The basic assumption is that the current Reform was unleashed in a bid to curb the excesses of the past and preserve human life and human dignity. If the Reform is expected to keep rolling on the right track, it has to remain true to its basic humanitarian objectives: preserve human lives, put an end to massive human displacements, and put an end the midnight knocks by secret police on the doors of peaceful citizens. If the Reform process is not discharging its historic mission, then it may be facing a lethal danger that can reverse it and even put the entire project under constant threat of implosion.
If innocent and apolitical citizens keep on dying for belonging to a given ethnic group over which they have no control, or for speaking another language or for living in a certain locality, then there is something horribly going wrong. At present, many self-proclaimed politicians, activists and a good number of ordinary folks in this country seem to be fixated on emotional politicking. Many of them are galvanized by nationalist zeal of this or that brand and becoming self-styled political analysts or activists without thinking twice about the devastating consequences of their irresponsible utterances. This infatuation with ethnic politicking finds its way among innocent citizens too. And this is where the danger lies.
This is the psychological material that went into the making of Slobodan Milosevich in Serbia and the Hutu extremists in Rwanda who ran the Radio Mille Collines and engineered the 1994 genocide. Every opportunity is used to bring up political topics for discussion and self-styled experts are pouring out their admiration or horror with this or that brand of ethnic politicking. Political commentators increasingly look like soccer analysts.
There are too many political teams or brands to choose from but in the final analysis, all brands boil down to a single obsession: dangerous ethnic politicking. To make a long story short, the nation is caught in a frenzy of passionate politicking from which there appears no escape route. One of the many disadvantages of ethnic politicking is the tendency to make us all politicians whether we like it or not. In fact, it is relatively very easy for everyone, educated or uneducated, to jump on the bandwagon of passionate politicking.
They have something to say about where they come from, who their fathers or grandfathers were or where they were born or what their national, tribal or ethnic origins are. Even the man in the street and the ladies in the neighborhoods, have something to say about ethnic identity whenever they gather for the ritual coffee ceremony.
This country is really fixated on ethnic politicking irrespective of its tragic consequences. Much of it is poisonous gas; more powerful that carbon emission. It is being released into the political atmosphere and people are getting poisoned almost on a daily basis. In more serious cases, they are getting asphyxiated. Ethnic politicking is as easy as walking into a self-service restaurant and take the kind of food you want to eat for lunch.
The trouble is that while food helps you stay alive , ethnic politicking may poison you. Ethnic politicking is pre-modern and predemocratic. It is mostly divisive and quarrelsome. Ethnic politics can hardly evolve into democracy. Its ultimate destiny is nationalism and ethnic nationalism is undemocratic because its basic assumptions are based on “we and the others” and separateness while the democratic assumption is based on “we, the people” and togetherness. Ethnicity is disruptive, democracy is inclusive. Without denying the existence of ethnic communities in this country and their right for legitimate and peaceful articulation of their grievances and demands, we can also affirm that much of ethnic politics is pre-modern, appealing to the emotion than to reason.
Ethnic politics is also inflammable and has to be handled with care lest it spoils the show by inciting or appealing to the worst demons that lie hidden human hearts and wait the appropriate moment to wreck havoc on the country. And when ethnic politicking is in crisis, it gives birth to the demons of narrow nationalism. Ethnic politicking can hardly evolve into universal democratic ethos as the world knows and accepts it. In extreme cases, ethnic politicking leads to wars and disasters.
The demons of ethnic politicking work in many forms and guises. They are telling many people not to sleep peacefully at night until a certain piece of land in a certain corner of the country is returned to the “rightful owners”. They seem to overlook that the said piece of land is part of the big territory they call country.
If the country belongs to all of us, there is no need to quarrel over a small part of it. Ethnic politicking is such a powerful anesthetics that it robs people of their rationalism and fixates them on such things as a piece of territory, ancestral claims, ancient myths and other esoteric issues. The only battle worth fighting for should be the battle of ideas over how to shape the future and not how to bring out old skeletons out of the cupboard. It becomes increasingly evident that people are ready to die for democracy (and many have already died for it) but the living ones hardly know how to make good use of it when it is available freely.
Talking is surely the business of democracy and one of its manifestations. Democracy above all requires and encourages diversity of ideas and rational thoughts and the courage to admit mistakes and the humility to admit that “if there is anything we know, it is that we don’t know anything”. When everyone is talking about a single issue, and worse still, when everyone is ready to jump at one another’s throats at the mildest expression of difference with the various brands of ethnic politicking, this is not democracy but a kind of collective hysteria. The dilemma is that even our learned compatriots who are supposed to put sense in so much nonsense have long joined the fray and offer little by way of remedy. To be educated is supposed to offer rational or feasible alternatives. What we are witnessing at present is rather an attempt to make ethnic politicking a platform for seeking celebrity status, acceptability or admiration and following from the crowd.
If everybody continues to shout on top of their voices about the virtues of every brand of ethnic politicking, we are sure to become one big madhouse where those who are supposed to enlighten the mob find themselves in total darkness. Education or enlightenment should come first. They talk about election but they seldom speak about what elections mean or how to hold fair and free elections. The US is more than 200 years old as a federal and democratic country. But intellectuals there are still teaching and learning about democratic politics. We on the other hand try to copy this or that aspect of democracy and try to implement it here without critical insight.
Almost all political parties are talking about democracy but seldom teach their followers what the notion entails or how it can be implemented in our situation. In the past, we tried to copy the political systems of communist countries and the result was total disaster. Nowadays, we try to copy the theories and thoughts developed by Western intellectuals without critically assimilating them. How many of us really know the true meanings of fashionable political jargons like tribe, ethnic group, nationality, nation and the like? We often enter into dangerous disputes without having clear ideas about what we quarrel about. Many people tell us that what is present in this country is what they call “ye zer politika” or race politics because the Amharic “zer” refers to race. And race is about the color of our skin or our eyes or our hair…etc. Blacks and whites in America are different races and ethnic groups. But here in this country we are similar racially and diverse ethnically and we cannot call the ongoing disputes as “zeregnanet” or racism because there is no racism in Ethiopia.
Ethnicity and nationalism are often confused. There may be ethnic disputes or ethnic nationalism but no racism. This is at least how this writer looks at these issues without claiming any authority on the matter. So, most of our arguments emanate from such lexical confusions. In a way, many ethnicity-obsessed politicians look like the two bold men in the popular tale who fought over a comb. Our educated compatriots should enlighten us about those inconsistencies. Sorry to say, but some of them join the confusion and contribute to the dangerous emotionalism. And this is fertile ground for political swindlers and hypocrites to mushroom in the guise of honorable “activists” or false “heroes” of social media, as they do now.
Then why do we blame our uneducated folks when they are misguided by our own ill-informed or half -baked knowledge? Our attempt to take and promote what fits best our personal agenda is always ill-fated and bound to fail sooner or later. We did not know much about communism, except jargons and lexical muddles. We tried to copy some of the theories in our bid to look more learned than others, for personal gains or to promote a certain brand of politics. It all ended in disaster. What guarantee is there now that we may not fall into the same pit by selling our confusion to an unsuspecting and emotional audience that is also the victim of ethnic politicking? We have no guarantee because we are already seeing some of its ugliest faces of ethnic politicking.
The demons are encouraging blind acceptance of established “truths” than critical thinking or freedom of dissent from officially or public sanctioned views. This is really the dangerous path ethnic politicking is taking. The return to sanity may be found in revisiting our wrong notions and rechecking them against our reality in order to prevent similar mistakes from being built into our short and shaky democratic experiment. The demons of ethnic politicking need to be exorcised now, and exorcized not with weapons but with the holy waters of sensible arguments, reasoned debates, knowledge and most of all, concern for the lives of innocent folks that are lost senselessly because of our wrong views or evil intentions. We should never wait until the demons of ethnic politicking lead us to the fires of the Biblical Apocalypse or to Dante’s Inferno.
Herald January 27/2019
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
