This article is part of the Analytical Reporting to Improve the Federation (ARIF) project.
Ethiopia’s ethnofederal system was designed to counter coercive homogenization, but, as in the former Yugoslavia, it left minorities tragically exposed in dominant groups’ homelands.
For Hassan, an Amhara farmer who called Oromia home for a quarter of a century, last year’s rainy season came pouring with tears and blood.
On 18 June 2022, a string of villages in Tole, which is largely populated by Amharas, a minority in Oromia region, saw one of the deadliest identity-based attacks in recent years. Gunmen set houses ablaze, looted properties, and killed hundreds.
The federal government and several survivors blamed the attack in West Wollega Zone on the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA)—Oromo nationalist insurgents at war with the authorities since 2018—accusations the group denied.
Among those slain were four of Hassan’s family: two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a granddaughter. The attacks went on for hours and regional security forces didn’t arrive until much later despite being stationed less than 20 kilometers away.
“It was indescribable. Too many people were lost,” Hassan recalled to Ethiopia Insight about the violence. International rights groups called it a “callous massacre” carried out with “unmitigated cruelty”.
The Tole atrocity occurred in a wider context of growing insurgency and deteriorating insecurity in many areas in Oromia, which has intensified and spread in recent months. Violence also recently flared again in an Oromo enclave in Amhara region. Much like other conflicts across Ethiopia, civilians have been caught in the crossfire.
These conflicts among dominant and minority groups are part of a general increase in violence across Ethiopia. In recent years, there has been a surge in clashes between various formal and informal groups, and more consistent fighting between groups from neighboring regions in bordering areas.
Worryingly, these dynamics mirror the Yugoslav federation prior to its violent ‘Balkanization’ during the 1990s. For example, Slobodan Milošević, from the dominant Serbian republic, rose to power in the late 1980s by highlighting the alleged oppression of minority Serbs by the Albanian majority in Kosovo and, from 1992 to 1999, launched successive campaigns of ethnic cleansing.
Increasingly, in Ethiopia, political violence is taking a brutal form in which appalling acts targeting civilians are not only committed but also filmed. Social media is inundated with footage of people being burned alive, villages set ablaze, and heads on spikes.
Such instability has exposed the failure of the country’s political system to protect minorities. Some minority communities report a lack of confidence in regional government structures that, as in the case of Tole, almost entirely comprise members of the region’s dominant group.
Hassan fled Tole with his four surviving children and spent weeks in a nearby makeshift camp. His and hundreds of other families returned to their villages only following federal assurances.
But, in October, when federal soldiers left the area, Hassan felt he couldn’t stay in the region any longer. Oromia security forces lack the appetite to protect “others” and sometimes they even condone violence against Amharas, he argued.
One morning “we got up at 3am and started traveling,” he told Ethiopia Insight. “We left everything behind.” He’s now in Worebabo in Northern Wollo Zone of Amhara region, hundreds of kilometers to the northeast, where his family faces an uncertain future.
Two weeks after the Tole tragedy, at least 150 Amharas were killed during similar attacks in neighboring Kellem Wollega Zone.
Such incidents are, unfortunately, all too common in today’s Ethiopia.
The past four years have seen an unprecedented surge of violence against minorities, sometimes in the form of targeted attacks and on other occasions during clashes with dominant groups.
As such, it’s imperative to explore the structural fault lines created by the federal constitution—or, arguably, by its lack of implementation—that have become increasingly apparent amid the recent violence.
Federalism Rationale
Ethiopia has historically been a unitary state characterized by centralization of power and homogenization of identity, efforts that many believe were inconsiderate of the country’s diverse people, languages, religions, and ways of life.
Consequently, the unitarist approach led to pervasive feelings of marginalization. It began to face challenges in the 1960s from left-leaning movements, many of which were mobilized around ethno-national identities. They gradually picked up momentum and, in 1974, contributed to overthrowing Ethiopia’s imperial dynasty.
Upon taking power, a committee of military officers known as the Derg also failed to address the national question and imposed another unitarist system. Its leaders visited unspeakable violence on their opponents, causing armed ethno-national liberation movements to proliferate.
In the early 1990s, the centralizing military regime collapsed as allied rebels closed in. The Derg’s successor, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), ushered in a radical shift in managing the country’s diversity.
Formalized under Ethiopia’s 1995 federal constitution, internal boundaries were redrawn according to ethno-linguistic settlement patterns in an attempt to address the legacies of marginalization and subjugation.
This constitution grants “nations, nationalities, and peoples” an all-encompassing right to self-determination, including the right to secede from the federation through a constitutionally prescribed process. In theory, these group rights complement the constitution’s liberal protection of individual rights that are granted to all citizens.
Other core components of the right to self-determination are territorial self-rule for these nations, nationalities, and peoples, and protection of their cultural and linguistic rights. Regional states and sub-regional administrative units (nationality zones and special weredas) have been established to ensure that groups can exercise these rights.
The federal constitution states that all ethnic groups enjoy equal status and rights regardless of population sizes and settlement patterns, including the right to self-determination.
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This disregard for population size was mirrored in the party-state system created by the EPRDF which could be seen as anti-majoritarian partly because it gave an equal vote in the party’s decision-making organs to all parties, including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) even though the population of Tigray, which the TPLF represented, was only six to eight percent of Ethiopia’s.
The EPRDF preferred consensus-based governance in which unanimity was sought among members and elites from the four regional member parties and everyone was expected to get on board once decisions were made.
With its replacement by the Prosperity Party in 2019, that approach seems to have been abandoned by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, although there is a lack of clarity about regional representation within the executive bodies.
At the national level, fears of creeping majoritarianism, meaning the dominance in the political sphere of the two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, contributed to tensions that led to civil war in Tigray. Politically salient narratives of minority rule under the EPRDF have been used to justify persecution of Tigrayans orchestrated by the Prosperity Party-led state.
At the regional level, as in Oromia, Amhara, and Benishangul-Gumuz, some dominant groups appear emboldened to assert themselves even further over minority communities, leading to worsening violations.
Internal Minorities
Ethiopia is a country constructed of minorities in the sense that none of its communities constitute a numerical majority. Given this context, the federal system aimed to protect the rights of identity-based groups by empowering them through the granting of territorial autonomy.
Yet, while there are over eighty ethno-linguistic communities, there are only eleven regional states and around thirty sub-regional administrative units in which specific identity-based groups are granted territorial and political autonomy.
Given that no community lives exclusively in their homeland, all regional states are, to varying degrees, heterogenous and thus include internal minority groups.
While the federal constitution doesn’t distinguish between indigenous and non-indigenous minorities, and treats all groups identically under the law, this distinction is either explicitly or implicitly made in all of the regional constitutions.
Some of the regional constitutions, such as those of Gambella and Benishangul-Gumuz, specifically distinguish between indigenous or “owner” ethnic groups and others.
The federal constitution focuses closely on group rights, but individual rights are also protected and can be claimed by all Ethiopian citizens.
The key distinction is that indigenous minorities are territorially empowered and guaranteed the right to self-determination under the regional constitutions, whereas non-indigenous minorities can only claim individual rights as Ethiopian citizens under the federal constitution.
One aspect of this dichotomy with perilous ramifications is a narrative of “settlers” built around non-indigenous minorities, most often Amharas, linking them with past imperial aggressions in which “indigenous” people were violently subdued, dispossessed of their land, and discouraged from practicing their culture in the interest of state-led assimilation.
While it’s true that Ethiopian history is rife with attempts of forceful homogenization, these types of anti-imperial narratives are used by some as carte blanche to attack and forcibly displace non-indigenous minorities during bouts of violence.
Although people with non-indigenous identities are not legally excluded from the right to land, government jobs, or political representation, some Ethiopians believe the regional constitutions facilitate discriminatory outcomes.
In practice, non-indigenous minorities—such as Amharas and Gurages in Harari, Amharas in Oromia, Oromos in Amhara living outside of the Oromo Zone, and Amharas and Oromos in Benishangul-Gumuz—struggle to have their human rights protected.
Certain ethno-national groups are empowered over a given territory largely because they are demographically dominant, enjoy self-administration, and thus maintain control over political institutions while non-indigenous minorities within that territory are often excluded.
Other factors, like the operating language of the regional government and various informal practices that foster discrimination, assure that certain groups within a region enjoy political dominance.
For non-indigenous minorities in a given territory, these principles could mean exclusion from political participation and a lack of protective mechanisms.
Adem K. Abebe, an Ethiopian constitutional scholar based in the Netherlands, told Ethiopia Insight that, due in part to the first-past-the-post electoral systems, non-indigenous minorities “lack political representation in regional councils and local administrations,” which reinforces their subordination. As a result, “accessing public services can also be complicated for them.”
Owing to this set-up, minority communities often report administrative challenges posed by various informal practices.
For instance, Amharas in Oromia maintain that members of their community, especially those who don’t speak Afaan Oromoo, must rely on bribery in police departments and courts to get basic services easily granted to someone from the dominant group.
Meanwhile, Oromos and Amharas living under Harari region’s unique system claim the bureaucracy favors ethnic Hararis over others. Some small business owners also complain of the difficulties to get loans from government-linked microfinance institutions.
These challenges stem partly from the federal and regional constitutions’ failure to fully anticipate the issues faced by intra-regional or internal minorities.
So, ethno-territorial federalism has—in theory, if not always in practice—solved certain inequalities and minority rights issues at the national level, but it has also created new ones, owing to the presence of sizable minorities within each regional state.
While territorial self-rule is an empowering affirmation for the group or groups that are demographically dominant within a given territory, the rights of minority groups are frequently overlooked in decision-making processes, even on issues that directly impact them.
Unique Harari
Among Ethiopia’s eleven regional states, Harari is unique not just for its minuteness—the last census in 2007 put its population around 180,000—but also because the titular Harari nation assumes political dominance despite making up less than ten percent of the population.
This makes it an outlier region in which a minority population is empowered over other groups, including the Oromo who account for more than half of the population.
The political dominance of Hararis is expressed in the representation of their interests in the executive. Additionally, one of the two regional parliamentary chambers, the Harari National Council, is exclusively reserved for delegates from this group and the council recommends a candidate to serve as regional president.
Ordin Bedri, Harari’s current president, spoke glowingly of the federal arrangement and the need to realize that “diversity is the source of our strength” during the observation in late November of Nations and Nationalities Day, a day set to mark the advent of the current federal dispensation.
Nevertheless, tensions remain in the region, which is surrounded by Oromia’s East Hararghe Zone. Political haggling in the historic city of Harar mainly takes place between Hararis and Oromos.
Despite some accommodations, such as both Harari and Afaan Oromoo being regional working languages, some Oromos in the region feel they deserve a greater say in Harari politics to reflect their majority status.
A mid-level member of the ruling Prosperity Party’s regional branch expressed a concern among some Hararis that with Oromo politicians playing a more prominent and assertive role in national politics, Harari’s distinctive arrangement could be under threat.
Tsegaye, an ethnic Gurage shopkeeper who has lived in Harar for the past twelve years, believes members of other communities are relegated to third-class citizens. “It’s only a dream to imagine you can be treated equally” by local administrators, he told Ethiopia Insight.
For Amharas, who are the second largest group in the region, the existing arrangement is also seen as exclusionary and puts them in the unenviable position of having little to no political representation.
Despite this controversial set-up, Harar has been mostly spared from large-scale violence, although tensions between Hararis, Oromos, Amharas, and other communities do exist.
However, nearby Dire Dawa, a multi-ethnic self-administering city administration claimed by two neighboring regions, Oromia and Somali, has seen clashes in recent years. Dire Dawa’s own peculiar system, in which Oromos and Somalis each control 40 percent of the city’s administrative positions and others are allotted 20 percent, has been a point of contention.
Amhara’s Minorities
In Amhara region, in addition to the Oromo, two other minority communities are recognized by the regional constitution and administer their own nationality zones: the Agew Awi and the Agew Himra. Additionally, the Qemant and Argoba are granted the right to self-rule within their own Nationality Wereda.
Idris, a 28-year-old civil servant in Bati, a town in the Oromo Zone of Amhara region, generally feels at ease when he is in his hometown or its surroundings within the zone.
In the zone, regional minorities belonging to the Oromo nation like him are empowered, giving them the right to self-rule. They also have a relatively higher level of freedom to develop their language and other cultural practices.
For Idris, the right provided by the Oromo Zone to use one’s language in schools, courts, and administrative affairs is irreplaceable. He says other Oromos living in neighboring South Wollo, which is outside of the Oromo Zone, “do not have that privilege” and are forced to either assimilate with the dominant Amhara group or risk being treated differently.
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Such recognition grants these minority communities the right to set up local governments but has not resolved lingering issues—and there has also been plenty of violence.
Most notably, the question of Qemant identity is caught in a political struggle between the Amhara and Tigray regions that has led to the persecution of Qemant people in Amhara, protests over their rising demands for autonomy, and deadly inter-communal clashes.
Many Qemant refugees reportedly support the Qemant Liberation Army (QLA), an insurgent group fighting for more autonomy for the Qemant.
Also, the Oromo Zone, together with weredas in neighboring North Shoa Zone, has been a hotbed of violence that has occurred sporadically involving local armed forces and civilians, as well as interventions by federal police and defense forces.
As this shows, the option of granting special administrative status to minority groups at the sub-state level resolves some minority rights issues for those living in those units but leaves similar concerns unaddressed for co-ethnics living outside of these special areas.
It’s also notable that security concerns exist for Oromos living both within and outside of the Oromo Zone.
Idris recounted that, before the outbreak of civil war two years ago in the adjacent Tigray region, there used to be recurrent violent incidents, particularly around the month of Ramadan. The zone is inhabited predominantly by Muslim Oromos and, according to Idris, skirmishes happened with Amhara Orthodox Christians.
While non-Amhara groups in the region contribute to Amhara’s security apparatus, the demographic dominance of Amharas in the rank-and-file and in senior leadership has often meant, according to Idris, that during clashes between members of the Oromo and Amhara groups, the former feel security forces sided with the latter instead of being impartial arbiters.
Amharas in Oromia
Oromia is home to sizable minority populations, most notably Amharas, who, according to one estimate, represent up to ten percent of the region’s approximately 40 million people.
Since 2018, Oromia has been embroiled in violence between the OLA and federal and regional authorities, as well as between the Oromo and Amhara communities.
In early December, amid intensified fighting between government forces and the OLA, fresh rounds of attacks against civilians were reported in East Wollega Zone. What’s different this time around is the involvement of the Fano, armed Amhara militiamen, in attacking security and administrative figures.
This follows calls by Amhara activists for armed men from the group to offer protection to the minority population within the region, something they argue is not being provided by the region’s forces.
This spell of violence, however, has again seen minority Amharas being targeted.
Two Amhara men who fled their homes in Kiremu district in East Wollega Zone and were hiding in a place called Haro told Ethiopia Insight that regional police forces were actively involved in forcing people out and looting properties.
All three warring forces, Ethiopian authorities, Oromo insurgents, and Amhara militias, have been accused of attacking civilians, leading to thousands of deaths.
Regional authorities have allowed a perfect storm to brew by seemingly turning a blind eye—or worse—to escalating security emergencies and vulnerability of minorities.
The familiar pattern of these attacks involves security forces withdrawing from the area before militants attack and then two diametrically opposed narratives emerge as to who is responsible.
The OLA insurgency and communal violence in Oromia reflect the deep fissures in Ethiopian society that, since 1995, are articulated based on the multinational federal set-up.
Relations between the Oromo and Amhara communities are fraught owing to the legacies of the Neftegna-Gabbar feudal system. After its nineteenth century expansion, the Ethiopian empire used this system to control southern lands and resettled many Amharic-speaking people there.
Based on this history, Oromo nationalists see Amharas as settlers in indigenous Oromo land and view their presence in the region as a legacy of that brutal and exploitative system. This “neo-neftegna” narrative has been used to justify attacks on Amhara civilians living in Oromia.
Oromo nationalists typically support multinational federalism but claim the TPLF-led EPRDF never effectively implemented it. The prevailing opinion of Amhara and Ethiopian nationalists, meanwhile, is that the federal and Oromia region’s constitutions are primarily responsible for the bloodshed.
Amhara advocates claim Oromia’s constitution doesn’t provide equal standing to minority groups in relation to Oromo inhabitants, who are exclusively empowered over the region. The document places other groups in secondary status next to “people of the Oromo nation”.
For Adem K. Abebe, the recurrence of violence in the region against minorities is partly driven by a “monolithic” vision of Oromia in which some groups envision a homogenous region.
Amhara politicians and activists claim this neo-neftegna moniker is a dog whistle used to stoke the ethnic cleansing of Amhara “settlers” in Oromia. They also fear “Oromo supremacy” and constantly downplay narratives of oppression and exploitation put forward by Oromos.
For many Oromos, Abiy’s attempts to forge a single national identity and criticism of ethnic politics are seen as a battlecry against Oromia’s autonomy and self-determination. They accuse Fano of waging an expansionist campaign aimed at annexing parts of Oromia into Amhara.
In his critique of Medemer (Amharic for ‘coming together’), the governance philosophy championed by Abiy, Awol Allo, lecturer in law at Keele University, called the term “a new vocabulary to resurrect and operationalise the old assimilationist Amhara-centric model of state.”
He argues that Abiy “and his Amhara supporters” see Ethiopianization as inclusive and thus good while “ethno-national politics is bad because [it is] exclusionary.” The war in Tigray and violence in other parts of the country exhibit the ruins of this Ethiopianist vision, Awol adds, and, as a result, the “stench of disintegration is in the air.”
Benishangul Violence
In Benishangul-Gumuz, five groups are recognized by the region’s constitution as being indigenous: the Benishangul, Gumuz, Shinasha, Mao, and Komo. According to the last census, these groups collectively make up close to 57 percent of the region’s 784,000 residents.
The largest non-indigenous communities, the Amhara and the Oromo, are the second- and fourth-most populous groups in the region, respectively. They, along with the region’s Tigrayan and Agew communities, are deemed residents, not citizens, who can vote but—although they are legally permitted to do so—in practice are inhibited from running for office.
The regional constitution’s designation of five ethnic groups as “owners” makes an explicit division between natives and outsiders whose rights, notably access to land, are unequal.
An overarching struggle takes place between the Gumuz and Benishangul, two historically oppressed and sidelined communities who cherish their special privileges under the regional constitution, and others, notably Amharas, who view the measures instituted under the federal system to rectify this dark legacy as being discriminatory in their own right.
Since 2018, tensions among some of the indigenous and non-indigenous peoples have led to recurrent bloodshed. The entire region has seen ethnic-based violence, but Metekel in particular, followed by Kamashi and Assosa, has been the site of a stream of attacks.
While clashes over resources have long been common, the recent violence has been more unambiguous in its ethnic character. Thousands have been killed over the past four years amid clashes in which the Gumuz fight non-indigenous groups, mainly the Amhara, Agew, and Oromo, prompting the deployment of ill-disciplined government forces in the area.
Operations have also reportedly involved Amhara regional security forces crossing over the border into Metekel. Further complicating matters, elements of Benishangul-Gumuz’s security apparatus have reportedly sided with Gumuz militiamen against the federal army.
At times, fighting takes place between the indigenous groups, particularly among Gumuz and Shinasha communities. The latter are often labeled by the former as Qëy (light skinned), a designation the Gumuz also bestow on Amharas, Agews, Tigrayans, and Oromos.
By referring to indigenous groups as the region’s “owners”, critics argue, Benishangul-Gumuz’s constitution has institutionalized the relegation of others as “settlers” who do not belong to these areas. Non-indigenous groups have been subject to violent attacks motivated by concerns that outsiders are violating the rights of indigenous communities, specifically land rights.
In response, Demeke Mekonnen, the Deputy Prime Minister, called for Amhara civilians to be trained as community defense forces when he visited the region in October 2020. The regional government adopted this strategy of civilian defense and recruited over 10,000 militia members composed of non-indigenous groups who received government-sponsored military training in all weredas of the Metekel Zone.
At the same time, the region’s indigenous groups are engaged in a struggle to preserve their territorial autonomy and protections under the federal and regional constitutions.
The three empowered groups have also been subject to attacks at the hands of the non-indigenous groups because they are asserting their constitutional land rights.
Irredentist claims on parts of Benishangul-Gumuz, specifically Metekel Zone, by some ethno-nationalists in neighboring Amhara contribute to violence in the northeastern part of the region.
According to these ownership claims, the zone, which used to be in Gojjam Province before the federal arrangement, should be part of Amhara. Viewed more cynically, Amhara regional officials want to administer Metekel to control the zone’s mineral deposits and arable land.
Gumuz residents of Metekel fear a potential Amhara occupation and feel threatened by an influx of “outsiders”—namely, Amharas, Oromos, and Tigrayans—acquiring fertile land.
In the region’s south-west, meanwhile, there are spillover effects of the insurgency in Oromia.
OLA insurgents operating in neighboring East Wollega have been accused of launching attacks in bordering areas and fighting against groups like the Benishangul-Gumuz People’s Liberation Movement (BPLM).
Debating Solutions
The policy options to manage diversity in divided societies like Ethiopia include empowering ethnic communities through the grant of either territorial or non-territorial autonomy, devising a territorial or residency-based federalism, and strengthening national protections of minority groups while emphasizing the rights of Ethiopian citizens regardless of their ethnic background.
The primary solution offered by the 1995 constitution to protect minority rights is territorial, the ability to self-administer in response to issues of marginalization. In practice, desires to create new regional states or to secede under Article 39 were not permitted by the EPRDF, despite the party’s claim of zealous loyalty to the constitutional rights of identity-based groups.
In recent years, there has been increased motivation among groups, particularly in southern and south-western Ethiopia, to obtain more territorial autonomy.
However, a political dispensation focusing predominantly on territorial autonomy reinforces a system in which dominant groups continue to control political institutions and activities while perpetuating the marginalization of internal or sub-regional minorities.
Given the problems associated with both a unitarist system, as practiced during imperial times and by the Derg, and the EPRDF’s multinational federalism since 1995, renowned Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani has called for Ethiopia to embrace territorial federalism whereby the boundaries of constituent units are not aligned with ethnicity.
The limitations of the territorial approach in addressing the pressing issue of minority rights speaks to a need in Ethiopia to provide more effective protections of individual rights.
Non-territorial autonomy is an alternative or supplementary mechanism that could be used in Ethiopia. In a non-territorial system, members of each group living throughout the country elect representatives who then autonomously manage clearly defined areas of their national life, such as schools and cultural practices.
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Ethno-territorial federations do not allow violations of individual rights like freedom of movement, association, and speech, but, in practice, such violations do take place in Ethiopia.
Human rights violations in Ethiopia are often related to the universal individual rights that are protected by the federal constitution but are not always enforced. The regional constitutions, arguably, facilitate a variety of informal discriminatory practices.
The deficiencies of the current mechanisms in tackling issues of minority participation and protections warrant supplementing them with additional approaches.
One solution would be to draft a minority protection law. The federal government has the mandate to do so and such amendments would be binding to the regional states, but would only make a difference if implemented.
This raises the perennial debate over whether the constitution itself is the problem or rather the lack of constitutionalism, meaning the lack of proper implementation of this written document.
What’s clear is that, despite some potential flaws in Ethiopia’s constitutional design, particularly at the regional level, there is also a lack of enforcement.
In and around Tole, no significant measures have been taken since the massacre last June to ensure minorities are protected and lives shattered by the violence are rebuilt.
Calls for an independent investigation remain unanswered. Humanitarian needs remain unmet and survivors like Hassan say their feeling of security is attached to the presence of federal troops. In some cases, though, federal soldiers have been the ones committing atrocities.
Over the past five years, as Ethiopia continues to grapple with pervasive communal violence, the authorities’ preferred remedy has been to return people who fled their homes to their places of origin.
However, Hassan, who is now left to depend on aid, told Ethiopia Insight he wouldn’t “dream of” returning to western Oromia and living as a minority.
With so many lives at stake, the issue of minority protection is far too important and urgent for Ethiopia to ignore.
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Main photo: Berak IDP Site, Delo Mena Woreda, Bale Zone, Oromia; 15 January 2019; Mersha, UNICEF.
Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.