Government of Ethiopia Needs to Learn to Listen to the Oromo People
One thing that government of Ethiopia has
failed to do is listen. This is for the simple reason that Ethiopia is facing a
more serious crisis than it appears to know or is willing to accept. The state
cannot wish away what is facing it and I am sorry to say that there no military
solution to the problems facing Ethiopia. The government has used the gun for decades
and failed terribly so that the people uprising are no longer afraid of the gun.
This helps to complicate the situation a little more.
Currently, Ethiopia is facing a crisis of
unprecedented magnitude, yet its government and Western enablers refuse to
acknowledge and recognize the depth of the crisis. Refusal to accept the
seriousness of the crisis is a major undoing and will have far reaching
consequences for Ethiopia and the region. The Oromo people are the single
largest ethnic group both in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa and the crisis
beating the state and the Oromo community is starting to exhibit a clear
evidence of a problem that is threatening to degenerate into a full-scale
social explosion with a possible and dangerous regional/international
dimension. The ongoing protests have been characterized by absolutely
extraordinary display of defiance by the Oromo people and it is by far the most
significant political developments in the country since the death of Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi, the strongman who ruled the country for over two
decades.
The Oromo have accused the security forces for using live
bullets against peaceful protesters, killing over 400 people. The Oromo have
witnessed numerous harassment from the state security agencies; their elite and
political activists, human rights activists, journalists, religious and community
leaders have been arbitrarily arrested and detained. Their territories have
been characterized by curfews and internet shut downs with currently the regime declaring
a state of emergency. All these measures are just but a desperate state’s
attempt to intimidate a section of its people who have a grievance. Unfortunately,
these people have time and again demonstrated their determination and refusal to
be cowed by the state.
What the Addis admiration seems not to accept is the simplest
fact that ‘you cannot use a gun on someone who is too willing to die.’ State weapons
are often used for outright intimidation as a form of deterrence. It means that
whenever people cause chaos, the state can intimidate them through the show of
power so that they back down for fear of being hurt. But such a strategy cannot work in situations where the people are ready to be hurt and to die for a cause that they so believe in. Is it not
interesting as it is annoying, that the Ethiopian government still clings to some false hope
that the Oromo will eventually give up on their cause? I doubt they will; they have shown they won't.
In order to understand this, we must pay some recourse to history.
The Oromo people have a historical grievance which can be interpreted as
genuine. They are a people who continue to see themselves as parts of no part;
as a people who belong to the country but have no say in it; as a people who can
speak but whose voices are heard as a noise, not a discourse. A strategy of
divide and rule that has been experimented for the last 25 years by the current
regime has continuously and spectacularly failed. This is a strategy beating the
Oromos and Amharas, the two largest ethnic groups in the country which have
been falsely presented as eternal adversaries. The Addis administration, in its
quest to crash the Oromos, has equally build on yet another falsity that Oromos
are a secessionist group to justify the continued monitoring, control, and
policing of Oromo intellectuals, politicians, artists and activists. Oromos are
protesting this kind of state censorship and they are determined to defy it at
all costs, including footing ultimate costs.
The state is doing all these with total disregard of the fact
that the Oromo make up well over a third of Ethiopia's 100 million people.
Historically, Oromos have been pushed to the margin of the country's political
and social life and rendered unworthy of respect and consideration. Oromo
culture and language have been banned and their identity stigmatized, becoming
invisible and unnoticeable within mainstream perspectives. And in pursuit of
its divide and rule ideology, the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary
Democratic Front and Tigrayan elites have strived over time to present
themselves as the only political movement, in the country, that could provide the
stability and continuity sought by regional and global powers with vested
interests in the region and to present Oromos as spoilers who needs to be contained.
Blinded by some international allies, especially the US,
which sees Ethiopia as strategic in the global war on terror, the Ethiopian
government is in denial and making the same promises of restoring 'law and
order' through further repression and crackdown. The US is not doing anything significant about the situation,
neither are regional bodies and neighboring states. In fact, the US, has in numerous occasions, created and propagated fantasy stories which cast Ethiopia
as 'democratic and its leaders as progressive' despite it being an open secret that Ethiopia
is effectively a police state.
Amid these silences, government refusal to listen and inaction by allies, neighbors, regional bodies and the international community, it should be understood that the Oromo protests are microcosmic of more enduring and
deeper crisis of political representation and systematic marginalization
suffered by the Oromo people. Underpinning this is a genuine grievance that the Oromos are
ready to pursue at all costs. The international community led by the
US, continue to cajole the Addis administration, due to differentiated interests
while the Oromo continue to suffer under the weight of a government that is outright
dictatorial. Meanwhile Ethiopian government continues to experiment on the same old tactic; that of terrorizing
the Oromos using the state hard power, a strategy that will for sure exacerbate
the situation and throw the country into chaos in an already volatile region.
It is time for Ethiopia to be told to try the untried - talk to the Oromo
people; listen to the Oromo People.
Government of Ethiopia Needs to Learn to Listen to the Oromo People
Reviewed by Ibrahim Magara
on
October 11, 2016
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