Another American Military Intervention? Is the West Calling for Peace or Making Ethiopia the Next Iraq?

Blindness

 

Blindness is not why the world goes blind;
But by the adjectives our tongues wield to glorify enlightenment.

The year-end balance between truth and desire
Is tipped by the weight and might of words.

Where one basks in the valor and honor of a hero with fervor,
Another aches at the chilling beauty of a neighbor’s Hitler.

'ህገ መንግስት'?

 

'ህገ መንግስት'?

ያኔ 

መሰረት ሲበጃጅ

ላገር እንዳዲስ ቤት፣

ዳቦ ስም ሲወጣ፣

ለዘመን ህልም ማሸት፤

ምን አሰበን ነበር

ያልነው "ተስማምተናል፣"

ነገድነት ይንገስ

ሰውነት በቅቶናል!

 

አይደለም ወይ ቃሉ

የሰነዱ አንድምታ

ሃገር ሰው አልባ ይሁን

ነገድ ብቻ እውነቷ?

 

ዛሬ 

ታድያ  ደርሰን "አቤት" 

"ዋይ" "ዋይ" ምንለው፣

በነገድ ፍርድ ቤት

ሰው መቼ ደም አለው?

በቋንቋስ ምህዋር ውስጥ፣

እልቂት መች ፍች አለው?  

ነገ 

የሰነዱን ቁመት፤ ወርድና፤ ጥጋጥግ

በልተን፤ሰንጥቀን፤ህመሙን ሳንፈልግ

ሰውነትን ሳንዋጅ፣ ሰውን ሳንደነግግ

እልቂት ብንረግም በደም ብንበረግግ፣

መሆናችህ አይደል በሃሳዊ ብግነት

ላራጅ ለገፋፊ ቢላ ሚያፈላልግ?

....................................................................

=የኢትዮጲያ ህገ መንግስት መስረታዊ ተፋልሶዎች በፈጠሩት  መድልዎ ምክንያት በየግዜው ህይወታችውን ለሚያጡ ዜጎች።  

መተከል

 

መተከል

ልክ እንደ ፍዝ ግጥም፣ ቤት መምቻው ሚደግም፣

የዘመኔ መርገም አንዱ ካንዱ አያርም ፣

ሚደፋ ባንድ ቃል፣ሚመታ ባንድ ቃል፤ 

ጅግጅጋ  መተከል

ድሬ       መተከል

አዳማ     መተከል

ሻሸመኔ   መተከል

ማይካድራ   መተከል

መቀሌ       መተከል

ሁመራ        መተከል

መተከል    መተከል

ኮንሶ         መተከል 

አርሲ       መተከል 

መ

ተ

ከ

ል

.......

በግፍ ለተገደሉ ኢትዮጵያውያን ሁሉ። 

Criminal Impunity: Genesis of the TPLF Initiated Conflict in Tigray

 

On November 15, 2020, at 11:55 AM, Senait Mebrahtu tweeted (in Amharic), “From now on, if you don’t cease what you are doing, I will release a video of you being abused in prison and put you to shame forever.” This tweet was directed at the renowned, award-winning Ethiopian journalist and human rights activist Reeyot Alemu. Reeyot was a prisoner of conscience for five years under the TPLF-led government of Ethiopia. Senait is an active member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that held power in Ethiopia for twenty-seven years until it was ousted by a popular uprising in 2018.

That same day, the spokesperson for the TPLF—now the ruling party in the Tigray region—appeared on a regional TV station and threatened to launch rockets into neighboring Eritrea and other targets within Ethiopia, just hours before attacks were carried out on two airports in the Amhara regional state.

There are striking similarities between the two threats: both serve as evidence of criminal intent by the very individuals who issued them, regardless of the public’s awareness. That unawareness, however, was rooted in a deep-seated sense of entitlement to criminal impunity—an impunity long enjoyed by members of the TPLF. It is this mindset that emboldened a former prison torturer to threaten her victims with the release of abuse footage, and a regional government spokesperson to boast about missile capabilities and openly threaten to target the entire Eastern African region.

Torture as a Thing of Pride

Both the tweet and the televised interview glaringly highlight a reality most Ethiopians know all too well—and that many foreigners may not: the TPLF’s entrenched sense of being above the law and its disturbing romance with criminal impunity.

Senait Mebrahtu is not only a card-carrying member of the TPLF, but—just three years ago—was one of the torturers operating in the many prisons and underground dungeons across Ethiopia under TPLF rule. These facilities were used to cripple, shame, and silence opponents. According to firsthand accounts from torture survivors, Senait was among the most sadistic perpetrators. The catalog of horrors included sodomy, amputation, fingernail removal, flogging, and urination on victims. Survivors reported that acts such as “pulling genitals with pliers and flogging while tied to poles were daily occurrences.” Senait, they say, used sexually sadistic acts to humiliate her victims, including verbal abuse and urinating on them while they were in chains.

And now, this very torturer lives freely in Tigray—bold enough to threaten one of her former victims, journalist Reeyot Alemu, with releasing video footage recorded during acts of torture, in an attempt to silence her.

To many outside observers, it may seem unbelievable that a known torturer would publicly threaten victims and still walk free. But this absurdity lies at the heart of the conflict in Tigray. For the past two years, any attempt to bring such criminals to justice has been mischaracterized as an attack on their ethnicity.

Criminals Playing the Ethnic Card to Escape Justice

The last two years in Ethiopia have seen a constant struggle between those pushing for national progress and those nostalgic for the era of unchecked power held by a few over millions.

In any other country, such criminals would have faced public outrage and imprisonment. Instead, former torturers mocked the forgiving gesture of a nation that offered them a second chance. In Tigray, where many of these individuals have taken refuge, they rebranded themselves as “untouchable” and “holy.” Criticizing or even questioning them is twisted into an affront to ethnic identity.

Two years ago, when federal police issued arrest warrants for some of these criminals hiding in Mekelle, the Tigray regional police arrested the federal officers who arrived to serve the warrants. TPLF leadership portrayed the federal government’s pursuit of justice for thousands of torture victims as an attack on the Tigrayan people. This logic is as absurd as Nazi generals claiming that the Nuremberg Trials were anti-German. These individuals—who once wielded power for personal gain while neglecting the people of Tigray—now seek refuge behind the mask of ethnicity as justice approaches.

Today, the former head of Ethiopia’s intelligence agency and central committee member of the TPLF, who oversaw extrajudicial killings and atrocities like those Senait boasts about, is defended simply because of his ethnicity.

Torturers as Heroes

In most societies, such criminals would be imprisoned or at least live in shame. But in Ethiopia, ethnic politics—what might be called “ethnic apartheid”—has enabled them to avoid justice altogether. These individuals can freely threaten their former victims using footage recorded during acts of torture. It’s akin to Nazi officers threatening Auschwitz survivors with video evidence of their suffering to keep them silent. No Nazi would have dared brag about such crimes—because justice would have found them. But in Ethiopia, torturers from just three years ago walk freely, even celebrated as heroes.

A prime example is the "We Are Getachew Assefa" campaign launched by TPLF youth, defending the former intelligence chief wanted for crimes against humanity. Immersed in a culture of impunity, these former leaders now add insult to injury—threatening Ethiopia with rockets and violence.

At the heart of the Tigray conflict is the defense of this criminal impunity—of figures like Senait and Getachew Reda, who consider themselves not only above the law but also expect the world to forget the brutal, repressive regime they upheld just a few years ago. They frame their desire to regain power as a legitimate political cause—when, in truth, it is a desperate effort to escape justice.

Romancing Terrorism While Demanding Negotiation

What the world may glean from headlines is that a renegade regional government ambushed Ethiopia’s Northern Command, looted weapons, and threatened missile strikes on the capital and neighboring countries—and then followed through on those threats. To many outside observers, it seems inconceivable that a political party would attack a national army and demand to be restored to power. But to Ethiopians, this is a familiar playbook—the TPLF’s impunity over the past 27 years.

The global narrative may frame the TPLF’s defiance as a political disagreement or as resistance to authoritarianism. But Ethiopians know that the core TPLF leadership shows no remorse for the atrocities it committed. Instead, it seeks to delegitimize the current government and stage sham regional elections as a way to reclaim power—with no accountability.

The world may have heard about the massacre in Mai Kadra, where TPLF's Samri killing squad slaughtered, hanged, burned, and beheaded more than 600 ethnic Amharas and so-called “Welkait” people. But Ethiopians know this was only one of many brutal acts—part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing and terror designed to intimidate the country into surrendering power.

The world may see only the TPLF’s digital propaganda and its global network of agents. Ethiopians see clearly what the TPLF is: a treasonous, terrorist mafia organization.

The world may hear calls for negotiation and assume both sides are equal. But Ethiopians know that negotiating with terrorists who rejected the country’s forgiveness would mean sacrificing the future of peace in East Africa.

Freedom for Tigray—from the TPLF mafia rule!

 By Tariku Abas Etenesh

 

 

 

 

We are Avatars Gaming Politics of Stereotypes

“Like all art that arises from culture, games are deeply political,” writes Alfie Down in her Guardian article entitled Video Games are Political. And according to American Psychology Association magazine, 91 % of children in the United States between the age of 2 and 17 play video games and nationally 99% of teenagers play these games. That is why, according to Erika Schickel, who in her article Grand Theft Mommy recounts her love of virtual games, video gaming” is currently framing the argument for the need to tighten restriction on content and rating video games to protect America’s youth from its immoral influences.”

However, the puritan impulses of the society toward sanctifying the field of gaming seems doomed from the start. It appeared not only destined to fail but also headed towards propagating the problem even more. Part of the problem seems to be the fact that “America’s youth” are not a homogeneous group that could be served with “one fits all” protective ruling. This is a challenge mainly because the games are informed by a culture which also lays on the foundations marked according to Sarkisian by favoritism in terms specific gender, color, and class. This makes the “protection of America’s youth” a contested proposition at best. This is to say that the psychology of game designing that relies on narratives of race, culture, and religion can’t be wholly divorced from the implicit and overt biases of the dominant culture.

Although political is not the first thing that comes to mind for the child or the adult player any video games nor are the expressed intentions of the producers, the tacit purposes behind the psychology that informs the designing, the marketing, the promotion and the messaging of games is political in their general sense. Schickel doesn’t subscribe to the ideas that gaming is immoral as she has shown in her story but only that the trapping of gaming is seductive for both adults and the young. Part of it this seduction is attributed to the sense of freedom that the gaming world promises for the child who lives under family sanctions of "dos and don’ts." Through the games introduced to the child wrapped as birthday or holiday gifts, the child draws a ticket for freedom. Because in the gaming world Schickel writes “everyone acts on their impulses, nobody watches their language; nobody has to bring a snack.” This freedom makes gaming perfect escape from the family of rules. Moreover, such relationships of the child playing with the world of the game and the promises of the act of gaming make gaming very complex political tool.

As a result, In the gaming world, the player is not only being political through identification with the already designated characters the storyline, the challenges or opportunities but also personally aggressed or acted upon as an avatar of cultural, religious, economic and political hegemonic voices the game’s politics perpetuates. Like any political tool, games serve the double purpose of offering a pleasurable respite for the player while unconsciously making the player the vessel of the messages the politics would want to impose. This is true for only on adults who feel they have a sense of distinguishing what to take or not but also on the children who are impressionable. Schickel writes, “What is interesting about the games is it forces you to behave in a socially unacceptable manner.” “The unacceptable” behavior, however, doesn’t present itself as such during the game. Because while gaming the individual is transformed. In the process of playing an avatar, the player itself become the avatar for the trapping of the psychology that I find the game designing.

Indeed, there are advantages that gaming brings to the child as Schickel implies in sharpening the child’s mind regarding problem-solving, insistence to complete task and sense of loyalty to peers. In spite of these advantages, Sarkeersian argues that associations made in the games to color, gender, and cultural codes, if they continue to promote the dominant "white good others bad myth," they remain dangerous. Further arguing the politics of games Alfie states games are “often biased – even when their designers intend them to be impartial – towards conservative, patriarchal and imperialist values such as empire, dominion and conquering by force.” For every side one takes, for every solution one searches, for every kill one scores and for every people one is forced to identify as a problem a political decision was made and the player by agreeing to go along with the “rules of the game” is made to condone them. Coercing the player into lending political consent to the popular culture.

As Schickel writes when playing the game, the player is no more partial or objective but subjective avatars acting like “Big Brother trying to mitigate the selfish drive that this game demands.” Everyone becomes a player in the politic of video games. There are works to be done to rid the world of video games of exoticization of women in general and colored women in particular on the one hand and the total misrepresentation or non-representation of diversity on the other.

Gaze as a Grammar of ‘Homo-reflectus’

Homo-sapiens can be redefined as homo-reflectus i.e. beings living by and for refined reflections of the self. And the 'reflections element' of the species is inherent in what each person ultimately accepts as being human. Examination of this inherent and common reality that one can't avoid living by and can’t imagine life without leads us to the inevitability of transaction of reflection through the currency of given, received, refuted or accepted gazes. An examination into the language we speak, the religion we follow, the philosophies we cherish, the dresses we wear, the lifestyle we follow, the things we feel free to see and the eyes we allow to be seen by, the cinema we prefer to watch, the way we prefer to be seen in the cinema, everything that made us who we are homo-reflectus is a manifested gaze.

As bell hooks in the Oppositional Gaze, puts it,” there is power in looking” because, she quotes Fanon, “This “look’ from - so to speak - the place of the other - fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility, and aggression but in the ambivalence of its desire.” Thus, an act of viewing a film is not just an act of participation in the gaze but also a participation in the power relation, a participation in the manifestation of how one is gazed at and thus defined, aggrieved, glorified and or fixed in the accepted grammar of the community. The gaze becomes as Fanon said more “oppressing “and “fixing” when it is compounded by the vocabulary of race introduced into it. The masculine, patriarchal gaze that sanctions a defined rendition for what 'the woman image' should be and this image is one that takes the woman as reflections of the wishes of the man. The oppression becomes more when the woman factor is coupled with color and racism.

Before cinema or other forms of projected images exercised the power of 'sanctioned looking’, language is the first mirror that the homo-reflectus is introduced into the exercise of the privileges of gaze. Each member of the community of language is offered preordained sets of eyes and perspectives with the grammar as spectacles into the self and into the world and into others. And all languages are statements of the power relations in a community. Language is a power relation manifest in the binaries between the strong and the weak, the privileged and the dispossessed, the man and the women and the master and the slave. It is thus evident to notice that the language of a patriarchal mode of thinking and sanctions a patriarchal mirror as the way of viewing the world in spite of the gender differences of its members.

As a result of the grammar of patriarchy, a woman for millennia, 'should teach' herself to see herself in terms of the secondary station she is given. She is an extension of a man a wo-man, she is the secondary, almost accidental being in the thought of the gods who happen to create her out of the man and for the man. In the patriarchy, religion is the first technology that gave the technical definition for the woman. And every subsequent technology both in ideas and in 'forms' have perpetuated the male gaze as 'the gaze,' the defining gaze that coffers on one the right of acceptance and conformity to be recognized as sane. A catalog of laws and rights that women were not part of the beneficiaries are numerous and are still many. The male universal gaze is the most common mirror awaiting any homo-reflectus as truth if it chose to comply, bow down and rhythm with the system. This is how the gaze works in cinema.

What is true for the man-woman binary is also true for the black-white binary. It is compounded when the double layered identification of black and woman come together into the gaze scene dominated by the patriarchal eyes. In the complex and yet fully unresolved racial scene of motion pictures in the west, where the black body in general and black women’s bodies, in particular, were subject of the centuries of defined set of conjugation in the grammar of the white-male-racist, gaze, the cinema not only projects the same but insists to impose it too. Hooks to this end writes that “Critical interrogating black looks were mainly concerned with issues of race and racism, the way racial domination of blacks by white overdetermined representation.”

That anything produced by the patriarchal grammar being a way to perpetuate its gaze is one thing while adding gender, race, and class makes the gazing dynamics even more complex. That is why a simple act of being at a movie theatre is enough an exercise of projected, accepted, resisted gazes in play both by self and others attesting to our tendency to seek refined reflections of self.