“...As long as you succeed people are yours
entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children...” Nicolo Machiavelli.
By Keransso Biyyaa*
May 29, 2006 — It is of more interest to me to
focus on the external aspects of it as exercised against the civil society and
especially students. To give a background, right from the outset in 1991 Meles Zenawi’s Machiavellian
principles of meanness started to manifest themselves when a snap shot election
was run in Oromia and Oromo Liberation Front won a sweeping vote. ‘The prince’
then knew that if he continues to see people exercise their free will, his
rapacious appetite for power was going to be shattered. So he had to ban Oromo
Liberation Front and other democratic forces from peaceful forum of struggle.
Following that “The Prince” started to strengthen
his Peoples Democratic Organisation (PDOS) because
through them he wanted to succeed in tapping the blood of the people, their
property life and children”.
For all Oromo people and all Ethiopian people
alike that was ‘the making of a ‘medieval prince’ within what the western
donors were duped to think was the making of “a new breed of African leaders”,
democrat on the making.
Meles Zenawi,
the new breed of African dictators, as most prefer to call him, has been
putting on his mask of choosing ‘to be loved’ by the west whenever elections
are about to be conducted and during and after voting begins he puts on his
other mask of ‘being feared; by the people internally. That’s he kills
opposition candidates, deploys security into school compounds and university
campuses and as a need arises he organises a secrete
group who blast bombs in different parts of a city or in different rural
markets to be internally feared. For instance market bomb blasts in Gedo of Oromia State and current Finfinne (Addis Ababa)
bomb blasts are evidences of his malicious acts. Yes this is hidden from the
west because the west is busy fighting terrorism and their media’s attention is
directed in that regard.
Particularly, Meles Zenawi’s policy of open killing and expulsion of Oromo
School Children is taking place in Oromia presently. He is taking the blood of
the children now because they speak against injustices. This is happening in Mekele University of the Tigrian
State- the homeland of ‘a new breed of African democrat’.
Finfinnee University Oromo students faced
a series of segregated killings, imprisonments, and expulsion from university,
for instance in year 2004 because they opposed the moving of Oromia’s capital
city from Finfinne (Addis Ababa) to Adama.
And thousands of Oromo school children are facing
the same atrocities in the hands of TPLF/EPRDF security forces because they
support the cause of their people- the yearn for freedom and democracy.
The new breed of African dictator, Zenawi, is clever to name civil society protests against
tyranny in the country as “anti-constitutional forces”, “anti-peace forces” and
“anti-development forces.
After these differentiating labels will follow the
butchering of school children. Specifically, students bath in blood at their
school gates from security gunfire. Some sustain serious injuries; in case of
girls permanent damage to uterus rendering them unable to give birth forever. ‘The
prince’s’ forces are also cruel enough to damage the eyes and brains of young
thinkers. Others will be taken to concentration camps and prison where they
will be broken into at night and killed like what is happening at Kaliti prison.
For the Oromo school children these are bodily and
emotional sufferings, for the ‘Machiavellian democrat’ it is a physical and
emotional pleasure.
Whereas all these physical and emotional damages
are done to the children of Ethiopian civil society of Non-Tigrean
descent, including Oromo school children, the Tigrean
School Children attend their schools without any physical or emotional tormentations because the country is ‘theirs’ through the
their prince, Meles Zenawi.
Nevertheless, his entrenched maliciousness does not make him stop and think
about the enduring consequences. Why should the cunning prince worry about
making
I think ‘the prince’ has never had peace of mind
because the bloods of many innocent civilians are shouting into his ears. Even
when he goes to bed with ‘the first lady’, Nicolo
Machiavelli will immediately come after the light has gone out to whisper into
his ears the whole night, “...as long as you succeed people are yours entirely;
they will offer you their blood, property, life and children...”
Dear 21-century ‘new breed of African democrat’,
now the whole world has learned about your meanness, and above all people in
Ethiopia have long learned your Machiavellian or your similar principles of
Fascism and Nazism. We know you are killing true democratic protesters in broad
day light in the streets of the capital city, we know you are killing school
children in Oromia, we know you are killing protesters in Somali Region, we
know you are killing protesters in Awassa (SNNP),
just to name but a few. Therefore, we must all stand up and stop you before you
kill us all!