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Ethnicity and constitutionalism in contemporary Ethiopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Jon Abbink
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Extract

The phenomenon of ethnicity is being declared by many to be the cause of all the problems of Africa, especially those of violent conflict. Some salient examples are Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya. While in many cases ethnicity and ethnic-based antagonisms have indeed been a factor in conflicts and have often been suppressed within the structures of the post-colonial states (with their seemingly sacrosanct boundaries), the political relevance of the phenomenon has varied widely. In the political system and the laws of an African country, however, ethnicity seldom received official recognition.

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Articles
Information
Journal of African Law , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1997 , pp. 159 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1997

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References

1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the Seminar on “Ethnicity, Politics and Memory in Ethiopia: Some New Perspectives”, held at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, in November 1996. I am most grateful to Alessandro Triulzi and Stephen Ellis for comments. Final editing was done in January 1997.

2 Cf. Ake, Claude, “What is the problem of ethnicity in Africa?”, (1993) 22 Transition 1–14.Google Scholar

3 Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front, the rebel guerrilla movement which ousted Mengistu's communist dictatorship in 1991. Its core is the Tigray People's Liberation Front, a movement founded in the mid-1970s in the northern region of Tigray.

4 This Constitution was ratified by the Constituent Assembly in December 1994 and became official in August 1996. It was the fourth Ethiopian constitution promulgated for the last 65 years. Another was drafted in 1974 in the early stages of the revolution, but it was ignored and shelved by the Derg military council which took over power later that year. I have used the following text: The Draft Constitution of Ethiopia. A Draft Approved by the Council of Representatives (an unofficial draft translation from the Amharic), Addis Ababa: Constitutional Commission of Ethiopia. 1994.

5 Cf. Banks, Marcus, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions, London, 1996, 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Nevertheless, the concept of “ethnic rights” is legally speaking still very unclear and not very useful (cf. Addis, Adeno, “Individualism, communitarianism, and the rights of ethnic minorities”, (1993) 67 Notre Dame Law Review 619.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Elster, Jon, “Introduction”, in Elster, J. and Slagstad, R. (eds.), Constitutionalism and Democracy, Cambridge, 1988, 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Ibid., 3.

9 Cf. Bassi, Marco, “Power's ambiguity or the political significance of Gada”, in Baxter, P.T.W., Hultin, J. and Triulzi, A. (eds.), Being and Becoming and Oromo. Historical and Anthropological Inquiries, Uppsala, 1995, 177fGoogle Scholar. Also Baxter, Paul, “The creation and constitution of Oromo nationality”, in Fukui, K. and Markakis, J. (eds.), Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa, London, 1994, 167–186. Other relevant examples would be the Sidama (luwa) age-grade system, the traditional “sacred” or “divine” kingships in southern Omotic-speaking regions of Ethiopia (Maale, Wolayta or Gofa), the system of clan-elders and religious leaders among the Somali, or the Dizi councils of chiefs and elders. They all contains core elements of an indigenous “rule of law” system, whereby people have basic individual rights, next to community rights.Google Scholar

10 See Bassi, loc. cit.

11 ” Cf. Lewis, Herbert L., “Democracy and Oromo political culture”, (1995) 7 Life and Peace Review 26.Google Scholar

12 In the sense of more democratic, non-centralized societies without a strong executive power and characterized by more structural equality in collective decision-making.

13 Baxter, op. cit., 183.

14 See the recent 1994 Census reports on the various regional states of Ethiopia, published by the Central Statistical Authority, Addis Ababa, 1995–1996.

15 Cf. Adeno, op. cit., 621.

16 During most of its history Ethiopia was de facto a kind of federal country, where the power of the monarch was often superficial and remote, and regional autonomy substantial. See Clapham, Christopher, “Constitutions and governance in Ethiopian political history”, paper for the Symposium “The Making of the New Ethiopian Constitution”, 05 1993. Addis Ababa: Inter-Africa Group.Google Scholar

17 Cf. Baxter, op. cit., 183.

18 See Haji, Abbas, L'Etat et les Crises d'Intégration Nationale en Ethiopie Contemporaine, Talence/Bordeaux, 1993.Google Scholar

19 The word as such in Amharic (behéreseb) did not even exist before the early 1980s, when Mengistu's neo-Stalinist ideologues introduced it during their work for the Institute for the Study of Ethiopian Nationalities.

20 As expounded in a famous 1969 article by Walleligne Mekonnen in a student opposition paper (Challenge) in the Haile Selassie years, cf. Tadesse, Kiflu, The Generation. The History of the Peoples' Revolutionary Party. Part I: From the Early Beginnings to 1975, Silver Spring 1993, 53–54.Google Scholar

21 The TPLF long had as its ideological core the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray, of which Ethiopia's present leaders were members. It is not know whether this League still formally exists.

22 Hobsbawm, E., Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London, 1995, 567.Google Scholar

23 Buchanan, Allen E., “The right to self-determination: analytical and moral foundations”, (1991) 8 Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 41–50.Google Scholar

24 The Constitution was published on 12 December, 1996, with the imprint “21 August 1995” (the date of the inauguration of the federal Republic of Ethiopia) in Vol. 1, No. 1 of the new Federal Negarit Gazeta, which replaced 54 years of the Negarit Gazeta, set up by Emperor Haile Selassie I. Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Federal Negaril Gazeta thus appeared after about 40 subsequent issues were already published. The reason for the delay is not known.

25 With good reason, see Buchanan, op.cit., 45.

26 In the Constitution, 51 groups are mentioned if those contained in the names of the other member states are included.

27 This “over-ethnic view” of people may, incidentally, be a serious bias in Western perceptions (and also within Africanist studies) of African societies.

28 See the short but very perceptive paper by Goudappel, Flora and Oosterhagen, Maarten, “Ethnicity, federalism and development: constitutional solutions for Ethiopia?” Rotterdam, Erasmus University, Center of Constitutional Law, 1996, 2Google Scholar

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 6.

31 Ibid., 5.

32 Ibid., 3.

33 See ,Jembere, Aberra, “The functions and development of parliament in Ethiopia”, in Zoethout, C.M. et al. (eds.), Constitutionalism in Africa. The Quest for Autonomous Principles, Deventer, 1996, 82.Google Scholar

34 Op. cit., 3–4.

35 Cf. Cohen, John M., “‘Ethnic federalism’ in Ethiopia”, (1995) 2 (N.S.) Northeast African Studies 172–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 See Chole, Eshetu, “Opening Pandora's box: preliminary notes on fiscal decentralisation in contemporary Ethiopia”, (1994) 1 (N.S.) Northeast African Studies 7–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 See Brietzke, Paul H., “Ethiopia's ‘leap in the dark’: federalism and self-determination in the new Constitution”, [1995] 39 J.A.L. 32.Google Scholar

38 Aberra Jembere, op. cit., 88.

39 Henze, Paul B., “Comments on the Ethiopian Draft Constitution of 1994”, Washington, D.C., unpublished paper.Google Scholar

40 Aberra, op. cit.

41 Cf. the state newspaper Ethiopian Herald, 9 December, 1996, 1.

42 Henze, op. cit., 3.

43 Art. 24 is a novel one, stating (24.1) “the right to human dignity and good reputation”, and (24.2) “the right to freely develop his personality in a manner consistent with the rights of others”.

44 Cf. Adeno, op. cit., 619, 622.

45 This problem was already implicit in the ethnic map of the Derg regime, drawn up in 1984 by the (Government) Institute for the Study of Ethiopian Nationalities, and discussed by Bureau, J., “A propos de l'inventaire des nationalities éthiopiennes”, in Lepage, C. et al. (eds.), Etudes Ethiopiennes, Actes de la Xe Conference Internationale des Etudes Ethiopiennes, Paris, 24–28 août 1988, Paris, 1994, Vol.1, 501–511. In fact, a lot of work of delineating “nationalities” by the Derg was without much change taken over by the EPRDF regime after 1991, showing an underlying common point of view derived from Marxist views on the “national question”.Google Scholar

46 See Clapham, op. cit., 5.

47 Cf. Brietzke, op. cit., 34–35; or Henze, op. cit., 4–5.

48 Henze, op. cit., 4.

49 The Constitution drafters have taken the extreme interpretation of “self-determination”, i.e. they followed the “National Principle” (cf. Buchanan, op. cit., 46), without having sufficiently studied and weighed the various options in this field: autonomous community structure (as in Spain), cultural autonomy, regional autonomy, self-government,. etc.