Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 9, 2023
🌿𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐇𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐚 (𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐦 𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲)!🌿
Hossana ( Palm Sunday ) is celebration of entry of Jesus to Jerusalem riding a donkey. Children in Jerusalem sang Hossana praising Jesus Christ. Source: cnewa.org. The day is celebrated in a peculiar way. It’s very common to see laity wearing cube shaped palm ring and wearing palm stripe on the head.
The Feast of Hosanna -Palm Sunday has been celebrated in Ethiopia since the earliest days of Christianity. Celebrated a week before Easter, the day marks the beginning of the Holy Week and commemorates the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ with his disciples into Jerusalem. On this day Ethiopian Orthodox laities wear headbands of palm leaves, a reminder of the palm leaves that were laid by a huge crowd of people when Jesus arrived at Jerusalem. The best place to observe this ceremony in Ethiopia is at Entoto St. Mary Church in Addis Ababa and St. Mary Zion Church in Axum, where on the 28th November 2020 Muslim soldiers from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia armed by Iran, UAE and Turkey went on the rampage and massacred over 1000 Orthodox Christians.
Axum, a Holy City in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, whose main Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion is believed by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians to hold The Biblical Ark of Covenant.
❖“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy”[John 10:10]
A few days ago, Eritrean and Ethiopian troops cut down the mango orchards at Adeba and Tseada on the Zamra river in south-central Tigray. It’s not a massacre, a mass rape or torture. But chopping down those fruit trees is evidence for the war aims of the leaders in Asmara and Addis Ababa.
In a phone call from nearby on March 1, my friend and colleague Mulugeta Gebrehiwot said this.
they came with five Eritrean divisions and two Ethiopian divisions and started a campaign to the southern part of Tigray, a campaign in the Samre area. The Tigray forces were to the far south. They destroyed the town of Samre. They came up with Sino trucks, they loaded the grain of the peasant and [indistinct] it is even difficult to explain it in words, the level of destruction.
There is one valley that had an irrigation system that had a massive plantation of mangoes. They literally eliminated that village. The plantation is on a river called Zamra. It is an irrigation system and the two big villages are a called Adeba and a village called. Tseada. They literally cut down the trees, the fruit trees. You remember we had some mangoes at home when you visited us in Mekelle last time; one of our sisters lives in that village, there were mangoes she brought us from there. They cut all of them down. It takes six to seven years to take fruit from a mango tree, so this literally means making the people poor for the coming six or seven years, that if is someone replants them immediately.
Cutting down fruit trees has a special, age-old prohibition in the laws of war. In Deuteronomy 20:19, God commanded the Jews:
“….When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof, by forcing an ax against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege.”
This injunction was developed in the Islamic tradition. The famous and often quoted opinion of Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, instructed Muslims as follows:
…. Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for guidance on the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies; do not kill a woman, a child, or an aged man; do not cut down fruitful trees; do not destroy inhabited areas; do not slaughter any of the enemies’ sheep, cow or camel except for food; do not burn date palms, nor inundate them; do not embezzle [booty or spoils of war] nor be guilty of cowardliness… You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone.
These traditions single out fruit trees for protection because they are the essential source of sustenance for rural people. Destroying them is a specially egregious form of starvation crime, because it takes so many years to recover.
The wanton destruction of the orchards along the Zamra River reveals the intent of the armies rampaging through Tigray. Their goal is to reduce the Tigrayan people to penury, to grind them down so that they can never rise again.
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