The Wall of Silence

A prince of the old Solomonic line carried the case of Ethiopia’s persecuted Orthodox Christians into the European Parliament. The institution has the power to act — and a long practice of looking away.

By E. Frashie

The whole of southern Germany had stopped moving. Storms had taken down the railways, and the keynote speaker was late — he had changed trains four times and called it, when he finally reached the lectern, a small miracle that he had arrived at all. There is a metaphor in this that the afternoon did not need spelling out: a man had come to Brussels to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing. Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate apologised for the delay, thanked the room, and proceeded to lay before it a charge sheet that the institutions of the West have spent the better part of a decade declining to read.

The hearing had been convened in the European Parliament under the intergroup on freedom of religion or belief, and organised by the European Centre for Law and Justice, a faith-aligned legal advocacy body whose report on the subject — bluntly titled The Silent Suffering of the Amhara People in Ethiopia — was first published two years ago and has now been revised. The choice of witness was deliberate. Asfa-Wossen Asserate is a grand-nephew of Haile Selassie and a descendant of a Solomonic line that traces its claim to Aksum; he is also a German-based historian and author whose father was among the sixty senior officials executed on the Black Saturday of November 1974, while the prince, then a student, was stranded abroad. He has spent fifty years in exile. He is, in other words, the rare witness whom even an indifferent chamber finds difficult to wave away.

He had come to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed rail timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing.

His thesis was delivered in the flat, exhausted register of a man who has made the argument before. Ethiopia, he said, is not enduring a civil war but several at once, governed throughout by what he called an ethnic-elite lens that has hollowed out its institutions, its press and its courts. The portion he had come to document was the fate of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church — an institution he dated to the first century, older than the Roman and the Byzantine traditions, custodian of the Books of Enoch and Jubilees and of manuscripts that survive nowhere else on earth. For eight consecutive years, he charged, a coordinated campaign has been waged against Orthodox communities in parts of Ethiopia, and above all in Oromia.

The case, as he made it

The specifics were grim and familiar to anyone who reads the Horn closely: churches burned to their foundations, some of them ancient repositories of manuscript heritage; priests, monks, deacons and nuns killed; crucifixes torn from the necks of worshippers, children among them, in footage that circulates widely and produces no arrests. The victims, the prince noted, are predominantly Amhara, but include Tigrayan, Gurage and Oromo Christians — a point worth holding onto, because it complicates any attempt to file the violence under ethnic politics alone. He reserved his sharpest language for what he described as the state’s capture of the Church itself: the displacement of its canonical leadership, the installation of compliant bishops, and the dismantling of an autonomy that had survived emperors and Marxists alike. An institution that endured the Derg, in his telling, is now being asked to survive the peace.

On the gravest numbers, candour requires the distance the prince himself volunteered. His tally of nearly forty thousand casualties from federal air and drone strikes on Amhara across five months — some fourteen thousand of them dead, with further claims of mass rape, abduction and detention — was drawn, he conceded from the podium, from a single American monitor with few specialists on the country. Those figures sit far above anything in the independently documented record and should travel only with that caveat attached. The corroborated core of his case is narrower and no less damning. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has logged repeated mass killings of Orthodox Christians in the Arsi zone through this year; and in the final days of May, as the nation queued to vote, assailants moved through Arsi again, killing at least thirty-five worshippers and burning the Teleta Saint Gabriel church, a structure that had stood for a hundred and one years. The federal government blames the Oromo Liberation Army and the prime minister offered his condolences; the OLA denies responsibility and accuses forces aligned with the state. The attribution is contested. The dead are not.

An institution that endured the Derg is now being asked to survive the peace.

He widened the lens before closing. He cited the patriarch, Abune Matias, who in early May had pleaded with the country’s leaders not to be ruthless with God’s people. He noted that thousands of schools across Amhara stand damaged or destroyed and that, by the monitors he trusts, only about a fifth of the region’s children now attend one. And he turned, pointedly, to the singer Teddy Afro, whose record Ethiora — briefly the second-ranked album on a global chart — pleaded for reconciliation across faith and tribe, and whose premises were raided and whose managers were jailed for it. A confident state, the prince implied, does not fear a hymn to brotherhood.

Six things he asked for

The prince’s demands to the institutions of the West

The United Nations — an independent Human Rights Council inquiry into the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Oromia, with particular attention to the Arsi massacres, the church burnings and the displacement of clergy.
The United States — to invoke the International Religious Freedom Act and designate Ethiopia a Country of Particular Concern.
The European Union — targeted sanctions on the officials within the government who have enabled, coordinated or shielded the perpetrators.
The African Union — to end its institutional silence and acknowledge that a member state is committing crimes against its own religious minorities.
The international criminal bodies — to begin the systematic documentation of evidence for prosecution, naming the prime minister and his senior security and political officials.
The global media and civil society — to break the wall of silence, sustain coverage, and amplify the voices of those living in fear.

The institution he was addressing

It is the fourth and sixth of these that the afternoon implicitly tested, because they were addressed to the very rooms in which he stood. Brussels is not wholly deaf to the subject: in January the Parliament passed its annual human-rights resolution and, for the first time, named “Christianophobia” as a global pattern. But a resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs. The gap between the two is the whole of his complaint. The European Union has the legal machinery for targeted sanctions and the diplomatic standing to make an African Union member uncomfortable; what it has lacked, on Ethiopia, is the will to spend either.

He ended where such testimony always ends, with the roll-call of the previously ignored. The world expressed its remorse after Rwanda, after Sinjar, after Srebrenica, he said, and remorse that arrives after the fact is not justice; it is paperwork. The Church he had described has outlasted the fall of Aksum, the medieval invasions and the Derg’s Marxist persecution across two thousand years. It would be a particular shame, he suggested, for it to be extinguished now, in plain sight, under the gaze of a world that possesses both the knowledge and the instruments to prevent it. Whether that world reaches for them, or reaches once more for the language of regret, is the only question the hearing actually posed — and the one it adjourned without answering.