The Horn Of Africa States: Ethiopia Should Change Course – OpEd

Unresolved ethnic grievances have always led to violence throughout history, no matter how long they stay dormant. And ashes, they say, sometimes, cover some hot spots that can trigger fires and flames, as so do, ethnic disparities and injustices in countries.

They often lead to a breakdown of systems and governance followed by violence and eventually a breakdown of countries into their constituent ethnic groups. Former Yugoslavia is generally taken as an example of one of the most recent countries which broke down into its component parts through a violent process.

The Soviet Union also broke down into many parts although the process there was not violent as the center understood it would lose more than keeping together its varied component communities, although the consequences of such breakdown in the Soviet Union is currently manifested in the Russian/Ukraine war.

If the leadership of a country which consists of nations brought together in the past through force are not wise enough to keep them together through creation of a nation state where all are equal and where one group does not dominate the others, it is bound to confront an opposition and once that opposition turns to violence, it can lead to a breakdown and the seeking by the aggrieved parties of total independence.

Ethiopia is one such country that was created through conquests. It was kept together as a country through an imperial system which was replaced by a military dictatorship, followed by a dominant ethnic group in an ethnic-based federal system, held together always by military force.

This was replaced by the current continuing federal government, which put in power the largest ethnic group in the country, in the hope this would calm the boiling ethnicity in the country. In the beginning, everything went as well as it could.

The new administration freed all political prisoners, brought back exiled opposition groups, made peace with one of its arch enemies, Eritrea. It earned the Prime Minister a Nobel Peace Price in a short period of about a year. He came in 2018 and........

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