On Oct. 23, Jawar Mohammed—a high-profile activist and media mogul—accused Ethiopia’s security forces of trying to orchestrate an attack against him, a claim police officials later denied. What then followed is quite depressing.
Over the next two days, violence that took ethnic and religious dimensions, erupted in much of the country’s Oromia region and led to the death of 86 civilians. The Oct. 23–25 uprising is just one example.
Ethiopia is currently unenviably leading the world on internally displaced persons. Africa’s second most populous nation is undergoing a massive and under-reported humanitarian crisis, with three million of its people internally displaced as conflicts flare along ethnic lines.
At the center of this crisis is the country’s unique federal system that makes ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle. Ethiopia’s Ethnic federalism was formally introduced in Ethiopia in 1995 by the Ethiopian People Democratic Front (EPRDF), after toppling the Derg military junta that ruled the country between 1974 and 1991. The main rationale for ethnic federalism is the promotion of cultural and political status of the nations that were historically marginalized through the introduction of self-government. EPRDF, established a federal system of nine regions (ethnic homelands) based on ethnic identity (unlike any other federations) and two city administrations.
Article 39 of the 1995 Constitution bases key political and economic rights on being ethnically indigenous in these ethnic homelands but not in Ethiopian citizenship. It essentially passes rights to land, jobs in public offices and representation at regional and federal levels to the dominant ethnic group inhabiting a region—”the majority of whom live within a common territory“.
Source: qz.com