Tag: Featured

The World Food Program reports that “Ethiopia has made important development gains over
the past two decades, reducing poverty and expanding investments in basic social services.
However, food insecurity and malnutrition are still a major concern across the country; an
estimated 20.4 million people currently require food support. This includes internally displaced
persons (IDPs), who have had to leave their homes due to the conflict in the country’s north
and the severe drought in south and southeast.” This is a huge challenge that must be
addressed now.

Abiy has learned the hard way that in terms of power, Addis Ababans who defeated the tribalization of Addis Ababa schools pale in comparison to the EOTC. No institution in the entire continent of Africa has the power to mobilize support in comparison to EOTC. Apart from the Church’s institutional architecture that commands over 60 million members, other social institutions from ጽዋ to እድር are associated with the Orthodox social enterprise.

In today’s Ethiopia, ethnonationalist movements have continued to fuel inter-ethnic animosity and violence that continue to further weaken the country. A tolerant political culture and social capital that had long defined Ethiopians have become a thing of the past. Now that a possibility of religious violence is added to the list of problems that threaten the peace, the fragile state of Ethiopia is facing a major catastrophe that should not be taken lightly.

Today, the Abiy Administration upped its threat by telling the Church they cannot protest during the Sunday prayer session. Over a million Orthodox followers are expected to attend Church services to pray for the wellbeing of their Church. Obviously, the mass will overflow outside of Church compounds. This is common in Ethiopia when churches and mosques gather for prayer and peaceful protest.

The international community that is financing the Abiy administration has moral responsibility to ensure bullets that were bought with their funds are not used to kill Christians. In recent months, the Abiy government has been piling weapons and the PM has threatened the Church and its followers that his administration has tools that it has not used in the past.

Ethiopians of Tigrayan descent, residing both inside and outside of Tigray, have contacted this researcher to request greater scrutiny of grassroots Tigrayan opinion on the ongoing conflict in Northern Ethiopia. These “silenced voices” have been characterized by many Western analysts and English-language media as supportive of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a vanguard armed group that exercises authoritarian control of both the “Tigray government” and the “Tigray Defense Forces.”

Structural violence is the root cause of the ongoing political crisis in Ethiopia. To understand the full picture of the current crisis, therefore, it is important to fully understand the historical, contextual, sociopolitical, and cultural dynamics of where Ethiopia is heading. Doing so makes it evident that the current debacle stems from the self-proclaimed apartheid constitution that segregate the diverse Ethiopian people along ethnolinguistic lines.

While no one questions the plight and suffering of the Tigrayan population, the displaced northern Afar communities can literally watch aid trucks drive past them and through their region, to hand over aid to the very leaders who are destroying their lives.  Humanitarianism should not discriminate across ethnicity. The Afar, shaken by the same lack of basic services as Tigray but, at the same time, suffering grave atrocities, destruction of their assets and displacement from their lands, still wait for their turn – both from national and international institutions – of receiving greater help. Selective outrage is outrageous indeed. 

Ethiopians have now been in pain as this war and the destruction it caused continue to linger. And it is very painful for all to watch. Moreover, TPLF’s history of corruption and divisive rule, recent atrocious actions, pro-war rhetoric, and political vision show that what it is attempting is not take over Ethiopia. Because its elites already understand that an Ethiopia that accepts its second coming is nonexistent. But its objective is to dismantle the Ethiopian state as we know it, which in turn takes the Horn of Africa towards unchartered territories of violence, displacements, and even potential war of all against all.

The adoption of unilateral coercive economic measures by the US is a flagrant breach of the fundamental principle of sovereign equality in international law and violates the basic norms of international relations as enshrined in the UN Charter, countless UN General Assembly resolutions, charters of various regional organizations, such as the Charter of the Organization of American States and the Constitutive Act of the African Union, and numerous international treaties, including the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

No wonder that the late Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, had to go out of the constitution and resort to dictatorial methods to protect his power and prevent the country from falling apart. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the refusal to generate a collective being, a general will by transcending ethnic distinctions turns any officeholder, including the Prime Minister, into a representative of an ethnic group.