Hassan Keynan

Hailemariam Desalegn, Former PM of Etiopia

The piece published in Foreign Policy today – Ethiopia’s Government and the TPLF Leadership Are Not Morally Equivalent – is obviously well timed to preempt or deflect any criticism or inconvenient truths the planned UN Security Council meeting this afternoon on the civil war in Ethiopia may throw up. The piece may or may not have been authored by Ato Haile Mariam Desalegn. It bears his name but there is mention of a US-based lobby firm being involved in crafting the piece. Whatever the truth, Haile Mariam Desalegn seems to suffer from a perennial affliction which is the curse of the Ethiopian political class:  Selective amnesia, selective silence, selective outrage.

Haile Mariam Desalegn is the man who said he was unaware of the existence of  Jail Ogaden and the two-decade long Crimson Terror that EPRDF/TPLF unleashed across the vast plains of the Ogaden on his watch both as Deputy Prime Minister to Meles Zenawi and Prime Minister (2012-2018). The current Prime Minister was also a senior Military Intelligence Officer at that time, and therefore complicit in the atrocity crimes perpetrated in the Ogaden. Jail Ogaden constituted labyrinths of infernal terror and torment that conjure up images of the archetypal categories of hell described in scripture and classical literary work.

The methods, tools and techniques for mass incarceration, torture, mass humiliation, and mass slaughter pioneered and perfected at Jail Ogaden were rolled out and scaled up across 6 of the 9 Zones in the Somali Regional State (SRS) inhabited by 2.4 million people. The Jail Ogaden in Jigjiga was transformed into a vast open prison-house during the signature EPRDF Terror campaign I refer to as Crimson Terror.

Approximately 60,000 innocent civilians were murdered in the vast killing fields of the Ogaden.    Some estimates put the number at 100,000. Garroting was widely used as a method of execution. And in Jail Ogaden when a victim was tortured to death the murderers cheered, in Amharic, “A bulb burned out.” Mass starvation & systematic rape were used as weapons of war as revealed in diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. Schools and health facilities were transformed into military bases and prisons. Food donated by the international community was seized by the military and sold to traders in neighboring countries.  Wells were capped. Many villages and towns were burned as documented by human rights organizations. Over 250,000 fled to Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia and Yemen.

The entire machinery of the Ethiopian State was mobilized and deployed to execute the Crimson Terror Campaign. Even the courts were complicit in the commission of these savage state-sponsored atrocity crimes.

Jail Ogaden and the entire Crimson Terror campaign across the Ogaden are now recognized as Ethiopia’s contribution to the infrastructure, implements, methodology, and terminology of mass slaughter, and arguably even genocide.

Haile Mariam Desalegn saw no evil and heard no evil when tens of thousands were slaughtered and entire communities were wiped out by the Ethiopian Defense Forces across the vast killing fields in the Ogaden when he was in power as the TPLF’s right hand man and its handpicked Deputy Prime Minister to TPLF Guru, Meles Zenawi.

Now he says he remembers that the TPLF is “a criminal enterprise.”  If he had an iota of moral fiber or a modicum of human decency in him, Ato Hailematiam would have intervened when tens of thousands were sagely slaughtered on his watch. Selective & convenient outrage is the hallmark of cowards.

Tyranny has deeper roots in Ethiopia.

May freedom prevail in the prison-house of nations and everywhere in our world where tyranny has a foothold.

Hassan Keynan is a former Professor and a senior retired UN official who worked in Africa, Asia and Europe