Reflecting on the inauthenticity and superficiality of the Joint agreement

Teodros Kiros ( Ph.D.)

My reflection here is a continuation of my recent statements in Rendezvous with Victory,  Perpetual Peace and most recently  Eritrea’s Dictator- Isaias Must  Go. I now would like to delve deeper into the nature and goal of the Agreement.

Women’s  uteruses were savaged by blades put inside them so that they will not bear Tigrean children.   Older Tigreans were burned alive and then thrown to ravines.  Babies were bombed by drones and planes. Cities and villages were flattened to the ground. Priests and churches were destroyed. Hard earned money was blocked in banks.  People were starved to die with pictures of mothers who cannot nurse their famished babies.  Mothers were compelled to kiss off their children to die in the war.

These  few examples are tragic. Tragedies have a language of their own. Historically they take the form of wars and long after the wars are over, traumas are stored in the human body and fester there, as sources of anxiety and depression. Those traumas are intergenerationally sedimented in the body and recorded as memories by the brain. The world is by now informed by the  Jewish Holocaust and recently the Rwandan genocide.  These world shaking events  have left deep cuts in our human hearts and yet we continue to generate them endlessly.  Power mongers produce these wars and use the poor, the marginalized, the alienated and the systematically conditioned individuals who participate in these tragedies as if they are orgies.

For years race has been used to mask the banality of evil as we learned from the history of slavery. We now know better.  That race is only a mask of human cruelty. Rwanda, and now Ethiopia have taught us that human cruelty becomes banal when it is organized by thoughtlessness.  Individuals from the same race but different tribes continue to sponsor barbarism in Ethiopia.

The joint agreement which was handled  coldly as if it was an International trade agreement, without passion, remorse and moral shame. If the agreement was serious it should have begam with a heartfelt moment of silence for the thousands of people who continue to die in this unnecessary war. They should have been remembered, and the generals who prevailed over these wars should have wept.  This tragic war deserved existential seriousness.

As if this absence of seriousness was not sufficiently disturbing, a superficial agreement was rushed in ten days, without focus by a few negotiators in my name. The correct procedure should have been  addressing two themes as starters.

(1)          Silencing  the Guns

(2)          Unconditional provision of basic services to the people of Tigray.

A serious negotiation of these should have been what the negotiators are mandated to do and take to the people for further discussions.

This is exactly what should have happened which did not. Instead we were given a hodgepodge of proposals which are going nowhere.