Ethiopians are the hungriest people in the World.  I am not a person who would gloat over the hunger of a fellow African. I know what hunger is. I come from one of the most destitute places in Africa. No my statement is simply designed to highlight that this has been the biggest lie ever told in our region.

I once heard the BBC say, ‘the world is tired of feeding Ethiopians’. There is, what the BBC called   ‘donor fatigue’. True whether under the Emperor Haile Sillasie or the Dergue there was no overt begging for food aid what ever the problem. Begging for food became a way of life only during the reign of Meles and his Tigrean rulers.

Actually Ethiopia was never a food deficit area. Ethiopia always had enough food not only to feed it self but even at times to feed its hungry neighbors. The country never suffered form a boom famine. Only from what Amrita Sen calls a’ slump famine’.

The tragedy is that this artificial problem— driven by NGOs in the famine business, actually was one that could have been internally solved simply because it was a problem of distribution and never a problem of scarcity. An ‘entitlement failure’. But above all the food problem was and is one of inept leadership. In a nut shell a non existent problem and food begging was elevated to an art form under the inept leadership of Meles.

Now there is word that Meles is planning a millennium bash to celebrate the Julian calendar of the year 2000. Every society celebrates New Year and a new Century for that matter, especially when there is something to celebrate about.  There is nothing new here.

What makes this unique however is, this extravaganza is coming from a leader who only yesterday had the temerity to tell the world they had a responsibility of feeding his country. He is  now  willing  to spend millions of dollars on a celebration that none of his sixty million people  really take seriously  or for that matter care about. But that is beside the point.

Some Sixty years ago the UN charter declared the sovereignty of Nations and the sanctity of borders which became a symbol and a sign of the end of European Colonialism along with any other forms of hegemony.

Ideally this was supposed to make us all free, independent and masters of our own destiny. Nations on equal par with  other Nations. But as  Partha  Chatterjee says National liberation and Sovereignty are not just powerless against   the global capitalist hierarchy but themselves  contribute to its organization and functioning.

It is in this context that one has to view the intervention of. Ethiopia in Somalia and the genocide that has and is being committed against an innocent civilian population.

This intervention as a former  US  foreign Official, Susan Rice gloated, was designed to weed out  the Union of Islamic Courts (the rag tag leaders of Somalia) because they are in her words, a threat not only to the region ( presumably the Christian highlander ruling class of Tigrai) but to the important sea lanes .Sitting idly, she intoned, will make Somalia  a haven for terrorists who would be lobbing  nuclear weapons at shipping fleets making their way across the Indian Ocean.

The elementary reason advanced by the Ethiopian ruling class was of course no different from what Ms. Rice said. The UIC  in the aggressors words where  ‘a band of terrorists that would portend unforeseen horrendous acts if allowed to fester'.

There is no question that these  motley collection of bearded Mullahs, who  believe in some archaic Koranic eschatology that they will be able to resurrect  an obsolete ancient order, would  given time, self  destructed. But equally too there is no issue that Somalis

everywhere accepted the rule of the Union because it was their last straw for some semblance of peace. For some semblance of normalcy. Some semblance of hope after almost two decades of  life in the doldrums..

The US has rewarded Ethiopia with a half billion aid package for its foray into Somalia. The US of course has been in a state of paranoia  since 911. Imagining a terrorist here. Imagining  a terrorist there, a terrorist everywhere.  But there is one undeniable fact we all know. At the risk of seeming redundant the BBC again”Somalia enjoyed a six months lull in the insecurity that had dogged the country in the past 16 years, when the UIC took power last year. But insecurity has returned to the city.”

Terrorism is evil. We have seen its most evil face in the World Towers. We have witnessed its horrific deeds in Britain and in Spain and in Kenya and in Indonesia and we have witnessed its scourge in Iraq.

True it is reasonable,  prudent and wise  to be vigilant and suspicious if there is sufficient indication that the worse can happen. But as Alison Wier critiquing the new PBS serious “America at a crossroads ‘humorously puts it we also cannot benefit much in  a panel discussion where  one side says, all Moslems are terrorists and  the other side says  some Moslems  are not terrorists.

It is in this context that  we should also equally stand vigilant. Vigilant and  guarded and conscious  of those  who would defile the memory of the thousands dead at the hands of terrorists and  the   struggle and the  commitment  of the many who have lost their lives in the fight against terror and  in the fight against dominance and against  hegemony. Against those who would make  a mockery of the global struggle by using it as a camouflage  for their own narrow and selfish ends.

Ethiopia’s’ Meles has committed an act of genocide that the so called  civilized world has decided to  turn a blind eye to. The protectors of universality abroad have been silent and   their silence has become deafening. It is one thing to chastise a Mugabe for being hard on the opposition or to speak out against a Government that imprisons a journalist. I am not in any way trying to belittle or  imply  that these are not heinous act in their own right.

But If  humanitarianism could be interpreted ambiguously and moral rectitude’s applied selectively  then we are all in mortal danger of loosing our direction and our moral compass.. This forces us into an uneasy position where we are compelled  to judge them. And we find  the verdict quite disturbing specially in light of our experience in Rwanda.

Their selective apostasy gets interpreted as a paradigm of racial hierarchy. Racial exclusions arise as  a result of differentiated inclusions. Genocide is genocide wherever it is committed or who ever commits it or under whatever guise  it comes. To not speak out now is to appease perpetrators and to invite others to repeat history.

It thus  becomes incumbent on us   and  on our  responsibility as human beings who care about other fellow human beings, to believe that Somalis like Croats and Kosovars are also human beings worthy of empathy..

The African Union to its credit had objected to the deployment of foreign troops in support of one or another faction as is clearly stipulated in the UN charter. But the AU has now sheepishly acceded to supporting a so called ‘UN peace keeping mission in Somalia.’

Although many African countries have refrained from such a calamitous  misadventure, a few have decided to risk the lives of innocent people on such a dangerous mission.

Uganda is one of the small numbers of countries in Africa that has agreed to send this so called ‘Peace Keeping Force’.  Now that must be the biggest joke of the Century.

In the land where one of the most horrific and brutal atrocities of our century and our continent is being committed against the Agonizing  people, here is a leader who is not only trying to make peace with the notorious, ‘The Lords Resistance Army’ —who by all logic should be weeded from the face of the earth — but also wants to keep peace in a far of land where it is least needed.

But then that is Yoweri Museveni an   ex Marxist turned  neo-con  turned  neo-liberal who has expended  his goodwill to stay in power  in his own country for the last fifteen years. What has he got to loose.

Another country that has pledged a ‘Peace Keeping Force for Somalia’ is of course Nigeria.  Now Nigeria   is a country that had failed to bring about any meaningful form of democracy to its one hundred million plus population or maintain peace in its own backyard, the  oil  producing region of the Niger Delta, (the most lucrative business for British Petroleum) trying to impress the world  that all is well within its borders because Nigeria leaders find that to be politically expedient.

There are of course other minor players too. There is al Beshir ‘the Butcher of Darfur’ using his country as a shipping transit  for arms from our Continents’ notorious mischief maker, the arms merchant they call Gaddafi or is it ‘Ketafi’ who never seems to tire from seeing Africans butcher other Africans.

Another one  in particular is Eritrea’s nonentity leader Isaias.  Pretending to portray an image that he is a leader to contend with, here is a man child who for all practical purposes has turned his country into a basket case. A country in name only. A country wasting its meager resource and in the process wasting itself because of  the egoistic hallucinations  of this  megalomaniac despot. A defunct icon, filled with symbolic pomp  who believes  that the destabilization of the Horn would in some pervert way be his restoration from a pre-ordained ugly ending. He doesn’t learn from history. How can he if he doesn’t know history?. If  the past is any indicator of the future and I strongly believe it is, he like his predecessors would also be mummified and touristified  so  future generations of Eritreans can also  visit and etch in to  their minds  the face of evil.

When I write bitterly about our current crop of leaders (leaders?), there are those, the appeasers the charlatans who argue that these are leaders better than their predecessors. Are they? Better in what sense? Maybe they are. I don’t know and frankly speaking I don’t give a damn. Yes we may not have climbed Everest. But don’t forget we still have our standards what ever it is worth.

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