Ethiopia’s nightmare seems to never end. We are being tormented, humiliated, and brutalized in our own country by a tribal junta, and mistreated abroad by other governments. Now even the dead are not allowed to rest in peace. We are currently receiving reports that families of those who are buried at St. Joseph and Holy Trinity churches in Addis Ababa are ordered to remove the remains of their loved ones within a specific date or else they will be dumped in mass graves.
Distraught and desperate, families from the Diaspora are rushing back home to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the regime to transfer the remains of their deceased families, many of whom have been buried at those two cemeteries for several years, and a significant number of them are patriotic Ethiopians who fought against Fascist Italy and other foreign invaders.
There is no land shortage in Ethiopia. Why would the regime forces families to dig the graves of their loved ones? The answer is:
1) The regime assumes that those who are buried at St. Joseph and Holy Trinity cemeteries belong to middle-class and affluent Ethiopians who are willing to pay any thing for their departed parents and other close relatives to have proper burial. It is a big profit-making scheme for the ravenous TPLF.
2) The two cemeteries are burial sites for what the TPLF-led regime describes as the Amhara nobility. There is nothing that makes the TPLF thugs more happy than humiliating the Amhara people.
If such a despicable act occurs in any other country, there would be a massive riot. Any rational politician would not dare destroy historic grave sites. Unfortunately, as Teshome Mitiku sings [watch here], Ethiopians are leaderless people. That is why the TPLF junta is peeing on our society with no immediate consequence. Rest assured, however, that there will come a day of reckoning.
It is difficult to blame the families for obeying the Ethiopian regime’s gruesome order to dig out the remains of their dearly departed. One cannot think rationally when it comes to such deeply emotional matter. But the rest of the Ethiopian society, particularly those who are in the position of providing leadership to our people, are to be blamed for failing to come together and fight to remove the primary source of Ethiopia’s misery and nightmare, i.e. the TPLF junta. Shame on us all for tolerating such indignity.