The USA should cease the moment

By Teodros Kiros

The United States, as one of the founding members of the UN, is no stranger to the concept and practice of collective security. Therefore, the popular uprisings in North Africa should not be viewed as a challenge to the United States; on the contrary, they should be perceived as a golden opportunity for America in finding new democratic friends in Africa and elsewhere. If the United States is serious in reformulating its foreign policy spectrum in such away to accommodate democratic regimes and no longer appease dictators, it should uphold what political scientists call ‘global level of analysis,’ in which state and non-state global actors find common ground and work together.

The US, in fact should send a clear signal to democratic forces around the world, including to those in Uganda, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, the Arab countries, that it will support them in their struggles for democratic transformation. (Abugida, Dec 20,2011) Dr. Ghelwadewos, the author of the above statement is our leading political scientist, known, for his measured judgment is quite right, when he counsels American policy makers to cease the moment and stand side by side with the voice of the voiceless across the Middle East, and onto Africa.

The waves of revolution are moving towards the seascape of the people’s courageous acts of self-liberation. Very soon the winds of revolution will be moving to Ethiopia, and the people promise that this impending uprising will be as admirable, as honorable and as organized as its Tunisian and Egyptian sister revolutions. The historic Ethiopia will pray to its God to put her on the right path, to teach her, and to invite its rulers to come to the palaver of dialogue.  As the peaceful Ethiopians march on the paths of Participatory Democracy, it hopes and prays as Dr. Ghelawdewos put it, that I American policy makers support in words and action the aspiration of the millions of Ethiopians as they stage the peoples uprising organized by the principle of Existential seriousness and framed in a new Moral Economy embodied in the feminine principles of MATT: Order, Truth, Balance and Justice.

America should stand by the millions of Ethiopians who will peacefully march at Meskel Square and lead a principled fight for their dignity and measured prosperity, aspirations, which are distinctly safeguarded by the American constitution. America must return to its revolutionary roots of Jeffersonian and Madisonian democracies, which brilliantly blend the political virtues of participation of the people and their self imposed checks and balances of the excesses of power and domination.

We must remind American policy makers that our uprising seeks to free Ethiopians from tutelage to tyranny, exactly as the Americans did when they freed their nation from tutelage to English tyranny; that we Ethiopians will demand our existential right to be fed, sheltered and clothed; that we will fight to exercise our political rights to free speech, to assembly and to the exercise of our conscience to free worship and belief. We appeal to all thinking Americans to support our project of staging a people’s revolution in defense of human dignity, which has been conspicuously absent in Ethiopian history, the people’s history. The new American policy must not be influenced by procuring oil, however necessary that is, but rather by the respect of human existential rights that the new revolutions are defending-as the fundamental rights of human dignity.

Teodros Kiros Professor of Philosophy and English (Liberal Arts) Berklee College of Music