A MOMENT OF REFLECTION: FORGET THE ETHIOPIAN ELITES AND THE KUPAMANDUKAS?

By Tecola W. Hagos

I. Introduction

The negative and insulting tagging of individuals or groups with labels, in print or in the Internet, seems to have grown out of control. I understand the great temptation to use potent labels to describe and discredit effectively individuals or groups because such relatively inexpensive labeling of individuals or groups is the most economical and efficient use of words. At times, the real underlying purpose of such designation eludes me. On the other hand, the overemphasis of academic credentials has become also a polarizing shroud in our discourse. Would it be some form of compensation for lack of confidence in ones own abilities to deal with complex issues at length that we dwell too much on such contingent individual attributes? Is it meant to discourage any form of challenge, for example, by �non-scholars� or �non-intellectuals�? Is it some form of acknowledgement of a perverse hierarchical class structure? Are we substituting our traditional aristocratic titles of Rases, Liuels et cetera with such academic credentials? It is bothersome and detracting.

It has become exceedingly clear to me that Ethiopia has very few heroic and selfless sons and daughters especially in the Diaspora. What Ethiopia has given birth to seem to be mostly stillborns  I am using such harsh terms because I am disgusted with the selfishness and often-amateurish behavior of our politicians, especially in the Diaspora. The millions of poor farmers and small merchants of Ethiopia have no one to defend their rights or fight for their human rights. They have been rendered invisible by our self-indulgence and ferocious pursuit of political power. It has been an expensive hallucination to me and probably to a large number of fellow Ethiopians as well out here in the West in believing that Ethiopia�s educated few would be the harbingers of change and democratization to Ethiopia. Day by day, it has become obvious to me that Ethiopia�s elites are not any different than anyone of us, but seek one thing only�power and all of its benefits and none of its risks and responsibilities. It does not matter where these elites are staked up whether they are in the Opposition or in the current brutal Government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Of course, I am fully aware of the fact that the members of the Opposition are fully engaged in a life/death struggle with the oppressive and violent government of Meles Zenawi. In fact, that is precisely my point in that the struggle has metamorphosed into a struggle of hate and ethnic conflict polarizing and shrouding the true needs of the people of Ethiopia.

Judging by the types of comments and letters, I have been receiving in the course of the year, and from my reading of several thousand postings in several Ethiopian Websites, it seems to me that the oppressed and disfranchised millions of Ethiopians have been reduced to a status of inanimate pawns on our political chessboard. For the Ethiopian elites and politicians, the poor Ethiopian seems to have become invisible. In the rare occasions when we do address the suffering of our brothers and sisters, we do it in a disturbingly condescending manner, or with selfish woe-to-me approach.  We have become �hollow men� filled up with our own echo. We hear all kinds of pontification, public prostration, flagellation, remorse, et cetera by Ethiopian elites trying to out demonstrate each other of their particular worthiness to lead the mass of suffering Ethiopians. I believe that Ethiopia�s �elites and scholars� have failed Ethiopia miserably.

II. Hailu Mengesha�s Ande Ethiopia Radio Interview

The recent interview of Professor Hailu Mengesha, a man with impressive credentials as the founding member of the TPLF, activist, educator et cetera, on Ande Ethiopia radio program (Metropolitan Washington DC) on Sunday, 17 July 2005, stopped me in my track. It is beyond my expectation that an individual such as Hailu Mengesha who had not only preached human freedom but also actually fought for that ideal could blame the victims of Meles Zenawi�s security and police forces brutal murder of over forty demonstrators and bystanders on 7 June 2005. There cannot be any excuse no matter what the demonstrators did or did not do for such massacre and wanton brutality. Even if we accept that the demonstration was illegal and the timing of the demonstration dangerous with a possibility of uncontrollable civil disorder, to kill unarmed demonstrators and detain thousands under deplorable conditions is not the act of a responsible government. I do not want to think of what Meles Zenawi would have done if there was a gun battle. No matter, the government is under obligation to observe humanitarian principles and restraint from shooting at young people and civilians who were bystanders.

On that radio interview, Hailu Mengesha blamed the Opposition for allegedly instigating or giving the wrong signal to students and people in general to demonstrate, and thereby exposing innocent citizens to grave danger in the hands of the well armed and overzealous government forces. The problem with such pointing of an accusing finger at the Opposition was that it exonerates the brutal government from responsibility. It seems both Hailu Mengesha and his host at the Radio station had accepted the fallacious proposition that Meles Zenawi�s banning of all demonstrations under the declared state of emergency after the May 15 voting was legally (constitutionally) acceptable step taken by the Prime Minister. We have already explored that issue and had found out that the Prime Minister had no such authority to declare a state of emergency under the 1995 Ethiopian Constitution. [See Tecola W. Hagos, �Editorial: the Beginning of the End: EPRDF�s Government Brutality Against University Students,� June 6, 2005]

Even Professor Fasil Nahum, a stanch supporter of Meles Zenawi, and the individual who was responsible for the drafting of the 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia, reportedly had stated that the Prime Minister has no such authority to declare a state of emergency on his own. Both Article 77 and Article 93 have given that authority to the Council of Ministers under certain circumstances to declare a state of emergency. None of the conditions in Article 93 for such state of emergency declaration was present at the time the Prime Minister issued his state of emergency, and there was no Council of Ministers resolution either. Thus, there was no legal reason for denying anyone in Ethiopia from demonstrating during that time. There was no Constitutional basis for the type of repression against the demonstrators or any one else on June 7, 2005. The criminal was Meles Zenawi not the demonstrators.

Hailu Mengesha went even further by making a truly hasty generalization when he stated that all governments would act in their own interest presumably to the extent of ordering the murder of citizens demonstrating against the wishes of the chief executives of such governments. To support such extreme view, he cited a couple of incidents one from the past history of oppression in Texas of human rights movement in the United States and the case of Hawzien bombing by Mengistu Haile Mariam�s Government war planes. The connection between the Texas incidents that of Hawzien is tenuous. This is where I see the danger of relaying on rhetorical representations rather than basing one�s arguments on foundational principles. The building of a general or universal principle out of a limited number of particulars is a fallacy.

Moreover, Hailu Mengesh did not limit his assertion to such generalization only, but he further stated that under similar circumstances, if he were in a position of leadership, he would have acted as Meles Zenawi did. He asserted also that Professor Mesfin Woldemariam would have done the same as well. I object to this type of projection from ones own subjective response to an objectification of third parties. This type of supposition, dealing with what another individual would do or not do, based on one�s own possible action, is what logicians call a kind of inverse tu quoque (ad hominem) fallacy.  I have no idea what Mesfin Woldemariam would have done if he were Prime Minister. However, by looking at the civic activities and his human rights advocacy for the last fourteen years, I believe Mesfin Woldemariam would not have ordered the murder and imprisonment of demonstrators and bystanders under any circumstance. Although I do not believe him because of his long struggle for human rights and democracy, Hailu Mengesha had stated at that interview in no uncertain terms what he would have done if he were Prime Minister�he would have ordered the shooting and killing of demonstrators.

I am not trying to be the defender of Mesfin Woldemariam or the Opposition. They can defend themselves very well, and do not need my input. Thus, my main reason for writing this article is because there are relevant questions in relation to the types of questions and answers given during the interview on Ande Ethiopia of several days ago that deal with issues of democratization, human rights and constitutional law, and executive power and limitations, and not because of any desire on my part to criticize a distinguished veteran of over thirty years struggle for human rights and human dignity. We must also understand the possible reason why since the May 2005 election individuals with impeccable record of struggle would seem to support Meles and his regime that they have opposed for years. It is not, as some would have us believe, because of the fear of the possibility of �Tygreans� losing political power to the Opposition, that there is such reaction from �Tygrean elites.� Rather, due to the type of fearful rhetoric and agitation being carried out by some irresponsible leaders from the Opposition, with threat of ethnic cleansing and attack on Tygreans as a whole, we end up having such reactions. Condemning an entire ethnic group for the misdeeds of the corrupt few of its members, without making any distinction between Meles Zenawi (and his associates) from the Tygrean population, who are no less victims of the regime just like other Ethiopians, is a destructive process.  

III. The Problem of Liberation of the �Self� from Ethnicism

I understand why Ethiopians with different ethnic background are nervous about Tygreans and do not trust Meles Zenawi and the members of the TPLF as Ethiopians. Who could blame them for that, for Meles has betrayed the national interest, fractured the nation, monopolized the business for the benefit of himself and his corrupt associates, led the nation into an economic disaster, murdered and detained thousands of Ethiopians. It is indeed a tragedy that one individual�s esoteric political views could succeed in breeding such degrees of distress and suspicion and stain the new reality of nationalist movements that seem to have swept over the world. Nevertheless, I am not saying that ethnic based conflict was started by Meles Zenawi. The problem between Tygreans and some of Ethiopia�s ethnic groups has historical context like all other problems of ethnic conflicts in general. Thus, to see the current ethnic based conflicts and problems in a narrow and selective manner will not help us advance the causes of human rights and democratization in Ethiopia�s political and economic aspirations. We must not overlook the fact that we Ethiopians have played a role in our own demise by our indulgence in allowing and accepting Meles Zenawi�s political program including our participation in the past two-election farce. I believe we either misunderstood or missed the point when we accepted the principle of peaceful civil disobedience for our action was that of passivity not of peaceful civil disobedience. It seems such misreading of such complex concept and the adoption of such strategy by the Opposition played into the hands of Meles Zenawi�s political game.

If we ask why Meles Zenawi succeeded in his effort of fracturing Emperor Haile Selassie�s �unitary state� into ethnic based loose aggregation or independent ethnic enclaves resulting in a disembodied and very weak Ethiopian state, the answer is simply because we allowed it. Meles would never have succeeded in such an effort if it were not for pre-existing condition, such as the effect of the premature socialist/communist student movement, the greed of Haile Selassie�s officials, poor education programs, the concentration of the meager resource of the nation in Addis Ababa, the elimination and destruction of the traditional power base and the political and economic structures by the brutal Mengistu et cetera. Such defective development programs and political events eroded the nationalist spirit of a people from within. It is difficult for anyone not participating in the benefits of a community to feel a part of that community.  Here in the West, we Ethiopians feel intensely nationalistic as a result or as a reaction to the way we are perceived by the American society as �aliens� thereby giving us a common identity�our Passport identity fills up the vacuum left by our loss of identity, and we become ultra Ethiopians.

Those who accuse people of being narrow ethnic advocates are guilty of ethnicism by the very fact of such accusations they level at people. Mostly such accusers are from Addis Ababa and vicinity easily identified as Amharas or thoroughly Amharized Mehale Sefaris. What distinguished the rest of us, who believe in Ethiopia as a unitary state, is the fact that we do not go around labeling those who do not agree with us as �Shoan intellectuals�, �Gondere intellectuals�, �Oromo intellectuals�, �Tygraei intellectuals� et cetera when we discuss political and social issues that concerns Ethiopia. For example, the types of responses I received on my Four Part series of articles on past Ethiopian leaders that I presented almost a year ago represent the views of members of fractured society tittering at the very edge of a chasm. Almost all of the letters, chat comments, and articles criticizing me never failed to state that I am a �Tygrean� this or that, an identification that is misleading and adds nothing to the discourse. By contrast, when I address my detractors, I do not identify them by ethnic reductionist labels. I see them as Ethiopians. Period!  Therein lies our differences.

Since we are at it, I want to point out why I discussed Tewodros, Yohannes, Menilik et cetera in such articles. In an effort to stop the distortion of the history of Ethiopian leaders facing off foreign invaders especially in connection with the background events leading to the loss of Eritrea and Ethiopian Afar coastal territories and Ethiopia�s Red Sea territorial waters, I revisited the history of that period with fresh perspectives. In order to bring about some degree of horizontal distribution of heroes through out the many ethnic groups of Ethiopia, I defended the activities of Yohannes IV as a symbol of Ethiopia�s unitary state interest. Moreover, because of the effort of a few revisionist historians or commentators who argued and tried to shift the blame for Ethiopia�s problem of access to the sea and the alienation of �Eritrea� and the Afar coastal region to Yohannes, I undertook the unrewarding task of deconstructing the popular uncritical �history� of Emperors Tewodros and Menilik.

It is simply in our best interest to encourage, at least respect, people who want to restore some historical fact that was being eroded of truth and stop the shifting of blame to someone else the role Menilik played in the land locking process of Ethiopia and the loss of outlet to the sea. I was attacked as a �Tygrean� intellectual when I explained the disparity of development program between Tygreai and the rest of Ethiopia as a starting timely leveling of the uneven development that favored Addis Ababa and vicinity for over fifty years at great cost to the people of Ethiopia. I was once again attacked as a �Tygrean� intellectual when I pointed out the moral deterioration of Ethiopians and the rise of prostitution. The fact is that I was not being narrow nationalist or Tygrean chauvinist in expressing my concern and pointing out serious problems facing us all. I was simply pointing out the fact that Tygrei as well as other areas such as Wollo, Gondar, et cetera have suffered tremendous underdevelopment, and such poor people from those areas should be given priority in the allocation of development fund. My points of concern had nothing to do with ethnic favoritism. Still others, after ten years since I left Ethiopia in my second exile, have continued to attack me for my previous association with the TPLF even though I left Ethiopia toward the end of 1992, and never been involved with the TPLF or Meles Zenawi�s government ever since.

If I were associated with the TPLF in the past, it is because my brothers and relations were in EPDM. We believed by my being with the TPLF, we will hold to our vision of a united Ethiopia, a form of counter balance to the then ongoing fracturing by ethnic identity that was threatening the continued existence of Ethiopia at the time. I have not understood the depth of the hatred the Meles Zenawi�s group within the TPLF had for the rest of Ethiopia. I have never raised the issue of my personal feelings about any ethnic group, except may be about my childhood friends from Dessie, Wollo. If I go by my personal relationship and personal friendship et cetera, to see how I feel about different people from different parts of Ethiopia, I realize that I have absolutely no ethnic based affiliations. This should not come as a surprise to anyone since my formative years were shaped by people who were the most democratic and least discriminatory of individuals from different regions of Ethiopia.

I learned some bitter hard-facts from my relationship with the Solidarity (TISJD) movement leadership and few of its members in recent years. It is to be recalled that at the risk of my own life and health, I traveled for a couple of years all over the United States and Canada trying to convince Ethiopians that the Ethiopia-Eritrea Border Arbitration Commission is illegally constituted and that Ethiopians should forcefully express their disagreement to the workings of such a commission to the international community. [I absolutely hate traveling by air because my legs swell, I get excruciating headache, et cetera with tremendous risk of death that I was warned of.]  However, for all my effort, after logging thousands of miles, at the New York City demonstration at the United Nations, I was not even invited to be one of the presenters to the Secretary General of the United Nations of a petition (a petition I wrote), and the signature of hundred of thousands of Ethiopians (I helped collect). I have suffered similar humiliation and abuse by Meles Zenawi and his government, although I was one of the first few individuals who tried to bring about peaceful transition to a traumatized nation at great risk to my life. I had to deal with ersatz like Meles Zenawi and others who were mostly wet-behind-the-ears, uninitiated, and crude young men barely out of their boyish enthusiasm and rigid political outlooks, during my brief career as an advisor in the Transitional Ethiopian Government in the 1991-92 period.

The sum total of my relationship with TPLF or Solidarity was a dismal failure. Solidarity itself was effectively infiltrated by pro Meles Zenawi and pro Issaias Afeworki groups who succeeded in neutering and grinding it down to dust. At this point, Solidarity is just a shell of its former vibrant potent self, an ignominious end to such a promising movement. Solidarity in time would have transformed itself as a national movement transcending its narrow ethnic base and would have become a vehicle of unity as a much more integrated political force�that was at least my vision and hope for it.  It did not happen. At any rate, I was never a member of any such ethnic based political group including Solidarity since 1992, after I left Ethiopia and stopped my association with the EPRDF. Before and after I stopped my association with the EPRDF in 1992, I advocated for political groups based on political and economic ideology and not ethnicity or religious affiliation.

I have never believed in ethnic politics, and it is only when I am pushed to the wall, I might have identified myself as a Wolloie. As far back as I remember, I valued my Ethiopian identity more than anything else. At HSIU, during those formative years, I was very critical of Wallelign Mekonnen�s article, for example, on nationalities, in 1969. Nevertheless, I always showed up when called upon to face the police down at the trenches. It did not stop me either from my own brand of rebellion against social norms to the extent of wearing dark glass all the time even in the night. Of course, that was silly, but true�a rebellion of sort. I knew Wallelign before he became famous; he was my classmate in high school, in Dessie before he left to the Lab School in Addis Ababa.

It was during that tumultuous period in 1969 I started working on my well known painting, �The Ethiopian,� as a real challenge to my fellow radicalized University students who were sold on all sorts of radical ideas including the annihilation of the Empire of Ethiopia. I executed �The Ethiopian,� �Tew-Simagn Agere� (the begena playing old man), and several other patriotic paintings during that rebellious period of my life. All those paintings were meant to glorify our great history, to express my pride in being a citizen of a great civilization and an Empire at that, and as a counter weight to the idea of a fractured pseudo-state that the leftist student movement was propounding at the time. Why must my pride about Ethiopia be a surprise to anyone, after all, I grew up sucking in the great stories narrated by my family elder members of my many ancient ancestors who forged a nation through their great valor and blood and sweat.

True, I demonstrated against the Government of Haile Selassie, maybe even more so than Wallelign and the other student leaders in terms of being in the fire-line down in the streets of Addis Ababa�our battleground. For safety and tactical reasons, the student leaders were rarely with us to the end of the demonstration during our confrontations with the Police. Some people, to this day, do not understand that the student movement was a mass movement, for students demonstrated against the government of Haile Selassie for diverse reasons and different goals at times diametrical opposed to each other. Some people still blame us for the demise of Haile Selassie, and for being ungrateful hand�biters of a great leader who nurtured us. I did not demonstrate in order to establish a totalitarian government nor a military dictatorship but for a democratic government where the rights and human dignity of all Ethiopians is respected. However, when the change did happen in 1975 and took an anti-democratic route, I organized the employee of the Ministry of Finance and challenged the newly installed military regime, and paid for it with imprisonment and torture. By hindsight, I might add, our direct confrontation of the Derg was a very na�ve and reckless act.

IV. NES Press Release No. 6 and Former Political Leaders [Meison, Derg]

The Network of Ethiopian Scholars (NES), Scandinavian Chapter, had issued what may be considered as a first and a very constructive edict. I have no problem with the aim and the overall involvement of the Network of Ethiopian scholars and intellectuals in the political life of Ethiopia. In fact, I greatly value all objective evaluation of current political processes if such a thing is possible at all.  The particular Press Release is replete with very many excellent observations on the current Ethiopian political dynamics. It is also delivered with great sense of perspective and humility.  I greatly admire and respect the Ethiopian scholars involved in the formulation and writing of Press Release No. 6. My only problem with the Press Release is specifically with its blind endorsement or support of an open forum for anyone (Ethiopian) to participate in the politics of Ethiopia. They should have been careful in identifying the actors in the political processes as much as they spent time teaching us what is meant by political democracy.

 The question of shunning criminals who were former leaders of Meison, the Derg, et cetera who were in high positions as policy makers or in charge of direct operations against Ethiopians resulting in death, torture, prolonged detention et cetera should have been taken up by such august body with great concern and attention rather than in a couple of dismissive and hasty paragraphs accusing those of us who raised such concerns with arrogance. �We find those who attack members of the opposition for all sorts of vices and past connections with discredited regimes to be simply diversionary. It is thirty-one years since the imperial regime passed away and nearly fifteen years since the military regime disintegrated following the footsteps of the larger disintegration of its chief allies the former Soviet Union Republics. These regimes have self-discredited themselves and will not return in any form or guise.�[Network of Ethiopian Scholars (NES) - Scandinavian Chapter, Press Release No. 6] In addition to my objection to NES�s censor of statements of legitimate concerns about the participation of well-known criminals and political terrorists, such as Negede Gobeze, in the political life of Ethiopia, I find the NES downplaying the atrocities committed by past regimes and political players [Meison leaders and Derg officials], just because of the passage of time, quite disturbing. Those who are willing to forgive and forget the atrocities of leaders and groups in the past would commit atrocities of their own in the future.

Furthermore, the NES reference of court decisions as a prerequisite for barring people from election is a red herring. Neither I nor anyone else I know of had raised the issue of barring individuals from running for election arbitrarily in Ethiopia. I took issue with individuals like Negede Gobeze, who would not dare travel to Ethiopia because of the atrocities they have committed against innocent Ethiopians in the 1970s, are actively engaged in political activities in the Diaspora distorting and dirtying the political atmosphere by their presence. To speak of �court process� in dealing with such horrible individuals whose participation at high governmental position justifying and defending Mengistu�s bloody government in international arenas is common knowledge, or leaders of Meison and other political organizations who were involved in the creation of the Provisional Office of Mass Organizations Affairs (POMOA), which was the instrument of barbaric murders and torture of Ethiopians, is nothing short of blasphemy and betrayal of all victims and all Ethiopians.   

Let us revisit a few of the types of evil that Ethiopians suffered in the hands of those individuals that I tried to exclude from participating in any significant position in the political activities of Ethiopians in the Diaspora. For example, let us take up first the root idea for all such labeling of individuals and political organizations by ethnicity or class affinity. It was part of the diabolical strategy of the leftist student movement of the late 1960s and still continued to this day in this or that form. That same crude formula of the 1960s was refined by the then and some of the current leaders of Meison such as Negede Gobeze and his collaborators who are using what Negede has outlined in his book in which he had cannibalized and recycled Meison�s white-paper (working paper) that was submitted to few Derg members in September of 1975. At the time, it is to be recalled that the Derg had formed its pedantic People�s Organizing Committee, which was later supplanted by the Provisional Office of Mass Organizations Affairs (POMOA) in accordance with Meison�s recommendation. Both Chairman Haile Fida and General Secretary Mesfin Kassu of POMOA with five other members of the fourteen-person executive body of POMOA were all Meison leaders. POMOA was responsible for starting the mass political murder in Ethiopia�s modern political history and for carrying out the early part of the subsequent Red Terror in 1977 and after, where tens of thousands of innocent Ethiopians, young and old, male and female were butchered.

Let us call a spade a spade, that thousands of Ethiopians were murdered or detained by the Derg with full participation of Meison for over a year and a half before Meison too had its fallout with the Derg and was liquidated as a political organization in August of 1977 and its leadership went underground thereafter. It is a tragedy that Ethiopia�s elites were instruments for the introduction of terror as a political tool in Ethiopia. We also have from that period the basic documentation that led to the establishment of the blueprint for the fracturing of Ethiopia by nationalities and ethnic enclaves in order to weaken the central aristocratic power structure of Ethiopia. It is quite tragic for no one benefited from such blind fury of self-mutilating Ethiopian elites. Most of Meison and EPRP�s leaders paid with their lives in that unholy fratricide, and we are left with a bitter legacy that we are still trying to overcome to this day.  It is the same Bolshevik technique of penetration and dismantling of existing power structures, in order to replace the old by a new one, which was attempted at least in the minds of few die-hard leftovers from the Derg and Meison, in the election process of 2005. After a score of years, we have not learned anything from our past mistakes.

The thing that is most disturbing to me is how very little positive precedent we are leaving to the next generation of Ethiopians by way of political culture or any culture. This is not the type of problem that the mere passage of time would cure. In fact, the opposite is true. With the passage of time, things could get worse or are getting worse for Ethiopia. What tradition are we leaving our succeeding generations of Ethiopians?

V. Being an Ethiopian is a Daunting Challenge

Being an Ethiopian is not just a function of biology, but also a state of mind. I might even argue that it is less of biology, but more of a state of mind. We spend too much time trying to segregate rather than unify us all. The chats and articles of Ethiopians in the Internet are overflowing with such divisive statements of labeling people by ethnic identity. We use freely all kinds of disfranchising labels on people without much thought. For example, what is the point in identifying me as �Tygrean intellectual� as I often read in chat postings and a few articles by serious writers?  If the aim is to create unity among the diverse people of Ethiopia, how does such alienation by labels serve such a purpose of integration and unification? It is also sad to observe that the only people identified as such seem to be with Tygrean identity not Oromo, not Somali or anybody else.

What is wrong with Ethiopians these days? Having witnessed about a year ago some of the worst political alliance in the history of Ethiopia, I ask myself over and over where we are heading. I visited a number of websites and chat stations as part of my effort to understand my fellow Ethiopians. To my dismay, I find some of the most juvenile comments and arguments in such interactive chat forums. After looking at such dismal condition for over a year, I was hoping that there would be a leveling out and responsible and knowledgeable Ethiopians would come forth and engage us all in more constructive form of discourse than the type of garbage we are reading in chat forums. Ethiopians in general are very fearful people who tend to get courage to attack other Ethiopians or the Government officials hiding behind false names and functioning in anonymity within a group. The minimal courage that I observed in Ethiopians in general is usually a mob-based courage. Even the demonstrations staged at different locations and for different causes have common trends and characteristics: they are all nothing more than an extension of our debo tradition of loose association of neighbors for a particular undertaking with minimal commitment and loyalty with no close follow-up. I cannot help but rethink the myth of Ethiopian courage and bravery.

For sure, we are teaching the next generation of �Ethiopians� how to be vicious, irreverent, vengeful et cetera. The obsession that I have been observing in my critics of identifying me and other individuals with some ethnic identity, seems to me to be some form of attempt to deny us our citizenship or Ethiopian identity. Such effort is the moral equivalent of murder. The level of cognition or intellectual maturity within the Ethiopian community is dismal. It is ever sliding backward. I wonder often these days, are these people who write such immature articles and post garbage in chat forums the type of people who aspire to give guidance to a future Ethiopian democratic society? The guttural language, the name calling, the incoherence, the poor grammar, et cetera that one reads in Ethiopian owned websites and chat forums can be understood as the visible tip of deeply seated problems of a traumatized society. I could not even turn with confidence for help to Ethiopia�s elites for some solutions to our chronic conflict and hatred for each other, for they too have become part of the problem.

Our mental constitution is such that we could not even restrain our animal impulse to dominate others even when we have done some terrible things in our past lives, as was the case with the participation of Negede Gobeze and others in the Opposition and who muddied the political water of the 2005 election further because of their blind ambition. Most of Ethiopia�s political players from that era who are now popping out all over the opposition forum ought to walk with brown-bags over their heads let alone aspire to be political leaders. Thus, I think of the whole Ethiopian situation as a catastrophe. How are we going to pull ourselves from such political and social abyss? END

Tecola W. Hagos

21 July 2005