Carpe Diem Ethiopia

The WB's threat to cut aid to Ethiopia bodes badly for the people of Ethiopia. An ancient Ethiopian proverb goes "when two elephants fight, the only one that dies is the grass beneath them." Fellas, it's time to head back to the bargaining table. How will the EPRDF react to this threat? It will largely depend on whether the Bush administration will join the WB bandwagon. The bank, headed by neocon Paul Wolfowitz , has made a ballsy move and its November 16 threat should worry the heck out of the EPRDF. However, despite the Bush administration's apparent intolerance of governments that wield the gun on their citizens (even when they serve United States interests), it is highly probable US policy will remain pro-EPRDF as long as al-Zarqawi continues to murder people in Baghdad and elsewhere. Meles has been in the forefront in the war against terror—not just to serve US interests in the region but because he himself has hunted down jihadist elements way before 9-11. ...

Early this morning, the Ethiopian Federal High Court, under the guise of prosecuting acts of treason, decided on a course to continue the process of silencing Ethiopian voices calling for free, fair, and transparent elections. A dose of sulfuric acid has just seared through the arms of the torchbearers of Ethiopian democracy yet the silence of the international media (including that of the BBC’s that has attempted to keep Ethiopia’s authorities honest ) is deafening. We were not entirely surprised by the Easter Week High Court assault but we must admit that we harbored some hope that Ethiopia’s best minds relegated to Kaliti’s dungeons may have a courageous ally on the Federal bench. But hope, as Red warned, and as we frequently forget in EPRDF’s Ethiopia, “is a dangerous thing [that] can drive a man insane.” So how did we all get here? How did Ethiopia’s voices of democracy end up facing treason charges by the very government that shed the blood of the innocent in the wa...

Image by permission ( Ethio Zagol ) Every now and then individuals unjustly incarcerated by their governments create documents that leave enduring words of freedom for generations to come. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is one such document. Birtukan Mideksa’s Second Letter from Kaliti addressed to U.S. Ambassador Vicki Huddleston is an enduring voice of freedom for all Ethiopians. An admirer of the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes , Bertukan Mideksa’s yearning for an Ethiopian government of checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and a free media are lessons in tempered advocacy befitting a former judge of the Ethiopian Federal High Court . Judge Bertukan’s disgust with the U.S. Ambassador’s duplicity, however, is a searing indictment of the neocon dilemma: support for governments that repress their people but are declared allies in the U.S.-led war against terrorism. Judge Birtukan’s epistle, like Martin Luther King’s, documents a lead...

Die-hard advocate of the right to free expression and father of American democracy Thomas Jefferson once said that if he were forced to decide "if we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, [he] would not hesitate to prefer the latter." The notion of a government's silencing of the press led the drafter of the Declaration of Independence to subsequently declare "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." What compels Carpe Diem Ethiopia to cite a slave-owning Virginian who in 1776 and at 33 years of age breathed words that Ethiopia's rulers can never bring themselves to utter in 2006? Frezer Negash . Her release from jail is cause for all of us to celebrate but this should not obscure the very criminal act of incarcerating her in the first place. We are incensed over Anthony Mitchell's expulsion, the jailing of Ethiopian journalists, and the consequ...

I dedicate this piece to one of the greatest Ethiopians that ever lived, Belatengeta Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin . Farewell, hero. The following is not a diatribe against Addis’ city planners, its architects, builders, contractors, or foreign and domestic investors. It just ponders a time gone by. And it misses the sound of a child’s laughter on an open field. 2005 I negotiated Addis’ hidden potholes and its equally treacherous minibus’s driven by kids with chat-glazed eyes on my way to my old neighborhood to visit an extremely wrinkled ninety-something-year-old grandmother. I was armed with an overpriced French perfume named after a number I furtively grabbed at La Guardia as well as several letters from family I would be reading out loud into the wee hours of the night. The lovely woman began birthing before the Italians arrived in Addis and it showed. Rheumatoid arthritis has gnawed at her fingers, and age has done its thing to her eyesight, teeth, and gait. I love her and she knows ...

Months ago, I asked an extremely erudite Ethio pian friend why he doesn’t start a blog. Gifted and wise be yond his years, out of H’s mouth pours brilliance I wish I could borrow for a fortnight, to at least offer a solution to the quandary Ethiopia has become. H considered my question carefully through his thousand mile stare I thought had dissipated unanswered and only brooded over through the thick cigarette smoke that hung suspended at our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, but thankfully returned in typical quizzical look, yet shrouded in usual crypt. He asked, “how can I recall my bullets once I fire them?” Conversations with H often take on a Socratic repartee where answers are buried deep in parables. His reasoning struck a nerve and I took a mouthful of the pale ale in front me; the Yeungling went down in nervous gulps. I gave it my best shot: “I guess you don’t want to write things you will regret?” He slowly nodded, leaving us both to our thoughts and ...

It ain’t easy being black in America. Racism’s sinewy tentacles have touched almost every Ethiopian that has migrated to America since the mid-1970s and we have learned to deal with it on a daily basis at the workplace, in private and public facilities, educational institutions, and even in places of worship. Ethiopians have been harassed, attacked, beaten, and in one case, murdered by xenophobic white Americans. Unfortunately, We have not been immune from the racist aspects of the criminal justice system either. Like most dark-skinned people in America, we are targeted on highways by bigoted cops, subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures, and serve disproportionate prison sentences in the hands of ignorant judges and all-white jurors. Ethiopian immigrants refuse to buckle under the weight of such challenges in the land of the free. To many African immigrants, American racism pales in comparison to the hellhole their leaders have turned their countries into. For Ethio...