By Tesfay Atsbeha and Kahsay Berhe
Gold and wax on the form of organization
The inhuman measures of expelling Ethiopians from their own country in the district of Gura Ferda, Ethiopia
should outrage all Ethiopians. How can hardworking innocent farmers,
women and children who were living legally be deprived of their houses,
farmland and belongings and evicted by force, simply because they are
ethnic Amharas? The root cause of this crime is the backward and
divisive ethnic politics of Meles Zenawi.
Since
tyrants normally fear the elite of a people whom they want to
subjugate, they try to destroy or weaken the elite as Hitler and Stalin
did in Poland and the Italian fascists did in Ethiopia. A similar
repressive policy has been causing a brain drain in Ethiopia in the last
decades. On the top of that, Meles is harassing poor and harmless
people like the Amharas, Anuaks and Afars, who do not pose a threat to
his power.
According
to the internal magazine of the Marxist- Leninist League of Tigray
(MLLT) called: “May Day” in the late 1980s, the Amharas should not be
organized as Amharas and the cadres of Meles, like Addis Alem Balema
(later Ambassador, etc…) were sent to convince the members of the MLLT
in Europe of the alleged need that the Amharas should not be ethnically
organized. It would have sufficed to pass orders to the members of the
TPLF/MLLT in Tigray to let them accept whatever Meles wanted, but the
members in Europe asked why the form of organization should not be left
for the Amharas themselves to decide.
They were told that the Russians
who were members of the oppressor nation like the Amharas were organized
as Party committees of Petrograd and Moscow by the Bolsheviks and not
as Russians. The discussion grew hot. The participating members in a
meeting in London told Addis Alem that they have neither the right to
decide on how Amharas should organize themselves nor the duty to imitate
whatever the Russians did and rejected the proposal.
The
discussion looked like a combination of gold and wax. Meles seemed to
see ethnicity as a source of as well as a danger for his power at the
same time. Whereas ethnic division would enable him to divide and rule,
he wouldn’t succeed if the Amharas and Oromos got their own respective
independent organisations. The Amharas would be too strong if they
organized themselves ethnically and those who opposed meddling in the
rights of the Amharas suspected what Meles wanted, but they could not
discuss openly to avoid being incriminated by Meles for opposing what he
did not present openly. Therefore the indirect agitation (the Russian
argument) was unanimously (except the cadres of Meles) opposed by the
participants.
It is a paradox. Meles seems to fear the Amharas not
only because they have the experience and the potential to remove him
from power, but also because they stand for Ethiopian unity. Although
his history will be associated with Ethiopia as he is (mis) ruling the
country, Meles is opposed to all who stand for the unity of all
Ethiopians.
This is the reason why Meles lumps together the
multi-national organizations to bogeymen as interhamwe, chauvinists,
neftegna and remnants of the Derg. Meles also hated the EPRP more than
any other organization in Ethiopia not because it is an Amahra
Organization, since many Tigrayans and other non-Amharas in leadership
positions belonged to its founders, but because it is for the unity of
Ethiopia and it was aware of his machinations. Of course, Meles used to
say that the source of the dangerousness of the EPRP was the
attractiveness of its program to the petty bourgeoisie.
The TPLF and the puppet organizations
When
the All Amhara People’s Organization (AAPO) came into being, Meles was
forced to declare the formation of his own Amhara organization called
Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM) led by non-Amharas. It was
the Ethiopian people’s Democratic Movement (EPDM) which was renamed to
ANDM. Some members of the EPRP who didn’t want to continue the struggle
as members of the EPRP, who had neither their own program nor the
ability to form an independent organization went over to the TPLF. They
were at first disarmed in the vicinity of Abergelle by the TPLF but not
treated as POWs, because they came to the TPLF voluntarily while the
fighting between the TPLF and the EPRP was going on.
They might have
taken a pre-emptive measure to avoid being taken prisoner. Most of them
went abroad and the remaining few formed the EPDM with the help of the
TPLF. To their credit, they had already struggled as members of the EPRP
and they decided to continue the struggle, instead of giving up. The
EPDM was created as a puppet of Meles who dissected it into ethnic
components with some transplantation in its leadership. In all fairness,
the difference between the members of the TPLF on the one hand and the
other members of the EPRDF like the ANDM, OPDO and SEPDM is that the
TPLF was formed by its own members while the others were formed by the
TPLF even from prisoners of war. In other words, the TPLF was unlike the
others, not a puppet in the beginning.
The homogenization of the members of the EPRDF as Puppets
The
similarity of all EPRDF members (except Meles) is their homogenization
as puppets. None of them has the right to express his/her own opinion,
if the opinion differs from that of the tyrant. Some of the members are,
owing to the fact that they are puppets, very powerful and rich
puppets.
Gura Ferda and shame to the members of the EPRDF
Why
are there no members of the EPRDF with a bit of courage to rescue their
compatriots in Gura Ferda? Many Ethiopians would have gone to the
streets to demonstrate against the inhuman treatment of Ethiopians in
Gura Ferda if they had no fear of the members of the EPRDF who maintain
tyranny. If there are some EPRDF members who care for their people they
must first free themselves.
The perpetrators of Gura Ferda should
be accused of committing crimes against humanity, because “these
offences constitute a serious attack on human dignity, grave humiliation
and degradation of more human beings” according to the Rome Statute of
the International Criminal Court. The victims should be compensated and
helped to return to their farms.
