The Appalling 'Ethiopian' Tyranny as lived in Occupied Sidama Land

Intending to shed more light on the totalitarian practices of the Abyssinian invaders of the Sidama Land and the other southern territories, I will publish a series of enlightening articles written by the Sidama Leader Kambata Xoola, Chairman of the Sidama National Liberation Organization (SNLO). Chairman Xoola's first article focuses on the interaction of the political and the socio-economic policies of discrimination, revealing the tragic conditions under which 5 million Sidamas still live, because the Amhara and Tigray Abyssinian robbers methodically steal all the natural resources of the occupied Sidama Land.

Sidama Land – Human Rights Abuses, Poverty, and Socio-economic Marasm

By Kambata Xoola, Chairman of the Sidama National Liberation Organization

Recent developments in the Sidama Land, still occupied by the Abyssinian invaders, reveal that the Sidama nation continues suffering all types of injustices, while its rich resources are ceaselessly stripped away by the brutal colonial settlers and the few selected puppets of theirs. There is no progress at all as regards the country's socio-economic standards, and development seems to be prohibited notion for the occupied Sidama Land.

In striking contrast with almost the entire world, life standards in both, urban and rural areas, are sharply deteriorating. The farmers whose lives depend on subsistent agriculture are seriously affected by the extended expropriation of their lands and natural resources. Furthermore, social, political, cultural, and educational oppression generates an environment whereby every socio-economic activity is either prohibited to Sidamas or beneficial to Amhara and Tigray settlers. The entire Sidama nation lives under conditions of severe imprisonment.

Unemployment remains one of the highest in the colonial empire of Abyssinia and the few Sidamas who fill the gaps in the highly corrupt "governmental" offices are obliged to be members of the Abyssinian colonial political establishments. Contrarily, Abyssinian colonial settlers in Sidama Land are immediately employed.

In the occupied, deliberately impoverished and methodically tyrannized Sidama Land, if Sidama nationals refuse to become an Abyssinian (Amhara and/or Tigray) party member, they risk their position, as they can be automatically fired, and then never find any employment opportunity, as they become automatically blacklisted. Many Sidama nationals, who refused the most dishonoured position of an Abyssinian party member, ended up facing intimidation, harassments, imprisonment and/or death.

Life expectancy for Sidamas is getting slimmer. For millions of tyrannized and dispossessed Sidamas, nutrition is limited exclusively in few pieces of bread per day. Even worse, this little is often out of the reach for the hundreds of thousands of Sidamas who live with lees than half a dollar per day. Starvation has become endemic, and the occupied Sidama Land faces the most inimical treatment at the hands of the thuggish and criminal Zenawi administration.

Even if we refer to what the Zenawi administration arrogantly boasts as achievements, we can immediately realize that none of them is to be found in the occupied Sidama Land. In this regard, it is essential to specify that economic discrimination takes the form of exclusion of the Sidama Land from almost all the technological achievements of the 20th century.

The Abyssinian regime views Sidama Land as a rich occupied land from where the invaders and current rulers can extract all natural resources permanently and to do so they terrorize, dehumanize, and bestialize the Sidama nationals. As a matter of fact, the Abyssinian rulers always viewed the Sidama nation as a danger to its terrorising reign and criminal plans.

The reason is simple; the rocky and impossible to cultivate mountains of the land of the Abyssinian invaders, the current provinces of Tigray and Amhara, are not able to offer them what is needed to sustain them, without them working hard. Oppression of other nations is the only method of daily work they have learned over the past 100 years.

All the achievements of the Abyssinian regime in the Tigray province have been materialized due to natural resources expropriated and money stolen from the occupied Sidama Land. Socio-economic discrimination can take at times absolute forms. In fact, the political discrimination is not the target but the medium; it precedes the economic discrimination and the illegal confiscation of another country's natural resources. It helps the Abyssinian terrorists materialize their economic targets, which are merely a generalized theft.

Consequently, the Sidama People don’t have any voice in their own motherland of which they are the only legitimate proprietors. The political power, economic decision making, and the socio-cultural dominance entirely remain at the hands of the Abyssinian colonisers and their puppets, the few Sidamas who scramble for what is the leftover of their ignorant and brutish masters. These few Sidama collaborators cannot realize that their masters' slogan of "one Ethiopia" aims at dehumanising the nations of their colonies.

The Southern Province of the Abyssinian Tyranny: A Cemetery of Nations

Amorphously amalgamated, the nations of southern 'Ethiopia' suffer much more than others who are under the Abyssinian barbaric colonial rule. In addition to the sufferings other colonies (like Oromia, Ogaden, and Afar Land) are undergoing at the hands of the obdurate Abyssinian rulers, the different southern Ethiopian nations have distinct socio-political identities and particular cultural values. The Sidamas are only one of these nations.

It is completely improper to include different nations within one province as the phenomenon helps only raise tensions. However, the Abyssinian dictators intentionally created a dysfunctional entity in order to let many different nations fumigate in the oven named 'Southern Ethiopian Nations and Nationalities Regional States’. The name itself is invalid and fallacious.

The evil Abyssinian tyrannical intention was to manage to rule the various nations therein regrouped by turning them against one another. This helps the Abyssinian tyrants calmly exploit the abundant resources of the lands, which is their main objective.

The daily lives of the criminal Abyssinians (Amharas and Tigrays) are mostly based on the resources confiscated from the so-called Southern Ethiopian nations, including the Sidama. The method is practiced elsewhere; in Ogaden, in Oromia and in Afar Land.

Amhara and Tigray settlers, criminal colons, are therefore dispersed throughout the colonized lands where – with the continual support of their army – they contribute to the colonial patchwork of plundering resources and suppressing the development and the progress of the colonized nations.

The nations of the southern region (including the Sidama, the Sheko, the Kaffa, the Wolayta, the Kambata, and others) are brought together because the Abyssinian colonial empire targeted their precious and rich resources. These all regions don’t get any benefit from their natural resources of which they are the only legitimate owners; they are reduced to shadows, they have no voice and no decision making power.

The decision making power entirely remains at the hands of the occupiers, and the so called 'regional Abyssinian representative cadres' who are sent there to make the lives of the indigenous nations as worsw as possible. Read: http://www.sidama.org/documents/continued_civil_war_in_ethiopia.pdf

Only the colonial settlers and their puppets, who form together the pseudo-regional governments, have the chance to live a respectable life, which happens of course at the prejudice of the impoverished and dispossessed masses. As the prices have gone higher, the outright majority of these nations are condemned to starvation.

One hundred kg of maize, which was under 100 Ethiopian birr a decade ago, reached already over 500 Ethiopian birr. As the average income of the Ethiopian civil servants remains terribly low, between 600 and 800 Ethiopian birr per month (US $ 66 - $ 88 per month), it is very difficult for the urban populations to sustain their family life.

As the threat of massive starvation is very real, this humanitarian tragedy for over 75 million people seems to be given a blind eye by tyrant Zenawi's Western allies, namely the US and the UK.

Note
Picture: Sidama children