Exilic Oromo Voices Condemned Further into Exile, into Silence
- Created on Tuesday, 03 December 2013 00:55
When
the Saudi government started to crackdown on Ethiopian refugees and
migrant workers last month, it was obvious that the consequent abuse was
directed against all those who travel on Ethiopian passport
irrespective of their particular national or ethnic identities.
From
day one, we all reacted with anger, frustration, and despair. We were
angry about the shameless infliction of brutality on these exilic souls
referred to by the Saudis as ‘illegal residents.” We despaired at the
lack of shame on the part of the Saudi police. We despaired at the lack
of swift and appropriate response from the government of Ethiopia. We
were frustrated by the total indifference of the international
community.
Ethiopians
of all colors joined hands in expressing this anger. We all agreed on
the need to stop the violence. And that actions must be taken to support
the victims by providing relief and protection through such measures as
repatriation to their country, or facilitating the migrants safe
departure to the countries of their choice, while also pressing Saudi
Arabia to account for the atrocities perpetrated by its officers.
At
first, the activists started with a tone that spoke more against the
Saudis and less against the Ethiopian government. Some of the dominant
voices among the Ethiopian diaspora who were unhappy with that narrative
(and with Ethiopia’s response, or lack thereof) sought to change gears
using the occasion to express their general protest against the
Government of Ethiopia. At times, such a protest appeared inappropriate
to the occasion or to the audience, and, in some instances, people went
to the extent of fighting among themselves as a consequence.
On
some of these occasions, I also observed the impropriety and the
crudity of it all. I saw how this kind of activity risks the obfuscation
of the message these protests were supposed to send. But even then, I
understood its significance in venting out pent up political anger
(which at times is so bitter only because of lack of political space at
which to express it). I thought, may be, this is the diasporic folks’
way of reminding the public in whose countries they live about the
problems that put Ethiopians in this position of precarity in the first
place.
I
thought, perhaps, this is the only way they participate in the
political life of their country of origin—even by turning meetings
called for expressing humanitarian solidarity into ones of raw hostility
and agitation. I thought, may be, this is the only way they can keep
politicizing the violence (in the good sense). May be, I thought, this
invites a fertile ground within the context of which to understand the
violence (by considering not just the atrocities in Saudi Arabia but
also the systematic violence in Ethiopia that served as a push factor to
create the refugee/migrant status for these victims there). I thought
that perhaps this is another moment of political fecundity. This, I
thought, is another moment of productive political conversation.
And then came the Oromos.
And
they said, “We are Oromos, not Ethiopians. Stop the violence against
the Oromos.” Then all hell broke loose in the dominant Ethiopian
diaspora activist community. The anger turned against the Oromo now, not
against the Ethiopian government, not even the Saudis. The violence of
the Saudis became a non-issue. The social media community’s major
preoccupation became why the Oromos say that, and whether they should be
allowed to say that. As always Ethiopia’s problem became only Oromos
and Oromia. It created an occasion for some to re-enact and foment
long-held hatred for the Oromo. Some found an opportunity to indulge in a
discursive violence that is beyond the pale.
I always thought that Oromos (and their demands) are one of the important high-stakes problems in Ethiopia.[1]
But I never thought it was the only one, for it is only one of the
several most important problems. Nor have I ever thought it is the
only—or a unique – challenge posed by the ethno-national diversity,
although it is increasingly coming to be portrayed as such.
But
when the conversation shifted from one that condemns the Saudis to one
that curses the protestors who demanded the cessation of violence
against the Oromo, I wasn’t entirely surprised, but I was genuinely
intrigued. And I asked questions.
Why
is it that folks who used the occasion to put up a general protest
against the government so shocked to see the Oromos, too, used the
occasion to protest against the Government of Ethiopia? Why was it that
the Oromos’ invocation of their particular lived experience taken to be
so much of a heresy? Why is it that some of us feel justified in
(de)selecting voices that can qualify for presentation in these
platforms? Who are we to make judgments about who can protest and who
can not?
Why
don’t we try to make a closer analysis of the demographics of these
refugees/migrant workers and their backgrounds? Why was it that this
didn’t occasion an opportunity for a robust engagement with the push
factors in Ethiopia? Why was it that we have not even thought of the
political economy of repatriation of these victims? (Are they going to
benefit from the repatriation? What are they being repatriated to? Where
are they going? Who stands to gain from their repatriation? And who
stands to lose? At whose expense do these acts of repatriation happen?
When
the Foreign Minister, Tewodros Adhanom, said ‘We will bring them home,’
many people were heartened. I found myself thinking: What is home to the Oromo migrant? Where do the Oromo migrants go to? Is Ethiopia, the ‘home’ Foreign Minister Tewodros talked about, home to them, too? Has
it been home for them before they left? What is home without your
dignity? What is home when all you find there is the indignity of
poverty, inequality, insecurity, and all forms of unfreedom? What is
home to the homeless at home? What is home if it is a place where you
have no prospect, no hope of dreaming your way out of your miserable
existence, when it is a place where you can’t dream dreams that allow
you to step out of your seemingly eternal precarity? What is home
without your dreams (even dreams of self-estrangement)?
For
some of them, home could be exile, only more exilic than exile itself.
Perhaps more atrocious than the atrocities of the Saudis.
The
debate in social media, and the reaction of most Ethiopianists, in its
rage and fury about the Oromos distancing themselves from Ethiopia,
seems to suggest that voices of protest are differently valued. Even
protests initially meant to express mere human solidarity dissipate into
resistance to the Oromo demand for self-distantiation, that perennial
Oromo quest for justice expressed in the language of dis-association
with/from Ethiopia. In this context, exilic Oromo’s homelessness and
continued estrangement is not only underappreciated but also interpreted
as an affront to Ethiopian nationalism. The self-distantiation (itself
preceded by historic marginalization) from Ethiopia is taken, not as a
corrective critique to oppressive state nationalism, but as a heresy
that seeks to undermine and demolish this state nationalism.
State
nationalism in Ethiopia is constantly unsettled. In its unsettlement,
it is deeply wounded. In its woundedness and consequent insecurity,
Ethiopian state-nationalism mourns its ‘loss’ every time its Oromo
critique rears its head in resistance. Constantly haunted by its
repressed other, it continues to be overly exercised by the voices of
protest. The more distinct these voices (as they often become when the
language used is ‘We are Oromos, not Ethiopians’), the more it provokes
anger among state nationalists. By so doing, the former succeeds in its
resistance. In their call for the Saudis to stop the violence against
the Oromos (just as in their denial of being Ethiopians), they are not
just resisting the blunt and more immediate violence Saudi officers are
inflicting on them, but also making an indictment of the subtle and more
systematic violence they sought to escape from as they migrated away
from home. In a sense, they are seeking relief from the tragedy of being
repatriated to the home that never was.
The
Oromo self-distanciation also succeeds as a mode of critique (whose
task is to unsettle, irritate, satirize, and destabilize existing
assumptions and boundaries). Its success is incomplete, though, because
the kind of conversation state nationalists are engaged in is not one of
working towards focusing on the push factors but rather towards pushing
the Oromo further away. The state nationalists still seek to silence
the Oromo. By trying to deny space to their distinct voice of
resistance, they even seek to condemn them to the very atrocities they
were initially protesting against. They condemn these exilic souls
further into exile.
And yet …
The
longing continues. The longing for relief, the longing for arrival, the
longing for one’s own home, continues. Even the longing for
self-estrangement, the longing to go away from one’s own suffering, the
stride towards that quiet ‘space’ of mourning and lamenting, that deep
and endless longing that gnaws at our souls, continues. In the words
signaling distantiation from Ethiopia, the Oromos sought to express a
longing for distance, a flight away, from their suffering. They sought
to express a longing for exile (from exile).
In
reacting to it angrily, the Ethio-nationalists sought to condemn them
into the very suffering they were initially outraged by; they tried to
deny them the right to distance themselves from the atrocities and the
consequences thereof: the pain of loss, the anguish from attack and
abuse, the sorrow from homelessness, the agony of exilic placelessness,
and the suffering from all this and from a hope indefinitely deferred.
If
home is relational (as I assume it is) and if it is made in the course
of an intimate conversation with the relational other, to the extent it
is not happening between and among Ethio-state nationalists and their
Oromo critic; to the extent Oromos aren’t allowed even to ‘speak’ about
their plights in their own distinct voice as Oromos; to them, home
remains a longing. For, under the circumstances, they will never be able
to find their home in a shared conversation. Perhaps for those of us
who seek justice, home remains to be only in the longing, the longing to
belong and unbelong at the same time.
The
writer, Tsegaye Ararssa, is a Melbourne-based legal scholar and a
graduate student at the University of Melbourne Law School.
[1]
It has been a while since Paul Baxter captured the problematic and/or
problematized nature of the Oromo relation with the Ethiopian state in,
‘Ethiopia’s Unacknowledged Problem: The Oromo’ (1978) 77 (208) African Affairs,
283-296. But even he didn’t conclude that the Oromo is the only problem
of Ethiopia. Most recent debates on social media seem to obsess with it
as if it were the only problem of the ‘polity’, especially when it
comes to the issue of diversity. The Oromo demand is increasingly being
presented as an exceptional one, sort of an aberration, to the pattern
in the wider Ethiopia. The continued controversy around the demands of
the Oromo, the continued failure to understand it (the almost deliberate
predilection to misunderstand it), its continued return to haunt a
state nationalism that repressed it in the past and is ill-equipped to
address it in the present suggests that the Oromo question (and the
question of the Oromos) is still unacknowledged for what it is, at least
not in its own terms.
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