Imagining Ethiopia Post-identity Politics

Ethiopia’s Regime Faces Precarious Times As Diaspora Plans for the Future
In November 2015, residents of a small town called Ginchi launched protests against a proposal by Ethiopia’s government to expand Addis Ababa, the capital, into the surrounding farmlands in the Oromia region. The protests have since grown into a movement demanding greater self-rule, freedom and respect for the ethnic identity of the Oromo people, who have experienced systematic marginalization and persecution over the last quarter-century.
In Amhara, the country’s second largest region, protests started in Gonder on July 31 this year, and rapidly devolved from addressing localized identity questions of the Welkait community into a region-wide movement that has spread into numerous other provinces in just four months. Though the large-scale July 31 incident in Gonder marked the first major confrontation between Amhara protest leaders and the Ethiopian government, the dispute between the Amharas and the regime can be traced back as far as the early 1990s, when the Tigrayan-dominated regime redrew the district boundaries of the Welkait community that belonged to ethnic Amharas into Tigray region. Some Amhara activists have described the ongoing Amhara protest as ‘25 years of anger unleashed’. The protesters in Gonder have also expressed slogans of solidarity for the protests in Oromia......See More