Are Ethiopian protests a game changer?

Political protests which have swept through Ethiopia are a major threat to the country's secretive government, writes former BBC Ethiopia correspondent Elizabeth Blunt.

For the past five years Ethiopia has been hit by waves of protest, not only by formal opposition groups but also Muslims unhappy at the imposition of government-approved leaders, farmers displaced to make way for commercial agriculture, Amhara communities opposed at their inclusion in Tigre rather than the Amhara region and, above all, by groups in various parts of the vast Oromia region.
In the most recent unrest in Oromia, at least 55 people died when security forces intervened over the weekend during the annual Ireecha celebrations - a traditional Oromo seasonal festival.
The Oromo protests have continued long after plans to expand the capital Addis Ababa's boundaries to take in more of the region were abandoned earlier this year. And in the last few months groups which were previously separate have made common cause.

In particular, Amhara and Oromo opposition has coalesced, with both adopting the latest opposition symbol - arms raised and wrists crossed as if handcuffed together.
The picture of Olympic silver medallist Feyisa Lilesa making this gesture while crossing the finish line at the Rio 2016 went round the world, and photographs from the Ireecha celebrations in Bishoftu show the crowd standing with their arms crossed above their heads before police intervention triggered the deadly panic.

'Inflaming anger'

In theory, Ethiopia has embraced parliamentary democracy, but such hurdles are put in the way of potential rival parties that there are currently no opposition members of parliament.

Image copyright Reuters

Image caption The security forces have been accused of using excessive force to quell unrest

The EPRDF has in theory devolved a good deal of power to the country's ethnically based regions, but time and again regional leaders have been changed by central government.
Ethiopia's constitution allows freedom of speech and association but draconian anti-terrorism laws have been used against those who have tried to use those freedoms to criticise the government.
It is now clear that these attempts to hold on to control in a changing world have misfired.
Just as attempts to dictate who should lead the Muslim community led to earlier protests, reports from Bishoftu town, where the 55 died, say that anger spilled over on Sunday because of official attempts to control which Oromo leaders were allowed to speak at the event.
The overreaction of the security forces then turned a protest that might have gone largely unnoticed into a major catastrophe, inflaming anger in Ethiopia itself and causing growing concern abroad.
And so the cycle continues, and every time protests are badly handled they create more grievances, and generate more anger and more demonstrations.
The US government is among those who have expressed concern at the deteriorating situation. Its Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, met Ethiopia's Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn during the UN General Assembly last month.
She urged him to be more open to dialogue, to accept greater press freedom, to release political prisoners and to allow civil society organisations to operate.

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Ethiopia's ethnic make-up

• Oromo - 34.4%
• Amhara - 27%
• Somali - 6.2%
• Tigray - 6.1%
• Sidama - 4%
• Gurage - 2.5%
• Others - 19.8%

Source: CIA World Factbook estimates from 2007
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Ethnicity and Power in Ethiopia Sarah Vaughan PhD

Abstract This thesis explores why ethnicity was introduced as the basis for the reconstitution of the Ethiopian state in 1991, examining the politicisation of ethnic identity before and after the federation of the country’s ‘nations, nationalities and peoples’ was instituted. The establishment of the modern Ethiopian empire state in the nineteenth century, and the processes of centralisation and bureaucratisation which consolidated it in the mid twentieth, provide a backdrop to an emerging concern with ‘regionalism’ amongst political circles in the 1960s and 1970s. Ethnicity operated as both resource and product of the mobilisation by which the major movements of armed opposition to the military regime of the 1970s and 1980s, later the architects of ethnic federalism, sought control of the state. Under federalism through the 1990s, political representation and territorial administration were reorganised in terms of ethnicity. A stratum of the local elite of each ethnic group was encouraged to form an ethnic organisation as a platform for executive office. Meanwhile ethnic groups and their elites responded to these new circumstances in unanticipated but calculative ways, often radically reviewing and reconstructing not only their sense of collective interest, but also the very ethnic collectives that would best serve those newlyperceived interests. The architects of ethnic federalism are influenced by a Marxist formulation of the ‘National Question’ which incorporates contradictory elements inherent in the notion of ‘granting self-determination’: the conviction that self-selected communities respond better to mobilisation ‘from within’, in their own language, by their own people; and the notion that ethnic groups are susceptible to identification, definition, and prescription ‘from above’, by a vanguard party applying a checklist of externally verifiable criteria. These two sets of assumptions correlate with tenets of instrumentalism and primordialism respectively, which are, as they stand, equally irreconcilable. An investigation of theoretical approaches to ethnicity and collective action suggests that many conflate the ‘real world’ and ‘socially constructed’ referents of the ethnic profile of an individual (the constituents of the individual state of being an ethnic x), with the fully constructed collective accomplishment which creates members of an ethnic group (conferring the social status of being an ethnic x, of which those referents are markers). Differentiating the two, and exploring the recursive relationship between them, by means of a consideration of calculative action within the framework of actors’ categories (emerging from emic knowledge systems) and shared social institutions (premised, whether their referents are ‘natural’ ‘social’ or ‘artificial’, on collective processes of ‘knowledge construction’), may improve analysis of the causes and operation of collective action associated with ethnicity and ethno-nationalism. Ethnic federalism in Ethiopia offered the prospect of a shift away from the ‘high modernism’ of that state’s past projects to ‘develop’ its people, apparently in favour of the collective perspectives of groups of its citizens. The coercive and developmental imperatives of the state that guided its implementation, however, have militated against the substantive incorporation of locally determined social institutions and knowledge. read more