Veronica🇨🇬👑🇬🇧

ዕዳ ⟡ 220 · 257 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⟐ THE INSTRUMENT Four governments of four ideologies, and one method between them. This movement is about how the Ethiopian state has handled the Orthodox Church, and the answer is not the one either side gives. 📜 THE FINDING, FROM THE SPECIALISTS Stéphane Ancel and Éloi Ficquet, on what follows a change of regime: designating a new patriarch "had become a tradition in the history of the relations between the state and the Church." And the Rift Valley Institute's Peace Research Facility, 2023: the Ethiopian state "has always laboured to harness, mobilize and control the country's religious plurality." ⚠️ That is two sources, not three. The Peace Research Facility is the Rift Valley Institute's own programme, and I am not counting it twice. 🕯 THE SEQUENCE 1976 — the Derg deposes Patriarch Tewophilos and has him strangled. 1976 — it installs a successor Alexandria refuses to recognise. 1991 — Patriarch Merkorios ceases to be patriarch and leaves the country. 2013 — a new patriarch, with no high-profile rival. 2018 — the Prime Minister brokers a reunification, in Washington. 2023 — the Prime Minister seals a settlement in a schism, in his own presence. ❌ AND WHAT I AM NOT CLAIMING That this church has been singled out for destruction. Posts 224 and 227 are the case against that, and they are strong enough that I have given them their own posts. ⚖️ WHAT I AM CLAIMING The patriarchate is the lever. Every state has reached for it, and the present one has reached for it twice. ‖ Monarchy, Marxists, ethnic federalists, and this government. ‖ Not one of them left the choosing of a patriarch to the church. #EthiopianOrthodox #Ethiopia #EOTC

ዕዳ ⟡ 231 · 257 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📊 ARSI · WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW Leave the patriarchate. This is the ground, and it is where the numbers hold. 📈 THE MEASURED PATTERN ACLED, October 2026. Since February 2023 it has recorded 193 instances of civilian targeting in the Arsi zone, and around a third of them were aimed at Orthodox Christian residents. Most of it in Shirka woreda. In 2026 alone: twenty-five incidents targeting Orthodox civilians, half of them in Shirka. On election day, 1 June, more than two hundred houses were burned, mostly belonging to Orthodox residents, and the 101-year-old Teleta St Gebrael Church went with them. 🕯 20 AND 24 OCTOBER 2026 Fourteen killed at Gora Silingo in Merti district. Forty-six at Tereta, Chole and Birbo in Shirka. Twenty homes burned. Sixty in all, by the Holy Synod's count, which the wire services carry. ACLED puts the Shirka toll between forty and sixty by its own reckoning, and calls it the deadliest violence in that zone since 2023. ❌ AND FOR TEN DAYS NOBODY ESTABLISHED WHO DID IT The Oromia regional government blamed the Oromo Liberation Army. AP and Reuters both record that it presented no evidence. ACLED's own words: "The perpetrators of most of this violence are an unidentified armed group." The Holy Synod named nobody at all. That held until 3 November. Posts 232 and 233 are the state commission's own field investigation, which names a group — and revises the count. ⚠️ AND THE DETAIL THAT MAKES IT A PATTERN Shirka's population is predominantly Oromo and Muslim, on the 2007 census — the last one taken. The people being counted there are a local minority, in their own country, and the counting is being done by a conflict monitor in another one. ‖ A third of the civilian targeting in one zone, across three years, on one faith. ‖ That is not a toll. It is a shape. #Arsi #Shirka #EthiopianOrthodox

ዕዳ ⟡ 113 · 257 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⟐ AND HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS TO A PHOTOGRAPH The last post said a picture proves only what is inside the frame. This is why I said it. 📰 THE GUARDIAN · 13 JANUARY 2022 A story on airstrikes and starvation in Tigray, run with a recent photograph of displaced people in a camp. The displaced people in it were in Afar. ✅ AND THE PAPER SAYS SO ITSELF The footnote is still on the article. It records that the piece was amended on 14 January 2022 to replace a recently taken picture of displaced people encamped in the Afar region with one showing people in Tigray, the subject of the story — and that the Tigray photograph dates from March 2021, because access there was "severely limited." Corrected the next day. A photographer had said publicly that day that the picture was his, taken among Afar displaced who trusted him. He is the man in the last post. 🔍 NOW READ THAT SECOND CLAUSE AGAIN The replacement was ten months old, because nobody could get in. So the desk had no current picture of the story it was running, and reached for people who were not in it. ⟐ AND NOW THE BIGGER VERSION AMHARA ADVOCACY TELLS That a Sekota photograph of Amhara displaced was used the same way, on the April 2022 ethnic cleansing report. I went and checked. The article that report ran under carried an Associated Press picture from Sudan — in the archived copy from before the complaint, and in the live page now. I could find no Guardian page on Ethiopia carrying his credit at all. So I am printing the one I can prove, and not the one I would rather have. ‖ One people's displacement stood in for another's, and the paper put the admission in writing. ‖ That is not a lie about Amhara. It is the machinery running on somebody else, where you are allowed to see it. #Ethiopia #Afar #Tigray

ለማያውቅሽ ታጠኝ ከበቡሽ!

ዕዳ ⟡ 6 · 257 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ❖ 1936 · WHERE THE MACHINERY WAS BUILT I said he reached for something already lying on the ground. Here is the machinery that put it there, and here is the document. 📜 THE DECREE Royal Decree-Law of 1 June 1936, no. 1019, in the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 13 June. Italy's constitution for occupied Ethiopia. 🗺 ARTICLE 2 · THE MAP Article 2 gives three governments plus a Governorate of Addis Ababa; article 11 names the five Governments of Italian East Africa. Two are named after peoples — Amara, capital Gondar, and Galla and Sidama, capital Jimma. Article 4 detaches Tigray by name and hands it to Eritrea. Gojjam is cut into two. Shewa is dismembered and not reassembled until November 1938. 🗣 ARTICLE 32 · THE LANGUAGE Read this one twice. Amharic is permitted as an official language in two places only, Amara and Addis Ababa. Arabic becomes the official written language of Harar and of Galla and Sidama, and Arabic instruction is made compulsory "in all the Muslim territories of Italian East Africa." Eritrea, which has just been handed Tigray, gets Tigrinya and Arabic. Oromo is given standing in the schools of three units. ⚖️ ARTICLE 31 · THE RELIGION Now read the two clauses against each other. The institutions of the "monophysite Christians" — the Ethiopian Orthodox — "will be regulated by special laws." Muslims are given "full liberty, throughout the territory of Italian East Africa, to restore their places of worship, their ancient pious institutions and their religious schools," and their disputes are to be judged by qadis under Islamic law. One church placed under special legislation. One religion handed back its own courts. In the same article, four lines apart. [ ✅ VERIFIED · Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 136, Arts. 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 31, 32 ] ‖ Divide and rule is usually a figure of speech. ‖ Here it has an article number. #Ethiopia #Amhara #EthiopianHistory