Dr. Malone Says Federal Government is “Lawless” and Actively “Violating the Nuremberg Code”
“Our government is out of control on this [Covid response] and they are lawless. They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common rule. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg code. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Bellmont Report. They are flat-out illegal and they don’t care.Hopefully, we are going to stop them before they take our kids.”
It’s no wonder Twitter PERMANENTLY banned him in a shameless attempt to get ahead of this interview.
First up, Dr. Malone breaks down the federal government’scash-for-Covid “death benefits”for hospitals, which incentivizes healthcare providers to artificially inflate the infection and death count.
Unbelievably, hospitals can receive as muchas a $30,000 bonusfor placing a patient on a ventilator, and they are eligible to receive even more cash if the patient is declared dead with the virus, regardless of if it contributed to their death or not.
In short, the healthier the patients get – the less bonus money they receive. Seems a little backward, no?
“The numbers are quite large. There is something like a $3,000 basically death benefit to a hospital if it [a patient admission] can be claimed to be Covid.
There is a financial incentive to call somebody covid positive.The hospitals receive a bonus from the government – I think it’s like $3,000 – if someone is hospitalized and able to be declared Covid positive.
They also receive a bonus – I think the total is something like $30,000 incentive – if somebody gets put on the vent [ventilator].
Then they get a bonus if somebody is declared dead with Covid.
The CDC made the determination that they were going to make a core assumption –if [someone is] PCR positive, and [they] die, that is death due to Covid.
So, the extreme example just to show the absurdity: if the patient comes in with a bullet hole to the head and they do a nose swab and they come up PCR positive, they’re determined to have died from Covid.”
😈 Shame on you, callous President Sahelework Zewde!
😈 Shame on you, ignorant minister Dr. Liya Tadesse!
😈 Shame on you, traitor Journalist Hermela Aregawi!
😈 Shame on you, the heathen Bishop Abune Ermias
👉 Look at Filsan, Y’ALL!
She Was in Abiy Ahmed’s Cabinet as War Broke Out. Now She Wants to Set The Record Straight.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took a sizable risk when he chose her as the youngest minister in his cabinet: Filsan Abdi was an outspoken activist from the country’s marginalized Somali community with no government experience. She was just 28.
Like so many, she was drawn by Abiy’s pledges to build a new Ethiopia, free of the bloody ethnic rifts of the past — overtures that built Abiy’s global reputation as an honest broker and helped win him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Then the opposite happened.
Less than a year into her tenure, Ethiopia was spiraling into an ethnically tinged civil war that would engulf the northern part of the country — Africa’s second most populous — and as the head of the ministry overseeing women’s and children’s issues, Filsan found herself tasked with documenting some of the war’s most horrific aspects: mass rapes by uniformed men and the recruitment of child soldiers.
This week, Filsan, now 30, broke her public silence in a lengthy, exclusive interview with The Washington Post, in which she told of cabinet discussions in the lead-up to the war, official efforts to suppress her ministry’s findings about abuses by the government and its allies, and the resurgent ethnic divisions fracturing the country.
A spokeswoman for Abiy declined to comment on Filsan’s recollections.
“The war has polarized the country so deeply that I know many people will label me as a liar simply because I say the government has also done painful, horrible things,” Filsan said. “I am not saying it was only them. But I was there. I was in cabinet meetings, and I went and met victims. Who can tell me what I did and did not see?”
Disputed story lines
In the 14 months since Ethiopia’s war began, the world has largely relied on the scant access the government has granted to a handful of journalists and humanitarians for any kind of independent reporting. Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, where the war had been contained until June, has been subjected to a near-total communications blockade since fighting began in November 2020.
In the information vacuum, a propaganda war has flourished alongside the very real fighting that has claimed thousands of lives, and even the most basic story lines of the war are hotly contested.
Who started it? Who carried out the atrocities — massacres, summary executions, intentional starvation, mass rapes, hospital lootings, the arming of children — that people from across northern Ethiopia have recounted, either in their ransacked villages or in refugee camps? Is ethnic cleansing underway? Is Ethiopia’s government winning or losing the war?
In January, Abiy prematurely answered the last question by declaring the war over. He brought a group of ministers including Filsan to Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, which government troops had taken over from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a well-armed regional political party resented elsewhere in Ethiopia for its outsize role in the repressive government that ran the country for three decades before Abiy’s ascendance.
Abiy accuses the TPLF of instigating the war with an attack on a military base, in which Tigrayan soldiers killed scores of non-Tigrayan soldiers. TPLF leaders say they were defending themselves. In any case, the conflict quickly metastasized, drawing in ethnic militias and the army of neighboring Eritrea.
In Tigray, Filsan was told to create a task force that would investigate widespread claims of rape and recruitment of child soldiers.
“We brought back the most painful stories, and every side was implicated,” she recalled. “But when I wanted to release our findings, I was told that I was crossing a line. ‘You can’t do that,’ is what an official very high up in Abiy’s office called and told me. And I said, ‘You asked me to find the truth, not to do a propaganda operation. I am not trying to bring down the government — there is a huge rape crisis for God’s sake. Child soldiers are being recruited by both sides. I have the evidence on my desk in front of me.’ ”
Filsan said she was told to revise the report to say that only TPLF-aligned fighters had committed crimes. And when her subordinates at the ministry wouldn’t release the full report, she chose to tweet that “rape has taken place conclusively and without a doubt” in Tigray.
Since then, even her childhood friends have shied away from being seen with her, fearful of the association. Colleagues in the ministry referred to her as a “protector of Tigrayans,” she said — implying that she was a traitor.
The task force’s conclusions have since been echoed by a slew of reports by human rights organizations, which have done interviews either with refugees or by phone because of access restrictions. A joint report written by the United Nations and Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights agencies also found evidence that all sides in the war had “committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, some of which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Widespread allegations of crimes committed by Tigrayan rebels have piled up since June, when the force surged south into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, pushing back government troops and aligned militias and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The five-month onslaught was recently reversed when the rebels retreated to within the borders of Tigray.
Filsan argues that the Ethiopian government could have avoided the wave of revenge rapes and massacres of the past months.
“If there had been accountability for the rapes that took place in Tigray, do you think so many rapes would have happened in Amhara and Afar? No,” she said. “Justice helps stop the cycle. But both sides felt they could just get away with it.”
‘Yes, I know the pain, too’
As the pendulum of momentum swings back and forth in the war, and a total victory seems more and more elusive, Abiy’s tone has shifted from the relatively straightforward anti-insurgency rhetoric of late last year to calling the war an existential battle against a “cancer” that has grown in the country.
In his and other official statements, the line between the stated enemy — the TPLF — and Tigrayans in general has increasingly blurred. And under a state of emergency imposed in November, Tigrayans around the country allege, thousands of their community members have been arbitrarily detained. Tigrayans crossing the border into Sudan recently recounted fleeing a final stage of what they say is ethnic cleansing in an area of Tigray claimed by the Amhara people.
Filsan recalled that before she resigned, she had been told first by a high-ranking official in Abiy’s Prosperity Party and then by an official in his personal office that all Tigrayans on her staff — and at other ministries, too — were to be placed on leave immediately.
“I said, ‘I won’t do it unless the prime minister calls me himself, or you put it in writing,’ ” she said, adding that subordinates of hers enforced the order anyway. “Many Ethiopians are lying to themselves. They deny that an ethnic element has become a major part of this war. They have stopped seeing the difference between Tigrayan people and the TPLF, even if many Tigrayans don’t support the TPLF.”
When she resigned in September, Abiy told her to postpone her decision for six months, claiming that the war was nearing its conclusion. But by then, she had lost trust in him. Even before the war, in cabinet meetings, Abiy had repeatedly implied that a conflict was coming and that the TPLF would be to blame for it, Filsan said. But she felt that peace had never really been given a chance, and that Abiy seemed to relish the idea of eliminating the TPLF, even though crushing dissent through brute force was a page right out of the TPLF’s playbook.
“It’s now been 100 days since the day we met, and it has only gotten worse. I knew it then, I knew it before then, and I know it now: He’s in denial, he’s delusional. His leadership is failing,” said Filsan.
The feeling that she was being drawn into the same ideology of ethnic domination that the TPLF had espoused when it presided over the country was hard to shake. As a Somali, she came from a community that had been trampled during those decades, and earlier, too, under communists and kings alike. Uncles of hers had been dragged from their beds and beaten; women she knew had to wear diapers after having been raped by soldiers; children were taught to kneel and put their hands up if confronted by a man in uniform.
“So, yes, I know the pain, too, I know the reasons people want revenge. But if we don’t back away from it, we are doomed,” she said. “One day we will wake up from this nightmare and have to ask ourselves: How will we live with the choices we made?”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 11, 2021
❖ When victims remain silent they create the illusion that the atrocities are not widespread – and are often reversed or projected.
The psychology behind victim reversal can best be understood as the perpetrator (physical, emotional, mental, or otherwise) creating a very detailed and elaborate portrayal of the actual victim as the perpetrator and as such the perpetrator as the victim.
This can be understood as a form of gaslighting in that it essentially represents disempowerment of the victim, empowerment of the aggressor (the perpetrator), manipulation, and ultimately control.
Denial – At the first sign the victim stands up for themselves and call out the abuser and their abuse, the abuser will refuse to acknowledge it happened.
Attack – This follows on naturally from the first step whereby the abuser is unsure of where the victim stands. The abuser will start tearing away at the foundations of support for the victim.
Reverse Victim and Offender – The abuser now flips the switch and begins talking about themselves as the victim. This is the classic example is the falsely accused role.
Guilty people take advantage of their partners, friends, relatives, and rely on the fact that their victims are more likely to self-blame. This essentially allows the abuser to continue getting away with what they do. The more the guilty party are able to do this, the more victims are likely to self-blame in a vicious cycle.
Genocide denial is the attempt to deny or minimize the scale and severity of an incidence of genocide. Denial is an integral part of genocide and includes secret planning of genocide, propaganda while the genocide is ongoing,[1] and destruction of evidence of mass killings. According to genocide researcher Gregory Stanton, denial “is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres”.
Some scholars define denial as the final stage of a genocidal process.[1] Richard G. Hovannisian states, “Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception and half-truths reduce what was to what might have been or perhaps what was not at all.”
Examples include Holocaust denial, Armenian genocide denial, and Bosnian genocide denial. The distinction between respectable academic historians and those of illegitimate historical negationists, including genocide deniers, rests on the techniques used to write such histories. Illegitimate revisionists rewrite history to support an agenda, often political, using falsification and rhetorical fallacies to obtain their results.
😈The following entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
💭 Even those unlikely allies like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ are all united now in the Anti Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon unique appearance in world history.
✞ With the Zionist Tigrayan-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
💭 Due to the leftist and atheistic nature of the TPLF, because of its tiresome, foreign and satanic ideological games of: „Unitarianism vs Multiculturalism“, the Supernatural Force that always stood/stands with the Northern Ethiopian Christians is blocked – and These Celestial Powers are not yet being ‘activated’. Even the the above Edomite and Ishmaelite entities and bodies who in the beginning tried to help them have gradually abandoned them
✞✞✞[Isaiah 33:1]✞✞✞ “Woe to you, O destroyer, While you were not destroyed; And he who is treacherous, while others did not deal treacherously with him. As soon as you finish destroying, you will be destroyed; As soon as you cease to deal treacherously, others will deal treacherously with you.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 9, 2021
The Oromos/Gallas who are unfortunately now 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 from
which 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
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 9, 2021
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is reportedly not happy after he was told that Ethiopia’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was retreating, two months after advancing on the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa which sparked concerns among the international community.
Speaking to Sudans Post this morning, a TPLF diplomat in Nebraska, United States said Museveni has told Debretsion Gebremichael that he has a ‘strong disapproval’ of the decision by TPLF forces to retreat after making gains against Ethiopian federal forces.
“What happened in Afar and Amhara regions was not only a defeat for the TPLF and its allies, but it is also a disappointment for the President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni who is not happy at all after all the gains and advances that we have made against the dictatorial regime of Abiy Ahmed,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
“When he was told that the forces are retreating back towards Tigray, Museveni said in his own words, that ‘I am not happy and I have a strong disapproval for what your troops have done to please those forces’ and this is what he said, but it was something that was outside of our power,” the official added.
Museveni and his son are believed to be pro-Tigrayans in the ongoing Ethiopian conflict.
In November his son Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba who is also a senior army commander sent shivers down the spines of some people for openly backing the Tigrayan rebel forces currently fighting the elected government of PM Abiy Ahmed.
Gen. Muhoozi posted on his verified Twitter account saying: “Our great Tigrayan brothers and sisters cannot be defeated. They have an unconquerable spirit!”
Two days earlier, Gen. Muhoozi had openly stated that he supports the cause of the Tigrayan forces who are currently fighting the government of President Abiy Ahmed.
“I urge my great and brave brothers in the Tigrayan Defence Forces to listen to the words of General Yoweri Museveni! I am as angry as you and I support your cause. Those who raped our Tigrayan sisters and killed our brothers must be punished!”
‘We have to turn back’
In a statement, TPLF leader Debretsion said the decision by his leadership to retreat was necessary due to unforeseen circumstances has Ethiopian federal forces have deployed heavily along the areas recently occupied by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
“We evaluated the overall situation, both ours as well as that of the enemy, and arrived at the decision on our own. We have to turn back; we shouldn’t continue in the present [course]; we have to carry out additional tasks, additional adjustments’ – it was after we identified this that we arrived at the decision,” he said in the statement.
“It was a tough decision but one which had to be made. We have to understand that it was a correct decision. [The decision] wasn’t made because of diplomatic pressure or through discussions,” he added.
The rebel leader further pointed out that “We don’t make discussions which the people of Tigray are not aware of or diplomatic activities which the people of Tigray have not accepted… This is a time of fierce struggle.”
💭 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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