Ethiopia Is a Unique African Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Ethiopia is that rarity among African states: a country with a very long continuous history and one of the two never conquered by Europeans during the 19^th century partition of Africa. It also has one of the world’s oldest Christian churches, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, dating back to the fourth century. Christianity was declared the state religion in the Kingdom of Axum, forerunner of today’s Ethiopia, in 330 AD.

The medieval Christian kingdom was known to Europeans, often in the form of myths regarding Prester John, a mythical Christian king in the heart of Africa.

Unlike most parts of Africa, Ethiopia also had a feudal social system, with a land-owning nobility ruling over a peasantry from which it exacted tribute.

The Italians had tried to incorporate Ethiopia (also known as Abyssinia) into their empire but were defeated by Emperor Menelik II at Adwa in 1896, thus allowing Ethiopia to retain its independence.

But 40 years later, Ethiopia was subjugated by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and amalgamated with neighbours Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into an East African empire. Mussolini’s dream didn’t last long, though; in 1941, during World War II, the British expelled the Italians and restored Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne.

However, Ethiopia remained a feudal backwater. This came to a sudden end in 1974, when Haile Selassie was overthrown in a military coup, and was dead a year later, probably murdered by the revolutionaries who had assumed power.

The next few years marked a period of turmoil, as the Derg, the military council now running the country, quickly fell into internal conflict. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam became Ethiopia’s leader. Calling himself a Marxist-Leninist, he instituted a regime of terror, killing thousands of his opponents.

He also began to collectivize agriculture. All rural land was nationalized, stripping the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Imperial family, and the nobility of all their sizable estates. But within a matter of years the country was suffering from a major famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

By now the country was beset by various separatist movements, operating in regions inhabited by peoples who were not Amhara, the ruling ethnic group who represent only about one-fourth of the population. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front launched a war for regional autonomy; the Oromo Liberation Front started political agitation in the Oromo areas; while in the Ogaden, the eastern part of the country inhabited by Muslim Somalis, the Western Somali Liberation Front began armed struggle. In 1977 Somalia invaded the Ogaden region in an attempt to annex it, but with Cuban and Soviet aid, Ethiopia drove its army back.

All of these different struggles merged into an overall civil war in the 1980s. Mengistu was finally toppled by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), an alliance of the various insurrectionary movements, and he fled to Zimbabwe in 1991. He remains there despite an Ethiopian court verdict finding him guilty in absentia of genocide for the deaths of some two million Ethiopians overall.

With Mengistu’s removal, the country, which had been run as a centralized state by both emperors and Marxists, acknowledged its diverse nature. In 1993 Eritrea, which had been attached to Ethiopia against its will after the Second World War, and had fought against its incorporation for decades, was granted independence. A year later the rest of the country, under a new constitution, was reorganized as a federal polity.

The first multi-party election took place in 1995, with Meles Zenawi Asres, head of the EPRDF, elected prime minister; he served until his death in 2012. Allegations of human rights abuses were levelled against his government, which continued to battle political opponents and secessionists.

In 2005, a disputed election led to violent unrest, and security forces killed nearly 200 people while putting down demonstrations. The 2010 election was also marred by irregularities. A leader of the country’s largest opposition group, the Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Ethiopia, Gebru Asrat, said that “The ruling party has completely turned the country in to a one party state.”

Under Meles Zenawi’s tenure Ethiopia also fought a boundary war against Eritrea from 1998 to 2000, and sent troops into Somalia in 2006 to halt the gains of the al-Shabaab Islamist militants; some are still involved there. The current prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe, was Meles Zenawi’s deputy.

The 94 million Ethiopians are now divided into nine ethnically based and politically autonomous regional states, and two chartered cities, Addis Ababa, the capital, and Dire Dawa. The constitution assigns extensive power to them; on paper, they even have the right to secede. In practice, though, Ethiopia is far from being a democratic state.