Girma Berhanu Feb 12 #6956
Google text translation of a German article from a local German newspaper
“Die Tagespost”
Würzburg, 9. Februar 2023
*Cruel test for Ethiopia*
𝐃𝐢𝐞 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭
𝐖𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐳𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐠, 𝟗. 𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑
IN FOCUS
Cruel test for Ethiopia
BY STEPHAN BAIER
Ethiopia’s government is playing with the fire of nationalism and in doing so is attacking the church.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is of apostolic origin and is the last strong bracket holding the country together.
Ethiopia has always played a special role on the African continent. Apart from a brief, ill-fated conquest by Mussolini, it was never a colony, but proudly boasted several millennia of statehood. In addition to the crown, it was the Christian faith that gave the country cohesion and identity. But now the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is in danger of collapsing: not because of questions of faith, but because of a political-ethnic intrigue.
Three archbishops of the Oromo region deliberately went into schism: they broke with their mother church, set up their own ethnic-based patriarchate and claimed to have ordained 26 new bishops. As a result, the Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church declared ordination donors and recipients excommunicated and relieved them of their church offices.
In the church statements, the schismatics are simply referred to as “criminals” and “criminal gangs”.
With good reason, because the schism is being fought out bloodily. Recently, two people died in an attack on a church. Several bishops, priests and church officials in the western and southern regions were abducted and mistreated. Church property was stolen or declared confiscated.
It is all apparently happening with the blessing and complicity of the government: since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali came to power in 2018, thousands of believers, including priests and deacons, have been “massacred and millions of them violently by politically motivated, ill-advised radical ethnic nationalists expelled,” the church said in a statement. Millions of Christians were dragged into a politically instigated total civil war, in which brothers and sisters of orthodoxy slaughtered each other. Hundreds of old churches and monasteries with their invaluable heritage have been destroyed.
The reason for this is the government’s ideology, which “emphasises the ethnic division of citizens” and a strategy “which the Church openly describes as backward and an obstacle to development”. This development aims to ethnicize the traditional country. Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate, the great-nephew of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie who lives in Germany, told this newspaper: “The government wants the Oromos to have hegemony over the entire country. The church is to be weakened through ethnicization.” She is the ultimate force of unity: “As long as there is one There is Ethiopian Orthodox Church, there is also Ethiopia. Without them there would no longer be an institution that stands for the unity of the country.”
The prime minister, who comes from the fourth marriage of a Muslim Oromo but has turned to a Pentecostal church, is likely to have as little sensitivity to Ethiopia’s traditional church as to Christian tradition. The schismatic bishops are being defended and supported by state security forces, while dignitaries of the traditional church have been harassed and kidnapped. Most recently, the head of government publicly justified the schism and criticized the church. The violations of religious freedom in Ethiopia are not an internal matter, neither of the country nor of the church, but a scandal that calls for global solidarity.
The Daily Mail
Wuerzburg, February 9, 2023
GIRMA BERHANU
Professor
GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY
Department of Education and Special Education
Västra Hamngatan 25, A-hus room 168
Mail address: Box 300, 405 30 Göteborg
office: +46-(0)31-786 2325 image
mobile: +46 704731818image
girma.berhanu@…
www.ips.gu.se
Source: https://groups.io/
