The
Vandals of the 21st Century: Eritrean and Amhara Troops in Tigray
Kalayu Abrha
01-18-21
We are having a "Wild West" scenario in the 21st Century, in a world that has succumbed to the rule of lawlessness, when it is expected to be more human than the anthropoid ape it evolved from. What is happening in Tigray is a material expression of how much humanity has retrogressed socially while paradoxically it claims to have achieved a space-age technology. The world's largest democracies and the World Body have disabled high-tech world wars but turned a blind eye to wars of savagery worldwide. The "highly advanced" world has stood and watched the Jewish holocaust, the death camps of Cambodia, the massacre of Salvador Allende's supporters, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Rwandan genocide, and the Rohingyan tragedy. Tigray, an ancient human civilization, a world treasure, and the home of brave but peace loving people, has been invaded by foreign troops, with the inexplicable permission of Ethiopia into its sovereign territory to do whatever they wish to do. Tigray is the core of the Axumite Civilization, which spanned for over a thousand years and was the contemporary of Rome. This makes it a world heritage that is jealously guarded by humanity. What happened to great Rome, in the 5th Century AD, by the Vandals is happening to Tigray in the 21st Century. By this Century and much earlier, the world has moved the common noun- "Vandals"- into a word in the English Dictionary. In the dictionary the word "Vandal" means a person engaged in the worst of all human actions over fellow humans. This implies that the world has vowed never to allow anything like that ever after. Unfortunately, realities around the world, including in Tigray, is a living witness of the fact that the world community has not lived upto its promise of making Vandalism history. The word Vandal has close to 30 synonyms: savage, brutal, uncivilized, rude, rough, harsh, destructive, atrocious, outrageous, cruel, barbaric, inhuman, ruthless, malicious, ferocious, sanguinary, blood-thirsty, beast, merciless, wild, unpolished, rapacious, ravenous, remorseless, hard-hearted, hooligan, murderous.
