By:Asress Mulugeta
The current government in Ethiopia has been in power for a total of almost 25 years, and it is based on a single ethnic minority group from the north part of Ethiopia, Tigray. From the very beginning, Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has utterly been undemocratic by its nature. TPLF has stolen democracy and votes from ethiopian people in all the previous national elections. All the elections held in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015 were either fake and/or Scandalous. TPLF has also made sure to control all sectors of the country with its own ethnic group. The military, religious, and economic sectors have always and still continue to revolve around the Tigray ethnic group.
The ruling government has been using the divide-conquer strategy to stay in power forever. Among about the 20 countries in the world that implement federal system of government, it is only Ethiopia that uses ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of its federal system of government. In ethiopia, teritorial boundaries are drawn in a way that maximizes ethnic homogeneity. In contrast to ethiopia, western federations (eg. Canada and Switzerland) usually catagorized as multinational federations don’t promote ethnicity as the chief instrument of state state organization and mobilization.
TPLF has pitted several ethnic groups against each other and particularly the major ethnic groups, the Amhara and Oromo. The major ethnic groups feel they’ve been deprived of their legitimate participation in governance because of the Tigrayan dominance of the political and economic aspects of the country. There have been several genocides, massacres, and ethnic cleansing that have taken place throughout the country, and not one individual has been held accountable for all those killings and massacres. No one is safe in Ethiopia, except members of the TPLF.
In December 2003, the TPLF lead military attacked and abused Anuak civilians in Gambella region – delibrately killing, raping, beating, torturing, and harassing civilians. TPLF massacred over 400 Anuak civilians in Gambella. These abuses left Anuak villagers fearful of leaving their homes at night, going to the fields and farms outside of town, or fetching water from the water pumps or streams.
In the aftermath of the 2005 election, the TPLF regime’s Special Forces killed more than 200 innocent people and threw to jail leaders of a party that won the election. Between 2005 and 2010, the Ethiopian parliament passed three bills (Media, NGO and Anti-Terrorism bills) that criminalize dissent and the free expression of ideas, and in the meantime, the regime made it sure that no viable opposition party exists in Ethiopia. As a result, the incumbent ruling party won 99.6% of the seats in a 547 seat parliament in an election that reminded us a typical Soviet era socialist election.
In 2012 and 2013, hundreds of thousands of poor farmers of Amhara ethnic group were forcefully evicted from the southern part of Ethiopia and the Benishangul-Gumuz area. similarly, TPLF’s ethnic dictatorship policy has made many people homeless and claimed many lives in many parts of Ethiopia.
Recently, starting from November 2015 untill now, the Oromo people have been peacefully protesting against the TPLF devised plan to grab land from the Oromoia region near the capital. But the Tigrayan military, police and security apparatus responded by waging war and terrorism on Oromo school children, farmers, teachers and elderly people; until today, they massacred more than 140 people, imprisoned more than 20,000 Oromo, and beaten and disfigured thousands of individuals. European Union 28 member countries called emergency meeting to discuss the issue on January 11, 2016.
The sad part is that if the ruling ethnic minority group from Tigray continue terrorizing and killing people from other ethnic groups unabetedly; Ethiopia’s future will not be any different from the current Syria.