UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY ETHIOPIA by GÉRARD PRUNIER; ÉLOI FICQUET

Author:GÉRARD PRUNIER; ÉLOI FICQUET
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP
Published: 2015-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

10

THE TIGRAY PEOPLE’S LIBERATION FRONT (TPLF)

Medhane Tadesse

After a sixteen-year armed struggle in the countryside against the Derg and several armed groups in northern Ethiopia, the Tigray People’s Liberation Movement (TPLF) came to power in 1991. Since then the TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has ruled Ethiopia alone, although an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at power sharing was made during the initial transition period.

The successful transition had much to do with the character and history of the TPLF, which was instrumental in forming the EPRDF and has provided the ideological direction of the government, as well as much of its leadership. Upon assuming power the TPLF embarked on the difficult task of restructuring the Ethiopian state. Attempts by generations of rulers of Ethiopia to centralize the state were reversed in 1991 when the Front spearheaded an innovative and bold experiment of transferring authority to regional administrations based on ethnicity.

The TPLF was founded in 1975 by a group of Tigrayan university students most of whom were active participants in the Ethiopian student movement. In the mid-1980s the TPLF established a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organization and in 1989 the Front formed the EPRDF, which gave it greater Ethiopia-wide legitimacy and carried the party to victory in 1991. By defeating several armed groups, and finally the Derg, the TPLF fought its way to the helm of power in Ethiopia. Achieving an outright military victory meant that the TPLF faced little opposition either within or outside the EPRDF. It also meant that it could gain the approval of its proposed constitution and pursue its programs of political and economic reform largely unhindered. Its major challenges were the war with Eritrea and achieving democratic government at home; it was these challenges that critically defined its own future and the direction of the country.

After it had amended but not seriously altered its program in the face of dramatically changed international circumstances (an insurrection by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in 1992–93, Islamist incursions from Sudan and Somalia, the defeat of the Eritrean army in the war of 1998–2000, a measure of economic progress, and small democratic advances) it was a shock when the TPLF’s Central Committee divided in acrimony in March 2001. In the following years many of the most senior members of the Front were dismissed, marginalized, or jailed as the movement went through convulsions that spread to the other sections of the EPRDF and to the army. Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister, chairman of both the TPLF and the EPRDF, together with his close followers quickly assumed the upper hand in the contest and then initiated what was held to be a wide-ranging program of internal reform. Compounding this, the shock of an ambiguously contested election in 2005 left the Front with no other choice but regrouping under one strongman advocating a developmental state agenda.

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