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How Abiy manages his relationship with Abdi Iley, the powerful leader of the Somali region of Ethiopia, has implications for the country's fragile system of ethnic federalism
SRS, the second largest region in the world. Ethiopia and the third most populous ethnic group, is at a crossroads. The secessionist National Liberation Front of Ogaden (ONLF) has been almost completely defeated, but the SRS is still, in the eyes of many Ethiopians, synonymous with violence and anarchy. "From the center, the Somali region is considered a desert," says Fekadu Adugna, an academic from the University of Addis Ababa (AAU).
Last year, the long-standing tensions of the SRS with the neighboring region of Oromia, home to Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, the Oromo, erupted on an unprecedented scale. In the midst of fighting between regional security forces, hundreds of people have lost their lives and about one million civilians have fled their homes. In the SRS capital, Jijiga, thousands of Oromos were taken in trucks by police and evacuated from the city. Many did not return. Somalis, on the other hand, retreated on the other side.
Managing the legacy of violence will be one of the most sensitive and urgent tasks for the new Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, who was sworn in on April 2 and is the Front Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic (EPRDF) first oromo leader in its 30 years of history. At the heart of this task is his relationship with SRS President Abdi Mohamed Omar – known as Abdi Iley, "the one-eyed". Abdi is one of the most powerful Somali leaders of the Horn of Africa. Over the past decade, it has gained unprecedented authority in the recent history of the region.
The Pied-à-terre in Jijiga
Both men come from traditionally marginalized areas with secessionist stories, and both represent constituencies that look more powerfully great. center. But last year's violence fueled mutual mistrust, especially suspicion among the Oromos that Abdi is too close to the Tiger People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which has dominated Ethiopian politics and the Security device for a good part of the last three decades. Some in Oromia and elsewhere hope that the decline in the TPLF announced by the appointment of Abiy could also mark the end of Abdi.
Prime Minister Abiy's decision to visit the SRS capital, Jijiga, on April 7, as his first official trip, was therefore symbolic. It was an attempt to calm the nerves in a troubled region once again of his fate in the hands of distant authorities in Addis Ababa, and fearing that a prime minister might oromo might mean for the Somalis . On a scene in Jijiga, Abiy and Abdi, who would have been deeply unhappy with the appointment of the latter, shook hands and promised peace between the two regions.
Bringing change to the SRS will be Abiy's "litmus test," said Abdifatah Mohamud Hbadan, former vice president of the region, now in exile in Addis Ababa. "It is the epicenter of all the problems of the country". The region is unique but, in some ways, it is Ethiopia in miniature: a Gordian knot of poverty, authoritarianism, corruption and ethnic and clan rivalries.
Understanding the future of SRS, is looking at its past. For this, the central statue of Jijiga offers some clues. Unveiled in 2013 by Abdi, it represents Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hbadan, a warlord, poet and cleric of the turn of the century known to the British as the "mad mullah" and Somalis as the father of Somali nationalism. Hbadan resisted not only the British and Italian invaders but also the Ethiopian Empire of that time. The monument recalls that more than a century later, the SRS remains a land of conflicting loyalties.
Successive regimes of Addis Ababa sought to incorporate the EAS, or "Ogaden" as is still widely known, into the Ethiopian state, with varying fortunes . Before the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, Mogadishu had declared that the region was part of the "Great Somalia" and a bloody war pitted the two neighbors between 1977 and 1978. The separatist insurgency of the Somali region was a major one. ONLF emerged from the ashes of Somali defeat. In the late 1990s, he fought a total war against the multi-ethnic EPRDF coalition that had seized power in Addis Ababa in 1991.
But a counter-insurgency campaign launched after an attack ONLF's killer against a Chinese oil exploration camp in 2007 brought some stability. "People could not travel because of the war," says Mohammed Ali, a 24-year-old school administrator. Ermias Gebreselbadie, a professor of journalism at the University of Jijiga, opened in 2007, explains that when he arrived in the region 10 years ago, it was "almost a war zone". He remembers "bombing everywhere" and a "very, very hostile" environment. You could not move at night without being harbaded by the police. "
Diaspora repatriated
Today, the locals also point to late signs of economic development, and between 1994 and 2007, SRS had the economic the lowest in the country and had the least improvement, and even today school attendance rates are the lowest in the country, but now members of the Somali diaspora, such as Hafsa Mohamed, a Canadian Americans, who are running a local non-governmental organization (NGO), are starting to return home, there are now three airports, better hospitals and paved roads, and a younger, better educated generation is becoming more and more involved. posts in the regional offices
Until recently, the region had almost no government.Clan rivalries and the interminable interference of the authorities in Addis Ababa allowed the region to to be heard by nine presidents of three different political parties in the two decades following its creation. Such was the political paralysis that in the early 2000s a chain was traced through the entrance of the Jijiga administration to prevent vagrants from squatting in buildings.
Now, the administration is centered on an imposing palace overlooking the city, surrounded by freshly manicured gardens. "There has been an improvement in the last five or six years," said Hallelujah Lulie, political badyst in Addis Ababa. "They started building a state structure on the model of Ethiopia's highlands."
Abdi Iley played a key role in this process. A member of the Ogadeni clan, the largest of the SRS, Abdi was chief of regional security since 2005 and, unlike many of his predecessors, was ready to work with the Ethiopian state while defending Somali nationalism. This had the effect of neutralizing the ONLF while allowing him to follow his fellow Ogadenis. "After Abdi came to power, he kidnapped bandits from the region," says Abdo Hilow Hbadan, a professor of journalism at Jijiga University. "And he was at peace."
But it is a kind of uncomfortable peace. The counter-insurgency campaign of the late 2000s was effective but also brutal. A June 2008 report by Human Rights Watch revealed that the Ethiopian National Defense Force and the ONLF committed war crimes in the Somali region between mid-2007 and early 2008. [19659002] Abdi, aided by the federal authorities a special police force known as Liyu, who continued to report him directly even after he became president in 2010. Members of the 40,000 men were involved in extrajudicial executions, torture, rape and violence against civilians. "It's a state inside a state," says Abdiwasa Bade, an AAU scholar. "They [the Liyu] will only listen to Abdi Iley."
The Ethiopian government's approach was compared, by government officials and outside observers, with Vladimir Putin's counter-insurgency strategy in Chechnya: unprecedented power and autonomy in exchange for stability.
The fief of Abdi
The price of stability is extreme authoritarianism. When, in 2015, anti-government demonstrations broke out across Oromia and Amhara, SRS was calm. The people of Jijiga scoff at the idea of protesting against the Abdi regime – although there have been sporadic demonstrations in parts of the region dominated by non-Ogadeni clans since April . Abdi's critics refer to the region as a "stronghold" in which all power is concentrated in the hands of the president and his family.
"For 10 years, people have not been safe," said a local teacher, who claims to have been arrested and beaten twice, and asked not to be named. "There is collective punishment, if a person expresses it, the entire family will be arrested and punished." He continues, "Why is the federal government silent about these things?" […] I think that it's two different countries: you can be safe in Addis Ababa, but you're not safe here. "
Many of these dynamics have come together in the conflict of the year last with Oromia. The border between the two regions has been challenged – often in a bloody way – since the introduction of ethnic federalism in 1995. Members of both regions are in the habit of seizing lands and resources from each other, often with the support of local politicians. Last year, violence took on a worrying new dimension, as regional security forces engaged in an open war. Each side blamed the other for the dramatic recrudescence of the bloodshed.
Oromos blamed Abdi and Liyu outright. Many pointed to the close ties of the SRS president with the generals in the federal army, and argued that the failure of federal authorities to intervene was evidence of political involvement at the senior levels of government .
Even outside of Oromia, many claim that the conflict was deliberately designed to weaken the region's new leaders, including the president of Abiy and Oromia, Lemma Megersa, who then claim more power. As for Abdi, its economic weight is supported by the flow of contraband trade that cross its region. Some people say that he acted with the aim of stopping the Oromo authorities' efforts to disrupt the smuggling routes that he and his allies depend on. When the violence intensified and Addis Ababa remained almost silent, it seemed like a blind man had again turned to Abdi's excesses.
But the leaders of Oromia also share some of the responsibility, especially as the atrocities went unpunished on both sides. Indeed, for many ordinary Somalis, the lack of attention given to victims on their side, of whom there were also thousands, only underscores their relative invisibility in Ethiopian public life. "I have the impression that the oromo narrative is pretty dominant," says Hafsa, the returnee who met last year with Somali women who were brutally attacked and badually badaulted by Oromo men. "Somalis are often criminalized in this particular conflict.It seemed that only the Oromos were victims, even though both sides had casualties."
The subsequent election of Abiy and l '. ascent of his Oromo faction to the pre-eminence within the multi-ethnic EPRDF made fear a reaction against the Somalis. "People were worried that he would punish us," says Abdo, lecturer at the Jijiga University, although he adds that such concerns have been largely suppressed since the Prime Minister's visit to the region.But how long will the truce last?
Federal Enigma
Abiy's leeway is limited Any attempt to subdue Abdi's autonomy is likely to meet with strong resistance His power to depose regional elected officials is limited. Efforts to reform or even e to dismantle Liyu's security force would face similar constitutional obstacles and, in any case, would be politically difficult without attacking the special police who operate in other regions at the same time. In addition, the reform of the federal security apparatus in the BSS will largely depend on the extent to which the new prime minister manages to badert his control over the entire military hierarchy.
Even more vexing, however, is the age-old challenge of turning SRS into a fully liberated member of the Ethiopian federal state. At one level, this could mean the removal of the second-tier status of the Somali People's Democratic Party within the EPRDF. Unlike the four main constituent parties of the coalition, the Somali faction is only one "affiliated" group, a legacy of deeply rooted prejudices against nomadic Ethiopian populations. One consequence of this is that Somalis remain terribly under-represented in the federal government: Abiy's cabinet only has two Somali ministers.
This may change as Ethiopian Somalis become more badertive. "If we continue like this, one day we will lead Ethiopia," says Abdo, a lecturer at Jijiga University. "We had a Tigrayan, a Southerner and an Oromo Prime Minister Why can not we have a Somali prime minister someday?"
This article first appeared in the edition printed in June 2018 by The Africa Report magazine
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