Working Toward the Promise of the Blessing of Ethiopian Unity
The President of the Ethiopian Crown Council, His Imperial Highness Prince Ermias Sahle-Selassie Haile-Selassie, was in Boston on May 13 to deliver a speech to the Ethiopian National Congress. The following is the text of his remarks:
What a pleasure it is to be with you in Boston today to be able to celebrate with Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians alike the importance of the preservation of Ethiopia’s unique and rich culture and heritage. I would like to thank the Ethiopian Community in Boston and the Ethiopian National Congress for inviting me to make a few remarks today on our beloved country. Unfortunately, I must leave you today after this gathering to return to Philadelphia where one of the champions of Ethiopian freedom, Dr Asrat Woldeyes, lies gravely ill, the result of many years of illegal and cruel imprisonment. His life has been shortened by intolerance, but his legacy lengthened by his resistance to this fact.
Boston recently witnessed the stamina and grace of Fatuma Roba in the Boston Marathon. By winning the race, and raising our Ethiopian flag high, she championed what is best in all of us. Fatuma reminded us of the power of perseverance, the will to win against all odds. Fatuma brought to the world, in a flash, the focus of international admiration. She inspired and motivated us with her pride in her Ethiopianness.
Today, because of incessant civil wars, there are attempts to polarize Ethiopian society into its various national elements, undoing the painstaking historical process of unification. Pride in Ethiopianness is discouraged today by those who control our country. Amharas are no longer expected to look out for the interests of Oromos; the Oromos are not expected to care about the fate of Tigreans, and so on.
Is this really “progress”? Is this really “self-determination”? Xenophobia is the opposite of the kind of expansive and embracing national pride which Fatuma Roba showed us.
In a world increasingly dominated by global languages, global economic trends, and seamlessly-integrated communications, can we expect that the life of an Oromo-speaking child will be better because someone said: “Your own language is the source of all pride and all attempts at working with your kinsmen across a nearby border are worthless.”?
Of course not!
Yes! it is important to know your local language, culture and customs. Yes! it is important to bring decisionmaking processes closer to the people. But ethnic chauvinism is the ugly face of ethnic politics.
Politicians wish to retain power regardless of the fact that they cannot inspire the many and richly-varied people of the Great Ethiopian Empire to support a common dream. The kind of ethnic federalism we see in Ethiopia today is a method to divide and rule the people, so that those in power, who are a minority, may not be challenged. What the world is weeping about in the former Yugoslavia is the problem which Ethiopians have been bearing for the past six years. In Ethiopia, “ethnic cleansing”, chauvinism and hatred have been conducted without television cameras, while an unwitting world applauded what it called “a new generation of leaders” in Africa. It seems like the same old generation of suspicion, hatred and greed to many of us.
We have seen our society become less tolerant, more isolated, and embroiled in yet another spate of internal and regional conflicts. This, in a region where instability reigns, is a very worrisome feature.
Where we should be tackling the problems of poverty, lack of education, AIDS and the lack of adequate healthcare generally, as well as the lack of infrastructure, we are being lured by the macabre sideshow of another war: the very fundamental negation of human rights.
Ethiopians have created a courageous and inherently democratic society of peoples. So where people demand the right to ask questions, the government must not take this to be a subversive act. It is a fundamental right! We must all learn to practice the art of negotiation and avoid resort to war. We have tried war, and it has aged us beyond the unbroken 3,000 years of our unified culture.
And if Ethiopians are fundamentally courageous and democratic, they are also proud and fiercely independent. We have jealously guarded our independence to a degree never seen in any other country in the world. We have never allowed our country to be submerged into a colonial entity. Our forefathers have sacrificed heavily for this. And so many more Ethiopians in recent months and years have sacrificed themselves for the preservation of Ethiopia.
We must not become a lost generation, succumbing to greed, selfishness and anarchy. We must begin to build an increasingly harmonious and prosperous society.
We will not achieve this, however, if we jeopardize our national ability to unite in order to respond to threats to our security and sovereignty.
Unless we — as individuals and as Ethiopian nations — absolutely and consciously commit to building a society which is founded on tolerance and respect for alternative views, one which is rooted in reconciliation, then we are further weakening our country. Ultimately, by inaction, or by mirroring the ethnic separatism of the ruling Addis politicians, we jeopardize our existence as a multi-communal, multi-religious state.
The administration in Ethiopia — if it is to build a civil society which retains Ethiopia’s present or historic borders — must make tangible changes in its policies.
Subjugation can only work for a while, and while subjugation is in place, prosperity is absent.
Through all of this, the Ethiopian Crown remains there for the people of Ethiopia, as their impartial symbol of unity. It is there to offer inspiration and hope. It is there to protect the Constitution of the People’s choice.
The Crown must remain above politics, and offer the long-term leadership which establishes the framework of society, the freedom of peoples to accord each other respect, the freedom of people to work together to progress the wellbeing and happiness of all.
The Crown is there to remind Ethiopians of every communal, linguistic and religious group of their proud history.
We pray to see our flag — raised here in Boston by Fatuma Roba — fly high and proudly once more in Ethiopia. For what made Ethiopia a uniquely proud culture was the fact that the Ethiopian Lion Flag flew over a number of uniquely proud cultures which came together and by consensus created a sum even greater than the total of its parts.
An astronaut in the United States once said that the technology which took him to the heavens was the sum of many parts, each made by the lowest bidder. Ethiopia is the sum of many parts each made by the highest bidders: the peoples who have given their lives to the fulfillment of their cultures. Ethiopia as a whole has a quality based on the historic and unique brilliance of its individual parts. And only by consensus does this society move safely, confidently and intact into the future.
Ethiopian History
The Impact of Geography on Ethiopia’s Strategic Development
By Gregory R. Copley
Taken from his recent book, Ethiopia Reaches Her Hand Unto God
Civilizations survive and prosper, and are shaped, by the geography which defines their rainfall, their proximity (or isolation) relative to other communities, and their access to traditional trade routes such as seaways or riverways. Peoples adapt to their surroundings and are influenced by their contact with other cultures. History has brought together the various historic European Civilizations into a single unit which we now call “the West” in such a way that the influences of geography which were paramount only a century ago are today of secondary importance to the cultural phenomenon of the civilizsation.
But the peoples of what is today Ethiopia, although now influenced by the global community of which it is an increasing part, developed unique civilizational characteristics over many millennia due to the geographic and topographic phenomena which protected it from many of the influences of other civilisations. As a result, distinctly Ethiopian patterns emerged of society, military structure, social and noble ranks, religious interpretation, and so on. The isolation of much of the society from the rest of the world, brought about by the natural boundaries of the Amhara plateau, allowed the Ethiopian communities to find their own level, and develop their cultures, away from a constant exposure to external influences.
This isolation also made Ethiopia a haven for wildlife. More than 800 species of birds are found in the country, 26 of them exclusive to the area. And 103 species of mammals exist in Ethiopia, seven of them unique to the country.
It is here, too, that humankind — homo sapiens — first began its evolutionary origins as Australopithecus afarensis, the ancestors who walked erect through the Rift Valley of Ethiopia some 2½-million years ago.
It is significant that Ethiopian civilization — the eventual blending into an “Ethiopian” identity of the various peoples of the region — developed substantially in isolation from the evolution of other Civilizations in Europe, South Asia and East Asia. The name “Ethiopian” is itself, however, a Greek appellation meaning “burnt face”, and by the time this name had been given, civilization in the area had already been developing for millennia. “What is clear ... is that 4,000 years ago, perhaps as a function of the divided nature of the Ethiopian topography, increasing linguistic and cultural specialization and separation had become the order of the day,” Hancock, Pankhurst and Willetts noted in their excellent book, Under Ethiopian Skies.
It is not that Ethiopia developed in ignorance of the outside world; rather, its contact was selective and limited. Trade with the major Civilizations of antiquity, such as Constantinople and Rome or with Persia or Asia, and earlier with Egypt, was for the most part filtered through the coastal plains of Eritrea. Ethiopia provided myrrh to Egypt some 5,000 years ago, and some 4,500 years ago Egypt sought gums and resins — some of them important in the embalming process for Egyptian funerary customs — from Ethiopia. And although Eritrea, the “filter state”, eventually became part of the broader Ethiopian Empire, it had experienced a different world.
And it is not that Ethiopian Civilizations lacked curiosity about the outside world. The Sabæan Kingdom, from whence Queen Makeda (the Queen of Sheba) came, almost certainly held territories which spanned the Red Sea from what is now Yemen into what is now the Tigré region of Ethiopia, well up the escarpment from Eritrea. And well before the Christian era, the Axumite Kingdom, based in what is now northern Ethiopia’s Tigré province, had controlled the coastal plain and the port of Adulis. The Axumite Kingdom was a powerful trading state, strategically located on the seaway between Egypt and Persia, and well-placed for trade with the Arabian Peninsula and South Asia.
It was during the Axumite period that the Semitic language Ge’ez became commonly used. It was related to the Sabæan language of the Arabian Peninsula, not surprisingly. And from Ge’ez — or Ethiopic, still the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church — stemmed the Amarigna (Amharic), Tigrigna, Guragé and Harari (Adare) languages of modern Ethiopia.
Ge’ez script, based on a syllabary, is the only African language to have a unique form of writing, another factor which created a vacuum in which the Ethiopian peoples would develop their own views of the world. Amharic, with 33 consonants, each with seven different vowel variations, has 321 characters and 20 diphthong characters, and seven variations of the letter “b”.
Language was to prove divisive as well as inclusive in the growing Ethiopia as Oromotic languages came into the Empire with the Oromotic peoples, and others. Language today remains one of the overriding points of division in the Ethiopian society. While the Empire was strong, the ruling group was able to impose a national lingua franca — Amharic — on the country. All successful multinational or multicultural societies have imposed a lingua franca. It has always been resented, but it has always been a key to the success of a complex political entity. India today could not function, firstly without English, secondly without Hindi. In the case of English (in India), it was the most acceptable option, because it did not favor one particular group or area, as Hindi obviously did. In Ethiopia, now without a unifying central government, linguistic differences highlight the cultural differences of the various nations within the state.
Within even the linguistic groups were further divisions. In the past two centuries, the rise of the Shoa Amhara saw a gradual absorption of the traditions of Shoa into the Empire as a whole, and vice versa. Today, the face of the Empire is no longer Shoan, as it was briefly under and after Menelik. It is truly “Ethiopian”, blending the customs of all of the peoples. This evolution and blending came at a time when the country was becoming increasingly exposed to external (mainly Western) influences. So, as Ethiopia became codified as a nation-state in the modern sense, so were the tools of statecraft used to strengthen some of the Ethiopian methods and structures and the armed forces.
And yet of overriding cultural and structural significance to the State was the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, despite the fact that the Empire has always been home to substantial Muslim and animist populations, as well as to other Christian sects. It was the Ethiopian Church which became unique to the culture, although its origins were in the earliest Christian church, at Alexandria, Egypt, a link which survives to this day. The Muslims of Ethiopia could identify with the Muslims of Arabia, whereas Ethiopian Christians were limited in the outside forces with whom they could identify. Part of this was because, along with the development of unique languages for the area (and in this case, Ge’ez, the language of the church), the antiquity of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity ensured that a strong local set of traditions evolved.
Religion and language set Ethiopia apart from the rest of Africa, too. Had it not been for the buffer zone of Sudan, Ethiopia may have developed more closely than it has done with Egypt, which until a few decades ago always provided the Abuna (Patriarch) for the Ethiopian Church.
The Church was one of the most significant pillars of Ethiopian society. It developed the only significant fixed constructions — monasteries and churches — of any importance for many years. So, in a sense, the fixed icons of Ethiopian society were those provided either by the church, or by the ancient stelæ (obelisks) of the Axumite ruins. The sense of oral history was extremely strong, and learning was centered around monasteries, just as, before Christianity, the stelæ of Axum were the history books of the age. In much of Ethiopian history, the monarchy was a mobile caravan which traced its way across the largely agricultural and feudal countryside. When it is realized that the legal condition of serfdom was only abolished on the statute books of Great Britain in the early 20th Century (but in reality with the earlier coming of the Industrial Revolution), and in reality in Russia after 1917, it is hardly surprising that Ethiopia continued as a largely agricultural-feudal society well into the late 19th Century.
It was only the military victories of the Shoa which, culminating in the accession of Emperor Menelik II in 1889, brought Ethiopia into the modern world. It took Menelik seven years to unite the disparate peoples into a force which could defeat a modern European army (the Italians) on the battlefield at Adwa in 1896. From that point, he began, with some success and with — for the first time — any continuity of diplomatic relations with the major powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Egypt), the process of “internationalizing” Ethiopia. He re-introduced a modern currency system to the country, for the first time with any real success since the Axumite Kingdom some 1,500 years before. And he modernized the Army.
Still, Ethiopia was a predominantly poor, agricultural country, with little infrastructure. The construction of Addis Ababa by Menelik was of paramount importance in creating a modern nation-state, but even so, in the absence of the massive investment required in infrastructure and education, the society and Army required a structure which would ensure unity, and productivity in food and other goods. For this reason, the society retained, longer than European states, its reliance on noble ranks and regional fiefdoms.
Emperor Haile Selassie, when he came to the Throne in 1930 after many years as Regent and two years as Negus, was already filled with the zeal to reform and modernize. He, unique among Ethiopian rulers for almost two millennia, had been exposed to the outside world, and had received as strong an education in Western culture and society as he had in Ethiopian traditions. And it was he who attempted to blend historically-respected traditions of society and military management into a 20th Century, international context. For this reason, ancient military titles, such as meridazmatch, gerazmatch and dejazmatch, are retained, not to interfere with modern practices, but as a reminder of Ethiopia’s uniqueness. Indeed, unlike the aristocratic titles of military and governmental leadership in Europe — such as count, baron, etc. — the Ethiopian titles of ras, meridazmatch and gerazmatch retained their direct functional relevance well into the 20th Century. We have seen rases and dejazmatches fighting in traditional military capacities well into this Century; indeed into World War II and beyond.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, using modern equipment and extensive quantities of chemical weapons (mainly mustard gas, a blistering agent which had caused widespread death and injury on the Western Front during World War I), the Imperial Army arrayed to meet what was an overwhelming threat. Emperor Haile Selassie, in his autobiography, My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress, noted the traditional disposition of forces for the Battle of Maytchäw on March 29 to April 1, 1936 [Mägabit 20-23, 1928]:
“... We divided the strategic order [of battle], by which we were going into battle, into four groups, adding the troops collected from various offices. We arranged that one group be directly commanded and led by Ourselves and that the remaining three groups be led by three commanders, ie: by HH Ras Kassa, by HH Ras Seyum, and by Ras Getatchäw. The part commanded and led by Ourselves direct was divided as follows;
“At the front, the corps of the guard of honor under Qägnazmatch Mäkuriya Bant Yergu and his deputy Gerazmatch Kefle Ergätu.
“On the left, the corps of the guard of honor under Gerazmatch Abära Gezaw.
“On the right, the corps of palace servants and footmen under Qägnazmatch Bälhu Däggäfu.
“At the rear, the corps of the palace guards under Dejazmatch Adäfersäw ...”
The Emperor continued his description of his Order of Battle by noting the deployments on the Center Front, the Right and Left Wings. The deployment would have been familiar to Emperor Menelik, save for the fact that the Army — which only seven years earlier was but partially converted to khaki and modern structures — now had many more modern weapons and some automation. But it was not an army to match the by-now state-of-the-art Italian combined-arms operation, strongly supported by air power.
The Battle of Maytchäw was probably the last major set-piece battle in which a reigning monarch commanded an army in the field. The Ethiopian Army consisted of traditional elements which would not survive the end of World War II, although the titles of ras and dejazmatch continued to be given to senior military officers. At Maytchäw, there were the “corps of Schneider rifle carriers”, and “the Army of Walläga Arjo and of Walläga Gudru”. There was a contingent under a Liqä Mäkwas [one of the Emperor’s favorites, Haylä Waldä Gäbr’el], and “the Army of the Ministry of Agriculture”. There were the armies of various other districts, and various other ministries (such as the Army of the Treasury and Stores, the Army of the Ministry of Finance), and the Army of the Master of the Horse, the “excellent rifle bearers”, and so on.
As in historical times, the Army was accompanied by the supreme pontiff of the Church, Abuna Petros, bishop of Wallo, and the second highest-ranking churchman, Etchege Gäbrä Giyorgis, and other notables. A retinue of other priests, princes and nobles kept close to the Emperor to offer advice.
There was no mistaking the occasion: it was a nation gathered into war to defend itself. In this event, in the short-term, it failed. Italy overran much of Ethiopia, but without conquering it. The ongoing war, when conventional defense was no longer possible, transformed into a vicious guerilla conflict, with the Italians — who had defied all international convention in the use of chemical weapons, banned after World War I — suppressing the population violently. Ultimately, the conventional war returned as the tide turned against Italy, and Ethiopian and British forces — with the Emperor and his son, Alga Worrach Asfa Wossen, and the Duke of Harar and other princes and nobles at the head of the Ethiopian forces — re-took the country. But by that time, Ethiopia’s forces had the look of an army of the mid-20th Century. The rhinoceros-hide shields were gone, and the lion mane head-gear of the Emperor and dejazmatches at the 1930 coronation were relegated forever to glass cases or an occasional ceremonial event.
But the Battle of Maytchäw and the ensuing national uprising against the Italians showed that Ethiopia could unite as a single nation against external aggression, as it had earlier done at Adwa in 1896. The strong symbols of nationhood were there, and they were potent. All that was required was that they be married to modern technology, modern structures of deployment and employment, and a more fluid approach to command and control.
Ethiopia had a modern Army in mid-1998, when the Eritreans used a ragtag force to occupy the Yirga triangle area of Tigré. Only a month before the incursion, the administration of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had declared the 70,000 to 80,000-man Ethiopian Defense Force to be operationally ready to fulfill its duties. As it transpired, it was not. The Ethiopian defense budget, declared in July 1998 to be equal to US$144-million, was, in fact, only the tip of the iceberg of what the Meles administration was, in fact, allocating to the military. According to former Ethiopian Ambassador to Paris Imru Zelleke, one of the leaders of the Ethiopian opposition in exile, Meles was in reality diverting the equivalent of some 30 to 40 percent of Ethiopia’s national budget toward defense.
And yet Ethiopia could still not dislodge the Eritrean forces. The nation would not unify behind the “modern” government of Meles Zenawi unless Meles agreed to restore human rights, open the political debate, and restore a free press and some of the traditional structures of Ethiopia. In 1935-41, Ethiopia, although impoverished and backward in some of its military capabilities, could unite and defeat a modern military power. In 1998, with the advantages of a war-seasoned army — which had spent almost two decades fighting in the field as a guerilla force — Ethiopia’s politicians could not inspire the unity of the country to defend the borders.
Having said this, almost all elements of Ethiopian society were, indeed, unified in their wish to oust the Eritrean forces from Tigré and broadly condemned the atrocities inflicted on their Tigrean and Afar citizenry. However, the Meles administration, fearful of allowing any concession to “opposition” elements, was reluctant to allow compromise on the issue of political prisoners, declaring that there were “only convicted criminals” in the prisons of Ethiopia. Meles hesitated, too, on the restoration of traditional symbols, even to save the country.
The war of 1998-99 again demonstrated the impact of geography on Ethiopia’s progress. The Red Sea sea-lanes of communications (SLOCs) dictated that Eritrea’s importance to the world trading community appeared, at first glance, to be more important than Ethiopia’s population and productive capacity. At another level, however, it was geography which had historically divided the coastal, trading Eritreans from the productive heartland of the Ethiopia of which they were an integral part.
The fact that, in 1997, Eritrea was one of the world’s leading exporters of coffee is indicative of the underlying factors: Eritrea grows no coffee. It is imported from Ethiopia for re-export. Thus, the symbiotic, and often adversarial, nature of bilateral relations becomes more apparent: Eritrea, the trader, needs Ethiopia to provide the goods with which it can trade. If, with the declining nature of relations — due to the introduction of the Eritrean nakfa, among other things — meant that Ethiopia was to find new avenues of exporting its goods, through Djibouti for example, then Eritrea would undoubtedly suffer. Hence the need for Eritrea’s Isayas Afewerke to react strongly in the hope of shaking Meles Zenawi from the Ethiopian leadership.
Geography begets geopolitics. The importance of Ethiopia and Ethiopians illustrates this. The admixture of people and geography shapes cultures; cultures imply social politics.
The very existence of Ethiopia astride the Rift Valley, the apparent point of origin of human evolution, dictated, inevitably that Ethiopian society would evolve at an earlier period than society elsewhere. Equally inevitably, other ancient civilizations would develop nearby as the human population expanded, and the proximity of the people in the Ethiopian area to the ancient states of Egypt and Israel meant that interaction would shape Ethiopian society and history.
Queen Makeda was able to visit King Solomon because of the geographic proximity. Moses led the Jewish people out of bondage in Egypt across the Red Sea from a point believed by many historians to have been in Eritrea, rather than taking them across the contiguous landbridge of the Sinai. This implied that the “Egypt” which Moses was fleeing was far closer to Ethiopia than is now the case. We know that the Ethiopian and Egyptian cultures met at Meroé, once an independent kingdom on the Nile in what is now Sudan, near the modern Ethiopian border.
The interaction between the ancient biblical societies of (among others) Israel, Ethiopia and Egypt was a natural and inevitable consequence of geography. The durability of the different symbols, beliefs and cultures of these civilizations, and the fact that these civilizations were basically the building blocks of the West, has meant that their impact on the entire world is still being seen. If the Solomonic or Davidic religious strands of Israel and Ethiopia remain a visceral part of the region, then this should come as no surprise. Islam, which evolved like Christianity from the line of Abraham, is part of the same geographic-social pattern.
The intensity of the intertwining of ongoing religious-cultural symbolism with everyday life in a society which has been as protected by geography as Ethiopia should also come as no surprise. It is the rest of the world which has changed: as the spread of humankind occurred, the teachings of the old religions and old customs became, where they were maintained at all, more abstract and academic. In Ethiopia, as with Israel through much of this period, and Arabia — but more in Ethiopia than elsewhere because of the isolation — it is still more natural for people to lead a life in harmony with their religion and culture, despite the invasion of modern communications and the exposure which today’s modern transportation brings.