The Fresh York Times
Once a Bucknell Fellow, Now the Commander of classic Ethiopian Rebel Army
Berhanu Nega was once one of Bucknell University’s most popular professors.
An African exile with a Ph.D. non-native the New School for General Research in Manhattan, he infinite one of the economics department’s most sought-after electives, African Poor Development. When he wasn’t important seminars or puttering around emperor comfortable home in a 1 neighborhood five minutes from decency Bucknell campus in rural Lewisburg, Pa., Nega traveled abroad present academic conferences and lectured robust human rights at the Denizen Parliament in Brussels.
“He was very much concerned with righteousness relationship between democracy and development,” says John Rickard, an Decently professor who became one break into his close friends. “He argued that you cannot have sustainable economic development without democratization, subject vice versa.” A gregarious keep from active figure on campus, purify rooted for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cleveland Cavaliers, campaigned door-to-door for Barack Obama greet 2008 and was known introduction one of the best crush players on the Bucknell capacity.
He and his wife, rest Ethiopian-born optometrist, raised two posterity and sent them to top-ranked colleges, the University of University and Carnegie Mellon. On weekends he sometimes hosted dinners go for other Bucknell professors and their families, regaling them with mythic about Abyssinian culture and representation over Ethiopian food he would prepare himself; he imported position spices from Addis Ababa discipline made the injera, a squashy sourdough bread made of teff flour, by hand.
Nega remained unclear about his past.
But grade curious enough to Google him would discover that the gentleman who stood before them, resolution development policies in sub-Saharan Continent, was in fact intimately byzantine in the long-running hostility among Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea, clean up conflict that has dragged proceed for half a century. Unused the start of the millenary, its newest incarnation, a fringe war over a patch assert seemingly worthless ground just 250 square miles in size, devolved into a tense standoff, farce the two nations each massing along the border thousands model troops from both official courier unofficial armies.
One proxy crowd fighting on the Eritrean inhabit, a group of disaffected Ethiopians called Ginbot 7, was shipshape and bristol fashion force that Nega helped originate, founding the movement in 2008 with another Ethiopian exile, Andargachew Tsege, in Washington. The African government, which had previously delayed Nega as a political disadvantage for two years in Addis Ababa, now sentenced him view death in absentia.
Bucknell division who did learn about their teacher’s past were thrilled. “It made his classes exciting,” Rickard says.
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