ይድረስ ለአማራ ልሒቃን በሙሉ በያላችሁበት በተለይም በኦሮም ጥላቻ ለተጠናወታችሁ ግለሰቦች

Excerpt

This piece is a spinoff from a response to Yonas Biru’s offensive article “Oromummaa is a Lie: Gadaa is Part Democratic and Part Apartheid” [1]. Due to its length and scope, the conclusion of that response has been relocated here for further refinement as "An Open Letter to Amhara Elites". For now, this text preserves the core substance of the original conclusion. A fully edited and final version will be released on January 7, 2026. Please check back then. Thank you.

A Direct Address to Amhara Elites and Self-Styled Intellectuals: Facts, Not Hate

(a penultimate section moved here from the main article)

I have deliberately avoided engaging with many outrageous articles over the years, for instance [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]—pieces that, in my judgment, fail even the most basic standards of intellectual honesty, historical method, or good faith argument. They were not worth dignifying with response. Silence, in those cases, was not concession but discipline.

However, there comes a point where silence itself risks being misread as acquiescence—especially when the objective shifts from mere polemic to something far more troubling: an attempt to suppress knowledge itself.

That line was crossed decisively in a recent article aptly titled “Asafa Jalata: They Tried to Erase His Scholarship. Instead, They Enshrined It” [6]. That intervention made clear that what is at stake is no longer just disagreement, but an escalating effort to delegitimize an entire body of scholarship, memory, and intellectual tradition by smearing it through association and distortion.

It is in that context that I now respond—belatedly but necessarily—to the article that casually lumped Gadaa with apartheid [1], an article I initially did not take seriously when it appeared over a month ago. Its superficial provocations did not merit engagement then. They do now—not because the argument has improved, but because its implications have deepened. What once looked like crude polemic has revealed itself as part of a broader pattern: not debate, but containment; not critique, but prosecution.

Taken in its totality, and read alongside the point-by-point rebuttal presented above, one conclusion becomes unavoidable. This is no longer about defending Gadaa, Oromummaa, or any single scholar. It is about whether those who claim education, intellectual authority, and moral seriousness are willing to place themselves on the right side not only of history, but of argument, logic, and basic ethical responsibility.

What follows, therefore, is not an attack, but a plea—direct, uncompromising, and overdue—to Amhara elites and self-declared intellectuals like Yonas Biru: to abandon caricature for evidence, contempt for method, and inherited hostility for intellectual courage. The moment demands more than cleverness. It demands honesty. And it demands it now.

This is a direct appeal—and a warning—to Amhara elites, public intellectuals, commentators, academics, and opinion shapers who continue to recycle arguments untethered from evidence and animated instead by resentment, denial, or inherited hostility.

Debate is legitimate. Disagreement is normal. Contestation is healthy. But arguments built on distortion, selective outrage, and caricature do not make you principled—they make you unserious. Facts are not optional. Historical method is not a buffet. And moral language is not a weapon to be deployed only against those you dislike.

We are neighbors. We are not going anywhere. The Oromo are not going anywhere. No amount of polemics, labeling, or historical vandalism will change that reality. The question is not whether you will coexist—but whether you will do so with dignity or with bitterness that corrodes your own credibility.

Hatred is not strength. Denial is not intelligence. And recycling debunked talking points does not make you brave—it makes you predictable. People are watching. Younger generations are watching. And increasingly, they are embarrassed by what they see.

History does not only judge victims and perpetrators; it judges witnesses, bystanders, and those who had the education and platform to do better but chose comfort over courage. This moment, too, will pass. When it does, your children and grandchildren—better informed, less burdened by inherited animosities—will read what you wrote and ask difficult questions.

Do not become a footnote of intellectual failure. Do not turn education into an excuse for prejudice. If you claim the mantle of enlightenment, act like it. Argue with evidence. Disagree with integrity. And engage your neighbors—not as enemies to be subdued, but as fellow humans whose history and

dignity deserve the same respect you demand for your own.

The Instructive Question No One Wants to Answer

There is one revealing question that Amhara elites and self-styled intellectuals have consistently avoided—and its silence speaks louder than any polemic. It is a question worth sitting with, not deflecting, not rationalizing away.

How is it that, over decades of documented repression, dispossession, cultural erasure, and mass violence against the Oromo and other oppressed nations and nationalities of this empire, there is not a single prominent individual—never mind a movement, not even a handful—who publicly empathized with the victims, let alone stood with them out of conscience?

History offers a stark comparison.

Even under the most brutal incarnation of South Africa’s apartheid system, there were white South Africans who rejected the moral rot of domination, crossed the line of privilege, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed. They did not wait for power to change hands. They acted while the system still rewarded silence.

So the question stands, undiminished and uncomfortable: can you name one comparable figure among Amhara elites—one who, against personal cost, rejected the injustice of the system because it was unjust, not because it had become politically inconvenient?

If the answer is silence, that silence is not neutral. It is an indictment—not of an entire people, but of an elite moral failure that history will not excuse with claims of ignorance or complexity. The record is too vast. The suffering too visible. The excuses too rehearsed.

Yonas Biru and many others like him: contrary to what is expected of those endowed with education, influence, and analytical skill, you have too often used these tools not to confront injustice but to reinforce it.

• Education exists to illuminate, to question power, to widen moral imagination—not to rationalize domination, sanitize cruelty, or dress inherited prejudice in academic language.
• When learning is deployed to defend the indefensible, it ceases to be enlightenment and becomes complicity.

It does not have to be this way. Moral courage is not a finite resource. Empathy is not treason. Acknowledging injustice does not erase anyone’s identity or history. What it does erase is the pretense that education without conscience is enlightenment.

This moment will pass. All moments do. But what will remain is who spoke, who stood, and who hid behind clever arguments while others paid the price.

Future generations—less burdened by inherited hatreds and better informed than today’s polemicists—will read, compare, and judge. Choose carefully what you leave them.

Conclusion of the Main Article

Provided here as part of the previous main article and to form the basis for pending one.

This essay is not an argument against debate, disagreement, or critical inquiry. It is an argument against intellectual dishonesty disguised as rigor, and against the use of education as a shield for moral evasion.

What has been exposed here is not merely a flawed analogy or a tendentious reading of history, but a recurring pattern: the transformation of analysis into prosecution, scholarship into discipline, and critique into containment.

A strong rebuke of a political ideology is not a denial of Oromo identity, nor is it a denial of history. What is unacceptable—intellectually, morally, and civically—is the deliberate weaponization of scholarship to prosecute an entire people’s self-definition, to delegitimize their lived experience, and to stigmatize their right to speak in their own name.

At the core of the article, Yonas Biru's most revealing claim is also its most indefensible: “Oromummaa is a lie.”  What does that even mean?

Let us pause on that phrase, because it is not merely offensive; it is intellectually nonsensical. Saying an identity is a “lie” is equivalent to declaring “Amharinet is a lie” or “Americanism is a lie.” Does this make any sense?

Identities are not empirical propositions subject to verification or falsification. They are lived social realities formed through shared history, language, memory, and collective experience. To call an identity a lie is therefore not an argument—it is a category error. Such language does not arise from analysis; it can only be the language of those blinded by hatred. It reveals conceptual confusion so basic that it fails at the level of grammar, logic, and social theory alike.

This is the core political prosecution being advanced: take a legitimate cultural and national self-understanding, rebrand it as “extremism,” smear its scholars as conspirators, and then present the resulting caricature as proof that Oromo claims—historical, cultural, or political—deserve no hearing. It is not a search for truth. It is an attempt to disqualify the Oromo voice from the public square while wearing the costume of “balance.”

And then comes the rhetorical sleight of hand: he pretends to “protect” Oromo culture by splitting “cultural Oromummaa” from “political Oromummaa,” while using that split as a bludgeon to shame, expel, and silence Oromos who will not submit to his preferred narrative. That is not nuance; it is gatekeeping. It is not reconciliation; it is policing.

On Gadaa: the world does not recognize it because of Oromo propaganda; it recognizes it because it survives serious scrutiny. UNESCO’s inscription of Gadaa as Intangible Cultural Heritage was not a casual social-media “like.” It is the outcome of rigorous documentation, vetting, and review.

Disagree with interpretations of Gadaa, debate its historical evolution, critique specific practices—fine. But equating Gadaa to apartheid is not “half critique, half democracy.” It is a category error dressed up as scholarship, and it is designed to inflame.

Wait, and then there is Donald N. Levine—hardly an Oromo nationalist, nor a fringe romantic—who described Gadaa as “one of the most complex systems of social organization ever devised by human imagination” [7,8]. One is left to wonder: are the usual suspects now prepared to extend their familiar mud-throwing repertoire to Donald N. Levine as well? Will he too be recast as an ideologue, alongside Asmerom Legesse and Asafa Jalata—or does scholarly admiration become unacceptable only when it refuses to flatter imperial nostalgia? At some point, one suspects, the problem is no longer the evidence, but the discomfort it causes.

To the Amhara elites and intellectuals—especially those who consider themselves educated: base your arguments on facts. Debate is normal; disagreement is healthy. But hatred is not analysis, and contempt is not evidence. We are neighbors, and we are not going anywhere. If you cannot grant a modicum of respect to the people you live beside, what exactly did your education educate you for?

Be blunt with yourselves: the posture of sneering certainty—of declaring an entire people’s identity a “lie,” of forcing their heritage into grotesque analogies of apartheid [1] and antisemitism [9]— Seriously?—in the process treating scholarship as a weapon of ethnic humiliation—does not make you look strong. It makes you look unserious.

Read the titles of articles by Yonas Biru and Girma Birhanu as a psychological record:

• Oromummaa is a Lie
• Gadaa is Part Democratic and Part Apartheid
• Weaponized with Lies and Soaked in Blood
• Religion Cleansing and Cultural Evilgelization
• The New Frontier of Antisemitism
• The Death of Gadaa and Waaqeffanna
• Anthropological Whitewash or Political Hackwork?
• From Liberation Ideology to Transgenerational Trauma
• An Amhara-Tigray Coalition [against Orommumma]
• The Answer To The Oromummaa Mass Social Psychosis

Incitement? Not promoting peace for sure.

This is not intellectual development. This is escalation.

Every title:

• intensifies moral accusation,
• widens the alleged crime,
• darkens the language,
• and strips nuance further.

This is how panic writes.

The Antisemitism Accusation: Where the Mask Slips

The moment Oromo political thought is stretched to antisemitism, the argument collapses under its own absurdity.

That charge — echoed by Girma Berhanu in the Eurasia Review piece [9] — is not analysis. It is moral shock therapy.

Antisemitism is invoked not because it fits, but because it: carries maximum global stigma, shuts down conversation, and repositions the accuser as morally superior by default.

This is a textbook tactic: when you can’t refute a movement, criminalize it by association with the worst available evil.

Oppressed people emerging from subjugation are suddenly recast as:

• apartheid architects,
• religious cleansers,
• cultural exterminators,
• antisemitic extremists.

At that point, words really do fail — because the accusation has detached from reality altogether.

When someone inserts themselves into another people’s self-definition, the motive is never curiosity. It is control, or more precisely, fear of losing control. That’s not scholarship. That’s ontological intrusion.

When someone keeps returning to the same people, the same identity, the same culture, the same scholars — with ever more venom — the question is no longer what are they criticizing?

The question becomes: What are they afraid of losing?

The fear is simple and unvarnished: fear of Oromo assertiveness, coupled with a refusal to accept the loss of unearned privilege once protected by an oppressive order. Nothing more. Nothing less.

People now, and history later will judge you. Don’t become a laughing stock of history. Your words will remain—quoted, archived, and remembered. And you will be judged not only by your opponents, but by your children, grandchildren and their descendants—future generations who will be more enlightened, who will be embarrassed by the hatred you normalized, and who will wonder why you could not choose facts over fury, truth over tribal intoxication, and neighborliness over spite.

If you want reconciliation, start with intellectual honesty. If you want dignity, stop prosecuting identity. And if you want history to treat you kindly, stop writing hatred as if it were scholarship.

The Oromo are not asking for exemption from scrutiny. They are asking for parity of standards, honesty of method, and recognition of their humanity and history as something more than a problem to be managed. They are neighbors. They are permanent. And no sustainable future can be built on narratives that demand one side’s perpetual moral surrender as the price of coexistence.

This moment, like all moments of denial, will pass. What will endure is how it is remembered—who used their voice to clarify truth, and who used theirs to obscure it; who leaned into evidence, and who leaned into prejudice; who expanded the moral circle, and who narrowed it in defense of comfort. History does not forget such choices. Neither do future generations.

History does not ultimately judge who argued most cleverly, but who stood on the right side of truth when doing so still carried a cost.

---

References

1. Yonas Biru, Oromummaa is a Lie: Gadaa is Part Democratic and Part Apartheid, 18 November 2025, Borkena Ethiopian News.
2. Asmarom Legesse, "Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society", 1973, Free Press (originally Collier-Macmillan Ltd.).
3. Asmarom Legesse, "Oromo Democracy: An Indigenous African Political System", 2006, Red Sea Press.
4. Asafa Jalata, "Gadaa (Oromo Democracy): An Example of Classical African Civilization" (2012), Sociology Publications and Other Works.
5. Gada system, an indigenous democratic socio-political system of the Oromo—Inscribed in 2016 (Eleventh session of the Committee) on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
6. OT Editorial, Asafa Jalata: They Tried to Erase His Scholarship. Instead, They Enshrined It, 23 December 2025, OROMIA TODAY.
7. Gadaa, Wikipedia.
8. Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (1974, 2000 edition).
9. Yonas Biru, The Oromummaa Politics is Weaponized with Lies and Soaked in Blood, 5 May 2023, BORKENA Ethiopian News.
10. Yonas Biru, Oromummaa’s Religion Cleansing and Cultural Evilgelization Project, 3 June 2023, BORKENA Ethiopian News.
11. Girma Berhanu, The New Frontier Of Antisemitism: Racial Discourse And Oromo Extremism In Ethiopia – Analysis, 29 June 2023, Eurasia Review.
12. Yonas Biru, The Death of Gadaa and Waaqeffanna, Murder or Natural Mortality?, 7 February 2024, The Habesha.
13. Yonas Biru, Asmarom Legesse’s Gadaa: Anthropological Whitewash or Political Hackwork?, 21 November 2025, The Habesha.
14. Yonas Biru, The Oromummaa Legacy: From Liberation Ideology to Transgenerational Trauma, 13 December 2025, The Habesha.
15. Yonas Biru,  An Amhara-Tigray Coalition Is The Answer To The Oromummaa Mass Social Psychosis, not dated, ConcernedEthiopians.Org.

---