Rebutting racist slander of Zimbabwe, Ethiopia
By Debru Negash Afrasa (M.D.)
Of late, Ethiomedia’s publication of banal and bizarre articles that have nothing to do with Ethiopian or African affairs must have baffled many. As if that is not enough, it published a vulgar, contemptuous and outrageously racist piece directed at Africans in general and Ethiopians in particular.
By so doing, its editors have willfully injured the dignities and sensibilities of Ethiopians and Africans across the whole world.
That the appallingly insolent article, "Africa is giving nothing to anyone, apart from Aids," saw the light of day on Ethiomedia on July 11, should enrage even the most unpatriotic and servile Ethiopian.
One wonders how Ethiopian editors could allow this otherwise wonderful medium to be used as a launch pad for a ferocious racist to unleash such an unprovoked assault on us and our motherland.
It is an act of outright treason. On that score, Ethiopians must demand an unconditional apology.
Ethiomedia’s other folly is duplicity. It failed for instance to reprint a balanced article on the causes of Zimbabwe’s predicaments authored by a well-informed and conscientious South African scholar recently.
Instead, it has been publishing a barrage of anti-Zimbabwe propaganda aimed at misrepresenting the realities of that country.
None of ethiomedia’s reprints from the partisan tabloid Press on Zimbabwe ever made any reference to that country’s remarkable achievements in the past.
All those who are in the know admire the leadership of the small African country that in just two decades of independence had shamed the oldest nation states in Africa in terms of achieving the highest literacy rates and widest health service coverage.
Zimbabwe’s woes began when its Government decided to ensure equitable distribution of the country’s resources to all its citizens.
The wrath of the man who so revoltingly insulted us and vilified the Zimbabwean leadership in passing, emanate from his primal racist worldview that is premised on the belief that Africans have no right to redress historical injustices. Racist bigotry after all, is the domain of the primitive mind.
This writer abhors any violations of the rights of man irrespective of who by such crimes are perpetrated.
However, ethiomedia’s selective morality is bemusing. Not once has this reader ever glimpsed at the pages of Ethiomedia to find anything about the mind-boggling atrocities some nations commit with impunity against those they deem inferior.
Robert Mugabe, like many mortals may have his failings. Over 100 people allegedly lost their lives in connection with land restitution exercise including 12 Zimbabweans of European descent. Certainly, any life unjustly lost is one life too many.
However, over half a million Ethiopians were killed during the so-called 1974 revolution and its aftermath. Equitable land distribution was also at the heart of the upheaval.
India too underwent an even grander convulsion over land after its independence. Why then such a frenzy over Zimbabwe? Why such a virulent attack on its leader?
Is it not because of the belief of those constitutionally perverted racists who wish to also preserve their monopoly over everything in Zimbabwe?
Ethiopia’s lessons to Europe and humanity at large
Let the ill-informed and dare I say narcissistic Kevin Meyer, browse through the archives of famines in Europe. He will embarrassingly discover that Ethiopia, the very country that he so brutally insulted had come to the rescue of Europe after the second European War.
Indeed, Ethiopia fed much of Europe from Greece, Germany, and the Netherlands to Britain. It is not in them to parade the good deeds of their forebears committed in the demands of their conscience.
Let those Eurocentric zealots like Meyer, who have no sense of history take note. For the record, Ethiopia gave refuge to thousands of Armenian survivors of the Turkish genocide.
Several thousand Greeks who have been savaged by unjust Ottoman rule were also given refuge by Ethiopia when Europe abandoned them.
Ethiopians protected, sheltered and fed several thousand Fascist Italian soldiers after their ignominious defeat.
And thousands, who preferred Ethiopia to Italy, were magnanimously granted permission to live in freedom and dignity in the country they came to colonise. The list of Ethiopia’s lesson to humanity and Europe in particular, is long.
Islam was worshiped for the first time in freedom in Christian Ethiopia over 13 centuries ago. It was to the country of the pious Ethiopians and their equally pious Christian emperor that Prophet Mohamed (peace be upon him) directed his followers, to seek refuge.
Hundreds of his followers who fled the violent persecution in Arabia were welcomed by their Christian hosts in our great country.
Compare this with what used to happen a thousand years later in Europe where people were quartered or burned alive for alleged heresy or for belonging to the wrong Christian denomination or for being Jews.
If Meyer had a mind and some decency, he would have looked into the various underlying factors that have created Ethiopia’s dire socioeconomic situation over the last three and half decades.
The long civil strife and wars along with bad governance have weakened the country profoundly.
The land tenure system that denies ownership and title deed, without which no credit facilities can be accessed, is another very important economic bottleneck in Ethiopia’s agriculture that Meyer and his ilk seemingly never wish addressed.
The writer is a former lecturer with the College of Medicine at the University of Zimbabwe.
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