Tigray has resisted Ethiopia’s far greater military might for two years – here’s why neither side is giving in

December 7, 2023 by socweb

Protesters in the UK demonstrate against the war in Tigray, Ethiopia, in October 2022.
Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images

Asafa Jalata, University of Tennessee

The Ethio-Tigray war started on 4 November 2020. For almost two years, the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea – along with Amhara regional forces and militia – have waged war against Tigray’s regional government and society.

Tigray is a tiny ethnonational group that makes up about 6% of Ethiopia’s population of 121 million. Yet, it has been able to hold off well-armed military forces.

As a sociologist who has written extensively on the cultures of nationalism in the region, I have studied the deep and complex roots of this conflict. I believe that understanding its history is key to comprehending how Tigray has developed the resolve to hold off a far greater military might than its own.

Neither the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea nor those of Tigray accept the principles of compromise, peaceful coexistence or equal partnership. According to their political cultures, winners take all. It’s zero-sum politics.

The war today

The Ethiopian National Defence Force captured Mekelle, Tigray’s capital city, on 28 November 2020. The Ethiopian army was helped by Eritrean and Amhara military forces.   

Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, congratulated his army and allied forces for what looked like a quick victory.

However, the Tigrayan Defence Force made a tactical retreat. Its troops moved to rural areas and used guerrilla operations supported by war veterans. This strategy demonstrated Tigray’s effective fighting force, which was first developed in the 1970s.

As a result, eight months after the start of the war, Tigrayan troops returned to their capital. The Ethiopian army retreated from Mekelle and other cities.

Tigrayan troops then invaded the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, and almost made it into Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in November 2021. However, they soon retreated to their region.

Since then, Tigrayan forces have controlled and administered most of Tigray.

The Ethio-Tigray war has been devastating for Tigrayans. They have faced mass killings, military bombardment, rape, looting and the destruction of property. The conflict has denied them access to food, electricity, telecommunications, medicine, banking services and other necessities.

Yet they support the Tigray Defence Force. To understand why requires a deeper reading of Ethiopia’s history.

A complex history

Two Amhara emperors and one Tigrayan emperor laid the foundation of the modern imperial state of Ethiopia. The first emperor of Abyssinia/Ethiopia was Tewodros (1855-1868). He was followed by Yohannes IV (1872-1889) of Tigray and then Menelik II (1889-1913).

Under Menelik II, the Amhara state elite replaced Tigray’s leaders. They made Tigrayan society a junior partner in building the Ethiopian empire.

But Tigrayan nationalists believe their society was the foundation of the Ethiopian state.   

In the last decades of the 1800s, the Ethiopian empire expanded from its northern core of Tigray and Amhara by colonising the Oromo and other ethnonational groups.

It established slavery, the nafxanya-gabbar system (semi-slavery) and the colonial land-holding system by taking the land of conquered people.

The nafxanya (gun-carrying settlers) elite – led by the Amhara – dislodged the Tigrayan elite from Ethiopian state power. Tigray was pushed to the periphery of an Amhara-dominated society. This created political rivalry between the two groups.

The status and living conditions of the Tigrayan elite and people deteriorated. This, along with several wars in the region, aggravated political, economic and social problems.

Accumulated grievances and many forms of resistance produced the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in 1975. It aimed to liberate Tigrayans from Amhara-led governments. This helped develop Tigrayan nationalism.

Tigray’s two nationalisms

Tigrayans maintain two forms of nationalism.

The first promotes Tigrayan autonomy, self-reliance and development.

The second is Tigrayan Ethiopianism. This theoretically maintains Ethiopia’s current geopolitical boundary, with its decentralised political structures where different population groups have some autonomy.

After building military power in the 1980s, Tigrayan elite dominated other ethnonational groups, particularly the Oromo, the empire’s largest ethnonational group.

Between 1991 and 2018, the Tigrayan elite controlled state power and the political economy. The Tigrayan elite created a pseudo-democracy. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front was the mover and shaker of the Ethiopian state.

The Oromo expressed their collective grievances with this political arrangement through the struggles of the Oromo Liberation Front. The Qeerroo/Qarree (Oromo youth) movement got involved between 2014 and 2018. This eventually dislodged Tigrayan leadership from Ethiopian central power in 2018.

Abiy was a member of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organisation, a subsidiary political party of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The Tigrayan Front, alongside its allied organisations, elected Abiy as Ethiopia’s prime minister in April 2018. He later turned on his support base. 

Once he came to power, Abiy and his allies believed they wouldn’t stay in control if they did not destroy Tigrayan and Oromo nationalists. These were symbolised by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Oromo youth movement.

Zero-sum politics

Tigrayan and Amhara elites express and practice Ethiopianism differently.

The Amhara elite dominated Ethiopia from 1889 to 1991. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front overthrew them in 1991.

The wealth and experience Tigrayan elite accumulated over nearly three decades increased their national organisational capacity. This has helped them in the current war. 

The Oromo have rejected the dominance and tyranny of both these groups. They have carried out their liberation struggle.

Abiy and his Amhara collaborators are fighting Tigrayans, Oromos and others to control Ethiopian state power. Their winning the war in Tigray and Oromia would allow the Abiy regime to continue a modified version of Ethiopia’s pre-1991 policy.

For Tigrayans, losing this battle would be equivalent to losing political power and returning to victimisation, poverty and the threat of annihilation.

Uncertain future

Given their complicated political history, reconciling the central government and the Tigrayan regional government is challenging. Even if these two groups negotiate a peace deal, conflict will continue if the Oromo are left out of the process.

If Tigray and Oromia’s political problems aren’t correctly understood and resolved, conflicts will continue until the collapse of the Ethiopian state.

Asafa Jalata, Professor of Sociology and Global and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jalata Published in The Conversation

December 6, 2023 by socweb

‘Ethiopia’s other conflict’: what’s driving the violence in Oromia?

Oromo women protest against Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed over violence in their homeland  in 2020. Keith Mayhew via Getty Images

Asafa Jalata, University of Tennessee

In November 2020 an outbreak of violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region captured worldwide attention. The conflict was between Tigrayan forces and the forces of the Ethiopian government and its allies.

Since then, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been under increasing global pressure to negotiate with Tigrayan officials to stop the carnage in the region.

Even before fighting broke out in Tigray, though, the government had established military command posts in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest state. Oromo people were protesting and calling for self-determination. 

In Oromia’s latest wave of violence in June 2022, Al Jazeera, the New York Times and Reuters reported that hundreds of people had been killed by the Oromo Liberation Army in Wallaga, Oromia.

These news reports labelled all the victims Amharas, members of Ethiopia’s second-largest ethno-national group. The Oromo are the largest. 

As a scholar of Ethiopian politics and society, I’ve researched and written extensively on the Oromo movement, and identified the historical forces that have shaped its current politics.

My understanding – taking into account the history of oppression of the Oromo in Ethiopia and numerous reports by rights groups of attacks against the community – is that the violence in Oromia is mainly driven by the federal government and its agents. The Oromo Liberation Army is responding to state terrorism and gross human rights violations.

Oromo voices are not represented in the Ethiopian government, the global system or the media. The federal government and its allies, particularly Amhara elites and forces, blame the Oromo movement for the violence. This is a strategy to delegitimise the Oromo struggle for self-determination.

Oromo identity

The Oromo consider themselves a nation. They are estimated to make up between 35% and 50% of Ethiopia’s 115 million people. An exact figure is difficult to come by as the government doesn’t provide this data.

Ethiopia has about 80 ethno-national groups. The Amhara make up about 27% of the population. Their language, culture, history and religion have dominated other ethno-national groups. Their warlords and leaders have dominated Ethiopia’s political economy for almost 150 years.

Despite their numbers, the Oromo consider themselves colonial subjects. This is because, like other subjugated ethno-national groups, they have been denied access to their country’s political, economic and cultural resources.

Habasha (Amhara-Tigray) warlords colonised Oromia. The region was then incorporated into Abyssinia (the Ethiopian Empire) in the late 19th century.

Menelik II, the Ethiopian emperor, established a form of colonialism that settled Amhara, Tigrayan and other ethnic soldiers in Oromia. Most Oromos were reduced to serfs, providing free labour and tax revenue.

The colonial government claimed about three-quarters of Oromo lands for its officials and soldiers. It granted the remaining quarter to Oromo collaborators.

In the 1970s, to oppose political, economic and cultural marginalisation, Oromo nationalists created the Oromo Liberation Front. Its military wing is the Oromo Liberation Army. They wanted national self-determination and democracy, and participated in the failed revolutions of 1974, 1991 and 2018.

The Ethiopian state has continued to subject the Oromo people to violence and human rights violations. Successive Ethiopian governments have caused deep social, political, cultural and economic crises in Oromo society.

Drivers of violence

The government and the Oromo Liberation Front have blamed each other for the latest outbreak of violence in Oromia, particularly in Wallaga.

A sub-group of the Oromo, the Macha, live in Wallaga. They have been targets of the Ethiopian government and expansionist Amharas, who claim to be the original owners of the region.

During the famine of the 1970s, desperate Tigrayans, Amharas and Oromos from elsewhere settled in Wallaga. Amhara expansionists began to call all these people Amharas to justify their claim to the territory.

Prime Minister Ahmed has taken the side of Amhara expansionists.

Ahmed came to power in 2018 mainly because of the Oromo struggle but later turned against the movement. His vision is of a centralised state rather than self-determination for Ethiopia’s different groups.   

The state’s ideology of “Ethiopianism” has been used to justify the subordination of the Oromo and other colonised peoples. It has empowered the class that dominates the bureaucracy, army, culture, Orthodox Christianity and Ethiopian colonial-political economy.

The Oromo Liberation Army, which has been outlawed and labelled a terror group, asserts that the government has created a clandestine security structure that masquerades as the Oromo army. It says this structure is responsible for the latest attack and those before it.

Between December 2018 and December 2019, in southern Oromia, government soldiers displaced 80,000 Oromos and detained more than 10,000.

An Amnesty International report found that state soldiers executed 52 people over this period on suspicion that they supported the Oromo Liberation Army. 

The government additionally took incarcerated Oromos through mandatory training for several months. These detainees were trained on the constitution and the history of the Oromo people. These “lessons” were intended to get the detainees to abandon the quest for nationalism.

A July 2022 Human Rights Watch report termed the government’s actions in western Oromia “abusive”. It documented communication shutdowns, executions and arbitrary detentions. 

Way forward

The global community must pressure the Ethiopian government to reach peace with the Oromo Liberation Army. However, this will only be successful if a neutral body mediates on behalf of the United Nations.

Ahmed’s government is willing to negotiate with the Tigrayan defence forces mainly because of the pressure from global powers. However, it refuses to reconcile with the Oromo Liberation Front and is determined to solve a political problem militarily. 

Ethiopia cannot be at peace without an independent reconciliation body that solves the Oromo political problem fairly and democratically.

Asafa Jalata, Professor of Sociology and Global and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Brown Selected for Visiting Fellow in Glasgow

December 5, 2023 by socweb

Michelle Brown, professor and associate head in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, received a 2022 Visiting Fellow to the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences to spend July at the Scottish Centre of Crime and Justice Research. 

Brown, a leading abolitionist scholar, will work with faculty to investigate Scotland’s historical ties to slavery and its effects on present day punishment. Brown is the first abolitionist scholar to visit the University of Glasgow. 

“I’ll be there giving talks, meeting students, and facilitating workshops on these issues, as well as building digital spaces to be accessible and usable for students and community members organizing around criminal justice reform,” Brown said. “At this point in my career, everything I’m doing is collaborative. I work with students and communities across the United States and the world on these transformative issues. I want this work to be much more international.” 

According to Brown, 1 out of 2 Americans have a loved one in prison or jail, including her. 

“I grew up with family members who were both in the system and working in the system and several of them suffered various forms of exclusion and punishment from poverty and addiction,” Brown said. “Mass incarceration and the criminal justice system today is seen as the singular and only answer to all of our major social problems. Pushing for alternatives to prison and punishment is part of the reason I’ve been invited to Glasgow.”

Brown is part of numerous sponsored projects through 2022 and 2023 in effort to progress her research and teachings. She is the author of The Culture of Punishment and co-author of Criminology Goes to the Movies. Brown has received several different awards, including the 2016 Criminal Criminologist of the year by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. Her work in Scotland this summer will continue to research imprisonment and alternatives to punishment. 

“The students and faculty are deeply excited to bring a leading abolitionist scholar for the first time to Scotland,” said one of Brown’s sponsors. “This movement is of urgent interest in Scotland as the country and university confronts its historical ties to slavery and its current excessive use of punishment.”

Her outreach at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences will focus on sensory criminology, transformative justice and trans-Atlantic abolition movements, and anti-prison work and freedom-making practices in Scotland and the UK. Additionally, Brown will also be attending the Law & Society conference in Lisbon. 

“We are so proud of the international reputation Michelle has made for herself as one of the world’s leading critical criminologists,” said Stephanie Bohon, professor and head of the UT Department of Sociology. 

While in Scotland, Brown plans to go hiking, explore the music scene, and visit the Highland mountains. In the future she hopes to be able to be in Scotland for a full year and explore all it has to offer for criminology. 

“For me, it is not just about my work, but the cumulative work of trusting what we do in class and with our research at a university that can have these ripple effects that add up to something much larger than me,” Brown said. “I love those moments.”

-Story by Leah Carter

Derek Chauvin trial begins in George Floyd murder case: 5 essential reads on police violence against Black men

December 8, 2022 by socweb

Catesby Holmes, The Conversation

The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is underway in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Chauvin, who is white, is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter in connection with the death of George Floyd, who was Black, during an arrest last May. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds, Floyd – handcuffed and face down on the pavement – said repeatedly that he could not breathe, while other officers looked on.

A video of Floyd’s agonizing death soon went viral, triggering last summer’s unprecedented wave of mass protests against police violence and racism. Chauvin’s murder trial is expected to last up to four weeks.

These five stories offer expert analysis and key background on police violence, Derek Chauvin’s record and racism in U.S. law enforcement.

1. Police violence is a top cause of death for Black men

Since 2000, U.S. police have killed between 1,000 and 1,200 people per year, according to Fatal Encounters, an up-to-date archive of police killings. The victims are disproportionately likely to be Black, male and young, according to a study by Frank Edwards at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, in Newark.

In 2019, Edwards and two co-authors analyzed the Fatal Encounters data to assess how risk of death at the hands of police varies by age, sex and race or ethnicity. They found that while “police are responsible for a very small share of all deaths” in any given year, they “are responsible for a substantial proportion of all deaths of young people.”

Police violence was the sixth-leading cause of death for young men in the United States in 2019, after accidents, suicides, homicides, heart disease and cancer.

That risk is particularly high pronounced for young men of color, especially young Black men.

“About 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys are killed by police” during their lifetime, Edwards wrote.

In contrast, the general U.S. male population is killed by police at a rate of .52 per 1,000 – about half as often.

2. Chauvin has a track record of abuse

Many police officers who kill civilians have a history of violence or misconduct, including Chauvin.

In an article on police violence written after George Floyd’s killing, criminal justice scholar Jill McCorkel noted that Derek Chauvin was “the subject of at least 18 separate misconduct complaints and was involved in two additional shooting incidents.”

During a 2006 roadside stop, Chauvin was among six officers who fired 43 rounds into a truck driven by a man wanted for questioning in a domestic assault. The man, Wayne Reyes, who police said aimed a sawed-off shotgun at them, died. A Minnesota grand jury did not indict any of the officers.

Nationwide fewer than one in 12 complaints of police misconduct result in any kind of disciplinary action, according to McCorkel.

3. Bad police interactions hurt Black families

Even when officers who use excessive force are fired, as Chauvin was after the George Floyd killing, these incidents – occurring so frequently, for so many years – take an emotional toll on Black communities.

In a 2020 Gallup survey, one in four Black men ages 18 to 34 reported they had been treated unfairly by police within the last month.

The racism and inequality researchers Deadric T. Williams and Armon Perry analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which surveyed nearly 5,000 families from U.S. cities, and found that negative police interactions have “far-reaching implications for Black families.”

“Fathers who reported experiencing a police stop were more likely to report conflict or lack of cooperation in their relationships with their children’s mother,” they wrote.

Black mothers also report “feelings of uncertainty and agitation” after Black fathers are stopped by police, Williams and Perry found. That can “affect the way that she views the relationship, leading to anger and frustration.”

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4. This happens far less in Europe

According to a 2014 study on policing in Europe and the U.S. by Rutgers researcher Paul Hirschfield, American police were 18 times more lethal than Danish police and 100 times more lethal than Finnish police.

The top reason for this difference, Hirschfield wrote in an article explaining his findings, is simple: guns.

In most U.S. states, it is “easy for adults to purchase handguns,” Hirschfield wrote, so “American police are primed to expect guns.” That may make them “more prone to misidentifying cellphones and screwdrivers as weapons.”

U.S. law is relatively forgiving of such mistakes. If officers can prove they had a “reasonable belief” that lives were in danger, they may be acquitted for killing unarmed civilians. In contrast, most European countries permit deadly force only when it is “absolutely necessary” to enforce the law.

“The unfounded fear of Darren Wilson – the former Ferguson cop who fatally shot Michael Brown – that Brown was armed would not have likely absolved him in Europe,” writes Hirschfield.

5. American policing has racist roots

Well before modern gun laws, racism ran deep in American policing, as criminal justice researcher Connie Hassett-Walker wrote in June 2020.

In the South, the first organized law enforcement was white slave patrols.

“The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s,” Hassett-Walker wrote. By century’s end, every slave state had them. Slave patrols could legally enter anyone’s home based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

Northern police forces did not originate in racial terror, but Hassett-Walker writes that they nonetheless inflicted it.

From New York City to Boston, early municipal police “were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime,” writes Hassett-Walker. “Officers were expected to control ‘dangerous classes’ that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor.”

This history persists today in the negative stereotypes of Black men as dangerous. That makes people like George Floyd more likely to be treated aggressively by police, with potentially lethal results.

Catesby Holmes, International Editor | Politics Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.