Addis Ababa’s largest cemetery to be uprooted

(EthiopianReview)

Some families whose loved ones are buried at the St. Joseph (Kidus Yosef) Cemetery in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa have contacted Ethiopian Review with information that the land is needed for development and that they need to remove the remains of their relatives.

Families are being told to disinter their relatives and rebury them on some plot of land located on the road to Jimma.

Obviously the information is terribly upsetting to a lot of people. Yosef Cemetery is about as old as the city of Addis Ababa and almost every resident of the city has some relative buried there.

Addis Ababa Administration, whose mayor is Meles Zenawi’s puppet Kuma Demeks, has warned that the bodies that are not moved by a certain date will be dumped in a mass grave.

Addis Ababa can expand in several directions and there is no shortage of land. So it is not clear why the ruling junta is subjecting hundreds of thousands, may be millions of families to the ghoulish process of exhuming graves.

Kidus Yosef Cemetery is the final resting place for thousands of Ethiopian heroes and patriots such as Abebe Bikila, as well as average citizens. It is a cemetery steeped in Addis Ababa and Ethiopian history.