The Bitter Lesson must be learned!
We cannot afford division between one party when we are calling for a national strategy to use a democratic arrangement to make all parties that care to enter into politics to learn to do politics with argument, debate, learning, innovation, creativity, fantasy and imagination. This call is to all -– the ruling, the opposing, the alienated and the armed and non-armed!
We must learn from the division that wrought so much havoc in our history. We know what division did during the February uprising. The divided rulers were annihilated. They turned into agents exposing each other to soldiers who could not comprehend what they were hearing. They could not believe that such men that they used to bow to the floor were acting with so much loose moral carelessness against each other. Nobody was spared. They all perished. That is something that the lesson has not been fully grasped yet.
The soldiers that took power also murdered each other with a criminal license that will make the most well known killer look sane. The top killer was able even to sit calmly and run his office whilst beneath his cellar the dead body of murdered emperor Haile Selassie was buried! It makes us all cringe when we realise the extreme limits to which human cruelty can extend beyond anything that any spirit and humanity can bear!
The idealistic generation organised to bring changes in land distribution and democratic Government also split. This was indeed a great and special generation. It had a generosity of collective spirit, and a willingness to sacrifice that cannot be underestimated. The generation that perished through the Red Terror had the overriding ambition to better the condition of the people and the country.
But that wonderful and idealistic generation too fell to historical mis-fortitude. It too split into two camps. When and where this split did began? First it began in 1971 in Los Angeles when ESUNA split. It became worse when ESUE and ESUNA split in Berlin in 1973. The most disastrous split indeed began in Berlin in 1973 one year before the 1974 February uprising. Delegates from Europe and America flocked to Berlin to the World Wide Association of Ethiopian Students with members from ESUNA and ESUE and the Newly Formed world Wide Ethiopian Women’s Group. For two days the meeting run smoothly and we managed to agree to create a weak secretariat to accommodate the sectarian struggles and differences of the time. The ESUE leaders such the late Haile Fida were for a struggle that would take many years- dubbed as ’ rejim Guzzo’. Our side from the USA was for starting a people’s democratic revolutionary movement in the Ethiopian countryside where an integrated development of production, health, rural transformation by building united defence, united Front and nation wide party embracing all nationalities and groups was to be launched. Given the difference we though a weak secretariat was the best option. Though we said we should start going to the countryside, our idea of the struggle was to change the conditions of the peasantry. We wanted to change the countryside with knowledge, education, production and health by building political
power from the grassroots. The ESUE side disparagingly described our attempt to enter the world of the peasant and change it- ‘achier guozism’.
After the Berlin meeting was nearly done and over with like a fateful arrow the delegate from Algeria, the late USUAA- EPRP leader Berhane Meskel arrived in Berlin via East Germany. He proposed the idea of the World Wide Federation of Ethiopian Students. ESUE and Haile Fida opposed the idea and saw it as a cover to a hidden clandestine party that they knew was being hatched behind their backs.
As a delegate of ESUNA at the time, I thought it was unfair to impose a Federation idea after we have settled for a world wide secretariat after a two-day deliberation. We had heated argument off- meeting with those who proposed and those amongst the delegation from USA who supported it. The ESUE delegation threatened to oppose the Federation idea and in fact they did risking a possible split. I believed that a split was a horrific alternative. I continued saying it is not wise to split. The federation is not worth it if it comes at the expense of our unity. Serious disagreements ensued. I protested and warned that the division made abroad will be exported inside the country and it would create and bring bloodshed. Those who wanted the Federation would not listen to such reason. They came to split and not unite with the ESUE branch of the foreign Ethiopian student movement… continued on next page