Dehai News

Ximdo; Peoples Peace Movement Grows in Horn of Africa

Ximdo is a peoples peace movement that has been growing in the war and famine plagued Horn of Africa for several months now. The word is from the Tigrinia language, used by Eritreans and Ethiopia’s Tigrayan's . It has a number of meanings but the best is “coexistence and cooperation”, between peoples, peacefully. Like when two cows are harnessed side by side to plow a field? 

Its first manifestation was the work of Eritrean activist/entertainer Awel Seid and it took place exactly where the Eritrean and Tigrayan border met, with Awel sitting on the Eritrean side and Bro. Berhane, a prominent Tigrayan peace activist, on the other side. It was a direct, non-governmental people to peoples peace movement between two peoples, the Eritrean and Ethiopian Tigrayan's who have been at war, or no war no peace, for almost all of the last 27 years.

Since the first “Ximdo” took place it has spread, with Awel Seid hosting the Ethiopian Afars and the Eritrean Afars in a peace program.

Attempts are being made to have Ximdo come to bring the Afars and the Tigrayan's together. Talk is even that efforts are being made to have Amharas and TIgrayan's sit and talk peace between their peoples. Hope is it will spread to include the Afars and Somalis in Djibouti and on and on across the Horn of Africa.

You must understand that a civil war has been raging in Ethiopia since the end of 2020 with the TPLF, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, the de facto government of Tigray, and before that in Ethiopia for the past 34 years, attacking the Ethiopian government of PM Abiy Ahmed and eventually its neighbors in Amhara, Afar and even Eritrea. I will never forget those evenings when TPLF rockets landed near our home in Asmara, Eritrea where we were living at the end of 2020.

There are a lot of Ethiopians who use the word “genocide” to describe the TPLF and later the Abiy Ahmed armies invasion of Amhara and Afar. In the actual fighting alone some 500,000 Tigrayan's, child soldiers mainly, were moved down in human waves in the TPLF assaults. Tens of thousands more were killed in the fighting, victims of indiscriminate artillery fire and massacres in general by the TPLF, and later the Ethiopia army under PM Abiy. Millions were driven from their homes and left to starve in make shift refugee camps.

Today the Amhara FANO/Patriots fighters alongside others are locked in a death struggle with what remains of the Ethiopian government of Abiy Ahmed with the only thing keeping his regime afloat is the cash and weapons supplied by the “Cancer of Africa”, the United Arab Emirates.

The Tigrayan's, both TPLF supporters and opposition forces are beginning to take up more active resistance to the Abiy Regime, finding themselves having more reason to work with their erstwhile Amhara enemies in FANO than with the Abiy forces. So Ximdo between Amhara and Tigrayan's, something almost unthinkable earlier this year, is now entirely possible.

Ximdo is going to needed even more in the future once the Abiy Regime is defeated and run out of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Empire of Emperors Menelik and Haile Sellasie will dissolve and new countries will be born with names like Amhara, Tigray, Afar, Oromia amongst others. New borders will have to be drawn, disputed lands resolved and “cooperation and co-existence” will be essential if peace is to take root. With the guarantee of foreign interference in this new explosion of independent countries the best hope for peace is Ximdo, like two oxen plowing side by side.

Thomas C. Mountain is a educator and historian. He lived and reported from Eritrea from 2006-2021 and at one time was the most widely distributed independent journalist in Africa. Contact him at thomascmountain at g mail dot com or through X/Twitter at thomascmountain