Atrocity in Ethiopian History

“Ethiopia” has long been a violent proposition. Or, to put it a little more precisely, the exercises in state-formation and imperialism that have given rise to Ethiopia in its modern form have long been underpinned by violence, often of an extreme kind. This is not to essentialize Ethiopian national identity or Ethiopian culture, which of course are complex and multi-layered; after all, it can be safely argued – in the tradition of everyone from Thomas Hobbes, through Max Weber, to Charles Tilly – that all such political projects are rooted in violence, and that all states (and certainly empires) are defined by their deployment of extreme force against an array of “others.” That, from a certain point of view, is their entire point. However, it is to argue that, profoundly disturbing though the reports recently coming out of Tigray are, such atrocities are neither anomalous nor without precedent. Violence has long attended political turmoil in Ethiopia. It has been the essential ingredient in the making and remaking of the Solomonic empire, particularly in the quest to dominate troubled provinces and peripheries, and has been both cause and effect of ideological struggle. Atrocity has routinely been deployed in the pursuit to protect – and project – the hegemonic core in ethnic, cultural, and religious terms. Cycles of expansion and disintegration, and episodic challenges to the centre, have involved large-scale violence against ordinary people. Two broad premises need to be established at the outset. The first is that we are concerned here primarily with violence against “civilians” or “non-combatants” – historically an ambiguous category, admittedly – and with the infliction of violence against communities or even entire populations with no immediate, explicitly military target in sight. There is an important distinction to be drawn between the military confrontations on appointed battlefields, which are like rivets in the Ethiopian historical edifice, and the killing of people. Conflict between armed groups gives rise to its own peculiar cruelties, but that is not our central concern here. The second premise is that Ethiopia is at root and in essence an empire, and that Ethiopian imperialism – like every other variation of it – is an intrinsically violent process. It is not exclusively violent – again, no imperialism is that – but at its core is the physical harm inflicted on communities of people identified