ESAT -Interview with Prof. Ezekiel Gebissa

October 2nd, 2016 will be a day of infamy in the history of our great nation. Oct 2nd will stand along Yekatit 12, 1937 where the Fascist leader Graziani ordered the massacre of over 30,000 Ethiopians in Addis Ababa and vicinity due to an attempt on his life. We erected a monument at Sidist Kilo to commemorate that dark day. It is there both to remind us about the price of losing sovereignty and the consequences. No one has killed us indiscriminately like that until the arrival of Woyane.

It is sad but October 2nd 2016 will equal in the atrocity to that ugly day in 1937. October 2nd. millions were put in harm’s way, and many hundreds died. There was no questions hundreds of thousands were traumatized. People celebrating freely were in an instant made to flee for their life not knowing where to. There were mothers with children, pregnant women, old men and women and toddlers that came to wash the problems of last year and hope and pray for a better one.

Irreecha festival is a happy event where the elders give thanks if it was a happy and prosperous year and pray to make the coming one a better one. It has been celebrated as far back as one can remember. Nothing like what took place that day has ever occurred.

The government set up search stations on all roads leading to the event making sure there are no weapons. The area was encircled both by Oromia police and Special Forces of the Woyane group. No one can enter nor leave without their knowledge.

The oromo region has been under siege the last eleven months. The loss of life would be staggering under normal circumstances but we Ethiopians are more concerned about how many instead of why even one? For your information close to nine hundred have died and untold amount of young ones jailed in one of the concentration camps Woyane keeps. (Zuai, Bir Sheleko, Dedessa)

When confronted with the presence of all that security force, the constant searching and the memory of the last twelve months state of siege of their region, to say the Oromos and their friends and family were not in a good holiday mood is a valid assessment. It is also true the young people arrived with their hands crossed showing defiance against the system. It is also a fact that ‘Down with Woyane’ was chanted so loud and often the hills reverberated and the lake water rose.

There were two helicopters buzzing the crowd and attempting to drop leaflets. That added to the tension. The feeble gesture by the regime to intimidate and create fear has the reverse effect. It angered the crowd. And the chant ‘Woyane Down’ drowned the valley.

On October 2nd 2016, on a clear day Abay Tsehaye, Seyoum Mesfin, Debretsion Gebre Mariam, Samora Yenus and friends ordered their private Agazi Forces to open fire on their own people that were gathered to celebrate a cultural holiday. They bear full responsibility to the loss of life on that dark day. The doctors will say death by bullet, death by drowning, death by being trampled over and many other reasons. The most obvious cause for the death of our family members is the TPLF Central Committee. They killed our people because they demanded Democracy in a supposedly free land.

The Woyane regime that controls our country assembled the Special Agazi Forces days ahead of time, camped them in the hills and gave them authority to use lethal means including tear gas and automatic weapons on a crowd numbering millions and that is confined in a small open space.  It is premeditated plan when they brought armed soldiers to control a crowd that they know was not armed and has peaceful intentions other than protest loudly.

What are we supposed to make of that? The Prime Minister was quoted to have said fifty-two killed due to stampede and was in a rush to order three days of mourning. The Woyane Media like EBC and their stepchildren went viral on the ‘stampede’ angle. I have no idea who they thought they could cover up mass killing in the middle of the day.

It took only a few minutes to refute all their claims. From the hundreds of videos that was taken by the media and ordinary people it was clear to hear the guns blasting and the tear gas canisters hissing with the smoke cloud engulfing the poor and confused people.

If there was any semblance of Democracy in Ethiopia the government that given an order to fire on assembled mass of people will be out of office in a minute. The Woyane regime does not suffer such consequences. It is answerable to no one. It will continue killing until they either subdue the population using any and all atrocities or they are forced out of power by the organized action of the people. Woyane leaders think they have no alternatives. Even if they had any the Irreecha killing seems to have closed all avenues of civilized discourse.

TPLF have many fancy ideas in its head that they think gives them alternatives when the shit hits the fan. Believe me they discussed it, drew maps and thought it all out. It gave them false reading of success in its initial phase of conquest and setting up the system. It led to blunders as the years went by.

The setting up of the Kilils worked like a charm. EPRDF was the perfect tool to give the illusion of Democracy. The ethnic hatred actively being stocked by the Front kept the population on the edge where trust, loyalty, friendship and empathy became stupid deeds. Fear is not such a good tool, it runs out.

Ethiopia is a poor underdeveloped country. TPLF found out it costs plenty to have a standing Army that is one of the largest in Africa, Federal Force, Agazi Troops and Internal Security apparatus. That did not leave much to develop Tigrai for the coming divorce. Let alone controlling the Nile all the way to Gambela TPLF couldn’t even hold on to Welkait. On top of it the Oromos and the Amharas finally figured out the scam and decided to renew their love.

For TPLF to advocate divorce is not a good course of action at the moment. It has all of a sudden become a crazy and stupid idea dreamed up by Kat intoxicated blood drunk psychopath that left his buddies in a big quandary. What are our mini leaders supposed to do? What they did was expose their fear. They were easily unnerved and lost control of the situation. It also shows the Mafia group is not capable of analyzing a given situation, weigh the pros and cons and make an intelligent decision. There is no one with leadership skills among them. They did not rise to the position they occupy being smart but rather being ruthless, heartless and void of empathy is how they did it. That works in a small group setting but it is absolutely useless when it comes to governing with any legitimacy.

So today we have them on the ropes and all we got to do is apply more punches to relieve them from their misery. That is what you would think. Twenty years of  Derg and twenty four years of Woyane should make us an expert on what to do and especially what not to do at a time like this. There are still some waving the ethnic flag but generally It is a pleasure to see that we have refused to play the game as officiated by Woyane. The Kilil mentality will take a long time to erase but the road we have started is a very promising highway.

To those still singing Woyane tune of division we say it is time we put a stop to this emulation of Woyane culture of division and hate. What the Ethiopian situation is showing us today is the days of ethnic grouping is not healthy and leads to no good end. The solidarity of the people of Gondar with the people of Adama is what forced the mafia group into the psychiatric ward. So what is with this ethnic Bura Kereyo? What makes you think the ethnic association and narrow vision that did not work for Woyane TPLF will work for you. I am sure some of you guys do not check your email and failed to read the memo announcing we have hit the RESET button regarding that app. Time to move. To tell you the truth it is sort of disconcerting to see our people that are residing in the US among the multitude and still cling to that primal and primitive notion of ethnicity. If you ask me it is a sign of an underdeveloped brain.

The new question in front of us is what kind of Transitional Government  (TG) do we want to create? What are the powers of the TG? For how long? What should be done with the Military? Who should be included in the TG? What should the role of foreign powers be in this situation? What about the fate of the current people in power? Would they be allowed to leave?

Ethiopians at home and all over the world are slowly digesting this calamity brought on us by a few criminals in positions of power. How to go about getting rid of them without doing damage to our country and people is what is keeping us awake at night. We have many mature, reserved and able individuals that are capable of steering our nation on the right path. It is our job to calmly look at our options and with love and good will there is no question our old country will join the civilized world and we will put out effort and energy in building a better place for our children to grow and thrive.

Security officials watch as demonstrators chant slogans while flashing the protest gesture during Irreecha, the thanksgiving festival of the Oromo people, in Bishoftu town, Oromia region, Ethiopia, on October 2, 2016.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/08/qa-recent-events-and-deaths-irreecha-festival-ethiopia

Ethiopia ,irreecha Massacre candlelight Vigil ,Toronto

If it weren’t a monstrous entity that we are fighting against and haven’t suffered under three successive repressive regimes during our life time, the West’s unblinking hypocrisy would have no doubt thrown our conviction in the lofty principles of democracy into disarray and chaos and force us to seriously question its sanctity. Or is democracy a necessity for the West but a luxury for the rest they can live without? Or does it have to be rationed and time-released in developing nations like Ethiopia because a full dose of it is unhealthy for their economy? That is actually what President Obama – the leader of the free world – alluded to during his visit to Ethiopia in August 2015 at which time he also made his infamous remark of “Ethiopia is a democracy” cementing further his administration’s relationship with the autocratic TPLF  .

The West’s relationship with TPLF has been encumbered with flaws since its inception, and intent of malice should never be ruled out. Otherwise how would one explain what happened in London in 1991 when the capitalist West handed the rein of power to an avowed Marxist Leninist group – TPLF to replace the Marxist Military Junta of Col. Mengistu Hailemariam? What is unforgivable and disturbing is that the West knew from day one that TPLF was genocidal in general and towards the Amhara in particular. The West knew TPLF’s intent very well and was not that shallow not to suspect that TPLF would implement its genocidal agenda when circumstances permit. But that didn’t deter the West from forging its ‘unholy alliance’ with one of the most dangerous and criminal entities in history. Even more alarming is the West’s failure to learn a lesson from the 1994 Rwanda genocide and revisit its commitment to the ethnocentric and fascistic TPLF. The reckless haste the West concluded the dubious London Conference and the fact that it was fraught with deliberate negligence are also indicative of the West’s malicious intent that indeed set up Ethiopia for chaos and looming disintegration. In the summer of 1991, the West gave a matchbox to the arsonist TPLF and Ethiopia is burning today.

In the last 25 years, TPLF has been committing genocide on piecemeal basis until it became full blown in November 2015 when over 500 peaceful protesters were mowed down and murdered in the Oromia region. By TPLF’s own census, for a country that has experienced an uncommon population explosion in recent times, the Amhara population has been dwindling and the cause is not that complicated to figure out and understand.  From time to time, TPLF Special Forces armed with weapons and other gears supplied by the West including training have viciously slaughtered Amharas, Oromos, Annuaks, Somalis, etc. thus engaging in ethnic cleansing or managing the population of certain groups to lessen potential resistance to tyranny. Such crimes are being committed with the West deliberately stuck to its “hear no evil, see no evil” stance in addition to the material and diplomatic support it provides to the murderous TPLF.  Obvious and undeniable, the West’s agenda of the so called ‘War on Terror’ seamlessly feeds into TPLF’s interest of perpetuating its tyranny. As a result, there is no reason why the West shouldn’t be held accountable not only morally but also legally for the genocide, the atrocious human rights violations, the destruction of cultures, traditions and values, the wholesale corruption and plunder, the loss of innocent lives, and the depression, the grief and overall traumatic experiences Ethiopians have been subjected to.

The fact that the West has been arming the TPLF’s war machine up to the hilt making it one of the strongest in Africa could never be an afterthought at all. The West’s use of TPLF’s mercenary Army to fight Al-Shabab in Somalia, or deploy it in between warring factions elsewhere in Africa as “peacekeepers” is never a coincidence either. It is part of a long term scheme the corner stone of which was laid down long before the sham 1991 London Conference. The West was grooming TPLF for such an eventuality years earlier while the latter was in the woods as a ragtag bandit. The West knew very well who it was dealing with. It saw in TPLF a brutal and merciless killer that was devoid of remorse and humanly regrets. It saw in TPLF someone that didn’t play by even the most rudimentary rules of engagement; and it saw in TPLF a group that had no compunction for breaking promises; that had no friends, and instead enjoyed making enemies, and above all that behaved like a drug-cartel.  The West knew it was dealing with a group that was immensely parochial, greedy, rigid and unpatriotic. But all these negative attributes didn’t deter the West from striking friendship with TPLF because these were the very qualities the West realized were going to be useful for its agenda in the Horn of Africa. Far from being worried, the West knew it could keep TPLF in line as long as it keeps throwing money, weaponry, and undeserved glorification at it, and that is what the West has been doing for the last 25 years at the expense of Ethiopia and its people. Let’s not forget among the reasons why the West preferred TPLF over the other groups that were fighting against the Derg at that time was also because TPLF enjoyed critical and unwavering support from EPLF. As a result, TPLF appeared more appealing and a much better bet than the rest to carry out the West’s future controversial and malicious missions. The appalling ruthlessness of TPLF in its short history until that time, definitely must have assured the West of the latter’s propensity to dictatorship which in turn was indicative of its longevity and long term dependability as a future partner. Of course, it wasn’t that difficult to figure out for the West that in a democratic Ethiopia, the country’s army would never be available to cater to its wild whims and discretions. Today, because of the deliberate and convenient miscalculations and misdeeds of the West, a cloud of catastrophe and long term civil strife is hovering over Ethiopia. What an unforgivable sin!

That TPLF is not a creation of the West is undeniable. But there could be no denying that the West willfully adopted it “as is” without requiring it to modify itself to benefit Ethiopia as a country. As a result, in the last 25 years, TPLF has left nothing but a trial of destruction, mayhem, murder, corruption, exploitation and repression along its path. Thus the West’s culpability is beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In addition to flooding TPLF with money and arms, there are indications that the West has been indiscriminately sharing intelligence with TPLF throughout the last 25 years. As a result, it would be the height of naivety to think that Andargachew Tsige was snatched in Yemen, or that TPLF spied on ESAT, and diaspora without the acquiescence and support of western intelligence. To think that the West would arm TPLF without the associated intelligence supports is engaging in self-deception and wishful thinking.

There are also plenty of circumstantial evidences suggesting the West’s involvement in TPLF’s Ahbashization Project of Ethiopian Muslims supposedly to preempt their future radicalization – an absolute figment of the imagination – leading to the loss of many innocent lives and long term incarceration of the Muslim Community leaders throughout Ethiopia. Thanks to the West, today in Ethiopia, no faith or belief system is immune from attack by TPLF Special Forces as demonstrated by the massacre and butchery at the Irreecha celebration of our peaceful Oromo brothers and sisters.

No matter how atrocious, destructive and embarrassing TPLF’s behavior has been, the  enabler West has kept generously streaming millions of dollars to the coffers of the latter, help it secure loans from World Bank and IMF circumventing national and international laws, loyally fan its fabricated two digit economic growth rate, and single it out for chivalry in Somalia, etc. President Obama, in his press conference on July 27, 2015 in Addis Ababa said “So we don’t need to send our own Marines, for example, in to do the fighting…..The Ethiopians are tough fighters… so that we’re doing things that we can do uniquely but does not require us putting boots on the ground”. In other words, TPLF is sacrificing Ethiopian lives in Somalia, innocent lives that translate into more western money in TPLF’s coffer – blood money!

The West’s deliberate dead silence coupled with its never ending material and diplomatic support have emboldened TPLF to a point that defies explanation. As a result, its army and Special Forces have stepped up relentlessly attacking peaceful protesters with western supplied batons, teargas, automatic rifles, machineguns and attack helicopters including throwing hand grenades at mosques with congregations inside. What is the West- the bastion of democracy doing? Nothing! And suffice to say that its dead silence has proved as lethal as the weapons that it has been supplying to the murderous regime. The West’s on and off moaning and babbling of “… we have serious concerns about lack of political space in Ethiopia…” is no less hurting than Susan Rice’s “diabolic chuckling”. Obviously, it is in the West’s interest not to condemn TPLF in strong terms because of the boomerang effect such condemnation might have on the West itself since the West is equally responsible as TPLF for the horror and bloodshed in Ethiopia.

25 years of warnings to the West about the dire situation in Ethiopia by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Freedom House, etc. that hailed from none other than the very bosom of western society itself, have completely been ignored. The never stopping voice of these organizations on behalf of Ethiopians in particular and humanity in general is indicative of the West’s absolute arrogance and complicity in the killing, maiming, incarceration, and deprivation of basic human rights, exodus of scholars and religious leaders and the perishing of the Ethiopian youth in the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, and in shipping containers heading to South Africa, not to mention the ones burnt alive in Johannesburg and Durban, and the ones slaughtered by ISIL on the sands of Libya. Whichever way we take a look at it, Ethiopia’s woes lie at the doorsteps of the West!  There is no way the West wouldn’t be found guilty in an International Court of Law if we had our day in court. The West would never be less guilty than TPLF – its ‘prodigal son’ because there is premeditation; there is motive; there is a crime scene; and above all because there are 99 million victims!

The federal government has declared a state of emergency as of Saturday, October 8, 2016. The cabinet of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has an emergency meeting on Saturday afternoon where the government declared the state of emergency at a time of deteriorating security situation in Oromia Regional State.

The state of emergency declared for the first time in 25 years, will last for six months.”It may be shortened depending on the improvement on the security front,” a senior government official told Fortune.
UPDATE:

The constitution allows the Prime Minister to declare state of emergency for up to six months, but needs to present the bill to parliament in two weeks. Prime Minister Hailemariam is expected to table his declaration to Parliament in 10 days.

UPDATE:

Addressing the nation on the Marshal Law declared last night, Prime Minister Hailemariam pledged to respect fundamental human rights and diplomatic privileges under the Vienna Convention.

Ethiopia declares state of emergency
ESAT News (October 9, 2016)

The regime in Ethiopia on Sunday declared a state of emergency retro effective Saturday October 8, 2016. The Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, said in a televised address to the nation that the state of emergence was needed to repulse what he called “the danger posed by anti-peace elements and foreign enemies on the peace, security and stability of the country and its people.”

The state of emergency was declared after months of anti-government protests, especially in the Oromo and Amhara regions of the country where security forces killed hundreds of peaceful protesters and tens of thousands detained.

Protests were reignited this week after the death of hundreds of festival goers on Sunday as the Oromos celebrated Ireecha, an annual thanksgiving and a festival to welcome spring. Security forces shot live bullets and threw gas canisters at the festival goers creating a massive stampede which reportedly caused the death of hundreds. Witnesses and video evidences also show security forces shooting at party goers who also used the occasion to express their grievances against the regime.

The Prime Minister said the state of emergency “would not infringe the rights enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution and diplomatic rights listed in the Vienna Convention.”

The Prime Minister blamed the unrest in his country on “foreign forces” and “anti-peace elements.” The TPLF government has been routinely blaming neighboring Egypt and Eritrea for all the crises in the country. Official statements from the government have been accusing the two countries of supporting the protest movement and opposition forces, but with no tangible evidence.

Reports say the Ethiopian government has summoned Egyptian ambassador to Addis Ababa, Aboubakr Hefny, for discussions. Associated Press reported that officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have talked to the Egyptian diplomat.

The government media has recently been televising a video purportedly showing Oromo opposition groups in Cairo holding a meeting with Egyptian officials. But that video had surfaced on the Ethiopian social media two years ago. The government television, EBC, used footages of that video to accuse Egypt of buttressing the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which is outlawed by the TPLF government.

By Obang Metho

We in the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia (SMNE) are deeply shocked and grieved by the loss of hundreds of Ethiopians in our Oromo family, inBishoftu, Ethiopia on Sunday, October 2, 2016 during a celebration of the Irreecha Festival, a traditional day of thanksgiving for the Oromo in Ethiopia and worldwide.

Despite ruling regime’s reports of 60-70 deaths, reliable sources using body counts and names, allege deaths numbering nearly 700 persons. Most of these victims were young people, dressed in traditional clothes, joining together outdoors for celebration, speeches, dancing and in open appreciation for God’s provision. The festival is widely celebrated following the rainy season and draws millions to join in the public gathering, considered one of the largest in all of Africa.

However, this year the numbers of participants were estimated to be around two million, down by two million from last year, likely due to the regime-sponsored violence and killing of peaceful civilian protesters in Oromia over the last eleven months.

Based on reports from the ground and videos widely circulating on the social media; in the midst of the celebration, the regime authorities took over the stage as festival speakers were addressing the crowd, even forcefully taking the microphone away from a speaker. The speakers and people in charge of the festival had been elected by the people, creating a strong reaction to this government intrusion that essentially hijacked one of the Oromos’ most important cultural days of the year. Adding insult to injury, the regime authorities who replaced them included some known to be complicit in past killings of peaceful protesters in recent months.

Some members of the crowd began to protest by crossing their arms together above their heads, signifying the gesture of protest that has now become widely known and accepted. In response, security forces fired tear gas at the crowd and shot their guns into the air; but some also shot into the crowd, as evidenced by the gun shot wounds on the bodies of some of the dead and wounded. At the same time, numerous military hummers were present with masked security agents pointing their guns at the crowd, while multiple helicopters circled overhead, again with similar masked soldiers pointing guns at the crowd. The crowd panicked under the threat and began to run for safety, causing a massive stampede. As they ran, many fell into deep ditches, body upon body, causing numbers of people to suffocate from the weight of others on top of them.

Authorities knew these festival participants were unarmed and did not have the intention of using violence because all of them had gone through a security check gate before entering the area so as to ensure they had no weapons. So, why did these forces use tear gas and fire their guns, some into the crowd? Why were they masked? Why was a helicopter circling overhead with guns pointed downward? Why were there tanks with security men directing their machine guns at the crowd? Why were they also masked?

It all was intimidating to the crowd and ignited a reaction from the people that would not have otherwise happened. Yet, the TPLF are now minimizing the numbers of dead and wounded and instead, are blaming the victims for running away in a fear-caused stampede.

In addition to the report of nearly 700 deaths, it was also alleged that nearly 900 more people were injured, some critically. The nearby hospital could not cope with the numbers and seriousness of the injuries as one can see from some of the many surfacing videos where many bodies cover the floors for lack of beds. It is likely the number of dead will increase.

This is a tragedy that should not have happened; yet, TPLF/EPRDF leadership, when panicking, continues to resort to bullets, brute force and bloodshed whenever they sense increasing vulnerability to the growing opposition against them. In this case, those participating in the festival were all peaceful, despite some speaking out for freedom and justice, accompanied by the gesture of crossed arms. The TPLF/EPRDF fears that any of these public gatherings could morph into public resistance that could catalyze the public to wider resistance. Yet, the strong-armed reaction over the last year has empowered and intensified the public protests rather than curbed them. Nearly 1,000 lives have been lost prior to this and already we are seeing the increasing and intensifying reaction of the people.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of so many lives. Grief and hardship from these losses are affecting families, communities and Ethiopians throughout the country and world. The last eleven months have been dark months for the majority of Ethiopians; it is hard to imagine how the TPLF and others who are guilty of these crimes feel. How would they feel if these were their own children?

No one would have thought this kind of religious celebration would end up being the scene of such great bloodshed. Who among them expected never to return home; yet, there were nearly 700 who would never make it. Their families must now face their loss. What happened?

Violence has never been part of the Irreecha celebration until now. The TPLF/EPRDF regime is responsible for terrorizing and killing the people as well as the deaths of those from the stampede; yet they take no responsibility. We are not surprised. Most everything the TPLF/EPRDF claims are filled with lies to cover up the truth or to create a more desirable or less negative image than exists in reality. Ask the people about the double-digit economic growth and you will discover holes in their claims.

The TPLF/EPRDF goes through an elaborate process to hold an election; yet, the outcome— a 100% victory for them— is predetermined. They currently have more political prisoners in jails, detention centers, and prisons than most any other African country other than Eritrea; yet they claim to be a free country; however, according to Freedom House, Ethiopia under the TPLF is close to the bottom of the scale regarding basic freedoms.
Outsiders sometimes accept their claims or numbers, not having a means to double check the statistics, but then the TPLF/EPRDF uses the information they themselves supplied to these foreign media and institutions to verify their own claims.

The killing of innocent people has become the trademark of the TPLF. When the TPLF went to the bush to try to overthrow the oppressive government of the Derg, killing was their way to power, even killing those among them, some of whom were competitors. There is nothing new about the TPLF killing more innocent people.

Mr. Obang Metho, Executive Director of the SMNE states:

“To the people of Ethiopia:

The whole families of Ethiopians are mourning the loss of these people. To those who lost your close family members, we are with you and also grieving for the loss of your loved one. We are praying for you and those who are injured for a speedy recovery. Now is the time to reflect on the death of these people and to pray that God uses their death to wake up a country to stand together to create a home where people will live in harmony and with respect towards each other. 

Those left behind must take responsibility to bring reconciliation among our people and to help heal the wounds dividing us. To do so, we must reject the regime’s primary means of survival— seducing us to endlessly remain embittered and isolated from each other based on ethnicity, religion or other identity factors. We must understand, we have to agree to do so for them to win, while putting humanity before ethnicity or any other differences, is the way to a better Ethiopia. Becoming complicit with them in something that is wrong, will bring destruction on all of us and this is what we are now facing.

Let us work together in calm; not reacting emotionally with rage and vengeance. In such a wrong state of mind, great destruction can be perpetrated with great regrets later. Let us rise to a higher standard. Justice will be done in a court of law, not in the street. 

Do not harm another or their property because they belong to a certain ethnic group or political group. We need to be better than they are. Destruction will not bring life, but take it. We have to avoid that. We have to see a bigger, better and more common vision based on what is right that will bring a lasting solution. Whatever we do, let our actions not be reckless so we end up like Syria, Rwanda and other places of death and destruction we need not become.

We have a calling to stand for what is right, moral and good, not just in our own eyes— which could change overnight— but in a way that will honor the way we live together. Then we will be more able to create a country where we are valued by our humanity instead of only “considered human” if someone else thinks we “possess” the “right” identity factors. Justice, freedom and opportunity is for all Ethiopians not only one ethnic group. 

To the TPLF leadership:

You cannot get away with this. Ethiopian people know who has done it; there were many witnesses. It is a matter of time and the sooner you stop, the better for you and your own future. You should come to the table of dialogue before the public forces you to come to ours. Destruction of the other is not the outcome for which we seek; but instead, we seek “real freedom and genuine development” of a society that will help us rise above the hate, injustice, the dehumanization of self or others, untruth, theft of the property of others, violence, killing and the failures of the past.

To the EPRDF:

Your future is not in your hands, but increasingly in the hands of the Ethiopian people. Yet, we do not suggest you leave this dying regime behind and be on the side of the people unless you believe what the people are doing and seeking is right, moral and good in the eyes of our Creator. If you see it is, we invite you to become part of such transformational change and reforms in Ethiopia.

To Tigrayans:

I encourage you who are supporting the TPLF leadership to abandon them and take the side of the people. The TPLF has purposely alienated you from the rest of Ethiopians to make sure you have no choice in the matter but to support them, even if privately you adamantly disapprove of what they are doing and reject their rule.  

Some have succumbed to the perks and privileges that have bought your souls and your cooperation while others among you have suffered from neglect and lack of opportunity to ensure there are poor to be put on display in Tigray to keep the development and aid money flowing. Those in between are struggling with the difficulty of living in the midst of corruption and wrong, but finding it dangerous to oppose those so close to you. At the same time, a minority at the top has erected a system where they have been able to deplete the banks, the resources and opportunities while others’ hands are crossed over their heads and tied. I invite you to come out with us to stand against what is wrong and to stand up for what is right. 

What kind of future do you want for yourselves, your families and your descendants? The material gains some of you have made, may eventually be lost and what it left is the people, so we call you to side with the people. 

If the TPLF really loved you, they would have made the other people love you; but instead, they have tried to alienate you so you will support them, but later, what they have done will make you the object of hatred and shame as a legacy.

What did your leader, the mastermind of ethnic hatred politics and division, Mr. Meles Zenawi leave for you, but hatred from others. Reject it, like a father who instead, seeks to leave a legacy of good to his children that will bring benefits to them in the future. Speak up to the TPLF leadership and say, “Not in my name! “Condemn their actions. If what has been done in Bishopftu had taken place in Adwa or Mekelle, would there be mute silence from the TPLF or the Tigray? If not, speak out! Wrong is wrong; break the silence and be on the side of the people”. 

In conclusion, this massacre of nearly 700 people in one day, which has just occurred in Bishopftu, can be compared to others horrific massacre in the world that resulted in global outrage, like at the Hungarian Revolution Massacre in 1956, the Soweto massacre on June 16, 1976 in South Africa, the Mendiola massacre in January 22, 1987, the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 4, 1989 in China and the Rabaa or Tahrir Square massacre in Egypt on August 14, 2013. It must be condemned and stopped. Each of us should do our part.

May we humble ourselves to become compassionate, principled and ready to forgive and to seek the freedom, justice and well being of others as we seek our own.

______________________________________________________________

Please do not hesitate to email me if you have comments to: Obang@solidaritymovement.org

By Prof. Alemayehu G. mariam

I cry for the hundreds of victims of the October 2, 2016 Irreecha Festival Massacres in Ethiopia.

I also cry out for freedom, democracy and human rights in Ethiopia.

On October 2, 2016,  troops loyal to the Tigrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (T-TPLF) opened fire indiscriminately on crowds attending one of the most important cultural and spiritual events in Ethiopia, the Irreecha (Thanksgiving) Festival  in the town of Bishoftu, some 45 miles southeast of the capital Addis Ababa.

An estimated 500 plus people were killed by gunfire and in a pandemonium that followed the gunfire. Twice that number were severely injured and maimed.

For over ten years, I have been the unremitting voice of massacre victims in Ethiopia.

For over ten years, I have appealed to the conscience of T-TPLF leaders, but having none, they have ignored my appeals.

The people of Ethiopia petitioned, solicited and implored T-TPLF leaders and their cronies and supporters to change their ways; to become more human and humane;  to show a little compassion and understanding;  to be a little less greedy and to feel the pain and suffering of their. They have turned a deaf ear to the voice of justice and blinded their eyes to  the suffering of the people. The have answered the peoples’ pleas with repeated insults, injuries and massacres.

I became a human rights advocate outraged by the Meles Massacres which resulted in the deaths and injuries of over one thousand unarmed protesters following the 2005 election.

As a utopian Ethiopian, I believed that  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For over a decade, every Monday, without missing a single week, I have raised my pen to register my bootless cries to the conscience of humanity and the mercy of divinity.

I believe freedom is like a train that is always delayed, but also always arrives.

On October 15, 2007 (almost to the week this month), I announced to Ethiopians, “Hold on! Hold fast! Hold tight! Your Freedom Train is coming!” (See my commentary, “One Small Step for the U.S. Congress, One Giant Leap for Ethiopian Human Rights”.)

I believe the Ethiopia’s Freedom Train has finally arrived, though very, very late.

All aboard!!!!!

Oromos, Amharas, Tigreans, Gurages, Sidamans, Welayita, Hadiya, Afar, Gamo, Ogadeni, Anuak… Christians, Muslims…

All aboard!!!!!

I have made my preliminary case for a crimes against humanity investigation and prosecution in the Irreecha Festival Massacres last week. (See my commentary, T-TPLF’s Killing Fields in Ethiopia: Massacre by Stampede at the Irreecha Festival!)

Let Barack Obama Speak!

For the first time, in over a decade, I must hold my peace this week.

This is the time for me to cry and cry again for the innocent young men, women and children who were slaughtered by the T-TPLF at the Irreecha Festival in Bishoftu on October 2, 2016.

I raised my pen to write, but my pen refused to shed its tears of ink. So I must cry and cry again.

I shall bite my tongue, just this once.

I yield my pages to Barack Obama to speak directly to the Irreecha Festival Massacre  victims, their families, friends and communities in  Ethiopia.

Let Barack Obama, the stalwart defender of the T-TPLF speak to them about democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

The blood of the Irreecha Massacre Victims are on Obama’s hands. There is no detergent on earth that can wash the blood of those victims from his hands. NONE!

Let Obama wag his silver forked tongue and ooze out his venomous lies.

I have nothing to say to him now.

But paraphrasing Shakespeare, I ask my readers only one question: “Were there a more malignant serpent seen, with forked tongue,/ That slily glided towards the majesty of Ethiopia?”

Thus spoke Barack Obama:

I don’t bite my tongue too much when it comes to these issues. We are opposed to any group that is promoting the violent overthrow of a government, including the government of Ethiopia, that has been democratically elected. We are very mindful of Ethiopia’s history – the hardships that this country has gone through. It has been relatively recently in which the constitution that was formed and the elections put forward a democratically elected government. U.S. President Barack Obama, Press conference in Addis Ababa 27 July 2015 (Emphasis added.)

Let history record: Ethiopians make no distinction between the killers who committed heinous crimes against humanity at the Irreecha Festival on October 2, 2016 and those who defend, bankroll, finance, subsidize, publicize, authorize, humanize, glamorize, militarize, idolize, lionize an apologize for them.

It is often said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

The history of apartheid South Africa is repeating itself in Ethiopia every day.

On March 21, 1960, the white minority apartheid regime massacred 69 unarmed Black men and women and wounded 180 others protesting “pass laws” in Sharpeville, South Africa.

On October 2, 2016, the T-TPLF apartheid regime in Ethiopia massacred over 500 men, women and children and injured hundreds more.

The Sharpeville Massacre is permanently recorded in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man in the Twentieth Century.

I do not doubt that the T-TPLF Irreecha Festival Massacre of October 2016 will be remembered as the second Sharpeville Massacre on the African continent in the in the Twenty-first century.

BEHOLD THE HARVEST OF APARTHEID IN WHITE AND BLACK!

When all fails to organize the People, conditions will.  Marcus Garvey

DOWN, DOWN, WOYANE!

The Ethiopian people struggle has reached to its pinnacle.  The oppressive TPLF regime is to crumble. Ethiopians of all walk of life have to be prepared what is to unfold.

The Fascist TPLF in its 25 years of brutal regime has saw seeds of hate, suspicion, disunity, false identity and history. It has established a structure that facilitate its minority regime while majority are left divided, disunited and paranoid of each other. These would create obstacles for smooth transition even after TPLF’s death.

Ethiopians have to be smart, measured, matured  and human on tackling this uneven road. We have to make sure  and work whatever possible to guarantee the next administration should  offer  equal opportunity for all of us, treat us equally under the law and ensure  genuine  citizenship  with all our human, economic, social rights and responsibilities respected. We should make sure that any regime that follows shouldn’t be on power without our will ( genuine election) and the power should be also curbed.

While we are under such new challenge defining our future,  we should remain committed and united  not to let any gap where our historical enemies (local or far away) and opportunists  to interfere in our country and our fate.

TPLF is not ready to negotiate for peaceful transition and ignored concerned  intellectuals and elders call for  transition and handover of power. It preferred  resolution by force and proclaimed state of  emergency law to further stifle the human rights  of Ethiopians and engage in killing spree.

The following are  my suggestions for the way forward  to spearhead the challenge we face and pave the way for democratic and compassionate nation building.

While TPLF is still on power, we have to  do some of the  following ,

1. To convene International conference where all opposition parties, civic organisations, religious institutions, respected elders, trade unions and responsible organisations to draw road map for the transitions and come up with “Transitional Charter” for the transition government.

2. Strong emphasis on national reconciliation and resolution through peaceful means which would avoid further bloodshed and pave for the matured transition.

3. A council made of all political parties, civic organisations, respected elders, religious leaders, intellectuals, trade union, higher educational institutions representative to be formed.

4. To avoid further internal struggle and potential bloodshed among these parties, the executive branch of this council which will replace the TPLF ministerial cabinet should be non political aligned respected  elders,  intellectuals, activists and technocrats.

The main responsibility of the council and  its cabinet should be first and foremost,

• ensure peace and stability in the country.
• national reconciliation and peaceful resolution of conflicts and differences.
• establish  commission to investigate the atrocities made by TPLF on the massacres and human right abuses it made in the last 25 years with International organization participation.
• release of all political prisoners.
• ensure free press, media  and peaceful demonstration
• establish independent court free from political interference.
• establish new apolitical  police and army. For the time being the current army and police force  ( excluding TPLF members and those above the rank of Major)  can be considered with addition of opposition armed members to form transitional government police and army forces.
• bring to justice those who are responsible for the crime committed by the TPLF/ EPRDF.
• nationalise the economic mafia organisations that belongs to TPLF and its branches …(like EFFORT and others).
• to compensate those who lost their family members, land and businesses due to TPLF atrocities
• maintain Ethiopian sovereign territory  and continue the developmental works that are of national interest including projects started by previous regime.
• to create  new constitution  which treats every citizen  equally  and ensure the fundamental human right respected  and grantee full citizenships  with its right and responsibilities.
• to organise genuine election with in 2 years.
• to make sure  first past the post and also proportional representation election outcome  in the new parliament ( ideal for country with different ethnicities and political views, it will deny one party full or 100% control like TPLF))
• Handover of power to elected government and resolve the council.

We  need the international bodies  (UN, OAU, EU, USA, UK and other organisation like Amnesty international, Human Rights and other relevant organisations)  to help us  during this transition which is also in their best interest.

For the implementation of such, we need every parties  and Ethiopians to be far sighted and work for the better to make TPLF’s regime the last oppressive regime in the history of our country.  We have to stand together and treat each other as brothers and sisters of one mother land. We need to be not deflected by selfish motives of ethnicity or religion which we belong  to define our common country and future. We need to  build a common country responsibly where we all are treated  as equals. we need to build a country of peace  and equality of which we will be  proud of.

“..Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”  Psalm 68:31.

May God help us!

by Tsegaye R Ararssa
10 October 2016.

This morning, Ethiopians woke up to the news that the Council of Ministers of the Federal Government has passed an emergency decree that may last for the coming six months. The official text of the Decree is not yet published in the official legal communicator, the Negarit Gazetta. (As it has now become customary, it may never be published at all; the regime does what it wants to do nonetheless.) That it is so declared today is announced to journalists by the Prime Minister in Cabinet on the state television. The Prime Minister spoke in order to announce the decision to journalists as the primus inter pares, the first among equals, in the Cabinet. The reason given by the Prime Minister for issuing the declaration is that there is a breakdown of law and order that threatens the safety of citizens and the integrity of the constitutional order.

To the peoples of Ethiopia, especially to those who have been under military rule for the last one year and more (without any fact that necessitates it or any law that warrants it), the decree makes no practical difference in their ‘lives’. As such, the decree has little significance, if any.

The people have seen the worst face of repression. Killing, maiming, mass arrest, arbitrary detention, public torture, dispossession, eviction, dislocation (because of loss of houses and job and domicile), and much worse. They have seen burning of prisoners alive (in Qilinxo, Ambo, Gonder, Angereb, Debretabor, Zuway, etc). They have seen towns set on fire and razed down (in Konso). They have seen detainees poisoned (in Sabbataa). They have seen massacres on a sacred ground (Irrechaa) that was turned virtually into a killing field (Horaa Arsadii). They have seen children shot dead right in front of their moms (in Wallaggaa, in Arsi, in Harargee, and everywhere else).

Every day, those that are alive have lived under ‘the shadow of death.’ They have seen the regime mobilize one group of people against the other and lose loved ones and their means of livelihood as a result. They have seen snipers shoot young people in market places, in school compounds, and in the privacy of their homes. In short they have seen it all. So, what new thing they haven’t already seen is this emergency decree going to bring about? The answer given by almost everyone is a resounding “NOTHING!”

But while we are at it, it is important for us to ask what it means to declare a state of emergency in Ethiopia. What exactly is a state of emergency? When is it proper? Who declares emergency? What is the procedure? What is the implication for rights and for the exercise of power by the regime? Why is it declared now? What new thing is the regime planning to do under the guise of the emergency decree?

In what follows, I explore these questions in the light of the Ethiopian constitution (although no law, constitution or otherwise, has ever meant anything in Ethiopia). The key provision that regulates the mode, procedure, consequences, and implications of emergency declaration is article 93 of the Constitution.

What is emergency declaration? And when is it necessary?

Emergency decree is a decree of extraordinary situation. It is a law of abnormal times. It is a way of creating ‘legal illegality’ in a constitutional-political order invoking necessity on the ground of actual or impending war, crisis in law order, natural disasters, or break out of epidemics. It is a regime of exception-making through which the state is authorized to do what it cannot lawfully do under normal circumstances. Through emergency laws, a state is empowered to exercise special powers justified on the ground that the exigencies of political life has become so terrible that it demands a special set of measures.

According to the Ethiopian constitution (art 93(1)(a)), emergency is declared when there is:

a) external invasion;

b) a breakdown of law and order that cannot be managed through ordinary law-enforcement mechanisms;

c) natural disaster; or

d) epidemic.

One can see from the above that special measures that have to be effected through emergency decree are said to be necessary in times of war, crisis of public order, natural catastrophe, or the spread of contagious disease or plague that threatens the population.

According to the announcement of the Prime Minister, the cause of the emergency declaration today is the complete breakdown of law and order which has threatened the constitutional order. This is of course a concession on his part to the fact one can easily observe on the ground since the re-emergence of the #Oromoprotests on 12 November 2015.

Throughout the year Oromia—where military rule is imposed–has been completely ungovernable. Konso has also been ungovernable for the last eleven months. After July 2016, when the Amhara resistance broke out in Gonder, the Amhara region also became ungovernable by the regime thereby necessitating a military rule to be imposed there, too.

Who issues the Declaration of Emergency?

The necessity of such a decree is assessed and acted upon by the Council of Ministers (COM). But the COM is not the only institution that has a sole authority on the management of emergency situation. The power to declare emergency is shared between the Executive and the Legislature. According to art 93(2), owing to the urgency associated with emergency, the declaration may be issued unilaterally by the COM but it should be presented to the parliament within 48 hours if the parliament is in session. If the parliament refuses to approve it, the decree will be dead on arrival. If the parliament approves it by a 2/3rd majority vote, it becomes effective for up to six months from the date of declaration.

If the emergency happens in the season when the parliament is not in session—like it is the case now—the decree must be submitted to the parliament within fifteen days. This may necessitate calling a special or extraordinary meeting of the parliament. Without the approval of the parliament, no emergency decree can be effective. In other words, emergency power is shared between the two institutions, the executive (COM) and the legislature (HPR). The former has the power to generate the emergency bill and the latter has the power to approve or reject the decree submitted to it by the former.

The How of Emergency Declaration: Procedure

The process is activated when the COM decides to have such a decree after duly assessing the situation. If exceptional measures are found to be:

a) necessary; and

b) not preventable through any other measures.

Thus, the COM must demonstrate that there is a serious crisis in public order that it could not otherwise control through the activation of ordinary law-enforcement mechanisms. Once this is demonstrated, the decree is submitted to the Parliament for approval. On approval by parliament, it becomes the law of exceptional times. When it is duly approved by the parliament, the parliament establishes an Emergency Inquiry Board that supervises the humane treatment of all persons arrested in the course of enforcing the emergency (art 93(5)). The Board ensures the accountability of the executive for its measures taken during the emergency season.

What does Emergency entail? What are its consequences?

The declaration of emergency confers special powers on the executive. It empowers them to take measures necessary and proportional to avert the danger. Often, the executive is given latitude to suspend some constitutional rights as may be necessary to protect public peace and order. The usual candidates are rights such as freedom of assembly, demonstrations, movement, etc, which can be suspended for a limited period of time.

However, these powers are not open-ended. There is a limit to what the Executive can do. In particular, its actions are circumscribed by constitutional provisions that are non-derogable. The provisions relating to the right to life, freedom from torture and all forms of cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment or punishment, equality and non-discrimination, etc are often seen as universally inviolable under any circumstance. This emanates from the principle of sanctity of human life, human dignity, and fundamental equality in worth of all human beings.

In art 93 (4)(3)), these non-derogable provisions are five: art. 1 (the provision that has to do the nomenclature of the country and the system it denotes); art. 18 (the provision on the right to freedom from cruel, inhumane, and degrading punishment or treatment such as torture); art 25 (the provision on the right to equality and non-discrimination); art 39(1) (the provision on the right to self-determination including secession); and art 39(2) (the provision on the right to language, culture, and history). Curiously, the right to life (under arts 14 and 15) is not in the list of rights that cannot be suspended or limited during situations of emergency. Given the weight given to other structures such as the federal democratic republican structure and the name that denotes it; or to right of nations to self-determination; the absence of the right to life, the most fundamental of all human rights, in this list must be an oversight.

Why now? What Motivated the regime to Issue this declaration?

What is the point of this declaration? What new measures are to be taken other than those “merciless” measures that were being taken throughout the year? What rights are to be newly suspended and/or limited because they have been left unviolated thus far?

As we all know, the regime has virtually banned all forms of demonstrations, political meetings, associations, etc for a long time. We know that there is no press freedom in the country. Ethiopia is one of the top four jailers of journalists in the entire world. Arbitrary killing, mass arrests, detentions, tortures, discrimination, have been a matter of routine practice throughout the 25 years tenure of the regime, only exacerbated now in the context of the open mass revolt in the last couple of years.

The regime has always been confrontational with religious groups because it routinely and unscrupulously interferes with their freedom of religion.

Demanding the right to self-determination as per the constitution automatically renders one a terrorist because apparently, in EPRDF’s book, the right to self-determination is already exercised by all. As a result, identity is securitized, i.e., it is handled as a matter of threat to national security.

The right to one’s distinct language—e.g. the right to a choice of script—is routinely violated, a striking example being the regime’s denial of the right of the Erob people of Tigray Region to adopt a Latin script for their language.

In its total lawlessness, the regime had left no right unviolated be it bluntly or systematically. It is because of this that in terms of what rights it limits or what new power it confers on the executive, this declaration is inconsequential. There is nothing it changes on the ground. The resistance was happening while a full military rule organized by a Command Post chaired by the Commander-in-Chief himself was already in place. In the name of taking a “merciless and definitive” measure on protestors, the army and its Agazi Regiment, the Regional Special Forces, the Federal Police, the States’ Police Forces, Prison officials, and the Local Militia have all taken ultimate measures on civilians, children, mothers, and the elderly. They have applied the most barbaric methods of execution, massacre, torture, and abuse. Surely novelty will elude them in this regard. They have practised abuses that the world’s ghastliest torture centres and killing fields have witnessed in history.

The only question that remains now is why the regime issues this declaration now? What do they want to achieve? There are two possibilities: 1) to give a retrospective legal cover to atrocities they have been perpetrating so far and to exculpate the more extensive barbaric measures they are preparing to take in a last vindictive act just before they vacate power; and 2) to terrorize the public into temporary silence during which time they will dismantle major infrastructural facilities and move to the home base of the TPLF core of the regime. These possibilities are mere speculations, of course, but these are speculations that are hardly without reasons rooted in the conduct, words, and attitudes of the key figures in the regime.

SBS Radio’s Kassahun Negewo interviews Professor Getachew Haile

The TPLF has passed so many state of emergencies since 1995 and once again, it’s puppet prime minister sat in-front of his fellow puppets and talked about the foreign powers who are destabilizing the Tigre colonized empire and promised to deal with the Oromo protest shortly. He said “I want to talk to you about one big issue that have collided in our country, which is the destruction of properties”.

As in the past, the Tigreans have chastised their puppet slave that he will face great consequences for failing to protect Azeeb Mesfin and Alamudin’s colonial properties in Oromia. While it is understandable that the Tigreans have all the reason to get mad at their puppet ministers and killer agents, there is nothing they can do more than what they have already done thus far. Since the Oromo protest started, they have dispatched thousands of Agazii killers and double of that number of stand ready army to support the forces that are spread all over Oromia’s villages.

To supplement this effort, the TPLF have dispatched thousands of what it called the Federal riot-law enforcement forces and spying groups that roamed all over Oromia and the Amhara region. All this said and done, however, the colonizing force is not able to restore its colonial order any more. This is because the problem of TPLF goes beyond what they believe to be the reason of the protest.

First, the people of the empire don’t have faith in the law and justice system written by the TPLF because it doesn’t serve everyone equally. Although the fundamental tenet of the law put on paper by the TPLF might be acceptable, that legal system only protects the entitled Tigreans and their puppets, not the mass. For example, verdicts had been passed on tens of thousands of Oromians by the TPLF “cadre judges” and many of the jailed died in prisons after suffering from torture and poisoning.

Second, the TPLF government puppets talked about elections and peaceful means of struggle, but they took away all these rights by force and won all the elections for 25 years. That means, it is simply unfair to ask the population to respect the law even when they do not agree with the outcomes of the TPLF law.

Third, it is true that there can be no excuse for the murder, arson, theft, and vandalism by anyone. However, burning down the properties which the “the government” robbed from the people is the same as passing down the same verdict that the TPLF passed down on the population. Now, this being the case however, when the people took back their land, the TPLF’s particular concern, among other things, becomes about the properties that were burned down. Meantime, the lives they take on daily basis nothing compared to their financial losses. How convenient? Any way, it is more logical to think that if TPLF’s wanton destruction of the Oromo families lives, it can make sense to the Tigreans, every action that the Oromo people are taking must be a legitimate expression of their outrage with the TPLF injustice. That’s why no TPLF rationalization, no matter how heartfelt, no matter how eloquent, can make sense to the Oromo people.

Fourth, the Oromo people have seen gruesome images of murdering and cruel treatments that they will never forget. Some were horrifying almost beyond belief. Beyond that, there are other ugly acts that can never be erased out of Oromo memories. Among the many stories out which one sticks in my mind, is the photo of a young Oromo boy whose head is split into two with gun butt used by the Agazii soldiers in Ambo. Others are the savagely beaten women, old or young Oromo protesters at every corner of Oromia. This is truth which the puppet prime minister who blames the imaged foreign power’s destruction deny. What is true is that people who are now fighting the Agazii army are those who had been watching these images on television and saw the beating and the killings.

Fifth, there is now a widespread agreement among economists that the economic growth we’ve been told for 25 years is nothing but the story of the prosperity of the few. All the preaching and propagandas we’ve been told was the voices of the investors who felt secured and prevailed over poverty. However, all these propagandas never aligned with the reality on the ground. In addition to the lack of civil liberties and political representations in empire Ethiopia, the absence of fair and equitable institutions reversed the gains people made under the communist dictatorship led by Mangistu H. Ayaanaa. A very strong determining effect on aggregate incomes of the population is TPLF’s ability to revise the rules of the game in the direction it wants to. The fact that the entire empire belonged to the TPLF has led to a tendency that the TPLF/EPRDF members have exclusive right to land just like the European colonial forces, while TPLF’s overly ambitious agenda of “governance” aimed at building the “EMPIRE” with the help of the unrepresentative, ignorant and corrupt PDOs didn’t lead to the strengthening of the empire that the Tigreans now love more than anybody.

Sixth, the fact that the judiciary system was controlled by the TPLF, just like many other institutions, reduced the Oromo people to “second citizen” in their own country.

Now the TPLF bosses talk about listening to the people and reform the system, not understanding the fact that only the removal of the TPLF is what will bring true reform. To overcome the apparent inefficacies created by the TPLF required the wave of violence which the Tigre team is dealing with today. After all, reforms were made this way since the birth of empire Ethiopia, and the TPLF has to face violence for reform to come. What this means is that changing policies is not going to be effective to stop the violence. In fact, if I was part of the TPLF team, I would tell them to leave Oromia alone and stick to Minilik’s palace and enjoy life for three more years. After that retire in America and enjoy the billions of dollars saved overseas.

#OromoRevolution On what was called “Declaration of Emergency” in#Ethiopia:
By Henok G. Gabisa

1 – Arrests, brutal crackdown has been taking place already. What will this state of emergency change ?

The country has already been under the same exact situation of state of emergency. Since the first protest broke out in Ginchi town, the people have endured all kinds of governmental brutality with impunity. For all intents and purposes, Oromia fell under the rule of the command post as of December of 2015 (see EBC report on December 15 or 16 where Getachew Reda and the PM HMD vowed for “merciless and definitive” action/measure against the protesters). The same statement was made by HMD in regard to the Amhara protest a month ago. So, that means, the country is already in exact similar situation with state of emergency. No official of the regime has ever been investigated and prosecuted for the killings of hundreds and thousands of mass arrests in the past months.

If there is anything the declaration of the state of emergency tells us, it is a sinister move thought to be used as a legal cover by the regime to continue to exculpate or exonerate itself from mass murders, mass arrests, media blackout and all other vengeful actions it is taking against the public. It is just a final attempt to legalize and legitimize all that is to come.

It has to be noted that it is just legal and constitutional under Ethiopian legal system (Article 93 of the Constitution ) to kill during state of emergency. In Ethiopia, right to life is among lists of derogable rights contrary to the international human rights treaty obligations where observance of right to life should remain intact in any kind of emergency situation. Not that Ethiopia has ever observed its international duty, now we are witnessing an all-out war situation declared against the citizens.

It has to be noted that the declaration of emergency is yet to be published. This means, the regime will have an unaccountably and extremely broad margin of military actions to engage in a war-like battles against the public. That will be another self-caused recipe for the end of the regime.

2 – Do you see it more like a domestic or foreign oriented message?

I see it like a message desired to be conveyed to the foreigners that the regime is still in control, while in fact, the irony of the declaration is a deep cut that demystified the country is in fact unstable, volatile and more likely to explode contrary to the invented narrative built over the last decades.

3 – Do you see any room for dialogue in this crisis ?

I think the room for dialogue is closed. That ship has already sailed with the#Oromomassacre at #Irreechaa last week that was caused by military’s firing at the crowed at the sacred event and stampede that followed as a result. Nobody expected the regime goes that low. It proved to the people that the regime’s political psychology is hell bent on winning the battle by deploying the military at any expense, even though we can’t find an example anywhere in the world where people lost a battle to tyranny and dictatorship despite the journey it takes to see freedom and democracy desired in life.

Escalation to respond to TPLF “State of Emergency”
Issues:

People killed, arrested, abused, expatriated, marginalized, displaced, embezzled, and colonized by TPLF.
People have a choice of political and freedom fighter parties. TPLF denied people to respect people’s choice but painted those as anti-peace falsely.
People rejected TPLF.
Now TPLF announced “state of emergency” to further subdued people.
Lessons:

Some freedom fighters including OLF, ONLF were isolated, surrounded and damaged by TPLF.
Implication: TPLF can use to do the same on Oromo military and police. So, they should fight now against TPLF.

TPLF denied independent investigation.
TPLF undertook genocide at South, Ogden and, now, on Oromo. This can call for Oromo military and police must do the same on Tigree civilians.
Abroad:

Ask and get financial, materials, and medical facilities from developed nation to support victims of TPLF. (task force)
Ask sanctions against list of TPLF leaders.
Locally:

Warning before extensive and intensive measures
Ask with clear message other states including Amhara, Tigree to withdraw military forces from entering Oromia and supporting TPLF. Failure to compel lead to attack on their civilians.
Ask OPDO to peacefully resign and mix with their Oromo community. Doing so, forgive them!
Continues process
Help Oromo military and police to fight TPLF and their agents. There shouldn’t be conflict of interest between ABO, and OPDO’s forces to protect Oromo from genocide, and build consensus amongst Oromo.
Oromo military and police should announce release of jailed political parties and others. No one has a right to damage Oromo illegally.
Actionable targets practically or trigger on
TPLF and their relatives including intrusion into Tigray, Mekele, civilian Tigree
PM HD and his nearest relatives
Tigree in the military force
Tigree resources everywhere
Break bridge, dig road, railways beyond easily reparable
Mobilize to attack across all over: North, East, South, West including in road closure and destruction of targeted properties at once.
Two objectives:

TPLF must now resign and live peacefully before escalation. Power should be transferred to people’s choice. Otherwise,
TPLF and their resources must be abolished.

GENEVA (10 October 2016) –United Nations human rights experts today urged the Ethiopian authorities to end their violent crackdown on peaceful protests, which has reportedly led to the death of over 600 people since November 2015. They further called on the Government to allow an international commission of inquiry to investigate the protests and the violence used against peaceful demonstrators.

“We are outraged at the alarming allegations of mass killings, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of arrests and hundreds of enforced disappearances,” said the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Maina Kiai, the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances and on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnes Callamard. “We are also extremely concerned by numerous reports that those arrested had faced torture and ill-treatment in military detention centres.”

“In light of the lack of progress in investigating the systematic violence against protesters, we urge the Ethiopian Government to allow an international independent commission to assist in shedding light on these allegations,” they stated.

The human rights experts highlighted in particular the 2 October events in Oromia, where 55 people were killed in a stampede.

“The deaths in the Oromia region last weekend are only the latest in a long string of incidents where the authorities’ use of excessive force has led to mass deaths,” Mr. Kiai said noting that peaceful protests in the Ahmara and Konso Wereda regions have also been met with violence from authorities.

“The scale of this violence and the shocking number of deaths make it clear that this is a calculated campaign to eliminate opposition movements and silence dissenting voices,” he added.

The UN Special Rapporteurs voiced particular concern over the use of national security provisions and counterterrorism legislation – the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation 652/2009 – to target individuals exercising their rights to peaceful assembly.

“This law authorises the use of unrestrained force against suspects and pre-trial detention of up to four months,” Ms. Callamard noted while warning that many of the killings could amount to extrajudicial executions. “Whenever the principles of necessity and proportionality are not respected in the context of crowd control, any death caused by law enforcement officials is considered an extrajudicial execution,” she stressed.

The Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances urged the authorities to immediately disclose the whereabouts of those disappeared and emphasized that” all allegations of enforced disappearances must be thoroughly and independently investigated and perpetrators held accountable”.

Ethiopia’s current wave of mass protests began in the Oromia region in November 2015, in response to the Government’s ‘Master Plan’ to expand Addis Ababa’s boundaries, which would lead to the displacement of Oromo farmers. In Konso Wereda, the protests started in mid-December 2015 after the annexation of Konso into the Segen Area Peoples Zone. Protests later spread to other areas of the country, including the Ahmara region.

“Curtailing assembly and association rights is never the answer when there are disagreements in a society; rather, it is a sign of the State’s inability to deal with such disagreements,” Mr Kiai said. “Suffocating dissent only makes things worse, and is likely to lead to further social and political unrest.”

The experts underlined the urgent need to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for the violence. A group of UN experts made a similar call* in January 2016, which went unheeded, they noted.

Mr. Kiai, Ms. Callamard and the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances call has been endorsed by the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Michel Forst, Victoria Lucia Tauli-corpuz, Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Juan E. Méndez and the Chair-Rapporteur of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Roland Adjovi.

(*) Check the experts’ January statement:  http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16977&LangID=E

ENDS

The Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity. Learn more, log on to: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/SP/Pages/Welcomepage.aspx

UN Human Rights, Country Page – Ethiopia: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/AfricaRegion/Pages/ETIndex.aspx

For more information and media requests, please contact Ms. Marion Mondain (+41 22 91 79 540 / freeassembly@ohchr.org).

To view this press release online, visit: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20663&LangID=E

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Authoritarian regimes are very skilled in elevating the concept of denial to a whole different level. Their standard play book is almost identical regardless of geography, political orientation or culture. First, they begin with their over-inflated self-worth, that is followed by their exaggerated accomplishments, and when the end is near they view themselves as messianic saviors with the mission to save the country and its people. This is the natural growth process of authoritarian regimes. Among many one particular trait is the most common in their mind set, which is denial and self-deception.

In 2011, during the Libyan uprising, Muammar Gaddafi was asked about the rebellion engulfing the country to get rid of his regime. Gaddafi’s response was pure self-deception. He said “I am loved by all my people, and there are no protests in Tripoli.” He also said true Libyans had not demonstrated but those who had come on to the streets were under the influence of drugs supplied by al-Qaeda and they are thugs and mercenaries.[1]

At a news conference on Monday, October 10, 2016, the TPLF regime’s spokesperson, Getachew Reda, denied there was a locally organized uprising in the country. Instead, he singled out Eritrea and Egypt as sources of backing for “armed gangs”. He further elaborated stating, “we know for a fact that the terrorist group OLF has been receiving all kinds of support from Egypt.” [2] “Armed gangs”? Those young and aspiring university students, pregnant women, fathers, mothers, professionals murdered by Agazi are now being labeled as “armed thugs”? This is sad – the dead, as well as the living, don’t have respect in Ethiopia.

This kind of response to a popular uprising that is demanding nothing less than fundamental change could only be defined as self-deception. According to Stanley Cohen, this kind of pattern of   behaviour can be observed in an organizational or government structure when “people, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information ‘registers’ well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.” [3]

The blaming of ‘foreign enemies’ or ‘thugs’ is language we are accustomed to hear from authoritarian regimes time and again. As part of their self -deception and delusion, their minds continuously manufacture parallel stories completely opposite to the reality.

Susan Rice, US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said “When he can laugh in talking to… journalists while he is slaughtering his own people, it only underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality.” She added that Col. Gaddafi was “frankly delusional”. Sadly, the same Susan Rice also gave a glowing eulogy to another tyrant and one of the architects of the current mess in Ethiopia. Speaking at the funeral of Meles Zenawi, she said, “He was uncommonly wise – able to see the big picture and the long game, even when others would allow immediate pressures to overwhelm sound judgment. Those rare traits were the foundation of his greatest contributions.”[4] Well, I wonder if Ms. Rice would stand by her words after seeing where Ethiopia is today.

The declaration of the so-called ‘state of emergency’ is nothing more than a comical show. There is nothing the regime was not doing before the declaration of the state of emergency that it is going to do now. It is well documented by credible human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that the regime arbitrarily arrests, search homes with out a warrant, exercises extrajudicial killings, torture and a whole host of human rights violations. So, what is left? What different authority or power would be given to the security forces? The declaration of the ‘state of emergency’ is a comedy, except we can’t laugh!

TPLF is a regime that has overstayed a welcome that it didn’t have in the first place. Twenty-five years of repression, polarization and institutional terror is the only mechanism that kept it in power. Now, the people of Ethiopia from all corners, age, religion, and identity have spoken in one chorus: Enough! The declaration of a state of emergency is the last card all authoritarian regimes play while they are being shown they way out. In essence, the state of the emergency is the last gasp of a dying regime to feed their own self-deception and denial.

In the end, neither the self-deception nor the glowing words of their external supports can save authoritarian regimes from their demise. Any government can only govern with the consent and mandate of the people. A regime that absurdly claims that have won 100% of the vote has neither the consent nor the mandate to govern.  In Ethiopia we are witnessing the last sequence of a brutal authoritarian regime, state of emergency and the end!

The writer can be reached at alem6711@gmail.com

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12603259

[2] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/ethiopia-blames-foreign-enemies-stoking-unrest-161010100148946.html

[3] http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/27/1/Self-Deception-Delusion-and-Denial/Page1.html

[4] http://hornaffairs.com/en/2012/09/15/text-of-amb-susan-rice-speech-at-the-funeral-of-meles-zenawi/

Voice of Amara Radio 10 Oct 2016

ESAT 30 Min Mon Oct 10 2016

Once a Bucknell Professor, Now the Commander of an Ethiopian Rebel Army

Why Berhanu Nega traded a tenured position for the chance to lead a revolutionary force against an oppressive regime.

By JOSHUA HAMMERAUG. 31, 2016

Berhanu Nega was once one of Bucknell University’s most popular professors. An Ethiopian exile with a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, he taught one of the economics department’s most sought-after electives, African Economic Development. When he wasn’t leading seminars or puttering around his comfortable home in a wooded neighborhood five minutes from the Bucknell campus in rural Lewisburg, Pa., Nega traveled abroad for academic conferences and lectured on human rights at the European Parliament in Brussels. “He was very much concerned with the relationship between democracy and development,” says John Rickard, an English professor who became one of his close friends. “He argued that you cannot have viable economic development without democratization, and vice versa.” A gregarious and active figure on campus, he rooted for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cleveland Cavaliers, campaigned door-to-door for Barack Obama in 2008 and was known as one of the best squash players on the Bucknell faculty. He and his wife, an Ethiopian-born optometrist, raised two sons and sent them to top-ranked colleges, the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon. On weekends he sometimes hosted dinners for other Bucknell professors and their families, regaling them with stories about Abyssinian culture and history over Ethiopian food he would prepare himself; he imported the spices from Addis Ababa and made the injera, a spongy sourdough bread made of teff flour, by hand.

Nega remained vague about his past. But students curious enough to Google him would discover that the man who stood before them, outlining development policies in sub-Saharan Africa, was in fact intimately involved in the long-running hostility between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea, a conflict that has dragged on for half a century. By the start of the millennium, its newest incarnation, a border war over a patch of seemingly worthless ground just 250 square miles in size, devolved into a tense standoff, with the two nations each massing along the border thousands of troops from both official and unofficial armies. One proxy army fighting on the Eritrean side, a group of disaffected Ethiopians called Ginbot 7, was a force that Nega helped create, founding the movement in 2008 with another Ethiopian exile, Andargachew Tsege, in Washington. The Ethiopian government, which had previously detained Nega as a political prisoner for two years in Addis Ababa, now sentenced him to death in absentia. Bucknell students who did learn about their teacher’s past were thrilled. “It made his classes exciting,” Rickard says.

In Ginbot 7, Tsege served as the political leader based in Eritrea; Nega was the group’s intellectual leader and principal fund-raiser, collecting money from members of the Ethiopian diaspora in Europe and the United States. That all changed one day in June 2014, when Tsege, known to everyone as Andy, made a brief stopover in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, on his way to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. As he sat in the airport transit lounge, waiting to board his flight, Yemeni security forces, apparently acting in collusion with Ethiopian intelligence, arrested him and put him on a plane to Addis Ababa, where he was paraded on state television and currently faces a death sentence.

Days after Tsege’s arrest and extradition, Nega volunteered to replace him in Eritrea. “Was I going to remain an academic, sitting in an ivory tower criticizing things?” he told me. “Or was I going to do something as an engaged citizen?” Nega put his house up for sale and took an indefinite leave of absence from the university. It was an extended sabbatical, he told his colleagues. Only a handful of close friends, his wife and his two sons knew the truth.

On a hot July afternoon in 2015, Nega packed a suitcase, bade his wife farewell and was driven by comrades to John F. Kennedy International Airport. He carried a laissez-passer from the Eritrean government, allowing him a one-time entry into the country. Nega was heading for a new life inside a destitute dictatorship sometimes referred to as the North Korea of Africa; the regime was notorious for having supported the Shabab, an Islamist terrorist group in Somalia, and for a military conscription program that condemns many citizens over age 18 to unlimited servitude. Nega also believes he has drawn the scrutiny of the Obama administration and was worried about being stopped and turned around by Homeland Security. It wasn’t until the wheels on the EgyptAir jet were up and he was settling into his seat over the Atlantic Ocean, bound for one of the most isolated and repressive nations on Earth, that he was able to relax.

The lights cut out above Nega one chilly night this July, and the rebel chief sat in darkness in a bungalow in Asmara, Eritrea’s 7,600-foot-high capital. Nega had spread a map on a coffee table, and he was showing me the route for a clandestine mission that he planned to undertake the following morning. At dawn, he and a comrade would drive 300 miles southwest to the mined, militarized border between Eritrea and Ethiopia to rendezvous with intelligence sources at a rebel base camp. His contacts were smuggling across the border “highly sensitive information” about Ethiopian troop positions and about the strength of resistance cells inside Ethiopia, whom Nega was hoping to link up with his own fighters on the Eritrean side of the border.

“They’ve got documents, and they insist on handing them over only to me,” Nega told me. “When there is sensitive material, they first want me to see it and then filter the information to the rest of the organization.” Nega, a burly, balding 58-year-old with a rumpled facade and an appealingly unassuming manner, rubbed his forehead as the lights flickered and then returned. In recent years, Ginbot 7 has grown, and it is now guided by an 80-member council of representatives spread around the world. As commander, Nega oversees several hundred rebel fighters in Eritrea as well as an unknown number of armed members inside Ethiopia who carry out occasional attacks in the movement’s name. During his frequent visits to the front lines, he spends his time meeting with fellow commanders, observing training and — ever the professor — leading history and democracy seminars using chalk and a blackboard in a “classroom” in the bush.

Nega turned back to the map and traced a straight line leading to the Tekeze River, the westernmost border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The stream was a main crossing point for Ethiopian Army deserters fleeing to the rebels, and in recent weeks it had come under threat from advancing Ethiopian troops. “They are moving a sizable force into this area, because we are their main target now,” he said, referring to Ginbot 7, now known as Patriotic Ginbot 7. “And they are pushing a large part of their army, artillery and tanks into this zone. They haven’t started shelling us yet.”

The two nations, now ferocious enemies, were once joined. Eritrea, an Italian colony from 1890 until 1941, was annexed by Ethiopia after World War II; it took a three-decades-long war for the Eritreans to finally liberate themselves, in 1991. The neighbors remained at peace until 1998, when a simmering dispute over the Yirga triangle, a piece of rocky land along the border that had never been clearly demarcated in colonial maps, exploded into two years of tank and trench warfare in which 100,000 died. Today, despite a United Nations-supervised mediation that awarded the disputed territory to Eritrea, Ethiopia continues to occupy the border village Badame. Tens of thousands of troops face each other across a landscape of mines, bunkers, sniper posts and other fortifications.

Violence on the border, while infrequent, can be both sudden and brutal. In mid-June, according to the Eritrean government, Ethiopia launched a full-scale attack along the frontier at Tsorona, the first major incursion since 2012, possibly in retaliation for attacks on its forces by Ginbot 7. Eritrea claimed that it had killed 200 enemy soldiers and wounded 300, though Ethiopia downplayed its losses. “They almost always deny it,” Nega told me. “As far as the Ethiopian government is concerned, nobody ever dies.”

Ethiopia, while an American ally and an economic leader by African standards, is notoriously repressive. The minority Tigrayan regime has jailed hundreds of bloggers, journalists and opposition figures, keeping itself in power by intimidating political opponents, rigging elections and violently putting down protests. Since November of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, state security forces killed more than 400 protesters in the Oromia region, which surrounds Addis Ababa. Protests have recently spread to the Amhara region, as well; in August, security forces shot dead roughly 100 demonstrators and injured hundreds more. Thousands of Oromos, a minority group that makes up about a third of the population, have been jailed without trial on suspicion of supporting the Oromo Liberation Front, a secessionist group. The Ethiopian marathoner Feyisa Lilesa, who won the silver medal at the Olympics this year, drew global attention to the government’s abuses when he held his crossed arms over his head at the finish line in solidarity with his fellow Oromos; he says he fears returning home and is seeking political asylum.

Across the room in Nega’s bungalow, four fellow rebel commanders, all members of the Ethiopian diaspora, were finishing their supper. The men tore off pieces of injera and dipped the bread into a thick sauce called shiro, washing down the meal with bottles of the local Asmara beer. Esat, an Ethiopian opposition satellite channel broadcast from Europe and the United States, played softly on a television in the corner. The men were part of a revolving contingent of commanders who returned to Asmara from time to time to check their email and escape the primitive conditions in the bush. “We are five right now,” Nega said, introducing me to his comrades from Dallas; Arlington, Va.; Calgary, Canada; and Luxembourg. “Another, from the United Kingdom, is returning here tomorrow morning. We’ll be six when he comes. Last week we were eight — at one point we were 11.”

The house also serves as an infirmary for rebels who become ill or are wounded in combat, and it provides a temporary sanctuary for Ethiopian Army defectors who cross the front lines. One recent arrival was a former Ethiopian Air Force officer, an Oromo who had traveled north 42 hours by bus and on foot, then swum across the Tekeze River to Eritrea. He made the decision to defect while sitting in an Addis Ababa jail cell on “false charges,” he told me, of being a member of the Oromo secessionist movement.

Zalambessa, Ethiopia, a city on the border with Eritrea, was almost entirely destroyed during the two countries’ war, sparked by a dispute over a tiny parcel of rocky land. Credit Boris Heger/Associated Press

“We have many like him,” Nega said.

Nega put on his jacket to head off in search of diesel fuel for the morning journey to the border. With another rebel comrade from Virginia, we drove down the deserted, lightless streets of Asmara, searching for an open filling station, but the one we found had run out of diesel; Nega would have to return the next morning, delaying his departure for the front lines. When we returned to his home, Nega pointed to a pile of medical supplies in the hallway — bandages, splints, antibiotics, antimalarials — that he was planning to ferry to his fighters, and three cardboard boxes packed with solar cells that would provide some rudimentary electricity in the bush. While in the camps, Nega was dependent on his mobile phone for contact with the outside world, but even that was not guaranteed. “They have shut off phone coverage since the incursion” by the Ethiopians at Tsorona, he told me. “I’ll be out of touch for days.”

When I first met Nega, in late May 2016, the conditions were decidedly more comfortable. After 10 months in Asmara, Nega had flown back to the United States to attend meetings and the graduation of his younger son, Iyassu, from the University of Pennsylvania. Given his deepening involvement in a rebellion against an American ally, it was possible that this would be the last time he could visit the United States. Indeed, Nega, who is not an American citizen, had his State Department-issued “travel document” suspended three years ago, and his application for United States citizenship has been put on indefinite hold. He now travels on an Eritrean passport; together with his green card, it gained him entry into the country — this time. The State Department would not comment on Nega or Ginbot 7, but Nega surmises that the Obama administration does not look favorably on his activities. Still, he insists, “nobody is saying, ‘Back off.’ I think they know that this is not about being against the U.S. We are upholding the basic principles under which the U.S. was established.”

We met over Memorial Day weekend on the terrace of the upscale Café Dupont on Dupont Circle in Washington, joined by his sister Hiwot, who runs a technology start-up in New York, and Iyassu, a 21-year-old former high-school track star who was starting work at a New York investment bank in the fall. Over white wine and chicken salad, the conversation touched on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s commencement address and Nega’s excitement over crossing paths, after the ceremony, with Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden. (Trump’s daughter and Biden’s granddaughter were members of Iyassu’s graduating class.) I asked Iyassu if he had reconciled himself to the idea of his father’s new life on the front lines, and he said that he had. “Ultimately he should continue to pursue what he believes in,” he told me. He expressed little interest, though, in visiting his father at his Eritrean rebel camp or delving deeper into the raison d’être of the Ginbot 7 movement. “I just got out of college — my life has its own direction,” he said. “I can’t take time off. … I’m a little bit removed generationally as well.”

The elder Nega is part of a generation of Ethiopians who grew up amid violence and tumult. Over lunch, he recalled what it was like to be a high-school student when a Marxist junta, the Soviet-backed Derg, overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie and ushered in a brutal dictatorship. Nega had grown up privileged, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur, and he watched as his father’s vast commercial corn and soybean farms were seized and security forces began arresting, imprisoning and executing thousands of dissidents, including many students. He and his two older sisters joined a resistance movement called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (E.P.R.P.). They went underground, living in safe houses, eluding the police. His eldest sister was later captured and disappeared in the Derg’s prisons. His family searched for her everywhere.

“We had people coming to our house and telling my parents, ‘I saw her at this place.’ My mother used to go out all over looking for her,” Nega recalls. Her former cellmates later told him that she had died in prison, probably by committing suicide with a cyanide capsule that she wore around her neck. “It was common to have cyanide with you because if you were caught, you would be tortured and executed, and through torture you might be forced to betray people,” Nega said. As the crackdown in Addis intensified, the E.P.R.P. sent Nega north to Tigray province, the center of a growing guerrilla war against the Derg; there, he carried out attacks on government forces. In 1978 a power struggle erupted within the E.P.R.P. leadership, and Nega was thrown into prison. He was released one day before guards turned their guns on the remaining prisoners, killing 15. Nega escaped to Sudan, living as a refugee in Khartoum for nearly two years, then obtained political asylum in the United States in 1980.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he also played on the soccer team. While studying for his doctorate at the New School for Social Research, he lived in Brooklyn and wrote his dissertation on the failures of Ethiopian agriculture under the Communist regime. Meanwhile, Ethiopia was sliding deeper into calamity. When the guerrilla movements increased their attacks in Tigray in the mid-1980s, the Derg dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, blocked food supplies to the region, creating a devastating famine in which one million people died. Photographs of starving children, disseminated by the news media, catalyzed an international relief effort, Live Aid, and inspired the pop hit “We Are the World,” making Ethiopia a worldwide synonym for hunger. The famine had wound down, and the rebel war was escalating, when Bucknell hired Nega as an assistant professor in 1990. “He never trumpeted his background, the fact that he had been a guerrilla fighter,” says Dean Baker, a former Bucknell colleague who now heads the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

In 1991, after a decade’s struggle, three rebel groups — the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front — defeated the Derg and marched into Addis Ababa. The new government, led by the Tigrayan rebel leader Meles Zenawi, set about rebuilding the war-shattered nation. Nega finally had reason for optimism. He knew Meles well — the prime minister had been in the same university class as his dead sister — and after the Tigrayans consolidated power, Nega obtained a leave of absence from Bucknell and flew with his wife and two sons, both toddlers, back to Addis, determined to help rebuild the country. Nega believed that Meles “had good intentions,” he told me.

But Nega’s enthusiasm for the new government wore off quickly. At Addis Ababa University, where he taught part-time (he had also taken over several of his father’s businesses), administrators cracked down on dissent, banning the student government and the school newspaper. When Nega encouraged his students to press for academic freedoms, police assaulted them and other demonstrators; later, as unrest spread through the city, they shot 41 people dead. Nega spent a month in jail for abetting the protests. “At night I was hearing prisoners being tortured, beaten,” he says.

‘Was I going to remain an academic, sitting in an ivory tower criticizing things? Or was I going to do something as an engaged citizen?’

In May 2005, with the economy growing rapidly and the government’s popularity appar­ently high, Ethiopia held elections, the first truly multiparty vote in Ethiopia’s history, and invited international observers to attend. But the results were not to Meles’s liking. Nega’s Coalition for Unity and Democracy won 137 of the 138 seats on the City Council in Addis Ababa. Nega was poised to become mayor, but the government denied his party the victory and jailed him along with other C.U.D. leaders. American colleagues began a campaign to free Nega. “The Bucknell faculty approved a motion to support him and call attention to his plight,” Rickard says. “We talked with journalists, ambassadors, trying to make sure that he stayed on the front burner.” International pressure helped to secure Nega’s release after 21 months, and he returned to the United States. The experience “hardened him,” says Samuel Adamassu, a member of the Ethio­pian diaspora who has known Nega and his family since the 1980s. “It made him realize these people are not willing to change without being forced.”

After our lunch in Washington, I attended a fund-raising rally for Ginbot 7 at the Georgetown Marriott, attended by about 500 members of the Ethiopian diaspora. Nega stood before a backdrop of Ethiopian and American flags. It would be a fight to the death, he assured the cheering crowd. “There is no negotiation with someone who is coming to rape you,” Nega went on in Amharic, the principal language of Ethiopia. “We have to stop them.” The contrast between the mild-mannered academic I had met on the patio of the Café Dupont and the fiery rebel leader was striking. Nega announced that he had brought news from the front lines: Guerillas claiming loyalty to his movement had carried out their most significant attack to date, outside the town Arba Minch, in southern Ethiopia, formerly the site of an American drone base. “We killed 20 soldiers and injured 50 of them,” he said, calling it “a new stage in the struggle.” (The Ethiopian government claimed they foiled the attack and killed some of the gunman.)

When Nega helped found the Ginbot 7 movement in 2008, the year he returned to teaching at Bucknell, he explained that the movement would seek to “organize civil disobedience and help the existing armed movements” inside and outside Ethiopia and “put pressure on the government, and the international community, to come to a negotiation.” Yet the Ginbot 7 platform advocated destabilizing the government “by any means necessary,” including attacks on soldiers and police. It was a discordant message coming out of a liberal American university whose first class was held in the basement of the First Baptist Church of Lewisburg in 1846. “It’s a line that he has crossed,” says Rickard, the English professor, who finds Nega’s advocacy of violence “troubling” but understandable. “He has never been a pacifist, never renounced armed struggle,” he says. “He has seen elections overturned, hundreds of people murdered on the streets. His sister died, and his best friend is in prison, in peril of his life. He sees violence as viable and necessary. It’s kind of shocking, in a way.”

While Ginbot 7 started to foment its resistance, Ethiopia was busy rebranding itself as an economic success story. Following South Korean and Chinese models of state-directed development, Meles borrowed from state-owned banks and used Western aid money to invest heavily in dams, airlines, agriculture, education and health care. Ethiopia’s economy took off, averaging nearly 11 percent growth per year for the last decade, one of the highest rates in Africa. Addis Ababa became the showpiece of the country’s transformation, with a light rail system, ubiquitous high-rise construction and luxury hotels, high-end restaurants and wine bars packed with newly minted millionaires. At the same time, the country was becoming a bulwark against the spread of radical Islam in the Horn of Africa. Today Ethiopia provides 4,400 peacekeepers to an African Union force in Somalia and helps keep the peace along the tense border between North and South Sudan. In July 2015 President Obama, on an African tour, paid the first visit ever to Ethiopia by a sitting American president.

Yet in the classroom and abroad, Nega argued that Ethiopia’s transformation was a mirage, created to placate Western observers troubled by the lack of democracy. “In 2005, it became clear that legitimacy would not come through the political process, so they started this new narrative — development,” he told me. Nega insists that Ethiopia has “cooked the books,” and that its growth rate is largely attributable to huge infrastructure projects and Western development aid, with little contribution from the private sector. “The World Bank is throwing money at Ethiopia like there’s no tomorrow,” he told me. The actual growth rate, he insists, is closer to 5 to 6 percent — per capita income is still among the lowest in the world — and the weakness of the country’s institutions will mean that even this rate cannot be sustained.

Two months before Obama arrived, the government presided over what was widely considered a sham election, in which the ruling party won all 547 seats in Parliament, But Obama, making it clear that security trumped other concerns in the Horn of Africa, stood beside Meles’s successor, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, and described the government as being “democratically elected.”

“I was shocked,” Nega told me. “ I understand the reality of power and why he supports the Ethiopian government, but to say it is ‘democratically elected’? I was disgusted.”

Three days after my first meeting with Nega in Asmara, and shortly after he returned from his border rendezvous, we drove in the late afternoon in his white Hilux pickup truck through the landscape of his new life. We passed the run-down and nearly deserted Asmara Palace Hotel, formerly an Intercontinental Hotel, and a large Catholic church that Nega couldn’t identify. “I’m a lousy tourist guide,” he said apologetically. While in Asmara, he spends most of his time hunkered down either in his residence or at a borrowed office in the center of town — one of the few places in the city with a high-speed internet connection. Eritrea has the lowest internet penetration in the world, with only about 1 percent of the population online, and this rare broadband connection allows him to catch up regularly on Skype with his sons and his wife. “I don’t think she’s very happy about my being here,” he admitted, shifting uncomfortably. “We have really stopped talking about it.”

Immediately following its independence in the early 1990s, under the rebel-leader-turned-president Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea was briefly considered one of the hopes of Africa. When I visited the country in 1996, five years after it won its liberation from Ethiopia, the former rebels were starting to revive the wrecked economy — rebuilding roads, bridges and a railway to the coast, calling on the Eritrean diaspora to invest. But after the border war between 1998 and 2000, Eritrea’s leadership turned inward, growing increasingly suspicious of the outside world. Afwerki suppressed dissent, expelled Western journalists and NGOs, turned down foreign aid, nationalized industries and discouraged foreign investment; according to the World Bank, per capita income is about $1,400 a year. In 2009 the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Eritrea, including an arms em­bargo and a travel ban and a freeze on the assets of top Eritrean officials, for providing weapons to the Shabab, the radical Islamist group that has carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya. (Eritrea called the allegation “fabricated lies.”) A June 2016 United Nations report accused the Eritrean government of committing “crimes against human­ity,” including torture, jailing dissidents and the open-ended military conscription program that the government justifies as preparation against another Ethiopian invasion.

With virtually no investment coming into the country, Asmara has become a city frozen in time. Two donkeys meandered down Harnet Avenue, the capital’s main boulevard, stopping to nibble at a patch of grass around a palm tree. As we watched the crowds walk down the tidy avenue lined by an imposing red brick cathedral, a 1930s-era Art Deco movie theater and crumbling Italian bakeries and cappuccino bars, Nega defended his decision to turn to the dictatorship for support.

“Do we really have to discuss the kind of dictatorships that the U.S. sleeps with?” he asked me. “Here is a country that was willing to give us sanctuary, a country that had once been part of Ethiopia. I look at any of these people, I talk to them, and they are just like me, they are as Ethiopian as I am. Why should I not get help from them?”

Nega insisted that he saw some positives in the dictatorship. “This is the only country that says, despite its poverty, ‘We are going to chart our own course — whether you like it or not,’ ” he told me. “They are not corrupt. You see these government officials driving 1980s cars, torn down the middle. I have seen their lives, their houses. There is some element of a David-and-Goliath struggle in this thing.” He called the United Nations report describing crimes against humanity an “exaggeration.” (A Western diplomat in Asmara I talked to, who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivities of his position, agreed with Nega’s assessment of the report, saying it was based on testimony of refugees in Europe who had “an interest in depicting their country as badly as possible to justify their status.”)

It goes without saying that Nega was reluctant to speak harshly about the nation that was providing his movement with a refuge — and that could snatch it away at any moment. “I don’t want to butt into their personal issues,” he said carefully. “They’ve always been nice to us.” Out of the public eye, however, the rebel leader can be more critical. “He holds no illusions about Eritrea,” says his friend and former Bucknell colleague Dean Baker.

I asked Nega if he was confident that pressure by the rebel groups could bring down the Ethiopian government. Nega believed that momentum was on his side. “This resistance to the state is coming in every direction now, in all parts of the country,” he said. He was giving himself “four or five years” before he and his rebel forces entered Ethiopia as part of a new democratic dispensation. “It certainly won’t be a decade,” he told me.

Until that happens, Nega will continue planning and preparing from a precarious and lonely limbo. Back at the bungalow, he led me down the corridor and showed me where he slept: a monastic chamber furnished with a single bed, an armoire and a night table strewn with jars of vitamins and blood-pressure medication. (He lost his medical insurance when he left Bucknell, but still has American insurance coverage through his wife, and he picked up a three-month supply of the medicine on his May trip to the United States.) He retrieved from the freezer a chilled bottle of Absolut and poured two glasses. We sat in the concrete courtyard, beside a clothesline draped with Nega’s laundry. The power failed again, casting us into total darkness, then returned a few seconds later. The contrast with his previous life in the States — cheering for the Lewisburg Green Dragons, his son’s high-school track team; vacationing on the beaches of Maryland and North Carolina with his extended family — could hardly have been more extreme.

“If you like comfort, and that’s what drives you, you’ll never do this,” he told me, taking a sip of the ice-cold vodka. “But sometimes you get really surprised. Once you have a commitment to something, all these things that you thought were normal in your day-to-day life become unnecessary luxuries.”