Thinking About the Ethiopian condition: A Transitional Proposal.

02-23-2022

By Teodros Kiros (Ph.D.)

Writing this piece continues to give me heartache.  My heart weeps as I reflect on an inevitable doom.  But nothing is permanent, least of all, we humans, whose actions, dreams, and imaginations are as impermanent as human life itself, at least the material part, the body, indeed, the body is subject to death.  it is only, the soul, for those who believe in it, which is deathless. 

For years, I took pride in being an Ethiopian.  I continue to do so.  Ethiopia is my blood, my veins, and my arteries. My ancestors gave us, Kemet, the land of the Black Pharaohs, who gave us, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, astronomy, architecture, and much else, and later the pyramids built on geometrical precision, and eventually, the Great Axum, with the Geez alphabets, gold coins, Christianity itself, further complimented by the churches in Lalibela, the profound proverbs and songs, of the Oromos, anchored on the lush and green of the Ethiopian South.  All these wonders of the world are the achievements of the Great Ethiopians from the North and South, West and East.

My heart throbs as I enumerate the achievements of this historic people, where Dinkenesh roamed 3. 5 million years ago, and where the six fossils of the human species remain, and from where Whites and blacks originated, from a single human cell, which gave us the racial differentiation about which we fight.

When I think about the current war in modern Ethiopia, I am taken back to reflect on historic Ethiopia, on the verge of fragmentation.   May I humbly make the following transitional proposal, to end the war between Tigray and the rest of  Ethiopia, that we consider the possibility of retaining the name and symbol of Great Ethiopia to be shared by all the nationalities who live there, and divide Ethiopia into the North and South, and identify its inhabitants as Northern Ethiopians and Southern Ethiopians, if they prefer,  and end the war, and learn how to live together, and then one day, reconstruct Indivisible Ethiopia.

The separation which I propose could be exacted by intelligent negotiation for saving Ethiopian lives.  The regime in power should come to the negotiating table and hammer out the details of the separation, as in the divorce situation.  Force will only increase the impending trauma. With every death, the wounds of war will germinate the scars which never heal.  If We Ethiopians love our country, let us temporarily divide it into parts, who can live as neighbors. 

This is an option which is worth deeply attending to.

So much blood has been shed. So many Tigreans have been raped, thrown into ravines, and systematically chosen for annihilation, and these tragedies will be long remembered as traumas, and be sedimented on the unconscious of the victims, the t doctors, and therapists will take years to provide needed treatments.   At this stage of the rising tragedy, we can only hope for neighborliness and pray to the Transcendent to heal us through the medium of time. It is only time that can heal the wounds of war.