Yonas Biru, PhD
This week’s Congressional Hearing titled “Ethiopia: Promise or Perils, the State of U.S. Policy” revealed very insightful points. For those who are not prisoners of a hermitized mindset one important issue is worth paying attention to.
At the 38:20 minutes mark of the hearing, Congresswoman Sara Jacobs stated: “According to a recent Harvard survey more than 90% of Ethiopians believe it would be unacceptable to move forward without some sort of truth-seeking trials and reparation. But all of us who have worked in conflict resolution know that [in] transitional justice, how you do it is more complicated than it sounds. The survey also found out that residents of Tigray have little confidence in domestic courts to provide justice with that a plurality of Ethiopians across the country favor using existing domestic courts to pursue accountability as opposed to some sort of hybrid [of domestic and international courts] or international mechanism.”
One thing the idiotic #NoMore movement has done is condemning the international community, particularly the US, as Ethiopia’s and Amhara’s enemy. This made Ethiopians to be suspicious of the international community. It is this idiocy that has led Ethiopians to favor using Abiy‘s justice system over independent international investigations.
This is exactly why I have been saying the hermitized intellectual class is a liability to Ethiopia and Amhara. The hermitized intellectuals should have some integrity. They must ask the people of Ethiopia and Amhara forgiveness for misleading them and lead a campaign to have an unfettered international investigation to bring all criminals to justice.
There is a strategy for every popular movement.No more was very crucial to speak against sponsors of TPLF at that critical time when TPLF invaded Amhara and Afar region murdering brutally our innocent people .At that particular time No more movement contributed a lot influencing the west to understand the cause of the crisis.of course there was wrong view of condemning globalization and the west that is partly true that we should be very smart to use globalization and the support of the western nations to help the legitimate cause of our people.Just little advice for Dr Yonas he may use ethical words and stop name calling in pubic forums.