Islam ignites in Muslim majority Ethiopia

For the first time in modern history, the leadership of Ethiopia’s Muslim community, which makes up a majority of the country, has become politically active and is calling for the overthrow of the USA-backed Meles Zenawi regime. Not even in the darkest days of the Soviet Union-backed Mengistu regimes Red Terror of the 1970s and 1980s did Ethiopia’s Muslim leaders call for their followers to rise up against the regimes’ tyranny.

Today tens of thousands of Ethiopia’s Islamic community are heeding their leaders’ calls and demonstrating in the streets of cities across Ethiopia, most significantly in the capital Addis Ababa, calling for an end to the USA’s policeman on the beat in East Africa, Meles Zenawi.

While Ethiopia is historically portrayed as a Christian country, in reality most Ethiopians are of the Islamic faith. Starting with the Oromo people, who make up at least half or more of the Ethiopian population, 40 million or more, and are almost entirely Muslim. Then add the Afars and Somali people of the Ogaden and it becomes indisputable that Ethiopia is a majority Muslim country.

So when for the first time in modern Ethiopian history the leadership of the Islamic community call for the overthrow of the government, and are joined in this call by the leadership of the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox Church it means only one thing, that the end of the hated USA-backed Meles Zenawi regime is finally in sight.

With insurgencies growing in size and strength throughout Ethiopia, in the east, south, west and north, soaring inflation and economic hardships and now the unprecedented politicization of the leadership of the Muslim community, the consensus of those in the know in the Horn of Africa is that the foreign funded rule of Meles Zenawi may last a year, a year and half at best, possibly even less.

And once Meles is driven from power, and his military either destroyed or having joined the uprising, who will the USA have left to enforce Pax Americana in the strategically critical Horn of Africa?

Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. His interviews can be seen on RT and PressTV. He can be reached at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.