Awol K Allo, is the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholar at the University
of Glasgow Law School, UK. Previously, he was a lecturer in law at St
Mary’s University College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The film seeks to transform the “demands for freedom of religion” into a joint criminal enterprise with terror groups.
On February 5, 2013, Ethiopia’s only and publicly funded Television
Station, ETV, aired a controversial documentary during prime time in
violation of an outstanding court injunction. Oddly subtitled “Boko
Haram in Ethiopia”, Jihadawi Harekat – Arabic for “jihadi movement” –
denounces leaders of Ethiopia’s year-long protest movement for alleged
links to foreign terrorists.
Muslims in Ethiopia have been protesting the government’s control of
the Supreme Islamic Council and its imposition of al-Ahbash, an unknown
Islamic sect across mosques in Ethiopia. In a press statement last year,
the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom said:
“The Ethiopian government has sought to force a change in the sect of
Islam practiced nationwide and has punished clergy and laity who have
resisted.” Elected to represent the movement, the accused Muslim leaders
were arrested and charged under Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law when
negotiations with the government failed last July.
A joint production of the Ethiopian National Security Agency, the
Federal Police and ETV, the film draws a parallel between a local
protest movement recognised for its peaceful acts of resistance with
Africa’s most notorious terrorist groups such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram,
Mali’s Ansar Din and Somalia’s al-Shabaab.
With dozens of journalists, politicians and activists already charged
or convicted under its vague and broad anti-terrorism law that
criminalises all forms of dissent, the fight against terrorism has
become the primary juridical framework within which to legitimise and
justify war against political foes. It is the new legal ideology in
which these political motives are institutionalised to provide
long-standing relationships of domination some legal pretext. In
Ethiopia today, America’s “war on terror” is used to short-circuit both
the constitution and international criticism.
Making fiction intelligible
Made to portray the Muslim community’s struggle for religious freedom
as a terrorist ploy designed to “establish an Islamic state”, Jihadawi
Harekat is less about what it describes so much as the alternative
reality that it depicts and crystallises. By drawing politically
explosive parallels between groups with radically different political
presuppositions, the film dramatises and escalates the gravity of the
threat. It replays deeply held narratives of the past and accentuates
the “evil” embodied by the committee in its attempts to frame them as
“public enemies” working towards a common goal with groups that inhabit
an entirely different political universe.
To amplify this new reality, that is, the cinematic production of new
subjects of terrorism, the film appropriates pre-existing frames of
reference that sociologists call “processes of signification”. To
augment the parallel, it situates the protest movement in the context of
terrorism – a discourse whose antecedent is always Islamic and “whose
stereotypical characteristics are already part of socially available
knowledge”.
Just because the protest movement shares the antecedent “Islam” with
al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, the signification equates a peaceful movement
that operates within the framework of Ethiopia’s own constitution with
violent groups on the sole basis of their imputed common denominator.
The exemplar images of violence embodied by al-Shabaab and Boko Haram
are situated within the geopolitical context and cultural idiosyncrasies
of Ethiopia to essentialise the association and ultimately render its
absurd collocation socially intelligible.
There are temporal, spatial, material and editorial questions that
the film cannot account for. By connecting events that took place from
East Africa to West Africa, from North Africa to the Middle East, by
gathering actors of differing ideological persuasions into unity, by
reducing complex and contingent historic and political issues into
self-evident mathematical varieties, Jihadawi Harekat inadvertently
slips into a crisis it cannot contain or suppress.
One excellent example is a hinge the film uses to connect the leaders
of the protest movement to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. In an
unedited interrogation clip wrongly broadcasted after the film, the
interrogators coerce Abubakar Ahmed – the chairman of the committee
chosen to be representative of the Muslim community – into accepting
their conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis have the
ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic world under Sharia law.
While the reduction of such complex and contingent issues of
historical and theoretical specificity into an either-or binary is
emblematic of the logic through which the film establishes its central
thesis, I am interested in the logic used to connect the ideologies of
the Brotherhood in the Middle East to the protest leaders in Ethiopia.
This pivot is a distinguished Qatari public intellectual, Jassim Sultan
whose teachings two members of the protest leaders were said to have
attended.
In an article that examined the increasing role of Qatar in the
politics of the Middle East, The Economist holds up Sultan as an
exemplary figure known for his “middle-of-the road” politics, not the
extremism depicted in Jihadawi Harekat. Sultan, whom the film accuses of
being a middle man between the “extreme ideological orientations” of
the Brotherhood and Ethiopia’s “jihadists”, was praised by The Economist
as, “a renowned Qatari intellectual, [who] strikes a chord by rejecting
the Brotherhood’s demand for strict obedience… derides its slogan,
‘Islam is the solution’, as facile”.
By editing conversations about conversations, copy-pasting
interrogations about different spatial, temporal and material
co-ordinates into a coherent Ethiopian story, the film seeks to
transform the most basic demands for freedom of religion into a joint
criminal enterprise with terror groups near and far. Nowhere else is the
conjuncture between words and images, facts and fictions, times and
spaces, persons and events manifestly absurd as in Jihadawi Harekat.
Instead of generating a moral panic that serves as the material
fabric for social control, the film generated consequences that are
destabilising the regime. In a statement to the press, a coalition of 33
political parties emphatically denounced the film as yet another
spectacle that epitomises the ruling party’s contempt for the
constitution and the rule of law.
Boomerang effects
The film, along with the ongoing trial, offers an important window
into the cleavage that divides the old Ethiopian Muslim subjectivity
from the new. Thanks to the government that never ceases to generate
crisis and mobilise the law and its court system to cement this crisis,
these events have opened up a space for critical cultural-political
awareness.
Muslims in Ethiopia, who conceive their religious subjectivity as
apolitical and go about their lives, have begun to realise that their
religious identity can be a potent site of subjectification and
domination. As one of 20th century’s prescient political thinkers,
Hannah Arendt formulates this point; an attack against a specific
identity creates spontaneous moment of political self-awareness. “If one
is attacked as a Jew,” Arendt said, “One must defend oneself as a Jew.
Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the
Rights of Man.”
Because of the events of last year, there emerged a critical space in
which a society that rarely, if at all, engages in questions of law and
politics, protested the usurpation of its constitutional guarantees. In
their struggle, Muslims in Ethiopia began to see unfair closures and
systematic subjections taking place at sites and moments they could not
have seen before. The government’s uncanny response to basic demands of
religious freedom has created a rare opportunity for a decisive break
with a docile political past and for the formation of a new collective
consciousness.
Awol K Allo, is the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholar at the University
of Glasgow Law School, UK. Previously, he was a lecturer in law at St
Mary’s University College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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