God please speak sense to our leaders, who are taking away our existential rights, to choose our leaders, to organize our people, to fight for their rights. Our rights are being chipped away. Our ears are muffled with unbearable pain. Our eyes are shattered by misery. Our mouths are being denied their rights to speak, through our leaders.

Dear God, speak, please speak, and save our historical nation, from entering into a civil war that we cannot afford.

We have patiently waited for change. We continue to silently bare the pangs of hunger. Our mothers cannot nurse their babies. Our fathers, permanently unemployed, squander their days at Bars, wishing that the pain will go away by the power of Tej and Tela. Our young bodies bored and hopeless take it on reckless sex, to only discover that our bodies are now ravished by AIDS, and let it be we say, let the body part company from the soul, so that when we are gone, we shall meet God to purify us from pain, hunger and hopelessness.

I leave the legality of Ms. Birtukan’s right to recant or not recant, to our able lawyers, as important as the question might be. That is not what concerns me here. 

My concern goes deeper, to the marrow of the bones. If our leaders, who are peacefully organizing the people to demand change cannot exercise that right, what rights are then allowed them by the constitution? Should not the rights of the people who are coming in record numbers to listen to their leaders, count for something, or is the democracy that the regime never fails to mention, a democracy that listen only to those who sing its praises? 

I say to the people, this time we must resist the intimidation of our leaders by marching on every street, every road, and every corner within Ethiopia and its Diaspora.

Resisting regimes which do not respect our leaders are simultaneously violating our existential and legal rights.

We will be remiss if we do not resist Ms. Birtukan’s right by the right constitutional measure of protest at the right time, for the right reason, at the right place, and for the absolutely right reason.  

I must add, we must do this in millions, and Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia must take the lead, and put the Ethiopian people toward rendezvous with victory.  

Teodros Kiros (PhD) December 29, 2008