Zenawi’s Interhamwe in Ogaden

The Absurdity of Asking a Slayer to Investigate His Murderous Regime

Now that the gruesome details of the ethnic cleansing tactics being employed by the current autocracy in Addis Ababa are slowly coming out, it is not unexpected for the Ethiopian prime minister to come out swinging against the veracity of the genocidal stories trickling out of Ogaden with the Ogaden refugees. After all who expects a slayer, at the level of Mr. Meles Zenawi, to own up to the military indiscretions of his minions and militias in Ogaden.

Coming out to claim that the fact that he was a former ‘insurgent’ makes him to avoid carrying out an ethnic cleansing in Ogaden is quite absurd to say the least. Given the documented and widely publicized human rights abuses and genocide reported in Ogaden, is it not that Zenawi is simply trying to deflect attention away from the very public decapitations, mutilations, and mass execution of innocent civilians that his poorly paid soldiers have been carrying out under his orders in Ogaden?

The only thing that is more absurd than Zenawi’s denials of ethnic cleansing and genocide is the otherwise impeccable U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes asking Zenawi to investigate the very murders and crimes against humanity that he has planned and ordered in Ogaden.

No one in their right mind asks a murderer to investigate his murders. The mass displacement, country-wide blockade, public beheadings, extra judicial killings, and the actions of the death squads that Zenawi has unleashed against the Ogaden masses should be investigated without delay by NOT ONE but by a panel of multi-UN agencies and human rights organizations. The Ethiopian regime should neither have no role nor a say in these investigations.

When the multi-UN agency panel convenes and since Zenawi has emphatically denied ‘that there have been no widespread human rights violations in the Ogaden, not only because we believe in the respect for human rights, but because we know how to fight the insurgency’ he should be personally held responsible for all the crimes against humanity that have so taken place in Ogaden.

Zenawi’s crimes are no less immoral than those carried out by the Hutu Interhamwe militias during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. These, Zanawi’s, crimes are no less wicked and gruesome than those carried out by Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic.

Why initiate a global search for criminals like Interhamwe militias, Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic while allowing Zenawi to act like a statesman and even listen to his diatribes? If crimes against humanity are one and the same Zenawi and his murderous regime should be brought to justice instead of absurdly asking him to investigate his murderous regime.

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Ogaden Online Editorial