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In an article (´HRW Report on Ogaden, Part 1: the Background, and the Early US Reaction´ http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/65593) dedicated mostly in the partly republication of the Human Rights Watch Report on Ogaden, and more particularly the Report´s part concerning the historical background of the Ogaden crisis, I stated my willingness to come up with an extensive historical commentary of that part of the Report. The present article contains my comments on this subject, which is however of secondary importance for the Report.
As an international NGO, the Human Rights Watch "is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world" (http://www.hrw.org/about/); in fact, this has little to do with History, historical compositions, and academic research. History is essential to the HRW only to demonstrate the background of a conflict or case of Human Rights violations. That´s why the leading Human Rights NGO does not hire historians, and their reports´ eventual historical inaccuracies do not minimize in anything the veracity and the significance of their focus, namely the Human Rights violations.
My comments evolve around the following points.
Point 1 Habasha means Abyssinian.
In the very beginning, there is an error of translation and historical terminology. In the first paragraph, under the sub-unit´s title ´Political and Historical Context - The People and the Area´, the term "habasha" is first not translated (Abyssinian) and second misinterpreted (or Ethiopian).
Basics in African History are enough to let every unspecialized reader understand; the real name of the country is ´Abyssinia´. ´Ethiopia´ is a fake name, and its use is part of the (mainly but not exclusively) Oromo Genocide.
Abyssinians (Habasha) are the Amhara and the Tigray; there is sheer rivalry among the two tribes about the property of the ethnic name, as the Tigrays deny the Abyssinian originality of the Amharas.
When the Abyssinian colonial empire was under formation in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century, the national bank of the country was incepted, and it was the Bank of Abyssinia (http://www.bankofabyssinia.com/mother_of_all_banks_in_ethiopia.htm). It still bears the same name.
Ethiopia is the name Ancient Greeks and Romans used for the Kushitic state at the southern border of Egypt, which antedates for millennia the ancestors of the (Semitic) Abyssinians who came from across the Red Sea in the last centuries of the 1st millennium BCE (the name Habashat itself has been attested in Ancient Yemenite inscriptions as name of a Yemenite tribe that later migrated, and was established in Adulis on the African Red Sea shore, before expanding up to Yeha and Axum in the hinterland). The Kushitic state of Ethiopia (Kush in the Biblical text was translated as ´Ethiopia´ by the Septuaginta) never expanded on territory of today´s Abyssinia (fallaciously re-baptized as ´Ethiopia´) and Eritrea. In its latest phase (with capital at Meroe, today´s Bagrawiyah in the NE of Khartoum), the Kushitic state of Ethiopia fell (360 CE) following the attack of the Abyssinian King Ezana of Axum, who had been christened. Only small part of Ethiopia´s territory (the area around Atbarah river up to its estuary in the Nile) was occupied for a period of some decades by Abyssinia. After this interval, Christianity was diffused in Ethiopia (Ancient Kush) from the North and three Christian Ethiopian states (Nobatia in the North, Makuria in the center, Alodia in the South) spanned between Aswan and Khartoum.
The use of the name ´Ethiopia´ by the Abyssinian kings of Axum occurred sporadically within the context of royal propaganda, and at times was used in order to preposterously claim Biblical references as prophesying Abyssinia´s Christianization (mainly Psalm 68:31 ´Envoys will come out of Egypt; Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God´). The effort was totally absurd because it is nonsensical for any propagandist to claim that a country (Ethiopia which resisted efforts of Christianization coming from Egypt, and opposed the Abyssinian army before being vanquished by King Ezana) stretches her hands to God (interpreted by Christian theologians as Christianization) before being invaded by another (Abyssinia) which had been christened, but however failed to diffuse Christianity even in a small territory of the defeated country (Ethiopia) for the brief period of occupation. In fact, the biblical author totally ignored Abyssinia. If the Biblical verse is to be interpreted as signifying / prophesying Ethiopia´s Christianization, then it certainly hints at the gradual Christianization of Ancient Sudan (Kush Ethiopia) ca. 50 years after the destruction of Meroe and the partly occupation of Ethiopia by Ezanas of Axum, which triggered the rise of the three Christian kingdoms of Sudan, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia (and more significantly Makuria).
The use fell in desuetude for centuries after the collapse of Axumite Abyssinia in the early Islamic times, and the tiny Agaw Christian kingdom seems to have been totally indifferent and unrelated to Makuria which attested a long period of decay that started before the times of the Agaw kingdom´s peak (of lesser radiation) and ended after its demise. Makuria still existed at the times of the composition of a mythical forgery of Biblical and African History, named Kebra Negast, which is a text compiled in order to promote royal claims of usurpers of low descent who imposed hatred, barbarism, and inhumanity, by exterminating the last rulers of the Agaw dynasty (and their descendants).
Within the forgery of Kebra Negast, even pseudo-historical persons have been created, notably Ethiopis, an absolutely irrelevant concept that is due to confusion and manipulation of miserably assessed earlier sources.
Despite all that, the name ´Ethiopia´ became the official name of the totalitarian colonial country only when it was understood that the outright majority of the country, which consisted of the subjugated Eastern African nations ca. 70 72% of the population), was of Kushitic origin, and therefore the use of a national name that would rather fit the oppressed than the oppressors would cast a shadow on the political realities and the oppressors´ attempt to physically and spiritually exterminate the oppressed Kushitic nations by amharanizing them under the racist and criminal project of the formation of an ´Ethiopian´ nation (which would then be culturally, religiously, and behaviourally Semitic and not Kushitic).
Any single use of the term ´Ethiopia´, instead of the correct term Abyssinia, consists in an Act of spiritual Genocide, being one more bullet aimed at the heart of Africa.
The aforementioned sentence in the Report turns out to be totally inconsistent: historical mistrust of what many Somalis perceive as "habasha" or Ethiopian "highlander" means simply the ´Somalis´ historical mistrust of the Abyssinians´. The related fact is true; the Ogadenis mistrust their invaders.
Point 2 No conflict between the Majority of ´Ethiopia´ and Somalia
A missed point is the clarification of the clash at the present level already. Many people have a confused idea about this conflict. It is however wrong to view it as a conflict between two nations, namely ´Ethiopia´ and Somalia.
This is reflected in Ogaden as well. It would be irrelevant to imagine that the Somali Ogadenis side with their government against Somalia; they all side with their Somali brethren against the pestilence of the Abyssinians who alone rule tyrannically fake ´Ethiopia´.
Again, the Ogadenis are not alone in their deep and perfectly justified feelings against the cursed country in which they find themselves contrarily to their own will.
In fact, ´Ethiopia´ is not a nation; it is the most tyrannical and anachronistic, dysfunctional and racist colonial state in the world. The subjugated and tyrannized Oromos, Afars, Sidamas, Kaffas, Shekachos, Kambatas, Hadiyas, Gedeos, Anuak, Wolayitas, Berta, Agaw and Gumuz are all supporting the Somalis and the Ogadenis against the Amhara and Tigray-led tyranny of ´Ethiopia´.
Even greater precision would be offered to readership if the religious background and data were to be taken into consideration. The Amhara and the Tigray Abyssinians do not form one monolithic religious group; sizeable part of the two Abyssinian tribes is formed by the Amhara and Tigray Muslims, who are even more tyrannized and vilified, massacred and humiliated than the Sidamas, the Oromos or the Ogadenis. They too sympathize with the Ogadenis and the Somalis, and started being active against the tyranny imposed by the heretic. Monophysitic (Tewahedo) Abyssinians on all the other ethnic and religious groups.
In real figures, 18% of ´Ethiopian´ population only support the tyranny, and the same is valid for the mass extermination of the Ogadenis, and the civil war triggered in Somalia: the unrepentant, racist and tyrannically educated Monophysitic (Tewahedo) Abyssinians.
This rivalry is very old indeed.
Point 3 The Somali Abyssinian rivalry is a 700 years old story.
Following an approximately correct presentation of the Ogaden´s ethnic and tribal identity, the Report´s text continues through another subsection under the title ´The Ogaden and Somali Nationalism in the Colonial Era´.
The first sentence "Somali political struggle in the Horn of Africa has a long history and the area known as the Ogaden, which constitutes a key part of Somali Region, has had a pivotal role in that history" is partly correct and partly erroneous. It is true that Ogaden is an indivisible part of Somalia, but the discord and the rivalry that opposed the Abyssinians and the Somalis is not just 100 years old. The text starts with "the Dervish fighters of Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan". In fact, their fight against the Italians and the British was the first of the sort, the earliest struggle of Somalis against European colonial powers.
However, the frontal encounter between the Muslim Somalis and the heretic Monophysitic Abyssinians covers a span of more than 700 years.
It all represents a frontal opposition between African Islam and Abyssinian Monophysitism. This conflict is the result of earlier historical developments in the entire Eastern African coastland. Before Islam, we know that, following a gradual rise, and its Christianization in the first decades of the 4th century CE, Axumite Abyssinia became an important ally of the Eastern Roman Empire due to Abyssinia´s position on the sea route of the silk.
Even at the peak of its strength, the Axumite Abyssinian kingdom was a small country centered around Adulis (in the area of Massawa) and Axum; this corresponds to most of today´s Eritrean territory, plus adjacent areas of the Tigray province of Abyssinia.
During pre-Christian and Christian periods, the coast from the area of Bab el Mandeb straits down to Dar es Salam was never under Abyssinian direct or indirect control, cultural, religious, economic or political influence. Most of Somalia´s Northern coast, including the area of today´s Djibouti, and Eritrea´s southernmost confines, was independent and self-ruled as a commercial oligarchy of the local elders, known to the Mediterranean world as The Other Berberia. From the Horn of Africa (Ras Asir) to the area of today´s Tanzanian coast, Azania was a Yemenite colony, although we can be sure thanks to references of the Periplus of the Red Sea that the population was homogeneous.
The excellent relations between the Ancient Somalis and the Yemenites (of the merged kingdoms Sheba and Himyar) have gradually placed the area within the Persian sphere of influence during the Sassanid times (224 651 BCE). The Iranian territory arrived up to the borders of Yemen in the area of the Hadhramawt coast (then an independent state known in the Mediterranean world as Libanotoforos Hora, namely the Frankincense-bearing Country), so in definite vicinity to the Somali coastlands.
The Jewish presence and the gradual diffusion of Nestorian Christianity in Yemen can lead us to the working hypothesis of an early Jewish and Nestorian Christian presence in the Somali coastland, which is still to be corroborated by means of archeological excavations; if true, it must have been very limited however.
The ´global´ confrontation of the 6th century superpowers, the Sassanid Empire of Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire, was reflected in the striking contrast between the Nestorian Yemenites and the Monophysitic Abyssinians. When Kaleb of Axum undertook a military expedition in Yemen to help the Eastern Roman Empire, Axum lived in its expansionist phase, prelude to its collapse. Kaleb´s successor, Abraha, may even have led an attack against Arabic states in the North of Najran (northern circumference of Yemen, currently occupied by Saudi Arabia) and encircled Mecca, failing however to invade it. The result was the Persian intervention and annexation of Yemen. It is interesting to notice that even at the moment of Axum´s greatest expansion, Somalia and the Horn of Africa remained far from the Axumite control.
Following Yemen´s early adhesion to Islam (630 after the preaching of Ali at Sanaa, while Prophet Muhammad was still alive), and the subsequent Islamic invasions in Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran and Egypt, the entire Middle East between Tunisia and India became part of the Islamic Caliphate´s territory; the only exception was the territory of today´s Turkey (then Eastern Roman Empire), Upper Egypt and Sudan (the area of the three Christian states, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia), and Axumite Abyssinia.
However, the shock was not the same for the three Christian Ethiopian states and Abyssinia. In the Pre-Islamic times, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia did not control the Red Sea coast of today´s Sudan and were not involved in the Red Sea trade; their wealth hinged on the Nile and Sahara trade routes, and the fact that Egypt became part of the Islamic Caliphate did not damage in anything their finance at least for the first centuries of Islam.
On the other hand, Axumite Abyssinia, although also involved in the African trade (at least up to some extent) leaned on the Red Sea coastland, and Adulis seems to have continuously been commercially more important and financially wealthier than Axum itself. The early explosion of Islam turned the entire Red Sea into an Islamic Caliphate´s lake, and cut Axum off Adulis. This was a lethal hit, and the Abyssinian kingdom subsequently turned to an insignificant and impotent, marginal realm of far lesser importance than Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia.
Pursuing different path, Somalia accepted Islam relatively early; this contributed to the wealth of the inhabitants of the Somali coastlands who along with the Yemenites became the main mariners and sailors of the times of the Islamic thalassocracy across the Indian Ocean and between Egypt and China.
Early Muslims settled in Adulis, Zayla (Awdal) and Banadir, and as early as the beginning of the 8th century CE we have inscriptions referring to the death of Muslims originating from the Arabian peninsula. At the times of the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, the rise of the Indian Ocean navigation and the trade growth consolidated the local Muslim communities that could not possibly be controlled by the immense state that spanned from Morocco to India and China. Local royal and principal authorities exercised the political power in the Red Sea and Somali coastlands, progressively expanding in the inland. Axum was a meaningless spot of poverty and ignorance.
Documents dating back from the 13th century refer to early migrants who founded the Emirate of Shawa in A.D. 896. The Emirate of Shawa seems to have been dependant on the kingdom of Awdal, which was also known as Jabarti or Zayla'a. Al-Masudi referred to the Muslim state of Zayla, whereby the local population was in their majority non-Muslim. In the 10th century, from the Horn of Africa (Ras Asiir) to Sanaag, Zeyla, Harar and Shawa in the west, an advanced process of Islamization prevented any revival or rebirth, let alone expansion, of the demolished Axumite Abyssinian kingdom.
The early times of the Crusaders did not mean the slightest interruption in the advance of Islam in Eastern Africa. At the same period, the rise of a small Christian kingdom in the south of the Axumite center, nearby the northern shore of the lake Tana, highlights a Christian Kushitic revival of the Axumite Abyssinian past; it is however anemic, pale, and totally disconnected from either the coast or the Christian Ethiopian states of Makuria and Alodia in today´s Sudan.
Most of the Jabarti sub-clans (Walasma, Harla, etc.) and the tribes of Awdal, , Hagar, Shawa, Hargay, Wargar, Gabal, and Argobba had already adhered to Islam. The area in the west and the south of Harar, the territory of the Arsi Oromos and the Hadiyas had also accepted Islam. Awdal´s southern province, Bali, was a melting pot of various African Muslims ready for further explorations, expeditions and expansions. The epic narratives concerning the 12th century legendary figure of Sheikh Nur Hussein of Bali, originating from a Muslim family in the Banadiri city of Marka, highlight the importance of the area in the Islamization process. The founders of the Muslim kingdoms of Awdal and Shawa seem to be relatives and originate from the Banadir coast. It seems that the pre-Islamic Yemenite colonization of Azania continued down to Islamic times, and in the 8th and the 9th centuries, we attest numerous successive waves of migration. Thus, when Al-Hamawi and Ibn Said wrote about the Berbers (the ancient name of the Somalis survived for many Islamic centuries) that all of them were already Muslims. We can therefore conclude that for a period of ca. 600 years, the diffusion of Islam in the Horn of Africa was a matter of peaceful diffusion, migrations, trade relations and intermarriage. Contrarily to Sunni Shia tensions in neighboring Yemen, the two branches of Muslims co-existed peacefully in Somalia.
The rise of a revengeful, hateful, and ruthless Amhara dynasty ca. 1270 plunged the Horn of Africa in ceaseless wars due to the introduction of terrorism, racism, fallacy, forgery, odium and inhumanity. Many place the beginning of the Somali Abyssinian rivalry before 500 years, when the Great King of Somalia miserably downgraded by the Abyssinian academic forgers to just imam (in order to help further confusion with modern Islamists) Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim attacked and almost crushed the perverse, barbaric, Abyssinian kingdom of Odium. This may certainly rectify the approach adopted by the authors of the section ´Background´ of the HRW Report on Ogaden, but does not reflect the historical truth correctly.
The Great and Noble Somali King, who fought against the joined forces of the Portuguese and the Abyssinians, only reacted to Abyssinian aggression; this nefarious attitude had started with the rise of the pseudo-dynasty of vulgar and uncouth elements, who were comically and erratically self-styled as . descendants of King Solomon and the Yemenite Queen of Sheba, whom they fallaciously depicted as Abyssinian! The pseudo-royal propaganda for the bogus-Solomonic ´dynasty´ of burglars, gangsters, impostors and terrorists was Kebra Negast, a corrupt text of the utmost fallacy, venomous racism, and anti-Islamic hysteria.
There lies the beginning of the conflict between Somalia, Ogaden included, and Abyssinia. The constant references of the murderous colonial dictator Haile Selassie to the Somali King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim were due to a premeditated act of incitement to anti-Somali revenge. These references, as well as the Amhara and Tigray stories about the so-called Gragn (:the Somali King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim), portrayed as a monster, are all part of the Amhara and Tigray Monophysitic Racism. Ogaden, as pertinently studied by the HRW totally committed staff, is just one victims.
Africa´s thorniest problem, the Abyssinian fallacy, racism, and anti-Islamic hysteria, will not end, even if all the subjugated nations of Abyssinia achieve their national independence, and the Amhara and Tigray Muslims secede from the Monophysitic state that oppressed them for long. The threat will still be there. It will end only after an international tutelage that will re-educate and re-humanize the Monophysitic Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians. To survive they will have to change and reject the evil theories that emanate from Kebra Negast. In a forthcoming article, I will present the portrait of 738 years of Abyssinian Anti-Somali Racism and Hysteria.
Note
Picture: Column decorative details from the underground galleries and chambers of the Palace of Kaleb, locally considered as the Treasury of King Kaleb. Nothing of all this influenced Ancient Somalia, which was in the sphere of Yemenite cultural, political and economic influence.
As an international NGO, the Human Rights Watch "is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world" (http://www.hrw.org/about/); in fact, this has little to do with History, historical compositions, and academic research. History is essential to the HRW only to demonstrate the background of a conflict or case of Human Rights violations. That´s why the leading Human Rights NGO does not hire historians, and their reports´ eventual historical inaccuracies do not minimize in anything the veracity and the significance of their focus, namely the Human Rights violations.
My comments evolve around the following points.
Point 1 Habasha means Abyssinian.
In the very beginning, there is an error of translation and historical terminology. In the first paragraph, under the sub-unit´s title ´Political and Historical Context - The People and the Area´, the term "habasha" is first not translated (Abyssinian) and second misinterpreted (or Ethiopian).
Basics in African History are enough to let every unspecialized reader understand; the real name of the country is ´Abyssinia´. ´Ethiopia´ is a fake name, and its use is part of the (mainly but not exclusively) Oromo Genocide.
Abyssinians (Habasha) are the Amhara and the Tigray; there is sheer rivalry among the two tribes about the property of the ethnic name, as the Tigrays deny the Abyssinian originality of the Amharas.
When the Abyssinian colonial empire was under formation in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century, the national bank of the country was incepted, and it was the Bank of Abyssinia (http://www.bankofabyssinia.com/mother_of_all_banks_in_ethiopia.htm). It still bears the same name.
Ethiopia is the name Ancient Greeks and Romans used for the Kushitic state at the southern border of Egypt, which antedates for millennia the ancestors of the (Semitic) Abyssinians who came from across the Red Sea in the last centuries of the 1st millennium BCE (the name Habashat itself has been attested in Ancient Yemenite inscriptions as name of a Yemenite tribe that later migrated, and was established in Adulis on the African Red Sea shore, before expanding up to Yeha and Axum in the hinterland). The Kushitic state of Ethiopia (Kush in the Biblical text was translated as ´Ethiopia´ by the Septuaginta) never expanded on territory of today´s Abyssinia (fallaciously re-baptized as ´Ethiopia´) and Eritrea. In its latest phase (with capital at Meroe, today´s Bagrawiyah in the NE of Khartoum), the Kushitic state of Ethiopia fell (360 CE) following the attack of the Abyssinian King Ezana of Axum, who had been christened. Only small part of Ethiopia´s territory (the area around Atbarah river up to its estuary in the Nile) was occupied for a period of some decades by Abyssinia. After this interval, Christianity was diffused in Ethiopia (Ancient Kush) from the North and three Christian Ethiopian states (Nobatia in the North, Makuria in the center, Alodia in the South) spanned between Aswan and Khartoum.
The use of the name ´Ethiopia´ by the Abyssinian kings of Axum occurred sporadically within the context of royal propaganda, and at times was used in order to preposterously claim Biblical references as prophesying Abyssinia´s Christianization (mainly Psalm 68:31 ´Envoys will come out of Egypt; Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God´). The effort was totally absurd because it is nonsensical for any propagandist to claim that a country (Ethiopia which resisted efforts of Christianization coming from Egypt, and opposed the Abyssinian army before being vanquished by King Ezana) stretches her hands to God (interpreted by Christian theologians as Christianization) before being invaded by another (Abyssinia) which had been christened, but however failed to diffuse Christianity even in a small territory of the defeated country (Ethiopia) for the brief period of occupation. In fact, the biblical author totally ignored Abyssinia. If the Biblical verse is to be interpreted as signifying / prophesying Ethiopia´s Christianization, then it certainly hints at the gradual Christianization of Ancient Sudan (Kush Ethiopia) ca. 50 years after the destruction of Meroe and the partly occupation of Ethiopia by Ezanas of Axum, which triggered the rise of the three Christian kingdoms of Sudan, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia (and more significantly Makuria).
The use fell in desuetude for centuries after the collapse of Axumite Abyssinia in the early Islamic times, and the tiny Agaw Christian kingdom seems to have been totally indifferent and unrelated to Makuria which attested a long period of decay that started before the times of the Agaw kingdom´s peak (of lesser radiation) and ended after its demise. Makuria still existed at the times of the composition of a mythical forgery of Biblical and African History, named Kebra Negast, which is a text compiled in order to promote royal claims of usurpers of low descent who imposed hatred, barbarism, and inhumanity, by exterminating the last rulers of the Agaw dynasty (and their descendants).
Within the forgery of Kebra Negast, even pseudo-historical persons have been created, notably Ethiopis, an absolutely irrelevant concept that is due to confusion and manipulation of miserably assessed earlier sources.
Despite all that, the name ´Ethiopia´ became the official name of the totalitarian colonial country only when it was understood that the outright majority of the country, which consisted of the subjugated Eastern African nations ca. 70 72% of the population), was of Kushitic origin, and therefore the use of a national name that would rather fit the oppressed than the oppressors would cast a shadow on the political realities and the oppressors´ attempt to physically and spiritually exterminate the oppressed Kushitic nations by amharanizing them under the racist and criminal project of the formation of an ´Ethiopian´ nation (which would then be culturally, religiously, and behaviourally Semitic and not Kushitic).
Any single use of the term ´Ethiopia´, instead of the correct term Abyssinia, consists in an Act of spiritual Genocide, being one more bullet aimed at the heart of Africa.
The aforementioned sentence in the Report turns out to be totally inconsistent: historical mistrust of what many Somalis perceive as "habasha" or Ethiopian "highlander" means simply the ´Somalis´ historical mistrust of the Abyssinians´. The related fact is true; the Ogadenis mistrust their invaders.
Point 2 No conflict between the Majority of ´Ethiopia´ and Somalia
A missed point is the clarification of the clash at the present level already. Many people have a confused idea about this conflict. It is however wrong to view it as a conflict between two nations, namely ´Ethiopia´ and Somalia.
This is reflected in Ogaden as well. It would be irrelevant to imagine that the Somali Ogadenis side with their government against Somalia; they all side with their Somali brethren against the pestilence of the Abyssinians who alone rule tyrannically fake ´Ethiopia´.
Again, the Ogadenis are not alone in their deep and perfectly justified feelings against the cursed country in which they find themselves contrarily to their own will.
In fact, ´Ethiopia´ is not a nation; it is the most tyrannical and anachronistic, dysfunctional and racist colonial state in the world. The subjugated and tyrannized Oromos, Afars, Sidamas, Kaffas, Shekachos, Kambatas, Hadiyas, Gedeos, Anuak, Wolayitas, Berta, Agaw and Gumuz are all supporting the Somalis and the Ogadenis against the Amhara and Tigray-led tyranny of ´Ethiopia´.
Even greater precision would be offered to readership if the religious background and data were to be taken into consideration. The Amhara and the Tigray Abyssinians do not form one monolithic religious group; sizeable part of the two Abyssinian tribes is formed by the Amhara and Tigray Muslims, who are even more tyrannized and vilified, massacred and humiliated than the Sidamas, the Oromos or the Ogadenis. They too sympathize with the Ogadenis and the Somalis, and started being active against the tyranny imposed by the heretic. Monophysitic (Tewahedo) Abyssinians on all the other ethnic and religious groups.
In real figures, 18% of ´Ethiopian´ population only support the tyranny, and the same is valid for the mass extermination of the Ogadenis, and the civil war triggered in Somalia: the unrepentant, racist and tyrannically educated Monophysitic (Tewahedo) Abyssinians.
This rivalry is very old indeed.
Point 3 The Somali Abyssinian rivalry is a 700 years old story.
Following an approximately correct presentation of the Ogaden´s ethnic and tribal identity, the Report´s text continues through another subsection under the title ´The Ogaden and Somali Nationalism in the Colonial Era´.
The first sentence "Somali political struggle in the Horn of Africa has a long history and the area known as the Ogaden, which constitutes a key part of Somali Region, has had a pivotal role in that history" is partly correct and partly erroneous. It is true that Ogaden is an indivisible part of Somalia, but the discord and the rivalry that opposed the Abyssinians and the Somalis is not just 100 years old. The text starts with "the Dervish fighters of Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan". In fact, their fight against the Italians and the British was the first of the sort, the earliest struggle of Somalis against European colonial powers.
However, the frontal encounter between the Muslim Somalis and the heretic Monophysitic Abyssinians covers a span of more than 700 years.
It all represents a frontal opposition between African Islam and Abyssinian Monophysitism. This conflict is the result of earlier historical developments in the entire Eastern African coastland. Before Islam, we know that, following a gradual rise, and its Christianization in the first decades of the 4th century CE, Axumite Abyssinia became an important ally of the Eastern Roman Empire due to Abyssinia´s position on the sea route of the silk.
Even at the peak of its strength, the Axumite Abyssinian kingdom was a small country centered around Adulis (in the area of Massawa) and Axum; this corresponds to most of today´s Eritrean territory, plus adjacent areas of the Tigray province of Abyssinia.
During pre-Christian and Christian periods, the coast from the area of Bab el Mandeb straits down to Dar es Salam was never under Abyssinian direct or indirect control, cultural, religious, economic or political influence. Most of Somalia´s Northern coast, including the area of today´s Djibouti, and Eritrea´s southernmost confines, was independent and self-ruled as a commercial oligarchy of the local elders, known to the Mediterranean world as The Other Berberia. From the Horn of Africa (Ras Asir) to the area of today´s Tanzanian coast, Azania was a Yemenite colony, although we can be sure thanks to references of the Periplus of the Red Sea that the population was homogeneous.
The excellent relations between the Ancient Somalis and the Yemenites (of the merged kingdoms Sheba and Himyar) have gradually placed the area within the Persian sphere of influence during the Sassanid times (224 651 BCE). The Iranian territory arrived up to the borders of Yemen in the area of the Hadhramawt coast (then an independent state known in the Mediterranean world as Libanotoforos Hora, namely the Frankincense-bearing Country), so in definite vicinity to the Somali coastlands.
The Jewish presence and the gradual diffusion of Nestorian Christianity in Yemen can lead us to the working hypothesis of an early Jewish and Nestorian Christian presence in the Somali coastland, which is still to be corroborated by means of archeological excavations; if true, it must have been very limited however.
The ´global´ confrontation of the 6th century superpowers, the Sassanid Empire of Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire, was reflected in the striking contrast between the Nestorian Yemenites and the Monophysitic Abyssinians. When Kaleb of Axum undertook a military expedition in Yemen to help the Eastern Roman Empire, Axum lived in its expansionist phase, prelude to its collapse. Kaleb´s successor, Abraha, may even have led an attack against Arabic states in the North of Najran (northern circumference of Yemen, currently occupied by Saudi Arabia) and encircled Mecca, failing however to invade it. The result was the Persian intervention and annexation of Yemen. It is interesting to notice that even at the moment of Axum´s greatest expansion, Somalia and the Horn of Africa remained far from the Axumite control.
Following Yemen´s early adhesion to Islam (630 after the preaching of Ali at Sanaa, while Prophet Muhammad was still alive), and the subsequent Islamic invasions in Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran and Egypt, the entire Middle East between Tunisia and India became part of the Islamic Caliphate´s territory; the only exception was the territory of today´s Turkey (then Eastern Roman Empire), Upper Egypt and Sudan (the area of the three Christian states, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia), and Axumite Abyssinia.
However, the shock was not the same for the three Christian Ethiopian states and Abyssinia. In the Pre-Islamic times, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia did not control the Red Sea coast of today´s Sudan and were not involved in the Red Sea trade; their wealth hinged on the Nile and Sahara trade routes, and the fact that Egypt became part of the Islamic Caliphate did not damage in anything their finance at least for the first centuries of Islam.
On the other hand, Axumite Abyssinia, although also involved in the African trade (at least up to some extent) leaned on the Red Sea coastland, and Adulis seems to have continuously been commercially more important and financially wealthier than Axum itself. The early explosion of Islam turned the entire Red Sea into an Islamic Caliphate´s lake, and cut Axum off Adulis. This was a lethal hit, and the Abyssinian kingdom subsequently turned to an insignificant and impotent, marginal realm of far lesser importance than Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia.
Pursuing different path, Somalia accepted Islam relatively early; this contributed to the wealth of the inhabitants of the Somali coastlands who along with the Yemenites became the main mariners and sailors of the times of the Islamic thalassocracy across the Indian Ocean and between Egypt and China.
Early Muslims settled in Adulis, Zayla (Awdal) and Banadir, and as early as the beginning of the 8th century CE we have inscriptions referring to the death of Muslims originating from the Arabian peninsula. At the times of the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, the rise of the Indian Ocean navigation and the trade growth consolidated the local Muslim communities that could not possibly be controlled by the immense state that spanned from Morocco to India and China. Local royal and principal authorities exercised the political power in the Red Sea and Somali coastlands, progressively expanding in the inland. Axum was a meaningless spot of poverty and ignorance.
Documents dating back from the 13th century refer to early migrants who founded the Emirate of Shawa in A.D. 896. The Emirate of Shawa seems to have been dependant on the kingdom of Awdal, which was also known as Jabarti or Zayla'a. Al-Masudi referred to the Muslim state of Zayla, whereby the local population was in their majority non-Muslim. In the 10th century, from the Horn of Africa (Ras Asiir) to Sanaag, Zeyla, Harar and Shawa in the west, an advanced process of Islamization prevented any revival or rebirth, let alone expansion, of the demolished Axumite Abyssinian kingdom.
The early times of the Crusaders did not mean the slightest interruption in the advance of Islam in Eastern Africa. At the same period, the rise of a small Christian kingdom in the south of the Axumite center, nearby the northern shore of the lake Tana, highlights a Christian Kushitic revival of the Axumite Abyssinian past; it is however anemic, pale, and totally disconnected from either the coast or the Christian Ethiopian states of Makuria and Alodia in today´s Sudan.
Most of the Jabarti sub-clans (Walasma, Harla, etc.) and the tribes of Awdal, , Hagar, Shawa, Hargay, Wargar, Gabal, and Argobba had already adhered to Islam. The area in the west and the south of Harar, the territory of the Arsi Oromos and the Hadiyas had also accepted Islam. Awdal´s southern province, Bali, was a melting pot of various African Muslims ready for further explorations, expeditions and expansions. The epic narratives concerning the 12th century legendary figure of Sheikh Nur Hussein of Bali, originating from a Muslim family in the Banadiri city of Marka, highlight the importance of the area in the Islamization process. The founders of the Muslim kingdoms of Awdal and Shawa seem to be relatives and originate from the Banadir coast. It seems that the pre-Islamic Yemenite colonization of Azania continued down to Islamic times, and in the 8th and the 9th centuries, we attest numerous successive waves of migration. Thus, when Al-Hamawi and Ibn Said wrote about the Berbers (the ancient name of the Somalis survived for many Islamic centuries) that all of them were already Muslims. We can therefore conclude that for a period of ca. 600 years, the diffusion of Islam in the Horn of Africa was a matter of peaceful diffusion, migrations, trade relations and intermarriage. Contrarily to Sunni Shia tensions in neighboring Yemen, the two branches of Muslims co-existed peacefully in Somalia.
The rise of a revengeful, hateful, and ruthless Amhara dynasty ca. 1270 plunged the Horn of Africa in ceaseless wars due to the introduction of terrorism, racism, fallacy, forgery, odium and inhumanity. Many place the beginning of the Somali Abyssinian rivalry before 500 years, when the Great King of Somalia miserably downgraded by the Abyssinian academic forgers to just imam (in order to help further confusion with modern Islamists) Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim attacked and almost crushed the perverse, barbaric, Abyssinian kingdom of Odium. This may certainly rectify the approach adopted by the authors of the section ´Background´ of the HRW Report on Ogaden, but does not reflect the historical truth correctly.
The Great and Noble Somali King, who fought against the joined forces of the Portuguese and the Abyssinians, only reacted to Abyssinian aggression; this nefarious attitude had started with the rise of the pseudo-dynasty of vulgar and uncouth elements, who were comically and erratically self-styled as . descendants of King Solomon and the Yemenite Queen of Sheba, whom they fallaciously depicted as Abyssinian! The pseudo-royal propaganda for the bogus-Solomonic ´dynasty´ of burglars, gangsters, impostors and terrorists was Kebra Negast, a corrupt text of the utmost fallacy, venomous racism, and anti-Islamic hysteria.
There lies the beginning of the conflict between Somalia, Ogaden included, and Abyssinia. The constant references of the murderous colonial dictator Haile Selassie to the Somali King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim were due to a premeditated act of incitement to anti-Somali revenge. These references, as well as the Amhara and Tigray stories about the so-called Gragn (:the Somali King Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim), portrayed as a monster, are all part of the Amhara and Tigray Monophysitic Racism. Ogaden, as pertinently studied by the HRW totally committed staff, is just one victims.
Africa´s thorniest problem, the Abyssinian fallacy, racism, and anti-Islamic hysteria, will not end, even if all the subjugated nations of Abyssinia achieve their national independence, and the Amhara and Tigray Muslims secede from the Monophysitic state that oppressed them for long. The threat will still be there. It will end only after an international tutelage that will re-educate and re-humanize the Monophysitic Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians. To survive they will have to change and reject the evil theories that emanate from Kebra Negast. In a forthcoming article, I will present the portrait of 738 years of Abyssinian Anti-Somali Racism and Hysteria.
Note
Picture: Column decorative details from the underground galleries and chambers of the Palace of Kaleb, locally considered as the Treasury of King Kaleb. Nothing of all this influenced Ancient Somalia, which was in the sphere of Yemenite cultural, political and economic influence.
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