Ethiopia: Elections, Constitutional Change, and Genocidal Violence
Election
Originally published by The Elephant — Read the original article →
Election process
In November 2020, a war erupted in the Ethiopian region of Tigray. Six hundred thousand to a million civilian lives are estimated to have been lost. Amongst the many war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the two-year war was genocide against Tigrayans. Abiy Ahmed has on several occasions insisted that the catalyst for war was his intolerance for voluntary disassociation and the exercise of the right to vote.
The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) postponed the 2020 election several times, but the final “indefinite” postponement under the cover of COVID-19 breached the constitutionally set term limit. Then NEBE chair Birtukan Mideksa’s claim that COVID-19 introduced public health imperatives that overrode those of democracy was unconvincing given the government’s non-enforcement of other measures such as lockdowns or even social distancing, and its farcical claim of having developed a “homegrown” cure.
Following a public outcry over the “corona-clouded power grab”, four prescriptive options for a “constitutional route to postponement” were presented to a curated array of government-aligned opposition by the then minister of justice, now minister of foreign affairs, Gedion Timothewos. The exercise was met with derision, even by its hand-selected participants. An equally performative constitutional “tribunal” was held, but that too failed to foster agreement over the legality of the postponement and the legitimacy of the government following the expiration of its term.
