As the curtain refuses to descend, Ato Alemu calls for Meles to exit the scene.

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Paulos Yrgaw
May 3, 2006

In the Ethiopian political culinary, the ingredients we are told are perceptions. These perceptions whose loci in the Hippocampus refuse to turn into chunks, lose their momentum as semantics. However, the alarmists graduate the yellow siren into red, as they "foresee" the morph of the perceptions into gossip and eventually into a power to reckon with.

When "now" is impacted on by Lorentz contraction, for now, the perceptions are cramped in Addis where the keepers of the key to Lyceum intellectualize and rationalize the hue of the power-brokers.

However, when the whole is greater than the summation of its parts, Ethiopia is the summation of circa seventy two million cephals. Addis the land of perceptions (no pun intended) with merely four million supra-cephals can not pretend to ride the bike, when pressing the pedal losses its effect on the wheel. Simply because, the perceptions lose their meanings outside the confines of the Polis. Rather, the leaders invested a real political time on the vast peripheries of Addis for practically two decades when Addis was in a slumber, hence the ostensible political lacuna between the erudite in Addis and the tillers on the periphery is explicable.

Ato Alemu is tenacious. He says, he is misunderstood. Maybe he is. However, he is misunderstood not because he is right, rather he is misunderstood because he is wrong. Ato Alemu rather eloquently how flawed he may appear, compartmentalizes the perceptions into three threads. The "Tigrean" dominated leadership, the perceived flawed approach to the Eritrean dimension and the attempt to diplomatically isolate EPRDF by the Diaspora.

If we turn the notch thirty years backwards, when Tigreans set out to fight the Colonel, hardly great many people of the society offered a helping hand in a bid to destroy the Colonel. Here, one should be cautious, Tigreans by no means can have the entitlements for power by default. Or simply because, they were the bearers of the torch. Their "cling" to power is merely to accommodate a conducive political stratosphere when the nation sails into totally unprecedented political milieu when the talk of the day is democracy.

The apparent negative connotation which is carried with the notion "Tigrean domination" is the assumed "Tigraization" of the nation that comes with it. Such as implementing Tigrean language as an official mode of communication and the promotion of Tigrean culture, customs and norms through out the nation. And in more wilder instances, blunt cronyism as well. But as well all know it, that is not the case in Ethiopia. The leadership instead, walks in a very fine line, not to give a field day to those who wish to see the "Alawi-iazation" of Ethiopia by Tigreans. As I see it, as E.P.R.D.F matures more and as fresh minds and new generation crawl into it, the exit from the scene of certain ethnic group will be spontaneous.

The Eritrean dimension with in the gist of the matter where the leadership is invariably accused or gossiped on of mishandling the case is to miss entirely the crux of the matter. My understanding is that, the Ethiopian approach to the acrimony was to attain a legal objective as opposed to a political objective. When the US-Rwanda peace initiative called for the status-quo-ante right after the inception of the war, the Ethiopian government demanded for the Eritrean government to pull out of Badme which had been under the Ethiopian administration prior to the war.

The Ethiopian government insisted that, unless the Eritrean government comply with the demand, it would not take the case to the international court or arbitration. Hence, the sole objective of the Ethiopian government had been from the inception to restore the status-quo-ante, once that is achieved the Eritrean dimension in the larger scheme of the issue is rendered a moot. The issue becomes more entangled and problematic only when one tries to augment into it a political objective when the gist was entirely based on legality. In short, the need for the war was to achieve legal objectives not political objectives. Hence, the smear is a gun ammunated with pellets with no effect what so ever.

The ceaseless jibe on websites and a hype in Congress by the Diaspora seemed to have scored a major PR and a "knockout" blow to the Ethiopian government’s otherwise impeccable diplomatic acrobats in other sectors.

However, the beauty of America lies in its remarkable ability to de-centralize its power-blocks into practically non-causality. When a Congress-man, while listening to a hearing calculates at the back of his head on how to win the hearts of his constituents, the State Department is concerned on how to keep the American vital interests intact around the globe. And the State Department, has long ago sewn in its thinking in the scope of Realism that, Ethiopia is indispensable. Hence, Ethiopia’s relatively stable political climate reined by a democratic leadership means to America more than a showcase in a half-day in Capitol Hill.

P.S. Ato Alemu, I apologize if you think I was carried away with emotions in my previous article. And many thanks for those kind words. The respect is mutual as well.
Paulos Yrgaw
Ottawa, Canada.
Comments: Asimov107@yahoo.ca

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