Among us children of the oppressed nations in the Horn of Africa there are certainly advanced intellectuals. The problem is
most of them are gurus with private agenda even when they appear politically active. This makes them greedy and also rigid in their thinking upholding dead systems or uniform beliefs. They are not really free from negative traditions and hidden missionary agenda even though they may work with unflagging energy and talk about liberating their people. They mostly spend lot of energy struggling for positions against one another, surrounding themselves with the aura of power, authority, wisdom and aloofness. Their aim is to attract young people to themselves to create around themselves hierarchical structures filled by people handpicked from above and not elected. So they create a power center with the unpaid work force and sacrifice of many ordinary people. Such procedures will end in creating dictators such as Meles Zenawi and Isaiyas Afwerke sooner or later.
For me the first thing to do is therefore to repeatedly question my own motivation even while initiating this site. Since I have decided not to please anyone and not to create any organization around my person, my unflinching duty is to point out the way from confusion to clarity demolishing thereby certain attitudes and views that keep us in an unfathomable depth of resignation to the point of despair. Many of us, especially Oromos, portray the liberation struggle most of the time as painful and bitter. This general picture is not only inhibiting but also false. A liberation struggle, if true to itself, must be motivated in the first place by an unconditional love for the people and not by hatred. Once this is clear the leadership of such a liberation struggle must be a loving leadership elected by ordinary members and with the participation of civic organizations. It must tolerate a wide range and spectrum of views and differences that are mediated through democratic dialogue and really free press.
Such liberation struggle involves more joy and happiness than suffering. The revolutionary energy it generates transforms suffering into joy and happiness in the form of the power of ordinary people and concrete daily achievements that cause jubilation after jubilation rather than sorrow. In the seventies when I was in Beirut I read books by Frantz Fanon. I think he said almost something like this: when oppressed peoples lose hope they start taking over the values of the dominant culture using them for measuring one another. They start hating themselves and one another or blaming things on external factors. The more they do that the more their capacity for love diminishes, and they become zombies, leading to more despair and cynicism. They may dream of, and talk a lot about liberation but the frequency of their love is too low to transform their feelings into clear thinking and decisive action. In these situations they may fall prey to the manipulations of their intellectual gurus easily.
Especially for us Oromos mostly talking has become a substitute for action. I was impressed by the statement made once in a Paltalk Oromo room by a worker in the Oromo language section of the VOA. He said the Amharic section was flooded with letters from listeners and had to apologize for having not enough time to broadcast or read them, whereas the Oromo section was starving begging for response. Since I started BARIISA.COM I have been waiting for some responses in the form of articles, especially critical articles. I am far from despairing. We spend lot of time talking about the Oromo question instead of action.. This reminds me of the Ilaali culture of Arsi particularly in the vast plains of Sikkisaa, Mandooyuu and Diida’a. Social occasions were many in which Ilaali was practised: death, marriage and pilgrims to the many traditional shrines such as Dirree Sheik Husein, Suf Omar, Dhaamole etc. When I was in school I went with my father during the vacations, attending a number of those mass meetings. I was impressed not only by the drama but also by the rhetorical splendour. The topics were varied, involving also politics in a cleverly camouflaged way, at times even openly, depending on the situation. Putting its dramas, mostly humorous and comic, and its entertaining aspects aside, the whole point is to argue for the sake of argument and mostly to defeat in the process other contestants and speakers. Its most brilliant practitioners were well known in the entire Arsi area. There were traditional figures practicing this all their lives going from place to place and winning the argument. Lot of fantasy, imagination and even logical thinking is involved, I must admit. That is why some of such leaders were famous also for mediating or smoothing out differences in times of conflict. Yet basically the Ilaali created the illusion of mastering the situation. It provided an outlet for the emotions and faculties of an oppressed people. People went home at the end of the gathering feeling that all the burning issues of the time were properly addressed and that all was well. Lot of self-deception and flattery is involved here. Anyway the Ilaalii developed into an art of argument like the art of rhetoric in ancient Greece when the Sophists became powerful. And all this is seen in a dominantly pastural and peasant milieu. I think even today if contests in rhetoric take place Oromia wide the Arsi will win all the prizes! Thanks to the Ilaali culture the Arsi dialect is one of the most fluent.
Now even in Greece Socrates condemned sophistry. He said our approach when we use the language should not be for conquering an opponent but to know the truth. He is right. Gimmicks are gimmicks even when they sound logical. Philosophers use argument even today. But its aim is different. It is to discover rather than defeat.
When I particularly consider the Oromo issue I am amazed at our, shall I say, ingenuity in explaining the still stand and stagnation in our struggle. We blame the weakness of our struggle on a number of things. Let me mention a few examples. Oromo disunity in general comes first. Second, the lack of unity among Oromo political Organizations. Third, we talk about the absence of a corridor to the outside world. Fourth, we have no friends in the world. All these reasons and explanations are either shallow or are factors of secondary importance. No nation ever starts its struggle for freedom and liberation united from the outset. Lack of unity among political organizations is just nonsense. But which organizations if we disregard nonentities which exist only to hinder the struggle instead of advancing it? The last two reasons do not deserve serious consideration because you cultivate friendship and create corridors to the outside world through your struggle. You will not find them ready made.
Here is an interesting story. Ten blind men crossed a river. One of them said: let us count to see if someone is missing. He counted nine forgetting one-himself- and declared that one was missing. Others did the same in turn reaching the same conclusion of course. They started wailing and weeping for the missing till someone who stood aside following what happened told them that each of them did forget to count himself. There are many other false explanations in which we Oromos ignore ourselves such as tribalism, regionalism and the religious divide. But they are not better. Mind you I do not mean such problems do not exist but they are no reasons to explain our dilemma completely.
Here is one of the points I want to make in this article. The political elites of the oppressed nations in Ethiopia must dialogue with the people of Abyssinia and their political elites. True, most of the Abyssinian elites – Tigrayans as well as Amharas – are engaged in sabotaging a democratic dialogue by refusing intransigently to recognize in practice the rights of the oppressed nations to self-determination, if I disregard the Woyane pretentions. The reason most of them present for their intransigence appears logical from outside. They say all peoples in Ethiopia are oppressed including Amharas and Tigrayans. So there is no need to raise the question of the right to self-determination separately. They say it is divisive. At the same time they work in practice for their own supremacy directly and indirectly.
Let us see. I personally have not seen as yet any sensible members of the oppressed nations in Ethiopia who deny that the masses of the Amhara and Tigray peoples are exploited. But the point here is they are not exposed to multiple oppressions: Their lands are not occupied by settlers or, as under woyane, sold to foreign companies under the pretext of lease for hundred years.Their villages are not burned down periodically, innocents massacred. Their cultural and ethnic identities are not sidelined or repressed. Their religious values are not trampled on and violated. Their history is not ignored. These facts stand in the full glare of our reality in Ethiopia . No amount of feudo-bourgeois linguistic logical tricks and games can hide them. What are we waiting for? This pattern of outrageous denials and misuse of the truth exists also among Eritrean highlanders, who call themselves Tigrinyas and not Tigrayans, a coined identity, sadly enough. I say sadly enough first because democratic values among elements from the Eritrean highland are not yet as dead as in the empire of Ethiopia where they never existed, second, because Eritreans have fought together for the liberation of their country and they should know better.
Anyway the past is haunting us all. It is a matter of degree. If we accept dialogue unconditionally I am sure we shall overcome together our present reality and the gloom of history. Especially most Amharas have serious problems when it comes to renouncing their bloody emperors and the religious connotation that the name Ethiopia implies. Unless they overcome these hurdles they are heading for isolation and dead end where there is no place for genuine dialogue. They also tend to dismiss the right of oppressed nations to self-determination as a left-over from the communist era. Communism or no communism human rights and the issues of social justice are burning issues as ever.
No one can stop the struggle of an oppressed nation for liberation, no matter how small. We all need restructuring our activities creatively. We must continuously challenge the upsetting negative and mistaken thoughts and concepts that flow through our minds and this means attitude modification. Once we are free we will see no reason for fear and understand what we have in common is more than what separate us. If all the oppressed nations in Ethiopia, small and big, become free and independent this could release new energies for a much better future. The main thing for me is to be free from state sponsored terror and oppression. We must forget the nonsensical idea that small nations are not viable and cannot survive on their own. They can survive as much as big ones. In this global era the entire world is interconnected. Look just at the peoples of Europe, small and big. They are Independent yet working as one to overcome problems that concern them all. We can do the same if we have confidence in ourselves as humanbeings.