy really tame Ethnic fissures and recast the country into a nation whose “sovereignty is respected and feared, and whose territorial integrity is preserved,” as he has promised?

I see the idealist Ethiopian prime minister pursuing at best a long-term project. Today’s stable Western democracies such as Britain, the United States, France and Germany evolved through ethnic and religious conflicts and mayhem over centuries. Many post-colonial states were haphazardly created overnight as “nation-states” by cobbling together disparate ethnic and religious communities and are expected to function as unified nations. Examples include Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Democracy and elections often challenge their state structures, instead of integration them.

In 1970 Pakistan gave its feuding ethnic communities their first national elections, which allowed long-estranged ethnic Bengalees in the eastern province the opportunity to vote for secession and create independent Bangladesh. In multi-ethnic Iraq, America’s pie-in-the-sky neoconservatives prescribed elections, hoping to set up a Western-style secular democracy. The Iraqi Kurds used their votes to create all but independent Kurdistan. Shiite and Sunni Arab Iraqis are being governed, under the democratic system, by their religious (Shari’a) laws. In Lebanon, 78 years of democracy and elections have failed to integrate its half-dozen confessional communities into an integrated nation. Abiy thinks his electoral mandate would enable him to remake the multi-ethnic Ethiopian chimera into an integrated, liberal democratic nation.

Abiy’s mission is noble, but I think the best course for him to pursue it would be to open painstaking dialogue and negotiations among Ethiopia’s feuding ethnic groups for a unique brand of nationhood and type of national integration that would best fit the country’s unique communal history and behavior patterns. Today Ethiopia seems unprepared to achieve the national cohesion of contemporary America or Britain. The patriotic and visionary prime minister and Ethiopian political elites should, I think, settle for the level of national integration that is feasible today. And they may, if they want, to work toward ushering in the like of the British or American model in the future, if that is possible, hopefully without civil wars.

• Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator, lives in Sylhet, Bangladesh.