Marbles

Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. Frederick Douglas

 

Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear. Heinrich Himmler

 

 

1977 | 

No one mentioned how long she labored to bring me into this world. Or what my birth weight was. My mother birthed me. And that was it. The earliest memories of childhood emerge from a kaleidoscope of marbles: small marbles, large marbles. Bright, colorful marbles. And then there were the buddies. 

Oh how I loved playing marbles with my buddies! Barely five years old, we hit marbles with amazing precision—one eye closed shut, head cocked to the side, tongue flicking from corner to corner of our mouths . . . and swoosh! And one day, someone came and said something like “hey guys, I think they took the Negus away!” My buddies and I stopped our game and glanced at each other for a full two seconds. The event sufficiently digested, we returned to our marble game in progress. In the fall of 1974, while my brat friends and I argued over marbles, an empire came crashing down. By 1977, we had seen things children should never see—like lots of young people lying in their own pools of blood. And we stopped playing marbles. Our childhood had come to a screeching halt. 

2007 | 

They should’ve told me to blink slowly because when I opened my eyes thirty years had gone by. You’ve traveled thousands of miles from where they buried your umbilical chord, fled an ancient nation whose rulers rendered life hellish for you and your people; sought and acquired refugee status in a new land that welcomed you without much fanfare—just your promise to abide by an uncomplicated document that begins with the words We the People. Thirty years have offered a life of crossing not just oceans and continental divides but also centuries of philosophical schism on issues of governance, restraint, suffrage, and statecraft. But your escape from tyranny is only corporal—your mind is back there; you wish the same for the children of Ethiopia, who, in 2007, are petrified out of their wits of those who govern in their name.

Tone Deaf at the Dawn of the Millennium Here’s what the EPRDF and its supports don’t get: democracy doesn’t exist because a government claims it does. As we argued more than a year ago in Can our Generation be Heard, that judgment belongs to the governed. Democracy also exists when the governed stop fearing their rulers; when they cease talking about their rulers in surreptitious and hushed tones. This, our friends, is our simple and rudimentary democracy test for an African government. The EPRDF’s incantations on good governance and the rule of law fall on deaf ears not because the governed have not bought into the EPRDF’s offers of democracy but because the party is preaching to the converted. What the people seek is not a government of dictum but one that restrains its police powers. The EPRDF’s endless litigation of democracy in op-ed pieces is abortive and deathly boring. The EPRDF wants you to believe that opposition to its rule is wrapped in a cocoon of ethnic hatred for members of the Tigrayan community. We, at Carpe Diem Ethiopia, have repeatedly expressed our abhorrence of ethnic hatred and have in fact placed a high burden on the political party we believe best enshrines Ethiopia’s democratic future—the CUDP—to lead the way in denouncing anyone, including the EPRDF, who expressly or impliedly uses ethnicity to further a political outcome. 

 

But the EPRDF’s and its supporters’ non-sequitur assertions of Tigrayan hatred are nothing but boldfaced red-herringed lies: opposition to the party is rooted in the governed’s disagreement with the party’s prescriptive agenda on countless issues of state governance. But let’s assume for a moment that the EPRDF is right—that those who disagreed with its policies violated basic tenets of democratic debate and engaged in acts of treason. Winston Churchill once remarked that one of the most unfailing tests of civilization lies is how a country treats people accused of crimes. The EPRDF’s treatment of those it accuses (and suspects) of committing crimes has rendered the ruling party and the government it leads utter failures under both the civilization and fear tests.

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The BBC reported the April 9 dropping of genocide charges against the Ethiopian voices of democracy. In discussing the charges, the report states that “[t]he opposition [CUD] blames the deaths on security forces.” The BBC gets it wrong—almost every international observer, including prominent international human rights organizations, placed that blame squarely on Ethiopia’s security forces—not just the CUDP. On a related note, as we argued in The Consent of the Governed, the attempted genocide charges, much like the treason charges, are rooted in one incontrovertible and indelible truth: bullshit. As we wrote in Consent:

[H]ow does one defend against the charge of genocide? All precedent tells us is that those who commit genocide—the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, and Milosovics have never been tried, found guilty, and sentenced in courts set up by their own people. Our very own Mengistu falls in that category. Also, the convictions have always required the United Nations or the Allied Powers after the Second World War to set up monstrous tribunals that have attempted to give some semblance of timely, and non-retributive justice administered to the most responsible mass killers. Immensely perplexing is how in the world could people who are not part of a government’s security apparatus or acting on behalf of such entity be charged of the crime of genocide when they have not committed such act or do not have the means to commit it? The EPRDF has thrown us in a bizarre world where those who have done the killing have charged those whose only crime is to demand an end to tyranny through peaceful means.

. . .

When Bereket Simon compared the Ethiopian democratic movement with the Interhamwe, no one knew the metaphor was intended to plant seeds in Ethiopia and abroad to subsequently justify possible post-election crackdowns. The oft-repeated EPRDF reference to the Rwandan experience is deceptively erroneous: the Interhamwe was a government-sponsored mob and was not a civilian campaign that rolled out of control—it was, as Human Rights Watch described, a campaign in which the early organizers were military and administrative officials. The Rwanda genocide was a state-sponsored killing and the EPRDF's disingenuous analogy was designed to create fear among the governed to ultimately justify bogus genocide and treason charges.