The Potential of Democratization in Ethiopia: The Welkait Question as a Litmus Test

The Welkait Amhara Identity Question Committee (የወልቃይት የአማራ ማንነት ጥያቄ ኮሚቴ) requested state institutions to recognize the identity of indigenous⁹ Amhara people from Welkait as Amhara. They claim that when the government demarcated the regional borders and placed Welkait within the Tigray region, they violated the FDRE’s article 46 (2) of the Constitution: “States shall be delimited on the basis of the settlement patterns, language, identity and consent of the peoples concerned.” This request was written in a letter and sent via fax and delivered in person to all relevant zonal, regional and federal offices of the government, ministries and EPRDF party bureaus on 17 December 2015.¹⁰ The request was printed on the letterhead of the Welkait Committee, and received and numbered by the receiving institutions (i.e. Office of the Prime Minister no. 034440).

The letter starts with a written authorization of the delegates to represent the Welkait Committee and the Welkait Amhara people. The centrality of the message in the letter is the “Welkait Amhara National Identity Question.” Further, the letter enumerates the key contributions of Welkait citizens to the culture and history of Ethiopia. It states that apart from their ancestors cultivating the Amhara identity, their land and property were acknowledged and respected. Welkait citizens were proud of their Ethiopian and their Amharic identities (Welkait Committee, 2016: 1). Oppression, violations of the law and other “unpleasant incidents” have forced them to justify their Amhara identity claim. The letter testifies that Welkait is geographically located in Amhara territory, that it has been administered by Amhara offices—within North Gondar (Auraja) under the administration of Wogera region—prior to the restructuring in the 1990s, and that cultural expressions through music, dance, ceremonies and language are distinctively Amharic. It is mentioned that many people also speak Arabic and Tigrinia due to the proximity to Sudan, Eritrea and Tigray. The letter attests to the national contributions of Welkait people through their cultivation of export products including sesame, cotton and millet (3). It also stresses that Welkait people have contributed politically to the country as patriots who fought the Derg regime, resisting the TPLF narrative that all Amhara were Derg supporters (4). The letter stresses that the question is not new but that it has been raised since 1991 based on the constitutional rights expressed in article 39, paragraphs 2 and 5, which suggests that the government, over the decades, repeatedly promised to answer this question democratically but failed to do so (4). Worse, Welkait people who kept their Amhara identity were harassed, dispossessed, killed, arrested, kidnapped and deported, and many are still missing to this day. In Ethiopia, it is a constitutional right for anyone to demand acknowledgment of identity, but the government breaks its laws (5).¹¹ The letter goes further to mention oppression and discrimination. As described in the letter, oppression and discrimination are manifested through the tendency of denying children the right to learn the Amharic language. Children are forced to speak Tigrinia in school even though this is in total contravention of the constitution. Officials in state institutions speak Tigrinia only. Names of places, rivers, lakes, mountains, springs, cities and regions have been changed from Amharic to different Tigrean names. The discrimination becomes evident when 95% of government jobs are given to Tigreans and only 5% to Amhara. Amhara girls and women were abducted and raped; Amhara students were raped by Tigrean teachers (5). The letter mentions and lists Welkait Amhara people who were dispossessed for refusing to convert their Amhara identity to Tigrean. The dispossession involved confiscation of their land and belongings which were given to Tigreans (5). “Under the previous regimes, people lived peacefully in the area but the current government treats Welkait Amhara people like war enemies despite living under the same democratic constitution” (6). Every year new proclamations are passed that dispossess Amhara. More specifically, while Amhara people used to receive two hectares of land per household, Tigreans now receive 50–100 hectares that are taken from dispossessed and displaced Amhara (7). The letter ends with the request to be protected by the constitution while they politely, democratically and peacefully want to engage with the public and the institutions to finally get an answer to this question without being harmed in person or losing property (8). “We ask this because we have the experience of our people being abducted, killed and disappearing simply for asking this question” (8). The appendix to the letter provides a list of 116 names of Welkait Amhara people who have suffered this fate for raising this question. The attachment also lists some dispossessed and rape victims (8–11).

Displaced Welkait Amhara discussed their concern in Gondar and formed a group to debate among the Welkait Amhara community if there was any justifiable reason to pursue the identity question and demand their civil rights. On 23 August 2015,¹² they had convened their first meeting and formed the Welkait Amhara Identity Question Committee. On 19 September 2015,¹³ they conducted an inaugural conference at the Landmark Hotel in Gondar with approximately 450 Welkait Amhara in attendance (Keasegid, 2019; Muluken, 2018: 214f.). At this conference, a committee was formed with 20 members, including Colonel Demeke Zewdu as head of mobilization and Teshager Woldemicael as secretary. One of the resolutions of the meeting was that “From that day onward, we have contacted the Federation to regain our identity as Amhara,” said Teshager (2018). They have collected approximately 25,000 signatures of Welkait people who identify as Amhara and authorized the Committee to speak on their behalf.¹⁴

When members of the Welkait Committee started to petition and tried to deliver their request to the responsible government offices, they were denied and threatened. Demeke (2018) recalls:

After the offices in Tigray region refused to accept and process the petition, on 3 February 2016,¹⁶ the Welkait Committee sent The Request for the Declaration of Welkait People of their Amharan Identity as per the Constitution to the House of Federations (HoF) for an appropriate remedy. Simultaneously, copies were sent via fax to the offices of the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Council of Ministers, Ministry of Justice, EPRDF, Federal Police Commission, the Tigray Regional State President, the Federal Human Rights Commission, the Federal Office of Ombudsman, and the Tigray region’s TPLF. The HoF claimed that it was not responsible and referred the case back to the Tigray regional council (Atalay, 2018; Demeke, 2018). The Tigray regional council gave them an oral directive to present their case to the Western Zonal administration of the Tigray region. But the zonal and district (woreda) administrations were not willing to hear the question. Hence, the Committee approached the regional council again, to no avail. The district, zonal, regional and federal offices gave the Welkait Committee a run-around, each refusing to hear the case, claiming not to be responsible. Some argued that it is a matter of identity, others that it pertains to borders. The former should have been dealt with on the state or zonal level, the latter on the federal. Clearly, there was a lack of political will to hear the claim and address it.

Over these months, the Welkait Committee held regular meetings and consultations with the population in Gondar, Bahir Dar, Welkait, and other places with displaced Welkait Amhara people, to which everybody was invited to participate and the intentions and demands of the initiative were made public and transparent. In sum, the Welkait Amhara Identity Question was brought forward by the appointed committee in a peaceful, democratic and lawful way, based on the laws of the country. How did the government agencies react?

Months passed and no office reacted to the petition. On 28 January 2016,¹⁷ a delegation of 81 Welkait Amhara people traveled to Addis Ababa with the intention to submit their letter personally to the HoF. When they reached Entoto, the outskirt of the capital, federal police stopped them. They interrogated the Committee in Tigrinia, refusing to speak Amharic, the national working language of Ethiopia (Demeke, 2018). They told them to stop raising this question, denied them entrance into Addis Ababa and deported them to Chancho in Oromia region, 300 km from Entoto. The Committee informed the Oromia regional government about the incident and received their support in return. Two days later, they split up and went to Addis Ababa in different groups. On 3 February 2016,¹⁸ 19 delegates reached the HoF, and four entered the office to make an appointment. However, when they left, they were taken into custody and treated like criminals—interrogated, intimidated, photos and fingerprints taken—at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Atalay, 2020; Demeke, 2018; Keasegid, 2019; Teshager, 2018). The following day, 4 February 2016,¹⁹ the delegation was held at HoF and given a letter to the Tigray region, stating that to raise the Welkait question is a constitutional right and that it has to be treated by the regional legal bodies properly.

Half a year later, the Tigray region still refused to deal with the question but sent the military to arrest all committee members. In July 2016, the committee members Atalay Zafe, Alene Shama, Getachew Ademe and Mebratu Getahun were arrested in Gondar’s Kebele 3 and taken straight from Gondar to Maekelawi prison in Addis Ababa (Atalay, 2020). In Ethiopia, the name Maekelawi is synonymous with torture and state terrorism. They were kept for the first 17 days in solitary confinement in a dark chamber. No communication was possible during the confinement. Usually, interrogations were held in the middle of the night. During the daytime, they were kept in dark rooms. Limited toilet hours ensured separation from other prisoners. After 17 days, they were moved to a windowless room together with 20 other people. “The air was very bad, it stank. Many people were sick,” Atalay (2020) recalls. The food without vegetables and fiber caused constipation as a method of torture. The Committee members, some elder men, handled the torture differently. Getachew Abebe fell very sick, he could not get up. Other inmates’ legs and backs were covered with scars from the beatings by prison guards (Mengsti, 2018).²⁰

After three months in the crowded and closed room, they were transferred to “Sheraton,” a small room with the luxury of a window. After another five months they were moved to the Addis Ababa Police Commission which is on the same compound, where their indictments were read. From there they were transferred to the transit camp Kilinto Zone 3, into a room of 7 × 2 meters filled with 150 other people. “You could barely sleep. The room is called ‘Siberia’ because it is very cold. We were imprisoned for one year, seven months and 15 days” (Atalay, 2020). The group was released from Kilinto in three phases. The last group included Atalay Zafe, Getachew Adene, Mebratu Getahun, Teshager Woldemicael, and the priests Aba Gebreyesus and Aba Gebreslassie. They were all accused of being terrorists. The priests were not politically engaged; they only protected the trees belonging to the monastery Woldba from being cut by Tigrean settlers. As punishment for their resistance, the priests were arrested and nuns were raped (Atalay, 2020).

Colonel Demeke Zewdu recounts his attempted arrest:

The arrests of Welkait Committee members in July 2016 triggered protests that spread across the Amhara region. The Welkait question became a national question for democratization and justice. The specific demands for Welkait self-determination and the release of political prisoners broadened to demands for more democratic rights. These were suppressed by the TPLF-led leadership. Human Rights Watch reported that there were large-scale arbitrary arrests throughout Amhara region and that security forces killed over 30 unarmed people at one incident in Bahir Dar alone. It also reported that peaceful protesters expressed concerns regarding the unequal distribution of power and economic benefits in favor of those aligned to the government (Human Rights Watch [HRW], 2017: 7). Colonel Demeke Zewdu became a hero in the Amhara region and throughout most of the country. His mentions were mostly accompanied by the term ጀግና (jegna, hero); his image is plastered on buses, taxis and walls. His house in Gondar-Deslagn was turned into a museum; the bullet holes in the walls are clearly visible (Keasegid, 2019: 90). People express that he resembles the hope in a democratization process in the country that will bring rule of law and justice to the disenfranchised and marginalized (179ff.). In numerous interviews and informal conversations, Colonel Demeke was credited for starting the democratization in Ethiopia, and his insistence on peaceful and democratic processes following rule of law, despite harassment and life threats, was a starting point for political reform processes under Abiy Ahmed. After appeals from religious leaders for peacefulness, protesters were mostly unarmed and changed tactics to holding general strikes. These were outlawed when the then Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn declared the state of emergency on 9 October 2016.²² During the countrywide state of emergency, from October 2016 until August 2017, security forces arrested more than 20,000 people and committed widespread human rights violations (HRW, 2018: 2). The Ethiopian Human Rights Council had condemned the arbitrary arrests, violence, shooting and silencing of citizens in Amhara and Oromia during the state of emergency (Ethiopian Human Rights Commission [EHRC], 2016; HRCO, 2016, 2017). In January 2018, Colonel Demeke was released when the citizens of Gondar held another peaceful general strike in the city and warned that they would use violence if their demands for releasing political prisoners were not answered. Shortly after, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned, declaring that TPLF hindered his envisaged democratic reform course, and made room for a successor. After several weeks of deliberation, Abiy Ahmed was appointed Prime Minister. Important aspects of the autocratic democracy he set out to reform will be described in the following section.

When TPLF assumed power over Ethiopia, ethnicity was introduced as a major category and fault line for power. The regional states and political parties were organized around ethnic identity. Previously, even during the Era of Princes, groups mobilized in power struggles along with regional domains; ethnicity was not a relevant divide (Yonatan, 2010: 157). Some Welkait Committee members stress that their question—to be considered Amhara and not Tigrean—is one of identity but not political (Goitom, 2019). However, since identity has been highly politicized under ethnic federalism, identity began to matter for inclusion or exclusion from power. When identity is politicized, every identity question becomes political and may be assumed as challenging power.

The FDRE constitution, however, not only recognizes diversity but also celebrates it. Political ethnic and regional pluralism is embraced as a key solution to the problems witnessed by the previous regimes in reflecting the lived reality of diverse culture, lifestyle, economic activity and political orientations of Ethiopian peoples. According to the constitution, within the framework of territorial autonomy by each sub-national jurisdiction, minority communities can exercise a broad range of political powers, including the authority to afford an official status to their languages and to establish and control their educational institutions. The Ethiopian constitutional reform of the early 1990s had the empowerment of regionally and locally based ethnolinguistic groups as its primary agenda. In the constitution, several components of the right to self-determination can be identified. Ethnic groups are granted language and cultural rights. In their claim for recognition, the Welkait Committee stressed article 39 (2), which provides that every ethnic group “has the right to speak, write and develop its own language; to express, to develop and to promote its own culture; and to preserve its history,”²³ as well as article 46 (2), which holds that “states shall be delimited on the basis of the settlement patterns, language, identity and consent of the peoples concerned.” As a first step, they requested state institutions to answer this identity question. Article 19 (1) of Proclamation no. 251/1993 states that the HoF has the power to refer the application presented by any nation, nationality, or people who believe that its self-identity is denied, to the regional state concerned (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia [FDRE], 2001). Additionally, article 20 (1) stipulates that applications shall be submitted to the HoF only after exhaustion of solution by the various organs in the administrative hierarchy of the state concerned. Once an answer is provided, they could then ask the Amhara region to petition for a change of state borders in line with article 48 of the constitution to include Welkait. To comprehend why the institutions declined to even hear the Welkait Committee and denied to process the question requires comprehending the character of Ethiopia’s federal democracy.

Although Ethiopia’s government expresses itself as a federal democratic republic, the Democracy Index classifies the political system for subsequent years as an “authoritarian regime” (The Economist Intelligence Unit [EIU], 2017: 10, 2019: 28, 2020: 13). The Democracy Index 2017, assessing the situation in 2016 when the Welkait Committee was arrested, predicted for Ethiopia to continue to be a deeply entrenched one-party state without providing the freedoms necessary to promote genuine democracy (EIU, 2017: 50). The report for 2019 remains skeptical of the transformative power of the new Prime Minister: “patronage systems that have been entrenched for decades will be difficult to reverse with any speed” (EIU, 2020: 45). In November 2020, Abiy (2020) painstakingly described the details of how the “criminal clique” hindered his reforms.

Scholars investigating Ethiopian federalism have pointed out discrepancies in the de jure and de facto states. The country has a progressive constitution but it is insufficiently implemented. Constitutionalism is a concept that states that the authority of the government is derived from the people and its authority is limited by the constitution. Its legitimacy depends on obeying these limitations; the idea of rule of law means that every person and entity must observe the laws; nobody is above the law. Also, the idea of rule of law, meaning that all government decisions should be under the law, is closely linked to the concept of constitutionalism. With its novel ethnic federal arrangement for self-determination, the constitution could be, in theory, considered as a groundbreaking design that combines grassroots self-governance with ethnicity uniquely. However, the political system is characterized by the “centralization syndrome” (Fiseha, 2014: 60). Federalism usually means a shared government and shared power between the federal and state levels. It promotes decentralization and certain degrees of regional autonomy. In practice, however, all power lies centrally with the ruling party—until 2020 the TPLF-led EPRDF.²⁴ This inherently contradicts the liberal, democratic and politically pluralistic provisions of the constitution. Assefa (2013) argues that although states are given broad mandates to design policies that fit their local context, in actual terms their role is limited to the implementation of policies designed at the center. Hence, the judicial framework provides rules and procedures that can deal with inter-ethnic or boundary disputes and regional state minorities, but the political space to address them is closed.

Ethiopian federal studies scholars point to the paradox between generously granted constitutional powers to the states and a centralized federal system in practice, which arises from a centralized party system as well as historically hierarchical and patriarchal governing structures (Bahru, 2017). The ruling party coalition controls not only the institutions of the federation but also all the regional states governments in the federation either directly through its member parties or indirectly through affiliated parties that control the other five states. As a result of this party structure, most policies that have implications for the federal and state governments are generated through the party’s central decision-making apparatus (Assefa, 2015: 33f.). As a result of Assefa’s (2013: 34) assessment that the ruling party “contradicts the constitutionally proclaimed principles of self-rule and state autonomy,” he defined the Ethiopian political system as “democratic centralism” resulting from the twins of hierarchy and authoritarianism with their emphasis on obedience to the higher level:

Hence, under TPLF, democratic institutions in Ethiopia were not allowed to work according to the spirit of the constitution. Zemelak (2015) confirms the dependency of local governments on the leadership of a single ruling party. He recommends the need to consult the relevant community in the process of demarcating and altering local boundaries (202). He further argues that “the federal Constitution falls far short of explicitly recognizing local government as an autonomous order of government” (205). By building on the argument by Getachew (2015: 191) that it is necessary to use local government only as an administrative arm, not as empowerment, Zemelak (2015: 2017) claims that the EPRDF changed its policy towards local governments “as a political maneuver to diminish the power of regional authorities.” Hence, Ethiopian governance under TPLF was managed by a political order with a minimum level of participation and representation and avoidance of any effective challenge to the leadership. The regime held on to an effective monopoly of political power and, thus, remained a classic case of an illiberal state. Therefore, the House of Federation could refer the Welkait case back to the regional offices, knowing very well that they had no power to solve the issue.

This part has shown that the political structure of the FDRE unter EPRDF lacked meaningful federal and democratic components. Political analysts qualified the Ethiopian political system as authoritarian, centralized and hierarchical. It lacked the two essential components of democracy—that is, democratic institutions and public discussion. The word republic stems from the Latin res public and means public affair: transparent, open discussion and decision making. To discuss the Welkait question was impossible and the attempts criminalized. Hence, taking a democratic turn in Ethiopia, as Abiy Ahmed has promised, requires deep changes in Ethiopia’s political culture. His understanding and promise of democratization will be presented in the subsequent sections.