ESAT News–The legal director of an international advocacy group has said that Ethiopia’s political prisoners like journalist Eskinder Nega and Andualem Aragie are not terrorists but victims of “kangaroo courts” and unjust laws designed to criminalize fundamental rights.

Kate Barth, Legal Director of Freedom Now and international advocate for Eskinder Nega and Andualem Aragie, told ESAT that the courts as well as laws› such as the anti-terror proclamation are unjust and unacceptable by any standard.

“The Ethiopian courts aren’t simply independent or unbiased bodies. That is in fact one of the arguments we made in some of our legal filings with the international tribunals. In the specific case of Mr. Nega and Mr. Andualem’s case, there was literally no evidence produced at trial,” she said.

Barth called the anti-terrorism law a “total joke” used to criminalize dissent. “Terrorism is a favorite trick of Ethiopia to say that its critics are effectively undermining the government, which is crazy as we all have the right to free speech. Ethiopia has signed numerous international treaties promising to give its citizens the right to free speech and simply criticizing governments does not make you a terrorist,” Barth noted.

The legal director pointed out that UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has already found the continued detention of journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega a violation of international law.  UN panel of five independent experts from four continents concluded that  the government violated Eskinder’s fundamental rights to free expression and due process. The UN Working Group called for his immediate release in 2013.

According to the American lawyer, the public speech and articles  produced as evidence of terrorism at the trial of Eskinder and Andualem were laughable. “No reasonable, independent and unbiased court anywhere in the world would say yes these men are terrorists,” she said.

Barth also accused the regime of torturing political prisoners to force confessions.

She indicated that torture is being used against prisoners of conscience to obtain confessions but the judges illegally allow such evidence without any questions.

She urged the US government to reconsider its allegiance with the TPLf-led oppressive regime that violates the fundamental rights of citizens. “The people of Ethiopia are in the streets and up in arms because their rights are being repressed.”

Barth underlined that the support of the U.S. government to the oppressive regime, prioritizing security concerns over human rights, is a serious miscalculation that needs to be reviewed.

She also called on the regime to free all political prisoner as repression and violence worsen political instability. “Your position cannot be secure while you badly mistreat your own citizens. You just will continue this cycle of violence and instability.”

“The only way for you to create a secure, peaceful and prosperous Ethiopia is going to be to change the trajectory of the country and respect the individual’s rights. A great way to start that would be to free all political prisoners,” the director said.

Freedom Now, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy nonprofit, makes efforts to free some of the world’s most recognized political prisoners using “legal, political and public relations advocacy.”

—

Full interview with Kate Barth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWnKWKH1kEk

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About 8.5 million reported people are in hunger

Drought victims continue to live in fear and uncertainty as the recent severe drought has killed two million livestock so far, according to a report of the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The primary reason for the death of the livestock is linked to a rise in drought affected areas and people.

The surge in drought was disclosed by the government after the completion of a Belg assessment Humanitarian Requirement Document (HRD), which was jointly developed by the government and humanitarian organisations, involving more than 200 individuals.

The current food and nutrition crisis is significantly aggravated by the severe blow to pastoral livelihoods, reads the report of FAO.

The effects of low rainfall also continue to have a devastating impact on the food security conditions of the country as the number of people who are in need of immediate assistance has increased from 7.8 million to 8.5 million, becoming the third worst drought in half a century.

Oromia and Somali regional states remain severely affected by the drought, accounting for over half of the drought victims in eight regions of the country, affecting 10.6pc and 31pc of their population, respectively.

Also, the number of priority Weredas has grown from 454 to 461, half of which are severely affected by the drought.

The report is released as the average price of food has reached its highest level since October 2015, hitting 12.5pc in the past month, growing by an unprecedented level against the target of the government to keep the rate at a single digit.

The document showed a significant change in the humanitarian context, requiring urgent life-saving interventions, pushing the humanitarian requirement of the country to 1.2 billion dollars from 948.6 million dollars as of January 2017, of which about 771 million dollars is covered by the government and donations from humanitarian partners.

The United States, the government of Ethiopia and the United Kingdom are the major donors to the drought with a fund of 179 million dollars, 147 million dollars and 40 million dollars, respectively.

The increase in the humanitarian need is mainly attributed to the poor performance of Belg (spring) rains this year, especially in Oromia, Somali and Southern Nations, Nationalities & Peoples’ (SNNP) regional states, where the effects of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) was very high, according to the report.

Two months ago, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), in its report, disclosed that the food stocks of the World Food Programme (WFP), the National Disaster Risk Management and Control (NDRMC) and the Joint Emergency Operation Plan (JEOP) will be depleted owing to the deteriorating food security rate in the country.

Now with the rise in the number of drought victims, NDRMC and WFP are expected to supply 84pc of the total food in the drought affected areas whereas the remaining will be covered by support through the Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) consortium.

The food shortage is also exacerbated by the attacks of the Fall Army Worm (FAW), induced in some of the regions of the country, affecting 2.7 million hectares of land in six regional states.

First seen in South America, an irrigated maize farm in Yeki Wereda, in SNNP, was the first to be attacked by the FAW.

Maize, whose price has doubled over the past two months, is highly attacked by the armyworm among all crops. Of the 1.7 million hectares of planted maize in the country, about 22pc has been heavily infested, with all maize-growing areas at risk of damage.

The chance of spreading to sorghum-growing areas in Afar, Amhara, Tigray and Somali regional states is also very high, according to the mid-year review.

“We are preparing a protocol to conduct a study on yield loss assessment at the FAW infested areas,” said Woldehawariat Assefa, director of Plant Health & Quality Control at the Ministry of Agriculture & Natural Resources (MoANR).

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ESAT DC Daily News Wed 16 Aug 2017

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From Making Ethiopia Safe for Ethnic Diversity to Making Ethnic Diversity Safe for Ethiopia  

By Abdissa Zerai (PhD)

When World War I broke out in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States would be neutral in the conflict. It was believed that his decision was based on the desire to preserve the lucrative U.S.-Europe sea trade. For two and a half years, the President was able to maintain the position of neutrality; but soon Germany made it clear that no merchant ship servicing Britain and Continental Europe would be safe from U-boat attack. What is more, there was news that Germany was seeking an alliance with Mexico. Now Woodrow Wilson knew that America had to enter the war. On April 2, 1917, the President appeared before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany. In his famous line of justification for the need to take the bull by the horns, Woodrow Wilson stated: The world must be made safe for democracy. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, this thesis has increasingly gained significant currency in political discourse around the vast swathe of the globe.

In a seminal article titled The Rise of Illiberal Democracy published in 1997 in Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria (1997), a well reputed Indian-American political journalist who is the host of GPS (Global Public Square) on CNN, a Washington Post columnist and the author of The Post-American World, argues that for a century or so in the West, democracy has meant liberal democracy, i.e., a political system marked not only by open, free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property. According to Zakaria (1997), the latter bundle of rights (the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property) is what is referred to as constitutional liberalism, which is theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy.

Referring to a political scientist Philippe Schmitter, Zakaria (1997) notes that liberalism, either as a conception of political liberty, or as a doctrine about economic policy, may have coincided with the rise of democracy, but it has never been immutably or unambiguously linked to its practice. It is only gradually that the two strands of liberal democracy have been interwoven in the Western political fabric. However, while these two strands of liberalism (democracy-conceived as political liberty- and constitutionalism) have become inseparably linked to each other in the West, he argues that they are coming apart in the rest of the world. As a result, says Zakaria (1997), in the rest of the world, democracy is flourishing, but constitutional liberalism is not. While democracy often focuses on the procedures for selecting government, where such procedures include having open, free and fair elections, constitutional liberalism is about the goals of the government. According to Zakaria (1997), constitutional liberalism refers to the tradition that seeks to protect an individual’s autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source-  state, church, or society. The term marries two closely connected ideas: it is liberal because it emphasizes individual liberty; it is constitutional because it rests on the tradition of the rule of law.

In the Western tradition, constitutional liberalism developed as a defense of the individual’s right to life and property, and freedom of religion and speech. In order to secure these rights, says Zakaria (1997), it emphasizes checks on the power of each branch of government, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, and separation of church and state. For Zakaria (1997), constitutional liberalism, almost in all of its variants, asserts that human beings have certain natural or “inalienable” rights and that governments must accept a basic law, limiting its own powers, that secures them. However, tension often exists between constitutional liberalism and democracy; and this tension centers on the scope of governmental authority. According to Zakaria (1997), constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power, whereas democracy is about its accumulation and use. From the beginning, liberals saw in democracy a force that could undermine liberty. Since the very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority, early liberal thinkers warned against the danger of ‘oppression’ coming from the majority of the community or against the ‘tyranny’ of the majority.

In the post-1991 world in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where constitutional liberalism historically had little or no root, dictatorships have suddenly given way to democracy. But the rapid pace with which the political system was opened up and multiparty elections were instituted produced an illiberal outcome that was incompatible with democracy as we know it. Following the multiparty elections, political forces in diverse societies found it easier to organize support along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. As elections require that political forces compete for people’s votes, the success of these disparate groups with incompatible interests would depend on their ability to rally the masses behind their respective particularistic causes. Once an ethnic group or a coalition of ethnic groups comes to power, it tends to centralize control of power, often by extrajudicial means, and exclude other groups. Owing to the incompatible interests, compromise becomes impossible; hence, the Darwinian political struggle easily degenerates into destructive conflict and violence. Rather than serving as a means of mediating divergent interests and managing societal conflicts, democracy has ironically become a potent instrument for the effective exercise of exclusion and marginalization, which in turn contributes to the exacerbation of societal tensions and conflicts. Disillusioned with the rise of such illiberal type of democracy with the potential to eventually destroy the legitimacy of democracy in the eyes of these societies and beyond, Zakaria (1997), revisiting Woodrow Wilson’s earlier commitment to making the world safe for democracy, resets the task of the 21^st century to be that of making democracy safe for the world.

Upon a closer reading, one cannot not observe some parallelism between Woodrow Wilson’s idealism about democracy in the twentieth century and Fareed Zakaria’s disillusionment with the state of democracy as the end of the century approached and the latter’s plea for course revision going into the 21^st century, on the one hand, and Ethiopia’s embrace of ethnic federalism a quarter of a century ago, how it has lately run amok and the imperative of rethinking it as we go forward, on the other hand. Thus, the title of this piece is structured by essentially inflecting Woodrow Wilson and Fareed Zakaria’s respective calls for action with respect to democracy. The difference is that in the latter’s case, the operative word is democracy, whereas in the case of this piece, it is ethnic diversity.

Since the emergence of modern Ethiopia as a nation-state, her political history has been punctuated by political conflicts with varying degree of intensity, ranging from passive resistance to violent confrontations. Due to the changing international environment following the end of the Second World War, the attendant decolonization frenzy set in motion in the Third World, and the Cold War ideological divide that structured the world into two contending camps, the political struggle in Ethiopia took on a new dimension. Armed with new theoretical and conceptual tools derived from Marxism and Leninism, the emerging Ethiopian intelligentsia started articulating the nature of Ethiopia’s problem. Although the Ethiopian intelligentsia of the time invariably shared the existence of oppression, exploitation and marginalization of the Ethiopian masses, they differed on defining the nature of such oppression, exploitation and marginalization. While some of them wished to articulate the problem in terms of class, some others, though acknowledged the class-centric characterization of the problem, were keen to define the problem largely from the national perspective, i.e., taking the ‘national question’ as the primary analytical category.

As the way a problem is defined has a bearing on the way it would eventually be resolved, the disagreement among the Ethiopian intelligentsia on the nature of Ethiopia’s problem later proved consequential. Unable to narrow their differences, the cohort plunged themselves into an orgy of fratricide. The military took advantage of the situation and seized the lever of power. It then embarked on carrying out land reform, uprooting the landed aristocracy, nationalizing private property and took upon itself the task of reorganizing the Ethiopian society into a collective socialist utopia. Soon, it found itself besieged by both external and internal forces, such as Somalia’s irredentist regime, separatist forces, and ethno-nationalist liberation fronts. Although the military junta took good care of the threat from the irredentist regime of Somalia, the separatists and ethno-nationalist liberation fronts waged a protracted war of attrition against the Mengistu regime, and eventually brought its demise in 1991. In the aftermath of the military overthrow of the Mengistu regime, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) – a coalition of four ethno-nationalist fronts- assumed control of power, marking the beginning of a new political dispensation that has radically reorganized the Ethiopian state.

Since the armed struggle had ostensibly been waged on the ground that despite the fact that Ethiopia was constituted by diverse ethno-linguistic communities, the Ethiopian state, instead of reflecting such diversity, had for long subjected these communities to oppression and had forced them to endure the life of indignity. In fact what had traditionally been billed as the Ethiopian state was nothing more than a state that had effectively been captured by and been the mirror-image of a particularistic group. In other words, the argument was that the existing Ethiopia was not hospitable to the various ethno-linguistic groups that constituted it. Thus, with some variations, the objective of the struggle was to dismantle the system that had legitimized the domination of a particularistic group over the various ethno-linguistic groups and thereby build a new Ethiopia where all the constituent ethnic groups would enjoy equal treatment and respect; to put it differently, it could be said that the armed struggle was arguably aimed at giving birth to a new Ethiopia that would be safe for ethnic diversity.

In order to address the hitherto sense of domination, marginalization and exclusion felt by the various ethno-linguistic communities constituting the Ethiopian state and in so doing build a new Ethiopia that would be hospitable to ethnic diversity, the new EPRDF government devised a federal system that is structured along ethno-linguistic cleavages. In the new dispensation, each titular group or a group of titular groups was empowered to control a regional state. In this manner, the new constitution recognized the centrality of ethnic cleavages in regulating access to power and resources. The assumption was that if ethnic groups were to exercise self-rule in their respective federal sub-units and participate, via their representatives, in the federal government, it would engender the sense of inclusion on the part of constituent ethnic communities and thereby create a fertile ground not only for better inter-group relations but also for the emergence of one strong politico-economic community. However, after more than a quarter of a century long experiment with the new federal system, our problems have increasingly become intractable, prompting one to wonder why a system that was ostensibly meant to effectively redress historical ills has produced such pathological signs. How does one account for such state of affairs? Although both proponents and detractors of the system might have different explanations for the current debacle, here below I would like to draw attention to some important factors, which I think, have contributed to the current state of affairs.

One of the factors, which I think, have partly contributed to the current outcome is the sudden opening up of the political space and the institution of a multiparty democracy. By the time the EPRDF came to power in 1991, there was a seismic change in the international system with respect to ideological reorientation, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Domestically, the new government had to show the public that it was qualitatively different from the military dictatorship that it had replaced. The convergence of these external and internal factors forced the new government to commit itself to a sudden opening up of the political space and the embrace of a multiparty democracy. In a society where the tradition of constitutional liberalism was nonexistent and where democratic practice was alien to both the political elites and the citizenry at large, such sudden opening up of the political space let loose the ‘beast in us.’ Instead of seeking a common ground where compromise could be achieved, the political struggle among the various groups turned into a gladiatorial contest where the winner’s sense of security and satisfaction is ensured with nothing less than a complete defeat and humiliation of the opponent. The long cherished democratic ethos of majority rule and minority right gave way to something akin to the tyranny of the political majority and the withering away of the political minority. In a deeply divided society such as ours, groups with incompatible interests via for state capture in anticipation of seizing the opportunity to monopolize the exploits that would potentially accrue from such a capture. No matter how lofty the ideals codified in the constitution which makes such electoral contest a possibility are, the end result invariably becomes domination through electoral means. As Elshtain (1995) notes, democracy is not simply a set of procedures or a constitution, but an ethos, a spirit, a way of responding, and a way of conducting oneself. A democratic drama is the playing out of the story of self-limiting freedom. Conducting oneself democratically entails a continuous exercise of self-discipline and an unwavering commitment to be governed by ‘the rule of the game.’ This is not as easy as writing a celebrated constitution or delivering captivating speeches about democracy with rhetorical embellishment. The exercise exacts demands on fellow men and women to ‘walk the talk’ and to live and breathe it on a regular basis; and by any measure, this is a tall order. In the Ethiopian context where such a disposition is chronically in short supply, it is my contention that the sudden and dramatic opening up of the political space and the institution of multiparty elections has partly contributed to our current predicament.

Secondly, the new political dispensation which boasts of building a new inclusive Ethiopia sought to effect such inclusion through exclusionary means. The new government’s principal accusation against the old Ethiopian state was that it had excluded and relegated the various ethno-linguistic groups to the margin. But in order to redress such exclusionary injustice, the EPRDF government empowered groups to organize and mobilize themselves along ethno-linguistic cleavages with the goal of securing self-determination, whatever that means. To this end, the new federal sub-units were established where separate titular groups would have their own separate administrative sub-units. It appears that in order to be deemed equal, ethnic groups would have to be separate from each other in self-governance. In this logic, being separate is equated with inclusive equality. Although the historical context and the target objective was obviously different, the thinking behind this logic is reminiscent of a legal concept infamously known as separate but equal, which was a legal doctrine in the U.S. constitutional law that was used to justify racial segregation in the old days.

As separate is inherently unequal, the attempt to bring about inclusion by an exclusionary means is bound to produce an outcome that is incompatible with the original intention. Once access to power and resources is predicated on difference, you essentially remove the incentive for ethnic entrepreneurs to commit themselves to the task of building an inclusive polity. What is more profitable for the political entrepreneurs is making sure that ethnic and cultural boundaries are reified and solidified to extent that they become impermeable. As part of the endeavor, they would revive and manufacture cultural symbols which their respective community members could easily relate to. They would rally their communities behind these symbols with a missionary zeal. The group would then position itself as communal contenders vis-à-vis other competing cultural groups for their share of power and resources. In such an environment, dissent within the group is seen as tantamount to treason or betrayal of the community. To be critical of the behavior or actions of the leaders is taken as aiding and abetting the enemies of the group and endangering the unity of purpose among the collective. Judgment of individuals is no longer based on their behaviors or actions but on ontological basis or on the basis of their group membership, i. e., whether they are in-group or out-group members. If an in-group member is found in a compromising situation, the common retort would be, Well, he may be son of a bitch, but guess what! He is our son of a bitch, and with this, the individual would easily evade accountability, setting a bad example for others to follow. Any wrong doing or practice of corruption by sons of the soil is not only condoned but also receives a tacit approval because it is seen as taking their share of the ‘cake.’ If there is ever a time when the group might express an outrage, it is when the same ‘sin’ is committed by an out-group member. It is the spread of such evasion of accountability throughout the body politic that is partly responsible for the current paralysis.

Another crucial factor that might have partly contributed to the current uncertainty is the lack of commitment on the part of the governing elites in making sure that constitutional liberalism takes root. In the theoretical discussion presented earlier, I have noted that constitutional liberalism is essentially marked by the supremacy of the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion and property. Although in the classical sense of liberalism, these liberties were primarily connected to individuals, nowadays many political theorists believe that they would also apply to groups or collectivities as one is not necessarily antithetical to the other as some political elites would have us believe. Thus, in this piece, I do not intend to delve into a theoretical debate about individual versus group rights, as I do not see the two as mutually exclusive, and the readers should take note of that position. I have also argued that there is inherent tension between constitutional liberalism and democracy since the former is about the limitation of power, whereas the latter is about its accumulation and use.

In ethnically divided society like ours, the political elites’ primary obsession is with procedural democracy that emphasizes plebiscite and universal suffrage since they understand that this is the path to power that would enjoy some degree of respectability and legitimacy in the eyes of both internal and external audiences. Through the use of ideals, such as equality, freedom, rights, autonomy, self-determination, etc., the political elites mobilize their particularistic constituencies to rally behind their causes whenever elections pope up. Since elections produce winners and losers, the stakes are high for the disparate groups vying for power and influence. Especially in an ethnically divided society where interests of the various groups are often incompatible, elections are a matter of life and death, and not a political exercise that right-bearing citizens engage as a sign of their civic duty. Electoral gain for one group is tantamount to a complete loss for the other group. As a result, the whole process is structurally fraught with apprehension and tension, and part of the reason why we quite often observe an overwhelming electoral turn out in the third world, particularly in Africa, is attributable to such a phenomenon, and not because the electorate in these places are much more conscious of democracy.

Once such tension filled electoral cycle is over, neither the winner nor the loser would feel secure in the real sense of the word. The difference is that the winner would have structural advantages to consolidate its power and ensure that the loser never rises up from the ashes to pose any meaningful challenge to it. This is often done by centralizing power. In relation to this phenomenon, Zakaria (1997) notes that over the last decades, governments claiming to represent the people have steadily encroached on the powers and rights of other elements in society. It is a usurpation that is both horizontal (from other branches of the national government) and vertical (from regional and local authorities as well from private business and other nongovernmental groups).

Such centralization and usurpation of power is often effected by deliberately destroying independent centers of power that are supposed to exercise checks and balances as well as those that would guarantee citizens’ liberty. In such a manner, the various institutions would become instruments used by the party in power for the exercise of political and economic ‘lynching’ of the ‘enemy’ in general and the opponent in particular, all in the name of the absolute sovereignty of the political majority. In the absence of a functioning rule of law, separation of powers, independent judiciary, impartial courts and tribunals etc., or indirectly speaking, in the absence of constitutional liberalism that limits the power of the political majority, citizens’ rights, be individual or collective, would easily become subject to the vagaries of the political majority, essentially stalking the ‘tyranny’ of the political majority, which would further guarantee the continuation of the vicious cycle with no end in sight. The instrument that is ostensibly meant to make the country safe for diverse ethno-linguistic communities would, thus, end up exacerbating the grievances among the various groups and thereby pose an existential threat to the integrity of the country itself. In general, in a deeply divided society, once the political elites use elections as a Trojan horse to seize the lever of power, they do not see it in their best interest to ensure that constitutional liberalism takes root, as doing so would constrain their power. On the other hand, as Zakaria (1997) argues, democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous, bringing with it the erosion of liberty, the abuse of power, hyper-nationalism, ethnic divisions, and even war, and this seems to be where we are now.

If this is the case, then the question that confronts the Ethiopian political elites now is what to do to make ethnic diversity safe for Ethiopia. With respect to this question, there are cacophony of voices being heard from disparate political forces. Their only point of convergence is their common aversion (albeit for quite different reasons) to the EPRDF. Such aversion to the EPRDF centers on the place of ethnicity in our national politics. For the present discussion, I will focus on two major voices on this important matter. In the first category are political forces who view ethnic politics as anachronistic and antithetical to and incompatible with democracy. They view ethnicity as a mere social construct which ethnic entrepreneurs exploit it in order to gain access to power and resources. They argue that it is a diabolical plan hatched by the EPRDF for the express purpose of divide and rule. If the EPRDF is removed from power, ethnic politics will wither away and national politics will be restructured along ethnic-neutral citizenship axis, and Ethiopians will live like ‘one happy family. Thus, the focus of attention ought to be on the removal of the EPRDF. On the other hand, those political forces that fall in the second category argue that one cannot imagine Ethiopia without its constituent ethnic groups and the viability of Ethiopia depends on ensuring the rights of ethnic groups to govern themselves, utilize their resources, cultivate and nurture their cultures and languages, and be able determine their own destiny, among others. And anything short of these cannot guarantee peace, tranquility and harmony but would lead to conflict, chaos and eventual fracture. They blame the EPRDF for the current state of affairs since they believe that the crisis is the outcome of its apparent failure in living up to the provisions of the constitution.

I contend that the two views advanced by the two groups are problematic as to be able to cure our political ills as they both seem to suggest. With respect to the views advanced by the political forces in the first camp, it is important to acknowledge that the issue of the ‘national question’pre-dates the birth of the EPRDF. The EPRDF might have made ethnicity the most salient political variable but it did not manufacture it out of the blue. Secondly, it is a misplaced hope to assume that ethnic politics will wither away once the EPRDF is gone. As it stands now, ethnic politics has taken the life of its own and does not, as such, depend on the existence or the decimation of the EPRDF, and it will continue to shape the Ethiopian politics for sometime to come. This is not a value judgment but it is a statement of political fact.

As far as the views advanced by forces in the second camp is concerned, politics structured along ethnic fault lines cannot be a panacea for guaranteeing durable peace and harmony among diverse constituent groups. As Horowitz (1985) asserts, there is nothing as responsible for the conflict-promoting character as the ethnic party systems. When the dimension of democracy is added to the mix, the danger cannot be underestimated. According to Zakaria (1997), there is often a mistaken notion that the forces of democracy are the forces of ethnic harmony and of peace, but neither is necessarily true. Recognizing the complexities of the challenges we face with respect to ethnicity will help the political forces to seriously think about designing a political solution that centers not on what is ideal but on what is possible, given the circumstances, and it is prudent to refrain from purveying false hopes to the public.

This begins with the recognition that in diverse societies, social conflicts are bound to exist. According to Reinhold Niebhur (1932), what makes social conflicts inevitable is the limitations of the human imagination, the easy subservience of reason to prejudice and passion, and the consequent persistence of irrational egoism, particularly in group behavior. For Niebhur (1932: 14),

…though human society has roots which lie deeper in history than the beginning of human life, men have made comparatively but little progress in solving the problem of their aggregate existence. Each century originates a new complexity and each new generation faces a new vexation in it. For all the centuries of experience, men have not yet learned how to live together without compounding their vices and covering each other “with mud and with blood.”

In a futile attempt to do away with potential social conflict, there is a temptation to wish away ethnic identification in favor of civic identification. However, notwithstanding its fluidity and the contested nature of traditions, Levy (2000) advises that we need to take seriously the enduring power of group loyalty or attachment, and durability of ethnic and cultural groups. And ethno-cultural identities are strongly felt, and experienced by many people.

According to Levy (2000:5),

Persons identify and empathize more easily with those with whom they have more in common than with those with whom they have less. They rally around their fellow religionists; they seek the familiar comforts of native speakers of their native languages; they support those they see as kin against those they see as strangers. They seek places that feel like home, and seek to protect those places; they are raised in particular cultures, with particular sets of local knowledge, norms, and traditions which come to seem normal and enduring. These feelings, repeated and generalized, help give rise to a world of ethnic, cultural, and national loyalty, and also a world of enduring ethnic, cultural, and national variety. Nations are felt (if not always thought) to be ancient in origin, continuous in history, and unified in spirit. These feelings are powerful, sometimes latent but easily and quickly mobilized, and ignored at our peril.

There is no doubt that such attachments are susceptible to the emergence of factionalism. And yet, the solution does not lie in wishing to do away with such group identifications. As Levy (2000) notes, if we wish to control the ‘mischief’ of faction, ‘relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.’ Faction cannot be done away with, so it ought to be made use of or constrained, as the case may be. And he believes that this is how we ought to treat ethnicity. Ethnic attachments should be seen as a given, a fact to be channeled productively if possible and constrained if not. From the point of view of Levy (2000), in a multiethnic/ multicultural society, what we need to do is to think about the terms of our coexistence, the institutions and norms that can help us prevent the worst outcomes of that coexistence.

Thus, in order to make ethnic diversity safe for Ethiopia, it is incumbent on all concerned political forces to have serious conversations about what ought to be the terms of our coexistence; about what ought to be the nature of the institutions and norms that should be brought into existence in a bid to helping us preempt the most egregious consequences of that coexistence. I believe these ought to include the entrenchment of constitutional liberalism where the rule of law is sacrosanct, where the separation of powers is the norm, where impartial courts and tribunals are citizens’ refuge, where not strong men but strong institutions reign supreme, etc. To date there has been too much focus on procedural democracy and too little attention paid to constitutional liberalism. As Zakaria (1997) reminds us, however, constitutional liberalism has led to democracy, but democracy does not seem to bring constitutional liberalism. Hence, it is imperative that due consideration be given to the notion of constitutional liberalism.

The writer can be reached at berhanwota@gmail.com

References

Elshtain, Jean B. (1995). Democracy on Trial. New York: Basic Books.

Horowitz, Donald L. (1985).  Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Levy, Jacob T. (2000). The Multiculturalism of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Niebhur, Reinold. (1932). Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/Religion-Online.org%20Books/Niebuhr,%20Reinhold%20-%20Moral%20Man%20and%20Immoral%20Society%20-%20Study%20in.pdf

Zakaria, Fareed. (1997). The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997.

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Abdur Rahman Alfa Shaban with EHRP

The Ethiopia Human Rights Project (EHRP) has shone light on instances of rights abuses in the country’s prisons.

EHRP used the story of a young woman, Nigist Yirga, who has been held by authorities since 2015 for participating in anti-government protests that hit the East African country.

Nigist – born and raised in the northern Gonder region said her only crime was for participating in peaceful demonstrations of July 2015. ‘I was arrested due to my participation in the protest.

I expressed my objections to the mass arrest and killings that was happening all over the country, which was why I took part in the protest. That led to my imprisonment.

‘I expressed my objections to the mass arrest and killings that was happening all over the country, which was why I took part in the protest. That led to my imprisonment,’ she added.

She discloses further that after arrest, she was sent to a detention center in the capital Addis Ababa – over 730km from Gondar. She was held in the Meakelawi facility which is notorious for widespread torture.

She chronicled how she was held incommunicado in Addis Ababa – an extremely cold cell with late night interrogations were some of the horrors she faced. She told how her hair and toe nails were pulled whiles she stood naked in front of male officers.

The 3 minutes 44 seconds cartooned video clip posted on Youtube said she was currently being held at the Kality prison where a certain degree of abuses continue among others: highly restricted visits which last 30 minutes. ‘I should not have suffered all these because I exercised my right,’ she concluded.

It is not known when and how the story of Yirga was documented. The EHRP is a non-governmental organization whose vision is ‘the amplification of Ethiopian Human Rights Voices,’ its website says.

‘Ethiopia Human Rights Project (EHRP) understands the challenges that local civil societies in Ethiopia face and their limitations to engage on rights advocacy because of the restrictive environment in which they operate in,’ they added.

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ReliefWeb REPORT

In areas where families were heavily reliant on their animals to survive, the loss of livestock has reduced one-time breadwinners to being recipients of aid.

Arid land and undetected diseases continue to threaten the remaining animals and are leaving entire communities in the Afar region of Ethiopia without sufficient food and income to survive.

Based on our recent observations and spot checks in the Afar region of Ethiopia, there is a huge need to build and strengthen local communities so that they are able to cope with this ongoing crisis and be in a stronger position to deal with future environmental disasters.

Thanks to the support of our UK donors, Islamic Relief is responding to ensure that more than 57,000 people in the Afar region of Ethiopia will be able to withstand and reduce the effects of drought in the future by:

Improving access to water: Severe drought has led to rivers drying out, leaving entire communities and their animals without any water. Our teams in Ethiopia are developing plans to construct a new borehole and to rehabilitate existing water sources, as well as upgrading motorised water pumps with solar panels to ensure the environmentally friendly and cost effective pumping of water. Additionally, at these water sources, water troughs will also be constructed, providing drinking water for livestock.

Improving food security: Traditionally, livestock provide households with a variety of food and non-food products from milk and meat throughout the year to leather and wool, and, if not restocked, the families will be unable to consume the nutrients they need to live. Reports by the United Nations indicate huge losses in the number of small animals and cattle due to the ongoing drought.

Thanks to your donations, we will provide female-headed households with sheep or goats that are well accustomed to the local climate. One of the animals will be a male to allow them to reproduce and they will be purchased from local markets.

Livestock treatment vouchers will also be provided to enable free vaccinations for at least three months to ensure the animals remain healthy until households are able to generate their own income and cover veterinary expenses.

Developing income generation activities: Loans will be provided on a revolving scheme, alongside essential business skills training, to support farmers in earning an income. Activities such as livestock marketing and beekeeping, as well as the production and sale of various products, will provide an additional income essential to ensuring families are able to cope with the effects of the drought.

Improving pasture availability: The region had vast areas of land covered with mild pasture which is now decreasing due to new settlements and overgrazing. Islamic Relief will work with local institutions and the wider community to reclaim 300 hectares of pasture land to ensure livestock have plenty of farmland for grazing, especially in the rainy seasons.

Supporting community animal health workers (CAHWs): CAHWs are community-based vets who provide treatment and vaccination in collaboration with the government animal health provision. In the Afar region, CAHWs are unable to provide these services due to a lack of kits and drugs. To ensure communities have access to the necessary veterinary services for the wellbeing of their livestock, we will provide training, basic drugs and vet kits to CAHWs.

Enhancing disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities: Early warning systems are essential to ensure communities can cope with the effects of severe drought. Islamic Relief is working to ensure local communities in the Afar region are able to identify, assess and work to reduce the risks of disaster through a CMDRR (Community Managed Disaster Risk Reduction) approach. This includes strengthening community-level structures by establishing and training village and neighbourhood level DRR committees.

Islamic Relief will also work on strengthening the early warning information system established by the government and provide logistical, financial and contingency planning support of neighbourhood-level DRR committees.

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ESAT Latest Ethiopian News August 17, 2017

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The post ESAT Yetsehafian Dimtsoch Reeyot with Dr Assegid Habtewold Thur 17 Aug 2017 appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News|Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Mike Lillis and Scott Wong

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August 17, 2017
Reuters

FILE – A woman transports animal feed in a wheelbarrow that was distributed under a European Union (EU) funded project in Ethiopia, April 8, 2016.

ROME — Livestock are dying in parts of Ethiopia that are overwhelmingly reliant on their milk as deepening drought pushes up the number of districts in need of life-saving aid by 19 percent, according to a report released on Thursday.

At least 8.5 million people in 228 districts of Ethiopia need urgent food aid in the second half of the year, up from 5.6 million in January, according to the study published on ReliefWeb, a website run by the United Nations.

Ethiopia’s eastern Somali region is one of the country’s worst affected zones and is home to a quarter of the country’s cases of severe acute malnutrition, U.N. agencies said.

Severe acute malnutrition is a condition that kills up to half of sufferers under five years old.

FILE – Basherow Hassen, a mother of four, waits for food aid with her twin children in the Warder district in the Somali region of Ethiopia, Jan. 28 2017.

“The number of districts requiring immediate, life-saving intervention increased to levels not seen since the height of the El Nino drought impacts in 2016,” said the joint report, which was compiled by the U.N. and the Ethiopian government.

Eastern and southern Africa were hit hard last year by drought exacerbated by El Nino — a warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean — that wilted crops, slowed economic growth and drove food prices higher.

A strong aid response almost halved the number of Ethiopians needing food aid to 5.6 million since mid-2016. But the devastating drought was followed by poor spring rains this year in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

Since the end of last year, about 2 million animals have died in Somali region, which is home to many herding communities, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“For livestock-dependent families, the animals can literally mean the difference between life and death, especially for children, pregnant and nursing women for whom milk is a crucial source of nutrition,” FAO said in a statement last week.

The U.N. agency is helping the worst-hit communities to protect their remaining livestock with vaccinations, supplementary feed and water, and improved fodder production.

“It is crucial to provide this support between now and October — when rains are due — to begin the recovery process and prevent further losses of animals,” said Abdoul Karim Bah, FAO’s deputy representative in Ethiopia.

“If we don’t act now, hunger and malnutrition will only get worse among [herding] communities,” he said.

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Interview with Dr Taye Zegeye and Tsigereda Mulugeta

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BRIEFING TO THE DIPLOMATIC COMMUNITY ON:

 AEUP and BLUE parties’ alliance and activities towards merger in the future.

 The 10 months of State of Emergency and its impact on the nation’s political landscape.

 The upcoming Addis Ababa City Administration Election and other future plans of the parties.

1. AEUP and BLUE Parties’ alliance and activities towards merger in the near future:

All Ethiopia Unity Party has 25 years of peaceful struggle experience and passed through the ups-and-downs of the Ethiopian politics. Even though it is only 5 years since Blue Party is established, it accomplished so many political activities to mobilize the people in all angles of the nation having the capital as a strong hold.

AEUP and Blue Party are working together starting from April 8, 2017. The two parties accomplished so many activities in the last 5 months and will continue working together aiming at merger in the near future.

The two parties are now working together on:

 members training & capacity development,
 organization affairs in region, zone and Woreda level,
 Public relations in programmed and current political issues.
 human rights and the issues of prisoners and
 The upcoming Addis Ababa City Administration election

These and other activities are going beside the 6 member merger facilitating committee, 3 from AEUP and 3 from Blue Party, works towards making the two parties one.

The Merger is just the beginning to form a big and competent national party, that is why we are inviting other parties and groups which has the same program as ours.

2. The 10 months of State of Emergency & its impact on the nation’s political landscape:

The regimes’ lack of good governance causes the mass uprising to irrupt immediately after it declared 100% winning of 2015 general elections. Actually the peoples uprising all over the country, especially in Oromiya and Amhara regions has its own deep rooted and immediate causes.

This in turn leads the regime to panic and take harsh and ruthless measures in its own people. Instead of giving prompt and genuine solution to the aged and immediate causes it declared the state of emergency all over the nation and put the country under the military rule, called Command Post which worsened the problems and become a dividing wall between the people and the regime. And it caused damages on the country trades and investment, tourism, and social interactions which established in centuries and hardly to recover soon.

As AEUP and Blue party scanned in 20 Zones of their organizational structure the citizens in those areas are in real danger of losing security and confidence of being intimidated by the military forces. And party supporters and members too. After the state of emergency 74 AEUP members and 121 Blue Party members are liable to prison and torched

For example: AEUP and Blue Party structures in

• South Wello – Dessie,
• East Gojjam – Debre-markos,
• West Gojjam – Bahir-dar,
• North Gonder – Gonder,
• West Guji – Gelana and
• Gedio Zones the parties’ supporters, members and leaders are being intimidated and imprisoned and forced to leave their leaving areas. The harassment in the last 10 months causes to weaken peaceful struggle in general and our structure in particular to cloth offices.

3. Upcoming Addis Ababa City Administration election and other future plans of the parties.

The main objectives of AEUP and Blue party are to have substantial vote in the next year Addis Ababa City Administration election and work for smooth transition. The two parties are committed to work hard to change the nation’s thousands of years of history of bullet to that of ballot.

True, that the political landscape is now closed, the genuine parties’ activities are hindered and limited to following up prisoners’ cases. They can’t deliver their alternatives to the people. The regime blocks the way to public meetings and peaceful gatherings in an unconstitutional way. Thus, our alternatives in:

 human rights,
 federal system,
 land tenure system,
 Foreign policy
 Free market etc not reached the mass.

We believe that change is natural and inevitable but as a civilized people and as we are a 21st century we have to make the change manageable, peaceful and make the country’s future better than its past.

The diplomatic community is well aware that a lifelong relationship should be established with the people of the nation, not with the regime. Hence, as a partner and strong alliance the diplomatic community shall be concerned and committed to work to the well being of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian people.
Even though, Ethiopia has good weather condition and the Ethiopian people are known in hospitality to welcome individuals and organizations from all parts of the world, it is very clear that a nation’s good face shall be seen only when its internal peace is guaranteed.

Long Live United Ethiopia!
August 18, 2017
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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ESAT Daily News Amsterdam August 18,2017

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More often than not, nations, great and small, pass through a convulsion be it social and political the outcome of which is determined by the decisiveness of the actors involved, the leadership in the main. In its relatively short history, the United States has also passed through social and political convulsions that at the end of the day decided the outcome and made the country for what it is today. If what makes the US for what it is today is its own violent history marked by great political and social convulsions, then the main ones that stand out as highly significant are the genocide against the native (indigenous) population, slavery, the gold rush to California, the war of independence, the civil war, World War II and the resultant dominance in world politics and the resultant self-entitlement as the world policeman. Each of these convulsions was accompanied by political constructs that ‘rationalized’ and eulogized the social and political circumstances that prevailed thereby burying the vanquished into the ashes. Because of the specifically ferocious nature of these conflicts that ravaged the country, ideas and perspectives were polarized that demonized those of ‘the other’. Competing ideas were, more often than not, polarized to the extreme resembling binary opposites. Characterizations followed smearing this or that community or people belonging to certain social classifications. It has always been the native (indigenous) versus the European, slaves and slave-owners, the North versus South, gray versus blue coats, democrats versus republicans, liberals versus the far right. Such dichotomy has also been extended to the international level wherever the US turned up to act as the policeman; Americans versus Japs or Germans, Americans versus Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese (VC), Cubans and the list is long.

In all these developments one element missing with enormous consequences, -and as opposed to Western Europe-, on the political behaviour of US politicians is the absence of social democracy particularly after World War I. Though the social democratic movement in the US was strong in the late 19^th century and up until World War I, a ruthless political war was declared on it and was later crushed with extreme violence the remnants of which was once again uprooted through the McCarthy campaign in the late 50s. The disappearance of social democracy from the mainstream US politics deprived that country of another or alternative view, if you like, that is different from those of democrats and republicans who, in the main, are not ideologically different. That was to have huge impact on not only the political process, the working of government institutions and of those state institutions involved in the area of national security, but also in the thinking of an ordinary Americans. Foreigners applying for a US visa used to be asked whether or not they are members of a Communist Party. West Europeans who also come from the traditions of liberal democracy, on the other hand, have distinct political dispensation where political bigotry does not exist significantly unlike the US. People are never persecuted for what they think in the political sense. Until their political suicide in the wake of the end of the Cold War, communist parties freely competed in European politics. In fact, Francois Mitterrand who ran on the socialist and communist ticket won the presidency in 1981. Such political dispensation has huge impact on how ordinary Europeans’ interact politically among each other and internationally.

With the end of the Cold War and with the “victory of the US”, political liberalization was expected to make headway as there was no contending super-power. On the contrary, political bigotry assumed a new proportion as the far right sought political dominance. Clinton won the presidency and a fresh resurgence of hope and optimism in world politics surfaced as a result of which a series of changes occurred at the global level. Apartheid came to an end, the Good Friday agreement ended the conflict in Northern Ireland, the erstwhile ‘unsolvable’ conflict between Palestinians and Israelis gave a promising start with the Norwegian-negotiated Oslo Accord, and the pacification of the Korean peninsula also gave a promising start with the declaration of Pyongyang’s readiness to end its nuclear programme and so on. These were the world’s political hotbeds that were on the way of getting solutions. Amazingly, the optimism that was just created started to fade away, -except the situation in South Africa,- when George W. Bush assumed the US presidency on a political plat form that was so reminiscent of the Cold War warriors such as Richard Nixon. As such, Bush renewed the antagonism that the US entered with different forces globally, a hostile policy that was completely uncalled for at the time of the optimism created during the Clinton’s presidency. The North Koreans went back to resuming their nuclear programme, the Oslo Accord went into shambles and the Middle East once again became a hotbed with the intransigence of Israelis. Incidentally, it is impossible to imagine Bush adopting a jingoist policy particularly in the Middle East without collaboration with the Israelis. With the end of the Cold War, jingoists within the Israeli ruling circles saw a good chance in further isolating Palestinians by crushing their active supporters particularly Sadam’s Iraq and Syria. Bush’s false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were just excuse for dethroning Sadam. Then, no wonder why Syria was next. It is on the basis of such reality that one needs to examine what is going on in the US today and its involvement outside its territory.

No doubt that G. W. Bush’s presidency was one of the worst in the history of the US. It created public outrage at various levels including foreign policy and the financial crisis that threw the entire Western world in a deep economic meltdown with huge impact on the deterioration of quality of life. Western Europe, save the Scandinavian countries, resorted to a further trimming of public welfare thereby changing the character of the welfare state as we know it. This had to have huge impact on the voting pattern of the election in the US in 2008 when Barak Obama won by a landslide.

Now, we need to ponder a little bit on the historic significance of Obama’s victory. What did Obama’s victory mean? When Jesse Jackson ran for the presidency in the mid-80s, he failed to win even the democratic nomination. Within a span of two decades, the people of the US elected a black man as their president. I had always thought that because the US was built at the expense of the genocide of the native population, the surplus from the cotton plantations where unpaid slave labour was massively abused and the violence perpetrated against women, a black, indigenous and a woman would never be elected as president. Obama’s victory displayed a shift in public perception of race relations in the US. The numbers spoke for themselves; it was not just the black vote that brought Obama to the White House. In fact, a substantial vote must have come from white folks as well. That signifies an important departure from the heretofore prevailing perception about race relations in the US. What does that mean in sociological terms? It means that a social transformation has taken place, a great many people now think differently from the heretofore dominant perceptions on a number of social, political and economic issues. This is highly significant as it is perhaps for the first time that a social transformation has taken place in the US with that scale. A great many people broke from a number of perceptions that they used to hold. It should be within this context that we need to examine the significance of the changes that Obama opted to introduce. Obama’s victory was a victory of sanity over jingoism at a national scale. To that extent it constitutes social transformation.

Since the arrival of Columbus in ‘America’, the US had been beleaguered with all forms of bigotry directed against the native/indigenous (condescendingly referred to as ‘Indians’), Afro-Americans, women, Hispanics and other non-Caucasian immigrants, Jews, gays and so on. All these forms of bigotry emanate from constructs that don’t accept human beings for what they are and with what they are born. And none other than Nelson Mandela reminds us of the fact that racism and bigotry is not born but learned, socially and politically constructed. There are two fundamental elements of importance in this statement which, incidentally, Mandela himself lived up to. First, racism is learned and constructed and the hidden irrational for such constructs is either power or money. The second element is that once a person is aware of the origins and irrationality of such constructs, such a person is disposed to consider racism/bigotry as foolish, stupid and ignorance. Such ideological disposition makes an individual capable of being forgiving and never leaves any room in her/his mind to hate and bigotry. It is such ideological disposition that makes one towering over bigots and haters. That made Mandela perhaps not only the greatest freedom fighter but also the greatest statesman. No wonder he was loved by white South Africans as well. Obama was such a leader. I still remember vividly the images of those white young women weeping with joy along Jesse Jackson at Obama’s victory rally one night on November 9, 2008. Unfortunately and unlike Mandela, however, he had to pass so many hurdles erected in his way by the far right both in the Congress and outside. Now, let’s glance at these hurdles.

Obama’s major contribution to the US is mainly in the social transformation that we mentioned earlier. He stood for women and children rights. Invariably, he displayed his support for women and children and unequivocally condemned the violence against them. This was anathema to the far right that sees any liberalization at the level of thought and perception as a declaration of war against the tradition of the US. Obama affirmed gay rights and was the first president ever to endorse gay rights. For the far right and Christian fundamentalists, this was again a declaration of war on the very “morale of the American family.” The US had been one of the four diehard states that stood consistently against the recognition of the rights of indigenous communities. It sided with few powerful states and literally held the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations hostage by blocking the draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for over twenty years. It was under Obama that the US finally signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and it was Obama who stopped the construction of the controversial oil pipeline in North Dakota, the land of the native Sioux. This hit the heart of the far right. These social transformations indeed raised its wrath.

Generating social transformation is one thing but maintaining it and making it sustainable is totally a different matter and belongs to a different category in social thought. This is about strategy and tactics on the one hand and opting for which principles on the other. That is perhaps where the Democratic Party goofed paving the way for the far right to launch a come-back. As the saying goes in my native Amharic, a wounded wild animal makes a violent movement before dying. That is exactly what happened in the US after Obama’s election: enters the Sanders’ phenomenon creating a huge cleavage within the Democratic Party to the extent that Sander’s supporters refused to endorse Hillary Clinton during the presidential election. The powerful youth behind Sanders signify that not only the Republicans, even Democrats are not poised to bring the alternative to the country’s woes.   Obama’s social transformation faced setback, the far right regained momentum with the support of conservative elements and voted Trump to the White House. With the help of fundamentalist churches, middle of the road voters crossed over to the Trump camp. The fact that how long this setback to Obama’s social transformation would last depends mainly on the actions of Donald Trump, a process that has already begun and moving quickly. Charlottesville turned out to be pivotal to this process. The wrath of sane America is directed against Trump as the entire political society of the US hit the roof by his statements that are non-committal to the sane values of the country.

Now, if there was ever a moment when Trump displayed his idiotismus, as the Germans would say, was Charlottesville. In a span of one week, he gave three statements one contradicting another. But, the most telling one came on Tuesday when he equated neo-Nazis and racists with those who protested against them. But, politics is not a football match where a referee says you are wrong and punish you with free kicks. This is about the US, a country that bled during the civil war in which perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and managed to abolish slavery and traversed over the years and centuries to bury the ramifications associated with slavery such racism and bigotry. These are the values of the US as a multi-racial country and constitute the foundation for its unity. No politician, let alone the president, can be indifferent to this fundamental value and principle. Neo-Nazis and other far right groups may express their views according to the US Constitution but the state and politicians can remain indifferent when they come out publicly violent. In fact, it was the duty of the state and the police in particular to bring under control these fascist thugs when they resort to violence. In Charlottesville last week, where was the police? And when members of sane America protested against the neo-Nazis, Trump comes out and says “both sides were in the wrong”. We have heard so many absurd statements and utterances by Donald Trump beginning from the days of his campaign but this one is beyond absurdity. The fact that he was so emotional when stating that “there are fine people” among the neo-Nazis speaks for itself. Donald Trump does not belong to sane America, he is on the “wrong side of history”, to use Obama’s famous expression.  **************

Melakou Tegegn is a specialist on international relations and development sociologist based in Uganda.

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Helen Mesfin of the Helen show on EBS TV. (Courtesy photo)

New York (TADIAS) — Helen Mesfin from the popular Helen Show on EBS TV is launching a trailblazing annual event entitled “Empower the Community” in Washington, D.C., combining her broadcast experience with her professional work in the hospitality industry, and creating a space for community members to participate in panel discussions as well as provide resources and information for families. The event is scheduled to be held at the DC Convention Center on Saturday, August 26th, 2017.

Panel discussion topics include “The Power of Civic Engagement” featuring Menna Demissie, who is Vice President of Policy Analysis & Research at the Congressional Black Caucus; Henock Dory, former White House Policy Advisor for the Obama Administration’s Office of Public Engagement & Intergovernmental Affairs; and Yodit Tewolde, criminal defense attorney, former prosecutor, and legal analyst. Additional speakers include Dr. Senait Fisseha, MD, JD Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Director of International Programs at the Susan T. Buffett Foundation; and Dr. Debrework Zewdie, Distinguished Scholar at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“Empower the Community Weekend is a groundbreaking new event that will bring together the largest East African community in the Washington D.C. Metro Area,” Helen says. “The event provides panel discussions, entertainment, empowering information on education, career, arts, finance, health & wellness, giveaways and much more.” She adds: It’s focused on providing resources and family centered activities. We will have various pavilion and activities engaging families with information they need to live productive lives and thrive.”

Helen says the program will also include kids corner with activities such as “reading time, games, fun exercises, art and a booth by D.C. United Soccer Clinic.

Empower the Community Weekend will be launched Saturday August 26th, 2017 by the producers of Helen Show on EBS TV. (Courtesy photos)

Here is a summary of parts of the program on August 26th from 11am-7pm at the Washington Convention Center

Empower Youth: follow your passion. Actress Azie Tesfay; Director/Producer Messay Getahun; Author Michael Asmerom, and Graphic Designer Heli Amare.

Business Leaders Panel: Getting To The Top: Strategies for breaking through the glass ceiling with successful Ethiopian American business leaders. Tefere Gebre, Executive VP AFLCIO, Meskerem Tadesse Director of Center for Minority and Business and Professor of Business Administration and 2 more to be announced next week.

Health & Fitness Pavilion:
Free health screenings provided by Kaiser Permanente, American Kindy Fund, Silver Spring Smiles & Pearl Smiles Dental – BMI, blood pressure, blood glucose, dental screening, fitness consultants, zumba, resources for families with special needs, giveaways and much more. Partner organizations and sponsors are Kaiser Permanente, American Kidney Fund, Ethiopian American Nurses Association, Silver Spring Smiles & Pearl Smiles as well as Ethiopian American doctors.

Career Pavilion:
Hear high energy career motivational speakers. Learn career advancement tips. Participate in informational interviews. Receive mini career coaching. Assess your career aptitudes. Partner organizations include 21st Century Community, YEP – Your Ethiopian Professionals, Alexandria Workforce Development and MBC.

Finance Pavilion:
Topics covered include raising money savvy kids, financial responsibility, creating generational wealth, dealing with college debt, getting your credit right, securing your family’s financial future, and home buying 101. Partner organization are Primerica, CLRA group and Your DMV Team.

Immigration and Legal Issues with Attorney Yemmi Getachew & Hellina Hailu
Fear NOT, Know Your Rights as Immigrants – 11am
Surviving the Stop – How to Engage with Law Enforcement 1:00pm
Teaching Kids & Young Men What to Expect and Know

Warrior Moms – Special Needs Parenting
Leah Tesfa, Birollei Debela and Salem Hagos

Entertainment
Wayna, Ras Nebiyou, Ethiopian Traditional Band, Abel Dureyew, Comedian Gergish and more.

Vendors at the event will also be selling various artisan merchandise
—
If You Go:
Saturday August 26
11am -7pm
Walter E Washington Convention Center
801 Mt. Vernon Place, NW
Washington DC 20001
www.empowercw.com

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.

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Voice of Amhara Daily Ethiopian News August 19, 2017

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‘An honorary Ethiopian’ Sylvia Pankhurst SBS Amharic

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Weather forecasters are still making predictions about whether there will be morning Oregon Coast clouds, and how long they might linger, on Monday, Aug. 21, when the solar eclipse happens. Here’s a guide to when the eclipse will start in towns along the Oregon Coast.
The Oregonian/file

ECLIPSE

At this point, the North Coast is looking like it will be cloudier longer than the Central Coast. The eclipse begins in Astoria at 9:06 a.m., and ends at 11:36 a.m., lasting a total of two hours and 30 minutes.

Mark Graves | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Mark Graves | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Lincoln City

According to the Lincoln City Visitor & Convention Bureau’s lincolncityeclipse.com, the solar eclipse will begin at 9:15 a.m., and end at 11:15 a.m. Totality will occur at 10:16 a.m., lasting about two minutes.

The Oregonian/file

The Central Coast town of Newport is in the path of totality. The eclipse there begins at 9:04 a.m. and ends at 11:36 a.m. Obscuration — the amount of the sun that will be covered by the moon — will be at 100 percent at 10:16 a.m. That totality will last one minute and 49 seconds.

Mark Graves | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Mark Graves | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Kristi Turnquist | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Oregon solar eclipse forecast, as of Sunday: Cloud cover, duration for 19 cities

Here at OregonLive.com, we’ll be updating the weather forecast for cities across Oregon as the Monday, Aug. 21 solar eclipse gets closer. Here’s what the Monday morning weather is expected to look like, as of Sunday morning.

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“These perpetual little panics of the French – which all arise from fear of the moment when they will really have to learn the truth – give one a much better idea of the Reign of Terror. We think of this as the reign of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.”

Karl Marx in a letter  to Friedrich Engles during the Paris Commune (1870).

____________  *** ___________

These little perpetual panics of the T-TPLF in their terrified state of emergency

Last week the Thugtatorship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (T-TPLF) declared the end of the “state of emergency” it put into effect on October 9, 2016 following the T-TPLF- sponsored Irreecha Massacres.

Bah humbug!

The T-TPLF declared its “state of emergency” as a last desperate act of self-preservation and to stave off total collapse.

The T-TPLF state of emergency decree does not signify strength or power. It signifies deep fear, panic, dread and trepidation.

The T-TPLF state of emergency is the “reign of people who are themselves terrified.” It is the emblem of a system of  “cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.”

Truth be told, the T-TPLF declared a state of emergency because it was terrified of the unity of Oromos and Amharas.

In 2016, both groups rose up in defiance against the T-TPLF’s 26-year minority apartheid tyrannical rule.

Truth be told again, the same political dynamics that set off the black majority uprising against the white minority apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s set off the Oromo-Amhara uprising against the minority apartheid T-TPLF regime in Ethiopia in 2016. The only difference is that the minority apartheid regime in Ethiopia is black.

The 1985  state of emergency decree marked the beginning of the end of apartheid minority white rule in South Africa.

I shall wager that the 2016 T-TPLF emergency decree shall be remembered as the beginning of the end of minority apartheid T-TPLF rule in Ethiopia.

The 1985 South African apartheid emergency decree  gave police, security and military forces sweeping powers to arrest without a warrant, indefinitely detain and interrogate alleged suspects without the presence to counsel, use deadly force at the slightest provocation, ban antiapartheid organizations, impose curfews and place severe censorship on the media.

Within months, some 10 thousand persons under the age of 18 were placed in detention in apartheid jails.

The 2016  T-TPLF state of emergency decree is a mirror image of the South African decree.

The T-TPLF decree authorized police, security and military forces (officially designated “Command Post”) the power to detain any person without a warrant indefinitely and perform prolonged interrogation without counsel, use deadly force in the discretion of the “command post”, prohibit public gatherings, ban any written documents deemed to be “terroristic”,  impose curfews and total censorship on the press.

During the T-TPLF state of emergency nearly 30,000 persons were detained. The T-TPLF itself admitted detaining over 11,000 people as of November 12, 2016.

As of August 2017, nearly 8,000 detainees are facing trials in T-TPLF kangaroo/monkey courts. The total number of  detainees over the past ten months in T-TPLF prisons is likely to exceed 100,000 innocent persons.

The T-TPLF is famous for cutting and pasting laws from other countries and putting their name on it.

In 2012, the late T-TPLF thugmaster Meles Zenawi said, “In drafting our anti-terrorism law, we copied word-for-word the very best anti-terrorism laws in the world. We took from America, England and the European model anti-terrorism laws. It is from these three sources that we have drafted our anti-terrorism law. From these, we have chosen the better ones.”

Is it any wonder that the T-TPLF should copy word-for-word apartheid South Africa’s state of emergency decree to come up with the “best” state of emergency decree? After all, is there a “better” example of a state of emergency decree than apartheid South Africa’s?

The tactical objective of the T-TPLF decree was to enable it to buy more time to divide the “Amhara”  and “Oromo” opposition and wage a war of attrition against each group and weaken their will and united resistance to its rule.

By October 2016, the T-TPLF was losing its undeclared brutal war on the Amhara and Oromo fronts. The T-TPLF was so desperate, it pulled its troops from Somalia in October 2016 to deal with the mass uprising in Oromiya and Amhara regions.

Truth be told, since May 1991, the month the TPLF ragtag rebel army marched on the capital, Ethiopia has been under a de facto police state of emergency.

That state of emergency became de jure (by law)  when the T-TPLF enacted its so-called anti-terrorism law (Proclamation No. 652/2009).

There is absolutely no difference between the “antiterrorism law” and the October 2016 state of emergency decree in terms of breadth and scope of repression. The T-TPLF could do everything, without exception, under the “antiterrorism law” that it authorized itself to do  under its state of emergency decree.

The T-TPLF was just playing semantic games substituting “command post” for a martial law police state in the guise of “antiterrorism”.  No one is fooled by the T-TPLF’s con name game.

Now the jig is up for the T-TPLF!

Wise and oppression-weary Ethiopians are rising up across Ethiopia just like Kwame Nkrumah predicted decades ago at the dawn of African independence in his poem, “Ethiopia the wise shall rise.”

The dawn of a rising Ethiopia is at hand!

Ethiopia is rising from under the boots of a minority apartheid regime.

The T-TPLF wise guys, (I mean Mafioso-style) are going down, down, down!

The T-TPLF wise guys are crying out terrified, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”  (FYI: “Mayday” is the anglicized pronunciation of a shortened version of the French phrase “venez m’aider” (“come and help me” or “come and give me aid”.)

But the T-TPLF is getting no aid.  No one is coming to the aid of the T-TPLF.

Not even American Joe and Jane Taxpayer who have dumped tens of billions of dollars to keep the T-TPLF afloat over the past two decades.

Only crushing foreign debt (nearly $40 billion in 2016 representing 54.8 percent of GDP) provided by The World Bank-ruptcy to be paid by Ethiopians whose “per capita income of $590 is substantially lower than the regional average.”

But the cunning T-TPLF bosses had a number of other weapons in their arsenal in addition to a state of emergency decree.

Since the brutal Irreecha Massacres of October 2016, the T-TPLF  has pulled out all sorts of scams from its bag of tricks to cling to power and continue with the business of black apartheid rule as usual including:

1)   cabinet shuffling to pretend they are making leadership changes;

2) bogus corruption investigations and prosecutions to create public distraction;

3) undertaking campaigns of disinformation and propaganda to confuse and mislead the population;

4) organization of bogus national dialogue forums with hand selected ethnic and opposition representatives to hoodwink the donors and loaners;

5) trotting out opposition leaders with dubious pasts to create the impression of reaching out and being inclusive;

6) sending out their own members pretending to be regime critics to capture and lead the public debate and discussion on bogus reform and a variety of other empty gestures to cling to power.

Nothing has worked for the T-TPLF!

Nothing!

Today the doddering, virtually senile and over-the-hill T-TPLF bosses could not figure out why the tricks they have used over the past 26 years no longer work.

Old dogs, old tricks.

They are clueless about what to do to crush the widespread and deep-rooted popular resistance to their ethnic hegemonic apartheid rule.

The state of emergency may be over for the people of Ethiopia, but it is not over for the T-TPLF,  which today finds itself in a state of emergency of late-stage regime decay with endemic and structural corruption, crony capitalism and mired in crimes against humanity.

In October 2016, the T-TPLF bosses believed the fire of defiance and resistance ignited by Ethiopian youth culminating in the Irreecha Massacres will flicker and burn out in a few weeks. They boasted they have arrested all the troublemakers and all will be back to apartheid rule as usual within six months.

The uprisings, massive acts of civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance and noncooperation in Oromiya and Amhara regions are now in full-fledged mode. The T-TPLF has little to no control in Oromiya and Amhara regions.

In eastern Ethiopia, the U.S. Embassy last week reported “intense fighting” against T-TPLF troops.

Last month, the T-TPLF desperately tried to negotiate an end to the state of emergency  by making a separate peace with the Oromos  so that it could wage a separate waron the Amharas.

To ger a separate peace with the Oromos, the T-TPLF bosses offered them an olive branch in the form of cotton candy.

The TPLF thugs have such deep and total contempt for the Oromo people that they thought they could buy their support and loyalty by promising to rename the capital “Finfine” and giving them imaginary “extensive rights in the capital city.”

Of course, the whole object of the T-TPLF name game for the capital was to hoodwink and preoccupy the Oromos in empty talk about “special interests” and “extensive rights” while they implemented their Plan B to steal, confiscate and expropriate more Oromo land.

Suffice it to say that the T-TPLF, despite its best efforts, was unable to pander to, pacify or placate the Oromos and Amharas who rose up together against its rule.

I am proud the Oromos told the T-TPLF to take a hike, but not in Oromiya.

I must confess that on many occasions I have shaken my head in disbelief and chuckled in amazement: “Who the hell are the TPLF thugs to give anything to the Oromo, the Amhara or anyone else?”

Aah!!! The audacity of thugs!

The irony in the T-TPLF apartheid system is that they waged a “liberation” war to create the “Republic of Greater Tigrai” in a “two-step process:  1) redemarcating Tigray’s borders to expand the region’s borders within Ethiopia, and 2) acquiring coastal lands within Eritrea and seceding as an independent nation.”

After imposing minority apartheid rule for 26 years, the T-TPLF bosses have come to believe that they own Ethiopia lock, stock and barrel and can give it away or keep it as they freaking please.

An inconvenient truth be told, they sure do!

After the  2015 “election”, the T-TPLF owns 100 percent of  “parliament”.

After the 2010 “election”, the T-TPLF owned 99.6 percent of the “parliament”.

But that is not all!

The TPLF owns 100 percent of the land in Ethiopia.

The T-TPLF owns 100 percent of the top military leadership positions in Ethiopia.

The T-TPLF owns 100 percent of the top businesses and economic enterprises in Ethiopia.

The T-TPLF owns 100 percent of the civil service jobs and political appointments in Ethiopia.

The TPLF’s raison d’etre (singular reason for existence) from the inception, as they declared in their  “Manifesto”,  was to “liberate” Tigrai from “Ethiopia” and achieve “self-determination”.

More T-TPLF con games to cling to power and prolong apartheid rule

When the T-TPLF cotton candy con game on the Oromos did not work, they whipped out another con game.

The T-TPLF announced it is negotiating with the “opposition”.

The “opposition”, of course, is the gang of useless and spineless lackeys and flunkies handpicked by the T-TPLF to lick their boots. Just like the fake “opposition leaders” in the so-called EPRDF coalition, the make-believe front organization for the T-TPLF.

What is laughable is the fact that the T-TPLF claimed to negotiate in the middle of its draconian state of emergency.  The policemen of the police state want to negotiate with the prisoners they hold captive.  The wolves-in-sheep’s clothing negotiating with the sheep. Hyenas negotiating with antelopes about what/who  to have for dinner.

Of course, as the T-TPLF talked negotiations, it was also jailing, massacring, torturing, prosecuting and persecuting innocent citizens at will.

It never fails. The TPLF thugs think they are so smart they can hoodwink Ethiopians and the loaners and donors into believing that there is a real negotiation going on with the possibility of a political solution.

In one videotaped “conference” on T-TPLF TV,  their lackey-leaders are seen and heard talking about the need  “for urgent dialogue with other stakeholders”, “better governance”, “opening of political space”, institutionalizing the “rule of law”, “taking responsibility for past mistakes”, “civility and tolerance”, “reconnecting the (T-TPLF) with the people”, “peace and harmony” and a whole bunch of other nonsense.

The shameless bootlickers!

Of course, the real Ethiopian opposition leaders are languishing in T-TPLF jails.

But “negotiation” talk is an old T-TPLF trick.

The T-TPLF  has always talked the talk of “negotiations” every time it has faced a direct challenge to its power and authority as I documented in my commentary, “The Zero-Sum Negotiation Games of the T-TPLF in Ethiopia”. But it never walked the negotiation talk.

On March 30, 2017, the 100 percent T-TPLF-owned, -managed and –operated “parliament” (the T-TPLF controls 100 percent of the seats) in Ethiopia authorized  a four-month extension of the current SoE. T-TPLF puppet prime minister (PPM) Hailemariam Desalegn told the “parliament” he controls by 100 percent that “82 percent of Ethiopians want a partial or full continuation of the state of emergency.”

For the T-TPLF accustomed to winning elections by 100 and 99.6 percent, an approval rating of a paltry 82 percent must have been terribly disappointing.

The PPM obviously misspoke. Naturally, 100 percent of the Ethiopian people approved of the state of emergency and its renewal!

Why would the T-TPLF extend its emergency decree for another four months if it indeed believed “ordinary security arrangements are sufficient enough to maintain calm”? If such a claim is true, the decree should have simply terminated at the end of the six-month period.

The T-TPLF extended its decree because it knew that terminating it at six-months will re-stoke and reignite the righteous anger and indignation of the people.

But the T-TPLF decree did not succeed in bottling up the widespread popular resistance.

Like a dormant volcano, the popular resistance continues to spread under the surface in the form of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance.

Just like in South Africa, the fire of popular resistance burns red hot in the hearts, minds and souls of all patriotic Ethiopians who abhor living in an apartheid system.

Reality check for the T-TPLF

The T-TPLF hyena has been riding the Ethiopian tiger for over a quarter of a century.

The hard truth the T-TPLF hyena has learned over the past year is that the day for it to dismount the tiger’s back is at hand.

The T-TPLF can try and prolong its ride by an emergency decree and increasing its use of armed violence. But the die is cast.

The T-TPLF hyena’s days of riding the Ethiopian tiger is fast coming to an end.

When (not if) the T-TPLF hyena dismounts, by hook or crook, it will be looking at the sparkling eyes, gleaming teeth and pointy nails of one big hu(a)ngry tiger!”

Deep anger and loathing have replaced the people’s fear of the T-TPLF. That is a hard lesson T-TPLF  leaders have learned.

The Ethiopian tigers and cheetahs are no longer afraid of the cackling T-TPLF hyenas.

As Robert Holmes argued,

Power dissolves when people lose their fear. You can still kill people who no longer fear you, but you cannot control them. Political power requires obedience, which is fueled by the fear of pain to be inflicted if you refuse to comply with the will of those who control the instruments of violence. That power evaporates when the people lose their fear.

The immutable truth is that the T-TPLF could try, but will never succeed, to rule by brute force. But its days are numbered!

The T-TPLF bosses are in denial about another hard political truth: Regardless of how powerful a dictatorship is, it cannot rule without some degree of genuine cooperation and support of the people.

Popular support for the T-TPLF in Ethiopia, if it ever existed, vanished long ago. The people of Ethiopia are showing their defiant resistance by means of civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance and noncooperation with the apartheid oppressors.

No one but T-TPLF cronies, lackeys and bootlickers recognize any legitimacy in T-TPLF rule. But when the appointed time comes, they will be the first to cast a stone at the T-TPLF.

The T-TPLF cannot expect to remain in power in an apartheid system indefinitely without accepting the absolute necessity for change, that is massive and radical change.

The time for incremental change at a pace dictated by the T-TPLF is gone. Long gone.

It has been said that “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

It does not matter how many soldiers, guns, tanks and warplanes the T-TPLF has to lord over 100 million people. Unless it is able to adapt to the urgent and emergent circumstances in Ethiopia, the T-TPLF will not survive. It could prolong its rule at most by a few years, but survive and thrive as the apartheid masters of Ethiopia forever, it will not!

The T-TPLF is under a state of emergency, comatose in the intensive care unit

The T-TPLF bosses know they are in late-stage regime decay. Their “state of emergency” is a last ditch effort to reconsolidate power and go on with the business of apartheid as usual.

The T-TPLF today is gripped in a “siege mentality”, a psychological state of emergency.

The T-TPLF leaders believe they are completely surrounded by enemies.

Their enemies are the victims of their wanton violence and massacres, those they have jailed and tortured and those whom they have ripped off for 26 years.

They feel they are in constant danger from everything and everyone. They are frightened to death by the very people they rule with an iron fist with a trigger finger.

They can’t sleep at night and can’t stop looking over their shoulders during the day. Because judgment day is coming!

Time has run out for the T-TPLF. Con game over!

The only way the state of emergency in Ethiopia will end is with the end of the T-TPLF.

Over the past six months, the T-TPLF has pretended to project a state of normalcy and firm control in the country under a state of emergency.

The T-TPLF leaders believe they have capped the volcanic eruption of the people’s anger and frustration permanently by their emergency decree. That is self-delusion.

But T-TPLF bosses know that the state of emergency has only shoveled dirt over the volcanic ambers of anger, frustration and defiance burning furiously just under the surface.

Volcanoes often remain dormant for decades without giving the slightest signs of an impending eruption.

Likewise, oppressed societies may remain dormant for decades without giving the slightest indication of the pressure and heat buildup of deep, widespread, sweeping and pervasive dissatisfaction, anger, resentment and rage.

But societies like volcanoes explode without warning. When they do, the outcome is  catastrophic.

A declaration of a state of emergency or its pretended lifting will not stop the peaceful struggle of all Ethiopians for freedom, democracy, human rights and majority rule.

Such is the “objective condition on the ground” in Ethiopia, to borrow a favorite phrase of the late T-TPLF thugmaster.

Despite empty promises of dialogue, negotiations and outreach, the T-TPLF’s preferred method of conflict resolution has been and remains to be massacres, butchery, carnage and murder.

The popular uprising of 2016 demonstrated that the fear of T-TPLF butchery and brutality has not marooned the Ethiopian people on an island of despair and submission.

The T-TPLF bosses are masters  of copycatting. They are masters of monkey see, monkey do. They ape whoever seems to have the “best” ideas. Thugmaster Meles copied word-for-word the “best” terrorism laws in the world.

The T-TPLF bosses today should copy the strategy of the white minority apartheid regime in South Africa in the late 1980s when the unraveling of South Africa accelerated  and the white minority apartheid masters agreed to black majority rule and saved itself from a horrible fate.

The minority white regime understood it was doomed in a black majority country. An existential lesson for the T-TPLF.

The minority white apartheid rulers in South Africa came to appreciate the maxim, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Four years later, Mandela was released in 1990 and a South Africa teetering on the cliff’s edge of a civil war was saved.

The masters of apartheid in South Africa decided to change, just in the nick of time. Of course, the South African apartheid leaders were well-educated, astute, rational, shrewd, calculating, farsighted and discerning. They huffed and puffed but when the time came, they sat down and cut a deal with Mandela and the African National Congress to transition to black majority rule.

The T-TPLF masters of apartheid in Ethiopia will not act in the nick of time. For them, the nick of time means catching the last plane out of Addis Ababa just like that criminal scoundrel who ran off to  Zimbabwe when events closed in on him. The only difference will be that they will head off to the U.S., Europe, China and elsewhere, and not Zimbabwe, to enjoy their billions in stolen loot in the sunset of their lives.

There is evidence that many of the top T-TPLF leaders have moved out their stolen loot and their families to the U.S., Europe and even China.

They don’t give a damn what happens after they are gone, just like the proverbial Ethiopian donkey which said, “After I am gone, I could not care less if grass ever grows again.”

I do not deny the T-TPLF bosses are slick: slicker than a can of oil, crazy like a fox, sly as a serpent, artful as a carload of monkeys and streetwise (bush-wise) as wise guys.  A pig in lipstick is slick but not smart.

All I am saying is that the T-TPLF bosses are not smart enough to understand that in politics as in biology adaptability determines survivability. Without adaptation, the only option is extinction.

The T-TPLF bosses have never been able to distinguish between the rule of law and the law of the jungle where might makes right. That is because they spent most of their formative years in the bush and brought to the city lock, stock and barrel (literally, no pun intended) their bush mentality and way of doing things.

As I have always said, you can take the thug out of the bush, but you can never take the bush out of the thug. That is so even if you dress up the thug in designers suits and wrap him in graduate degrees purchased from internet diploma mills.

Once a thug, always a thug!  Thug is as a thug does.

I wish I could say the T-TPLF masters of apartheid in Ethiopia will wake up from their slumber of arrogance and ignorance and change and adapt in the nick of time and avoid a catastrophic end for themselves and others. In the lyrics of Dan Fogelberg,

I hear the thunder three miles away …/ The demon is free/ And people are running from what they can’t even see/… Face the fire you can’t turn away/  The risk grows greater with each passing day/ The waiting’s over/ The moment has come…/

The moment has come for the T-TPLF to face the fire of massive civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance and defiant noncooperation.

I have no doubts the T-TPLF bosses would rather leave Ethiopia in the fires of civil war than leave power peacefully.

Like Nero who watched Rome burn from his palace in the Palatine Hills, the T-TPLF Neros will watch Ethiopia burn on CNN or online from the comfort of their suburban living rooms in the U.S., Europe or China.

The forest fire of ethnic hatred they ignited over the last 26 years will consume them. As I have always prophesied many times before, regardless of the billions the T-TPLF bosses and lackeys have stolen from the Ethiopian people, in the end they shall only inherit the wind of a firestorm!

President John Kennedy put it more plainly: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

The fact of the matter is that the T-TPLF’s “state of emergency” declaration is simply a declaration that the T-TPLF  itself is on life support in the ICU.

It will be over when the T-TPLF apartheid state is over.

On October 9, the T-TPLF did NOT declare a state of emergency for the Ethiopia.

It declared an emergency S.O.S.  for the “S.S. T-TPLF”. The T-TPLF issued a Mayday distress call on October 9.

The S.S. T-TPLF has been struck by a tsunami of the Ethiopian peoples’ anger, frustration and outrage.

There is no question about it. The T-TPLF Ship of State is sinking, and sinking fast.

The S.S. T-TPLF is going DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!  (Did someone say, “Down, down, Woyane!?”)

In October 2016, the T-TPLF tolled the bell for the Ethiopian people by declaring a state of emergency.

In August 2017, for whom does the state of emergency bell toll?

It tolls for the(e) T-TPLF!

Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam teaches political science at California State University, San Bernardino. His teaching areas include American constitutional law, civil rights law, judicial process, American and California state governments, and African politics. He has published two volumes on American constitutional law, including American Constitutional Law: Structures and Process (1994) and American Constitutional Law: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (1998). He is the Senior Editor of the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, a leading scholarly journal on Ethiopia. For the last several years, Prof. Mariam has written weekly web commentaries on Ethiopian human rights and African issues that are widely read online. He blogged on the Huffington post at  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/ and later on open.salon until that blogsite shut down in March 2015.

The post Ethiopia: Mayday (S.O.S.) in August for the T-TPLF! – Al Mariam appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News|Breaking News: Your right to know!.