Book Review by Seyoum Hameso
A partial account of the internal dynamic is explained by the second book written prior to the war. Alemseged Abbay’s
Identity jilted or re-imagining identity is divided into eight chapters. The main theme of the book is that ‘the collective identity perceived by the trans-Mereb political actors of the past is disavowed by the current political actors’(p.xi). Hence identity jilted or abandoned. The theme seems a call of duty for what observers called ‘Tigray-Tigrinie’ identity (see also p.43). That the actors sought different paths of identification, one to be independent and the other to grab the ‘state machinery’ in Ethiopian
centre. The author is thus puzzled why the current trans-Mereb ‘rational political actors’ side-stepped ‘the creation of "Greater Tigray" state after military victory’ and ‘abandoned the common sense of identity that had been entertained by the 1940s political elites...’(p.7)
The author argues that ‘although the peoples of northern Ethiopia have had some form of statehood for millennia, it was at the turn of the nineteenth century that conquest and expansion gave the country most of its current shape’ (p.2). The enlarged empire state brought into existence at the turn of the century was dominated by a minority ethnic group, the Amhara. (He refers to the Ethiopians state from the 1890s to 1990s as ethnic Amhara state in a country where Oromo make up 35-40%, Amhara make up 20-25%. Tigrean 6-8%, Sidama 8%, and Somali 6%).
Their language became the national language, their army was made the national army and the Coptic Orthodox Church, which they share with the Tigrayans, became the national church and the emerging bureaucracy filled with the Amhara elite. The net effect was the emergence of an Ethiopian state with "a profound identity of its own, which was inherently discriminatory as between different peoples and regions within the country"’(p.12). Conflict and upheavals in 1974 and 1991 were to change this framework.
The analysis in the book about ethnicity and nationalism (or ethno-regional nationalism as the author refers to) is broadly based on primordialist and instrumentalist views. According to the author, for
Eritreans, the search for self-identity and self-determination takes its shape from history, the memory of colonialism and religious factionalism, and the use, by Ethiopian states, of ‘terror as a political weapon’ (p.32). The author particularly mentions the role of the genocidal and genocidal-like states such as the
derg. The same could be said of the TPLF/ERDF regime, for ‘when an ethnic state in a plural society fails to win ‘spontaneous consent’ for its hegemony, it can resort to coercion. Failing to subdue resistance, the state gets frustrated and resorts to mass murder’ (or genocide). This remains the gist of the problem in Ethiopia today and in the region.
For the Tigrians in Tigray, the historical memory of loss of power and privilege to Amhara hegemony after 1898, the ensuing absolutist state gave rise to resistance and rebellion. The author laments that ‘the political power of the Amhara was accompanied by their cultural hegemony. Tigrayans were
pressurised, directly and indirectly, to abandon their culture and despise their own language. Power and prejudice were reinforcing one another...’ (p.45). The Weyane rebellion was suppressed by external support.
In both Eritrea and Tigray, the rebellion movements were never short of the marks of mobilisation and identity construction. These include, for
Eritreans, the destruction of the federation, the centralising ethos of the imperial and genocidal behaviour of the
derg state, military ventures and conscription, famine and resettlement ‘as weapons of mass destruction’, ‘massacre of civilians’, and the hunting of intellectuals and businessmen all of which were applied for both. The author likens this with Hitlerite saying that ‘the greatest of sprits can be liquidated if its bearer is beaten to death with a rubber truncheon’ (p.137) accompanying a catch phrase: ‘We need the land, not the people’ (p.209).
In conclusion the author is of the opinion that the social ‘primordial identity’ (for example, held by Kebesa highland peasants) and the ‘instrumentally shaped sense of identity’ (held by Eritrean and Tigrean liberation fronts) is ‘diluted by state mass violence’. What is left unexplained is the current wave of mass state violence involving profound deportations including civilians and business people, cannon-foddering amounting to massacres, new enemies and friends, and the development of the feeling of ‘others’ perhaps proportional to the imperial and the derg era. The current war is a demonstration of profound absurdity of this particular regime’s polity.[]
Seyoum Hameso
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