Alemayehu G. Mariam Last week, a couple of interesting political statements grabbed the cyber headlines. One was a truly entertaining piece entitled “Letter from Ethiopia,” by the indomitable Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega. Eskinder’s “Letter” sought to make sense of the power jockeying that is apparently taking place backstage to replace dictator Meles Zenawi. The other…
By Alemayehu G. Mariam It has been said that Africa’s natural resources — oil, diamonds, minerals — have often proven to be sources of woe, suffering and misery than wealth, prosperity and progress for the people of the continent. What should have been a blessing for Africa’s poor has become a curse of corruption, malfeasance…
Alemayehu G. Mariam Since the dawn of African independence from colonialism in the early 1960s, African liberation leaders and founding fathers qua dictators, military junta and “new breed” leaders have sought to justify the one-man, one-party state — and avoid genuine multiparty democracy — by fabricating a blend of self-serving arguments which converge on the…
By Alemayehu G. Mariam “Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” said Sir Walter Scott, the novelist and poet. Is there “famine” in Ethiopia, or not? Are large numbers of people “starving” there, or not? Is convulsive hunger a daily reality for the majority of Ethiopians, or not? No…
By Alemayehu G. Mariam It was a remarkable display of raw machismo: “My way or the highway… or jail!” It was a one-man political theatre, a monologue about absolute power, domination, toughness, brawn and pugnacity. It was a demonstration of sang froid machismo calculated to taunt and sneer at the opposition, and bombard them with…
Alemayehu G. Mariam The “delegation of African negotiators” rumbled into Copenhagen rubbing their palms and licking their chops to load up tens of billions of dollars in carbon blood money and make a quick exit. They were disappointed. There was no gold at the end of the Copenhagen rainbow. At the end of the day,…
By Alemayehu G. Mariam Use a sledgehammer to smash a butterfly! That is the exquisite art of war unleashed on Ethiopia’s independent press by the dictatorship of Meles Zenawi today. The latest near-casualties in Zenawi’s war on Truth have just escaped by the skin of their teeth. Their distress signal ricocheted across cyberspace last week….
By Alemayehu G. Mariam The inconvenient truth about Africa today is that dictatorship presents a far more perilous threat to the survival of Africans than climate change. The devastation African dictators have wreaked upon the social fabric and ecosystem of African societies is incalculable. Over the past several decades, bloodthirsty dictators like Uganda’s Idi Amin,…
By Alemayehu G. Mariam In his book Night, Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and the man the Nobel Committee called the “messenger to mankind” when it awarded him the peace prize in 1986, wrote: For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and the…
By Alemayehu Gebremariam Recently, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi warned that the African delegation he is expected to lead to the climate change talks in Copenhagen in December would walk out of any “negotiations that threaten to be another rape of the continent.” The Ethiopian dictator, who was speaking in Addis Ababa at a meeting…
