Rwanda's past, Ethiopia's future
April 12, 2004

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Thank you for posting the article entitled After Genocide, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity," (The NY Times, April 9, 2004). It is a very thought-provoking article. I believe the lessons contained in this article will prove instructive to all thoughtful Ethiopians, as they have been to me.

As I was reading the article, what struck me as a tragic irony is the fact that, over the past fifteen years or so, we in Ethiopia have been flirting with (some would say "institutionalizing") ethnicity with the same intensity that the rest of the world has been trying to run away from it. There has never been a country, in Africa or anywhere else in the world, where national politics had been organized primarily around ethnicity and the populace was then able to enjoy democracy and prosperity. To the contrary, such countries almost always end up in turmoil and genocide. Yugoslavia and Rwanda are the poster children. If recent events in Gambella and elsewhere in the country are any indication, the ethnicist ideology and politics of Meles Zenawi's regime is programming Ethiopia to a Rwanda-like genocide.

Clearly, one should not rush to cite the Rwandan case as an evidence for the need to ban ethnicity altogether from Ethiopia (or from any other country, for that matter). However, the Rwandan experience is a clear testimony of the need to place the focus of a nation's political discourse more on civil society and citizenship rights, rather than on the slippery slope of collectivist legitimacy ideologies of political power, such as ethnicity. The sooner we Ethiopians recognize that, the better we will be able to contribute to the alleviation of the worsening deprivation and disenfranchisement of our people.

Afework Gebru