Love and Liberation

Humanitarian Work in Ethiopia's Somali Region

Lauren Carruth

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501759499
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Lauren Carruth's Love and Liberation tells a new kind of humanitarian story. The protagonists are not volunteers from afar but rather Somali locals caring for each other: nurses, aid workers, policymakers, drivers, community health workers, and bureaucrats. The contributions of locals are often taken for granted, and the competencies, aspirations, and effectiveness of local staffers frequently remain muted or absent from the planning and evaluation of humanitarian interventions structured by outsiders. Relief work is traditionally imagined as politically neutral and impartial, and interventions are planned as temporary, extraordinary, and distant.

Carruth provides an alternative vision of what "humanitarian" response means in practice—not driven by International Humanitarian Law, the missions of Western relief organizations, or trends in the aid industry or academia but instead by what Somalis call samafal. Samafal is structured by the cultivation of lasting relationships of care, interdependence, kinship, and ethnic solidarity. Samafal is also explicitly political and potentially emancipatory: humanitarian responses present opportunities for Somalis to begin to redress histories of colonial partitions and to make the most out of their political and economic marginalization. By centering Love and Liberation around Somalis' understanding and enactments of samafal, Carruth offers a new perspective on politics and intervention in Africa.

1

HUMANITARIANISM IS LOCAL

In her landmark book on refugees in Africa, the anthropologist Liisa Malkki says:

When these black citizens of Burundi and Rwanda exercise their exit option, most of them will do so on foot. And as they cross the international border, they will undergo a transformation: they will emerge knowable again, on the other side, to international wire services and international relief organizations and developmental agencies and scholars as “African refugees.” . . . They will become not only a “problem,” they will also become an object of humanitarian relief . . . In becoming objects of the philanthropic mode of power, the political, historical, and biographical specificity of their life worlds vanishes.1

Malkki’s book, and this passage in particular, still fascinate me. Her observations inspired my first journeys for ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Ethiopia—inundated as it was with long histories of families fleeing across borders, episodic international relief operations, and the displacement and sedentarization of livestock herders and traders.2 But, as Malkki acknowledges, her characterization of refugees, as invisible to the gaze of the international community before their official request for asylum, also represents her gaze, like my own, a gaze of an expatriate, and not the perspective of the more typical, average aid worker there, who, most likely, was also Burundian or Rwandan.

The “philanthropic mode of power” Malkki identifies in these relief operations is a product of the global humanitarian aid industry and the adjacent academic, development, and international business communities, made up mostly of Europeans and North Americans, who for generations have often rendered the Burundian and the Rwandan exotic, mysterious objects of concern, and the sites for colonization, exploration, resource extraction, labor exploitation, and intervention. So from the vantage point of the African refugee and African aid workers helping meet the needs of these refugees, this “philanthropic mode of power” may very well have been an exotic artifact of a largely mysterious and distant global humanitarian industry, and not something inherently accessible to most aid workers. Global humanitarian intervention, or bani’aadamnimada in Somali, likewise, is “an ideology, a movement and a profession structurally, economically and culturally ‘of the North,’” Antonio Donini writes.3 Relief operations like this are produced through a dominant “white gaze” that views persons and political systems in the Global South as deviant and underdeveloped, therefore in need of intervention and salvation.4

I am part of this industry. My academic and policy research have allowed my international travel and interpolations into relief operations, and given me a privileged (while partial) perspective on the lives and communities of persons who appropriate and affect these “philanthropic modes of power.” I have worked for and with UN agencies carrying out relief work. I have worked as a visiting scholar and graduate student at various universities in Ethiopia and the United States conducting research in different parts of the country. And now I am a professor, still regularly traveling to Ethiopia for research and advocacy work.

However, spending extended time with relief workers and policy makers in eastern Ethiopia—both participating in policy making and response processes as well as observing people at their work—has made me aware of additional humanitarian epistemologies and alternative ways of defining and being humanitarian. In other words, there are other modes of power afoot within relief operations, outside the actions and perspectives of expatriates. Emic forms of humanitarianism—in Somali, samafal—and the labor of locals are what make humanitarian interventions actually work. Expatriates like me, only staying in the Somali Region for short periods of time, remain peripheral to these subaltern modes of power and these alternative ways of understanding and responding to crises.

Somali aid workers, by contrast, have transformed global humanitarian modes of power to render themselves vital to the everyday functioning of relief agencies. Somali Ethiopians implemented and evaluated almost all the relief operations unfolding in eastern Ethiopia. Somali Ethiopians authored most donor appeals to garner funding for programs in the Somali Region, wrote or helped produce many of the news media stories, negotiated with Ethiopian political figures, oriented outsiders newly deployed to the area, cared for crisis-affected persons both within and outside the structures of relief operations, and even shaped public perceptions of crisis and humanitarian response through their posts and photographs of crisis on social media platforms. Even the recipients of aid were part of humanitarian modes of power. In large numbers they volunteered to participate in focus groups and interviews designed to evaluate crisis and various forms of aid, and they allowed themselves and their children to be counted, measured, logged, vaccinated, diagnosed, and treated. The operations of power within humanitarian programs involved the vernacular, ideas, and activity of all these “locals”—people who represent the heart and the workforce of contemporary global humanitarian aid. Their articulations and enactments of samafal were therefore central to the global humanitarian industry and what it means to be a humanitarian today, and not merely local or uniquely Somali interpretations of humanitarian response.5

Decentralization in Ethiopia: Making Global Humanitarianism More Local

“Decentralization” refers to the strategic devolution of power, decision-making authority, and accountability to regional and other smaller, more local, administrative catchment areas and away from centralized federal governmental offices.6 In the Ethiopia context, the idea of decentralizing power and governmental authority out from offices in Addis Ababa to regional governments in places like Jigjiga represents an effort to offer, in return for Ethiopian unity, a modicum of autonomy to regions throughout the country, populated by various minority ethnolinguistic groups.7 Acknowledging Somali regional power and autonomy within Ethiopia counterbalances powerful Pan-Somali nationalist movements and forms of economic cooperation across the Horn of Africa.

Decentralization in Ethiopia additionally provides an antidote to histories of colonization and violent, centralized power during past Ethiopian governments—including, most palpably, the Marxist-Leninist military junta called “the Derg.” In 1991 the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), with assistance from other ethnicity-based militia groups, toppled the Derg.8 In the wake of the revolution, an alliance of groups from across the country formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by the Tigrayan military commander, Meles Zenawi.9 In 1995 the Transitional Government of Ethiopia ratified a new constitution that established the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and divided the country into mostly ethnic-based regional states. Ethnic-based regions—like the Somali Region—were based loosely on ethno-linguistic groups that were able to form coherent political parties and align with the EPRDF.10 Memories of famine, forced resettlement, abuse from police and military forces, and the previous stifling of political dissent during Haile Selassie’s rule and during the Derg’s rule led many Somalis in Ethiopia, years later, to embrace the TPLF, then the EPRDF, and most recently the Prosperity Party, as more peaceful and promising alternatives to imperialism and tyranny.

Federalism in Ethiopia was accordingly a postcolonial political project, and promises of regional autonomy and power sharing were central to its implementation and popularity. The Ethiopian Constitution asserts that:

1. Every nation, Nationality and People in Ethiopia has an unconditional right to self-determination, including the right to secession.

2. Every Nation, Nationality and People in Ethiopia has the right to speak, to write and to develop its own language; to express, to develop, and to promote its culture; and to preserve its history.

3. Every Nation, Nationality and People in Ethiopia has the right to a full measure of self-government which includes the right to establish institutions of government in the territory that it inhabits and to equitable representation in state and Federal governments.

“Nation, Nationality or People” for the purpose of this Constitution, is a group of people who have or share a large measure of a common culture or similar customs, mutual intelligibility of language, belief in a common or related identities, a common psychological make-up, and who inhabit an identifiable, predominantly contiguous territory.11

The constitution thus guarantees democratic representation and equitable resource allocation to a set of politicians representing ethnolinguistic groups—a term Alemseged Abbay calls, “consociationalism” or power sharing between elites at the federal level.12 These elites optimally governed in parallel and as a complement to the leadership of existing secular ugaas (sultans or chiefs within kinship groups or “clans,” in accordance with xeer, or customary Somali law), and Islamic religious leaders (sheikhs and mullahs). Decentralized ethnic federalism in Ethiopia was originally conceived (by Meles Zenawi and others in power within the EPRDF alliance) in order to end domination of Ethiopian politics by the Amhara ethnic group, and to dissuade revolt and secession among other ethnic groups by allowing them to manage their own economic and political affairs.13

The Somali National Regional State was included in the first national conference of representatives in Addis Ababa in 1991, and in the two years following this, hundreds of thousands of Somalis either fleeing crises farther south or returning to their homes in Ethiopia, crossed back into the region.14 After ensuing conflicts between different political parties and kinship groups, the Ethiopian Somali People’s Democratic Party (SPDP) formed in 1995, and has represented the Somali Region in the national parliament since 1998. In every election since 2000, the SPDP has officially allied with the EPRDF and most of its elected Members of Parliament have supported the EPRDF. After the Somali regional president Abdi Mohamoud Omar (known as “Abdi Iley”) was arrested by police forces from Addis Ababa in 2018, he resigned, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the EPRDF working with SPDP leaders, nominated Mustafa Muhummed Omer, a relative outsider to party politics, to fill the vacancy and stabilize the region. As of 2020, Abdi Iley remained imprisoned in Addis Ababa, and has been charged with inciting violence, allowing a secretive police force to operate extralegally and with impunity (the Liyu), running a covert and abusive penal system (the infamous “Jail Ogaden”), and attempting to undermine constitutional order.15 Despite recent changes and conflict since 2018, both within the Somali Region and within the federal government in Addis Ababa, President Mustafa promised to continue with reforms of the region’s political and penal systems.16

Since the Somali Region’s inclusion into the Ethiopian federal state system and constitution, Somalis have been variably integrated into multiple, fluid, and often antagonistic political organizations: on one hand, the Somali Region is incorporated as one administrative unit within the Ethiopian federalist state. On the other hand, Somali residents continue to regularly interact, travel, and trade with other Somalis living in Djibouti, Somaliland, Puntland, Somalia, Kenya, and the swelling diasporas abroad. Somali Ethiopians’ bifurcated and dynamic practices of citizenship—at once officially belonging to the legal entity of the Ethiopian state while also belonging to transnational communities of Somalis—challenge various projects of Ethiopian unity and the governmental provision of humanitarian services.

Historians and social scientists find that, long before the Derg rose to power, lineage-based “clan” affiliations and other kinship structures (such as the qabiil or reer, translated in English as the clan, tribe, or family group) in Somali societies surpassed or superseded formal state, colonial, or international authorities.17 Tobias Hagmann and Mohamud Hussein Khalif call the Somali Region a “frontier space,” where repeated attempts to centralize political power have clashed with traditional, more egalitarian, systems of governance.18 Centralized political projects were, according to Virginia Luling, “suspended above a society which would never have produced and did not demand” such centralization.19 Like wise, Jon Abbink argues that before colonization and partition by British, Italian, French, and Ethiopian empires, Somalis in the Horn of Africa were not united by a single culture or any one particular nationalist project, but instead, remained only loosely associated through their common religion and language, and only infrequently connected through trade and intermarriage.20 David Laitin and Said Samatar find that even modern Somali social organizations were “acephalous.”21

Others disagree. Lee Cassanelli described largely coherent and powerful “clan” hierarchies and wars for domination of land and natural resources between groups throughout much of the last thousand years.22 The powerful Ajuraan dynasty during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, for example, produced a highly cohesive and long-lasting Somali polity replete with administrative stratification, theocratic ideologies, suppression of local conflicts over water and grazing rights, and unified opposition to other ethnolinguistic groups in the Horn of Africa. Peter Little, similarly, finds a “radical localization” of politics that overshadowed various nation-state authorities through time, characterized by an array of residual customary social structures, such as the hierarchical structures for traditional leadership and Somali customary law.23

Following a series of failed nationalist and unification projects, continuing civil strife, and intermittent humanitarian crises and interventions throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century, many Somalis I spoke to professed a lingering distrust of both formal state institutions as well as international interventions.24 As Hagmann and Khalif argue, “both the imperial government [under Haile Selassie] and the Derg had, in typical centralist manner, regularly indulged in micromanaging politics in the Ogaden.”25 Indeed, local governmental bureaus and governance structures (such as police forces and the judiciary) in the Somali Region remained, during this research, largely detached and less active in everyday life than kinship support and customary law (xeer). Elders (oday), including sheikhs and mullahs (wadaaddo) and chosen leaders (ugaas) frequently organized conflict resolution through mediation, individual dispute resolution, and their own interpretation and enforcement of laws and contracts. Religious leaders maintained positions of authority outside their “clan” (qabiil or reer) affiliation and apart from formal Ethiopian systems of governance, drawing instead upon their scholarship, experiences with pilgrimages, and talents for Qur’anic healing, divination, and mentorship.

In addition, Somali nationalist and secessionist mov...