Ethiopia – As the world solemnly remembers the victims of Auschwitz’s gas chambers victims few weeks ago, we feel compelled to reflect on whether humanity has truly learned from the past and we question if the world is taking concrete steps to ensure that atrocities of a similar nature and magnitude would never take place again. Auschwitz did not happen in a vacuum, nor was it born from an overnight thought. But It was a culmination of years of systemic victimization, propaganda, and dehumanization of the Jewish people.
The world had tolerated the labelling and oppression of Jews for years. The world kept silent while Jews were deprived of their rights, expropriated, and forcibly removed from their homes in Germany. The world was mute when they were branded as vermin and parasites, and hate towards them was made normal through months and years of propaganda. Auschwitz was the terrible result of a long apathy, complacency, and failure to act.
History is repeating itself today in Ethiopia, where the Amhara people face a disturbingly similar trajectory of persecution while the world looks on in complete silence. Successive governments have indulged in genocidal propaganda to vilify the Amhara people.
For at least three decades, educational curricula in schools and other governmental institutions in Ethiopia have been used to propagate narratives: that the Amhara are enemies of other ethnic groups. Ethiopia’s ruling elites, particularly in the past three decades, have allowed a systematic erosion of the Amharic language, culture, and world-view, rooted in the erroneous perception as a mechanism of control forcibly imposed on other groups.
State-sponsored propaganda has been portraying Amhara populations as subjugating others in the most brutal manner. Considering that war and conflict are a shared, rather complex history that most nations, including Ethiopia, struggle with, Amharas were singled out to be seen as aggressors for no other reason but political expediency.
This silenced facts that the Amhara themselves, like others, were also victims and participants throughout the history of Ethiopia. At the same time, any challenge to the false narratives, views, and facts have been sidelined and silenced. Whilst this has been propaganda the world now watching when the campaign has reached a stage when an open genocide and persecution of the Amhara people continues unabated.
Forcible expropriation and displacements of the Amhara people have become common stories. massacres and mass killings of the Amhara people have been documented throughout Ethiopia, and amid the country’s recent conflicts, government soldiers have been implicated in atrocities, and gross human rights violations of Amhara civilians including indiscriminate slaughter, gang rapes, and deliberate destruction of property.
The loud echoes of the cries in Auschwitz are heard all over Ethiopia in concentration camps where the Amharas are kept in inhumane conditions and subjected to unimaginable suffering. Shocking photos reveal the horrific state of Amharas detained in Abiy AhmedAli’s concentration camps. In TuluDimtu, Amhara prisoners reportedly are suffering illness with outbreaks of communicable disease.
The cries of innocent people, the blood spilled unnecessarily and the suffering for no reason other than their ethnicity is just too obvious to remind us of Auschwitz and difficult to ignore. Just as the silence of the world then enabled the persecution to escalate into an open genocide, the silence of the world today is allowing the suffering of the Amhara to persist and deteriorate.
The deafening silence to the screaming voices of innocent civilians who are subjected to suffering and the indifference of those who look away and the same indifference in history warns us of the worst that may follow. The deafening indifference of the world, the same indifference with which history warns will lead to extermination and devastation.
