44 Middle East & Africa The EconomistOctober 5th 2019
“H
ow is democracy?” asks Bashir Ah-
med Hashi, smiling broadly, as he
bounds out of his jeep towards the gates of
Jigjiga prison. Entering the courtyard, the
commissioner is greeted by a loud cheer.
Excitable inmates jostle to shake his hand
and pat him on the back. “For 24 hours a
day we are happy now,” says one. Bashir,
who was appointed prison chief for eastern
Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State less than a
year ago, looks a little bashful. “I’m popular
here,” he explains.
Before August 2018 the Somali region
was the most ill-treated place in all of Ethi-
opia, tyrannised by its then state president,
Abdi Mohamed Omar, who had waged a
scorched-earth campaign against seces-
sionist rebels for more than a decade.
Backed by the central government, Abdi
and his heavily armed special police force,
the Liyu, murdered and raped civilians, im-
prisoned and tortured tens of thousands of
alleged rebels, and, according to Human
Rights Watch, committed crimes against
humanity. “It was like a giant prison,” says
Mohammed Gurey, one of hundreds of
thousands of Ethiopian Somalis to have
fled abroad in recent decades.
That all changed last year when Abiy
Ahmed became Ethiopia’s prime minister.
Abiy, who deposed Abdi and put him on
trial in Addis Ababa, the capital, invited
Mustafa Omer, an exiled activist and un
staffer whose own brother had been killed
by the Liyu, to take over as acting state pres-
ident. Dissidents and rebels returned in
droves. Mohammed became the region’s
deputy security chief. The infamous cen-
tral prison in Jigjiga, the state capital, was
closed. Thousands of prisoners were freed.
Since then Mustafa has overseen the
most dramatic turnaround in the region’s
recent history. “It is the safest place in Ethi-
opia right now,” says Kamal Hassan, anoth-
er recent returnee. When your correspon-
dent visited Jigjiga in the final months of
Abdi’s rule, former detainees refused to
meet in public for fear of reprisals. Today
many of them are in government. The old
prison is to reopen as a museum, and Ba-
shir takes visiting journalists and human-
rights workers on tours—revealing, for ex-
ample, the toilet cubicles where political
prisoners huddled in solitary confinement
and the underground pit where human
waste was dumped on them as punish-
ment. Meanwhile separatist leaders of the
Ogaden National Liberation Front (onlf)have ditched their weapons and plan to
contest elections next year.
The contrast with other parts of Ethio-
pia, where recent democratic reforms have
been accompanied by a surge in violence
and lawlessness, is striking. But even in the
Somali region, the process is imperfect and
fragile. Some critics allege that Mustafa is
keener to take revenge on the old guard
than to strengthen state institutions. “He
treats everyone who worked for Abdi like
they are Hitlers,” complains an associate of
the former regime. Locals bristle at a gov-
ernment dominated by well-heeled dias-
pora types. Others resent a lack of consulta-
tion. “Transparency is not very strong,”
sniffs Abdirahman Mahdi, the onlf’s sec-
retary-general. Some worry about a return
to strong-arm tactics: in recent days nearly
600 youngsters were indiscriminately
rounded up in Jigjiga on vague allegations
of criminality and taken out of the city for
“rehabilitation”. About a tenth have since
been released.
Reforming such an authoritarian set-up
is tricky. Take the Liyu. One of Mustafa’s
first moves was to recall its top command-
ers to Jigjiga to undergo a two-month eval-
uation. The most notorious were fired, the
rest given lessons in human rights and the
constitution. Rubber batons replaced live
ammunition for crowd control.
These days reports of serious abuses are
rarer. But reforms will need to go further. In
the past the Liyu answered only to the pres-
ident, in effect acting as a private army. Re-educating the troops is a “very cursory” sol-
ution, notes the onlf’s Abdirahman. A
more lasting one is likely to involve inte-
grating them into the state’s regular police.
In recent years all of Ethiopia’s regional
governments have built up special police
forces which they are loth to give up.
Even more vexing is the question of jus-
tice for past crimes. Only Abdi and some of
his closest associates have been put on
trial. Mustafa calls it a “moral dilemma”.
Stability, he says, was the priority when he
took office: “We had to balance the need for
justice with the pragmatic reality that we
need a special force here to keep peace.”
Yet many Ethiopian Somalis are de-
manding that those responsible for atroc-
ities be held to account. “Everywhere you
go this is the complaint: people who com-
mitted crimes are still living among them,”
says Mustafa’s human-rights adviser, Je-
mal Kalif Dirie. Mohammed Mohamud Mo-
hammed, a former detainee, recalls seeing
one of his tormentors working for the Liyu
as a security guard at the onlf’s homecom-
ing ceremony last year. “I couldn’t believe
my eyes,” he says. “I just froze.”
To this end the government plans to es-
tablish a regional commission to investi-
gate atrocities going back decades. And it
has set up a committee with the onlfto
work out how best to pursue what lawyers
call “transitional justice”. So far, a few peo-
ple have been identified to go on trial. “You
cannot have reconciliation without having
accountability,” says Mustafa.
Such challenges are found throughout
Ethiopia. In February Abiy’s government
established a national reconciliation com-
mission, the first in the country’s history.
But what happens in the Somali region in
the coming months and years may be in-
structive. “What we want the commission
to recommend is how to get out of this
mess,” says Jemal. “There has to be a depar-
ture from this cycle of killing.” 7JIGJIGA
The most dramatic change in Ethiopia is happening in the least expected placeEthiopia’s Somali regionLessons from an open-air prison
Abiy Ahmed, heeding the call