Consent of the Governed (repost)
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...