While the best minds and hearts in the world today think and do what they can to solve societal, environmental and political problems in order to avert war and create real peace on earth, in harmony with the laws of nature,
the global forces bent on the exploitation of man by man are busy using the old colonialist principle of divide and rule spreading hatred and war, heralding an era of conflicts between civilizations, thus distorting reality and icing up and dimming human awareness with the sole intention of distracting attention and warding off real issues of our time. No wonder that in this atmosphere bloody dictators in a number of developing countries feel more protected and secure beyond imagination and are in no mood to budge or have mercy on the oppressed masses.
In our own region of Africa bloody dictators are thriving as ever in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Uganda and Somalia even though they are judged and dealt with differently, depending on the degree of their loyalty to the global empire builders. Those who identify with the war on the socalled terror are the safest and at their forefront stand the Ethiopian militarists led by Meles Zenawi. Accordingly, of all these dictators, this faces the most explosive internal situation.
The release of Birtukan Mideksa must be seen in this context. It is meant partly to ease the pressure from which the regime is suffering since it has shamelessly stage managed a fictitious election. The dictator enacted the drama of pardoning her, making her confess whatever she confessed in order to clip her wings rendering her a lame duck in the eyes of her supporters and admirers. It is clear that those international circles who initiated her release do not want her to be free enough as to challenge the very regime that is their darling. Nevertheless I do welcome her release. She has suffered too much. Yet I have no illusion. Tens of thousands of Oromos are sitting right now in Zenawi’s jails and secret detention centers. Besides, Birtukan is not just an ordinary opposition leader. She has become, among other things, a rallying point for all the chauvinists who deny even the existence, let alone the rights, of oppressed nations in the empire of Ethiopia. Can she ever distance herself from them? I have strong doubts. Needless to say, the chauvinist groups have more influence in the West than OLF factions put together and had more vigorously agitated for her release.
The current drumming up for a dubious resolution of the so-called differences among OLF factions and thecongratulations they received from the so-called ALEJE, Alliance for Liberty, Equality and Justice inEthiopia, in its press release, point in the same direction. Most of the Abyssinian political elites, the ones who are in power as well as the ones who are in opposition and their international patrons, are afraid that the struggle going on in Somalia will spread to Ethiopia. They have done everything possible to strangle the struggle of the Somali nation against the Abyssinian interference and domination, and to dismiss it as the work of Alqaeda. But facts speak louder than propaganda: the overwhelming majority of the Somali people are against the puppet regime imposed on them by the West and Ethiopia. The heroic struggle of the Somali people which started already long before there was news of Alqaeda will continue. The Somalis, unlike the Oromos, have never been debilitated mentally by their oppressors. They will not be intimidated in the foreseeable future.
The big question is will we, the Oromos, learn the lesson and overcome centuries of stagnation , fear and stillness inculcated in us by constant terror, before it is too late, or keep waiting as we mostly do for the impossible. Sometimes I am ashamed even of running this website. Words need to be backed with action. Even while free I feel at times that I am living in a cage like a jailbird. Can a bird in Jail sing freely? Yet I have great respect for words. How else can I express myself in the absence of solidarity? Of course I can sing like a bird in cage.
Is it the irony of fate that most of the OLF factions share the Abyssinian and Western fear of the developments in the struggle of the Somali people? Its implication in the context of the aspiration of the Oromo people is frightening them all. Hearing Lenco Lata advising the western circles on how to deal with Somalia is highly illuminating for many of us. If the West does not stop blindly supporting the Abyssinian aggression and supremacy in the region Oromos, Somalis and others will be obliged inevitably to form a common front to coordinate their struggle sooner or later. That is only natural, come what may. In the mean time OLF serves many Oromos who claim to be its members and supporters as an excuse not to struggle, to avoid serious commitments. It is well known that OLF does not make serious demands that require revolutionary sacrifices or tight discipline on its supporters or even members. It is indeed comforting to belong to OLF in many ways. If you are an OLF member you can become fat and incapable of seeing lies in its story .All you need to do is mostly raising funds for it. It keeps patronizing everybody ultimately to contain and not to release the potentialities of the Oromo struggle, all this for extremely selfish reasons.
Currently some of its members or supporters talk threateningly of zero tolerance for division. Actually division is much better than unity in slavery and cowardice. It is such a unity that not only the Abyssinian militarists in Ethiopia but also the regime in Eritrea want us to achieve. I know for one that Afwerki hates Muslims more than anything else in this world. It is sickening for him that the overwhelming majority of the Oromo people happen to be Muslims. He has managed to neutralize mostly the Muslims in Eritrea itself even though these Muslims, unlike Muslims in Ethiopia, do not easily bow to oppression thanks to the fact that for the most part of their history they had escaped the hell of the feudal empire of Ethiopia. Despite his defiance of the Anglo-American circles Esaias is left alone for that reason. If he gets his Badme back he may join the rat race for destroying the Somali resistance as well. This does not surprise me. Some of us did hope that the group under general Kamal may initiate new forms of struggle to challenge the Woyane. Alas, I believe that Kamal is a prisoner of old OLF factions and Esaias. Moreover, I believe there are no real differences between the old factions except by way of diffusing diffidently false information and misleading their followers.
I suggest again and again that all really self-respecting Oromos accept our reality. Truth will liberate us from our anguish and help us see new dimensions of our struggle for justice. We do not need to hide behind nonentities. We do not need to spend lot of energy trying to suppress and hide our weaknesses from one another. If we keep following nonentities our self- respect will erode further. A person who has lost self-respect cannot stand up to defend his rights. This is a more immediate and dangerous challenge for most of us. The question is how to create a truly revolutionary culture without sacrificing democratic values, without saying one thing and doing the opposite like most of the Abyssinian political groups.
Eduardo Galeano speaks in “Mirror ” of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the end, he says, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls, he continues, sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we, he says, rarely hear of them. Eduardo counts some of the walls and ends by asking why some of them are so loud and others mute. Finally I would like to add that, of all such walls, the most hideous and hidden ones are those erected around the oppressed nations of the Ethiopian empire. They also must fall. There is no other way to a lasting peace in the region.