MUST-READ | Looking Back – Oromo Liberation Front’s (OLF’s) Statement from 1978 (From Archives)

Some of the highest-ranking OLF leaders in 1978 (when the below statement was issued)

The following excerpt from a 1978 statement of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) is published herein to seek comparative analysis between the affairs of the Oromo people and Oromia under the Dergue Abyssinian military occupation of the 1970’s and today’s affairs of the Oromo people and Oromia under the TPLF Abyssinian military occupation. Though some argue that many aspects of the Oromo political life under the century-old Abyssinian military occupation of Oromia have changed over the last four decades, after reading the below statement, one can observe the affairs of Oromia in 1978 have fundamentally remained almost the same, if not worse, in 2015 (except some token appeasements – “temporary outlets” – here and there from the occupying Abyssinian military forces), and the current dismal State of the Oromo Nation will also remain the same in the future as far as Oromia remains under the Abyssinian military occupation. Historically, this statement was released when many, if not all, of the founding leaders of the Oromo Liberation Front were still alive (see photo here). At the time, this statement was widely distributed all over the world, including being published in a U.S. academic journal for the Horn of African region. The revisit of this statement is also for those reactionary forces which are naively convinced that “national self-determination” and “nations and nationalities” (in some instances, the “OLF” itself) were invented by the TPLF takeover of state power in Ethiopia in 1991. In the letter/statement, OLF argues that the support the Cubans were giving to the anti-people Dergue were shortsighted; true to this analysis, a few years after this letter, the Dergue falsely believed its ‘win in the East’ was a testament for the popular support for its regime and mobilized its forces to ‘crash’ the Eritrean national movement in the North, and with that campaign, the Dergue itself died, though it took almost a decade for Dergue’s slow death to be realized in 1991. - The Editor

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