Ethiopia, stop brutalizing Somalis
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is increasingly becoming a dark omen for Somalis than a vanguard of hope and respect for the rule of law.
By The Editorial Board
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has earned the admiration of Ethiopians and the respect of the international community for his recent political and economic reforms in his country. He has been unlike any of his predecessors. In a short period of time — four months, to be exact — the man achieved what many in the region could only dream of: He dismantled the old, autocratic regime that allowed minority groups to misrule the majority.
Ethiopians are now freer to criticize their government, something that in just a few months ago would have landed one in jail or earned him a death penalty.
But, in Ethiopia, old habits die hard. Ethiopia’s new leaders have a proclivity for dusting up old tricks employed by past dictators. They barely start their terms with a clean slate.
That is what Prime Ahmed is doing right now. Instead of breaking the mold of old Ethiopia with fresh thinking, he fell back into his predecessors’ bad habit of trampling on Somalis’ rights.
On August 3, Ahmed sent thousands of troops, tanks and armored vehicles into Jigjiga, the capital city of the Somali region in Ethiopia, sparking a chaos that killed dozens of people and destroyed properties, including churches.
The Jigjiga operation followed the same old script of preferring brute force to the contents of the brain. By entering the city in the middle of the night, the federal army looked more like an invading force than an orderly army that had the interests of the locals at heart.
The Somali region is now on lockdown; access to the Internet is blocked. Businesses have been shuttered. Terrified Jigjiga residents are fleeing to other cities, mostly out of fear of future military crackdowns.
Addis Ababa’s ill-advised move was illustrative of its decades-old inhumane policies toward the occupied Somali region in eastern Ethiopia.
While few will mourn the departure of Abdi Mohamud Omar, the brutal thug who ran Jigjiga since 2010, yet it’s hard not to criticize Addis Ababa’s perverse decision to send tanks and special forces to the city. The savage military takeover has put a damper on hopes that Ahmed’s change would benefit all.
Omar’s administration was created by Addis Ababa’s Tigray-controlled federal government. He was a protege of Samora Yenus, Ethiopia’s former army chief, who used him as a tool to brutalize Somalis. He was a part of an Addis Ababa policy that valued the region’s resources more than the people who own those resources. It’s a dark irony then to see Addis Ababa now raiding the Somali region on the pretext of taming its poodle.
The forced resignation of Omar is part and parcel of Ethiopia’s typical divide and rule policy, which it employed since the introduction of the federalism in the country in the early 1990s. Addis Ababa regularly interfered in the internal affairs of the Somali region, whimsically picking and ousting its leaders, violating the constitution which bars the national government from poking its nose into the affairs of regional states.
It’s disheartening that Ahmed is increasingly becoming a dark omen for Somalis than a vanguard of hope and respect for the rule of law.
To put the army’s Jigjiga incursion into perspective, Ahmed made a conscious effort not to interfere in any of the other regional states, especially in the Tigray region, whose leaders openly challenged his plan to give up Badame town and return it to Eritrea that claimed its ownership. President Mulatu Teshome of Ethiopia has even awarded Yenus, the former army chief, Ethiopia’s highest military medal in recognition for his service.
Scholars have always argued that Ethiopians inherently hate Somalis under their occupation and rightly questioned if the ongoing transformation in Addis Ababa would ever trickle down to the Somalis.
Somalis don’t love Ethiopians either. Somalis and Ethiopians have never ever had good neighborliness. For, their relations weren’t based on a foundation that can sustain good friendships. Their relations were poisoned in the 19th century by British colonialists who handed over a whole Somali region to Ethiopia, a decision Somalis always resisted. The recent production of oil in the region is worsening the overall security and political situation in the area. The on-off bad blood between Mogadishu and Addis Ababa has also exacerbated the ties of the two nations, leading several times to wars, most notably in 1977, when Somali forces briefly retook the region before Ethiopians with the help of the Soviet Union and soldiers from Cuba pushed them back.
A student of conflict resolution, Prime Minister Ahmed should have read the history of the Somali region to understood the reasons behind Somalis’ dislike for Ethiopia. He should have consulted widely before sending the army to Jigjiga. Abiy should avoid stirring up problems for his nascent administration. Remnants of the old regime are waiting in the wings, biding their time to strike back.
Ahmed is not a historian, but a look at the recent uprising that brought him to power offers him a good lesson on might’s ineffectiveness against the will of determined people. A brutal administration can only suppress people for sometime, but not all the time. Who has thought a prime minister from the Oromo ethnic group, which was systematically marginalized by Ethiopia’s successive governments, would ascend to power in Ethiopia?
Politicians forget the past when they enter ornate offices in Addis Ababa. Meles Zenawi, whose forces removed dictator Mengistu Hailemariam in 1991, applied, in less than no time, the same tactics of his predecessor. As brutal as it may have been, history repeated itself in Ethiopia and the system established by Zenawi crumbled after three years of peaceful protests. Zenawi must be rolling in his grave that the once-despised Oromos are in the ascendant in Ethiopia and that his archrival, Isaias Afwerki, is going to get back Badame, which was at the center of the decades-old conflict between Addis Ababa and Eritrea.
Abiy’s advent may have changed the political landscape in Ethiopia, but if he ever wishes to properly rule Ethiopia he needs to drastically change Addis Ababa’s policy toward the Somali region and Somalis at large. Maltreating Somalis when the rest of Ethiopians are heaving a sigh of relief is a bad habit he should kick as a matter of urgency.
But if he thinks that Addis Ababa can siphon oil and gas from the Somali region and send it to Djibouti or Eritrea via pipelines without the consent of the real owners, he’s in for a rude awakening. Peaceful protesters toppled mighty, ruthless Tigray generals. The policies that marginalized communities proved time and again their uselessness, as they only lead to the downfall of oppression practitioners.
The ongoing talks between the leaders of the Somali region and Ahmed’s administration in Addis Ababa is a travesty and caricature of the rule of law. How can the youthful prime minister order the illegal disbandment of a regional system and then ask its ousted, weakened and humiliated leaders to come to Addis Ababa for talks. Anointing a new Addis Ababa puppet for the Somali region won’t heal the disastrous consequences of the reckless Jigjiga invasion.
We’ve never thought that Ahmed will — so sudden and so early in his term — metamorphose from a victim of oppression to an oppressor. Ahmed’s Ethiopia insists on oppressing Somalis, who are already smarting from the abuses meted out to them by previous regimes, while protecting old oppressors — a bitter irony of a leader who’s, perhaps, suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
If there’s a time that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed needed to call upon his conflict resolution skills — or any other skills he may have — it is now. He must resolve the Somali region’s problems once and for all. Returning the army to its barracks should be the first step toward restoring normalcy to the region, whose tranquility was undermined. It’s high time that Somalis in Ethiopia are allowed to make their own decisions without the interference of Addis Ababa.
Mr. Prime Minister, it takes more than nice words to execute a policy change in Ethiopia. The cold reality is that you’re falling far short of our expectation.