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Anatomy of Sebhat
Nega’s big lies
By Fekade Shewakena ǀ
June 23, 2009
Ato Sebhat Nega’s interview on the Voice of America, Amharic
Service, recently sounds like a play out of Orwell’s, Animal Farm,
but it also speaks volumes about the mindset inside TPLF, and the groupthink the
regime officials are possessed with. Like all people intoxicated
with power and anything that comes with it, Ato Sebhat had no limits or
inhibitions to stop him from making bold faced lies. Ato Sebhat belongs to a
category of humans that Orwell describes as people who use ordinary language “to
make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity
to pure wind”.
The voice of America Amharic service has also invited
listeners to put questions to Ato Sebhat for a future airing. But what is the
use of asking questions when you know the person who takes the questions thinks
the sky is the limit for lying? This man didn’t even stutter for a second when
he told us that his TPLF invented Ethiopia and introduced the Ethiopian people
to one another for the first time in history.
An interesting part in the interview was also Sebhat’s
elaboration on the nature and work of EFFORT, the so called Endowment Fund for
the Rehabilitation of Tigrai, the TPLF business conglomerate. Sebhat literally
told us what Mussolini would tell any journalist in 1935 about his “civilizing”
ventures in Ethiopia when he told us about the role of EFFORT in building the
Ethiopian economy. Now that is very interesting in itself but the man’s idea of
what capitalism is and his vision of how he intends to build it is even more
troubling. This robber baron bragged about EFFORT being the biggest investment
company in Ethiopia and wants us to be surprised by that achievement. What would
have been surprising was if a company supported by a ruling party, that has
unlimited capacity to crush all its competitors and one that has the privilege
of getting as much as 3.2 billion birr debt written off by the Commercial Bank
of Ethiopia by order of the ruling class, was to rank in second place. It is
ironic that the Ethiopian people have to subsidize the same company which in the
first place was set up with money and property looted from them. But I credit
Ato Sebhat for inadvertently but bluntly telling us that his idea of building
capitalism is preparing the Ethiopian people for apartheid-like serfdom.
Why make
big lies?
Absolute power often makes absolutely delusional.
Understandably, some of the lie has its source in Sebhat and his friends being
delusional. There is a pervasive groupthink inside the opaque TPLF clique that
is heavily powered by its narrow ethnic nationalism. Like all autocrats, they
often manufacture their own facts and after repeating that for a while tend to
accept them as truth. Once they accept a lie as truth they often stick by it
even if evidence proves them wrong. Anyone presenting evidence to the contrary
is often considered criminal or the enemy and punished. This is why every
opposition in Ethiopia, weak or strong, and citizens who dare to ask fair and
hard questions are subjected to merciless persecution. That is why Birtukan
Mideksa is languishing in prison. That is why we hear a barrage of draconian
decrees being promulgated every now and then. That is why entire villages in
the Ogaden were burnt to the ground and people killed like flies. Isn’t their
crime only asking questions and demanding to be consulted before they were
forcibly evicted from their land to give way for foreign oil finders? It is the
same reason that led to the genocide of the Agnuak in Gambella.
Many people I know were dumbfounded to hear Ayatollah Sebhat,
say that his clique invented Ethiopia in 1991. It is unbelievable how a very
old man of his age pulled the energy needed to put a bold face as his mouth
puffed the mega lie that the Ethiopian people came to know one another for
the first time after his group took power 18 years ago. You may think this
goon is off his medication when he spewed this offensive absurdity, but the
truth is that this is right out of the talking points of the entire delusional
TPLF cabal who are trying their best to rewrite history. There was a big public
amazement about Ato Girma Woldegiorgis, the “President”, regarding a letter he
wrote in condolences for Tilahun Gesesses death. Ato Girma is reported to have
written thanking Tilahun Gesesse for breaking through a government ban of
singing in Oromoffa. Many people cringed how this extremely old man of not so
good health, and on his way to God, can make such a bold faced lie through his
teeth. Ato Girma, I heard, is reported to have confided to people close to him,
that he has not read the letter himself and that it was written in the Meles
Zenawi’s office for him to sign and issue. I found Ato Girma’s explanation
plausible. This is purely a TPLF kind of lie.
This self-serving clique thinks that Ethiopians don’t even
know that the period between Menilik and Mengistu Hailemariam has seen a more
ethnically diverse ruling class, than TPLF’s ethno-centered reign of the last 18
years. Sebhat, Meles and Bereket think that they have succeeded in hiding from
us that, for the first time in modern Ethiopian history, since Menilik, there
are no Oromo generals in any key position in the Ethiopian army. Sebhat and the
whole clique think the Ethiopian people are not watching.
The assertion of Sebhat that the TPLF invented Ethiopia also
tells us something more: this tribal clique thinks and acts as if it is still
the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes) in Ethiopia. They deny
the existence of time in between. As far as the TPLF is concerned, the most
revolutionary proclamation that made land public property in 1974 and that
fundamentally took away the key instrument of oppression of one group of people
by another, has not taken place. If they admit that this actually happened,
and that there was a revolution that transformed ethnic relations in Ethiopia,
they know their colonial and apartheid look-alike tribal politics would fall
apart. They have also convinced themselves that there was no parade of cultures
of nations and nationalities during the dergue. They think they have invented
that too. They don’t want to think the Institute of Nationalities in Addis
Ababa was even set up under the dergue. They think the Ethiopian people spent
sleepless nights trying to find out the ethnicity (nationality) of Mengistu and
the rest of their rulers. History and time exist only when it agrees with the
TPLF. Since they are stuck in time, they have not lived to see the early periods
of Mengistu who at the time used language similar as theirs as reason to
slaughter Amharas. Meles and Sebhat still keep calling Mengistu the protector of
Amharas. Those of you who may have been amazed by Sebhat’s phantom assertions
should know that these are the ingredients from which Sebhat’s sick and thick
mind is made of.
Yes, if you see what looks like a colonial or an apartheid
model of governance in Ethiopia today, where 93% of the leadership of the
country’s army is from Sebhat’s ethnic group (Tigreans) and the security and
bureaucracy is almost exclusively controlled by TPLF operatives, the reason is
that Sebhat and Meles and Bereket think we cannot see reality for ourselves but
take their words for everything they claim and read the history they have tried
to rewrite for us.
It is obviously a futile exercise to ask questions of people
like Sebhat Nega, Meles Zenawi or Bereket Simon in hope of getting a straight
answer just as the VOA journalist tried hard on Ato Sebhat. These people have
eaten up all sense of cultural inhibition and decency to stop them at anything.
For example, you may want to ask them, as the VOA journalist, Ato Addisu Abebe,
tried on Ato Sebhat, about the ever narrowing political space for opposition
groups in the country, even give them a quantitative measure of how narrow it
has gotten or compile testimonies from everyday people in Ethiopia who are
disgusted with their rule, or show them research by respectable international
human rights groups, and academics who tell us that the political space for
building democracy in Ethiopia has diminished and human rights abuse is at its
worst. Sebhat and Meles would simply tell you that democracy is flourishing in
Ethiopia and people are happy. “There are no angry people in Ethiopia”, said
Sebhat in the VOA interview. How much evidence you may have to the contrary
does not matter. Even the people whose children are mowed down on the streets of
Addis Ababa are happy and love the Agazi as far as Sebhat is
concerned. Meles in a recent
interview with the Financial Times was asked about the
draconian civil society laws recently instituted in the country. He simply
said, “some people would say this is clamping down, we would say this is an
empowering law”. In TPLF-speak you can say “we killed them in order to let
them live”.
Ato Sebhat, if you happen to read this I will live you with
the following two lines hoping that you will let them permeate through your
head.
-
Not
all political conflicts in a country are ethnic conflicts or wars between
nations and nationalities. Your characterization of conflicts in Ethiopia as
a war between ethnic groups is too dumb even to people who have not read
history. Rivalries and wars come in different packages including in the form
of class conflicts. They even occur within the same ethnic group and there
were many in Ethiopia. Even as they were struggling against their oppressive
rulers, the Ethiopian people have often considered themselves Ethiopians who
were not given a share of what their country should give them. This is a
country where people across ethnicity rose up together to defend. Ato
Sebhat, there in Adwa, near your village, you can find the bones of most
nationalities in Ethiopia. And that your notion that we knew each other
with the help of TPLF in 1991 exits only in your paranoid and tribal dense
head.
-
Like
every people who lived under tyranny, the Ethiopian people will rise up,
most likely in your life time, to take back their country. Looking at it
from where most of us stand, your government looks more like an apartheid
establishment than anything else. Believe me, the people you have burnt
their villages will rise up from the ashes soon. The people whose children
you mowed down on the streets of Addis Ababa have not forgotten. The Amharas
and Oromos and the rest of our people you despise and whose children you are
packing your prisons with, are not far from the horizons of their freedom.
Even the people of Tigrai in whose name you do your crimes will definitely
rise up some day and will say enough already, get off my back and not in my
name. You will find that you have left your children a pile of ash and thin
air instead of the personal wealth and prosperity you accumulated.
-
Please
spare the people of Tigrai from lying in their name. I have not seen
anything to show me their ownership of EFFORT as you claimed. Sir, through
your actions and your tribalization of loyalty and privilege you are buying
hatred for the people of Tigrai. Tragically you have done this with some
success. Please know that ethnicity as a political tool can be redirected in
any direction and with relative ease. You have no monopoly of it, sir.
I wish you and the cabal can come back to your senses before
it is too late. The silence of the people you subdued by force is fooling you.
You have confused silence with agreement and happiness. You are sitting on a
time bomb, sir. There are angry people all around you. You said they are not the
people “they are individuals” but how many million individuals do you think
constitute a people?
Ato Sebhat, if you have made your lies with some mix of
truth, we would have engaged in a useful debate. It is sad that you limited my
job to restating everyday observations, things that are as clear as the
September sky over Ethiopia. In the words of the satirist I quoted above, “we
have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious has become the
first duty of intelligent men”.
As for VOA’s call for questions to Ato Sebhat, I have only
one question that I ask you to put to him. I have the same question put to
Senator McCarthy in the US senate at a hearing known as the Army-McCarthy
Hearings in 1954 by the head attorney of the US army - “Have you no sense of
decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Fekadeshewakena@yahoo.com
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