Carpe Diem Ethiopia

Ethiopian prosecutor Abaraham Tetemke's closing argument yesterday calling for death penalty snapped us from a self-induced reverie. We took a brief hiatus from blogging: needed to recalibrate, re-synch; regain lost time with good friends—old and new, and our families. The horror taking place at the federal "high" court and the government's sickly recommendation for the ultimate sentence prompted our return. We hope to soon return to our attempt to become, as Ethiopian Politics urges, one of the fleas arrayed against injustice. Until we publish our own writing, we took the liberty to repost a brilliant op-ed piece by Ethiopian Politics. It is rare to agree with everything we read on the issue of Ethiopian democracy and governance, but we almost always do with ETP. The Millennium Disconnect is one of those writings that remind us of the cyclical and cynical nature of power and politics in Ethiopia. The piece also reverberates our own disgust with the ...

I have avoided all interaction with the man down the hall in the past several years since I joined this east coast outfit. The dour self-righteous pre-Madonna’s world view revolves around stale and unsolicited sloganesque rants against Bush, American racism, and organized religion. With the exception of the occasional silly emoticon-filled group e-mails I get from him, our paths generally don't cross each other. The New Englander, like some white liberals I know, loves his causes but not necessarily the people he purportedly defends: talking to black and Latino male coworkers makes him break into a cold sweat. I overheard his conversation with someone in the hallway not too long ago. I could trace an edge to his nasal timbre. “ He doesn’t have the support of the real African-American community right ?” Shit. Obviously, Barack Obama. “ . . . and minorities (it came out “MNORDYS”) have so much to thank the Clintons, right ?” The woman he was talking to is an Af...

Today is a historic day in this nation's history. Senator Barack Obama just clinched the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States.   More than a year ago, in February 2007, in From Kenya With Love: Barack Hussein Obama , we believed that Senator Obama's historic candidacy for the Office of the President of United States " . . . would allow registered African-American voters (including Ethiopia-Americans) in the Democratic Party a clear alternative to the carpet-bagging junior senator from our favorite state in the Union. " Before the world was introduced to the monstrously bizarre world of the Clintons, long before a single primary vote was cast, we seethed at the fact that "Hillary Clinton and her arrogant and demeaning posture vis-à-vis African-American voters is back and managing to convince, yet again, many in the African-American community that she, like her husband, is "black" and deserving of their support....

We will return with new postings. We repost an earlier piece, The Consent of the Governed. Our muted puzzlement in December 2005 following the EPRDF’s announcement it would charge the leaders and members of the opposition with the crime of genocide is now turning into a deranged retroactive scream in our heads. Five months in politics is a lifetime. Since December, Berhanu Nega and his fellow political dissenters now rendered criminal defendants have decided not to fight the EPRDF’s charges in court. By filing incendiary charges impossible to fight in a Third World courtroom, the EPRDF seems bent on sending the nation on a historical collision course. Unfortunately for Ethiopia, an entire people’s outcry—in the country and abroad—has not forced a reckoning in the rank and file of the EPRDF. But how 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, foun...