Toward ever more honest self-evaluation
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in it.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
The recent government atrocities against Muslims in Arsi region, the capital and other areas have received some coverage in the media. Most sources say Muslims have been angered by government interference in religious affairs and its attempts to impose on them the theology of the Al-Ahbash sect. Probably, the sect is backed by international circles eager to reform Islam or even change it if possible as to make it serve their global interests.
More of a passive apolitical Islam, other-worldly, limited to the rituals and traditional spiritual blubbering, seems to be in urgent demand and is badly needed especially in Ethiopia even though enough of it is already available in reality.
Now, there have never been a time in the Amhara and Tigray dominated Ethiopian Empire when governments have not intervened brutally in religious affairs especially when it comes to Muslims. Many ordinary people in the West do not know even now that Muslims in Ethiopia are always treated like a fifth-column. They also do not know the fact that they constitute half the population of the empire. Sometimes I do visit Ethiomedia.com. Its Amhara Professors never tire to tell us in their regular articles about amicable and harmonious, peaceful coexistence of religions in Ethiopia through centuries, echoing again and again empty words. I prefer comedy to tragedy but not when it is based on outrageous farce and cheap lies.
The truth is Ethiopia has been periodically a slaughterhouse of Muslims, the worst anywhere in the world. It is high time that the peoples in Western countries realize the hidden realities of the Abyssinian dominated empire. By the way, our old OLF, run by Wollega bureaucrats and their fans, do not like to hear this truth. They always have tried, even using mindless Muslim Oromos, to isolate the Muslim majority of the Oromo people from other oppressed Muslims in the empire, all in the name of Oromumma, Oromonness or under the cover of propaganda related to the glorious Gada system. Why is that? It is because these OLF leaders lack political culture and maturity. I have said it before a number of times. I will repeat it again and again to reawaken awareness: these OLf leaders are not more Christians than the leaders of the Eritrean highlanders. The Amhara regimes had left no stone unturned to convince the Eritrean Christians that the struggle for the Liberation of Eritrea had been part of the Arab plot to islamise and arabise Eritrea. As we all know, they failed there utterly. Most of the present Abyssinian elites are unanimous today that their tactics will work when applied especially to the Oromos. It is possible that some international players advise them all to ignore the realities on the ground. They believe themselves to be the creators of new realities!
Coming back to my point, I want to say that the Al-Ahbash sect is unnecessary. The Muslims in Ethiopia have already been mostly dazed by systematic repression and oppression and are forced to political passivity, with some exception. The Saudi government controlled and financed Wahabi clerics as well as most graduates from Al-Azhar academy do preach easy transcendentalism and political submissiveness no less than Al-Ahbash even though they may differ on other issues. The reference by Karl Marx to religion as opium seems still valid when we consider the misuse of religions politically. The combination of this sort of preaching with government repression and the culture of chewing the psychedelic qat has created paralysing atmosphere of submission since long among the Muslims in Ethiopia
My own thinking is that Muslims in Ethiopia are presently intentionally manipulated and provoked not just by the Ethiopian regime alone but also by the Anglo-American circles eager to justify more military spending and more intervention in their war on “Islamic terror.” As long as there is parliamentary democracy at home they have to convince the electorate. I have great respect for press freedom. It allows me, among other things, to say here that democracy even in the West is really under threat now.
I have been considering for sometime how to present the recent developments in Ethiopia in their broadest context in a clear and meaningful way. I am extremely glad to find by chance in the meantime a book with the title “A World Without Islam”, by an American author. He is Graham E. Fuller, a political analyst, specializing in Islamic extremism. He was vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council. He also worked for the CIA in Kabul. He is an academic who cannot be easily accused of sympathizing with Moslem or left wing extremists. I may not agree with the writer on everything. But, having read the book carefully, I can say that he grasps and articulates in clear and most rational terms the issues of the so-called war on terror and what it is all about in the light of history.
In his catalogue of oppressed nations and nationalities in our region, the writer avoids mentioning the Oromo case for whatever reasons. Yet, I would like to amply present passages here from his book. I recommend it also to all sensible persons in Ethiopia, especially to the Oromos, most especially, to those Oromos who listen unconsciously to the time honoured old Abyssinian propaganda about Muslim and Arab threat. To be plagued by not admitted and not discussed fears will only create hesitations and doubts retarding, even poisoning our struggle for liberation from oppression.
To talk in this time, as Professor Asafa Jaalata does, of Oromo girls sold to slavery on the streets of Cairo and Constantinople in fifteen century is to miss the point. Some weeks ago, I ran into a pro OLF person in a bus station in Holland. He shouted at me insults saying that I tried to divide Oromos by raising religious issues in Bariisa.com. He was so gripped by hatred so much that he could not even listen to my response.
My aim is to strengthen Oromo unity by openly discussing our problems and not to spread hate among us. I realize I am engaged in a thankless task. But I know how emotions of hatred are blinding. Generally, even rational thinking fails to curb them, once they get out of control. We see what is happening in such a homogeneous nation like the Somali nation. Gripped with clan hatred they are destroying their country intentionally leaving the door open to foreign intervention, including the Abyssinian intervention. They see it happening daily and are suffering as a result, yet it is as if they were not seeing it, so absorbed in their clan worries and blinded by petty considerations and secondary contradictions. Why do they not stop following opportunist leaders? No amount of intellectual objective discussion seems to help. Will the Amharas and the Tigrayans ever behave in this manner within their ethnic groups? I think they have left this phase behind somehow and are doing all they can to dominate others indefinitely.
It is also high time that we Oromos re-examine our usual mind-set and easy assumptions. I think the Somali situation is much better than ours. Most of us Oromos are consumed by self-pity, but we are occupied most of the time by extremely egoistic concerns. We have been unable to produce revolutionary leaders who are titans among titans. Instead, we worship and expect a lot from self-appointed leaders who cultivated the culture of keeping themselves aloof even from their followers. Mostly we refuse to produce committed leaders from our own number on the grounds that they are no better than ourselves. The result is most of us are waiting for better weather. We orally keep begging one another to struggle in the meantime. Most of us do not realize that the struggle for liberation is not a choice but a duty and an obligation that needs revolutionary organization and discipline.
Part of our sickness is to lay all the blames for our ordeal at the doors of our immediate or distant enemies alone. This will not work and is not right. Victim mentality, the usual picture that Oromos are exclusively good, peaceful and kind Volk needs to be seriously re-examined. Besides, we do not need to believe all the propaganda of our political leaders, and all what our eccentric academics tell us about the Gada system being specially and supremely democratic and social. There is some truth in this. But it is not the whole truth. After all it was also a military system: its periodic and predatory wars at the expense of the non Oromos must be admitted. I even assume that the majority of the Oromo people must have been eventually fed up of the endless expansionist wars. I cannot help thinking that the general Oromo passivity and pusillanimity today is not due merely to the Abyssinian colonialism and conquest. It might have also deeper roots in our cherished old system which gave way to feudalism even from within. Let us investigate received information, examine our thoughts, spell out our feelings and speculate as free human beings, far from cheap popularity, ambition, rivalry and self-advertisement.
It remains to say that conflicts in the name of religions are worse. We need to know their genesis and their real causes. The writer of “A World Without Islam” has done a good job of exposing them systematically. Let me quote him at some length. I would like to stress that the extracts here are chosen by me somehow at random and are no substitute for reading the book:
“To generalize about such a huge and dynamic phenomenon as Islam is to pin it as a butterfly in a collection box to preserve it, to be consulted and examined as a specimen for all time. There are really thousands of butterflies out there, and the species is evolving and changing even as we seek to grasp it. Ironically, it is the most fanatic and rigid of Muslims, on the one hand, and their most zealous enemies in the West, on the other, who seek to freeze Islam into one single immutable phenomenon, the better to promote it or denigrate it. In the end, I hope to persuade the reader that the present crisis of East-West relations, or between the West and “Islam,” has really very little to do with religion and everything to do with political and cultural frictions, rivalries, and clashes. This conclusion matters a lot: it has everything to do with how we end up treating the problem of Western-Muslim confrontations today. Are we in fact headed toward a titanic and implacable clash of civilizations, a new Hundred Years’ War or World War IV, as some have suggested? A small group of Muslims, Christians, and Jews actually like such a stark narrative of existential struggle. But if we conclude that religion is not the central issue at work in present tensions, then we have a much better chance at dealing with and even resolving those issues, however more complex they may be. In that sense, we are hopefully working toward building a solid foundation for the three great Abrahamic faiths- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam- that share more than they dispute.”
Earlier in the introduction we read this: “ As counterintuitive as this argument might seem at first glance, a powerful case can be made for the existence of deeply rooted geopolitical tensions between the Middle East and the West that go very far back into history indeed, predating Islam, even predating Christianity. A multitude of other factors have powerfully influenced the evolution of East-West relations over a very long time: economic interests, geopolitical interests, power struggles between regional empires, ethnic struggles, nationalisms, even severe clashes within Christianity itself- all of which provide ample ground for East-West rivalries and confrontations that really have little if anything to do with Islam.”
Let me add here that the Anglo-American circles who are leading the war on the so-called “Islamic terror” are not unaware of these insights. The point is to legitimize through parliamentary democracy their military and political interventions in their bid for a new form of world domination. I think the writer is aware of this simple fact when he says, “Neo-imperialism remains strong in the Muslim world for two reasons: because so much of the Muslim World possess huge geostrategic importance due to energy sources and transportation routes, and precisely because it remains the last area where weak and pliable authoritarianism is the rule. Even though direct forms of foreign rule have long since faded, modern mechanism include large US economic subsidies- particularly in the case of Egypt- use of loan mechanisms controlled by the United States from the World Bank, military sales, diplomatic support, the presence of military bases, regular political intervention, manipulation of regional policies as pressure points, military threats, and near silence on violations of civil liberties and human rights in these states.”
One wonders why the writer is silent on the key role the Abyssinian dominated Ethiopian Empire is playing in this deadly global game. Ethiopia seems to be a taboo zone in the chain of neo-colonial outposts in the world. Amhara and Tigray tyranny and brutality is nothing in itself had it not been backed from outside in this broad context.
By the way, many naïve Oromos assume that the Amharas have lost power completely to the Tigrayans. I do not subscribe to this assumption. True they are relegated to the second position especially in the military command structure. But they are still very powerful both in the regime and as opposition. What makes the Amhara politics and mind-set more dangerous than the Tigrayan political thinking is not only their determination to preserve the empire without even cosmetic minor changes whatsoever but their dream to amharise us all in some way via their language, under the slogan of Ethiopiawinnat , the glorious Ethiopian identity, with which their ethnic identity supposedly merges and into which it ultimately disappears! That is a crazy dreamland. It gives them the feeling that they are mature statesmen and world diplomats, capable of thinking universally! Sadistic Amhara fantasies and ambitions can take cover behind such typical posturing. No doubt that they are very clever in their own way. But, as said, they are not alone. Tigrayans do not hide their ethnic identity. They want to dominate us as long as they can. They cannot dream to tigranize us directly. do they? Nevertheless, they may decide eventually to amharize us to reach a final compromise with the Amhara elites if these accept Tigray political supremacy unquestionably, which is not impossible in the Abyssinian “brave new world.”
Let me end this article by making this final speculation and plea. Most of us Oromos communicate with each other on extremely stereotyped and superficial levels. In this we are not much different from most Amharas, even though we do not shout “zerraaf.” loudly. A few days ago, an Oromo, living in the US was talking to me on the phone. He was trying in the most polite terms to make me accept a proposition that is absolutely illogical and unacceptable. Sadly we waste our energy pretending most of the time to be what we are not, and we are mostly incapable of true love and substantive communication, which is the source of creativity and any meaningful commitment. This is so because, most of the time, we repress our genuine emotions, feelings, ideas to hide our pessimistic, defeatist underlying deep convictions. Yet we are never tired of sterile polemics, arguments and counter arguments in empty space. We need to learn how to be transparent and responsible even in small things, which is part of genuine humility. We really need to learn how to love ourselves truly and productively responding to our inner voice if we want to be free from eternally serving the declared and undeclared Abyssinian agendas. First let us change ourselves. Only then can we be of use to our nation.