Part One: Leave and Never Come Back! Three years ago—on July 3, 2015, around 10:50 AM—a few (and I stress, a few ) connected, mafia-like members of the TPLF operating within the state-owned Ethiopian Airlines still considered themselves above the law. That day, they used a fabricated “security concern” and a vague accusation of “political tendencies” as a cover for their real motive: ethnic profiling. They sent security officers to my office at the Aviation Academy and literally forced me out, saying only, “Leave” —with the unspoken but clear message: “And never come back.” And I never did. To an outsider, especially someone unfamiliar with the inner workings of the airline, this may sound unfathomable. How could a civilian airline allow a political group to carry out mafia-style operations against its own employees? But I was not alone. Many before and after me have faced similar intimidation and injustice. While these individuals acted under the banner of the TPLF, I want to m...
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 othe...
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...
Comments