As the Vice President of the Amara region, Ato AlemnehMekonnen is presumably and officially the second most important Amara in the world. He is putatively and by default the leader of a people that is over 30 million strong. There are about as many Amaras as there are Ghanaians, and there are more of them than the populations of forty other African countries, and over one hundred more other countries globally. They are the second most populous nationality not only in Ethiopia but also in Africa, second only to another Ethiopian giant, their brothers and sisters the Oromos. By all accounts Ato Alemneh has a huge responsibility to safeguard and protect the reputation and interests of the people over whom he has been put in charge. But why is Ato AlemnehMekonnen insulting and characterizing Amaras as “drooling/slobbering/frothing” (for lack of a single word English equivalent to lehacham)? Was he making benign jokes that are within the bounds of propriety and using Amara eloquence (qene perhaps) in a rather frisky didactic semiprivate lesson for his acolytes? Or was he reflecting and letting the proverbial cat of Amarophobia out of the bag? Is his speech a preamble and a predecessor of future similar denigrating characterization of Amaras by other officials and party hawks particularly those trained by him? Or is he testing the ground to see how permissive or provoked the Amaras are to their inferiorization (a new term I created for the sole purpose of this discussion)? This article examines the implications, provocativeness and the psychology behind his speech in the context of the larger interethnic tolerance that is necessary in a county like Ethiopia.
The context of Ato Alemneh’s speech
Ato Alemneh’s verbal incontinence has been widely circulated on YouTube and is easily available to all those who are interested to listen directly from the horse’s mouth. In a subsequent lengthy televised interview surrounded by a bevy of journalists Ato Alemneh not in an expansive mood any more but looking flustered like a chicken that has just escaped the talons of a falcon claimed that his speech has been doctored and distributed by the enemies of the Ethiopian state (a well-known blame-it-on-the-enemy strategy). In this press release he does not give an explanation why he would be a target for such a technological attack since he was an unknown and obscure provincial official that most people never heard of before his notorious speech. But given that he might be right and in order to give him the benefit of the doubt, I asked an expert on such matters with many years of relevant experience along with other recordings of Ato Alemneh’s voice for expert opinion. I was given assurance that there is no indication of any interference in the version that I forwarded and that he was indeed the speaker. My comments are based on this certitude.
In his by now infamous speech, Ato Alemneh seemed to have been in a great and expansive mood and on a roll to entertain his audience by creating a jocular ambience. His famous diatribe according to some sources was made while he was sharing his wisdom and expertise on things Amara for training behind closed doors. The topics he was covering were no less important than democracy and governance to local media professionals and party functionaries and perhaps others. Ato Alemneh was prepared to impress by shooting from all hips. But in retrospect he sounded more like an expert on these subjects from Mars or a parallel universe rather than from this earth and Ethiopia. It is obvious from his tone that he was enjoying his jokes and seemed to be talking to a house full of complying and colluding listeners who were laughing at his quips from time to time as in an comedy American sitcom. He was also obviously trying to sound highly educated in the hyphenated sense by inserting English words and phrases where simple Amharic would have sufficed. Contrary to his wish as a famous teacher his insertion of run of the mill English words to spice his Amaric lecture made him sound more like a country bumpkin and an uneducated clown rather than an erudite professor. It appeared from the gleeful tone of his voice that he was proud of coining the term “drooling/slobbering/frothing” characterizing Amaras as he repeated this term innumerable times so that his students do not miss the main point of his lesson and use in their future career like their professor. According to Ato Alemneh, the insulting term describes a type of stinking superiority complex that he seems to think that Amaras bear with pride. He chose this metaphor of an unsightly torrent of saliva and froth constantly accompanying the unwashed puerile faces of Amara adults not too differently than an apartheid era white or a racist American southerner might have used to describe blacks as inferior beings. He stresses that this characterization paradoxically and perfectly describes the supercilious attitude of the very poor barefoot migrant Amaras to other parts of Ethiopia, who do not even have the wherewithal and foresight to insert a few eucalyptus leaves into their stinking galoshes as do the more technologically savvy other ethnic groups across the river who are the targets of their aspersion. For Alemneh, Amaras are a stinking hallucinating mass of unwashed ignoramuses who do not even have the intelligence to realize their own stink and drool under the cover of a false sense of superiority. This unfounded superiority complex he suggests has been the harbinger of the hatred and the documented attacks on Amaras in many parts of the country outside of their homeland. His solution to the Amara problem was to prevent Amaras from leaving their homeland by providing employment (perhaps he is thinking of opening factories where millions of Amaras will be employed in the high tech business of inserting eucalyptus leaves into galoshes which he regarded as high technology in his speech) so that they do not spread their froth and snoot far and wide in other parts of the country. In short he is suggesting an Amara Bantustan along the line of former apartheid South Africa where they will be geographically confined to prevent them from offending others and where he and his followers who he has trained very well will teach them how to wipe their noses and wash their faces and insert eucalyptus leaves into their galoshes.
Is inferiorization of Amaras by Alemneh Mekonnen hate speech?
By definition hate speech consists of verbal and nonverbal expression that is used to demean, oppress, or promote violence against someone on the basis of their membership in a social or ethnic group. Such speech involves more than simply an indication of a dislike for someone or a group and is different than simple teasing or ridiculing of someone, or throwing an ugly word at a moment of anger or frustration. There is no doubt that Ato Alemneh’scharacterization of Amaras and inferiorizing them as, “drooling/slobbering/frothing”, by any measure or standard meets all the criteria of hate speech. It is no less offensive than the racial and other ethnic slurs demeaning terminology that have been found so offensive that the UN and other international bodies and governments have legislations to limit their use as they interfere with the human rights of groups of people and have historically set the stage for human right violation up to genocide. The case against him is even stronger because of his position as a highly placed government official whose speeches can be taken as government policy. Ato Alemneh did not directly incite violence against Amaras, but what seems to be clear from his talk is that he is vicariously attempting to justify the violence that has been perpetrated against Amaras as having been provoked by their superciliousness in a type of “blame the victim” approach used by perpetrators as a justification for rape.
What is surprising in this case is that in the majority of cases, hate speech is created by people who are part of the majority against a minority population. Paradoxically Ato Alemneh’s offensive speech is lobbed against the second largest majority in a populous nation. In a later press interview where he tried to blame his enemies for doctoring his speech he stated that he is himself an Amara and expresses his incredulousness at the entire accusation. Such reasoning has been used by many accused of travesties against groups of people and crimes against humanity and ended in many celebrated trials. This strategy did not work for them and unlikely to help the hapless and shamelessAto Alemneh in the minds of the people of Ethiopia and the Amaras in particular.
Amaras as the proverbial fallen tree that invites many axes..
Ato Alemneh probably thinks he was recently appointed to his high and important position as a hatchet man not just to gnaw at the fallen Amara tree piecemeal but to use a bulldozer and push it all the way down and incinerate it once and for all. But the fact is as this author suspects that Ato Alemneh is probably a young and newly minted high level party functionary with an inflated ego who is trying to spread his wings through bragging and slaying the big dragon of current Ethiopian ethnic politics, the Amara people. In other words he is just a tadpole and at best a small fry in tank filled with big fish. In his distorted thinking he is also probably trying to curry favor with factions of the party who areAmarophobic and do not mind or even encourage the inferiorization of Amaras whom they see as the vestiges of a past they would like wiped out of the history of the country. There are indeed those who believe that Amaras should be punished and put in their place and kept quite in a corner. Articles, books and even statues are cropping up both abroad and in Ethiopia to cement the hatred against Amaras. Ato Alemneh probably saw a novel opportunity in the field of hate politics and became an unexpected Amara quisling in this scenario of defamation. What better tool than an Amara insulting Amaras! His effusive and incomprehensible speech exposes his lack of experience not only in managing the affairs of 30 million of his own kind for which it is obvious to all that he is totally unsuited but also for his own political career. Since the death of Meles, the party had lost its one and only eloquent voice and has since been scrambling for a replacement. Perhaps the hapless and inchoate Alemneh saw an opportunity to impress the party bosses as an unexpected Amara charismatic replacement for the PM position in a few years when the rather bland current PM finishes his term and the position becomes vacant. But Alemneh is by any measure not and will never be another Meles. This author in consultation with others recommends Ato Alemneh to consider a career as an entertainer in the wonderful Ethiopian sitcom Betoch as Vice President to Ike the guard, where Ike would mentor him in the art of perfecting sleep in the garden and currying lascivious favor from competing maids and never be heard from again in the field of Ethiopian politics.
NB: Abebe Haregewoin is not a politician affiliated with any group or party line. He considers himself an observer of things Ethiopian, and would best describe himself as a social commentator on issues and ideas he finds interesting without trying to offend anyone or support any cause other than his own ideas.
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