Al Mariam’s Commentaries

  An old African proverb says, “An ant can kill an elephant.” The ant is said to get into the elephant’s ears and trunk and gnaw and nibble until the pachyderm goes completely crazy and dies from exhaustion. That African proverb has come true in America. The ant that vanquished the Grand Old Republican elephant…

Prof. Alemayheu G. Mariam VOA Interview on Ethiopian Political Prisoner Bekele Gerba.   Click on the link below to listen: http://almariam.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Prof-al-voa-bekele-gerba.mp3  

In American legal lore, there is the Scopes Monkey Trial. In 1925, a high school teacher named John Scopes was prosecuted in Tennessee for teaching human evolution in a public school [violating the Butler Act]. Throughout the U.S., the Scopes trial was widely seen as a struggle between the “ignorati” who fought to keep their…

We remember our brother Eskinder Nega There is nothing more the T-TPLF (Thugtatorship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front) would like to see than the memory of the great Eskinder Nega erased and obliterated from public memory and consciousness. The T-TPLF wants the world to forget Eskinder Nega. They want his memory to fade away…

Last July, Barack Obama visited Ethiopia and declared the ruling Thugtatoship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (T-TPLF) regime a “democratic government.” The T-TPLF claimed with a straight face that it had won the 2015 “election” by 100 percent or all 547 seats in “parliament”. The New York Times called it a “sham”. Human Rights…

Hunger or famine games in Ethiopia? USAID says there is no famine in Ethiopia, only hunger (a/k/a “severe malnutrition”, “food insecurity”, “food scarcity”, “food insufficiency”, “food deprivation”, “severe food shortages”, “chronic dietary deficiency”, “endemic malnutrition”, etc.) caused by El Nino drought. I say there is famine, as in F-A-M-I-N-E! In countless commentaries over the past…

Author’s Note: The following is a true and correct copy of my letter to USAID Administrator Gayle E. Smith dated March 16, 2016, and the response I received from T.C. Cooper, Assistant Administrator, USAID Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs dated April 7, 2016.. My letter questions recent statements made by Ms. Smith regarding the famine in…

After Bernie Sanders’ crushing victory in the Wisconsin primary (56.6% v. 43.1) on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton landed a low blow challenging Sanders’ political stripes. Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes?  Are zebras donkeys (no pun intended)? Is Sanders a democrat with socialist stripes or a socialist with democratic stripes? “Is…

Author’s Note: This is the second installment in a series of ongoing commentaries that I expect to post regularly under the rubric, “Ethnic Apartheid in Ethiopia”. The twin aims of the series are: 1) to demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that the political system created and maintained by the Thugtatorship of the Tigrean People’s…