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In the end, the Amhara coterie are the biggest losers.
Paulos Irgau. 01-22-22
When the past keeps changing, it is not an anomaly within the Law of Entropy but mendacity at play pure and simple. History [capital H], however, replaces the past for it is true to itself, a verdict to itself and judge to itself as well and that is precisely the difference between Tigreans and the expansionist Amhara elites when the latter clings to the past and the former to History instead. If one juxtaposes vagaries by design [I agree, it is oxymoron, but you get the drift] with in History, however, it becomes the past and that is the reason one fails to learn from it and abounds to repeat it. More often than not, the similarity between the original and the repeat becomes seductively striking particularly when one remains ossified instead of gleaning a lesson from it.
What I have in mind and the theme of this article is to bring to focus the similarity between Melosevic’s Serbia and Abiy’s Ethiopia when the latter carried on a trajectory not only to break Tigreans but to eliminate Tigray torpedoed by the Amhara elites.
As every ending has a beginning, the ending was when Melosevic, right after the civil war, lost the election to the Opposition in September 2000. And the winning party, constrained with economic straight jacket, fell under the mercy of the West and the West demanded to hand over Melosevic as a precondition for economic inject. The winning party obliged and Melosevic stood at the end of the road so to speak. The road however started in the last decade of the last century when Melosevic presided not only over the autonomous Serbia but over the Federal government of Yugoslavia as well. Certainly, a plethora of articles have been written about Yugoslavia ad nauseam including academic works but a historical snapshot warrant for a context.
Here is how the intellectual juggernaut Tony Judt in his book, “Post War: A history of Europe since 1945” put it as an overview. “……. When Josip Tito died in 1980, the Yugoslavia he had reassembled in 1945 had a real existence. Its constituent republics were separate units within a federal state whose presidency comprised representatives from all six republics as well as two autonomous regions—the Vojvodina and Kosovo—with in Serbia. The different regions had very different pasts. Slovenia and Croatia in the North were predominantly Catholic and had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Southern part of the country—Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia—was for centuries under the Ottoman Empire and accounts for the large number of Muslins in addition to the predominantly Orthodox Serbs.”
It was within the said, political and historical backdrop, the ensued civil war ought to be seen including Melosovic’s rise to power hoped on Serbian nationalism. The eerie undertone became more attuned when in 1989, Melosovic won the election in Serbia and subsequently, he set out to transform the carefully balanced Federal system into a Serbia-led unitary system. He begun by absorbing the two autonomous regions—Vojvodina and Kosovo—into Serbian enclave. The two republics in the North—Slovenia and Croatia reacted and threatened to break away and opted for independence instead.
Emboldened, the Serbs in Kosovo albeit a minority including in Bosnia, rallied behind him and Melosovic declared war using the Federal army on anyone who stands in his way and his project. He went after the Albanians in Kosovo in particular where the horrid story has become a stain within the European conscience when the power be opted to handle and appease him as they vacillated between indecisiveness’s and indifference as well including after the massacre of 7400 refuges in the so called “safe zone” in Srebrenica when the Dutch peacekeepers laid down their guns instead of protecting the hapless civilian refugees. Certainly, NATO later on interjected to stop the Serbs but it was after much damage had been done.
Here again, one can does not help to notice the striking similarity between Melosovic’s Serb-led unitary system and Abiy’s Amhara-led unitary system when the latter is cutting the existing Ethnic based Federal arrangement in Ethiopia to shreds. Abiy however, had to subcontract his project to Eritrea and the Gulf states in the company of Fano Amharas and Somalia mercenaries among others when Turkey, Iran and China hoped on with drones in a bid to decimate Tigray.
The similarity doesn’t end there when the IC including the UN shrugged off the war crimes and crimes against humanity including the genocide in Tigray when they churned out “concerns” ad infinitum. In the end, Melosovic was tried for war crimes, and he was found guilty. And died in prison in The Hague of a heart attack. And the Serbs as well, in the end lost everything including Yugoslavia when they set out to preserve it with a fatal and deadly project when passion ruled over reason.
Time as they say is a treasure and the place for the treasure is in the parentheses, footnotes including in the entire prose of History when History can never go wrong but only it does when stupid men mistake it for the banal past instead.
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