Kahsay‘s Book with its title: Ethiopia: Democratization and Unity deals practically with the same Generation dealt with by Kiflu Tadesse from another perspective and supplements the latter; as Andargatchew Assegid deals with still another aspect. From the viewpoint of the apologists of the incumbent regime the generation is supposed to have rocked the mountains, whereas it is rather the country, which was rocked to the extent that rifts within its components are growing.

This Generation spearheaded the struggle in the late 60s and early 70s that culminated in the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, which in turn engulfed younger generations. The only positive changes brought about by the revolution so far according to the author are the land reform, literacy and the performing arts with the Dergue playing the decisive role for their implementation. The Generation produced victims in the form of martyrs, maimed, disintegrated families, displaced people, and refugees on the one hand, and as Kahsay emphasizes, it also produced mass murderers on the other.

Kahsay portrays the high lights of the events which unfolded in the course of the armed struggle led by the TPLF. He deals with the nature of the leadership of the Front from the very beginning and above all from his insider knowledge, so much so that his objectivity is unmatched by any other author on the subject so far.

It is almost impossible for a foreigner to find out facts about the TPLF which is not transparent, when it comes to aspects, which the leadership chooses to hide or distort. This is more complicated, when such an organization has an absolute control over the people. Therefore even an empirical research is bound to suffer under the uniformity of answers of the interviewees. The absence of important pieces of information or their distorted availability obviously forces a wrong conclusion. And if such conclusions are to be transferred as experiences they can disillusion those who try to put them into practice. Mr. John Young, who wrote his dissertation on the armed struggle in Tigray led by the TPLF, has managed to make up the most informative document yet on the subject and deserves a corresponding credit, but he portrays the TPLF as non-coercive organization. Kahsay`s insider information about the extremely coercive nature of the TPLF is supported by concrete evidences.

Personal experience

Most of the founding members of the TPLF including Kahsay came from the University of Addis Ababa and some knew each other earlier at high schools. Some had close and others loose friendship with each other. They appeared to agree on their opposition to the undemocratic nature of the military regime, on establishing a just system and on paving the way for economic progress. However, Kahsay, as he writes in his book underwent two shocks in the very beginning, while the TPLF was still a small organization. These shocks accompanied him all the way emotionally as well as politically during the armed struggle and have still influence on him up to now.

Some individuals, as friends, made it amongst themselves and arbitrarily became the de facto leaders. The rest did not at least openly oppose, but the first shock unfolded itself, when the self-appointed leaders committed a hideous act, as Kahsay still remembers with disgust. They suspected Ghidey Woldegiorgis, one of their friends to be an agent of the regime and started to beat him with sticks and burn him with hot sickles, without any concrete evidence. Kahsay, who remembers Ghidey Woldegiorgis as a decent and sincere person, tried to hold the torturers back, but they threatened to deal with him as an accomplice and told him that it was a revolution. The victim passed away under torture.

The perpetrators confessed later on within the group, which witnessed the incident that they had committed a mistake due to lack of experience. Although Kahsay could not forget the cruelty, he hoped that his shocking experience would be an isolated incident. However, as Kahsay observes further, what the CC learned out of the incident was to avoid transparency, to be as systematic and as secretive as possible, while it committed acts of killing on innocent, unarmed or disarmed people.

After some time, Kahsay writes how he was faced with the trauma of having to personally murder a person with whom he had friendly contacts. Dejen Tessema, an ex cadre of the Dergue escaped from the regime and hid himself in his home village near Alitena. Since Dejen was co-operating with the TPLF, Kahsay used to meet him to collect information. Meles Zenawi told Kahsay to tell Dejen to hand over his rifle to the TPLF. Nevertheless, Dejen was not willing to do so, because he, according to Kahsay, needed his rifle to defend himself against possible government agents and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party, EPRP, with whom he was at loggerheads. Kahsay accepted the reasoning but Meles Zenawi ordered Kahsay to do to Dejen, what the TPLF did to the Tigray Liberation Front (TLF), meaning to win his confidence first and then kill him or get him killed by units of the TPLF which were in the vicinity when Dejen falls asleep. To avoid being incriminated as well as to deny Meles Zenawi the possibility to look for another killer, Kahsay did not directly oppose Meles Zenawi but he won time for himself and Dejen by creating some excuses till Dejen escaped.

The author, unlike the official historians of the TPLF is a dissident and therefore free from the chains of Stalinist centralism, opportunism and the fear of losing personal privileges to openly write about the truth. He has above all a moral advantage since he opposed or avoided taking part in acts of inhumanity which were on the order of the day during the armed struggle. The most important pieces of information and their analyses pertain to the internal complete absence of transparency of the Front, the danger of the disintegration of Ethiopia in connection with the politics of ethnicity, the inhuman acts of liquidations, tortures, purges as well as intrigues of power struggle and the slavery of the rank-and-file members.

The author informs that a self-appointed leadership excluding other founding members wrote a declaration which stated that the Front would dissolve itself and join an organization at a higher level, if such an organization came into being. The “higher level” was understood to mean at the level of the whole of Ethiopia notwithstanding the fact that its authors did not elaborate their role in the formation of that would- be organization. Although Kahsay criticizes the formation of a Tigrean Front which preferred ethnic consciousness to that of Ethiopianness, he insists that there was no reflection of any secessionist tendencies in the Front at the time, when the declaration was written. The declaration was accepted by the remaining members as well, even if its content was not democratically discussed.

An emotional feeling of being Ethiopian is anchored in the psychological make up of Tigreans. But, according to the author, something alien to that make up appeared in the TPLF, when it was joined by Meles Zenawi and Sebhat Nega. Meles Zenawi, who belonged to the group which was supposed to be trained by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) had heard the sound of gun fire and fled from Asmera without informing his friends. He joined the TPLF some months later in 1975, after giving some unbelievable excuses.

The leadership made some changes within itself again without the participation of the rank-and-file members. Sunhat became the chairman and Meles Zenawi a deputy member of the CC and an assistant to Abay Tsehaye, who was the head of the political committee of the organization. Both Meles Zenawi and Sebhat Nega aggravated the undemocratic practice in the TPLF not only by excluding rank-and-members but also members of the leadership, like Aregawi Berhe (the military commander of the Front at that time etc. They dissuaded Abay Tsehaye to collaborate with them and wrote the anti-Ethiopian and infamous manifesto of the TPLF with the aim of forming the republic of Tigray. They sent Seyoum Mesfin like an errand boy to duplicate and distribute the manifesto in the Sudan. Abay Tsehaye and Seyoum Mesfin had belonged to the authors of the TPLF declaration which was far from the idea of secession.

Kahsay writes that he realized from this second incident that the self-appointed leaders would not only instill fear into the minds of the members by intimidating and killing in order to stick to power, but also impose any aim they wanted on the members as the aim of the Front. Therefore, he became and remained skeptic about the aim of those individuals since that incident. His opposition to the preamble of the program of the TPLF in 1988, which distortedly put the national question as a decisive factor for the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 as well as his rejection of the call for the acceptance of a referendum for Tigray by other organizations were in line with his skepticism. Kahsay´s suggestions for a rotating presidential system and his several Theses to ensure unity are attempts to thwart disintegration on the basis of ethnic differences. He shows even strong reservations to participate in the activities of ethnic organizations.

Kahsay describes the reaction of the members of the TPLF as confused, when they simultaneously heard the news about the manifesto of the TPLF and the fact that it was opposed by the EPLF. He remembers some of the founding members asking, whether anyone had ever mentioned the word secession the previous year. They could not dismiss the criticism of the EPLF as a fabrication because they were confronted by a manifesto which was supposed to be theirs. However, the opponents of secession and the authors of the manifesto in the leadership joined hands after some outbreaks of initial emotions and created the impression that all were responsible for the manifesto. The names of the authors of the secessionist manifesto were not known to non-CC members of the TPLF for 11 years, until Aregawi Berhe disclosed them in 1987.

Kahsay writes about the fighters who joined the TPLF either because they were convinced of doing the right thing or for other different reasons. They used to work day and night to destroy the dictatorial military regime, voluntarily risking their lives in the belief that they would contribute to the establishment of a just system. The fighters were not on the pay of the leadership. The leadership did not even spend on them what classical slave owners used to spend in the form of food and shelter because the fighters were being fed by the people. The leadership was prepared to reap the fruits of the labor of the fighters, in fact enrich itself and live in luxury at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands. It had the power to kill them without any need to justify its measure. Every individual member of the CC had the power to pass a death sentence without any consultation with anyone else. The fighters had many duties but no rights or some rights only on paper. As the Front took over state power and some fighters were no more needed as canon fodder, they were forced to live as beggars. The leadership purposely forgot their existence.

Kahsay`s accounts are likely to provoke readers to raise questions. The question, why he and other members of the TPLF continued to struggle under a leadership, which trampled on human and democratic rights as the regime against which they had taken up arms, seems to me to be an appropriate question. Kahsay and I were asked this question by several individuals. We discussed about our responsibility and arrived at the conclusion that proving our innocence and exposing the criminals is not enough. We served the TPLF each full-time for thirteen years and not only failed to correct the mistakes, but also contributed to the fact that an Ethiopian murderer was replaced by an anti-Ethiopian murderer Therefore the damage the TPLF has inflicted on Ethiopia, as Kahsay illustrates is so far more than its positive contribution.

As Kahsay elaborates, we knew a few of the inhuman and undemocratic practices in the Front, but we did not expose them even when we were abroad, because we reasoned that the Dergue would take advantage of our critique and employ it as a piece of propaganda. We did not inform members of the mass organization, because we did not want the TPLF to lose its supporters. We could not raise the issues within the organization, because we were not allowed to do so due to the Stalinist system of centralism, control and mutual suspicions. According to this system, as practiced by the TPLF, the formal procedure of raising an issue was decisive as one had to get permission to raise an issue. Doing it without permission was considered factionalism, which was punishable by up to death. We did not decide to leave the organization earlier, because we hoped for a favorable condition to come to bring the criminals to justice. We openly opposed the malpractice later on by, for example convincing all members of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT) in Germany. But Meles Zenawi and Seyoum Mesfin sent Addisalem and Tewolde Gebru to administratively dissolve the branch, which criticized an undemocratic decision. The leadership of the TPLF/MLLT practices always the same procedure: Liquidation if it deemed it necessary or purging and then fabricated incrimination followed by a campaign of character assassination.

As Kahsay`s accounts clearly show and the behavior of the incumbent regime testifies, the enormous sacrifices paid by the TPLF were meaningless for the people as a whole and a luxury for a few war criminals like Meles Zenawi. For the majority who actively participated in the struggle it was just a process of simply killing and getting oneself killed, a phenomenon which ended up in a change for the worse.

Kahsay shows that an armed struggle creates a favorable condition for another tyranny. The wish to get rid of tyranny by an armed struggle may not be questioned by non-pacifists, but the danger that an armed struggle would replace tyranny by its copy, as in the case of the TPLF is a serious warning, because such a phenomenon renders the sacrifices and efforts useless. Therefore, Kahsay without indulging himself in advising people against waging an armed struggle, hopes to convey the message, that peaceful resistance is better than even a victory under the leadership of ruthless murderers like that of the TPLF.

The decisive part of the history of the TPLF dealt with by Kahsay in his book shows, that Meles Zenawi, despite his ideological acrobatics remained consistent in his anti-Ethiopian policy and his policy of arbitrary killings, divide and rule, intrigues, manipulations, psychological terror in endless meetings etc. in all the years. For Meles Zenawi an ideology or a theory has always been one of the means to stick to power and never an end in itself. Whereas the military regime fought against and destroyed part of the generation of the elite, Meles Zenawi has gone far beyond to endanger the unity and existence of Ethiopia and the relative harmony of her people. He has duplicated the problems at least for the next generation. Therefore, Kahsay, by showing the aggravation of the national, humanitarian and social problems with every increase of the power of the TPLF/MLLT/EPRDF under Meles Zenawi is clearly showing not only the urgent need to get rid of this regime once and for all, but also appealing for the need to instill an Ethiopian sense of patriotism into the minds of coming generations of Ethiopians to rule out the possibility of any TPLF-like organizations coming to power with any Meles-like anti-Ethiopian murderers in Ethiopia.