Europeans felt they had a divine right to conquer and civilize Africa so did the Abyssinian and still do when they colonized the Oromo people and conquered their land.Abyssinia colonialism mirrors European perception and tactics from their historic take over of Eritrea,Oromia and Ogaden.
Abdirahman Mahdi is the European representative of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). He spoke on behalf of Shigut Geleta, Head of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) Diplomatic Division. The ONLF and the OLF both fight for self-determination of respectively the Oromo and Ogaden populations of Ethiopia, currently controlled by a minority rule of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. In their struggle against this regime, the ONLF and OLF work closely together.
This lecture addresses among other things the manner in which blacklisting a political movement as ‘terrorist’ functions as an ideological cover-up of the enforced administrative construct of the Ethiopian state. Apart from the Oromo, who represent the largest ethnic group in the country, many other peoples struggle for independence from the contested state such as the Ogaden. At what level can we argue that the state of Ethiopia even exists, when its main legitimacy seems to be based on its capacity to suppress the very political majorities that constitute it? The blacklisting of a people’s history thus becomes a way of evading confrontation with the criminal dimensions of the state itself.