Ogaden 2007 – What to do

The following is the integral text of a speech given at the Helsinki Annual Conference of the Communauté Ogaden en Europe (Ogaden Communities in Europe), 2 – 4 August 2007. As the long tyrannized province of Abyssinia borders with all parts of the former united Somalia, Somaliland, Puntland and the occupied part of the Somali South, the risk of an Islamic extremist explosion is real and great; that’s why the International Community, in the light of the recent UN resolution on Darfur, should get immediately involved by means of UN – AU military force in order to avoid both, the perpetration of a second Darfur, and the explosion of Islamic Terrorism’s most incredible volcano.

Mr. Chairman,
Distinct and Honorable Guests – Leaders and Representatives of the Illustrious People of Ogaden,
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for the honour of extending an invitation to my modest person who has not suffered as much as so many millions of Ogadenis have every day and for so many endless decades of Abyssinian, Amhara and Tigray, tyranny.

Apologies for being unable to attend this great event that is expected to shed more light on the unbearable and inhuman situation that prevails these days in Ogaden, being a shame for the entire Mankind.

As I am set to prepare this speech to address your Honorable Conference, I pass in review of the recent events in

1) Global News from Somalia – July 21st
Somalia: Explosions kill 2 in Mogadishu
Somalia: a Government official killed overnight
UN body urges end to use of child soldiers in Uganda and Somalia
Fresh fighting forces thousands more to flee homes in Somalia

2) Unknown Massacres in Ogaden: daily life routine
Extrajudicial executions
Massacres of the innocent and the harmless
Disappearances
Rapes – harassment
Illegal imprisonment
Torture –practiced in particularly inhuman methods
Ill-treatment
Displacement
Intentionally caused starvation
Dispossession – segregation – humiliation

3) A Washington Post editorial – July 21st
Title: The moral hazards of dealing with Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi
From this article I select the following excerpt:
"The most visible U.S. pressure came in the form of a bill, sponsored by Rep. Donald M. Payne (D-N.J.), which would link U.S. aid to Ethiopia's performance on human rights. It passed the House's Africa subcommittee, chaired by Mr. Payne, this week".

4) And the last news from Reuters
"Ethiopia on Friday freed 38 opposition members sentenced to jail this week for treason, inciting violence and trying to overthrow the government, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said. Rights groups and donor governments complained the trial was politically motivated and an attempt to dismantle the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) after they made strong gains at May 2005 elections that spawned deadly protests."

I will start from the last point.

Free people from allover the world had joined forces to denounce the Abyssinia’s partial and unfair Judges’ illegitimate and inhuman purposes. This humanist and well-coordinated, vociferous and fervent reaction brought a positive result in no time. Among others, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) had strongly condemned the sentencing of the leaders of the Coalition for Unity & Democracy (CUD) member of the Alliance for Freedom & Democracy (AFD) to life imprisonment.

It is essential to bear in mind that every coordinated action does bring fruit. We may be living at the times of materialistic consumerism, but if we stick to primordial, human principles and virtues, if we coordinate our voices and activities, we can still make Ogaden and many other places allover the world a beautiful place with free people enjoying a human and rightful society.

I will go back to the Washington Post editorial, adding another excerpt: "Ethiopia is a strategic ally. But it will probably take more work by its hard-pressed civil society, and more pressure from the United States, before it can be called a democratic one."

I am sure you will all agree with me that the lesson is being taken; just 10 months ago the situation was still very bad in Ogaden, but the Washington Post bothered very little, and dedicated no article to that vast country that has it all to become a new member state of the UN and the African Union.

Ogaden has a large surface, a significant population, rich natural resources, and great History. In addition, it is landlocked, being surrounded by multi-divided neighbors. This alone demonstrates how greatly a Free and Independent Ogaden would contribute to a peaceful and progressive Horn of Africa.

How to get there?

Today, Ogaden certainly lives the most difficult moments of its millennia-long history. The paranoid Abyssinian involvement in Somalia was a disaster as conception and a tragedy as execution. At the same time, it revealed in the most spectacular way the unrepresentative character of the tyrannical abode that is un-historically called ‘Ethiopia’. The tribal Tigray regime of Meles Zenawi is being shaken from its foundations.

The tyrannical environment

Whom and what does murderous tyrant Mele Zenawi represent?

Ogadenis amount to almost 10% of the entire country, being mercilessly slaughtered by the Zenawi’s Tigray thugs, his cousins and nephews.

Oromos total 40% of the entire population, and having seen their capital Finfinne (dictatorially re-baptized Addis Ababa) excluded from their administrative zone, face all sorts of discrimination, ethnic, social, cultural, linguistic, and religious.

Sidamas represent 7 – 8% of the country’s population, and after having been peremptorily regrouped along with other peoples in an impersonal and nonsensical ‘Southern Province’, they faced terrible persecution, massacred at Loqqe before 5 years in a most inhuman and repugnant way. No one published in the supposedly civilized and judicious West an article about the Loqqe black page of Africa’s History.

Other southern peoples, and the Afars in the North-East of Abyssinia’s pseudo-empire represent together more than 10% of the country’s population.

One could primarily deduce that Amhara (approx. 20%) and Tigray (approx. 10%) rule tyrannically over Abyssinia’s tyrannized masses. This would consist in an incomplete view of the current circumstances and of the country’s Modern History.

The focus of East African Evil

If Africa’s Semitic intruders, the Abyssinian Amharas and Tigrays, oppressed the numerous Kushitic and Ethiopian indigenous peoples whom they invaded in various stages over the past 120 years, one of the reasons is that oppressive and undemocratic social structures pre-existed already among the Amharas and the Tigrays, in the quasi-barbaric and anachronistic Amhara and Tigray kingdoms of the late Middle Ages.

It is noteworthy that there many Catholic and Protestant missionaries found martyr’s death at the hands of the illiterate and fanaticized, heretic monks and priests, the infamous debteras.

Read the Catholic Encyclopedia Advent (www.newadvent.org / entry ‘Abyssinia’), and you will understand what Personification of Hatred is.

I believe it is my duty to highlight a brief but quite indicative passage (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01075e.htm):

"On 11 December, 1624, the Church of Abyssinia, abjuring the heresy of Eutyches and the schism of Dioscorus, was reunited to the true Church, a union which, unfortunately, proved to be only temporary. In 1632, the Negus Basilides mounted the throne. Addicted as he was to polygamy and to every vice, he showed himself the relentless enemy of Catholicism, and of its moral law. The Jesuits were handed over to the axe of the executioner, and Abyssinia remained closed to the missionaries until 1702." (the underlining is mine)

You may agree with me that Jesuits and other Christian missionaries never met that terrible fate in Ogaden, and other East African Muslim states.

When it comes to religion, the Amharas and the Tigrays are not monolithically heretic Christian Monophysites; there is a disastrously diffused in the West falsehood, due mostly to the fact that the Abyssinian political power was always at the hands of the heretic Christian Monophysitic elite. However, these societies are ultimately bipolar, and utterly oppressive.

Today, the victims of the Amhara and Tigray internal oppression are the Muslims who amount to at least 40% of the Amhara and Tigray populations.

And this tells us everything; the present tyranny’s nucleus evolves around the heretic Monophysitic Christian Amharas and Tigarys, who consequently represent no more than 16 – 17% of the overall population of this Cemetery of Peoples, named ‘Ethiopia".

Saddam Hussein’s Sunni tyranny over the peoples of Iraq was definitely more representative.

What to do.

First - Unity

Unity among Ogadenis is the first imperative choice. All grassroots organizations, cultural associations and political parties, liberation movements, intellectuals and political activists must unite under one frontal organization that will ensure that political and cultural diversity is guaranteed while Unity against an ailing, aggressive oppressor is the top concern.

Second - Outreach

Upon the shoulder of every Ogadeni, and even more so of every Ogadeni abroad, lies the great task of reaching out to the global community; Ogaden’s Illustrious History, Colourful and Diverse Culture, Religious Tolerance, Century-old Multifaceted Tyranny, and Current Unbearable Cruelty must reach every reader, every audience throughout the world.

All the world must understand that Ogaden’s Islam is a tolerant and peaceful religion and social culture that makes the people keen to discover the outer world, and able to tolerate diversities.

In the villages and the cities of Ogaden, you do not see women wearing the black niqab Islamic veil as you definitely do in Cairo, Amman, and Jeddah, the capitals of the supposed friends of the Western World.

At the same time, every event that occurs in the smallest and remotest village in Ogaden must be immediately reported and denounced.

The critical issue that for more than a century Ogaden (or a part of it) has not been asked about its political determination and choice must be focused on. All people allover the earth must come to know that, despite the fact that other parts of the formerly colonized African territories were given access to National Independence, and Self-determination, from Senegal to Namibia, colonized Ogaden undeservedly and inhumanly remains still in 2007 colonized by the world’s most murderous and dysfunctional political fossil.

Perpetuation of the medieval, anachronistic and tribal regime of the bloodthirsty tyrant Zenawi can no longer be tolerated, if people want truly to escape an abysmal descent to Islamic Terrorism proliferation.

Third - An Alarming Warning to the Entire World

It must be made clear to the entire world that, while privileged people in the West live in provocatively luxurious ambiance, millions of human beings in Ogaden are being deprived of rudimentary nutrition, health, education, technological and economic development, freedom, Human Rights, and security, finding themselves at the mercy of the most heinous and cannibalistic squads of a pariah like Zenawi to whom civilized statesmen and diplomats should not even talk, let alone offer economic or military assistance.

Due to the vicinity of Somalia, and because of the paranoid military expedition to Somalia, all bets are off. Lack or delay of international interference will soon bring an Islamic Terror mushroom-like proliferation throughout Africa for which ignorant and suicidal leaders of the West will be held as the only responsible.

All the people around the globe must come to know that practically speaking there are no borders anymore between Somalia and Abyssinia. The message of the clandestine followers of the Islamic Courts of Justice can arrive – and is currently arriving – to any Ogadeni, to any Somali in Puntland, to any Muslim Oromo, to any Muslim Amhara, to any Muslim Tigray and to any Afar. It may sound as sweet as peace and liberation after a century of monarchical, communist, and pseudo-republican tyranny.

And then, the Ogadeni political, intellectual and religious leadership may fail to convince the local population that the moderate and tolerant policy they pursued for decades can possibly bring results.

Instead of the dream of an independent and democratic Ogaden that can still be obtained now through help to ONLF and the other Ogadeni groups and through immediate UN mandate in the entire province, a nightmare may occur before too long.

Instead of the oppressed peoples of Abyssinia forming democratic countries like Ogaden, Biyya Oromo, Sidama Land, a Sinister Islamic Republic of Ethiopia can be materialized when oppressed Ogadenis, Afars and Oromos, and oppressed Muslim Amharas and Muslim Tigrays come to terms that improvement is within reach not on the basis of national statehood but by reason of Islamic Fraternity.

Reasonable and democratic diplomats, leaders, intellectuals and activists in the West must understand and admit that Africa’s current borders – that have been a shame for the entire Mankind – are not sustainable anymore. Left like that, they will end up forming the Southern Wing of the Islamic Caliphate.

UN Mandate in Ogaden

Due to the evident deterioration of the Human Rights condition in Ogaden, the UN must be asked to deliberate and decide on how to detach the tyrannized province of Ogaden from the hands of the Abyssinian cruel tyrants, while isolating the explosive Southern part of Somalia. A series of measures should be taken immediately:
- UN and African Union (AU) soldiers to be deployed in Ogaden – replacing any authority appointed by tyrant Meles Zenawi

- Preparatory work for a Referendum for Independence in Ogaden to be held in December (- monitored by the UN and AU)

- Preparatory work for free elections in Ogaden (possibly by February 2008) – monitored by the UN and AU

- International recognition of Somaliland and Puntland

- International body to reach agreement in the border demarcation between Somaliland and Puntland, and between Puntland and Somalia

- AU soldiers to immediately and totally replace Zenawi’s soldiers in Somalia

- Preparatory work for free elections in Somalia (possibly by December) – monitored by the UN and AU

Even if the Islamic Courts of Justice manage to win the elections, their regime will be properly and effectively isolated, with no chance to fuel extremist purpose and discourse as it has already done.

Independent, Free Ogaden, engaged in the path of Democracy, Tolerance, and Socio-economic Progress is the only means to defeat Islamic Extremism in the Horn of Africa.

The international community must therefore identify in the ONLF and the other Ogadeni organizations, movements and parties its urgently needed interlocutor and partner.

Thank you for your attention.

Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Fatih Universitesi Istanbul – 1996/7
Eastern Mediterranean University – 1994/6