Carpe Diem Ethiopia

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, found guilty, and sentenced in courts set up by their own people. Our very own Mengistu falls in th...

He came to class reeking of the brothel where he had spent the night and of the Katikala that still sloshed in his body. He was a drunk fool, my history teacher, a man small both in stature and in mind and prone to hurling insults at his students in the cruelest words he could conjure in the Amharic language. He was unashamed to discharge audible bodily vapors so putrid those of us condemned to his class learned to hate our own language. But then there were those rare moments of sobriety that more than made up for the daily gaseous inferno. A lucid clear-eyed man would bounce from the door to his desk in his heavy platform shoes and bark a perky " endimin aderachuh !" to a room of adolescents who never figured how to deal with the malevolent moods of an alcoholic teacher. A torturous gilmiCHa -filled roll-call later, the tiny man would ceremoniously reach for a crumpled paperback from a crumpled overworn jacket. He would then launch into a dramatic reading from Oro...

Above image (Ground Zero) September 10, 2001, 11:50PM It always feels good to leave the city to the restless souls who never seem to know the difference between dusk and dawn. I could barely keep my eyes open as the train whisked my exhausted body away from the office. It was a few minutes before midnight and I couldn’t wait to get home to see the tots snoring in their miniature beds. I longed to kiss their tiny brown foreheads and to whisper in their ears how much their father loved them. My wife was up, nursing. Our apartment still smelled of the empty agelgil that bore traces of the Ethiopian lamb her grandmother had laboriously cooked, frozen, and packed in Addis Ababa barely 48 hours ago. I salivated, just thinking about the tender and spiced Ethiopian lamb. We had celebrated the new year (our EnQuTaTash ) with our friends, including the entire CDE team, around the leathery agelgil . I placed a couple of calls to Addis to wish a few members of the family a happy new...

Critically acclaimed author of Wax & Gold and Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society is a brilliant man who clearly loses sleep over Ethiopia. Donald N. Levine’s scholarly work , articles , and interviews speak volumes of his rejection of tyranny, admiration of the Ethiopian mind, and his optimism in the ability of Ethiopians to ultimately live in a democratic society. The conclusions he reached more than four decades ago on the foundations of Ethiopian unity seem dead-on to our unscholarly minds: the unity of the Ethiopian experience rests initially on three pervasive patterns: (1) a continuous process of interaction of the differentiated Ethiopian peoples with one another; (2) the existence of a number of pan-Ethiopian culture traits; and (3) a characteristic mode of response to the periodic intrusion of alien peoples and cultures. (Greater Ethiopia) Professor Levine’s identification of democratic cultures in traditional Ethiopian society is highly releva...

It is perfectly human to express fury at those who defile you and your beliefs. The marketplace of ideas invites vitriol and that’s precisely what the 2005 Ethiopian elections produced. Unlike individuals, however, a government’s response to criticism and insult must be tamed and reflective—it must be conducted within a set of transparent rules designed to factually refute the criticism while taking great care to protect the very right to criticize and insult. We must state the obvious: a citizenry’s belief that it is free to express its disagreement with its rulers is a central and most fundamental aspect of a democracy. A prime minister’s gratuitous speech that “democracy goes on unperturbed” is not what convinces the governed that democracy has finally arrived at their nation’s doorsteps. Nor are the random acts of parliamentary opposition to majority rule and equally random ruler tolerance of it sufficient to quench a people’s thirst for intellectual liberty. Democracy does not r...