Ethiopia: Advocates for “reconciliation,” please shove your suggestions while my friends are dying
How dare anyone demand Amhara victims carry the burden of reconciling with those who seek to wipe them out of existence!
“Reconciliation” is a con job process that makes the international community happy, not those who have to live where trouble can start up again.
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A reasonably professional looking news website calling itself Fair Observer just published a fair amount of drivel. I know this because, unfortunately, whoever runs the X feed of Amhara Association of America had the questionable judgment of retweeting it.
You can tell early on that the two nobodies who wrote this piece are late to the party as the language they use gives it away: “Global coverage has often foregrounded the siege of Tigray and the suffering there, rightly so, while paying comparatively less attention to the contemporaneous atrocities inflicted on Amhara civilians during the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) advance.”
On first blush, after several opening paragraphs detailing atrocities against Amhara, this sounds conciliatory. Except it’s not. There was no “siege of Tigray,” and I, for one, see red when a couple of idiots suggest that it was “rightly so” for the global coverage to “foreground” it (good Gawd, what horrible syntax).
Why “rightly so,” gentlemen? Or are you going to repeat the lies of a terrorist organization about a famine that never was, each one contradicted by video evidence and the words of aid officials? I’d love to know.
It was, in fact, impossible to carry out a “siege” on Tigray if the TPLF was able to advance into southern territories. And it was able to advance. I was there with brave colleagues to see the TPLF’s destruction in Wollo and Afar.
Another tipoff that Monsieurs Akrem and Maspul don’t know what the hell they’re talking about is that they rely heavily on Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and other compromised organizations as sources for their analysis. There is not one single Ethiopian news source or alternative news source quoted in any part of their description. This is par for the course these days with mainstream Ethiopia coverage, BUT —
That both Amnesty and HRW demonstrated incredibly cynical conduct and sometimes outright lied about the war has been well documented. I know this because I was one of the ones who documented it, and I detailed it all in my book, The Hyena War. But hey, Akrem is in Saudi Arabia, Maspul is in Malaysia. Why should they bust their asses to actually dig deeper, right?
Anyone who is Ethiopian or cares about Ethiopia is entitled to demand better.
What is truly infuriating, however, is that this is yet another article that dresses up in sometimes pompous yet oh-so-apparently reasonable language an argument that might as well be water vapor.
And I, for one, am sick of it. While it seems to be a reflex for those in the Western diaspora to pounce on anything that comes close to mentioning Amhara victims (hence the AAA’s retweet), this is pathetic. The “it’s better than nothing” rationale has gone on for too long. And as much as I try to stand in solidarity most of the time with the AAA and will always admire its meticulous research efforts, guys, this ain’t helping.
For those who think I am unfairly attacking an effort that’s supposedly sympathetic to the Amhara cause, consider that this article either intentionally or out of just dumb-as-paint ignorance, offers validation to the “Tigray Genocide” myth and the “Tigray siege” lie. It’s peddling the notion that the two narratives can perfectly co-exist in this weird alternative universe of International Studies. Sorry — hard pass.
Especially when their suggestions are useless. Akrem and Maspul write: “Policy implications for Addis Ababa and the international community are urgent and practical.” Well, no, they’re not. The simple truth is that Ethiopia is hardly urgent to the international community, preoccupied right now with Ukraine and Gaza, nor has the Abiy government shown any sign it’s willing to relent in its ethnic cleansing.
“First, Ethiopia must ensure genuinely independent, well-resourced investigations into the most serious incidents in Amhara, including Chenna, Kobo and Kombolcha, and make findings public subject to due process.”
Pray tell, who will make Abiy and his officials do this?
“The Pretoria Peace Agreement’s explicit directive to craft a comprehensive national transitional justice policy provides a legitimate vehicle for such investigations.”
Really? This is the same Pretoria Agreement that was completely ignored as the TPLF hung on to its weapons, something that federal officials later conceded they damn well knew they couldn’t prevent.
“Still, domestic design must incorporate international best practices and third-party verification to secure credibility.”
Again, who will make them do this?
“Third, the international community should adopt a calibrated mix of engagement and conditionality that supports national justice reforms while keeping external incentives aligned with accountability.”
Again, it’s telling that their link to reforms is an AP story about a UN probe that was clearly compromised and gave short shrift to any victims other than the favorite people of the UN’s loudest bullhorn Tedros Adhanom. The authors don’t have a clue.
The international community is not interested and won’t be interested until there is a decisive victory for Fano forces. Those in Washington and more importantly, those in Europe who are far more astute about the situation, know damn well that Abiy has to be dropped. He’s running Ethiopia economically into the ground, and his relentless support for Oromuma fascism and ethnic cleansing can only be ignored for so long.
Which is why this pair are really out to lunch when they write, “Fourth, reconciliation demands a concerted narrative and civic strategy to counter hate speech and ethnic scapegoating. Policymakers must invest in community-level dialogue, support traditional dispute resolution mechanisms…” Blah, blah, blah.
Oh, for pity’s sake! It is astonishing that a writing pair for which half is made up of an Ethiopian person can be so dim when it comes to Ethiopians’ own sense of justice. While Ethiopians will clearly need international help after booting Abiy out, they do not need any conceptual “imports” of political models.
How dare anyone demand Amhara victims carry the burden of reconciling with those who seek to wipe them out of existence!
Would anyone demand this of Ukrainians and Russians? Show me someone who does, and I’ll show you a fool.
Would anyone dare, after what we have all seen on the nightly news of the moon landscape of Gaza, insist that Palestinians “forgive” Netanyahu, his bloodthirsty cabinet officials, and his sadistic generals?
Reconciliation was a model developed in South Africa by South Africans for a unique political context. While it has been adapted by other countries (including my own), it has its fierce critics — including, by the way, some in South Africa who noticed that reconciliation did absolutely nothing to solve the horrendous inequality between Blacks and whites, with whites still owning most of the land and a lot of the wealth.
But reconciliation is often the ice cream with sprinkles choice of those who have nothing to lose and who don’t have to live where the trouble can start up all over again.
Oh, the international community loves reconciliation! So do “policy tourists” like Akrem and Maspul. So does the international business community, which wants to get stuff done. Because reconciliation is a puppet theater. It is all about saying, “See, it’s all behind us now! Smiles everyone!”
In Canada, there is a hypocritical and empty gesture that’s performed ahead of almost every theater play, every concert, every public song recital in big cities. Someone steps out and bores the hell out of an audience by reading a script that resembles this: “X organization acknowledges we are on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples…”
We’re not going to give those folks their land back, mind you, and we may not even have Aboriginal people working for our organization, and hey, most of ’em probably can’t afford the theater tickets, but look! We did the bare minimum!
Reconciliation, these days, is a con job.
To be clear, this does not mean there will be no informal reconciliation among the various ethnic peoples of Ethiopia. I simply trust Ethiopians to work out their own way to settle things rather than have a farce of “let’s leave it to the policy makers.” The whiff of condescension is quite pungent off this pair’s set of suggestions, and Ethiopians don’t need to be lectured on how to reform their education system. It’s pretty damn obvious what will need to be done when only days ago, the world learned how in Addis, there’s “a new rule banning the teaching of Amharic in the upcoming school year. Any school that fails to comply will be shut down.”
Given the sham of the Pretoria Agreement that settled nothing, that insults every Ethiopian’s intelligence today and was endorsed, by the way, by the Biden administration and certain European powers, why should the Amhara people trust “a reconciliation process?”
Justice is a different thing altogether.
It is my own personal opinion that Ethiopians, whether they be Afar, Amhara, Gurage, you name it — and including the families of Tigrayans and Oromos who were murdered for helping their Amhara brothers and sisters — are entitled to justice. Nor should they apologize for it in a new world climate in which the US government blows up a Venezuelan boat, killing eleven people without even a pretense of due process over its accusations.
Nor should they apologize for wanting to see Abiy and his crew sitting in prison cells.
Nor do Ethiopians need a lecture on reconciliation from an accountant who lives in the capital of a despot who arranged the horrific murder of a respected Saudi journalist in Istanbul. While I don’t hold Mr. Akrem responsible for all the crimes of the country where he’s a guest (or by extension, Mr. Maspul for what happens in Malaysia), I do find it ironic and bordering on darkly comical for him to weigh in on Ethiopian human rights when he lives in one of the worst offending countries on the planet.
Call us when you publish ideas on Fair Observer for how to make Mohammed bin Salman all warm and cuddly.
Meanwhile, let’s all encourage Fano units to finally get their act together to put Ethiopia on a course to political, economic, and cultural stability.
