These untended wounds were ingested only to be passed down to their children. Pain birthing pain, my parent’s generation not only had to cope with their parents’ burdens, they eventually witnessed the Derg rise to power under the pretense of standing for the people only to bury them in unmarked graves. The horrors of Mussolini were revisited upon Ethiopia in the 1970’s and 80’s, except this time the despot was not an Italian hooligan but a home-grown hoodlum.
Mengistu killed and hacked his way into authority only to commit a genocide in order to retain power. More than 500,000 Ethiopians were murdered by the Derg and those who survived were traumatized in ways that we have yet to fully grasp. It was during this era that we learned to mistrust one another, a campaign of rumors and innuendo turned neighbor against neighbor. To survive, we learned to smile outwardly and hide our true feelings; a wrong word uttered or something spoken taken out of context could lead to a death sentence. Elders, scholars and keepers of our traditions were murdered by the thousands, a vacuum was created that would later balloon into a chasm.
After seventeen years of terror, the TPLF arrived promising liberation. Though they told us by the name they retain to this day that the liberation they espoused was never for all Ethiopians nor even for the average Tigrayans. Three decades after they marched on 4 kilo to Addis Abeba, they left behind a legacy of terror that did not match the body count of the Derg but exceeded its malice. Their ideology of sectarianism indoctrinating a generation of Ethiopians to think about ethnicity first and turned our common humanity into an afterthought.
One government giving way to the next, each one worse than its predecessor. At each turn, we take to the streets and demand justice only to be ignored by the world and the only rewards for our toils are corns on our feet from marching and horsed voices from shouting. We have turned into a nation of individual grievances who refuse to listen to others who hurt. This is not to diminish the suffering of Ethiopians ...continued...
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