The Addis Ababa airport I used to know was shabby and neglected, an overgrown shack of wood, concrete and tin. It smelled of incense mingled with the dank, sweet odor of sewage. But the old airport had been torn down since my last visit; in its place was a sparkling, high-ceilinged structure of metal and glass into which light poured from every direction.
Now, as I rode into the city, traffic stopped for a herd of goats and beggars were sleeping on the traffic islands that divided the road. But people were also bustling around with cell phones stuck to their ears, and brightly lit Internet cafes were filled with young people. Things were changing for the better, it seemed when I arrived last month. There was no reason to suspect that Ethiopia was poised to plunge headlong into darkness — that within a week, dozens of street protesters would be dead, and tens of thousands of young people arrested.
Like many in the West who follow Africa, I was prepared to think well of Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s engaging prime minister. After all, in 1991 he had toppled Mengistu Haile Mariam, the communist dictator. Under Mengistu, fear used to be palpable. Hulking members of the secret police patrolled the streets at night, their weapons hidden under long dark coats. I had been in Addis Ababa 14 years ago when Zenawi’s Tigrean People’s Liberation Front had freed the city, ending 15 years of civil war. The young TPLF fighters, dressed in frayed, unmatched combat fatigues, had seemed incorruptible as they moved through the city, stealing nothing, as though still in the countryside where they had lived for years.
Zenawi, an avowed Marxist Leninist during the civil war, adroitly changed ideologies after taking charge of Ethiopia in May 1991. With the Soviet Union collapsing, Zenawi vowed to bring democracy and Western-style economic growth to Ethiopia. Since then, Ethiopian democracy had been far from perfect — Zenawi’s party had won suspiciously resounding victories in two consecutive elections and was suspected of fudging poll results in parliamentary races in May that were initially seen as fairer. But I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. Hadn’t a free press been allowed to flourish in the capital? Hadn’t I seen, in visits over the past decade, that people were no longer afraid to speak their minds? And didn’t the cell phones and Internet cafes indicate that part of the population was emerging from poverty?
All too often encouraging signs of change have proven false in African nations, but Zenawi’s mastery of the language and symbols of liberal democracy had raised hopes that Ethiopia would be an exception. Figures such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz praised Zenawi as a wise leader. Contributions from Western donor countries covered almost a third of Ethiopia’s annual budget. And Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center had sent hundreds of observers, declared the May campaign this year basically free and fair. Yet democracy, like beauty, is sometimes only skin-deep — and elections are of only cosmetic value when the army, the media and the justice system are all controlled by the ruling party.
As I drove into Addis Ababa, the police were stopping buses, seemingly at random, and searching all male passengers. This was the first sign, for me, that something was amiss. The next day I sat in the attic of a small restaurant, with 20 young men, most well educated yet unemployed. They were chewing mildly narcotic leaves of qat and talking politics, green paste dripping occasionally from the corners of their mouths. All of them had been stopped and searched over the previous 24 hours, and all were angry.
The May 15 elections had been rigged, they told me. When the government realized it was losing in the rural areas, its traditional power base, as well as in the cities, it had stolen ballots and stuffed boxes in the swaths of countryside where no observers were posted. After the elections, Zenawi imposed a state of emergency, outlawing public protest and lambasting the opposition over state-controlled television and radio. In June, students at Addis Ababa University who had shouted protest slogans had been arrested. When a high school girl lay down in front of the trucks that came to take the students away, she was shot by a sniper. Then all hell broke loose and at least 35 people were shot dead when security forces opened fire.
Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, a leading intellectual and one of the architects of the main opposition party, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), had championed human rights and been jailed by both Haile Selassie’s and Mengistu’s regimes. Now, at age 75, he was at odds with a new regime.
White-haired, frail and coughing as he chain-smoked Marlboros, Mesfin expressed both hope and outrage when I interviewed him in his cluttered apartment. “The opposition is engaged in peaceful political struggle, but the government is using brute force. Yesterday, the police entered the CUD offices, beat people and carted them off. Hundreds are in prison.” Mesfin lit another cigarette. “For the Ethiopian people, the masses, there is a new awakening. They once believed that God gave you rulers. Now they are beginning to realize that they have sovereign rights.”
The CUD had called for a general strike to be held Nov. 4, but on Nov. 1, the day after I spoke to Mesfin, violence began. Several hundred high school students joined by children in the sprawling Merkato market confronted police and red-bereted army special forces, blocking streets, burning tires and throwing stones. Across the city, stores closed their metal gates; the minivan taxis disappeared, city buses were pelted with stones. By nightfall, eight people were dead, including two police officers, and most opposition leaders — including Mesfin — had been arrested and charged with treason, an offense punishable by death. Independent newspapers had been closed, and journalists were in prison or hiding.
There had been warning signs about the repressive nature of the Zenawi regime 14 years ago. Ethiopia has some 70 ethnic groups, including the Amhara, the Oromo and the Tigreans. The Amhara tribe, whose members included Haile Selassie and Mengistu, had ruled Ethiopia for a hundred years, conquering lands and creating a nation out of disparate parts. The Oromo, the largest ethnic group, were largely disempowered. The Tigreans, though fewer in number, were the Amhara’s historic rivals.
The day after the Tigrean fighters ousted Mengistu, Amhara demonstrators carrying long green branches had protested Zenawi’s plan to allow Eritrea, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, which had been fighting for independence for 30 years, to secede. “Ethiopia must stay united,” the agitated demonstrators had cried. I was standing with Tigrean soldiers, who were still dressed in their ragtag rebel clothes, when they singled out one demonstrator and cornered him in front of the exterior brick wall of a church. He was a middle-aged man with a paunch and I watched him raise his hands in a gesture of submission before the soldiers shot him at close range — once, twice, until he collapsed.
My natural sympathy was not with the protesters. I saw them as Amhara supremacists who did not appreciate that the Tigreans had liberated them from a brutal dictatorship. Because of this, perhaps, I didn’t judge the incident harshly enough.
I thought of that shooting again as accounts of police and army excesses started pouring in last month. A French journalist I met on the street had seen army troops firing at the backs of retreating demonstrators. A young woman ran up to us breathlessly and said she had seen soldiers burst into a house a block away and start shooting. Soldiers roared through the now empty streets by the truckload. By afternoon, most of the shooting had subsided. But not all of it.
In the morning, in one of the thousands of dirt alleyways that form grids between Addis Ababa’s broad avenues, I was led into a mud-brick home, where mourners wept and danced in a frenzy of sorrow. A 17-year-old named Tsegahun had been standing with friends in the alleyway at dusk the day before when soldiers arrived. One of the friends said, “They called him over, told him to kneel down, and shot him twice in the midsection.”
After that, hundreds of young men had taken refuge in a nearby river gorge to escape soldiers who had come knocking on doors at midnight. I heard the same story in neighborhood after neighborhood. Arrests continued every night for a week, until thousands were taken, human rights groups said. Many were hauled 220 miles away, to the malaria-infected lowlands near Sudan.
After a week, Addis Ababa returned to a semblance of normalcy. Shops reopened — though only after the government had begun to revoke the licenses of businesses that remained closed. Parents wandered from police station to police station, trying to get information about their arrested children. The opposition leaders, Mesfin among them, were shown on TV shuffling, handcuffed and bent, toward a courtroom.
Suspicion simmered, as though the Mengistu era had returned. People in cafes shot furtive glances at neighboring tables.
“We feel betrayed by democracy,” said a journalist who said he has been in hiding since the Nov. 1 crackdown. “It’s as if the government encouraged us to speak our minds so that it would know who to grab when the time came.”
Yet many Ethiopians believe that the Western democracies could still help. The driver who took me to the airport, a friend from previous visits, had carefully avoided talking politics during my trip.
As we approached the terminal, he finally had his say. “The donor countries can twist Meles’s arm and make him compromise — release the prisoners, allow the newspapers to reopen,” he said about Zenawi. “That’s if they care about democracy as much as they say.”
Democracy had been the focus of the people’s disappointment — yet that disappointment had not killed their desire for it. Zenawi, undoubtedly, already knows this.
__________
Author’s e-mail:[email protected] Micha Odenheimer is a writer and rabbi based in Jerusalem.
A leader handpicked by Tony Blair to champion Africa has smashed his opponents with the biggest crackdown in the continent’s recent history, jailing 40,000 people including boys of 15.
Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister and a member of Britain’s Commission for Africa, has launched a systematic onslaught against every possible adversary.
The entire leadership of Ethiopia’s main opposition party has been locked up. Mr Meles has closed five newspapers and jailed their editors, while police have killed about 80 demonstrators.
Paramilitary units have killed people arbitrarily and thousands have been detained at random.
This operation had thwarted “an insurrection”, Mr Meles said.
A crackdown on this scale has not been seen in Africa for 20 years and the repression exceeds anything by President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for the past decade at least.
Apartheid-era South Africa’s onslaught against the black townships in the 1980s provides the only recent comparison. Ethiopia sank into crisis after a general election in May. The opposition said the polls were rigged and called mass protests in the capital, Addis Ababa.
Demonstrators gathered in huge numbers in June and again last month. On both occasions the security forces opened fire with live rounds. A handful of protesters were armed and shot at police. But most were unarmed and western diplomats dismissed Mr Meles’s claim that a violent “revolution” was unfolding.
Instead, repression has followed November’s demonstrations. Twenty-three leaders of the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), including Hailu Shawal, its chairman, will be formally charged with treason today. The CUD holds all 23 of Addis Ababa’s parliamentary seats and its most junior figures have not been spared.
Police came for Teshome Legesse, a CUD city councillor, as he was having lunch with his family on Nov 1.
When they beat him with rifle butts, his wife, Etenesh Yimmam, 46, became hysterical. They beat her with sticks, then one of the police shot her twice.
The man who killed Mrs Etenesh received a shouted order from another officer: “Just do it.” At that moment, he fired again, apparently aiming at the woman’s son, bent over her body. He missed and wounded one of the family’s neighbours. Then two officers fired in the air, dispersing the crowd, and the police left in a pick-up, taking the dead woman’s husband.
Arrests were taking place across Addis Ababa. The city’s jail overflowed and prisoners were held in its compound. As that became crammed, detainees were held in the National Exhibition Centre. Even that overflowed, so government offices were used as temporary prisons.
Detainees were beaten, stripped of their shoes then driven to an old military camp at Dedesa, 250 miles west of Addis Ababa. There they survive in disused barracks on daily rations of four slices of bread.
Western diplomats have reports of executions at Dedesa and of a body being hung on the camp’s gates. The best estimate for the total detained is 40,000.
Most were held for a few weeks. But Mr Meles said on Tuesday that 3,000 were still in detention.
Last year Britain gave Ethiopia £44 million of aid, of which £30 million went directly into the government’s coffers. This year £50 million has been withheld.
Mesfin Abebe, 15, an orphan who begs on the streets, was arrested, beaten and held at Dedesa for 15 days. “They did not choose who they were arresting,” he said. “They just grabbed boys from the street.”
The 60-member Kinijit Council has unanimously agreed on the following eight-point precondition the Meles regime must fulfill in order for Kinijit to enter Parliament:
1. The Election Board needs to be restructured and be able to operate independently
2. All government controlled media should be free and accesible to all political parties
3. The legal system must be able to operate independently without any coercion by the ruling party
4. An independent commission should be established to investigate the June 8, 2005 killings of unarmed civilians
5. Ensure that the police and the armed forces do not get involved in politics and take sides
6. Recent laws that have been passed at the concluding sessions of the last Parliament that deal with parliamentary procedures and governance of the City of Addis Ababa should be recended
7. All political prisoners should be released, and opposition party offices that had been closed should be opened
8. Establish an independent body that will make sure that the above mentioned conditions are fulfilled
Four members of the Kinijit Executive Committee have been assigned to submit these conditions to the Prime Minister.
The 60-member CUD Council postpones discussion on parliament until tomorrow. This was decided after the chairman, Ato Hailu Shawel, requested delay until he arrives in Ethiopia from his trip abroad. According to inside sources, the council is now evenly divided on the question of entering parliament, and Ato Hailu’s arrival is expected to sway some member to his side. Upto yesterday, the informal count was 30 to 27 favoring entering parliament
The Council also today approved the Executive Committee’s decision to discontinue negotiation with the EPRDF until Meles agrees to include the issue of contested ballots in the agenda. The decision was 34 to 4.
The 60-member CUD central council will revisit the question of entering or not entering parliament tomorrow. After repeatedly telling the public that the issue of entering parliament is not important, Dr Berhanu Nega and his allies have put the matter before the central council on Wednesday, but the majority decided that it wants to know the result of the negotiation with the ruling EPRDF first. Another council meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, to discuss and decided on the matter again. Reportedly, the vote on Wednesday was too close, so the CUD Chairman, Ato Hailu Shawel, has canceled his trip to Germany and is flying home to be present at the meeting.
The proponents of entering parliament are using tactics ranging from persuasion to intimidation. One of their arguments is that if CUD votes not to enter parliament, Meles will ban the party and put in jail the MP-elects. Those who oppose entering parliament argue that no matter what, they should respect the desire of the people because without popular support CUD cease to exist as a popular movement. Over 95 percent of the people of Ethiopia told both CUD and UEDF in no uncertain term not to enter parliament before making sure that the votes they cast on May 15 are properly counted.
In this raging debate, the lining up forces looks like this: On the side of those who are pushing for entering parliament are the Meles regime, American and European ambassadors, the factions in CUD that is led by Dr Berhanu Nega, and in UEDF by Dr Beyene Petros. On the side of the people of Ethiopia who have expressed a clear desire on this matter include CUD Chairman Hailu Shawel and about half of the CUD central council, the Chairman of the Coalition of Ethiopian Civic Associations, Dr Taye Woldesemayat, and all the civic associations in the coalition, a large majority of Ethiopians in the Diaspora, and most of the Ethiopian independent press journalists in Ethiopia.
Within the next few days, this matter will be settled one way or the other, but according to many observers it seems that the proponents of entering parliament have the upper hand currently, unless the opposition regroup and fight back vigorously in the next few hours and days. If the proponents of entering parliament win, it would be a betrayal of the people of Ethiopia whose desire of living in freedom and democracy will have been thwarted by the Meles regime with the collaboration of some opposition leaders in whom the people put their trust.
One may ask, what’s the alternative to entering parliament? Please read the following statement by the Network of Ethiopian Scholars as a reference:
Oct 2, Ottawa – Ethiopians and Ethio-Canadians hold a demonstration in front of the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, Canada. Over 200 Ethiopians braved the smouldering heat and chanted respect the vote of the people, stop killing and arresting opposition members, down with dictatorship, release unconditionally all opposition party members and respect the rule of law, stop the law of the jungle, etc.. They also requested the government and people of Canada to stand behind the Ethiopian people and stop supporting a tyrant regime in Ethiopia. The representative of the organizing committee gave a detailed update on the situation of the political stalemate in Ethiopia and Melese’s demand to start negotiation with the opposition.
At the end of the demonstration the demonstrators unanimously agreed to sustain the demonstration until democracy and the rule of law prevails in Ethiopia.
Oct 2, Geneva – Today, despite the short notice and a rainy afternoon, Ethiopians in Switzerland gathered in front of the UN head quarter in Geneva and marched towards UN Human Rights Office Headquarters in solidarity with our beleaguered people who are muzzled under the tottering dictatorial regime of Meles Zenawi that at gun point robed the May election result. The demonstrators vowed to remain solid and united until our people’s vote is respected. photo
Oct 2 – Ethiopian Jews and Ethiopian community members from different parts of Israel have gathered today in front of PM Ariel Sharon’s office in Jerusalem. They expressed solidarity with the people of Ethiopia in its struggle against Meles’s dictatorial regime. They also plead from the Israeli government to assess the situation in Ethiopia as it is declining and exert pressure on US government through the powerful Jewish Lobby. A letter of plea was also submitted to the government. Photos will be available soon.
Oct 2 Washington DC candle light vigil photo
Sep 29 – Due to massive repression and threats of violence by the Meles regime against the people of Ethiopia, the CUD/UEDF joint task force decided to postpone the Oct 2 nationwide pro-democracy rally.
Seattle – Sunday, Oct 2, starting at 2:30 PM, Place: West Lake, Mall Park, Downtown, Seattle, Tel: 206 240 8266
Jerusalem – Rally of Ethiopian Jewish and Ethiopian community in Israel to express solidarity with the Ethiopian people in their struggle against the brutal regime of Meles Zenawi. March will start from the Prime Minister’s ofiice through Israeli Parilament and Foreign Ministry, Oct. 2, Contact info: Abrham
050-7686237
Sep 22, Brussels – Thousands of Ethiopians from all over Europe gathered in Brussels on Sep 22 for a pro-democracy rally. They appealed to the European Parliament and European Commission to stand with the people of Ethiopia whose vote have been robbed by the Meles regime. Representatives of the protestors met with EU officials during the rally. www.ethiogermany.de
WORDWIDE
Geneva
The Ethiopian Association in Swiss is going to hold
demonstration on Sunday October 2 2005 at 14:00 local
time. Starting from the UN HQ in Geneva to the office
of the UN Higher Commission for Human Rights.
Contact info: +417997768773
+41788750678, +41794798904
Vancouver
Place: Robson Square
Date: Sunday October 2, 2005
Time: 6:00 pm
Contact: 604.767.4352
Houston
Rally is being organized at the Galleria, in front of Dillard’s, at the corner of Westheimer and Post Oak. Oct 2 at 2 PM
Contact: 713-446-5222
Toronto
Date: October 2, 2005
Time: 2:00 PM
Place: Dundas Square
Flyer
Seattle
Sunday, Oct 2, starting at 2:30 PM, Place: West Lake, Mall Park, Downtown, Seattle
Tel: 206 240 8266
Washington DC
Sunday Oct 2, candle light vigil at the White House starting at 6 PM, and Monday Oct 3, march from Congress to the State Department
San Francisco
Monday Oct 3, rally at the Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave., starting at 10 AM
Contact tel: 408 483 2913, 925 829 0529
London
Oct 2 at Marble Arch, starting at 1 PM
Stockholm
The Stockholm rally is on Monday, Oct. Starts from Sergel Square and march to the Parlament. Contact tel:
+46-8-43747496
46+73 767 0148
Ottawa
Oct 2, at Parliament of Canada, 1 PM
Jerusalem
Rally of Ethiopian Jewish and Ethiopian community in
Israel to express solidarity with the Ethiopian people in their struggle against the brutal regime of Meles Zenawi.
March will start from the Prime Minister’s office through
Israeli Parliament and Foreign Ministry, Oct. 2, 15:00 local time. Contact info: Abraham
050-7686237
ETHIOPIA
Rallies in Ethiopia postponed
Nazreth
Harar
Dire Dawa
Jijiga
Awassa
Negele Borena
Kibire Mengist
Shashemene
Mekele
Hosahna
Woliso
Wolqite
Jima
Metu
Nekemt
Gimbi
Fiche
Ambo
Debre Markos
Bahr Dar
Gonder
Dessie
Woldia
