By Fayera Nagara,
Washington, DC, USA

All peoples of the world see the United States as a champion of human rights and a beacon of democracy. It is only in the United States where a son of an African immigrant runs for and wins the most revered office in the world – the White House. We found a great deal of strength in his experiences and accomplishments. There are many great women and men in the United States who have spoken out and written about their own experiences and struggles to make the world a better place. We have tried to educate ourselves by reading their books, learning about their lives and their experiences that became our sources of inspiration.

As President Clinton put it, “People all over the world are impressed not by America’s power but by the power of our ideas.” We never doubt both because these powerful ideas have made the United States the most powerful country in the world.

A Nobel peace prizewinner and former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, has written a very good book, Our Endangered Values, America’s moral crisis. This book highlighted the rise of religious fundamentalism in the West, the Middle East and Asia. By integrating faith and reason, President Carter has given a detailed account of religious fundamentalism in Our Endangered Values. Some of these right-wing Christian fundamentalists have become advisors to a former guerrilla fighter and leader of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT), Meles Zenawi, that later transformed itself into the Tigrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) after the collapse of Communism. According to the Ethiopian Review September 1996 edition, Samuel P. Huntington was one of these right-wing political advisors to Meles Zenawi. He was an advocate of “One-Dominant Party System” – Revolutionary Democracy. He advised Zenawi to make Revolutionary Democracy a peasant centered political party by alienating and isolating the educated elite. It is the moral equivalent of a communist ideology – “proletarian dictatorship” but controlled and manipulated from Washington.

Both proletarian dictatorship and peasant dictatorship advocate for one dominant party system so that they manipulate and control the uneducated segment of the society. The author, Faisal Roble, wrote on Ethiopian Review that Tekola Hagos, who defected from the TPLF, calls Huntington a racist. Both ideologies are totalitarian and highly repressive. Linda Gustitus, President of National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), once said, “Both the United States and the Horn of Africa has become a victim of small thinking”. She asked us to stand up and we did. The majority of torture survivors on that hall were from Ethiopia. About 50% of torture survivors that came to the Washington Metropolitan area are from Ethiopia.

The TPLF was given de-facto recognition to commit crimes against humanity with impunity. Even though ethnic Tigreans account for only 6% of the Ethiopian population, it is widely publicized that they have unfair representation, 93.4%, in the Ethiopian Army leadership. They have controlled all state instruments – the executive, the judiciary, the law enforcement, the security, the military, the election board, the economy and the media. They also controlled all aspects of civil society institutions. The Oromos who account for about 40% of the Ethiopian population have no representation in the leadership of the military. They have been marginalized, became powerless and they are the prime targets of persecution by this minority regime. By controlling the economy, they have become the major investors and land grabbers. To seek partnership, they have invited investors from China, India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to secure long-term domination.

As per the data we obtained from the Oromo National Academy (ONA), the United States is the major donor to this minority-dominated regime. We believe that this is not good for long-term U.S. African relations. We hope that the United States will be in the right side of history by changing its past flawed foreign policy of supporting dictators because it is destabilizing the Horn of Africa.

Here is a firsthand story written by an American aid worker, Michael Maren, in his book – the Road to Hell. “Michael Maren has spent most of the last twenty years in Africa, first as an aid worker, later as a journalist. He witnessed at close range a harrowing series of wars, famines, and natural disasters. In The Road to Hell, he tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somali dictator in building a political and economic powerbase. How he UN, Save the Children, and many other nongovernmental organizations provided raw materials for ethnic factions who subsequently threatened genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi. He brings firsthand reports of African farmers, Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many countries, joined together in a vicious circle of self- interest. Above all, he heralds an important truth: humanitarian intervention and foreign aid activity is necessarily political. It gets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests. It is cynically manipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations.”

The Huntington legacy of making citizens powerless over their government was well articulated by Faisal Roble. He wrote, “In such societies where citizens are powerless over their governments, therefore, corruption, coercion and clientelism remain the main political culture. “This is what African Scholars like Professor George Ayite call the “leaking bowl” and what Michael Maren has put on record on the Road to Hell.  

We strongly believe that Africa will develop only when its people create a government that is accountable to the middle class and educated elites not by puppet governments that serve as satellite polity. Therefore, taxpayers’ money should not be given to army generals of a minority regime who hijack aid money to enrich themselves, their family members and their ethnic group only. Instead, aid money has to be given to the people to develop strong civil-society institutions. Africa needs to develop independent media to educate the people about human rights, environmental protections, health and nutrition.

Sustainable development will come only when human rights are respected and the middle class and the educated elites freely participate in the governance of their own country. To the contrary, according to an advocacy group based in London, Oromia Support Group, the TPLF has openly declared to eradicate and wipe out Oromo intellectuals. We fled our country because of such persecution by this minority regime.

We have a plan to develop our capacities and we believe that the Oromo people will have a significant impact in developing the Horn of Africa and bringing a lasting peace and stability to the region. Therefore, we kindly ask aid organizations to revisit their past practices and focus on the long-term interest of both peoples of the United States and Africa. We have built a very strong partnership with various academic, human rights, media, community, and religious organizations in the Diaspora. We have also built a network of highly effective Oromo community organizations all over the world. The Ethiopian government uses Chinese technologies to block websites, TV and radio stations broadcasting from these community organizations. They have also restricted local independent newspapers, books, journals and magazines that are critique to the government. We need your support to reverse these undemocratic and repressive practices to reach out and educate our people. We also want to support you to minimize China’s growing influence in Africa.

We have shared values with the United States that has a rich democratic heritage than a totalitarian communist regime of China. The Oromo people have a very good culture of democratic governance – the Gada System that is similar to Jeffersonian democracy. That is why we also say Oromo values are in danger in Ethiopia. We are also aware of the smear campaigns, the scare tactics and political maneuvering in the United States but the Ethiopian experience is in its worst form. In addition to lies, deceptions, corruption and torture, there are killings and extra-judicial executions by the death squads of this regime. We are also very much worried about the severe moral crisis in our region. Our culture of tolerance and moral values are in danger and we are struggling to preserve them for our children too.

Therefore, Meles Zenawi’s supporters were trying to impose 16^th century ideas on the Oromo people. They have been using the divide and rule tactics developed by the slave owner, William Lynch since they came to power in 1991.They were imposing a highly autocratic Abyssinian culture on us. Zenawi’s supporters cannot understand the Gada System without making adequate research on it. We have Oromo and non-Oromo scholars who have already studied it. We have capable scholars, community organizers, and professionals in all fields to promote good governance, to protect the environment, to defend human rights for the Oromo people, the minorities in Oromia and other marginalized peoples of the region.

Fayera Nagara

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Fayera Nagara presented this paper at the Oromo Studies Association- 2013