The spokesperson of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit), Dr Hailu Araya, has cleared the confusion about the party’s decision regarding Kinijit Diaspora. In an interview with VOA’s Addisu Abebe today, Dr Hailu said that both groups that tried to work on behalf of the top leadership have been dissolved by the executive committee’s decision.
A controversy arose when former Ethiopian Teachers Association president Dr Taye Woldesemayat, who helped create and became the chairman of the so-called Kinijit International Council (K.I.C.), said last week that the executive committee’s decision doesn’t apply to his group.
In the interview with the VOA, Dr Hailu made it clear that the decision applies to both the Kinijit International Leadership (K.I.L.), which has dissolved itself upon learning about the decision, and the K.I.C., which was created just three weeks before the Kinijit leaders were released from jail.
The K.I.C. headed by Dr Taye Woldesemayat was formed over the objection of all the Kinijit support committees in the Diaspora. Out of the 23 members who were invited to join the K.I.C., less than half have joined — many of whom have never been members of Kinijit. Dr Taye himself had made his anti-Kinijit stand public by declaring that he did not even vote for it in the 2005 elections. He has also never been to any Kinijit public meetings, and never spent one minute of his time in the past 22 months in the world-wide effort to secure the release of the Kinijit leaders.
It is now becoming clear that Dr Taye and members of the K.I.C. were hand-picked by Shaleqa Yoseph Yazew and his group of serial party-hoppers (EDU, EPDA, Tatek, AAPO, Kinijit, etc.) to split apart Kinijit and run away with a splinter group in order to cover up their theft and mismanagement.
The biggest fool in all this is the once-respected Dr Taye who is currently being used as a trojan horse by the corrupt shaleqa.
Most Kinijit members were willing to over look Dr Taye’s invective against Kinijit’s jailed leaders out of respect for the sacrifice he made in spending six years in Woyanne jail. But they consider what he is doing now to be anti-Kinijit. Those who are cheering him on are well-known anti-Kinijit web sites and radio programs.
The shaleqa and cohorts are able so far to create all this havoc using the good name of Ato Hailu Shawel, chairman of Kinijit. Their claim to any spec of legitimacy inside Kinijit is their close, personal relationship with Ato Hailu Shawel.
Ato Hailu Shawel will have to make a decision soon. He has to decide whether to continue allowing the shaleqa group to disrupt the organization using his name. Unlike Dr Taye, we are confident that Ato Hailu will make the right decision.
In the mean time, the executive committee’s spokesperson, Dr Hailu Araya, did the right thing today in clearing the confusion purposefully created by the shaleqa group and their puppet, Dr Taye. Listen Dr Hailu Araya’s interview here.