By Tesfaye Demmellash (PhD) - Part I
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| Tesfaye Demmellash (PhD) |
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 actualfreedom 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.
http://www.ethiomedia.com/broadway/4441.html
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