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By Girma Berhanu
July 23, 2020
- Introduction
The mob of young men, carrying machetes, marched into the neighborhood with a list of names and ethnicities of its residents. “This land is Oromo land,” they chanted.
Hundreds were killed during a recent attack on mostly non Oromos in the Oromo region. Thousands were injured and most of the victims are members of the Amhara, Gurage etc. ethnic groups. The reports[1] which just arrived, detail horrible killings[2], looting and other violence targeting non Oromos. Armed groups of so called Queeroo,[3] according to the reports, carried out these organized attacks against members of other ethnic groups. The attacks were driven by a misguided urge to fully get rid of non-Oromos from the entire region. Schools, hospitals, business centers, places of worship and public facilities were attacked and destroyed, and houses and villages burned down.
While I was writing this analysis, ‘tens of thousands of Ethiopians took to the street in Washington DC and London to protest the ethnic and religious-based killings in the Oromo region of Ethiopia[4]. Carrying Ethiopia’s popular and historical flag, the protesters also called for the demobilization of ethnic-based special forces: the Oromo regional state has trained about thirty rounds of special force recruits, and all the regions have their own special forces. According to local reports, there were instances whereby the local security forces collaborated with the killers[5]. There were also those who watched indifferently when the radical groups unleashed their attacks, including beheading an elderly man in his late 70’s (Borkena July 17, 2020)[6]. The latest attack occurred within a few hours in the first week of July. From our knowledge of the distribution of arms to the group (mostly machetes) and to the local police forces (mostly firearms), we can derive a general hypothesis on the objectives of the coordinators of the atrocity. Corroboratively, the objective of the group was to kill as many Amharas and members of other ethnic groups as possible within short time. Indeed, much evidence confirms that traditional weapons, firearms, grenades and bullets were not used at random but in a deliberately targeted and efficient manner. The madness of the radicalised ethnocentric Oromo “nationalists”, under OLF ideology, has lately manifested itself not only in the
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The ethnic cleasning is well dokumented in national and international media. The extremist promo separatist gruppen OLF and the Muslim wing lead by Jawar must be stopped otherwise we will witness genocide in large scale.
They are not the same people. The original ቄሮ were university students and civil servants protesting illegal land-grabs, corruption and lack of political freedom. That was the ሀጫሉ ሁንዴሳ ቄሮ. But the Jawar ቄሮ, on the other hand, is made of street gangs የሠፈር ዱርዬ አህዬች። There is no similarities between the two. In fact the people of Ambo, the cultural heartland of the Oromo where ሀጫሉ is from, have long resented Jawar’s undue dominance of their organic movement for genuine democracy for Ethiopia that they started. The pleasant news on otherwise gloomy events is that Jawar’s ቄሮ have failed. Now we can only imagine if the Jawar version of the so called ቄሮ was to succeed. We have a taste of it, don’t we? And it’s bitter and ugly. Afraid that we will let them win if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.