Rundassa Asheetee | February 28, 2014
Getachew Haile
Thought such catastrophe can and should be left behind as history, the Abyssinians who interpret this catastrophe as a Nobel work based on their narrow perspective have opened unhealthy conversations between them and their victims. Interestingly, this situation allowed the minority Tigre tribe to rule the country for 23 years with iron fist and the tribe is going to stay in power as long as past continues to occupy, disturb and divide the people of empire Ethiopia, particularly the Oromo and the Amhara.
One way of finding meaningful and accurate reason that contributed to these misunderstandings is the poisonous opinions that old dying racist men like Getachew Haile and his parent’s slaves such as the Larebos are spewing against the Oromo people. As far I can see, Amhara’s dying black Hitlers such as Haile and the like are so angry and restless by the victory that the Oromo people scored and spiting out the filth of hatred in which they were born and raised with.
In contrast to Oromo and other nations historians and educated men and women, racist men such as Getachew Haile like to stress certain basic Amhara specifics, consistent with their clergy men’s behavioral pattern. For example, they view their non-logical argument about the greatness of their cruel and inferior monarchs as an asset, not as a liability to themselves and to nations and nationalities of empire Ethiopia. They are proud of king Minilik’s breast cutting practice in places such as Anole and Calanqo of Oromia and wish to practice this tradition again because they think that it is efficient civil service methodology. The reason behind such conviction is that they believe they are different from the rest and thus they’re superior because of the Orthodox religion that they’ve borrowed from Greece and because of the Amharic alphabet they copied from Hebrew.
As it happens, the rest of ethnic groups in empire Ethiopia are increasingly being angered by the Amhara dying racists failure to stop promoting deceptive history and become agents of change.
Nevertheless, their attempt to promote false history continues to drain the trust which the society have built over a period of century and half. As expected, the Amhara’s little hitler named Getachew Haile ridicules Oromians state system known as the Gadaa system as a mafia system because he and his likes are increasingly frustrated by the return of the Gadaa system and the Oromo culture in general. Worse, this uneducated Arab Diqaalaa speak against the Oromo nation in a manner the street girls and bar prostitutes speak.
Obviously, this is an expected role that the son of those girls can play. Ever since these sick racists came to power in empire Ethiopia, they have used hate and the ridiculing of those whom they fear the most to shape government policies. Ever since then, they have marginalized tens of millions from being a part of the economic development by dismissing any talk of honesty and decency.
Thanks to these sick little racist Diqaalaas, their cousin, the Tigreans are ruling the country now for 23 years justifying their intervention to stop the conflict these little Hitlers artificially produce.
To intentionally confuse the mass, these little Hitlers often use terms such as “We” and “Unity” to suggest that people are united, of course as long as one interprets term “Unity” similar to their interpretation of hatful historiography.
Interestingly, even little old Hitler Getachew Haile attempts to explain the history of the Oromo people in a manner his racist parents taught him. All this is done to hide the undeniable and terrible part of their own historical heritage of cruelty, cheating, immorality and hate of black people.
Nonetheless, even if these dying racists will not admit the fact that their chauvinist political views were and still are the focal point and a driving force for secessionist tendencies that links the Eritreans experiences and the current Oromo and Ogadenia demands to liberate their own free state, the day in which their grand children will suffer the consequence of their racist hatred is not too far.
Certainly, there are few Amhara historians who do not deny the fact that their monarch’s approach to nation building has been the factor that contributed to the separation of Eritrea and they know that it will be their attitude that will lead to the collapse of empire Ethiopia. In short, the Amhara racism is the reason for the rise of the Oromo and other nations and nationalities nationalist movement and secessionist tendencies. Yet, old racist Diqaalaas such as Getachew Haile intentionally overlook these danger because they think that denial will fix the danger that their ignorance and hateful hearts produced. They do this because they think it is humiliating to accept and defeat and that is racists rationale.
But, at the same time, the Oromo people have already looked back to the nineteenth century and identified that Abyssinians political structures and it’s processes, of course was the factor and hindered the development of liberal democracy and ultimately facilitated the rise of the Eritrean, the Tigre and the Oromo nationalism. Further, a wide range of foreign scholars contributed to this argument without necessarily using the term “Oromo Nationalism.”
Basically, the Amharas racists rigid behavior became the main factor that manifest the past, current and future problems by making every system that has been tried so far to malfunction.
Convincingly, the Amharas had been the elites of empire Ethiopia, particularly, hateful men like Getachew Haile and the like were considered as senior civil servants who retained much power and influence well into the 1970s.
When mass revolt took place in 1974, they tried to stand in the way of the revolution; a case in point was Getachew Haile’s ill advice to Mangistu Hailemariam to deny his Walayita linage and call himself Dejazmach Kebede’s son. By manipulating ignorant Mangistu, Getachew Haile, Shimalis Mazengiya, Alemayehu and the like played detrimental role in the death of hundreds of thousands young and intellectuals though the military was blamed for all the killings.
Getachew Haile’s script in PDF
To be continued………
Rundassa Asheetee
Getatchew Haile’s Profile
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Getatchew Haile is an Ethiopian-American philologist, Regents Professor Emeritus of Medieval Studies, and Curator, Ethiopian Study Center at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.[1][2]
He was born in Shenkora (then Shoa, Ethiopia) on April 19th 1933. From 1945 to 1951 he visited Trinity School in Addis Abeba. He graduated from the Coptic Theological College, Cairo, Egypt with a B.D. in 1957, from the American University in Cairo, with a B.A. in 1957, and from the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, with a Ph.D. in Semitic Philology, in 1962.
Getachew has always been controversial.
How Getachew Haile was paralyzed
By Amy Bowen , April 8, 2007
St. Cloud Times
Is this Dr. Getatchew Haile? the caller asks.
Yes, Getatchew answers into the telephone.
Can I come over and talk to you?, the voice asks.
Why and about what?, Getatchew asks, skeptical.
It’s Oct. 4, 1975. Getatchew is at home in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa. He knows the dictatorship government sees him, an outspoken critic, as a threat.
While his infant daughter sleeps in her crib and the rest of his family is at a party, Getatchew loads a .45-caliber revolver. It’s dinner time — 5 p.m.
Two men, one in a military uniform, see Getatchew waiting at his home’s gate with his revolver. They scurry away to call for assistance.
A group of 50 to 100 soldiers surround the home. Getatchew hears the whistle of bullets pass his ears and fires back.
Later he finds out the military shot 4,000 bullets into his house and considered demolishing it during the attack.
Getatchew runs out of ammunition. He tries to climb over the garden wall to escape.
He feels a bullet hit his back. He falls. A man with steel-toe boots kicks him in the head.
Where are the rest of them? he demands.
It’s just me, Getatchew utters, his mouth full of blood.
The man doesn’t believe him. He keeps kicking.
The military doesn’t know if they should leave Getatchew to die or take him to jail. The men shove him onto a truck bed and take him to the hospital.
That is the last time Getatchew sees his home in Ethiopia.
‘Like a movie’
The attack, and the incriminations that followed, pushed Getatchew out of his homeland, but his ties to a religious library brought him to a new home at St. John’s University.
Getatchew, now 75 and retired, sits in his lake home in Avon. He’s made Central Minnesota his home since 1976 — raising a family, working at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Collegeville for about 22 years and voicing his opposition to the communist influence on the Ethiopian government.
His expertise with Ethiopian manuscripts made him an invaluable resource at the library and the university. Getatchew also taught medieval studies.
Since 1973, he has spoken against the two communist governments that have run Ethiopia. He favors a democracy.
Even now, Ethiopian courts have charged Getatchew with treason for speaking out against the government in 2005. If he were ever to travel to Ethiopia, he would be jailed or hanged.
“My whole story is like a movie,” Getatchew says, sitting in his wheelchair, dressed in slacks and a warm sweater.
He now writes his life story for his family.
Hospital stay
After the attack, Getatchew lays for days on his back in the hospital. Doctors place him on a board with only a white bed sheet covering it.
He asks to be rolled over. Doctors move him.
The sheet, soaked with blood, sticks to his back. Doctors pull it off. The movement strips his back of skin.
The BBC and the Voice of America report Getatchew’s story that year.
Newspapers in England and the United States pick up the story. The international pressure proves too much for the government.
After a month in the Ethiopian hospital, Getatchew and his wife, Misrak, leave their three children to seek medical treatment near London.
When Getatchew arrives in London, hymn-singing choirs greet him at the gate. The choral salute was arranged by an organization he has served while in Ethiopia — the World Council of Churches. The organization pays for his medical bills.
“When you are rejected from your country and you are welcomed like this, what do you feel?” Getatchew asks rhetorically.
That winter, Julian Plante, then-executive director of the Hill library, visits Ethiopia’s manuscript preservation office in Addis Ababa. Getatchew, a deeply religious man, has worked with the Hill library in the past to preserve and record valuable Christian manuscripts.
Where’s Getatchew?, Plante asks.
Members of the Hill library’s Addis Abba’s office tell him what happened.
The director finds Getatchew in a London hospital.
Come to Collegeville when you are well, he says later. We have a position.
“The mercy was there,” Getatchew said. “The need was there. They had a job for me.”
Italian invasion Getatchew was born in 1931 in the Ethiopian countryside. As a boy, his parents divorce and he moves to Addis Ababa to be with his father.
Ethiopia is under Italian occupation in 1935. He and his father, who is educated as a priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox church, are homeless, living in a makeshift community in a local graveyard.
“It was almost an acropolis,” Getatchew said. His father teaches church lessons, reading and writing to the children living in the graveyard.
Italy withdraws from Ethiopia in 1941.
Getatchew studies theology and social sciences in Egypt. He then earns his doctorate in Semitic philology, the study of words, in Germany.
He settles in Addis Ababa and teaches at a university.
“That’s what I wanted to study,” Getatchew said of his love for language. “I was kidnapped by this discipline.”
Not again Getatchew sees hope when the army rebels against the Ethiopia monarchy in 1973. He wants the country’s people to have more freedom.
But the military starts ruling the country.
“There was no freedom. We wanted to have democracy, to make the monarchy a figurehead,” Getatchew said.
The government confiscates land. It stops newspapers. People starve.
The government creates a civil parliament; each major department and province appoints representatives. People in the province where Getatchew was born ask him to represent them. He sees it as a way to speak out.
“That revolution, I always compare it to a tsunami,” Getatchew said. “When a tsunami comes you run away. You can’t resist it.
Many of us tried to direct it — to redirect it. It didn’t work.”
Collegeville
Seven months after he was wheeled into a London airport on a stretcher, Getatchew contacts a travel agent.
I want to go to Collegeville, he says.
The agent scours maps. It’s as if it doesn’t exist.
The closest airport is in St. Paul. Is that OK?, she asks.
He receives a two-year visiting scholar visa.
He and Misrak discover a new home.
St. John’s gives Getatchew a job cataloging Ethiopian manuscripts.
He struggles to bring his children to the United States. Why do the children need to come if Getatchew plans to stay for only two years?, the U.S. government wonders.
St. John’s takes on his case. He will have to stay, they say. There is too much work, and he is the most qualified, they say.
Send the children, they plead.
A few months later, the family is reunited.
Getatchew still worries. St. John’s gives him one-year contracts. What if they don’t renew his work?, he wonders. He’s paralyzed. What kind of life can he give his family when he’s confined to a wheelchair? “This worry hangs around your neck,” he said.
After four or five years, he receives word the contract will not be renewed. There is no more money.
But before he can comprehend it, the university president finds him.
Don’t worry, says the Rev. Hilary Thimmesh, then-university president. Your work is not done, Thimmesh says. We will find the money.
Getatchew never worries again. His work is still not done. Although now technically retired, Getatchew continues to work at the Hill. He does research and writes about his experiences.
He also helps scholars who want to learn about his homeland. “(St. John’s) is hugely important to my family,” said Rebecca Haile, Getatchew’s oldest daughter. “For them, that’s where they came and set down roots.”
His co-workers call him an inspiration and a gift.
“He’s one of the most remarkable people I know,” said Columba Stewart, Order of St. Benedict, executive director for Hill. “I respect him. … There’s a personal story of survival, exile and making a new life in a very strange place.”
Study
peace_and_reconciliation
Getatchew’s
home office shows the luxuries of living in the United States. Hanging
on his wall are the college diplomas of his six grown children from
places such as Harvard and Yale. His room is filled with photos of his
six grandchildren hugging him.Despite the comforts of his current life, Getatchew watches the turmoil in his homeland. He still speaks out. His vocal opposition makes it impossible for him to go back. He visits his homeland mentally while reading its ancient manuscripts. He almost can hear the stories told in Ge’ez, a language spoken in Ethiopian churches. He becomes so immersed sometimes he forgets he’s at St. John’s. His scars from that 1975 attack are still evident. The mark where the bullet left his body still has an angry bump. His arms tell of him breaking through glass while trying to escape. His head still has a scar where the soldier kicked him. But never assume Getatchew carries pity for what has been taken away. His love for family, education and religion have
blessed him, Rebecca Haile said.
“He is able to see the joy in every (situation),” she said. “He has always been able to focus on the happiness and joyfulness. … He’s one in a million.”
No comments:
Post a Comment