World’s biggest displacement of people threatens reforms of prime minister Abiy Ahmed
On a drenched field in southern Ethiopia, hundreds of members of the ethnic Gedeo community are huddled together with nothing to do but wait. It had rained all night and the ragged shelters they had strung together were sinking in the mud. “We can’t go back,” said Haptemu Mariam, 28, a father of six who fled his home in the Guji area of the neighbouring Oromia region last year. “The Guji people are dangerous,” he said, referring to a group with which his people had lived peacefully until a recent flare up of violence between the two groups. About 700,000 people have been displaced by the Gedeo-Guji dispute, according to the UN. Yet it is just one of many inter-ethnic conflicts raging in Ethiopia that have given the country an unenviable distinction: last year more people fled their homes there than in any other nation on earth. In total, 2.9m people were displaced by December 2018, more than those dislodged in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan combined, according to estimates published this month. The upsurge in communal violence has coincided with the early days of Abiy Ahmed’s tenure as prime minister and is arguably the greatest threat to his lofty ambitions. Elected prime minister in April last year, Mr Abiy has won international praise for his sweeping political and economic reforms in Africa’s second-fastest growing economy. But the huge displacement during his tenure is the biggest black mark against the ambitious leader’s first year in office. “Officials and others [outside of the Abiy administration] have been focused on the opportunity for democratic progress, and they have been reluctant to also recognise this serious humanitarian and security crisis,” said William Davidson, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think-tank. Appointed by the ruling party to steady Ethiopia after three years of anti-government protests, Mr Abiy has won over much of the country with promises to reform the country’s authoritarian politics. He has released journalists and political prisoners, welcomed exiled dissidents back into the country, declared peace with longtime foe Eritrea and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But this freedom has had dangerous consequences. Ethiopia is a complicated multi-ethnic federation with more than 80 ethno-linguistic groups. In many parts of the country, the new political atmosphere has allowed long-running tensions between communities to erupt into conflict as hate speech has flourished. Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed has promised to reform the political system but until his party agrees on how future power will be shared, violence could continue, warn experts © AFP More than 200,000 ethnic Oromos have been evicted from the western Benishangul-Gumuz region since September, while Benishangul authorities last month accused members of another ethnic group, the Amhara, of killing more the 200 people in a territorial dispute. Similar disputes have flared on Oromia’s eastern border with the Somali region. In southern Ethiopia, Guji and Gedeo groups have periodically clashed over access to productive farmland, but the recent conflict was marked by an unusual intensity. In the villages around the town of Dilla where Mr Mariam and his family are huddled, the government has begun putting displaced people on buses to return them to their homes, in what they said was an effort to regain the initiative. Aadi Tigistu Boyalla, an official in charge of the response in the Gedeo zone, told the Financial Times that any security issues had been resolved and that the plan was for all the area’s 446,420 displaced people to be returned by the end of the month. However, humanitarian workers accuse the government of rushing the process by returning people against their will to areas where the underlying causes of the conflict have not been addressed. Some were being taken back to homes that had been burnt or occupied, said one aid worker who declined to be identified. “You just don’t wake up one day and return half a million people. You need to plan,” the person said. “Two years is a viable timeframe, not two weeks.” The situation, long-ignored, is now generating international attention. “The government’s actions are making an ongoing humanitarian crisis even worse,” the Refugees International aid organisation said last week. “Pushing people to return to their home communities prematurely will only add to the ongoing suffering,” senior advocate Mark Yarnell said. The prime minister’s office said all returns had been compliant with international best practice, but warned that unnamed “hostile” actors had sought to disrupt the process. “There are elements exploiting victims of displacement and conflict for their own agenda,” a spokesperson said. Recommended African politics Ethiopian ethnic rivalries threaten Abiy Ahmed’s reform agenda One explanation is that political and community leaders from the Oromia region have seen the rise to the prime minister’s office of Mr Abiy — who is also from Oromia — as a chance to assert the rights of the region’s people. Other officials say that the conflicts are an unavoidable consequence of Ethiopia’s attempt to move from a de facto one-party state to a pluralist democracy. For almost 30 years, Ethiopia has been governed as a collection of ethnic regions dominated by a single group at the head of a highly centralised state. Mr Abiy has promised to reform that system but until his party agrees on how future power will be shared, violence could continue, experts said. “There’s a concern that the country is on a negative trajectory due to entrenched elite disagreement over what sort of federation Ethiopia should be and how to share power,” said Mr Davidson of the International Crisis Group. “Unless there’s some sort of agreement on a common vision for Ethiopia, there’s a danger that the turmoil continues, and possibly gets much worse.”
