Getachew Abera
They used to come discreetly in the night or very early in the morning. Now they don’t hide themselves anymore. They cruise the streets with police cars, their sound systems blasting, telling people to cooperate in helping to arrest “traitors and spies”.
Before the voices behind the loudspeakers were adult men, not very friendly, but sane. Now, increasingly, there are often no more cars, no more loudspeakers, just gaggles of street boys with coloured shirts, brandishing long sticks, running down the street, shoving and pushing each other.
They scream a lot, always about “traitors and spies”, and we know that means “Tigreans”. And they don’t want you to help them arrest anybody, they just want to do it themselves – so run.
I have a girlfriend who is “half Tigrean”. Or at least this is more or less what was written on her identity card.
Now we have been recently issued with new identity cards. The ethnicity is not mentioned any more, which should be reassuring. But this is not the case.
Because the boys with the long sticks now have a field day. They can grab anybody they want, accusing him (or her) of being “a traitor and a spy”.
I have a friend working at the African Union who survived the Rwandese genocide. He laughs if you tell him it was Hutu killing Tutsi. He says it was the war between those who could buy shoes for sending their children to school and those who could not.
Never mind Tutsi or Hutu. Now the street boys with the sticks have no shoes and they don’t go to school. They run and they scream. At times you see policemen (or we think they are policemen) who come behind them.
They will choose who they take. They take the unhappily grabbed ones in big cars or small trucks. And we don’t see them anymore.
Me and my half-Tigrean full-girlfriend had to run the other day. If you know Addis, at the foot of the new empty skyscrapers built these last few years, you still have the maze of old shanties and back alleys.
The Tigreans hated those when they were in power. They said they were unsanitary and were used to shelter criminals. Now this is where they hide, because they are supposed to be the criminals.
Yene gorobete (in Amaharic this means “my neighbour”) is the title of a song by the famous singer Alemayu Eshete. We run in the small alleys, where our neighbours had run before.
Image source: flckr
