A powerful King lays his eyes on a married woman and he sleeps with her. As it happened, she is married to one of his highly regarded Generals. To make matters worse, the woman gets pregnant. The King concocts a scheme and he asks the General who is in the battlefield to take sometime off and spend a quality time with his wife.
The General, a morally upright and conscientious that he is, he says, he can’t indulge himself while his soldiers are on duty and defending the country [the idea was to have the General to sleep with his wife so that the pregnancy would be taken for his.] The King devises another scheme. He writes a letter to one of the superiors of the General and to have the General take the front line when the soldiers engage the enemy. The General obliges and he dies in the battle. The King marries the woman but the child did not survive.
A prophet comes to the King looking for a council. The prophet tells the King a story of a wealthy man who owned one hundred [many] sheep. And there was a poor man who owned only one lamb. The wealthy man forced the poor man to give up his only lamb so that he can prepare meal for his guests. The poor man obliged. The prophet asks the King if he could render a verdict and deliver justice to the poor man. The King gets furious upon hearing the injustice that had befallen on the poor man and he couldn’t believe that kind of inhuman act actually took place in his kingdom. And the King says, the wealthy man deserves to die. The Prophet says, “The wealthy man who committed the crime is you” pointing his finger at the King.
The King was King David. The married woman was Bathsheba. The General was Uriah, a Hittite. The prophet was Nathan. And the setting was in Jerusalem, circa 1000 B.C. King David was certainly guilty. The guilt, however, had several facets: Criminal Guilt, Moral Guilt, Political Guilt and Metaphysical Guilt.
The criminal guilt is because King David had Urhia killed. The moral guilt is that not only King David had Urhia killed but he slept with Uriah’s wife as well. The political guilt is that King David used his power including the institution of the Monarchy itself to commit a crime and took advantage of the weak position of a married woman. The metaphysical guilt is that King David violated the blessing of God when God chose him to be the anointed King. In the end, King David repents.
The above different [four] guilt facets is taken from a series of lectures that was given by the German Psychiatrist and Existentialist Philosopher, Karl Jaspers, titled, “The Question of the German Guilt” right after the end of World War II.
The Ethiopian Guilt:
Criminal Guilt: Abiy Ahmed committed genocide in Tigray including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He invited a foreign entity [Eritrean] when they committed genocide, gang raped girls and women, burned farmlands, ransacked major infrastructures including factories, businesses centers, hospitals and schools among others. Moreover, Abiy Ahmed is using starvation as a weapon when he locked Tigray under siege for almost two years now. In a bid to appease the Amharas, he handed over a huge chunk of land of Tigray when they had committed not only ethnic based massacre but tampering with the evidence lest it sees the light of day.
Moral Guilt: We all have divine sparks with in us where under the natural law, we are all equal. However, Abiy Ahmed treated Tigreans not only less of citizens of the country but less of humans as well when he used hate crime words and speeches that had propelled the mass killings in Tigray including when Tigreans were pushed off high cliffs and burned alive not to mention thousands of Tigreans as well are languishing in prisons across the country. Moreover, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize when he made a speech saying that he knew what war was like but in a clear moral decadence and depravity, he declared an all out war on Tigray.
The Political Guilt: Abiy Ahmed used the political institutions including the military and the media to declare unjust war on Tigray where the civic and religious institutions as well were on board particularly the latter forwarded its blessings. Moreover, Abiy Ahmed undermined the sublime and sanctity of the Constitution when he mustered special forces of other regions to invade Tigray when he still has cut off Tigray from the rest of the country which contravenes with the spirit and article of the Constitution.
The Metaphysical Guilt: The zealot Pentecostal base in Ethiopia including the self declared quack prophets and the former Prime Minister claimed for God to have chosen Abiy Ahmed to lead the country. Hailemariam Desalegn is on record saying that, Abiy Ahmed’s catapult to power was a divine intervention. It is a cruel joke. Really.
The Good Book says, “..Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves…you will know them by their fruits…” No leader in the history of the country caused so much pain and suffering including spiritual and moral exhaustion like Abiy Ahmed. Historians say, Emperor Tewodros was equally reckless but as far as we know, to the very least, he was not a certified liar. And he never let foreign troops invade the country to commit ethnic cleansing left and right.
Ethiopians in general have a serious reckoning to do. A serious reflection to do. Precisely because what happened in Tigray is a gravely serious matter. Genocide has been committed in Tigray by the very person Ethiopians cheered on, raved about to the extent that when the past was mistaken for twenty seven “dark” long years when it was in fact a golden era in a sharp contrast to where they find themselves in under the man who royally duped them as a man of God when he is anything but.