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Money is the mother’s milk of Nonviolent Campaign

Posted on , Updated on by Elias Kifle

In order to run a successful nonviolent civil resistance, you should know how much and which kinds of material resources are required to fulfill the grand strategy, and discover ways to fund-raise in order to keep your movement on a permanent offensive… [read more]

8 thoughts on “Money is the mother’s milk of Nonviolent Campaign”

  1. There is no doubt bout it. People are willing to part with their money for a cause that they think has direction and end game. This is how Churchs get money from their followers. The Ethiopian opposition need to hold regular debates, make it seem it has direction, make it seem it has some destination and the money will simply follow. The lack of money right now is because of the question “what is the purpose? what is the end game?” Nobody cares if we are against woyane. infact everybody is against woyane at this point in time. The point is, what is the end game? what is the roadmap?

  2. Even if I agree partly with what Mamo said above,yet there are many Ethiopians who are fighting at home and uitside any kind of injustice,what is needed is organization,make it possible for people to give what ever they can from countries where they are currently living,where I live in Holland,there is a radio stationwho has contact also with Isat tv.it needs hard work but soon or later many Ethiopians will hear,upto now many became rich themselves even from the subsidy they get in the name of Ethiopians that is what I heard long before,but now I hope and believe no body will do such thing,sure the must be a way to collect money and help the poor Ethiopians scaterd all over the world,what have the Jews done,it is my people,so we also that is the only way we have,the past Ethiopians helped each other as Ethiopians,having learned from that,we need to do better and asham these enemies of our land.

    Mamo replies:
    May 29th, 2012 at 2:01 PM

    Dude, people have given up on giving money. There are atleast a million Ethiopians outside of Ethiopia. How many of these people give money for a political cause? May be 5000? I am just being generous here.

    The mentality of the opposition is that they are not getting money because the people are stingy. This is a very stupid position. Churchs and Mosques get millions of dollars every year from hundreds of thousands of people every year. The difference is the mosques and churchs have end games, they promise you some kind of salivation an end goal.

    The Ethiopian opposition is just a collection of anti-weyane hodge podge. There is no cause except being anti-Weyane. That is not good. They need to come up with a roadmap. They should hold televised or radio-transmitted debates… they really do not even have to pull a trigger in the jungle.

    We are all anti-Weyane. It is next to illogical for me to give money to someone else for being the same as me. I might as well keep the change to myself.

    Opposition needs to show leadership, need to come up with plan, if that is not possible atleast hold debates. The money will follow (flow). Learn from the churchs and the mosques.

  3. An interesting precedence being set for Ethiopia should Meles Zenawi, like his distance cousin in Syria, choose to massacre Ethiopians indiscriminately in order to cling to power. President Bashar al-Assad is in an apparent hot seat. The story of TPLF mimics that of Syria’s Alawites.In Ethiopia, there should NOT be a vengeful policy against all perceived enemy but a tactical one against the criminal invadors. Unless Meles Zenawi leave town a la Mengistu style, the scenario in Ethiopia is going to look like just like Syria.

    Questions about the viability of the plan were thrown into sharp relief by the massacre in the villages that constitute Houla, near Homs, on Friday, whose victims included 49 children and 34 women by United Nations count. The Security Council on Sunday unanimously condemned the massacre and, while not assigning blame, censured the Syrian government for using heavy artillery against civilians. The aftermath of the killings continued to reverberate inside Syria. Shops, including the famous Hamadiyah bazaar of Damascus, stayed shut as part of an opposition-led call to observe three days of mourning, according to opposition activists and residents. Damascus has been a bastion of government support. The activists and residents said government agents forced some stores to reopen, particularly in the nut and candy bazaar, by prying open their metal shutters. Mr. Annan, the envoy of both the United Nations and the Arab League and a former United Nations secretary general, arrived with a new mandate from the Security Council — including Russia, which had usually blocked action against its ally in Damascus — to carry out his plan. He was scheduled to hold talks on Monday with Walid al-Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, and with President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday. He will also meet with a variety of other people, including opposition figures, on the trip, which was scheduled before the massacre. From the beginning, the peace plan has been given slim chances of success. But it was seen as an acceptable means to try to bridge the differences over Syria between the West and the Arab nations on one side and Russia, China and Iran on the other. Some analysts have called it an international stalling measure, because the Western appetite for military intervention in the conflict is low, even in the absence of Russian opposition. In Washington, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the massacre “horrific” and “atrocious” and said that he was prepared with military options in Syria should they be requested by the White House. But he otherwise spoke cautiously about American intervention by force. “There is always a military option, but that military option should always be wielded carefully,” General Dempsey said on Fox News. “Because one thing we’ve learned about war, I have learned personally about war, is that it has a dynamic all its own — it takes on a life of its own.” Nonetheless, he said, “it may come to a point with Syria because of the atrocities.” White House officials said on Monday that General Dempsey’s television appearances were not a coordinated administration response to Syria, but had been previously planned as part of the commemoration of Memorial Day. In recent days, the Obama administration has come under intensified criticism by some in Congress and by the Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, who accused President Obama of not doing enough to help the Syrian opposition. In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was slightly more expansive in holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence during comments after a meeting about Syria with his British counterpart, William Hague. And both he and Mr. Hague agreed that the main priority was to fully carry out the peace plan. Mr. Lavrov repeated Russia’s position that it was tied not to Mr. Assad staying in power, but to the Syrians piloting their own political transition. “For us, the main thing is to put an end to the violence among civilians and to provide for political dialogue under which the Syrians themselves decide on the sovereignty of their country,” he said. Despite the increased Russian public pressure on the Syrian government, Mr. Lavrov did echo Syrian government claims that the violence was being fomented by imported terrorists working at the behest of foreign governments — “a clear hand of Al Qaeda, and the threat of terrorism is growing.” Later, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Russia’s special representative to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, had told Riyad Haddad, the Syrian ambassador, that violence against civilians was unacceptable and that the six-point plan had to be implemented. In Houla, where survivors buried their remaining dead in a mass grave on Monday, new accounts of the killings emerged, adding to earlier statements that some the attacks were by pro-government thugs who went house to house to find victims. Human Rights Watch quoted one elderly woman from the Abdul Razzak clan as saying she survived by hiding in a back room while gunmen dressed in fatigues killed most of her family. “I heard several gunshots,” she was quoted as saying, describing how she collapsed in terror until the soldiers left. “I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot. They were shot in their bodies and their head. I was terrified to approach to see if they were alive. I kept crawling until I reached the back door. I went outside, and I ran away.”

    – International Pressure on Syria Grows After Killings, NYT – 2012/05/29.

  4. This is how the ehno-fascist dictator meles and his cohorts run a tplf government at the expense of Ethiopia.

    ‘…The army is controlled by TPLF loyalists. Almost all the generals that have key positions in the army are TPLF members from one minority ethnic group and handpicked by Meles
    Zenawi.

    The economy is significantly dominated by two conglomerates. The billionaire Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi, who has lost the respect of the Ethiopian people when he publicly declared to be a TPLF loyalist in 2005, has managed to have a significant share in many sectors of the economy.

    Nonetheless, the privileged Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT) has emerged as the unchallenged monopoly that pays neither income tax nor opens its accounts for external audit.
    Nobody has access to EFFORT’s astounding wealth except Meles Zeanwi, his wife and hismost trusted loyalists like masters of corruption Abadi Zemu, Arkebe Ekubay and Getachew Belay.

    After Meles appointed his wife, Azeb Mesfin, who is widely known as the first lady of corruption, as head of his business conglomerate, it turned out that EFFORT is nothing but a family business making billions of birr in annual profit.

    While EFFORT controls the fate of the Ethiopian economy, the stake of the TPLF in foreign aid is managed by two domineering NGOs called the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) and the Tigray Development Association (TDA).

    The exploitative ethnic apartheid Meles and his cohorts have imposed on the people of Ethiopia has reduced the nation into Africa’s most explosive powder keg that can erupt any time.
    …’

  5. @Anonymous of comment #3,
    Are you stupid or what? What is the massacre in Syria got to do with massacres a hndred times worse in Meles’ Regime?. There we see a US administration condemning what is happening in Syria but qe also see the same administration aiding & abetting Meles Zenawi to continue his brutal atrocities across the whole of Ethiopia every now and then that makes your Syrian massacre look like nothing. We see a hypocrite US regime ignoring the plight of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians every year but shut f the human right of others elsewhere. If it weren’t for the diplomatic, financial, military support that dictator Meles receives every year from the hypocrite regimes of US & UK, Meles & Bereket would have been history hiding in Zimbabwe along with Mengistu Hailemariam. These ones are much much worse that Mengistu.

  6. An inevitable precedence has been set for Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia as he escalates the massacre that he’s accustomed of committing for the last 21 years. The pro Syrian government thugs called Shabiha is responsible for much of the massacre in Syria; they’ll be the equivalent of Lieyu Police.

    “A tsunami of lies.” That’s how the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja’afari, characterized the Security Council’s condemnation of his government, following the latest massacre of its citizens—a hundred and eight of them, in the town of Houla this weekend, including, it now seems, at least forty-nine children. One ghastly eyewitness report after another describes agents of Bashar al-Assad’s government committing the murders, but the government blames unidentified “terrorists” for the slaughter. Since Assad calls anyone who does not support him a terrorist, the suggestion is that the dead of Houla committed suicide—or, at least, that they have only themselves to blame for their mutilation and murder. A few days before the horror in Houla, Assad told Russian state TV that he was the victim of an “information war” waged by “the West.” “These lies, or rumors, or false accusations—call them what you will—all these soap bubbles, they have a short life,” the Syrian President said. According to the U.N.’s conservative estimates, some ten thousand Syrian citizens have been killed since peaceful protests against Assad’s dictatorship began fifteen months ago. Although there has been increasing armed opposition, the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties are the result of state violence, and Assad told the Russian broadcaster that the spin is not important: “The main thing is to win in real life.” … Inevitably, there has been speculation in the press that the Houla massacre will be a “game changer”—the pivotal outrage that will propel international military action against Assad. The Washington Post editorial page, for instance, has been boosting the idea of a NATO air war in Syria for a while now. What the paper’s argument boils down to is: it worked in Libya, so why treat Syria differently? That Assad must go, as Obama has said repeatedly, is not in dispute. But the Syria hawks don’t even bother to describe who or what should replace him. In fact, as I write in this week’s Comment in The New Yorker, Syria presents, in every particular, a completely different predicament than Libya did. Given the terrible tangles of domestic, regional, and geo-strategic politics at stake, the more pertinent reference is the cautionary example of Afghanistan. A few days before the massacre of children in Houla, Reuters reported on the poisoning, in northern Afghanistan, of more than a hundred and twenty schoolgirls and three of their teachers. The girls survived, but scores of them were left unconscious. The National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, blamed the Taliban, and noted that this was the second such poison attack in a month by militants opposed to the education of females—the first one had claimed a hundred and fifty victims. The N.D.S. warns that the Taliban would like to shut down all schools that allow girls to study before NATO troops withdraw, at the end of 2014. Already, in the past year or so, at least five hundred and fifty schools have been closed in Taliban strongholds around the country. Today, CNN reported another incident of Afghan schoolgirl poisoning: this time, a hundred and sixty students were hospitalized. Should we send NATO to the rescue? It’s too late. NATO has been there for more than a decade, and last week, in Chicago, its leaders declared its plan to withdraw from Afghanistan “irreversible.” What makes anyone think that we can protect Syrian children better?

    –SHOULD WE BOMB SYRIA? – BY PHILIP GOUREVITCH, New Yorker.

  7. The opoint Mamo raised is relevant toour cse.The sillent majority have no confidence in some politcal parties andmovements specially those who declared armed struggle.I for one have never supported G-7 or any one who seeks aid from Shabia.The reason why the majority are not dancing tpgether with thes organizations is clear.First,whether they like it or not before thy exstablish their organizations these leaders were expected to broadly consult Ethiopians.Second,they are expected to believe and have confidence in the people of Ethiopia.Third,the facta that some leaders speak of democrcy does not mean they will honer the rights of others.If that was the case they could have been able to roatate around their organizational leadership. Experiancethought us that they failed in both points as aresult they are paying for it.It is time Ethiopians at home need to come up with home grown military leaders to lead the people to freedom.It is possible then for the people to flock behind such kind of commited and home based leadership provided its leadership shows confidence in our people.

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