The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) is poised to hold a referendum at 12 different Kebeles where the Amhara and Kimant ethnicities who have been living together for long.
That referendum will be hold based on the decision passed by the House of Federation, the state-affiliated FBC reported on Thursday.
Amhara region’s cabinet, recently, has agreed a self-administration of the Kimant society. Also, the two (Amhara and Kimant) can delimit an administrative territory according to their wish, the region decided.
NEBE’s Public Relations Director, Tesfalem Abay was quoted by FBC as saying, “The Board, as a responsible organ to deal with the referendum, has already sent a technical team to those Kebeles”.
A temporary action plan, which is expected to be endorsed “soon” is also installed following a consultation between NEBE and the Amhara region.
According to their expectations, 25 thousand people is going to be voted on the referendum.
Although the Kimant was mentioned in the 18th century, the question of ‘who are the Kimant people?’ has been one of the contentious issues since 1991. Their early history is more obscured and hence it becomes a puzzle for scholars interested to study this people.
Kimant political movement has largely been a post 1991 phenomenon. Beside their shared experience of marginalization and exclusion, and the new politico-legal environment emerged for mobilizing ethnic identities, their struggle has mainly grown- out of the wider conditions of discontent in the federal arrangement that denied and marginalized their existence as a distinct ‘nationality’.
No comments:
Post a Comment