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Toronto – Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Thursday appeared in the Ethiopian Parliament – over 95 percent of whose members are from the ruling Prosperity Party.
One of the questions he faced from one of the few opposition voices in the parliament, Dr. Abebaw who is from National Movement of Amhara (NaMA), was regarding the situation in the Amhara region.
The question was the government declared that it will take control of the region within two months but now it is more than a year and the government did not manage to control it. Abiy Ahmed made a bluff about it. “We won in the Amhara region and we have been with the people.” He took the question out of the context of the military engagement to a political one. There is no chance for the member of the parliament to not let the Prime Minister distort the questions – as the questions are submitted before his appearance in the parliament.
Abiy Ahmed’s administration has evidently suffered a military and political defeat in the Amhara region. But then again Abiy Ahmed framed the question in a way to make it appear that the struggle between those who seek peace ( in this case “government”) and those who lack “rational” thinking that war is not desirable. He also painted a picture that conversation ( it could be seen in the context of peaceful struggle) is possible in the country while the reality on the ground is different. Anti-war peaceful protest coordinators were arrested and no public peaceful protest is allowed in the country on alleged grounds of “security problem.”
But the major distortion in the response he gave is that he made it sound like the Amhara people do not have legitimate demands. It is like the war is between champions of “development” and those who do not want peace.
Since Abiy Ahmed took over power in 2018, tens of thousands of ethnic Amhara were massacred in the Oromia region of Ethiopia by what is said to be a coordinated campaign by radical ethnic Oromo nationalists and their supporters in the government structures. Hundreds have been kidnapped. There were times when the Federal government and Addis Ababa City Administration jointly imposed a ban on travel from Amhara region to the capital. All that combined to make the demands of Amhara morph into an existential one- and that is what the Fano forces are saying. Fano forces have a massive support in the region and beyond – one of the reasons that their armed struggle against government forces achieved a remarkable military gain.
Watch his response and share your remarks in the comment section
Video : embedded from FBC YouTube channel
Cover photo : screenshot from the video
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