BY DEJEN RAS
Recently, in one video shared on YouTube, a Tigrean scholar said, “Extraordinary challenges require extraordinary solutions … that coming together is not an option but a must. Otherwise, we perish. … if they (Tigray people) do not do something, then they are doomed.” Further, he also said, “They are trying to decimate us.” These statements seem to be innocent, and the kind of call the scholar is making seems a noble thing to do. There is a sense of urgency and an obligatory or a must-do aspect in the tone of this acclaimed paleoanthropologist.
There is also nervousness and a feeling of despair in the wordings of the speaker: perish, doomed, decimate. We wanted to refute this fear, a self-created lie. Since it is the basis of all the mess they have created in the country and in the region at large.
The scholar claims that he is Paleoanthropologist, the study of human evolution through fossil and archaeological records. He argues from this perspective that “Tigray was, is, and will be.” Hence, the emphasis of his talk is the possibility of the perishing of Tigray, unless and otherwise, they come together to do something about it.
That means he has assumed the independent Tigray from the past, present, and the future too, without considering the wider context where Tigray is at present as well as in the past. He continues his argument and reasoning using skewed, biased, and selective data, by claiming that he only has the truth and his truth shall prevail over time, emotions, and so on.
The word PERISH means “to become destroyed or ruined: cease to exist,” while the word DOOM means “to give judgment against,” according to Meriam Webster’s dictionary. This scholar is claiming that Tigray is going to cease to exist and it is judged against. This is bluntly a twisted and erroneous claim. No one is planning and claiming to destroy Tigray. In fact, the main force that destroyed Tigray using fear and all means is the distractive force created within its communities in the past 46 years, the terrorist communist ideology-infested organization or party called TPLF.
It is preparing the condition for the destruction of Tigray. It is the people who reason like this man and those who were/are in power on the people of Tigray that create FEAR upon the people to act unwisely. Remember, fear is the worst form of human emotions.
You have a high probability of mobilizing people to act in a certain way if you use fear as a means to manipulate them. Saying to people, you are going to be destroyed or you are judged to be wiped out on the globe is to manipulate those people with the worst form of FEAR.
This clever cunning man used concepts, constructs, and language codes of the present age to convince his listeners, which he was asked to present it using the English language. This means the intended audience is the people in the open worldwide, as well as the younger generation. In his argument, he used the heritages or civilization like the writings, engineering, science, coins, music, and philosophy from the region as the main source of contention.
He emphasized that the people who live in the northern and the southern of Tigray, either want to take these heritages and enlightenment to themselves or they want to destroy them. This is the most bizarre and twisted justification for why they are challenged by all their neighbors whom he described as southern and northern people. Three simple reasons:
Heritages and enlightenments are not sources of conflict.
All these heritages and civilizations from that region whether it is the writings GEEZ, which is the root language of Tigrigna (a regional language of Tigray and Eritrea) and Amharic (the national language of Ethiopia, spoken by the people who live in the southern part of Tigray); or Saint Yared’s music used by Orthodox church throughout the whole region; or the ancient monuments, religious places or histories are the roots of the people throughout the region.
There is no contention on all these. There is mutual respect and understanding among the people in the whole region for of each the heritages or historical events he mentioned. Those historical facts that he mentions are the shared history of the people in the northern part in general. Attaching such huge heritages and cultures that flourish some thousands of years ago to a particular bloodline limits the glory of that past.
The main source of the present conflict
Second, he deliberately avoided the main reason for the conflict or the war that is happening now. All the world knows that very few people formed a party called TPLF and they force it on the people of Tigray first and then took power using on the whole country, Ethiopia. This was done by overthrowing the Derg regime with the help of the Eritrean rebel fighters at the time, Amhara farmers, as well as the western powers as part of their proxy war with Soviet bloc.
They then DIVIDED the people with ethnic bloodline and ruled it with the oppressive rule. Since they monopolize power across the country, they were able to steal billions of dollars from the whole of the country, not only from the Tigray region. That created unrest throughout the country during 27 years in power. In the end, the people of Ethiopia overthrow them in 2018 by youth movement without a gunfight. The corrupt party leaders run away and hide in Tigray.
The people of Tigray asked them “why did you come back to us, you have forgotten us and abandoned us for almost two decades?” But these highly manipulative people deceived the Tigray people again. They inflicted the people with FEAR by saying “you are surrounded by all enemies.” They galvanize support and forced the people who refused to go to war. They designed the war strategies and prepared for more than two years, and refused to negotiate. Finally, they attacked the 80 percent of the country’s army that was residing in Tigray for two decades, protecting and helping them.
That was the red line for the government and the people of Ethiopia. So it was not about heritage or history or philosophy or religious places and so on. It was about ego, it was about selfishness, and it was about injustice for too long on the people that brought the war in the country.
Equating few criminal leaders with the people of Tigray
This man claims that people are going to be decimated if a few evil and selfish leaders from that region are brought to justice. He literally said, if they come for your *elites* they are not coming to them, but for you the people. He literally equates the people of Tigray with those few criminals. He claims that those corrupt leaders who own millions and billions of dollars while approximately 2 million people of Tigray live with food aid every single day are equivalent.
That is how they drive the people by fear. They are constantly creating enemies for the people in the region daily, and they multiply the number of enemies each time they open their mouths and act wildly by killing and destroying their own neighbors (AFAR and Amhara people) by devouring cities, villages, and different communities in the country and even neighboring countries, which now the whole world is aware of it.
This guy simply is moving the goalposts (or shifting the goalposts). He shifted the center of the issue. He has mixed many things that do not go together to create the narrative he wanted to propagate. It seems he is in urgent status since all the lies that were built in the past 46 years are coming to an end, crumbling day by day before his own eyes.
That is why he has to use English to reach out to the new generation of the diaspora the Tigrean community, which struggling to cope up with compiles of lies after lies created by these evil masterminds. In addition, he seems to respond to the current dialog on media and social media for scholars’ involvement.
Editor’s Note: The views entertained in this article do not necessarily reflect the stance of The
The January 11/2022
