By Edao Dawano

(OPride) — On the morning of Sept. 3, eyewitnesses in Addis Ababa reported a flurry of gun shots at Qilinto prison, a remand center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital. That was followed by the expansive compound catching fire, which has reportedly destroyed a large part of the maximum security jail often used as a holding place for political prisoners awaiting trial.

Authorities confirmed 23 deaths but activists say the casualty figure could be as high as 60. The Qilito prison houses up to 3,000 inmates, including prominent Oromo opposition leaders Bekele Gerba, the deputy chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) and his colleagues.

The loss of life in such a gruesome way is heartbreaking. And the Ethiopian government’s handling of the tragedy is simply revolting–to say the least. Nearly a week after the incident, the whereabouts and status of the detainees remains unknown. After shuttling between several federal prisons hoping to locate their loved ones, on Wednesday distraught mothers staged an  impromptu protest demanding to either be given the body of their dead relatives or be given access to them. To add insult to their injury, some were themselves detained.

Most of the prisoners at Qilinto were locked up on trumped up charges in connection with the 10-month old Oromo protests. I have no doubt that they longed to be free and be reunited with their families. They dreamed and hoped to see injustice lifted from their people. Yet, at least for dozens of those detainees, both their hopes and lives were destroyed by a suspicious fire in a dark jail cell where they’re physically powerless to escape or defend themselves.

I sat thousands of miles away from Qilinto, absorbing the news and trying to imagine what it’s like for the families to be kept in the dark about the fate of their loved ones. Bontu Bekele Gerba is a brave and courageous young woman. In her media appearances, she speaks with so much composure exuding an unnatural strength. I used to envy Bontu that she gets to at least visit the prisons and see and speak to her father. Hers is no enviable position at all but I somehow found myself relating with her situation this week.

My father Bekele Dawano, a fierce advocate of Oromo rights, among the legion of Oromo freedom fighters, disappeared 25 years ago when I was a mere child. I grew up my entire life not knowing whether my beloved father is dead or alive. The blackout of the news of Qilinto and the government’s refusal to inform the families left me paralyzed and filled me with agony. It brought back years of pent up anger and pain.

For years, I thought blessed and lucky were those that knew where their loved ones were–for they could at least go and visit them in prison. Even those whose relatives or family members were killed, could mourn, have some kind of closure and move on with life, as they say. But not having any closure about my father, whose fate and whereabouts remain a mystery a quarter a century later, is akin to living with an unrelenting and insidious pain.

If I had known my father is in Qilinto, like everyone of the families of the prisoners held there whose fate remains unknown, I would have ran wild  to the site to seek information about his status. I would have been arrested demanding to see my father’s corpse or a proof that he’s alive. But I’m not lucky enough.

I share the agony of awaiting for dreadful bad news that Bontu and the families of the rest of the prisoners might be living through. Not knowing the fate and wellbeing of someone you love kills–piece by piece. Over the years, I found the psychological torment harder than anything else, there are plenty, I had to cope with. Distance does not shield me from feeling their pain as I grew up nursing it having been robbed my father when I needed him the most.

After 25 long years of uncertainty and searching, I still nurture a faint hope that my father could be in any of Ethiopia’s many jails. So, when a prison is torched, as the case these days, my hope shrinks a bit. I feel as if my father and his fellow prisoners of conscience are smoldering there unattended. I feel suffocated seeing the smoke billowing into the sky. I fear and worry that the Ethiopian government, which snatched my father and robbed me of a normal childhood, may have now burned him alive. I try to assess the moral culpability of those in power and try to imagine the sheer inhumanity of the prison guards shooting down inmates attempting to put out a raging fire. Nevertheless, I find myself drowned in deep thoughts and overcome by a feeling of powerlessness.

It’s late at night, alone in my bed, twisting and turning, I try to write and then stop. I fight back tears and ponder over the possibility of my father being at Qilinto. I wouldn’t have known. He could be one of those shot or burned alive while fighting to douse the inferno with his bare hands. I ponder, since he disappeared more than two decades ago, even if he’s incinerated at Qilinto, he could be rendered unrecognizable or be left there to suffer and slowly meet his death. Having processed all this, I sort of wake up from my hallucinatory state of mind and wish that I would be lucky enough to claim his body and end the decades of sorrow and pain. It is this sort of hope against hope that’s been my secret to ease the burden of memory, as well as profound and chronic agony.

I know I am not alone. There are other families who have similarly been kept in the dark for years. I sometimes wonder how they cope with the sorrow.

My hope and reasons

I spent most of my formative years drifting in thought in search of my lost father and trying to understand what life in prison is like. Having used to them and finding them to be largely uninformed, the rumors that keep flooding me don’t any longer offer much of a hope. Some say my father was killed long time ago. Others claim he’s tortured and he died due to illness and lack of medical care. My father is a man of principle and unshakable political conviction. I was once told that his captors admired his courage and bravery as to not kill him. And instead he’s being held at one of the remote hidden prisons along with other prominent prisoners such as Nadhi Gamada, Yosef Bati, Lamessa Boru and many others who disappeared from the public eye in the last two decades and a half. On a good day, this gives me a sliver of hope–however fleeting.

Sometimes I wish I had the opportunity Bontu Bekele Gerba and other children of Oromo political prisoners had: to visit their fathers in prison. I would have done the same if I had known wherever he was imprisoned. In fact, disregard the visitation, a knowledge that my father is alive would have been enough to calm and steady my yearning and tattered soul. Not knowing that kills. I want to comfort Bontu and others who are being subjected to unspeakable ordeals like this week’s but often I don’t even know how to express my own reality. Sometimes I feel no emotion at all as if my heart has become laminated in pain and everlasting grief.

Through exile and years of uncertainty and high flying rumors about my father’s whereabouts, either he is long dead or still alive, I have chosen to keep him alive — and that slim hope gives me a respite from the chronic pain.

This lived experience, as dismal as it is, gives me a unique understanding of the Oromo struggle for freedom and our progress, as well as shortcomings. My father would be so proud to witness the Qubee generation taking the mantle and defiantly pushing the struggle forward. He would be delighted to know that the Oromo are on the cusp of realizing their long-held aspirations for freedom, justice and equality. It is also why I remain hopeful. My father’s and his likes’ sacrifices were not in vain. The progress we’ve made as a society was borne on the back of a great cost of lives, torture and imprisonments of many. Every kid believes their dad is a giant. But for me this is not just a childish fantasy, my father and those who sacrificed and are sacrificing so that the tens of millions of Oromo suffering from repression, discrimination, and marginalization will someday live normal lives are Giants in our tortured history.

This is what I want to share with Bontu and all the families of disappeared or dead prisoners at Qilinto or elsewhere. In the midst of all the trauma and anguish, we should not lose sight of the fact that because of our sacrifices — i.e., families of the victims of the Ethiopian state’s gross injustices — the struggle for freedom will triumph and the yoke of oppression will soon be lifted from the necks of our people. The sacrifices of these political prisoners will serve as a torchlight and an inspiration to current and future generations to uproot injustice in all its forms.

In due times, all lives lost in the fight for the advancement of Oromo rights will be revived–at least in our collective consciousness. They will return for my children, yet to be born, and their children as their collective heroes and heroines to emulate. That is why we must and shall remain committed to sustaining our national struggle and bringing it to its logical conclusion: an end to tyranny and injustice in all its forms. Only by doing so can we keep those brave heroes as well as heroines and their memories alive and celebrate their noble sacrifices.

Aluta continua! Praise and glory to all the brave souls that came before us.

Tesfalem Waldyes & Kalkidan Yibeltal

(Addis standard) — On June 28 2016, hundreds of people in Jido Kombolocha, a small town located in East Shoa Zone of the Oromia regional state 207 km south east of Addis Abeba, were heading towards the local Farmers’ Cooperatives Union office. Even though it was Tuesday, the air was full of a market day ambiance – market days for the farmers in the surrounding rural Kebeles are usually on Monday and Thursday. Many of the farmers used carts pulled by donkeys, while others used their horses.  A few, on the other hand, preferred to walk. At their destination, a crowd of people had already gathered, flooding the Union’s compound that accommodated tin-roofed houses.

The local administration uses the compound, which harbors sacks of grains and cereals piled on three separate spots, as a relief food distribution center. Residents that came from the surrounding rural Kebeles were lining up to collect food aid that was being distributed. The sacks, which the farmers were loading on their carts or sitting on, visibly display the national flag and a statement that reads: “Gift from the Government of Ethiopia.”

Milling wheat, white pea beans, cereals and edible oil were the main items given to the rural residents of Adami Tulu/ Jido/Kombolocha Woreda on that day. But the distribution targeted only three of the 43 rural Kebeles in the Woreda. Home to some 172,000 people, the Woreda is designated as one of the hot spot areas of the recent El-Nino induced drought that affected more than 10.2 million people all over the country.

For inhabitants of the area, drought related rain shortages are not uncommon. Living in an area prone to water scarcity, the local farmers chiefly depend on the main rainy season, spanning from June to September, for the cultivation of their produces. Thus, whenever a rainy season botches, thousands are immediately relegated to the status of food aid recipients.

Nonetheless, the reality of the past two years was nothing like they had seen thus far.

“On previous occurrences only four to five Kebeles were affected. The number of food aid beneficiaries [normally] fall between five to ten thousand,” Abiti Kemele, Head of the Woreda’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Bureau, told Addis Standard. “Now all the 43 rural kebeles are affected. The number of beneficiaries is huge. Almost 70 to 80 per cent of the population is [living] on food aid.”

What makes the recent drought especially worse is that it affected not only farmers considered to be vulnerable to external shocks but also those who are included in the much publicized (and admired) social security system, otherwise known as the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP). It is a program that was designed (and is being implemented) to respond to not only  chronic food insecurity problems but also short term environmental shocks, and help millions of people under its umbrella become sustainably self-reliant.

Targeting highly climate-vulnerable population, PSNP is a double-pronged program that aspires to provide social protection to the chronically food insecure and shield the poorest of the poor in the rural areas from environmental shocks, while simultaneously reducing the risk of disaster by building up the capacity for resilience.

The program, which began in 2005, often receives applauds, both from the federal government, which is in charge of running it, and its Western development partners, which are helping to finance  it; both parties maintain the narrative that PSNP is a package that bridges the response gap between emergency relief and long-term development aid.

However, more than a decade after it first came into being and a year into its fourth phase, which extends to 2020, PSNP appears to have fallen short on some of its significant promises and aspirations.  (Read our economic commentary here).

Decent proposal, modest effects

Plans for the PSNP, commonly known as “Safety Net,” were first laid in 2003, but the actual  implementation was launched only two years later when the government started providing food or cash transfers to food insecure households – households that had been on food aid assistance for at least three previous years. Aimed at preventing asset depletion in household level and creating productive assets at the community level, the PSNP, according to official documents, incorporates intensive public work activities to improve resilience, risk financing facility to help poor households to better cope with transitory shocks, and assisting the most vulnerable community members to obtain the full benefits of consumption smoothing and asset protection.

At the onset of its implementation, only four regions; Tigray, Amhara, Oromia and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNP) were included. But in the decade since its birth, it grew and now covers eight regions.

Theoretically PSNP is a program designed to engage its beneficiaries in labor intensive public works, 60 per cent of which are in soil and water conservation. In order to fill the food gap often experienced during a lean period – the time between harvest and planting when households tend to run out of food – cash is paid for up to five days of work a month per household member. This cash-for-work project goes for six months a year, until recipient households accumulate an asset and income level that enables them meet their food needs for 12 months, and until they are able to withstand modest shocks at which time they ‘graduate’ from the program.

In the ‘direct support’ component of the program, on the other hand, groups that cannot contribute labor to public works are offered unconditional cash or food of equivalent value to that received by labor contributing households. Pregnant and lactating mothers, the elderly, persons with disabilities and the chronically ill are some of the beneficiaries of direct support.

However, a 2011 PSNP impact evaluation study found out that households receiving Direct Support had considerably lower average income and asset values, and owned and cultivated less land than households participating in the Public Works component.

And a study conducted by Guush Berhane et al. of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Can Social Protection Work in Africa? The Impact of Ethiopia’s Social Protection Program, found out, “[a]gainst the formidable background of rising food prices and widespread drought, participation in the Public Works component of the PSNP has modest effects.”

To its credit, the program reduced the length of the last hungry season by 1.29 months a year among households that received transfers for 5 consecutive years compared to eligible households that received almost nothing. Meanwhile five years of participation raises livestock holdings by 0.38 tropical livestock units as compared to receipt of payments for just one year.

During the 2011 Horn of Africa food crisis, the PSNP response had cost an estimated US$53 per beneficiary compared to US$169 per beneficiary targeted through the usual traditional humanitarian response system, according to a report published by the UK’s House of Commons International Development Committee.

In its fourth phase now, the PSNP targets to reach 10 million food insecure Ethiopians by 2017. According to the blueprint document for Phase Four, which commenced in September 2014, the program is expected to cover a total of 411 Woredas by the third year, showing an increase of 92 Woredas compared to PSNP phase three.

Perpetual state of poverty

Adami Tulu/ Jido/ KombolochaWoreda is one of the 262 food insecure Woredas when PSNP was launched in 2005. But the Woreda remained in the beneficiary list for the last 11 years. The household of Ahmed Haji Kedir, 55, is one of the registered 23,000 beneficiaries of the program.

Ahmed mainly relies on the Safety Net to feed his eight children, himself and his wife. He receives 730 Birr per month on behalf of five of his eight children. His other three children, his wife and himself are excluded from the program. Ahmed complained that the amount his household receives is not enough to buy food for the family, let alone cover other expenses. “A quintal of maize now costs 700 Birr,” Ahmed told Addis Standard. “We are left with 30 Birr after we bought maize. It is only enough to buy some Kale (cabbage).”

Like the 8,000 inhabitants in his village, Dambe Adansho Kebele, Ahmed is severely affected by the failure of rain in the last two years. For six months of a year, he and his family survived through the Safety Net’s support but for the remaining months, his family totally depends on his daily labor work.

Despite being a recipient of the Safety Net program since its inception, Ahmed is not able to recover his plot of land which he sold years back to sustain his family. He is also not able to build an asset during his 11 years stay in the program. “I don’t have land,” Ahmed said, “I am not able to get out of poverty.”

Ahmed Haji relies on the Saftey Net to feed his family of ten

It’s the struggling beneficiaries like Ahmed that trigger a question of the effectiveness of the PSNP. A document by the World Bank states that the program is embedded in the Ethiopian government’s strategy and policy of food security and eradication of extreme poverty. The Bank, which is one of the 11 co-financers of the PSNP, considers the program as a direct contributor to the “two pillars of the organization’s new global strategy of reducing absolute poverty and promoting shared prosperity.”

However, what Addis Standard observed on the ground is in line with what critics of the program point out. On his research, Food Security and Safety Nets: Assessment and Challenges, Desalegn Rahmato of Forum for Social Studies, argues that although the program had a “positive impact on many beneficiaries, the gains made so far have not been adequate enough to ensure robust food security for most households.”

Others indicate at the ever ballooning cost of the program as yet another gauge to question whether or not the program has met its target of reducing poverty amongst millions of its beneficiaries. Several indicators show that the financing of the project is registering a significant increase with every phase rather than declining.

For the first phase of PSNP, 2005 to 2006, donors have contributed US$70 million. That amount almost tripled to US$200 million for the second phase that ran from 2007 to 2009. The five year long third phase, which started in 2010 and ended in 2015, consumed US$2.3 billion. When it reached to the current phase the figure has sky rocketed to US$3.6 billion.

As the budget keeps on growing, so does the number of beneficiaries, which was 5.2 million at the program launch in 2005. It quickly climbed to 7.2 million just after a year. On the second and third phases, the numbers have increased to 7.6 million and 8.3 million, respectively. The current phase, PSNP Four, which is being implemented for a period of five and a half years as of September 2014, targets to benefit as high as 10 million people.

As of September 2016, an urban safety net program will also start operating in Addis Abeba, the government said a few weeks ago. The program is expected to assist more than 260 000 beneficiaries, of whom 60 000 will be recipients of Direct Support for the coming ten years and will consume some 36.7 billion ETB (US$ 1.5 billion) according to the government .

This alarming increase in both the number of beneficiaries and the money to fund the program by itself sharply contradicts the initial plans for the program. It was declared that as households achieve food security and ‘graduate’ from the program, the number of beneficiaries will decrease over time.

However, even the few people who are ’graduating’ from the program, keep on falling back into poverty as food price hikes and rain failure fuel food insecurity in rural Ethiopia. Accordingly, impact evaluations indicate that there is a strong preference among beneficiaries for payment in food than in cash due to uncertainty about food prices, lack of food availability on the market, deliberate price inflation by traders when cash transfers are made, and the imbalance between the value of the food basket and current cash payments.

A success story dotted with holes

Despite several acclaims the program receives for enrolling millions of food insecure Ethiopians, one of the major holes in PSNP has been the absolute lack of practical measurement to decide whether or not it is successfully helping those enrolled in the program.

According to a document released by the World Bank, since 2005, 2.8 million people have graduated from the program. Graduation from the Food Security Program in Ethiopia, a study published in March 2014 by the Bank maintains that graduation has become central criteria to the government’s assessment on whether or not the program is succeeding in meeting its objective of reducing chronic food insecurity in the country.

However, effective measurement to decide those who are considered ready to graduate from the program is dotted with several irregularities ranging from absence of strong institutional capacity to measure, to the government’s unbridled interest and absolute control of measuring the results. Critics also point at the fact that even if there is a significant decrease  in asset depletion and an increase in asset building in general, both trends tend to freeze only after a short period.

“In theory, all chronically food insecure households in Ethiopia should be registered on the PSNP, and those with labor capacity should exit from the program when they have achieved a level of food security,” WB’s study on graduation explains. “In this sense, a crude indicator of the success of the PSNP could therefore be measured by the total number of households registered on the program, which is expected to fall every year.”

The problem is even those ‘graduated’ beneficiaries, supposedly resilient to shocks, often show a high tendency to relapse to the level of food insecure after a single or two failed rainy season.  Addis Standard witnessed several previous participants of the program from Dambe Adansho Kebele lined up to receive food aid at Jido town on June 28. Gelas Abate, 46, is one of them.

Gelas Abate complains that he “was forced to graduate” from the program before he stood firm on his feet

A farmer and a father of ten, Gelas was enrolled in the PSNP during its introduction in 2005. He stayed in the program for nine years. He claims that he was “forced to graduate” from the program before he stood firm on his feet. Although his life has improved “a little bit” while he was staying in the program, he has now relapsed and is, once again, seeking for support to sustain his family. “I bought chickens and goats on the money from the Safety Net,” Gelas told Addis Standard “[but] when I exited from the program I sold them all.”

After the program, Gelas mainly depends on the rental fee from his small plot of land but that meager income is never enough. So when the government started food aid distribution in his locality in January 2016, his family was registered as food aid recipients. But only four out of the 12 members of his family were qualified to receive aid, and Gelas is not happy about it. His family now receives 60 kg of wheat and 1.5 liter of edible oil per month but that, Gelas argues, is not enough for a family of 12.

Gelas is not the only former beneficiary of the PSNP who speak of a “forced graduation.” Those who were receiving “direct support” from the program, or households who, in the program’s lexicon, are “considerably older, had fewer members, and had fewer able-bodied workers,” were also made to ‘graduate’. The selection committee in Kebelelevels often verifies the direct support beneficiaries as measured by their ownership of “livestock and landholdings.”

Asena Berisso, an elderly in his seventies, matched the requirements when he became enrolled in the program. But he was one of the 41 elderly people who were allegedly forced to ‘graduate’ from the program in 2014. A father of ten and visibly weak to farm his small plot of land, he rented it out to other farmers. Like Gelas, he has now fallen back into food insecurity when the recent drought struck his village.

“Old people are forced to exit from the program to fulfill the quota set by higher authorities,” a fellow villager of Gelas and Asena said. “The confused chairmen of the Kebele included the old and weak people [as graduates] in order to fulfill the quota.”

The head of the Kebele concedes. Temo Gemechu, Chairman of Dambe Adansho Kebele, told Addis Standard that he included “some old people” and other beneficiaries to meet the 60 person quota graduation requirement he had received from the Woreda authorities. Though the Safety Net has a “Graduation Guidance Note”, he used simple criteria to include the beneficiaries on the graduation list.

Temo’s Kebele began graduating the beneficiaries since 2007. According to him, the Kebele first uses ownership of any livestock, including sheep and goats, as a graduation criterion. Later on even having chicken started to be considered as an asset.    Research papers indicate that in other parts of the country annual cash crop production, land size and land quality are used as a graduation criteria.  “A household is considered ready to ‘graduate’ from the PSNP when it has achieved ‘food sufficiency’,” Graduation from the Food Security Program in Ethiopia states. “Though conceptually clear, this definition raises several questions at an operational level, including how to assess whether a household is ‘food sufficient’ over a 12-month period, and how to assess whether the household is resilient against modest shocks.”

The Dambe Adansho PSNP beneficiaries, who believed they graduated from the program prematurely, went to appeal their cases in the city of Zeway, 47km from their village. In 2014 representatives of 170 such beneficiaries have delivered a letter of appeal to the Woreda officials based in Zeway. But they did not get any response as of yet.

Another study published in May, 2013, Ethiopia’s PSNP: Integrating Disaster and Climate Risk Management, maintains that as the program uses existing government systems and staff at all levels, rather than creating separate structures, for management and implementation, capacity constraints at the regional and local levels have affected its operation while communication between departments was weak.

But contrary to the criticisms by various experts and beneficiaries, some researchers continue lauding the PSNP in Ethiopia as an exemplary social security scheme and recommend other countries in Africa to replicate it. The government too often promotes the program as the flagship component of its larger food security strategy and boosts its success on several occasions. On the donors side the program is considered as a “pivotal shift from annual emergency food aid appeals to a planned approach to food security and predictable drought risk management” and achieves its goals. “PSNP has contributed significantly to improved food security in Ethiopia over the past years, consistently meeting its development objectives,” a World Bank document claimed.

But the one thing both its critics and its advocates agree on is that the program has created the infrastructure for a vast logistical arrangements that has helped Ethiopia handle the recent drought better than what would have otherwise been the case.   This is despite the fact that the same drought has killed hundreds of livestock, including those belonging to the beneficiaries of the program.

Ethiopia, a country dependent on rain-fed agriculture and prone to the smallest change in climate pattern, will remain vulnerable to both “chronic” and “transitory” food insecurity in the coming near future. Even donor organizations, which often claim the success of the PSNP, do not hesitate to admit that “food insecurity, malnutrition and vulnerability will remain high” in Ethiopia.

In September 2014 the World Bank document estimated that 29 per cent of Ethiopians live under absolute poverty while 44 per cent of them suffer from chronic malnutrition. It further stated that an estimated 43 percent (46 per cent of the rural population) are vulnerable to absolute poverty. Analyzing such numbers and trends, experts argue that the PSNP will inevitably linger for foreseeable future. “The food security program as a whole is heavily dependent on the donors and all the indications are that it will remain so for many decades to come,” Desalegn Rahmato predicts in his study.

“Food security will be achieved without a robust safety net program, and there is therefore a need for an expanded and better managed PSNP that is well integrated with agricultural, health and other services provided to communities by government and non-government agencies,” Desalegn’s sober reflection added.

By Leenjiso Horo, September, 2016

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” —Frantz Fanon

The Great Oromo Generation of 1960s

The great Oromo generation of 1960s chose to fulfil its mission. Its mission has been and still is the liberation of Oromia. It rejected any political line of betraying this mission. .It is a generation of heroes and heroines of utmost patriotism. It is a generation that gave its live for political independence of its country and its people, for justice, unconditional political freedom, and democracy. Its members are too many to remember and call their names. In this national liberation struggle, hundreds of thousands of its members were martyred and buried in shallow graves; in ravines, plains, hills, and mountainsides in unmarked holes. Many of its members are still in the struggle. At the same time, thousands upon thousands have also fallen in the cities; in towns, and in villages murdered by the sadistic, cruel and barbaric fascist TPLF and Dergue regimes in front of their houses and in front of their families. Tens of thousands tortured and maimed in the prison cells and hundreds of thousands kidnapped and disappeared without trace. In this struggle and selfless-sacrifices, this generation has made eight distinctive achievements. Namely, Oromia is put on the world map, the Oromo people are made known to the world community, the Oromo Flag is raised over Oromia, Qubee-the Latin Oromo alphabet was created and made the official script for Oromo Language; the Qubee generation-a new generation was born; Oromo language is made official language, the Oromo unity is made a reality and the Political Program for independence was charted as political program of struggle.

In so doing, this generation demonstrated the highest measure of patriotism and selfless sacrifice for its country. For this, this Oromo generation has won the right to the eternal love of their people, the love of the present generation and the love of the generations yet to come.

In this national struggle, it maintained the mission, the objective and the goal of the struggle despite all obstacles posed by internal and external forces to undermine them. With unity, it overcame adversities. Above everything else, the generation of the 1960s set a shining example of faithful devotion to the objective of the Oromo struggle, to the oneness of Oromo and to Oromoness/Oromummaa. For so doing, this generation chose its unity unto death by accepting death over betraying the national struggle. This is the first time in the history of national liberation movements that the leadership of a Liberation Front was killed and buried together in one unmarked grave for rejecting political line advanced contrary to the mission, the objective and goal of the national struggle and contrary to the oneness of Oromo and the Oromoness. This historical martyrdom was made by the leadership of the OLF- the leadership of the great Oromo generation. In its death and in its blood, the leadership of this great Oromo generation and the millions of the Oromo nationals who sacrificed their precious lives in this struggle together cemented the Oromo unity and guaranteed the continuity of the Oromo struggle for liberation.

The Oromia Flag

This is the Oromia flag. It is the flag of the Oromo nation. It is created with the blood of millions of Oromo heroes and heroines. Today, this flag is the symbol of struggle for liberation.

This flag is a symbol, an identity, and an emblem of the Oromo nation. It symbolizes the honor, the inherent dignity, the identity and the beauty of the Oromo nation. It displays the pathos and ethos of the Oromo people. This flag has important interpretive features. It has red, yellow, and green colors, and Bakkalchaa, the star, and the Odaa, each of which represents an important aspect of the Oromo nation. Here I only give simple rudimentary truth of the interpretation of the Oromia flag as to what it symbolizes. Here is it. The red represents the selfless-sacrifice, fearless courage, integrity and the devotion of Oromo people in the struggle for the national independence and freedom. It symbolizes the bloodshed for over a century by the successive Oromo generations including the present one in their struggle for freedom, and independence of Oromia from Abyssinian colonial occupation. On the whole, red represents the war of national resistance against the enemy and our vigilance for protection and defense of Oromia after independence. The yellow represents the happiness, the wisdom, the power, the peace, and our love for Oromia and for the humanity. And it further symbolizes, the beauty of Oromia’s sky, its land, and its people and the kindness, the generosity, and the hospitality of the Oromo people. And the green symbolizes the land, the lakes, rivers and the natural and man-made wealth of the Oromo people, the fertility and richness of Oromia. Bakkalchaa with its rays of light represents the bright future, the hope, the liberty and freedom. The star represents unity, equality, fraternity, strength, justice and the harmony of our people. It symbolizes one nation and one Oromia. The Odaa represents the cultural, political, economic, social, and democratic tradition- freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the press, and the sanctity of the home and judicial aspect of our people as practiced under Gadaa System. All in all, this Oromo flag symbolizes the unity, democracy, the fertility of Oromia, and the power of the Oromo nation.

Indeed, under this flag millions of the Oromo nationals have sacrificed their precious lives for the independence of Oromia for half a century to-date. For the love of this flag and for what it stands for, the Oromo people have dearly paid in human and material resources at the hands of the colonial rulers. For the ownership of this flag and for the defense of what this flag symbolizes and stands for millions of Oromo heroes and heroines- men, women, youths, children, and elders have been sacrificed their precious lives and hundreds of thousands have been beaten, tortured, maimed, deprived of their property and ganged into the prison cells of the colonial empire. So, this flag by the Oromo people’s interpretation represents the ideals of ultimate sacrifice to liberate Oromia and establish people’s Democratic Republic of Oromia. It does not belong to anyone except to the Oromo nation.
The Oromo nation has raised this national Flag so high for the world to see. In totality, this flag represents the values of unity, freedom, liberty, justice, independence and hope for the citizens of Oromia. Indeed, this flag is a declaration for independence of Oromia, and of the struggles, the Oromo people have been going through for over a century to achieve their independence. Thus, this flag is not a slogan, not a decoration, not a piece of cloth, not a flag of a group, but it is the symbol of a living nation-the Oromo nation. Indeed, this Oromo flag remains a living piece of history for the generations to come and it is a source of pride and unity for the Oromo people. All in all, the Odaa, the star, the rays of sun and the red, green and yellow colors embody the very qualities that make our nation great: liberty, justice, freedom, democracy, love of country and national purpose.

Here, one must understand that we do not know the names of millions of the Oromo farmers, peasants, and their sons and daughters who fought and perished in this national liberation struggle, and the names of those tens of thousands who had perished in the Dergue’s notorious torture Chambers. And, of course, we do not still know the names of hundreds of thousands of Oromo nationals who have already been perished in the Tigrayan regime’s notorious torture concentration camps. Still arrests, tortures, mass murders, annihilation and the evictions of the millions from their lands are continuing. The colonialist crime must be stopped. It can only be stopped in unity. This is the Oromo way to defeat the enemy.

The new Oromo generation: The Qubee Generation

Now, it is time for the Qubee generation to take up the torch of struggle that commenced with the great Oromo generation of the 1960s. The ultimate aim of the Oromo struggle is total political independence. For this, many forms of strategy and tactics have been used. In this struggle, a partial victory has already been won by the generation of the 1960s. The Oromo unity is achieve; Oromia is put on the map, Oromo are known to the world community, the Oromo flag is made a realty, Qubee has been created, the new Qubee generation is born, and Oromo language has become a working language. Now, it is for the Oromo Qubee generation to raise the struggle to higher level to achieve full victory. For this, it is time for this generation to engage in armed liberation struggle. This requires the mobilization and organization of the population. The armed struggle for liberation, confronts the challenge of the enemy. It is impossible to defeat the enemy with empty hands, by staging peaceful demonstrations, by witting letters to the UN and to the governments of foreign countries, and by words of mouth even though they are important.

The Qubee generation must clearly understand that TPLF is in a war of its own destruction. It is in chaos. It is about to fall to pieces. Everywhere there are fighting with it; everywhere it is hated; and so everywhere it is weak. Despite all these, some Oromo political groups have shamelessly preaching the gospel of rescuing it from its collapse and disintegration. The truth is to rescue this dying fascist regime is a betrayal of the Oromo national liberation struggle and of the Oromo people who have been its victims. These groups have been negotiating terms of surrender to establish “transitional government/Caretaker government” with the TPLF- a fascist regime that has been committing genocide against the Oromo and others peoples. The Oromo Democratic Front (ODF), the OFC, the Medrek and the Blue Party are in charge of the term of negotiation for surrender. It is time to expose and fight these opportunist reactionary dark forces until they unconditionally surrender to the will and aspiration of the Oromo people and to the will of the Oromo patriots and nationalists. This should be done not next month, not next week, not tomorrow—but now. At the same time, it is time to mercilessly expose and fight the poisonous propaganda of collaborationists the internal traitors whose aim is to undermine the Oromo unity and struggle. It is time to politically disarm these collaborationist forces. On the contrary, the energy and enthusiasm in the Oromo people’s heart is rising for liberation. The Qubee generation has risen up and has raised the Oromo flag so high. It is united in the purpose, in the mission, and in the objective of the struggle. It is generation with a fighting spirit; with firmness and the determination to continue the struggle that commenced with the Great Oromo Generation. It is also a generation that firmly resolved to defeat the enemies of the fatherland, the enemies of our people, the enemy of our unity and our struggle and the enemy of liberation of Oromia. Its voice of struggle is being echoing all over Oromia and beyond.

Now, it is time for Qubee generation to take the role of leadership of the struggle. It is time to organize, to rise up, stand up, to be armed and fight to defeat the primary enemy of Oromia and its people-the Tigrayan fascist regime in order to liberate Oromia. For this, the time has come to us with only two choices –whether to submit or fight. The decision is ours and only ours alone as to which one to choose. I believe, we shall not submit and we have no choice but to fight back by all available means in our power in defense of our people, our country, our future, and our freedom.

Hence, to bring a real change in the life of the people, it is time to cast away illusions of peaceful struggle or non-violence struggle to resolve the conflict with Tigrayan fascist regime. Non-violent struggle does not and cannot work when the enemy’s swords are at peoples’ hearts. TPLF never yield to anything but to open and secret violence alone. In this case, choosing to play a peaceful means of struggle with a fascist regime or fascist organization is only a choice between two ways of losing playing political game. One choice is to be sent to prison, or to exile or to the grave or to all of them. Ethiopia had seen this outcomes. In 1970s, MEISON and ECHA and many other organizations that advocated for a peaceful road to socialism under the rules of constitutional legality of dictatorial military regime. The dictatorial military regime saw their tactics as attempt to undermine it. Consequently, it turned against these organizations. As a result, many of their members were sent to prison; many had ended up in exile; many were killed. Again 1991, the OLF joined the TPLF in forming “Transitional Government of Ethiopia” to peacefully resolve the longstanding conflict in the Ethiopian empire. But, it had failed to achieve this goal because of the intransigence of the TPLF. The OLF had paid dearly for joining the TPLF. In this case, hundreds of thousands of its members and supporters were sent to prison; tens of thousands were tortured, killed; mutilated, maimed and thousands have ended up in exile.

In 2005, CUD had also met the same fate at the TPLF’s hands. Here too, many of its members were murdered, tortured and exiled.

The second choice is to become a puppet organization; a mouthpiece and servant of order. Here, the puppet organization is put as a political leadership of its people own charging it with sending its own people to prison, to exile or to the grave or to all of them on the behalf of its master. This is what the OPDO has been and is doing in Oromia on the behalf of the TPLF. The Ethiopia has been seeing this violent crime since 1991 to date. Failing to learn from history, today ODF, OFC, Medrek, Blue Party and unnamed others are secretly negotiating with the fascist TPLF to form “Transitional Government/Caretaker Government”. In George Santayana words, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. Hence, having failed to learn this truth the ODF, OFC and the others have followed the same path. The fact remains that negotiating to establish “Transitional Government/Caretaker Government” with the fascist Tigrayan regime that has been and still is committing genocide against peoples in Ethiopia is a supreme irony of history. This means to negotiate with a fascist colonial regime to establish “Transitional Government” with is, an irony of history. If history is any guide, this peaceful negotiation to establish “Transitional Government/Caretaker Government” with the fascist regime is truly the surest road that will lead to a future fire, sword, blood and tears for these organizations. It is, therefore, time to abandon negotiation with genocidist Tigrayan regime and opt to go for armed struggle to dismantle it. Without armed struggle nothing can bring the enemy to its knees. Armed struggle takes the war of liberation into every corner where the enemy is—to its homes, to its barracks, to its centers; it must be a total liberation war. It is necessary to deny this fascist Tigrayan regime from having a moment of peace, a moment of rest, a quiet moment both inside and outside its homes, barracks and camps and on streets. This enemy must be attacked wherever it may be, make it feel like a cornered beast wherever it may move or go. Once this happened, this fascist regime will be forced to turn itself into its own internal annihilation. Armed struggle remains the only viable option to do so. It is time to face this fascist Tigrayan criminal violence with revolutionary violence. Hence to resort to armed struggle is the way to go; it is inevitable. For this, our people must be mobilized, organized, armed and fight. In this national liberation struggle, the Oromo struggle is not only against colonial occupation but also against its Oromo allies and collaborators– the Oromo opportunists, revisionists, and capitulationists. It is only in such a total struggle the triumph of peace, freedom, liberty, justice, national political independence, national sovereignty and democracy can be achieved.

Oromia Shall be free!

By RENÉ LEFORT 9 September 2016

(Open Democracy) — There is every sign that Ethiopia is plunging into a crisis whose scale, intensity, and multiple and interdependent drivers are unprecedented since the founding of the regime in 1991.

The Ethiopian leadership remains in denial. The long meetings of its ruling bodies have culminated in a report on 15 years of national “rebirth”, in which it awards itself good marks, while acknowledging the existence of a few problems here and there.

Nonetheless, the odd warning signal may be heard – though very seldom – in counterpoint to the general complacency. Hailemariam Desalegn, prime minister and chairman of what is essentially the single party, has gone so far as to warn that the issues facing the regime are a matter of “life or death”,[1]and that Ethiopia is “sliding towards ethnic conflict similar to that in neighbouring countries”.[2]

Well, these neighbouring countries include Somalia, epitome of the ‘failed state’, and Sudan, which has split in two and where civil war is raging in the new Southern State. In this, unusually, he is in agreement with Merera Gudina, head of one of the main opposition parties still permitted to operate, whospeaks of the probability of “civil war […] if the government continues to repress”.[3] There is every sign that Ethiopia is plunging into a crisis whose scale, intensity, and multiple and interdependent drivers are unprecedented since the founding of the regime in 1991, although the impossibility of field research precludes any in-depth and conclusive assessment.

The first, very discreet signs of this crisis appeared in the spring of 2014 in a part of the country where they were probably least expected: in Tigray, where the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), pillar of the quadri-ethnic party ruling coalition – the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) – seemed both unopposed and unopposable.

Yet the Tigreans loudly and clearly accused “their” Front of neglecting them by only looking after its own interests or, as Hailemariam Desalegn expressed it, of using “public authority for personal gain at all levels”.[4]

The crisis erupted into the open a few weeks later in Oromya, with additional grievances. In the most populous of the nine states and two municipalities that make up federal Ethiopia, a state that is also the country’s economic powerhouse, students took to the streets to protest against the Addis Ababa Master Plan. Their suspicion was that this would inevitably lead to a transfer of sovereignty from the Oromo region to central government and be accompanied by “land grabbing”, the expulsion and dispossession of the local peasant farmers. Protests resumed in November 2015 and continue today at a larger scale that now includes the general population and almost the whole of Oromo State.

Turning up the heat

The heat was turned up a further notch in mid-July with the advent of protests in the historic heart of Amhara State. Together, Amhara and Oromo account for almost two-thirds of the country’s total population. The diversity of the ways of life that characterizes Oromo – farmers and pastoralists, of its religions – Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Protestant, animist, together with its very loose traditional structures, prompts Merera Gudina to emphasise “the chronic division between Oromo political forces”.[5] By contrast, the homogeneity of the Amhara population – in its vast majority small farmers and Christian Orthodox – fosters unity, while its mobilisation is favoured by its sense of hierarchy and discipline. Finally, the parallel protests by Oromo and Amhara, with largely shared reasons and objectives, breaks with their historical antagonism: the dispossession and subsequent exploitation of the Oromo by an Amhara – and Tigrean – elite from the late nineteenth century onwards, embedded their relations in a system that the Oromo have described as colonial.

The toughest demonstrations that the regime had faced followed the contested elections of 2005. They were essentially confined to Addis Ababa, with the young unemployed playing a major role. In all, they lasted only a few days, in two surges. They came in response to a call from established political forces for a very clear outcome – respect for the verdict of the ballot box. The regime reacted in unison with violent repression – killing almost 200 and arresting tens of thousands – immediately followed by a large-scale strategy of political reconquest through the expansion of the quasi-single party and a rallying of the elites. The protests very quickly died down, and the opposition forces collapsed.

This time, the protests affect the country’s two main states. Despite the repression – hundreds killed, thousands arrested – it has been going on for nine months, with varying degrees of intensity. The attempts at dissuasion through fear have not been enough[6] – at least for the moment – to demobilize the protesters, as evidenced by new forms of protest such as the recent “dead city” operations in the Amhara region[7] and the just launched boycott campaign in Oromya.

This time, a whole generation of young people is in the forefront of the protests – the 15-29 age group represents more than a quarter of the population – starting with, but not confined to, all those who have benefited from mass education, who have carried their elders with them. This time, their anger derives from widespread discontent, focusing on three areas.

First, they are fed up not just with the regime’s authoritarianism, but more so with the way it is exercised: supervision and control that are stifling, intrusive and infantilising, imposed everywhere, all the time, on everyone, by a Party that has swallowed up the State. The second focus is the implementation of a federalism that is in theory equitable, but in reality profoundly unbalanced. Tigray, representing 6% of the population, was the epicentre of the rebellion, which threw out Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military-socialist junta in 1991, the Derg. It was headed by the Tigrean student elite that founded the TPLF. This historical role justified its initial primacy.

Twenty-five years on, however, this elite remains vastly overrepresented at the apex of political power, the army, the security services. In addition, through public and para-public companies, it controls two thirds of the modern economy, excluding traditional agriculture.In the specific Ethiopian case… a tentacular and increasingly voracious and arrogant oligarchy… has ultimately filtered down to village level.

The third focus of discontent is the backlashes of the “developmental state”. This system centralises revenues at the summit of power, which supremely decides on its optimal use for development across the country. This strategy has been decisive in the exceptional economic growth of the last decade – probably around 6% to 7% per year – and in the expansion of education and health services alike. However, the centralisation it entails is evidently incompatible with authentic federalism. Moreover, in the specific Ethiopian case, the fact that the functions of political leadership, economic decision-making and the management of public and para-public enterprises are concentrated in the hands of the same people at the summit of the party-state, free of any control and political counterweight, has led to the creation of a tentacular and increasingly voracious and arrogant oligarchy, which has ultimately filtered down to village level.

These flaws have had a cumulative and mutually reinforcing impact. In Oromya in particular, the implementation of development projects dictated from above and often controlled by nonindigenous oligarchs, has frequently been marked by authoritarianism, spoliation and ethnic favouritism. In the case of “land grabbing”, there are multiple instances of land being brutally appropriated and embezzlement of the compensation owed to evicted farmers. The triggering factor for the protests in Amhara region was the authorities’ refusal to tackle the dispute arising from the incorporation into Tigray of the Wolkait region – a thin strip of land in the north that was part of the imperial province of Amhara – imposed after 1991 without public consultation of any kind, together with the transfer of western areas to Sudan, a process conducted in total secrecy.

“Thief!”

The demonstrators’ slogans and targets speak for themselves. They have attacked prisons to free the inmates. They have ransacked public properties, not just offices, vehicles, etc., but also health centres, unemployment offices and cooperatives, places they see as existing more to control the population than to perform their purported functions.They have ransacked public properties…  they see as existing more to control the population than to perform their purported functions.

They have gone after local party bosses and their possessions – the lowest layer of the oligarchy – targeting government representatives as much as the despoilers. They have burned businesses owned by national and foreign investors (farms, factories, hotels, etc.) because they symbolise an external stranglehold over Oromya and the Amhara region. “Oromya is not for sale” was one favourite slogan. In short, the demonstrators are targeting both the persons and property of those they see as having obtained position and/or wealth at their expense, through the patronage of the ruling power. “Thief!” is one of the most oft repeated slogans.

In Oromya, the conviction of having remained second-class citizens in a system dominated by a “northist” minority, and in the Amhara region of having become second-class and of feeling permanently “humiliated and marginalized”[8] because a part of the Amhara elite was dominant in the imperial era, is less and less tolerated. The assertion of ethnic identity and the demand for the full rights associated with it are at the heart of the demonstrations. “We want genuine self rule”, cry the Oromo, “We are Amhara”, declare the crowds in the historical capital Gondar, or in Bahir Dar, the new capital. However, these claims are also taking a very worrying turn. In Oromo, demonstrators have gone after Amhara and Tigreans, as well as their properties. Tigreans have been targeted in the Amhara region. However, distortions of every kind in the propaganda war make the reality difficult to grasp. In particular, were the rioters targeting arrivistes more than Tigreans, or vice versa? Anyway, Tigreans are even beginning to leave certain areas, notably in a “mass exodus” from Gondar.[9] Some go so far as to speak of “ethnic cleansing”.

There are pressing calls for these practices to cease, both on social media and from the legal opposition. But as Beyene Petros, one of its leaders, explains:“we’re just watching… people are coming out spontaneously… political parties are bypassed”.[10] By contrast with 2005, this popular protest is largely independent of the legal opposition, and even the illegal opposition groups, such as the Oromo Liberation Front, the oldest and most radical of the Oromo “nationalist movements”, and Ginbot 7, heir to one of the big opposition parties of 2005 and considered a pan-Ethiopian movement.There is no secret central command orchestrating events.

There is no secret central command orchestrating events, although there is no doubt that informal clandestine networks, with links to the diaspora, are contributing to basic coordination and the exchange of information. “These protests are at the level of an intifada”, claims Merera Gudina,[11] or rather at the level of what could be called an “Ethiopian Spring” reminiscent of the “Arab Springs”.

‘Arab plot’

In addressing this situation, the ruling power clings stubbornly to a binary, reductive and simplistic analysis. True, it quickly shelved the Master Plan, an entirely unprecedented turnaround. It also reaffirmed the self-critique that emerged from the congresses of summer 2015: beyond the immense benefits that it has brought – peace and development – its action has been marred by failures and deficiencies, notably with regard to corruption, bad governance, unaccountability and youth unemployment. The narrative is that these are the only failings that the “public” condemns, which makes them “legitimate”. It has undertaken to correct them and “to discuss with the people” in order to tackle them more effectively.

So the legitimacy of these “public” claims is accepted. But those who demand more are supposedly driven by a “destructive agenda” manipulated by “destructive”, “anti-peace”, “anti-development elements”, “bandits”, or even “evil forces” and “terrorist groups”, “extremist Diaspora members who have negotiated their country’s chaos for money”, which are puppets of “foreign actors” or “invaders”, starting with Eritrea. It is they who are “hijacking” peaceful demonstrations and turning them into illegal and violent protests. Websites close to the TPLF, among the few accessible in Ethiopia, are more explicit: according to them, the wave of protest is simply the outcome of an Arab plot, led by Egypt, in which Asmara, the OLF and Ginbot 7 are mere “foot soldiers”. Their real purpose? “To destabilise” Ethiopia, repeats the government, “the total disintegration of Ethiopia as a country”, according to these websites.[12]

To attribute the crisis to external, foreign conspiracy is unjustifiable. Eritrea, still in an on/off state of war with Ethiopia, and Egypt, deeply alarmed by the construction of a colossal dam on the Nile, would undoubtedly welcome a weakening of Ethiopia. It may even be that they are trying to fan the flames. But they do not have the means to light the fire and keep it burning. And the ruling power’s claim that they have been able to do so is itself an admission of weakness: for them to succeed, the regime must already have been resting on weak foundations.

This externalisation also exempts the government from having to consider the grievances at the heart of the protests, going far beyond a few personal failings and deficiencies in implementation. Externalisation is also used to justify repression as the only possible response: there can be no compromise with the enemies of the motherland. It would therefore be pointless to move beyond the use of force and engage in the political sphere, as it did in 2005. Above all, however, the government rejects this option because a political response to the protesters’ demands would require it to question its whole political structure and policy.

‘Intellocracy’

The TPLF is a child of the student movement of the end of Haile Selassie’s reign, radically Marxist and above all Leninist. From its creation, it adopted the movement’s analysis of Ethiopian society. The peasantry – still 80% of the population today – backward and illiterate, the working class tiny and in any case ‘trade-unionist’, the ‘national’ bourgeoisie equally small and anyway indecisive, assigned an irreplaceable role to “revolutionary intellectuals”, as Lenin defined them. They are the only ones able to develop the path that would bring Ethiopia progress and well-being, and therefore the only ones with the legitimacy to impose it on Ethiopians, willingly or by force if necessary.[13]

This conviction remains. Just a few years ago, Hailemariam Desalegn explained: “due to poor education and illiteracy, the Ethiopian public is too underdeveloped to make a well reasoned, informed decision”; so the “enlightened leaders” have “to lead the people”.[14] At the other extreme, every local official is convinced that his position places him within the circle of “enlightened leaders” and that he has the right and duty to assume all the authority associated with that role.

This messianic vision creates an unbridgeable divide between a handful of ‘knowers’, an ‘intellocracy’, which alone has the legitimacy and the capacity to exercise power, and all the others, the ‘ignorant’, in other words the people, reified and bound to obey in its own interests, whatever it may think. It justifies a totalising ascendancy in every sphere, exercised through an age-old hierarchy on which the Leninist formula “democratic centralism” confers a modern and revolutionary dimension. Or, in this particular case, “revolutionary elitism” or “elitist centralism”.[15] Of course, the outcome has been exactly the same: centralising excess and denial of democracy, culminating with the installation of a “strong man” at the apex of a pyramid of power. Meles Zenawi, the prime minister until his death in 2012, would become the acknowledged fulfiller of this role, drawing on immense rhetorical skills backed by an exceptional intelligence.

In this binary vision, the political spectrum is inevitably polarised at two extremes. The ruling power is the sole promoter of peace and development. Those who oppose or merely question it are assigned to the “anti-peace”, “anti-development”, “anti-federalist” camp, as “chauvinists” or “narrow nationalists”, threatening the Ethiopian state and the integrity of the country. Although masked in the early days of the TPLF by the collective operation of the leadership, this conception of ruling, monopolistic and exclusive to the point of extreme sectarianism, is in essence undemocratic. It legitimises the use of force whenever those in power deem it appropriate.

A new middle class

However, a growing section of the population is no longer prepared to be stifled, undervalued and marginalised. A new middle class has emerged, essentially in the public sector, in services and – largely unrecognised – in the countryside, where a rump of recently enriched farmers has emerged. 700,000 young people are in university, 500,000 have obtained degrees in the last five years.[16] In a country of close to 100 million inhabitants, the number of mobile phone customers has reached 46 million, internet users 13.6 million,[17] compared respectively with fewer than a million and 30,000 ten years ago. Satellite dishes have sprouted on the roofs wherever electricity is present, breaking the public television monopoly. It is estimated that 4 million Ethiopians live abroad, but still maintain close relations with their native country. Millions of Ethiopians are suddenly connected to the world. More globally, the demands society now places on the regime are commensurate with the upheavals brought about by the development it has driven. In this sense, the regime’s very successes have come back to bite it.

Ethnic faultlines are also imprinted in the regime’s DNA. From the mid-1980s onwards, the TPLF carried its combat against the Derg from the regional to the national level. At least within the country’s two major “nations”, Oromo and Amhara, it thus had to find ethnic political movements to join it. But rather than forming partnerships, which would have entailed power-sharing, it imposed its grip on them. That is the original sin of federalism ‘Ethiopian style’.

Rather than reaching agreement with the spearhead of anti-Derg struggle in Oromya, the OLF, it created the Oromo People’s Democratic Organisation (OPDO), drawn from among its Oromo or simply Oromifa-speaking prisoners. This structure would be confined to the rank of ‘junior partner’, even more than the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), the Amhara component of the EPRDF, although its initial nucleus had been an autonomous group. The new Oromo and Amhara elites that joined this structure did so more out of opportunism than by conviction, and in general at least without recognising their leaderships as legitimate representatives.

Federalism, which was supposed to achieve a harmonious balance in inter-ethnic relations, has in fact as practised led ultimately to their deterioration. It faced an insurmountable contradiction. On the one hand, it promoted new ethnic elites to political, administrative and economic functions; on the other, it continued to keep them subordinate, while sharpening ethnic identities. Large parts of these elites, and moreover large swathes of their nations, are no longer prepared to tolerate this.

Deepening faultlines

Ultimately, the exclusiveness and top-down approach are having a negative impact on the economy. In the first phase, the party’s control over the State and the modern sector encouraged the mobilisation and effective use of resources. At this time, the ‘developmental state’ proved its worth by delivering remarkable economic growth. It has to continue if the regime wishes to tout it as a pillar of its legitimacy.

However, this model is on the wane. The developmental state has gone off the rails, diverted by the oligarchical dynamic. The onus is on private investors, in particular foreign investors, to take over from public investment to drive structural transformation towards a globalised market economy. However, the governing power’s obsession with maintaining control is stifling those investors.

Finally, the party political discipline imposed on the technocracy smothers its professional capacities and its confidence. This is one of the primary sources of frustration. It also hampers the effective use of the resources essential for growth in an increasingly complex economy. Yet even at its current rate, that growth is unable to absorb the two to two and a half million young people entering the labour market each year, including new graduates, contributing to the anger that is now exploding in the streets.

In light of these contradictions, the fault lines are deepening. The discontent of the Tigreans has triggered the emergence of a ‘reforming’, pragmatic and politicised current inside the TPLF, which wants to rally them by making the Front work for them again. It advocates breaking with the “rule of force”, an immemorial feature of Ethiopian history.

It underlines that the only way to achieve long-term stability, beginning with peaceful changes of government, is through the step-by-step introduction of the “rule of law” by full and integral application of the constitution, notably the separation of powers, the exercise of fundamental liberties and an authentic federalism.[18] It would have to be “consociationalist”. The chief nations would be equally represented, with decisions taken by consensus, so each would possess an effective right of veto. The second “traditionalist” or “conservative” current rejects significant change and argues for continuity. Essentially, it takes the view that Ethiopia is not yet mature enough for democratic move, and still needs to kept under iron control. A website close to the TPLF argues:“the people are not ready yet in every aspect and meaning of the word (democracy). Any attempt to accelerate that process other than its natural course… can only lead to darker places”.[19]

Reflecting the intensity of this division, these websites are full of heated debate between those who show real understanding of the protests and those who utterly condemn them, between those arguing for immediate political openness and those calling first and foremost for the crushing of the unrest. However, they agree on one point: an unprecedentedly virulent condemnation of the leadership of the Front, which is deemed inept and incapable of handling the situation.

This political division has also reached the ranks of the ANDM and OPDO, but here the focus is on federalism.  The “ethno-nationalists” reject the asymmetries of the current federal system and are keen to assert their party’s autonomy from the TPLF. Their adversaries are considered too weak to fend for themselves and vitally in need of the TPLF’s support. So, the OPDO base has literally disintegrated. At its summit, there is overt opposition between Abadula Gemeda, who expresses understanding for the claims of protesters and is the only leader who enjoys real popularity, and Muktar Kedir, who is perceived as an insubstantial apparatchik imposed by the TPLF. The same applies to the problematic destiny of Gedu Andergatchew, President of the Amhara region, number two in the ANDM and the Movement’s real heavyweight in terms of popularity, and the official number one, Demeke Mekonnen, a much criticised figure who is nevertheless supported by the TPLF.

This ethnicisation of the political landscape is also apparent in the deterioration of relations between TPLF, ANDM and OPDO. Discussions with their rank and file members and a reading of their websites give an insight into their mutual mistrust.

In the TPLF, there is an iron belief that the “rotten chauvinists” and “revanchist”Amhara, controlled remotely by Ginbot 7, have “hijacked” the ANDM, are intent of restoring their former hegemony by “overtaking the position of TPLF in the Ethiopian politics” and are even once again forcing Tigreans “to defend our existence from extinction”.[20]

In the ANDM, there is a conviction that the TPLF wants to continue to make Amhara pay for the former dominance of some of their elite, to marginalize them and to dispossess them of ancestral lands.[21] For the ordinary OPDO party official, nothing has changed since the nineteenth century conquests: exploitation, oppression, marginalisation, or even quite baldly “genocide”. Hackneyed as it clearly is, the word is widely used, symptomatic of a paranoia that casts doubt on what remains of the unity at least at the base of the EPRDF.

These fractures were born since the initial formation of the ruling power. Meles Zenawi widened them, but succeeded in masking them by maintaining an iron grip over the tensions that they engendered. The present wave of protests has exacerbated them.  They are splitting, not to say cracking, the party, from its summit to its 7 million member base, which is torn between loyalty and discipline, the material advantages of membership, and the ever-growing swell of popular aspirations within it.

In Oromya, part of the OPDO pushed behind the scenes for overt opposition to the Master Plan. The regional police were unable to cope or adopt a prudent ‘wait and see’ strategy. Today, they are virtually out of the game, and the federal police and army have had to intervene. The OPDO has essentially been relieved of the government of Oromya, which is under military administration via a “Command Post” based in Addis Ababa and headed by Hailemariam Dessalegn.[22] In the Amhara region, at least the big initial demonstrations were held with the support or tacit approval of part of the ANDM, although officially forbidden. Out of their depth, the Amhara State authorities had to request army intervention. The region has been placed under military command.[23]

The growing number of leaks of documents and recordings of discussions at the highest level of government and the State-Party are testament to the fact that frontline leaders now have one foot in the government camp and one in the protesters’ camp. Villages and entire local areas are taking advantage of the dilution or even disappearance of public authority to set up embryonic forms of self-government. In places, the State-Party’s local structures have placed their organisations at the service of the protesters. Armed men, who can only be village militiamen in principle strictly under local government control, have fired in the air alongside demonstrators. They are necessarily involved in fatal ambushes on soldiers and attacks on military depots. Desertions and overt acts of insubordination are taking place.

Losing authority

By contrast with 2005, when neither the federal nor regional governments lost control, today – at least at certain times and in certain places – they have lost authority over their own agents and even their monopoly on the use of force. Hailemariam Desalegn had to concede: “chaos” has broken out “in parts of Oromia and Amhara states”..[24] There has been a shift from demonstrations to riots, and then from riots to pockets of insurrection. Militiamen and farmers hold hundreds of thousands of weapons. The transition from unrest towards a scattered armed peasant revolt (a “jacquerie”), is a possibility.

The crisis is not only about a change of government, or even regime change. It is systemic, because it is rooted in the form in which contemporary power has been exercised since its bases were laid down in the middle of the nineteenth century. This has been theocratic, authoritarian, centralised, hierarchical, ethnically biased, monopolising the country’s resources.

“Intellocracy” has replaced theocratic feudalism, but other main traits have been more or less transposed in an updated form. The ruling power faces more or less the same demands as those it addressed to Haile Selassie’s regime forty years ago: rule of law; fair use of assets, beginning with land (“land to the tiller”, went the slogan; denunciation of “land grabbing’” now); the “national question”, in other words a balanced relationship between Ethiopia’s 80 “nations, nationalities and peoples”; and, at the crossroads of the land issue and the “national question”, the border conflicts between the states.“They want to rule in the old way, and people are refusing to be ruled in the old way”

“They want to rule in the old way, and people are refusing to be ruled in the old way”, is Merera Gudina’s concise summing up.[25] What the protesters – and indeed the “reformists” – are demanding is huge: the shift from an imposed, exclusive and closed system, to an accepted, inclusive and open system. This would require a total reconstruction, an outcome that the successors of Haile Selassie, then of Mengistu, failed to bring about.

For the moment at least, this goal is well beyond the EPRDF’s capacities. Firstly, it is paralysed by its divisions. These range from personal conflicts to business rivalries, from old ethnic tensions to new political disagreements. Secondly, the Front would risk disintegration if the “reformists” tried to force through their views. Whatever side they are on, its leaders know that a split would be fatal to everyone. They are obliged to maintain unity, with the result that they seem for now condemned to immobility.

Opening up

The majority of the Front perceives opening up as a leap in the dark and a fatal threat to its positions and its interests.

Opening up to the opponents of the Front would have to go hand-in-hand with an internal opening up. It would inevitably threaten numerous unfairly acquired positions.

Until now, the rule of winner-takes-all has reigned. In the general perception, or at least ‘Abyssinian’ perception, authority is either absolute or moribund: if it accepts concessions, it implicitly acknowledges that its end is imminent. To open up would therefore trigger a sharing of power, which could culminate in total loss of power.

Opening up would also mean a historic shift. For centuries, power has been “northern”, Abyssinian. A fair representation of the different ethnic components is inconceivable without the Oromo, the largest ethnicity, playing a central role, a role moreover that they are demanding.

That would be an even more hazardous leap for the TPLF, abandoning its domination and betting that a genuinely democratic federalism would emerge. In other words, that nations or a coalition of nations much more populous than the Tigreans would not impose majority rule, threatening the preservation of what for the Front is non- negotiable: Tigreans remaining in charge of Tigray.Finally, power and enrichment go together.

Finally, power and enrichment go together. From the summit of the state-party to its most modest ranks, official positions and oligarchical rents are mutually reinforcing. This material dimension is an overwhelming reason to preserve the status quo. In particular, the vast majority of the Front’s members think that it is right that their commitment and obedience should be rewarded with direct or indirect favours.

To open up, but to whom, in what domain, and to what point? Everyone agrees that the protest movement has neither a recognised leadership nor a clear programme, which is its major weakness. Would it consider itself authentically represented by the legal opposition, enfeebled through repression and its own divisions, or by the more radical illegal opposition, whose real representativeness is impossible to assess? Would these very diverse forces agree on a sort of shared programme of demands?

Up to now they have always stumbled over two crucial points: whether to maintain public ownership of land – far and away the primary asset – or to privatise it; and whether to accentuate or to temper federalism. For the moment, the voices making themselves heard cover a very wide spectrum of demands, from the launch of a national dialogue through to the total and immediate overthrow of the EPRDF. And history tells us that in such circumstances the extremists quickly prevail over the moderates.But the word compromise has no direct translation in Amharic…

Yet short of plunging the country into chaos, there exists no credible alternative to the existing authority, except in the long term. Supposing the EPRDF were to decide “to rule in a new way”, it would only do so on condition that it remained in control of a very gradual and therefore very long process of change. Which of its adversaries would accept this? On one side or the other, all-or-nothing politics have so far been the rule. But an inclusive and open system cannot be created unless all the stakeholders, without exception, are ready for compromise, in other words ready to make reciprocal concessions in order to reach an agreement. But the word compromise has no direct translation in Amharic…

Worst case scenario

So every scenario remains possible, including the worst-case. The regime may decide to continue on the same trajectory, relying on repression and the acceleration of its recovery plan for the state-party. It could be that the machinery of repression will stifle the protest movement. This machinery is extensive and experienced. It is even possible that the army could decide to take matters into its own hands, if it thought that the political leadership was failing. Its effective head, Samora Yunus, has always said that “the army is always vigilant to safeguard the constitutional order”.[26]

But will it be able to, especially if protest intensifies, and in particular if it takes root in the rural areas? From a leaked record of a meeting of army chiefs, it seems that some are uncertain about the physical capacity of the troops to hold firm on multiple fronts, and above all about the risks of insubordination, or even mutiny, resulting from the ethnic divisions in their ranks.[27]“Killing is not an answer to our grievances”

Even supposing that simple repression works, the probability is high that it would only offer the regime a period of respite before, sooner or later, a new – even more devastating – surge of unrest. To prevent this, it has just decided to put on the table the question of Wolkait and the relations between Addis Ababa and the Oromo lands around it, and above all to “sack and reshuffle party and government officials including Ministers” in the coming month, all through wide-ranging discussions “with the people”.[28]

But even the legal opposition judges these reforms to be “cosmetic”.[29] Up to now, these discussions have always consisted in a massive process of self-justification, with no genuine consultation of the people, which is unable – or does not dare – to make itself heard. Moreover, this promise is an old chestnut. The struggle against the dark triad of corruption, bad governance and unaccountability, on the agenda since the early 2000s, has had no impact. The campaign to “purify” the state-party of its black sheep, launched with much fanfare in the autumn of 2015, has been a damp squib. It touched only minor officials, while none of the senior figures – some are notorious for their corrupt practices – was affected, leading the population to conclude that the campaign was nothing but a smokescreen.

This triad of failings extends from top to bottom of the EPRDF. It is hard to see how the Party could put an end to them in response to what it sees as the main demand emanating from the people, without putting itself at high risk.

“Killing is not an answer to our grievances”, cry the demonstrators. For the moment, however, no other genuine answers are to be heard or seen, unless basic common sense, not to mention democratic aspirations, were to prevail in the ruling power.

[1] Walta, August 30, 2015
[2] BBC, August 3, 2016
[3] Thomson Reuters Foundation, August 11, 2016
[4] Ethiopian Herald, September 2, 2016
[5] OPride, August 3, 2016
[6] AFP, August 15, 2016, Le Monde, 15 août 2016, New York Times, June 16, 2016,
[7] Daniel Berhane, August 17, 2016
[8] ECADF, September 2016
[9] Daniel Berhane, August 13, 2016
[10] AFP, August 17, 2016, http://www.ethiomedia.com/1016notes/6057.html
[11] Washington Post, August 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/a-year-after-obamas-visit-ethiopia-is-in-turmoil/2016/08/09/d7390290-5e39-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html
[12] See, for example, Walta, August 31 2016, The Ethiopian Herald, August 20, 2016; Tigray On Line, August 13, 2016; Walta, August 11, 2016.
[13] See for example Messay Kebede, From Marxism-Leninism to Ethnicity: the Sideslips of Ethiopian Elitism, University of Dayton, 2001.
[14] Cable from the US Embassy in Ethiopia, April 28, 2008
[15] Gebru Tareke, The Ethiopian Revolution. War in The Horn of Africa, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 89.
[16] Ministry of Education, Education National Abstract 2013-2014, Addis Abeba, June 2015.
[17] Walta, July 13, 2016
[18] The most notorious expression of this position has just been provided by General Tsadkan, a military hero of the TPLF and then of the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, since excluded from the Front but still profoundly respected within it.
[19] Aiga Forum, August 25, 2016
[20] See also Aiga Forum, August 7, 2016
[21] Messay Kebede, a well know intellectual, underlines “the TPLF’s systematic policy of humiliating and marginalizing” the Amhara, which led to “the psychological frustration of humiliation at being both degraded and demeaned”; Ethiopian Review, September 2, 2016
[22] Addis Standard, June 25, 2016
[23] Addis Standard, September 1, 2016
[24] Walta, August 13, 2016
[25] Washington Post, August 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/a-year-after-obamas-visit-ethiopia-is-in-turmoil/2016/08/09/d7390290-5e39-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html
[26] The Ethiopian Herald, September 3, 2016
[27] ESAT Daily News Amsterdam, August 12, 2016
[28] Daniel Berhane, September 1, 2016
[29] Ethiomedia Forum, August 31, 2016

About the Author

René Lefort has been writing about sub-saharan Africa since the 1970s and has reported on the region for Le Monde, Le Monde diplomatique, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur.  He is the author of“Ethiopia. An heretical revolution?” (1982, Zed books).

By Geda Moti (PhD)

I read interview article of Prof Mesfin W/M (http://www.mereja.com/amharic/512100) and article by Girma Kassa (http://www.ethiomedia.com/1016notes/7405.html) with concern of its implication on forth coming solidarity imperatives. Obviously, the ideas reflected on Amhara identity in both articles are often floating around recent publications related to the unrest in Ethiopia. I understand the right one can have to state its own identity and history as long as it may hold water without negatively impacting on others. However, at its height of claiming solidarity among stakeholders, the tendency to define the identity of Amhara as if it was not in place and is evolving consequent to TPLF’s oppressive policy raise my concern. Meanwhile, I decided to briefly state my worry in an attempt to expect plausible assertions from Amhara elites particularly who are experts in the area. Also for my appeal in case it worth remedial action

Needless to mention that persistency of Prof. Mesfin’s long standing tactic in this area (details: ) and apparently recent involvement of Girma Kassa’s calculated self-identification as composite of different blood lines and yet differing practical self assertion made me cautious even more than ever. If I think the mysterious move around true self expression is embedded in the fear of what the bad part of history of Ethiopian empire might pose on us and is aimed to save Ethiopia from disintegration by any possible means, let me ask very easy layman’s question. Who will prohibit us starting afresh unity from zero years of common history or who will dictate any one of us to deny the so called 3000 years of Ethiopia’s existence? As for me, the reply is in: as to how we understand our common past and try to shape forthcoming our common future.

Contrary to the tactical assertions that Amhara identity evolved consequent to TPLF’s oppression for short term gain, I feel the issue remained one of the most critical factors so long constrained Ethiopia from being motherland for all citizens contained in the boundary. It must be dealt candid. I believe, if the fact is not defined based on the reality on ground, it simply keep us refreshing forgone unproductive history we have had in common. Also, it is key underlying factor of forthcoming imperative part of presumed political solution. At this point of our common history, it is not the collapse of the TPLF regime appears worrisome to me but as to how we cooperate to find our optimized future.

By extension of tactical self-hide and manifest approach, promoters of hidden motto are usually seen attributing irrelevant concepts to other nations such as Oromo. The irony is that concepts insisted by persons not immediate member of the Oromo nation seem not to work for any nation including that of the promoter’s. Therefore, I am asking if the current effort to attach Amhara identity as recent resurgence in connection to the TPLF’s policy shouldn’t remind me the anachronism of our common history instead of looking forward for better common future as Ethiopian nations and nationalities.

Not only in a civilized politics but also a civilized person understands the right of other person, nation, or nationality, etc to decide on its own/common better future. For instance, if I tell someone to call me Dr. or Professor X, it is mandatory legally and tacit morally for that person to call me as per my specification. The right a person in question might have is to ask me to prove to him/her my claim to be a doctor. Otherwise he/she has no right to reject my initial as long as he/she is interested to call me and remain in harmony with me. The analogy of this ordinary typology is focusing on the fact that substantial number of members of Amhara nation were on long historically failed journey underestimating the interest of Oromo to be called as Oromo nation. To continue to relegate such quest might lead to fatal failure. I wish such interest shouldn’t fall on deaf ears!

To bring readers on board, one of the case in point is that,Oromo never called itself as clan (what they used to say as gosa) nor defined its cause at ethnic level (may be equivalent to their current nomenclature- zewuge). In spite of desperate interest for unity or popping for pseudo collaboration without practical affirmative contribution, it should be better to recognize one another/s interest and thus it would yield to desirable and acceptable solution.

In line with this, let me raise currently ongoing misleading political move around some Ethio-prefixed political fronts. Iunderstand the motto behind the recent re-classification of Oromo as moderate, fanatic or other was not keen approach. Consequently the reason for loss of interest of such Ethio-prefixed political fronts to negotiate with OLF in order to reassert long lasting and fair co-existence which might also redeem Ethiopia is embedded in this key topic: related to true self identification. What do you think such rude Oromo classification may mean even to politically layman people? Is the move toward long lasting true collaboration for common benefit or for tactical approach of short term gain, if any? Actually, it is hardly possible to expect keen and strategic collaboration with elites of people who don’t want to speak our language even after several decades of residence or born in Oromia. So, misleading query for unity only adds to worsen the fragile matter.

Therefore, the intention of boldly re-stating some of the existing facts and my piece of advice not only for those elites who wish to reclaim their lost kingship (conqueror line of Judah) but also for the current tyranny in the Ethiopian empire, is to come down and swallow the bitter truth of Oromo’s indispensable fundamental rights to its country Oromia and solicit Oromo’s political organization promoting this scenario: the OLF! I hope whosoever rejects OLF as a fundamental Oromo organization established by Oromo heroes for the very cause of Oromo is parallel to the long lasting all inclusive political solution for the empire and by default is regressing on the triangular tactical re-arrangement.

It must be always crystal clear to all friends and enemies of Oromo nation that a failure, for whatsoever  reason, to accommodate the ultimate goal of OLF is betrayal of Oromo nation’s interest and devalue the ongoing sacrifices of Oromo heroes and heroines since the period of about a century and half. Equally, the tendency to reject or underestimate Oromo martyrdom or an attempt to consider the common past history under Ethiopian empire as holly act is tramping over the blood of Oromo thus far shade to achieve the goal of equality and freedom and semblance of false collaboration. Oromo say no to short term gain and long term loss of political supremacy!

Finally, sticking to my topic title, anyone nation or individual who need to be in better common future with Oromo and is interested to facilitate justice should call us Oromo nation (never downplay the rights we have even in the TPLF’s constitution), never deny our true common history since the establishment of Ethiopian empire in the last 19th century, never accuse independent Oromo forces of guilt we never commit such the one recurring as Bedeno massacre. Never forget that we (individual Oromo, independent Oromo forces and the Oromo nation) are people full of mercy and people struggling against tyranny system (not individual person or household).

If you want to commensurate with such just cause, Amhara elites can unanimously tell us who exactly you are in terms of nation, present your exact subjects for collaboration, help your people aware of forthcoming imperative scenario and advice your parents and relatives in Oromia not to hate Afaan Oromo or be obstacle to its re-emergence (instead that they should learn) and remind them that we are endowed with culture that defines Oromoness by birth, by choice and by adoption. In doing so play win-win strategy but not opt for selfish tactic!

By Dr. Baro Keno Deressa

Dr. Baro Keno Deressa

The Oromo people are managed to unite under their vanguard organization OLF to fight for the same purpose (eradicating colonization). The formation of unity under one organization and the bravery act of Oromo people brought changes in Ethiopian empire. The Patriotic act and the clear message of qube generation guided by qeerroo leadership from Oromia get a good response from all nations of Ethiopian Empire (Amharas, Gurages, Afars, Ogaden, sidama, Benishangul, Gambellans, innocent Tigreans ….etc).

Many Oromo nationalists criticize the colonial system of Ethiopian Empire. The core value of Ethiopian empire was not build on the will and equality of all nations. Nations are a product of the human will and imagination and the institutions that sustain their collective efforts. The key values of federalism, democracy, and inclusive government have not been sufficiently consolidated as core values for their nations. Full or real freedom, they believe, will come with freedom of all. Eradicating all forms of colonial system of domination is crucial (political, economic, social, military) in order to accomplish freedom of all nations.

In Ethiopian empire minorities who have nothing to do with the majority populations have noticed that they can take hold of the minds of entire populations, magnify their own voices, and silence the usual destiny which majorities usually are allotted in their own nations. Now, mere minorities of one-half percent of the population can exert total mind control by monopolization of the larger nation’s media holdings.

All nations in the Ethiopian empire are igniting their struggle for freedom and justice. The chronical mass protests throughout the largest and most populous Oromia Regional State and the recent Amhara Regional State mass protests are the sign of collective demand for real change.

Our innocent people in Ethiopian empire are crying for real changes in order to overcome this time of instability and insecurity. As change considered being inevitable in Ethiopian empire so do resistance. There are two forces resistant to real change:

1. The Ethiopian colonial system policy makers
2. The disoriented so called Oromo political analysts and professionals (servant of the colonial system)

In answering this question, please permit me to describe bleeding and thrombosis:

Bleeding disorder:  Coagulopathy (also called a bleeding disorder) is a condition in which the blood’s ability to coagulate (form clots) is impaired. This condition can cause a tendency toward prolonged or excessive bleeding (bleeding diathesis or bleeding disorder), which may occur spontaneously or following an injury or medical and dental procedures.

Thrombosis is the process of a blood clot, also known as a thrombus, forming in a blood vessel. This clot can block or obstruct blood flow in the affected area, as well as cause serious complications if the clot moves to a crucial part of the circulatory system, such as the brain or the lungs.

Factors that contribute to increased risks of both bleeding and thrombosis include altered blood flow, diminished numbers and function of platelets, and inflammatory alterations in endothelial cells. Management may be particularly challenging in individuals who require invasive procedures or anticoagulant therapy. If the bleeding is not treated well the patient will die because of hemorrhagic/hypovolemic shock, if the thrombosis is not treated well the patient will die because of thromboembolic complications. In such kind of complicated situation the tasks and responsibility of medical doctor is to keep the patient health intact and find solution for deadly combination of disorders.

Ethiopia is a country with multifaceted and complicated political, economic and social problems. The question of oppressed nations like Oromo are fighting for freedom! Freedom! Freedom and identity struggle. The answer from the colonialist empire is mechanical repair forming fake organization like OPDO and cultivating traumatized intellectuals from all oppressed nations. So, for more than a century the colonialist leaders are giving the wrong answers for the wright questions. Our struggle is to end this inappropriate communication and liberate our nations from century long colonization.

In order to motivate my argument let us look at the act of resistance forces to the real changes:

1. The Ethiopian colonial system policy makers (resistance forces of real change)

Whenever change is introduced it triggers emotional reactions of the peoples because of the uncertainty.  Fear of unknown to the implementers. This creates fear and anxiety to the peoples who have gain confidence to the systems, structures, and relationship. Any disruption of familiar patterns may cause fear and resistance. Let us look their point:

• Mother Ethiopia:
  Dear brothers and sisters, Ethiopian empire is not a real mothers for Oromo, Ogaden, sidama, gambella, benishangul, innocent Amhara, innocent Tigre …..etc peoples. The Ethiopian empire leaders killed and still killing millions of people from Oromo and other oppressed nations, imprisoned illegally innocent peoples because of their belongingness, tortured and evicted from their land. Mother have to protect her children from harm and assisting her children to build good future. But the system in Ethiopia empire is contrary to the principle of motherhood. So, it is impossible for Oromo of other Oppressed nations to call her mother!! So, dear opportunistic elite stop this illogical theory and embrace the real change.
• Ethiopia have a 3000 year proud history:
  I will respect your right to magnify your own history, but we Oromo people are talking about colonization of 130years which destroys our democratic ruling system (Gadaa), destroys our identity, stole our freedom and brought total destruction to our people and our country Oromia. So keep your history as you like and respect our struggle for freedom.
• We are one people:
  Yes, we all are human being, our people are lived together for a centuries, married each other, studied together and respect each other. For century long there is no Ethiopian colonial rule survive without the patriotic act of Oromo sons and daughters.  But our price was humiliation and death  “when it comes to power and money Oromo’s are the last to touch the desk and when it comes to the human-right and equality Oromo’s are the first to be victim of the system”. So, we are one as human-being but we were/are different under the system of colonial rule. Now, when we say it is enough and it is time to build our country Oromia and regain our right as human being, individuals or groups with colonial system and mind have to setback and respect the demand of our people and oppressed nations.
• Champion of Africa and model of global world (New TPLF formula)
  In the 21^st century when the robot is acting like human being, the Ethiopian colonial leaders are still thinking like primitive time. How can be the government be champion or model for others while killing, torturing, imprisoning without any criminal charge and harassing his own people on the daily basis. All those lies reflects that the system was not build on the basic principle of human value. The Ethiopian empire leaders are investing in building walls instead of bridges, investing in weapons instead of Books, investing in corruption instead of Morality, investing in ignorance instead of Intellectualism and wisdom, investing in fear and terror instead of stability. Investing in chaos instead of Peace, investing in hate instead of  Love, investing in segregation instead of Convergence, investing in discrimination instead of tolerance. Investing in hypocrisy instead of fairness. Investing in superficiality instead of Substance, investing in immaturity instead of Character. investing in secrecy instead of Transparency, investing in lawlessness instead of Justice, investing in lies instead of Truth. The so called leaders instead of bluffing with the name of champion and model on the world stage take time to assess your intellectuals capacity humanity and legality of your action.

2. The disoriented so called Oromo political analysts and professionals (resistance forces of real changes)

Since the time of colonization the Oromo people and oppressed nations are experienced political marginalization, unnecessary death and torture because of their belongingness, eviction from their ancestral land and deprivation of freedom. When the people’s struggle reach the maximum level in order to eradicate the colonial rule the opportunistic individuals or servant (not policy makers) of the colonial system start to magnify their masters policy. Let us look their point:

• We have to be broad minded and tolerant.
  Come on my professional analyst, Oromo people are colonized for more than centuries by narrow minded, uneducated and analphabet junta elites. In addition we Oromo people are nation of peace, nation of love and tolerance, nation of democratic rule, nation of justice and equality. When Amhara and Tigre people come to our country to collect coffee, to work in agriculture, to clean house and shoes we loved them as our family, we guide them in order to success in their life, we never discriminate them because of their belongingness and social class. Again when the colonial rule change the individual name in order to humiliate our identity and change the name of our cities to feed destructive colonial system we tolerate them. So dear professional what are you talking about broad minded and tolerant? Or still you are in deep coma! or your traumatic experience of serving the colonizers is metastasis you! or you are working for your personal luxury while millions of hero’s are fighting for justice!!!! 
• OLF have to change his stand:
  First of all who are you to talk about OLF or giving order to change his stand? did you feel the pain of Oromo people or are you Oromo only by name? did you test one day let alone one month the bitterness of the freedom struggle? By the way the stand of OLF is the life of Oromo people and the light of freedom for all oppressed nations.According to the western: The “Oromo problem” continues to trouble Ethiopia. Although the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, never in their history have they maintained political power. During the period of European colonialism in Africa, the Ethiopian highlanders undertook an intra-African colonial enterprise. Many ethnic groups in the present state of Ethiopia, such as the Oromo, were subjected to that colonialization. Conquered ethnic groups were expected to adopt the identity of the dominant Amhara-Tigrean ethnic groups (the national culture). It was illegal to publish, teach, or broadcast in any Oromo language until the early 1970s, Even today, after an ethnic federalist government has been established, the Oromo lack appropriate political representation.

  The TPLF government invested millions of dollars to destroy OLF, build many puppet organization like OPDO and diaspora Oromo traitors, cultivated many disoriented Oromo intellectuals. At the end the TPLF government with all his almighty power failed to reach his goal. Now the OLF is reignite the struggle for freedom.

  So, while the foreigners acknowledge the marginalization and inhuman atrocities against Oromo people and other oppressed nations and the peoples are showing their patriotic action on the daily basis in order to eliminate this act of terror, but you are blaming OLF for inability of compromise and obliviousness of your masters. Be rational before opening your mouth to satisfy your stomach and bosses.

  Additionally you are promoting your masters policy of colonial rule but you are demonizing our struggle for freedom, that is not fair. As I see your initial on the TV, most of you are (Dr.) by the way classical knowledge is not the same as field action. You were educated to serve your colonial masters in the kitchen and our qeerroo and WBO are fighting on the field to eliminate the brutal system. So let me give you my experience. When I was at medical school, I was taught evidence based systematical and structural approach of problems (diseases). But when I came to the field (hospital) because of the urgency matter approaching the problems is totally different. In urgency situation the priority is saving the patient life and later on back to the systematical and structural approach.

  At this moment my people priority is liberating Oromo and Oromia by eliminating  colonial system. So, dear brother reading your school book is at this moment inconvenient and try to translate your knowledge in the field action in order to help your peoples struggle.

• Unity and democracy
  We Oromo people are the fore front champion of unity and the founder of modern democracy. My question is here for you, why are you divert our real and justified question of Oromo people to be master of their destination by confusing with homework of you masters (reinstalling old system with cheating and deceiving).Successive Ethiopian governments by the name of unity and democracy have attempted to completely eradicate the existence and the identity of the Oromo people and other southern nations and nationalities. Particularly indigenous Oromo’s living in the surroundings of Finfinne has suffered the most and was made landless consequently forced to become beggars. Where are the habitants of Oromo clans of Gulale, Eekka, Galan, Abbichu? For you doesn’t matter because you are taught and raised to serve your masters.

  The Ethiopian Constitution also acknowledges the ‘special interest’ of Oromia regional state under Art 49(5) because Finfinne is an Oromo land. However, almost three decades after the Constitution was adopted, there is not even a single public school that provides education in Oromo language let alone enabling the Oromo people to partake in the administration of the city. But you are teachings us to accept all those injustices and humiliation as a normal. When you come to the television for analysis beside your classical knowledge please could you tell us also your contribution to the Oromo people’s struggle against colonization and injustices? I think you are not dare to talk about that because you grow up by serving your masters policy of destruction and traumatized by their lies which frightened you to touch the truth.

  Summary of the resistance forces to real change: Both of you are destructive forces failed to safe your patient, instead of healing the bleeding nations, you are suffocating the innocent peoples across the nations in Ethiopian empire by magnifying your lies (thrombosis). My advice for both of you, accept the reality instead of denying the truth and ignoring the facts. In addition ask yourself also the grade of your morality.

  That will be the beginning of the hope and the end of destructive –colonial system. In addition in order to be rational and effective in solving complicated problems it is better to look carefully the vision of OLF. The only and effective way of bringing stability in Ethiopian empire and horn of Africa is finding the right answer to the justified question of Oromo people and other oppressed nations.

Conclusion:

Oromo people are committed to end the sufferings of his people and all oppressed nations by eradicating colonial system. Then after, Oromo people need to build in his own country Oromia a truly independent judicial system; a system that is not controlled, operated or influenced by the ruling party. Our judicial system should treat the governors and the governed equally – because every person is equal before the law. We need to build a responsible government in order to provide education, housing, job opportunities, health services; a fair and equitable infrastructure for all people instead of only for a very few privileged groups. We need in our country  Oromia where laws are enacted to protect and defend the public welfare, instead of laws that protect the interests of small groups of elites.

To achieve all those goals the qube generations of the Oromo sons and daughters with engineer feeling are on the field, the outstanding qeerroo leadership is going well, the desire and commitment of our people to eradicate the colonial system is encouraging, the “WBO” determination and sacrifices are stronger and solid, vision and guidance of the Oromo people vanguard organization OLF is permanent present. My people all the factors for our victory is on the table, so don’t confuse yourself with the defenders of colonial system propaganda and delusional disoriented Oromo political analyst. It is time to redouble our efforts in order to faster our victory.

Victory to the Oromo people!

Dr. B. K. DERESSA, Medical degree in internal medicine, specialized in Gastro-Hepatology diseases. University Hospital of Brussels-Belgium

Etana Habte, Special to Addis Standard

Protests in Ethiopia, Reuters

(Addis Standard) — In the first part of this series, I explored in historic perspectives (particularly with developments in Oromia regional state) the Ethiopian government’s road to becoming a counter-protest state and the systematic ways in which the regime further bolstered its role as a counter-protest state. And in the second part I discussed about the surge of popular protests in Ethiopia focusing on the socio-political and party architecture in which the ongoing Oromo protests first took shape. In this third, and last, part I will take a close look at the decades-old simmering tensions between the Oromo nation and successive Ethiopian states, discovering what they reveal about the contemporary politics of the Ethiopian counter-protest state  vis a vis its relations with the Oromo protests, which, by several measures, have reached a point of no return.

Decades of simmering tensions

Continuous confrontations and tensions between Oromo protesters and the ruling party manifested in Oromia-wide Oromo protests may not be understood fully unless we look back its history. In order to contextualize the on-going Oromo protests, we must consider decades of relationships between the two confronting parties – the Ethiopian state and the Oromo nation – discovering what they reveal to us about the politics of the Ethiopian counter-protest state, and what they suggest about the future prospects of Ethiopia’s political trajectory.

It is indisputable that this massive movement in Oromia is not simply a political phenomenon whose root is limited to the period between 2006-2015; it goes as far back as the 1960s when modern Oromo political activism was born, and even goes as far back as the formation of the Ethiopian state itself.

Yearning since the 1960s for three overarching questions – language, land, and self-rule – Oromo nationalism has been growing more than ever since the introduction in Ethiopia of the multi-national federalism in the early 1990s. While the Oromo question for land has two parts: the homestead (qee’ee) and the Oromo country (biyya-Oromoo), the issue of language became the foundation of identity question. The third, the Oromo question for self-rule in the course of their national struggle, seemed to have been conceived as an ultimate solution capable of addressing the other two.

These three overarching Oromo questions were aired in the 1960s by the Oromo members of the Ethiopian student movement and the Maccaa-Tuulama Self-help Association, and were later on articulated in the early 1970s in the political program of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). These questions have been dealt with piecemeal in the revolutions of 1974 and 1991. The 1974 revolution succeeded in the promulgation and implementation of a proclamation answering the country’s pressing demand, which was coined through the famous slogan of the student movement – “land to the tiller”; it was able to return plots/homestead to individual peasant households. With the Oromo in view, the 1974 revolution answered the question of qee’ee (homestead) but it had never attempted to deal with the Oromo question of yearning for biyya-Oromoo (Oromo country). Instead it criminalized the demand presenting it as a treasonable crime. The revolution also addressed the Oromo identity claims by allowing some media outlet forAfaan-Oromoo (Oromo language) but the demand to use Latin alphabet (qubee) was made another treasonable crime.

The political change in 1991, however, went far beyond the offers of its predecessor and dealt with more fundamental issues. Demands of Oromo nationalism was legitimized and institutionalized within the state apparatus when the new regime – for the sake of its own legitimacy – decided to offer concessions to decades old national struggles. Through the federalism arrangement, it created the long sought after Oromo country within Ethiopia in the form of the Oromia National Regional State with its own regional parliament, Caffee Oromiyaa. It also allowed Afaan Oromoo, which had long been criminalized and heavily suppressed under the imperial and socialist Ethiopia, to be recognized as the medium of instruction in schools throughout Oromia.

But as the rule of the TPLF/EPRF began to unfold the problems inherently linked to its system of rule started to unearth. When in 1991 a coalition of rebels overthrew the Derg, the victorious TPLF-led-EPRDF not only took control of the capital city, expanding daily at the expense of Oromo farmers, but also inherited one of Africa’s oldest authoritarian state form, effectively excluding from the country’s politics, economy and cultural manifestation most of the southern peoples (the Oromo included).

As soon as TPLF took control of the center, a dubious, rather feckless Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE), where various political groupings, including Oromo parties of which the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) was prominent, was organized in 1992. Perhaps as part of its concerns to take the OLF on board, the TPLF recognized Addis Abeba as the capital of Oromia and promised that the interests of the Oromo people in the city would be accommodated. The Transitional Charter that established the TGE (1991-1995) declared, “The special national and political interests of the Oromo are reserved over regions 13 [Harari State] and 14 [Addis Abeba].” In 1995, Oromia’s interest in Addis Abeba was once again recognized by the constitution that created the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE). Article 49, sub-article 5 of the constitution states that “The special interest of the State of Oromia in Addis Abeba, regarding the provision of social services or the utilization of natural resources and other similar matters, as well as joint administrative matters arising from the location of Addis Abeba within the State of Oromia, shall be respected.” However, the whole scheme boiled down into a political manipulation where the TGE gained the support of Oromo parties and the people’s support for the creation of a lasting TPLF-dominated authoritarian regime. When the TPLF dominated EPRDF ensured its control over Oromia, it went on to purge the OLF out of the TGE in June 1992.

In 1995, when the new constitution transformed TGE into the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE), the TPLF dominated government began employing ambiguities in the constitution and walked in earnest to take full control of Addis Abeba. In Article 49, where issues of Addis Abeba have been stipulated, three of its sub-articles (sub articles 2, 3 and 5) present contrary provisions, a state of affairs that made the gate wide open for the ruling party’s looming interests over the city. After appointing a TPLF veteran soldier as the mayor of Addis Abeba in 2000, the regime took a bold decision in 2003 to shift Oromia’s capital from Addis Abeba to Adama, 100km southeast of Addis Abeba. When the office of the Oromia regional parliament, Caffee Oromiyaa, was thrown to Adama it appeared that the hope of the Oromo to have their government in the city they believe is the center of Oromia was dashed.

Following the 2003 government decision to transfer Oromia’s seat to Adama the leadership of Maccaa-TuulamaAssociation (MTA) and Addis Abeba University students immediately organized a protest, which was met with brutal crackdown. The organizers were imprisoned and MTA was outlawed and had its office looted and dismantled. The university itself dismissed nearly 400 students whom it believed had taken part in the protest. While it was clear that thousands of farmers were evicted between 1995 and 2003, it was, however, the decision to transfer Oromia’s capital from Addis Abeba to Adama that gave birth to the Oromo struggle for Addis Abeba.

The declaration of the proposed “Master Plan” a decade later would mean dashed hopes and broken promises; it breaks up into two what has been known in the narrative of modern Oromo political activism as biyya-Oromoo (Oromo country), a reference to Oromia. On one hand, it is a broken promise because it sustains the regime’s tradition of deciding on issues relevant to biyya-Oromoo without the consent of the Oromo nation. In fact, many believed the implementation of “the Master Plan” would come close to restoration of the former Shewa governorate-general, which in turn would mean a renewed wave of cultural invasion on the Oromo as much as a territorial break up of Oromia.

Addis Abeba’s expansion in historical times had scored the highest record in eviction of the surrounding farmers in its environs, namely, Tuulama Oromo, but the EPRDF regime took this to a new level previously unmatched in Ethiopia’s history. Most peasant households have been and still are poor in Ethiopia but they live on their land and depend on its produce for their livelihoods, whatever its sufficiency. Tuulama Oromo in this regard appear the most unfortunate for encountering endless evictions since at least the 18^th century. Left in isolation from the Oromia National Regional State, Ethiopians in all walks of life, and undoubtedly the TPLF/EPRDF regime, the Tuulama Oromo have been forced to bear unbearable projects accompanying the regime’s intent (whatever the name attached to it) of expanding the city of Addis Abeba with no regard to their way of being.

Coherently conscious

 The Oromo population constitutes nearly 40 per cent of Ethiopia’s estimated population of 100 million. Some are adherents of Islam (being involved in more than one sect); others follow different sects of Christianity, and still others adhere to Waaqeffannaa, the Oromo indigenous belief system. In rural Oromia, their social organizations exhibit diverse historical experiences and regional patterns. These few remarks help us appreciate the internal diversity of Ethiopia’s largest ethno-nation.

So far, a number of scholars have made serious attempts to understand the contemporary political status of this diversity within the Oromo nation. While some treated them as a nation others seriously question that status. This diversity, for example, in the eyes of Gebru Tareke, an Ethiopian scholar, made the Oromo nation “a vastly dispersed people with no history of political unity since the sixteenth century.” Another scholar, John Markakis, wrote, “From the beginning of their historic [population movement] the Oromo did not forge unity above the tribal level, nor did they ever coordinate their efforts for a common purpose. Each tribe pursued its own destiny entirely independent of the others, and inter-tribal warfare was the rule rather than the exception.”  Historian Bahru Zewde on his part says “…the incorporation of the nineteenth century has resulted in the denigration of Oromo culture and identity,” but plainly denies the fact that an Oromo country has ever existed before the twentieth century; he argues against a map of Oromo country – Ormania – made by a German missionary J.L. Krapf based on primary historical data he collected ‘during an eighteen-years residence in eastern Africa’ in mid 19^th century.

While Gebru Tareke and John Markakis have taken Oromo internal diversity far beyond limits, it is fairly recognizable that Oromo internal diversity led to considerable divisions that played key roles not only in their historical experiences with Ethiopian systems of rule but also in creating within themselves fissured political groupings.

But the fact that the ongoing Oromo protests engulfed the whole of Oromia in merely three weeks’ time threw some light on the perspectives of these scholars – Gebru and Markakis, for example – who consistently argued against the presence of the Oromo’s nationhood.  By claiming that Oromoness is counterfeit, that it never existed, that Oromo nation possess within itself lots of local and cultural diversity to develop any coherent consciousness and never possessed an overarching sense of “nationhood”, or that they are inseparably intermingled with various other peoples, “the opponents believe that they can divide, destroy, or, perhaps, wish away Oromo nationalism,” to use the words of Herbert Lewis, who wrote The Development of Oromo Political Consciousness from 1958 to 1994. 

While this attitude has clear origins in politics and “interests,” it is facilitated by the general social science discourse that still tends to discount or decry ethno-nationalism. Yet this kind of internal diversity which some scholars employed to question the very existence of the Oromo as a nation is seriously called into question with the start of Oromo protests in November 2015.

Many scholars attempted to understand the challenges of the Oromo national struggle in isolation from the political developments in that tumultuous region of Ethiopia and the horn of Africa. But the on-going Oromo movement appears to have overcome lots of deterring factors long-lived in the Oromo national struggle.  In less than four weeks what the Oromo people regarded as a serious threat to their national identity caused a union of massive popular movement that engulfed the whole of Oromia.

A case in point is how Oromo national identity, Oromummaa, has been built over decades and the significant impact it has in uniting a population of close to 40 million for a coherent cause. Oromoness is a reference to all those features that make up Oromo personality. It is constituted by the entirety of the Oromo culture. It is worth noticing that Oromo activists, artists, political commentators, scholars and politicians appear to have successfully campaigned over the last two decades highlighting the fact that Oromummaa transcends differences in political opinions, religions, and all sorts of background, a concept well articulated in the works of Oromo scholars such as Assefa Jaleta.

Readjusting the narrative

 Apparently placed at a precarious position, many scholarly works need to be revisited; there is a need to further investigate facts and collect empirical data to create effective analytical frameworks capable of capturing the whole, more nuanced scenario that would help us better understand the Oromo nation and its indisputable place in the Ethiopian state. Only then can we appreciate and understand why and how various Oromo politicians chose to establish different political parties after the onset of the 1974 revolution; have decided to join rival political groupings not founded for separate Oromo cause; have even joined the dictatorial military regime – a clear indication that even those of similar social and religious backgrounds understood Oromo problems differently and likewise proposed disputing routes of political struggle. Only then can we clearly comprehend why Oromia has in the last quarter a century exhibited spatial and temporal mismatch on concerns of opposition to the EPRDF regime. Without readjusting our existing narratives it will be hard to understand how and why the 2014 and the on-going Oromo protest movement overlap and deviate.

Our understanding of the cultural and socio-political stances that are being taken through the Oromo protests movement can also be appreciated when placed into context with issues related to the wider Horn of Africa. A more accurate contextualizing of these stances can be viewed within the affairs of Ethiopia’s broader issues, and their complexities. The same understanding appeared to have been useful to inform narratives shaping the future of the Oromo national struggle. The days of hiding behind Oromo internal diversity as Ethiopia’s numerical majority with subaltern political constructs are gone, and will not come back again.

It is also incumbent upon us to understand that taking opportunities offered in the current multinational federal system, Oromo youth at secondary schools and junior colleges throughout Oromia, and the ever expanding universities have for the last two and half decades propagated their literature, folklore, music, songs, poetry, theatre, drama, and other forms of cultural revival and actions in these concepts of the Oromo cultural movement. Taking into account the growth of federal universities from less than five when TPLF/EPRDF took power in 1991 to over 30 in 2015, it becomes important to see the relationship between this considerable expansion in higher education and the growth in modern Oromo political activism.

While ‘economic solvency’ remains one of the fundamental points of the Oromo people’s opposition to ‘the Master Plan’, for the growing Oromo consciousness it is by no means comparable to the Ethiopian regime’s project of posing immeasurable challenges to the concept of Oromoness altogether, and all of what it means from the central parts of Oromia, the territory the Oromos believe is “handhuura-Oromia” (Oromia’s bellybutton).

Understanding this is at the same time one of the pillars in symbolization and conceptualization of Oromoness in the minds of the Oromo people. It is such understanding of Oromoness which seems to have brought the new generation of OPDO, discussed in part two of this series, to openly speak against “the Master Plan” in April 2014. There is little doubt that the Oromo nation conceived ‘the Master Plan’ as a threat to their national identity. Styled after popular Arsii tradition, “namni lafa hinqabne, nama lafee hinqabne,” (a person without land is a person without bones).

Hope for millions

 After nearly five decades of struggle, the Oromo seem to have learnt from experience and history that an attack on one part is an attack on the whole. Collective memory helps a society to understand both its past, present, and by implication, to imagine its future. It is important to underline here that it is the memory of past injustices and the contemporary aims of the TPLF/EPRDF regime against the future of the Oromo nation that has served as one of the most important tools stirring the ongoing protest.

The Oromo protesters believed that “the Master Plan” violates the territorial integrity and identity of the Oromo and their aspiration to become a self ruling nation.  In the perspectives of the protesters rallies across Oromia are rallies for self-defence. The progress of Oromo nationalism over decades appear to have succeeded to present the cause of the Oromo of the central region as the cause of all.

While the government employs the same old narrative of “we have made it possible for Ethiopia’s oppressed nations for the first time to use their own language and exercise their cultures,” public political consciousness seems to have navigated far ahead of this narrative. As protesters have proved for themselves through their practical experiences that the regime has very little room for implementation of provisions in the same constitution drafted and promulgated under its own dominance, they took up constitutional provisions as weapons against it. In short, the constitution has become for the Oromo protesters what James Scott theorized as “weapon of the weak.” As the protests set out to start the systematic use of provisions in the constitution by dissent voices within OPDO, the protesters and the opposition became united. It is mainly in this sense that the regime’s propaganda to present the protesters as “terrorists” and “anti-peace” failed to bear fruit.

The struggle for Addis Abeba and the adjacent territories presents the Oromo people with a choice between survival and annihilation as a cultural unit and as a nation. It is this understanding that managed to mobilize the entire Oromo nation throughout Oromia region and tested the limits of the counter protest state that Ethiopia is. This popular perception has clearly succeeded in establishing in the minds of Ethiopia’s single largest nation that “the struggle for Addis Abeba is the struggle for Oromia.”  EPRDF’s killing is far from threatening the Oromo people and all indication suggest that there is no turning back. The slogans have now changed from “No to the Master Plan,” “Oromia is not for sale,” and “Oromia needs autonomous self-government,” to “justice for our blood and lives.”

It is also a hope of millions of Oromo and many more that it is upon the Oromo national struggle to give birth to an efficient national political narrative that, while not compromising unanswered historical questions in Oromia, gives rise to a country-wide coalition of political parties that can realize the old democratic demands of the peoples of Ethiopia, a state of affairs Ethiopia had missed to realize at many historical trajectories.

Despite age-old terrains of relations among various groups of peoples in Ethiopia and the Horn, and where the Oromo people deeply and actively involved themselves for generations, Oromo struggle is a struggle for self-rule as well as one for democracy, struggle for both group and individual rights. Signs of overcoming disagreements and standing together for common cause are being observed at this point of the Oromo national struggle. Appreciable is unequivocal banners carried out by Amhara protesters in support of their Oromo brethren and statements made by some Oromo and Amhara political parties and dialogues initiated by their respective media outlets.

TPLF/EPRDF’s approach of facing popular protests with bloody crackdowns is no longer keeping Ethiopia as a state. The persistence of the Oromo people in the face of the counter protest state’s ruthlessness will also soon begin to reflect itself within the Horn of Africa’s fragile peace and stability position. Any concerned party, be it domestic or international, which takes seriously the Horn of Africa’s peace and stability, must not only understand the framework of today’s popular demands (that refuse to turn back in Ethiopia’s Oromia region), but must also become grounded in the particular historical contexts of this framework.

Ed’s Note: Etana Habte is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, SOAS, University of London. He can be reached at:ittaanaa@gmail.com

Previous Articles:

1. #Oromoprotests: The “Oromo Street” and Africa’s Counter-Protest State
2. #OromoProtests: The “Oromo Street” and Africa’s Counter-Protest State – Part II

By Dr. Baro Keno Deressa

Mr. Getachew Reda (spokesperson of TPLF government)

In medical terminology: Pathogen is an agent causing disease or illness to its host. Pathogens are mostly microscopic, such as bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and fungi.

Today i am going to talk about the macroscopic pathogen of the humanity TPLF government. I said this because of my profound belief that, the TPLF government and their leaders  are very much aware of the real situation in Oromia which is quite different from what they were trying to portray to the Ethiopian empire nations and international community. Before i am going to enter to my main point i would like to quote the universal declaration of humanity.

Declaration on a shared humanity:

• Human being are born equal and that they all share hopes and aspirations, paths of fulfillment, paths of suffering, and dreams within a common journey as human beings.
• Human beings share the freedom to follow particular paths of life within the rights and obligations shared by all and contributing to the common good of humanity.

Recently the spokesperson of TPLF government in Ethiopia (Mr. Getachew Reda) openly and publicly on the TV insulting Oromo people after killing, torturing, imprisoning and evicting from their land. I don t know what the other viewers concluded but for me I seriously questioned his sincerity.  As a result, I concluded that the statements he made was may have been based on the following premise: He know the exact reality in the country but he is  too arrogant to tell the Oromo peoples and other oppressed nations that no matter what the truth is, they MUST accept it. Why not? After all, TPLF is the victor and the strong always dictates!

It is unfortunate that I am an Oromo and I am familiar with the real situation. Let me raise some questions to evaluate TPLF and Mr Getachew Reda emptiness and brutality:

• Where is your humanity?
• Where is your moral value?
• Hoe gave you right to occupy Oromo farm? Mining? City?peoples?
• Hoe gave you right to govern Oromo people? Other oppressed nations?
• Hoe gave you right to decide our fate let alone killing us?
• By the way what is your intellectual capacity/academic grade? Sorry to ask you this question, most of you are allergic for!!!!!
• Did you forget your history of 25 years ago, when you put your leg for the first time on the Oromo land you were beggars, you were weak, you were poor, you were hungry and you were vulnerable. But the Oromo people and Oromia gave you all: Feed you well, makes you rich, makes you strong, helps you to build sky rocket buildings, gave you warm home. So how comes that you are turn back to the killer, torturer and murderer of child and pregnant women of this generous and blessed nation of Oromo!!!!!! And other oppressed nations!!!!

Now you are telling us that the Ethiopian economy is growing very fast, and that the freedom of press is among the best in the world and democracy is thriving, even though we know that the poverty level is at its worst and Ethiopian empire ranks number one in the world in the number of journalists and political leaders (like Mr Bekele Gerba) becoming prisoners of conscience. TPLF as the core player of the Ethiopian government and Mr. Getachew Reda as a spokesperson of TPLF government are failed to understand the traditional way of respect of humanity, failed to read and understand the core value of universal declaration of humanity, failed to respect and implement their own constitution, failed to build independent judicial system and failed to build a responsible government. TPLF junta government is well succeeded in killing, torturing, imprisoning, harassing and evicting the Oromo people and all oppressed nations in Ethiopian empire. All those parameters of failures and success shows that TPLF government is deadly pathogen and needs eradication therapy.

Before i am going to enter into the eradication therapy let me summarize the evil act of our colonizers.

Oromo people are colonized for more than centuries by narrow minded, uneducated barbaric and brutal junta elites. During the colonization period those elite groups shamelessly and brutally destroys our democratic ruling system (Gadaa), destroys our identity, stole our freedom, evict our people from their ancestral land, and brought total destruction to our people and our country Oromia.

Our colonizers in general especially the current colonizers TPLF-junta sticks a knife in our back ten inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If they pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound, they won’t even admit the knife is there (thousands of our brothers and sisters are died/dying, children of age 8 and 13 including pregnant women are executed on the day light without any criminal charge, medical doctors are murdered while they are treating critically wounded person, millions of Oromo peoples are languishing in the prison camp, sick people from Oromo and oppressed nations are suffering from natural disease and manmade disaster-but TPLF is talking about reparation of chromosomal disorder (killings machine of agazi commando).

Eradication therapy:

TPLF junta comes to power not by his strength. There are several factors which played crucial roles, namely the majority negative view of Derg, the weakness of the Derg military mighty, the fertile geo-political situation, the enormous influence of international powers on Derg regime, the multiple pressure of the rebel groups (from north EPLF and TPLF and from east and west OLF).

OLF, TPLF and EPLF overthrow the Derg because it was not a democratic institution. Now OLF has the same view about TPLF and therefore OLF want TPLF to leave; if TPLF will not leave voluntarily, they are willing to remove TPLF by force. TPLF, You overthrew the Derg regime, with the help of the gun. And now you tell the world, that OLF can come back only if it renounces armed struggle. Why is it that Kalashnikovs in the hands of TPLF can bring democracy but in the hands of OLF can only bring misery to Ethiopian empire?

In my opinion, your Kalashnikovs killed thousands of innocent peoples across the nations of Ethiopian empire no matter what you call them and of course that did not bring democracy to Ethiopian empire. Our nation is still ruled by gun-carrying young cadres of TPLF.

How many factors are fulfilled now days?

• All nations in the Ethiopian empire including the innocent Tigrians hate TPLF
• Thanks to our hero’s Fayyisa Lelisa the international community are embarrassed by the brutal act of TPLF government and shocked by the magnitude of TPLF atrocities against Oromo people and other nations in Ethiopian Empire (still enormous tasks waiting us concerning the international community).
• At this moment OLF, ONLF, SLF are effectively confronting this brutal government. G7 with his union is also starting the confrontation.
• Currently geo-political situation is not in our side
• The moral and determination of the TPLF Ethiopian government soldiers are diminishing gradually.

All factors of the victory are almost fulfilled for all oppressed nations in Ethiopian Empire. Now, the main question is all nations has to do his parts in order to fasten our victory. In case of Oromo people I am telling you confidently that our brave qeerroo and OLA (WBO) are working hard in order to complete our eradication therapy (eliminating colonization).

Let me explain my confidentiality of this fact: Our “WBO” are the best fighter in the battle field, our “WBO” are trustful , our “WBO” are vanguard of our people, our “WBO” never betray the truth of our people, our “WBO” is never give up during harsh and worst time. Let me give you one real fact from thousands of episodes. In the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996 after many destruction and challenges we start to regroup under the true son and heroes of our people comrades Gutama Hawwas in the desert of Bale. Later on the reinforcement Comrades come from Harar. During those periods, our WBO successfully eliminate enemies in various places  and start to combat the enemy in the heart of their camps. But later on the TPLF government wage total war with thousands of his soldiers against hundreds of WBO’s. Their soldiers are logistically supported by airplane and helicopter. At the end we decided to fight this enemy with smaller group and brought to them  many casualties. One week later the TPLF government occupy all villages, rivers and start to torture local residents. During that fight most of our comrades were passed away including our hero and our commander in chief comrade Gutama Hawwas, some of the comrades were captured, and some of us were remain in the bush with wounded comrades without medicine, bullet, water and food. The remain comrades start to share our urines to support our wounded comrades just to make wet their lips and start to eat soil. But we were swear to each other and to our peoples justified cause not to surrender to our enemy and prefer to die.  One captured comrades also showed the patriotic act according to the information from local residents in Bale. While he was captured and tight his hands on the back side one OPDO come to him and questioned him about other comrades where about  and our comrades spit on the face of OPDO soldiers and showed the commitment of our “WBO” to our goal (eradicating colonization). During such critical moment in the hands of our enemy the reaction of our comrades (WBO) gave tremendous proud to local residence.

Here, I tried to reaffirm the ability, the commitment and determination of our fighters in order to defeat the colonial rule. We know the fighting technique of the TPLF, we know the grade of their heroism and we know the their limitation. But some factors down played our desired victory especially,  geo-political situation and limited resources. But now our qeerroo is opening new liberation base from in out.

The Fascist government of TPLF junta confirms nationally and internationally his pathogenicity. TPLF government atrocities was/are comparable to Nazis genocide act against humanity. This kind of government have no moral value and legal right to lead Tigrai regional state let alone Oromo’s and other nations in Ethiopian empire. I am quite confident to win this war and liberate our people Oromo and other oppressed nations in Ethiopian empire. I am calling all Oromo peoples to support OLF in order to empower our qeerroo and WBO and defeat our chronical enemy colonial ruling system.

Victory to the Oromo people!

Dr. B. K. DERESSA, Medical degree in internal medicine, specialized in Gastro-Hepatology diseases. University Hospital of Brussels-Belgium

The Oromo Irreecha Festival Revisited and Reinterpreted

By Mekuria Bulcha, PhD

Introduction

Once again the Oromo are preparing for the celebrations of the Irreecha festival at Lake Arsadee in Bishoftu city 50 km south of Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in central Oromia. This time the annual national rendezvous takes place on October 1, 2016. Although it is the Oromo equivalent of Thanksgiving,[1] and is essentially a non-political festival, the Irreecha was suppressed by Ethiopian regimes for about a century. Brought back to life by the political and cultural struggle the Oromo people have been waging for decades, today, the festival is playing a primary role  for the survival of Oromo culture and identity. The festival is celebrated in different localities across Oromia as well as transnationally by the Oromo diaspora in many countries around the world.  In an article titled “Oromia’s Irreecha Festival – A Revival of an Ancient African Culture: An Attempt to Understand and Explain”, published in September 2015, I have discussed the socio-cultural and historical role of the pan-Oromo symbols and artefacts that are displayed during the Irreecha festivals. I explored and discussed the meanings of the blessings of elders who officiate at the festivals, the environmental ethics which are articulated in the rituals and the performances of artists who entertain the celebrants. In this article, I will (a) discuss the festival in the context of the recognition accorded to it by UNESCO for registration as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, (b) discuss the contradictions between [the] values and ethics symbolized by the festival and the politics of the Ethiopian regime, (c) explore the significance which millions of Oromo youth who celebrate the festival give to it, and (d) briefly discuss the concerns about celebrating the festival in the context of the prevailing political situation in Oromia.

At the national level, the revival of the Irreecha celebration was started by a few people in the mid-1990s under difficult condition particularly due to restrictions imposed on the organizers by the government. Today it is celebrated by millions of Oromos who converge on Bishoftu from every corner of Oromia and other regions in Ethiopia as well as from other countries in the world.[2] The number of participants keeps on increasing because those who visit it once keep on coming back while new visitors are attracted to it in large numbers every year. Lij Yaareed, a young Oromo in his early twenties, told a reporter last year that he was in Bishoftu for the 17^th time to celebrate the Irreecha. A young female respondent, Kunoo, who “grew up with the festival” told the same reporter:

I have been participating in Irreecha since childhood. I have witnessed that the number of participants has been increasing dramatically year after year. Today it has come to the extent that it is difficult to move forward and pass one another. The crowd is thick. I am really excited to see what will happen in the coming few years.[3]

During the last five to ten years the festival has been attracting not only Oromos but others, including tourists and journalists from other parts of the world. As I will explain later, the Oromo youth are very enthusiastic about the festival. In fact, looking at video pictures covering participation in the festival, it seems that they had constituted more than half of the celebrants who have been gathering on the shores of Lake Arsadee during the last three years.

An ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’

Lately, the Irreecha tradition has also caught the attention of the United Nations Economic and Scientific Commission (UNESCO). Last year, UNESCO’s representative in Ethiopia Mr. Alpha Wright visited the Lake Arsadee festival told millions of Oromos and others that Irreecha is an important landmark in the history of mankind and that it will be soon registered as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Article 2, of the UNESCO Convention of 2003 defines “Intangible cultural heritage” as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups, and in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.”[4]

Needless to say that the news of recognition of Irreecha by UNESCO was received gratefully by the Oromo. UNESCO’s recognition was received with excitement because it proved the bankruptcy of the ideology and policy of the Ethiopian state that had denigrated their culture as “pagan and primitive” suppressing parts of it to the edges of extinction. The Irreecha festival is one of the Oromo traditions which was saved from extinction and is revived during the last two decades. One can mention many factors which make the Irreecha an intangible cultural heritage worthy of UNESCO’s recognition and protection. To start with, it is worthwhile to point out that the ideological underpinnings of the Irreecha celebration are deeply rooted in religious traditions which the Oromo had shared with the peoples of northeast Africa in the distant past and which are partially preserved only in Oromia until today. The Irreecha has its roots in the ancient monotheistic religion, Waaqeffanna, and that the Oromo, with the exception [of] religious fundamentalists among Christians and Muslims, participate in its festivals irrespective of their religious backgrounds. The reason is that whether they call themselves Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Catholics or Muslims, the ideological underpinnings of Oromo religious practices is, by and large, Waaqefannaa. Writing about similarities between Waaqefannaa, Christianity and Islam, many scholars[5] have stated that the codes of conduct of the traditional Oromo religion are to a large extent equivalent to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament. Therefore, the moral counsel officiated by Oromo elders at the Irreecha festivals does not contradict the essence of any religion. In fact, the elders who conduct the Irreecha rituals at Lake Arsadee often are from all the three religions—Waaqeffannaa, Christianity and Islam. The elders thank God and bless the nation as their ancestors did in the past. Representing the different religions of the Oromo, they remind their audience to uphold the Oromo ethics of safuu and nagaa (moral order and peace), reconcile among themselves and pray to God to reconcile with them.  They counsel that no hate and fanaticism be given place in Oromia. In short, the Irreecha festival is a sacred rendezvous of an entire nation irrespective of religion, sex, age and class. As I have explained elsewhere,[6] the festival is also an expression of Oromo respect for nature and pursuit for harmony. It is about peace not only among humans but also between human beings and nature. The green grass carried by every participant, luxuriant vegetation and abundant water against which the artists perform, provides a symbolic connection with God and nature. It suggests that the Oromo are and will be at peace with God, humans and with nature.

A philosophy of life

The Irreecha festival is an occasion when the haayyuu (elders of the nation) thank God and bless their people and land as their ancestors did. It is an event when they remind the Oromo about the traditions of their ancestors and give them advice to uphold the Oromo ethics of safuu and nagaa as well as reconcile among themselves, and pray to God for his mercy and reconciliation with them. As a concept, safuu means the righteousness and benign moral order required for life to continue and nagaa connotes individual as well as collective well-being and security. Thus, as codes of conduct nagaa and safuu interlock and guide behavior and promote peace and harmony. Normally, every Oromo is supposed to abide by these principles even today. In the past, the result was the harmony which permeated the social world and the bounty and beauty which characterized the natural environment in Oromia and were described by European travelers who visited the region in the late nineteenth century.

Stressing the important moral and philosophical messages imbricated in the Oromo concept of nagaa and the analogous ancient Egyptian concept of maat, philosophy professor Charles Verharen advices us to pay attention to both thought systems arguing that “philosophies are the guiding foundations of cultures”, and that “non-African philosophies have failed” Africa.[7] He suggests that in order to rescue itself from the multifaceted catastrophe facing it, and to plan for the future, Africa must recapture its history and find its own philosophy. Verharen observes that the ethics in both the ancient Egyptian thought and the traditional Oromo religion, Waaqeffannaa, and suggests that the similarities between them may not be accidental but signs of possible linkages between the two philosophies. He believes that studying the traditional Oromo cosmology will help us to re-conceptualize African philosophy. In his view, “The philosophical principles of maat and nagaa promise an African model for passing over life on to future generations in these perilous times.”[8] Regrettably, mankind is facing dangerous times. Religious fanaticism and unscrupulous exploitation of Mother Earth for material benefits are pushing mankind already to the edges of unprecedented chaos and destruction. All moral boundaries are being trespassed and innocent children, women and men are murdered in the name of religion. Environmental destruction is threatening life on earth. In other words, the world is experiencing the exact opposite of what the principles of nagaa and maat prescribe.

The recognition of Irreecha by UNESCO for registration as a cultural heritage for humanity is indeed a recognition of a philosophy of survival. Oromo culture has evolved as an integral part of nature.  One cannot celebrate the irreechaa festivals in a desert. Green grass, flowers and a body of water amid green meadows are part of natural “paraphernalia” of the irreecha festival. As reflected in the festival, the Oromo make ‘pilgrimages’ to nature to thank God for his generous gifts of the sources of life he bestows them through Mother Earth. The Oromo attribute safuu, the ethical considerations that guide human relationships, also to nature. Human and ecological survival overlap or are seen as interdependent. Humanity is embedded in and is interconnected with nature.

What we had, what we lack, what we must reclaim

Nations around the world organize parades for different reasons. Some organize them to commemorate historical events such as their victories in battles or day of national independence. Others use parades to exhibit their cultural achievements or display technological progress. The Irreecha festival, in the form it takes today is, by and large, is an annual national rendezvous organized to celebrate the revival of Oromo culture. It also mirrors Oromo victory over attempted destruction of their culture by Ethiopian regimes in the past.  By and large, the costumes which the majority in the parade wear and the artefacts they carry reflect the culture and history which the different branches of the Oromo nation had shared and preserved.

The significance of the festival is reflected not only in the artefacts displayed in the parade, but also in the gentle attitude and serene atmosphere reflected in the gathering and the amazing harmony which pervades a festival of which the participants are millions of people. The festival looks like a family gathering; thousands of small children accompany parents. The parade proceeds peacefully and ends without incidents. The behavior of participants is guided by the nagaa and safuu codes of conduct mentioned above. An overview of cultural heritage reflected in the festival tells us three things: (a) what the Oromo had in the past, (b) what they had lost or were denied under Abyssinian rule, and (b) what they should reclaim.

The tangible and intangible artefacts which are displayed at the Irreecha festival constitute the pan-Oromo gadaa cultural heritage which were described by many scholars. Together, they symbolize justice, peace, and sovereignty. By and large, they are symbolic artefacts from the past Oromo gadaa republics. The bokkuu, the scepter which is carried by men, is the symbol of the gadaa political system which signifies democracy and justice. Another symbol of the gadaa system is siiqqee, the scepter carried by women. It symbolizes the institution which protected the rights and sanctioned the dignity of women in Oromia in the past. The bokkuu and siqqee as well as a range of other pre-colonial pan-Oromo gadaa symbols which are lined-up and displayed prominently in the Irreecha parades everywhere reinforce the memories and values which are shared by the Oromo in general. However, we know that today the tangible and intangible cultural artefacts which we see in the Irreecha parades do not symbolize what we actually have[, but] they remind us of what we definitvely had and then lost, and will unconditionally recover. The current Ethiopian regime permits the Oromo to carry symbolic artefacts in parades, but does not give them the right to exercise the rights and freedoms the artefacts symbolize. Thus, we read both sides of the bokkuu at one and the same time—the democratic system our ancestors had in the past and its deprivation under alien rule at present for the last 130 years. We “read” democracy on one side while the other side reminds us simultaneously the utter lack of democracy and of the total absence the rule of law. When we look at the bokkuu carried by thousands of men in the parade, we “see” what we do not have. Under the current regime the Oromo face arrests and incarcerations without warrant, torture and extra-judicial killings, disppearance without trace, and eviction from (their) lands and homes. The  siqqee can be “read” in the same manner. Under gadaa, it was a sign for women’s defence against oppressive husband or male chauvinists in the village (society). Then, protection was available and defense was possible. Not now. There is no law or moral order to defend Oromo women against the horror of rape by the security forces of the Ethiopian regime in their homes and in jails throughout Oromia.

The green grass that the celebrants carry and the water in the background tell us also a story that has two sides.  On the one hand they tell us about the fertility, bounty and bounty which God has bestowed to the Oromia country – in other words the bounty for which they thank Him and pray to Him. It tells us also the respect with which the Oromo created traditionally their natural environment. On the other hand they tell us about the devastating environmental destruction that is going on in Oromia at this moment. They tell us about the pollution of our rivers and lakes by land grabbers and mining companies. The remind us about the destruction Oromia’s remaining forest patches by fire and illegal logging, and indeed, about the price our youth have paid with their lives to protect them.

By bringing out these symbols ceremonially once again, the Irreecha festival is enabling us to “read” two histories of the same people (the Oromo) at once. Although they are from the past, the symbols tell us more about the present: who we are and what we lack as a people collectively. They construct a narrative which holds us together as a people and provide us with bases for imagination and collective action to reclaim what is taken from us. Irrespective of the atrocities being committed by the present regime against our people, the Irreecha festival, provides them, particularly the young generation a vision of a bright future which can be built on our democratic heritage.

Shared understanding, unity, identity, dignity and solidarity

Writing about the significance of intangible cultural heritages, UNESCO notes that “There are things that we regard as important to preserve for future generations” and goes on to say that they are important “because they create a certain emotion within us, or because they make us feel as though we belong to something–a country, a tradition, a way of life.”[9] That is exactly what Irreecha does. As indicated above, one of the factors which adds significance to the Irreecha festival is the historical and cultural consciousness it raises among participants, particularly the Oromo youth who constitute the majority. The past is communicated to them and to others not only by elders who lead the festival, but also through the rich symbols of the Oromo gadaa culture, the attire of the multitude who march in harmony, the dignity with which the Oromo conduct their collective social and political affairs, and the pride with which they are re-asserting their culture and identity at present albeit against great odds.

The positive emotions and thoughts which the Irreecha festival arouses among the Oromo youth are more than what one can guess. Using interviews made by a reporter from the Oromia Broadcasting System (OBS) with 12 (7 female and 5 male) young participants during the 2015 festival at Lake Arsadee,[10] I will discuss briefly their perceptions and interpretations of the Irreecha festival. When one listens to these young men and women the themes that emerge are: common understanding, identity, a feeling of great pride and joy in their heritage, unity and sense of belonging to community, a strong sense of Oromummaa, and a vision of what the Oromo can do together in the future.

The young participants in question are experiencing the resurrection of their nation and partaking in the reconstruction and reinterpretation of its collective memory through the Irreecha festival. Common understanding is one of the themes that emerge from the responses of the young respondents. Charles Taylor writes “Something is common when it exists not just for me and you, but for us, acknowledged as such.”  The festival creates a “collective reality” and sense of history. By collective reality I mean a state of being of the same mind, or sharing of understanding about a common past and having aspirations about a common future. The feelings and thoughts which the festival creates are “inter-subjectively” shared by the young participants. Gammada, one of the young male respondents told the reporter that the Irreecha festival is “first, a great place where a reciprocal discovery of the feelings in one another occurs. Secondly, it is a stage on which you are free to support or reject whatever you like or dislike. Thirdly, it the stage on which I learn from you and you learn from me. Everybody learns from one another.”

Identity (eenyummaa in the Oromo language) is another important theme raised by nearly all of the young respondents. They felt the Irreecha festival as an expression of Oromo identity. Sociologists say that collective identity is constructed not only in and of the collectivity’s present life, but also in reconstructing its earlier life. Thus, for Ilillii, one of the female respondents [participants], “Irreecha is all about the expression of identity – Oromummaa [being Oromo]. Since it is only the Oromo who have the tradition, the youth are motivated to learn more about their identity.” She means about the meanings of the tangible and intangible historical and cultural artefacts which was looking at the festival while answering the questions of the reporter. Kunoo expresses this in depth. She says “The Oromo thank Waaqa [God] through their culture which expresses their identity.” Explaining her statement she adds, “For me, Irreecha is my identity, because when the Oromo people first created it, they made it in harmony with their ethos of Thanksgiving to Waaqa. Thus, for me participating in Irreecha is upholding my identity.” Abdiisa goes further along the same line saying “Irreecha is our identity. Everything in it is about us Oromo. It is unique to us. It is the symbol of our identity. It cannot be separated from us. Ireecha, I think, is in our blood.” Jaalallee and Firaa-ol share Abdiisaa’s view. Jaalallee says “Ireecha is our festval. It is a big occasion where everyone see each. This makes me happy. I feel very much happy for my being Oromo. We see numerous things which make us happy.” Firaa-ol says “I am extremely happy about my being Oromo. The Oromo are participating in the festival in very large number. That makes me happy.”

The interviews indicate a strong feelings of pride which the Irreecha festival creates among participants. The young respondents in the OBS documentary talk about the great sense of pride they felt in belonging to a national community which has such a tradition – they express the positive feeling of being Oromo which the festival had aroused in them. Biiftu says that since the Irreecha “expresses our culture, the large number of participants in itself is our pride. We are number one for having such a magnificent culture. It makes me feel proud.” For Muhee, “Irreecha is not only a unique festival for the Oromo, but also for the whole world.” Apparently overwhelmed by the color, magnitude and magnificence of the festival he says, “I haven’t seen such a huge gathering on any festival. This is my first time to participate. The variety of beautiful costumes, the huge number of youth, elders and other participants make me proud.” Bosonee joins Muhee saying “I feel very proud. I consider this a great day. I am extremely happy to take part in one of the biggest festivals in the world.” Keenboon is another respondent who finds happiness in the magnitude of the festival and immensity of the number of participants. She says that such large number participants have come from different areas and counties in Oromia to celebrate the Irreecha makes her proud in being Oromo. She stresses the significance of the festival in strengthening Oromummaa and Oromo nationalism.  Boontuu who seems to find pride in the variety of Oromo cultural artifacts displayed at the festival, among others, says “The participants are from different areas. It is so beautiful. It is a source of my pride. It is what every Oromo must be proud about as well.” Gammadda joins the two female respondents saying,

Anytime I come to the Irreecha, I enjoy a special feeling of Oromummaa. This is because I join Oromos coming from every corner: from the north, the south, from east and west. I observe the spectacular variety in culture, costumes, and hear beautiful songs at the event. All this makes Irreecha one of the greatest events; it makes me proud of my identity. It stimulates me to learn more about Oromummaa.

Unity is another theme raised by most of the respondents.  As expressed by Gammadaa “Irreecha is a symbol of Oromo unity. It is the only festival where the Oromo join for a clear and sole purpose of unity and Oromummaa.” According to Abdiisaa, Irreecha is “meaningfully contributing to Oromo unity and solidarity. The fact that the people are gathering in such large number every year shows this.” Kunoo joins her male counterparts saying,

Irreecha has a special place in strengthening unity since the people are not only displaying the varieties of Oromo costumes but also discuss together, share views in different dialects and sing Maree hoo as one. This shows unity. Irreecha is very important in strengthening unity….  It is important specifically for the youth to strengthen our unity. I am enjoying it and feeling happy about it.

For Boontuu, Irreecha is “an extraordinary gathering at which enormous number of people meet. Songs and prayers take place. The event is conducive for promoting unity and love among the youth, and the Oromo in general.” Another female respondent, Bosonee, says that “Irreecha is an ever growing festival inside and outside Oromia. We Oromos strengthen each other by coming together for the festival. We promote our culture like our costumes, songs and in many other ways. We learn more for ourselves.”

When marginalized and oppressed communities attach meanings to events and artefacts to signify their collective experience, they share not only a history but also a belief. The OBS documentary indicates a positive belief and vision which the Oromo youth have about their nation’s future. The vision is the result of what they saw at the festival–the size of the gathering, the variety, color and beauty that characterize the Oromo nation, and the spontaneity and unforced unity of the multitude. The tranquility and familial spirit in spite of immensity of the participants’ number is beyond imagination. In general, the feeling which Irreecha festival seems to give the young respondents is a strong belief in Oromo capacity to achieve whatever they may want if they act together. Biiftuu says

We came to this place from different localities in Oromia which are located far apart. We came here because we have similar views about being Oromo. We share Oromummaa. Like the people, ideas are also found scattered all over the country.  We must also bring different views together. If we consolidate our ideas about issues of common concern and unite we can achieve greater goals.

In fact that was what happened. The Oromo youth could act together and stop the Master Plan which had targeted millions of Oromos for eviction and dispossession. If implemented, it could also destroy the historic Ireecha grounds. For this reason, the Oromo, the youth in particular rejected the Master Plan strongly. Since then (September 2015) they have been doing great things together and with the majority of their people. Obviously, the young respondents were not alone in having the feelings described here. The feelings were shared by other Oromos who were at the festival in Bishoftu and those who watched it on TV.  It is possible to say that the Irreecha festival is one of the mirrors through which the Oromo society “looks” at itself today, that is to say imagines, feels or knows about its own existence as a nation. It is an event and platform for the expression of Oromo history and culture in symbolic artefacts, songs and dances and massive parades. It connects the Oromo people with one another and to their common past. It introduces the Oromo youth to their heritage, motivates them to preserve it and pass it to the coming generation. As I have pointed out in the article mentioned above, asked by a journalist what he was thinking about the Irreecha in 2014, a young celebrants replied “I don’t have a word to express what I see or feel. I believe that that this is my culture and religion at the same time. This is what was forwarded to us by our ancestors; and it is what I will forward to my children.” He is not alone in having that “feeling”.  Given the boundless pride which the young respondents discussed in this article express about Irreecha and Oromummaa, it is possible to conclude that his feelings are shared by millions of Oromo youth. That means the recovery, revival and survival of the Oromo culture is assured. To have such a young generation, like the ones I have discussed above, who have the courage and intelligence, is to be a blessed nation– a nation which has a future.

Celebrating Irreecha under a vicious repressive rule

Reporting about the promise which UNESCO representative gave last year concerning the registration of Irreecha as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a journalist concluded that the Oromo people will celebrate the next festival with joy with the rest of the world. Indeed, they will celebrate the festival during this Sunday, but, regrettably, it is difficult to expect a joyous mood under the prevailing political conditions. Oromia is under a vicious military occupation since November 2015 and the entire Oromo nation is waging a peaceful struggle to get rid of it. However, it is expected that the Oromo will converge on Bishoftu as usual to participate in the Irreeech festival. Given the weight of the atrocities which the Ethiopian regime had committed against them since November 2015, the Oromo mood will be less relaxed than ever before. However, that may not mean they will turn the festival into an open protest let alone violet one. For them, the occasion is sacred and requires tranquility. To express their anger in a protest would violate the spirit of an occasion which the Oromo greatly value.

However, as we all know the ruling Tigrayan elite are nervous than ever before and the possibility of their irrational interference is very high. There is no moral boundary which they will not cross to harm their enemies, particularly the Oromo. In the beginning of September 2016 they killed the only son of a woman and forced her at gun point to sit on his dead body, beating her with gun butts and breaking her bones. Her son’s crime was being a young Oromo. Her crime was running into the street and lifting his dead body. The regime’s guards allegedly set Kilinto prison, on the outskirt of Finfinne, on fire in which hundreds of political prisoners, most of them Oromo, were incarcerated. Over 20 prisoners were burnt to death. Since November 2015, over 1000 Oromos, most of them young students, were killed and thousands have been injured. Tens of thousands have been imprisoned. When asked by a journalist about his feelings when he passed the finishing line in Marathon race in the Rio Olympics and crossed his hands over his head, athlete Fayyisa Lellisa said that he “had flashbacks of the enormous tragedy happening back home ..Thoughts about the suffering of my people flooded into my mind and strengthened my resolve.”

Lilesa says he understands why some people call him a hero [Diego Azubel/EPA]

[1] The festival is celebrated bi-annually in different parts of the Oromo country. The Irreecha Birra festival is celebrated in the month of September and Irreecha Arfaasaa in the month of April. The first marks the end of the rainy season and the beginning of harvest time while second is to welcome the rains and the beginning of the planting season.
[2] According to Tafari Negusie Taafa, between 5 and 6 million people had participated in the Irreecha festival in September 2015, Oromia Broadcasting Service (OSB), February 8, 2016
[3] See Irreecha: Colour and treasure of Oromo by Amensisa Ifa,  Oromia Broadcasting System, video, October 2015
[4] See UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Paris 17 October 2003.
[5] Among them we find Emperor Menelik’s court chronicler and historian Asme, the Dutch Catholic missionary and anthropologist, Joseph Van de Loo, and the French missionary Martin de Salviac.
[6] Mekuria Bulcha, “Religion and Social Relations in Oromo Tradition,” in Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Conference of Oromo Studies, State University of Washington, Seattle, July 25-26, 1998.
[7] Charles Verharen “Comparing Oromo and Ancient Egyptian Philosophy”, Journal of Oromo Studies, volume 15, no. 2, 2008, p. 5.
[8] Ibid. p. 26
[9] UNESCO, What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/doc/src/01851-EN
[10] See Irreecha: Colour and treasure of Oromo by Amensisa Ifa, ibid

Dr. Baro Keno Deressa

TPLF-agazi truck-Irreecha Massacre of Oromo Civilians (comparable act of France-Nice ISIS terror attack) People asks OPDO where are you?????

The colonial ruling system in Ethiopian empire brought misery to all nations ( Oromo, Ogaden, sidama, gambella, benishangul, innocent Amhara, innocent Tigre …..etc ). Ones and for all this chronical cancer (colonial rule) is going to get lasting curative surgey by gallant sons and daughters of Oromo people and other nations. To achieve this goal radical resection of the system with his tentacles (like OPDO) is essential in order to bring real freedom, justice and peace

In case of malignancy,the goal of curative surgery is to remove the entire tumour with no residual disease (oncological R0 resection), which requires extensive resection of the surrounding tissues. Even if lymph nodes are histologically free of disease, molecular biological techniques reveal infiltration with cancer cells in 50% of cases.

The goal of palliative resection is to improve the quality of life, relieve pain and preventing obstruction without treating the origine of the disease.

Oromo people are political human while our colonizers were/are political animal. The evidence of this fact is the way of life that Oromo peoples exercise. Oromo people political humanity originate from their root which Oromummaa stands for: Society is composed of many different, often competing interests, the basic, seemingly inescapable cleavage between the few who are rich and the many who are poor is potentially the most dangerous social division of all and the underlying cause of much civil unrest. The key to preserving any political community, therefore, is to strike a balance between the members. To this end, the law must be “sovereign” and must serve as an impartial arbiter — “reason unaffected by desire.” Moreover, there must be moral equality before the law. The law cannot be used as a tool to favor the rich and powerful but must be an instrument for achieving social justice, which he defined as “giving every man his due.”Our colonizers have never had moral value and respect rule of law.

Oromo peoples colonizers in general and the current one (TPLF junta) are guided by their prodigious appetites instead of using higher level dictating power like brain and other values (sorry they don’t have brain, only gun). There is a double-edge to the human psyche. Our “lower-level” appetites and urges manifestly serve our needs, but they can also become destructive, both to the community and to ourselves. Our prodigious appetites must therefore be constrained by the higher-level dictates of “reason”, along with our social and ethical impulses, and by the collective actions of the community to protect and preserve itself. How can be a regime like TPLF call itself i am your government while killing children of age 8yr, 13yr, pregnant women and innocent civilians, burning the prisoners alive, smashing the public with a truck and harassing the peoples on the daily basis because of their identity Oromummaa????? The current TPLF junta lacks all factors of humanity (brain to think, moral, social and ethical values).

There is a diversity of talents among men; consequently, one man is best suited to one particular occupation and others to another…We can conclude, then, that production in our country will be more abundant and the products more easily produced and of better quality if each does the work nature (and society) has equipped him to do, at the appropriate time, and is not required to spend time on other occupations. So my advice to TPLF junta leaders: You are failed to lead the nations in Ethiopian empire, you are failed to implement your own constitution, you are failed to build a fair sovereign law unaffected by TPLF desire, Now it is an appropriate time for you to look other job which nature equipped you (maffia style bandit and robbery)

Successive Ethiopian regimes have never displayed humanity or respect for Oromo’s and denied opportunities to build their social, economic, political, cultural and organizational infrastructures. The current Ethiopian regime (TPLF junta) inhuman atrocities reach  uncomfortable degree, defined by the depredations and mass slaughters perpetrated by TPLF junta agazi commando. And thus far there are few indications  that this atrocities will end soon. More often than not, international institutions stand by while political rights are eviscerated and mass killings are committed by regimes desperate to retain power. International law is a patchwork of conventions that deal with issues raised by dictatorships in a piecemeal, ineffective fashion. The Convention Against Torture, for instance, addresses politically motivated degrading treatment and torture, while the Genocide Convention targets the worst abuses a dictator could commit. The International Covenant On Civil and Political Rights delineates a base line of rights that must be protected but offers no clear mechanism by which to vindicate violations.

Our colonizers (TPLF junta) is committing genocide, thousands of Oromo peoples across Oromia are murdered, recent truck Irreecha Massacre is comparable to france Nice terror attack, millions of Oromo’s are languishing in diverse prison center, mass murder is still going on across Oromia and international community are failed to enforce their convention  against criminal regime of TPLF-junta. For more than centuries the Oromo peoples are fighting for justice! equality ! and peace! But still in the 21^st century the reaction of our colonizers is worst than ever. My people as i have mentioned many times in my previous articles we have to empower ourselves and redouble our support to our gallant fighters WBO, our golden generation Qeerroo movement and our vanguard organization OLF in order to speak loudly with enemy language.

Eradicating criminal regime like TPLF would make the world safer for all. It would lift the yoke from the necks of millions still laboring under authoritarian and dictatorial rule of TPLF junta. And it would be the clearest vindication of the rights enumerated in the U.N. Charter in 1945.

Victory to the Oromo people!

Dr. B. K. DERESSA, Medical degree in internal medicine, specialized in Gastro-Hepatology diseases. University Hospital of Brussels-Belgium

By J. Ebisa

Like millions of Oromo and non-Oromo worldwide, I watched the recent Irreecha Oromo Thanksgiving festival where hundreds of Oromo, about 700 according to sources, were gunned down, provoked to run into deep ditches and suffocated or stamped by massive crowd in panic. I still feel angry and distraught by the tragedy which could have been avoided. It is not far-fetched truth to suggest that it was deliberately and meticulously organized by the Wayyane regime which worked over years to sabotage and discourage this important ceremony which it assimilate to Oromo nationalism. This is a painful day which adds a chapter to the collective humiliation of the Oromo nation which has experienced many genocidal killings and massacres under successive regimes. In the following pages, I briefly discuss the significance of Irreecha in embodying Orommuuma and the multi-faceted struggle for the survival of the Oromo as nation both in the past and the present.

What makes Irreecha unique in Oromo history and ethnography?

For the Oromo, Irreecha is a unique day of celebration of life and communication with God since immemorial times. Irreecha, Oromo thanksgiving, often takes at the end of rainy season and welcome of a new harvest where they collectively thank their God for His providence, peace and harmony and interact with each other. It is the most peaceful day in Oromo culture where people do not carry spears, knives and other harmful weapons but green grass (Irreecha) and Sniqee the symbol of peace and fertility and femininity in Oromo culture. Even in the event of conflict and hostility between individuals and groups, it is seen the most peaceful day and rallying time. However, the Woyane, which never stopped killing and harassing, every single day and night since its coming to power, could not even give a one-day respite by deliberately creating havoc and terror which took the lives of hundreds of these beautiful young people and adults dressed in ceremonial attire and Irreecha in their hands. In doing so, it created indelible memory of sorrow and hatreds against this regime which has never been recognized as legitimate and representative despite its false claims to the contrary. This tragedy is a testament to  its declared war against the Oromo nation, which it escalated with the State of Emergency declared on October 9, to justify the ongoing genocidal killings.

Historically speaking, all Ethiopian rulers (of Amhara-Tigrean stock) share the same view on Oromo identity and unity. They are scared of Oromo demographic strength and potential cohesion and strove, and are striving, to prevent large Oromo national gatherings such as pilgrimage (Muuda) and Irreecha (Thanksgiving) which attract millions of Oromo from all corners of Oromo land.  It has to be stressed that Menelik was the first to ban Irreecha and pilgrimage of Oromo to the holy place as he felt that this large crowd would create insecurity and threat to the newly created empire. In so doing, he broke and undermined the kinship bond and unity of Oromo groups who kept their interaction and institutional linkage for centuries despite their dispersion over an extended territory.

In addition, emperor Menelik also forced the Tulama Oromo to circumcise before the Gaada time which literally undermined the Gadaa system in order to convert them to the Orthodox Church. The military defeat and political pressure exerted on the colonized Oromo meant most of the Oromo became Christians and Muslims which eroded Oromo representative institutions. Gadaa and Irreechaa continued to be organized locally and marginally at community levels by losing their central importance in Oromo’s socio-political life.

The fear of Oromummua (Oromoness) continues unabated among old imperial elites  who have to yet to come to terms  with the idea that the Oromo are a nation, a Great Nation as de Salviac named them, a formidable nation, whose identity is based on deeply noted in cultural tradition (Gadaa, Qaallu, Irreecha) and a common language completely intelligible and continuous geographic conditions. Some of them have pretended that the Oromo are not one nation but congeries of related tribes.

Some Naftagna, pseudo historians or their coolies are mobilized to argue that Oromo /Oromia was created by Tigreans in 1991. When they lost war to deny Oromo nationhood or Oromia, they kept the fight by opposing and protesting against the Qubee, the use of Oromo alphabet to write Afaan Oromo. Additionally, they denied or continued to minimize Oromo proven historical grievances against the Ethiopian state. The priests went up to excommunicating its members who prayed in Oromo. At one point they allegedly refused church service for members for using Qubee, etc. The Qubee generation is waging a battle on the two  fronts: the fight against the vestiges of the past and those who have never renounced to reign again under another name and the current oppressors.

Irreecha and the roots of Oromo protest:

The change in 1991 appears to have given the hope that the Oromo felt that they would be free to revive the Central Oromo institutions such as Gadaa and Irreecha as a symbol of Oromo nationhood and emblem of identity. Irreecha became an immediate success both among Oromo’s at home and Diaspora. This time, in 2016, the ceremony have rallied 4 million people together despite government tricks to sabotage to impede it. The TPLF seems to consider the 40 million Oromo as its enemies, not free citizens who have inalienable rights to meet and worship together and to express dissent, the rights guaranteed in the Ethiopian Constitution and the Federal Act.

The TPLF junta, more than any regime in Ethiopian history, predicated on the control of every facet of Ethiopian life: religion, politics, economy (the patriarch has to be a Tigrean, it had to select the Imam from its preferred sect) and it would like impose their own Abba Gadaa. They practically control the entire national economy and political institutions, including 100% representatives in the pavement. These shameless leaders claimed 100% victory in a nation where they do not represent more than 6% and where Tigray does not add practically nothing, or very little to a national wealth. The Oromo, as other people in the country, saw first-hand that these penny less and horde hungry men taking over their land and resource and thrived at their expense and they became nouveau riche, millionaires or even billionaires in a very short period of time “because they are brave  warriors and hardworking”  while “others (Amhara and Oromo) are coward, lazy and envious” – the expressions attributed to a young Tigrean woman living in Diaspora which may reflect the view of empowered Tigrean elites.  It is funny that the Amhara are now at the receiving end of these TPLF insults and  degrading remarks which they generally distributed to disempowered people, Oromo included.

Beyond the total control of the economy and exclusion and marginalization of the non-Tigrean, the Woyane have induced fear and insecurity in the country; pupils and students are not safe in schools, dormitories and on the streets. Successful graduates are unsure to get job opportunity in economy controlled by Stalinist plutocrats. Those who have a job are worried losing it with the changing mood of the autocrats. Even being loyal to OPDO does not guarantee anything  they often brought new OPDOs to keep members under pressures. For any success, the TPLF takes credit and for any failings OPDOs easily become the scapegoat and disposable. Did not it place the blame for the Addis Integrated Master Plan on local authorities? Does not it try attribute the cause of social discontent to bad governance and corruption to OPDOs, their powerless local agents while they in total of the control of the economy and politics? This is not surprising for the government founded in lies and manipulation.

Farmers are not secure on their holdings because the land belongs to the state which could dispossess them anytime. Religious believers are harassed because of the government intervenes in religions affairs – it may know the Imam who better communicate with Allah! Citizens can easily go to jail, disappear and even being killed for no reasons other than expressing their dissent. Anybody can be accused of terrorism, and anti-peace and anti-development and persecuted by the so-called anti-terrorist laws. In fact, this was reported by Human Rights organizations, UN and EU. The Kleptocrats who have never enjoyed popular support and legitimacy rule through terror. Despite repeated calls from UN, EU and human rights organizations to allow independent investigations into reported abuses of human rights, the government would not agree.

One of the major problems which the international community has failed to understand or chose to ignore is that, this government is not a national government but ethnocrcay. Everything from local level administration to national institutions were designed to ensure a Tigrean hegemony. Its army is not a national army but private militia in the service of TPLF agenda. It is not the embodiment of a nation protecting national interests and common good. The presence of Agazi (name for Tigreans special forces) in any place struck fear like SS under the Nazi rule or the Rwandan Interhamwe (the killer militia in 1994). They are seen not as the protectors of citizens’ safety and security but a hostile force entrusted with the mission to kill, maim and arrest, and rape. The daily deaths in the different parts of the country, Oromia regions in particular provide a vivid picture.

Thus, despite its relentless campaign globally and nationally to pretend that the government is legitimate and democratic based on rational bureaucracy and a rule of law, it is far from meeting the basic standard of a modern government: the whole thing is a farce (fake democracy, fake federalism, fake justice system, fake rational administration, fake prime minister, fake double digit economic growth and prosperity which were sold to the West government and International financial institutions. Yet a pseudo “success story” from war torn and unstable region looks attractive. The questions is: for how long do the Western donors tolerate the gross abuses of human rights? Do they understand the depth of the grievances of the Oromo and others under this regime? Is it morally acceptable to tolerate insecurity of tens of millions in the country for their alleged security? The long term consequences government violence and marginalization could be dramatic consequences for the region in case this government allowed to continue its misrule.

In other words, instead of internal and external terrorism threatening the country, the major threat for their wellbeing of the people in Ethiopia emanates from its government. What surprising is not so much its claim to be rampart against terrorism, but the dismissal of all legitimate concerns and protest of citizens as terrorism.  Recently, they are trying to justify their never end rule as guarantee against imminent danger: GENOCIDE. Seriously? The misuse and abuse of the concept of genocide by the Woyyane is not new; Meles justified federal model a means of preventing a kind of genocide which occurred in Rwanda. His disciples Abaye Tsehai and Seyoum Mesfin have taken the relay of ignorance and manipulation by branding the spectre of genocide to deflect the conversation from their crimes to suggest that if they are not in charge of the affairs things will go from bad to worse. These pseudo-intellectual talk shows  that their shallow education and miseducation to understand this complex phenomenon. It is not a crime not receive higher education or not getting a chance to take courses or a decent lecture on a genocide in world politics and history. Actually, they are perpetrating genocidal killings in many parts of the country in Oromia in particular.

The state of emergency declared today is a recipe for more violence and massacre; it sets the stage for more violence. This intimidation, massacre, planned atrocities cannot stop the oppressed people from standing up for the rights. Historically, those who committed genocides in Germany, Cambodia (the pol pot regime, 1975-1979) and Rwanda in 1994 were perpetrated by fascists and undemocratic governments in power. They were all government induced genocides, genocide from above. Today, the one which engaged in genocidal massacres is the TPLF government and its armed militia. Are they organizing inter-communal conflict as a way of extension of their power which seems to be shrinking day by day? My only hope is they do not use “Genocide” to deflect criticism from widely governmental crimes and abuses of human rights and foment inter-ethnic conflicts for short term political calculation.

The on-going Oromo protest

As opposed to the preceding regimes, this government promised, a measure of autonomy economic, political power and cultural powers for federal regions. After consolidating its hegemony, it has decided to take back the concessions made to the Oromo and it is the promise non-kept promises, disempowerment, contempt and marginalisation that triggered the current resistance.  It is to be noted the Oromo never surrendered without a fight although the magnitude of the resistance varied, mostly regional and fragmented. They kept on fighting against injustice and oppression in the different corners of their land. Their collective resistance started to take shape since the 1960s and evolved through the subsequent decades of sacrifice under Haile Selassie and the Darg regimes. The Qubee generation, which was born and educated with the sense of Orommumaa is now spreading of the ongoing revolution. Interestly, to achieve its own policy goals, the government gave civic education including human rights at all levels and encouraged  to proud of cultural heritage. They gladly accepted and embraced their Orommuma and have decided to fight for their nation, culture and land. One thing which differs them from the predecessors is that they do not suffer from competing loyalties – they are Oromo and the age of communication and the social media helped to build their unity and wage collective struggle. They are the first victims of Woyane assassination and massacre which is making more resolute.

The recently announced Amhara-Oromo solidarity, by some, does not mean that Amhara and Oromo have the same historical memories and experience. It is true that both the Amhara and Oromo are marginalized and oppressed by Kleptorcatic gangs which mix Stanlism, plutocracy as neo-liberal developmentalism as a method of governance.

However, one of the problem with this solidarity is that may harbour a hidden dream to back to power in the event the current regimes and they are making transitional government to this effect. the Qubee generation and the Qeerroo fighters are ready to uproot the Tigrean Kleptocratic regime, but also not to see the vestige of imperial past under the tautology of individual rights and liberal democracy. They pertinently know that Ethiopia is not a civic nation, liberal individualism is not the answer to oppressed nations like the Oromo. They strongly believe in Oromo nation possesses inherent rights to self-determination enshrined in international law and the charter to create a self-governing proud nation where individual rights institutionalized and respected in order to ensure peaceful co-existence and cooperation. The Qubee generation is forward looking, they do not want to see their people being marginalised and humiliated and reduced to second class citizens. They aspire to live in liberty and dignity on their land to be at home and are ready to pay the necessary sacrifice to achieve these noble goals. Justice will prevail and these combatants of liberty will enter into the pantheon of Oromo history for ever.

By J. Ebisa

Introduction

The recently discussed Amhara-Oromo solidarity, by some, does not mean that Amhara and Oromo have the same historical memories, experience, and aspirations. It is true that both the Amhara and Oromo are now marginalized and oppressed by Kleptorcatic gangs which mix Stanlism, plutocracy and neo-liberal developmentalism as a method of governance. The Oromo and Amhara have a shared interest to get rid of this intolerable regime. Then, what is next? Some Amhara would like to get back to power where they left off as ruling national elite whereas the Oromo aim to end the Amhara-Tigre rule domination once and all. Thus, one of the problems with this solidarity is that a hidden dream of the Amhara elite to put the clock back in the event the current regime ends and roll back political reforms by manipulating the transitional period and restore status quo ante which the Oromo nation already rejected and buried (http://www.ayyaantuu.net/beyond-the-bushoftu-massacre-the-war-on-orommuma-and-oromo-unity/)

As discussed in above quoted piece, over the last few weeks, there has been conversation about protests and resistances among two biggest national groups and largest federal regions, Oromo and Amhara. The widespread uprisings and resistances throughout Oromia and the appearance of protests in Bahir Dar and Gondar and the consequent violent repressions look like a wild fire. To this, one should add the less discussed cases, the Konso and the Afar protests. In some diaspora communities, we see some joint demonstrations between Oromo and Amhara activists to condemn the Tigrean Kleptocratic ethnocracy. Amhara-Oromo solidarity or “unity”, at very least a tactical alliance, is considered as a major threat even a nightmare for the ruling junta whose ethnonational base is about 6% in a country of 100 million inhabitants. It is not difficult to imagine a huge challenge of this minority government to face a colossus (representing more than 60% of the population together plus other groups who are likely to join them) which controls also a large chunk of the national economy.

I would argue that solidarity and unity is mechanical and superficial, not organic and genuine. It is true that both Oromo and Amhara are feel disrespected and marginalized, excluded and have common interest to change this regime by all means, in an ideal world by peaceful means. Generally, it is not uncommon to see alliances to achieve some goals; people, nations, groups and parties with different political ideologies and aspirations can create alliances or coalitions around the common denominator by putting aside their differences to face a common threat. For example, Western democracies, US in particular, created the Great Alliance with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazism despite the deep ideological and political gulf between communism and capitalism. That alliance was not natural but tactical and helped to defeat Nazism. After the end of WWII, both returned to their hostile stances which led to the cold war (1945-1990), an ideological and political and military conflict between East and West.

In fact, one can mention numerous examples from the annals of history the extent to which groups and nations formed alliances to deal with the greatest evils despite their differences. As common adage goes in politics, friendship and alliances may be temporary but interest is permanent. What does Amhara interests have to do with the Oromo interests? Are they compatible? Do they converge beyond the regime change which both despise and consider as illegitimate and criminal? Do they have common memory, experience and understanding of the past? What about future agenda and political journey they envisage both in short and long term?

The Weight of History and Memory

In the following paragraphs, I will try to answer the above questions in order to capture the crux of the argument. The country we now call Ethiopia was carved to its current shape since the first of the half 19^th century and has been exclusively ruled by the Abyssinians, the Amhara and Tigreans. The Amhara were the master of the land sine 1840s, when the conquest of the Tulama was completed by Sahle Selassie until 1991, roughly for 150 years. The Tigreans /Woyane have replaced them as the ruling group and have been in charge for 25 years now.

However, for the majority Oromo and other southern people, Amhara rule began in earnest with Menelik who created the empire under/around the Amhara power, culture, economic and political dominations. Initially, the Amhara expanded as feudal colonialists and then used the modernization and revolutionary process to their advantage to consolidate their hegemony and influence through the process of social change. In the meantime, the Oromo became colonial subjects (Gabbar, second class citizen for extended period of time (the vicious cycle of sub-ordination and humiliation and marginalization which continue unabated under the current regime) despite the numerous reforms and even a major revolution in 1974.

The grievances against the Amhara controlled state was so deep that the Woyane rallied the Oromo, in an open rebellion, for a new departure. They pretended that they would create a system which will correct injustices of the past, bring equality, mutual respect and democracy to the country. In reality, the hidden plan was to create a Tigrean Kleptocratic government under the tautology of federalism. Their predecessors, the Amhara owned the Ethiopian state and used it to their own advantage. Despite their apparent differences due to the change in international and national circumstances, the Woyane learned a lot from the Amhara rule – controlling the state and using it to their interests. For instance, both grabbed Oromo lands and resources and thieved in a relatively short period of time. The Oromo elders remember with some irony how Woyane and Naftagna came to Oromia as penny less and emerged as propertied wealthy elite in a record time as the expense of labour, land and resource of marginalized people.

With respect to the methods of rule, both have the same strategy despite changes in times and circumstances. The Amhara, being a minority to effectively rule such a large empire where they lack knowledge of local culture and language, created the balabbat system in the conquered lands which ensured Abyssinian authority at the local levels (Local channels of communication). The fate of the Balabbats was sealed with the fall of Haile Selassie and went to the bin of history. For its parts, the Woyane, a small group with no capacity to govern the country on their own, badly needed collaborators and fabricated their local agents, messengers, to impose their domination. They created OPDO to replace the old version of the balabbat system in order to control the Oromo population.  But, OPDO agents are artificial creature easily disposable compared to the balabbats whose power was embedded in local communities.

As often been the case in the Ethiopian traditions, the Tigreans have accused the Amhara of misruling the empire and oppressing and exploiting the nations and nationalities composing the polity. This was not invented myth but largely shared by all people who were conquered and incorporated into the country. Now, the Amhara have their own arguments to accuse the TPLF as ethnocratic, exploitive, oppressive and divisive regime. In the process, they forget and openly deny or minimize the damage of their governance system spanning 100 years.  Above all, it is an irony that the Amhara are blaming their cousins, Tigreans, for lack of democracy, lack of respect for human rights and lack of inclusive government as if they presided over regimes which ruled differently.  The fact of the matter is that the Woyane system is a continuation or a replica of Abyssinian political culture based on factionalism, manipulation and repression, not something invented in the 1990s but adapted to the changing national and global realities to justify their policies.

From Oromo perspective, the Tigreans and Amhara are the two faces of the same coin; they are imperial people.  It is difficult to choose between plague and cholera! The Amhara owned the state under all successive regimes and the Tigreans, despite many promises, and changes in political orientations, constitution, the federal structure, rule with an iron fist. They have one thing in mind: to replace the Amhara as the dominant group, and exercise exclusive power in accordance with Abyssinian well-known political system: a zero sum game and the winner takes all paradigm. It looks as if they are saying “we won power by force, and will keep until were are forced out by the same means.”

The Oromo collectively and unanimously reject and abhor imperial rule no matter the ideological cover of the system.  Here, I have no time and space to compare and contrast what Amhara and Tigrean rule look like. Future researchers may come up with interesting insights and conclusion on methods and impacts of their governance on the southern people. The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 and the TPLF takeover 1990s provided ample opportunities to address Oromo historical grievances by the owners of the Ethiopia state. Unfortunately, little has changed and we still talk of Oromo uprising and revolts for their rights.  The 40 million or so Oromo are saying enough is enough of Amhara-Tigrean rule.

Oromo aspirations and the Centrality of Collective Rights

Historically, the Oromo were not imperial people, and they do not want to be one now. They did not have an organized ideology and system of exploitation to impose on any one. The key issue and demand is, and has always been, to restore their violated dignity to be self-governing and free people under the political system of their choosing including the Gadaa system. Gadaa is one the brilliant accomplishments in their long history and constitutes one of the original contributions of the African people have to offer to world civilization and system of governance. The Oromo are proud to learn that their ancestors were ruled by democratically elected leaders until they fell under ruthless feudal colonialism. They are thrilled to show that their ancestors had the concept of human rights and natural rights before John Locke popularized them in his Two Treaties of Government in 1689. Moreover, the Oromo put in place a democratic system of governance well before European enlightenment, between 17^th and 18^th century, known as political and philosophical movement for liberty, equality and fraternity, which became slogans of the French Revolution, even global slogans.

The Oromo Gadaa leaders had been implementing, since immemorial times, the concept of fraternity, equality and liberty which were enshrined in the Gadaa laws. They did not wait for Jean Jacques Rousseau to hear that “all men are born free and equal”. They did not borrow his concept of General Will and common good which was already carefully crafted in the Gadaa system. This is true for the rule of law, term limit for elected officers and the checks and balance system that ensures both individual and collective rights. The sad story in all this is that, Oromo’s civilizational model /system was destroyed and replaced by a feudal autocracy of Menelik. In so doing, he reduced a free and egalitarian society into slaves, helpless serfs, and colonial subjects. The Oromo are now out to restore aspects of what was taken from them in order to live in freedom and dignity.

One of the major problems and obstacles for Oromo -Amhara solidarity is, and has always been, their scholars, politicians, and activists have not yet to come to terms about the existence of Oromo, Oromia and Orommumaa which they tend to dismiss as the invention of the Woyane.  They have mobilized an army of scholars, activists and even priests to discredit and undermine Oromo identity and as they did for centuries. As I wrote in another piece:

Some Naftagna, pseudo historians or their coolies are mobilized to argue that Oromo /Oromia was created by Tigreans in 1991. When they lost the war to deny Oromo nationhood or Oromia, they kept the fight by opposing and protesting against the Qubee, the use of Oromo alphabet to write Oromiffaa. Additionally, they denied or continue to minimize Oromo proven historical grievances against the Ethiopian state. Their priests went up to excommunicating its members who preached in Oromo language. At one point they allegedly refused church service for the dead members for using Qubee.

All this -both their official and unofficial dream and endeavor to undo Oromummaa they rallying cry “Kelil” which they dismiss as Bantustan, Apartheid segregated villages in South Africa, not a coherent socio-cultural reality. This is offensive and insulting. They hate any change to the status quo, unitary and centralist and assimilationist state. For the Oromo, the question is not whether the federal model acceptable but its superficial nature just created to enable the Tigrean to control and exploit Oromo sources.

The Amhara give the impression their desire rollback all important reforms since 1990s including the federal model should they get they opportunity. For the Oromo regardless of different ideological orientations, which could be divided into minimal land maximal nationalists, Orommumaa and Oromia remain the basis for any future political arrangements. This clearly suggests that the Oromo cherish collective rights, which does not mean the negation of individual rights as all rights inter-dependent and inter-related as explicitly stipulated in the UN Declaration: “All human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent; equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, promotion and protection of civil and political, and economic, social and cultural tights”

This clearly stipulates that no hierarchy in category of human rights – human need civil /political rights, social and economic rights as well as group/collective rights are necessary for the life of dignity. However, oppressed and colonized people do feel, rightly, that individual rights cannot guarantee their freedoms, protection against the power of the state or dominant groups. In other words, in poly-ethnic empire based on conquest, and power disparity/inequality, individual rights cannot appropriately and fairly address the national question and deeply-seated grievances. Historically, Individual rights claim is related to the people that have power, propertied class and a privileged category where group rights/collective right are claimed by the oppressed people. In Ethiopia, those who sing the hymn of Individual rights are former power holders, and all those who think that they have somethings to loose when disempowered are empowered through collective rights. It is not that collective rights take anything away from them but they lose the power and opportunity to infringe upon others’ rights, who will be self-governing and the master of their destiny.

In other words, regardless of their numbers, the Oromo constitute an oppressed nation under Abyssinian and empire rulers. There is nothing less than full-fledged autonomy which guarantees self-government status where they could share sovereignty, on some domains, with other nations and nationalities at the federal level. So, the future talk and political arrangements should start from where are now, not where we were before 1974 or 1991. Oromo cultural unity and geographical unity is not subject to negotiation.

For so long, the Amhara ruling political and intellectual elites tried to disguise their own Amhara identity under “Ethiopian identity” they called themselves Ethiopians, not Amhara, until very recently. Yet, they promoted their own sense of identity and history by wrapping in Ethiopian flag. Interestingly enough, the Tigreans say that old Ethiopian flag is the symbol of Amhara domination. For their part, the Amhara reject the current TPLF Flag as a symbol of Woyane domination. In the meantime, the Oromo feel the Ethiopian flag, both Tigrean and Amhara version, is the symbol of imperial power, not the symbol of freedom and dignity taken from them.

In fact, this is more than a dog fight on a piece of cloth but the sign of polarized and fragmented body politics and competing view of national identity and the conquest aspirations. It is in this context, the young Amhara activists have claimed officially Amharaness before Ethiopian identity. It is a slap in the face of older generations of Amhara like Prof. Mesfin who he denied all his life the existence of Amhara identity as a way of negating the identity of oppressed peoples. That appeared logical then. If you elevate Amhara identity to national identity and promote it as such, why do you reduce what is national to ethnic? Not anymore. The Amhara have realized that they are one of the constituent groups, not the group defining or imposing the terms of Ethiopianism on others. Here, it is important to stress that there is no problem with being Amhara, Amhara culture and values, religion, way of life. What Oromo rejected and resented for long is the imposition of this culture at the expense of their own.

Concluding Remarks

The Amhara -Oromo solidarity is possible in so far it promotes common interest and mutual respect, not as a means of controlling the future agenda for self-interest and coming through the back door. Historically, the Oromo resistance and protests were targeted against the Amhara, the rulers of the empire. When they lost and replace by the Woyane regime, the Amhara are opposed to many concessions made particularly in the 1990s to the Oromo people. The Oromo do not see many reasons to form an alliance which centralist elites whose political thoughts and political agenda are stuck in the distance past. Many Amhara based political organizations and even civic group are allergic to the issue of identity and collective rights, disguising themselves by Lockean individual liberalism which they think is the best way to restore Amhara influence/power. All the reference to Locke and Kantian cosmopolitanism to deny Oromo collective rights and their right to self-determination is an exercise in futility.

Oromo political organization and groups (OLF the General Kemal Gelchu group and recently ODF) which reached agreements with Amhara based organizations were not only criticized by the fact that they deny Oromo collective rights but also could not delivery any results. This rapprochement was with revulsion and contempt by the majority Oromo. These agreements and alliances all failed miserably. Where is the agreement between General Kemal Gelchu and Ginbot? What is the significance of ODF and Ginbot agreement? They are miles behind the movement of history. Both Amhara and Oromo activists do believe these coalitions are artificial  and do not reflect the fundamental aspirations of their constituencies.

To come back at the issue of Oromo-solidarity, the question is: solidarity for what? To change the current government only? What kind of government and political system do we want? Here starts the thorny issue. The Amhara solidarity with is belated. They were debating for months whether or not supporting Oromo protest is an opportunity or risk. Some argued in favor of support that if the Oromo protesters carry Ethiopian flag and promote Ethiopian identity or no support if the movement consolidate Orommumaa and weakness what they call national identity. So, it is a conditional support and half-hearted, superficial and opportunist. This is perfectly understandable as everyone looks for its own interests. The Amhara protest was triggered not because of planned solidarity with the Oromo but due to territorial conflict in Wolqait which the Woyane annexed to Tigrai.

They now want to use this “solidarity” tautology to have some influence on Oromo transitional charter. In fact, the nature of Oromo charter is the talk of the week on the news outlets both in Amharic and English as if what Oromo do is their business. Some started attacking the tenor of Oromo Charter without knowing what is in it. This shows two things; 1) outmoded paternalism and imperial nostalgia. They still seem think that what is good for the Oromo and for everyone in the country. 2) what is funny is that no one interested in their transitional charter, which is based on Amhara agenda.

In the light of the above analysis, there is a need for the Oromo activists consult with their base about the possible national transitional charter. TPLF imposed its political agenda on OLF and weak ethnic/regional based parties. The Oromo have learned from this experience and will come up with coherent charter which responds to Oromo aspiration and interest of other groups. Obviously, other groups can come with their own vision to solve the country’s political and economic problems. Everything is on the table except Oromo’s collective rights where the tenor and contour of the issue will be discussed.

Before we talk of Amhara-Oromo solidarity, there has to be a robust inter-Oromo dialogue, solidarity and unity more than ever before. The Oromo Charter should be inclusive given the importance of the issue for this generation and even for generations to come. It is imperative to reach out to different social groups and organizations in the nation of 40 million people. No one should be left out including senior leaders, veterans of Oromo Liberation Organizations, young activists, scholars, the Qubee generations in the forefront of the struggle, and Oromo elders, religion leaders, representatives of civic and community organizations and all stakeholders to get their input which is likely to make the charter an embodiment of Oromo interest, and a road map. I trust that the organizers/convers of the meeting take into account this seriously to claim that the charter would reflect the Oromo voice and sensibilities. At this juncture, one is reminded that, in Oromo culture, important decisions are reached through consensus, not imposed by autocrats.

Note: The #OromoProtests and #OromoRevolution that has been given wide written, visual and social media coverage all over the world has been denied attention & coverage by the CNN. The following piece will exactly explain the reason why the CNN has been refusing to report on the profound & unique struggle & revolution of the Oromo people, the first in its kind in Africa, that is shaking TPLF from its foundation.

Submitted by IWB

CNN is paid by the US government for reporting on some events, and not reporting on others. The Obama Administration pays CNN for content control.

Let that sink in.

Additionally CNN and CNN International are also paid by foreign governments to avoid stories that are damaging, and construct narratives that show them in a better, albeit false, light.

Amber Lyon is a three-time Emmy winning investigative journalist and photographer. She accuses CNN of being “fake news.”

Back in March 2011, CNN sent a four person team to Bahrain to cover the Arab Spring. Once there, the crew was the subject of extreme intimidation amongst other things, but they were able to record some fantastic footage. As Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian writes in his blockbuster article from September 4th 2012:

“In the segment, Lyon interviewed activists as they explicitly described their torture at the hands of government forces, while family members recounted their relatives’ abrupt disappearances. She spoke with government officials justifying the imprisonment of activists. And the segment featured harrowing video footage of regime forces shooting unarmed demonstrators, along with the mass arrests of peaceful protesters. In sum, the early 2011 CNN segment on Bahrain presented one of the starkest reports to date of the brutal repression embraced by the US-backed regime.

Despite these accolades, and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.

Having just returned from Bahrain, Lyon says she “saw first-hand that these regime claims were lies, and I couldn’t believe CNN was making me put what I knew to be government lies into my reporting.”

Here is a segment of the Bahrain report that Amber Lyon and her team put together. CNNi refused to allow it to air because the Bahrain Government had paid them not to show it.

Dika Godana G^*, Department of soil resource and watershed management, Gambella University, Ethiopia

Source: Arts and Social Sciences Journal
also in PDF

Introduction

Background and justification

Complex pastoral management systems have evolved from the pastoralists’ successful adaptation under the harsh conditions of arid and semi-arid rangelands [1]. Similarly Blench [2] noted that, the existing pastoral systems including their local adaptations are highly diverse, although they share common development trends. Pastoral resource management systems are influenced by natural environments with high variability in rainfall and recurrent extreme climatic conditions, associated with spatial heterogeneity. Again, the pastoralists’ knowledge and strategies in rangeland and water management are disturbed by inappropriate development policies, and this leads to environmental degradation and the erosion of important social structures.

Pastoralists in Ethiopia like the other African countries have continuously suffered from a long history of political, economic, and socio-cultural marginalization. The pastoralist’s problems have been exacerbated by recurrent and complex natural calamities such as drought, flood, disease etc. [3]. The environment is the basic determinant of the nature and productivity of rangeland ecosystems of pastoralists. Physical environmental factors, like climate, topography and soil determine the potential of rangeland to support certain types and levels of land use [4].

Since the 1990s, pastoral development approaches in eastern Africa have improved, due partly to increased support for livestock mobility, customary institutions, and pastoral livestock strategies, and partly to a greater emphasis on human development and rights based approaches. The building blocks for pastoral development, notably empowerment and governance, are now better understood and addressed, but there remains a major gap in understanding, at a practical level, of how pastoralists manage their natural resource base. Development projects have enabled pastoral communities to strengthen their tenure over rangeland resources, and to restore traditional management practices, but projects often lack the capacity to help pastoralists to benefit from scientific advances in rangeland management [5,6].

Rangeland monitoring is the process of periodically assessing the condition of the natural resources, mainly vegetation, water, and soil. During the monitoring process positive and/or negative change in the pasture composition and consequently general land condition can be assessed. This information can assist in making proper land management decisions to ensure sustainable land use. Rangeland can be monitored both in traditional and modern ways. The traditional method of rangeland monitoring and evaluation follows changes in indicators of environmental health, enabling herders to adjust their forage management and conservation strategies to the long and short term availabilities of resources [4].

Indigenous or local knowledge can be defined as skills, practices and technologies that are an integral part of the production system in a specific culture. They are area-specific skills and practices concerning natural resource management, human and animal health, etc. developed by indigenous people over centuries. Therefore, it is important to take advantage of indigenous institutions, environmental knowledge and traditional management practices [7].

Borana rangelands are one of the southern Ethiopia’s lowland grazing units in which pastoralists have been keeping their livestock for living. Cattle, goats, sheep, and camels are the dominant domesticated animals in these rangelands. According to Cossins and Upton [8], the Borana pastoral production in southern Ethiopia was considered until the early 1980s as one of the few remaining productive pastoral systems in East Africa.

Since then, there is evidence that the system is experiencing decline in productivity, associated with periodic losses in cattle populations; changes in land use; and fire ban that have resulted in the proliferation of bush encroachment and a general decline in forage production.

The present crisis might be the result of the combined effects of climatic variability and increases in bush cover that may increase the risk of drought-induced herd die-offs [9].

Traditionally, the vagaries of the natural environment can be overcome through access to and management of communal rangelands, mobility of stock, and institutions for mutual assistance. However, drought induced livestock mortality is often seen as a symptom of inherent flaws in livestock production systems; barren rangelands are taken as evidence of unsustainable grazing pressure and increasing land degradation [10].

Therefore, the rationale for this study was to identify major factors that hamper the potential of rangeland productivity and to assess the role of indigenous knowledge in rangeland management.

The Study Area and Methods

The study area

The Borana Rangeland is found in Oromia National Regional State, southern Ethiopia. It lies between 4o0’-5o30’ N latitude and 37o30’-39o20’ E longitude. It covers about 95,000 km² which is estimated to be 7.6% of the national area. Yabello Woreda is found in this category covering about 5556 km² (Figure 1)

Figure 1: Map of study area.

Woreda is located between latitude 4o30’55.81” and 5o24’36.39”N and longitude 37o44’14.70” and 38o36’05.35”E [11] (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Map of specific study sites.

The study area comes under the influence of a bi-modal monsoon rainfall type, where 60% of the 300-900 mm annual rainfall occurs during March to May (Ganna) and 40% between September and November (Hagaya) [12].

Adisu [13] also cited that, the rainfall of the area is distinctly bimodal pattern (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Annual Rainfall of Yabello Woreda.

Research design and methods

For this study partially mixed concurrent dominant status qualitative decision research design were applied.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis were considered. Qualitative data were analyzed by discussion of the ideas, opinion, and concepts of collected data. Quantitative data were analyzed by using of SPSS software and Microsoft Excel program to present the result in form of graphs, tables and percentages.

Results

Indigenous knowledge of borana pastoralists in rangeland management

Borana pastoralists’ indigenous knowledge (IK) about range ecology, livestock resources and social organization has developed highly efficient range management strategies to deal with the high-risk environments of arid lands. Indigenous knowledge is a culture-based knowledge that is specific to certain group of peoples.

Even though some study says the utilization of indigenous rangeland management has declining, the practice is not totally lost. According to the responses of many of the respondents from study area, some of the practices of indigenous knowledge of pastoralists are discussed below (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Map of indigenous land use patterns in Borana rangelands, southern Ethiopia.

Herd mobility

Herd mobility was traditionally practiced by the pastoralists as the key strategy to make use of the scattered rangeland resources on a large spatial scale. According to the ideas of most of the respondents from study area, they have been practicing the mobility of herds. Herd movements have been reduced considerably over time. Many years ago, Borana rangeland management was organized at a large scale of the landscape. Many of the respondents confirmed that, at present day movement by home is minimized because of pastoralist permanent settlement and mobility is by stock.

Some of the pastoralists (44%) from study area leave their previous location and move to the other reera (Figure 5). The prime reason for this movement was the decision made by Raba gadaa to arrange settlement and leave the settlement encroached into grazing area for grazing. The rangeland of Dharito and Dambala Saden was fragmented and taken by settlement and farmland. It is to leave the land for livestock/grazing. In Harweyu, bushes take the area of rangeland and some of the villages are settled in the area of grazing. Unlike that of Dharito pastoralist, some of the mobile pastoralists to Dambala Saden and Harweyu leave their previous location for grazing. This movement of pastoralist by home in study area is not by willing of them. It is because of the decision made by Raba gadaa. However now pastoralists not move by home but they send their livestock to other ardaa where there they believe forages are available. Before sending livestock to the other ardaa they send abuuru scout to that ardaa to observe the availability of forages and water sources of that ardaa and assure permission from abbaa dheeda (headman of seasonal grazing) of that ardaa. During the time in which drought is hard pastoralists from study area send their livestock to Dirree grazing zone.

Figure 5: Graph showing responses of pastoralists on how long they have been leaving in their current places.

As the displacement of villages was not by their will they also choose their present location as per the decision of kebele leaders. The head of each ardaa identify the villages settled in the prime grazing area and identities the villages to be arranged with community. The decision of Raba gadaa was putted to action by kebele leader and head of each reera.

As it can be observed from the (Figure 5) some of the respondents stayed at their current location for less than one year (10%), others for one to five years (44%), about (8%) have been at their current location for 6 to 10 years and only (38%) of has lived for more than 10 years. Those who have stayed for one to five years are moved as a result of decisions made by raaba gadaa.

Many of the pastoralists (93%) have no plan to leave their present location. For instance, respondents from Dharito, if they are asked, whether they have planned to leave their current location, many of them responded they have no plan. Dharito is one of the kebeles of woreda that has been shifting from pastoralists to agro-pastoralism. Due to agro pastoralism nature of the area they cannot leave their farm land. The prime reason for them not to move is farm land and even during drought they move their livestock.

The mobility of pastoralists from Dambala Saden and Harweyu depends on the condition of rain and forage available for livestock. Dambala Saden is one of the kebeles of woreda that has been said remaining forage species are available and Harweyu is also one of the ardaa which is pastoralist, except a few introduction of farmland. Due to pastoralism nature of pastoralists they stay during the season on which forage is available for livestock at their area and otherwise they move. They move not by the home but by livestock.

The prime reason for the movement is that productivity of livestock depends on the availability of forage species which in turn depends on the rainfall availability.

The result of analytical discussion with elders and herders showed that, the most important fodder species that livestock graze during dry seasons are different grass species and leaf of different trees.

The result of (Table 1) shows those, grass species like Cenchrus ciliaris, Heteropogon contortus, Dactyloctnium species, Chrysopgon aucheruand others are highly desirable for livestocks to graze. Their life forms are perennial. The frequencies of Dychoriste hildebrandtii (11.6) is high followed by Cenchrus ciliaris and Heteropogon contortus with frequency 8.9 and 8.5 respectively. The growth form, desirability, life form and frequencies of other species can be observed from the table.

strong>Table 1: Desirability, growth form, life form and frequency (%) of the different grass and non-grass species in the study area.

According to the herder at foora livestock, of Gombo mountain during the period of hard drought when root of grass are lost, livestock graze leafy trees like Ejersa (Oea europaea subsp. cuspidata), Biiqqaa (Pappea capensis), Dhamee (Sschrebera alata), Dhitacha (Dodonea angustifolia), Gaallee (Psydrax schimperiana), Daboobesa (Rhus species), Qalqalcha (Boscia mossambicensis), Mi’eessaa (Euclea divinorum), harooressa (Grewia bicolor) and etc.

Water is a crucial resource in the lowlands of Borana. Pastoralists depend on water for household consumption and for the watering of their livestock. The mobility of livestock even depends on the availability of water for livestock. The main source of water for the pastoralist from Dharito during dry season is Dharito wells. Dharito has three wells i.e., Dambicha well, Digalticha well and Hawaticha well.

The well manager (abba herregaa) establishes watering rights for well users by fixing water rota. During rainy season livestock and people get water from nearby small ponds. Again for Dambala Saden the main source of water for livestock during dry season are Labuu wells, Digaluu and Bulee ponds. Small ponds around villages, Doloollo and haya guraacha are the main source of water during rainy season for Dambala Saden.

In Harweyu hargaasaa water pump and Yaatu well are the main water source for livestock during dry season. However, during rainy season livestock get water from Dozori, Muyatte, Madhera hidda and Didibisa ponds.

Customary institutions for rangeland management

The result of analytical discussion with elders and survey (97%) in study area indicates that Borana has a unique system (customary institution) of managing natural resources in general and rangeland and water resources in particular. Indigenous institutions includes local cultural form of organizations, for instance locally elected, appointed, or hereditary leaders and elders, customary rules and regulations relating to access to resources, indigenous practices and knowledge. The researcher has discussed the institution for rangeland management along with institution for management of water resources as they are inseparable.

Broadly speaking, the Borana customary institutions have been categorized into two forms: micro and macro institutions. Both could be further divided into many branches. Each of them has a responsibility for natural resource management and other societal issues at various levels. Management of any resource has to start at the lower level in accordance of Borana law. According to analytical discussions with elders micro level institutions for the management of rangeland are Warra, Ollaa, Ardaa, Reera, Madda and Dheeda. Again appointed and elected individuals in the community like Jaarsa dheeda, abbaa herregaa and Jaarsa madda have their own roles and rules of managing natural resources in general and range and water resources in particular.

Warra

Warra is a smallest unit in the village that includes family of one household (the father, mother and unmarried children). The unmarried son and daughter get their own ibida/warra after they have married with their couples. The roles of warra in rangeland management start from the advice of parents to their children who look after livestocks. They told to their herders not to be out of customary law of Borana. There are area reserved and not to be allowed for grazing during rainy season. For instance, kaloo (enclosure) is not grazed during early rain to allow the growth of grasses.

Livestock and calves graze open grazing areas this time. Herders or member of warra take care of resources on their side and even reports their father when he/she sees others are exploiting the resource. Then abbaa warra pass wrong doer to the concerned body or village heads.

Ollaa (Village)

The ollaa (village) is the collection of different warra. The coming together of many households forms ollaa. Abbaa ollaa (head of village) is the most popular man among his villagers in terms of his ability to organize, analyze and manage things according to aadaa Borana (Borana custom). One or more villages have kaloo in common. From the villages which has kaloo together pastoralists elect one person to take care of enclosure.

Ardaa

Ardaa is a particular site that is inhabited by a village or cluster of villages. Ardaa is a small grazing territory where its residents can commonly share water, pasture and other resources within the context of aadaa seera marraa-bishaan Boranaa (Borana customary-laws of pasture and water). Elders from a village or villages usually hold residential meetings on how to manage and share resources in their territory.

Reera

Reera is the cluster of villages which are found in a specified site, or two or more close sites inhabited by people who can use water from the same sources and their herds can use on the same grazing grounds. Abbaa Reeraa (head of cluster) is a famous man or who has ability of managing rangeland and water resource of reera area. He represents the members of his fellow cluster at the next larger territorial unit, madda. People in the same cluster have also regular meetings to consolidate the natural resource management systems in their unit.

Madda

It is a wider territorial unit than reera; its concept is derived from a permanent water source. It is made up of combination of clusters, which often surround the water well at its center. A madda is administered by the council of elders drawn from different clusters of that madda. In other words, they are heads of all clusters surrounding a permanent water source. They usually meet at water point to discuss how to manage and share water and pasture among residents in their unit, or with other new comers who come from other madda in search of better resources.

Dheeda

This is wider unit than madda. In most cases it includes in it several madda’s that are managed independently by council of elders drawn from different madda’s. The word dheeda literally means grazing. So, the word is sometime taken as grazing land limited to specific unit. The Borana land has two major grazing zones Liban and Dirree. Liban grazing zone (dheeda) further divided into two Golbaa and Gubbaa while Dirree is blends goomolee, Malbee, Golboo, Dirree (Tula wells grazing zone) and Wayaama grazing zone. Jaarsa dheeda are responsible for decisions about mobility; addressing social disputes and have an important role in conflict resolution.

When we come to the management of water resources of Borana in general and that of study area in particular, the most important water resource that are highly regulated by customary institutions are wells, hand-dug shallow ponds known as haroo. However generally in Borana deep tula wells and natural ponds containing water throughout the year are managed through customary laws. The grazing lands surrounding well are protected (laafa seera eela) during the wet season and used during the dry season.

According to discussion with elders, property right of wells to goes the konfi who initiates digging ceremony of wells. Konfi is abba eela (father of well) and he pass ownership title to his clan after retired. The management of wells belongs to all members of clan and Borana in general. Konfi assigns well manager (abbaa herregaa). The well manager (abbaa herregaa) establishes watering rights for well users by fixing water rota. The other small management may goes to abba guyyaa (father of the day) who regulates the daily function of the well. Abbaa guyyaa can be from any of Borana clan. He is appointed only for the day on which his livestock was watered from the well. He is the coordinator of the day and supervises the activity of the other groups like obaatu (those who lift water from the well) for livestock. Their responsibilities are lifting water for livestock from well and cleaning and collecting animal dung from daargulaa (well zone).

Herd splitting

Herd splitting is one of the pastoralist’s indigenous rangeland management knowledge. It is the practice of dividing the livestock into separate herds depending on their age, sex and productivity. Almost most of the respondents (96%) from the study area, responded that they spit their herd into different divisions. Pastoralist divides their herds on the bases of their ages. The reason why pastoralists divide their livestock is that small calves and large livestock cannot graze together. Herd diversity and splitting are techniques that can be used to maintain the long term productivity of the range, and in some cases to improve degraded rangelands.

The result of analytical discussion with pastoralist from study area indicated that, pastoralists divided livestock as waatiyyee, yabbiyyee, haawichaa, and loon foora (mobile herds). Calves of both sexes younger than 5 months (waatiyyee) were kept on open grazing around the encampment and were supplemented with forage cut and carried to them. Yabiyyee also graze open grazing around villages and enclosure. Cows providing milk for the households (loon haawichaa), and animals younger than three years was sent to the grazing heads. However mobile herds (loon foora) were sent to other ardaa during drought. Herd splitting allows easy management of rangelands. Livestock are grazed by their ages. When asked why not they mix all age categories of livestock, they reply that waatiyyee and loon haawichaa cannot graze together. During both season of grazing waatiyyee and yabiyyee graze around the villages and loon haawichaa (milk herds) was send to grazing head.

Traditional enclosure: Reserved grazing areas

During analytical discussion with pastoralist, all of them repeatedly raised that, the use of traditional range enclosures locally known as kaloo is widely practiced in their area for dry season grazing. Traditional range enclosures can be used as a method of rangeland restoration where rangelands are often heavily grazed to allow the herbaceous vegetation diversity to recover. Each of the study sites has their own kaloo. One site has about two to four and above reera and each reera has their own kaloo. The prime purpose for the kaloo to be designated is in order to reserve grasses for dry season grazing. Most of the time kaloo is designated for waatiyyee and yabbiyyee. However according to views of some of the elders from the study sites, beside the divisions to which the enclosure is designated for enclosure is allowed to dullacha laafaa (weak cows), qottiyyo (oxen) and livestock to be sold. This is during drought season to improve the weight of livestock.

The management of kaloo (enclosure) in the study area is by Jaarsa dheeda (elder of grazing) of that reera. It was managed according the customary institution. Each member of the village and reera has the responsibility for the management of the enclosure. If there is the misuse of enclosure the issues has first to be resolved at the village level by elders of the villages. If the issue has to be focused in-depth, Jaarsa dheeda has to make decision.

Migration of ollas and demarcation of settlement and grazing areas

As many of the pastoralists (83%) from the study area indicates, demarcation of settlement and grazing area are the recent phenomena. It was started in the Borana in general and study area in particular in 2011 by raaba gadaa. It was before some three years. This is not the indigenous knowledge that has been practicing in the past. Borana pastoralist further explained that, Borana leader at the raaba gadaa has talked on the issues of rangelands and they have reached on the decision that, the area of rangeland has been taken by expansion of cultivated land and settlement. They have reached on the decision that the area of rangeland taken by settlement and expansion of cultivated land has to be leaved for livestock for grazing.

As it was pointed out by the respondents of this study, the prime objectives of this decision were to demarcate grazing area and settlement area and to have a good grazing area by leaving out some of the farmland in strategic grazing area and migrating village settled in strategic grazing area.

Some of the pastoralists were dissatisfied with this arrangement of grazing and settlement area. They were migrated in season of bona hagaya (long dry season) which is followed by prolonged period of hot and dry season and made migration difficult to them. However, it is not totally out of benefits. They responded that, even if migration is in the long dry season (bona hagaya), during the rainy season, the area that is previously under settlement and cultivation was used for grazing.

Major constraints to Ik-based rangeland management

The outcome from the focus group discussions with most of pastoralists of the study area and result of survey (68%) indicates that, this interesting system of rangeland management (IK) has been facing a serious threat from many sides. From time to time the smooth functioning of Ik on the rangeland management has been weakening. On the views of discussions with the elders and herders, the constrains to IK-based rangeland management was from external interventions like intervention of state (kebele administration) in the power of elders, inappropriate development concepts like construction of permanent water ponds, and lack of pastoral oriented extension and ban of burning of rangeland.

On the occasion of discussion and interviews with pastoralists, they strongly asserted that, the power of elders, Jaarsa dheeda (elders of grazing) and Jaarsa madda (elders of watering) has been declining. This is again further confirmed by (73%) of survey result, which indicates as power of decision on rangeland management in not in the hands of the elders. The main reason for the declining of the power of decision making of the elder is the intervention of kebele leaders and leader of each reera in the management of rangeland. Throughout the encampments in the study areas, younger community members and abbootii reera (father of each reera), in experienced in rangeland management, were appointed and given the powers of decision making at the local level. The power they were given was the power of elders. They concentrated on public security and political control, but gave little consideration to the rangelands. The elders were excluded from decision making as if their management system is backward and hence no longer able to apply their knowledge. In all of the study sites when there is miss-management of range and water resources, reera and kebele administrations makes the decisions. This has made the networks between elders to be weakened.

As raised by many of the respondents from study area, inappropriate development concepts for instance, the construction of permanent water ponds in former rainy season grazing areas in Dambala Saden started in the early 1970s or in beginning of gadaa Gobba Bule has severely disturbed pastoralists’ herd mobilityand thereby reduced the variability in stocking densities. The assumptions for water developments were that the lowlands of Borana lacked surface water in general. The main water sources of study area are small hand-dug ponds and some deep and shallow wells in which livestock degrade rangeland surrounding the areas of the well. The aim of water development program was to reduce pressure on the dry season rangelands by creating watering points in the wet season rangelands.

The Ethiopian land use policy has favored sedentarization. The kebele administrations and extension services promoted crop cultivation as a means to settle the pastoralists on the permanent settlement. However pastoralist of the study area asserted that, dramatic expansion of cultivated land into the study area and increase of number of villages because of population increase is the main problem of rangeland management. Many of the respondents stated the reason of decline in mobility is expansion of farmland and that pastoralist can’t move by leaving their farmland. In this development concept there is ignorance of pastoral livestock production and the lack of capacity to support pastoral rangeland management. Even though crop cultivation is base for the economy of our country, the extension messages were not appropriate to the needs of the pastoralists.

The issues of the proclamation to ban the burning of highland forests have equally applied to the pastoral rangeland. The ban to the controlled burning was introduced during Gadaa of Gobba Bule. According to the results of interviews with pastoralist, before banning of burning they control the expansion of the bushes by burning. Rangelands are burned during dry season when grasses are dried well. This can kill the species of bushes and allows for the new growth of palatable grasses. Borana pastoralist informed, after the application of this proclamation, their indigenous system of burning has weakened and even failed and since then bushes has taken rangelands at large.

Conclusion

The study showed the role of pastoralist’s indigenous knowledge in managing rangeland and major constraints to IK-based rangeland management.

There is a unique knowledge of rangeland management. In the past the strength of pastoralist IK is very good. The evidence presented in this study showed that mobility of herd, customary institutions, herd splitting and management of traditional enclosure are the main IK in rangeland management. At present day movement by home is minimized because of pastoralist permanent settlement and mobility is by stock. This is because of inappropriate development policy and expansion of crop cultivation. Customary institution of natural resource and rangeland management is not functioning well. However, the dependence on customary institution manages rangeland better. The use of traditional enclosure enables pastoralist reserve the forage for the time of difficulty. Herd splitting into different categories and diversification were identified as a means in which pastoralists adopt to degrading environment and uses the declining rangeland resources sustainably. Indigenous knowledge is the most important system of rangeland management in Borana. The smooth functioning of IKbased rangeland management was disturbed. The severe disturbances to indigenous knowledge based rangeland management are from external intervention like inappropriate extension services and development polices. Power of elders, Jaarsa dheeda (elders of grazing) and Jaarsa madda (elders of watering) was intervened by kebele leaders. An extension service and inappropriate development message that does not go with pastoral community has considerable impacts on the well function of IK. Again the policy that has banned the burning for rangeland is against the traditional knowledge of Borana pastoralist in rangeland management.

Recommendations

The productivity of rangeland in the study area is declining. This is because of many interrelated factors like bush encroachment, rangeland degradation, overgrazing, recurrent drought, erratic rainfall and expansion of crop cultivation. This has also considerable impacts on the livelihoods of pastoralist and rangeland productivity. The unique knowledge of community in rangeland management is also not functioning well. Therefore, the following recommendations are made for the future interventions by the researcher.

The problems affecting the productivity of rangeland should explicitly be regarded as community and societal problems and not simply the only concern of pastoralist. This mean it should be the concern of all stakeholders: government, private sectors, any local and international NGOs, pastoralists, public and etc.

The future development direction in Borana lowland should support indigenous knowledge of pastoralist in natural resource management in general and rangeland management in particular.

NGOs, Woreda and Zonal Pastoral Development Offices should stand beside pastoralist in supporting and integrating indigenous and technical knowledge for sustainable management of rangeland.

Management of traditional enclosure, mobility and herd splitting should be inextricably linked and managed in accordance to customary institution of pastoralist.

Rangeland development and extension services of the government should be built on pastoral indigenous rangelands knowledge.

Local and regional monitoring of rangelands problems should use local knowledge to focus the problem in detail.

Any rangeland development policy and programs should take into account IK of pastoralist and policies aimed to improve livelihoods of pastoralist should consider the structure of pastoralists.

References

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By Asafa Jalata, PhD

Abstract

The analysis starts by offering a critique of the existing social movement literature and by suggesting the integration of critical theories of knowledge with theories and wisdom of indigenous peoples in order to develop an alternative knowledge of critical thinking and scholarship in social movement studies. It also proposes ideas about the need to democratize knowledge for better accounting for social movement studies, including that of indigenous struggles, for the purposes of formulating approaches that are necessary for enhancing a greater understanding of social movement theories and actions on global level. In the current crisis of global capitalism and neoliberal globalization, there is an urgent need to develop new insights for advancing the prospects for global social transformation, which is articulated by the slogan of the World Social Forum, namely, another world is possible. The piece specifically develops possible ways of struggling against and replacing bourgeois internationalism by globalism from below through advancing the agenda of an egalitarian democracy.

Keywords

capitalism, neoliberalism, social movements, knowledge for liberation, indigenous movements, elite democracy, dictatorship, egalitarian democracy, globalization from below

Corresponding Author:

Asafa Jalata, The University of Tennessee, 901 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA. Email: ajalata@utk.edu

Personal Reflexive Statement

In writing this article, I have been influenced by my life, political, and intellectual journey. I traveled from my birthplace, Oromia (Ethiopia), to Europe and the United States because the Ethiopian colonial government targeted me for imprisonment or elimination. My engagement in political activism when I was a college student to liberate the Oromo people from Ethiopian colonialism and global imperialism forced me to end up in exile and created for me the opportunity of pursuing a graduate study and becoming a professor in the United States. As an academic, my political activism and exile life have provided me new insights and opportunities for teaching and researching, among other areas, issues of social justice and democracy on global level.

In this age of globalization, neoliberal forces of multinational corporations, states, and interstate systems are engaging in ‘‘savage development’’ (Quan 2012) or ‘‘violent development’’ in peripheral countries (Rajagopal 1999, 2003, 2006). The main purpose of this kind of development is to accumulate more capital by dispossessing and privatizing communal or public properties for reducing the cost of production and for raising the rate of profit in order to overcome the structural crisis of global capitalism. Over all, ‘‘neoliberal globalizers’’ are attacking, dispossessing, and repressing the working classes, indigenous peoples, and other subaltern groups on global scale and causing human and ecological disasters. Progressive and humanist scholars and activists who deeply care for humanity are expressing their concerns about gross human rights violations and environmental degradation in the world, and trying to develop an alternative world system, which will be based on the principles of egalitarian democracy and social and material equality.

At the same time, social movements and all forces of social justice, equality, liberation, and egalitarian democracy are fragmented, decentralized, disconnected as well as theoretically disoriented, and lack a clear and practical guidance; they also lack sophisticated knowledge that can expose, discredit, and delegitimize the theories and actions of neoliberal globalizers and their organizations. I argue that the existing theories and knowledge are inadequate to help in mobilizing, reorganizing, and uniting all social movements on local, regional, and global levels by going beyond ethnoracial, geocultural or geopolitical, and gender–class barriers in order to empower ‘‘democratic globalizers’’ in general and progressive social movements in particular from below by envisioning a new world system that is beyond exploitation and injustice.

Broadly seen—as labor and women’s movements, national liberation struggles, and social/socialist revolutions as well as other social justice movements—social movements have been agencies of piecemeal social change or revolutionary transformation that have struggled against aspects of global capitalism and its political structures, institutions, forms of knowledge, and ideologies. The nationstates, intergovernmental organizations, dominant classes, powerful racial/ethnonational groups, multinational corporations, and patriarchal institutions have been producing false or biased knowledge and narratives to naturalize and justify all forms of inequalities and injustices. But various progressive social movements have struggled to expose and discredit them by producing alternative narratives, knowledge for liberation, and new worldviews. Consequently, there are two forms of contradictory processes of knowledge production, narratives, and modes of thought: One form is associated with a dominant narrative and knowledge for domination, exploitation, and maintaining status quo; and the other one is associated with a subaltern narrative and knowledge for liberation, social justice, and egalitarian democracy. However, because of their domination over political economy, institutional power, cultural, intellectual, and ideological resources, the nation-states, multinational corporations, the dominant groups, and elites have considerable influence over subaltern groups and other ordinary people. Despite the fact that various social movements have introduced some social reforms, they have failed to develop a necessary critical theory and knowledge for human liberation and an ideology that can overthrow the dominant worldview in order to produce a new politico-economic paradigm, one that facilitates the emergence of participatory and egalitarian democracy.

Most often, these movements have been gradually incorporated into the nation-state or captured state power and have become an integral part of the capitalist world system. As a result, social movements have been only successful in introducing limited changes and reforms that are unable to go beyond the parameters of global capitalism. Further, the failures of elite democracy and the socialist and national liberation projects in solving the problems of all forms social inequalities, massive poverty, and other forms injustice require global transformation from below in order to build a better world. The increasing crises of the capitalist world system—the possible depletion of the world’s valuable resources, global financial and ecological crises, growing social inequality, the intensification of terrorism from above and below, and the declining of material resources for ordinary people—indicate the possible paradigmatic shifts that are shaping the prospects for advancing new and system-transformative modes of thought, knowledge, and action.

Learning from the past limitations of various social movements, progressive forces and contemporary social movements need to develop an alternative knowledge and a critical ideology that can help in reimagining a new world order beyond domination and exploitation. First, this article critiques social movement literature and provides theoretical insights for the analysis. Second, it develops background information on the evolution of diverse social movements and their accomplishments and failures. Third, since the existing theories of social movements such as resource mobilization (RMT), political process (PPT), framing and social construction (FSCT), and new social movement (NSMT) are neither well integrated nor fully developed, this piece attempts to suggest how to overcome these challenges by explaining how critical academic inquiry and knowledge will be better conceived to analyze the work of social movements.

Fourth, the piece forwards the insights that emphasize the need to advance the democratization of knowledge. Such insights better account for indigenous movements and their knowledge that promote the horizontal forms of organizations and foster a greater understanding of world systemic divisions or geocultures in social movement theories. Fifth, by explaining the processes of exploitation and dehumanization, this article suggests possible ways of challenging and overcoming the theories and ideologies and practices of political absolutism or dictatorship, elite democracy, and the vertical organization of societies that maintain oppressive social systems and exploitation. Finally, the piece proposes how to envision a participatory and egalitarian democracy that can help in balancing the interests of individuals and societies in order to control or destroy the systems of repression, domination, and exploitation. It also explores how to replace vertical organizations or institutions by horizontal one by learning from certain democratic indigenous peoples and by imagining egalitarian societies based on the principles of egalitarian democracy and social and material equality.

Theoretical Insights on Social Movements

This work draws from an analytical framework that emerges from theories of social movements, the world system, and globalization. It combines a structural approach to global social change such as globalization, neoliberalism, and capital accumulation with a social constructionist model of human agency of social movements. Scholars and activists do not formulate theories in social vacuums. Social and political actions inform theories, and theories influence actions. These realities have facilitated conditions for the development of various social movement theories. As Aziz Choudry (2015:19-20) notes, ‘‘upsurges in social movement studies research itself can be attributed to periods of widespread social protest and mobilization. These include the multiple worldwide movements in the late 1960s and the emergence of global justice, climate justice, and antiausterity movements more recently.’’

But for collective behavior theorists, social movements are social problems (Choudry 2015:43). Classical scholars of collective behavior such as Neil J. Smelser (1962) and modernization theorists such as W. W. Rostow (1960) wrongly considered social movements as abnormal and irrational or deviant. These theorists believed that the collective behavior of social revolutions and movements is caused by factors such as social breakdown, strain, deprivation, discontent, cognitive dissonance, ambiguity, and psychological frustration. Such theorists blamed the victims for struggling for their own survival and emancipation. The theory of functionalism that claimed that a society was an integrated social system that would fulfill various functions, including maintaining consensus and equilibrium to manage social tensions and contradictions, became obsolete. Over all, the mainstream classical theoretical models have failed to explain how the politicized collective grievances, political consciousness, and organizational capabilities could lead to the development of social movements and collective actions.

Progressive movement scholars and activists started to use neo-Marxism and conflict theory as alternative theories to explain the relationship among political power, conflict, and domination. Learning from the struggles of the colonized and subjugated peoples and other subaltern groups and oppressed classes, progressive scholars started to develop theories of social movements in the 1960s. Prior to this decade, Orthodox Marxists mainly focused on the struggle between capital and labor and considered the working class as the savor of the world and ignored or minimized the revolutionary potential of other subaltern groups. In the 1960s, RMT of social movement emerged by challenging the classical model of collective behavior and by asserting that social movements are normal and rational actors (McCarthy and Zald 2001:553-56).

RMT as a theoretical paradigm shift challenged the collective behavior and functionalist theories, which promoted status quo in society, by developing a conflict theory as an alternative theory. The development of social movements, political protests, and cultural or political conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated how classes, ethno/racial groups, and other groups struggled over conflicting interests of economic, political, and cultural resources. RMT expressed that social movements would pool together their resources such as skills, funds, labor, time, commitment, land, technic, and expertise and form organizations to advance their common interests (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Tilly 1988). This theory is based on the principles of conflict, rationality, and preexisting organizations such as religious, cultural, ethnonational and traditional ties, and interest groups, including labor unions, political parties, and voluntary associations. RMT primarily depended on political, sociological, and economic theories and paid less attention to political interests, social psychology, and other issues (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1978).

The decade of the 1960s was an important period in the capitalist world system. National liberation movements flourished in the Rest and the West. The mainstream theoretical approaches of social movements have failed to explain how collective actions emerged. For instance, the African American movement developed in the United States in its reformist, revolutionary, and cultural phases (Jalata 2001). Influenced by the African American movement, diverse social movements emerged from progressive elements of white society. These movements included the Free Speech Movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, antiwar movement, countercultural and environmental movements, and feminist movements (Van Deburg 1992). Criticizing theory RMT, PPT emerged in the 1970s by explaining social movements in relation to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and state formation (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1978).

PPT model criticized RMT for (1) downplaying politics and political interests; (2) deemphasizing the role of grievances, ignoring ideology, and exaggerating rationalistic roles of movement actors; and (3) ignoring group solidarity as well as social psychology (Buechler 2011:123-40). Combining the traditions of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and John Stuart Mill, Charles Tilly (1978) emphasized the importance of ideology, grievances, aspects of rationality, the importance of social solidarity and common interests, and the availability of political opportunities for social movements to emerge and develop. He integrated the Marxian tradition that recognizes conflicting interests, the existence of conflict, and the importance of organization with the Weberian tradition that stresses commitment to belief systems. PPT recognized factors such as the availability of material, intellectual, and cultural resources; the capacity for mobilizing these resources for collective action, the importance of the existence of preexisting social networks, organizations, and institutions; and the rationality of participants in weighing costs and benefits for engaging in collective action of social movements (Tilly 1978).

Similarly, Doug McAdam (1982) further developed PPT by identifying that RMT blurred the difference between the oppressed classes and groups and the established polity members, over exaggerated elite’s financial support for social movements, minimized the role of the masses in movements, lacked clarity on the concept of resources, and glossed over the issue of grievances. ‘‘PPT emphasizes the role of grassroots movement leadership, contending that there are frequently struggles between this base and middle-class supporters who see the movement as an opportunity to use or control it for their own interests,’’ Choudry (2015:46) writes. McAdam identified two necessary conditions for social movements to challenge the established political system. These two conditions are the structure of political opportunities such as political and economic crises and the strength of indigenous political organizations that are equipped by cognitive liberation and political consciousness.

Cognitive liberation has three dimensions, namely, the recognition of the illegitimacy of the established system, the capacity to overcome fatalism among the populace in order to believe in changing a social system, and the ability to believe that introducing social change is possible (Piven and Cloward 1979). Furthermore, another theory called FSCT emerged by criticizing PPT for giving a secondary role for collective grievances in the emergence and development of social movements. This theory focused on micro-level social dynamics and emphasized framing, signification, media, and social psychology. It also paid attention to both symbolic interaction and cultural theories that help in the construction of meaning and understanding of grievances, motivations, recruitment process, and identity formation.

FSCT identified three categories and focuses on them. The three categories are (1) the process through which social movements frame grievances as injustice and illegitimate and require a collective challenge; (2) the recognition of movements such as status and identity politics, religious movements, lifestyle interests, and environmental concerns; and (3) the necessity to understand the role of meaning and signification (Buechler 2011:145-59). By focusing on micro-level analysis, FSCT emphasizes the importance of cognitive liberation for politicizing grievances. Cognitive liberation allows people to integrate individual interests, values, and beliefs with the activities, goals, and ideologies of social movements.

When there is cognitive liberation or the transformation of consciousness and behavior, movements emerge. The process of the transformation of political consciousness indicates that when movement actors do not recognize the legitimacy of a given establishment, they may organize and engage in collective action. Most political process theorists focus on structural factors of political opportunity and organization and paid less attention to subjective factors such as cognitive liberation. Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina (1982:6-9) recognized the importance of micromobilization and cognitive liberation and identified the role of ideas and political consciousness in shaping collective action. In micromobilization, knowhow is very important, and it includes ‘‘a repertoire of knowledge about how to engage in collective action along with the skills to apply that knowledge’’ (Buechler 2011:144).

Framing and micro-level analyzing are important in convincing people to mobilize and organize. Organizing people requires building loyalty, managing the logistics of collective action, mediating internal conflict, and framing and politicizing grievances in relation to structural factors (Gamson et al. 1982:6-9). Referring to the theoretical framework of Ervin Goffman, Steven M. Buechler (2011:146) defines framing as an ‘‘interpretive schemata that people use to identify, label, and render meaningful events in their lives. Frames allow people to organize experiences and guide actions, both in everyday life and in social movements.’’

The dominant classes and groups in the capitalist world system most of the times can control and exploit oppressed classes and other subaltern groups because they have the know-hows, skills, and knowledge as well as economic resources for developing central organizing ideologies that can be translated into organizational capacity (Jalata 1996). The development of the three theories occurred in the United States by expanding on classical revolutionary theories (see below) because the United States, the hegemonic world power, became the hotbeds of conflicts, struggles, and ideological innovations in the 1960s to challenge and change American apartheid, sexist, and classist democracy one way or the other. Social movement theories refuted mainstream theories; they also exposed the deficiencies of modernization theory and Orthodox Marxism, which are Euro-American centric and reductionist.

Furthermore, NSMT emerged in Europe in the 1970s claiming that people consciously construct their collective identities based on their cultural values, lifestyles, and ideologies (Melucci 1980, 1989; Touraine 1981). NSMT asserted that the analysis of Orthodox Marxism that focused on the contradictions of capitalism did not adequately explain the essence of NSMT such as peace, environmental, and women’s movements that emerged from middle class rather than the working class in Europe (Choudry 2015:46). The demands of NSMT were not limited to economic issues but included issues of culture, quality of life, democracy, peace, environment, and identities.

Of course, the issue of culture is not yet adequately addressed by social movement theories. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) expanded on Karl Marx’s use of money capital from a narrowly conceived economic category of monetary exchange for profit to cultural capital and social capital to demonstrate how these forms of capital can be invested to secure material and social benefits and upward generational and intergeneration social mobility for dominant classes and social groups. Bourdieu identifies three main forms of capital, namely, economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital: ‘‘economic capital … is … directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of private property rights; . . . cultural capital … is convertible … into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of [position of power] and educational qualifications; and . . . social capital, made of social obligations (‘connections’) … is convertible … into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.’’ I believe that the issue of culture, particularly cultural capital, should be one important element in social movement theory.

Despite their weaknesses, social movement theories are relevant because they are addressing the issue of expanding democracy through the struggles and actions of groups and/or classes who have been negatively affected by the capitalist world system and its political structures. Debates among the framers of RMT, PPT, FSCT, and NSMT have enriched our knowledge on theories of social movements by focusing on different issues that are directly or indirectly related to social movements. The analyses of progressive social movement theorists are complementary despite the fact that their focuses have been different in explaining how social movements emerged, developed, and caused social changes. The critical integration of these diverse approaches to social movement theories can help in reducing the rigid focus on political economy or culture and objective or subjective factors.

Of course, some theories of social movements focus on politics and others deal with political economy or culture. In real life, these phenomena are interconnected and inseparable, and we must not confuse analysis with the social reality on the ground. Diverse theories and approaches are needed to deal with the complex societies, cultures, and the capitalists world system. Accepting the principle of the struggle for knowledge democracy, there is an urgent need to further synthesize and critically integrate progressive social movement theories. Going beyond those social movement theories that developed in core countries, democratic globalizers from below should expand the dialogue between theorists of the West and the Rest. I will come back to this issue later.

The Evolutions, Accomplishments, and Failures of Social Movements

For more than five centuries, both the agencies of capitalists and oppressed and exploited classes and ethnonational and other subaltern groups have been dialectically interconnected and changed each other. But, the capitalist classes, states, and their organizations such as multinational corporations and international institutions have played a determining role in alienating and exploiting the working class, terrorizing, committing genocide, enslaving, and dispossessing indigenous peoples both in the West and the Rest (Jalata 2013; Marx 1967). Generally speaking, the dynamic and contradictory interactions between global capitalism and diverse forms of resistance that sometimes developed into diverse social movements have shaped the current global system (Agartan, Choi, and Huynh 2008).

Starting from the late fifteenth century, mercantilism successfully developed into global capitalism through the expropriation of the European actual producers, the dispossession of lands and other valuable resources of indigenous Americans and other peoples, the domination of international trade, and the enslavement of some Africans (Frank 1978; Marx 1967; Rodney 1972; Wallerstein 1984, 1988). At the same time, as Tuba Agartan, W. Choi, and T. Huynh (2008:47) note, ‘‘examining the European capitalist world economy and its engagement with other social worlds in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries reveals a remarkable range of movements, movements directed against fundamental processes of world accumulation and increasing European political aggression.’’ Capitalism as the racialized world system created and/or consolidated two forms of social stratification systems: One is class-gender based that has allowed gradual generational and intergeneration upward mobility for peoples of European origin and their collaborators regardless of their class origins (Jalata 2001). The second one has been the racial caste system (racial slavery and neoslavery) that has allowed little or no upward social mobility.

It is clear that these two major forms of stratification have privileged the white working class in the West and discouraged them from allying with the movements of nonwhite workers and indigenous peoples in some Western countries and the Rest. Knowing these facts help us from repeating the mistake of Orthodox Marxism that lumps together the social movements of whites and nonwhites to declare the revolutionary potential of the global working class in creating a socialist paradise. Now, we know that the working classes in the West, most of the times, rather than struggling for an alternative system of socialism or egalitarian democracy have mainly developed reformist strategies to achieve generational and intergenerational upward mobility and to be integrated into the capitalist world system. Let me briefly explain the evolution of the two stratification systems. The complex processes of the capitalist deepening (the intensification of capitalist activities in the West) and broadening (colonial expansion to the Rest) led to socialization and racialization/ ethnicization of labor through separating the actual producers from their means production such as lands in order to reduce the cost of production and increase the rate profit for the purpose of capital accumulation and concentration in the hands of the capitalist class.

Karl Marx (1967:17) explains how feudalism was dissolved in Western Europe via the process of original capital accumulation: ‘‘The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of expropriation, in different countries, assume different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and different periods.’’ Through the processes of broadening and deepening, capitalism has demonstrated its global nature from the beginning. Consequently, the colonial expansion to the Americas between the late fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, to Africa and Asia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Australia in the eighteenth century, the domination of international trade by Western Europeans, and the practice of racial slavery facilitated the emergence of the industrial revolution (Marx 1967; Rodney 1972). The development of Euro-American countries and other powerful countries was made through war, state terrorism, genocide, and massive human rights violations (Jalata 2016).

Before continuing the discussion on the impact of the industrial revolution, it is important to briefly explain the ways racial and other forms of exploitation have developed over time and impacted the operation of the capitalist world system and contributed to the development of social movements, as we shall see below. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, capitalism consolidated itself on the global level. But after facing structural crises in the first half of the twentieth century, global capitalism reestablished and strengthened itself under U.S. hegemony. Since the 1970s, with the intensification of the crisis of the process of capital accumulation and the declining of the U.S. hegemony, the West has started to promote a policy known as neoliberalism to revitalize global capital accumulation (Arrighi 1994; Harvey 2005, 2006; Quan 2012). As David Harvey (2005:7) demonstrates, through the policy of neoliberalism the neoliberal state has intensified the process of capital accumulation by dispossession of the economic resources and rights of the world population; the ‘‘fundamental mission [of the neoliberal stat] was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital.’’

Despite the fact that neoliberalism has negatively affected ordinary peoples in the West and the Rest, it has more severely affected nonwhite peoples. Peoples beyond the West are more targeted by what H. T. L. Quan call savage development because, more or less, they lack official or elite democracy that is practiced in the West. Quan (2012:4) asserts the following: ‘‘By savage [development] I am referring to a type of [development] that centers on expansionism, order, and anti-democracy, [and] . . . malnutrition, disease, state-organized violence, and environmental degradation. This is a symptom of a savage mind and a civilization, that can neither control itself [nor] define its destiny.’’ Neoliberalism intensifies the need to increase profitability through global expansion, dispossession, war, and state-organized terrorism. These practices involve diplomacy and war policies; therefore, Quan (2012:10) considers the U.S. war in Iraq as a neoliberal development strategy. Particularly, accumulation of capital by dispossession has involved state terrorism and genocide as the case of indigenous peoples illustrates (Jalata 2013).

Of course, the processes of capital accumulation by displacement as well as state terrorism and genocide have been integral parts of global capitalism from the beginning. The emergence of the industrial revolution that I have mentioned above consolidated these complex and interrelated processes. This revolution technologically, organizationally, and militarily empowered Western Europeans and their collaborators in the Rest and helped in finalizing the colonization of Australia in the late eighteenth century and Africa and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Marx (1967:763) notes that further socialization and racialization of labor through dispossession of the means of production and through colonialism resulted in ‘‘the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime.’’ All these factors involved state terrorism, war, genocide, the destruction of indigenous leadership, cultural and institutional destruction and the intensification of social stratification, rationalized and justified by the ideologies of racism, sexism and classism as well as the discourses of progress, civilization, Christianity, modernity, and development (Jalata 2013).

Indigenous peoples did/do not peacefully accept these abuses and crimes against humanity, and they first resisted/resist individually and collectively, and they gradually formed/form social movements wherever and whenever they could/can without developing an ideological clarity and organizational capacity that were/are essential for challenging and defeating global capitalism on many levels. More or less, states and corporations and other institutions have continued to dehumanize and exploit indigenous peoples all over the world, and their social movements have continued their struggles for liberation and social justice. Slowly, multiple forms of social movements also emerged in the West and the Rest as labor movements, women’s movements, social revolutions, and anticolonial movements. As noted by William G. Martin (2008:9), ‘‘significant clusters of movement activity existed across zones of the world-economy from at least the eighteenth century.’’ Of course, the whole world was not incorporated into the system in this century.

What did all social movements including trade unions, classic revolutions such as the American (1775–1783), French (1787–1799), Haitian (1791–1804), and Russian (1905–1917), Mexican (1910–20), and Chinese (1889–1949) revolutions and other national liberation movements or social movements accomplish? Did they fundamentally challenge the capitalist world economy in order to establish an alternative system, or did they revolt to get their own shares by removing the political structures that hindered their progress in the capitalist world economy? European colonial states and colonial settlers invented many countries by destroying indigenous peoples and dispossessing their homelands, and colonial states and later the descendants of these settlers in the Americas and South Africa revolted against their motherlands to form their racialized sovereign nation-states. The classic American Revolution was the main model for inventing such countries and states. In addition, this revolution established a sexist, class-based, and apartheid democracy.

But the famous classic French Revolution emerged in the center of the West to overthrow an absolutist monarchy by using the slogans of ‘‘liberty, equality, and fraternity,’’ that were interpreted differently by different classes and groups. For the capitalist class and its supporters, liberty and equality mean to have ‘‘legal rights’’ to own private property by dispossessing or exploiting others in order to accumulate more capital regardless of the consequences of these processes for the working classes and indigenous peoples. Social and material equality, liberty, and equality cannot be practiced in global capitalism. Despite the fact that the capitalist class and popular forces engaged in the French Revolution, far fewer radical changes occurred because of the replacement of the absolutist rights by the capitalist rule of law. ‘‘In the Classic social interpretation, the French Revolution marked the turning point in the birth of capitalism,’’ Agartan et al. (2008:15) write, ‘‘signaling all at once the vindication of the Enlightenment, the overthrow of the feudal order by a revolutionary, secular bourgeoisie, the entrance of popular masses onto the world stage, and the creation of the rule of modern nation-state and its citizens.’’

Amazingly, the French Revolution and its slogans had far-reaching influence in the West and the Rest. Paradoxically, the Haitian Revolution that was initiated by enslaved Africans and lit the beacon of hope for the enslaved and colonized populations in the West and the Rest of the world was influenced by these slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Over all, the classic revolutions left indelible marks on the world. Because of the significant impacts of these classic revolutions, scholars call the epoch of the long eighteenth century ‘‘the Age of Revolutions’’ (Agartan et al. 2008:11). In Western Europe, while the capitalist classes were struggling to break down the power of the monarchs that monopolized state power and had absolute control over economic activities (Cairns and Sears 2012:29-30), the popular forces were struggling to dismantle social hierarchies and eliminate political repression and economic exploitation. The capitalists wanted to capture state power in order to get access to the economy and to limit the power of the popular forces; consequently, the emerging liberal democracies ‘‘tended to be nondemocratic, either authoritarian or based on highly restricted franchise, meaning that only a small proportion of the population could vote. Indeed, these early liberal states feared democracy, as they were concerned that real power in the hands of the masses would threaten the unequal power structure of the emerging capitalist order. They were liberal inasmuch as they gave individuals the right to control their own wealth and property’’ (Cairns and Sears 2012:29-30).

The absolutist states were replaced by liberal democratic states in England in 1689 and France in 1789. The liberal democratization process was different from the notion of democracy that was originally associated with the struggle of popular forces that promoted the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This shows that the concept of democracy has been contested from the beginning. In France, the efforts of popular and revolutionary forces to destroy hierarchical class structures through reorganizing society horizontally and eliminating the legitimacy of private property in order to establish egalitarian communities were not successful. But, the reformist aspects of the revolution were successful in uprooting the French absolutist state that denied freedom to the capitalist class and popular forces (Anderson 1979). The capitalist class and its supporters tamed democracy through developing the concepts of nation, nationalism, and the citizen that have tied together all classes ideologically in a given geopolitical boundary called a country. Therefore, the concepts of nation, nationalism, and the citizens were invented with the emergence of the nation-states in the capitalist world system.

In the process of reimagining an egalitarian democratic world order, it is absolutely necessary to rethink about the social construction of the concepts of nation, nationalism, the citizens, and country that reify artificial social boundaries among world populations. Originally, state nationalism emerged through restructuring of the absolutist state into the nation-state and developing bourgeois democracy. The development of state nationalism and bourgeois democracy in France and in other Western countries demonstrated the victory of the capitalist class over the remnants of the feudal class, the peasantry, and the emerging working class (Snyder 1976:77). With the elimination of absolutism and the emergence of the capitalist class as the new dominant class, the popular democracy that the working class, the peasantry, and other revolutionary forces struggled for was suppressed and bourgeois democracy was established.

While declaring this democracy, nation-states in the West had intensified the process of class, racial/ethnonational, and gender oppression and colonial expansion (Jalata 2010). State nationalism and bourgeois democracy conceal the contradictions that exist among the citizens of the nation-state, and the concept of the citizenship glosses over the real problem between the ideological claims of democracy and equality of citizens and the vast material differences that are structured into socio-economic conditions of distinct social forces within the nation-state. As a result, various social movements such as labor unions and other movements had fought against exploitation and the violations of their rights in the West. At the same time, there were clusters of social resistance to the broadening of capitalist world economy via colonialism. There were indigenous and slave revolts in the Americas; nationalist movements also emerged in the Balkans. Colonized or enslaved peoples were inspired by the secular ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and engaged in liberation movements and demanded their rights. These processes led to the formation of new states such as Haiti (1804), Belgium (1830), and Greece (1831).

Similarly, the anticolonial resistances in India and Jamaica, anarchists in Europe and America, and waves of revolutions emerged. Furthermore, between 1848 and 1873, unrest emerged in Europe and social movements appeared in the United States;1 within four weeks, political upheavals in France, Germany (not yet united), Italy, and the Hapsburg Empire intensified (Bush 2008:53-56). These uprisings made many achievements such as the freedom of speech, publication, assembly, and association. Counterrevolutions and repressions stopped the progress of the 1848 revolts in Western Europe. But the struggles laid a foundation for the future more organized movements. The decades between 1848 and 1917 were significant periods for social movements; these movements immensely increased their challenges to capitalism by organizing themselves into unions, congresses, parties, associations, and brotherhoods. According to Caleb M. Bush (2008:52-53), ‘‘Beginning the period under serious repression, by 1917 movements—through competing and often contradictory strategies of reform, revolution, and all that falls in between— were vying for control of the state, even gaining state power. These developments constituted the most significant turn for movements and movement strategy.’’

The repression of 1848 revolts in Europe did not stop the further development of social movements. The second half of the nineteenth century was the period of the blossoming of social movements in Western Europe and North America. The modern labor unions emerged during these decades. For instance, independent labor movement emerged in France and Germany after 1848. In 1864, the First International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was formed and provided a platform for radicals such as Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx. The IWA and the Paris Commune of 1871 increased their attack on capitalism. Both of them provided ‘‘an overarching ideology’’ for social movements (Bush 2008:56). Furthermore, the German General Workers’ Association was established in 1863 and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and General Union of German Workers were formed in 1869. White workers in the United States, supported by socialists, started their labor movements in the 1860s to fight against capitalist oppression and exploitation.

The Russian revolutionary movement captured state power declaring ‘‘socialism’’ in 1917. After capturing state power, the so-called socialists began to support labor, revolutionary, and national movements around the world for sometimes. As labor and ‘‘socialist’’ movements continued their respective struggles, labor strikes intensified in France, Germany, England, Sweden, and the United States between 1873 and 1896. Also, anarchists and socialist internationalists intensified their efforts to establish an alternative system to capitalism. Reformist movements developed in Great Britain, Germany, and Australia and promoted ‘‘reformist parliamentarian socialism’’ or social democracy. The Socialist Party of America and the Communist Party of the United States were formed in 1901 and 1919, respectively. Germany’s Social Democratic Party and the British Labor Party were formed 1875 and 1906, respectively. Australia’s Labor Party that was established in the early 1890s won its majority parliament election in 1910. Between 1917 and 1968, several movements seized state power and introduced some reformist and revolutionary programs, but they gradually abandoned their lofty programs and reintegrated into the capitalist world system by consolidating it.

Consequently, social movements (radical labor, socialists, communists, and national liberation movements) had joined the capitalist world system by accepting and reifying the concepts of nation, nationalism, the citizens, and country. Despite the fact that capitalism faced ‘‘the age of catastrophe’’ between 1914 and the World War II and the Bolshevik Revolution emerged in Russia in 1917 demonstrating the systematic crises of the capitalist world system, oppositional forces failed to develop an alternative system to global capitalism and its ideological, economic, and political infrastructures. ‘‘In North America and Europe, labor and socialist struggles were fully institutionalized following [WW II],’’ Caleb M. Bush and Rochelle Morris (2008:84) note, ‘‘gaining access to state power and significant political and economic benefits at the very cost of their anti-systemic nature’’ (authors’ emphasis). More or less, the most prominent social movements such as movements of workers, women, and the civil rights movement in the United States achieved some of their objectives under bourgeois democracy without defeating capitalism in the twentieth century (Amenta, Chiarello, and Su 2010).

Accepting the discourse of the so-called national interests and promoting their individual and group advantages, the workers in the West have allied with the capitalist class and nation-states against the indigenous communities and other dominated and exploited peoples in the West and the Rest. As socialists and social democrats gained access to state power and political and economic benefits, they pursued their personal, class, and group interests within the capitalist world system. Similarly, despite the fact that the liberation struggles of the colonized peoples for independence put some strain for sometimes on core countries and powers, their achievement did not go beyond ‘‘flag’’ independence and their movements lost their antisystemic characters. In the mid-twentieth century and after, some former colonies achieved their flag independence and gained the status of neocolonial states to enrich their government officials and local and international capitalists at the cost of the dehumanized and exploited indigenous and other subaltern groups.

In the current era of neoliberal globalization, in the name of democracy, development, and human rights, the state, multinational corporations, and international organizations in the Rest are engaging in dispossessing lands and other resources while repressing and terrorizing indigenous peoples and their social movements. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2003:3) explains that ‘‘it is not the lack of development that caused poverty, inflicted violence, and engaged in destruction of nature and livelihood; rather it is the very process of bringing development [to indigenous peoples] that has caused them in the first place.’’ The brutality of neoliberalism is causing massive poverty, famines, wars, terrorism, and massive migration in the peripheral world. Using the so-called international law and its political economic hegemony, the West has continued to dominate and exploit its former colonies; on their parts, neocolonial states have ‘‘come to colonize all life spaces in civil society and [have] effectively championed the interests of the global elite that runs the world economy. The democratic deficit experienced by global governance processes has been exacerbated due to the democratic deficit of [neo-colonial states] that act as the agents of the globalitarian class’’ (Rajagopal 2003:12).

Most peoples in the Rest did not even receive the benefits of bourgeois democracy and the rule of law because the West and their collaborators in the Rest have been against democracy in most countries. With the emergence of neocolonial states, capitalism and dictatorship have been integrated again by the alliance of Western imperialism and the intermediate class in the Rest. ‘‘The intensification of sharp inequalities within and between nations has been the reality of capitalist expansion in the Global South,’’ Cairns and Sears (2012:34) write, ‘‘and that has often been associated with brutal authoritarian regimes, not liberal democracies.’’ Furthermore, the NSMT or the ‘‘new’’ left that emerged in 1968 also failed to establish an alternative system to capitalism.

So social or revolutionary or national movements could not go beyond introducing some reforms in the capitalist world system. Generally speaking, social movements have introduced limited social changes in the capitalist world system without facilitating the emergence of egalitarian democracy, which can contribute to the development of a fundamental social transformation by eliminating or reducing all forms of social inequalities and injustices. In former revolutionary countries like the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and others, peoples have even lost their civil and political rights and forced to live under total dictatorship. Betraying its revolutionary position and following the footsteps of the West, presently China has engaged in neoliberal agendas to loot the resources of Africa and others (Quan 2012). The past experiences of social movements teach us that human liberation is impossible under systems that practice exploitation and injustices while claiming the ideals of democracy, national liberation, and socialism. Then, what is next?

Theoretical and Intellectual Challenges in Studying Social Movements

We know more about global capitalism than about various forms of social movements that have struggled against its exploitative and repressive aspects. Marxist and neo-Marxist scholars and other critical scholars have adequately studied the development of the global capitalist system and its various stages from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries (Frank 1978; Harvey 2005; Marx 1967; Wallerstein 1976, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1989). Orthodox Marxism theorized that capitalism would create the whole world after its own image; that means industrialization would take place all over the globe dividing the world populations mainly into the capitalist and the working classes and resulting in two forms of revolutions: a bourgeois revolution and a socialist revolution.

According to this version of Marxist theory, the capitalist revolution would be necessary for a socialist revolution to emerge, and the proletariat dictatorship was prerequisite for the socialist revolution to occur. Karl Marx’s study of capitalism was based on critical social scientific research, but his idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not based on social scientific research. His theoretical assumption that the working class would play a leading role in individual and social emancipation and fundamental social transformation did not become reality. History and social praxis demonstrate that Marx’s prediction of the revolutionary role of the working class and its international solidarity to promote a global socialist revolution proved to be wrong. The opposite of what he predicted happened. The capitalist class has created global solidarity. Of course, the working class did not develop well in the Rest because the West limited the possibility of industrialization there.

As neo-Marxists theorized, imperialism would not necessarily lead to industrialization in the Rest, and there would not be industrialization and a capitalist revolution in this part of the world. Consequently, the weak capitalist class in the Rest was reactionary and incapable of leading a capitalist revolution. Therefore, they theorized that revolutionary intelligentsia and the peasantry would lead a socialist revolution instead of the working class. Despite the fact that countries like Russia, China, Cuba, and others engaged in the so-called socialist revolutions without the dictatorial leadership of the proletariat and acted as a counterhegemonic bloc for sometimes, they later reintegrated into the capitalist world system. This so-called socialist bloc could not eliminate the extraction of surplus and the exploitation and repression of the working class and the peasantry. The regimes in these countries have become authoritarian and repressive. Although Orthodox Marxists romanticized labor movements and gave them the role of liberating humanity through a socialist revolution, proletarian internationalism, and dictatorship, these movements could not even fully defend their own class interests. In the name of proletariat dictatorship, socialist revolutions were aborted in the former Soviet Union, China, and other countries, and state capitalism has flourished in these countries. In the West, labor parties and unions have become parts of the capitalist political structures, and they even could not struggle beyond their economic interests. Currently, neoliberal policies are attacking their interests and forcing them to be disorganized and weakened. The working class has also failed to overcome the ideologies of racism and sexism and could not even form the unity of the working class within a given country.

One of the shortcomings of social movement studies is their focus on the experiences of Western societies. However, recently, a few scholars by going beyond Western experiences have started to study the role of transnational social movements and their organizations. For instance, Jackie Smith (2008) calling them democratic globalizers explains about transnational social movements and their struggles against neoliberal globalization and their institutions; these movements have demanded for popular control over international organizations in order to establish a democratic global system, which promotes human rights, social justice, and ecological sustainability. Her idea of conceptualizing transnational social movements as global networks that involve institutions, organizations, and individual activists that struggle for global democracy is innovative and helpful in expanding our knowledge bank by overcoming some of the current deficits in movement studies.

In addition, Smith and Wiest (2012) explore the role of global social movements and their organizations both in the Global North and in the Global South that struggle to reform and democratize intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and other institutions. Smith and Wiest (2012:17) note that these social movements and their organizations have developed the capacity to challenge ‘‘the basic logic and structure of the world economic and political system.’’ These authors have expanded the horizon of social movement studies despite the fact that international and intergovernmental organizations still mainly serve their financiers known as neoliberal globalizers and powerful states. Without any doubt, these pioneering studies advance our understanding of social movement theories and practices.

But still more research is needed to deeply understand what roles social movements play on local, regional, and global levels. Particularly, social movement studies need to focus on the understudied areas of the world. Although we can learn a lot from the experiences of Western social movements, it is impossible to adequately learn about all social movements without learning the conditions of social movements in the Rest. Seeing the West as an independent entity implicitly assumes that it has nothing to do with the Rest. Practically speaking, both the West and the Rest are two sides of the same coin. Also, the Rest is in the West, as the case of North America demonstrates. For example, indigenous Americans and African Americans are geographically in the United States, but their socioeconomic conditions are similar to that of the Rest. For these reasons, we cannot adequately understand about the issues of social movements in the West without understanding those in the Rest and vice versa.

As demonstrated above, the theories, research, and knowledge on social movements are fragmented, incomplete, and underdeveloped. There are also other problems such as shortage of cross-cultural, comparative empirical and theoretical research, and historical and interdisciplinary approaches that include critical legal studies and cross-disciplinary work. Without overcoming such monumental theoretical, methodological, ideological, and intellectual challenges, we cannot adequately broaden and deepen our knowledge on the structural and subjective factors of social movements both in the West and in the Rest. One major approach of overcoming the limitation of social movement studies is combining critical theories and knowledge with the theories and wisdoms of indigenous peoples that expose the deficiencies of mainstream theories, knowledge, and the ruling ideas of those who dominate and lead the capitalist world system. Another major approach to reduce the deficits of social movement studies is to intensify critical dialogues among progressive scholars and activists of the West and the Rest in order to build a more robust transnational social movement.

The Urgent Role of Progressive Intellectuals and Activists

There is more moral and intellectual responsibility on progressive scholars and activists in the West to advance the cause of social movements because they are large in numbers and they have relatively abundant resources than progressive scholars and activists in the Rest. The first step to advance the causes of human rights and progressive social movements is to overcome a narrow cultural thinking and to develop humanist or human-centric liberation knowledge. This step is necessary to develop theories and practices that demystify those knowledge and theories that justify exploitation and injustice in the name of modernity, civilization, universalism, elite democracy, and development. Progressive social movement scholars cannot introduce innovations to their theories and research without totally overcoming their geocultural roots and distorted ideologies.

Ideology plays many roles in a society, and its essential function is to define and promote the political, material, and cultural interests of a group, a nation, a social class, a state, or other entities; it also ‘‘offers an explanation and an evaluation of political, economic, and social condition; provides its holders a compass that helps orient them and develop a sense of identity; and tenders a prescription for political, economic, or social action’’ (Hybel 2010:1). In the ideological clothing of universalism, progress, democracy, development, civilization, and humanity, mainstream theories and knowledge have hidden the massive human rights violations of indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups and have contributed to the perpetuation of underdevelopment, poverty, and suffering for the majority of the world populations (De Sousa Santos 2007; Rajagopal 2003, 2006).

Recognizing that these problems cannot be solved in the capitalist world system, some leftist and activist scholars have started to imagine an alternative egalitarian world order in which exploitation and oppression will be minimized or totally prevented. Such scholars also theorize about an emancipatory political project for the future and the possibility of recreating community-based societies by learning from the past of humanity in which egalitarianism and participatory democracy were practiced. For example, in recent decades, critical anthropologists have started to imagine the possibility of building an egalitarian society by learning from the experiences of noncapitalist societies and by demonstrating that domination and exploitation are not natural (Solway 2006). The work of Anthropologist Richard Lee on the San community in Southern Africa is an exemplary one.2 Similarly, a few scholars who studied the Oromo society have discovered the egalitarian character of Oromo democracy known as the gadaa system that existed before the emergence of contemporary democracy in the West (Baissa 1971, 1993; Legesse 1973, [2000] 2006).

Discussing the philosophy of Oromo democracy, Asmarom Legesse (1973:2) notes, ‘‘What is astonishing about this cultural tradition is how far Oromo have gone to ensure that power does not fall in the hand of war chiefs and despots. They achieve this goal by creating a system of checks and balances that is at least as complex as the systems we find in Western democracies.’’ The gadaa system has the principles of checks and balances (through periodic succession of every eight years), and division of power (among executive, legislative, and judicial branches), balanced oppositions (among five parties), and power sharing between higher and lower administrative organs to prevent dictatorship and exploitation (Baissa 1993; Lepisa 1975).

When gadaa was an all encompassing institution of politics, military, defense, economy, religion, ethics, culture, and tradition, siqqee was used by Oromo women as a check and balance system to counter male-dominated roles in the gadaa system. The siqqee institution gave a political and social platform for Oromo women to effectively voice their concern and address their social justice issues (Kelly 1992; Kumsa 1997). The gadaa/siqqee system prevented the transformation of gender role separation into gender inequality, and women and men ‘‘had a functional interdependence and one was not valued any less than the other’’ in the system (Kumsa 1997:119). The processes and practices of gaadaa/siqqee and social development have been interconnected (Jalata and Schaffer 2013). The Oromo have a theoretical concept of social development known as finna, which explained phases and features of development in the Oromo society, and embodied the cumulative historical and recent changes that have taken place to produce a new social order.

Finna ‘‘represents the legacy of the past which each generation inherits from its forefathers [and foremothers] and which it transforms; it is the fertile patrimony held in trust by the present generation which it will enrich and bequeath to future generations . . . it describes a movement emanating from the inside, a developing of the inner potential of society based on the cultural roots it has already laid down’’ (Kassam 1994:16-40). It has seven interconnected cumulative development phases, namely, guddina (growth), gabbina (enrichment), ballina (broadening), badhadha (abundance), hoormaataa (reproduction and rejuvenation), dagaaga (development with sustainability), and dagaahoora (reciprocity, sharing, and cultural borrowing).3 Some Oromo activists and their social movements led by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) currently attempt to restore their egalitarian cultural traditions and the democratic political system that the Ethiopian colonial state and its international supporters have opposed and repressed (Jalata and Schaffer 2013).

The OLF should avoid the pitfalls of other social and liberation movements that won the war and lost the battle. It will truly achieve its objectives of defeating Ethiopian colonialism and restoring the Oromo democratic tradition by building robust civic and political institutions and by envisioning and developing egalitarian democracy. These are the only ways that this front can implement social, economic, and political justice without becoming a tool of the capitalist class and global powers. So the serious challenges that are facing those social forces and progressive Oromo intellectuals and activists and others that are struggling to establish an egalitarian democratic order are demystifying the theories and ideologies of domination and exploitation. This can be done by developing the knowledge for liberation that can facilitate alliances among all peoples to build grassroots transnationalism by challenging and defeating bourgeois internationalism and unjust globalization.

There are no blueprints in taking these steps. According to Bruce G. Trigger (2006:27), ‘‘The challenge of the present is for progressive anthropologists [and others] to draw on their knowledge of social behavior to try to design societies of a sort that have never existed before in human history: ones that are large-scale, technologically advanced, internally culturally diverse, economically as well as politically egalitarian, and in which everyone will assume a fair share of the burden as well as of the rewards of living on a small, rich, but fragile planet.’’ Tigger suggests the necessity of learning from the past to construct a better and just society where exploitation of subaltern groups and ecology will be avoided and where knowledge and technology can be harnessed to overcome the victimization of people by unjust globalization. As already mentioned, theories develop from social praxis. So it is possible to learn from precapitalist democracies such as that of the Oromo and the theoretical models of ‘‘real utopias’’ or ‘‘utopistics’’ of the current period to advance the theory and practice of egalitarian democracy.

For example, Erik Olin Wright (2006:96) explains the necessity of developing ‘‘a coherent, credible theory of alternatives of existing institutions and social structures that would eliminate, or at least significantly reduce the harms they generate.’’ He explores how capitalist ‘‘institutions and social structures generate human suffering and obstruct human flourishing, [and] how [they] distribute the conditions for suffering and flourishing unfairly’’ (Wright 2014:333). A truly precapitalist egalitarian democratic society, which controlled its institutions and public and private resources such as that of the Oromo institutions and social structures, promoted social justice and political justice. In the model of real utopias, according to Erik Olin Wright (2014:333), the claims of social justice and political justice ‘‘call for a society that deepens the quality of democracy and enlarges its scope of action, under conditions of radical social and material equality.’’

These conditions occurred under Oromo democracy from the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Oromo democracy allowed people to receive all forms of social justice and socioeconomic equality. In Oromo democracy, everybody worked for herself or himself and in collective, and nobody was allowed to exploit the labor of others. When social justice allows all people to ‘‘have equal access to the necessary material means to live flourishing lives,’’ political justice empowers people ‘‘to contribute to the collective control of the conditions and decisions which affect their common fate—a principle of both political equality and collective democratic empowerment’’ (Wright 2006:96). In overcoming institutional harms, there is a need to design an egalitarian modern democratic society. In this effort, we can learn a lot from Oromo democracy, egalitarian social development theory and praxis, and other precapitalist democratic traditions.

Progressive social movements need to struggle for developing an alternative development model to global capitalism, neoliberalism, and violent or savage development. This alternative development model must try to maintain the balance among nature, humanity, and environment on local, regional, and global levels by overcoming the exploitation of humanity and environment. There is an absolute necessity to develop technologically advanced and politically and economically egalitarian society through preventing the accumulation of wealth/capital in the hands of a few, which exploits humanity and environment. These noble paradigms cannot be practiced without totally uprooting the false ideology of racism, sexism, classism, cultural universalism, the ideology of linear modernity, and investment in destructive military organizations and weapons of warfare and nuclear armament.

My suggestions to progressive intellectuals and activists are also to go beyond their left liberal and Marxist traditions that limit their visions to the experiences of the West and study and learn more about the indigenous peoples in their own countries and the Rest. Then, they can find ways of collaborating with them to advance the struggle for human liberation and egalitarian democracy. Almost all social theories have limitations because of the specific geocultural roots of their thinkers and framers. Also, our scientific knowledge including social scientific knowledge is not value neutral because humans socially construct it. According to Third World Network (1993:485), ‘‘Scientists are strongly committed to beliefs and certain cultural ethos, which compel them to convert diversity and complexity into uniformity. In addition to this belief system and cultural ethos—which manifest themselves in the propositions that scientists embrace—science has its own power structure, reward systems and peer groups. All of these [factors] combine to ensure that science is closely correlated with the existing, dominant and unjust, political, economic and social order of the world.’’

It is not surprising that mainstream and oppositional social theories are mainly Euro-American centric because they have been produced in the West. Sandra Harding (1993:2) describes Eurocentrism as ‘‘the assumption that Europe functions autonomously from other parts of the world; that Europe is its own origin, final end, and agent; and that Europe and people of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing to the rest of the world.’’ While learning from the past and present, progressive and activist scholars must overcome their specific geocultural roots and equip themselves with multicultural liberation knowledge in order to build grassroots transnationalism on a larger scale. Movement theorists must help all social movements to learn about one another and develop a broad alternative vision that exposes the fallacies of capitalist globalization and its neoliberal policies and to engage in struggle to create a better future.

To accomplish all these political projects, progressive intellectuals need to improve their theoretical and empirical research and knowledge by combining historical and interdisciplinary approaches that include all social sciences, critical legal studies, cross-disciplinary methods, and critical comparative studies. Without developing the democracy of knowledge, combing these approaches is impossible. These approaches can help in appreciating and learning from indigenous movements. Several indigenous movements in southern, central, and north America have emerged and developed since the 1950s to change their resistance struggles to protests and revolutions in order to restore their humanity and collective land rights; such struggles have enabled some of them to have access to bilingual and intercultural education, to introduce constitutional reforms, and to promote multicultural democracy by emphasizing economic and social equality and justice (Hall and Fenelon 2009; Van Cott 2007, 2009). According to Hall and Fenelon (2009:91), ‘‘Over the fifty years or so, American Indians have become emblematic of movements to reestablish their legitimate status as sovereignty.’’

Native Americans in the United States and First Nations of Canada have struggled for self-determination. Other indigenous organizations such as the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, the Interethnic Association of the Development of Peruvian Rainforest, the United Multiethnic People of Amazonas, and others have participated in liberation struggles in Latin American countries to introduce some changes in individual and collective rights, in the areas of engaging citizens in public policy decision-making, and in holding leaders accountable. Some indigenous Americans in Latin American countries have rejected the capitalist model of development: ‘‘the visions embodied by Indigenous life projects entail a relationship between equals and an end to the subordination of Indigenous peoples’’ (Blaser, Feit, and McRAE 2004:4). Donna Lee Van Cott (2007:9-10) notes that Latin America’s indigenous ‘‘social movements and parties offer unique perspective for addressing democratic deficiencies, as well as the capacity to mobilize social capital for democratic ends and to forge consensus on common political projects. They are expanding public expectations of democracy by insisting on greater participation, the reduction of inequality, and the protection of collective rights.’’

Our knowledge of social movement theories, knowledge, and practices are expanding and improving. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2003:249-53) articulates seven counterhegemonic narratives of social movements as a critique of development and sovereignty: First, social movements are challenging Western development models of rationality such as the role of the expert, progress or ‘‘catching up’’ with the West, and linear development from the so-called backward society to the so-called civilized and advanced one. Such movements are organized around liberation theology in Latin America, environmentalism, cultural revivalism in India, and Green movement in Germany; they also reject Marxist modernism. Second, there are several movements that struggle for the material well-being and culture; they struggle for cultural identity and human dignity. Examples of such movements include the urban squatters movement in Brazil, the movement of Black Communities in Colombia, the Working Women’s Forum in India, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

Third, there are social movements that do not aspire to take state power; they are organized around cultural identity such as ethnicity, language, and ecology. ‘‘Their political agenda seems to be a democratization of their political institutions, the family, community, the workplace, and the society at large. Many identity based movements including feminist movements in India and Latin America . . . appear to organize themselves on this understanding of politics’’ (Rajagopal 2003:251). Fourth, there are social movements that use peaceful means by rejecting violence to challenge institutional politics. Fifth, the failures of liberal democracy and formal institutional politics have facilitated the development of some social movements that have struggled to refine democracy in the Rest. Sixth, there are social movements that are interconnected and formed cross-border alliances without having international legal framework. Seventh, some movements reject sovereignty-property roots of liberalism and use the liberal rights discourses. ‘‘Such struggles reflect a convergence between theory and action, that human rights scholars and activists have longed for but that has been generally unavailable. These [movements] show how individuals and communities can achieve their autonomy and self-realization by participating in shaping their own destiny without being constrained by theoretical boundaries’’ (Rajagopal 2003:253).

The Democracy of Knowledge and Knowledge for Liberation

Euro-American-centric theories and scholarship have suppressed or implicitly and/or explicitly distorted the cultures, traditions, and knowledge of indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups (McGregor 2004). Raewyn Connell (2007:368) notes, ‘‘Most theoretical texts are written in the global North, and most proceed on the assumption that where they are written does not matter at all . . . . With few exceptions, social theory sees and speaks from the global North.’’ Amazingly, mainstream theories and knowledge have presented the destructive capacities of global capitalism for more than 500 years as something positive for indigenous peoples and others.

At the same time, they have dismissed the theories, knowledge, and wisdoms of indigenous peoples and other counterhegemonic theories. Indigenous ‘‘knowledge systems have been represented by adjectives such as ‘primitive,’ ‘unscientific,’ and ‘backwards,’ while the western system is assumed to be uniquely ‘scientific’ and ‘universal’ and superior to local forms of knowledge . . . . The modern knowledge system ‘is merely the globalized version of a very local and parochial tradition’ arising with ‘commercial capitalism’ and ‘a set of values based on power’’’ (McGovern 1999:27). Euro-American hegemonic theories, scholarship, and the ruling ideas have ignored that the colonized indigenous peoples have been ‘‘a data mine for social theory’’ (Connell 2007:369) and the source of objective knowledge production. The hegemonic knowledge of the West and their collaborators in the Rest limits our understanding of the whole world by ignoring the geocultures of indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups.

Of course, there have been leftist scholars who have exposed the exploitative and oppressive aspects of global capitalism by focusing on the hierarchies based on gender, class, and race/ethnonation. However, because of their Euro-American-centric thinking and their limited knowledge of indigenous societies, and their evolutionary and modernist thinking, some of them have focused on capital–labor relations and, more or less, glossed over the problem of indigenous peoples. Furthermore, except a few cases, their works on indigenous peoples have been contradictory, incomplete, or distorted. Because of the rejection of multicultural knowledge and wisdoms and the tradition of abyssal thinking (de Sousa Santos 2007), Euro-American theoretical and intellectual knowledge from right and left could not fully recognize the full humanity of indigenous peoples.

Such scholars even ignore or gloss over their own precapitalist cultures and civilizations by focusing on their modernity. More or less, these intellectual traditions have seen indigenous peoples as social forces that cannot survive the onslaught of the process of the so-called modernity. In order to critically and thoroughly understand the problems of indigenous peoples in the West and the Rest, we need to stretch our intellectual horizons beyond the limitations of these theories, scholarship, and the ruling ideas of the dominant system. Therefore, I argue that social theories and scholarship that cannot address all of these issues are incomplete and contradictory or partially or completely erroneous. Unfortunately, most critical and progressive scholars from the West and Rest cannot see beyond their geocultural and state-centric lenses, and they just give lip service for the liberation of global humanity from exploitation and dehumanization. Liberating global humanity from exploitation and injustices requires developing liberation knowledge that incorporates the best elements of knowledge and wisdoms of all human groups and genuinely reflects multicultural and cross-disciplinary knowledge.

The state-centered knowledge elites have created artificial interdisciplinary boundaries among social sciences and also objectified indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups or have ignored them because of their subordination and powerlessness. M. A. Rahman (1993:14) asserts that ‘‘domination of masses by elites is rooted not only in the polarization of control over the means of material production but also over the means of knowledge production, including control over social power to determine what is useful knowledge.’’ The knowledge for liberation, however, attempts to replace history of domination by history of liberation by recognizing the agency of the oppressed and exploited classes and groups. ‘‘Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent,’’ D. J. Haraway (1991:198) writes, ‘‘not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his [or her] unique agency and authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge.’’

The knowledge elites with support of states have produced ‘‘official’’ history that has completely denied a historical space for the subaltern groups in general and that of indigenous peoples in particular. Such negative views about the oppressed and exploited groups have prevented some scholars from understanding subaltern history and culture as well as their resistances and movements. According to John Gaventa (1993:27), ‘‘The power of knowledge industry is derived not simply from what knowledge is produced and for whom, but also from the growth of new elites who people the knowledge production process.’’ Some of the intellectuals who have studied subaltern groups have promoted the interests of the capitalist ruling class and its collaborators at the cost of the terrorized, colonized, oppressed, and exploited classes and groups. Others claiming that they are maintaining objectivity and neu- trality have ignored the suffering of such peoples.

Euro-American-centric scholars and their foot soldiers in the Rest have dominated the writing of historiography of the oppressed classes and groups; such scholars have an ideology of the so-called cultural universalism and a top-down approach that have completely ignored or distorted the social and cultural history of the colonized and subjugated peoples (Wallerstein 1983). Cultural universalism is an ideology that the capitalist class and their collaborators in the capitalist world economy use to look at the world mainly from their own cultural perspective and to control the economic and cultural resources of the dominated people; it also helps in creating and socializing a global intermediate class by subordinating or destroying multicultures in the name of science and technology (Wallerstein 1983:83). According to Thomas Heaney (1993:41-42), ‘‘With the writing of history, knowledge became power, or rather an expression of power and a tool for maintaining it. History, and later, science, were frequently used not merely to understand, but to legitimize historically shaped political relationships and institutions.’’

The emergent, critical, and comprehensive social movement studies can have a serious impact on developing the knowledge of liberation. Critical social movement studies must build this kind of knowledge by exposing the deficiencies Euro-American and state-centric knowledge that is called the knowledge for domination and maintaining status quo. Social movement studies must promote a better understanding of the struggles of the dominated and exploited peoples and their histories and their aspirations. Progressive scholars who are involved in studying social movements need to debate openly and honestly to transform their scholarship and suggest ways through which liberation knowledge develops and expands.

Therefore, the building of democracy of knowledge is the first step toward the liberation of global humanity from exploitation and injustices by exposing the fallacies of the knowledge for domination and maintaining status quo in the nation-state and in the global capitalist world system. Going beyond the capitalist world system and studying all experiences of humanity without being limited by a modernist mind-set can help in developing critical theories and praxis that are necessary in building an alternative word system. Furthermore, progressive social movement scholars should challenge the problems of false cultural universalism and exclusionary relativism; they need to identify all positive and humanist values of all cultures and negative, reactionary, and oppressive elements of all cultures and build on the positive ones while delegitimizing those values that dehumanize and harm individuals and peoples.

These approaches can help in truly developing progressive global cultural universalism based on multiculturalism that is compatible with inclusionary and progressive cultural particularism. The fallacy of the liberal theory and practice of political equality and its false cultural universalism must be rejected because they exclude the praxis of economic democracy and multiculturalism (Mutua 2008). Progressive social movements should struggle by combining political democracy with economic or social democracy and by promoting a genuine global human rights movement through the inclusion of the best element of cultural practices of every society in the world.

Envisioning Egalitarian Democracy

Mainstream politicians and academics (both conservatives and liberals) in the West and the Rest mainly promote policies that encourage investment and profitability at the cost of the public interest. In the Rest, global capitalism promotes fake democracy or dictatorship that allows the officials of neocolonial states and local and transnational capitalists to intensify the exploitation and dehumanization of people through neoliberal policies and programs. In the West, elections are taking place just for formality without discussing substantive issues of full employment, health care, education, environment, and social justice (Cairns and Sears 2012). Consequently, less and less people are participating in voting considering politics as meaningless and absurd.

The endless crisis of global capitalism and the widening gap between the few rich and the majority poor are making people in the West to be dissatisfied in the present democracy. James Cairns and Alan Sears (2012:3) see democracy as ‘‘one of those words that gets used so heavily that we do not often pause to think about what it means’’ and define it as ‘‘an open question.’’ These two scholars suggest that people should engage in the process of ‘‘democratic imagination’’ to expand their knowledge of democracy by including the concepts of popular power and self-government to satisfy their needs. Seeing democracy as an open question demonstrates that there are competing definitions of democracy. For those who control the major political and economic institutions, democracy does not involve the collective struggle for popular power and self-government (Cairns and Sears 2012).

For Cairns and Sears, democracy emerges from everyday life and collective action to make institutions responsive to the needs of the people; they use the concept of democratic imagination to criticize the existing democracy and envision popular democracy or democracy from below. Cairns and Sears (2012:4) suggest that this imagination must combine deliberate collective action ‘‘to improve the ways that human beings live together.’’ They also assert that democracy from below aspires to empower people to achieve collective self-government, attempts to fundamentally change society, and to promote the principle that real power emerges from genuine equity. But official or elite or liberal democracy is limited to elections, the rule of law, and certain freedoms and does not extend to workplaces, schools, families, organized sports, and personal relationships. According to Cairns and Sears (2012:4), ‘‘The idea that human beings deserve freedom, meaning that they ought to govern their own lives and communities, has indeed emerged from the resistance, in the form of collective action, and not simply the power of idea, that has led to the development of different forms of democracy at key moment in history. Regardless of the particular ways in which democracy is imagined, it is fundamentally about the daily practice of living together as humans. Safeguarding or improving democracy, therefore, involves action in the real world.’’

Bourgeois or official democracy claims that it provides citizenship rights to people and then denies them equitable living standards and substantive democracy. Currently, official democracy implements the policies of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has started to roll back social citizenship rights that subaltern groups achieved by their collective struggles in the West. Neoliberal policies have installed lean governments by cutting public pensions and unemployment insurance programs, attacked collective bargaining rights of workers, and increased user fees in the areas of education and transportation (Cairns and Sears 2012:67-69). Neoliberals have blamed the welfare state for global economic crises, the declining rate of profits for corporations, for rigidly regulating labor market, and for increasing social benefits for subaltern groups through social programs. While claiming to become lean, neoliberal states have become more interventionist and pumped trillions of public dollars into failing private banks and corporations and engaged in massive spending on policing, prison-industrial complexes, and the military.

Most people in the Rest in general and indigenous peoples in particular are not even allowed to have official democracy. For indigenous peoples in the West, official democracies are illegitimate because they do not implement the rule of law to protect their interests. Generally speaking, many people in the West believe that democracy is in trouble, and the problem increases with the further crises of the capitalist world system. If democracy is to benefit all, it must be reinvented to solve the problems of the ordinary people rather than serving as a tool for further capital accumulation for the rich and powerful groups. This reinvention requires that people empower themselves and their social movements. In envisioning and inventing a participatory and egalitarian democracy, we can learn a lot from the experiences of noncapitalist societies that prevented exploitation and domination through collective efforts and horizontal organizations.

Discussion and Conclusion

A more critical and productive dialogue will be needed between social movement theorists and world systems analysts. As noted above, Steven M. Buechler has started such a dialogue, although more explorations and discussions are needed from scholars of these two theoretical orientations. The reductionist approaches of only focusing on political economy or cultural factors or psychological factors must be avoided by using critical interdisciplinary methods and approaches, which enable theorists to analyze chains of interrelated historical and sociological factors. Furthermore, critically and thoroughly reevaluating social movement theories and practices and building on their strengths for developing new social movement theories, which reflect multicultural liberation knowledge and egalitarian ethos, are highly needed.

Specifically, integrating the best elements of social movement theories and practices with the theories and wisdom of indigenous peoples and their movements can help in advancing the praxis of a progressive global social movement in order to reinvent international law and to build internationalism from below. Since neoglobalizers are organized internationally, democratic globalizers and their social movements need to create global solidarity such as the World Social Forum for creating a transnational social movement and taking coordinated collective actions on global level for challenging and defeating neoliberalism and its policies. Such actions are not possible without developing multicultural liberation knowledge that helps in liberating the minds of ordinary people and progressive intellectuals and activists from all forms of social evils such as sexism, racism, classism, and cultural and religious chauvinism.

Above all, without critically and thoroughly exposing and challenging the fallacies of the mainstream theories, knowledge for domination, and the ruling ideas of the capitalist class and its collaborators, social movements cannot fully play a positive role in promoting egalitarian democracy from below. Because of their immense intellectual and materials resources and geopolitical positions, if they can overcome their Euro-American-centric paradigms, progressive intellectuals and activists from the West can contribute significantly to promote and advance progressive social movements on country, continental, and global levels. They have also more opportunity to participate in the struggle for social justice because of the opportunity of official democracy.

Similarly, progressive scholars and activists from the Rest, despite their meager material resources and their hostile political conditions, can contribute a lot through their comparative theoretical and empirical research and through participating in the struggle for social justice on different levels. Both progressive scholars and activists from the West and the Rest need to have critical, deep, and broad understanding of large-scale and long-term social changes by rejecting the modernist and evolutionary approaches and by studying noncapitalist societies both in the West and in the Rest to learn more about humanity and imagine beyond global capitalism.

People have constructed societies, and they can also remake them on egalitarian democratic principles by enabling individuals and groups to enjoy the fruit of their labor without being dominated, alienated, exploited, and dehumanized. Supported by progressive scholars and activists and by overcoming their narrow interests through developing the knowledge of liberation, social movements can ally with indigenous movements and other social forces that struggle for egalitarian democracy and an alternative world order. All these require reimagining about social movements by developing cross-cultural liberation knowledge and a critical ideology that looks to the past, the present, and the future in order to build a robust organizational capacity that can help build an alternative and better world for global humanity.

Author’s Note

Paper presented at Social Movements and Global Transformation: Political Economy of the World System XXXVIIIth Annual Conference, April 10-12, 2014, University of Pittsburgh.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. News of the revolts of 1848 reached the United States and American Fourierists supported them and sent delegates to France. The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention also emerged in 1848 as the beginning of the Women’s rights movement in the United States. Later, radical feminism and suffrage movements developed on the global stage.
2. Based on more than four decades of ethnological research findings of Anthropologist Richard Lee, Bruce G. Trigger (2006:25) notes, ‘‘social and political equality in hunter- gatherer societies was not direct expression of human nature. His evidence indicates that hierarchical behavior was actively suppressed in hunter-gatherer societies, where economic and political egalitarianism had great adaptive advantages, as well as in some of the more mobile middle-range societies. Contrariwise, in more complex societies competitive behavior was supported and reinforced by the state.’
3.  Guddina is a concept that explains how Oromo society improves itself by creating new experiences and adding them to its existing cultural life. Gabbina is the next concept that explains the enrichment of cultural experiences by integrating the cumulative past experiences with the contemporary ones through broadening and deepening the system of knowledge and worldview. Without Oromo democracy, there is no sustainable and egalitarian sociocultural development. Ballina refers to the expansion of enriched cultural experiences from one society to another through the reciprocity of cultural borrowing, based on the principles of social equality, fairness, and social justice. The cumulative experiences of guddina, gabbina, and ballina lead to the stage of badhadha. This phase is the stage of wholeness and peace. According the Oromo tradition, this stage indicates the maintenance of peace among Waaqa (God), nature, and society; theoretically speaking, there is no conflict, poverty, disease, or natural calamity because of the balance between Waaqa, nature, and society is maintained. The development of badhadha leads to the stage of hoormata. In this stage, people, animal, and other living things reproduce and multiply because of the availability of conditions such as availability of rain, resources, and peace. The next stage is dagaaga, which is the phase of development cycle that is integrated to maintain an even and sustainable development of society. The final phase is daga-hoora in which full development takes place in the Oromo society and expands to neighboring societies through reciprocity, sharing, and cultural borrowing.

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Ezekiel Gebissa, Special to Addis Standard

Ethiopia’s political history of the last half-century has been the pregressive unfolding of the twinned ideas of “land to the tiller question” and the “national question.” Two ideological factions coalesced around the question of nationalities: the ethno-nationalists who favored self-determination and the Ethiopianists who advocated granting regional autonomy to regions where centrifugal tendencies were evident.[1] In 1987, a constitution that established the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia partially adopted the Ethiopianists’ position by granting regional autonomy to five regions to diffuse demands for self-determination.[2] In 1991, the ethno-nationalists who favored self-determination ousted the Ethiopianists and vowed to construct a decentralized federal state of Ethiopian nations, nationalities and peoples.[3]

In recent weeks, the Ethiopianist’s position is attempting to engineer a comeback to reclaim the relevancy it lost in 1991 by unleashing a particularly shrill and vitriolic rhetoric against Oromo nationalists. The rehashed slogans of Ethiopianist “patriots” in diaspora circles is relentless but has little consequence beyond inflaming passions and whipping up diaspora support for a defunct political position. The resurgent Oromo nationalism, expressed in the historic Oromo protests of the last two years, is not just a nationalism of articulated grievances against Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s (TPLF) increasing authoritarianism and insatiable rapaciousness. It is a more organic cultural nationalism built on a shared Oromummaa[4]or Oromo identity and a collective consciousness buttressed by Oromo political and cultural heritage. As such, there is no Oromo audience for the nostalgic assimilation dream of the imperial period.

In this reflection, I argue that Oromo protests were preceded by a cultural revival that occasioned the emergence of a resurgent Oromo nationalism, unified the Oromo nation and helped launch an unprecedented sophisticated civil action in the recent history of Ethiopia. A corollary to my argument is an assertion that Oromo nationalism that was expressed in the Oromo protests is a home-grown, pragmatic nationalism that has outgrown the dystopian goals and methods of earlier periods. I begin by correcting misconceptions about the earlier Oromo nationalism with a view to showing that imagined pan-Ethiopian territorial nationalism is ill-suited to a genuine federalism.

Political Realignments and Construction of National Identities

Even after the adoption of the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1995, the pan-Ethiopian nationalists kept dismissing ethnicity as a feature of marginal groups destined to assimilate into the modern state.[5] In their view, the assimilationist policies of the imperial regime (1941-74) and the military-socialist regime (1974-91) have replaced ethnic consciousness and identity by pan-Ethiopian patriotism.[6] As such, they characterized the contemporary ethno-nationalist resurgence as ethnic mobilization whipped up by power-hungry elite that will disappear once citizenship rights were ensured. Insisting that Ethiopia is indivisible, the pan-Ethiopianists consistently bemoaned national self-determination as “unpatriotic, or even un-Ethiopian.”[7] After several metamorphoses, the political groups that advocated the pan-Ethiopianist solution to the “national question” formed the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) in the mid-2000s. During the 2005 national elections, they offered a liberal democratic state buttressed by a pan-Ethiopian nationalist ideology as the appropriate remedy for Ethiopia’s quest for national integration and economic development.[8]  For CUD and its successors, such as the Ginbot 7 Movement for Freedom Justice and Democracy, liberal prescriptions are the solution to Ethiopia’s twinned questions of land ownership and the question of nationalities. Many of them still oppose ethnic federalism and advocate land privatization. This influential interpretation undergirds the views of the pan-Ethiopian assimilationists.[9]

Rent by internal dissensions and the pan-Ethiopianist challenge, the TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) gradually moved away from its ethno-nationalist commitments. Beginning in the early 2000s, the party began to embrace Ethiopian nationalism asserting that its policy of accommodation of ethnic grievances, aided by economic growth will eventually render ethnic nationalism politically irrelevant. Its search for an ideological basis for its rule culminated in the politics of a dominant party leading a developmental state that will build a middle income country governed by a federal system.[10] Like the pan-Ethiopian nationalists, the EPRDF now holds that a modern state, conceived in the norms of self-reliance, universal equality and individual autonomy will render the vestiges of ethnic loyalty obsolete.[11] The EPRDF has now settled on economic developementalism based on accommodation of ethnic demands. It is a position that can aptly be characterized as a neo-nationalist accomodationists.[12]

After the 2005 national elections, the EPRDF and its pan-Ethiopianist opponents found common cause in politically marginalizing the OLF, the main ethno-nationalist party that remained committed to the idea of the right of national self-determination. As the result, the OLF was hemmed in by these two champions of pan-Ethiopian nationalism. In present-day popular consciousness in Ethiopia, OLF nationalists are viewed as relics of the era of liberation movements whose goal is to tear down the state, subvert democracy, development and peace, and revert back to a pre-modern way of life organized around a primordialist conception of ethnicity.[13] As such, Oromo nationalists are criticized for three reasons: first, elites exploiting the language issue, which ostensibly has been fully addressed, to claim power; second, espousing a secessionist agenda which is divisive and unattainable; and third, inventing traditions unaware that modernity has made indigenous institutions unworkable and irrelevant.[14]

 Exploiting the Language Issue

Echoing a more general assumption in the literature on nationalism, the pan-Ethiopian assimilationists in particular maintain that Oromo nationalism results from an invented tradition by elites whose purpose is to create a language-based collective identity.[15]  Some have depicted Oromo nationalists as political entrepreneurs who manipulate symbols in order to achieve power by grasping for straws of issues that have already been addressed.  Reflecting the pan-Ethiopian view, Daniel Kendie states:

The great majority of Oromos take great pride in their Ethiopian identity.  … their national identification has been largely formed, and they enjoy widely shared values and internalize restrains on highly parochial and norm-challenging actions.  … The integrative dilemma comes not from tribal animosities or masses in revolt, but … from competition between ethnic elites for state power in which state centralism encourages alienated elites to raise ethnic demands.[16]

On the accommodationists side, Alemseged Abay posits that under the TPLF “Oromo cultural grievances were genuinely accommodated. Afaan Oromo thus became an academic and administrative language. The Oromo elite … can now freely enjoy their distinct identity.”[17] As the result, he concludes that the secessionist dreams of the OLF have been seriously undercut.

Both sides mistakenly equate Oromo nationalism with the OLF, which they consider is an elite creation. In fact, Oromo nationalism with which the OLF is often identified was forged in the womb of social and cultural nationalist groups such as the Macha Tuulamaa Self-help Association and the Afraan Qalloo Cultural Troupe and its offshoot music bands in Western Ethiopia (Guddattuu Wallaggaa, Burqaa Boojji, Biqiltuu Mandii and Lalisaa Najjoo) and Aduu Birra in Addis Abeba. For these groups, their goal was cultural survival, construction of national identity and a restoration of historically-rooted way of life.[18]

In invoking Afaan Oromoo as their rallying cry, Oromo cultural nationalists of the 1960s were interested not just in enriching the language as a medium of communication. Oromo nationalists maintain that language is a carrier of the forces that enliven folk songs, dances and various genres of literature, philosophy and world view, forces that in turn shape individual and national identities. Their primary goal was to revive a distinctive community founded on memories of unique origins, history, culture, homeland, and social and political practices. As Shawn Mollenhauer has shown in his study of Oromo music and politics, “the use of lyrics with double meanings … has long been a weapon used by Oromo to express political and social dissent.”[19] Even under the repressive Derg regime, Ali Mohammed Birra, the legendary Oromo song artist whose lyrics were known for their subliminal political messages, explicitly states in his song Galmaa Adaa Kenya that the Oromo language is more than a medium of communication:

The repository of our culture, the protector of our history

The vanguard of our unity, and foundation of our liberty

The Oromo language, the root of Oromo identity.

 As we now see with hindsight, language was the transmitter of symbols of cultural life that numerous Oromo poets, painters and composers deployed during the very restricted and dangerous political environment of the Derg years to transmit national folklore, political system, history, landscape, mythology, moral ethos, religion and systems of knowledge.[20] In Barnoota Barnoota, Ali Birra says:

Knowledge, knowledge, and knowledge again

Self-knowledge should be the Oromos’ destination

Authentic knowledge, is rooted in history

Its source is the national heritage and the shared culture

The Oromo language is the center pole and the peak

It is this kind of knowledge that will liberate us all.

Language revival was accompanied by recovery of political culture that was thought to be defunct. Released at about the same time, Ali Birra expresses the Oromo yearning for the restoration of the Gadaa system, the participatory political system of the Oromo.  In Karaan Galma Abba Gadaa Eessa, language is described as an emancipatory vehicle.

Asabaleehoo, gurraamaleho, which path leads to the Abba Gadaa palace?

I like to go there and strengthen it, and then sit back and narrate his story.

We are impoverished because we sold our culture, our history and our language

When we were made a laughing stock, but our sages saved us by their wisdom

Someone else’s scepter may break, but the Abba Gadaa’s scepter would never

We glossed over our story, but the pain we suffered is still there

We glossed over our story, but we have no poverty of history.[21]

In this song, written in the 1970s, the artist explicitly states the Oromo longing for self-government, invoking the Abba Gadaa’s (the head of the traditional government) symbol of power and expressing the Oromo aspiration for self-rule. Oromo artists revitalized the Oromo language as the basis for forging common identity as a necessary precondition for nationalism and political action. This cultural awakening was a grassroots movement that involved people from all walks of life. The elite had little to do with it.

The maturation of this cultural movement came to the fore in the Oromo Cultural Show of 1977 in the National Theatre which, Mollenhaur observed, was “a major moment in the development of Oromo music and Oromo nationalism. It was the first time that the Oromo from a number of different areas came together for the purpose of presenting, while simultaneously exploring, a pan-Oromo identity.”[22]

In the history of Oromo nationalist moment, therefore, the longing for language isn’t merely to exercise the right to speak it, as the pan-Ethiopianists assume.  It is a vehicle for “raising political and cultural consciousness” and for mobilizing Oromos “to join the struggle for self-determination, emancipation and liberation.”[23]

When these songs were released in the mid-1970s, the OLF was not even constituted as a political organization. At the time, the alleged Oromo elite were members of either the All Ethiopia Socialist Movement (AESM or Me’ison) or the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) who believed that the question of nationalities would be resolved as part of the class struggle of the socialist revolution that was underway, not through fostering ethnic identity.[24]

It is the cultural turn that recaptured the elite back into Oromo nationalism rather than the elite reproducing nationalism to serve their private political ambitions. It then follows that the language issue is not a matter of obsession for Oromo nationalists that stops with obtaining the right to speak it. It is an instrument of reconnection with the Oromo heritage and imagination of the future.

Unrelenting Secessionist Agenda

Over the last several decades, Oromo nationalism has evolved from a quest for self-reliance to seeking regime change to fighting for total liberation. Prior to the early 1970s, the political goal of Oromo nationalism was articulated by the OLF’s immediate predecessor, the Ethiopian National Liberation Front (ENLF). Founded on 27 June 1971 by Hajji Hussien Sorra in Aden, the ENLF declared its objective was to overthrow Haile Sellassie’s “feudal regime” and to create a “progressive republic” based on a decentralized union comprised of autonomous regions. Specifically, it supported land distribution to peasants, freedom of the press, release of political prisoners, the right to organize political parties and professional associations.[25]  The ENLF was established to unite all the oppressed peoples of Ethiopia to pursue the goals of removing felt injustices and building an Ethiopia in which all nationalities were equal citizens. The ENLF was organized after the Macha Tuuluma Association was suddenly banned in 1968 and its leaders were imprisoned. It was also a response to the Oromo people’s national rage and a revival of the spirit of the Bale rebellion.[26]At this stage, the focus of Oromo activists was on the restoration of personal dignity and the cultural identity of the Oromo. Few entertained the idea of an independent Oromo republic.

Independence as a political goal was first introduced in 1976 when the OLF revised its political program and declared its main political objective as follows: “the realization of national self-determination for the Oromo people and their liberation from oppression and exploitation in all their forms. This can only be realized through successful consummation of the new democratic revolution . . . and the establishment of the people’s democratic republic of Oromia.”[27] The political program was in sync with the prevailing global political environment. As Lencoo Lata has noted, the “Oromo struggle for self-determination was conceptualized as part of a worldwide process of ending both class and national oppression within the wider goal of bringing about a totally new world order.”[28] Thus, the political program of the OLF wasn’t a utopian vision that hailed from a “narrow nationalist” mind, but a political choice that resulted from a deliberative process that took account of the prevailing conditions of the time.

A closer examination of the OLF political program reveals that the organization was not resolutely in favor of secession from its inception. The program also envisions possibilities of a democratic union with other ethnic groups. It states that the OLF “will work to bring about, where possible, political union with other nations on the basis of equality, respect for mutual interests and the principles of voluntary association.”[29] The ambivalence in the program reveals the existence of contrary voices to the secession agenda within the organization. There has been a diversity of opinions within the OLF at least since the late 1980s between two factions which held opposing positions on the issue of secession but chose to remain in the organization to protect the larger purpose of Oromo unity.

In the past two decades, the OLF has gone through an organizational maturation curve.[30] In the phase of organizational maturity it has reached, it had the chance to evaluate its goals, make adjustments, and elaborate policies and issue-appropriate forms of action for its members. The internal divisions that had been simmering for years came to the surface in the late 1990s, dividing the organization and reflecting the diverse historical experiences of a nation dispersed over a large area. Diversities of opinion resulted in dissensions that became factions, beginning with the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Oromia (IFLO), followed by the Oromo Peoples Liberation Organization (OPLO or IBSO), the Oromo Liberation Front Transitional Authority (OLF-TA), the Reformed Oromo Liberation Front (ROLF), the Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) and Front for the Independence of Oromia (FIO).[31]

At the moment, none of the major Oromo nationalist organizations openly advocate a separatist position. The Oromo National Congress (ONC) and the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM) have always advocated self-rule for Oromia and shared rule in governing Ethiopia.[32] The political program of the newly formed Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) states that its objective is “to lead the struggle of the Oromo people to achieve freedom and self-determination through the creation of a genuinely democratic multinational federation in Ethiopia, where all peoples enjoy citizenship and democratic rights as well as self-rule and shared rule.”[33] Even prominent OLF leaders are not doctrinaire about the independence for Oromia. In response to a question why he changed his long held political stance, Leenco Lata, president of the ODF and a founding member and leader of the OLF, stated:

I cannot preach what is unachievable. It cannot work in Ethiopia. If Oromia was to become a country, the entire region would be in chaos. Oromia is everywhere.  … It will be best to fix the country from within so we all have a democratic country in which to live. The Oromo don’t have to think like we are a victim or act like we are a minority. We are not a minority but a majority. We will not forget the historical chapter, but we have to start a new chapter where we work together with everybody to create an Ethiopia for everybody.[34]

 Even though none of Oromo political organizations maintain a strictly secessionist stance, EPRDF officials continue to state that “the OLF’s sincerity and commitment to the democratic question is in question.”[35] As noted earlier, the OLF’s supposed inalterable “secessionist” predilections are the rallying cry of its opponents, primarily the pan-Ethiopian assimilationists and accommodationists. The irony is why this imputed position of the OLF is considered a political crime given that the right to secede is enshrined in the FDRE Constitution.

 Oromo Nationalism is an Invention of Elites

What then of the third charge that nationalists invent new collective identities to serve the power interests of novel social groups. Even Oromo scholars sometimes argue that Oromo nationalism is the handiwork of a disgruntled new social class, the educated professional strata, for whom assimilation to the “Ethiopian” identity did not result in any material pay off.[36] To be sure, the founding OLF leaders were actually very successful individuals, many of whom were not only concerned with power but also their identity in a period of large-scale social change in Ethiopia.[37] They were highly educated people who looked back to earlier historical periods, not just to as mine pit for their political strategies but to find lessons for the present. Analyzing the social status of the early Oromo cultural and political nationalists shows they were individuals who were engaged, as Anthony Smith notes, in the rediscovery aspects of their past rather than in the invention of new traditions.[38]

The contemporary Oromo nationalist political landscape can hardly be described as elitist. The revival of Oromo political, religious and cultural heritage is sustained by grassroots institutions organized by local people who have no direct connection with Oromo nationalist elite. There are myriad such cultural institutions that now are the engines of cultural revival. The Abbaa Gadaa local councils with their traditional assemblies located in nearly twenty centers across Oromia are institutions dedicated to the revival and restoration of the gadaa system. The Waaqefanna centers are organized to revive the theology of the faith which promotes peace (nagaa), reconciliation (araara), love (jaalala)and harmony (walta’iinsa)[39] and to provide space for worshipers of the Oromo indigenous religion. There are now several congregations across Oromia organized into five clusters.[40] These massive cultural institutions are organized by Oromo elders who voluntarily took up the initiative to recreate Oromo traditional political and religious institutions.

The above two institutions are powerfully expressed together in the celebration of the Irreecha festival. When the festival is celebrated annually at Lake Harsaadii near the town of Bishoftu located about 30 miles southeast of Addis Abeba, it is presided over by the chairperson of the Gumii Abbooti Gadaa (The Union of the Abbaa Gadaa Councils), attended by several million festival attendees.[41] These institutions have their roots in the past but they are quite adapted to the contemporary circumstances. The gadaa institutions that have now reemerged, following many years of rediscovery, are being revived in a way that the present generation can respond to. Abba Gadaa Beyene Senbetu Roobii, president of the Abba Gadaa Council always makes the point of amayeesu (modernizing) the institution.[42]

All of this suggests that elites do not have a free hand in “creating” a nation or inventing nationalism. The process of reconstruction and reconstitution succeeds not because of the elite’s social engineering capacity but on the degree to which their message resonates with the aspirations of the target population.  In their effort to return to the past, Oromo nationalists are engaged in a project of self-discovery and collective definition that may lead them to experiment with several alternative visions of the nation over an extended period. In the Oromo case, what the ENLF envisioned isn’t precisely the same as what the OLF imagined. The IFLO’s vision of an independent Oromia is different from the OLF’s. Even the OPDO, which in many ways expropriated the OLF vision, was not molded in precisely the OLF tradition.

As discussed above regarding the evolution of Oromo political programs, the continuous elaboration of options is a sign not of political opportunism but rather of the preparedness of Oromo nationalists to face contingency.  In any event, Oromo nationalism is dynamic and diversified as the nationalists’ multifaceted engagement in Ethiopian politics shows. It is irreducible to a secessionist agenda however hard the holdovers of the assimilationists of the past and the accomodationist currently hanging on to power try.

Conclusion

After the massive protests of 2014-16, the Oromo issue has now taken center stage in Ethiopian politics. The demands of the protestors, while many, revolve around these continuing questions of land, identity and self-rule. A functioning participatory democracy within a genuine federal system is the most promising, durable, supportable and least disruptive solution to the longstanding “question of nationalities.” It is already enshrined in the existing FDRE constitution and as such is positioned not only to address the hopes of the majority of Ethiopians for stability, prosperity and human dignity but also to allay the fear of minority groups concerned about being overwhelmed by the larger nations. The Oromo protests have exposed the excesses and weaknesses of the incumbent regime. Now they face the challenge of demonstrating their political acumen to contribute to creation of a balanced and participatory governance in Ethiopia which Oromo leaders championed when the current constitution was adopted. What is called for now is an all-inclusive conversation to design a road map back to the promises enshrined in that document.

Ed’s Note: Ezekiel Gebissa is a Professor of History and African Studies at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. He can be reached at egebissa@kettering.edu

End Note:

[1] John Markakis, Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers (Oxford: James Currey, 2011), 14;

[2] Semahagn Gashu Abebe, The Last Post-Cold War Socialist Federation: Ethnicity, Ideology and Democracy in Ethiopia (New York: Rutledge, 2014), 119-120.

[3] John Markakis, National and Class Conflict in the Horn of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 254-257; John Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray People’s Liberation Front 1975-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 99; Alem Habtu, “Multiethnic Federalism in Ethiopia: A study of the secession clause in the Constitution 35:1 (2005), 323.

[4] Gemechu Megersa, “Oromumma: Tradition, Consciousness and Identity,” in Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquires, ed. P.T.W. Baxter, Jan Hultin and Alessandro Triulzi (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 1996).

[5]    Sarah Vaughan, “Ethnicity and Power in Ethiopia,” PhD Diss. University of Edinburgh (2003), 37-38. This position is supported by many of expatriate Ethiopianist scholars and a school of nationalism. Cf. Christopher Clapham, “Conclusion: Revolution, nationalist and the Ethiopian state,” in Marina Ottaway (ed), The Political Economy of Ethiopia(New York: Praeger, 1990), 221-231; Harold Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (London: University of California Press, 1994).

[6]    Dawit Wolde Giorgis, Red Tears: War, Famine, and Revolution in Ethiopia (Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1989), 117

[7]    Merera Gudina, “Contradictory Interpretation of Ethiopian History: The Need for a New Consensus,” in David Turner (ed.), Ethiopian Federalism: The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press), 120.

[8]    Daniel Kendie, “An Alternative Approach to National Development,” Paper presented at the International Conference on African Development. Western Michigan University, August 1, 2001.

[9]    The Political Program of Ginbot 7 Movement for Freedom Justice and Democracy.  http://www.ginbot7.org/program-3/  Accessed May 29, 2016.Daniel Kendie , “Ethiopia: An Alternative Approach to National Development” (2001). International Conference on African Development Archives. Paper 10. http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/africancenter_icad_archive/10. Idem, Daniel Kendie (1994) “Which Way the Horn of Africa: Disintegration or Confederation?” Northeast African Studies, 1:1 (1994), 137-167.

[10]  It should be noted that the notion of a dominant party was a TPLF goal since it was introduced to Ethiopia by Samuel Huntington in 1993.  Huntington, “Political Development in Ethiopia: A Peasant-Based Dominant Party Democracy,” In W. H. Tecola (ed) Democratization in Ethiopia (1991-1994): A Personal View (Cambridge: Khepera Publishers, 1993), 271.

[11]  Ezekiel Gebissa, “Oromo Protests: The Martinet’s Message Meets Its Match, Addis Standard, 6: 59 (March, 2016).

[12]  Meles Zenawi, “States and markets: neoliberal limitations and the case for a developmental state.” In Akbar Norman, Howard Stein & Kwesi Botchway (eds), Good Growth and Development in Africa: Rethinking Development Strategies. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 140–72; Addis Alem Balema, Democracy and Economic Development In Ethiopia (Lawrenceville, NJ, 2014).

[13]  Alemseged, Abbay, “Diversity and State-Building in Ethiopia,” African Affairs 103 (2004):593–614.

[14]  Alemseged,  (2004):593–614.

[15]  Solomon Gashaw, “Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Ethiopia,” The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism, ed. Crawford Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 138–157.

[16]  Kendie, “Ethiopia: An Alternative Approach to National Development” Paper 10.

[17]  Alemseged, 12.

[18]  Tesfaye Tolessa Bessa, “A History of Oromo Cultural Troupes (1962-1991)” Science, Technology and Arts Research Journal 2:1 (2013), 86-94; Mohammed Ademo, “Afran Qallo Band Marks 50 Years of Making Music and History,” OPride: News, Views and Public Service. http://www.opride.com/oromsis/news/3583-afran-qallo-band-marks-50-years-of-making-music-and-history. Accessed May 29, 2016.

[19]  Shawn Mollenhauer, “Millions on the Margines: Music, Ethnicity, and Cencorship among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” PhD diss., Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Riverside, 2011. P. 87.

[20]  Gianpaulo Calchi Novati, “Conflict and Reshaping of States in the Horn of Africa,” in Alessandro Triulzi and M. Cristina Ercolessi Ieds.), State, Power, and New Political Actors in Postcolonial Africa (Milan: Felterineilli, 2004), 87-112.

[21]  Ali Birra’s Song, “Karaan Galma Abba Gada Eessa.”

[22]  Mollenhauer, p. 87.

[23]  Demitu Argo, Oromo Art as a Politcal Resistance. http://www.ogina.org/issue4.html. Accessed May 29, 2016.

[24]   Marina and David Ottaway, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution (New York: Africana, 1978), p. 120.

[25]  David H. Shinn, Thomas P. Ofcansky Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia 155.

[26]  Bahru Zewde, Documenting the Ethiopian Student Movement: An Exercise in Oral History, 108.

[27] Oromo Liberation Front Program, (Finfinne,1976).

[28]  Leenco Lata, The Horn of Africa as a Common Homeland: the state and self-determination in the era of heightened globalization (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier  University Press, 2004), 1

[29]  Oromo Liberation Front Program, (Finfinne,1976).

[30]  Organizations, as civilizations, rise to respond to a challenge. Usually, the life cycle models have four stages: birth, growth, maturity and decline. During their life evolution the organizations must adapt and renew to survive. Organizations that fail to respond often end up in failure.  Kim S. Cameron, Robert I. Sutton, David Allred Whetten, Readings in organizational decline: Frameworks, research, and prescriptions (Boston, MA: Ballinger Books, 1988).

[31]  Asfaw Beyene, “Leadership and the State of the Oromo Struggle: What is going on?,” Paper presented at the Oromo Studies Association Annual Conferece, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,  July 14-15, 2012.

[32]  Merera Gudina, “The Ethiopian State and the Future of the Oromo: The Struggle for ‘Self–Rule’ and ‘Shared Rule‘”, Journal of Oromo Studies 15:1 (2008); Bulcha Demeksa, My Life, My Vision for the Oromo and Other Peoples of Ethiopia  (Red Sea Press, 2013)

[33]  The Program of the Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) http://oromodemocraticfront.org/odf-political-program/

[34] Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia. http://www.solidaritymovement.org/130406-SMNE-Applauds-Oromo-Democratic-Front.php Accessed May, 27, 2016.

[35]  Ballema, 111.

[36]  Mohammed Hassen, “The Development of Oromo Nationalism,” Asefa Jalata, Oromo Nationalism and Discourse

[37]  Thomas Osmond, “Knowledge, Identity and Epistemological Choices: An Attempt to Overcome Theoretical Tensions in the Field of Oromo Studies,” in Susanne Epple (ed.), Creating and Crossing Boundaries in Ethiopia: Dynamics of Social Categorization and Differentiation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2014), 196.

[38]  Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of nations (Osford: Blackwell, 1986), 358.

[39]  Bedassa Gebissa Aga, “Oromo Indigenous Religion: Waaqeffannaa,” International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation 3:4 (2016), 1.

[40]  Bedassa Gebissa Aga, “Freedom of Waaqeffannaa Religion in Ethiopia post1991,”

    International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation 2: 9 (2015), 12.

[41] Mekuria Bulcha “Oromia’s Irreecha Festival – A Revival of an Ancient African Culture – An Attempt to Understand and Explain” September 27, 2015.  http://www.ayyaantuu.net/oromias-irreecha-festival-a-revival-of-an-ancient-african-culture-an-attempt-to-understand-and-explain/ accessed May 31, 2016;  Gemechu J. Geda. “Irreecha: An Indigenous Thanksgiving Ceremony of the Oromo to the High God Waaqa”. In Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions. Edited by James L. Cox. (New York: Ashgate, 2013), 152-155.

[42]  During his tour of Oromo communities in North America in the fall of 2014, Abba Gadaa Beyene Sanbatu Robi, President of the Oromia Gadaa Council, emphasized the need to adapt to the demands of modern realities.

Brief account on the Oromo protest from Nov. 2015 – Nov. 2016

By Tarekegn Chimdi (PhD)

Background

The Oromo people constitute over 40% of the total population and a single largest national group in Ethiopia. Since the date of colonization by the Abyssinians at the end of 19th century, their political, economic, social and cultural life was undermined. Historians noted that after more than three decades of fierce wars of resistance their demographics were reduced from 10 million to 5 million. They were faced with cruel subjugation, exploitation, discrimination and marginalization; forced to slavery and servitude. Their egalitarian and democratic system of governance known as Gadaa was abolished. Successive regimes in Ethiopia had been furthering their subjugation and repression through heavy-handed cruel, inhumane policies (be it under the guise of democracy or socialism). The current Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) led totalitarian regime is the worst the Oromo people witnessed.

The TPLF dominated authoritarian regime ruled for a quarter of century with complete control on political, economic and social life in Ethiopia after toppling over a century old Amhara hegemony in 1991. Currently, it controls 80% of the economy through its conglomerate the Endowment Fund For the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT), 98% of the military and security leadership controlled by the TPLF membership, 100% of the parliament controlled by the TPLF and its puppet People’s Democratic Organisation (PDO)s remotely operated. As a result, the TPLF elites and PDO operatives amassed billions of dollars from trading on the natural resources under their control; restricting the ownership of businesses and industries, sprawling real estates and mansions in big cities; foreign direct investment, aid and leasing millions of hectares of lands to foreign investors. The TPLF operatives benefitted from the illicitly maintained economic, political and security power without observance of the rule of law.

On the other hand, the Oromo people were faced with rampant human rights abuses and systematic repressions that were repeatedly reported by international human rights organizations and yet largely ignored. Untold sufferings and systematic repressions in the last 25 years include extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, raping and torture. However, the Ethiopian government champions itself for being the fastest growing economy and key ally in the fight against terrorism to hide its genocidal character against the Oromo people. The reality on the ground shows that the Oromo people are targeted on the basis of their racial origin. As a result, over 95% of the prison cells in Ethiopia are filled with the Oromos and Afan Oromo has become the official language in prisons.

Land grabbing as a trigger to peaceful protest in Oromia

Land grabbing negatively affected the livelihood of millions of farmers and forcibly evicted from small subsistence farming, pastoral and grazing areas. Forced eviction and relocation in the name of investment that was orchestrated by internal and foreign actors, has evicted over 1.5 million Oromo farmers without their consent and compensation from around Finfinne (Addis Ababa) in the past ten years. Millions of hectares of arable land was confiscated mainly by agribusinesses from foreign multinational companies and the ruling regime (TPLF) cadres and their operatives resulted in the uprooting and destitution of the millions that led in part to further the starvation of the ten millions of peoples in Ethiopia. Such unethical and inequitable investment had been observed to yield abysmal poverty, food insecurity, broken communities, loss of identity and culture and aggravated environmental degradation. Above all the Oromo people in and around Finfinne (Addis Ababa) became the epicenter of the episode and in a way it reflects the way the Oromo people were conquered, robbed off their land and properties, reduced to serfs and slaves, and kept under inhumane subjugation.

The dynamics of the land grabbing that was aimed to expand Finfinne (Addis Ababa) by ~2000% from the current 54,000 ha to 1.1 million ha started with the horticulture industry, mainly the cut flower plantations. In less than a decade, several dozens of cut flower investments from within and abroad mushroomed within the radius of 80km surrounding Finfinne (Addis Ababa) to takeover the land from subsistence farmers that fed millions before the change of ownership. The establishment of these plantations and the expansion of real estate within the peripheries were the stepping stone to establish the boundary of Finfinne Special Zone of Oromia which later to be incorporated into the infamous “Addis Ababa and the Surrounding Oromia Special Zone Integrated Development Plan” or shortly “Master Plan”, in 2014. Similarly, Midroc’s and Karturi’s farms were meant to benefit and export crop produces into their countries of origin; jatropha, castor oil and sugar cane plantations were not established on non-arable terra nulis land, but on small subsistence farms whose owners were forcibly evicted without (with small) compensation and the security to their livelihood deprived. In general, the Oromo people are deprived of their livelihood by the Ethiopian successive regimes. As a result of deep historical and current grievances, suffering from oppression, exploitation and persecution for years, the students staged peaceful protests over Oromia for years and the response were being quelled heavy-handedly by the security forces of the Ethiopian government. The announcement of the infamous “master plan” further triggered the already deep-rooted grievances to explode. The plan was opposed by the Oromos from all walks of life: Oromo political parties, civic organisations, students, farmers, etc. for several reasons as it was unconstitutional, not inclusive and without the consent of the people. Moreover, it was deliberated to destroy the identity, livelihood, culture and language of the Oromo people.

War on Unarmed Oromo Protesters

In May 2014, the Oromo students from different universities, secondary schools and the general public from all over Oromia engaged the Ethiopian government in a peaceful protest in tens of thousands to denounce the “master plan” and voice their legitimate concerns. In the demonstration that started at Ambo, 100km from the capital, more than 50 civilians were shot and killed by the Ethiopian government security forces. In total over 80 unarmed civilians were killed in different parts of Oromia the same momth. Several hundreds of unarmed civilians were injured and thousands were arrested. The Ethiopian government shelved the implementation for a while until it issued final version of its master plan in the last quarter of 2015.

On November 12, 2015, peaceful student protest broke at the town of Ginchi, 80km from the capital to the West of Addis Ababa, against the sale of Ginchi stadium to an investor and the clearing of Chilimo forest. The government security forces killed two students and the population were angered. As a result, peaceful protests engulfed all parts of Oromia within two weeks. In order to legitimize its discriminatory policies, the Ethiopian Government issued a decree for Oromia to be ruled under martial law from the end of December 2015. Over 50,000 regular and special army was deployed under the command post led by the Prime Minister, Head of Army, Police and Security Chief to stop the protest mercilessly.

In Figure 1, the maps in the years 2015 (upper) and 2016 (bottom) show the distribution of protests from November 2015 – November 2016. In the last one year, peaceful demonstrations were staged mainly by the students and farmers across almost all Oromia districts at least once. They were all peaceful until turned violent by the heavy-handed measures of the Ethiopian security forces. As shown in Figure 1, 2015 (upper) in the last quarter of 2015, there were sporadic protests in Oromia that matured to cover all parts of Oromia intensively, some parts of Amhara and other southern regional states after July 2016.

Figure 1: the maps of the distribution of protests in 2015 (upper) and 2016 (bottom)

Table1 below shows the scale of fatalities over one year period across the states in Ethiopia. The total number of fatalities from November 12, 2015 to December 31, 2015 was 137 in total, with Oromia at 102. In the year 2016, violent crackdown from the Ethiopian security forces spread all over Oromia and a total of 1855 persons were killed in the last ten months. The security forces also reacted violently against protesters in Finfinne (Addis Ababa), Amhara, Dire Dawa, Somali and Southern Nations and Nationalities (SNNP). In the Amhara state, the protests that started in July 2016, in Gondar, was triggered by the opposition of the inclusion of Welkait district into the Tigray state. Over 233 persons were killed in this state in the last five months in Gondar, Bahir Dar etc in relation to peaceful protests. Similarly, in Konso and Gedeo districts of the Southern Nation and Nationalities and Peoples (SNNP) state dozens of protesters were killed. The data shows the cause of fatalities in the Gambela, Somali, Harari and Tigray different from peaceful protests. In general, the scale and distribution of the protests and fatalities in Oromia over the other states indicate the degree of harshness and discriminatory measures carried out by the Ethiopian government and the genocide is in the making against the Oromo people.

Table1: the scale of killings over one year period (Nov.12, 2015 – Oct. 29, 2016)

By definition the killings of over 1000 people from the same social group in a year qualifies the term “genocide” and killings of unarmed civilians in mass also refers to “massacre”. The graph in figure 2 shown below covers the daily fatalities across Oromia and Finfinne (Addis Ababa) where those killed are from the Oromo national group. In the graph the killing from the beginning of August 2016 to the end of October 2016 was covered. The first peak corresponds to the killings on the Oromia grand protest staged all over Oromia on the 6th of August 2016 and over 188 people were killed by the Ethiopian security forces. On this particular day, peaceful protests were held in over 200 towns and cities across Oromia and Finfinne (Addis Ababa) (see figure 3) and tens of thousands were arrested from all over Oromia and Finfinne in inhospitable remote malaria infested Tolay, Awash Arba, Huriso and Dhedhessa military camps.

Figure 2: the scale of killings by the security forces in Oromia and Finfinne (Aug. – Oct. 2016)

The second peak corresponds to the killings at Qilinto maximum-security prison located in the southern part of Finfinne (Addis Ababa) on September 3, 2016. A local newspaper    Addis    Fortune    reported    that    the    government    security    forces indiscriminately shot at the prisoners after fire broke on the premises. The government sources report 23 prisoners died of suffocation from fire. However, the Ethiopian Human Rights Project (EHRP) put the figure to 67 and the Oromia Media Network also reported additional two killings. Local sources alleged the Ethiopian government sources for starting the fire and indiscriminately shooting the prisoners.

Figure 3: the map showing the geographical coverage of protests in Oromia on August 6, 2016

The third peak in Figure 2 corresponds to the Irreechaa massacre at Hora Arsadi of Bishoftu town, 40km to the East of the capital that occurred on October 2, 2016. On the Irreechaa annual thanksgiving festival, over 2 million Oromos from all over Oromia were gathered to celebrate. The Ethiopian government agitated and provoked the festival by installing its close operatives and cadres to takeover the stage from the legitimate leader of Gadaa (Abba Gadaa) who is in charge of the event. The celebrants were angered and started chanting slogans and crossing wrists above head – the popular sign of Oromo protest. The security forces deliberately started roaring Humvee in the crowd, hovering helicopter in the sky, firing the tear gas and bullets to suffocate the people on a narrow space. Most of the people perished in the ditch and the lake. Some sources put the death toll at 55 and above citing the cause of death simply as a deadly stampede. However, local and opposition sources put the figure of the death toll to at least 678. It is the responsibility of the government to protect the people away from the ditch through fencing and/or soil filling; avoiding any provocative acts, unblocking the safe exit and panicking the population on narrow space unless it deliberated and planned to cause massacre.

After the Irreechaa massacre, the Oromo people reacted with deep sorrow and responded through difference means of peaceful resistance against the Ethiopian government. The roads to different parts of the Oromia and Ethiopia were blocked, the economic boom of the TPLF elites was devastated. In a week to Irreechaa massacre, the Ethiopian government declared state of emergency that applies to the other states as well. The security forces reportedly killed more that 283 people (see figure 2, the fourth peak) in one week of the state of emergency.

Summary

The Ethiopian security forces continued their unparalleled genocidal crimes of torturing, raping and killings, largely hidden from the eyes and ears of the international observers, embassies and the media. Records show that over two thousand Oromo civilians (students, farmers, teachers, civil servants, elders, leaders and members of the Oromo opposition party) were killed in the last one year from live bullets of the Ethiopian security forces. Witnesses out of Oromia show exceptional heinous crimes of killing that includes children from age 1 to the old men to the age of 80, pregnant women and mothers, a mother killed with her two sons, three siblings from the same parent. There are evidences of mothers and siblings ordered to sit on the dead body of their loved ones after being killed by the security forces. Wives and daughters were gang raped in front their husbands, loved ones and parents. Moreover, every independent Oromo person is routinely subjected to harassment, extrajudicial killings, imprisonment, rape and torture. Several thousands were wounded from live bullets and estimated over 50,000 were arrested in different detention camps in remote areas labeled as “terrorists” without convictions and/or rare trials.

The TPLF/EPRDF is still acting with impunity despite continued call for investigation into the genocidal crimes it commit by the renowned international human rights organizations, the UN Human Rights Council, African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights in the last several months. The western governments such as US, UK, Canada, Australia and others issued the statements of concern and travel warnings which may not be enough to curb the looming dangerous situation. The Ethiopian government had been major recipient of direct investment and economic aid earnings mainly from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), the US, UK and the EU used to further human sufferings. Western governments are requested to sanction, use their diplomatic leverage to pressure the Ethiopian government to allow an independent UN and African Commission investigations over the massacres, completely halt the state of emergency and remove command posts from the villages, unconditional release of Oromo politicians and civilians from detention camps. Furthermore, the perpetuators of the massacres must be brought before international tribune to curb the genocide in the making in Oromia.

References

1. The data for this analysis was extracted from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) database http://www.acleddata.com/
2. Tarekegn Chimdi “Systematic repression and rampant human rights abuses against the Oromo People in Ethiopia (2008) ” presented at AFSAAP conference, “The Oromo People and Finfinne (2004) ” intervention at the UN office of High Commission for Human Rights www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IPeoples/WG/IGFM1-oromo-4b.doc
3. Addis Fortune newspaper on Qilinto prison indiscriminate killings 4. Human Rights Watch, Society for Threatened Peoples and Amnesty
4. International reports in 2015 and 2016
5. Press releases from the UN Human Rights Council, African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights, foreign offices and governments
6. News from Oromia Media Network, Al Jazeera, VOA, DW and others

By Edao Dawano

(OPride) — On the morning of Sept. 3, eyewitnesses in Addis Ababa reported a flurry of gun shots at Qilinto prison, a remand center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital. That was followed by the expansive compound catching fire, which has reportedly destroyed a large part of the maximum security jail often used as a holding place for political prisoners awaiting trial.

Authorities confirmed 23 deaths but activists say the casualty figure could be as high as 60. The Qilito prison houses up to 3,000 inmates, including prominent Oromo opposition leaders Bekele Gerba, the deputy chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) and his colleagues.

The loss of life in such a gruesome way is heartbreaking. And the Ethiopian government’s handling of the tragedy is simply revolting–to say the least. Nearly a week after the incident, the whereabouts and status of the detainees remains unknown. After shuttling between several federal prisons hoping to locate their loved ones, on Wednesday distraught mothers staged an  impromptu protest demanding to either be given the body of their dead relatives or be given access to them. To add insult to their injury, some were themselves detained.

Most of the prisoners at Qilinto were locked up on trumped up charges in connection with the 10-month old Oromo protests. I have no doubt that they longed to be free and be reunited with their families. They dreamed and hoped to see injustice lifted from their people. Yet, at least for dozens of those detainees, both their hopes and lives were destroyed by a suspicious fire in a dark jail cell where they’re physically powerless to escape or defend themselves.

I sat thousands of miles away from Qilinto, absorbing the news and trying to imagine what it’s like for the families to be kept in the dark about the fate of their loved ones. Bontu Bekele Gerba is a brave and courageous young woman. In her media appearances, she speaks with so much composure exuding an unnatural strength. I used to envy Bontu that she gets to at least visit the prisons and see and speak to her father. Hers is no enviable position at all but I somehow found myself relating with her situation this week.

My father Bekele Dawano, a fierce advocate of Oromo rights, among the legion of Oromo freedom fighters, disappeared 25 years ago when I was a mere child. I grew up my entire life not knowing whether my beloved father is dead or alive. The blackout of the news of Qilinto and the government’s refusal to inform the families left me paralyzed and filled me with agony. It brought back years of pent up anger and pain.

For years, I thought blessed and lucky were those that knew where their loved ones were–for they could at least go and visit them in prison. Even those whose relatives or family members were killed, could mourn, have some kind of closure and move on with life, as they say. But not having any closure about my father, whose fate and whereabouts remain a mystery a quarter a century later, is akin to living with an unrelenting and insidious pain.

If I had known my father is in Qilinto, like everyone of the families of the prisoners held there whose fate remains unknown, I would have ran wild  to the site to seek information about his status. I would have been arrested demanding to see my father’s corpse or a proof that he’s alive. But I’m not lucky enough.

I share the agony of awaiting for dreadful bad news that Bontu and the families of the rest of the prisoners might be living through. Not knowing the fate and wellbeing of someone you love kills–piece by piece. Over the years, I found the psychological torment harder than anything else, there are plenty, I had to cope with. Distance does not shield me from feeling their pain as I grew up nursing it having been robbed my father when I needed him the most.

After 25 long years of uncertainty and searching, I still nurture a faint hope that my father could be in any of Ethiopia’s many jails. So, when a prison is torched, as the case these days, my hope shrinks a bit. I feel as if my father and his fellow prisoners of conscience are smoldering there unattended. I feel suffocated seeing the smoke billowing into the sky. I fear and worry that the Ethiopian government, which snatched my father and robbed me of a normal childhood, may have now burned him alive. I try to assess the moral culpability of those in power and try to imagine the sheer inhumanity of the prison guards shooting down inmates attempting to put out a raging fire. Nevertheless, I find myself drowned in deep thoughts and overcome by a feeling of powerlessness.

It’s late at night, alone in my bed, twisting and turning, I try to write and then stop. I fight back tears and ponder over the possibility of my father being at Qilinto. I wouldn’t have known. He could be one of those shot or burned alive while fighting to douse the inferno with his bare hands. I ponder, since he disappeared more than two decades ago, even if he’s incinerated at Qilinto, he could be rendered unrecognizable or be left there to suffer and slowly meet his death. Having processed all this, I sort of wake up from my hallucinatory state of mind and wish that I would be lucky enough to claim his body and end the decades of sorrow and pain. It is this sort of hope against hope that’s been my secret to ease the burden of memory, as well as profound and chronic agony.

I know I am not alone. There are other families who have similarly been kept in the dark for years. I sometimes wonder how they cope with the sorrow.

My hope and reasons

I spent most of my formative years drifting in thought in search of my lost father and trying to understand what life in prison is like. Having used to them and finding them to be largely uninformed, the rumors that keep flooding me don’t any longer offer much of a hope. Some say my father was killed long time ago. Others claim he’s tortured and he died due to illness and lack of medical care. My father is a man of principle and unshakable political conviction. I was once told that his captors admired his courage and bravery as to not kill him. And instead he’s being held at one of the remote hidden prisons along with other prominent prisoners such as Nadhi Gamada, Yosef Bati, Lamessa Boru and many others who disappeared from the public eye in the last two decades and a half. On a good day, this gives me a sliver of hope–however fleeting.

Sometimes I wish I had the opportunity Bontu Bekele Gerba and other children of Oromo political prisoners had: to visit their fathers in prison. I would have done the same if I had known wherever he was imprisoned. In fact, disregard the visitation, a knowledge that my father is alive would have been enough to calm and steady my yearning and tattered soul. Not knowing that kills. I want to comfort Bontu and others who are being subjected to unspeakable ordeals like this week’s but often I don’t even know how to express my own reality. Sometimes I feel no emotion at all as if my heart has become laminated in pain and everlasting grief.

Through exile and years of uncertainty and high flying rumors about my father’s whereabouts, either he is long dead or still alive, I have chosen to keep him alive — and that slim hope gives me a respite from the chronic pain.

This lived experience, as dismal as it is, gives me a unique understanding of the Oromo struggle for freedom and our progress, as well as shortcomings. My father would be so proud to witness the Qubee generation taking the mantle and defiantly pushing the struggle forward. He would be delighted to know that the Oromo are on the cusp of realizing their long-held aspirations for freedom, justice and equality. It is also why I remain hopeful. My father’s and his likes’ sacrifices were not in vain. The progress we’ve made as a society was borne on the back of a great cost of lives, torture and imprisonments of many. Every kid believes their dad is a giant. But for me this is not just a childish fantasy, my father and those who sacrificed and are sacrificing so that the tens of millions of Oromo suffering from repression, discrimination, and marginalization will someday live normal lives are Giants in our tortured history.

This is what I want to share with Bontu and all the families of disappeared or dead prisoners at Qilinto or elsewhere. In the midst of all the trauma and anguish, we should not lose sight of the fact that because of our sacrifices — i.e., families of the victims of the Ethiopian state’s gross injustices — the struggle for freedom will triumph and the yoke of oppression will soon be lifted from the necks of our people. The sacrifices of these political prisoners will serve as a torchlight and an inspiration to current and future generations to uproot injustice in all its forms.

In due times, all lives lost in the fight for the advancement of Oromo rights will be revived–at least in our collective consciousness. They will return for my children, yet to be born, and their children as their collective heroes and heroines to emulate. That is why we must and shall remain committed to sustaining our national struggle and bringing it to its logical conclusion: an end to tyranny and injustice in all its forms. Only by doing so can we keep those brave heroes as well as heroines and their memories alive and celebrate their noble sacrifices.

Aluta continua! Praise and glory to all the brave souls that came before us.

Dr. Baro Keno Deressa

Grand #OromoProtests Mogor town, West Shewa, August 6, 2016

Immune system disorders cause abnormally low activity or over activity of the immune system. In cases of immune system over activity, the body attacks and damages its own tissues (autoimmune diseases). Immune deficiency diseases decrease the body’s ability to fight invaders, causing vulnerability to infections. In response to an unknown trigger, the immune system may begin producing antibodies that instead of fighting infections, attack the body’s own tissues.

Immunotherapy is a treatment that uses certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. This can be done by stimulating your own immune system to work harder or smarter to attack cancer cells. Autoimmune colitis, hepatitis, endocrinopathies, and cutaneous lesions (rash, pruritus, and vitiligo) are examples of severe immunotherapy-related adverse events.

Today I am going to talk about our enemies immunotherapy: Now days our enemies are aggressively promoting their destructive polices against all types of Oromo peoples issues. The current one TPLF junta is manufacturing thousands of traitors in the name of reforms (artificial immunotherapy example his foreign minister and collectors of rest over in the name of business) and the previous one is working actively in the diaspora by dividing Oromo peoples in the name of peace lovers and nationalists (novel immunotherapy) and both of them are successfully creating auto-immune disease (attacking Oromo peoples with the weakest parts of the nations)

My peoples are like always committed to fight back those destructive forces with all means necessary. Educating our weakest parts, preparing ourselves by anticipating enemy next actions, organizing our peoples, identifying and eliminating the traitors and opportunists are the core issues of our struggle.

Oromo peoples are OLF and OLF is Oromo peoples. Let us look at three potential enemies who hate Oromo peoples and his vanguard organizations(OLF).

• Why TPLF hate Oromo peoples and OLF: Oromo peoples demand is freedom, live like human-being free and peacefully in his own country-Oromia. His vanguard organization OLF struggles to implement the will of his peoples. According to TPLF law all individuals and organization who support this demand has to be destroyed.
• Why the previous colonialist hate Oromo peoples and OLF: They regret that they didn’t finish it their planned silent genocide. According to their strategy their brothers the current colonizers TPLF is doing stupid job. TPLF declares open genocide against Oromo peoples. This formula was failed millions of time a century ago. The only successful Oromummaa eradication therapy is continuing silent one i.e eating them from inside by promoting and financing friendly diasporas activists (their criteria are: weak individual especially emotionally, easily manipulative financially, record less in the Oromo peoples struggle against colonialism…)
• Coktails of auto-immune disease from enemy immunotherapy: traitors, collaborators, opprtunistic individuals and pseudo leaders. Why this individuals and groups hate Oromo peoples and OLF: Those individuals and groups are calling themselves Oromos:
• while they are selling Oromo blood on enemy market (because they are record less in the history of our struggle against colonialism),
• while they are insulting our heroes and leaders (because they are raised to serve their colonial masters like their parents),
• while they are demonizing our WBO and Qeerroo’s to promote their business with our enemies. For those groups the priority is destroying Oromummaa and OLF is paramount in order to satisfy their masters (those individuals and groups are moral less and stupid by their nature).

Our enemies the current and previous one are uniting to divide us through renewed old system immunotherapy in order to increase the activity of therapy resistant auto-immune disease (attacking Oromo with Oromo) The main characteristics of our third group enemy are: They create the impression that they are doing the right thing, but secretly fail to do so when doing the right thing conflicts with their own narcissistic interest. They claim they are right and good; others are wrong and bad.  They are the reason things go well; other persons are the reason for things going badly.  They are captains who sail under false colors They mislead, deceive and prevaricate. They wear different masks for different occasions.

What we have to do in order to promote our peoples goal and defeat our enemies ?

Before I am going to enter in to my proposals, let me quote the inspirational words of our heroes:

Mr. Elemo Qilxu: To defeat our enemies, demands a collection of cocktails but the contents of the cocktails needs determinations and sacrifices. If, the cocktails fails to fulfill these criteria be sure the enemy is there.

G. Tadesse Birru : We Oromo nations are one blood and one people (religion and region can not divide us). Those peoples and groups who use these tactics for their political of economical benefits are our enemies.

G. Waaqoo Guutuu: We have to fight til death and teach coming generation in order to continue the fighting until our peoples demand get right answer.

Mr. Jarra Abba Gada: We Oromo peoples have one great power, that is our pride and heroism, even if our enemies acquire nuclear power we have to fight them with our truth.

Dr. Baaroo Tumsa: Empowering ourselves is the essential part of defeating our enemy

Mr. Adam Jilo: our enemies are always weak, because they are invaders, but we are everyday getting stronger and powerful, because we Carry the truth. So if you are truly fighting for the truth you are the winner

Mr. Gutama Hawas: Our struggle is founded on a concrete base, that is our peoples demand (freedom, freedom, freedom). These demand was initially executed by peasants and pastoralist and guided by our intellectuals. So our target is eradicating colonialism. To achieve our goal eliminating the collaborators, traitors end opprtunistic individuals and groups are paramount.

Mr. Nagasaa Kumsaa: Our enemies are like a parasite, they can not survive by their own power . To live longer and comfortable they have to have host (collaborators, traitors, opportunistic individuals and groups). Dismantling those hosts are the crucial parts of our struggle.

Qees Gudina Tumsa: You the colonizers you made a hell on the earth to burn my people, to harm innocent women and children without any criminal activities, now you let me suffer on the hanging robe and you cut my leg while I am alive. But one day the truth and the pain of my peoples will confront you.

My peoples, here is my proposals:

• One WBO is comparable to 1000 of our enemies and their puppet. Our enemies and their puppet traitors and collaborators have not a real gut to fight, but yes prodigious appetites to eat. But the global and regional situation gave them suitable condition in order to survive so long. But our WBO is a real fighters (fighting the enemy and natural disasters). So i am quite sure one day we will win these war. I will support our WBO with my money, idea and with everything I can. So my peoples I will ask you to do your part.
• Believe in yourself, we Oromo peoples have enormous power only by our name. That is why our enemy and their puppet get panicked when we executed a limited collective action. So empowering ourselves start from admiring and supporting our struggle against colonialism.
• Stop propagating enemy agenda: When TPLF come to power not by begging and diplomacy. They come to power by destroying human life and nature (their nick name was (DILDY AFRASH). Now days millions of opportunistic individuals and traitors are sided with our enemy to sabotage our struggle for freedom, peace, democracy and equality by the name of good governance and peaceful negotiation

Come on brothers and sisters :

• stop cheating your people in order to fulfill your masters will (TPLF) because of your 20 hectare home in laga xafo initially that ground belongs to the Oromo farmers surroundings finfinne (but you are working with our enemy to evict our innocent and poor Oromo man and women). One day those peoples will judge you.
• stop cheating your people in order to fulfill your masters will (TPLF) because of your import and export business (millions are dying to eliminate the colonizers but your busy with your garbage business)
• stop cheating your people in order to fulfill your masters will (TPLF) because of your annual vacation trip (millions of Oromo intellectuals, women and children are suffering in the TPLF detention center while you are filling your stomach with TPLF rest-over (firfari)

So our peoples demand is freedom, freedom, freedom to accomplish this demand we have to destroy all enemy activity including your 20 hectare home, your import and export business and your masters business company until our peoples demand 100% fulfilled. The answer is quite clear lifting the yoke from the necks of millions still laboring under authoritarian and dictatorial rule of TPLF junta will bring us to the fair share development goal.

Oromo peoples colonizers in general and the traitors and opportunistic individuals and groups are guided by their prodigious appetites instead of using higher level dictating power like brain and other values  There is a double-edge to the human psyche. Our “lower-level” appetites and urges manifestly serve our needs, but they can also become destructive, both to the community and to ourselves. Our prodigious appetites must therefore be constrained by the higher-level dictates of “reason”, along with our social and ethical impulses, and by the collective actions of the community to protect and preserve itself. How can be a traitors or opportunistic individuals  call itself i am your leaders or fighters while collaborating with our enemy in the killing of children of age 8yr, 13yr, pregnant women and innocent civilians, burning the prisoners alive, smashing the public with a truck and harassing the peoples on the daily basis because of their identity Oromummaa.

There are still millions of heroes’s are remained to quote their inspirational words. All our heroes’s are plight for truth, freedom, peace and empowerment. They fought bravely and sacrifices their life to their peoples demand. So stop selling our peoples blood and stop demonizing our heroes’s sacrifices and support the WBO and qeerroo to finish the job.

Victory to the Oromo people!

Dr. B. K. DERESSA, Medical degree in internal medicine, specialized in Gastro-Hepatology diseases. University Hospital of Brussels-Belgium

Related:
OLF is Oromo, Oromo is OLF | ABOn Oromoo dha Oromoon ABO dha – Ibsaa Guutamaa, June 17, 2016

Note: Dear Readers, this is just to let our readers understand how the bloody struggle and heavy price that the Oromo people have been paying is sabotaged by western writers and their media outlets.

Will Its Experiment With Ethnic Federalism Work?

By Harry Verhoeven, ForeignAffairs.com | August 29, 2016

When U.S. President Barack Obama visited Africa a year ago, he ended his five-day tour by visiting Ethiopia, the continent’s second-most-populous country. He ­enthusiastically praised Addis Ababa for its role in regional peacemaking, most visibly in and between Sudan and South Sudan, as well for as its careful management of its diverse population; the country is home to tens of millions of Muslims and Christians, who, for the most part, live together peacefully. Obama also highlighted Ethiopia’s track record as a developmental state. In the last quarter century, it has lifted millions of people out of extreme poverty, cut child mortality rates for those under five by more than two-thirds, and overseen a decline in HIV/AIDS-related deaths by more than 50 percent. With Somalia haunted by the jihadist group al Shabab, South Sudan facing an all-out civil war, and Eritrea hemorrhaging thousands of young people fleeing to Europe via the Mediterranean, Ethiopia stood out as a bastion of progress and stability.

Yet today, Western diplomats and intelligence services are scrambling to assess a series of alarming protests in Ethiopia—what activists have labeled #ethiopianprotests—that are raising questions about whether Africa’s brightest growth story of the last decade is about to unravel. There have been months of demonstrations in Addis Ababa and the surrounding region of Oromia, where more than 35 percent of the Ethiopian population lives. Thousands of Oromo are contesting the unequal gains of the country’s developmental programs, even in the face of live bullets. But what has really instilled a sense of crisis is the violence that has rocked the Amhara region, where long-standing tensions boiled over into the ambush of a senior federal police commander and Amhara protesters, armed with guns, fighting street battles with soldiers. Nobody knows the official body count, but at least several hundred have died over the past few months.

Understanding the demonstrations, and their violent escalations by both security forces and protesters, requires a look at the ideology and political practices of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which has governed the country since its overthrow of a military dictatorship in 1991. The protests, which are neither a new phenomenon nor uniform in their demands, revolve around the fundamental question at the heart of Ethiopian politics in both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries: how to turn a violently built, multiethnic former empire into a modern nation-state.

Protesters chant slogans during a demonstration over what they say is unfair distribution of wealth in the country at Meskel Square in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, August 6, 2016.
Tiksa Negeri / Reuters

Protesters chant slogans during a demonstration over what they say is unfair distribution of wealth in the country at Meskel Square in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, August 6, 2016.
The answer for the EPRDF has always been a combination of ethnic federalism, revolutionary democracy, and state-led development. The party emerged out of decades of civil war, in which ethnically based rebel fronts confronted central (or rather, centralizing) governments in Addis Ababa, and it consists of a coalition of several of these groups. Among them, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front is the first among equals, even though it hails from a region where only seven percent of the population lives. Because the EPRDF came to power by drawing on resentment against the ethno-chauvinism of successive Amhara-dominated regimes, there was a real risk that the country would disintegrate into the kind of anarchy that characterized Somalia at the time. The Front’s solution was to grant self-determination, including the right of secession, to all of Ethiopia’s nations and nationalities: instead of denying ethno-regional identity, the EPRDF turned it into the cornerstone of its new state, hoping to draw out the venom from the imperial legacy of coerced assimilation. After decades of civil war, Eritrea peacefully left Ethiopia in 1993, but the other ethnic groups—including the Oromo, Tigrayans, and Amhara—remained, having been granted self-rule within regional states.

This solution struck many constitutionalists as unworkable because it appeared to institutionalize inter-regional confrontation, thereby merely postponing Ethiopia’s dissolution. But because of the EPRDF’s Marxist-Leninist leanings, its interpretation of ethnic federalism was borrowed from Stalin’s template for how to organize a multinational federation: autonomous states can be kept together only by the ironclad grip of a vanguard party. This ideology continues to guide the Front today. As a result, the EPRDF dominates all regional states through satellite parties in an attempt to harmonize socioeconomic policies and prevent a resurgence of ethnic antagonisms. Political organization is everything for the Front: it rejects Western liberal democracy and instead practices “revolutionary democracy,” which prioritizes Leninist democratic centralism while recruiting millions of Ethiopians from all ethnic groups into party ranks. The role of the masses is hence framed in terms of revolutionary and administrative mobilization, not liberal participation.

Initially, the idea of retaining local language and identities, of nations and nationalities electing their own representatives, was genuinely popular.

The endurance of this ideology is also evident in the EPRDF’s long-term strategy to overcome ethno-regional rifts. Marxist ideology posits that ethnic identity is “false consciousness” and that the only true division in society is class; the political gamble underpinning the EPRDF’s developmental state project is that the material transformation of Ethiopia, particularly its rural areas, will ultimately lead people to forget the identity politics of old. The historical materialism of the Front, along with an organiz­­ational culture of secrecy nurtured by the armed struggle, also explains its distrust of liberal democracy: the people simply cannot yet be trusted with bourgeois freedoms.

For years, the triad of ethnic federalism, revolutionary democracy, and state-led development allowed the EPRDF to claim that it embodied legitimate and, above all, highly effective government: if Ethiopia receives several billions of dollars annually in overseas assistance it is not just because it has been an indispensable partner in the global war on terrorism but also because aid experts remain thrilled about the success of pro-poor government programs in education, health, and infrastructure. But now, the EPRDF is facing a crisis of authority, with both its legitimacy and its effectiveness in question.

Take ethnic federalism. Initially, the idea of retaining local language and identities, of nations and nationalities electing their own representatives, was genuinely popular. From the start, conflict within and between the new regions—often about the status of minorities within the redrawn administrative borders—was expected and, indeed, has claimed hundreds of lives annually since 1994; in that sense, #ethiopianprotests is nothing new. But the EPRDF always argued that ethnic federalism would decentralize violence, thus removing an existential threat to Ethiopian unity, and ultimately cause parochial attachments to wither under a new nation-state identity. A quarter century later, however, ethno-regional loyalties seems to have lost little of their mobilizing appeal, including their incendiary potential to be manipulated by zealous diaspora politicians. Ethnic-tinged antigovernment protests and violence have recently rocked places that have been transformed by economic growth, such as the Amhara capital, Bahir Dar, and Adama, Oromia’s most dynamic city, but have occurred for years in long-marginalized peripheries, such as Gambella, in western Ethiopia, and the Somali region. For all the talk of cross-ethnic alliances by some commentators, little unites the opposition: while Amhara chauvinists fly the flag of the old unitary state, Oromo secessionists demand the country’s breakup. Yet even if Ethiopians can’t agree on what constitutional reform should look like, ethnic federalism faces existential questioning from the peripheries to the center.

People attend a demonstration organized by opposition party the Ethiopian Federal Democratic Unity Forum (MEDREK) in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa, May 24, 2014.
Tiksa Negeri / Reuters

People attend a demonstration organized by opposition party the Ethiopian Federal Democratic Unity Forum (MEDREK) in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa, May 24, 2014.

Revolutionary democracy has also run into trouble. The ethno-regional satellites that, with the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, compose the EPRDF have been increasingly delegitimized by corruption scandals and ineffective leadership. Their role in implementing ethnic federalism and developmentalism is pivotal but they are widely seen as feeble. Some Oromo and Amhara politicians within the Front are trying to use the protests in their regions to gain greater influence and resources, arguing that only they can act as middlemen between the overbearing center and the restless masses, but such scheming is resented by the politburo in Addis. Nationally, the EPRDF has large problems of its own; the 2012 death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who expertly but ruthlessly ruled Ethiopia for 21 years, created a leadership vacuum that has not been filled, leading to institutional paralysis and Machiavellian jockeying in a party and country used to the strictest application of democratic centralism. For example, in March 2016, just after the new prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, apologized for the shooting of Oromo protesters and promised that the repression would end immediately, the Tigrayan-controlled security services intensified the crackdown, making their “boss” look powerless.

This highly combustible mixture—a divided political center, an ineffective and ambiguous regional elite, and the ideological legacies of Marxism-Leninism and the liberation struggle—is at the root of today’s unrest. To quell the masses, the EPRDF must face the ironic predicament in which it finds itself: economic development and ethno-regional empowerment have, predictably, lead to a classic revolution of rising expectations. The Front’s problem is not that ordinary Ethiopians deny the country’s progress—that so many of them can put their children in school or receive electricity at home. It is that millions of them—whether or not they participate in, or even approve of, the protests—feel that the current dysfunction within the political system is hampering an equitable partaking of the economic boom. In a striking parallel with the dilemma facing the Chinese Communist Party, with which it maintains excellent ties, the EPRDF knows that it has the most impressive track record of any Ethiopian government in modern history but that its control is being undermined by soaring levels of internal rent-seeking. If the party wants to survive, it must address the corruption that so angers its citizenry. In doing so, it will not only further raise expectations, but also be compelled to confront its delusions about what the theory and practice of ethnic federalism can achieve and, above all, question the privileges select elites have so far enjoyed.

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