Discourse Structures,Weaponization of Language and Ethiopia’s Civil War

Introduction

The weaponization of language by belligerent forces seeking to legitimize their war-narratives while also delegitimating their opponents in war discourses is a well-known war-time tendency. This tendency reached appalling proportions in the Tigray-Ethiopian civil war which began in 2021 and only ended in 2022 after the African Union’s (AU) mediation. Apart from its broader weaponization by the Ethiopian political elites in the bitter civil war, language has also been the principal medium of incitement to violence while simultaneously functioning as an identity marker and a legitimizing instrument for political agendas of the principal actors in the conflict. The term civil war when referring to the Ethiopian conflict, as used in this paper, refers to an armed conflict between groups of the same country. However, Abbink (2021) rejects the use of the term on the grounds that it can only be applied when big parts of a country are in conflict, as opposed to the Tigray/Addis Ababa one in which a provincial elite seeking to protect its political and other interests led an armed insurrection against the federal government. However, he admits that there is an underlying ethnic element to the conflict produced by 27 years of ethno-linguistic-based administrative federalism in Ethiopia’ (p. 3). Yusuf (2019, p. 7) states that the ethnic dynamic was caused by rising competing ethno-nationalisms which led “to the relative weakening of party and state structures, resulting in the intensification of ethnic mobilizations.”

The appeal to both ethnicity and chauvinistic nationalism through the instrumentation of language has echoes of past genocides like the Jewish holocaust during the Second World War and the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The European Jews, the Rwandan Tutsis, and moderate Hutus were first ethnically profiled through dehumanizing and objectifying discourse structures, before being corralled in concentration camps to get gassed, in the case of the Jews, or in the Rwandan genocide, to be slaughtered in the villages and city streets. In the above examples, the linguistic objectification of political “others” as half-human was instrumentalized through dehumanizing discourses. These discourses legitimized the persecution of the victims as national threats or pests, thus benumbing the consciences of their killers. The persecution of the “other” through linguistic violence, immediately followed by physical elimination is a form of projecting power over the adversary, often based on some ethnic characteristic. It is often facilitated through hegemony-seeking political discourses. This article will examine the matrix between ethnic identity, hegemonic politics and hate filled discourses in the Ethiopian conflict, and the extent to which ethnic identity has provided the scaffolding for the development and propagation of hate speech.

Research Methodology

The researcher used a desktop approach relying on close reading of articles and newspaper reports on the proliferation of hate speech during the Tigray/Addis Ababa conflict, especially as it manifested in social media platforms like Facebook. Online sources were mostly used. The language used by the belligerents was then analyzed using discourse analysis, the hermeneutic analysis, and the articulatory theory.

Regionalization of Politics and the Ethnic Paradigm as Ethiopia’s Achilles Heel

Ethiopia, the host of the continental political grouping known as the African Union (AU) and the only African country not to be colonized by the European powers, has as its Archilles heel an archaic mix of ethnic federalism and regionally fragmented politics. This arrangement, while decentering political power from the national government, also creates a destabilizing political dynamic that makes the construction of a national identity predicated on the core-values of being Ethiopian (if it really exists) moot. Kersmo (2021) observes that the centuries old lack of central control by a national ruling class, and the location of real power in the hands of regional princes and nobilities rather than kings or queens has caused “ramifications” which have dogged Ethiopian politics “when the central government weakens, and local authorities embolden” (p. 25). He also notes that foreign invasions by Egyptians and Europeans, and local conflicts have conspired to create political instability. Most importantly, he observes that radicalized young Marxist revolutionaries undermined a more progressive monarchy headed by Haile Selassie from the 1930s while claiming to be liberating them from “subjugation by the monarchy and the ethnic group they perceived it represents, the Amhara” (p. 27). This disruption soon morphed into many regionally and ethnically based political parties, all claiming to be liberation movements, but effectively representing ethnic groups like, for example, the Amhara, Oromo, Somali, Abo, Tigray, Ogadan, and others.

The tragic consequences of these ethnic-based affiliations were the balkanization of national politics and the rise of the Mengistu-led Derge which brought a reign of terror that lasted for many decades and cost the lives of close to two million people. Kersmo (2021) adds to this combustible political mix the external factors like the great power tensions of the Cold War pitting the United States of America and its allies against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics-led (USSR) Warsaw Pact powers. These external parties sought to gain control of the geo-politically vital Horn of Africa. Subsequently, the Soviet Union established a foothold in the southern Red Sea region while the United States entrenched its influence in Somalia. The confluence of ethnic-provincialist identities seeking to establish local hegemonies and Marxist revolutionaries ostensibly promoting the national interest on one hand, and the interplay between the powerful Cold War blocs each seeking to establish beachheads in a strategically important region of the world, on the other, further complicated the existing internal balance of power. All these forces added to the inter-ethnic and ethno-provincial tensions that would ultimately threaten to dismember the Ethiopian federation through a hate-speech laden internecine conflict which has characterized the country’s recent civil war.

Literature Review on Ethnicity, Political Affiliation, and Identity-Making Markers in the Context of Conflict

Ethnicity, national political processes, and identity politics have for long been synonymous with political instability in post-colonial Africa. In many contexts, the individual’s ethnic affiliation has been stronger than their personal identity—because the latter is subsumed by the sense of cooperate identity. The cooperate identity often provides fertile ground for ethnic mobilization by opportunistic national elites. Yeh and Hwang (2000) see ethnic identity as being an “enduring, fundamental aspect of self that includes a sense of connection in a social group or ethnic group and the attitudes and feelings associated with that membership.”

The violence that has resulted from such mobilization flies in the face of the African Union’s (AU) stated ideals and goals of silencing the guns in Africa by 2030. Already, there is cynicism regarding the AU’s objectives and timelines with critics like the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) pointing at the “spread of terrorism and violent extremism, a resurgence in coup d’états, resource-linked instability and conflicts in areas like the Great Lakes Region, and intra-state conflicts such as in South Sudan, Libya, Ethiopia and Cameroon” (ISS/PSC Report, 2022, p. 1). Thus, the AU’s aspirations for continental peace risk being reduced to unrealistic verbal declarations flying contrary to the real world of fratricidal conflict in many parts of the continent, in most cases, under the banner of ethnic-identity politics. The terms ethnicity, ethnic group membership, ethnic identity, and ethnic affiliation are synonymous, and are often applied subjectively. Yang (2000) explains that ethnicity, for instance, is rendered subjective because it is produced by human sentiments and minds. He also adds that the term has objective characteristics such as physical attributes, presumed ancestry, culture or national origin. In this regard, ethnicity is defined as “affiliation or identification with a racial group as part of ethnicity” (p. 40).

When discussing ethnicity, three theories—namely, primordialism, constructivism, and instrumentalism are essential to our understanding of this concept. According to Yang (2000, p. 40), the primordialism school sees ethnicity as “an ascribed identity or assigned status” which is inherited from one’s ancestors. In other words, one traces his/her ethnic affiliation through “ancestral lineage and cultural ties, in determining an ancestry.” On the other hand, constructivism regards ethnicity as a socially constructed identity. The process of its construction “creates ethnic boundaries which are flexible and changeable or dynamic.” According to constructivism, ethnicity is a reaction to changing social environments (p. 43). Constructivism also advances a third argument on ethnicity regarding its social dynamic aspect; whereby it renders ethnic affiliation as a concept an unstable signifier, and not necessarily a fixed biological or hereditary aspect. Hence, the social processes occurring in a particular society—including socio-economic, cultural, political, and structural phenomena do combine to inform and shape ethnic affiliation. Furthermore, as Yang posits, ethnicity may be shaped by factors like “ascription and adversity,” by which identity is assigned through external influences such as “government, churches, schools, media, natives and other immigrants” (p. 45). Yang adds that “adversity includes prejudice, discrimination, hostility and hardship.” These social factors result in the affected groups banding together to form “group identity and solidarity,” further creating the concept of “emergent ethnicities.”

The third school, instrumentalism, differs from the first two alluded to above in that it regards ethnicity as “an instrument or strategic tool of gaining resources” (p. 46). In this school, individuals decide their ethnic affiliation based on self-interest, in other words—“what is in it for me?” The vested material and/or other interests determine the individual’s choice of ethnic affiliation—based on the competitive advantage he/she stands to benefit from such an association. These considerations add another variant of instrumentalism called the rational choice theory. Typical examples of both the instrumentalism, primordialism and constructivism theories operating in the same conflict-ridden space are in the current Russia/Ukraine war, in which different versions of ethnicity and historical origin compete for legitimacy. Putin rejects Ukrainian exclusive and particularistic identity as a separate nation-state from Russia and seeks to militarily impose Russification, as an alternative identity. Russification, of course, is a hegemonic discourse with specific structures and discourse markers, which include the use of the Russian language, Russian television and radio stations, Russian newspapers, and national identity markers like the Russian Rubble currency, Russian passports, Russian flag etc. The term itself refers to “policies designed to spread Russian culture and language among non-Russians” (Encyclopedia.com, n.d.). We see in the involvement of mercenary armies from Chechnya and other non-Russian or Ukrainian areas the instrumentalism theory in practice as these third-party players associate with the belligerent ethnic/nationalist actors for promised benefits like citizenship or money.

Based on the three schools of ethnicity, it is inevitable that the different competing ethnicities and their divergent, if not contradictory interests; the competition for political power, resources, or other forms of hegemony like the religious, cultural, economic, and political would cause physical confrontation. Caselli and Coleman (2012, p. 7) submit that conflict when viewed from the perspective of the ethnic conflict theory arises out of “social discourses that end up conditioning individuals to identify with particular groups.” They also submit that from an instrumentalist writing perspective on conflict, “ethnic groups are socially constructed to build winning coalitions.” Such ethnic groups, bound together by common material aspirations and interests pursue the path of violent conflict to achieve those interests. The processes of deciding affiliation in such instances are governed more by primitive acquisitive instincts and impulses and less by any morality. Even the discourses they create in pursuit of their objectives as coalitions are predicated on maximalizing the coalitions’ material benefits. Hence, Esteban et al. (2012) state that the prize for the victors in an ethnic-based conflict includes political power, religious hegemony, access to public funds, state subsidies and infrastructures. They point out that such conflicts are often instrumentalist rather than being primordial in nature. It is easier to create and justify labels that form part of dehumanizing the “other” using material accumulation and hegemony-building enterprises to a particular end. In that light, Caselli and Coleman (2012, p. 7) state that social discourses that lead to conflict are easily constructed where there exist markers (of color, or language, or religion, etc.) around which discourses can be organized.

The markers in conflict discourses are embedded in the human psyches of belongingness, be they primordial with long-entrenched feuds and hatreds, or constructivist, or instrumentalist. These discourse markers underpin the internecine conflicts as well as the inter-state ones which together have caused millions of deaths in the past century. Esteban et al. (2012, p. 859) aver that,

The use of non-economic “markers” such as ethnicity or religion addresses both these issues. Individuals on either side of the ethnic divide will be economically similar, so that the gains from such conflict are immediate. The losing group can be excluded from the sector in which it directly competes with the winners.

In view of the above averment, most conflicts are driven by, primarily, competition over resources and secondarily, deep-seated ethnic feuds that have proven difficult to reconcile. The latter reality appears to be the case in the Tigray/Addis Ababa conflict. The pent-up feelings of hate and grievance generated by the nexus between ethnicity, profit, and political power give birth to discourses in which language is weaponized, and instrumentalized. In this way, it is added into the offensive arsenal in the hands of its users—targeted at the “other.”

Language, Rhetoric, and Conflict

History has witnessed the libels and discourse markers that envelop hegemonic-seeking narratives and package hate speech as a weapon of exclusion, marking the “other” as a target of destruction. Historically, Hitler and the Nazis stigmatized the Jews as traitors, thieves—and basically objectified them through vilification. The verbalized assaults, beginning as a peripheral lingua of extreme nationalists, soon became a national discourse when the Nazis assumed state power and through rhetoric, propaganda and hate speech, dehumanized Jewish ethnicity. The language that first preceded, then justified, and accompanied genocide, was the mobilization tool that recruited the Germans behind so-called “Final Solution.” The term “Final Solution” itself signified the rejection of Jewish ethnicity as a human aspect. It, therefore, legitimized, through linguistic manipulation and revisionism, the holocaust. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia (2020), the concept “Final Solution” was a euphemism applied by the NAZI leaders in Germany to implement policies aimed at forcing the Jews to leave the country, and other parts of Europe. It later evolved from political and economic persecution to physical annihilation, or what is known as the holocaust. It also ideologically positioned the Nazi worldview against that of the Allies. War rhetoric is therefore an aspect of violence and other associated horrors of warfare. Booth (2005, p. 24) considers war rhetoric as weaponized language and asks the question—“How do we deal with the fact that war itself is an extension of rhetorical resources?” He asserts that war rhetoric is itself marked by banality—indicating the combatants’ notions of morality and perceptions of what is right and wrong, and how they express these through good and bad words. The end of the usage of these discourse markers is to justify certain entrenched ideological positions and their accompanying military actions. Ultimately, these discourse markers are aimed at the prosecution of a particular hegemonic project.

Potent Discourse Structures in the Tigray/Ethiopian Conflict and the Framing of Issues

Some of the critical questions Booth (2005) poses on war rhetoric are: (i) how should academics deal with war rhetoric and (ii) how should we distinguish good, defensible war rhetoric from the cheap bombast, propaganda, nonsensical, rhetrickery? Both questions are predicated on the notion of weaponization or instrumentalization of language in conflict situations such as Ethiopia. What is clear though, is that any war discourse in the hands of a belligerent party is as deadly as any other potent war weapon. The tongue is a destructive force when used cynically, while also a good instrument when used constructively. However, war knows no morality and no war can ever be categorized as good. Similarly, no war discourse can ever be righteous. This paper, therefore, teases the question: can there be true and lasting peace in Ethiopia without confronting the hate speech discourses embedded in the ethnic essentialist mindset of the key political actors that thrive on both identity and power politics?

The articulation theory states that “discourse structures constitute and organize social relations among elements such that their identity is modified” (Deluca, 1999, p. 336). Thus, articulation is the instrument of fixing meanings, identities and social relations within specific discursive limits and contexts. Within these discursive fields, antagonism may occur, resulting in efforts to disarticulate or even re-articulate certain hegemonic discourses (p. 336). Hence, a hegemonic war discourse in an ethnically pluralistic country like Ethiopia would repeat the fault lines embedded in its demographic, political and socio-economic ecosystems. The government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Mr Abiy Ahmed Ali (hereafter referred to as Abiy Ahmed) in its quest for uncontested political hegemony centered in Addis Ababa, the capital, found itself confronted by a recalcitrant regional counter-discourse asserting the TPLF’s provincialist-cum ethno-nationalist project with the decentering of political power away from the capital as one of its main objectives.

Thus, one finds that the political rhetoric of the Addis Ababa government, reflecting the overarching desire to impose a more centralized system of government over all of Ethiopia is a dominant political ideology. It projects the absolutist power of the elected federal government over competing alternate versions of the Ethiopian political infrastructure. The federal government is seen by the provincialist centers of power like the TPLF and its allies as a totalizing enterprise that endangers the very idea of federalism, no matter how disruptive of the country’s politics it may be. To the federal government, this attempted putsch against its authority must be stopped, even through military means. The competing interests of the power elites on both sides of the political divide find expression in the discourses of inclusion and exclusion of the associates/opponents, thereby widening the existing ethnic rifts in the country that are historically embedded in its political arrangement. This article also relies on a hermeneutic analysis of the main discourse markers found in the Ethiopian war discourses on Facebook and Twitter.

Fixing Discourses and Meaning in a Conflict Zone

Hermeneutics is the practice of interpreting texts to get to an understanding of what they mean. It relies on textual interpretation of the text, using the same method as exegeses. George (2020) defines hermeneutics as the philosophy of interpretation. He adds that hermeneutics treats interpretation as a subject matter and not as an accessory to the study of something else. He explains that the theory is concerned with the meaning of interpretation—its basic nature, scope, and legitimacy. Furthermore, he adds to the above description the aspect of essential philosophical questions about being and knowledge, language and history, art and esthetic experience, and everyday life. In the context of this paper, the analysis will focus on the contradictory and sometimes confrontational, if not vitriolic language which problematizes the very humanity of the political opponent as a human subject.

The key discursive component of the current Ethiopian civil war is what is termed hate speech. Sorial (2015) defines hate speech as a broad term used to describe any speech which attacks others because of their perceived difference which may be gender orientation or membership to a particular group. She adds that in conflict environments, the public discourses thereof may have hate speech manifesting as an overt discourse or as vitriol. In Ethiopia’s recent conflict, most of the inflammatory and hate speech were propagated on Facebook (Mail and Guardian, 2021). This is because Facebook failed to curb the spread of hate speech in its platforms. In one inflammatory post on Facebook, Tewodros Kebede Ayo of the Northern Patriots referred to the Qimant minority in the Ahmara region as “snitches.” He specifically identified the town of Aykel as a place of ‘snitches’, adding that “the punishment has been imposed…the clean up continues.”“The Mail and Guardian” reported that a few days after this post people were dragged from their homes and killed outside of town.

Discursively, the word “snitch” refers to a sell-out, a traitor, an informer, and a talebearer. The term connotates a morally bankrupt individual, completely bereft of the sense of allegiance and patriotic duty. In the context of its usage in the Ethiopian conflict, it “others” the opposing side, delegitimates their political standing and enables their punishment as evil doers undeserving of any public sympathy. The informer’s unreliability and association with rumor and hearsay weans him/her off any human empathy and sets them up for the political stack. Taslitz (2008, p. 141) defines rumors as “unverified statements communicated among persons for instrumentally relevant purposes, that is, to achieve certain goals.” Furthermore, he states that rumors “are a species of ‘meme-transmission’” ideas that survive and propagate or die through a process of natural and cultural selection.

The word that was used to signify the penalty imposed on Ethiopia’s “snitches” on the Facebook post was “clean-up.” The clean-up concept presupposes the existence of dirt or a contaminating substance. Used in ethnic discourses, it legitimizes extra-judicial or extra-legal killings of political opponents or citizens considered not worthy of life. It is the lingua of genocide, and it is both derogatory and inflammatory speech. It has often been a precursor of mass killings in conflict zones like pre1994 Rwanda and NAZI-occupied Europe during the Second World War. It is the language of extermination of the “other.” Zimbabwe’s current president Emmerson Mnangagwa used it against the Ndebele ethnic minority during the Gukurahundi genocide in the 1980s when he dehumanized the Ndebele villagers by objectifying them as the infrastructure that supported the dissidents (disgruntled former Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army guerillas that destroyed government reconstruction equipment in Matabeleland) and as cockroaches that required the deadly chemical DDT (Alexander, 2021). In Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, cleaning up meant the ethnic cleansing of the minority Tutsi and moderate Hutu through genocide. Words like ’cockroaches’ and ’inyenzi’ were libels that were hurled at the Tutsi and moderate Hutu in the build up to the genocide and as it eventually unfolded. Hence, “clean-up” is a discourse structure of both ethnic profiling and verbalized violence, actions which scholars like Heiskanen (2021) have termed ethnocide, meaning the destruction of a particular ethnic group.

The hate speech problem in Ethiopia’s recent civil war did not suddenly arise as a direct consequence of the conflict. With the growth of social media, there has been an exponential rise in hate speech pitting one tribe against another. The Tigrayans, Oromos, Amhara’s and others have also been complicit in this problem. In an MA dissertation on hate speech in Ethiopia, Mulugeta (2019, p. 57)) notes that social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been the focal point of hate speech in the country. In one Facebook post, Mulugeta divulges a message in which a Tigrayan describes the Amhara as “landgrabbers” digging “their own grave” and forgetful of the fact that “#Tigray has the strongest army and intelligence in East Africa.” In another post on Twitter, Mulugeta shows how the Amhara are depicted in dehumanizing terms as “mammoth donkey.” In yet another post on Twitter, a message reads “I hate Oromo… they are like monkey” (p. 58). Another threatening post from a supposedly Amhara individual writing on Twitter ominously sends a chilling message to “the districts of Oromo and BenshangualGumuz” in which he/she warns that “if the slaughter and whipping of Amhara isn’t stop, Amhara will begin slaughter anybody’s district in Bahir Dar, Dobre Tabor, Gondar, FinoteSalam, Kossober, Wolldia and Dessi and so on.” The above examples of verbalized warfare reveal a troubling trend of intolerance, hatred and feuding that was already rife years before the civil war in Ethiopia started in earnest.

A few years before the Rwanda genocide in 1994, the alleged Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) allies who were regarded by the Hutu government as being either infiltrators or acolytes of the RPF were labeled the “enemy” and were to be “neutralized” (HRW, 2022). The term “enemy” means adversary. It alienates and dehumanizes the “other” as an existential threat, an opponent, a sinister alien, and an antagonist. Bruneau and Kteily (2017) regard dehumanization as a facilitating act that enables advantaged groups to morally disengage from disadvantaged groups to facilitate “acts of intergroup aggression such as colonization, slavery and genocide.” They explain the link between blatant dehumanization and asymmetric conflict—the Israeli/Gaza conflict of 2014 being a case in point. The word ’enemy’, in the Rwanda case is an aggressive referent of alienization, produced by an ingroup in a violent conflict. It is directed at the outgroup for the sole purpose of visiting acts of genocide or brutality on it, without the burden of moral accountability. Lynne (2012, p. 174) says that the Tutsis were derogatively labeled as cockroaches, and ’inzoka’ (snake). These words, just like the term enemy carry both the aggressive intent and the self-vindicating attitude. Lynne asserts that derogatory terms and speech acts help “to illuminate the important ways that power is enacted through discourse, how speech acts prepare the way for physical and material acts, and how speech generates permissions for actions ‘hitherto uncountenanced’.”

Benesch (2004) explains that the term “inyenzi” (cockroach) was “coined in the 1960s by some of Rwanda’s governing Hutus to refer to rebel fighters of Rwanda’s minority ethnic group, the Tutsi.” She adds that in the 1990s, “inyenzi” became a slur applied to any Tutsi. A term like “inzoka” (snake) even when used euphemistically to identify an outgroup during a fratricidal conflict discursively denigrates and marks the subject as a threat that must be physically eliminated. It is, therefore, part of the linguistic repertoire of exclusion and a vital component of warfare. It is weaponized speech which is as destructive as any other weapon in the arsenal of the aggressor group. Hence associated terms like “clean-up” and “neutralization,” in Ethiopia’s case, as conflict discourse structures, fall within the definition of hate-speech or genocide discourse. Discourse in relation to power positions the aggressor versus the subject in a vertical asymmetrical conflict that is structured in the language that enables and justifies the violence. The targeted group is forced to engage with the aggressor within the discursive limits set by the former. The result is a tit-for-tat vitriolic-cum violent orgy that creates self-perpetuating and ever more combustible verbal articulations seeking to secure both moral and battlefield victories. The victim group always seeks to claw back some power from the aggressor to gain leverage.

Foucault’s theory of discourse states that there are no clear criteria for attaining justice or articulating morality since any resistance to authority results in alternative manifestations or reconfigurations of power. In terms of the instrumentalist theory, other ethnic groups in Ethiopia’s conflict pitting the Tigray-based TPLF against the federal government are forced to choose sides depending on what is at stake for them. Thus, the Tigrayans may regard themselves in a primordialism sense as a victim ethnic group that was being targeted by the federal government, backed by the Eritreans, whose president “Mr Isaiahs nursed a bitter, longstanding grudge against the Tigrayans” (New York Times, 2022). On the other hand, the Addis Ababa government sees itself as a legitimate champion of democratic federalism. Abiy Ahmed’s conflict with the TPLF began when his order that no provincial parliamentary elections must be held, was ignored by the Tigrayans in 2020. As the dispute simmered into inevitable conflict, the TPLF on the 3^rd of November 2020 attacked the Federal government’s troops thereby sparking the civil war. The ethnic character of the conflict in Tigray manifested itself in the displacement of thousands of Tigrayan civilians by the Amhara militias, the government’s blockading of aid in the region which brought human-induced famine to millions of people and the attacks by Eritrean tribal militias and the Eritrean army. Abbink (2021) concedes that the conflict had an underlying “ethnic” dynamic’ that had been “produced by 27 year of ethno-linguistic-based administrative federalism in Ethiopia” (p. 3). He avers that this political model “led to recognition of diversity” but also to increasing group conflict based on the “politics of identity” (p. 3).

On the ethnic dynamic aspect of the Ethiopian conflict, “The New York Times” (May 16, 2022) highlighted the fact that the Oromo Liberation Army militia had aligned itself with the TPLF and attacked the Ethiopian government’s troops. In response to the escalating war, Abiy Ahmed, in 2021 “resorted to inflammatory language, denouncing his foes as ‘cancer’ and ‘weeds.’ that he vowed to bury in a deep pit”.” According to the “Voice of America News” (Voice of America News, 2021), observers noted that the war had escalated into an ethnic conflict since the Amhara have fought alongside the forces from Oromia and Sidama, against the Tigrayans who had been attempting to get back the lands that had been taken by the Oromo in the past 27 years. These historical tensions fed the hate-speeches that have characterized the civil war. They were starkly demonstrated in Abiy Ahmed’s categorization (alluded to above) of his TPLF opponents as “cancer” and “weeds” deserving of a place in a “deep pit” when the conflict escalated.

Martin Plant (2021) notes that the other prominent words appearing on Facebook during the Tigray/Ethiopia war are “killers,”“terrorist,”“cancer” and “weeds.” Abiy Ahmed’s government used these aggressive alienating terms to refer to anti-government groups across Ethiopia, including the TPLF. The word ‘killers’, whether used objectively or pejoratively effectively dehumanizes the “other” through criminalization. Gross and Aolain (2021), state that words in any conflict discourses are powerful rhetorical instruments that describe, label, and categorize a particular subject. This means that these discourses are also invested with emotions, consciousness and meanings which translate to decisions, actions, and reactions. On the other hand, Moges (2022) argues that the TPLF had abused the Oromos and the Amhara “on the pretext of reigning in the armed Oromo Liberation Front” after the 2005 elections. The TPLF had “portrayed Amharas as the oppressive enemy that dominated and colonized the rest of the country.” One notes that in the above example, the TPLF are accused of framing their political rivals as enemies and colonizers while justifying their violence against these groups. The words “enemies” and “colonizers” in a politically charged and ethnically poisoned context represent an othering of political rivals that frames a hostile discourse against the targeted groups.

Gross and Aolain (2021, p. 7) claim that the framing of issues and outcomes significantly shapes decisions—whether pertaining to private decisions or to public policy. They add that the entities that do the framing filters can “manipulate” the interpretation and meaning that recipients of that information are likely to attach to it. This is because framing enables the framing party to set the agenda and make value judgments and opinions whether rationally or irrationally. Such agenda setting preconditions or influences the moral responses of the targeted audiences. Hence, framing, as an agenda-setting function empowers the architect of the specific war rhetoric and directs the interpretation and hence, the moral reactions of the targeted audience. In a way, the audience is robbed of its independent and rational thinking and is transformed into a partisan or rented crowd. Consequently, the labeling of anti-government groups in Ethiopia as “killers,”“terrorists,”“cancer” and “weeds” was an agenda setting tool whose end was to manipulate public opinion. It was designed to assure a conviction without a trial through a process in which the architect became the prosecutor, trial judge, jury, and executioner, all bound into one role. Any alternative view of the outgroup was excluded in this process, as the architect foreclosed the discursive space through aggressively and self-righteously setting the agenda.

As a political discourse, labeling mobilizes public consciousness, reshapes social morality, and centers the architect, in this case, the crafter of the war rhetoric as the constitutive agent of social order and guarantor of law and order. This is because war rhetoric not only constitutes the “united community of patriots,” but also, it identifies the enemy using two categories for the population—“us” who need protecting and the “dangerous others” who threaten us’ (Gross & Aolain, 2021, p. 10). The ingroup (us) and the outgroup (them) dynamic is a dichotomy that both organizes and categorizes. It then erects a scaffold for the condemned and guarantees the follow-up violent acts of cleansing the contaminated nation of the unwanted. Furthermore, the noun “killers” creates war metaphors that reconstitute as arbitrary violence in the face of heightened social tensions. It creates the sense of grave danger in the public imagination and authorizes state-sanctioned anti-insurgency acts of brutality. All these developments are contingent on the architect’s effective framing of vindictive and vituperative war rhetoric.

The word ’terrorist’ has in the recent past assumed a more forceful agency as a descriptor of emergent and deadly war criminals bent on disrupting the civilized west and its moral order during the infamous 9/11 attacks in New York. The shocking television pictures of exploding planes, a burning New York and terrified victims jumping to their deaths from high-rise buildings, accompanied by shrieking police and emergency rescue sirens combined to create a lasting memory of epic catastrophe and the discourse of “war on terror.” The “war on terror” discourse was crafted by President George W Bush, who, invested with the power of an American-led broader western military alliance, declared a general war on the “terrorists” and their collaborators all over the world. As “war on terror” discourse’s chief architect, President Bush solemnly declared that the United States of America was at war and would go after the terrorists. He declared that every nation in the Middle East region would have to declare whether “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Bush, 2001). The United States of America would not make a distinction between them and their backers. Since that time, the term “terrorist” has come to mean the most depraved form of war thuggery and base criminality that is deserving of the strongest military rebuke. The term “terrorist” was attached to the TPLF and its allies in the Ethiopian conflict, in another case of state weaponization of language and its instrumentalization as a favored categorizing and alienating tool. The word “terrorists” found a grim synonym in the term “cancer,” in Ethiopia’s war rhetoric.

The word “cancer” connotates a plague, an affliction of the Ethiopian body-politic and a pestilential threat to national existence that must be deservingly expunged. The appellation relies on a framing metaphor which attaches feelings of horror and revulsion in the public imagination, thereby enabling the architect, in this case, Abiy Ahmed’s government to shape the war narrative and construct the adversary as an inhumane subject. According to the architect’s logic, the inhumane subject, in the name of the public good, deserves elimination as a morally repugnant alien. In Ethiopia’s war discourse, the terms “terrorists” and “cancer” were rationalizing descriptors that targeted the consciences of the members of the ingroup, the patriotic citizens, and directed their judgment in accordance with the design of the state as the framing agent. Its application went beyond the limits of propaganda speech and instead assumed the characteristic of hate-speech. This is evident in the interchangeability of the labels “terrorists” and “cancer” with another like word—“weeds.” All these aggressive labels share the common thread of undesirability, threatening alien, and grave parasitic danger. The presumed and now well-known method of dealing with these threats is annihilation. The words trigger similar perceptual, emotional, and cognitive responses from the targeted audience—fear and trepidation. The collective sense of foreboding of evil is the intended outcome anticipated by the framing and agenda setting parties in the conflict.

The patriotic impulses of national survival and self-preservation justify the righteous indignation of the us-group (targeted audience) and its capitulation to the hegemonic ideology of the war-making state, as well as the required endorsement of state-violence against those excluded as “them.” In this case, Abiy Ahmed as the architect spoke from a privileged position of head of the federal government and used this status to frame the siege narrative of the us-group and the state’s obligation to act in its defense against the perceived them-group/s as a pestilential danger to national survival. This particularistic discourse enabled the state to mobilize public consciousness and control the war narrative it peddled, while also dictating the public response to its own articulations. The power of asserting a dominant war discourse and setting the limits of its usage confers the godlike authority to decide who lives and who dies in the most arbitrary of ways. This arbitrary use of power, ironically, gets to be endorsed by a majority of the citizenry whose rational thinking has been subsumed by the dominant national discourse. Facebook removed Abiy Ahmed’s post which called upon the Ethiopian public, as the us-group, to “take up arms and organize and march through [any] legal manner with any weapon and power…to prevent, reverse and bury the terrorist TPLF” (Martin Plant, 2021).

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Facebook post, as a national call to arms, appealed to the emotions and moral sentiments of the in-group, or the “patriots.” They were being asked to make sacrifices and become active combatants in pursuit of their own liberation from the “enemy” groups that threatened national survival. His representation of the TPLF as the enemy which had to be buried was amplified in a television interview in which he declared “we will not flinch till we bury the enemy and ensure Ethiopia’s freedom” (Walsh, 2021). This article revealed how the Tigrayans also used hate speech terms like “enemy” and “colonizers” to describe the Amhara in framing their liberation discourse. The use of “liberation” terminology in conflict contexts is itself problematic because each belligerent in a conflict professes righteousness and liberation as the cause. Most combatants in a war zone see themselves as the forces of good and tend to frame their adversaries as the oppressors and themselves as liberators. War rhetoric knows no irony or objectivity.

Conclusion

Whereas the African Union has set as one of its targets the silencing of guns on the continent, and in pursuit of this goal appointed the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo as its peace ambassador/broker in the Ethiopian conflict, and whereas these efforts have resulted in a cessation of open military hostilities in 2022, it remains to be seen how long this deal will last. Chances are that the same forces that led to the conflict between the federal government and the TPLF may ignite another war in Tigray itself or some other region of the country, unless well-intentioned, genuine, and meaningful reformation of the political architecture of the country urgently take root. The Horn of Africa region has for a long time been a volatile and politically turbulent place, whose misery has been compounded by ethnic politics, residual resource-driven conflicts, and vendettas and more worryingly, the big power geo-political contestation for hegemonic primacy. As Olika (2008, p. 3) states, while ethnicity is a recognized driver of conflict in the Horn of Africa, the politics of the state remains a significant factor. He adds that peace and security studies is concerned about “economic security, mental/psychological,” political and economic freedoms at both regional and national levels, all of which constitute the primary responsibilities of the state. Thus, peace-making in Ethiopia, a key state in this important region of Africa, is but one small step toward the African Union’s anticipated pacification and silencing of the guns.

The prized target of peacebuilding will require a more deliberate, sustainable, and deeply entrenched process of eradicating ethno-centric, identity-based, and resource-driven feuds that are deeply entrenched in the country’s political history and discourses. To build the necessary trust, goodwill and commitment to reconciliation and nation building, the parties to the conflict, beginning with the main belligerents in Addis Ababa and Tigray, as well as the African Union and the broader international community, must all pledge to disrupt, undermine and progressively uproot the ethnic based and hate-filled toxic political discourses. This effort should be grassroots based, incorporating local community/tribal leaders, and locally based state functionaries and non-governmental organizations working through provincial community institutions right up to the echelons of the Ethiopian state, instead of elitist driven. Adopting and adapting peace-building practices from successful post-conflict countries like South Africa and Rwanda, including incorporating into the country’s legal framework a jurisprudence that rewards promoting harmonious coexistence of different ethnic groups and criminalizing acerbic or divisive and vitriolic speech would be a good starting point. Overall, this paper concludes by attesting that language can still be used to foster peace and reconciliation to a great extent, in as much as it has been used to achieve the very opposite in the Ethiopian government/Tigrayan war.