By Tsegaye Ararssa

And now, … EPRDF blames the OPDO for the unrest, the massive acts of killing, the mass detention (now in the thousands). And the propaganda machine, elite politicos, elite TPLF apologists, and the Ethio elite in general (even those whom I considered sensible thus far) blame the Oromo people for resisting the master plan; they are presented as being ignorant, uninformed mass that is tossed around by OLF.

And all Oromo parties–OPDO, ONC/OFDM, ODF, are OLF now. (And of course OLF is the ultimate enemy, the embodiment of evil itself, right? Oh yes, they are supported by Eritrea and other ‘historic enemies’ of Ethiopia, too.) Never mind some regret that OLF has such a compelling ‘presence’ in Oromia and even on OPDO.

(I thought OLF is legally a terrorist organization. But it must be a powerfully resilient ghost, then! And the ghost is visible to TPLF and other ultra racist ethio-elite. Could this be the foretaste of the nightmare to come? Have they started to be haunted? Or is it that what we should do whenever the public resistance is against our own personal and group interest, we have to find an OLF ghost to blame.) … Which reminds me that, according to EPRDF’s book, the party/the government never errs.(Never mind their ‘criticism-self-criticism’ rhetoric of the 70s and 80s.) Popular resistance comes from the misinformed public.

It is always the people’s mistake to resist bad policies. If people resist, here is what you do: co-opt some cadres and force them to implement it. If that doesn’t work, force the public into a meeting and tell it to them. If that doesn’t work, imprison/kill those who express disagreement. If not, raid a city, a locality, kill as much and imprison in thousands (tens of thousands!) to create a mass terror. Then, do a media report saying ‘some terrorist/extremist/ narrow nationalist/ and what not’ elements agitated the mass into resistance. Then gather people and demand that they express remorse about the resistance and that they give absolute support to the planned policy.

… The cycle goes on. … Was I surprised? Ehmm, not really. That has always been the case.The people reject them by votes (as in 2005), they respond: oh, the people were mistaken! (Duh, in a democracy [I am assuming too much, I know!]; people’s error is preferred to leaders’!) The Muslims resist the imported religious education, oh the Muslim public is mistaken. People resist dispossession, oh, they are mistaken because they heard some extremist facebookers in the diaspora.

… Welcome to the old world of infallible (vanguard) parties and fallible people. The people has paid the cost of their fallibility (and the parties infallibility) thus far. But there won’t be enough to pay after a while. And the infallible party will soon start to pay for it. And the elite that commit and sponsor the violence may be able to pay their way out of the consequences for a while. Even for them, there will come a time when they won’t have enough to pay. In the mean time, where is the country heading? (Oh, I can’t talk about country. I am an Oromo, remember?)