COLUMN ONE : Ethnic Pride Gets a Test in Africa : Tribal conflict is among the continent’s most implacable problems. Ethiopia is now giving multiculturalism a try--promoting diversity rather than suppressing it.

Any unwitting observers who happened upon a public ceremony in a stadium near here recently could be forgiven for thinking they had strayed across the border into another country.

Speaker after speaker evoked the name of the “Nation of Oromia,” and the highlight was the presentation of degrees to 250 people who had just concluded a three-month course in Oromo history and language.

In the Ethiopia of just one year ago, such a gathering would have provoked a violent reaction by the government of the Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, and not only because it was sponsored by the Oromo Liberation Front, an insurgent group. By celebrating their tribe’s history and culture, they would also have challenged the foundation of Mengistu’s policy of keeping an ethnically diverse Ethiopia united by force and propaganda.

But since Mengistu’s flight into exile last May and the assumption of government authority by the rebel Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, this country has experienced an explosion of ethnic assertiveness.

The EPRDF-led transitional government has reversed decades of government policy by moving to promote, rather than suppress, expressions of ethnic and tribal diversity in the country. This effort has gone as far as a proposal to gerrymander the very map of Ethiopia, replacing its 12 traditional provinces with 12 new ones based on tribal predominance.

Within each of these provinces, ethnic groups would have the right to teach children in their own languages, promote their traditional cultures and maintain their own security and police forces. The central government would retain responsibility for Ethiopia’s overall defense, economic affairs and foreign policy.

It all amounts to a radical new approach to what is perhaps Africa’s most implacable problem, tribalism.

Across Africa, the root of most of today’s armed civil conflicts is ethnic strife. Krahn and Mandinka slaughter each other in Liberia, Afar rise up in Djibouti (and Ethiopia), Arabs attack the black Dinka and Nuer (who also fight each other) in Sudan.

Rwanda and Burundi were created as mirror images so that each could accommodate one of the two tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis, that had lived in uneasy proximity in the Belgian colony from which they sprang; the stratagem did not prevent a string of tribal massacres from taking place after independence, most recently in Burundi in 1988.

In Somalia, where everybody is said to be of the same Somali tribe, the unprecedentedly vicious and chaotic fighting is among sub-tribal clans--and in one case, between two factions of the same clan.

Post-independence African leaders have historically responded to these tensions by trying to suppress all expression of tribalism. This is difficult enough in countries such as Kenya, where four or more tribes tussle for political, economic and cultural authority, and virtually impossible in countries such as Nigeria, which harbors more than 200 ethnic groups.

Governments have tried banning elementary education in tribal languages, outlawing political associations based on ethnic identity, extinguishing tribal claims to particular areas of land. In almost every case these efforts have failed and often have even provoked greater feelings of ethnic identification--more tribalism.

Ethiopia’s new leaders argue that this is exactly what happened in their country. They contend that their new system may be, paradoxically, the only way to keep the country from ripping itself apart, and they base their argument on Ethiopia’s own recent history.

“Previous administrative decisions weren’t based on nationalities but on trying to efface the presence of nationalities,” Meles Zenawi, the revolutionary front leader who is president of the transitional government, said in an interview. “Unfortunately, it’s a reality you cannot run away from. These nationalities had no right to use their own languages, their own cultures. We can’t ignore that Ethiopia is a diverse country. Previous attempts to do that have led to wars, to fueling nationalistic tendencies.”

But many Ethiopians and outside observers question whether the promotion of ethnic differences might not instead widen tribal fissures.

“Ethiopians may either manage to work out a civilized modus vivendi ,” said Eshetu Chole, chairman of the economics department at Addis Ababa University, “or they may succumb to the polarizing forces that have been unleashed with such abandon. Whichever way the balance may tilt, it is bound to be by a slender margin.”

To the extent that the government has been unable to quell outbreaks of violent confrontation in some regions, Eshetu added, “The factional fighting and the uncertainty it creates are disastrous for the economy”--which is already on its knees after two decades of mismanagement and civil war.

Of course, those who are busily trying to reclaim long-suppressed ethnic traditions see the new policy far more positively.

“The only literature available in the Oromo language in my childhood was the Bible,” recalled Lencho Lata, an officer of the Oromo Liberation Front, one of several insurgent groups professing Oromo nationalism. “By the time I was an adult, even this was banned.”

The suppression of Oromo culture began not during the Marxist era but in the 1950s, under Haile Selassie, who was trying to forge an Ethiopian nation under his own dynastic rule. Lencho remembers a period when church services were ordered translated into Amharic, the emperor’s language, “even when the entire congregation was Oromo and no one in the church understood a word of Amharic.”

Islam, the majority religion in the tribe, was similarly suppressed, and such Oromo traditions as the election of elders every eight years were outlawed.

Under such circumstances, compounded by the problems of living amid a rising insurgency, the survival of language and culture could be tenuous indeed. Lencho observed that during the 1980s, while he was fighting as a guerrilla and his wife was in prison, their children were sent to live with relatives who spoke Amharic; when his wife was released in 1989, she found that the children had lost almost all of their Oromo proficiency and had to be taught again.

When the Oromo Liberation Front began to gain control of large swaths of territory in Harerge province in the east and Welega in the west in 1980, reviving the language was among its top priorities.

The front managed to print manuals for health workers and mechanics in Oromo and began distributing literacy primers for children through grade six and for adults. But the courses celebrated at the recent stadium rally, held in the village of Ambo, were the first such to be held in the open since the days of Haile Selassie’s reign, thanks to the transitional government’s policy.

One factor that makes the government’s new policy a sensitive issue is the gap between the way some Ethiopians view their country and the historical reality. Many Ethiopians cherish a traditional vision of “Greater Ethiopia” as an epitome of cultural unity, in which its diverse groups maintain an overall identity as Ethiopians, rather than Oromo, Tigre, Afar or anything else. But in truth this idea has long been honored more in the breach than the observance.

Before 1900, Ethiopia was almost entirely rural, a region without any large urban centers and one in which internecine warfare was pervasive.

Haile Selassie, who was overthrown in 1974, was the first Ethiopian ruler able to claim some semblance of unity for Ethiopia under a highly centralized government. But he accomplished this largely by maintaining a strong military presence in the most fractious regions and keeping regional princelings pacified by handouts.

Haile Selassie’s vision of a unified country tended to gloss over one of the principal roots of ethnic resentment: The right to rule “Greater Ethiopia” had been appropriated by his own Amhara ethnic group.

The Amhara were not Ethiopia’s largest tribe but were probably its most cohesive. By contrast, the Oromo, the most numerous group, were themselves deeply split, widely dispersed and too disorganized to challenge the Amhara for leadership.

Mengistu’s unification strategy entailed relocating whole communities and subjugating some regions militarily in order to bind them to central authority. Not himself an Amhara, Mengistu was nevertheless skilled at appealing to that group’s ethnic pride to keep the Amhara-dominated bureaucracy aligned behind his policies.

Of course, this further exacerbated nationalistic feelings. As one former Mengistu minister later wrote of the proliferating ethnic liberation movements of his era:

“Their struggle is a struggle to maintain their identity and traditions. It is a struggle against the attempt to uproot them from a land they have owned and worked for years. In short, it is for self-determination.”

For all that, unleashing tribal pride in Ethiopia has manifest dangers, especially now, when the transitional government and the EPRDF-dominated governing council have insufficient clout to keep order in the countryside.

Some regions of Ethiopia, particularly the eastern province of Harerge, have been suffering extreme ethnic unrest since the end of the Mengistu regime in May. Meles in his interview agreed that the violence in Harerge, which has prevented relief organizations from adequately addressing famine in the region, is ethnically based. But he ascribed it largely to political growing pains following decades of autocratic rule.

Not everybody is so confident that democratic debate can take root before the country fractures.

“We had relative internal stability in the past because Mengistu had troops and armor,” said one Western diplomat in Addis Ababa. “But there aren’t any troops throwing their weight around now. There’s a whole lot of people in the countryside no longer under the thrall of a disciplinary force.”

The instability caused by ethnic tensions is particularly dangerous now because, with Ethiopia’s economy in dismal shape, gangs of bandits are roaming the countryside. Because the rebel leaders disbanded the national police force after taking over in May and have not yet replaced it, there are few means to control the marauders.

And the prospects are not bright. After Mengistu’s fall, his army of 350,000 soldiers was demobilized. With the country’s agricultural productivity declining and its industrial infrastructure in ruins, feeding and employing these people will be, in the words of Eshetu, the university economist, “an awesome social challenge.”

The government’s ability to raise revenue to address such conditions has been crippled by years of war and the impending loss of the province of Eritrea, which is functioning as an independent country. Eritrea had one-quarter of Ethiopia’s factories, provided 15% of its tax revenue and was one of the very few regions that actually provided more revenue than it consumed in government expenditures.

That makes the central government’s ability to collect taxes and respect from the new tribal regions even more critical. This is by no means guaranteed because the transitional government is still closely identified with Meles’ EPRDF, which began as a tribal insurgency group in the Tigre province in the far north. The EPRDF is still referred to popularly as the woyane , or bandits, as it was tagged by the Mengistu government.

“It’s hard to imagine the EPRDF winning a national election,” said a diplomat in Addis Ababa. “They only control things now because they have an army and they took the city.” The transitional government originally pledged to hold regional elections by last October, the diplomat noted, “but now, they just say it will be ‘soon.’ ”

Nevertheless, in many ways Ethiopia today is reveling in its fledgling experiment in pluralistic politics. More than 50 political parties have been formed, and Saturdays and Sundays in Addis Ababa almost always feature some form of mass demonstration--whether Muslims agitating for religious rights, Ethiopian Orthodox believers protesting the selection of their latest abune , or religious leader, or some political faction demonstrating for or against a government policy--any of which would have landed its participants in prison a few short months ago.

“They’re drunk on democracy,” observed a diplomat residing in the capital.

So far, most formal expressions of ethnic pride are tempered by acknowledgments of national purpose. Scarcely a week passes without a conference among leaders of one or another “nation” within the country bemoaning their oppression under previous regimes and expressing confidence that they will be treated with equality under the present leadership.

The old regime’s slogans heralding the march toward socialism have been supplanted at public meetings with such chants as “We believe in the equality of nationalities!”

This is all part of an effort to bring diverse Ethiopia toward unity through cajoling, rather than coercion.

“It means a lot for me to see a unified Ethiopia, but how do you approach it?” asked Tesfaye Habisso, a member of the tiny Kambata ethnic group who is secretary general of the Council of Representatives, the transitional government’s legislative body. “It’s not our idea to bring it about through war and bloodshed.”