Association of Ethiopians in Europe Stop Apartheid in Ethiopia ! የዘር ፖለቲካ ለማስወገድ እንታገል
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The massacre of the Amhara must end!
By: Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate. Frankfurt, Germany
August 15,2023
The Ethiopian government has been systematically killing the Amhara for more than a week. The international community must work with Prime Minister Abiy to put an end to this. But a new constitution is needed to resolve the conflicts in Ethiopia, says Asfa-Wossen Asserate in the statement.
After the bloody civil war in Tigray , Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is now turning against the Amhara people and massacres them with the help of the army, military aircraft and drones . The least the West should do now is admit that they were wrong about Abiy. He is not the reform politician who will lead Ethiopia into a new, peaceful era. The West should also recognize that it was premature to award him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, right after he began his first term.
In Europe, including Germany, people often act as if the ethnic conflicts in Ethiopia were something inevitable, even something typically African. This is by no means the case. Africans also prefer peace to war. Most of the African ethnic groups live very peacefully together. Ethiopia has more than 90 ethnic groups. The great among them are the Amhara and the Oromo. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews have also lived in peaceful coexistence with one another for centuries. No matter what ethnic group Ethiopians come from, they all share the feeling that they all belong to the Ethiopian people.
Three identities – one consciousness
I myself live with a triple identity: I feel as an Amhare, as an Ethiopian and of course as an African. Ethnic boundaries are also disappearing as Ethiopians increasingly marry members of a different ethnic group and start families. Even the last Ethiopian emperor, my great-uncle Haile Selassie, was only a third Amhare.
So where does this violence in Ethiopia come from that is bringing so much suffering to the country? In the civil war against the Tigray, the Abiy government had allied with the Amhara, on whose territory most of the theaters of war were located, in order to jointly defeat the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) . This war was terrible and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Now Abiy is turning against his allies and has been massacring civilians in Amhara since August 7th. The advances of the Ethiopian army, which has more than 130,000 active soldiers , more than 450 battle tanks and a powerful air force , are officially not only directed against the Fano, an Amhara militia , but also against the civilian population of this region.
Also deployed Ethiopian Airlines
The cities of Debre Birhan, Gondar and Finote Selam were particularly affected by drone and bomb attacks . In violation of all international conventions, the army uses planes operated by the civil airline Ethiopian Airlines to transport troops and weapons to Bahir Dar , the capital of the state of Amhara.
The cause of these conflicts lies in ethnic divisions. Abiy himself leaves his origin largely in the dark. His father is probably a member of the Muslim Oromo, his mother is probably a Christian Amharin. Abiy himself belongs to the Pentecostal “Ethiopian Full Gospel Church” . All of that should be secondary. But Abiy pursues a policy that aims to make the Oromo the dominant ethnic group at the expense of all other ethnic groups.
I appeal to the international community to condemn the massacre of the Amhara people and to urge the Abiy government to stop this senseless killing immediately.
fatal condition
The decisive question is: How can this conflict be overcome in the long term? The bloodbaths in Tigray and Amhara have deep roots. They are in the Ethiopian constitution, which thirty years ago the socialist TPLF government based on the constitution of the USSR . And so Article 39 in Ethiopia also stipulates the right for every federal state to secede from the Federation of Ethiopia . The federal state of Ethiopia is based on ethnic groups and in this way divides the country. The ethnocentric constitution of Ethiopia is the root of all evil in the country. It means that the country is always dominated by just one ethnic group. To the hegemony of the TigrayOromo hegemony followed in 2018 with the election of Abiy .
Ethiopia needs a new constitution. This can only be federal and should recognize and respect both religious freedom and membership of an ethnic group . But it must no longer lead, as it does today, to one ethnic group being able to rule over all the others and oppress them at will. Only a democratic federation like in Nigeria or India can overcome the previous ethnic hegemonic order.
dr Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate is a member of the Imperial Family of Ethiopia and the author of several best-selling books. His memoirs were published under the title “A Prince of the House of David”. He is now also the European representative of the recently formed Amhara Popular Front.
Presented on Table.Media, a mjor German Media station from Germany.
Translated from German Language to English:
By Association of Ethiopians in Europe www.ethiodiaspora.net
