Page 97 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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Conclusion
We have established that the Oromo national movement emerged and developed in
opposition to Ethiopian settler colonialism and associated ethnocratic politics. Its goal
is to enable Oromos to determine their cultural, economic, and political destiny as
people through national self-determination. Like successive Amhara-dominated
regimes, the Tigrayan-dominated government has racialized/ethnicized the Ethiopian
state by placing Tigrayan ethnicity at its core, by denying Oromos and others national
self-determination, and by preventing the construction of a legitimate state that can
reflect a multicultural society through accountability and democracy.Without an ac-
countable, democratic, and legitimate state, Oromos and other ethnonations may soon
face a more disastrous condition. If the current Ethiopian state terrorism and massive
human rights violations continue to be ignored by the United States (and other West-
ern countries that back the regime), these conditions may soon result in ethnocidal
conflict and war.The crises facing the Ethiopian empire since the early 1970s has al-
ready destroyed social and cultural systems of peoples who traditionally opposed in-
corporation into the empire.
The Tigrayan-led Ethiopian government has penetrated Oromo society and others
through repression and terrorism, and key positions at all levels are now controlled by
Tigryan elites. Even those Oromos who have chosen to collaborate with the regime,
the OPDO, are not trusted.The Tigrayan-dominated government has been killing or
chasing or imprisoning all opposition political movements and their supporters.Today
we find structural and conjunctural problems in the Ethiopian empire that facilitate
the radicalization of racist prejudice. Although the Tigrayan elites took power from
their ethnonational cousins, the Amharas, they could not establish their cultural and
ideological hegemony in the empire mainly because of the Oromo national move-
ment.As a result, the Tigrayan-dominated state has targeted the Oromo people using
subtle racist and public democratic discourses to maintain its ethnocracy. The racist
discourse helps to facilitate the intra-Tigrayan alliance against Oromos and others, and
its formal democratic discourse is used to hide Tigrayan ethnocracy and racism. Be-
cause the discourses of “democracy,” “ethnonational federalism,” “development,” and
the “social revolution” have failed to convince Oromos and others, the Meles regime
uses state terrorism to violently subordinate civil society and to maintain the kind of
political order that keeps EPRDF in power.
As all of these discourses and political practices are an integral part of global poli-
tics, they must be located and further explored in the context of the global world sys-
tem. Since the incorporation of Oromia into the Ethiopian empire, the colonization
of Oromos by Habashas, and the continued subjugation of the Oromo nation have
taken place within the logic of the racialized capitalist world system, it is necessary to
pay more attention to these issues in the next chapter. By focusing on the racist role
of the United States and its commitment to help maintain the Ethiopian empire at the
cost of Oromos by supporting the TPLF/EPRDF, the next chapter also explores the
challenge the Oromo national movement has faced in the racialized capitalist world
system.