An Open Letter to PM Abiy Ahmed

Your Excellency,

Innocent children, women, old people and poor men are being slaughtered in Ethiopia. Your people are confused and fear much greater catastrophe.

The victims are not casualties of war. They have committed no crime. They are innocents of all ages, men and women, hacked and shot and beaten to death in cold genocidal blood.

The murdered are not Amhara. The murderers are not Oromo. The dead were innocent men, women and children. Referring to their ethnicity obscures the crime. The killers are shameless criminals. Reference to their ethnicity is a slur on all decent people.

For such crime, it is wrong to talk about ethnicity, political parties, ethnic regions, motives or cause and effect. History and politics are games that intellectuals play.

Such talk desensitizes us. Such talk dignifies the murderers and betrays the dead. What is now happening in Ethiopia is primarily about justice.

Murderers are making themselves masters of the land.

These shameless men killed innocent women, children, unarmed men and citizens helpless against murdering gangs. These killers are giving speeches, as though they were conquerors, politicians and statesman.

They are acting without fear, and what is worse, without shame. Justice has become an orphan and a widow in Ethiopia.

Law and order are in retreat. Go out and talk to your people. Ordinary people, taxi drivers, shop keepers, will tell you that the police look away when they ask for protection. Police look away when innocents are being threatened, beaten, robbed and killed. Soldiers restrain the victims and their kin, but they are not doing all that they can and must to bring the killers to justice.

Come to the blood-stained fields and see the blood of your mothers and sisters and children and brothers and fathers and uncles. Restore dignity to their deaths. Give some comfort to their loved ones, abandoned in their grief. Protect those in fear under the shadow of genocidal death.

Do everything in your powers to stop the killers and to bring them to justice. Let no one doubt your stand on this matter. Use the full resources of your government to stop this genocidal crime.

Make the killers, and those who are plotting to kill, afraid. Let the murderers become hunted men, in fear for their lives and souls. Let those planning murder know that they will forfeit their lives.

You were elected by the Ethiopian people. They have given you the mandate and the responsibility. You know what such mandate is like. You have used it already. The current crisis calls for you to use the great power and resources of your government that is at your disposal.

If you don’t, mob justice, chaos, bloody vengeance and civil war will break out.

If you don’t, all your good work will be forgotten. You will be remembered as a man who did not give all he had to keep his country from burning. You will be remembered as someone who stood by and allowed innocents to die. Your legacy will be ashes.

By God’s grace, you still have time. Act immediately and decisively.

You stand in a grave and sacred position of responsibility. You are standing before man and God. You will be judged. Do not fail.

We believe you have the decency and the courage. Find the will to act without reservation or doubt.

Many of us are still very hopeful about you. We do not understand why you have been so passive thus far. You are running out of time. Act now.

Stop the cycle of blood that will continue for generations.

Rearrange all the priorities of your government and focus on this great crime that overshadows everything in Ethiopia.

See fully what is happening. Do not rationalize. Do not temporize. If your mind is holding you back, then use your heart. Reassure a frightened nation on the edge of chaos.

You owe this to the innocent dead, to their grieving families, to those exposed to danger and living in terror. You owe this justice to all Ethiopians, and to mankind.

You owe it to God.

Act now, before it is for you, and perhaps for the nation, forever late.

Sincerely, in the name of all who are still hopeful,

Mekonnen Haile and Yoseph Mamo