The Ethiopian State: Authoritarianism, Violence and Clandestine Genocide

"Modern" Ethiopia has been created and maintained through the achievement of external legitimacy. As the European colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, and Italy enabled the Abyssinian (Amhara-Tigray) warlords to create the modern Ethiopian Empire during the last decades of the nineteenth century, successive hegemonic world powers, namely England, the former USSR, and the United States, has maintained the existence of various Ethiopian government until now. At the same time, the successive Amhara-Tigray regimes have failed to achieve internal legitimacy among the more colonized peoples while maintaining some degree of legitimacy among the minority Abyssinian population. While authoritarian rule has been sufficient to maintain semblance of public order among the Abyssinian population, state terrorism and massive human rights violations have been widely used in an attempt to control the colonized peoples, particularly the largest national group, the Oromo, creating political instability, conflict and war, recurrent famines, poverty, and underdevelopment. The achievement of stability, peace, and development in Ethiopia requires a genuine democratic paradigm that includes decolonization, self-determination, and popular sovereignty. The "modern" Ethiopian state emerged in the second half of the 19th century, resulting from the confluence of three factors: the intervention of European powers in the Horn of Africa, the intensification of the process of political centralization in Abyssinia proper, and the increased war-making capacity of Amhara-Tigray warlords that resulted from asymmetric access to European firearms. These three factors occurred in the context of the development of capitalism in Western Europe and its expansion into Africa in the international political process of colonization known as the "Scramble for Africa." The intervention of European colonial powers in Abyssinia proper facilitated the process of political centralization by increasing the war-making capacity Amhara-Tigray warlords thus enabling them to gradually create the Ethiopian Empire. With the support of European powers, the Abyssinian/Ethiopian state emerged as a dependent-client state whose legitimacy on the world stage was dependent upon its relationship with a sequence of world powers who served as its benefactors. As a dependent-client state, the Ethiopian Empire achieved external legitimacy but lacked internal legitimacy from the ethnonations who were colonized and forced into the empire at gunpoint. The successive regimes of Menelik, Haile Selassie, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Meles Zenawi have followed similar policies and practices in achieving external legitimacy while promoting a series of different ideological discourses to legitimize their respective governments. The modern Ethiopian state has survived to the present day without achieving internal legitimacy. For more than a century, it has defended the interests of the Amhara-Tigray heads of state, state elites, and, to lesser degree, the interests of the Amhara-Tigray ethnonational groups from which the successive state leaders have emerged. While drawing its external political legitimacy from external powers, this state, through its leadership, has attempted to construct and maintain itself using the particularistic ideological foundations of Semitic ancestry, Orthodox Christianity, and Abyssinian (Amhara-Tigray) political culture within a political unit made up of a multinational and multi-religious population. As a result, the leadership has been unable to create the social consensus necessary to achieve the level of internal legitimacy necessary for Ethiopia to transform itself into a viable and self-sufficient country. To maintain their power, successive state leaders have maintained order through authoritarian structures where that is sufficient and state terrorism when necessary. Consequently, Ethiopia has remained an impoverished empire-state known to the world for its recurrent famines, wars, diseases, abject poverty, and a lack of respect for human rights. …