http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-ethiopia-when-the-shooting-got-closer/
Eyewitness / This is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the
dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department,
not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN
In Ethiopia, when the shooting got closer
In the Amhara region, the eye of the storm, an Israeli witnesses
deadly clashes that threaten to plunge the nation into chaos
By Micha Odenheimer October 5, 2016, 1:57 pm
AHIR DAR, Ethiopia: What does it feel like at ground zero of a popular
uprising? For the past two decades, Ethiopia has been considered one
of Africa’s success stories. Its rate of economic growth has been the
measure of all things, even as a once-promising democracy has hardened
into authoritarian party rule.
In recent days, Ethiopia has seen a stampede kill scores of protesters
whose deaths are blamed on security forces, spurring further clashes.
On Monday, Israel issued an advisory to its citizens traveling to
Ethiopia, the second of its kind in several weeks. The earlier warning
came shortly after I returned from Ethiopia, where I found myself in
the eye of the storm in the Amhara region in the country’s center.
Towns there have been in open revolt against the federal government,
which has sent in thousands of troops in an effort to regain control.
These eruptions — the latest in Oromia, southeast of Addis Ababa, and
the unrest I encountered in Amharia in August — are fueling the east
African nation’s worst conflagration since 1991, when rebels from the
Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) took control in Addis Ababa,
ending the rule of communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
During my visit in August, I found myself an incidental witness to the
alchemy of transformation, the moment when political protests morph
into violent insurrection. What happens in Ethiopia will reverberate
across Africa — and with its deep cultural, political and economic
ties to Israel, these worrying developments will resonate here as
well.
The first sign that something was amiss was that the WiFi in my hotel
in Addis Ababa wasn’t working. The demure young woman behind the
counter gave me a meaningful look when I asked her whether there was
somewhere else in the area I could find an internet connection.
“Nowhere,” she said, with a bitter edge in her voice. I knew that the
government strictly controlled internet access, sometimes turning it
off when a protest was planned so as to neutralize the organizing
power of Facebook and WhatsApp. “Is it the government?” I asked. She
nodded, almost imperceptibly, and lowered her voice. “They managed to
stop the Oromo,” she said, referring to the most populous Ethiopian
ethnicity, centered to the south and east of Addis Ababa where
demonstrations had been quelled. “But the Amhara? Maybe not.”
I was due to fly the next day, together with a friend, Yehoshua
Engelman, to Bahir Dar, one of Ethiopia’s most beautiful cities and
the capital of the Amhara region. I had first traveled to Ethiopia in
the summer of 1990 when 25,000 Ethiopian Jews were waiting to move to
Israel. It was love at first sight for me, and I had returned many
times since then. For Yehoshua, who, like me, is an Israeli and a
rabbi, it was the first time.
‘We want the old Ethiopia back again, before the government divided
and conquered us’
We’d come to Bahir Dar for sightseeing. But when we arrived, a crowd
had already begun to gather, internet blackout or not. It all seemed
spontaneous: A small group of young men could be seen walking
nonchalantly towards the town’s central square from the south, a few
more wandered in from the west; human droplets coalescing into a
stream. By the time we caught up with the crowd, there were hundreds,
and then thousands, and finally tens of thousands, walking towards a
bridge on the northern outskirts of the town. Alongside the bridge was
a large army camp, and rumor had it that trapped on the other side
were activists from Gondar, an Amhara stronghold where five protestors
had been killed several weeks before. The plan was for the Bahir
Darians to meet the Gondar delegation and bring them back safely
across the bridge.
A young man with a tuft of hair growing from his chin appointed
himself our guide. His name was Mesfin, and he had graduated with a BA
in Natural Resource Management from Bahir Dar University, but had been
unable to find a job for more than a year “This protest is about three
things,” he said, choosing his words with precision. “Identity,
democracy and unfair distribution of resources. If you are not a
member of the ruling party,” he lamented, “or at least part of their
ethnic group —the Tigrayans — you can’t get any of the good jobs.
That’s the identity part. And democracy? There is no democracy! The
entire parliament is from one party! The army is controlled by the
party! So are the big businesses. And now the government is taking
land that was traditionally Amhara and making it part of Tigray.”
The pop, pop of gunfire could be heard from far away, muffled by the
distance. As a river of us walked towards the bridge, a mighty stream
was moving quickly in the opposite direction. “No good,” said a
middle-aged man wearing a battered fedora who was walking fast, away
from the bridge. He paused for moment. One finger pointing outwards,
he hit his right hand cross-wise against his left wrist in a mime of a
rifle aiming and shooting. We kept walking. The sound of gunfire
subsided.
A quarter of an hour later, we saw a mass of people in the distance.
Smoke rose from a building we could just make out on the right. And
then, without warning, there were more gunshots, no longer remote, and
hundreds of people stampeded past us, away from the shooting. We
didn’t know it then, but dozens of demonstrators had been mortally
wounded in that second flurry of gunfire.
Government troops in Bahir Dar, August 7, 2016 (Courtesy Micha Odenheimer)
Soldiers in combat fatigues rushed past us and disappeared, as
demonstrators scattered and hid in the farmland on the side of the
road. With the soldiers gone, the crowd reassembled, walking now
towards town, chanting and singing ecstatically. A group of young men
held a large rectangular flag above the crowd — three stripes, green,
yellow, and red. “You see the flag,” Mesfin said. “It’s the old flag
of Ethiopia, without the star in the middle, and the diagonal lines.”
He explained that the ruling Tigrayan led coalition — the EPRDF — had
altered the flag. “It’s supposed to symbolize Ethiopia’s ethnic
diversity, but for us it represents Ethiopia disintegrating into
chaos.”
The EPRDF had federalized the country by creating ethnic states.
Ostensibly, this was in order to give more autonomy to the different
tribes and languages that form Ethiopia’s rich ethnic mosaic. Unlike
the Amhara, who had imposed their culture, language and rule on
Ethiopia’s tribes, the Tigrayans would recognize and affirm the myriad
ethnic identities within the country. But the EPRDF had installed
their loyalists in the local government of each state. The widespread
perception was that the government favored Tigrayans in terms of jobs,
development projects, and business opportunities. Federalization,
combined with lack of democracy, had inflamed ethnic tensions. “The
flag means we want the old Ethiopia back again,” Mesfin added, “before
the government divided and conquered us.”
The crowd thickened and swirled — an eddy in the human river — in
front of a government building guarded by soldiers. “Laiba, laiba,” —
thieves, thieves — the crowd taunted the soldiers. Teenagers in the
crowd began to throw stones at a billboard with a message from the
government, tearing craters in the board, and suddenly there was
shooting, and the smell of teargas in the air. The crowd dispersed,
and we ran too, into a maze of dirt-paved alleyways and finally into
another large street. A cloud of smoke rose from a tear-gas grenade;
we tried to avoid it, but our eyes burned and our lungs felt scorched.
It’s Mesfin’s first experience with tear gas. “Will this do permanent
damage to my lungs?” he asks, his voice quivering with apprehension.
We are not surprised when one of the women says to us: ‘Do you know
Hadera? My cousin is in Hadera’
People were huddling behind locked doors and shuttered windows, but we
found a café whose door is a crack open; when we approach, the owner
pulled us in. Seven or eight men and women were sitting around the
large room, trapped by the soldiers and the shooting.
“How many demonstrators were killed?” we asked. For the rest of our
time in Bahir Dar, this is the question everyone asks each other;
nobody really knows the answer. Everyone ventures a number — 28, or
40, or 60 — but qualifies what they say with “This is what I heard,”
or “A friend saw 20 bodies in just one hospital.”
“Where are you from?” we are queried. We are Israeli”, we answered.
And the classic response in the Ethiopian highlands: “Israel, oh, we
love Israel. You are our zemat, our family.” Bahir Dar is close to
some of the villages from which thousands of Falash Mura, Ethiopian
Jews converted to Christianity by missionaries 100 years ago,
emigrated to Israel. Thousands more are still in Gondar, hoping their
turn for aliyah will come. That’s why we are not surprised when one of
the women says to us: “Do you know Hadera? My cousin is in Hadera.”
A man of about forty, wearing dress pants and a pink shirt, completes
the inevitable pattern of Ethiopian conversation with an Israeli: “You
are Christian, right?”
“No, we are Yahudi, Jews.”
“But you believe in Jesus Christ?” comes next, said in a hopeful tone.
Yehoshua, the kinder of us two, says “We believe he was a very great
sage and prophet.” I don’t like his answer. This is no time for
sugar-coating. “Our prophets tell us that when the messiah comes,
there will be no more war. No more this.” I gesture outside, to the
empty streets where the soldiers are hunting for the young men
throwing stones and burning tires as roadblocks. “You don’t believe he
is the Son of God?”
“The Bible says we are all the children of God,” I answer. The man
nods, he likes the sentiment, but still looks at us with pity, which I
interpret to mean, “Poor fools, without Jesus how can they know
salvation?”
And yet, in Ethiopia to be an Israeli is to partake in mythic history.
Ethiopian Orthodox Christians see themselves as descendants of Solomon
and Sheba, and believe that their church possesses the Ark of the
Covenant. For the Amhara, Israel connects back to the Ethiopia of
Haile Selassie and the other Solomonic Kings, the Greater Ethiopia
they long for. Sometimes their memory fails them. “There has been no
democracy here for the past 25 years!” a young man of about 23 tells
me, as if before that there was democracy. “Are you joking? I ask him?
Do you know what it was like under Mengistu Haile Mariam?” I say,
referring to the last Amharic President (for Life) whose reign of
terror makes the EPRDF look gentle in comparison. The young man stares
at me, blank-faced. Mengistu is ancient history, already forgiven and
sentimentalized.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Yehoshua says as they beat the boy over the head
Yehoshua and I venture back onto the streets. A team of soldiers is
patrolling. Young men are throwing stones. The soldiers run after
them; the boys disappear into the alleyways. I want to film the
soldiers, but I am scared; our whiteness protects us as long as we
stay out of the soldiers’ way, but “aiming” the camera, “shooting”
film in order to show the world — these are military metaphors for a
reason. Filming is a hostile act. It’s impossible to get a clear,
steady shot with my Samsung J5 without exposing myself to the
possibility of a soldier’s gaze. It’s impossible to know how the
soldiers will react. Their fingers already at the triggers, they could
shoot reflexively, without thinking — a mistake they might regret, but
I would already be dead. I hide behind a tree, but a soldier sees me,
and gesticulates wildly — he’s coming to grab the camera. A split
second before he reaches me, a boy bursts out of an alleyway, with a
soldier in hot pursuit; my soldier joins the chase, my camera is
saved. The boy is caught: they are beating him on his head with a
wooden baton, he tries to break away, but he lurches and stumbles as
if drunk, the soldiers catch him and beat him again.
Yehoshua, tall and bearded, has been calmer than me throughout. I am
unsure whether this is because he is more spiritually advanced or more
foolhardy. Yehoshua walks over to the soldiers and chides them in his
upper class British accent: “Why are you doing this?” he says as they
beat the boy over the head. “You must stop doing this.” They continue
as if he was not there. “Yehoshua,” I say. “Let’s get out of here!”
We walk past a church; it’s packed with mourners who are wailing and
dancing in the ecstatic manner of Ethiopian funereal customs; a father
holds up photographs of his son, slain that day in the demonstrations.
A woman tugs at my shirtsleeve: “This will not end,” she tells me.
“They have gone too far.” A man chimes in: “Please, tell the world
what is happening. We are being slaughtered.”
This is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters the dictatorial
government kills. Not the UN, not the State Department, not Black
Lives Matter, and not CNN
I can’t help but think about my homeland. In Israeli politics, I’m
center-left. I’m against the occupation, but I don’t believe the
situation is Israel’s fault, at least not exclusively. And Israeli
soldiers have never fired wholesale into crowds of demonstrators,
killing dozens at a time, as Ethiopian troops have. But seeing the
soldiers patrolling the shuttered, burning streets, an alien presence
hunting stone-throwing boys, their body language as tense as a cocked
rifle, I can’t help but think of our own soldiers and the
Palestinians. History matters, but it also doesn’t; I know that the
Amhara were as bad as or worse than the Tigrayans are now when they
controlled Ethiopia. I know the Palestinians have rejected peace on
numerous occasions, that the withdrawal from Gaza empowered Hamas. But
I also understand: soldiers in neighborhoods where people oppose their
presence is a recipe for disaster; the power of the present eclipses
historical truth.
And I also think: this is Africa, and nobody cares how many protesters
the dictatorial government kills. Not the UN, not the State
Department, not Black Lives Matter, and not CNN. At least 50 people
were killed in Bahir Dar during the day of protest I describe. Amnesty
International estimates that, so far this year 700 people have died in
such protests across Ethiopia. Yet until Olympic marathon runner
Feyisa Lilesa, an Oromo, crossed the finish line with arms raised in a
gesture of protest against his government, the violence in Ethiopia
stayed below the radar of nearly all news organizations with the
notable exception of Al Jazeera.
“If the general strike continues another day or two, there will be a
big explosion,” a dreadlocked young man tells me in the evening. He
had gone to the demonstrations with a friend; the friend had been shot
to death. “There are a lot of people in this town who are day
laborers. They only have money for food if they worked that day. If
the protests continue, they’ll start to be desperately hungry; most of
them would rather die in a protest than be consumed by hunger. The
majority of Ethiopians have not enjoyed the fruits of the country’s
economic growth, and anger at the EPRDF government is fueled by the
undeniable linkage between economic opportunity and loyalty to the
regime. The blend of capitalism and autocratic favoritism is a rich
stew nourishing poverty and fury.
It appears that the woman at the funeral was at least partly right:
the regime went too –far. The shootings have produced a critical mass
of anger and desperation. Since that day in Bahir Dar, in cities and
towns across the Amhara region, the population has chased the local
administration out of town and installed their own mayors and
councils. The homes of officials associated with the government have
been set on fire. Flower farms run by foreigners from Holland, Israel,
Belgium, Italy and India have been overrun by mobs, their greenhouses
ransacked. Thousands of soldiers have been deployed to the Amhara
region, but it’s unclear which side the local police will take. The
Amhara and the Oromo, where hundreds have also been killed in
demonstrations, comprise 60 percent of Ethiopia’s population; the
Tigrayans are only six percent. Film of the latest demonstrations,
broadcast by opposition groups, show men with rifles shooting into the
air — this is a sea-change from Bahir Dar, where the demonstrators
were unarmed. Now, six weeks or so later, with dozens more dead and
reports of soldiers killed and captured, protestors and the regime
seem to be at an eerie stalemate, with the next outbreak of violence
sure to come soon. Meanwhile, in Israel last week hundreds of
Ethiopian-Israelis demonstrated in front of the US embassy in Tel
Aviv, asking for US intervention against the Ethiopian regime’s
killing of protestors in the Amhara and Oromo region. Similar
demonstrations in front of Ethiopian embassies took place in
Washington and Ottowa.
There was an ecstatic element in the protests I witnessed in Bahir
Dar, and an ecstasy as well in the anguish of mourning, and a feeling
of purpose that at a certain moment becomes contagious. Only two weeks
before we arrived in Bahir Dar, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had
returned from a triumphant visit to four African countries, including
Ethiopia, where he had been lionized with the pomp usually reserved
for leaders of superpowers. Israeli businessmen are bullish on Africa:
Netanyahu spoke of investments in agriculture as well as cooperation
on security. Ethiopia has been a partner in containing the spread of
Islamic militants in East Africa, But “security” means training and
sometimes arming police and soldiers whose primary function is keeping
autocratic regimes in power.
In May 1991 I was in Addis Ababa after the Tigrayan rebels had
surrounded the city but before they had entered. The soldiers of the
Mengistu regime had raided the army storehouses and were selling
everything from rifles to army boots on the street. I had just
finished my basic training as an immigrant with the Israeli army, and
saw some ex-soldiers selling army boots that looked strikingly similar
to the boots we were issued in the IDF. For two dollars, I had a new
pair of boots. Only much later did I turn the boots around and see the
Hebrew insignia stamped in rubber on the sole: “Israel Defense Forces”
— evidence of at least the most basic level of military aid that
Israel had provided the reviled Mengistu regime.
If Israel wishes to have boots on the ground in Africa, the protests
in Ethiopia should give pause. Security cooperation with dictatorial
regimes must be considered carefully, even from a real-politic, if not
an ethical, perspective. Without democratization, without policies
that put the poorest people first, Africa will continue to slowly,
inexorably, explode.
Received on Wed Oct 05 2016 - 13:21:26 EDT