By Daandii Ragabaa

For thirty years, Washington has backed a minority Tigrayan regime in Ethiopia—ignoring the grievances of the 30 million Oromo majority. The result has been not stability, but a cycle of repression, war, and growing resistance.

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When Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s rebel movement seized power in Addis Ababa in May 1991, the United States faced a choice. It could insist on genuine democratization in Africa’s most populous empire-state—or it could back a familiar ally who talked the language of reform while maintaining control through ethnic dominance.

Washington chose the latter.

Three decades later, the consequences of that decision are devastatingly clear. Ethiopia remains one of the most unstable countries in the Horn of Africa, with repeated elections rejected as fraudulent, scores of protesters gunned down in the capital, independent journalists imprisoned, and armed resistance movements growing in the countryside . The U.S. commitment to a Tigrayan-led regime ruling over the Oromo majority—estimated at more than 30 million people, over 40% of Ethiopia’s population—has produced neither democracy nor stability.

It has instead produced what scholar Hamdesa Tuso calls a “new Cold War”: the same strategic calculus dressed in new rhetoric, with the same disastrous consequences for the region’s peoples .

The Price of a Proxy

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched U.S. foreign policy in Africa over the past half-century. In Zaire, Washington backed Mobutu Sese Seko to the bitter end—and more than 2 million people died in the ensuing civil war. In Liberia, the U.S. looked away as Samuel Doe brutalized his population—and tens of thousands died. In Sudan, American aid flowed to Gaafar Nimeiri as he fought a civil war that would eventually claim more than 2 million lives .

Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi followed the same script. The Tigrayan leader was “good at talking the language of democracy and development—and even more adept at manipulating Western fears of terrorism” . But the reality on the ground told a different story.

When internationally observed elections were held in May 2005, they were supposed to cement Meles’s claim to democratic legitimacy. Instead, the results revealed his lack of national support. According to Human Rights Watch, Meles had “squashed political dissent in Oromia, the country’s largest region, thus denying voters there a real choice in the elections” . The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which many experts believe would have won a majority of votes in Oromia, had been forced out of the country in 1992—prevented from legally participating in the political process despite being the only major party to bridge Ethiopia’s Christian-Muslim divide .

The aftermath was predictable. Two waves of protest erupted in Addis Ababa. Both times, government forces shot scores of protesters and locked up opposition figures. Independent journalists were arrested. Opposition leaders who refused to take their seats were charged with treason .

The Oromo Question

To understand why U.S. policy has failed so spectacularly, one must understand the Oromo question. The Oromo are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, yet they have been systematically marginalized for over a century—first under Amhara-dominated imperial rule, then under the Derg, and now under Tigrayan dominance .

When Meles’s TPLF/EPRDF took power in 1991, it created a system of “ethnically-based federalism” that scholar Theodore Vestal described as “more Machiavellian than Wilsonian.” The Tigrayan minority—less than 10% of the population—could keep other ethnic groups divided and “content to manage affairs only in their own limited bailiwicks, then larger matters can be subsumed by the one governing party” .

As David Hirst of The Guardian observed: “The Tigreans dominated the administration, security services, police and army. Bitter memories of Amhara chauvinism seemed to pervade and envenom their new sense of mastery… The Ethiopian state in their hands, they persisted, if surreptitiously, with a Tigrean agenda. The right of secession was enshrined in the constitution while they diverted state resources to their own people and region” .

The Oromo Liberation Front

The OLF has been consistently misrepresented by U.S. officials. Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice listed it as a “terrorist” organization sponsored by Sudan—a designation that provoked immediate protest from Oromos around the world . Yet the OLF, like other liberation movements in human history (from the American Revolution to the African National Congress), emerged from legitimate grievances: land confiscation, cultural genocide, prohibition of the Oromo language, denial of education, and systematic discrimination .

“The Oromo people are the single majority nationality in the region,” Tuso writes. “Yet they have been the most oppressed, the most deprived, and the least exposed to modernity due to the century-old colonial subjugation and relentless exploitation” .

When the OLF withdrew from government in 1992 after fraudulent elections, all genuine Oromo political organizations were expelled from the transitional government. The U.S., instead of taking appropriate action against the rigging and sabotage, continued its uncritical support for the regime .

The New Cold War

The tragedy is that this pattern reflects not U.S. interests but a deeply flawed strategic vision. During the Cold War, the Horn of Africa was a proxy battleground between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. After the Cold War ended, the U.S. could have chosen a different path. Instead, as Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, reflected: “I cannot help being surprised at the amount of energy and effort spent almost entirely in vain by Moscow and Washington on these so-called African affairs. Somalia was only one of a number of countries whose local quarrels became enmeshed in the Cold War… and all of them worse off for their involvement with two superpowers” .

The post-Cold War era has brought a “new Cold War”—this time framed around the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. The West needs a new “empire of evil to mobilize against,” and Islamic fundamentalism has replaced communism as the antithesis of “the western way” . In this new paradigm, Ethiopia under Meles is positioned as a bulwark against extremism—a narrative that conveniently ignores the regime’s systematic violations of human rights and its instrumental use of religion as a political tool.

This mischaracterization is particularly dangerous for the Oromo. Some U.S. officials have described Oromia as a potential “breeding ground for Islamic Fundamentalism”—a designation that Tuso calls “not only a misrepresentation of a serious scope… potentially, it is a lethal designation” . In reality, the Oromo have three African souls—indigenous belief, Christianity, and Islam—and none of their national movements have been rooted in religious fundamentalism .

A Way Forward

The U.S. has a history of empowering weaker parties when it serves its strategic interests—from supporting human rights activists to intervening in the Balkans to protect Kosovar Albanians. Yet in the Horn of Africa, where Western powers bear more responsibility for the conflicts than in the Balkans, Washington has consistently sided with the oppressor .

In 2005, when the OLF sought peaceful accommodation and asked the State Department to support Norwegian mediation efforts, the Bush administration rebuffed the entreaties and instead dispatched a mid-level official to persuade Meles to make some internal conciliatory gestures . The refusal to engage with the OLF was, as one observer noted, “bewildering”—particularly because the party was “one of the few in the Horn of Africa to bridge the Christian-Muslim divide” .

The question remains: how long should the West continue to sponsor minority ethnic dominance in Ethiopia? If minority rule in South Africa was unacceptable to the U.S.—which it was—then why should it be acceptable in the case of Tigrayans ruling over Oromos ?

The answer, perhaps, lies in a long-overdue recognition that the Ethiopian Empire cannot be democratized from above by a minority regime. Empires collapse—the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the European global empires, the Soviet Union. To assume that the Ethiopian Empire possesses some unique immunity is to ignore history .

John Burton, one of the pioneers of conflict resolution theory, offered a warning that Washington would do well to heed: “There are needs of individual development and control that will be pursued, regardless of consequences. State manipulation, socialization, coercion and repression merely postpone the inevitable… The state has the means of repression and can survive for a long period of time at great cost; but finally suitably led peoples’ power, reflecting human needs that will be pursued, prevails” .

The Oromo people have been waiting for justice for more than a century. The U.S., by consistently siding with their oppressors, has helped ensure that waiting continues.

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Hamdesa Tuso’s chapter “Oromo Problem and U.S. Foreign Policy” appears in the volume “Arrested Development in Ethiopia.” Tuso, born and raised in Oromo country, served as a senior fellow at the Center for Development Policy and as a consultant on conflicts in the Horn of Africa, and is a faculty member at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.