The Diaspora Based New Collaborators

By Leenjisoo Horoo

In a national struggle, real nationalists clearly understand that the journey in the national struggle is as important as the destination itself. The journey ends when it reaches its destination. In the life of the journey, the nationalists understand that the struggle can run into bumps, curves, turning and twisting points and into mountaintops and valleys. In the process there are bruises and wounds. The Diaspora new collaborators are these bumps; their goals are to cause bruises, and wounds to the Oromo struggle in this journey of national struggle. It is with understanding of these; nationalists equally focus both on the journey and the destination itself.

Now, it is proper to examine the actions of the Diaspora based opportunists. And it is time to show their danger to the Oromo struggle. For years, we talked about the purpose of “Agenda for Peace”, about “Democratization of Ethiopian Empire”, and about “Regional Government of Oromiyaa”, -- a “government” formed by the colonial authorities as its subordinate in controlling Oromiyaa , as a dangerous scheme created to impede the struggle for independence of Oromiyaa. We now know their purposes have been to embattle and siege the Oromo struggle. Here the purpose is not to talk about them. The purpose is to say few things about the new collaborators that came into existence in 2006. In the year 2006, the colonial regime and its agent cleverly devised a new system to lure some Oromo nationals in the Diaspora into collaboration. The system goes by the name of “Developing Oromiyaa” or by the name of creating “Little Minnesota in Oromiyaa”. The participants in this schemed plan are the Oromo nationals, who were known for years, as the “honorary” bystanders or “honorary” nationalists, only in good times. In bad times, when they perceive that the national struggle is weak or in stagnation, or when the struggle faces a setback, they turn into monster and begin biting their own country, and their own people. These are individuals who are always ready, always willing and able to betray their country and people to advance their own financial and political craves. This is what is taking place in Oromiyaa today.

Today in the name of “developing Oromiyaa” and in the name of creating “Little Minnesota in Oromiyaa”, some Oromo Diaspora turncoats (gantuus) are also in alliance with the occupation army and its agents of Oromo descent, the OPDO. They are helping the colonizer in expunging our people from their lands and their homes. Then they turn around and buy those lands and homes. In this way, these national traitors are fattening the coffer of the colonizer and its local agents of Oromo descent. They are a newly created army of Abyssinia within Oromo nationals in the Diaspora. This means the Abyssinians and its agents of Oromo descent have been luring these individuals and groups with the promised of lands, business investments, and political positions if they avoid joining or supporting the Oromo struggle. Throughout the occupation of Oromiyaa to date, successive Abyssinian regimes have been using Oromo opportunists and collaborators to help Abyssinia to seize Oromo lands, to decimate Oromo institutions, to humiliate the Oromo, to cause the Oromo pain, to torment the Oromo, and to torture and kill Oromo and the rest of the colonized peoples in the empire. These opportunists are collaborating with their people’s enemies in order to accelerate their personal gains.

In their collaboration, they sanctify barbarism, cruelty, repression, and violence that Wayyaanee has been inflicting on the Oromo people and on their resources. By using the colonial regime and its agents, the Diaspora based collaborators are snatching, robbing, and looting the Oromo lands by expunging the Oromo people from their lands. These actions are very rampant in and around Finfinnee, Haqaaqii, Bushooftuu, Adaamaa, and Shaashamannee and in and around all major cities of Oromiyaa. Oromo are losing their lands, their homes, and their possessions to the Diaspora Oromo, those Oromo who are collaborating with the colonial regime and its agents of the Oromo descent. These Oromo individuals are untroubled and unconcerned by the torture, the brutality, the cruelty inflicted upon the Oromo people by the colonial Wayyaanee regime and its Oromo collaborators, the OPDO. They are untroubled when the colonizer razed the Oromo villages; when it turned Oromiyaa into concentration camps and torture centers and when hundreds of thousands of the Oromo nationals are confined and tortured in these torture centers. These collaborators are not bothered when Oromo nationals are ganged into prison cells. These opportunists are not bothered when their countrymen, women and children are displaced, disappeared, tortured, maimed, and killed. They are not concerned, not troubled, and not bothered when they take Oromo lands and homes for themselves. They are not bothered when they sell these lands and make profit on them. And yet they happily chase the lands to snatch from the Oromo people with the help of the prisoners of war, the OPDO. For their harmful action against their people, they do not show human concern. The capitulationists are harming our people. They have no feelings, no emotions, and no remorse for the harm they caused to our people. This is a sink to barbarity, a moral abdication. They failed to learn from what had happened to Goobanaa Daaccee. Goobanaa Daaccee was an Oromo, as these new collaborators. He sold out his country and allowed the colonizer to massacre his countrymen, women, and children for political power and for financial benefits, and yet despite this he too was finally consumed by the same Abyssinians that he helped. This will be the fate and the destiny that all collaborators including the Diaspora ones eventually will face.

Again there are other groups in the waiting in the closet. These groups’ have been taking back seat or have been sitting on the sidelines gleefully watching which argument wins the day. They give blind eyes to the Oromo struggle. And as the political debate between pro-independence of Oromiyaa and pro-Ethiopian democratization gets heated, this group looks the other way in waiting to where the political winds below. They seek to ride a political wind that benefits them. These groups, talk about liberation and about independence of Oromiyaa only in private, but they avoid public; they avoid being in organization and they avoid to help financially and politically. And they avoid commitment to the national cause, their people’s cause. These group not only afraid of Amaaraas, or Tigress, or Oromo, but they are also afraid of their own shadows.

Opportunists in their mirrors

The opportunist’s mirrors are surrender, betrayal, and unprincipled compromise. Their mirrors are betrayal of the ideals of national liberation struggle and the aspiration of the Oromo people for self-determination. Opportunists seize opportunities given to them by the enemy of their people’s struggle and then hope for gains of their opportunistic positioning to outweigh the costs of their betrayal. The opportunists are obscurantist. Their work is to obscure, to twist, pervert, distort and retard the national struggle for independence. To do this, they wear different masks. Some wear the masks of religion. And others wear the masks of region. And others wear both. Opportunists are those who are trapped within the confines of localism and unable to see the big picture, the whole nation and the whole country. Politically, socially, and ideologically, they are disconnected from their fellow countrymen and women. Their particular characters are, they appeal to provincialism, localism, and one’s own clan so as to divide their own fellow countrymen and women. They plunge members into chaos of conflicts in an attempt to factionalize the Oromo nationals. They eclectically select a few facts in Oromiyaa regional and local diversities, and then treat these diversities as irreconcilable difference so as to dismiss the historical, political, cultural, and the national unity of our people that made the Oromo people proud and glorious in history. In this way, they poison civic and political discourses and political debates. In essence, their attacks are directed at the very core of the struggle for the independence of Oromiya and on the Oromo national characteristics.

The opportunists discard, abandon and impede the struggle for the independence of Oromiyaa and yet to hide their true color from the public, they dress up as nationalists, talk as nationalists and as patriots. Their purpose is to serve the colonizer in order to be rewarded with material benefit in return. As their predecessors, these groups too are participating in the rape, blunder, and pillaging of Oromiyaa with aide of the colonial regime and its local agent of Oromo descent, the OPDO. They are fortune seeking opportunist Oromo nationals in the Diaspora running back and forth between Ethiopian empire and Diaspora areas. They are groups and individuals bought off by the colonial regime with the promise of giving them the Oromo land. Today, many Oromo nationals in the Diaspora are flooding Oromiyaa to buy the lands that the colonial regime confiscated from the Oromo people. In their ambitious quest for Oromo lands, they allied with the occupier of Oromiyaa.

They go to the colonial authorities and tell them that their hands are clean from Oromo political and armed struggle. They swear in the name of Ethiopia, telling the colonial authorities that they do not support the independence of Oromiyaa. Hence to convince the colonial regime, these pacifists sanctify the rape, the murder, the torture, the repression, the persecution, the blunder and pillaging of Oromiyaa and the Oromo people by the colonial regime. Some of them dressed up in the phrase “Little Minnesota in Oromiya” as a passport to the resources of Oromiyaa or as a means to exploit the Oromo people and take their land. And others are dressed up in the language, “Gadaan Gadaa Bilisummaa ti”. Literally it means the decade is a decade of liberation. And yet, they fight “bilisummaa” or liberation in the name of liberation, the “liberation” they coined in their platform, the Ethiopian democratization. For them, liberation means Ethiopian empire democratization. It is a twisted logic to claim to democratize a colonial state. These groups are captives of irrationality. They do not have confidence in the ability, and wisdom of their people. They trust the colonizer and its agent within Oromo ranks and other external forces. Oromo nationalism has left them; patriotism has departed them, and they are replaced with pacifism and surrender. They are politically incoherent and ideologically fragmented groups. Opportunists love to shake the hands of colonizer, in the name of business, the hands that soaked with the blood of innocent Oromo nationals that it murdered. They love to shake for their personal benefit the hands of those Oromo nationals who have been aiding and abetting in the crimes against Oromiyaa and its people. Opportunists’ motivational driving force is a pursuit of their personal greed and self-interest at the great cost and harm to their people and their cause.

These are the identifying characters of the opportunists and so those of the Oromo opportunists.