Page 98 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

CHAPTER IV
The Impact of U. S. Foreign Policy
on the Oromo National Struggle
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his chapter critically examines the impact of U.S.foreign policy on the Oromo
national movement, focusing on its racist practices. The application of racist
Tvalues to the Oromo issue by Ethiopian and U.S. foreign policy elites makes
possible the economic exploitation and political oppression of Oromos and facilitates
judgments and policy based upon stereotypes and unexamined, preconceived ideas
about Oromos. Just as other Western and Eastern bloc countries discriminated against
Oromos and other colonized nations in their dealings with Ethiopia, U.S. foreign
policy elites and the U.S. government have approached the Oromo issue with a racist
mind-set that serves its imperialist interests. This racist mind-set fosters institutional
and individual discrimination by treating Oromos unfairly and undemocratically. It
avoids critical investigation by introducing and accepting false information and by
closing off options for either democratic policy making or finding solutions to the
contradictions between Oromos and Habashas (Amharas and Tigrayanns).
Specifically, this chapter questions why the West, particularly the United States, sees
Habashas as “Semitic,” Christian, and “advanced” peoples, and Oromos as “savage,”
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“Muslim fundamentalists,” “pagan,” “backward,” and, most recently, “terrorist.” This
false dichotomy leads the United States and other Western countries to provide suc-
cessive Habasha state elites with political, financial, technological, diplomatic, and mil-
itary assistance and to ignore the voice of Oromos. Noting how European colonial
scholars misused political power and social scientific knowledge by characterizing
Africans as savages,V.Y. Mudimbe argues,“The novelty [of explorer’s text] resides in
the fact that the discourse on ‘savages’ is . . . a discourse in which an explicit political
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power presumes the authority of a scientific knowledge and vice-versa.” A racist ide-
ological discourse has enabled successive Ethiopian elites and their governments to
dominate and exploit Oromos, who comprise more than half of the population of the
Ethiopian empire.
Several scholars have studied the impact of U.S. foreign policy on the Oromo na-
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tional movement but have not addressed the racist ideological base of this policy that
prevents policy experts from objectively examining the Oromo question. By siding
with the Tigrayan ethnocratic minority regime, the U.S. government still enables the
massive violation of the human rights of the colonized Oromo ethnonational major-
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ity. Because of its imperialist economic and strategic interests and clearly racist as-
sumptions about Oromos, the U.S. government and its foreign policy elites allied with