Tuesday, October 8, 2013

The Oromo Renaissance

by OPFist

There is one thing I want to emphasize in this post, as the end of the semester approaches. It is something we have been discussing all semester in various ways, but I hope it will appear especially meaningful now. It is the many inter-connections among literature, socio-economic conditions, the many different spaces in which we live our daily lives, and politics. Similar to Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacques Derrida whom you read earlier in the semester, Naomi Klein and Jane Juffer, whom you are reading now, focus on the enormous complexity and incredible density of these things, as well as the way such things are not always “innate” or “natural” but rather change over time and therefore can be changed. I want to give you a real world example, a project that I am currently in the middle of working on, a project whose success and outcome is entirely indeterminate — and that project is the Oromo Renaissance.

Most of you do not know who the Oromo are. They are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group and have been violently oppressed for the past 150 years by another ethnic group who was only able to dominate the region by means of military support provided by commercial interests in Europe and the United States. So, in this blog, I want to share with you the rough draft of an essay I am writing and planning to publish in the first issue of an on-line magazine of literature and culture, which I am also helping to edit. I hope, as you read this draft, you will notice the different social spaces, institutions, legal structures, activist movements, and history — as well as the literature — which all overlap and interconnect in complex ways. Anyway, here it is… 

In July 2007 in Minneapolis, the Oromo Youth Leadership Conference discussed how to promote Oromo cultural identity. After the conference, several of the participants—including myself—proposed the creation of a new Oromo webzine that would feature poetry, fiction, visual arts, fashion, interviews with musicians, essays on culture, and more. As we first imagined it, the goal of our webzine was to contribute to an event that hasn’t fully happened yet—the Oromo Renaissance. Coincidentally, unknown to us when we began our project, the Oromo playwright Dhaba Wayessa was thinking along similar lines. He recently wrote, “As we all aspire to participate in the Oromo cultural renaissance, we need to nurture and develop our magnificent cultural traditions so that our children may embrace and carry them forward as an essential part of their lives,” and this March, he began raising money in Washington D.C. and Minneapolis for a new film project, Halkan Dorrobaa. Also unknown to us when we began, yet another Oromo intellectual, Asafa Jalata, concluded his new book Oromummaa with an essay that encourages the Oromo to learn from the political projects of other black communities, namely the Harlem Renaissance.[1]

Clearly, something is in the air. And something important is on the horizon. But what? What will an Oromo Renaissance look like? It is difficult to write about the future, especially from the perspective of an outsider—as I am obviously not an Oromo—but that is precisely the task of my essay. To accomplish this task, I will raise three questions: (1) What is the meaning of the word “renaissance” and what sort of project does it entail? (2) What is the usefulness of comparing one cultural renaissance such as the Oromo Renaissance to another such as the Harlem Renaissance? and (3) Is there something new about the twenty-first century that would make the formation of a cultural renaissance today different from earlier ones? To put it another way, since I am not myself an Oromo, I can only offer the readers of this new webzine my expertise as a professor of English and American literature.Hence, like the English, American, and Harlem renaissances before it, the Oromo Renaissance today will have two different audiences. One will be the Oromo community itself, but the other will be the international community. 

Therefore, just as within their ethnic community, Oromo artists adapt non-Oromo art forms, so too, beyond their community, artists hope to secure a place for themselves in a global culture. This attention to the “cultures of globalization” and the multinational publishing corporations that produce “world literature,” however, presents us with a paradox. And the paradox is this: in order to achieve their cultural integrity, the Oromo are finding that they must look outside their own culture and work closely not only with people of other cultures but also with other cultural forms, such as the modern cafe and multinational networks of distribution and consumption.

I raise these three questions—and I emphasize that they are open-ended questions to which I have no answers—in part because of a vague uneasiness I observed being expressed at the OYLC. Many of the Oromo living in Diaspora feel disconnected from their cultural roots and have developed attachments to other forms of culture (e.g., American hip hop, American consumer culture, western universities, Lutheran churches, and Muslim mosques.) However, there is a deep desire to reconnect creatively and imaginatively. For instance, around the same time that the editors of Ogina were thinking about creating this webzine, two other individuals—Roba Geleto and Gity Teressa—created an “Oromo Art and Poetry” group on the on-line networking tool FaceBook to “unleash the beauty of Oromia throughout our imaginations” in a way that would transcend the political and religious differences within the Oromo community. 

The FaceBook group includes poetry written in both English and Afan Oromo as well as links to YouTube videos of hip hop by the Oromo artist Epidemic the Virus who lives in Toronto. What is notable here is how young Oromo are already exploring their cultural identity through a hybrid of American and Oromo poetic forms. At the same time, many Oromo youth have been long dissatisfied with the political rhetoric of their elders who assert a simplistic and often jingoistic image of Oromo-ness, or Oromummaa. The editors of this new webzine Ogina want to follow the advice of scholars such as Mekuria Bulcha and Asafa Jalata by not simply asserting a nostalgic sense of what it means to be Oromo. Instead, they want to honestly and courageously explore the strange paradoxes and deeply felt contradictions of real, lived experience—their culture in a globalized world.

With the goals of the editors of Ogina in mind, I want to mention something I noticed when I first mentioned “Oromo literature” to the several of the older generation of Oromo scholars and journalists. They seemed to think that I was interested in old Oromo folk tales, when what I was really interested in was the possibility of something new—an Oromo novel set in the present. And I mention these divergent senses of the word “literature” because there is more at stake in these two very different emphases than mere idle speculation. There is money and the question of what to use it for. The Oromo community financially supports scholars at universities both in Oromia and in the U.S., Sweden, and elsewhere who research and recuperate the cultural and political history of the Oromo, but as far as I could tell, no money was being used to support young literary talent. This, of course, is important to me not just because I am a teacher of literature, but also because it is well known to historians that the African-American literature in the 1920s significantly helped to enable the Civil Rights movement. 

That the literature, music, and art of the Harlem Renaissance were important to the Civil Rights movement is obvious. Both of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson—were also novelists. And we also know that much of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance could not have been written without a significant injection of capital from various organizations, such as the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Theorists and scholars of civil rights movements all over the world have long appreciated the role of magazines, novels, poetry, and theater not only for galvanizing a political community but also for exploring the ethical dilemmas and problems faced by that community. So, at first, I thought that the Oromo living in Diaspora should really be using their limited financial resources to focus on the present and the future, not the past.

But when I thought further, I began to think about it differently. Literally, the word “renaissance” means “rebirth,” and so one of the peculiar aspects of a renaissance—any renaissance—is that it is simultaneously a looking back and a looking forward. For example, at the time of the English Renaissance in the 16th century, England was not yet a “nation” in the modern sense of what a nation is. Looking ahead to England’s new imperial future, poets such as Edmund Spenser invented a mythic past dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. In other words, England’s “rebirth” was not just about becoming something new or different, but a metaphorical renewal of the past. The same is true of the American Renaissance in the early 19th century following the Revolutionary War. And likewise, many writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s recuperated an African-American folk tradition. So, this renewal of the past—based partly on truth, but also imaginatively invented out of scarce archival resources—was important for the African-American project of self-liberation.[2] Likewise, their children, growing up in the U.S.A., Canada, England, Australia, Sweden, Kenya, and Somalia, struggle to understand their cultural roots, a culture that sometimes even their parents have difficulty articulating except through other institutions such as the church or the mosque.here].)

Not only did these three renaissances re-imagine their cultural history, but their poets and scholars worked hard to institutionalize a national language. Alongside the English Renaissance came the first Bible in English and the first English dictionary. When one looks at the spellings of words and names in English before 17th century, there seems to be no consistency to them. Even the famous playwright William Shakespeare spelled his own name different ways. Similarly, we have all noticed how some words in Qubbee seem to have several spellings. And the institutionalization of a national language and culture was not unique to the English Renaissance. Alongside the American Renaissance came the first American-English dictionary and a state sponsored elementary education system. And though the Harlem Renaissance did not produce a “dictionary” in the usual sense of that word, its writers experimented with how to represent the uniqueness of “black” English, and linguists later developed something called Ebonics. The Oromo today find themselves in a similar situation as the English in the 17th century, the Americans in the 19th century, and the African-Americans in the 20th century. For almost one hundred years, the Ethiopian state made it illegal to publish or teach in Qubbee. Only since 1991 have people in Oromia been able to publish books and go to school in their own language. And, among the children growing up in Diaspora, there is a powerful desire to learn their own language. For instance, a young man in Norway is currently busy trying to program iPods in Afan-Oromo.

And so, obviously, what motivates the Oromo elders to recuperate their cultural history is the fact that not just their culture but even their very language had been suppressed for so long. I will not spend time in this essay on that history as many Oromo scholars have already described it in considerable detail. I assume that all readers of this essay know already (far better than I do) the effects of Ethiopian state violence on Oromo language, culture, and sense of self.

However, no renaissance can simply be a nostalgic looking back at a past only dimly recollected. And so, the novelists, poets, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance also dramatized their present condition as well as imagined a brighter future. They invented the new musical form of jazz by blending together musical forms from Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Their writers borrowed the traditional European forms of prose and poetry but changed them in order to express their own way of speaking, feeling, and thinking. They were inventive, playful, and experimental.

Thus, the second question of this essay is a comparative one. The Italian and English Renaissance writers looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration and even imagined direct cultural linkages, and likewise, the Harlem Renaissance looked everywhere for inspiration, from German philosophy and literature to French modernist art to ancient African traditions. At the same time, of course, these renaissances also paid attention to how they differed from all other cultural traditions and trajectories—above all, they asserted their uniqueness. And what made them unique was their heritage, the heritage that we call Oromummaa. Interestingly, if one reads carefully Jalata’s book Oromummaa and Legesse’s book Oromo Democracy, one notices that they are describing two things at once. They are describing the unique heritage of the Oromo people, but they are describing it in the universal terms of democracy and human rights. So, just as a renaissance is simultaneously a looking back and a looking forward, it is also simultaneously a celebration of its uniqueness and its universality.

Today, no Oromo man or woman can help but notice the globalized nature of his or her own culture. Musicians have adopted western electronic instruments. Hip hop is popular not only among Oromo youth in the United States but also in Oromia. And this cultural hybridity is nothing new. Not only did the revolutionary culture of Ethiopia in the 1960s and 70s borrowed heavily from Russian and Chinese Marxism, but so too were its popular music and even the hairstyles (e.g., the Afro) a mixture of local and global cultural forms. Moreover, the Oromo know that their future has been—and continues to be—affected by the politics of the United Nations and other global institutions as well as the economics of multinational corporations. And so, the Oromo have always deeply understood the necessity of making connections to people and cultures outside their own community. In other words, they have always understood that to achieve political freedom and to end the injustice of their oppression, they have felt the need to demonstrate the injustice of their situation to a world audience. One important example of how they have done so is to link their interests with the fair trade coffee movement, as much of the world’s coffee is produced by impoverished Oromo farmers. A Minnesota coffee roaster has recently created a new blend of coffee called “Organic Oromian” to increase awareness of the Oromo contributions to a global economy and world culture. (For more on that story, and to find out how you can buy Organic Oromian Coffee, click [

And this paradox leads to the third question of this essay, and that is the question of the 21st century. What is novel about the Oromo Renaissance—and perhaps any cultural renaissance of the 21st century—is its location. Unlike the renaissances of Europe, America, and Harlem, the Oromo Renaissance is happening not just in one location, but in a state of Diaspora. Although all renaissances have historically emerged out of a dialogue between a local culture and a world culture, in the past they have typically been rooted in metropolitan centers such as Venice, London, and New York. In contrast, the Oromo Renaissance is an event that has no single center but is happening everywhere. It is happening in the U.S.A., Canada, England, Australia, Kenya, Somalia, Sweden, Norway, and even in Cyberspace as well as within the political state of Ethiopia. Therefore, the artists of the Oromo Renaissance, both young and old, are paying close attention to something truly wonderful—just how profoundly new their situation actually is.
___________

NOTES

[1] Dhaba Wayessa, Halkan Dorrobaa. http://boornagaa.com/; Asafa Jalata, Oromummaa (Atlanta, GA: Oromia Publishing, 2007): 272. See also Jalata’s “The Place of the Oromo Diaspora in the Oromo National Movement: Lessons from the Agency of the “Old” African Diaspora in the United States,” Northeast African Studies 9:3 (2002): 133-60.

[2] To name just a few of the books on this subject: Bonnie K. Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 1990); Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-2004, 2nd ed. (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 2005); Mekuria Bulcha, The Making of the Oromo Diaspora (Minneapolis, MN: Kirk House, 2002); Asmarom Legesse, Oromo Democracy (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 2006).

Godina Harargee Lixaa Aanaa Daaroo Labuu Keessatti Wal-gahiin Wayyaanee Diddaa Ummataan Fashale

Onkoloolessa 08,2013 Daaroo Labuu
OromiaALutaContinua2011FDGOlolli sirni garboomfaa Wayyaanee daangaa kan hin qabne tahuun hubatamaa dha. Qondaaloti Wayyaaneen Godina Harargee lixaa aanaa Daaroo Labuu keessatti wal gahii uummata waameen uummatni diddaa sirnichaaf qabu muldhisuun walgahicha diduu fi salgalee mormii dhageessisuun fashalsuu gabaasi nu gahe addeessa. Haalli kun kan itti hammaatee fi rifaatuu keessa buuse ergamtooti Wayyaanee uummata aanaa kanaa araddaa rarddaan walitti waamuun ABO shororkeessaa dha wayita jechuu eegalan uummatni gamtaan isintu shororkeessaadha ABOn dhaaba haqaa fi roorroo saba isaaf falmaa godhu malee ummata isaa gurguree dantaa isa jala kan kaatu miti,kijiba aamata 21 nurraa dhaaba ammaan booda mirga barbaadna jechuun dabballoota wayyaanee qaanessee jira.
Wal gahiin ergamtoota Wayyaanee kun araddaalee jiran keessatti diddaa uummataan fashaluu gabaasi addeessa. Haaluma wal fakkaatuun aanaa kana keessatti barsiisotni gamaggama hojii waggaa irratti dabballoota Wayyaaneen isin seelii diinaati wayita jedhaman barsiisotni gamtaan diinni isin lukkee Wayyaaneeti jechuun bakka wal gahiitti dhiisanii akka deeman baramee jira. Walumaa galatti Golee Oromiyaa keessatti waan Oromoof malee Oromoo irratti diinummaa oofuun hidda qabaachuu hin qabu jechuun qeerroon aanaa Daaroo Labuu gabaasee jira.


=>qeerroo

Ethiopian presidency and the need to share our humiliation

MulatuWirtu
By Hawi O.
(OPride) – The results are in. Ethiopia’s rubberstamp parliament, in a joint session on Monday, approved Dr. Ambassador Mulatu Teshome Wirtu’s nomination to be the next president of Ethiopia.

As a result, the Oromo people have won the symbolic position of the Ethiopian presidency for four consecutive terms. Dr. Negasso Gidada was “elected” through similar parliamentary session in 1995 as the first president of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) and became George Washington equivalent for the country. Upon Dr. Negaso’s exit in 2001, Lieutenant Girma Wolde-Giorgis, also an Oromo became the John Adams of Ethiopia and served for two terms that ended earlier this week. We now have Dr. Mulatu, as the Thomas Jefferson equivalent of the FDRE.
No evidence is needed to show that the EPRDF parliament is deeply in love with the Oromo people. But before celebrating this remarkable achievement and the special privilege afforded to the Oromo people by the ruling party, EPRDF, let us examine the powers and functions of the Ethiopian president as described in Article 71 of the country’s 1994 constitution.
The president’s first job is to open the joint session of the House of Peoples’ Representatives and the House of the Federation at the commencement of their annual sessions. Once a year he stands in front of lawmakers and tells them that the new session has just opened as if they could not have figured out that on their own. That is it. His first job is done. And he is whisked back to his Palace to perform other duties.
The second duty involves proclaiming in the Federal Negarit Gazeta, the official legal publication in Ethiopia, laws and international agreements approved by the House of Peoples’ Representatives in accordance with the Constitution. This might sound as if he has to personally take a print ready copy of the Gazette to Berhanena Selam Printing Press. No, it is not like that. He simply puts his signature at the bottom of the page without reading what is written on it. Why bother reading since he cannot change it any way, right? An illiterate person can do this job without any problem. What the parliament approved is a law of the land whether the president signs it or not.
The third and fourth duties of the president are to serve as an errand boy for the Prime Minister. In this capacity, the president tells newly appointed ambassadors that the Prime Minister has appointed them to Ethiopian missions around the world. He also welcomes new foreign ambassadors when they arrive in the country.
Giving award medals, prizes, gifts, and high military titles to whomever the Prime Minster has selected is the Ethiopian president’s fifth and sixth job responsibility. The seventh and final job of the president is to grant pardon to prisoners, who have already been pardoned by other people, including the prime minister.  
In none of these constitutionally allowed duties does the president have a decision making power. He only performs what the Prime Minster or a third party tells him to. He has to do the job whether he likes it or not. He is completely powerless to even say yes or no to anything.
We must first ask why such a job should be given to any human being. Aren’t there better ways of using human power, and a very skilled one at that? Why doesn’t the EPRDF give the job to a robot since it does not require the ability to think? Anyone who has taken an introductory computer science class can program a robot to flawlessly perform the duties of the Ethiopian president. Therefore, the EPRDF must assign robots as presidents and spare humans the humiliation associated with the position.
Another question we must ask is why does the Ethiopian President have to be always an Oromo? We know that the president has no power but why do Oromos have to always be appeased with such a powerless position? In other words, why does the Ethiopian president have to be an Oromo First, Second, Third, and Fourth given that Jawar Mohammed did not appear on Aljazeera when all this started? Does this not suggest that the Ethiopian presidency is a symbol of Oromo powerlessness? Why are Oromos given this humiliating position all the time? Since Ethiopia is a federation of about 80 nations, nationalities, and peoples, why don’t they all share the humiliation equally?
The current practice must change so that all the 80 ethnic groups can share the position of Ethiopian presidency on a rotating basis. This would be simple and fair. Since the term of the president is 6 years, every ethnic group will assume the position every 480 years. This means no one will see a member of his ethic group humiliated by being named President more than once during his/her lifetime.
But Oromos must be given credit for the three terms of humiliation they have already endured and for fourth one they have just took up. In other words, Oromos must be given credit for their service so far and not be encumbered with the position until every nation, nationality, and people has served four terms each.
This means starting from 2019 when Dr. Mulatu’s term ends, Oromos should be given a credit of 1, 896 years (4 x 6 x 79) before being humiliated again with the position of Ethiopian presidency. Hence, no Oromo must be assigned Ethiopian president until 3915 AD.
Of course, this assuming no political change would take place in Ethiopia in the next 110 years.
--
* Hawi O. is a Finfinne-based political satarist.

Wallagga Aanaa Anfilloo Keessatti Qonnaan Bultooti Oromoo Mirga Qabeenyaa Falmachuu Irraan Hidhaa Waggaa 5n Itti Murtaawe.

Onkoloolessa 08,2013 D.Doolloo

BilisummaaYeroo muraasaa asitti gabaasota haala uummata godina Qellem aanaa Anfilloo gabaasaa turuun keenya ni yaadatama.Ummanni naannoo aanaa Anifilloo qabeenya bunaa heddumminaan qaban irraa mootummaan Wayyaanee humnaan buqisuun lafa akaakiliin irra jiraataa turanii fi qabeenya isaanii dabalatee maqaa mishoomaan Investeroota itti gurguraa ture. Ummanni naannoos mirga qabeenyummaa falmachuu irraan hidhamaa akka tura,namootni qabeenya isaanii irraa hidhamaa turan kanneen hedduun isaanii sammuudhaan darban akkasuma kan lubbuu isaan of ajjeesellee kan jiru yoo tahu Mootummaan Wayyaaneen ummata qabeenyaa fi lafa isaanii falmatan gaaffii tokkoon malee hidhaatti akka geessaa jiru gabaasi addeessa.
Kana malees mootummaan Wayyaanee Oromooti mirga qabeenyummaa falmatan keessaa garii hidhaa waggaa 5nii itti murteessaa akka jiru beekamee jira. Amma akka odeessaan madheelee keenya mootummaa keessaa bahaa jiruutti mootummaan Wayyaanee jiraattota aanaa Anfilloo irra guddaa buqqaasisuun lafa qaban abbaa qabeenyaatti akka gurguruuf deemu murteessuun isaanii himama.
Haala kanaan uummanni guyyoota muraasaa asitti uummanni hunduu gara itti iyyatu dhabee dargaggoota  Oromoo jiran hundatti iyyannaa keenya nuuf dhageessisaa jedhaa akka jiraniidha. Mirga qabeenya keenya falmachuu dhabneerra,yoo falmanne hidhaa fi dararaatu nu irra gahaa jira  jechuun ummanni aanaa kanaa gadda guddaa keessa akka jiru gabaasaan Qeerroo aanaa kanaa addeessa.
Onkoloolessa 06,2013 gaaffii mirga qabeenyummaa gaafachuu irraan namoota hidhaa waggaa 5n 5nii itti murtaa’e nama 12 dhalootaan Anfilloo ganda Ashii fi Dullii ykn bakkuma tokkotti ganda Ashii kan tahan kanaan gaditti kan argamaniidha.
  1. Mulugeta Dagguu
  2. Birhanuu Dheeressaa
  3. Mokonin Dhibbisaa
  4. Abiyoot Hirkisaa
  5. Masarat Fayisaa
  6. Jabeessaa Taaffasaa
  7. Dassalee Ittaanaa
  8. Raggaasaa Taasisaa
  9. Dafeera Shuumaa
10. Lammeessaa Qana’aa
11. Bilii Solomon
12. Imaammuu Bal’inaa
Kanneen jadhaman yeroo ta’u. Namootni kun qabeenyuma dhuunfaa isaanii mootummaan weerare falmachuuf hidhaa waggaa 5n 5niin adabamanii jiru.

Tax Payers’ Money is Funding Terrorists in the Horn of Africa

By: Denebo Dekeba Wario | October 7, 2013
ukdemonistrationUK saw the brightest summer in years and everyone seemed to have been quite busy going on holiday and having fun.  For the Oromo in the UK and elsewhere in the world, however, August 2013 turned out to be less shining as it was a season when the torment back home has exacerbated. Even though the nation had already been suffering  a great deal of socio-economic, political and cultural injustices, last month was  a moment of mourning the death of more than twenty seven innocent people including children who were slaughtered by the Ethiopian government army  in  broad day light at Kofale in South Central  Oromia. It was also the period when the UN Convention 1951 Relating to the Status of Refugees was proved to have practically failed to protect the Oromo seeking sanctuary in other countries. This was revealed by kidnapping and subsequent killings of Oromo refugees by the Ethiopian security forces. Despite such gruesome violations of human rights, some of the Western governments kept on providing the dictatorial regime, to the detriment of the oppressed, with technical and financial support. These simmering bitter groanings have drawn thousands of Oromo men and women to the streets throughout Europe and North America since August 2013.
One of those mass demonstrations occurred in the UK. Disgruntled by the recent massacre of innocent people and continuous violations of human rights, the Oromo gathered by the Houses of Parliament in London on 13th   September 2013 and vented peremptorily:
UK tax payers’ money is funding Genocide in Oromia! 
Ethiopian government is terrorizing the Oromo!
The Oromo are counting on the British People!
Stop assisting despots in Ethiopia!
Oromo, the largest nation in East Africa has gone through one ordeal of suppression after another since the last quarter of the 19th Century. Supported, unfortunately, by the Anglo-Franch and Italian colonizers, the Abyssinian emperors had committed horrendous atrocities against the Oromo nation since 1882. For instance, more than 13,000 innocent people were killed over night at a district called Annole in Arsi province1886 during the conquest of Menelik II that was attended by the use of biological weapons and claimed the life of nearly half of the nation’s population. In those days, there were no global human rights organisations, the United Nations was not born, and the Universal Declarations of Human Rights was many years away from being conceived. Ever since, nonetheless, the world has gone through a great deal of structural and institutional changes in terms of human rights protection. Some dictators seem to have received a mounting persuasion and, sometimes, coercion from the “democratic” governments in the West with the intention to promote human rights. Unluckily, life for the Oromo under the Ethiopia regime, however, has remained the same, dare I say it, even worse!
Following the footsteps of its predecessors, the current Ethiopian government has gone to extreme lengths in Human Rights violations. A hundred and twenty seven years after the Annole Holocaust, a tragic event where blameless Oromo children, older men and women were massacred by the Ethiopian troops at Kofale, in the same province of Arsi on 3 August 2013.  Six decades after the promulgation and enforcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, more than five thousand Oromo men and women have been tortured to death and more than 20,000 have languished in prisons and concentration camps only because of their opinion. More than half a century after the UN Convention 1951 Relating to the Status of Refugees, Oromo refugees in the neighboring countries have been abducted and murdered by the Ethiopian undercover security. One of such pernicious examples is the murder of engineer Tesfahun Chemda[1].
Murdering innocent civilians should, I strongly believe, be considered despicable acts of terrorism and supporting such killers definitely equates funding terrorism. Even though the people butchered by the Ethiopian security forces were innocent civilians as those killed during the terrorists’ attack of the West Gate Shopping Mall in Nairobi-Kenya, the ordeal of the former remained hidden from the world. The Ethiopian government’s ruthlessness did not trigger anger in the White House nor in Downing Street. I am not entirely sure the UK government, which provides the Ethiopian government with financial aid of £500,000,000 each year[2], condemned the Kofale massacre of August 2013 as “sickening and despicable and appalling brutality”. Neither did the US lambaste the massacre as horrifying acts of human rights violation.
Well, you might wonder why such dreadful violations of human rights seemed to have remained concealed from the world.  There are combinations of different reasons in my opinion. First of all, the sufferings of the Oromo are not mesmerizing enough to make news in the BBC and the CNN these days because the Ethiopian authorities are so subtle that they use conventional weapons, not chemical ones, to kill the Oromo.
The victims are just shot dead, not suffocated by nerve gas or saran gas as in the case of Syria that has dominated the global media. Second, the Oromo do not do suicide bombings in response to the government’s violations of basic rights. Make no mistake; it is not because we are submissive to the injustice, but because we have strong sentimental respect and value or human life, especially of innocent civilians, that are seeped deep into our psyche.
It is very unfortunate that we happen to be living in the world where politeness and respect for human dignity fail to payoff.  Thus, the atrocities and genocide committed by the dictatorial regime does not easily bewitch the attention of global media giants. As a matter of fact, it has been more than a decade since all free electronic and print media were banned. Hundreds of national journalists who dared to expose the situation have worked their ways to jail and threatened to flee the country. Foreign media are not allowed to operate in the country and attempts to report undercover might result in severe ramifications. No one knows this fact better than Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson, the Swedish journalists who were jailed in Ethiopia for more than 400 days in an Ethiopian prison from between 2011 and 2012.
It is such a pity to see the western democratic countries funding the Ethiopian government. Many of us are a bit annoyed that countries like the UK and the USA are so wedded to providing the Ethiopian dictatorial regime turning a deaf ear and blind eye to the genocide and other gross violations of Human Rights. Isn’t this a shocking state of affairs and a horrendous way to spend the UK and the USA taxpayers’ money?  Please do not get me wrong, I am not against the generosity of these blessed nations however the aid should not be given to and /or used as an instrument of oppression. The Western governments bestowing the money ought to, at least, make sure that the donation is spent against measurable benchmarks of human rights and the will of the subject. This should be augmented by some form of retributive measurers without whom growing disaffection with the west might mature to another, perhaps, more costly phase that could exacerbate the worsening instability in the Horn of Africa.

[1] http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/ethiopian-repression-muslim-protests-must-stop-2013-08-08
[2]  http://www.voanews.com/content/ethiopia-is-top-uk-aid-recipient-117204413/157544.html.