2/22/2022
Paulos Irgau
Here is the deal. The famed historian Bahru Zewdie in his book, “A History of Modern Ethiopia: 1855-1991” captures the fall of Welayta’s last King when he said, “….In 1894, the powerful Southern Kingdom Welayta was incorporated into [Menilik’s Empire] after one of the bloodiest campaigns of the whole process of expansion. Kawa [King] Tona had come to power on a tide of popular support as a result of his rejection of his predecessor’s advice to submit and led Welayta resistance. The proverbial fertility of the region was alluring to Menilik’s troops in the wake of the Great Famine of 1888 to 1892, which covered large parts of Ethiopia. Menilik personally led the campaign when he was accompanied by his generals and in the face of a formidable array of forces, Welayta resistance collapsed, and a veritable massacre followed. In the words of the eyewitness J.G. Vanderheym: ‘One had the feeling of witnessing some kind of infernal hunting where human beings rather than animals served as a game.’ Tona’s refusal to surrender aggravated the human tragedy. The campaign came to an end when he was finally wounded, captured and brought to Addis Ababa.”
Almost a century later in 1991, Welayta arrived at a reckoning moment and had to make a choice between revanchism, and a reconciliation based on entering into a negotiated sacred document enshrined on an Ethnic Federalism. It chose the latter precisely because as Ghandi once put it, eye for an eye makes the world blind. I concur.
Thirty years later, Menilikites are back after a protracted slumber draped in a clever pretense when Tigray mistook them for a bona fide compatriot when they had been bidding for their time to bite the hand that had fed them at the expense of Tigray in particular.
What is even extraordinary is that the former Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn who hails from Welayta not only gave a supporting hand to the rise of the Menilikites but blessed it when he said it was a divine intervention. An intervention to decimate Tigray including a massacre tantamount to what had taken place in his own Welayta a century ago. And yesterday, Hailemariam had the audacity to bemoan and chastise the ‘warmongering lot’ when he elected a deafening silence when Abiy Ahmed declared an all-out war on Tigray a year and half ago.
The holier than thou sudden attitude is not a moral clarity but a symptom of a wounded animal when Abiy Ahmed is shunned like a “leper colony” particularly when he tried to beg by prostrating at the feet of those he had just vilified with his “No-More” stupidity. Absolution doesn’t cut it unless otherwise Tigray is left alone after Tigray holds all those who had done bad to her to account including those who had extended a helping hand either with a complete silence or with an open vitriolic attack. There is no place for a short memory in Tigray.