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Addis Ababa’s largest cemetery to be uprooted

Some families whose loved ones are buried at the St. Joseph (Kidus Yosef) Cemetery in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa have contacted Ethiopian Review with information that the land is needed for development and that they need to remove the remains of their relatives.

Families are being told to {www:disinter} their relatives and rebury them on some plot of land located on the road to Jimma.

Obviously the information is terribly upsetting to a lot of people. Yosef Cemetery is about as old as the city of Addis Ababa and almost every resident of the city has some relative buried there.

Addis Ababa Administration, whose mayor is Meles Zenawi’s puppet Kuma Demeks, has warned that the bodies that are not moved by a certain date will be dumped in a mass grave.

Addis Ababa can expand in several directions and there is no shortage of land (see the video below). So it is not clear why the ruling junta is subjecting hundreds of thousands, may be millions of families to the {www:ghoulish} process of exhuming graves.

Kidus Yosef Cemetery is the final resting place for thousands of Ethiopian heroes and patriots such as Abebe Bikila, as well as average citizens. It is a cemetery steeped in Addis Ababa and Ethiopian history.

We invite readers who are knowledgeable about the Yosef Cemetery to share with us what they know about its historical significance to Addis Ababa and the whole nation of Ethiopia.

54 thoughts on “Addis Ababa’s largest cemetery to be uprooted

  1. well, the dead are to be respected, i understand and agree. hopely the exhume and reburial will be of benefit to the development of ethiopia.
    in any case with all the land in Addis Ababa, could the development be done somewhere else? i smell a rat!

  2. I don’t why people are insulting Elias on this particular topic, this is a news for some of us whose relatives are buried there. Cemetry demolition is becoming a big money making machine. Last year when they removed all the old cemetrys from Debrelibanos gedam they charged $2500bir for removing and $29,000bir for reburing. If your parents are buried there you are not going to let them throw their exhumes in a mass grave specially if you are lviving abroad. This is another way to milk the diasporans an extra money. This is not going to be the lastone too several more will come as long as Meles Zenawi is in power.

  3. My father, my sister and brother were buried in Kidus Yosef Cemetery. The thought of removing anyone from their final resting place makes me sick to my stomach. Especially my father’s. He was a well respected military officer who fought for his country until the end. Now, the children of the country he protected and loved until his final day are throwing his body out from his grave. This is not only inhuman, but also a tragedy to all Ethiopians.

  4. Both my parents were buried there. I cannot believe that any government or municipal authority will do that. If this is true, God at the end will re-pay this government. Their end will be worse than Mengistu’s, Ghadaffi’s or any other dictator who ever existed. Have they no respect for the dead? There are thousands of bodies buried there. This is way worse than the Red Terror. Let us call it Black Terror. Some day Meles and his cronies will be accountable for this. How will he feel if someone went and destroyed the burial land of his loved ones. My father once said in 1993 before he died, “Woyane is like hot ember buried inside pile of ashes. One day Woyane will remove the ashes. Then, all Ethiopians will go through an oppression and control they have never experienced. Weyolat Ethipia!”

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