To:
His Highness The Butcher
Mengistu Haile Mariam

As the Prince of Darkness and the man who almost single-handedly sent to their graves tens of thousands of Ethiopians and Eritreans, you have reportedly been lamenting of late that the rulers who replaced you have not been living up to your standards of murder and mayhem, and that they were doing an abysmal job of running the country. As the architect of the policy, "Population Control Through Eradication," your concern about its fate in the hands of the Woyanes is understandable, logical even.

This is to inform your butcherness to rest assured the current minority government in Ethiopia has been so effective at emulating your policy that you should be proud your legacy continues unfettered. Only this time it's being conducted with more gusto and efficiency that the SS troops would have envied. One can't help but notice that while you were able to implement the policy in seventeen long years, the Woyanes have taken it to new heights, transporting within weeks countless unwitting victims to the north, clad in fresh military fatigue, and placing them at the mercy of northern gunners (sound familiar?), who have no choice but to oblige.

The Justification Department of the Woyanes, it should also be noted, has made slight modifications to the previous policy in efforts to galvanize the public into a common objective: "Go north, young man, and kill a snake named Isaias Afewerki, whose death and demise could only bring you joy and happiness, peace and harmony, wealth and prosperity."

Your line was that there were some crooks in the north, about a dozen of them, that were "Arab inspired" and bent on changing the country's religion, as if Ethiopia had only one. But you never liked to be bothered by the facts, a trait that was so fascinating and original about you. And who in his right mind was going to ask you why you needed a quarter of a million soldiers to get rid of "The Dirty Dozen?" Needless to say, the policy worked like a charm, or so you had your hapless victims believe, for you spoke like the Fuhrer, bullied like The Stalin, and killed like both.

In fairness to your butcherness, however, it should be made absolutely clear that you were always an Equal Opportunity Killer (EOK): When it came to dispensing with human life, it was immaterial to you what color one's eyes were, or where one's parents were born. One has to appreciate that in a homicidal murderer. It feels comforting, and even liberating to know--when collapsing upon being pierced by the revolutionary sword--that one was being democratically slaughtered just like everyone else. You were so fair, your butcherness, and so consistent. You were also shrewd enough to associate your regime with some of the most unsavory psychopaths who had ever inhabited the earth, convincing them that you were trying to plant in Ethiopia, and even in Eritrea, the same venomous seeds that Joseph Stalin had sown throughout the former Soviet Union. You were so good at it that they lapped it all up, and handed you more weapons than you knew what to do with. Whoever thought that Africa would someday bear a child, who would grow up and follow the footsteps of that quintessential expert in population reduction and control? Idi Amin tried it in Uganda and failed, and so did the late Jean Bodel Bokasa of the Central African Republic, but you outfoxed them all in a way that the Stalin-and-Fuhrer duo, the greatest killers of the millennium, would have approved of.

I am sorry to report, your butcherness, however, that in the diplomatic arena, the Woyanes are crude and not as seasoned, alienating and antagonizing almost everyone they come across, and being consistently inconsistent. Perhaps you should mail them one of the multitude of books you have authored on "how to make friends and still drastically reduce the population."

The aforementioned notwithstanding, I can assure you, no pun intended, that your absence is not really felt in Addis, or perhaps anywhere in the country. The famine that cost Haile Selassie his throne and his head and catapulted you to power is still around and flourishing. The youth, who had the audacity to think that they could perhaps go to school like their contemporaries elsewhere in the world, or even help their aging parents by selling produce and eggs at the neighborhood market, or by laboring in the farm, have been located in a wrong place at a wrong time, and not in one piece either. Some had thought they were fortunate enough to be selected for early release from prison and but have since found out that it was a raw deal; they perished in the north, missing the long and cold days at the penitentiary.

And, then, there were the most unfortunate of all souls, the parents. Wrongly assuming that the children were coming home for dinner, they had retired to bed and feigned sleep, suspecting correctly that their children might have disappeared in quest of the elusive snake in the north. They woke up from their nightmare and found out that they had grown gray hair overnight and developed a debilitating ulcer, for which there was no medicine available, even for the meager retirement pension for decades of services rendered to the Haile Selassie, Mengistu, and Woyane administrations. This is not in anyway intended to give you the impression that the Woyanes are as good as you were. In fact, if truth be told, they are so overwhelmed by your old job that they fall on their faces all the time, in spite of assigning different people to do different things. For instance, they have people now whose sole assignment is to misinform foreign reporters, others to insult the same, a few specialists to check the color of peoples' eyes, another bunch to loot private properties, and still others to carry out an assortment of similar nefarious activities that I don't want to bore you with. I know, I could almost picture you shaking your head in disgust over such waste, because for purely economic reasons you used to do everything yourself. You were the butcher-in-chief, the warden, the judge, the law, the jury, the prosecutor, and even the witness. You were the executive, legislative and judicial branches, all rolled into one. You did everything for that ingrate of a country. No one seems to appreciate how a person of so limited a potential could attempt to do so much, to so many innocent people, and be so effective.

Nevertheless, your butcherness, you needn't have worried. Despite minor differences here and there, Ethiopia is still in good hands. Indeed, most of the time it feels like you're still in charge and had never left at all.

Northernerly (but not) Yours,
(Signed)
Russom Mesfun