This piece is a personal response to the statement issued by the United States State Department. The intransigence of the surrogate regime in Ethiopia is to be blamed for
the political turmoil. The attempt to apportion the blame and implicate the victimized
opposition and its supporters in intimidation is devoid of prudence to say the least.
Official statements of this sort specially coming from the State Department can fuel the political crises in Ethiopia and further undermine the credibility of the current administration. The blame game being played by the State Department can be regarded as an endorsement of the crimes committed by the regime. It provides indirect help and scapegoat to the mass terrorising regime in Ethiopia to escalate its repression and force the peaceful popular opposition to abandon the peaceful channels it has been struggling to maintain. The extra-judicial arrests of the opposition leadership and thousands of other citizens are not warranted.
The State Department can not deny the fact that the surrogate regime in Ethiopia is wholly responsible for the gross human rights violations taking place in Ethiopia. On the other hand, we realize the anxiety and unease in the State Department caused by the rejection of a proxy administration and the rise of the vast majority of Ethiopians to reclaim and reassert their basic rights. This struggle has taken its natural and right course and earned the leadership of a resolute opposition. It is equally clear to the State Department that the opposition that is spearheading our struggle for democracy and freedom is legal and fully committed to peaceful means and venues.Therefore any association, be it part or whole of this peaceful opposition, with intimidation should be categorically dismissed as misdirected, unfounded and a veiled attempt to deny facts on the ground.
We have every right to express our peaceful dissent against and disapproval of any process that has denied us our human rights. A process that has led to the concentration and monopolization of political in the hands of a single individual with insatiable appetite for power and surrogacy. At this juncture I deem it imperative to reiterate to the State Department that the genuine democratic opposition and Ethiopians do not consider the ongoing process as democratic or anything like it since it is based on the complete exclusion of the vast majority
of us.
The political arrangement and atmosphere in the last 15 years have not allowed us to set
the country on a democratic track. The reason is obvious and that is the concentration of power in the hands of a tiny minority headed by a detested tyrant. The country simply saw the violent transfer of political power from the fiercely anti-western junta to western made warlord. This is the actual and tragic development and situation in the country and requires a permanent democratic solution. Dressing, or beating round the bush ,instead of addressing the real and
sticking issues does only aggravate the tension. I do not know of any democratic process the works for the effective exclusion and marginalization of almost all the major segments of society and stake holders.
Possibly this is the new or revised version developed exclusively for Sub- Saharan Africa. The application of the pretext and deceptive political jargon, the democratic process in this context is derisive, misplaced and tantamount to an insult to our intelligence. The other commonly employed deceptive term in western diplomatic circles including the State Department is dialogue. The constant misplacement and misuse of the jargons; democratic process and dialogue in the current political environment is part
of the ploy to maintain the status quo. Dialogue requires a willing and committed partner and it can not exist when the other side is stripped of its rights and locked up in dungeons.
This is what we witness now in Ethiopia and the preconditions for dialogue are missing. Calling and urging for dialogue when the leadership of the opposition is put behind bars and their party is under assault is pretension. It is well established that dialogue and tyranny are incompatible. Tyrants do not accept genuine dialogue and the offer for dialogue by the opposition in Ethiopia has been met by the arrest of their leadership. The fact is that in spite of the wide spread crack down and vote rigging, the opposition opted for dialogue but the west have failed to restrain their tyrant. The opposition that has been singled out as the prime target of the surrogate regime could have been naive. The salvo of equivocal and at times partisan statements issued by the State Department have proved beyond any shadow of fact the double standard and hypocrisy inherent in the US foreign policy. I state this time and again.
This counter-productive foreign policy needs overhauling, which I think is long overdue. It is because of this erroneous policy that the US has found itself on the losing and wrong side of the political equation in Ethiopia. Pursuing national interests any where and any time on mutual grounds is acceptable and equitable. The obsession of the current US administration with International terrorism and its loss of sight of the gross violations of human rights by a regime it controls and props up is to account for our present predicament
