The government’s reluctance and delay in providing access to credible international investigators has contributed to the frenzy of vicious propaganda by local and foreign bottom feeders. The Ethiopian government must provide unfettered access to respected and respectable international human rights agencies and media outlets.
The story dated February 11, 2021, titled ‘ETHIOPIA: UNLAWFUL SHELLING OF TIGRAY URBAN AREAS’ reported by Laetitia Bader, is biased, exaggerated, mostly non-factual and dishonorable. It is incomprehensible that a prestigious organization that protects and fights for all human rights abuses cherry picks and chooses which life is more valuable and which life is not.
There are countless issues facing Ethiopia today. Internal security challenges, boarder conflict, anti-Ethiopia efforts by Egypt because of the GERD and rebuilding Tigray are few of them. We are also heading to a landmark election in June 2021. The forces of darkness, the relics of the turbulent years, the “liberation” junkies are all out with negative messages months before the election. These need to be challenged. We hope for the best that public opinion will reject these false witnesses.
The sycophantic praise and canonization of the former TPLF officials, hailing them as noble, saint-like figures, ignores the considerable blood on their hands and is a whitewashing of their long history of serious crimes and grave atrocities. It is fundamentally wrong and an act of sheer dishonesty – the worst form of historical revisionism.
Egypt, along with the merchants of poverty in Africa, are using carrot and stick approach to use Sudan as a proxy to intimidate Ethiopia at the expense of unstable and impoverished Sudanese people. Egypt heavily relies on the Janjaweed military Junta who are now in the transitional military council of Sudan for its plot.
As the United Nations is major global institution that is presumably neutral, it cannot depend on unreliable, unattributable information. It has the obligation to get information from all parties and analyse them adequately before taking sides. Biased information erodes its credibility and hurts the people it alludes to help. The UN must be impartial.
Opposition political leaders should start shaping political dialogue by extolling the civic values of liberty, tolerance, transparency and development over ethnic identity. Getting the population out of poverty should take center stage. Ethiopia deserves a better political system than fatal obsession with ethnocentric federalism.
A democratic territorial-based federalism would ensure that individual and group rights are conferred based on residency and not ethnicity. In fact, this arrangement would be the best model to advance inclusive, equitable, and sustainable socio economic growth, democratization, and good governance; while at the same time, enhancing the stability and security of Ethiopians and the Ethiopian State.
Nearly three decades of its implementation has amply demonstrated that the Ethiopian Constitution has not bode well for our country. Its weakness has been made worse by its inbuilt mechanism of blocking amendments. A nation of over a hundred million people ought not be taken captive by a document put in place by an unscrupulous group, i.e., the TPLF and its accomplices.
If Ethiopia is going to have a decent post-conflict economic recovery, this mixing of business with politics, the ethnically centered enterprise empire-building, and few family-controlled conglomerates need to be reformed. The opportunity should not be missed.
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