For the record, I want to clarify that I am 19. So I was pretty much a toddler during the whole meles regime, meaning I wasn’t really politically aware.
(PS: THIS IS A VERY LONG RANT SO BEAR WITH ME)

I see a shit ton of dumps on tiktok from people who are so obviously the children of politicians or high ranking government officials, flexing their wealth. Dinners at hotto, brunch at the Sheraton, shopping in Dubai, ALC bottles lined up at Luna, the V8s and military license plates, and of course the classic “VIP car pass” that is truly the cherry on top. And let’s not forget the pics/videos of a policeman saluting them like it genuinely means something.

Every time I see it, I genuinely feel a level of rage incomparable to anything I have ever felt before. Sure, you can’t help the line of work your parents are in, but how do you have the brass neck to post this level of wealth that we ALL know a politician’s salary can’t provide? The audacity to flex stolen tax money TO THE PEOPLE YOU STOLE IT FROM??????IS THAT NOT CRAZY??
Do they not feel even the slightest bit of shame or embarrassment knowing that the Louboutins they’re wearing, or the absurdly expensive bill they just picked up at Marcus or Hotto was actually paid for by the men and women working day in and day out to barely make ends meet for their family? Those men and women who worked tirelessly earned that money. Your parents stole it. And now you’re turning around WITH ZERO SHAME might i add, to flex it in front of the very children of the people your parents stole it from. The fucking IRONY!!!!! THE AUDACITY!!!!!
What angers me even more and actually saddens me at the same time, is people in the comments being sarcastic or saying things like “Please be CBE lakelig,” and it makes me wonder how long, and how bad has the exposure to this level of corruption been for people to just accept it and not have enough anger left in them to fight?
I know for a fact it’s not because they aren’t angry enough. It’s more that they just don’t have enough fight left in them that the anger has hardened into resentment, and the resentment has eventually turned into acceptance. They have just accepted the painful reality that they really can’t change the fact that almost half of their barely there paycheck is going to pad the pockets of a few officials. And it worries me too. Will this anger i feel ever yield into something concrete that it will help reshape the painful truth of my people or will it just just slowly erode into the same resentment, the same exhaustion, and eventually the same acceptance? I hope i don’t, and i hope YOU don’t as well. We need to fight tooth and nail to build a future we can speak of with the same pride we have when we speak of our history. So stop seeing this corruption as a default, let that anger sit within you and have you seething for a great change so no child in the coming generation will have their future determined by their ethnicity.

I don’t think this needs to be explained in depth for anyone with a basic understanding to our movement, but alas I’ve decided I need to write this piece for good measure to ensure the story of how Selaisse actively dismantled any Amhara ethnonationalist base and left us on the backfoot we find ourselves in today is revealed, while our openly hostile political rivals had decades to formulate their dogma.

 

Haile Selassie was not an Amhara nationalistic man, but a feudal autocrat who used everyone, including Amharas. Conveniently there's a story that Somali nationalists, Oromo nationalist historiography, Tigrayan and Eritrean nationalist narratives tell that portray Haile Selassie as the "Amhara king", the ethnic champion of a "Neftegna" ruling class. It's a good story for those movements, as they can portray their own struggles as liberation from Amhara domination. However, it fails to stand up to further questioning. Haile Selassie was no Amhara nationalist. He was a centralizing autocrat, who in his fifty-eight years of rule, eliminated all opposition power centers, including Amhara regional lords, and centralized everything around his person. He slaughtered Amhara patriots, torched Amhara peasants, starved Amhara and Wollo provinces and siphoned off resources to Shoa and Eritrea and operated a court where loyalty to himself, not any ethnicity, was the only thing that counted.

 

The man he hanged: Belay Zeleke

If Haile Selassie, a Ethiopianist, was an Amhara ethnonationalist then Belay Zeleke is exactly the person that Haile Selassie should have celebrated. By the time Addis Ababa was retaken, Belay was one of the many guerrilla leaders of the Arbegnoch, who organized the resistance against Italy from 1936–1941, commanding tens of thousands of fighters in over twenty major engagements. He is considered to be one of the most effective patriotic leaders of the total resistance.

 

When Haile Selassie came back from exile, he put the Amhara hero in a paltry position, he declined in protest and he was arrested when he continued to rule the territory he had liberated. In Addis Ababa, Belay and his own brother were tried and sentenced in January 1945, and were hanged after Belay pledged to submit them on condition of being pardoned. They are not the way a monarch treats his champion of the ethnic citizens. How a despot deals with any commander whose own allegiance is not the same as his.

 

Interestingly, that is also the reason that none of the brigades and regiments in the Fano brigade service exist today that are named after Haile Selassie. Fano units are named after other Arbegnoch patriots, Amhara martyrs of resistance and self-defense, and not after the emperor who killed one of his own. If an Amhara nationalist leader were to be honored by Amharas as an icon, it's what you would expect to see. It’s for this reason Selaisse is ignored while Menelik, Tewodros, Zeleke, Ras Amoraw, and Yekuno Amlak are idolized among the modern fano movement in divisional nicknames but not Selaisse.

 

Bombing of Gojjame Farmers ‘68

Peasants revolted in the districts of Gojjam, Mota and Bichena in 1968 over new tax and land-measurement policies of the imperial government. Selassie responded by dispatching troops to the villages that summer and launching an air force campaign that dropped bombs on several villages and burned homes, a campaign that historians claim was designed to "scare the population into submission”. Many hundreds of people lost their lives. After months of defying the Emperor, the political cost of granting his demands was finally too high in December and the Emperor backed off and cancelled tax arrears. It was one of several such incidents; the Woyane rebellion in Tigray in 1943 was dealt with with British bombers and peasant rebellions continued throughout the 1940s-70s in Wollo over the same issues :  the dispossession of land, the imposition of taxes, the disregard of the peasantry as a constituency served by the state instead of a resource to be extracted from.

An emperor that rules for the benefit of "his" ethnic group will not send bombers against "his" farmers to make them pay taxes. Haile Selassie's rule was by no means an ethnic favoritism. It was a medieval personal-loyalty patronage, given and taken from all ethnicities, that is why it continued to create enemies among the ethnicities it had supposedly "pampered”.

 

Ethnic favouritism in attempts at creating a new elite

Following the UN-brokered federation in 1952, Haile Selassie gradually misappropriated Eritrea's autonomy, dismantling the elected Eritrean government in 1955, introducing Amharic as the language of schools and courts in 1958, prohibiting opposition parties in 1961, and then by the end of 1962, forcing Eritrean federalists to accept the abolition of the federation. He had groomed parts of the Eritrean elite to help him in this endeavor: those who sat in the federal administration and helped to relax Eritrean autonomy from within. The prize of this co-optation was the Eritrean Liberation Front, established in 1960 as this centralization process was in full swing, and by seventeen years the Eritrean war of independence that outlasted the life of the emperor. He did this by deliberately breeding a particular class of Eritrean unionist elite, and promoting them to the front of the crowd. Close to equally devout Christian and Muslim, Tigrinya-speaking unionists were disproportionately enrolled in the government bureaucracy, diplomatic missions, and significantly, university seats in Addis Ababa, which were documented by contemporary observers of Eritrea at that time. Business patronage mirrored this: men such as Haregot Abbai, Eritrea's first mayor (from 1963 to 1974), who was an Eritrean businessman and Asfaha Woldemikael, who ran Eritrea's federal administration from 1955 until 1962 when Haile Selassie dissolved it, were elevated to a position of patron-client authority. Even Haile Selassie promoted Eritreans to the highest positions in the imperial state itself: Eritrean Gen. Aman Andom was a member of the Imperial Senate by Selassie's own appointment. None of this was ethnic solidarity with Eritreans as a people, just the same animus of patronage that he had in all his other places, for which he purchased the loyalty of a particular elite, in order to crush the autonomy of the broader population it was drawn from.

 

The most obvious example among all of them is Tadesse Birru from Shoan Oromo. He was a Shoan Oromo who came from the Shoan system he gently fostered in his regional favouritism and had been promoted to Colonel General in Haile Selassie's Imperial Army, the head of the elite Fetno-Derash special forces, head of the national police modernization, and played a leading role in crushing the 1960 coup attempt — a very "pampered," decorated member of the imperial establishment. He set up the Mecha and Tuluma Self-Help Association for the development of Oromo in 1966–67, which was banned by the regime and he was jailed. He escaped and started to fight with arms in Shoan and is commemorated to date as the father of modern Oromo nationalism; his fighters merged into what now is known as Oromo Liberation Front. The emperor was not responsible for Tadesse Birru's demise due to some rival ethnic project; he nurtured him and broke him and the reaction was the emergence of the OLF.

The destruction of the Amhara warrior aristocracy and stunting Amhara nationalism with it

 

The ethnonationalist narrative requires Haile Selassie to be the enabler of the Amhara (Shoan) feudal privilege. Indeed his entire project after 1941 was to challenge the authority of the “neftegna” landed nobility that this story represents as standing in opposition to him. He abolished the hereditary system in favor of centrally appointed governors, who answer only to him; he established a national army and gendarmerie to replace the old feudal levies; he maintained the imperial treasury as a part of his own household and not as a restraint on his power. Even lords of the Amhara people who may have opposed the emperor independently, such as at Gojjam, Begemder, and Wollo, were either marginalized and/or suppressed, as was the case with Belay Zeleke. Haile Selassie's system was not "Amhara rule. It was the rule of one man, clad in the fairytale of the medieval Solomonic myth, in which the traditional Amhara aristocracy was hollowed out to eliminate other sources of power.

 

Development went along the same lines of neglect for Amhara regions. Shoa, the home of the country's only university, of industrial investment, of the modern state, was the central area, and Addis Ababa;  Gojjam, Gonder, and Wollo, majority Amhara areas, were over-taxed for grain, and under-taxed for industrial investment; and were exposed to just those famines and revolts described above.

Mind you, during those years, the military's focus was on fighting EPLF, right after fighting off major Somali aggression. The war was in Eritrea. It was only when TPLF waged its war that war eventually came to Tigray.

And you will find that, most of the argument Tigrayans use in support of TPLF is because of war atrocities committed by the military (such as bombing of civilians in Hawzien).

TPLF starts unnecessary war, and moreover, seeking the independence of Tigray (this is how they started out, yes later they changed this aspect in some ways but too late). The military responds, as would in any country, and increasingly became committed towards fighting off TPLF in levels it never wanted to. The focus was EPLF.

Any war atrocities that come from then on cannot be used as legitimate reason to support the very organization that brought about these inevitable war atrocities. It's a feedback loop from that point on.

Notice that, whatever reason you give in support of TPLF waging war, you must ask was it worth the consequences (which we are still feeling to this day)?

target number 1 for corruption in Ethiopian modern history

Shibru was his professor back in the days at the university in Addis. And he is a saying he met Meles’ uncle, Terefe Asres, the brother of his father, Zenawi Asres) who told him the father of Asres, Meles’ grandfather is from Gojam. Meles daughter herself is not even from Tigray genetically she is actually Amhara on her mother side And father side so she is mainly Amhara but she has gave no attention to the Amhara regions conflict and probably hates Amharas.