Ethiopia: A Political History
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Editorial perspective · Part 7 of 25

The Hollow Pillar · III — The 1991–1995 foundational period

The Transitional Period Charter of 1991: An Improvised Constitution

The Transitional Period Charter of Ethiopia was drafted over three days in July 1991 at a conference in Addis Ababa convened by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, which had taken Addis Ababa six weeks earlier.

An argument by Zef Telahun

This is an editorial perspective — signed opinion, not the site's neutral analysis. Factual claims are footnoted; the synthesis, emphasis, and judgement are the author's.

Thesis

The Transitional Period Charter of Ethiopia was drafted over three days in July 1991 at a conference in Addis Ababa convened by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which had taken Addis Ababa six weeks earlier. The conference included representatives of the EPRDF, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (formally not a party to it, but present), the Oromo Liberation Front, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, and a selection of smaller political organisations and notable individuals.1 The conference produced a 20-article charter that served as Ethiopia’s de facto constitution from July 1991 until the entry into force of the FDRE Constitution in August 1995 — four years and one month. The charter established the principles that would later become the 1995 Constitution’s foundational features, including ethnic-territorial federalism, the right of nations and nationalities to self-determination up to and including secession, and the principle that “Ethiopia is a multinational state.”2

The charter is an instructive document for two reasons. First, it shows that the foundational decisions of the 1995 Constitution — the decisions for which the 1995 framers are commonly held responsible — were actually made in 1991 by a much smaller and less representative body than the constitutional commission that drafted the 1995 text. Second, it shows that constitutional substance, when it appears in Ethiopian history, tends to be improvised in moments of victors’ assertion rather than constructed through deliberative process. The charter was put together in three days. Its consequences would shape Ethiopian political life for the next thirty-five years.

The conference

The London peace conference of late May 1991, mediated by Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen, set the framework: the Derg would step down, the EPRDF would enter Addis Ababa to prevent state collapse, and a transitional arrangement would be negotiated.3 The London arrangement also tacitly accepted that the EPLF, having effectively won in Eritrea, would administer the territory pending a referendum on independence. These two decisions — EPRDF dominance in the transitional government in Addis Ababa, EPLF authority in Eritrea pending referendum — were the operational starting points for the July conference.

The conference itself was held at the Addis Ababa City Hall from 1–5 July 1991. Twenty-seven political organisations were invited, of which most attended. The EPRDF (a coalition of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement, the Oromo People’s Democratic Organisation, and the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Front) was the dominant force at the conference; the OLF was the principal counterweight. The EPLF participated as an observer, not as a party to the charter, on the understanding that Eritrea would be addressed separately through the referendum process.4

The conference was not a constituent assembly. Its members had not been elected. Many of the organisations represented were small, recently constituted, or organised specifically for the conference. The conference’s authority to produce a constitutional document came from the political fact of the EPRDF’s military victory and the willingness of other actors to accept that fact while negotiating terms.

This is, again, Schmittian constituent power: the sovereign that emerges from the political moment decides the constitutional framework. The charter is more open about this than most. Article 1 declares it the result of “this Peaceful and Democratic Transitional Conference” and provides no other authority for its provisions.

The text

The Transitional Period Charter contained 20 articles in five sections:

Preamble and rights (Articles 1–6). The preamble declares Ethiopia “a country comprising different nations, nationalities and peoples.” Article 1 incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into Ethiopian law. Article 2 enumerates rights to freedom of conscience, expression, association, peaceful assembly, and political activity. Article 3 explicitly affirms the right of “nations, nationalities and peoples” to self-determination, including the right to “exercise its rights to self-determination, including independence, when the concerned nation/nationality/people is convinced that the above rights are denied, abridged or abrogated.”5

This is the language that would become Article 39 of the 1995 Constitution. It originates here, in the July 1991 charter.

Foreign relations (Articles 7–8). Established the principles of Ethiopian foreign policy during the transition, including the recognition of the right of “the Eritrean people” to determine their political future through referendum.6 This is the constitutional commitment that would produce the 1993 Eritrean referendum and the formal independence of Eritrea.

Structure of the Transitional Government (Articles 9–14). Established a Council of Representatives (a quasi-parliamentary body of 87 members drawn from the political organisations at the conference) and a Council of Ministers (the executive). The President of the Transitional Government would be the chairman of the EPRDF (Meles Zenawi); the Prime Minister would be the chairman of the Council of Ministers (Tamirat Layne).7

Judiciary (Articles 15–16). Established the independence of the judiciary and called for “a new and impartial judicial system.”

Implementation (Articles 17–20). Set the transitional period at two years (subsequently extended), required the drafting of a new constitution, and provided for the eventual transition to a permanent constitutional order.

The charter was, in important respects, a more rights-protective document than what would replace it. The incorporation of the UDHR by reference (Article 1) was broader than the 1995 Constitution’s enumerated rights chapter. The provisions for political pluralism (Article 2) were less encumbered by national-security qualifications than the 1995 Constitution would prove to be in operation.

The crucial substantive choices, however — ethnic-territorial federalism, the right to secession, the recognition of Eritrean self-determination — were all made in the 1991 charter, not in the 1995 process. The 1995 constitutional commission inherited these as the framework within which it was operating, not as questions it was free to re-open.

What it did in operation

The Transitional Government of Ethiopia was, in operation, an EPRDF government with token participation from other parties. The OLF withdrew from the government in June 1992, citing irregularities in the regional elections of that month and the EPRDF’s tightening control of administrative structures.8 The withdrawal produced a brief insurgency in Oromia (1992–93) that was suppressed by the Ethiopian National Defence Force, and effectively eliminated the principal non-EPRDF political force in the transition. From mid-1992 onward, the transitional period operated as an EPRDF political project with diminishing pretence of multi-party participation.

The regional elections of June 1992 — held to constitute the regional councils of the fourteen administrative regions inherited from the Derg and reorganised under the new ethnic-territorial framework — were the first electoral exercise of the transition. International observers, including the National Democratic Institute and African American Institute, raised serious concerns about administrative manipulation, OLF withdrawal, and the absence of effective opposition in most regions.9 The 1992 elections, in operational terms, produced regional governments dominated by EPRDF-affiliated parties. The pattern would persist.

The Constitutional Commission was established by Proclamation No. 24/1992 to draft a permanent constitution. It was chaired by Kifle Wodajo and included 29 members representing the constituent parties of the EPRDF, some independent jurists, and representatives of selected smaller organisations. It worked from 1993 through 1994 to produce the draft that the Constituent Assembly would ratify in December 1994.10 The drafting process was technically careful — the commission consulted comparative constitutional material, held public hearings, and produced multiple drafts — but its operational starting points were the charter’s framework, and the framework was not on the table for substantive revision.

The Eritrea question

The most consequential decision the Transitional Period Charter ratified was the commitment to an Eritrean self-determination referendum (Article 2 of the foreign relations section). This decision was operationally inseparable from the EPLF’s de facto authority in Eritrea since May 1991 and from the London-conference understanding that the EPLF had won the war for independence and would now formalise the result through plebiscite.11 The April 1993 referendum, conducted in conditions that the EPLF (renamed PFDJ in 1994) controlled comprehensively, produced a 99.8 percent affirmative vote on Eritrean independence with reported turnout of 98.5 percent. Ethiopia recognised the result and Eritrean independence took effect on 24 May 1993.

The constitutional significance of this sequence is what makes it the subject of the next article. For the present article, what matters is that the Transitional Period Charter ratified by constitutional language a decision that had already been made militarily. The pattern — military fact precedes constitutional form — recurs through the Ethiopian constitutional story.

Steelman of the opposing reading

Two opposing readings of the Transitional Period Charter deserve engagement.

The first is the inclusion-as-process reading: that the July 1991 conference, whatever its limits, was the broadest multi-party constitutional consultation in Ethiopian history to that point, that the charter incorporated rights protections more demanding than any previous Ethiopian instrument, and that the failure of the transition was not the failure of the charter but the failure of the subsequent political process to live up to it.12 This is partly right. The 1991 conference was more representative than anything the imperial or Derg periods had produced, and the rights protections in the charter were genuine. The reply is that the conference and the charter together produced a political settlement (EPRDF dominance under formal multi-party cover) that the subsequent political process did not deviate from. The flaws of the 1995–2018 EPRDF order were features of the 1991 settlement, not betrayals of it.

The second is the necessary-improvisation reading: that the EPRDF in July 1991 faced a collapsing state, did not have the luxury of an extended constitutional process, and produced the best document it could under the conditions — and that to criticise the charter for being improvised is to demand the impossible.13 This is also partly right. The conditions of July 1991 were not conducive to deliberative constitutional construction. The reply is that the EPRDF was not in a hurry; the transition lasted four years, and during that time the basic decisions of the charter were never seriously re-opened. The improvisation became permanence. If the charter had been treated as a provisional document subject to fundamental revision in the eventual constitution, the criticism would not apply. It was not so treated.

Multi-causal accounting

The shape of the Transitional Period Charter reflects (a) the military victory of the EPRDF and EPLF and the political facts that victory produced; (b) the influence of the EPRDF’s own ideological commitments — particularly the TPLF’s Marxist-Leninist analysis of the “nationality question” — which made ethnic-territorial federalism the natural framework; (c) the broader context of post-Cold War constitutional drafting in Africa, in which Ethiopia was operating as wave after wave of African states moved from one-party to multi-party constitutions; (d) the specific influence of constitutional advisors, including some American and European jurists who participated in the consultative process; and (e) the absence of any organised political force with the institutional capacity to demand a different framework. None of these excuses the decisions; together they explain why the decisions were what they were.

What the article establishes

The Transitional Period Charter of 1991 is the document in which the foundational decisions of the post-Derg constitutional order were made — including ethnic-territorial federalism, the right of nations and nationalities to self-determination up to secession, and the recognition of Eritrean independence. The 1995 Constitution that is commonly treated as the source of these features actually inherited them from a charter drafted in three days by a victorious insurgent coalition. The charter operated effectively as a Schmittian constituent act: the body with the means to decide decided the framework, and the framework became constitutional bedrock for the next three decades.

The next article takes up the Eritrean referendum of 1993 as the most consequential single constitutional decision the charter authorised.

References

Footnotes

  1. Transitional Period Charter of Ethiopia, Negarit Gazeta, 22 July 1991. On the conference, see Marina Ottaway, “The Ethiopian Transition: Democratization or New Authoritarianism?,” Northeast African Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 67–84; Edmond J. Keller, “Ethiopia: Revolution, Class, and the National Question,” African Affairs 80 (1981): 519–49. ↩

  2. Articles 1–3 of the Charter. ↩

  3. On the London peace conference and US mediation, see Herman J. Cohen, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ch. 2; Paul B. Henze, Layers of Time, 313–319. ↩

  4. On the participation list and the conference dynamics, see John Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, 1975–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 9. ↩

  5. Article 2 of the Charter. ↩

  6. Article 2 (foreign relations) of the Charter; see Tekeste Negash, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Patrick Gilkes and Martin Plaut, War in the Horn: The Conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia (London: RIIA, 1999). ↩

  7. Articles 9–14 of the Charter. ↩

  8. On the OLF withdrawal, see Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868–2004 (Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2005), and Mekuria Bulcha, Contours of the Emergent and Ancient Oromo Nation (Cape Town: CASAS, 2011). ↩

  9. National Democratic Institute / African American Institute, An Evaluation of the June 21, 1992 Elections in Ethiopia (Washington, DC: NDI/AAI, 1992). ↩

  10. On the Constitutional Commission, see Fasil Nahum, Constitution for a Nation of Nations, ch. 5, and Tsegaye Regassa, “The Making and Legitimacy of the Ethiopian Constitution,” Afrika Focus 23, no. 1 (2010). ↩

  11. Ruth Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Tekeste Negash and Kjetil Tronvoll, Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). ↩

  12. This is broadly the position of EPRDF-sympathetic accounts, e.g. Andreas Eshete’s earlier writings and Tsegaye Regassa’s Afrika Focus analysis. ↩

  13. A version of this argument appears in Cohen, Intervening in Africa, and in some accounts emphasising the urgency of the 1991 transition. ↩