Advancing Ethiopia’s Struggle for Change

By Tesfaye Demmellash (PhD) – Part I
April 13, 2014

Tesfaye Demmellash (PhD)

Moving
steadily toward political transformation in Ethiopia and picking up the pace of
change require advancing the resistance in thought, strategy, and practice.
Essentially, this means gaining clarity about what the resistance is broadly
and deeply against, in the long-run as well as in the short-term. It means
determining how the overall national struggle is going to be waged from here on
out, and also getting a good fix on the kind of alternative political order
that is going to be created as the dark reign of the Woyanes begins to end,
hopefully sooner than later.

What the
national resistance is directed at is not an ethnic group or even ethnicity as
such, though political ethnicism,
particularly of the separatist, authoritarian variety, has been a major problem
for the country. Nor is it aimed simply or solely at the Woyane regime itself,
the narrow ruling clique within the TPLF that exercises dictatorial power over
Ethiopian government, politics, and society. The ruling entity is only part of
what Ethiopian patriotic and democratic opposition forces are against. More
broadly, the opposition struggle is (or should be) directed at a whole order of
domination maintained through a particular apparatus consisting of ideological,
political, economic, and social (specifically ethnic) constructs and
instruments.

I shall
describe the political and ideological aspects of the apparatus in some detail
in the course of this discussion. But it is important to be clear from the
outset that the form of domination the apparatus makes possible for the Woyanes
has ramifications beyond the TPLF regime itself and its surrogates. In some respects,
it has resonance among certain ethnic entities in the opposition, notably within
OLF factions and spinoffs, and in other ethnic oriented groups like Medrek.

It
follows, then, that there is a need to clarify in thought and vision what kind
of political transformation the Ethiopian national resistance wants to see
realized. It is not enough for opposition parties and coalitions, particularly
more active and notable ones like UDJ, Semayawi, AEUP, G7, and Arena to profess
in general terms ideas of freedom, justice and democracy, since these ideas are
often formally invoked through authoritarian identity politics within the
ruling party and among certain opposition groups. Even as it operates tactically
within the existing order of things, the patriotic and democratic resistance
needs to work out in concept and principle an alternative consensual model of democratic
rule in contradistinction to what the ruling party and its proxies have been
unilaterally practicing as “revolutionary democracy.”

In this
connection, it should be made absolutely clear that the nation doesn’t want the
replacement of one form of ethnic feudalism or kililism with another within the Woyane model. We want as one
nation and one people to make a transition to a better, actually democratic,
political order in which the vital interests of all Ethiopian citizens and
communities can be equally represented and advanced.

The
fundamental point here is this: there can be no Ethiopian democratization
unless there is a vital national whole that maintains itself even as it
undergoes real and far-reaching democratic change, taking integrally a new political form. The nation cannot have its very
integrity opened for “negotiation” among partisans of identity politics
claiming to speak for entire ethnic communities in the country and seeking to bring
prepackaged tribal identities and demands to the negotiating table from outside
Ethiopiawinnet. In effect if not
always expressly, the approach amounts to a denial, for example, that Oromos
and Tigres are already integral parts of Ethiopia, that they cannot suspend or
neutralize their Ethiopianness as they enter into negotiations over the
establishment of an alternative democratic political order in the country, only
to achieve it as a negotiated outcome. This whole approach is simply absurd and
cannot be given serious consideration.

Keeping
these points in mind, I look in this writing into the central challenges of
democratic transformation Ethiopia faces going forward. I do so in three parts.
In this, the first, installment I offer a critical description of what I
consider broadly and mainly to be the object of the Ethiopian patriotic and
democratic resistance, namely, the apparatus
or pattern of representation of ideas, values, and identities which has enabled
a narrow partisan-tribal stratum to establish and maintain its dictatorship
over Ethiopian government, politics, and society.

A
following piece will further examine the Woyane representational machinery, highlighting
its social operations and applications, particularly its construction of
localities and regions. In doing so, the machinery engages in a play of ethnic
identities and differences which represents, critically speaking, Woyane
domination itself. In a third and concluding installment, I shall discuss
matters of tactics and strategy in the Ethiopian resistance against the Woyane
political encoding apparatus and its operations. But, first, let me begin here
by saying a few words by way of justifying the need to describe the apparatus
as an object of Ethiopian national resistance. 

Just
Confront the Regime Directly?

The
oppressive, often provocative, policies and actions of the Woyane state are
widely known and resented by Ethiopians at home and abroad. We also know that,
as a dictatorial ruling group, the TPLF approaches political ideas and values
with overriding, grossly partisan-tribal interest, its priority being
immediately and exclusively controlling the articulation and enactment of
concepts like “democracy,” “the rule of law,” and “federalism” through its own ethnocentric
party hierarchy. Hence, the ruling party exercises virtually no broad-based intellectual,
cultural, and national leadership over Ethiopian politics, government, and
society. It is so inimical to the values of Ethiopian solidarity that it might
as well be a foreign colonial power.

So why bother
with its representation of ideas and values at all, it may be asked. Why not
simply apply pressure on the dictatorship through various kinds of direct action,
in this way forcing it to give up power or offering it “incentives” to enter
into negotiations with the opposition? The question, which I intend to take up
in another piece in connection with a discussion of tactics and strategy of
resistance, has merit. But what opposition forces face here is not an either-or
proposition: either they contend with
the ideas and beliefs that underpin the regime and give it a justification to
rule, or resist its policies and
actions directly.

It stands
to reason that patriotic and democratic Ethiopian dissident groups find it
well-neigh impossible to argue ideas with the Woyanes. Open, critical questioning
and exchange of ideas have no purchase on the closed, exclusively partisan
structures of rule through which the Woyanes project not only their dictatorial
power but their ethnonationalist orthodoxy. However, the challenge is not only
or even primarily coaxing the TPLF into meaningful give-and-take of thoughts
with Ethiopian resistance forces, perhaps leading to some kind of national
reconciliation. Instead, it is broadly coming to grips with the Woyane
partisan-ethnic machinery of domination as a whole, contending with its
representation of ideas, values, and identities, even in the context of “negotiation”
with the ruling party.

This level
of oppositional engagement does not preclude direct mass action, like staging public
demonstrations, and participating in other forms of civil and political struggle.
Indeed, it works well with them. But it involves more critically and systematically
intervening in and combating the ideological, political, and social constructs
of the Woyane regime beyond reacting to the rhetoric of the regime or
protesting its particular policies and actions. The engagement has to do with
more long-term strategic and tactical movement of Ethiopian patriotic and
democratic forces on the terrain of ideas, values, and social and cultural
identities as well as within the domain of politics as such.

Direct
action certainly has its role and function within the opposition struggle,
particularly in the short- and medium-run. But it is not sufficiently geared
toward the long-term challenge of Ethiopian national resistance and renewal. We
cannot afford to remain pre-occupied with reacting to the immediacies of
high-frequency events and issues, often triggered by the provocative policies
and actions of the regime, limiting our responses to partisan and personal
discourses of polemic, propaganda and counter-propaganda. Again, these actions
have their place, but they cannot be expected to free us from the necessity of
higher order, ideas-based, political and national engagement. Indeed, they
themselves have to be thoughtfully and strategically reworked, shaped and
directed.

The
opposition thus needs to be mindful of the Woyane model of political reason and
awareness, the encoding system the TPLF regime uses in attempting to represent
and understand universal ideas, say, democracy, and in addressing distinct
ethnic and cultural communities within the Ethiopian population as “nations,
nationalities, and peoples.”  Such mindfulness
is necessary not only for intervening in and resisting effectively the workings
of the Woyane representational apparatus, but also as a condition of developing
an alternative model of political knowledge and understanding.

It seems
to me that any credible attempt to set up a lasting, consensus-based democratic
political order in Ethiopia as an alternative to Woyane rule must be preceded or
accompanied by a comprehensive analysis and understanding of the fundamental
defects of the existing pattern of ethnocentric dictatorship. And this involves
gaining a good grasp of schemes of ideological and political encoding or
representation associated with the dictatorship.

The main
challenge here, and the end game, is deconstructing (as distinct from merely
condemning, rejecting, or polemicizing against) the dominance of exclusively
partisan-tribal reason and calculus, undoing particular formulas and habits of
identity politics while recognizing and advancing the value of ethnic equality
as such. The challenge includes settling terms and accounts with a residual
tradition of Leninist-Stalinist discourse in Ethiopia in which polemical
assertion generally takes the place of reasoned argument, and pronouncement of
dogma is often equated with statement of principle.

But, more
immediately, we face the problem of not even acknowledging this fundamental
challenge and recognizing the necessity of meeting it. The call to action has
yet to be a subject of sustained debate and discussion within the Ethiopian
intelligentsia, which seems to have simply disappeared from the political and
national scene. There is here a whole lot of intellectual and political work
that, since the Revolution, going back to the Student Movement, the nation has
long needed to have done, so much ideological and institutional stuff that
cries out for reviewing, debunking, and reconstructing. It is a major scandal
of the Ethiopian opposition against Woyane tyranny that, after nearly a quarter
century of struggle, we are nowhere near, in thought or practice, the
fundamental democratic change we want in our country.

True,
progress has been made in the opposition struggle, and there are today
promising signs of further forward movement, but there remains still a whole
lot to accomplish in broadening and deepening the national resistance against
Woyane domination. Advancing the resistance means in large part making headway
in reclaiming effectively domains of intellectual, cultural, social, and
political practice occupied exclusively by the TPLF regime and its surrogates,
particularly its Amhara and Oromo partisan-ethnic proxies. It means taking
measured steps that cumulatively roll back the regime’s colonial-like divisive
grip on these domains of Ethiopian national life, reckoning in the process with
its representations of ideas, values, and identities.

Apparatus
of Representation?

Ideas
rarely, if ever, present and enact themselves spontaneously or directly in
their own abstract terms. They are generally mediated more or less effectively
through definite social-historical contexts of articulation, interpretation and
understanding associated with the activities of particular groups, often
intellectual and political elites. In modern Ethiopia, as in other countries,
elites have always served as incubators of political consciousness and
knowledge whose contents (terms and styles of discourse, concepts, values,
images, narratives, and so on) are then more or less “popularized” by various
functionaries and cadres, often through definite codes of representation of
meanings, messages, and subjectivities.

But we
cannot in the Ethiopian case speak strictly of an impersonal “apparatus” or
“machinery” of ideological and political representation in connection with any
time before the revolutionary era. Beginning with the Student Movement, the age
or revolution and its aftermath can in this context be distinguished from the
pre-revolutionary period in at least a couple of ways.

For one
thing, the range of Ethiopian social, cultural, and national experiences that
could be subjected to an apparatus of exclusively partisan codes, agendas and
instruments of domination and construction was quite limited in the
pre-revolutionary past. Today under Woyane rule, even ethnic and cultural
identities, to say nothing of our national being as a whole, are swamped with
such codes, agendas, and constructs. Tribal subjectivities so constructed carry
hardly anything more than manipulated generic value assigned to them by an
impersonal, nationally spiritless “developmental” regime. But during the reign
of Emperor Haile Selassie, the worth of social and cultural identities had much
less to do with the ideological calculus of partisan and ruling elites than
actual communities’ own sense of who or what they are, their felt and lived
experience of self-identification. This is a fact we cannot deny even as we
recognize the prejudices and injustices the nation’s ethnic and cultural
minorities suffered during the imperial era, problems which the Revolution has
in some respects managed to overcome.

Moreover,
political beliefs and practices and activities of civil society groups were far
less objects of intensive ideological intervention and manipulation by the
state during the feudal and imperial era. Their restriction under imperial rule
remained laid back and haphazard relative to the systematic, highly intrusive,
overly controlling totalitarian tendencies that have commonly, though not
identically, marked the dictatorial regimes of the Derg and the Woyanes.

This is
the cruel irony of the whole political project of “national self-determination”
forged in Ethiopia through the Woyane
kilil system. Tigres as well as Amhars, Oromos, and other communities have
for over two decades of dictatorship endured a paradox of convergent extremes –
too much formal “self-determination,”
yet too little actual freedom for
individuals and communities, a whole lot of high-minded dogma of “national
liberation” wedded to crass party-state repression. By the way, the
exceptionally repressive Eritrean garrison state along with its miserable captive
population which “national liberation” ended up creating is an even more
graphic illustration of this, by all accounts, unbearable paradox.

In sum,
when we speak of a machinery of representation of ideas, beliefs and
identities, we are talking about an internal instrument or framework of perception,
understanding, and symbolization often housed within a political party or an
institution. We are referring to a political language or “software” through
which ideas and the actual identities of communities are encoded with partisan meanings
or values. Such a representational instrument has helped the Woyanes, for
example, serially fabricate and circulate in Ethiopia global Leninist-Stalinist
categories of “nationalities” and “peoples” along with a correspondingly coded narrative
of “national self-determination.” The machinery is an integral part and
instrument of Woyane domination and should therefore be reckoned with as such.

This grasp
of representational apparatus, which I will describe a bit more presently in
connection with Woyane rule, is very important, I believe. It is important
because, first, it allows today’s multi-ethnic Ethiopian patriotic and progressive
opposition forces  to gain a fuller
measure of what they are confronting, namely, not just a collection of regime
ideas, goals, practices, arguments, and terms of discourse, but an entire
political grammar, a whole language of partisan identity politics also “spoken”
by some entities in the opposition. Secondly, the understanding is important
because it sets up the deeply flawed TPLF mode of representation of ideas and
identities as a foil to a better, more democratic alternative. It thereby creates
motivating and enabling conditions for the Ethiopian national resistance to
formulate in thought and practice the desired political alternative to Woyane
dictatorship.

The Woyane
Machinery of Representation

Ethiopian
society today is flooded with state produced and distributed serial notions, values,
symbols, and identities that refer formally and operationally to a particular authoritarian
encoding system controlled by the TPLF. While marked by gaps and
contradictions, which the opposition could exploit, the system or machinery has
overall regularity, a consistency of ideological form and function, and a
rhetorical fluency. Yet the power of its representation of ideas, values, and
identities is not felt in terms of reasoned argument or through intellectual
and moral persuasion. Instead, the machinery makes itself felt by exercising
immediate authoritarian control of collective thought, speech, and behavior,
involving the direct manipulation of political codes, organizational
instruments, and captive constituencies.

In
applying itself in this way, the TPLF representational apparatus is grounded in
a core value at the heart of Woyane domination. What constitutes this
“value-center” is ethnic identity, real and imagined. For the Woyanes and their
tribal counterparts in the opposition, everything acquires meaning and
significance only in relation to what might be aptly referred to, using
language akin to that of the revolutionary era, as petty-bourgeois
ethnonationalism. The ruling party approaches big, universal ideas like
freedom, democracy, and human rights solely or primarily in the small-minded,
exclusively partisan terms of identity politics.

Identity so
narrowly conceived is even placed above our national being as ultimate organizing
principle, form, and substance of
Ethiopiawinnet. This is possible for the Woyanes because they see Ethiopia
as nothing more than the aggregation of insular tribal communities, imagined
and endlessly repeated in mind-numbing Stalinist code as “nations,
nationalities, and peoples.” Insofar as the TPLF affirms Ethiopian unity at all,
it seems to do so grudgingly as a practical necessity, mainly in pursuit of material
interests and partisan-cum-tribal agenda, not so much seeing or experiencing Ethiopiawinnet as a value and a reality unto
itself.

In a more
disapproving approach to Ethiopian solidarity, the TPLF representational
machinery uses its ethnicist value-center as a base from which to launch
ideological and political attacks on the unity of the country, on our common,
trans-ethnic, national culture. In being subjected to critical and oppositional
treatment by the TPLF regime (and by some groups in the opposition, notably the
OLF), Ethiopian nationhood has been represented less in its historical and
contemporary reality and more as a set of negative images and symbols in the
minds of its haters, who see in it nothing but a caricature of Amhara neftegnanet, expansion, and domination.  

In this
obsessive state of disapproval and outright denial of shared Ethiopian
nationality, what purveyors of hard-core identity politics in the country hate
about Ethiopia are not merely negative attributes like feudal oppression and
chauvinism. They often resent, and alienate themselves from, everything that
signifies Ethiopian civilization and national culture, including in some cases
our unique writing system, and an exemplary tradition of anti-colonial
resistance and long-lived independent nationhood, which constitute a source of
pride not only for the Ethiopian people regardless of their ethnicity, but also
for black people all over the world.   

In summing
up this discussion, we can draw a number of distinct yet related conclusions
about the TPLF machinery of representation of ideas and subjectivities and
their implications for the resistance against the Woyane regime. First, getting
a good grasp of the machinery in its actual as well as formal characteristics
and behavior is a necessary first step in intervening effectively in its
operations, in deconstructing it or even tactically coming to terms with it.

Second, an
essential and critical move in intervening in the operations of the apparatus is
to distinguish clearly issues and ideas important to the Ethiopian people,
including those having to do with local identity and autonomy, from the
limited, exclusively partisan construction of the issues within the TPLF (or
OLF) mode of representation. This distinction is very important. For we often
see a tendency, willful on the part of the ruling party and perhaps unwitting
among some of its supporters and sympathizers, to mix up, for example, the
TPLF’s unworkable, self-serving, authoritarian encoding of “federalism” with an actually functioning democratic definition of the concept of federal
government.

It should
be made very clear that the Woyanes pass themselves off as a “legitimate”
government largely on the basis of this confusion. The distinction of Ethiopian
national issues and problems as such from the particular mode in which the Woyane
regime imagines and approaches them enables us to recognize that the regime
maintains itself in power through political codes or myths often in the absence
of objective conditions or social-historical realities to which the codes seem
to refer and impart meaning.    

Third, the
Orwellian reversal of values associated with the Woyane political coding system
(where, for example, “democracy” really means dictatorship) and the generally low
quality of the ideas the system represents do not simply reflect the
intellectual inadequacies of the ruling party. Such inadequacies are
undeniable, but the problem at bottom lies beyond these shortcomings. It has to
do with the purposeful design and functioning of the regime’s representational
apparatus itself.

I would
argue that the reversal of values and impoverishment of political ideas we see
here are in large part outcomes of intentionally
narrow and shoddy representation by the ruling party. The Woyanes realize
that if they are to maintain their partisan-tribal dictatorship, political thought
cannot be allowed to gain unfettered national currency in Ethiopia and really carry
democratic values and significance that, for example, manifest themselves in free
and fair elections. That would spell for the Woyanes the end of their days in
power, and they know it. This means democratic thought in the country cannot be
allowed to escape from the direct or indirect control of their ethnocentric, authoritarian
representational machinery and come into its own conceptually and practically.

So,
whatever the formal constitutional and democratic conceit of the TPLF regime, “the
rule of law” and “democracy” can in
actuality mean only what the regime’s unilateral encoding system narrowly
and ritually allows them to mean, nothing more or different. The relatively
broad and negotiable significance of these ideas is pre-emptively hollowed out or
neutralized at the moment of their conception, not just implementation. Woyane
domination is thus maintained on the basis of deliberately designed
inauthenticity of ideas and values, on their intended emptiness and shoddiness.

And
insofar as the ideas and values have substantive contents, we cannot really
consider the articulation of their contents by the ruling party as
communicative “statements” or propositions which allow the interpretive
autonomy and participation of citizens, civic groups, and ethnic and cultural
communities. Nor can the governing party be realistically expected to help
develop the ideas by engaging the nation’s opposition parties in free flowing
public dialogue, debate, and discussion. Thanks to the impersonal
representational machinery they command as a dictatorial regime, the Woyanes
don’t need to appeal to our reason and consent as free Ethiopian citizens,
communities and political groups. Instead, they make immediate, instrumental
use of ideas as formulas and devices which act externally on our attention and
agency. In this way, the Woyanes subject us, in our very “identities” and
“self-determination,” to their partisan and authoritarian power.

Finally,
we can conclude that, because the Woyane representational apparatus is tightly
tied to identity politics, its heavily ethnocentric political conceptualization
and understanding cannot adequately generalize to cover wider, trans-ethnic Ethiopian
affairs. It is incapable of grasping Ethiopian national issues and problems
objectively and critically through broader, more complex definition and
analysis, including consideration of the country’s position in the evolving
global capitalist political economy. I will offer in a follow up piece some
thoughts and views on the Woyane system of social representation, specifically
its encoding of ethnic identity, and on what I consider to be a better, more
open and democratic alternative to it. But let me finish here by presenting a
preview of the subject I will discuss more fully in a later writing.  

I believe
we should approach the whole vexed matter of ethnic identity in Ethiopia (the
old so-called “national question”) with a new progressive concern about the
authoritarian manipulation of locality and the problem of ethnonationalist
orthodoxy conceived and promoted largely as political fashion among
self-serving partisans of this orthodoxy. This gross politicization of
ethnicity or “nationality” fundamentally negates not only Ethiopian solidarity
and democracy but also truly free individual and social agency within actually
autonomous, democratically governed regions and localities in the country.

The
politicization has sunk to a new low lately. It has taken a dangerous, ugly
turn in the building of a provocative, hate-mongering “statue” in Arsi by OPDO
(Oromo) extremists. A likeness of a woman’s breast placed in a hand, the
bizarre monument might be supposed to have been intended to memorialize
imagined victims of atrocities involving the cutting off of women’s breasts,
allegedly by soldiers of Emperor Menelik. There is no documentation of such
events or victims, and the tasteless sculpture is really an attempt to score
cheap propaganda points against the Emperor and all that he stood for as a
great Ethiopian leader.

More
significantly, the weird statue is probably intended to promote hatred within
the Oromo community toward Ethiopian nationhood, of which the community is an
inseparable central part. In erecting the grossly offensive structure, OPDO
ethnocrats and cadres likely had the agreement, even encouragement, of their
Woyane overlords, who are keenly interested in fabricating resentment, tension
and conflict between Oromos and Amharas as part of their overall
divide-and-rule scheme.

Bizarre as
this whole statue affair is, it is symptomatic of the significant challenge of
identity politics the nation faces going forward. It drives home the point that
locality or ethnic subjectivity is a vital intellectual, moral, and political concern
for the Ethiopian resistance against Woyane dictatorship. It is a graphic
reminder that partisan ethnicism both of the governing and opposition variety
is a major front in the Ethiopian struggle for democratic change and national renewal.