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Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and Sovereignty in the Ethio-Somali Frontier

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Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and Sovereignty in the Ethio-Somali Frontier Agamben in the Ogaden: violence and sovereignty in the Ethio-Somali frontier TOBIAS HAGMANN & BENEDIKT KORF Department of Geography, University of Zürich ABSTRACT This paper suggests an understanding of Ethiopian state sovereignty in its Somali borderlands from a historic perspective. It argues that Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden has recurrently operated as a state of exception, which allows the central government to rule its Somali periphery by violent bureaucratic means. Drawing on Carl Schmitt and particularly Giorgio Agamben, we propose an interpretation of the political history of the Ogaden as a recurrent government by exception that spans the Imperial (c. 1890-1974), the socialist dictatorship of the Derg (1974-1991) and the current democratic regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991-today). The paper conceptualizes the state of exception as a mode of governing the unruly frontier, it offers a genealogy of the violent incorporation of the Ogaden into the Ethiopian body politic and illustrates recurrent strategies by which Ethiopian government has controlled and punished political opponents by dint of emergency powers. We draw attention to the historic continuity of state sovereignty in the Ethiopian frontier as well as some of the empirical manifestations of the state of exception in one of the most under researched African borderland. Keywords: Ethiopia; Ogaden; state of exception; sovereignty; Giorgio Agamben; periphery; ethno-political conflict Paper to be presented at the international workshop ‘Bringing the Margins Back In: War Making and State Making in the Borderlands’, Ghent, 12-13 February 2010. This draft is not for citation without the authors’ permission. We welcome comments and suggestions for revisions at [email protected] and [email protected]. 1 INTRODUCTION1 When a foreign journalist challenged prime minister Meles Zenawi about human rights abuses by Ethiopian troops in the country’s volatile Somali or Ogaden region, he responded that his government knew ‘how insurgencies succeed and how they fail’. Referring to his own experience as a leader of the former rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the prime minister remarked that: ‘The most stupid mistake a counter-insurgency operation can make is alienating the population. If you alienate the population, you’re finished. We are not going to make that mistake’ (Perry 2007). Although political dynamics in Ethiopia’s Somali region often go unnoticed by the Ethiopian and international public, news reporters and human rights organizations have provided credible evidence of systematic human rights abuses by the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) during its 2007 and 2008 counter-insurgency campaign against the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (Alpeyrie, 2007; Gettleman, 2007a; Human Rights Watch, 2008; Sanders, 2008). Informed observers have described the ENDF’s conduct as ‘antiquated’ and markedly ‘counter-productive’ as it motivated large parts of the local Ogaadeen population to join or support the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).2 There is little doubt that Ethiopian armed forces, and to a lesser degree ONLF rebels, have committed atrocities against the local population ever since the beginning of the conflict in 1994. Similarly, there can be little doubt that, as the above statement by the prime minister illustrates, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and its security strategists are very much aware of the counter-productive effects of indiscriminate counter-insurgency campaigns. The former TPLF rebels had fought a brutal war for ethno-national self-determination during which they experienced first hand how the heavy handed counter-insurgency tactics by the Derg soldiers strengthened popular support in their native Tigray region (Berhe, 2009; Tareke, 2002, Young, 1997). Despite this experience, Ethiopian army commanders applied very similar tactics in 2007 and 2008 against the Ogaadeen population. This apparent contradiction begs the following question: Why does the Ethiopian army implement a counter- insurgency campaign in the Ogaden that frustrates large parts of the civilian population and thus generates increasing popular support for the ONLF rebels? This paper sets out to answer this empirical puzzle by considering Ethiopia’s Somali inhabited lowlands from a historic perspective in which a very particular logic of governing the frontier is at play. The notion of sovereignty, conceptualized by political philosophers Carl Schmitt (1992) and Giorgio Agamben (1998) as the ability to declare a ‘state of exception’ or ‘state of emergency’, is most helpful in this regard. Our main argument is that the ‘state of exception’ in Ethiopia’s Somali region is neither recent nor exceptional, but part of periodic interventions by which central rulers – from emperor Menelik to the military regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam to today’s ethno-nationalist government led by Meles Zenawi – govern the country’s south-eastern borderlands. The political violence that derives from these successive states of emergency must thus be 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Anniversary Conference of the International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University in April 2009. 2 Interview Hagmann, Ethiopian researcher, Addis Ababa, 15 July 2008 and interview Hagmann, expatriate humanitarian official, Addis Ababa, 15 July 2008. 2 seen as emanations of state sovereignty rather than as results of local disorder or anomy. As we shall illustrate in the following pages, the state of exception in the Ethiopian Ogaden represents a persuasive logic of government that relies on a set of recurrent strategies that permeate different regimes and time periods (rather than a spatially and temporally bounded phenomenon of exceptional circumstances). Among these recurrent strategies is the deployment of massive military force against the local population in attempts to subdue resistance. Rereading the Ogaden’s recent political history (ca. 1890- 2008) in light of Agamben’s legal philosophical theory of the state of exception reveals the intricate yet constitutive relations that exist between Ethiopia’s political centre and its margins. Contrary to conventional wisdom and as we argue in this paper, the Somali periphery is not (only) where the Ethiopian state ends, but the place where disorder becomes internalized into the body of the Ethiopian sovereign through the state of exception. This line of thinking leads us to consider some of the conventional assumptions about the nature and quality of ‘the state’ in so-called peripheral or borderland regions of developing countries. It is generally assumed that state failure or weakness, the inability to uphold a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, is a key explanation for the occurrence of political violence in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere (Bates, 2008). In the Somali region authors concur that ‘governmental institutions have never been strong’ (van Brabant, 1994:21), that the ‘regional government is weak and ineffective’ (Devereux, 2007:15) or that ‘government has made no difference’ (Lister, 2004:23). While it holds true that the regional administration has very limited capacities to deliver services (Hagmann, 2005b), an analysis of the governmental techniques associated with recurrent states of emergency in the Ethiopian Ogaden allows for a scrutiny not of the developmental state, but of the state as the ‘hidden reality in political life’ (Abrams, 1988 [1977]:61). When considering the state of exception as a manifestation of state sovereignty, one can no longer blame political turmoil in the (Ethiopian) periphery on the absence of the state. To the contrary, we argue in this paper that a coercive Ethiopian state has made its presence felt periodically and most resolutely among Somali society since the end of the 19th century. The Ethiopian Ogaden is often portrayed as an archetypical example of a disorderly periphery where the state – in this case the Ethiopian state – has failed to monopolize violence and ‘civilize’ unruly nomadic livestock keepers. Accounts of the region regularly insist on its problematic and volatile political, climatic and economic features (Hagmann, 2005a). The Ogaden has been described as one ‘of the most isolated and unforgiving desert environments in the Horn of Africa’ (IRIN 2000). The segmentary kinship politics of its ethnic Somali inhabitants are usually lamented for their inability to provide for stable political institutions. Prejudicial assumptions about Ethiopian Somalis supposedly aggressive character are made by international donors such as the European Union, which speculates that ‘Episodes of violence are common in the Region as clans tend to solve their differences through confrontation’ (2005:8). Such statements reflect only barely veiled feelings of superiority by foreigners, but also Ethiopian highlanders, vis-à-vis Ethiopia’s Somali region. This stereotype of the bellicose Somali pastoralist neglects the fact that village elders and administrators make use of elaborate conflict resolution mechanisms to solve communal disputes peacefully (Hagmann, 2007), that competition over resources at household level more often leads to cooperation than to 3 conflict (Bogale and Korf, 2007) and that many highly escalated conflicts in the region are partly sparked by the ongoing administrative decentralization (Hagmann and Mulugeta, 2008). Our emphasis on the influential effect
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