Dehumanisation and demonisation are the ideological backbones of the Imperial Ethiopian state and it is coming back with a vengeance, as we speak, aided and abetted by the state.
I have never witnessed a moment in my adult life when people of significant influence over government policy, including close advisors to the PM, openly and casually hurl dehumanizing epithets at the Oromo and others. Supremacist bigots who use the universal category that is “Ethiopia” as a mask to impose their particular language, culture and ways of life on an extremely diverse society, seizing this political moment to ensure a return to that inglorious past. The demonization and humiliation of the Oromo and other groups have reached its climax during the recent bout of violence in Oromia.
Supremacist forces used the recent violence (horizontally orchestrated to score political points), to spew hate and contempt for the Oromo, describing an entire group as barbaric and inhuman, prone to violence, and a threat to their civilisation. Hate was gushing out on social media like sewage While the significant majority of those who died are Oromo (68%), the supremacist and privileged elites that dominate the cosmopolitan centres of the Empire, manufactured a false narrative of ethnic cleansing – a useful peg on which to hang the imperial desire to vilify and denigrate those who reject their imperial fantasies. For them, the only lives that are grieve-able, those that are worth mourning and remembering, both in public and private, are those who belong to their groups.
After a half-century of bitter struggle and unremitting toil, the Oromo and the subjugated nations and nationalities of the South are, once again, facing collective humiliation of this kind at the altar of Abiy Ahmed’s narratives and policies. The Oromo, the single largest ethnic group making up well over a third of Ethiopia’s 110 million people, have to contend with this reality, once again. For the Ethiopian state, the Oromo is not just the uncivilised and the savage, it is the barbaric, because it is incapable of accepting the terms of its inclusion, and is therefore always a threat, that must be controlled, policed, and dominated.
We find ourselves at a moment when a Prime Minister ushered to power by a primarily Oromo struggle is now offering prominent Oromos as a sacrifice to the demands of the supremacists. Jawar Mohammed and Bekele are not in jail because they committed a crime. They are in jail because the supremacists demanded it and made it a condition of their support for the PM. We live at a time when Jawar Mohammed, and Bekele Gerba– individuals who played a decisive role in bringing Abiy to power – are languishing in jail, while the likes of Al Mariam, a hate-spewing Professor of Law and Political Science, serve as Abiy’s close advisors and confidante. Remnants of the Derg and folks with imperial ideological inclination dominate Ethiopia’s airwaves today, given platforms on state media to dehumanize Oromos and others, to deprive them of something that sustained them in the face of more than a century state-sponsored terrorism and institutionalized enforcement of assimilation – dignity.
In order for Abiy’s or Al Mariam’s Ethiopia to come back, in order for the pursuit of one language and one culture to get a discursive footing, Oromos, the single largest group and the most vocal proponents of multinational federalism, must be dehumanized. Most cosmopolitan elites who view themselves (wrongly) as liberal humanists committed to a democratic country under the rule of law, where ethnic identity is not a determining factor, were members of a culture that normalised the humiliation and demonisation of the Oromo and others. Hard to engage them to undo that when these debates are entangled with broader questions of power, agency, privilege, and core beliefs etc.
The whole point of the Oromo protests was to rehumanize the Oromo. It was a successful movement until it was hijacked. Would Oromo Protests 2.0 learn a lesson?
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