The smell of genocide

(by A. Alemayehu)

The smell of genocide

Here, there is no cobalt or tantalum

No oil

Just fertile soil

And people that morning to dusk toil

Or is there? We just don’t know

Well, there must be some resource

Some curse

That someone powerful has set their sight upon

Why else this tragedy, this massacre in silence

Of people with nothing but innocence

Thirty years these people have been hunted

Like wild life. Unarmed civilians, farmers

Massacred from time to time

The verdict: born Amhara, “born a crime”

Terrorists in office blame terrorists in the woods

Special Police change uniforms in the forest

To comeback as armed terrorists and massacre villagers

Back to the forest to change clothes

Jut to reappear in the village as Special Police

The magician terrorists of Oromia

The national defense force coordinates its movement

So as not to disturb the environment

Of ethnic based terror

Thanks to its Oromo leaders

The government office has ready-made statements

They just type in the date and release it to the media

100 terrorists have been destroyed, it reads

It has been the same one for four years.

Meanwhile, the air is filled with smoke

Combined with the dust of cattle herded away

Yeah, dusty smoke

The burning of thousands of gojos

Acres of farmland

Scorched human flesh

As if looking for Bismarck

The smoke from it drifts across time, across oceans

And in the smoke

I smell all twenty members of the same family

Their only memory, their ashes in Wellega and this puff of smoke

I smell the genocide

Translated from the Amharic, The Smell of Genocide, by A. Alemayehu

In remembrance of the 3oth day of the Gimbi Tole Massacre of Amhara civilians in Oromia, Ethiopia.

In this massacre of mostly women and children, entire families perished. The Tole, Wellega massacre of June 18 was followed by another massacre on 4^th of July, 2022 in Qellem, Wellega. In the Sene Oromia massacre of Amharas, although more than two thousand people were killed, the bodies of less than 1000 people were found and buried. The majority of the victims were Moslem Amhara farmers. The sustained campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Amhara has been raging for the last four years and the so-called international community has chosen silence.

By contrast, the Ethiopian government has not been silent. It has been busy minimizing the scale of the massacre, blocking efforts to observe a national day of mourning and attempting to obfuscate its active involvement in the genocide.

Ethiopia Wollega massacre: Death count surpasses 1500