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Editorial Revolution in Ethiopia: 15 Years on

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Editorial Revolution in Ethiopia: 15 Years on Editorial Revolution in Ethiopia: 15 Years on .. As it rounds off its fifteenth year, the revolution in Ethiopia appears to have completed a distinct phase with the institutionalisation of the regime that came to power in 1974. Military rule has been supplemented, though not supplanted, with the Workers' Party of Ethiopia (WPE), founded in 1984, whose prescribed role is to be 'the guiding force of the state and the entire society'. The state itself, renamed the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, was given a constitution in 1987, in which the dominant role of the Party is enshrined. Considerable care and time were given to fashioning these institutions, and much effort expended in mobilising popular involvement in the process. The obvious intention was to draw the curtain on the previous phase, marked by military rule, lawlessness and violence, and to usher in a period of 'socialist construction' under the aegis of the WPE. Christopher Clapham completed a study of Ethiopia just as the process of institutionalisation neared its end (Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia). It is the first detailed study of the regime, and his article in this issue offers a concise description of it, as well as his assessment of its strengths and weaknessnes. While he gives little credit to the regime's Marxist ideological assertions, viewing them essentially as instrumental to the purpose of mass mobilisation and organisation, he is impressed with the strength and organisational capacity of the state, which has been able to make its authority felt directly at the base of society — though not everywhere in the country — for the first time in Ethiopian history. This enhanced capacity for organisation and mass control accounts for the success with which monumental tasks like resettlement and villagisation were carried out, not to mention the massive, prolonged war effort against the Eritrean and Tigrayan rebels in the north. In Clapham's opinion, the Workers' Party of Ethiopia, whose 'leninist' structure parallels and reinforces the structure of the state, will further enhance the state's capacity to control and manage the destiny of the Ethiopian people. According to Clapham, the hallmark of Marxism-Leninism everywhere is the aggrandisement of the state, which then becomes the prune mover in the struggle for economic transformation and development. Insofar as Ethiopia's rulers have made progress in this direction, he is willing to grant their claim that theirs is a Marxist-Leninist regime; their ideological shallowness notwithstanding. Even within its own terms of reference, which we ourselves would not share, however, 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY this judgement was rendered dubious by recent developments, which have revealed the regime's vulnerability (see 'Briefings'). Michael Stahl examines the regime's record in the field of agricultural development. His article is based on a lengthy, recent personal involvement with peasant production in Ethiopia as administrator of the Swedish aid programme, the showpiece of which was the Chilalo Agricultural Development Unit (CADU) in Arsi province. Set up in 1967, and designed to promote smallholder production through a 'package' of inputs, the project was initially hampered by the quasi-feudal land tenure system of the ancien regime that robbed the tenants of much of the surplus they produced (see M.Stahl, Contradictions in Agricultural Development, 1973)). In recent years, the programme was completely undermined by the policies of the successor regime, which deprived the peasants of initiative, replaced the market with a system of compulsory purchasing by the state at fixed prices, and promoted collectives and state farms as opposed to smallholder production. As a result, the Swedes recently decided to wind up the programme. Stahl's article examines the whole range of policies promoted since 1974 that have affected agricultural producers in Ethiopia, and assesses their impact on production. The high point of the revolution for those Ethiopia's peasants, especially in the south, who were tenants came with the sweeping land reform in 1975, which not only gave the land to the tiller, but also afforded a considerable degree of self-administration in the rural areas through the newly established peasant associations. This was when the new regime and the state were at their weakest point, but it was not to last long. In the rural areas, where over eighty per cent of Ethiopians live, the strengthening of the state noted by Clapham was reflected in the incorporation of the associations as state adjuncts, and their use for the purposes of facilitating military conscription, tax collection, forced contributions to the war effort, and compulsory grain delivery at low prices. More recently, they played their part also in resettlement and villagisation. While the peasant sector was thus drained of initiative and surplus, the regime poured resources lavishly into a small number of collectives and state farms, whose performance as a model of socialist production has nevertheless been quite unimpressive. Economic stagnation, famine, a huge and widening foreign trade deficit, and regular budget deficits on one hand, and a very high growth of state expenditure due to the war on the other, should spell bankruptcy. Why this has not happened is the subject of Roy Love's article — an issue that Clapham had earlier raised. It appears that one way of financing the state has been increased taxation of the rural sector, whose contribution to state revenue more than doubled, as well as increased taxation of exports, almost entirely agricultural, which means that the producers got less. In return, this sector received little from the state, and most of what it got went to state farms. Credit and money supply expansion, as well as foreign indebtedness, the level of which can only be guessed at, since most of it is owed to the Soviet Union, were other ways of bridging the financial gap. The revolution and the regime in Ethiopia are approaching the end of a phase in another and more critical sense. The stalemate in the war against the Eritrean and Tigrayan liberation fronts in the north came to an end in mid-1988, suddenly and disastrously for the Ethiopian forces. Since then, they have been pushed out of Tigray province completely, and are hanging on precariously to a few towns in Eritrea where they can be supplied only by sea or air. It is obvious that ten years EDITORIAL 3 of inconclusive warfare sapped the fighting capacity of the Ethiopian army, while the effect on the insurgents seems to have been rather the opposite. The likelihood that the Soviet Union will scale down its military aid to Ethiopia magnified the peril. With the moment of truth approaching rapidly, the regime in Addis Ababa was politically paralysed. The recently adopted constitution included a scheme providing varying degrees of self-government to five autonomous regions and twenty-four administrative units. Eritrea and Tigray were included among the former, though sub-divided and shorn of some of their districts. The scheme is chiefly remarkable for the range of possibilities it offers to foster rivalries among ethnic groups and thereby dilute regional solidarity. Although it was rejected out of hand by all groups fighting for self-determination, the regime clung to it as its definitive 'peace proposal'. In the second week of May 1989, a spectacular convulsion at the highest level of the military establishment might have represented an attempt to end the political impasse produced. A large number of high ranking officers seemingly attempted to force Mengistu's removal while he was on a visit to East Germany. When things went wrong, the plotters were left defenceless, and a veritable massacre of the generals ensued. Thirteen generals and sixteen other senior officers were, in fact, killed, and about 150 top officers were implicated and arrested. Among the dead were the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Staff, the Commander of the Air Force, the Commander of the Second Army in Eritrea and his deputy. Though it failed, the attempt shattered the image of solidity depicted by Clapham and, given the rumoured withdrawal of Soviet military backing, bodes ill for the regime's capacity to carry on such costly internal wars. It should be remembered that the fate of Haile Selassie's regime was sealed when its main pillar of support — the military — cracked. John Markakis 4 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POUTICAL ECONOMY .ETHIOPIA.SOMALIA AND THE REPUBLIC OF DJIBOUTI so 100 iso ;DO ISO YEMEN I ARAB 0 '<» Z0Q 300 100 REPUBLIC S Delinaiion of the boundaries shown on this map must not be conskJsred authoritative, i 5 THE STATE AND REVOLUTION IN ETHIOPIA Christopher Clapham The sustained restructuring of the military regime which has taken place in the 1980s is an essentially 'leninist' project with three components: new and enhanced structures of institutional and centralised control, down to the grass roots level kebelles and peasant associations but one that has not succeeded in many regions; a drastic, state-controlled restructuring of the economic base; plus a limited but significant expansion of political representation essentially through the new Workers' Party. Some of its institutional forms and the economic and social changes (e.g. land reform) are probably irreversible but there has been over-reliance on the use of state power as the solution to all problems. Introduction Ethiopia has since 1974, and especially since the creation of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia (WPE) in 1984, made the most sustained attempt by any African state to create a Marxist-Leninist structure of government along broadly Soviet lines. This enterprise has often been criticised, from the left no less (in fact, generally more) than from the right, as the brutal imposition of an autocratic military leadership, using a largely meretricious Marxist rhetoric — a charge summed up in John Markakis' widely cited phrase, 'garrison socialism'.
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