The Mitmita Girls shuttled down to Little Havana from our beloved Manhattan to attend the opening of the über impressive W Hotel in Miami. Inevitably talk of Ethiopian politics crept into the mix and so we found ourselves trying to extricate our four inch Christian Louboutins from between the Anti Castro and the Pro Ethiopian Dictatorship crews.
So how did we end up in this predicament? We were stuck waiting on our friend who is half Ethiopian and half Italian and therefore doubly fashionable and exceptionally late to everything. La Femme Italienne, for whom we had snagged the coveted invitation to opening night, is ill-mannered—which is the problem with these molqaqa...spoiled girls… whose lives are nothing but a series of nights in Addis, Paris, Milan and New York. Which begs the question of why we befriended her? Well…She always has the most delicious gossip from Addis!
When she did finally decide to grace us with her presence, la Femme Italienne, arrived with two unexpected guests. As it turns out, joining our coterie of bon vivants was a dignitary of some sort from the Ethiopian Government. Granted it wasn’t the Prime Minister but rather one of his sycophants. So there we sat, wearing our nicknames as our fashion accessories—Miti, Mimi, Mitu and Mitmitaye—collectively the Mimita Girls—about to engage in verbal jujitsu with a totally. unworthy. opponent.
One of the gentlemen, pointing to his compatriot, announces: “This is a very important man in Ethiopia. He makes things happen.” He nodded knowingly.
My my. What a song to a Mitmita Girl’s ears. Since we are all gold digging social climbing kinda women, we are just charmed, charmed to find out how deeply important this chap was.
Paunchy, sparse of hair up top, plenty of hair on the chest with a fashion palate circa nineteen seventy something, our honored guest, leaned back on the couch trying to deflect what was an intended compliment but what was to our ears an insult; a deeply important man in Ethiopia’s government evoked sentiments of pure terror in our innocent hearts.
And whenever we, Mitmita Girls are scared, we summon from within us warrior women wielding machetes.
We are by nature peace loving girls. Truly we are! However, there is something about the murderous machination of Meles and his crew which induces urges of great violence in us—justice seeking violence, of course!
Back to our important guest. He looked like he could be a mercenary. More importantly, he was disastrously underdressed for the occasion of having drinks with the Mitmita Girls; We are awfully suspicious of people who dress poorly as a way of disguising their theft. He was a definitely a mercenary, we decided.
“Oh? Important?” we quipped. And oozing pure boredom we asked, “Esachew mindenew emitserut?” in perfectly well-honed Amharic with an American accent procured after years of privileged over education “and what is it you doooooooo, Monsieur Very Important?
We have just been dying trying to figure out how to smuggle Ethiopian artifacts out of the country…”
We smile sweetly.
The machete wielding warrior women within us thought it was almost too perfect to have this imbecile sitting before us. We should just let the warriors out and let them have their way with Monsieur Tres Important.
But we just bought these vintage LaCroix and Yves Saint Laurent dresses for the occasion of this opening and no sense in ruining perfectly good couture.
As with all deeply important people, the target of our inquiry deferred to the accompanying and évidement less important gentleman to explain his role in one of Africa’s most vicious plutocracies.
The details are of course inconsequential. The gentleman’s job could have been any number of troubling minamin… things.
For instance he could have been the person in charge of these outrageous land grants to foreigners…suddenly we have an abundance of Ethiopian landowners so we have began gifting our soil to others. Look at Prime Minister trying to convince everyone that he isn’t a land hording communist—its a land giveaway! Are you a foreigner? Do you have cash? Well Melesocracy has a stimulus plan for you! The Mitmita Girls are quite familiar with a few project finance deals ourselves; from what we understand, in these intricate transactions, Third World governments in collaboration with First World financiers orchestrate what are tantamount to beads for Manhattan deals where like the Native Americans, ordinary Ethiopians are bilked out of inheriting our land because a man with an uncanny resemblance to a goat has sold it to the Chinese.
The Warrior Women within us are seriously considering unsheathing a machete. Damn the consequences.
Or he could be the minister in charge of infrastructure—for example electricity and other such frivolities—which would sans doute explain what he was doing in Miami instead of being in Bole… seeing as how electricity is being rationed in Addis Ababa. Which as you know is all the rage in the industrialized and tres sophisticated countries with commodity exchanges. How totally modern! Why does everyone need to use electricity at the same time anyway, you wasteful fools! Everyone knows that we are on the cusp of the green revolution! You didn’t know it but Ethiopia’s Prime Minister is leading the way to greening the planet by conservation! That’s right, this is all about saving mother earth. Who knew the former jungle inhabitants now running our country are a hippie, tree hugging lot!
With the rush to introduce the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange some basic necessities, such as clean water and sanitary conditions have been left by the way side. All of this so that we can achieve that perfection of capitalism and all kneel at the alter of the market. Never mind that cholera has seized the city.
Those Warrior Women are now considering jumping on the table, channeling Legendary Singer Tilahun Gesesse, brandishing his sword and screaming, Zeraf Zeraf!
Or he could be from the Ministry of NGOs which is in charge of ensuring that pesky organizations like the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) stop publicizing such horribly sad depressing news unworthy of coverage! Look at this report from EHRCO’s May 2008 Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ethiopia:
Wubit Legamo Leka: 28, She lives in SNNPR, Wolayita Zone, Boditi town….During the 2005 national election, when her husband was running for Parliament she was an observer. She was arrested on 16 December 2007 and was beaten and tortured as a result of which she had a miscarriage of her four months pregnancy. She told EHRCO that while she was detained her four-year old child was taken by police to a childcare center. She said she was released on bail by the order of the high court.
Yikes! Beatings, tortures, miscarriages, oh my! We can so understand why the Diplomats are working with the Prime Minister to rid us of EHRCO! No one will come to visit our beloved land if every five minutes there are reports of beatings, torture, arrests and murders. Obviously the answer is not for the Ethiopian Security Forces to stop committing these crimes—that would be too absurd or surreal—instead we will put pressure on a human rights organization to stop it from doing work!
Meanwhile did you see where the Economist, oui, THAT Economist, called Birtukan a charismatic young leader and alluded to her unjust incarceration? Do you think Prime Minister just died when he read that? We think he should call back the Ambassador from London and have him summarily tarred and feathered for not blocking the Economist from printing that story. What the hell is it with these Europeans and their inability to control the press anyway!
Monsieur Tres Important might have held all of those positions or he might have been some other overlord. What we did find out was that Monsieur Very important is very loyal to Prime Minister.
Before the appointed mouthpiece could launch into the multitude of sins committed by our guest, La Femme Italienne announced that in all faireness, that we are not at all interested in his life. Elles ne s' interessent pas a sa vie! In fact, each one of them hates the Ethiopian government. Especially Prime Minister.”
Don’t you hate girls from one continent, speaking a language from a second one, sipping Martinis on a third continent while entertaining a murderous regime apparatchik?
“oh no no no.” insisted Monsieur Tres Important. “Surely you don’t mean Meles? No he can’t possibly be who you mean?” He gave us a peculiar look. If we weren’t so versed in Meles’ crimes we might have hesitated for a second under Monsieur’s withering gaze.
We and the warrior girls within us stood our ground as Meles’ mercenary took on the awesome responsibility of defending his boss’ record.
According to the gentleman, our beloved PM is a peaceful man. Not one to hold on to grudges. One that is often misunderstood. Indeed it seems he is a huge yoga practitioner. Believing in forgiveness, nirvana and meditation. Quite a departure from the egomaniacal, prisoner torturing, dissident disappearing, polpot wanna be we have been despising all these years.
As though this bit of tidbit wasn’t enough to sustain our gossip for weeks to come, Monsieur Very Important announced that he is quite familiar with the work of the Mitmita Girls. As it turns out, Monsieur was a huge fan of ours! Perhaps “fan” is too strong an emotion for what he feels. In fact he despises us! (We are shocked!) He thinks the Mitmita Girls’ missives are pure drivel (We are heat broken!) He laments our devious nature. (We are so misunderstood!)
As with apologists for criminal regimes, Monsieur’s quarrel wasn’t so much with any of our accusations of human rights violations leveled against the Ethiopian regime. He believes us to be very cavalier with certain bits of minutae. For instance, he was practically blue in the face when he explained that our writings on water shortage in Ethiopia were subpar because we didn’t know what the role of a water engineer was. Or how shameful it was that we didn’t know that houses in Addis were made out of tin!
What can we say—we are dilettantes! What do we know about engineering! As to the houses, we usually stay at the Sheraton and if forced to, at the Hilton when we are in Addis. Otherwise we spend all of our time being shuttled by black tinted SUVs from one gated community to another. So forgive us if we didn’t translate “korkoro” properly. In any case whether Korkoro means aluminum or tin, the greater issue, we stressed, is the Ethiopian government's inability to provide sustainable affordable housing to the population.
But really monsieur we can’t very well take your criticisms seriously when you have not even considered ours.
What say you about the charge of war crimes? About the torture of human rights defenders? The cold blooded murder of citizens? What say you about the rampant violations of human rights?
Monsieur Tres Important looked at us as though we were discussing eating babies for breakfast. He continued with his accusations.
“You are all “ethnicists!” He spat the word as though expecting us to acknowledge our prejudice and repent. He believes the Mitmita Girls adored Teddy Afro because of his ethnicity. We explained that we understood Teddy’s ethnicity to be “Konjo,” born of the tribe of Konjo Hager to his mother Konjit and his father Konjiyay—so we are totally guilty as charged. We have always maintained that high among the goals of the Ethiopian government, right between completely bankrupting the nation and obtaining a totalitarian control over the lives of ordinary people, is eliminating eligible bachelors from the dating pool.
When we laughed at the ethnicist charge, he moved on to censorship. Monieur thinks we engage in censorship because we don’t post all of the hateful mail that we receive, we asked him if he wanted us to post the comment where people have called us “whores.” He blushed purple.
We laughed. “If the comments calling us ‘whores’ are an attempt to launch into the much neglected issue of sex workers in Ethiopia and more importantly the trafficking of women in and out of the country, then we would be more than happy to engage you in this discussion. Granted as Mitmitas, smart women, women workers, and hell as women generally, we are accustomed to the misguided notion that we screw people for money.”
Then we smiled sweetly. “We just don’t think that people who prostitute themselves for Meles Zenawi, screwing a population of 80 million while they get filthy rich in the process, should be the first ones to throw around the word ‘whore.’”
Monsieur indicated he was tired of our “sarcastic journalism.” We responded that we were tired of our people dying.
Not even crème brule could bridge the divide between us and so we politely ended the cocktail hour.
True to the nature of a mercenary, Monsieur tried to stick us with the bill; it seems whether it is the tab for overpriced cocktails or the looting of our country, ordinary Ethiopians are always charged with picking up after the mess that Meles and his cronies have created.
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