Behailu Shiferaw
Many may have opinions;
But only few can get it across
Did Martin Luther King, Jr. create the idea of anti-racial segregation movement in the USA? Did Meles Zenawi create the notion of anti-military dictatorship in Tigray? Did Mengistu Hailemariam create “Land to the Tiller” movement? No, they took it up from the people and gave it a voice, I would argue.
Indeed, Public opinion leaders play a major role in defining popular issues and in influencing individual opinions regarding them. However, they still do not necessarily initiate the ideas. They, even in instances where they initiate their own opinion, need to foist it upon the people, usually by giving it some religious, ethnic etc. color to give it social base, hence making it public and not personal opinion.
There are several instances where some individuals joined movements in a very late stage and eventually became notable figures in them. As Dr. Mohammed explains, opinion leaders are not self-proclaimed leaders; it is the people that make them leaders. They just stand up for some opinion that is held up by a certain population group. And the way they handle the case and their ability to amplify the voice of the people in a convincing manner puts them on top of the mass. Then we call them public opinion leaders.
However there is that wrong perception of public opinion leaders as creators of the opinion; especially among the commoners. In most cases, mature and experienced public opinion leaders hold onto the truth that they are there only to amplify the public voice and they win a lasting trust among their followers. On the other hand, there are some who, after taking a certain opinion and popularizing it, claim to have originated it themselves. During such occasions, the opinion leaders suffer double damage. Firstly, they lose credibility among their supporters. And secondly, smart leaders of opponent opinion take advantage of it and quickly label it as “an individual’s agenda pushed in disguise of the public’s interest.” And such labels brought doom to several public opinions and their leaders in history.
Among the many ways in which people communicate through speech, public speaking—also called oratory— attracts more attention than any other. And public opinion leaders, in most cases, have this quality. We still remember the speech of Martin Luther Kind Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream.” We remember the oratory of Adolph Hitler, and how Mussolini’s speech at St. Peter square won him the support of his people in his way to invade Ethiopia.
In dictator regimes opinions are mostly formed around the palace and are injected down to the people because the people do not have enough space to come together and form a common thinking.
Contrarily, by its very nature, the democratic process encourages citizens to form opinions on a number of issues. Voters are called upon to choose candidates in elections, to consider constitutional amendments, and to approve or reject municipal taxes, environmental concerns, foreign policy and other legislative proposals. Almost any matter on which the executive or legislature has to decide may become a public issue if there is a democratic room for that. If we see the time when Ethiopia had to step into the war with Somalia, there was a real raise of opinion especially after the United Islamic Court (UIC) declared war on Ethiopia. Unluckily the opinion was injected down to the people like the dictator system discussed above.
The Ethio-Somalian war is of dual importance for this paper because it helps us exemplify how both parties strived to win the public support. The UIC, after trying to attack Ethiopia in different other ways, tried to claim religious grounds for its attack on Ethiopia. It is what I referred to above as ‘foisting one’s idea by giving it a religious or ethnic color’.
Thus Sheikh Sharif Ahmed and his followers like Hassan Dahir Aweys claimed publicly that Ethiopia had crossed the border of Somalia and attacked the town of Bur Haqaba which lies on the road from the government base in Baidoa to the Islamist-held capital, Mogadishu. And thus the Sheikh quickly declared the war to be a Jihad- a holly war in which every Muslim should join. Sheikh Sharif also expressed his confidence that saying, “History shows that Somalis always win when they are attacked from outside.”
Here the need to take on Shieck Ahmed’s quote is not about who wins the war but about who is fighting who. The Sheikh deliberately used the word Somalis just to give the war a national patriotic tone. Somalia was already declared to have been represented by a Temporary Federal Government which was then based in Baidowa. So he used the word just to say that they were leaders of Somalia at the moment and any interference made without their go ahead is invasion on Somalia. Here we note how important language usage is in public opinion leadership even in unstable and dictator regimes like the then Somalia.
A short period of Cold War as it looked, an Ethiopian foreign ministry official quickly replied to the claim saying there were “no Ethiopian troops across the border. And the UIC are using Ethiopia as a pretext to hide their motives behind a curtain.”
By then, one argues, even if the war was already imminent, leaders of the two parties were smart enough to try different ways to get the public backing. After the UIC declared the war to be a holy one, the government of Ethiopia had two different but hugely interrelated tasks to do. One was to ‘prepare’ the military for a defense. And secondly, it was to convince the Somalis in Ethiopia and other Ethiopian Muslim that there was not religious ground for the war that would call for a jihad and it was just a mask for other evil will.
The Ethiopian government’s strategy, put in a nut shell, was unveiling them as non-religious groups. One way to do it was that the PM himself used part of the Holy Koran that mentions exemption of Ethiopia from any kind of religious attack by the Islam world in the parliament. By doing so, the PM won the Muslim public support in two ways.
One, by mentioning and clearly explaining the Koran, he presented himself as someone who read their book and made the Muslims feel comfortable under Ethiopia which will anyway recognize their welfare. The second line distortion was presenting the UIC as group of naïve insurgents who have either not understood or adhered to the orders of The Prophet, hence trespassing His words and declaring holy war on Ethiopia. By then, the Muslim population of Ethiopia took a deep breath because part of the population was already in national and religious dilemma.
The second strategy was using the media extensively to dehumanizing the Islamic Court. Especially, the government media widely propagated the fact that the UIC was getting support from notorious terrorist groups around the world. At some point, the PM himself came out on ETV and mentioned a couple of terrorist groups and citizenships of foreign mercenary terrorists captured during the war. The Muslim fellows, who have always hated being associated with terrorism, found it golden opportunity to prove themselves on the non-terrorist side. Then the government of Ethiopia had the support of both the Muslim and Christian public when marching against the fanatic insurgents.
It was recalled that the PM said, after the war, that Ethiopia entered hostilities because it faced a direct threat to its own borders. He said, “Ethiopian defense forces were forced to enter into war to protect the sovereignty of the nation. We are not trying to set up a government for Somalia, nor do we have an intention to meddle in Somalia’s internal affairs. We have only been forced by the circumstances.”
The example of the Prime Minister of Ethiopia shows us that the opinions held by any population are shaped and manipulated by several factors such as individual circumstances, the mass media, special-interest groups, and opinion leaders. But especially in countries like Ethiopia, where public opinion leaders are also the ones who shape the way the media function, the opinion leaders are the most important factors to deciding what the public opinion should be and what it leads to.
One can say that the war between Ethiopia and Somalia had more of political grounds than religious one. However, it was a war in which both sides recognized the significance of religion as a tool to strengthening public support. Ethiopia and such other African countries like Somalia have come to a sort of politics where everything is categorized in some form or another to a certain group, be it religious, gender, ethnic or age group. Whenever there is a certain public opinion, either the opinion itself or its proponents are quickly categorized into a group the belongingness of which they had probably never felt.
“He/she is pushing the agenda of Amharas, Oromos or Tigres and/or Christians or Muslims and/or males or females and/or the youth or the elderly” etc is a label any opinion leader expects when he ventures to lead any opinion. Where there is not evidence linking them to such labeling locally, they are given names used in other countries. We remember when a senior government official labeled an opposition party to be advocate of inter-hamwey a militia group involved during the genocide in Rwanda while in truth one of the leaders of the labeled party was an attorney of the UN against the Rwanda genocide offenders during the international trial.
Public opinion has, thus, been associated with grouping at least in recent history of Ethiopia.
