This is a regime for the stone age operating in the 21st century.

October 21, 2016 5:02 AM

The regime’s state of emergency, announced this month, has legitimated two things. The first one is that it formalized the regime’s implicit desire and behaviour of being a military dictatorship... Secondly, it made it official that the slow motion mass murder the regime has been undertaking for the last 25 years could be carried out with full scale and coordinated order of the “command post” with much bigger causalities than the “red terror” of 1978-79.
posted by BekahVee (12 comments total)

FYI this post is about Ethiopia.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 5:13 AM on October 21, 2016 [9 favorites]

ahh, sorry, I put it in the tags, and didn't even think to put it in the post. Thanks!
posted by BekahVee at 5:25 AM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

My first guesses were Turkey and the Philippines.
posted by acb at 6:01 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

So the protests in Gondar seem to have begun as a response by the Oromo ethnic group to an authoritarian streak in the government, which is dominated by a different, minority ethnic group, and a reaction to land ownership issues, corruption, and political marginalization. And, since November, they've been violently suppressed. Human Rights Watch has some more context on the larger protests.

The comments on the original article are scary. Mobilizing ethnicity in the service of state-sanctioned violence is a scary, powerful thing.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:47 AM on October 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

Here's another interesting article with some more background on the unrest.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:44 AM on October 21, 2016

FPP from this summer about Oromo protests.
posted by sparklemotion at 12:28 PM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was in Addis for a month this summer and the vibe in the city was surreal to say the least. There was a heavy police and military presence at all major intersections and while the city center was calm during my stay, the police did beat protesters with batons in the outskirts. In Addis' Oromia hinterlands the police and military shot and killed over two hundred in one weekend (the number was almost surely higher). Most "average joes" I talked to are convinced the country will descend into civil war within the next year if the Tigray minority ruling party doesn't agree to some kind of power sharing with the Oromo and Amhara.

Notice how the American MSM takes little notice of repressive government regimes when they are our puppets or client states. Still no word, after more than a month, on the fate of Oromo and Amhara political leaders who were interred in Qilinto prison which burned down on September 3rd.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 4:13 PM on October 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here are a couple of good sources of news and commentary on Ethiopian politics:

zehabesha.com

Ethiomedia
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 4:31 PM on October 21, 2016

Thank you for this post, and also to the commenters. I read a bit about the protests when the government declared the state of emergency last week, but I would never have come across some of these links on my own. Posts like this are why I come here.

Also, the comments on the FPP are......revealing.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 8:37 PM on October 21, 2016

This is the most under-reported conflict in the world right now

As risk factors go, ethnic minority rule is one of the strongest predictors of some kind of state failure. At the same time, my hunch is that being a nascent industrial producer will reduce the chances of conflict... The Economist article hints at the role industry is playing:

The government is rattled by the prospect of capital flight. An American-owned flower farm recently pulled out, and it fears others may follow. After almost a week of silence, the state-of-emergency law was a belated attempt to reassure foreign investors, who have hitherto been impressed by the economy’s rapid growth, that the government has security under control.

I have been running a study of industrial workers in Ethiopia for several years, but I’m fairly ignorant about party politics and the roots of the conflict. If I were reporting on this, here’s what I would want to investigate: How removed and insulated are the party elites from the economic consequences of war? How much do the opposition leaders (and armed leaders) think about these economic pain points, and are they thinking strategically about using them? How chunky is political power, and can the ruling party credibly share a little more power, to broaden the ethnic coalition just enough to stave off war?

posted by kliuless at 11:44 AM on October 22, 2016

As risk factors go, ethnic minority rule is one of the strongest predictors of some kind of state failure.

It's great that they link to the paper, but it actually says something very different: that the strongest predictor by far is limited democracy plus political factionalisation. At the end of the paper they list factors that they didn't find significant:

TABLE B1
A selected list of variables tested that were NOT statistically significant when added to the Global Forecasting Model
[...]
Ethno-linguistic Fractionalization
[...]
Ratio of largest to 2nd largest ethnic groups
[...]
Ethnic War in previous 15 years

posted by Joe in Australia at 2:52 PM on October 22, 2016

From Africa Is A Country, "The Point of No Return in Ethiopia."

Frustrations and grievances in Ethiopia have been growing for years. In 2014, protests began over the Master Plan to expand the capital Addis Ababa into Oromia Region. This was just the spark. Though the Master Plan has been abandoned for now, thousands of people across Oromia and more recently Amhara regions have continued to protest against the government. Their demands are fairly basic: human rights, an end to authoritarian rule, equal treatment of all ethnic groups, and restoration of ancestral lands that have been snatched and sold oftentimes under the guise of development.

posted by ChuraChura at 7:22 AM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]