MEDREK: The Final Effort to save Ethiopia

Opinion | By Kemal Abdisa*

Ethiopia is at the crossroads, once again. When the military officer Mengistu came to power in 1974, there was a brief period of cautious optimism for change, only to have our hopes dashed as he kept the status quo and pursued his mass murder campaign. When another armed group of the TPLF/EPRDF came to power in 1991 with big promises and slogans of change, many people of southern Ethiopia were once again hopeful. They hoped to either establish a majority rule via voluntary union of Nations or hoped to otherwise see the demise of the evil Ethiopian empire that has brought so much death and destruction to the horn of Africa. But once again, their hopes were dashed by the TPLF/EPRDF tyranny that still strangles our people inside this state created by force and created by the massacre of many of our ancestors. Despite the tyrannical rule of TPLF however, many brave people of Ethiopia are trying to break the cycle of dictatorship and misery, by waging a peaceful struggle to bring real change once and for all. They began such peaceful struggle not because of the tolerance of the TPLF but due to the willingness to endure misery, to pay the ultimate price for progressive principles and to sustain the struggle even when their members and families are being killed by TPLF agents, left and right, in every corners of the country. Perhaps the biggest attempt to bring change to the country comes in the form of MEDREK, an alliance of several opposition parties and opposition figures....read full report