Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 8, 2021
💭 Lira crash slams Turkey’s factories, farmers and retailers
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has defended his ‘economic vision,’ even as the lira continues to hover near record lows. The plunge in the value of the currency has left many families struggling to make ends meet. Also in the show – the EU outlines a new trade strategy to give it more leverage against countries that try to coerce the bloc for economic or politican gain.
ELDER PAISIOS’ PROPHECIES ON RUSSIA-TURKEY
The ascetic monk Paisios, who became Saint Paisios by the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church in January, was known for his prophecies and predictions. One of them was that Istanbul, once the capital of the Byzantine Empire Constantinople, will become Greek again.
Specifically, Paisios wrote: “Events will start that will culminate with us taking back Constantinople. Constantinople will be given to us. There will be war between Russia and Turkey. In the beginning the Turks will believe they are winning, but this will lead to their destruction. The Russians, eventually, will win and take over Constantinople. After that it will be ours. They will be forced to give it to us.”
The text reads further, “(The Turks) will be destroyed. They will be eradicated because they are a nation that was built without God’s blessing. One third of the Turks will go back to where they came from, the depths of Turkey. One third will be saved because they will become Christians, and the other third will be killed in this war.” This is based on the Saint Kosmas prophecy.
Saint Paisios reposed on July 12, 1994. One of the things he wrote was, “I wanted nothing else but God to keep me alive for a few more years so I could see my country expand. And it will expand…”
“Turkey will be dissected. This will be to our benefit as a nation. This way our villages will be liberated, our enslaved homelands. Constantinople will be liberated, will become Greek again. Hagia Sophia will open again,” the text reads.
“Turkey will be dissected in 3 or 4 parts. The countdown has begun. We will take the lands that belong to us, the Armenians will take theirs and the Kurds their own. The Kurdish issue is at the works,” the text continues.
Paisios wrote further: “As long as there is faith and hope in God, a lot of people will rejoice. All that will happen in these years. The time has come.”
Saint Paisios the Athonite was born Arsenios Eznepidis in July 1924, in Farasa Cappadocia. His father was called Prodromos and his mother Evlampia. He had eight siblings. On August 7, 1924, a week before the Greeks of Farasa returned to the homeland, he was baptized by the parish priest, Arsenios, whom the Orthodox Church recognized as a saint. Arsenios insisted and gave him his name “to leave a monk in his place,” as he said.
Five weeks after the boy’s christening, on September 14, 1924, the Eznepidis family, along with other refugees, arrived at Piraeus and then went to Corfu, where they stayed for eighteen months. The family then moved to Igoumenitsa and then to Konitsa where Arsenios finished elementary school and got his diploma with “excellent conduct.” Ever since he was a child, he was writing down the miracles of Saint Arsenios. He had an inclination towards monasticism and wanted to become a monk.
Arsenios went to Mount Athos to become a monk in 1949, right after his discharge from the army. He stayed for one night at the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian in Karyes and then slept in the hermitage of Saint Panteleimon, in the cell of the Virgin Mary, where he met father Cyril, abbot of the monastery, and followed him faithfully. After spending time in various retreats of Mount Athos and Sinai, he moved to Koutloumousio monastery until he became seriously ill and passed away in the summer of 1994.
He was buried in the Holy Monastery of Saint John the Theologian in Souroti, Thessaloniki. Since then, every year on July 11 to July 12, the anniversary of his death, there is a vigil in the Sanctuary Retreat, with thousands of believers attending.
Elder Paisios wrote four books, published by the Holy Monastery Saint John the Theologian: Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian (1991), Elder Hadji-Georgis the Athonite, 1809-1886 (1986), Athonite Fathers and Athonite Matters (1993) and Letters (1994).
Elder Paisios became known for a number of controversial political statements and prophecies. These include the prediction that a war with Turkey will lead to a restoration of a Greater Greece that includes Albania, Macedonia and Byzantium (Istanbul), and the mass conversion of Turks from Islam to Orthodox Christianity. Many Greeks compare Paisios to Nostradamus.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 8, 2021
U.S. Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman will depart on Thursday for the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt to discuss international support for diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Ethiopia, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday.
The United States has repeatedly called on parties to the conflict immediately to end hostilities, but fighting has continued between the Ethiopian government and rebel groups, primarily the Tigray People’s Liberation Army.
💭 My Note: Again? For more drones? Curios, these are the countries that supply genocide swarms & assassin drones to the fascist Oromo regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali.
Mr. Jeffrey Feltman visited these countries back in August – and last week, he appeared for an interview on the very hateful „unEthiopian„ Washington-based media (ESAT) that set the stage for genocide by spreading hate against Tigray community and now watching a-year-long massacres silently. The daily broadcasts of ESAT played an essential role in the preparation for the genocide – and they will soon be accountable.
💭 Ethiopian businessman of Tigrayan origin, Samson Teklemichael gets kidnapped in a broad daylight in Nairobi.
They watched friends die in the mountains of Tigray. They survived imprisonment. They paid bribes and suffered from injuries as they fled the civil war devastating Ethiopia.
When the four Tigrayan asylum seekers made it to Nairobi this spring, at first they felt safe. Living in a one-room apartment more than 1,000 miles from the fighting, the friends — three medical workers and one journalist — said they were reassured to be in Kenya, a democracy and one of the region’s most stable countries.
But it was not long before their sense of security dissipated. Rumors abounded about intelligence officers surveilling Tigrayans on behalf of the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments.
Then, late last month, in an incident that sparked an outcry in Kenya and attracted international attention, two men dragged a prominent businessman of Tigrayan descent out of his Bentley and into a Subaru as he sat in Nairobi traffic. A traffic officer appeared in a widely shared video to be holding the door of Samson Teklemichael’s car open to assist his captors. Teklemichael could be heard pleading for bystanders to record his capture.
More than two weeks after Teklemichael was taken, it is not clear who was responsible or what their motivation was, said Kenya police spokesman Bruno Isohi Shioso. Police are still investigating, he said, and seeking tips from the public.
Mulugeta, one of the four Tigrayan friends living in Nairobi, was so shaken he did not leave the apartment for two days.
“I felt free,” he said. “But now my hope is lost.”
For more than a year, Ethiopia has been engulfed in a civil war that has claimed thousands of lives and put hundreds of thousands at risk of famine. The fighting between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government forces and rebels led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began as a political power struggle and is now increasingly driven by ethnic rivalries.
Human rights groups warn that Teklemichael’s disappearance is an ominous indicator of the long reach of Abiy, who just two years ago won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has referred to leaders of the TPLF, which dominated the country’s politics for three decades and is resented by many non-Tigrayan Ethiopians, as “cancer” and “weeds.”
Abiy’s spokeswoman Billene Seyoum declined to comment for this story. Another government spokesman, Legesse Tulu, did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman said during a news conference that he would look into the alleged abduction, adding that reports of police in Addis Ababa going door-to-door arresting Tigrayans were alarming. The United States, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom on Tuesday condemned reports of mass detentions of Tigrayans by the Ethiopian government, saying arrests without charges “likely constitute violations of international law and must cease immediately.”
“The brazen daylight abduction of Mr. Teklemichael on a busy Nairobi street has left many people shaken,” said Irũngũ Houghton, executive director for Amnesty International Kenya. “The collapse of the rule of law that we have seen in Addis Ababa, with thousands of Tigrayans being arrested on the streets, that chaos, that lawlessness, must not be allowed to show up in Kenya.”
Teklemichael’s wife, Milen Haleform Mezgebo, said in an interview that she had not heard from her husband since he was taken. Fearing for the safety of their three children, she pulled them out of school.
Mulugeta and his three friends limit their interactions with new people. When they see other Ethiopians on the street, they wonder if they are spies. Citing security concerns, they spoke on the condition that they be identified only by their second names.
The men are part of what analysts say is likely a large network of Tigrayans living illegally in Nairobi, unrecognized by the Kenyan government or UNHCR, the United Nation’s refugee agency. There were only 168 refugees from Tigray officially registered in Kenya in 2020 and 2021, said UNHCR spokeswoman Eujin Byun, and they have been transferred to Kakuma, one of Kenya’s refugee camps, per the government’s policy. The pandemic has contributed to a backlog of processing requests, Byun said.
Ethiopian asylum seekers must come through Kakuma to complete the refugee registration process, said Joseph Kotolo, Kenya’s head of refugee status determination. But the men in Nairobi said they worry about their health and safety at Kakuma, where nearly 200,000 people live in often bleak conditions. They believe the thousands of Ethiopians living there could pose a threat, although spokespeople for UNHCR and Kenya’s refugee agency said they had not heard reports of any attacks targeting Tigrayans at Kakuma.
The four men acknowledged, though, that their legal limbo contributes to their fear. They have repeatedly called the U.N. hotline, trying to secure status as legal refugees.
Teklemichael was “a businessman and a legal person who had been living in Kenya for a long time,” Mulugeta said. “I am not a businessperson. I am not a legal person. I have no money. … If he was abducted, what about us?”
Getting out
After fighting broke out last November in Ethiopia’s mountainous north, each of the men experienced a different version of the terror that forced them to leave.
Mulugeta, who was in Addis Ababa, said he was repeatedly punched by a police officer and dragged to a makeshift prison where he was detained for 40 days.
Hailay and Khasay, who worked together in the Tigray region’s health department, said they watched bombs kill two pharmacist colleagues in the hills of Abiy Addi in December. Hailay, 28, and Khasay, 26, tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the men, who had been walking dozens of feet ahead of them. There was no time to bury the bodies, they said, because more bombs were coming. They alleged the bombs were dropped by the Ethiopian government.
Teklemariam, 27, a childhood friend of Hailay, said he ran from Eritrean soldiers who repeatedly shot at him after taking control of his hometown, Enticho. Soldiers looted his family’s farm, he said, taking grain, shoes, clothes and cooking supplies.
When he traveled to Tigray’s capital last winter to pick up his paycheck, he called Hailay. With Khasay, they devised a plan.
“The only choice,” Teklemariam said, “was to escape from that horror.”
The deterioration of Africa’s second-most-populous country has been staggering. Once heralded for pursing democratic reforms and brokering peace deals in the region, Prime Minister Abiy is leading the battle on the front lines. The United Nations predicts hundreds of thousands of refugees will flee.
Traveling by bus through Ethiopia, Hailay, Khasay and Teklemariam were stopped near the border by an official at a checkpoint. He asked for their identification cards and demanded to know where they were coming from, they said. Not wanting to lie, they told him Tigray’s capital. Then he brought them to a small, bug-infested house where they estimated about 50 men were being held as prisoners.
For four days, the men said they were beaten by guards who demanded money they did not have.
Eventually, Hailay reached a friend who convinced the officials to release them.
With money gathered from friends, they paid smugglers to get them to Nairobi. The nearly 500-mile journey took a week by foot, motorbike and van. They ate only a handful of times, drank water from the river; and traveled mostly at night to avoid detection. At one point, the smugglers insisted they cross a crocodile-infested river.
Mulugeta, who they met on the journey, became like an older brother.
When Mulugeta, 35, fainted in the heat at one point and badly burned his leg while falling off a motorbike at another, they helped care for him. And when Mulugeta learned his friends in Nairobi had offered to pay for a one-room apartment, he offered to share it.
‘We are not secure here’
Teklemariam walked through Nairobi’s bustling streets one October evening, collecting the ingredients needed for dinner. He bought cow meat from the butcher around the corner and injera — a spongy bread that is a staple of Ethiopian cooking — from a woman who enveloped him in a hug.
He fist-bumped a gaggle of children on the way out.
“Nice Ethiopians,” he said, explaining that the family that owned the store was from the Amhara region, which has long had tense relations with Tigray. But they had welcomed him and his friends.
Back in the room, the other three men were carefully weaving around each other in the corner that served as a kitchen, chopping onions and chile peppers, starting the gas burner on which the meat stew would be cooked and arranging stools and sleeping pads around the makeshift table.
Since arriving in March, each has had their own struggles.
When the TPLF advanced in November, Teklemariam cheered. But rounds of government airstrikes in Tigray that were reported to have killed civilians muted his excitement. He guessed that any TPLF gains would be followed by retaliatory strikes. He feared for his family, from whom he had not heard in months because of a government communications blackout.
“Many Tigrayans are in a blue mood at this moment,” said Teklemariam, who said he was too traumatized to watch footage of the strikes. “Many people have become silent.”
The current situation, the men said, is not sustainable. Unable to work, they rely on the generosity of Nairobi’s Tigrayan community. They eat only two meals a day and have started buying pasta and ugali, a stiff flour porridge, because it is cheaper than injera.
Their six-month passes acknowledging them as asylum seekers expired in October. They said their calls to the U.N. hotline have been brushed off.
Teklemariam emerged from an interview with Kenya’s refugee agency in November in tears. An official told him, he said, to report to Kakuma or go back to his country.
Friends have said the only other way to get the paperwork needed to be in Nairobi legally is to pay bribes. But they do not have the money.
They now hope to get even further away, maybe to the United States or Europe.
What they know for now, Teklemariam said, is this: “We are not secure here.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 8, 2021
👉 From The Washington Examiner, by Michael Rubin
“To Be a Tigrayan in Abiy’s Ethiopia is to be a Dead Man Walking.”
“በአብይ ኢትዮጵያ ትግራዋይ መሆን ማለት በእግር የሚሄድ የሞተ ሰው ነው።”
“Turkish-backed forces pursued a similar strategy of demographic transformation as they sought to pursue an ethnic cleansing in Syrian districts along the Turkish frontier of their native Kurdish populations”
💭My Note: This was exactly what has happened to the Christians of Northern Ethiopia 500 years ago – and the Turks plus their Adal and Oromo Muslim allies are trying to achieve the same today by pursuing ethnic cleansing of Christian Northern Ethiopians.
Let’s remember, The Oromos/Gallas who are now unfortunately in power in Addis, are a nomadic and pastoral people, who 500 years ago were living in what is present day Kenya and Tanzania, were on the move looking for greener pastures for their cattle, which were the backbone of their economy. The Oromos, contrary to current popular belief, were not organized into a single unitary state, but were a fractured society of nomads organized into Gadas. Each Gada had a leader and operated according to the interests of the Gada and not as part of a bigger entity or an Oromo nation. Some of the Gadas moved Westward from present day Kenya, past Lake Victoria and ended up in what is now Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been the ancestors of the people currently known as the genocidal Hutus, who have very close cultural ties to the Oromos that live in present day Kenya and Ethiopia).
Those nomad Gadas that moved north into Ethiopia did so in staggered waves. According to the Portuguese, the Oromos first set foot in Ethiopia in the year 1522. But their advances were checked by the Ethiopians. Only after 10 years of destructive wars between Adal and Ethiopia, which weakened both nations, were the Oromos able to move deeper into Ethiopia and Adal unopposed. Some may not know this, but the reason that the Adals built the wall of Harrer, which still stands today, was to defend the capital from the advances of the Oromo. A very interesting point that I would like to make here is that, it was because of Gragn that the Oromos got what is now largely perceived as a derogatory name – Galla. From my understanding, when Gran realized that the Ethiopians were turning the tides of war against him, he needed allies quickly and approached the Oromo Gada that had settled closest to Adal, seeking a military alliance.
💭 The Gallas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organization differed considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not only the cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, but they helped to prolong a situation fromwhich even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly.
➡ Edward Ullendorff – “The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People.” Oxford University Press, 1960
💭 It has now been over a decade since Syria erupted into civil war. The uprising was spontaneous and spread like wildfire. Within weeks, President Bashar Assad had lost control over huge swaths of Syrian territory. The Assad family’s demise appeared inevitable. Rather than flee, however, Assad increased the brutality.
Neither fighting nor atrocities in Syria were random. Both sides fought for control over Homs, a small city literally at the crossroads of the country: Whichever faction controlled Homs could control commerce across Syria. Meanwhile, both Assad and the radicalized opposition sought to cleanse regions along sectarian or ethnic lines. The Syrian air force focused its assaults on Sunni population centers in order to change the demography of the Sunni heartland. Turkish-backed forces pursued a similar strategy of demographic transformation as they sought to pursue an ethnic cleansing in Syrian districts along the Turkish frontier of their native Kurdish populations.
While Russia, Iran, and Lebanese Hezbollah came to Assad’s defense and Turkey supported the radical Sunni opposition, moderate forces found no patron, especially as the Obama administration chose to sit on the sidelines. There was some support for the Syrian Kurds as they struggled against the Islamic State, but it was little, late, and undercut by former President Donald Trump.
Today, Assad has largely reestablished control over Syria. Moving forward, even if the United States follows the Arab lead to normalize relations with Assad, U.S. leverage over the Syrian dictator will be minimal. Assad now associates survival with intransigence and feels mass murder and ethnic cleansing pay off.
Today, Ethiopia is rapidly becoming the new Syria.
In November 2020, Tigrayan leadership rejected Ethiopian Premier Abiy Ahmed’s order to postpone elections. They feared that he sought to follow the path of self-described reformers who consolidate dictatorship . Abiy reacted with fury, sought to decapitate the Tigrayan military leadership, and then dispatched the Ethiopian army to Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray state. While Ethiopian officials insisted Abiy’s battle was just with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the army not only denied food to the entire Tigray Region but also closed Tigrayan businesses in Addis Ababa and rounded up ethnic Tigrayans in internment camps. To be a Tigrayan in Abiy’s Ethiopia is to be a dead man walking.
Initially, however, Abiy’s military assaults failed.
Last June, the Tigray Defense Forces recaptured Mekelle, and subsequently, they and other regional groups began to march on Addis Ababa. Just as the Syrian opposition sought to capture Homs, Tigrayan forces sought to cut off the Chinese-built railroad and highway between Addis Ababa and Djibouti, whose port is a lifeline for Ethiopian trade. Over the past week, the United Nations and various embassies began to evacuate their staff. Abiy’s fall appeared inevitable. It has not come yet.
Instead, the Ethiopian military has regained towns in northern Ethiopia that it previously lost. Tigrayan commanders said they made a tactical withdrawal to reconsolidate their lines. Given the press blackout, it is hard to know what is true. What is certain, however, is that while Washington has remained on the sidelines, other states, including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and China, have provided Abiy drones and other technologies to use against the rebels and control the population.
They took a gamble. If Abiy remains, their stock will rise while America’s influence will be zero. Meanwhile, refugee flows will accelerate, and ethnic minorities will radicalize. Abiy is a Nobel laureate, and it is possible that with foreign assistance, he can outlast the opposition. But like Assad, he will then rule over a husk of a country whose potential he has largely destroyed.
There is no magic formula to resolve conflicts, but sitting on the sidelines and acting only as a diplomatic scold will never work. It is time for the U.S. to do what it refused to do in Syria: offer meaningful support to those resisting a murderous dictator.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 