The Unity of Ethiopia (A serious reflection)

QUO VADIS ETHIOPIA – “Ethiopia Wodet?”>>> (Extract....from "Quo-Vadis, Ethiopia "wodet", Part VI; Ayal Sew Dessye)



A metaphor I always wished for Ethiopia:*0)





"It should be clear that Ethiopians of all ethnic/language groups have the inalienable right to speak their respective languages and preserve, develop and nurture their cultures. Every ethnic/language group has a

heritage that each is expected to cherish and uphold. That should be honored and all of us should respect all Ethiopian languages and cultures. As Ethiopians, we should be proud that our country is so diverse, and we should cherish all of them as they all belong to all of us. We are blessed with eighty plus linguistic groups that we should see and cherish as a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Ethiopia is the flowerbed that nurtures those beautiful flowers and the crystal vase that holds and beautifies them. And the safe keeping and care of this flowerbed and solid crystal vase should be our collective responsibility. As the beauty of a bouquet of flowers can be appreciated collectively and enjoyed only when they are held together in a container (vase), where each stem enjoys ample space and equal treatment, so should all ethnic/language groups in our country, Ethiopia. No malady afflicting a single stem or a selected few among the bouquet could spare the rest, nor should each be specially treated." (p. 4/5; "Quo-Vadis, Ethiopia "wodet", Part VI, Ayal Sew Dessye )



Quo-Vadis-Ethiopia-Part-VI.pdf



Interesting and worth reading; along with the rest of the previous parts:



Quo-Vadis-Ethiopia-Parts-1+2+3+5+6





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Could this be the resolute political-road map of discussion, which may help us out of the political stalemate we are in, to develop the political culture, re-solution and solution, which the "post-modern" Ethiopia urgently requires today?...Anyhow, I think it is high time that we call the "spade by the name" to resolve Ethiopia's existential problems to come to a reconciled political structure made up of all the colors of the political spectrum, in the interest of one collective common will:-



Building a United Ethiopian Nation (UEN), where a diversity of cultures could flourish together under one Ethiopian Democratic State (EDS).



- More or less under a federal structure, in which,



1) Eritrea has any time the option to join it voluntarily, under fully peaceful and democratic circumstances it chooses, at all times to come in the progress of history;



2) under a policy of peaceful co-existence, Eritrea's status quo as a sovereign state in the meanwhile would remain to be unequivocally recognized. /1*



Given the facts of the past complex development, in which the recent history of our generation has recorded that,



1) the stringent union of Ethiopia was (instead of the plausible federal unitary structure of Ethiopia, which included Eritrea after WWII) the construction of the reform resistant absolute monarchy of Atse HSI, which led to the fertile foundation of the independence struggle of Eritrea;



2) the independence of Eritrea, dismembering it from the rest of Ethiopia, with the outcome of the two autocratic regimes respectively, is a joint construction of the "unholy alliance" of the "West", the hegemonic interests of the regional "powers" of north Africa and the Arab-League (primarily Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabian) and the consequence of the naive "infantile power politics" of the Ethiopian Left(2*) and NOT THE WILL of ALL the peoples involved;



the sovereign and legitimate course of history, which has been taking effect generations after generations recorded in our history, with all its complexities and blunders witnessed, the unitary formation of the Ethiopian Nation has to be open-ended for all times to come.



I believe that this lies clearly in accordance with the legitimate and basic existential interests of all the peoples of post-modern Ethiopia. And today the first step can only be a united democratic Ethiopian state (possibly a federal structure, fully embedded under a constitution of basic civil and human rights regulations. (A healthy precedent case is the process of the German unity).



Anything less than this, in the contemporary volatile regional and global economic and political constellation of the World today, is simply counter to the basic interests of all the peoples living in the region and a conscious or unconscious self-destruction of The Ethiopia delivered to this generation, under all the circumstances and complexities history has recorded. The Ethiopia I simply can't help loving (subjectively and objectively, may be in the sense of Deleuze / Delanda's geological and human layers crystallized through generations of organic and non-organic matter /3* ምን አልባት እንደሚባለው እትብታችን የተቀበረበትና ምድር የተደባለቀበት ስለሆነ፤ "Minalbat, indemibalew Itibtachin yetekeberebetina yetedebalekebet silehone" :-) ), with all the tremendous sacrifice and sufferings IT contained… from all conceivable aspects.



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0*) Picture; http://www.designersparty.com/attach/1/1339624181.jpg



1*) like the German precedent case of two states and one nation during the cold war; Eritrea and the rest of Ethiopia co-existing until sooner or later the time comes, when the national unity of the Ethiopians on both sides could be peacefully introduced. – of course in spite of all the differences between the cases, the ground tenor remains similar; a political line, which the late Willy Brandt promoted all his life to witness the success and the wisdom of his policy of peaceful co-existence and a process of uniting "the people, which belong together, to develop together"; (his famous saying, "was zusammengehört, wächst zusammen").



2*) To be fair, I would say All sections of the Left, in a nutshell; including the puppet military with its eastern-block allies of the period; details may vary but are insignificant vis. a` vis. the logics of the process).



3*) http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/tiessen.html

Gilles Deleuze wrote, regarding history, that: "In reality, history is the history of desire" (Deleuze, 2004, On Capitalism, p. 263). The earth-bound, material desire line is an interesting site or metaphor for investigating how we come to create the future, as well as how we come to understand and represent the past. Architect Luis Fernandez-Galiano notes that just as we remember, and just as our pasts shape who we are in the present, the material world "also 'remembers,' also files information. The earth's layers remember geological ages, the rings of a tree recall past springs and autumns, and the archeological mound is a reminder of the passage of cultures" (Fernandez-Galiano, 2000, p. 66).

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:-) Nice links for reflection:



http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/09/02/reflexivity-and-modesty-towards-an-ethics-of-knowledge/

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/links/