4 - A Referendum on Ethnic Identity and the Claims of Citizenship

Summary

The Anywaa woman of the Shola market is not the only citizen of Ethiopia imperfectly and incompletely incorporated into modern Ethiopian citizenship regimes. Other individuals and groups, some numerically small, and some rather large in size, have contested the terms of their inclusion in recent decades, testing not only the present regime’s federal system, but a century and a half of a narrative of expanding citizenship. One prominent case came to fruition in early 2001, when voters in a poor region of southern Ethiopia were presented with a unique referendum on ethnicity. The Siltie, previously considered a subclan of the Gurage ethnic group, were asked quite simply, “Are the Siltie Gurage or not?” Their answer was overwhelmingly that the Siltie were not Gurage. This unique exercise in voting for an ethnic identity is one of the most dramatic modern experiments in injecting direct political competition into what has traditionally been regarded as a social or cultural matter. It followed years of campaigning, both for and against Siltie separation, by members of both the ruling political party and opposition parties, and prompted debate and eventually arbitration at the highest political authority on questions of nationality in Ethiopia: the House of Federation, which had ordered the referendum.

The complex and contested meanings underlying Siltie and Gurage identities provide a critical window into the citizen-creation and citizenship-expansion processes in Ethiopia and the potential of public policy with respect to ethnic identities in the context of conflict. Vesting a decision regarding the boundaries and content of ethnicity in the hands of ordinary citizens is a somewhat unusual political maneuver. Some would call it inherently democratic, as democratic procedures were followed and the results were accepted by all major parties. This is the argument, for instance, of Laitin and Reich’s “liberal democratic approach” to language policy.