Saudi Arabia torturing refuges, what a shame!

 by Dejenie A. Lakew

Inter- governmental, economic and cultural relations are meant – to create awareness , strengthen social relations and benefit common citizens.
Ethiopia and Ethiopians, the Islamic world and its people – It is documented in their holy scriptures that Muslims should love and respect Ethiopians and Ethiopia, as it is the country who saved their religion by giving refugee to followers of Mohammed when persecuted by their nemesis and threatened to abolish their religion Islam.
The huge investments the Saudi Arabians and other Islamic countries make in Ethiopia by full permission and collaboration of the Ethiopian government ( and its people – in principle ) across the lands of Ethiopia, and the financial benefits they gain have to bee seen from the perspective and point of view of a collateral benefits of economics from both sides and to nurture and cultivate cultural and social bonds among the common people of these countries. These connections have to create a bond of cultural likeness and affinity between Ethiopia, its people and the Arab countries and their societies. If that does not bear fruit then the relation will just be a bond of vultures who simply hunt for their meals, but not caring about the community that they are and benefited from.
But contrary to virtues of good neighborliness, affirmative inter-governmental relations that are shown and principles of peaceful co-existence and from the perspective of Islam and of course of Christianity – as they both are claimed to be religions of peace and love, the world constantly witnessed an imaginable and hard to fathom and to believe treatment of people of the horn of Africa, particularly from Ethiopia ( including Eritrea ) by people of Arabic countries. We witnessed, such in humane acts of savagery, cruelty and barbarity to the highest order from across the Sinai desert, the plains of Egypt, shores of red sea and urban towns and homes of Arabic countries. I question whether these people indeed worship any type of God. We have heard and witnessed time and again, that people are butchered and their organs are harvested ( a very degrading and dreadful term of a misfit : harvest to a human body parts, although it’s meaning is to collect the fruit of labor ) for sale in these places.

The Ethiopian government ( including Eritrea) should proactively be engaged with these governments so that their people should and must treat Ethiopians ( including Eritrea) humanely, the way Ethiopians received and threat the followers of Mohammed with honor and dignity – virtuous acts of humanity and civility. The inter-governmental relations after all is to benefit and up lift the lives of their common and ordinary citizens, not to drink whisky and cocktail with ministers in Hilton or in Dubai intercontinental.
The United nations and other global and continental organizations such as the European union and African union should look in to these matters and put pressure on these countries and their society so that acts of humanity and reasons of purpose reign, and artificial boundaries of countries should remain imaginary, invisible and porous to those who seek refugee from persecution.

The Ethiopian Muslim Civil Rights Activists

Personal reflections on the traits of a new generation of Ethiopians  
Alemu Tafesse recently published a highly profound article - The Ethiopian Muslim Civil Rights Movement: Implications for Democracy in Ethiopia. In it, he argued that the 14-month old Muslim civil rights movement has had remarkable implications for the democratic transformation of that country. He specifically argued that by forcing the government to completely throw away its democratic garb; by introducing into modern Ethiopia an alternative path to democracy, and by actually becoming an alternative location of democracy, the Muslims' activism has so far left great impacts on the contours of the current and future democratic possibilities of Ethiopia. While I generally agree with the points he raised, I also believe that they need to be discussed and debated by all Ethiopians at large.

My concern in this particular piece is much more limited than that of Alemu. I want to ask a specific question: what are some of the most prominent characters of this new Ethiopian Muslim generation that Alemuconsidered to have played a remarkable role in the democratic record of the country in its persistent fourteen-months old loud and non-violent activism? In trying to answer this question, my aim is not to assess the historical, political, economic, and religious background of this generation. I don’t intend explaining anything along those lines, but just outlining my personal reflections on a few of the qualities that the young Muslims have betrayed in their quest for freedom and justice. I believe doing this is a step towards understanding the kind of generation we are witnessing in Ethiopian at present—and take relevant lessons for future wider-scale activism.

Fearless: According to many scholarly sources, the political past has not been that good for Ethiopian Muslims in general. There have been numerous structural shackles that undermined the political, educational, economic and intellectual development of Muslims. These shackles have also had phenomenal impact on their
consciousness in that a large section of the population has for long been considered to be subservient and docile. As a person who grew up surrounded with such stereotypes, one of the things that has unforgettably stunned me is the vibrancy of the Ethiopian Muslims civil rights movement. The vibrancy of the new Muslim generation has stunned me for three reasons: One has to do with its break with the obedience-imposing “Ethiopian”culture. The second has to do with its specific incongruity with our (many of us who have followed Ethiopian politics for long) understanding of the new Ethiopian Muslim generation. The third is about its break out in the context of a very gruesome dictatorial regime. When the three came together, I woke up to the amazement that there are a large section of Ethiopians in Ethiopia who seem to have transcended the constraints of culture- and structure-imposed regime of fear and docility, or, more accurately, have managed to overcome the self-imposed sense of fear that usually tends to interlock with some structural and cultural templates in the society. I think how and why this happened now needs to be studied well by concerned researchers.

Non-Radical: But not every “fearlessness” is a blessing, nor is every break with tradition commendable. The other admirable—though perhaps more easily explicable-- element of this rather unexpectedly loud activism of Ethiopian Muslims is its moderate tone. As many observers have noted, the Muslims have been purely calling for the protection of religious rights and freedom in the country. Despite the government's clear intent to push them towards violence, the protesters have constantly refused to drag themselves into that pit. It is my belief that in outsmarting the government by contradicting its wish to induce the escalation of the demands and the resort to violence, the movement has made itself more durable than anybody's expectation. So, my admiration for the movement comes not just because it has been unexpectedly fearless, but also because it has been consistently non-violent. That it has so far been constitutional and legal in all its narratives is also part of this non-radicalism (although some oppositional forces might genuinely question the promise of such conservatism in the long-term. But this is a point of debate that I won't delve into here).

“Apolitically”Religious: the intensity of religiosity among Ethiopian Muslim generation is not baffling. In fact, any close observer of the post-1991 Ethiopian public would not but hasten to point out the increasing significance of religion among Ethiopians in general. This has not been different with Muslims. One striking thing that this movement taught me, though, is that the Ethiopian Muslim youth have been religious in an "Ethiopian" way despite the call for radicalization in the whole region and beyond. While I don't intend to give in to prejudice, many active Muslim movements in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries have had overly political tones. In fact, in many occasions, the activists in such contexts have been very vocal about their intentions to establish an Islamic polity, But there is nothing in religionper se—not even in religious activism as such-- that necessarily drives one to a politically aggressive positioning. And there is no more evidence to prove this than the young Ethiopian Muslim activists. Here, religiosity hasn't meant the craving for political totality. Interestingly, even when it crept into state politics, it just called for its absence: the demand was “no state in our religion!”

I know the so-called arguments reiterated by the government and its supporters to discredit the movement. To me, they are all neither sound, nor valid. They are, first, based on either no proof, or doubtful proofs or false “proofs”. The accusations, secondly, do not flow from the premises. For instance, the major TPLF propaganda that was released in the form of a documentary film absolutely failed to establish any proof that the accused Muslim leaders were intending to establish an Islamic state or wage a jihad. All it did was "accusation by association". It urged us to associate the movement to some two (rather unknown and unrelated) personalities (allegedly Shabab-trained), or the Arab Spring (through the pictorial juxtaposition of again unrelated demonstrations, Ethiopian and Arab, and through the establishment of a rather weak connection with a Qatar-based intellectual whose image was unfairly distorted). In none of these cases was there presented a proof that the movement was actually about what the government has said it was. Even the badly beaten Committee members didn't appear incriminating themselves. When they mentioned of an Islamic state, it was clear that they were responding to a specific question in another context.

The other sets of arguments are very weak--and also betray another problem: