Teenage boys facing Genocide charges?
By Ephrem Madebo


On Tuesday January 3, 2006, Emily Wax, A Washington Post columnist wrote an article regarding Child labor in Ethiopia. Here is a script from her article: “Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of child labor in the world, according to the U.N.'s International Labor Organization and the African Network for the Prevention of and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect. Nine million children ages 5 to 17 are employed, 90 percent of them in the agricultural sector, the agencies reported” Given the current biased educational system that blows apart the dream of young Ethiopians, the AIDS epidemics, and the misguided land tenure system, Ethiopian children or Teenagers have no choice, but take things on their own. Teenagers in Ethiopia have to work full time, go to school, and of course fight the TPLF system that reduced them to unskilled workers at their tender age.

On Wednesday January 4, 2006, the international community learned that two Ethiopian Teenage boys are facing genocide charges. What is Genocide? Is there a different definition of genocide? One for TPLF and another for the rest of the world? According to the on-line yahoo encyclopedia, genocide is the systematic destruction, wholly or in part, by a government of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. In the last 70 years the world has witnessed three unprecedented genocidal acts; Hitler’s attempts in the 1930s and 40s to destroy the entire European Jewish community, and to eliminate other national groups in Eastern Europe, the 1995 Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats killings of thousands of Muslims in Kosovo, and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. All of the above genocidal acts have two important common factors: All of them were backed by government, and all of them targeted religious and/or ethnic groups.

What is the basis for the genocidal charge of the Ethiopian opposition leaders, especially the two teenagers? Yes, Teenagers and many adults have been killed in Addis Ababa and many other urban centers of Ethiopia, but they were killed by TPLF forces. Yes, there were mass killings in Gambela, Awassa, and Ambo, but all of the killings were carried by armed government forces. Yes, teenagers can be used to execute genocidal acts (Rwanda), but there has been no genocide in Ethiopia to begin with. The irresponsible savage act of TPLF is no different from the hyena drinking water (upper course of the river) and warning the donkey not to litter the water (down stream). In the United States a consensual sex with a teenager can send an adult to prison for 10 or more years. In Ethiopia teenagers and young students are shot to death in broad day light not far from the US embassy in Addis Ababa, but those who ordered the killing do not face justice, they rove in the Menlik place to plot and to kill more.

During the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie I made a historic speech of complaint at the League of Nations, the West mocked at his speech. In 1974, the West quietly watched when Colonel Mengistu submerged Ethiopia in to the Soviet camp. Time and circumstances have changed, but it seems that the West never changes in matters that concern Ethiopia. Today, TPLF is taking the second most populace black nation to an extremely dangerous conflict in the name of democracy while the pioneers of democracy applaud Meles and company, leaders of the death squad. The world is wordlessly witnessing the killing of teenagers by armed government forces, and the government charging friends of the dead for genocide! How far will such a silence go?