“Can you do addition?” the White Queen asked. “How much is one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?
“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”
“She can’t do addition,” the Red Queen interrupted.
Lewis Carrol
Every now and then the Abyssinian political elites do try new songs for their old tunes. Their aim is to destroy the aspiration of the Oromo people to independence.
They are trying to present a slightly different version of Ethiopian history admitting some of the facts of history which they used to deny- in order to bury others deeper. But their new tunes give rise to a discordant, jarring sound poor in overtones which pleases no one but themselves, and the chorus of hired, servile Oromos. The old view of the Abyssinian conquerors that Ethiopia is God given to them and that it is the oldest nation on our planet has become unpalatable even to parts of the Abyssinian intellectuals. So the scramble for a slightly different interpretation of history to save the Abyssinian supremacy started in deadly earnest since the sixties. Many of Abyssinians turned even to Marxism-Leninism not out of love or conviction. As zealots, they wanted simply to salvage the empire under a new nomenclature especially as the struggle for national liberation intensified. Today the Abyssinian opposition elements are hammering home the importance of democracy for the same reason. Since they do not intend to practice what they peach, empty words do not seem to cost them anything. At the same time, the fascist TPLF is sucking the democratic West to save the empire.
I do not need to go into a plethora of the messy detail to prove my point. But I think we must be awake to certain Abyssinian attempts at reinterpreting the history of the Ethiopian empire to make it acceptable to the naïve among us.. We make a serious miscalculation if we underestimate their zeal for Ethiopia.. The Abyssinian political elites are desperate indeed to disprove through systematic propaganda that Ethiopia is a prison of nations and nationalities and that it is an African colonial empire.
To this end, Ethiomedia has been quick to post an article by Prof. Fiqadu Lamessa, July 30, 2013, entitled “History 101: Fiction and Facts on Oromos of Ethiopia.” From time to time, Ethiomedia.com can rotate full-circle from being an ‘opposition’ website to supporting basic TPLF views and policies. This is typical of almost all Abyssinian opposition. Today the inter Abyssinian conflict between Tigrayans and Amharas is part of the petty struggle for power, with no basic differences between them on defending the status quo based on Abyssinian domination. The article in question, on the face of it, purports to refute several articles published by al Jazeera on the Oromo question. But its implicit messages are much more than that. Actually it is a dangerous drill, a camouflaged Abyssinian manifesto. Its tone is admittedly educational. Its top-down bureaucratic style is clear and leaves its authors with inflated chests.. Yet it pretends, at the same time, a down-to-earth approach to the issue. Straight away, let me quote one of its main Fictions, the points it tries to disprove..
Fiction # 1:
“Between 1868 and 1900, half of all Oromo were killed, around 5 million people”
Fact # 1:
“This is one of the most repeated inaccuracies, usually told by Secessionist Oromos, radical ethno-nationalist politicians outside the country or pro-OLF history revisionist websites like gadaa.com et al. However, the undisputed fact is that even the total Ethiopian population (the sum of dozens of ethnic groups) was much less than 5 million in the late 1800s, let alone one ethnic group being ten million. So claiming that 5 million ethnic Oromos were killed by emperor Minelik’s forces does not add up. The truth is several thousand Oromos were in fact killed during battles of that era. It was not a “genocide” as some politicians claim but it was a massacre of the ill equipped southern forces defeated by the Shewan military of Emperor Menelik which had more European weapons. Throughout those decades, the truth is more Oromos were killed by other Oromos than by non-Oromos because competing Oromo Clans often traded for weapons to have an upper hand against their local competitors, who were often their fellow Oromos and Sidama neighbors”
To underline his remarks, the Professor ends this part by quoting another Professor to vilify Professor Asafa Jaalata, a respected writer on Oromo liberation struggle. I do not need to recycle here all the garbage in the article. Let me sum up the rest of its content: He asserts that Oromos have never been predominantly Muslim. He blames the derogatory label “Galla” on the Arabs and Muslims, exonerating the Habesha political class from all responsibility. On top of this, he says the Oromo question is not a colonial question. All his statements are no doubt exhilarating news to the neo- Abyssinian reactionaries and fascists, including the TPLF.
When I first came to Germany I stayed with Nagasu Gidada in Frankfurt. Then and later we had intensive discussion on the struggle of the Oromo people for independence from Abyssinia. I was impressed by his ideological commitment to our just cause. Apart from opportunism, what drove him much later to the Abyssinian camp is not his love for Ethiopia or the ignorance of history or politics. It was his fear of Islam .
The deep rooted fear is understandable especially in an era when the idea of conflict between cultures is systemically used to suppress and replace the ideas and realities of class struggle while capitalist globalism is on the march. But the fear of Islam should not allow anyone to justify keeping the Oromo people inside the prison that is Ethiopia or gingerly trying to foment hatred among our people and divide us alongside religious sentiments as Prof. Fiqadu Lamessa seems to do.
I never stop asking myself how the likes of Gidada and Lamessa fail to learn the lesson from Eritrea. The Ethiopian Chauvinists did every thing to frighten the Christian Eritrean highlanders with Muslim or Arab bogey to hinder them from joining the struggle for independence. If they failed there, how can they succeed with us? Such attempts are futile. In the same way, the ideas of conflict between cultures will never succeed in obfuscating completely the issues of social justice.
Juggling with language and numbers will not work when it comes to the Abyssinian organized mass killings and genocide against our people and others . In an empire where no census is allowed, where does Fiqadu gets his own numbers on, for example, the massacre of the Oromos during the battles of Minelik era , on the population of Ethiopia at the time, and on the equal representation of Oromo Christians and Muslims, while trying to debunk the estimates of others?
Besides, when we are talking of mass exterminations and genocides in Ethiopia we are not talking only of those committed by Minelik . What about the ones committed by other Amhara and Tigray emperors, kings and modern dictators who are mass murderers? What strikes me most about Fiqadu is the incongruity of his progressive and advanced views on capitalism and the nature of its relation to the third world in this global era with his commitment to serve the feudal Abyssinian mythological ethos on the unquestioned unity of Ethiopia! May be this incongruity is intended to mislead the naïve among us.
We have seen the ease with which also Fiqre Tolossa put up the idea that there has never been a time where Oromos have not regulated Ethiopian politics and that his imaginary Ethiop was himself an Oromo. The Abyssinian propagandists and their Oromo cohorts seem extremely desperate these days. They have acrobatically jumped from denying even our existence to considering us the backbone of the Abyssinian colonial empire of Ethiopia! By articulating on paper attractive concepts such as democracy, equality, social justice, they try to hoodwink us again and again. There is a deep rooted assumption among the Abyssinian intelligentsia, especially the Amharas, that Oromos, no matter how intelligent they may be, are indefinitely and ultimately manipulable and inferior to them in some essential ways.. This attitude is the result of centuries of Oromo cultural, political and military humiliation by the Abyssinians.. Unique feudal refinements and the monopoly on education have enriched the Amharic language. Some of its innuendos can be positive or negative depending on the situation. For example, “gar” or “yewah” ( kind ) can be interchangeable with “jil” meaning stupid. This double talk is often applied to Oromos, especially in Shewa , the area from where, according to Prof. Fiqadu, Oromos and Amharas jointly extended their rule over Ethiopia.
To some extent, Prof. Fiqadu has a point when he mentions inter Oromo rivalry during the Abyssinian conquest. It was certainly a factor but not a major one in the Oromo defeat. In my life time, I have not seen whatsoever any significant inter-Oromo conflict or rivalry. In the fifties and sixties when Shewan Oromos were brutishly driven away from their areas by the Amhara land lords, they migrated on a massive scale to the Arsi areas especially of Bale. My own father received Salaale families and settled them freely on his land in our Shaabo village just to the East of Goba where they stayed for more than a decade before they moved to Gololcha area where they bought land. Years later, after the death of my father, I visited them with my brother. As a youngster, I heard my father say when talking to us about them, “These are our people.” This was a highly religious Muslim cleric. But in some way he valued his Oromo identity as much as his religiosity.
This is not to underestimate the problems of regionalism and religious divide into which the Oromo people were forced as Prof. Fiqadu himself correctly pointed out. We must learn the lessons from Somalia, where extremely egoistic political elites parcelled out the country among themselves on clan basis creating an unnecessary conflict within one of the most homogeneous nations of Africa.
What is really amazing and shocking is this: we know how Western countries made praiseworthy efforts to expose and condemn organized mass killings, pogroms, genocides and holocaust, for example against Armenians and Jews. Both during colonial times and ever since, they turned and still, as I write this article, turn blind eyes to crimes committed against humanity in Ethiopia – an undeniable fact. The European colonial powers actually assisted the Abyssinan emperors in their extermination policies.
Prof. Fiqadu may pedantically ask how I can prove all this. In case he does, my answer is: Let him use his professorial position and ask former colonial powers involved. Perhaps they still have some records of the events. I am of no use to him in this field.
But I must hasten to add here that Oromos who have survived the Abyssinian genocides, pogroms and organized mass killings have orally passed to their children and the children of their children many aspects of what happened. Our oral traditions may not be totally as accurate as modern records but they contain the historical memory of our nation. As a boy I heard highly respected Arsi elders from different parts of Bale commenting on those oral traditions. The Abyssinians wanted to destroy or Abyssinize us in the most brutal ways. Our history is inside us. It survived in our memory to this day, as our elders said.
Does this sound as if we are conditioned merely by the past? It cannot be. For the simple reason that our nation is still locked inside the hell that is Ethiopia today. If you are in hell how can you forget it?
Fiqadu blames Oromo nationalists in the Diaspora for asserting the right of their people to self-determination which amounts in his eyes to secession. Where else does he expect us to be able to articulate our aspirations freely? In Fascist Ethiopia? I wonder where he has written his infamous statement and who is behind him.
By the way when I describe Ethiopia as a fascist empire some individuals try to invalidate my assertion on the semantic or anachronistic grounds. For me, however, the phenomena of fascism is older, much older than the term itself. There is nothing strange about this in history.
In general the Abyssinian elites and their Oromo hirelings underestimate the awareness and the resolve of the Oromo people to be free in the same way they underestimate the determination of the Somali, Afar, Sidama etc people as well. They are not alone in this. The blind Western commitment to the hegemony of the Abssinian minority in the Horn Of Africa is what keeps them defiantly intransigent.
Oromos have been invisible to the world for centuries due to the Abyssinian conspiratorial hegemony and brutality and the politics of its international backers. This picture is radically changing now as the Oromo Diaspora in the West grows both in numbers and political organizational awareness. The peoples of the West are learning more and more about our people. This is making many of the Abyssinian elements abroad furious. Some of them seem to be suggesting violence against Oromo activists to silence us from telling the truth, while at home the TPLF is doing their work for them suppressing the Oromo voice systematically as ever.
The recent hate campaign against Jawar Mohamed is unexpected. He has been agitating for democracy and human rights in Ethiopia. He has consciously avoided addressing the issue of the right of nations and nationalities to self-determination in Ethiopia, a fact which won him Abyssinian applause. Now I think the Abyssinian groups have realized that they cannot control him. As we all know the Abyssinian elites cannot work with Oromos they cannot control and manipulate, even those who do not struggle for Oromo independence.. This does not need explaining to an Oromo. But Jawar’s respect for his Oromo identity and his effective and extensive coverage of the ongoing peaceful Muslim protest is not to their liking even though they are also paying lip-service to the Muslim protest with the clear intention of sabotaging it from within.
Personally I think the Muslim protest movement is already infiltrated by Abyssinian Muslim Chauvinists from the North. I also think that TPLF is misusing the protest on the one hand to foster and strengthen Western fear of Muslim radicalism in the region, and to prove, on the other hand, to the Western nations that people in Ethiopia do enjoy the right to protest against their government.
TPLF did indeed encourage Wahabism among the Oromo Muslims with the intention of destroying Oromo nationalism by driving wedge between Oromos of the two major faiths.
The local Wahabi clerics on their part also misused the situation and spread their influence with Saudi finance beyond their dream.
Perhaps people such as Fiqadu Lamessa , Nagasu Gidada, Fiqre Tolossa and others alongside the Abyssinian cliques take fright at the sudden spread of Wahabism. They do not know how superficial this type of Wahabism offically mandated by the Saudi regime really is. They and the Abyssinian elites including TPLF, however, also underestimate the Oromonness of Muslim Oromos. While in Houston shop, I confronted a young Oromo woman wearing hijab with some questions. She turned on me vehemently saying she was wearing hijab not to weaken her Oromo identity but to empower it. She added that she never dreamed to be an Arab or something else. She said also that she had no intention of converting other Oromos to her religion. So, we had coffee together and I had an interesting discussion with her. I had in the end nothing to say against her hijab. She actually drove me home removing the hijab from her beautiful face. On parting when I extended my hands to her, she held them for sometime while telling me something. Truth is that Muslims in Ethiopia are generally exposed to unspeakable inhumanity by its brutal ruling classes. As the situation worsens things like hijab become symbols of solidarity, even if superficial, among the helpless masses. In the meantime the Wahabi clerics and their Saudi backers know how to draw benefits from their never ending miserable game.
By the way, Saudi Arabia is the first country to recognize the coup against Mursi by the American backed military. Naive Muslims and Arabs keep pointing their fingers only at Israel. The fact is governments such as those of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar serve illegitimate hegemonic Anglo- American interests among Muslims in the world better than Israel. That is part of the reason they stood the tide of the Arab Spring. Otherwise they are the most corrupt regimes anywhere in the world. Israel, whatever she does to the Palestinians, respects the will of its people at least. The role the Saudis are playing in Ethiopia, especially their attitude towards the Oromo issue is highly negative.
Finally, let me pray in an Oromo way: it is high time for us, Oromos, to unlearn petty thinking, petty self-assessment, in order to act in community efficiently and gracefully in this complicated world. Can we stop as individuals being constantly in self pity, self- centred, self- indulgent, self-righteous, self- satisfied, self seeking and self-important? Aaaamin. Our enemies do count on these tendencies in us more than on anything else. How and when shall we wake up?