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Genocide against Amharas in Ethiopia, a crime for which justice is long overdue
SENAY CONVERSATION MAY 22, 2024
By Senait Senay (PhD)
The world shall know that #Amhara|s in #Ethiopia finally ended up resorting to armed resistance, after suffering 30 years of extreme targeting, profiling, discrimination, massacres, and generally slow and rapid -onset genocide that are sanctioned by the system that is being run by the successive governments that all emanate from the same ultra-nationalist fascistic ‘ruling party’ a.k.a EPRDF and lately known as Prosperity Party. This party and the individuals within came to power and never left since early 1990’s.
Amharas tried everything under the sun to rectify the state sanctioned suffering they faced for three decades. Every single door was firmly shut on their face! They even tried the legal framework that was deliberately put in place to disadvantage them. They were ridiculed by the authorities at the helm of these ‘mandates’, just for example the speaker of the House of Federation made the Wolkait Amhara Identity Committee, that was requesting their right to self-govern according to the supposed ‘constitutional rights’ afforded to all Ethiopians, suffer for years. Another example is where the Speaker of the House of Representatives, shut down Amhara Members of Parliament for even asking a moment of silence to commemorate the hundreds of thousands that perished due to horrific genocidal attacks. In both cases, Amharas were being hunted down by state sponsored state and non state actors on the background, those who survived the direct assaults were dropping like flies in the backdrop, because of all sorts of man made disasters, including lack of food, shelter, medical services, and generally any access to assured livelihood.
These are just nuggets given as examples, for all intents and purposes ethnic Amharas have had zero political representation in Ethiopia for the last 30 years and counting. One may ask, how come one of the largest ethnic groups are left unrepresented in a system that is huge on group rights, specifically one that is based on ethnic identity? It is simple to explain in retrospect, but unbelievable for those who lived it at the time. Because, who would believe that one would lay their legacy in eradicating millions of people systematically in the 21st century? Especially, for a group who, day and night preached about liberating the ‘oppressed nations, nationalities, and peoples’ of Ethiopia? A categorized high level profiling of Ethiopians that no body until this day understands how the categories work, since neither population number or any other identifier consistently explain how these ‘separatist’ groups like TPLF and OLF that were allowed to govern the country they fought so hard to ‘Balkanize’, applied it to categorize the 84 ethnic groups of Ethiopia into these odd three groups that entail different level of rights. Anyway, I digress here, there are many illogical life-altering decisions that were made in Ethiopia for the entire tenure of this fascistic administration, and it is something that requires its own project to discern what happened and how it can get fixed once horrific crimes are stopped and humane system is put in place in the country.
Coming back to the ‘how did they do it?’ question, basically the entire Amhara population was disfranchised, and primarily made to think that everything under the sun when it comes to any problem in Ethiopia is their fault. This was systematically engraved in the school curriculums, in the educational policy, in the day to day rhetoric of the government owned media (which pretty much is the only consistent and wide coverage media there is in Ethiopia). That wide spread programing was systematically enforced through the federal and regional constitutions that hood wink all other ethnic groups in Ethiopia to conform to this verdict that the ‘separatists turn governors’ of the time passed on ethnic Amharas without any question. The machinations of how exactly this was enshrined in the various laws, rules and regulations of the nation, and how it managed to carefully outcast Amharas in all kinds of possible combinations of realities in the demographic distribution of different ethnic groups in Ethiopia, can be confidently labeled as its own level of mastery in deception. One good example is, population number of people that speak a given language was primarily used to assign ethnic ownership to various administrative units. However, in cases where those who spoke Amharic as their native language supersede (and there were hundreds upon hundreds of these cases, thousands if you consider Kebele/Rural Precinct level assessment ), they always came up with some anecdotal and local reasoning to skip the existence of those citizens, often by citing, ridiculous reasoning such as that specific population being ‘settler’ rather than indigenous. I want my readers to take a very strong note here, ethnic Amharas do not exist anywhere else in the world except in Ethiopia! Amharic is only natively spoken in Ethiopia. Its regardless of this fact that they used such reasonings to keep two-thirds of ethnic Amharas san any kind of political representation. And what happened to the remaining one-third? Well the one-third was left in Regional State labeled “Amhara” but surprise, surprise, this Regional State is the only one that has a local constitution that does not claim to belong to the people it is named for. Basically all the other ethnically-labeled regions have it in their local constitution that the regions belong to that group. Where as the Amhara Regional constitution claims that it belongs to the ..yep.. you guessed.. it that same vague group of categories.. ‘Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ that reside in the region.
So.. basically #AmharaGenocide is orchestrated as follows.. some separatist groups came to power, they divided the nation by ethnic States. Then while awarding each of the ethnic State to a given ethnic group (i.e only to 9 out of 84), for ethnic Amharas, they left them Stateless, except for a fake sense of owning a ‘Regional State’, that acted as an open air concentration camp, as the killings, massacres and displacement was put underway for 30 years straight since this system was imposed. The targeting took place with varying tempo and momentum of course. The Amhara suffering would slow down when national issues the government cares about, like election, war and continental or global events that the genocidal regime wants to shine at take place. It was while Amharas were undergoing this reality, the supposed ‘reform’ of the ruling party happened in 2018. By then the Amhara targeting has already facilitated enough hate to percolate among the wider population against Amharas, enough demonization, enough profiling and enough planning has happened. Since the reform hit, and the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) led governance change hands to the Oromo Peoples Democratic Organization (OPDO) led governance, the pushing of ethnic Amharas from the rest of Ethiopia, into what they would think is ‘safe haven’ just by the fact that it is labeled as ‘Amhara Region’ has already occurred by the successive displacement and generally nasty treatment of Amharas all over Ethiopia. With this new administration, the final level of targeting was ushered in. The targeting became rapid onset, direct attacks rather than using systemic methods like dismantling health infrastructures and giving forced contraception replaced the way the targeting was performed. Finally, a full-scale war was opened in the final location where many considered ‘safe heaven’, that never was. Amharas who lived in the Amhara Region all along never enjoyed the same level of ‘home’ State advantages other regions offered to their ‘owner ethnic groups’. Amhara region was sectioned off to give ‘special zones’ to other ethnic identity groups, while they are not afforded the same facility in other regions.
All along, this whole path we travelled for 35 years now in the nation is a step-by-step guide on how to push Amharas to a given area where they may believe they are safe, to later descend up on them with all the regime has got, as a final frontier to kill as many as possible then disfranchise the rest by discounting their existence, given many of the survivors are already being pushed to assimilate into other groups so that they can ‘survive’.
Any notable Amhara that actually has any chance of being heard by his/her people, who has tried to expose this over the years, is either killed, or is behind bars (concentration camps) or has joined the #AmharaFano movement to resist and alter this terminal reality for themselves and for their people.
It is within this context that Amharas have resisted militarily, after trying literally everything under the sun to rectify the situation. Even then, every single time the genocidal regime realizes that the people have indeed woken up and are fighting their survival, still…. instead of coming to terms that this sort of existence of living in a reality that could get you killed for no reason other than for just being alive of course cannot be offered to any sentient being that knows they are being slaughtered let alone humans, they still try and push all kinds of band-aid sort of concessions, just because they think they can. This regime ridicules’ the mothers whose children were beheaded right in front of them, the Amharas that were skinned alive, those that were burned alive, those that were cut into pieces while they still breathe, because it thinks it has the backing of the international community, the massive financial lenders, the geo-political actors and the mega-investors that aim to re-engineer Africa, for the sake of ‘Africans’. But the stark truth is that the fissure is showing, Amharas have chosen to reject this existence. The critical mass has awaken. This is very natural, to survive against all odds. Whether, that survival becomes a reality depends on how committed the people are willing to survive. And the Amhara Fano movement has already shown plenty that Amharas have chosen to survive. No level of deceit and false reassurance will turn back time to a time when Amharas took the regime and its guarantors for its words.
This reality has to be altered if we indeed believe in the words #NeverAgain and mean them. The current trajectory Ethiopia is on, is one that is sure to repeat a massive case of preventable genocide and other crimes against humanity against the Amhara people of Ethiopia. Resist from applying a ‘band aid’ solution, get close, get ready, look at the evidence, meet the survivors and understand the need to alter this horrific reality! Be ready to work with a force that is up and coming in the region, be ready to help justice transpire! Make things right one issue at a time in this world, and save humanity’s conscience.
Side Note:
Rampant use of concentration camps by the regime in Ethiopia has been reported by local medias and escapees, countless Amharas have been abducted and hoarded in various concentration camps across the country since 2022, approximately around the same time of the signing of the Pretoria ‘Peace’ Agreement. This agreement which was supposed to be only about ‘silencing of the guns’ of the war in the northern part of Ethiopia spanning the regions of Tigray, Amhara, and Afar; which raged between Nov 4, 2020 and Nov 4, 2022, ended up sealing the fate of Amharas as well as Afari’s in their absence, by putting details that are beyond just ‘silencing the gun’ and deciding on the framework of how the root causes of what caused the war in the first place should be addressed. Naturally, Amharas as they were not represented in the process were kept at the disadvantage of what the regime in Ethiopia and their counterpart in Tigray Region, TPLF (a.k.a and referred as TDF and Tigray Regional government, at various stages of the talk, with no clarification of the differences as per official documents that came out of the process) were doing in the name of this largely internationally sanctioned (albeit just from one camp) agreement. As time almost solves all mysteries if enough of it elapsed, it was later very clear to all that this was a pact to coordinate a much more organized attack on Amharas (as was the case for these two parties before their temporary split ahead of the so-called EPRDF party ‘reform’ in 2018). One of the solid examples of this alliance against Amharas, can be seen from the timing of the immediate decision to disarm Amharas, the wide-spread abduction of Amharas across the country, almost at the same time as the agreement was signed, and a number of back deals being done through tactical cooperation between TPLF and the regime in Ethiopia to dislodge the Amhara Fano movement. Here is GPE’s note on the wide spread use of concentration camps where Amharas are held without any due process of law and in extremely inhuman conditions where their rights are violated on a daily basis.
Pictured: Dr. Wondossen Assefa and Educator Meskerem Abera, two of the countless Amharas detained for daring to expose the suffering of Amhara people to Amharas, other Ethiopians and to the world.
Learn more about the genocide against Amharas by checking out the following hashtags on various social media platforms:
#FreeAllAmharaDetainees
#AmharaConcentrationCamps
#WarOnAmhara
#AmharaGenocide
#ForwardFano
End #AmharaGenocide
End #EthnicApartheidInEthiopia
End #FascismInEthiopia
