Email Sentences & Phrases in Different Situations

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In 2019, Interview with Dawud Ibsa for a project on peacemaking | By Andrew DeCort

I wish to express my gratitude to Obbo Dawud for this moving conversation. May peace, justice, healing, and freedom flourish in Ethiopia for all people. May our grief be shared, and may violence and dehumanization end.

In 2019, I interviewed Dawud Ibsa for a project on peacemaking. Obbo Dawud kindly allowed me to ask him 26 questions and responded very energetically to each.

In recognition of his release from over a year of house arrest, I am sharing a small excerpt from our long interview. Kindly note, an interview is not a political endorsement; it is human dialogue.

I was very moved by Dawud’s responses to my questions about grief, violence, and dehumanization. Here’s the conversation:

*** Andrew: My mother had a severe stroke six years ago, and I have felt the grief of seeing her grow weaker and weaker. But you have seen so many people suffer. How have you carried your grief?

*** Dawud: I saw my family being attacked by police and in court. I grew up in this situation from childhood. I heard this from many.

I saw my mother being beaten by police when I was in seventh grade. Again, I was imprisoned during the Derg from 1977 to 1979. My mother came to bring me some food in prison. I was called to collect it from her. But the policeman stopped me from collecting the food, which was my right as a prisoner. I obeyed his order and returned, but he fired shots at my leg. My mother fell down out of panic from this – when she saw her boy being wounded and broken. She fell and broke one of her legs, and my mother suffers from a broken leg in a wheelchair.

When I see this – she’s here in Burayu now – I always live in this memory. It hurts. I know it very well. She’s in her mid-eighties. Pain is what we are as human beings. But we have to live with it.

*** Andrew: How do you feel when you think of that police officer who beat your mother when you were a boy?

*** Dawud: Not only that man. I went as a witness to court against the police officer who shot me in the leg. The court asked me what I felt about him after giving my testimony. I said, “I feel nothing about him. It’s the system that propelled him [to behave] like that. Correct the system.”

The policeman was illiterate. The system did not provide him with training and discipline for how to treat prisoners. I saw the policeman losing his job with his family and crying. That touched me. His wife was at the court and she was crying.

*** Andrew: I’m not sure many people would imagine Dawud Ibsa being touched by a police officer and his wife weeping in court with the fear of losing their income. How have we become so dehumanized in our public discourse?

*** Dawud: That’s a problem in Ethiopia. Those of us involved in the struggle see a default in the system that has abused human value and built itself to continue like this. It refuses to change, and it has affected all of us.

People think of Dawud as a rebel and a very cruel person. But when I go and talk with them, they see a different person who has respect for human life. They get amazed.

***

“Love your neighbor as your self.”

Source: Andrew DeCort