Ethiopia’s ‘jihadi’ film and its boomerang effects

Ethiopia’s ‘jihadi’ film and its boomerang effects


By Awol K Alo; March 5, 2013

On February 5, 2013, Ethiopia’s only and publicly
funded Television Station, ETV, aired a controversial documentary during
prime time in violation of an outstanding court injunction. Oddly subtitled
“Boko Haram in Ethiopia”, Jihadawi Harekat
– Arabic for “jihadi movement” – ­denounces leaders
of Ethiopia’s year-long protest movement for alleged links to foreign
terrorists.

Muslims in Ethiopia have been protesting the government’s control of the
Supreme Islamic
Council and its imposition of al-Ahbash, an unknown
Islamic sect across mosques in Ethiopia. In a press
statement last year, the bipartisan US Commission on
International Religious Freedom said: “The Ethiopian government has
sought to force a change in the sect of Islam practiced nationwide and has
punished clergy and laity who have resisted.” Elected to represent the
movement, the accused Muslim leaders were arrested and charged under
Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law when negotiations with the government failed
last July.  

A joint production of the Ethiopian National Security
Agency, the Federal Police and ETV, the film draws a parallel between a local
protest movement recognised
for its peaceful acts of resistance with Africa’s most notorious terrorist
groups such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Mali’s Ansar Din and Somalia’s al-Shabaab. 

With dozens of journalists, politicians and activists
already charged or convicted under its vague and broad anti-terrorism law
that criminalises all forms of dissent, the fight
against terrorism has become the primary juridical framework
within which to legitimise and justify war against
political foes. It is the new legal ideology in which these political motives
are institutionalised to provide long-standing
relationships of domination some legal pretext. In Ethiopia today, America’s
“war on terror” is used to short-circuit both the constitution and
international criticism. 

Making fiction intelligible 

Made to portray the Muslim community’s struggle for
religious freedom as a terrorist ploy designed to “establish
an Islamic state“, Jihadawi
Harekat is less about what it describes so much
as the alternative reality that it depicts and crystallises.
By drawing politically explosive parallels between groups with radically
different political presuppositions, the film dramatises
and escalates the gravity of the threat. It replays deeply held narratives of
the past and accentuates the “evil” embodied by the committee in
its attempts to frame them as “public enemies” working towards a
common goal with groups that inhabit an entirely different political
universe.

To amplify this new reality, that is, the cinematic
production of new subjects of terrorism, the film appropriates pre-existing
frames of reference that sociologists call “processes of
signification”. To augment the parallel, it situates the protest
movement in the context of terrorism – a discourse whose antecedent is always
Islamic and “whose stereotypical characteristics are already part of
socially available knowledge”.  

Just because the protest movement shares the antecedent
“Islam” with al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, the signification equates a peaceful
movement that operates within the framework of Ethiopia’s own
constitution with violent groups on the sole basis of their imputed common
denominator. The exemplar
images of violence embodied by al-Shabaab
and Boko Haram are situated within the geopolitical
context and cultural idiosyncrasies of Ethiopia to essentialise
the association and ultimately render its absurd collocation socially
intelligible. 

There are temporal, spatial, material and editorial
questions that the film
cannot account for. By connecting events that took place from East Africa to
West Africa, from North Africa to the Middle East, by gathering actors of
differing ideological persuasions into unity, by reducing complex and
contingent historic and political issues into self-evident mathematical
varieties, Jihadawi Harekat
inadvertently slips into a crisis it cannot contain or suppress. 

One excellent example is a hinge the film uses to
connect the leaders of the protest movement to the Muslim Brotherhood of
Egypt. In an unedited interrogation clip wrongly broadcasted after the film,
the interrogators coerce Abubakar Ahmed – the
chairman of the committee chosen to be representative of the Muslim community
– into accepting their conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis have the ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic
world under Sharia law. 

While the reduction of such complex and
contingent issues of historical and theoretical specificity
into an either-or binary is emblematic of the logic through which the film
establishes its central thesis, I am interested in the logic used to connect
the ideologies of the Brotherhood in the Middle East to the protest leaders
in Ethiopia. This pivot is a distinguished Qatari public intellectual, Jassim Sultan whose teachings two members of the protest
leaders were said to have attended. 

In an article that examined the increasing role of
Qatar in the politics of the Middle East, The Economist holds
up Sultan as an exemplary figure known for his “middle-of-the road”
politics, not the extremism depicted in Jihadawi
Harekat. Sultan, whom the film accuses of being
a middle man between the “extreme ideological orientations” of the
Brotherhood and Ethiopia’s “jihadists”, was praised by The
Economist as, “a renowned Qatari intellectual, [who] strikes a
chord by rejecting the Brotherhood’s demand for strict obedience… derides
its slogan, ‘Islam is the solution’, as facile”.

By editing conversations about conversations,
copy-pasting interrogations about different spatial, temporal and material
co-ordinates into a coherent Ethiopian story, the film seeks to transform the
most basic demands for freedom of religion into a joint criminal enterprise
with terror groups near and far. Nowhere else is the conjuncture between
words and images, facts and fictions, times and spaces, persons and events
manifestly absurd as in Jihadawi Harekat. 

Instead of generating a moral panic that serves as the
material fabric for social control, the film generated consequences that are destabilising the regime. In a statement
to the press, a coalition of 33 political parties emphatically
denounced the film as yet another spectacle that epitomises
the ruling party’s contempt for the constitution and the rule of law. 

Boomerang effects 

The film, along with the ongoing trial, offers an
important window into the cleavage that divides the old Ethiopian Muslim
subjectivity from the new. Thanks to the government that never ceases to
generate crisis and mobilise the law and its court
system to cement this crisis, these events have opened up a space for
critical cultural-political awareness.

Muslims in Ethiopia, who conceive their religious
subjectivity as apolitical and go about their lives, have begun to realise that their religious identity can be a potent
site of subjectification and domination. As one of
20th century’s prescient political thinkers, Hannah Arendt formulates this
point; an attack against a specific identity creates spontaneous moment of
political self-awareness. “If one is attacked as a Jew,” Arendt said,
“One must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a
world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.” 

Because of the events of last year, there emerged a
critical space in which a society that rarely, if at all, engages in
questions of law and politics, protested the usurpation of its constitutional
guarantees. In their struggle, Muslims in Ethiopia began to see unfair
closures and systematic subjections taking place at sites and moments they
could not have seen before. The government’s uncanny response to basic
demands of religious freedom has created a rare opportunity for a decisive
break with a docile political past and for the formation of a new collective
consciousness. 

Awol K Allo,
is the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholar at the University of Glasgow Law
School, UK. Previously, he was a lecturer in law at St Mary’s University
College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

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author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.