“As long as a single Ethiopian walks this land, we will not barter away our dignity in fear of economic pain”, says the Prime Minister in forceful defiance to the onslaught of sanctions against Ethiopia by the Biden administration. He speaks in Amharic from a podium of the cavernous hall of the Ethiopian parliament. The video clip doesn’t show his immediate audience, however, it is clear from the topic that the intended audience is the US government even though the speech is in Amharic. Respectfully, he refers to the Americans simply as “our friends” and wishes “if they only knew who we are instead of asking unreasonable demands of us. No government in the history of mankind has been asked to sit down with a treasonous group that launched a surprise attack on its defense forces. No one has ever been asked to negotiate with those that broke the constitution,” he reiterates in unequivocal terms.
To make his point, he begins his speech with a lecture on American history. He refers to the surprise attack at the beginning of the Civil War on a US military camp in South Carolina (Fort Sumter) by Confederate forces under the cover of the night, just as TPLF did on his national defense forces. And that started the American Civil War that took Abraham Lincoln four years to conclude; we did it in three weeks. Lincoln cut off the escape routes of the rebels; that was exactly what we did. We had no choice but defend the constitution and the integrity of the country,” he went on to paint how his soldiers were killed and their bodies were left to rot for scavengers. “Everyone knows what happened, including the massacre of Mai Kadra of non-Tigreans by TPLF militia. And yet we are being told to negotiate with the killers, only because we are poor with a threat of economic repercussions. We are poor, but we are proud people. About a hundred years ago, we fought off the Italian colonialists; we were the only independent African nation. Our proud history goes way, way back before many of these new countries ever existed. We know how to govern for we have done it for thousands of years”, he asserts the long history of one of the oldest countries in the world. “Don’t tell us about diplomacy, please! We were at the founding of the UN and OAU. We mediated conflicts all over Africa. We have contributed peace forces from Korea to Africa. Only I wish they tried to understand us”, he wistfully notes.
His analogy of the Tigray conflict to US History did not end with the civil war. He picks up on another incident where the US was attacked by surprise – the Pearl Harbor attack on US by the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. “What was the response of the United State?”, he retorts. “The US dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Japan was devastated. For instance, General MacArthur’s military camp was the only place that was not ruined in Tokyo. The collateral aftermath of the atomic bombs is still felt to this date by those who had nothing to do with the war.”
So, instead of being sanctimonious lecturers, the Prime Minister reminds “our friends” to understand us and re-read their own history, instead of meddling in the internal affairs of a Sovereign Country, thousands of miles away.
Disclaimer: The quotes in this piece are not word for word as it is difficult to translate from one language to another. The intent was to convey the message as approximately as possible.
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