May 6, 2014
by Harben Seyoum
Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas? Joseph Stalin.
It has finally come to the world’s attention that repression and internet-based surveillance in Ethiopia has grown extensive and routine. The Stalinesque TPLF-EPRDF regime keeps electronic tabs on its citizens, at home and abroad, to better survey and repress any emergent dissidence to the reigning ethnic paradigm. If push comes to shove, it uses its draconian Anti-Terrorist Decree to justify its extra-judicial practices against its subjects. This means, censors monitor citizens around the clock and normalize the unequal politics of bloodlines (ethnic federalism), and blunt criticisms of government policy in general. The entire Killil conception of governance is neither new nor federal. It goes back to the Italian fascist occupation of Ethiopia between1936-41. This unpopular “ethnicization” of the country was specifically designed by Mussolini for the conquest and occupation of Ethiopia. It was used by the TPLF in 1991 to disenfranchise Ethiopians and to empower the minority Tigrai-Tigrign population of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The core of the TPLF-EPRDF regime may be anti-Shabiyan, but it is fervently pro-Eritrean in sentiment. In fact, the ruling ethnic group stretches across the dividing Mereb line.
In this system, the ethnically forged state has become an occupier and the ethnically divided population becomes the occupied. Some call the arrangement internal colonization. At any rate, the apartheid-based TPLF state disrupts ethnic solidarities, as well as the flow of information and public communications. All this control is to remain in power. Consequently, the aid-dependent TPLF-EPRDF regime has purchased the capacity to scrutinize the communications of its citizens, and by extension, to limit the type of information and ideas that are being infused and accessed among the occupied populace. Minority ethnic groups do not rule by consent, but rather by security police, espionage and intimidation. Steven Biko said it well, when he re-read the Stalinist dictum from the point of view of oppressed Africans. The most dangerous weapon of the oppressor, he wrote, is “the mind of the oppressed.” Indeed, notwithstanding the FDRE’s Constitution Article 29, why should the occupiers let Ethiopians have ideas and opinions that differ from the party line? Anyways, liberating ideas are usually fought for and rarely given.
