Now that the Meles regime has ignored the AFD’s call for a national reconciliation conference, the next step is for the AFD to go ahead and set up a transitional government in exile. A plan could be already in the works behind the scene. If it is, we believe that public discussions and input is helpful.
The government in exile is necessary for the following reasons:
1) highlights the illegitimacy of the dictatorship in power.
2) its presence helps exert increasing international and domestic pressure on the dying regime, expediting its inevitable fall down.
3) serves as a rallying point for the people of Ethiopia.
4) the international community will see that there is a better alternative that will be able to bring democracy, peace and stability in the Horn of Africa region.
5) there will be a planned, smooth transition of power, avoiding potential chaos.
6) defeats the Meles regime’s “divide and conquer” strategy.
Planning the government in exile starting now will give time for thorough discussions among the political parties, scholars, and the public at large. There is nothing to be gained by waiting.
Structure of the proposed Transitional Government
A proposal by Ethiopian Review
The Transitional Government will be headed by a five-member Presidency Council–a president and four vice-presidents.
President – from OLF
Vice President – from Kinijit
Vice President – from EPPF
Vice President – from ONLF
Vice President – from SLF
The Presidency Council (PC) will have a three-year term. At the end of the three-year term, there will be a national election under a new constitution.
The presidency rotates every 12-month.
Decisions in the PC will be made by consensus.
The PC’s decisions will be carried out by a Council of Ministers.
The Council of Ministers (CM) will be composed of a prime minister (PM) and two deputy prime ministers (DPMs).
The PM and DPMs will be appointed by the PC.
Prime Minister –
Deputy Prime Minister –
Deputy Prime Minister –
Minister of Defense –
Minister of Foreign Affairs –
Minister of Justice –
Minister of Interior –
Minister of Finance –
Minister of Agriculture –
Minister of Industry –
The rest of the CM members will be appointed by the PM with the consent of the PC and the DPMs.
The CM will serve during the three-year transition period.
The PC’s primary task will be to prepare the country for elections within three years. In preparation for the elections, the PC will:
1. create an election committee composed of one representative from each party.
2. convene a Constitutional Convention (CC) composed of 500 members, each member representing one woreda (district) of the country, as well as representatives of civic, religious, labor, and other groups.
Kinijit and OLF will have equal numbers–about 150 each–in the Constitutional Convention. The rest will be distributed among the other parties and groups.
Addis Ababa will be administered by Kinijit during the transition period since there is already a legitimately elected mayor (currently unjustly imprisoned) and city council.
Activities while in exile
1. The Transitional Government in exile, upon its formation, will contact all governments around the world and seek recognition as the legitimate government of Ethiopia.
2. Merge the EPPF, OLF, ONLF, and SLF fighters under one unified command to be named Ethiopian Armed Forces.
3. Contact each military officer in the army under the Meles regime and persuade them to join the legitimate Ethiopian Armed Forces.
4. All the ministers in the Transitional Government in exile will start to carry out their responsibilities. For example, the Minister of Foreign Affair will mobilize international support for the government in exile; the Minister of Justice will investigate officials of the Meles regime for crimes against humanity and corruption; the Ministers of Finance, Industry and Agriculture will create an economic team that will prepare a plan on how to grow the country’s economy during the transition period; etc
The danger of not setting up a government in exile
1. When the Meles regime collapses, chaos could reign in the country for several days, or weeks. A well executed plan by the transitional government in exile will prevent that.
2. The Meles regime will continue to incite ethnic conflict.
3. An unknown armed force could come to power and install another dictatorship.
4. The unity of Ethiopia will be in grave danger as ethnic-based parties become militarily and politically more powerful and decide to stick to their independence agenda when they see for them no political space under the Ethiopian tent. The Transitional Government will give political space for these ethnic-based parties to address the concerns and grievances of their constituencies under a united Ethiopia using democratic means such as elections, courts, dialogue, etc.
The wisdom of creating AFD
The Kinijit and OLF leaders, in deciding to create an alliance, were cognizant of the fact that Ethiopia is a changed country after a 15-year rule by the TPLF ethnic apartheid regime. The Meles regime has been leading the country towards a civil war by spreading hate, suspicion and hostility among the many ethnic groups, particularly the Amhara and Oromo. AFD is the best instrument to heal the wounds, and neutralize what Meles and his criminal gang have in store for us–Interahamwe-like civil war. Meles and his close family members may flee when the end for them arrives. But the hard core TPLF gangs such as General Samora Yenus have already declared their stand–to destroy and be destroyed (atfito metfat). Those who cannot see this are too far removed from the realities in Ethiopia.
For Melissa Fay Greene, the enormity of the AIDS orphan crisis in Africa became impossible to ignore one Sunday morning in August 2000. After reading an article in the New York Times estimating that more than 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa had lost parents to AIDS — and that by 2010 those figures were expected to rise to between 25 million and 50 million — Greene wondered who was going to raise 12 million children. Admitting that she and her attorney husband in Atlanta were being driven cheerfully “insane” by their five kids, Greene asked, “Who will offer grief counseling to 12, 15, 18, 36 million children? Who will help them avoid lives of servitude or prostitution? Who will pass on to them the traditions of culture and religion, of history and government, of craft and profession? Who will help them grow up, choose the right person to marry, find work, and learn to parent their own children?”
These questions sent Greene, now 53, on a journey as both an adoptive parent and a journalist. Since that Sunday morning, she and her husband have adopted two Ethiopian orphans, with two more on the way.
This month, Bloomsbury has published Greene’s fourth book of nonfiction, “There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children.” Greene, who has twice seen her work nominated for the National Book Award, is not the titular woman. Instead, it is Haregewoin Teferra who gives a human face to the havoc AIDS has wreaked on an entire continent. A middle-class, middle-aged Ethiopian, Teferra is as surprised as anyone to find herself running an orphanage out of her home in Addis Ababa. In 1990, Teferra’s husband unexpectedly died of a heart attack at the age of 54; eight years later, her adult daughter, the mother of an infant, died of AIDS. Overcome with grief, Teferra prepared to move into a hut on the grounds of a cemetery and live in seclusion. Instead, the director of a Catholic charity asked if she’d consider staying where she was and taking in a 15-year-old AIDS orphan. One orphan became two, and then four, and then — despite disapproving friends and little to no government assistance — 80. Some of these orphans were HIV-positive, some not. With the expansion of the orphanage came problems for Teferra, which Greene does not shy away from describing: Teferra was accused of child trafficking and also of negligence in ignoring claims from orphans that an orphanage employee molested them. These charges led to Teferra’s arrest, though she eventually was exonerated.
In addition to chronicling Teferra’s story, Greene provides a scientific and cultural history of AIDS — one in which she makes withering assessments of government leaders and pharmaceutical companies — and also a history of Ethiopia. But Greene is too shrewd a storyteller to think that it’s statistics that will motivate people to act, or even make them cry. Without a doubt, this is a three-hankie read, but it’s because of the stories about individuals: of those who, like Teferra, have upended their stable lives in order to help those less lucky; of the orphans themselves, among whom it is not uncommon for a 7-year-old to single-handedly raise a 5-year-old; of the adoptive families in America who, in cross-cultural run-ins worthy of a sitcom, must politely decline their new son’s offer to butcher a cow for dinner, or explain to their new daughter that there is no need, in Snellville, Ga., to watch out for hyenas when using the bathroom at night.
Both in print and in conversation, Greene comes off as very much a mom. She is perceptive, compassionate and clearly tickled by a good fart joke: Although the Ethiopians are famously well-mannered, she can’t resist bringing whoopee cushions as gifts for children at one orphanage. Indeed, it is the combination of Greene’s maternal tendencies and narrative gifts that make her the ideal person to tell this timely story.
What do you think motivated Haregewoin Teferra to give her entire life to taking care of these children?
I think in Haregewoin’s case, she was absolutely up against the wall. Grief had completely ruined her life, and she was going to need to leave the world as a result. She could no longer live without her husband and her daughter. That component of the story is so powerful and universal. I think a lot of people have found that the only way to survive is to start reaching out to others and trying to love other people. The children saved Haregewoin as much as she saved them.
How did you cross paths with Haregewoin?
I had heard she had these containers, like a trailer off the back of a truck, and she would cut a door in the container. People were calling her “the Container Lady” and thought she was living in the container with the children. But she wasn’t — she was using that as a dining hall and classroom.
I asked Good Housekeeping if I could do a story for them about her. Good Housekeeping had never done an international story, ever, but they said OK, they would try it.
The response [to the story] was tremendous. Good Housekeeping readers from all over the country sent contributions, $10 and $25 at a time, saying, “We had no idea this was happening.” Haregewoin was so encouraged by that. It emboldened her to keep talking to me.
And yet, while you were in the process of writing a book in which Haregewoin plays a huge role as a heroine, things temporarily unraveled at her orphanage. What was that like?
Last September, I first heard that there were accusations that child molestation had taken place in her compound, it was overcrowded, there were too many kids in each bunk, there were too many kids everywhere.
I did not mention it to my editors at that time because I wanted to be able to confirm it myself and figure out what was happening. I went over to Ethiopia, got what I thought was the story, came back, and then in December, she was arrested. The book was due Dec. 15. And Dec. 14, Haregewoin called me from prison. So then there was a frantic scramble on my part to get on top of events and to deal with my own disappointment and fury.
When I connected with Haregewoin again, I understood what had happened and I felt that I didn’t have her wrong. This stuff was not her fault. She wasn’t getting any help from the government or anywhere. She was taking in all these kids.
I had to forgive Haregewoin, see her as human, understand that she’s more interesting not being a saint, and realize that I sort of messed up because I did think I was writing about a saint. So I had to rewrite the book, starting from the beginning.
By the time you began reporting this book, you already had adopted a son from Bulgaria and a daughter from Ethiopia, in addition to your four biological children. How did you initially become interested in international adoption?
At 42, I thought, if my husband and I are going to have another child, this is the time. I have to do it. Should I do it? And we didn’t. I thought, we’ve got our four, they’re great, it’s enough already. By [the time I was] 46, our daughter Molly was starting to apply to colleges and we suddenly realized this was all going to end. It’d all been so incredibly fun and crazy and nice and she was going to leave. And we got kind of this panicky feeling of empty nest that we were going to be down to just three. At some point, my husband said, “Listen, if we want more children, we can adopt.” I’m sure he just tossed it out to comfort me.
One day I sat at the computer and I typed in “adoption” and suddenly I realized that the entire Internet had been invented for international adoption. I learned about the Internet at the same time that I learned about international adoption. At that point, Bulgaria displayed photos of children in orphanages who needed families, and I came across the picture of this little boy who became our son. He was just a sweet little guy, 4 years old, and needed a family and so we followed all the steps. At the moment that we brought him home [less than a year later], I had this science fiction feeling like I had pushed something on the computer and he’d come out of the screen.
Then a couple of years later, [our son] Seth was ready to go off to college and we thought, Oh God, no! Another one? You’ve taken Molly, leave us someone! So we started thinking about adoption again at the moment that, for me, the headlines hit the kitchen table: Africa is a continent of orphans. So I just thought, if we’re really going to adopt again, could we bring in one of these children?
Was your interest in AIDS orphans originally as an adoptive parent rather than as a journalist?
I sort of used journalism as a cover. I would say, outside a really close circle of friendship, people thought I was sent on these interesting assignments by the New Yorker and the New York Times and Good Housekeeping, and while I was over there, I would meet some nice little kid I didn’t feel like I could leave behind. But that was a total deception. I didn’t want people to think I was completely insane. But in each case, we already were doing the adoption and the article was a way for me to go over and do more research in something that passionately interested me.
I wrote about AIDS orphans for the New York Times Magazine feeling really humble that I was not an epidemiologist, a doctor or a social scientist. I had none of the criteria. But I was a firsthand witness. I could look at something and say what it was I was looking at. I thought, I can tell stories. Even here, I can tell stories. And that’s useful.
What’s it like preparing to adopt your eighth and ninth children?
It’s ridiculous. I almost hate to mention it. It sounds like more than it feels like. We had neighbors years ago in Rome, Ga., who had eight children, and I never thought we would pass that family, ever, ever, in a million billion years. They had eight children and we had a newborn, and the newborn was just about to undo me. I found the change from zero to one to be so gigantic and so difficult and impossible and wonderful, but exhausting, and I was hallucinating from the sleep deprivation. That change from zero to one — nothing else has compared to that. So going from four to five or five to six — once you survive zero to one, I found it manageable. Plus we’re not bringing in little babies, and not everyone lives at home.
My husband and I went pretty quickly from thinking, How could we possibly do this? to How could we not do this? Because we know we can do it. By our Atlanta Midtown standards, it’s a lot of kids and it’ll be a little crowded and crazy, but by the standards of where the kids are, it’s going to be Disney World here. For them, we live in the Disney World castle.
You tackle the science and politics behind the AIDS crisis in Africa, and your portrayal of pharmaceutical companies is incredibly damning. You speak particularly critically of companies like Glaxo Wellcome and Bristol-Myers Squibb who for years protected their patents through legal maneuvering, made drugs expensive, argued that they had to keep prices high because of the cost of research even though most research was government-funded — and made outrageous profits.
World-record-shattering profits were made on these drugs while people died. People in the know, looking at that, have said, “These were crimes against humanity.” There have been all these arguments by the pharmaceutical companies about why it doesn’t boil down to giving the drugs to people. But when you’re on the ground over there, the only thing that matters is getting the drugs to people. Everything else can follow from that.
It was life-changing what I saw when I went over [to Ethiopia] the first time, especially the orphanages of the HIV-positive children where they were all going to die — these were just orphanages that were hospices. We talked to the director of one of those orphanages and asked him what would he do if he had money. And he said he would immediately bring in more children. And we said, “What if it was a choice between buying medicine and bringing in more children?” And he said, “I’d bring in more children.” And we were incredibly shocked. But what he saw was children dying on the streets, so he thought the most good he could do was let the children at least die in a loving circumstance.
Are things still as bad as they were five or 10 years ago?
Progress has been made. The “3 by 5 Initiative” [an initiative by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization to get 3 million people in developing countries on anti-AIDS drugs by 2005], even though it failed to meet its target, still got hundreds of thousands of people on drug treatment. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William J. Clinton Foundation are reaching tens of thousands of people with the actual drugs that you would get if you lived in Chicago or Las Vegas.
What’s going to happen down the road a few years is that people will start to build up immunities to those drugs and need the second-line drugs, and those second-line drugs still have the high price tags on them. But we’re not at that crisis yet.
You point out that one misperception Americans have is that we’re a leader, in financial terms, in fighting AIDS and HIV. But though the United States does in fact give the most foreign aid money of any country in dollars (over $75 million between 2002 and 2005) — it gives one of the lowest GNP percentages (0.1575 percent).
We’re pathetic in that respect. And we don’t know it about ourselves. We think that we’re so generous and that we’re holding up the world, but we’re not.
You present a few theories about how HIV first spread, and you seem to favor the theory that, with the introduction of antibiotics to Africa in the 1950s, HIV spread through hundreds of thousands of unsterilized needle injections.
I found trusted experts who believe that is definitely the direction of the inquiry. But the force of the research now is behind finding a cure or a vaccine. There are not many people interested in how this happened. But it’s also possible that the answer is so terrible, if it’s truly the result of well-intentioned but misguided health campaigns. That’s a tragic answer. And it’s still going on.
There are regions where safe sex is increasing, condom use is increasing, sexually transmitted diseases are falling — and HIV is off the charts. That’s not explained by sexual behavior. One of the things people think is that AIDS is spreading out of control because of some African hypersexual behaviors. But researchers into sexual behaviors find African men have fewer lifetime partners than American men.
Was your goal in writing this book to move Americans to adopt an orphan themselves? To donate money? Or merely to be more aware of the situation?
I don’t want to promote adoption as the major answer to AIDS in Africa because there’s no way enough families around the world will open their homes to these children. That’s doomed to failure.
I hope to be working against paradigm. The paradigm of Ethiopia is, People are starving and/or People are very fast runners. A lot of the major newspaper coverage begins with images like that. In Haregewoin Teferra, there’s the story of a middle-class educated women whose husband was the high school principal and she too is suffering.
And on the most elementary level, I would love people to read this and think, “Oh my God, they’re just like us! What’s going on is as if my partner and I died and left our children orphans.” The first step is to feel it as an emergency happening to people like yourself.
In the book you describe a white father from Vermont who wonders, when traveling with his wife to Ethiopia to pick up their new daughter, whether there’s an imperialist angle to these adoptions. What’s the answer to his question?
Of course one has mixed feelings looking at international adoption. You weigh what the child is losing: connection to culture and history and language and religion and art and literature. A child is losing the world into which the child was born. And that is almost always a loss. It’s hard to offset that. A child is losing the right to grow up in a family that looks like the child, the child is losing the possibility of going out for dinner on a Tuesday night with his or her parents and not having people look over at the odd configuration of that family. It’s not all good news, and the fact is that people can have incredibly happy and wonderful childhoods outside the U.S. In fact, on every trip I’ve taken into rural Ethiopia, I’ve had the same thought looking around, which is, if you could have enough food, schools and medicine, this would rival any childhood on earth — the freedom of being out on this beautiful landscape and riding a donkey and chasing the geese and climbing a tree and running across the fields with your friends and swimming in a lake. It’s a Huckleberry Finn childhood — if there were food, medicine and schools. And parents.
But all of that is swept off the board when a child is orphaned in a poor country. Then you ask what can you do to make up for what the child has now lost? And what you can offer the child is a new family. And a new family trumps just about everything else. I can’t imagine a child on earth who would rather be speaking their native language in the impoverished orphanage in Romania or Bulgaria or China or Cambodia or Vietnam or Ethiopia rather than learn English with a suburban family in, you know, Dallas. The tradeoff wins out.
It’s a truism in the adoption world that people walking around with their adopted babies or children have observers come up and say, “She’s so lucky, he’s so lucky,” and the adoptive mom or dad says, “No, I’m the lucky one.” But what I’ve learned is that the true answer is, “You’re right. This child has won the lottery. This is a lucky child.”
Federal Police and soccer fans clashed this afternoon (local time) at the Addis Ababa Stadium in Ethiopia. During the soccer match, the fans started shouting slogans, which include “release CUD leaders,” and “Meles leba (thief).” The Federal Police reacted by beating up the protestors who responded by throwing stones. The soccer match was called off as a result.
For all the talk about ethnic self-determination in Ethiopia, almost no attention has been paid to the one and only ethnic group that actually seceded from Ethiopia–the Beta Israel, formerly called Falasha, whose entire population left the country. The story of their secession is full of drama, intrigue, suffering, and jubilation–and, like so much else about Ethiopia, fraught with misunderstandings.
One account of their exodus, which I once believed, was that their departure was instigated from outside pressures, most notably from the American Jewish community. Stephen Spector’s meticulously researched Operation Solomon (2005) clarifies the matter decisively, locating the real impetus in the religious motives of the Beta Israel themselves. Spector and other sources demonstrate that during the mid-1970s, once Israel’s two chief rabbis of Israel declared the Beta Israel authentic Jews, they experienced a heightened yearning to emigrate to the Land of Israel. How they strove to realize that yearning offers yet another testimony to the religiosity, hardiness, determination–and love of pilgrimage–that characterize Ethiopians of many regions.
Ethiopians of the North long regarded the Holy Land as an alluring beacon. Ethiopian Christians refer to themselves as deqiqa israel, children of Israel; Ethiopians were among the earliest immigrant groups to settle in Jerusalem. Legend is that the Lalibela churches were constructed to enable Ethiopian Christians to have an awesome destination once the route to Jerusalem was hampered by the Arab conquests. Years ago, I spoke with a group of resident monks in Jerusalem and asked if they did not miss their homeland: “Sela-agaratchew nafqot albezabatchihum?” “Inday!” they replied, “izih new agaratchn!” (What do you mean? Our homeland is right here!)
Visiting Jerusalem this year, however, I learned of two points Ethiopian Christians were in trouble. One concerns the decision of authorities not to grant asylum to some seventy illegal Christian immigrants. They were detained in prison for two years until a court accepted the UNHCR judgment that their appeal for asylum based on fear of personal persecution in Ethiopia was not well founded. Under pressure from local Ethiopians, the Government of Israel stayed their deportation until the Canadian Embassy issued invitation letters for them to be interviewed.
More serious is current litigation over Ethiopia’s age-old proprietary claims to a small enclave on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Deir es-Sultan (Eth. Debra Sultan). Thanks to their long presence in Jerusalem, from not long after their Christianization in the 4th century CE, Ethiopians acquired rights to some of Christianity’s most sacred sites. These rights were attested repeatedly by European visitors through the Middle Ages, one reporting in the late 14th century that Ethiopians possessed four different chapels in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Even so, after Salahadin conquered Jerusalem in 1187 and assigned Ethiopia’s rights to Egyptian Copts, those claims were contested repeatedly. Subsequent competition with diverse Christian nationals–Armenians, Greeks, and Copts–made it difficult for Ethiopians to hold on to those rights. Skirmishes with Egyptians during the two centuries after 1770 took away nearly all Ethiopian property. After the Six-Day War in June 1967, Ethiopians had to evacuate an old monastery near the Jordan, and rejoined their old compatriots at Deir es-Sultan just after it was evacuated by panicking Egyptian Coptic monks–all except their determined archbishop, who stayed only to be manhandled by the tough Ethiopians. That was a retribution of sorts for the episode when Copts threw stones at the Ethiopian Easter celebration on the roof; Israeli authorities changed locks of the two chapels and handed Ethiopians the keys. Still, vicissitudes of relations among Egypt, Ethiopia, and Israel continue to jeopardize Ethiopian rights to the site; at the moment, the case is still before the Israeli High Court.
Most Ethiopians fail to grasp the significance of this monastery for their nation–so argues Daniel Alemu, a young Ethiopian scholar in Jerusalem. Yet if Badme is significant for Ethiopia, he says, Deir es-Sultan is far more integral to Ethiopian history and national identity. It also symbolizes the deep religiosity often attributed to Ethiopians of all faiths; only the unbounded devotion that Ethiopians have for this
ancient holy site enables them to manifest the strength and tolerance needed to live for centuries under inhuman conditions in a collapsing monastery.
The attachment of Christian Ethiopians to the Holy Land pales next to that of their Beta Israel kinsmen. So deep was the Falashas’ historic identification with their Hebraic roots that they created an annual holiday, Sigd, when they climb a mountain and recite the Ten Commandments in honor of Moses on Mt. Sinai. All the Ethiopian olim (immigrants) whom Spector interviewed mentioned this as their primary motive. He quotes an elderly qes (Jewish priest): “Our ancestors all hoped and prayed that they themselves would make it to Jerusalem. They did not make it. We are on the brink of reaching Zion.” This evidence contradicts stories circulated in the West to arouse sympathy and donations, stories disconfirmed by those on the ground. Ethiopian officials, U.S. Government officials, and American relief agencies alike affirm that Falasha did not leave because of famine, warfare, disease, or persecution by Christians. Many Christians pleaded with them not to go, while others felt sympathy for their outpouring of collective devotion, including Berhanu Yiradu, who chaired a committee in Gondar working to expedite the movement to Addis; Dr. Girma Tolossa, who represented the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Addis; and an Ethiopian Christian priest who rented his large compound there to camp the Falasha migrants.
The dream of Zion drove Beta Israel to a via dolorosa into Sudan in the years after 1977 when the Derg halted emigration to Israel. Huge numbers made a long, dangerous trek across the desert, usually at night, in which thousands died dreadful deaths along the way. Once there, many more died in pestilential refugee compounds. Their tragic situation aroused the concern of people in Canada, the U.S. and Israel, after which the ministrations of outside supporters from North America and Israel were indispensable. Israeli Defense Forces began heroic efforts to locate and transport the survivors to Israel–efforts that culminated in Operation Moses of late 1984 when they brought some 6500 Falashas to Israel. When that was exposed in the Sudanese Press, it had to be discontinued. President Nimeiri was deposed, and the new regime imprisoned or executed Sudanese thought to have assisted those rescues. Even after that, Israelis rescued a couple thousand more from Sudan. All told, some twenty thousand Beta Israel left Ethiopia by way of Sudan, of whom about four thousand perished before reaching their destination.
By 1989, nearly half the recognized Falasha community had reached Israel. This fired a constant demand for family reunification, which led eventually to Israel’s agreeing to let some 27,800 more Ethiopian come between 1990 and 1992. The climactic highlight was the remarkable Operation Solomon in which 14,300 Beta Israel were evacuated during a daring 36-hour airlift in late May 1991. A recent Jerusalem Post
article includes Operation Solomon among the most memorable noble achievements in Israel’s modern history, alongside the Six-Day War and the rescue at Entebbe.
By now, numbering at 100,000 to two per cent of the Jewish population of Israel, Ethiopians comprise a larger percentage of the population there than of any other state outside of Ethiopia. Their adjustment problems have been amplified by having to leap from a largely rural subsistence lifestyle into the lifestyle of modern cities, to learn a difficult new language, and to be absorbed in such large numbers in a short time. Much has been made of stories about their maladjustment: reported high rates of divorce, school dropouts, and suicide. For some, the cultural rift proved catastrophic. “On the day I set foot in Israel,” one Ethiopian man said, “my life came to an end.” A great deal of the Ethiopian Jewish community lives below the poverty line in depressed neighborhoods. A disproportionate number are unemployed, since they lack skills appropriate to work in a modern economy. Some claim to have been excluded from schools or jobs on racial grounds.
On the other hand, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia were treated with better accommodations and services than any other immigrant group in Israel’s history. A recent survey showed that although their poverty level was higher than any other immigrant group, so was their level of satisfaction with life in the Promised Land. A decent number have made positive adjustments, becoming army officers, small businessmen, and successful candidates for city councils. Above all, from the viewpoint
of the olim, coming to the Promised Land was the fulfillment of a culture’s dream.
The situation is more ambiguous for several thousands of other Ethiopians who attempt to follow the trail of their Jewish countrymen. These people claim to be relatives of those already in Israel or to be converts to Christianity; the Hebrew name for them, Falasmura, signifies “Falashas who converted.” Their case has been championed by the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry (NACOEJ), an organization that sprang up in the 1980s to assist the Falasha immigrants, but was scarcely known in Israel before the completion of Operation Solomon in 1991. At that point the head of the Jewish Agency announced that except for a few hundred souls, the aliyah of Ethiopia’s Jews had reached a successful completion. The chief charitable organization for the Falasha, the American Association for Ethiopian Jews, closed down its American operation and all of its work in Ethiopia. NACOEJ seized the opportunity to establish itself in Addis as advocate for those refused entry to the airplanes of Operation Solomon because they were known to be converts to Christianity–hence, according to the clear guidelines of the Law of Return, not eligible to come on aliyah.
After 1991 NACOEJ assumed jurisdiction over the 3000 or so Falasmura in Addis and sent agents to villages south of Gondar to recruit groups of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who in one way or another recalled that their ancestors had been Falashas. The new migrants needed little encouragement; they streamed into Addis Ababa en masse, before long swelling the total arrivals to 50,000. NACOEJ lobbies in Israel and in the States became influential; they readily enlist the support of the Black Caucus as well as the United Jewish Communities if Israel makes any move that seems detrimental to the “Jews” languishing in Ethiopia. Although the group has now been thrown out of Ethiopia, it still works behind the scenes to support those thousands of expectant Ethiopians who anticipate eventually being brought to Israel. Processing all those hopefuls and new immigrants has become what some call a racket. The large reservoir of potential immigrants get encouragement both from their relatives who are already in Israel and from the tireless efforts of a NACOEJ-affiliated Ethiopian, Avraham Beyene, whose organization, which seeks to bring all the Falasmura to Israel, is based in Jerusalem. Paradoxically, Ato Avraham’s own Falasha ancestors were among those who early on converted to Christianity, and he, prior to his aliyah, had worked in Gondar under the auspices of the London Missionary Society for the Conversion of the Jews.
The Falasmura story threatens to override what was a narrative of triumph with a troubling denouement. Ethiopians who arrived since the early 1990s, despite their announced conversions to Judaism, keep distant from the Jewish life of the genuine Falasha community. They have become an increasing burden on the limited resources of the Israeli Government. They incite political opportunists to accuse the Government of racism by not admitting more Ethiopians, just as earlier ideologues accused Israel of racism by importing settlers from Africa.
The genuine Falasha exodus continues to have repercussions. Their departure had costs. It robbed Ethiopia of an important part of her history, a part to which recent scholarship has brought fresh attention. It deprived Israel of the only indigenous Jewish community left in the African Continent. It deprived Gondares of close friends and neighbors. (Indeed, some Gondares have come to feel guilty about how they mistreated the Falashas before their departure and wish to make amends by providing favorable conditions for their return.) And it stripped Falasha culture of its traditional moorings and accessories–ritual objects, prayerbooks, idiosyncratic monastic traditions.
On the other hand, Operations Moses and Solomon saved a distinctive branch of Judaism for the world. Ethiopianist Chaim Rosen notes that “there are perhaps one hundred Falasha priests still functioning in Israel, with many followers, and determinedly passing their tradition down to their sons. So the unique Beta Israel religion remains alive in Israel, and has been preserved there perhaps even more than in it might have been in Ethiopia, where it could have faded away like the Qemant religion.”
What is more, as I wrote in my IJES article, “Reconfiguring the Ethiopian Nation in a Global Era,” there is a sense in which Ethiopians in the Diaspora can and do continue to be an integral part of the Ethiopian nation. They can and do engage from afar, through visits, through the internet, and sometimes by repatriation. Some envisage channels through which Israeli Ethiopians can begin to connect back with the motherland, just like other Diaspora Ethiopians who return for limited times or for good. Falashas are learning skills that can be put to good use in Ethiopia’s development. They and fellow Israelis can harness the experience of Israelis in turning deserts into gardens, and fructify areas like the Ogaden and the their homelands in the northwest. The Ethiopian Government has broached the idea of offering fellowships at Ethiopian universities for Ethiopians in Israel. The prospect of offering Ethiopian Israelis a chance to renew ties to their other motherland offers opportunities for all concerned after the trials and tribulations of the past few decades.
ETHIOPIA’S prime minister, Meles Zenawi, now spends most of his time heading off his enemies. In the capital, Addis Ababa, the government’s response to its defeat in last year’s contested general election was to shoot scores of opposition protesters and imprison the city’s elected mayor. This led to the suspension of aid from his previously loyal Western backers.
To the south, in the Ogaden desert, he has been fighting with the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), a rebel group that seeks autonomy for south-eastern Ethiopia. On August 11th Ethiopia reported having shot dead 13 ONLF fighters slipping across the desert from Somalia. Ethiopia’s recent military incursion into Somalia in defence of the Transitional Government in Baidoa threatens imminent conflict there against Islamist militias based in the capital, Mogadishu.
On top of this comes the distinct possibility of a conflict with Ethiopia’s arch-enemy Eritrea in the north, where perhaps as many as half of Eritrea’s young men are massed under arms on its side of the disputed border.
Eritrea’s increasingly totalitarian regime has become a regional menace; its foreign policy now appears to comprise nothing more than to support any enemy of Ethiopia’s, no matter the cost. On August 8th Eritrea announced its biggest coup to date; a brigadier-general heading the 18th division of the Ethiopian army defected to Eritrea with several ranking officers, hundreds of soldiers, and plenty of weapons.
The general, Kemal Gelchu, was an ethnic Oromo. Probably as many as half of Ethiopians are Oromo, a good number of them Muslim. According to the government’s system of ethnic federalism, the Oromos are meant to have a large stake in power. In reality, they are weak and neglected, just as they have always been. A few support the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF)—another rebel group seeking a “fairer” Ethiopia, meaning a shift of power from Mr Zenawi and his fellow Tigrayans, who account for, at most, 7% of the population, but who have dominated the government and the economy since taking power in 1991.
Mr Gelchu’s defection puts a face to the deep unhappiness in the non-Tigrayan bits of Ethiopia. He and his men will now undoubtedly join the OLF and fight the Ethiopian government. Force is the only language the government understands, Mr Gelchu says. Alas, force may be exactly what Mr Zenawi is going to get, and on many fronts.
Amnesty International has reported that Addis Ababa mayor Dr Berhanu Nega’s health is deteriorating as a result of unsanitary prison conditions. The high court last month ruled that he should be transferred to a clean prison cell, but the Meles regime, as expected, has ignored the court’s ruling.
Kinijit’s Secretary General Muluneh Eyoel, council member Andualem Aragie and other younger leaders are exposed to the same or worse prison conditions. Those who are physically strong are kept in solitary confinement to wear them down.
The Meles regime keeps these political prisoners under inhumane condition not only to punish them, but to also physically disable them so that even if they are out of jail, they will not be well enough to lead the struggle. That is why every day these Kinijit leaders are in jail must be spent by the whole Kinijit organization fighting for their release.
One of the top priorities of any political organization should be to protect the well being of its leaders, because 1) it is difficult to replace skillful leaders, particularly leaders like those of Kinijit who were able to rally the nation around common goals, and 2) the enemy’s first target is the leadership, because it knows that without strong, competent leaders, an organization will not survive, let alone be successful.
Unfortunately, the Kinijit leadership and rank and file members abroad have practically abandoned the jailed leaders. The Kinijit structure abroad that took over the leadership responsibility is weaker and more fractious than the government of Somalia. The Kinijit leadership abroad and many of the rank and file members are busy alienating supporters and creating enemies than building alliances. Kinijit’s civilized/advanced (yeseletene) politics has been replaced with the current leadership’s bankrupt politics. Kinijit’s culture of brotherliness, love, peace, and tolerance, has been replaced by a culture of corruption, greed, intolerance, and hate.
One cannot feel any thing but bitterness after learning about the condition of the political prisoners, and observing the indifference of those who claim to be their supporters. The indifference to the plight of the Kinijit leaders by their own party is so much so that even latest information by Amnesty International and others about their health status is not posted in Kinijit’s official web site
