Ethiopia at the Millennium Plus One: Unite, Resolve, Promote and Persist to Uphold the United Ethiopia-Nation as the Cradle of the African National Imagination!
Exactly a year ago, Ethiopia said good bye to the old millennium and welcomed a new one. Today, this September 11, 2009 starts Ethiopia’s long walk to a third millennium. It remains open whether this third millennium proves to be a period where problems are resolved, people are fed and cared, and the nation is free and united under the principle of civic-nationalism/patriotism. Is it the time for the making or re-making of Ethiopia as a nation to go strong, free and united with hope for the vast expansion of its possibilities?
Time to end the politics that keeps the country humiliated with unending hunger, diseases and ignorance. Time to end the scar of ethnic divisions, human-made disasters, knowledge deficits and rule by tyranny! Time to create a sustainable political system where open, transparent, just, free and honest governance reigns supreme across the breadth and depth of the land by employing principles of solidarity, justice and the expansion of human rights; and not the crazy scramble of using anything and any means to seize power for self- interest, for the individual or a section of a community or a portion of the people, even if this means breaking and degrading Ethiopia as a united entity, identity, history, civilisation and nation!
This is indeed time to pause and reflect whether Ethiopia can move in a new direction or remain on the beaten path of the past and its present divisive trajectory. This new beginning at this significant moment can refresh us with the ululation of ‘Inquitatash!’ ‘Happy New Ethiopian Year’ during this millennium plus one day, means making a new millennial New Year resolution for all Ethiopians to come to a historic unity over the defining principle that matters to Ethiopia’s timeless survival: that is, to upholding Ethiopian nationalism as a defence of African national dignity and the African national spirit, national purpose and national passion. Today, nothing less and nothing more is imperative than standing for Ethiopian nationalism as the cradle of African nationalism. Ethiopians, East, West, North, Central and South- must unite under one civic-Ethiopian patriotic/national purpose, strategy, passion and project.
New Year Resolution no.1: Debunk all politics that fragments and divides Ethiopia!
It is ironic to see how self- absorbed and in-ward looking Ethiopians have become specially those who dabble in politics, and who fight for power to pursue one or another political opinion, position, project or programme. Ethiopia has suffered from a politics that destroys what it should use as a resource to build itself and African dignity. Its history should not be rejected by those who put first their self or group-interest. Its history must be appropriated properly and justly. It must not be condemned. It must be used to learn from. Today’s generation must have an intelligent commerce with the past. Successive political groups have railed against Ethiopia’s historical achievement that other fellow Africans respect, instead of using it as a resource to build a united future for all the people living within it.
It is indeed odd to find some Ethiopians who fight the idea and reality of Ethiopia and who carelessly undermine a nation that has been seen by Africans as the birthplace of their nationalism to advance forward African peoples’ sacred and still not fully completed quest to reclaim their humanity, justice, full rights, dignity, solidarity and liberty.
The best present for all Ethiopians today is to send the message loud and clear to all near and far: Some Ethiopians who deny their ‘Ethiopianess’, that fight, undermine, ethnicise, vernacularise, racialise, segment, fragment and divide Ethiopia are not just undermining Ethiopia and the history that Africans have used from that Ethiopian data to feed their national imagination. They must be informed with clarity and confidence that they are indeed undermining the African nationalist imagination by attacking the Ethiopian effort to attain historic national unity from its diversity. They are undermining the birthplace of African nationalism to quote Africa’s own tried and proved son, Nelson Mandela. They are undermining indeed the role played by Ethiopia in constituting the historic unity of African nationalism.
Today the Ethiopians from Eritrea, Tigray, Gambella, to the Oromo lands and so on, who share the collective historical achievement of Ethiopia, that Africans the world over respect constitute a majority. Those, who believe in Ethiopia, and are proud of being Ethiopian, constitute the majority. Those that connive directly and indirectly to undermine Ethiopia and by so doing undermine also Africa, living both within and outside Ethiopia, are very few along with their internal and external allies.
At this millennium plus one moment, it is time we move a resolution to isolate these divisive and negative forces, by strongly underscoring the national historicity of Ethiopia’s diversity by recognising also that this historicity is the birthplace of African nationalism. Let Ethiopians convert their mathematical majority into a political majority with a strong sense of history and purpose. Let them all resolve and proudly stand up denouncing and condemning those that have been messing up Ethiopia’s future by undermining its historic unity of its diversity with the added affront to fellow Africans and their human dignity.
We believe that given a free dialogue, all Ethiopians will rise to the defence of Ethiopia as a united nation, as one people, as a historical unity built from diversity, and most importantly, as the birthplace of African nationalism. To all Ethiopians on September 11, 2008, on Ethiopia’s New Year Day, we say unite and rise above all the petty divisions and restore Ethiopia’s role as the most authentic historical source for furthering Africa’s national project and purpose.
Resolution no. 2: The Demand to Compensate Ethiopia is Just!
After we wrote in NES 21 demanding that Ethiopia must be compensated, there were various reactions from different sources. Some of the reactions tried to suggest that Ethiopia has been compensated already. But there were others who wrote to us, whatever the overtures from later day Italian regimes, far from getting full compensation, Italy’s loot from Ethiopia has not been fully recovered yet: “Badoglio took half of the silver in the then Bank of Ethiopia, and over 100 cases of loot, which enabled him to build his palacious house in Rome, while Graziani personally took 70 cases. Italy has still not returned the most important part of Ethiopia’s looted National Archives- the Ministry of the Pen Correspondence between Ethiopia and Italy- or the small aeroplane Tsehai assembled in Addis Ababa.”(Richard Pankhurst e-Mail communication, September 9, 2008)
Far from the material losses to Italy by Ethiopia, the tragedy that continues to afflict Ethiopia today- the ethnic and vernacular divisive politics was fully experimented upon during the fascist aggression. This disintegrative politics was planted as a cancer in Ethiopia by the Italian Fascist aggression. For this divisive cancer that they left behind, no repayment can be enough!! The fascist strategy was founded on’ political subversion’ of Ethiopia starting since 1933! Ethiopia’s historic national unity was deliberately subverted and the aim was to bring about the country’s complete disintegration. Mussolini, and his generals De Bono, Badoglio and Grazziani and others bribed, cajoled, fought and subverted the various internal chiefs in order to bring about the compete ethnic and vernacular disintegration of Ethiopia. The cancer they planted still plagues Ethiopia and indeed like other colonial powers that have done similar things in other parts of Africa, its remedy has remained elusive to Ethiopia as well even, sadly, to this day.
When Ethiopia fell under fascist occupation, the hope of African nationalism at the time also turned into despair. There cannot be enough monetary compensation to this outrage against Africa too! What is fascinating is to read today how those who have struggled their whole lives for African national dignity and identity reacted to the fascist aggression against Ethiopia in 1935! It is edifying to hear their morally uplifting, committed, determined and honest reactions and feelings.
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In his biography Dr. Kawme Nkrumah relates his reaction to the fascist assault against Ethiopia. He was in London at the time of the savage attack on the way to the United States, when he saw the newspaper poster, “Mussolini Invades Ethiopia.” He said he was immediately and naturally seized by a strong outrage.
Dr. Nkrumah said:
“At that moment”, he wrote,” It was almost as if the whole of London had declared war on me personally. For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face, wondering if these people could realise the wickedness of colonialism, and praying that the day might come when I could play my part in bringing about the downfall of such a system. My nationalism surged to the fore; I was ready to go to hell itself, if need be, in order to achieve my object.”(Quoted in John. H. Brown, Public Diplomacy Press Review, USC Centre for Public Diplomacy, May 22, 2004)
Nelson Mandela felt a similar outrage: “I was seventeen when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, an invasion that spurred not only my hatred of that despot but of fascism in general.”(Nelson Mandela, Long walk to Freedom, p.402)
For many Africans the world over Mussolini’s fascist aggression, that was opposed by only a few countries, amongst them notably Haiti and Mexico, in 1935 proved a ‘turning point in African history.” The only un-colonised nation in Africa was threatened with colonial enslavement. This radicalised Africans the world over creating strong African national movement and sentiment with a readiness to preserve what Ethiopia symbolised as a country that resisted successfully direct colonial enslavement. If Ethiopia succumbs to the same fate that others in Africa have, it appeared to them that their dream to be strong, free and proud would be subverted and may not be indeed realised. Other Africans fought for Ethiopia to preserve that hope that they too will be free if they fought to keep Ethiopia as a free and historically united nation.
They felt that their future independence was tied to the destiny of forestalling Ethiopia’s fascist colonial subjugation. It is a historically recorded matter that Africans across the continent tried to rally support under difficult conditions and those people of African origin scattered around the world tried to supply both military and financial support for Ethiopia’s anti-colonial struggles.
The demand for compensation for Ethiopia is not just a matter to recover monetary redress. It is above all a struggle to excavate the root of our current malaise and redress the political injustices that Ethiopia continues to suffer to this day by forces that try to create a rupture between Ethiopia’s proud history and the struggle to recover Africa’s full national dignity by the historical unity of Ethiopia’s diversity with the rest of Africa. The demand must continue and must be redoubled. All who believe in Ethiopia must struggle to right the historic injustice that Ethiopia still continues to suffer by revisiting Ethiopia’s negative and limiting encounter with the colonial experience since the 15th century!
Resolution no.3: Transform politics from the art of destruction to the art of the possible!
When political groups split into nine or ten groups, it is very often nothing to do with having major differences in principles. Those who say they uphold Ethiopia, who are also the majority, can live within one broad political front, against those who have tried, like Italian fascism before them did, to decompose the nation into different ethnic and vernacular nations, nationalities and peoples. It is ironic those that profess division of the Ethiopian nation as the birthplace of African nationalism tell us they have a front to club them together with the counter-intuitive politics of keeping Ethiopia’s survival by dividing it, whilst those who uphold Ethiopian unity and joined forces to do election together have scattered now!
It is important that all those who say they stand for Ethiopia’s historic unity in its diversity form a united front and strongly re-establish Ethiopia’s place as the cradle of African nationalism without too much procrastination.
Ideally those that oppose Ethiopian civic- nationalism can also form a front and a clear contest can emerge where opposed ideologies, national sentiments and programmes can oppose each other by creating the principle of competition with consultation and the vice versa, provided there is a prior agreement on a workable and tolerable level playing field for the play out of the parties forming a front around civic nationalism and those opposing it with vernacular-ethnic nationalism.
That is the only possible concession to ethnic nationalism that can be tolerated, that is to say, provided there is a democratic and clear playing field, a contestation involving the struggles that are freely conducted for the votes, voices and choices of the people can be mounted. There is no doubt civic nationalism and African nationalism will win over ethnic-vernacular nationalism in Ethiopia as a springboard to re-energise African nationalism.
The national politics must gravitate towards these two broad positions: those who uphold Ethiopia’s civic nationalism vs. those who uphold Ethiopia’s vernacular-ethnic nationalism. A clear democratic space must be created where those who win can govern so that the problem of transition from tyranny to democratic governance that has been so elusive for Ethiopia can be achieved without continuing further the suffering and enormous sacrifice incurred over centuries.
Concluding Remark
The millennium plus one should be a time to realise the richness of Ethiopia’s history as the cradle of African nationalism.
Those who reject this history must be resisted. The majority that stand for Ethiopia’s civic nationalism must not be indifferent. All must work over time to gain time to establish Ethiopia as part of the story of the recovery of African identity and dignity.
The political subversion of dividing Ethiopia has been one of the ugly legacies of Italian fascist aggression against Ethiopia. The struggle to compensate Ethiopia is a struggle to understand and expunge how this cancer was planted in Ethiopia’s political life. The demand must continue.
As those who stand for Ethiopia’s historic unity with diversity are the majority, there is an urgent need for all those engaged in civic- nationalism to form a united front and confront those who dabble in vernacular and ethnic nationalism to prevent and subvert Ethiopia’s history as the critical resource for Africa’s national identity, as already has been amply recognised.
If, in South Africa after the crime of apartheid fascism, there can emerge a unitary state with civic nationalism, there is no reason why Ethiopia cannot try to form a unitary state on the debris of ethnic-federalism, provided there is the political will, the determination, the imagination and the historic sense and civilisation to attain this ideal. Let Ethiopia upgrade into civic- nationalism and patriotism and not degrade into vernacular nationalism. Let Ethiopia form a unitary state on the basis of civic nationalism Only when it attains its various components’ historic unity on a civic- national basis or foundation can Ethiopia recover to re-energise and sustain by stimulating African national dignity ever more and more.
Let us make a millennium plus one resolution to convert the struggle by any means necessary since the European Scramble for Africa or even earlier starting in the 15th century if necessary, to finding solutions by any means necessary from today to sustain the long-term future of Ethiopia as a united people, nation and country! Let us all resolve Ethiopia must live on as a cradle of African nationalism that it is as is inscribed in history!
Mammo Muchie, Dphil
Professor, Chairperson NES
Coordinator of DIIPER
Research Centre on Development Innovation and IPER and NRF/DST SARCHI chair-holder, TUT, South Africa
Aalborg University
Fibigertraede 2, 9220-Aalborg East
www.diiper.ihis.aau.dk
Dr. Seid Hassan- Professor of Economics
Department of Economics and Finance
Murray State University [email protected]
ጥቂት ዋቢ መጻሕፍትና ጽሁፎች
Abed, George T. and Sanjeev Gubta (2002): Governance, Corruption, and Economic Performance. International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C.
Svenssson, Jakob, (2005): “Eight Questions about Corruption.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 19, No. 3, (Summer), pp. 19-42.
The Global Programme Against Corruption: Un-Anti-Corruption toolkit, 3rd edition, Vienna, September 2004. To be found at: http://www.unodc.org/pdf/corruption/publications_toolkit_sep04.pdf
JOHANNESBURG — Lovemore Moyo, a senior leader in Zimbabwe’s opposition, on Friday likened the opposition’s power-sharing deal with President Robert Mugabe, its bitter enemy, to a “sister sister” accord. His homespun metaphor left a critical question unanswered: If the two estranged and hostile sisters cannot agree on how to revive the economically devastated country, which one prevails?
A day after the agreement was announced — though with essential parts still undisclosed — opposition officials and Western diplomats acknowledged that they were in the dark. Though the accord is to be celebrated in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, on Monday before an audience of dignitaries from across Africa, crucial elements have yet to be resolved.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who is to become prime minister, and Mr. Mugabe, the 84-year-old president in power for 28 years, have until then to reach agreement on dividing the ministries between their parties and selecting people to fill the jobs.
Though time is short, Mr. Mugabe postponed a meeting today with Mr. Tsvangirai, according to a Western diplomat who met with Mr. Tsvangirai this morning. Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition, confirmed that the two leaders did not meet today and that the composition of the cabinet remained unsettled.
“Nobody knows these details, including myself, the spokesman,” Mr. Chamisa said. “They haven’t been resolved, but they’re going to be resolved.”
Negotiators for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and the governing party, ZANU-PF, have jousted over an agreement since July. One irreducible issue had blocked a settlement until a day ago: Mr. Tsvangirai’s insistence that as the biggest vote-getter in Zimbabwe’s last credible election, in March, he should be in charge.
Under the compromise announced Thursday, Mr. Mugabe will remain as president in charge of the cabinet, while Mr. Tsvangirai will head a twin body of the very same ministers, known as the council of ministers, according to officials close to the talks. It remains to be seen which man will have the last word in setting policy.
David Coltart, an opposition senator and constitutional law expert who supports the agreement, acknowledged that the opposition still had a treacherous route to navigate in changing the government’s destructive economic policies.
“If there is a disagreement and there’s no consensus and Morgan tries to enforce it, Mugabe is still in charge of the cabinet,” he said. “You have a council of ministers, but it’s very unclear how it will work. It’s not clear it can dominate the cabinet.”
The cabinet will have 31 ministers, with 15 from the governing party, 13 from Mr. Tsvangirai’s party and 3 from a small opposition faction to which Mr. Coltart belongs. Political analysts in Zimbabwe said Friday that the success of the deal would largely depend on whether Mr. Tsvangirai did indeed wind up with real authority. Opposition officials were optimistic that he would.
“The deal will hold depending on who will have control of the cohesive machinery of the state,” said John Makumbe, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe. “If these are still in Mugabe’s hands, the deal will unravel, and we will soon be back to the negotiating table.”
Zimbabwe will also desperately need an infusion of foreign aid from wealthy Western nations. Inflation now runs at more than 11 million percent, and most people are out of work. When Zimbabwe turns to austerity measures in an effort to arrest the runaway inflation, it will need aid to feed and care for its millions of hungry and unemployed.
But doubts linger about whether Mr. Tsvangirai will have the clout he needs, when Mugabe loyalists are entrenched throughout the government. A great deal rests on the elements of power-sharing, to be disclosed Monday. “We’re waiting to see the final outcome of this deal,” James D. McGee, the American ambassador, said in an interview on Friday.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church traces its lineage back to the Queen of Sheba, in the 11th century B.C. Legend has it that Sheba married King Solomon, who fathered her son, Menelik. As an adult, Menelik returned to Jerusalem, it is said, and returned with the Ark of the Covenant.
The East African nation is even mentioned in the Bible. “Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God,” it says in the biblical book of Psalms. And in the book of Amos, the author asks: “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?”
Ethiopia was among the first nations to have Christian converts, but the church was not established as an institution until A.D. 340, when it got its first bishop and became the country’s official religion. Down through the centuries, the Ethiopian Church was part of the Oriental Orthodox communion, looking to Egypt and the Coptic Church for leadership. It also was constantly challenged by proponents of Islam.
In the 20th century, Emperor Haile Selassie helped push the Ethiopian Church into greater independence from the Coptic Church, writes Michael Allen for Harvard’s Pluralism Project at www.pluralism.org. In 1948, the Coptic Church agreed to consecrate an Ethiopian rather than a Copt as the next metropolitan of Ethiopia.
In 1974, though, Marxist revolutionaries overthrew Haile Selassie and severely persecuted Christians, seizing church properties and killing tens of thousands of believers, Allen writes. The communist government fell in 1991, and this in turn led to a schism within the church, with Patriarch Merkorios being accused of collaboration with the Communists and forced to resign. In 1992, the new government installed Patriarch Abune Paulos in his place, but Merkorios refused to recognize the election. The split between the two groups continues to this day, each one excommunicating the other.
“A bishop would never terminate his power or transfer his power to anyone else as long as he is alive,” says Dereje Shawl, an Ethiopian who runs The African Market in downtown Salt Lake City. “Merkorios went into exile because of political reasons. The new government appointed the current bishop, which is totally out of the doctrine of the church.”
Members of Utah’s tiny Ethiopian Orthodox community are divided about the competing bishops. “There is no consensus among the refugees as to who should lead the church,” Shawl says. “It’s a matter of opinion.” [What an ignorant. It is not a “matter of opinion.” It’s a matter of long established rules and procedures.]
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The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Ethiopian Woyanne troops opened fire on a group of people in the central Somali town of Beledwyne, along the border with Ethiopia, killing three civilians.
The episode apparently occurred a day after an attack on an Ethiopian a Woyanne military patrol left one soldier dead.
The local press today reports that the soldiers combed the neighbourhood of the ambush, shooting in the air and at homes, generating panic among the residents. At least four people were killed and two wounded yesterday in the outskirts of Afgoye, in the Lower Shabelle region, after an armed commando attacked the Laanta Buro military base.
According to witnesses, the soldiers at the base responded to the shelling in fighting that left several victims, including at least two civilians.
It is not the first time that Somali residents denounce retaliation on civilians by Ethiopian Woyanne and Somali troops, engaged in repressing anti-government insurgents.
According to humanitarian groups, over 6,000 civilians have died in clashes just in the past year.
Source: Missionary International Service News Agency (MISNA)
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi has said its neighbour and foe Eritrea is “incapable” of launching a war across its border even as regional diplomats fear the withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers has heightened that possibility.
“Eritrea could not risk another war with Ethiopia, because its troops do not match the power of Ethiopian armed forces. They are not capable,” Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi said on Thursday night in the latest rhetoric between the two.
At the end of July the U.N. Security Council disbanded its peacekeeping mission on the volatile border where the Woyanne regime in Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a 1998-2000 war that killed 70,000 people.
The two governments intensely dislike each other and still do not agree on their frontier despite its “virtual demarcation” on maps by an independent boundary commission.
Both say they do not want another war, but keep their militaries on alert and accuse each other of fomenting tensions.
“Eritrea also knows the consequences of igniting another conflict with Ethiopia,” added Meles in a statement on state TV.
Because it knew it could not win on the battleground, Eritrea was trying to destabilise Ethiopia by “sending armed terrorists” into its neighbour and round the region, Meles said.
“As the whole world knows, Eritrea is now engaged in training, arming and dispatching armed terrorists to destabilise countries of the Horn,” he said.
