By:Amdetsion Ze Tegulet
Arusi Negelle. Following our first appeal during the erection of the provocative Annole martyrs monument, local cadres were called on a series of meetings spearheaded by prominent TPLF and OPDO officials. The minutes of the meetings were communicated to us via trusted friends, both Amhara and Oromos, who are members of the OPDO.
At the meetings, it was revealed that:
“The OPDO-TPLF policy against Shewa Amharas residing in Arusi might go further than expulsion. If the Shewa Amhara finances inside and outside the country succeed in evolving the nations in another civil war, the result will not be the victory of Shewa Amhara chauvinism, but the annihilation of the Amhara race in Oromia.”
Also, many OPDO zealots expressed their concerns that they and the Arusi population are becoming impatient because so little had been done to clear the remaining Amharas out. The officials responded to these concerns by stressing that the concerns were legitimate and introduced their plans that all Amharas in Arusi plus a million from the surrounding areas of greater ‘Oromia’ are to be moved into a designated areas, primarily Bure,Gojjam. In the mean time, Amharas are to be reduced to total subservience by impersonal brutality, methodical cruelty. Shewa Amharas of Arusi are long used to being deferment to discrimination, persecution, pogrom. Encouraged by party cadres and the renewed provocative Annole rhetoric, ever since the erection of the monument, pent-up anti-Amhara fantasies have been unleashed in violence worse than anything experienced before in Arusi and ‘Oromia’ in general.
The strong hard working Oromo peasant was compared with the soft crooked Amhara peasant. ”A visible enemy is what is needed” said Adolf Hitler, ”If he hadn’t existed, we would have to invent him.” Throughout the meetings, the Amhara was projected as the villain responsible for all the ‘Oromia’s’ troubles. In much the same way TPLF would use the Amhara as the single opponent on whom every Tigre could focus his fear and discontent. To the public Hitler said, “A reasonable antisemitism must lead to the expulsion of the Jews”. And Jew hatred united the factions of the national socialist party. Amhara hatred is the ideological thread that sewed up the different ethnic factions of the EPRDF party together. The growing anti-Amhara sentiments were hailed legitimate bases for the past and ongoing expulsions of the Amharas that should be harnessed and directed towards similar future plans to uproot Amharas.
The TPLF-OPDO officials warned that the party is not to be seen to instigate demonstrations against the Amharas. But, if there were ”spontaneous” outbursts (similar ”outbursts” were orchestrated by local cadres, in the recent Gambella Amhara-evictions-and-massacres, calling for the total expulsion of Amharas), it would not be their business to prevent them. This was the modes operand of the Nazi party in its initial Jewish ethnic cleansing campaigns. TPLF-OPDO have also said ”a reasonable anti-Amhara chauvinism must lead to the expulsion of the Amharas.” Now, they are being terrorized out, stripped of everything they own before they leave.
Hitler called for the realization of an old nationalist dream. The union of all Germans in a great German state. One Reich embracing the German speaking people. The Nazi program called for the expulsion from Germany of strangers, of immigrants. Paragraph 4 of of the Nazi party program states: ”Only those who are our fellow country men can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be our country man.” For centuries Jews had been of a different religion. Now pseudo-science marked them as a separate race. The German Born Thomas Zettleman in his PHD thesis, 1990, explained the OLF program by indicating the order of ethnic cleansing events that are to take place for the realization of an Oromo ”reich” embracing all the Oromifa speaking people of East Africa. The expulsion of the ”Amhara colonialists” comes first in the list, followed by the eviction of non Amhara tribes identified as ”immigrants”. Europeans and middle easterners would be allowed to remain so long as they live by the dictum of the Oromia constitution (Hera), issued mainly to protect the culture and honor of the Oromo people. The Hera would be an instrument of national rebirth, guaranteeing cultural purification mainly via annihilation of cultural and religious symbols and values deemed as ”foreign”, pollutants. Nazi Germans collected Books judged not in keeping with the national spirit and burned them in public act of cultural purification. Hitler said, ”Anyone who understands national socialism only as a political movement knows virtually nothing about it. It is even more than religion. It is the will to create a new man.”
In power, the OPDO has been able to employ all the resources of the media to promote the national rebirth OLF believed. OPDO would be a creator of a new awakening of the Oromo nation within the Oromo people, which because of the many lost wars against Amhara imperialism and the subsequent colonization have been overran by many other strains , from the east, to the west and the north, which had mingled with and clouded the Gadda Oromo ideal. In a manner that mirrors Nazism, and starting from OLF’s conception that regarded Ethiopian orthodox Christianity as a sort of sickness in the natural Oromo nature, OPDO has considered it its duty not only to renew and improve the oromo nation as far as possible , but also to renew and improve religion, and lead them back step by step to a new sort of recognition of God. A new forms of worship ,the OLF ”Waqe Fata”. ”Irecha” is one such step. To replace religion, OLF/OPDO have looked to the Gadda past. They have been digging into the Gadda era , to revive the spiritual and cultural heritage of these ”greatest” people on earth.
OPDO is the privileged executor of the will and the decisions of its fuhrer, OLF, who it idolizes. At Nürnberg, in September 1935, the Nazis announced racial laws, the reich citizenship act ,and the act for the protection of German blood and German honor (the Nazi ”Hera”). Nazi declared the end of Jewish political rights. Today, Amharas living in ”Oromia” have virtually no rights to speak of.
The Nazi party ideologist ,Alfred Rosenberg, claimed that an international conspiracy of Jews,communists and capitalists, called ”The elders of Zion”, was bent on ruining the white races , especially the Germans. In 1929 the world economy crushed. For Germany, after years of ruinous inflation, it was a disaster. 6 million were out of work. More than 20 million lived of the dole. People became ready to think that perhaps here Hitler was right. Germany must be the victim of plots of an ”international conspiracy”. The former commander in chief of the TPLF army, Aregawi Berhe, have written, ”More over, since the people of Tigray had the dominant Amhara as their adversary, the media had mobilized the people and united the militant forces to deal an outward blow.” The grievances of Tigreans languishing in poverty, chiefly as a result of the ecological degradation of northern Ethiopia ,intensified by the post revolution land policies of the Dergue, as noted by Christopher Clapham, was soon to be ethnically interpreted. Woyane, as did the Nazis, claimed to offer a new approach, a new hope of salvation. Now, millions were ready to respond to TPLF’s emotional appeal. The resurgence of Tigrean greatness based on ethnic pride, loyalty to their nation. For people living in misery it was inspiring to be told that they were a golden race. And the Amharas, Oromos, Ghuraghes etc. were subspecies. It appealed to the need to think better of yourself by thinking worse of someone else. The TPLF led anti-Amhara propaganda united Tegres by focusing attention on the universal enemy. A good Tigrean should demonstrate his essential Tigraynness by acts against the Amhara. Long nurtured hatred founded outlet. We will never know precisely how many Amharas Woyane Tegres and their supporters murdered. According to G/Medihin Araya, former financial head of TPLF,at least 8 million human beings, more than 75% of whom are Amharas, done to death as a direct result of a Tigrean racial fury to date.
We, Shewa Amharas residing in Arusi, want to reveal to our fellow countrymen, that the planned mass deportations to Bure ,Gojjam, is mainly intended at carrying out a systematic mass murder of the tens of thousands of Amharas. Bure is a very hostile malaria infested low land with no infrastructures what so ever, that is completely intolerable and unimaginable (medically speaking) for a highlander to live and produce in it. For a highlander to relocate to such utterly un-adaptable area means an assured death, and TPLF knows it. This information has exposed the leap from deportation to extermination in TPLF’s Amhara ethnic cleansing campaign.
Upon reading this report you may ask under what political structure and what ideological system could that happen? In 1993, Ethiopian calendar, hundreds of Amhara homes in Wollega, Oromia were burned to the ground. Thousands of Amharas were brutally massacred. Federal police and local militias rounded up and marched 15,000 Amharas north and dumped them over the Bure, Gojjam concentration camp, with the full knowledge of the lethal consequences such hostile area would surely have on these highlander settlers. Many Ethiopians, local and international human right organizations new that the TPLF-OPDO militias were terrorizing Amhara communities in Wollega, deporting Amharas to mysterious heavily guarded area. There were even rumors that the conditions in this area were appealing. But few could imagine that the deported Amharas were being exterminated on mass.
Eventually all of the 15,000 Amharas that were relocated vanished into thin air in the biological genocide of a malaria outbreak, of which the area had long been notorious for, at the Bure-Auschwitz concentration camp. In the final moments before their distraction, the last survivors of the Amhara people in Bure-Auschwitz appealed to the whole world for help. They were not heard. May this last voice from the abyss reach the ears of all humanity.
After the Nazi Germans conquered Hungary, a detailed account of the mass murders that were taking place at Auschwitz against hundreds of thousands of Jews, communicated by a polish escapee , Rudolf Vrba, was sent to the council of Jews in Hungary, Budapest. But, unfortunately, Rudolf Kasner, leader of the council, made a decision that proved to be one of the most tragic decisions in the history of man kind. Kasner decided not to release the reports to the Jews of Hungary. On may 15th 1944,the Hungarian deportations were beginning. The extermination of 600,000 Hungarian Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz was the fastest campaign during the entire holocaust. Had Vrba’s report had been acted upon by the Jewish leadership in Budapest, they could have stopped hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews from boarding the trains to Auschwitz. Today we have to stop Amharas of Arusi from boarding the train to Auschwitz of Bure , Gojjam.
Finally, we would like to stress that we are not completely against other viable alternatives for resettlement. I am asking you to think for a moment of the men, women and children who are being driven from their homes in Oromia, and Arusi in particular, by a cruel persecution. Their only crime is the tribe to which they belong. For this their lives are being deliberately made intolerable for them. Our fellow Amhara countrymen must do their best to influence the Oromia government and other regional governments to search the open spaces of the country to find some hospitable place, where in large settlements these people can live in freedom and peace. Given the current circumstances, this is the main purpose of which we have made our second national appeal.
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