17/09/2022
This ethnically intoxicated group started hate on Ethiopia specifically on Amhara more than a two generations ago. This group has been the enemy of Ethiopia from the beginning of time. Unfortunately, the country fell under this enemy in 1991 in the form of Ethiopian government by force with help of Ethiopian historical enemies. Simply, it was a devastation event and a Big blow for 54 million people as the time.
“A Political History of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (1975-1991): Revolt, Ideology and Mobilization (they spelled it as Mobilisation) in Ethiopia. “
By Aregawi Berhe
Though he has some misleading statements and assertions throughout the book, he did an excellent job on the historiography side of things.
He asserted that, in the past century neither the ‘national integration policy’ of Emperor Haile Selassie (r. 1930-1974) nor the ‘Ethiopia First’ motto of the military Dergue regime (1974-1991), which hybridized Ethiopian nationalism with Marxism, helped stem the rising tide of ethno-nationalist rebellion. The regime of the emperor was confronted by ethno-national and regional armed movements in Tigrai (1942-43), Bale (1963-68), Gojjam (1967) and Eritrea since early 1960s. While he managed to successfully suppress the first three, the Eritrean movement was intractable – due to the external support that the others were not able to acquire. The Dergue too had to encounter another wave of ethno-national movements, some of them ‘inherited’ from the era of the previous regime and that ultimately brought its demise in 1991. Both these regimes collapsed in the face of the sustained onslaught of primarily ethnic-based national liberation movements and to a certain extent of forces of change at the center. One of the ethno-nationalist movements which spearheaded the revolt against the military regime from 1975 to 1991 was the Tigrai People’s Liberation Front (TPLF.
The TPLF started its struggle to ensure ‘self-determination’ for the region of Tigrai within the Ethiopian polity. It embarked on its armed struggle with a hybrid ideology that mingled ethno-nationalism with Marxism. Its Marxism was of a different variant from that of the Dergue. Ethnicity was the prime mobilizing factor of the people of Tigrai (sounds Familiar), while Marxism served as an ideological tool of organizational and policy matters as well as to attract other ‘oppressed social classes’ outside of Tigrai. ‘Self-determination’ for every ethno-national group in Ethiopia was also upheld as a motto that in turn attracted various marginalized groups, some of which finally joined the TPLF to forge the Ethiopian People Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in its final march to power in 1991. The initial junior partners of the TPLF in forging the EPRDF were the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement (EPDM), which later changed its name to Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), and the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), ostensibly (symbolic representation) representing the Amhara and Oromo ethnic groups (peoples) respectively. The TPLF thus could claim success, especially over the discredited military regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam and a number of other opponents which were either ethnic or multi-ethnic political organizations. Although previously there had been a number of ethno-nationalist movements of one form or the other that rose up to challenge the Ethiopian state, none of them were able to break the backbone of the central state. In 1991 after waging a sixteen years’ protracted war, the ethno-nationalist TPLF finally managed to conquer Ethiopian state power, with a host of local and external factors contributing to its success.
With the seizure of power by an ethno-nationalist force, one might assume that in post-1991 Ethiopia ethnic-based conflicts would have a better chance of being resolved. Yet after almost three decades of controversies and experimentation, ethnic-based conflicts have not gone away but grown into new forms of ethnic cleansing.
Historically, the TPLF traced the origin of its struggle back to the popular uprising of 1942 - 43, called the ‘Woyyane’, that was crushed by the forces of the imperial state backed by the British air force, although at that time the demand was ‘legitimate regional autonomy’, which may be regarded as one form of self-determination or decentralization. As the state, in subsequent years, pursued a heavy-handed administration in Tigrai with the aim of quashing any potential rebellion rather than opting for a peaceful and democratic handling of local demands, anger and frustration of the population increased. Ted Gurr’s words (1970: 354) asserted that: ‘Violence inspires counter-violence by those against whom it is directed’ were confirmed in Tigrai at the time. After 1943, the people kept on invoking the history of Woyyane, reminiscent of their struggle against injustice. Munck (2000) was to the point when he noted that ‘…with a long-term view it is clear that regimes which refuse to recognize a legitimate interlocutor may only postpone the inevitable, with the ensuing years of accumulated bitterness and distrust making a democratic settlement that much more difficult and fragile’ (2000: 11). Finally, calling it the Kalai Woyyane (‘second Woyyane’), the TPLF appeared to reinvigorate that struggle in the form of national self-determination against an oppressive state. As Abbink put it ‘[o]ften an ethnic revival is primarily a result of failing state policy…’ (1997:160), and this clearly appeared to be the case in Ethiopia. The cause of the struggle for self-determination found adequate justification in the eyes of many disgruntled Ethiopians, including Tigraians.
Radical ideology.
The main ideological source of inspiration for TPLF’s ethno-nationalist drive was, however, none other than Stalin’s theory on ‘the national question,’ influential in the Leftist-Marxist thinking among the opposition movements of the time. One should not forget the origin of organizations like the TPLF in Leftist students’ movements, which were charmed by these abstract ideas. The TPLF’s departure point was Stalin’s definition of a nation as ‘a historically evolved, stable community of language, and territory, six economic life and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture’ (1942: 12). Based on this definition, it was believed that Tigrai constituted a nation which had the right to self-determination. ‘The right to self-determination means that only the nation itself has the right to determine its destiny, that no one has the right forcibly to interfere in the life of the nation, … to violate its habits and customs, to repress its language, or curtail its rights’ (ibid.: 22-23). Furthermore, if the rights of a given nation are curtailed, Stalin propounded ‘a nation has the right to arrange its life on autonomous lines. It even has the right to secede’ (1975: 61-62). So far, Stalin sounded a devout nationalist, and so was the TPLF, especially in bringing the issue to the people it claimed to liberate – the Tigraians. In contextualizing the right of self-determination up to secession, Lenin had asserted that ‘the several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general democratic (now: general socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected’ (1971: 132). And Stalin reasserted that: ‘[T]he Bolsheviks never separated the national question from the general question of revolution…. The main essence of the Bolshevik approach to the national question is that the Bolsheviks always examined the national question in inseparable connection with the revolutionary perspective’ (op. cit.: 295). Hinging on both approaches of the national question for self-determination, the TPLF mobilized the Tigrai people, created a strong guerrilla army and cleared its way to eventually assume power in Ethiopia. Although to mainstream Marxists ethnicity was thought to ‘wither away’ with the emergence of a class-conscious, worldwide industrial proletariat, the TPLF, nevertheless, since its inception attempted to homogenize both the ethnic and the class ideologies for the entire duration of its struggle. It was a daunting task or simply a loss of direction for the TPLF to combine these mutually exclusive ideologies and wage a dual struggle. In recent years, after its rise to power in 1991, the TPLF seems to close the pages of its Marxist books and have bent towards ethnic politics; yet its declaration of 7 ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ (EPRDF, 2000)6 as a fresh policy guideline yields much uncertainty in determining where the TPLF exactly is heading. As for its ethnonationalist stance, the TPLF demonstratively appears to be persistent and even proudly talking of the ethnic experiment it is conducting. This double-edged theory has been an important tool in enabling the TPLF to bridge the gap between the Marxist-Leninist ideology that necessarily emphasized class struggle encompassing the whole of Ethiopia, and the ethno-national demand of the struggle that focused on Tigrai, the harmonization of which is, however, problematic. Problems of secession in a multi-ethnic state with the commencement of the insurgent movement under the TPLF, the idea of national self-determination was understood to mean autonomy or self-rule for the region of Tigrai in a would-be democratic, poly-ethnic Ethiopia. Later, in the early days of the struggle, self-determination was stretched by an ultra-nationalist group within the emerging TPLF, to mean secession from the Ethiopian nation-state, with the aim of establishing an ‘independent republic of Tigrai’, as declared by the 1976 ‘TPLF Manifesto’.7 The justification for this secessionist stance was drawn eclectically from the theoretical formulations of Stalin on self-determination. There were no other historical, legal, or political provisions that substantiated the arguments for secession. This idea of secession was contemplated only by a section of the leadership that with Eriksen’s term (1993) might be called ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ and not by the rank and file or the people of Tigrai, who constituted one of the main historic cores of the Ethiopian polity. This extreme position was one source of subsequent divisions in the organization. In 1978, the secession option was proclaimed to have been dropped, after pressure mounted from an internal opposition and also from other Ethiopians and friends of 6 See EPRDF, ‘The Development Lines of Revolutionary Democracy’ Addis Ababa, 1992 E.C. [2000]. 7 This was the first published program of the TPLF, also known as Manifesto-68. ‘68’ indicates the year the Manifesto was published in the Ethiopian Calendar (E.C.). For further details, see also chapter 5. 8 Ethiopia, who saw no merit in secession. Ironically, external pressure, particularly from the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), had also a significant role in the denunciation of secession as a program of the TPLF. Given the fluidity of ethnicity and the divergent analytical approaches it developed, the TPLF as an ethno-nationalist force appears to have eclectically theorized and pragmatically acted as far as the ‘national self-determination’ of Tigrai was concerned. Especially, when one looks into how class analysis and the strategy of class struggle was blended into the ethno-nationalist movement of the TPLF until the early 1990s, the current political turmoil within the TPLF and the worsening insecurity and crisis of the Ethiopian state are no surprise. The TPLF embarking on self-determination for the people of Tigrai was, at the same time, engaged, or pretended to be engaged, in class struggle that encompassed all oppressed classes in Ethiopia. Yet, it fell short of creating the power base for the latter by focusing on the former objective, self-determination of Tigrai. In the history of Ethiopia, no government other than that led by the TPLF since 1991 stretched ethno-nationalism to such a far-reaching point, although ethno-national challenges steadily trailed the evolution of the modern Ethiopian state. Constitutionally the post-1991 government granted the right to ethnic nationalities to secede and become independent states (ref. article 39.1 of the 1994 Constitution). The relationship of the numerous ethnic groups in Ethiopia has entered a new but turbulent phase, which looks difficult to manage indeed. As far as the point of ethnicity and politics is concerned, as Abbink observes, ‘[T]here is no going back to a unitary state structure in Ethiopia which denies ethno-regional differences and rights, or which lets one group dominate the state’ (1997: 174), although ‘the history of Ethiopia … is most obviously the history of a state, and the story that it tells recounts the ups and downs of what is assumed to be a broadly continuous political organization’ (Clapham, 2002: 38). ‘The implication is that’ as Doornbos expounds, ‘… basic political identifications are not with the state but with sub-national units, such as linguistic, ethnic, religious, racial, or regional collectivities’ (1978: 170). Thus, the restructuring of the 9 Ethiopian state in a way to create more stable and harmonious relationships among the multitude of ethnic groups becomes exceedingly difficult. The practical application of ethnic identity in various fields of the struggle for national self-determination continued to manifest the diversity of interpretations, inherent in the elasticity of concept itself and in the differing perceptions and inclinations of the TPLF leaders at all levels. In this regard, the issue of secession continues to challenge the stability of the Ethiopian state and its people.
TPLF has never agree to any peace agreement in it's life time. The peace talk with TPLF is a moot discussion!
