The Republic of Fear

It's easy to get lost in the numbers—no less than two million Iraqis died under Saddam Hussien’s watch. Images of Kurdish children lying prostrate, dead on the spot they breathed Saddam’s deadly mustard gas—the same biological weapon used by fascist Italy against Ethiopian villagers in 1935—show one of the most horrific acts of brutality known to mankind. The Butcher of Bagdad’s 1986-88 chemical and biological weapon attacks on thousands of innocent Iraqis in Halabja and al-Anfal are only a few examples of his systematic campaign to exterminate opposition to his brutal twenty-five year rule.

In various postings, we have stated our support for the war on terror. We are convinced that the dictator’s quarter-century rule needed to come to an end. In the long run, his removal from power will allow Iraqis the opportunity to build a nation based on tolerance and respect for the rule of law. We are further convinced that despite the US-led coalition’s failure to secure the peace following the regime’s downfall as well as the ensuing sectarian violence that may inflame the country and the region in further bloodshed, the powerful ideals of democracy and representative government have found their way into the hearts and minds of the governed all across the Middle East.

International lawyers and commentators will be debating the fairness of the political and judicial process that led to the dictator’s execution early this morning. Some of the questions will concern the removal of judges during the trials and whether the in- and out-of-court statements made by the Iraqi cabinet compromised the former defendant’s due process rights. The latter possibility is disconcerting—we have stated in past postings on the treason trials against the leaders of the CUD that improper political interference in judicial affairs is a primary indicator of a government’s use of its courts to determine a political as opposed to a just outcome.

Beyond issues of fairness is also the appropriateness of Saddam Hussein’s execution before other cases were heard, especially the trials on the massacre of Kurds. In our view, the need to create a meticulous record of the killings with the primary architect facing the charges and the victims’ families in court was compelling; such trials would have also shown to the world the horrors of chemical and biological warfare. We further believe such trials would have helped bolster the Bush administration’s claim of Saddam Hussein’s possession of and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.

What we nevertheless take from this incredible day in history is a reaffirmation of the notion that heads of states will answer for the crimes they commit against their people. Saddam Hussein’s conviction by the Iraq tribunal comes in the heels of the Rwanda and former Yugoslavia tribunal verdicts against individuals who participated in genocides against their people and goes a long way in sending a powerful message to those who engage in terror and extermination that such acts of impunity will not go unpunished.

Notwithstanding this powerful and timely lesson; however, we regret Saddam Hussein’s execution today. We agree with Richard Dicker, Human Rights Watch’s Director of the International Justice Program, that “the test of a government’s commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders.” We categorically reject the use of the death penalty even when imposed by a properly constituted court. In our view, an execution, whether carried out by Saddam Hussein against hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians or by a properly constituted court is the same: it is wrong. It is evil. Amnesty International states it best: the death penalty is the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights.

The man who created the Republic of Fear is gone for good. On this day, our thoughts and prayers are with Saddam Hussein's victims and with the people of Iraq who must find a way to create a viable system that will allow them and their children to live in peace.

When Parents Bury Their Children: A Story I've been Dying to Tell

I was surprised to hear someone mention her name at the December 2005 wedding that brought me to the country that birthed me. It took me a full week to find her number and when I called her, she screamed. I think, in joy. I promised to visit her and her husband and their two children the following day. But she asked me to come as early as I could because she needed to attend an arba in her neighborhood (the 40-day anniversary of a person’s death remembered by a prayer and renewed mourning).

“Addis Ababa is amazing, so beautiful,” she said, almost in a whisper. Seeing her for the first time in two decades had been surreal. As was the sight of her children, two girls who looked like carbon copies of herself. And nothing like the strange husband of hers who eyed me suspiciously. I kept thinking thank you Jesus the children don't look like you.

Her words broke the silence that had set between us since we left her home. The neighborhood where we grew up had changed dramatically but some of its sounds were familiar to our ears, including the muezzin’s calling of the faithful to the day’s last prayers. But these days, he was competing with the Qidase from the new Copt church. She kissed the church’s gates but impressive as it was, the gigantic Monophysite edifice obstructed the view of the august Wechacha Mountains that adorn the northwest gates of the city behind which the Addis sun has set for millions of years.

It had been many years since we had seen each other. Twenty-one years to be exact. Our paths had diverged when we were children but unbeknownst to each other, we had both lived in northeastern United States for many years. Her face had not changed much. The unruly, nappy, and often uncombed “baby” afro she sported as a young girl had been her way of distinguishing herself from the prissy rich girls at the international school she attended. I glanced at her from the corners of my eyes and observed what I had missed as a child—she was beautiful—the once tomboy’s generous lips stood in stark contrast with her slanted eyes set against an incredibly dark face. Her nickname, a combination of an Amharic adjective (describing her complexion) and an English proper noun (a country in Asia) was completely fitting.

“You did not even write me once! Twenty-one years is a long time!”

Twenty-one years is indeed a very long time. “But you left Haimanot. One day you were a permanent fixture in the neighborhood, the next, you were gone. All we heard was that your father put you guys in his car and drove all the way to Nairobi. I thought of you often after you left.”

“You’re lying,” she said, smacking my shoulder hard. She still liked to hit people. “Aren’t you?” She seemed to plead, as she smacked my shoulder again. “You didn’t write me because I’m just the little girl who always annoyed you!”

I kept walking, deep in thought, thinking about the passage of time. Our children were almost the same age when she and I knew each other. There was much we wanted to talk about, much to catch-up on. But she had a place to go, souls to comfort, and heavy tears to shed. 

We heard the wailing from a distance and each step we took in the direction of the shrieks of women in pain, my heart sank lower and lower. The arba was for a young boy who was shot by the Ethiopian police in November 2005. Haimanot and the boy’s mother were edertegnoch.

The significance of the moment struck me. Twenty-one years ago, Haimanot’s father had fled Mengistu’s Ethiopia when he discovered he was a marked man by Mengistu’s henchmen. Like millions of Ethiopians, our lives as refugees in foreign lands was compelled by governmental repression. And here we were, twenty-one years later, on our way to a leqso that would have never taken place but for the Ethiopian government’s killing of a child.

I didn’t think I should attend the arba. It felt voyeurish. I didn’t know the family and I have always found that aspect of our culture distasteful. Some may disagree with me but if death has visited your home, there’s nothing stranger than seeing hordes of people you’ve never seen before, especially at arbas when you’ve learned to deal with your sorrow and are more aware of your surrounding. Death should be a private moment with close friends and family members and not a public spectacle. But I couldn’t resist the urge to enter the compound. I needed to. 

Haimanot began wailing the moment we entered the compound. Her public display of sorrow surprised me; it finally showed her age. I quickly sat on the nearest chair I could find and bowed my head but Haimanot kept walking deeper into the tent, toward the boy’s mother, uttering words inaudible to me. It was during the renewed wailing in the tent that I saw the boy’s photograph adorned in a golden frame and that hung suspended on a tent pole. A face I will never forget. 

I have never heard such hatred for the Ethiopian government as I did that day. Their government had taken the life of a boy most of them knew. And with them, I hated this government that allowed its goons to fire live rounds at innocent and unarmed children. 

I decided to head home, to my hosts, sometime after dinner. She offered to walk me to the main road, to the taxi stand. I managed to convince her not to and I bid her farewell outside the leqso bet. I promised to stay in touch and all she said was “demo atetfa” (“so don’t disappear again.”)

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We have kept in touch and she permitted my discussion of the arba. The name Hamianot, which is altered to protect her identity describes her God-fearing nature. The boy was shot in the northeast region of Addis Ababa, an area bordered between Fitawrari Habte Giorgis and Yohannes Streets. He did not immediately die of his gunshot wounds. I regret I did not express my condolences to the parents and should’ve abandoned my supercilious principles to do so. But it is what it is.

The boy was just a kid. I don’t even think he was born when Mengistu was in power. The only recurring question I’ve had in the last year is whether the heathens who ordered the shootings of protesters have kids of their own. Don’t they understand the agony of a parent who buries a child? And therein lies the reason why the EPRDF is hated by the governed: a government accountable to its people understands parents’ love for their children—their wish to see their children grow healthy, receive a decent education, and above all, to not see their children's death. What Ethiopians ask is essentially a government that respects this fundamental order of the cosmos.

In a sane world, the head of a government who ordered its security officials to shoot down unarmed protestors would immediately resign. Judge Wolde-Michael Meshesha’s comments in his interview with EMF and Ethioguardian (taken from Ethiopian Politics) are a must read and the judge's account of Zenawi’s deflecting of blame on the government of Sudan for poorly training his goons shows the man’s inability to be accountable to the very constitution he created.

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It’s difficult to find music that expresses the rage that compelled kids to march in droves in June and November 2005. I found it in Lauryn Hill’s I Find it Hard to Say. Listen to it here. Consider her opening lines:

I find it hard to say, that everything is alright

Don't look at me that way, like everything is alright

Cuz my own eyes can see, through all your false pretenses

But what you fail to see, is all the consequences

You think our lives are cheap, and easy to be wasted

As history repeats, so foul you can taste it

And while the people sleep, too comfortable to face it

His life so incomplete, and nothing can replace it

And while the people sleep, too comfortable to face it

Your lives so incomplete, and nothing can replace it

Fret not thyself I say, against these laws of man

Cuz like the Bible says, His blood is on their hands

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Under construction:

Where is it Mr. Fung? We will pick-up on the CUD trials in Addis Ababa from where we left in They're Allowed to Take Notes and will make passing reference to Barry Scheck’s unanswered questions to LAPD criminologist Dennis Fung.

The making of a Nation: A discussion of the qualities Ethiopians should require of their leaders. The posting will start with 1896 and a discussion of Emperor Menelik’s dreams for the nation he created.

Mr. Meles, the Federalist: An analysis of the premier’s disingenuous application of the Federalist Papers and Madisonian democracy to Ethiopia (inspired by TC’s rage).

"Can you give that a rest? Damn." An ode to the spouses who make sure the children are fed on time and who bear with our late night blogging.  
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This posting is dedicated to the 193 + families who suffered a loss in June and November 2005. The fallen, most of them young, died to make representative government a reality in their country.

Term Limits: Unknown in Ethiopia

"We must resist the powers to keep our independence" Menelik II

The bright stars set against the dark night above Mount Entoto must have been a spectacular sight to the aging monarch from Ankober. A devoutly religious man, he woke up early in the morning to recite the Psalms of David before tending to the affairs of his ancient yet infant empire. Having pulverized a recently united, desperate, and foolhardy European power, the brilliant warrior literally and figuratively stood on top of his nation. With his back turned to an ancient highland past and his navel to an equally historic lowland south that would soon fall under his empire, he observed his garrisons camped on the frosty hill that stood 10,000 feet above sea level. They were armed to the teeth with weapons seized from a humiliated Italy and also supplied by European powers with dubious intentions; prepared to respond to the steady beating of the Negarit, ready to act at the monarch’s bidding, and ready to push Ethiopia’s frontiers to her limits.

His beloved second wife, not-so-lovely-to-look-at-but-a-must-have for any empire builder, shared her husband’s dreams of southern conquest but had her eyes set on the hot springs a few miles south. The Gondarine arthritic who couldn’t stand Entoto’s chilly nights spoke rarely, but when she did, her words resonated in her husband’s heart and in those of her enemies—“I am a woman…I do not like war…[h]owever, I would rather die than accept your deal” (rejecting Count Antonelli’s interpretation of the Wechale Treaty). On matters relating to palace intrigue and power play the monarch turned to her wisdom which the Light of Ethiopia supposedly dispensed with clairvoyant precision but which ultimately failed to serve her own end.

The emperor was no humanitarian—like George Washington a century earlier, the Ethiopian nation builder owned slaves and never considered ending ownership of human chattel. As the 19^th Century drew to a close, the Ethiopian ruler’s dreams were unrequited and his ambition to expand Ethiopia’s frontiers to the south, southeast and southwest frontiers were only stopped by the ubiquitous British and French whose dreams to control the headwaters of the Nile would have placed those territories under the British Empire (extending from the Sudan and Kenya); French Legion d’Honneur outposts as far inland as Asbe Teferi; and the Brits and the fascists duking it out in the Ogaden. Through sheer will, King of Kings Menelik II struck fast and hard and brought in formidable people and fertile lands within the confines of the emerging empire.

Conquest is a bitter affair for the conquered—men die defending their villages, women are impregnated by foreign DNA, and their children are turned into slaves, caretakers of the offspring of conquistadors. Our history books and numerous unpublished masters and doctorate theses stacked on the shelves of AAU recount the countless wealth that flowed north following the conquest of the Oromo and Southern lands—grain, livestock, ivory, gold, and yes, human chattel. Clearly, the inclusion of these lands and people into Ethiopia resulted in an exponential economic windfall for the empire. It also added to the nation a wealth of cultures some extremely rich in democratic traditions and thousands of miles of buffer zones contiguous to the Indian Ocean that served to limit expansionist ambitions connived at the 1884 Berlin Conference as well as irredentist zeal of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. The monarch handed to his predecessor(s) an Ethiopia spatially, demographically, militarily, and economically unimagined by the two Kassas before him. And for that, Ethiopia is today and will always be a power to be reckoned with.

But frontiersmanship always comes to a halt, as it must. Warriors at times engage in self-destructive behavior—they cross rubicons and take on more that they can peacefully administer. Campaigns also meet “natural deaths”—rivers, seas, cliffs, impenetrable forests, and mountain ranges—God’s barriers that allow soldiers to finally sheath their swords and to transform them into plough shares. Frontiersmanship takes on a new annotation: the collective aspiration of warriors and their descendants to secure a peaceful future for their children. For many nations, the process of creating political stability takes centuries.

"Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on this earth any nation that is superior to any other” Haile Selassie I

34 Years

Think what you must about the legacy of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I but the important role he occupies in Ethiopian history cannot be denied. In November 1930, at the time of his coronation, the 38-year-old assumed a nation without access to the sea, a written constitution, with a medieval economy, inexistent infrastructure, and militarily vulnerable—a reenergized fascist Italy breathing its putrid colonial breath across the Mereb River and who would soon use chemical-biological weapons to march into his capital in its zeal to avenge its humiliation in Adwa. But the emperor did it—in just 34 years, the son of Menelik’s favorite cousin created a strong unitary state, reclaimed Mereb-Melash and an outlet to the sea, helped create the OAU and ECA and brought their headquarters to Ethiopia, and shepherded his nation through the untenable world of non-alignment. And these are only a few of his achievements.

But HIM’s claim to power (essentially, descendance from a dubious union that resulted from an act of Judaic rape) and rule were certainly not democratic. By the end of the 1960s, a new direction was sorely needed and the emperor, for all sorts of reasons, was simply unable to read the pulse of his people. HIM’s undoing was his failure to imagine an Ethiopia without the Solomonic Dynasty and in that sense he was no different than Menelik—for all his accomplishments, he failed to bestow to his vassals the greatest gift he could have imparted to them: a system of governance that allows Ethiopians to have a say in their country’s future.

Ploughshares into Swords

Despite the uplifting Ityopia Tikdem rallying cry, sanguinous Mengistu Hailemariam drenched his country in rivers of blood unseen in the nation’s history. He did so by convincing young men to join death squads that hunted and cut down those who dissented. By creating a culture of mass flight out of the country, Mengistu (and his predecessor Meles Zenawi) turned Ethiopians into refugees who live as second-class citizens throughout the world. Mengistu’s end, like his predecessor’s was identical—he was forced to abandon power by those who wielded superior military power.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Since 1995, Ethiopia’s leadership has told us that unlike prior regimes it has received the consent of its people to rule over them. It has told us over and over again its claim to power is based on expressed consent it received in three election cycles. Repeated United States Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, by in large unopposed and unresponded to by Ethiopia, informs the conclusions we draw that those who dared to disagree with the EPRDF’s prescriptive agenda in the constitutional, political (domestic and foreign policy) and judicial realms have either paid for their disagreement with their lives or received brutal physical and/or psychological torture in the country’s notorious detention centers. When dissenters enjoy access to the public (like the leaders of the Coalition of Unity & Democracy), the EPRDF has used its security, judicial, and information apparatus to mete out its version of justice through surveillance, prolonged detention without change, presentation of false charges, and outright defamation of character.

And so we return to the warrior afoot on Mount Entoto. Empires are built by individuals who allow their dreams to seep beyond the frontiers they’ve inherited; to reach levels of expansion and power unfathomed by their predecessors. When judging these characters history’s eyes should nonetheless be fair—acts of barbarism of the heretofore must not be free of condemnation but revision and attendant reproach must be fair—after all, if we use past persecution practiced by the ancien order as a yardstick to measure the ability of a people to ultimately create a democratic society, America’s barbaric acts against native Americans and African slaves would render her system of individual liberty, separation of powers, and independence of judiciary, ideals on which we model our ideals of democracy, negligible.

The yardstick we use is one that contemplates the future—the question of whether a particular society has learned from its past mistakes and whether it uses those lessons to devise policy that serves the interests of Ethiopians and Ethiopians alone. For starters, the political party Ethiopian voters should support is not one that merely proves its superiority to the EPRDF by listing a litany of promises to adhere to lofty democratic ideals (not difficult to do so) but one that also runs on a single commitment: to limit the number of years it intends to rule.

Yes, my friends, the more things change the more they stay the same. Ethiopians have been governed by a group of heretics who replicated Joseph Stalin’s rule in Ethiopia and now by former Albanian Communists who waive a sickly and withered democratic banner as a pretext to rule in perpetuity. Monarchs have come and gone as have, and eventually will, “revolutionaries” of various types—the “socialists” and the “democrats”—but what remains constant is the curse that has befallen this nation of 70 million people of never having been blessed with rulers who have relinquished power voluntarily.

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• We look forward to discussing Dr. Berhanu's Goh. ET Wonq's suggestion, like her blog, is brilliant. We can't promise acuity but will do our best to contribute to the Wonq's attempt to engage all of us in a productive (and yes, democratic) exercise.

• Enkwan le berhane lidetu aderesachuh. (Merry Ethiopian Christmas)

• May the new Gregorian year bring peace to the good people of Ethiopia.