Self deception on all sides in Ethiopia continues unabated.
Last time I navigated to the pro Woyane Paltalk room. A lady was talking, trying hard to be sweet in her voice. She said that during the former
regimes in Ethiopia Muslims were referred to as Muslim community as if they were foreigners. Today, she added, the minister of defense in our country is a Muslim. She went on saying that Muslims in Ethiopia today have everything and that if they want they can even take over power!! I sent her a text saying that, like her master Meles, she believes that words can work magic even when they are utterly misused. I thought they might bounce me out of the room. This is a common feature of most Abyssinian dominated rooms. Even the Eritrean Al Hiwar Arabic Room did not hesitate to bounce me. As Dr. Bereket was speaking I sent text message saying the present Ethiopian regime would, in my opinion, never tolerate a democratic Eritrea or Somalia, because it is itself extremely undemocratic. I thought Dr. Bereket would not mind such a statement.
I never stop wondering how people sabotage their own long term interests or benefits for narrow mostly personal short term interests and self satisfaction. Many of the former revolutionaries in Eritrea both from the highland and lowland now want just to play it safe with the Tigray supremacists under the leadership of Meles Zenawi. I can only wish them smooth sailing. I can easily understand why some of the Tigray nationalists in the opposition from the Eritrean highland are staunch supporters of the regime In Ethiopia. Tigray nationalism is on the ascendance and strives to be a dominant factor in the Horn of Africa and, if possible, well beyond. Why do the politicians from the Eritrean lowland scramble for favor with Woyne, serving up a load of weak explanations to their people? That is more difficult to understand when we look back at the role the TPLF played in destroying the ELF. As said only immediate self-satisfaction and opportunism can explain this. They looked on, no, even supported the Woyane in its genocide in Ogaden and Somalia not to mention the atrocities in Oromo, Afar and other areas.
Sure I stand for a democratic Eritrea. That is in the interest of democracy in the entire region of the Horn of Africa. But we need to be saved from ourselves first. I want only to say my piece. You may say you read scandal sheets only for scientific reasons. We can always duck the truth with highly logical abstract arguments divorced completely from reality, a game in which Meles is quite efficient, no doubt. Eritrea under pro Woyane opposition forces will not get democracy. I am afraid it may lose even its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Under the dictator Eritrea has certainly big problems. But it is still an independent country free from the Ethiopian hegemony. When I compare the two dictators Esaias fares better in a strange way. We know his profile hard as it is. He is not a fascist that pretends to be a democrat of the highest quality. Was it Meles or his ambassador in London who said British parliamentary democracy is our model! Big words in the international arena, militarism and genocide at home. Meles is a small faceless charmer he wanted to be. But Meles’ secrets are not his diplomatic charm and linguistic tricks but the western backing for him in the fight against so-called terror. With the end of this game Meles’ time is over. He seems nearing his uppers even if wikiLeaks cables concerning Ethiopia are suppressed for the time being.
In my opinion if the world is sane Meles and his generals should stand immediately before the International Criminal Court for committing genocide in various places, before another more horrendous genocide case on a really large scale happens. In many cases atrocities against Muslims can be explained in terms of the war on terror but what if Meles turns his big guns on the Christian Amharas who hate his regime in case they take up arms as the last resort especially in areas not very far from the center where it is difficult to cover up? Such a scenario would expose Western regimes more than anything else that may happen in our area most probably.
Meles is lucky, among other things, because the Amhara elites in the opposition are half-hearted in their opposition to his regime because they fear more than anything else the struggle of the Oromo people for independence. Most of their energies are being wasted in undermining the legitimate aspiration of the Oromo people by mainly misusing the religious divide, which their emperors had created over the centuries. Haile Sellasie had tried to apply this policy in the Eritrean Highland trying to lump the Muslims in the Lowland and the Arabs together but he made no headway. In general the Eritrean political elite in the Highland are politically much more mature than their counterparts among the Oromo Christian elite. The irony is, unlike Axum, from which original Christianity spread to the rest of historical Abyssinia, the Oromos had their Christianity mostly forced down their throat by the violence mainly of Amhara emperors only in the last few centuries. Only in Wollega and some other isolated areas did Oromos get their Christianity mostly peacefully thanks to the work of Western missionaries only recently. These people take, therefore, their Christianity more seriously than Oromos in Shoa where to my knowledge till 1995 there was no single Oromo high priest in the Orthodox Church. The world is blind to many shameless things that happen in “unimportant” parts of the world. But with the world now becoming a global village times are changing making falsification of history and made up stories more difficult. Sometimes, let me admit, I am at loss for words to describe the situation in Ethiopia. I run this site for love yet I find myself going all out for criticism constantly almost in all direction. Many individuals and groups especially among Oromos take my criticism personally or else think that I am bent on exposing only Oromo weaknesses ignoring our points of strength. I do not criticize persons. Human beings, including myself, look essentially for happiness in the most unlikely places. Besides I do not believe that human beings are intrinsically bad. That is why I do not criticize persons unless I feel I must which is rare. My criticism is directed at what I believe to be destructive thinking, violent policies and crimes against innocent human beings. I became aware as a boy, even long before I was politically conscious, of gross injustice done to the Oromo people that included my own family and I felt the outrage even personally at an early age.
I would like to write about situations as they develop. If I dwell on the past it is only in as much as its influence is still with us at present. Right now a situation is developing in the Sudan that will give the EPRDF yet another opportunity for a military drama that it always badly needs to divert its own and world attention from real issues at home and to satisfy the ever trigger happy nature of its commanders. By getting involved in a major conflict in south Sudan Meles Zenawi hopes to make his service indispensable to the Anglo-American circles if they decide to dismantle the Sudan. In that context he may seize the opportunity to provoke Eritrea to overthrow the regime there replacing it with puppet opposition forces as in Somalia. Along the road he can show also Husni Mubarak who he is. All this would satisfy Amhara zeal for defending Ethiopia against imagined enemies at least for the time being, which is what Meles badly needs. Woyane tricks to neutralize the opposition particularly among the Diaspora do sometimes produce tangible results as when it started distributing public land for construction to buy loyalty galvanizing opportunist opposition elements to the rat race for the good life in the cities, even to be in the limelight of course mostly in fantasy. OLF advised its followers to join the race with the end result that they are pulling it out of its traditional line toward making major concessions to the Abyssinian political agenda.
I do not need to jump to any conclusions. There are many who get their kicks out of the situations in which the culture of self-deception is at work, in which many politicians think that they are in the know about everything.