Redefining protest in Ethiopia: what happens to the 'terror' narrative when
Muslims call for a secular state?
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/awol-allo> Awol Allo and
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/abadir-m-ibrahim> Abadir M. Ibrahim
23 October 2012
>From the periphery, Ethiopian Muslim protesters have recently turned a page
in the history of the country. They have proven that demonstrations by
religious groups can be peaceful, that secularism can be the aim of these
groups instead of their nemesis and that a radical Islamist agenda doesn't
have to be the dominant one.
The early contact between Ethiopia and Islam is romantic. It begins in the
days when Islam was a new religion in Arabia and Muslims a persecuted
minority. When persecution by their Arab kin became unbearable, early Muslim
converts sought and were granted refuge by an ancient Ethiopian-Christian
King, an asylum that is depicted spectacularly in Islamic theological
history. For centuries to come, when Islamic conquest was expanding in the
region and beyond, the Muslim Caliphs returned the favour by not invading
the Ethiopian-Christian kingdom in accordance with the prophet's order to "
<
http://zelalemkibret.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/ethiopia-and-the-middle-ea
st-haghai-erlich.pdf> leave the Ethiopians alone". After a millennium and a
half, the two, conjoined in this unique way, may be on the verge of a
monumental turning point in their common history.
While the romanticized relationship would not last. Muslim Caliphates and
Emirates later made numerous attempts at invading the Christian Kingdom only
to be <
http://www.selamta.net/history.htm> halted by the latter. The Empire
would also begin persecuting, forcefully baptizing and even, at times,
<
http://www.ethiopianmuslims.net/Islam_in_Ethiopia/Islam_in_Wallo%25Yohannes
.htm#46> massacring its Muslim minority. As late as the 1980s, when they
probably constituted the
<
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2007/90097.htm> largest demographic
block, Ethiopian Muslims were treated as foreigners in their own country.
Ironically it was a Marxist Leninist dictatorship, responsible for the end
of imperial rule in the country, which finally established religious
equality and secularism. Today, four decades later, formal equality still
persists. However, the Orthodox Christian community still represents the
socio-cultural mainstream; a situation that leads many Muslims to conceive
themselves as inhabiting the periphery on the Ethiopian political map and
social ethos.
Even though the principles of freedom of religion, equality and secularism
have now been entrenched in its
<
http://www.politicsresources.net/docs/ethiopiaconst.pdf> constitution,
Ethiopia is far from realizing these ideals. Recently, the state media has
been accusing 'elements' in the Muslim population of conspiring to commit
crimes including terrorism and mass violence. At the same time, voices
within the Muslim community, mainly through social media and peaceful
protest, have been accusing the state of hijacking Muslim organizations
nationwide and introducing and forcefully promoting a new sect in the name
of fighting Islamic extremism.
Out of this battle a number of fascinating trends are emerging. In most of
the Middle East, Muslims have generally tended to advocate for some form of
state recognition of religion or even theocracy, but the Ethiopian Muslim
movement is pushing for a secular state. For the first time in the country's
history, also, an organized non-violent protest has been launched. Unlike in
the past, the most important political initiative is coming not from the
centre but from the periphery, from the Muslim population of Ethiopia.
The Majlis: where the trouble started
At the centre of the controversy lies the institution that is supposedly
representative of the Muslim population in Ethiopia: the Ethiopian Islamic
Affairs Supreme Council (popularly known as the "Majlis"). Although there
seems to be a popular consensus regarding the need for an institution of its
ilk, the institution has a dark political history and a dubious legal basis.
The Majlis was established by the Marxist-Leninist military regime in
solidarity with the urban Muslim population who supported the revolution
that led to the downfall of the Orthodox-Christian imperial regime. Unlike
other religious organizations, however, the Majlis was not established by or
through law; it was established simply because it was willed by a handful of
Muslims and the military elite in the capital, Addis Ababa.
After the fall of the military regime, the Majlis' legal status changed,
though its precarious legal identity remained. Established as a non-profit
and non-political body corporate, the Majlis now functions more like an
administrative-executive arm of the state that not only professes to
represent but also regulate the Muslim community and its faith. Every year,
together with the leaders of the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches,
the head of the Majlis makes televised public statements on national
holidays. But akin to the executive branch of the state, and unlike the
other religious bodies, it has additional extra-legal powers. One of these
is its de facto power to veto the registration and licensing of any
Islamic/Muslim organizations in the country, which means that a legally
registered Muslim non-governmental organization or association can be shut
down by the Majlis' orders. Another significant governmental power arrogated
to Majlis' concerns is its regulatory power over issues of visa and travel
to Hajj (Muslim pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia). An Ethiopian Muslim going on
pilgrimage should get her travel documents and even her air ticket through
the Majlis, which charges exorbitant fees and inflated travel costs. Thus,
without any legal basis, the organization exercises the power of
representation, correspondence, diplomacy and even public administration,
and all this in the name of Ethiopian Muslims.
As a de facto organization that is recognized and legitimized by the state,
the Majlis has also been able to
<
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2010/148688.htm> flout regulatory rules
applicable to non-governmental organizations such as licensing, renewal and
annual audit reports. The sheer amount of power the Majlis wields is
certainly no accident. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with the state
whereby it provides control over major mosques, charities and the 'Muslim
voice'. In return, the state provides tenure to its leaders who are taken
care of relatively reasonably for occupying formally 'unpaid' posts and
tolerates the de facto administrative/executive powers that the institution
and its leaders have come to enjoy. From the perspective of Muslims, this
arrangement is tolerated mainly because the Majlis stands for the idea that
Muslims have an organization that represents them on a par with the
historically influential Orthodox Christian Church.
Maintaining a delicate balance between right to religion, secularism and
political expediency
The Majlis' operation outside the bounds of the written laws can be
partially explained by the precarious type of secularism practiced in the
country whereby the state is not explicitly religious but tightly controls
religious establishments. This it does without any explicit or implicit
authority of the written law. The state's hegemony over the Majlis, or other
religious organizations, has however never gone unchallenged as the
community of believers wrestles for and seesaws over control. For most of
the last two decades, some mutually tolerable balance was maintained with
the right hand always on the side of the state.
This balance was recently disrupted when the state decided essentially to
launch a sectarian conflict and weigh in on the side of the underdog that
the state had introduced. Prompted by the expansion of Wahabi/Salafi trends
in Ethiopia and the neighbouring countries and a spike in inter-religious
civil clashes, the state took matters a step farther when it decided to
import a new and presumably more peaceful and tolerant Islamic sect from
Lebanon under its protection. The followers of the sect, who are primarily
Lebanese, are known as the "
<
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=53
1772> Ahbash" (trans. "the Ethiopians/Abyssinians"), a reference to its now
deceased Ethiopian leader who rose to this rank being exiled to Beirut.
Before its state-sponsored introduction, the Ahbash sect did not have more
than a dozen or two followers in Ethiopia. Given the capacity of this third
world state, struggling to implement even mundane administrative tasks, this
was an piece of adventurism destined to fail.
According to the <
http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2011/195541.htm> US
State Department Terrorism Report, Ethiopia's Ministry of Federal Affairs
launched a nation-wide training in July 2011 to train Imams and Quranic
scholars throughout the country. In an article published in
<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/23/the_meles_inheritance>
Foreign Policy, Mohammed Ademo identifies the trainers as Lebanese Ahbash
scholars, confirming the protestor's claim that the state is undertaking a
mass Ahbashization of Ethiopian muslims. The training included both theology
and political indoctrination in which mosque leaders and scholars were
introduced to Ethiopia's "revolutionary democracy" as a unique and superior
existing system of governance which would guarantee the country's
'continued' political and economic salvation. It looks like the eventual
plan was to marginalize or get rid of other sects seen as politically or
ideologically hostile to the regime from positions of influence by assigning
these scholars as Imams to mosques all over the country.
This was not only a disturbance of the already illegal but delicate balance,
but was a clear and escalated violation of the country's constitution and
its international human rights obligations. It was also clumsy in its
implementation. The state's actions including videos of high state officials
proclaiming their plot to introduce the new sect flooded the social media.
Soon enough, an overwhelming majority of the Muslim population opposed the
intervention and rejected the new sect's doctrines before the latter even
reached the market place of ideas. In the end, the fight was not one of
theology but of constitutional principle; it was to turn into a genuine
struggle by a religious community for a secular state.
Given the history of the nation and the delicate balance in place, the state
should have expected that such an overt intervention would not go down well
with the majority of Muslims who already think that the state interferes too
much in their organization and the public expression of their faith. As the
regime begun deploying trained al-Ahbash preachers into mosques and
religious schools throughout the country, coercing mosque leaders to
cooperate with the new scholars, there emerged a wave of small-scale
protests across the country. While the overarching question that animates
the life of the protest is the demand for religious freedom, an irreducible
political demand lies at its core. Insofar as they are demanding an end to
state interference in religious affairs, theirs is a demand for secularism
born out of the recognition that the realm of the divine is constitutionally
excluded from the dominion of the state. It is a protest against the
political use of an institution that supposedly represents and speaks on
behalf Muslims but does not really represent them in any meaningful sense of
the term.
During a question and answer session in
<
http://www.ethiotube.net/video/19271/PM-Meles-Zenawi-answers-parliament-mem
bers-questions-April-17-2012--Part-3> Parliament, the late Prime Minister
Meles Zenawi provided the ideological-political framework for the on-going
Ahbash debacle. Zenawi denounced
<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvoDm6Wl1ZM> the protest, blaming and
dismissing the protesters' demands as an orchestration of violence by
"extremist Salafi elements". The Prime Minister situated the threat posed by
'Salafi' ideology within the broader geopolitics of the region. In that same
speech, Zenawi drew connections between Salafi ideological proximity to
al-Qaeda, its destabilizing role in neighbouring Somalia, and the broader
war on terror. Exaggerating the imminence of the threat presented by the
movement, in order to favour the supposed moderates, he pointed to two
specific sites in Ethiopia-Bale and Arsi-where he said a Salafi cell has
been uncovered.
In a nation where there are no vacancies for fact-checkers, Zenawi knew that
no one could call him out on specifics. Whatever the facts, Zenawi's
statements had the effect of establishing a hinge between the protest and
al-Qaeda, via the "extremist Salafi elements" deemed responsible for
orchestrating the protest. His statements were intended to instil fear, a
red hysteria that would, in one and the same move, coerce ordinary
Ethiopians into submission and prepare them for an inevitable crackdown. In
so doing, the late Prime Minister created the framework for interpreting the
demands of Ethiopia's Muslim community: protest-violence-al-Qaeda.
Accordingly, the security forces violently crushed protests and arrested
several leaders of the movement on a charge of terrorism.
In the following months, the state media, the sole source of information in
a nation of close to 90 million, began to demonize protesters and their
leaders, blaming them for violence and accusing them of 'terrorism'; a ready
term for callously labelling opposition groups, local and foreign
journalists, and political activists. As usual, the state-owned media in
Ethiopia helped to eradicate the very condition of visibility and audibility
of bodies and voices that speak from the political periphery.
These voices were deemed threats even before being heard, to the very
cohesion of the nation. The media began framing the issues as sectarian, an
intra-Muslim conflict. The legitimate political and legal claims of the
protestors were twisted, distorted and equated with violence. On the other
hand, the <
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq1B7TEH9p4> violence and direct
political involvement of the state was defined as the protection of "law and
order".
Framing violence and the leap towards a new culture of protest
The Ethiopian Television Station (ETV), the only TV station in the nation,
plays a crucial role of inexorably mapping events into readily available
frameworks of meaning and interpretation, always attentive to the
geopolitics of the region, and differentially oriented to local and global
audiences. In the context of this movement, this has meant raising the
specter of Islamic terrorism in ways that are politically productive both
within and outside. Internally, Ethiopian Christians and Muslims must feel
threatened by the new development, framed as the rise of Islamic extremism
in their country. Ethiopian Muslims must be cautioned about taking part in
any protest lest they should face a wrath fitting only to terrorists. Party
ideologues and cadres are to take their cues from the media not only to
begin identifying terrorists but to begin talking to the Muslim population,
calling meetings, and identifying those who need to be cleansed of
political/ideological deviation if they are to be brought back to a
politically righteous path.
Externally, western powers will 'recognize' the magnitude of the danger
threatening Ethiopia, so that they will tolerate the transient repression as
necessary and proportionate to the threat. Without naming names and
explicitly referring to the protesters and their leaders as terrorists, this
conjures up an image of the movement and the leaders that exhibits
characteristic features of "the war on terror". This is a tactic that amply
prepares the body politic for the ultimate political judgments of the state
if the protesters refuse to accept the terms put forth by the state.
Once the stage is set by the media machine, the next step is clear and
predictable. Despite the huge turnout and uncompromisingly peaceful
expression of their grievances, the media portrayed the protesters,
predictably, as violent extremists, and ultimately terrorists. In order for
this frame of violence to perform the much anticipated political task, there
has to be actual episodes of confrontation where protestors will be
conveniently televised throwing stones, breaking windows, and setting public
and private property on fire. This, in effect, would allow the state to
intervene in the name of law and order, violently crush the protest, arrest
activists, and prosecute them under one of a range of grotesque laws.
However, no one really expected what followed. The arrests were made, guns
fired, protesters hospitalized, eyes and lungs swollen from tear gas
exposure. The protesters however, did not reciprocate in kind. Instead of
harnessing them into violence, the media framing of the protest and the
violence of the state transformed what was a dispersed and localized
micro-protest into an exemplary nation-wide movement. Exemplary because of
its innovative mode of resistance, its ability to introduce new genres of
protest that did not exist on the Ethiopian political map, because of its
impeccable rejection of violence as a means, its ability to anticipate,
decipher and detect multiple repressive techniques of the state, and because
it established itself as disciplined and peaceful.
In adhering to non-violent modes of protest, they not only disrupted the
state's narrative of violence and terrorism, but also denied the state the
very weapon upon which it thrives, that crucial hinge that connects the
movement to the discourse of terrorism-violence. By refusing to throw stones
at public properties, even when the state made public resources such as city
buses available in the vicinity of the protest, the movement established
itself as anything but violent. Outwitting alleged agent-provocateurs and
coordinating through whatever resources available, they disrupted the image
of violence the state and the media were busy painting.
By emphasizing the peaceful nature of their demands, the protesters turned
to known signs and symbols of peace during protests. Exposing the media's
anticipation of violence as a trick that power uses to lure its subjects,
they not only tried to hold on to the core political contents of their
protest but also sought to retrieve what had already been usurped, and
demanded a hearing for their voice and visibility for their image. By
attending to the mediating power of the media, they resisted, if not
sufficiently subverted, the violence into which the regime was luring them,
and galvanized solidarity from those supposed to be afraid of their
extremist aims, namely, Ethiopian Christians.
The unique and appealing secret of this protest lay in a text that is
amenable to different interpretations. This protest may not be as
captivating as the confrontation between that lone Chinese student and the
tank at the Tiananmen Square, but it captures the mis-en-scene of many forms
of contemporary protests that must craft strategies local to their
circumstances in order to avoid their cooption and re-appropriation by the
state. In demanding their constitutional rights, the protestors affirm that
they are not revolutionaries. The protestors' chant, in Arabic - "the people
want to bring down the Ahbash/Majlis" - is taken word for word from that of
the Arab Spring, except that the Arab Spring revolutionaries had a far wider
mission.
In seeking respect for the principle of secularism, strict separation
between Church and the State, they draw on enlightenment rationality. They
also employ theological and subversive genres-subversive in the
postmodernist sense of the term. They chant 'Allahu Akbar!! [God is great],
they carry the white ribbon, and appropriate non-verbal modes of expression
to expose and counter the narrative of the state.. Insofar as terrorism
figures as a significant trope in the strategy of the state, the protestor's
strategy aims at 'disruption' i.e., disrupting the state's narrative of
violence and terrorism, and therefore denying it the very weapon it needs to
justify its own violence against protesters.
There's light at the end of the tunnel, and some crocodiles too
Having arrested key leaders of the movement, the state held long-awaited
elections on 7 October 2012. The protesters continued to vehemently oppose
the government's decision to go forward with the election while
representatives of the protest remained in jail. They quickly rejected the
outcome of the election as a sham and continued to call on the state to
respect the fundamental constitutional premise on the separation of state
and religion. In his first address to the Parliament, the new Prime
Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn congratulated the Muslim community for
conducting what he described as a 'free and democratic' election and
<
http://ecadforum.com/2012/10/19/ethiopian-muslims-continue-protests-as-new-
pm-continues-the-legacy-of-defiance/> reiterated his commitment to the
policies of his predecessor. In a move reminiscent of Meles Zenawi, Desalegn
raised the spectre of terrorism as a scare tactic.
For the first time in the country's history, a solely non-violent culture of
protest seems to be taking shape. But non-violent action is an undertaking
that is fraught with risks and its success requires consistency, persistence
and a creative genius capable of adapting to different situations thrown
against it by its Goliathan protagonist. Independently and/or despite the
best efforts of its organizers, the protests can also either run out of
steam or turn violent. If the protests turn violent or a section within it
resorts to violence, not only would the non-violent movement fail but would
also fail in its pioneering identity. In the event that the state turns to
violence while all involved remain peaceful, the protest will probably
retain its pioneering legacy.
Things are moving quickly and they are moving from bad to worse. On 20
October 2012, the state media reported the death of two protestors and a
policeman in the northern part of the country. While the protestors have
fully embraced a peaceful and non-violent means of expressing their
grievances, violence seems to be the inevitable expression of law and order
on the Ethiopian political landscape. Unless both the state and the
protesters act with the maximum possible restraint and diligence in the lead
up to the forthcoming Muslim holiday of Hajj, things might spiral out of
control. Tension is already running high. In a country where protest is de
facto criminalized, the holiday is an event of a very high political
significance. It will be used as an opportunity for the protestors to
demonstrate that the October 7 election was indeed a sham, fraudulent and
staged exercise by the state. Equally, the government wants to repress and
contain any rupture that might escape its control. The protestors have
already given a yellow card to the government. If the standoff continues to
drag on, there is the risk of political outsiders who have nothing to lose
and everything to gain from the escalation of the confrontation. In the end,
if the protesters succeed in retaining what is so unique about this protest,
they will have set an exemplary precedent in the nation's history of protest
and political activism, irrespective of its material outcome.
Received on Tue Oct 23 2012 - 20:19:13 EDT
