Introduction
Crises of governance in Ethiopia are embedded in the long uneven history of the Ethiopian state itself, and its place within a highly conflictual regional political arena, in which Ethiopia holds a central position. The crises that beset the ruling political coalition (the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, EPRDF) of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, after the apparently triumphant conclusion to its border war against Eritrea in May 2000, were only partially of its own making. This is not the place to delve into deeply contested histories, but it is at least necessary to place the developments that led to the impasse so apparent by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century in their broader context. This impasse was not merely the outcome of failed democratisation, or human rights abuse, or even indeed poverty, but was, rather, the latest expression of much deeper problems that derive from the inherent contradictions of state creation and maintenance in a perennially violent corner of Africa.
Most basically, the conflicts that have long structured Ethiopian politics result from the incompatibility between a particular conception of the state – which itself springs from the peculiarly hierarchical and authoritarian notions of governance associated with the cultures and societies of the northern Ethiopian plateau – and the numerous ethnic, cultural, class and economic elements that could scarcely be accommodated within this concept of governance, and the interests that upheld it. Throughout the history of modern Ethiopia, the resulting tensions have had to be managed, through some combination of force (which has always been essential to hold the state together) and political dexterity, in devising formulae through which the underlying divisions of an extremely varied society could be held in some kind of check. Ruling Ethiopia has never been easy.
The EPRDF itself came to power in 1991, in the wake of the collapse of the previous formula developed by the Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Maryam, a formula which at the outset in the mid-1970s appeared to offer a solution to the contradictions that had led inexorably to the failure of its own imperial predecessor. In an analysis widely shared by the Ethiopian student intellectuals of the 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of which the future EPRDF leadership itself formed part, the Derg and its supporters believed that Ethiopia's problems centrally derived from a history of economic exploitation that was most clearly expressed in the alienation of land in large areas of Ethiopia by the members of a ‘feudal’ class, which had profited from its role in the conquest of much of the country's current territory during the second half of the nineteenth century. Once this process was reversed, by nationalising land and vesting its control in peasants' associations drawn from the local population, the central contradictions of Ethiopian statehood would be removed, and it would be possible for peoples freed from exploitation to build a united Ethiopia under a socialist and also nationalist government.
This essentially Jacobin project, in which social equality would lead to national unity, was destroyed most basically by its incapacity to make any concessions to those who, notably in Eritrea, were already contesting the territorial structure of the state itself. Add to that its ruthless centralism, the rapid undermining of the local autonomy that the initial land reform had promised, the inevitable failure of its Soviet-inspired commitment to centrally planned economic development, and the ever-increasing burden, human and economic, imposed by never-ending wars, and its eventual collapse was assured. The alternative project embraced by the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), always the predominant element in the EPRDF which it formed as victory approached, nonetheless drew on significant elements common to all of the Marxist revolutionaries of the 1970s, adapted in the light of their own situation, and of a global constellation of forces dramatically different from that which had prevailed when the Derg was formed.
Central to the TPLF vision of Ethiopia was Stalin's theory of ‘nationality’, which accorded far greater prominence to the ‘national question’ than the Derg had ever done – appropriately enough for a movement heavily based in Tigray, which sought to create an alliance with other regional forces that were likewise opposed to the ruthless centralism of the Derg. Apart from recognising Eritrea's right to independence – the essential requirement for ending the most debilitating of all Ethiopia's wars – this also encompassed the right of every ‘nation, nationality, and people’ within Ethiopia to ‘self-determination’, explicitly extending not just to internal self-government, but to a right of secession from Ethiopia itself. But in making the national question, rather than the land question, the key to the resolution of Ethiopia's internal difficulties, the TPLF/EPRDF regime still shared with its predecessor the conviction that the problems of nationality in Ethiopia were essentially superstructural, and that the removal of the basis for discrimination by one group against others would in turn remove any valid source of separatism, and make possible the maintenance of a single Ethiopian state, not as rigidly centralised and nationalist as the Derg envisaged, but whose peoples were nonetheless capable of living harmoniously together.
Added to this was the recognition of both a capitalist economy and the elements of global liberalism that were imposed by the need to reposition Ethiopia within a transformed global order, difficult though these were to combine with an internal political structure that was still conceived by Meles Zenawi and his colleagues in essentially Leninist terms. The intense and peculiar legacy of long guerrilla struggle, guided by a Maoist conception of liberation war, has in practice proved virtually impossible to reconcile with liberal ideologies. That the pretence could be sustained for so long, before the regime's fundamental illiberalism became all too apparent in the aftermath of the 2005 elections, was due in very large measure to the leadership of Meles Zenawi—a man of extraordinary intellectual ability, great personal charm, tactical astuteness, and a capacity to appeal especially to international constituencies which were themselves looking for African ‘success stories’ to justify their own vision of liberal ‘good governance’. This collection of abilities was rendered all the more striking by the contrast with his opposite number, Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea. The fact that, unlike the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), the EPRDF took over a sophisticated and well-established state apparatus was also a considerable benefit.
Even though opposition was never absent, the EPRDF regime could plausibly claim, in its early years, to have brought all the disparate elements in Ethiopia's composition together into some broadly sustainable harmony. For the first time in decades, the country was at peace. The previously alienated peoples of the peripheries were given a level of autonomy that they had never previously possessed, and despite the disgruntlement both of central Ethiopian nationalists on the one hand, and many of Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, the Oromo, on the other, a reasonably manageable balance between the country's tradition of centralised statehood and the representation of its disparate peoples was achieved. The abandonment of the Derg's counterproductive attempt to run a centrally planned economy, and the adoption (to the extent that a movement still deeply imbued with Marxist thinking could do so) of a capitalist economic model, helped to create evident though still modest economic progress. Political space was opened to a dramatically greater extent than ever before in Ethiopia's history, with the establishment for the first time of an independent press, and other trappings of an expanded civil society. Most strikingly of all, Ethiopia's international standing was transformed from near pariah status into a favoured position in the new global order, notably among aid donors for whom the new government's apparent honesty, efficiency and dedication especially to transforming the lives of the rural masses chimed precisely with their own agendas.
The unravelling of this dispensation derives in large measure from the difficulties of controlling, and holding together, the four key arenas within which the regime had to operate. These are (1) the internal arena of the regime itself; (2) the central or national arena represented especially by the major towns, and the adherents of Ethiopian nationalism; (3) the arena of the ‘nationalities’, or of peoples within Ethiopia seeking to exercise both a measure of local autonomy, and a position within the central state commensurate with their importance; and (4) an international arena which – as during the Cold War, but in a rather different way – linked the perennial conflicts of the Horn to global agendas. Although there were evident linkages between these arenas, it is most convenient to examine each in turn.
Controlling the Regime
Given the unquestioned brilliance of Ethiopia's prime minister – a leading British economist described Meles Zenawi to me as having an intellect to match that of the three Nobel Prize winners whom he knew – it may seem carping to start by identifying problems at the very core of the EPRDF leadership. Yet alongside the extraordinary abilities that Meles has brought to the leadership of Ethiopia, there have also been weaknesses that account at least in some part for the problems of his regime. Chief among these is an exceptional level of isolation, which comes close to matching that of medieval emperors who were ritually secluded, and communicated with their subjects through a curtain. At all events, the openness that Meles shows towards distinguished foreigners, on whom he exercises his abilities at their most dazzling, have never been matched by any communication with Ethiopians, beyond the small group of surviving comrades from the long struggle of the TPLF. Apart from occasional visits to the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle, essential to maintaining his home base, he is very rarely seen in Ethiopia, outside the party and government headquarters at Arat Kilo in Addis Ababa. The headquarters itself is sealed off from ordinary Ethiopians, and even stopping a private car outside it excites the suspicion of its guards. The contrast with emperor Haile Selassie, who was constantly on visits around the country and could often be seen taking an afternoon drive through Addis Ababa, is striking; even Mengistu Haile Maryam, himself generally immured within the fortress of Arat Kilo, took more frequent trips to different parts of the country, and appeared in public on occasions such as the Revolution Day parade.
This isolation was most strikingly illustrated by the Prime Minister's failure to take any part whatever in the 2005 elections, an occasion which in any normal democracy would see the national leader engaged in non-stop campaigning. At no point does Meles appear to have recognised that elections even at their most artificial provide a mechanism through which to foster and reinforce the linkages between the government and those on whose behalf it claims to govern. Leadership isolation can also plausibly be regarded as lying at the base of other notable examples of political failure: the failure, for example, to anticipate the Eritrean attack on Badme in May 1998 which precipitated the two-year war that followed; the disastrous decision to accept the Algiers accord on December 2000 that committed Ethiopia to honour the demarcation of the frontier with Eritrea arrived at by the Boundary Commission; and indeed the failure to take discreet administrative actions through which it could undoubtedly have ensured that the results of the 2005 election went in its favour, without necessitating the falsification of the results once these had gone against it.1 Skilled political leadership, in short, requires a process of constant interaction with other players, and in this respect the EPRDF leadership has been badly lacking.
The TPLF, based as it was in the small, poor, distant and historically distinctive region of Tigray, always provided an inadequate platform from which to govern a country as large and diverse as Ethiopia, and its difficulties were compounded by sharp divisions even within the central core of the TPLF itself, which became apparent in the split of early 2001. The combination of longstanding personal rivalries, ideological disagreements and different approaches to the 1998–2000 war that eventually brought internal conflict into the open is explored at greater length by Lovise Aalen and Kjetil Tronvoll elsewhere in this issue. Although the Meles faction eventually came out on top, the split revealed the weakness at the heart of the government, and reduced the impression of authority and permanence that is central to maintaining power in Ethiopia. But the deeper lesson is that Ethiopian hierarchies are rarely as solid as they appear to be. They are characteristically held together, not by solid ties of loyalty and belief, but by pragmatic considerations of obedience, within a system in which open disagreement is extremely difficult to distinguish from rebellion, and in which the external appearance of uniformity can instantly be shattered once circumstances arise that make rebellion seem a practicable option. Even though one group of internal dissidents has now been exposed and suppressed, other factions may well be waiting to declare themselves.
A further weakness of the regime lies in the extreme fragility of its political organisation, beyond the original core in Tigray. The ‘people's democratic organisations’ or PDOs, established as the TPLF's alliance partners within the EPRDF, have proved to be no more than a shallow façade, dependent entirely on government patronage, and possessing no indigenous political base. Originally formed in most cases from prisoners of war from the Derg armies captured by the TPLF – and hence drawn from the ranks of generally ill-educated conscripts – they were later reconstituted with a local-level leadership characteristically of secondary school leavers with low-level government jobs, schoolteachers prominent among them. Any opportunity that they might have had to develop into a cadre of local political organisers, capable of generating support within their home communities and linking this to the regional and national governments, was undermined by the broader problems of the EPRDF's treatment of non-Tigrayan nationalities (and especially the largest of them, the Oromo), its complete inability to develop any ethos of bargaining or negotiation within the governing coalition itself, and the knock-on effects of its own internal divisions. The prominent role of the TPLF leader primarily responsible for developing the PDOs within the Southern region in the dissident group which attempted to oust Meles Zenawi in 2001, for example, meant that all of his appointees came under suspicion and many of them were purged. Throughout the PDOs, constant changes of leadership orchestrated from above prevented any local leader from establishing a position of authority amongst his own people, and in the process deprived the government as a whole of the political organisation that it needed. Although the government has made some attempt to revive the party structure, following the 2005 election debacle, its dependence on state power to maintain an appearance of popular support, rather than on popular support to maintain state power, is now even greater than ever.
Controlling the Political Centre
On coming to power in 1991, the TPLF faced the immediate problem – common to any guerrilla movement that seizes control of a national government – of taking over the state apparatus against which it had been fighting for the previous decade and a half. On the whole, it managed this problem extremely well. It inherited a generally disciplined and efficient government bureaucracy, with an underlying commitment to Ethiopian statehood, which had grown disillusioned with the Derg regime and, despite misgivings about both the TPLF's apparent ideological leanings and its commitment to a level of autonomy for Ethiopia's constituent nationalities that the bureaucracy generally did not share, was prepared to work with its successor. The Derg's army was disbanded (and replaced by that of the TPLF), and the leading members of the old regime were imprisoned and faced trials, which have been endlessly delayed, but most of the administration carried on as before.
The TPLF for its part was generally prepared to make the changes necessary to transform itself from a regional insurgency into the government of a national state. The Tigray region from which it came formed part – albeit an outlying and often dissident part – of ‘historic’ Ethiopia, and its own early toying with a secessionist agenda had rapidly been abandoned. Meles Zenawi, in this as in other respects, appreciated the changes that this transformation would require, and took steps to implement them. Those leading members of the TPLF who were reluctant to accept either the shift from socialism to economic liberalism or that from regional guerrilla to national government, were for the most part despatched back to Tigray – a decision that was to have counter-productive consequences, both in helping to foment the war with Eritrea (which although precipitated by the Eritrean occupation of Badme, was undoubtedly fomented in some degree by the actions of local TPLF cadres), and in providing TPLF dissidents with a base from which to plot against Meles himself. Despite the continuing sense that this was in essence a Tigrayan regime, it came increasingly to behave like a national government.
The Eritrean war of 1998 should then have provided the regime with an opportunity to marry its regional base to the wider representation of a sense of Ethiopian nationhood and territoriality – the extent of which, in the immediate aftermath of the Eritrean occupation of Badme, seems to have taken it completely by surprise. But although the war was widely supported – not least by those who had been most sceptical about the close relations between the EPRDF Government and its Eritrean counterpart in the years immediately after 1991, and most regretful of the loss of Eritrea – it did not extend the government's own political base. This was not least because the government itself made no attempt to use it to do so. Its decision-making remained tightly locked within the inner circle of the TPLF, where it only subsequently transpired that intensely contested issues had been fought out between the different factions. The war itself was fought almost entirely in Tigray, and the sense remained that it was in essence a settling of scores between the two insurgent movements – the TPLF and EPLF – which had maintained often fraught relations even during the period when they had both been fighting against the Derg.
In ideological terms, the war demonstrated the continued existence in Ethiopia of a nationalist constituency that had largely been overlooked by a government that itself tended to conceive the country as a loosely linked collection of ‘nationalities’. Despite being routinely disparaged by government supporters as mere ‘Amhara chauvinists’, there are evidently a significant number of Ethiopians, especially, but by no means entirely, Amharas, who view their identity essentially as Ethiopian. As in other African countries, migration and intermarriage have helped to generate interests in the maintenance of a single political structure; and at the same time as ethnic federalism has provided employment and a sense of belonging to educated individuals from previously disadvantaged groups, so it has also disadvantaged people who found themselves outside their ‘own’ ethnic territory, or who had an interest in being able to live and work in different parts of the country.
The control of the centre amounts in physical terms to the control of the towns, and especially Addis Ababa, a problem that has become much more difficult to manage because of the explosion of urban complexity and political space, represented by a more diverse, less state-controlled economy, a reasonably free press, and a deeply alienated intelligentsia. Ultimately, these are forces that need to be managed, and cannot simply be suppressed, and the extraordinary level of urban support for the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) in the 2005 elections strikingly illustrates the regime's failure to capture this constituency, and its consequent need to use force in order to ensure its acquiescence – a failure that renders it immediately vulnerable to any upsurge of urban violence, of the kind that can easily be triggered by apparently trivial causes, and that a stretched security force is unable to control.
Controlling the Peripheries
The control of the peripheries should have been, and to some extent indeed proved to be, an easier task than controlling the centre. The EPRDF regime itself came from one of Ethiopia's most distant peripheries, in geographical if not social terms, and its own outlook was heavily influenced by years of resistance to an overbearing central state. Moreover, it had something of great importance to offer peripheries throughout Ethiopia: a level of regional autonomy that these had never previously possessed, and which promised (and again to some extent provided) a sense of regional ownership and representation previously unknown outside the provinces of the central highland core. To have a government in Konso or Welayta that was visibly run by Konsos and Welaytas was a revolutionary change in Ethiopian politics, and one which, like the land reform of 1975, established a new and for many purposes irreversible transformation in the relationship between people and the state. That policies were still to a very large extent made in Addis Ababa for local implementation, and that the constitutional guarantee of a right of secession was more apparent than real, did not at least initially matter anything like so much as the change in the visible appearance of government on the ground.
Just as with the honeymoon period that immediately followed the Derg's land reform, however, the EPRDF's programme of ethnic federalism necessarily provided less than it promised, and came up against the contradiction between local autonomy and central power that was inherent in both projects. At one level, this was the same contradiction as that involved in the TPLF's own transformation from regional insurgency to central government. Things simply looked different from the centre, and in taking over the state apparatus, the new regime likewise took over many of the attitudes that went with it. It soon became clear that regional autonomy was, just as in the Stalinist model that the EPRDF adopted, subordinated to a monolithic party-state. The EPRDF proved entirely incapable of recognising the legitimacy of any regional or ethnic movement that was not under its own control, or of according any such movement an autonomous role in the government even of the most insignificant local arena. Insofar as the idea of federalism necessarily involves the recognition of alternative foci of power and authority, and the development of mechanisms through which to resolve the inevitable differences that arise from diversity, the EPRDF was never at heart a federal regime at all.
There were also, of course, problems inherent in the project of ethnic federalism itself, notably in the creation of internal frontiers separating peoples of different nationalities, which imposed sharp divisions. In turn, they signified the ‘ownership’ of territory by the nationality to which it was ascribed – in place of the fluid boundaries through which different peoples had historically accommodated themselves to one another, for example, along the ecological interface between pastoralists and agriculturalists. When the new regions were themselves multiethnic, most obviously in Gambela with its fraught relations between Anuak and Nuer, the fact that regional government now represented a prize worth winning intensified internal conflicts of a kind that are familiar throughout post-colonial Africa. Equally, however, there were occasions, as with the separation of the Silte people from the Gurages with whom they had initially been associated, where it was possible to manage differences through a process of democratic consultation.
Nonetheless, it was in the Southern Region, which included both Siltes and Gurages, that the political failures of the regime were most apparent. This was a large area that appeared to present the easiest of constituencies for the EPRDF. Given its history of subjection to heavy-handed and often brutally exploitative central rule, it had everything to gain from local autonomy. At the same time, none of the individual peoples within it had any plausible basis on which to claim independence from Ethiopia. Indeed, they had every reason to make common cause with the ‘historic’ Ethiopian nationalities against the threat presented by Oromo nationalism. The Gurages, who provided a disproportionate share of Ethiopia's business class, could be expected to promote a nationalist agenda, and mostly supported the CUD. Yet even these relatively small and unthreatening groups soon discovered the limits to the EPRDF promise of autonomy. The fact that one of the first and most persistent opposition politicians, Beyene Petros, hailed from Hadiya, and understandably attracted support from his own home constituency, provided an early example of the regime's inability to accommodate difference.2 However, the most extreme case was the brutal suppression, by heavy machinegun fire, of a peaceful and unarmed demonstration in May 2002, of Sidaama people protesting against a change – imposed without any consultation – in the status of the city of Awassa, from being within the Sidaama zone to becoming a separate capital city for the Southern Region as a whole. A regime incapable of managing an issue of this type without resorting to violence lacks political skills of the most basic kind.
The programme of ethnic federalism also raised, in a far more acute form than hitherto, the problem of the status of the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest, most diverse, and most centrally located nationality. It entailed the creation of a single Oromia State, in place of the previous structure under which Oromos had been scattered amongst the great majority of the country's regions, almost all of which also included substantial populations of other peoples. The greatly enhanced sense of ethnic identity that this promoted could only be intensified by the inevitable denial of the level of autonomy that Oromos were formally guaranteed. The EPRDF satellite party that nominally represented the Oromo, the Oromo People's Democratic Organisation (OPDO), was even more of a fiction than most of its equivalents elsewhere. The periodic imprisonment of Oromo intellectuals, and violent suppression of anti-regime demonstrations in Oromia, although not approaching the murderous brutality of the Derg, are nonetheless reminiscent of the treatment of dissent under Haile Selassie. Any political movement or faction that sought to represent local Oromo aspirations, including elements in OPDO itself and the two opposition parties that contested Oromo constituencies in the 2005 elections, was instantly suspected of association with the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which after a short period of cohabitation with the EPRDF in the early 1990s had gone into opposition and exile, and which retained the residual loyalty of a high proportion of Oromos. The ineffectiveness of the OLF's attempts to launch guerrilla warfare against the regime, infiltrating from Sudan into western Oromia with Eritrean support, appears to have done little to undermine this support, even though there is not, so far as it can be judged, any significant Oromo demand – in Oromia itself, rather than among the diaspora community – for secession from Ethiopia, and the problems of running an independent Oromo state would be insuperable.
The central problem in managing diversity, which derives from Ethiopian political culture and is not only a feature of the EPRDF regime, lies in the difficulty of creating the mechanisms through which to reconcile autonomous systems of power and authority within a common political structure. While Ethiopian nationalists decry the balkanisation of Africa's only surviving historically independent state, and look apprehensively to the fate of the EPRDF's Soviet model, the representatives of excluded nationalities (and especially of the Oromo) point to the regime's failure to implement its own policy.
Controlling the International Arena
If there is one arena within which the EPRDF regime has been unquestionably brilliant, it has been its management of the international system. It rapidly succeeded in placing Ethiopia in a highly advantageous position within the global and continental networks that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War, and using this position both to become a favoured recipient of international aid, and to pursue its own regional and domestic political agendas. Some of this reflected the abilities of Meles Zenawi himself: his intelligence, charm, accessibility to influential foreigners, and ability to recognise and respond to developments in the international system. It was also greatly helped by the long-established diplomatic capacities of the Ethiopian state apparatus, and its ability to present its own interests as the answers to other actors' problems: administratively, it appeared to represent a model of ‘good governance’; its economic policy was geared to rural development and poverty alleviation, in accordance with donor priorities; it sought stability within the region, and placed Ethiopia in its accustomed position at the core of continental diplomacy; and it swiftly signed up to the ‘global war on terror’, which at the same time gave it scope to promote its own agenda, with US backing, in Somalia. The contrast between this success and the churlish unpleasantness of the Isaias Afewerki regime in Asmara, and the total incapacity of Eritrean diplomacy, was simply embarrassing. This in turn enabled it to survive, almost unscathed, the effective rejection of the Boundary Commission's decision on the frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Although Ethiopia did not quite become a ‘donors’ darling', such as Ghana, Rwanda or Uganda, it nonetheless received sharply increased levels of foreign aid after the EPRDF came to power, largely because it could make a very convincing case for local ‘ownership’ of policies directed towards rural development, which chimed very closely with donors' own priorities. Even so, a high proportion of external aid (32 per cent in 2004/05) continued to be directed towards emergency assistance. In this respect as in others, the regime was characteristically adept at pursuing its own interests and ideological commitments, while presenting these in terms that donors could accept. The key limitations on full acceptance of the ‘Washington consensus’ were first the maintenance of state ownership of land, and second the promotion, under the façade of liberalisation, of nominally private corporations that were owned by constituent parties of the governing EPRDF, and especially by the TPLF. These devices obviously helped to maintain state control over the peasantry.
However, even in this sphere the regime has lost a great deal of its leverage, largely as a result of its own mistakes, rather than of any deeper causes arising from the international system. Its acceptance of the Algiers Agreement, which placed in jeopardy the gains from victory in the bitter war against Eritrea, was a remarkable piece of diplomatic ineptitude that could only have resulted from overweening self-confidence. Still more damaging was the failure to ‘manage’ the 2005 elections, in ways that would undoubtedly have enabled it to win them, while appearing to respect the norms of multiparty democracy to which the donor community was committed. Once it became clear that the EPRDF was in imminent danger of losing, the falsification of the election results and the brutal suppression of dissent that followed, had a hugely damaging effect on perceptions of the regime in the donor community, quite apart from the actual loss of aid that followed.
The Somali imbroglio similarly illustrated both the strengths and weaknesses of the regime's diplomacy, and demonstrated the close linkages between its domestic, regional and global policies. The situation in which the EPRDF came to power in 1991, just a few months after the flight of Siyad Barre and the total collapse of the Somali state, had been uniquely favourable to the management of Ethiopia's perennial problems with its south-eastern periphery. Ethiopia tacitly supported the breakaway of former British Somaliland to form the Republic of Somaliland (although formal recognition was diplomatically out of the question), while the creation of a Somali region within Ethiopia itself provided ample opportunities for manipulating the divisions between local clans. Although the region could never be entirely pacified, its internal politics prompted conflict between the Ogaden clan, substantially the largest in the region, and all of the smaller clans which could be mobilised against it. In southern Somalia, the Ethiopian Government established its usefulness to the United States during the ill-fated ‘Operation Restore Hope’, and thereafter pursued classically manipulative policies designed both to neutralise the Islamist elements within Somalia, and to protect its own territory.
The advent of the ‘global war on terror’ dramatically raised the stakes. Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in the region, notably the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole at Aden, preceded the events of 11 September 2001, and – together with the absence of government in Somalia, which thus appeared as an ungoverned space analogous to Afghanistan – turned the Horn into an arena secondary only to west/central Asia as a potential source of Islamist militancy. Initially, this could only be beneficial to the Ethiopian regime, which could present itself as a force for stability in the region. It was particularly valuable in insulating Ethiopia, especially against the possible loss of US support, in the aftermath of the refusal to implement the Boundary Commission findings, and the 2005 election.
However, in the longer term the impact has been much more problematic, especially with the emergence of a credible Islamist movement, the Organisation of Islamic Courts (OIC), in southern Somalia. This rapidly gained support in the latter half of 2006, taking over control of most of the country, and in the process creating a level of domestic order that Somalis had not enjoyed for decades. The problem was that such a movement could only maintain its momentum, in gathering support from a deeply fractured Somali society, by combining its Islamist appeal (necessarily the source of deep suspicions, globally as well as regionally) with the revival of Somali nationalist claims on south-east Ethiopia. No way could such a movement have stopped at the frontier, and its brutal and initially effective suppression by the Ethiopian army late in 2006 was prompted every bit as much by Ethiopian state interests as by tacit US support. Having intervened, however, the Ethiopian army then found itself (like Western militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the classic tar-baby dilemma, where every attempt to attack the problem led to its being still more firmly stuck to it. While the Ethiopian military presence in Somalia is clearly unsustainable, and its costs in terms of human welfare have been appalling, the alternatives are fraught with danger for the Ethiopian state.
Indeed, the regime's international standing has been less badly affected than its domestic position. It retains its status as a key regional ally of the United States, although this will certainly be endangered by the advent of a Democratic administration in the US, with a reduced emphasis on security considerations, and a potentially less sympathetic Africa policy team in the Department of State. Its reputation in Africa has been largely unaffected, not least because of the loathing that Eritrea attracts elsewhere on the continent, as a result of its own diplomatic ineptitude and the stigma (in African eyes) of having broken the taboo on breaching the territorial integrity of existing African states by which AU members hold such store. Ethiopia, like other African states, can also to some extent look to China to offset the loss of Western support, and Chinese-Ethiopian trade is burgeoning. Nonetheless, it has suffered needless damage.
Conclusion
As a result of the failure of its political management skills, the EPRDF regime has been obliged to depend ever more heavily on its control of the armed forces, the reliability of which I am in no position to assess. Although it faces no immediate threat of overthrow by rurally-based guerrillas, and has so far been able to cope with the rather ineffectual insurgencies that have been launched against it, it is extremely vulnerable to the difficulty of maintaining control over the towns. It is there, like the Haile Selassie regime, rather than in the countryside, like the Mengistu one, that it is most endangered – especially if, as happened in 1974, any significant section of the security apparatus sides with the opposition. Like those two regimes during the period immediately preceding their own collapse, it is in danger of losing its status as mengist, or the automatic obedience that governments habitually receive in Ethiopia from large parts of the population, simply because they are perceived as having power. Once this happens, then people have to consider other potential outcomes, and are correspondingly encouraged to set about trying to create them.
Similarly, it is clear that the solution to the complex problems of governing Ethiopia that the EPRDF regime sought to implement has now failed to establish itself. Although the system of ethnic federalism, like the party-state established by the Derg, has made important changes to Ethiopian governance that will survive the regime itself, the present political framework is so dependent on the regime that created it that its survival is unlikely. This, in turn, is partly for structural reasons – because these are inherently difficult problems, aggravated by deeply entrenched elements in Ethiopian mentalities – but also partly because the regime itself has manifestly failed to create the political mechanisms that were essential to assure the success of its own programme.
The deeper problem facing Ethiopia is that it is now too complex and diverse a society to be managed without the extremely adept deployment of the political skills – of discussion, bargaining, compromise and simultaneous recognition of alternative sources of authority – that are needed to create some kind of workable synthesis of the different elements of which it is composed. Regardless of the immediate ability of the government to maintain itself in power by force, this is not a viable option for long-term governance. However, such political management is something at which Ethiopians have historically been very bad indeed. The country is certainly changing, and important and unprecedented developments, including the development of civil society organisations and the creation of effective opposition political parties, have taken place in recent years. Whether these can in turn promote the changes in habits of governance that are needed for the management of diversity remains uncertain.