There are, in the life of a nation, events that burst on the historical scene with the unexpectedness and brightness of a new born star and sweep away all our accumulated certainties, making visible the truth of our history with unpredictable forcefulness. After such events, or “Truth Events”, as philosophers call them, we become new subjects who can no longer accept to live the way we did before, for we now know and find unbearable the lies that these events have shattered to smithereens. Two such events have graced our history: Adwa 1896 and, now, Addis Abeba 2005.

Adwa 1896 became a symbol of Ethiopian unity, for our ancestors transcended their ethnic identities and interests and stood together to defend their independence. Addis Abeba 2005 has now become the new symbol of this unity, for its inhabitants, who hail from every corner of Ethiopia, transcended their ethnic identities and interests – despite 14 years of EPRDF’s ethnic politics, ideology and propaganda – and stood together to defend democracy. Adwa 1896 became a symbol for all oppressed people, for, against all odds, a powerful foreign army was routed. Addis Abeba 2005 is now the symbol of freedom, for, against all odds and despite the intimidations, blackmails and persecutions, Addis Abebans stood together and rejected massively all the EPRDF candidates. Adwa 1896 stands in our history as a towering symbol of our dignity. Now Addis Abeba 2005 joins it as the new emblem of our recovered dignity.

Adwa represented the truth of Ethiopia in 1896 – that we are a united, independent and dignified people. Addis Abeba 2005, in its unequivocal rejection of ethnic politics and its representatives, now stands as the new face of this truth. The EPRDF may assert, as it has already done before even the votes were counted, that the peasants are with it, and that Addis Abeba is not Ethiopia. True, Addis Abeba is not Ethiopia; but Addis Abeba 2005 is the truth of Ethiopia. To claim that the peasants voted for the EPRDF is to forget that the Meles regime is the biggest absentee landlord in the history of Ethiopia; and, to adapt to our country Bertolt Brecht’s comment on elections in communist East Germany, it is not the voters who elected the EPRDF; it is the EPRDF who elected the voters. No wonder the EPRDF claims to have won in the rural areas, for it is electing itself. The truth of the rural voters is indeed Addis Abeba 2005, and the EPRDF regime knows it; that’s why it has made the peasants the tenants of the state so that it could control their choices.

The victory of the democratic opposition in Addis Abeba 2005 is so massive that to consider it as an outcome of a routine election is as absurd as considering Adwa 1896 as a mere military skirmish.. It is of course possible to give Addis Abeba 2005 a conjectural explanation, but such an explanation cannot grasp the historical depth necessary to understand its significance. If Addis Abeba 2005 is not to become an incomplete victory like Adwa1896 was internally, we have to step back and consider Addis Abeba 2005 from a historical perspective. To make my point, I will use Adwa 1896 as my historical reference, and comment very briefly on two important issues – the meaning of unity as it emerges from our history and the issue of emancipation from internal oppression – and on the links between these two issues and the elections of May 15, 2005.

The meaning of unity in Ethiopian history is one of the subterranean issues of these elections. History is a “medium of identity formation”, and only our history tells us who and what we are. Tigrai, the historical cradle, the heart and soul of Ethiopia, gave the world the brilliant civilization of Axsum which launched one of the most fascinating adventures of humanity, paving the way for the rise of a distinct political community called Ethiopia. From the Axumite period onwards, our history has been a process of multi-linear development emerging from complex disintegrative and integrative processes, triggered by the various interactions of regions and ethnicities. The decline of Axsum and the wars of Queen Gudit in the tenth century destroyed the existing system, and yet out of this disintegrative process emerged the Zagwe era which produced the unique works of Lalibella, one of the highlights of our culture. The wars of Imam Ahmad (1527-1543), as destructive as any Ethiopia has known, also triggered integrative processes: they anchored the inhabitants of the lowlands into the Ethiopian historical fold and added one more dimension to the pluri-vocal Ethiopian culture by making Islam an integral component of our history. At the same time, the Gran wars prepared the ground for the Oromo-Amhara confrontation and integration. During the Zemene Mesafint (1769-1853), the conflicts between the Tigrean, Gondare, and Yeju Oromo nobilities reduced the Ethiopian state to shambles, and yet this process of disintegration of the old order was also the birth of a new order that saw the integration of the Oromo into every sector of Ethiopian society. Concurrently, the disintegrative forces of this period gave rise to an intense and violent reconstruction of the Ethiopian state led by Tewedros, Yoahnnes, and Menelik, creating in their wakes other disintegrative and integrative forces. This contradictory and rich history forged the complex Ethiopian identity and framed our country as a shared space wherein our diversities have become different forms of expression of our common history and personality as Ethiopians. It is this historical unity that manifested itself in Adwa 1896, and in a different and novel form, in Addis 2005.

The Ethiopian unity that manifested itself in Adwa 1896 is not the creation of Menelik, though he was the embodiment of this unity. But he was not the only one. Bahta Hagos, Ras Sebhat and Dejazmatch Hagos Teferi, who broke their ties with Italy and joined the Ethiopian fold; Ras Mengesha who sided with Menelik despite differences between the two; the famous Oromo cavalry, the Tigrean, Oromo and Amhara foot soldiers who fought so valiantly; and all those men and women, from all corners of Ethiopia, who in one way or another stood together in Adwa, were all incarnations of this complex history. The Italians and Europeans were dumb-founded by this unity which they were unable to understand except, in the words of Barratieri, as something motivated by “hatred against the whites”. What they were unable to see, blinded by their Eurocentric view of the world, was that the crucible of Ethiopian history has forged a shared identity that, despite ethnic, regional and religious differences, made every participant the embodiment of Ethiopian history, engaged in the pursuit of a common historical destiny. It is the denial of this history that catches flat-footed all those who believe they could resort to ethnic divide-and-rule to deprive Ethiopians of their freedom and dignity. In Adwa 1896, Italy counted on ethnic divide-and-rule, in the words of the Italian foreign minister Blanc, “to divide Ethiopia and make each part dependent on Italy”. In Addis 2005, Prime Minister Meles, the Ethiopian father of ethnic divide-and-rule politics, injected into the campaign the threat of “Interahamwe” violence and agitated the specter of ethnic genocide, hoping Ethiopians will vote along the ethnic lines imposed by the EPRDF. Blanc failed, so did Meles.

In light of our history, then, the May 15, 2005 elections were not simply a matter of choosing candidates for the House of Representatives. The elections involved a fundamental choice between two radically opposed self-understandings of Ethiopians. Are we a “people” or a collection of “peoples”? Over the last 14 years, the EPRDF imposed on Ethiopians an ethnic self-understanding that depicts them as a collection of discrete ethnic units, described in the 1994 constitution as “peoples”, in the plural. Indeed, even the dead were not safe from the ethnic politics of Meles who asserted that Axum and Lalibella have significance only to their ethnies, while Dawit Yohannes, the Speaker of the House, flatly declared, “There is no Ethiopia.” The democratic opposition rejected this colonial conception of Ethiopians and appealed to them as a “people”, in the singular, who have forged a trans-ethnic nation, open to all ethnicities, wherein it is possible to construct together a free and prosperous society based on the respect of every individual. Addis Abeba 2005, the most multiethnic metropolis of Ethiopia, unequivocally voted for the democratic opposition and for the self-understanding of Ethiopians as a “people”.

The lesson to be drawn here is that this political victory is also the victory of the truth of our history. That’s why Addis Abeba 2005 is a “Truth Event”. One cannot build democracy against one’s own historical identity. If the democratic opposition is to respect Ethiopians, their history, their votes and their aspirations, it cannot enter into a governing coalition with the EPRDF, unless the EPRDF or its members sincerely renounce ethnic politics.

The second issue concerns our emancipation from internal oppression. In Adwa 1896, Ethiopians, in coming together from all over the country to eliminate the threat of external oppression, sowed the seeds of resistance to internal oppression, for, let us not forget that the unity of Adwa 1896 was rooted in a political system that deprived the majority of Ethiopians of their rights and property. But out of this national unity and the sacrifices that made it possible was born a transformed political subject – the Ethiopian people– unwilling to accept in the name of tradition the pre-Adwa system of oppression. Its demand to be recognized as a political subject triggered Menelik’s timid reforms, Haile Selassie’s sporadic modernization, the Derg’s “socialism”, and the EPRDF’s “ethnic federation”; but none of these have succeeded in creating a political order that expresses the sovereignty of every Ethiopian as clearly as the victory of Adwa expressed the sovereignty of Ethiopia as a nation.

From the internal perspective, Adwa 1896 is an unfinished battle. Though Ethiopians gained their external independence, the successive regimes of the post-Adwa period have kept them in bondage, both materially and politically. Under every regime since Adwa 1896, thousands of Ethiopians have died of man-made famines and preventable diseases; suffered unnecessarily for lack of health care, education, housing and jobs; and were deprived of their political, social and economic rights. Worse, our country has been transformed into an international icon of dependence on foreign food and money. Our ruling elites, whose style of life would leave many upper class Europeans and Americans green with envy, are more interested in siphoning more of Ethiopia’s wealth into their private coffers than in using it to extract Ethiopians from the harrowing poverty that is their daily lot. These injustices have been exacerbated by the political ethnicization imposed by the EPRDF regime.

Given this history of failures of the post-Adwa period, we cannot avoid raising the question if Addis Abeba 2005 will also become a chimerical victory. One lesson we could draw from Adwa 1896 is that unity, however historically rooted it may be, is not a substitute for freedom and social justice. In voting for the democratic opposition, what Ethiopians expect is that it become the midwife of a new society wherein they are no longer treated, as they have been until now, as a suffering people in need of being aided and saved. In fighting and dying at Adwa 1896, in standing up to the EPRDF and voting massively for the democratic opposition in Addis Abeba 2005, what Ethiopians were and are demanding is to be recognized as the active agents of their own historical transformation. The democratic opposition must stand with and not, as past regimes have pretended, in lieu of Ethiopians. This is one more reason why an alliance with the EPRDF cannot make sense, for if there is an incontrovertible fact about the EPRDF, it is that it sees itself as the owner of the people. That’s why it shamelessly declared that it has the votes of the peasants before the votes were even counted.

The EPRDF might have the majority of seats. But it is a defeated party – politically, morally and intellectually. The political, moral and intellectual victory has been clearly won by the democratic opposition. Since the EPRDF will not relinquish power as long as it holds the peasantry in its grip, it is incumbent on the democratic opposition to use its new legislative strength and political capital to free the peasants from the clutches of the EPRDF. If the peasants recover their political freedom, and if the democratic opposition continues to display its present determination and perseverance and commits itself to the priority of principles over personal ambitions, it will transform Addis Abeba 2005 into a historic, national victory either now or in the 2010 elections, at the latest; provided, of course, the EPRDF does not try to cling to power by resorting to the method by which it came to power – armed violence.