Once bitten – twice shy: A reply to Andargachew Tsigie
By: Saqattaa Shummii
e-mail: saqattaa@yahoo.com

Dear Andargachew;

As we have not met yet and before I proceed with my note as a reply to your article “ye Ginbotu mircha ina yaltemaikele astedader ye gil ina yebudin mebt tiyake” which appeared in the Amharic journal Tobia, I think it is correct for me say tena yistilign. I am privy only to the content of your article, therefore I am not sure of the date but judging from your allusions to the recent election, I believe it is written sometime in Ginbot 2005. The content is what I am aiming at anyhow. If one summarizes your article it is addressing three main issues although not formulated in that fashion – a) the Ginbot election, b) decentralised administration; and, c) individual and group rights. Your article is not directly addressing the Oromos per se but it is clear that you are targeting Article 39 of the Constitution, which laid the ground for the creation of the regional (ethnic based) administration which somehow benefited the Oromos.

In spite of your attempt to give the article a look of complexity, I have to disappoint you by saying that I found it very easy not only to fully understand the content, but also to read between the lines and identify your hidden agenda. I have to admit though that you are very articulate and politically correct. You are very smart and made no mistake of including a word which could offend the addressees. Had I been in your place I simply can’t imagine how I would have behaved. But my article, both in its form and content is different from yours. I am a victim of the system which you are trying to defend at all cost and therefore you and your fellow Amhara elites will be disappointed with my analysis. That is not what I enjoy to do but I have no choice. People like you – the ones who never change no matter how much one tries to explain to them about the brutality of the Amhara system, don’t deserve a better reply. But don’t take it personal. I am not against you as a person- I am sure you are a good person, considerate, loving and a caring family man but when it comes to the defence of my right, I will not give you credit for being a good person. Here you are my enemy because you are defending a ruling system which has been violating my fundamental human rights.

I am sure you will note from this article that

a) the word “you” in the entire article does not necessarily mean you as Andargachew, but you and the other Amhara elites who are defending the Amhara ruling system;
b) In the entire article, the word “principle” means the principle of the rights of nations to self-determination;
c) I used the ethnic groups, nations and nationalities interchangeably although I fully understand that they all have their own specific definitions in social science;
d) I used the concepts Ethiopia and Abyssinia differently i.e. all Abyssinians are Ethiopians but not all Ethiopians are Abyssinians;
e) unlike yours which is more “theoretical”, my article is more of a reflection of personal accounts and experiences encountered just in case it would be of help to convince and free you from an unnecessary complex – be it inferior or superior;
f) I am against secession in principle and that I am for equality among nations;
g) my attempt is to highlight the injustices committed against the Oromos by the Amhara ruling system and ask you the perpetrators or their defenders to commit yourself to the restoration of historical justice;
h) I am for the respect of human rights for all human beings and that there is no hierarchy in human rights;
i) I wrote mostly about the Oromos for simple reason that I am very familiar with the pain inflicted upon these people and I also felt that the target of your article is the “negative effect” of the “regionalization” which in my opinion has so far benefited the Oromos more than anyone else at least in exercising their right of using afaan oromo as the official language of courts and of instruction at schools;
j) in this article I am not addressing any of the atrocities committed by TPLF/EPRDF during the last 14 years simply because that part has been addressed separately by many colleagues – Amharas and oromos alike. I am targeting the Amhara elites for simple reason that it is their ruling system which is the root cause of all the prevailing problems and I see a danger that they you and your fellow Amhara elites are trying to restore that oppressive system once again;

Obbo Andargachew, you are different from other Amhara chauvinists in the sense that you tried to use spices from an international cuisine to justify your argument. I don’t know if you were using the human rights norms to confuse the readers or you truly believed in them. In any case, I will prove to you later that your reference to these international human rights norms to justify the supremacy of individual right over the so called group right, were totally wrong.

But before I proceed with the content of your article, I just wanted to tell the readers why I am replying in English. For two reasons - one practical and the other one – a matter of principle. The practical one is that I have no Amharic font in my computer and the principle one is that the question you have dealt with in your article is as a matter of fact, a question of the elite. Therefore I assume that most of our readers are conversant in English. You may accuse me of sounding like a Marxist (I have to admit that I still carry the remnants of that ideology) but the truth is that the principle of the right of nations to self-determination (the national question), which you were alluding to in your article is indeed the question of the educated – people like you (I believe you are) and me who because of our education and exposure to varieties of options, raise the issue on behalf of our people who are not lucky enough to be exposed to what we did. Otherwise, Ethiopian peasants, regardless of their ethnicity, do not have a clue about what we are talking about. They would die happy if only they got enough injerra on their gabattee every evening and see their children well fed before they went to bed. If you agree now that the issue is between you (sorry for assuming that you belong to one of the Abyssinian groups) and me an oromo, let us go for the duel. Judging from your article, you are an educated person and you even seem to have some notions of human rights laws. I don’t know how conversant you are in afaan Oromo but I am fluent in Amharic. Despite your attempt to use relatively unusual jargons, I fully understand what you meant and what you were aiming at because I could even read between the lines. To be honest with you, nowadays I very much appreciate my fluency in Amharic so that people like you do not confuse other innocent Ethiopians among others the Oromos by writing such an article. I will not leave you in peace and will continue exposing you to our fellow readers no matter how a complex a look you may give to your article.

Obbo Andargachew, it would be a disservice to our fellow Ethiopians in general and Oromos in particular if I hide my disappointment with your article which sent a wave of shock through my nerve system. It shocked me because this is the first time that I came across such a chauvinistic article, although disguised, since my student years in the 70s. Then it was a fashion to be on the side of those who were advocating the right of nations to self determination and I was in that group. I was with those who advocated the right of nations to self-determination not necessarily because it was the trend of the day, but because, being a young Oromo university student, it also served as a therapy for me to go over the trauma I went through while at schools in Ethiopia. You may wonder what the trauma was all about. I don’t blame you my dear. Judging from your article and without knowing you personally, I can say that you are from an Abyssinian family. Therefore, it is right to assume that from day one of your schooling you could freely communicate with your teachers because they all spoke in Amharic – your mother tongue. You were expected to learn only the geez alphabets and the writings. In my case it was totally the opposite. Born in an illiterate family of oromo peasant in a remote village of Wollega province, I started both the conversation and the writings on the same day. In short you had a 50% advance from the day we started schooling. I still remember the first day of my school the difficulty our teacher Mosissa - had to go through to explain to us what “ene” (I) meant. He was pointing at himself and we all thought “ene” meant either his shirt, his chest, or his tie – anything that was on that part of his body where the finger was pointed at. Difficult for you to understand the magnitude of the problem obbo Andargachew but that was the reality. You may wonder why teacher Mosissa did not explain to us in afaan Oromo but that also was the core of the problem my dear – he (like everyone at that school) was not allowed to speak afaan oromo in the school compound.

That all being said, I am neither fighting nor holding a grudge against you as an individual or as an Amhara but you as an Amhara elite who is defending the amhara ruling system. Of course now one of your elites, professor Mesfin promotes his home-grown theory that there is no ethnic group called Amhara which I have difficulty to understand. Does it mean that amharas never existed or they were so tiny a group from the beginning and therefore they were absorbed by the other major ethnic groups? In any case, until it is empirically proven that the Amharas never existed, I still maintain my position that they existed and their ruling system was used to oppress my people. By the way, I was wondering where Colonel Mengistu got the idea from, but now I know who his ideological peer was! I thought it was the colonel’s own anthropological discovery.

Obbo Andargachew, your approach to the issue of “regionalization” although beautifully packaged, is very ethno-centric and extremely dangerous for the future of our country. Your premises are not projecting peaceful solution for the prevailing low level conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed nations and nationalities. You and your fellow Amhara elites are preparing a recipe for disaster. Instead of admitting that the Amhara ruling system which helped your fathers and grandfathers commit such heinous crime against the people of the south including the Oromos, you are telling us that there has never been a nation called Amhara in the first place. Be as it is, your next move is very easy to guess – you are going to tell us that because there have never been an ethnic group called Amhara there cannot be an Amhara ruling system and subsequently no oppressor called an Amhara. A desperate criminal – attempting to remove the weapon of a crime from the crimes scene! But you are missing the point my dear. Not only us, the Oromos, but even the beneficiaries of that ruling system i.e. the fitwraris and Qegnazmachs who are still alive in the south will not agree with you and Professor Mesfin that they never existed as Amharas. For centuries you and your predecessors used to pump them saying that they, the Amharas were the ones who were sent to the south “ager le maqnat” (exact translation of which is colonization – qign gizat) and now you are telling these retired fitwraris and qegnazmachs that they were not Amharas in the first place. That is your internal problem to solve but as for us, the Oromos, we always knew that we existed as the Oromo nation and we will continue to exist for years to come. By the way, this new discovery of professor Mesfin reminded me of my son who used to close his eyes and stand in the middle of the park believing that no one could see him. Because he decided to close his eyes and could not see anyone, he thought that no one could see him either. But our professor is adult enough to analyse that his “new theory” should be better than that of my son. I can understand my son because he was a child, but a grown up man – a professor telling me that there has never been an ethnic group called Amhara, I have nothing to say except – come on professor, it is only you who closed your eyes but we all see with our own eyes that the Amharas do exist ! Like my son, now a grown-up boy is so ashamed when he watches that video clip where he was trying in his own way, to fool us, one day our professor will also be ashamed of his recent “theory”.

Professor Mesfin’s new discovery also reminded me of one story about a conflict between the USSR and China over an island. The story may not be authentic, but my Russian language teacher was very sure that it took place. It was about a long standing dispute between these two foes over an island which was not very useful for the USSR but was more needed by China. The USSR knowing that the existence of this island generated only a headache and was of no use whatsoever, decided to drop tonnes of explosives and sank it. The objective was met – there was no more object of dispute between China and the USSR, said the teacher. Unfortunately the relationship between the two nations did not improve simply because the “object of dispute” was removed. Instead of addressing the root causes of the dispute i.e. ideological differences between Maoism and the so called “Soviet Imperialism”, the USSR decided to remove the “object” of the dispute. But the low-level conflict between the two nations continued to prevail. You see obbo Andargachew, even if you try to remove the object of the dispute – the Amhara ruling system by telling us that there is no ethnic group called Amhara in the first place, it does not mean that the problem is solved. Dear friend, to ignore the facts does not change the facts! I am afraid, you are deliberately avoiding dealing with the root causes. Hence our conflict with the amhara ruling system will continue to prevail regardless of the removal of the name - Amhara. And that is exactly why I am always very Thomas (too suspicious) of anything you the Amhara elites propose. If you profoundly believe that we are all Ethiopia’s children and accordingly we are one big family, then why do you not at least make an effort to be honest and call a spade a spade. The amhara ruling system is the source of all the problems we are facing today in Ethiopia – be it political, social or economical.

You don’t want to say it but for sure you are from the same school of thought with professor Mesfin who is promoting the above theory. It reminded me of the USSR after the 25th Congress of the Communist party when it was decided that there was no more nationality based identification but the “sovetski chelovek” – a Soviet Person. But that assumption did not reflect the reality because on the ground what existed was a Russian, Ukrainian, or a Georgian person/national and a sovetski chelovek was an artificial induction. If you allow me to read between the lines, the reason why you are telling us that there is no ethnic group called Amhara is three-fold:

a) Amharas are widely believed to be the only known ethnic group to oppress the people of the South – which is a fact, and you want to remove that fact (the object of dispute);
b) once you succeed with removing the word Amhara from the Ethiopian political scene, you will then propose to remove the names of other ethnic groups as well and suggest a new but “common to all name” a la Russia – “the ethiopiski chelovek” – Ethiopian! ;
c) of course because there is no ethnic group called Amhara it is correect to assume that you will propose the a change of Amharic in to Ethiopian.
We were there and we have seen it my dear! Don’t waste your time. Isaa atii dhufteffo, harmetuu fudhatee gaba dhaqee jette intali. The little girl knew exactly what the stranger was looking for although he did not tell her.

Dear friend, we both seem to hate EPRDF but I am afraid for different reasons. You hate EPRDF because it introduced” the “gossa politika” and subsequently created a sense of “division” among the once upon a time “cohesive and happily living” Ethiopian family. Although not clearly said, you are insinuating that EPRDF created such an un-precedented division and hatred among the Ethiopians to the extent that in Oromiya for example Amharic is replaced with afaan Oromo. But I hate EPRDF mostly for not implementing properly what is stipulated in Article 39 of our constitution . You see, obbo Andargachew, we indeed speak the same language but with different meanings. And if me and you, assumingly the educated elites cannot speak the same language with the same meaning how can we expect our illiterate peasants to speak the same language especially after listening to our simulated campaign speech below?

The Rights of Nations to Self-Determination and preconditions for their implementation a la Andargachew:

To convince the readers that the right of nations to self-determination as a group right is not applicable to the nations/nationalities in Ethiopia you invoked the situation of the fifteen republics of former USSR. You were trying to prove to us that the principle is not applicable in Ethiopia because the current ethnic groups constituting Ethiopia never existed as independent states before the formation of Ethiopia. To further substantiate your argument you invoked alleged historical facts taking the example of the formation and easy dissolution of the USSR. I hope you will not be offended if I tell you that your “facts” were totally wrong because most of the fifteen Republics which formed the USSR never existed as States before they joined the USSR. But the different former vassals and pseudo-independent parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia which later formed the USSR had a different history from what you were trying to tell us in your article. Before the official formation of the USSR in the early 20s, there were no states called Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan etc. In addition to the fact that most of them were never independent states with a defined territory and centralised government, their incorporation into the family of the USSR was decided on behalf of the people by individual communists from these respective vassal regions. But once they joined the USSR their borders were defined, demarcated and delimited. Although they were fifteen Republics/states which formed the USSR, each one of them had in turn numerous ethnic groups in their respective territories. Hence when in 1991 the USSR was dissolved and the fifteen republics declared their independence another cycle of problem started. The problem was not with Russia, as the mother Republic, but within and among the ethnic groups of these fifteen republics. Chechens wanted to secede from Russia, Ossets and Abkhazs wanted to declare their independence from Georgia, Armenians in Azerbaijan seceded and created a de facto state of Nagorno-Karabakh and so on and so forth. To summarise,

a) most of the former Soviet Republics were not independent states with defined territory and a centralised government at the time they joined the USSR,
b) the people of the fifteen republics who joined the USSR were not privy to the decision by the communists who on their behalf agreed to form the Union,
c) because minority ethnic groups within these republics were not allowed to enjoy their cultural rights (for example language) while in the Union, the moment the situation became conducive for revolution, they protested against the newly independent republics; and,
d) it has continued to be difficult to bring peace to these republics for the last 14 years because people were determined to fight for their fundamental human rights and the central government finds it difficult to convince them otherwise.

Therefore, your argument that “because the Ethiopian ethnic groups (for example the Oromos), did not have their independent states before Ethiopia was created and therefore their demand for their right to self-determination cannot be justified is totally wrong. We are living witnesses of many states - members of the United Nations which never existed before they were created either as a result of ethnic based civil war (for example Eritrea) or because of the dissolution of a state (USSR). We don’t even have to invoke some imaginary examples but simply take Eritrea. Up until the Italians separated her from Ethiopia and gave her a sense of pseudo-state status (because it never exercised the rights attributed to a state), Eritrea never existed as an independent state. It came to exist as a state only in 1991 and today no one cares whether it was a state or not at the time it joined Ethiopia. And it continued enjoying its full membership in the UN alongside Ethiopia, a state which existed for more than one hundred years. Hence, your pre-requisite that a nation should exist as an independent state with a defined territory before it is incorporated into the family of another state so that the principle of the right of nations to self-determination is exercised – is totally wrong. The only requirement for a state to exist as a state once it leaves the family of another state is that the new state should have a defined territory, population and government. That is all!

I am not promoting secession and I never did. Far from it. I believe you too, claiming to be a self-appointed vanguard of Ethiopian unity, don’t promote it either. For once we seem, to agree on something but I am afraid we will not stay together for a long time. Although we both want to see Ethiopia as one country, we have different reasons for that. I don’t promote secession not only because oromos are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia and hence there is no reason for the majority to secede from the minority, but also because oromos, in my opinion, are the Ethiopians and therefore it does not make sense to secede from one’s self – an Ethiopian cannot be seceded from Ethiopia. If at all, nations have to secede from Ethiopia then it should be the minority – to be precise, the Abyssinians who did not play any role in the formation of Ethiopia in any way. I promote the idea that all Ethiopians i.e. Abyssinians and non-Abyssinians live in Ethiopia in equality and peace but if the minority Abyssinians one day decide to leave Ethiopia and create their own Christian enclave in the North, I will definitely fight for their right to do so and will definitely advise my fellow oromos and other Ethiopians not stand on their way and block their march to freedom. But you are against secession for different reasons. You, like your fathers and grand-fathers are paranoid that the Oromos, with their rich natural resources, vast land and manpower will secede and leave the Abyssinians alone in the non-productive part of today’s Ethiopia. Of course there will be no greater sorrow for the Amharas than losing their century old brutal rule and be “demoted” to a category where they will be less equal with others. That is your worry and an important area where our views diverge.

I fully understand your concern obbo Andargachew. Since 1991, you were witnessing that Ethiopia is no more divided in to 14 provinces but into regions along ethnic lines and that of course blurred your dream of keeping her as one entity. That is my wish too. But your and your fellow amhara elites’ attitude does not seem to create a conducive environment for this to happen. Your image of Ethiopia is the one which you, your parents and grandparents used to project where the Amharas were ruling over the other nationalities. In your Ethiopia where the Amharas are more equal to others, we were forced to believe that her different ethnic groups were so cohesive that no matter what, they would stick together. That is how we grew up and any opinion different from this mainstream view was doomed to be a narrow-nationalist or secessionist one. It was a wrong assumption. What keeps the people together is not an induced love but a relationship which is based on equality. Hence, you are rightly worried that the myth that the Amhara ruling system will be perpetual has gradually disappeared lately from the screen ushering in a new sense of joint ownership of Ethiopia in which all ethnic groups are equal shareholders.

Obbo Andargachew, we all know that Article 39 of our Constitution no matter how defunct it may have been, is a nightmare for you and your fellow Amhara elites. Unexpectedly you lost the control and the supremacy you have enjoyed for a century. In addition to the fact that your parents lost their land in the south in 1975

Email: Belew@yahoo.com

City: Africa