If you are wondering why the government of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia is doing the secretive land deals with Arab and Asian tycoons and agribusiness corporations without any public discussion and scrutiny, and why the officials are handling it in much the same way like thieves who sell their stolen stuff on street corners and dark alleys, you have asked a serious question and probably have almost gotten some of your answers. This is pure theft and burglary sugarcoated as investment — only in this case that the burglar has someone to open the door from inside. It is a dangerous venture that has little to do with solving Ethiopia’s economic problems but bound to negatively impact the country’s most strategic resources, land and water, and its posterity. It appears that we have reached a point where we are selling out our last belongings just like the desperate peasants I once saw in 1984 sell their last belongings for scrape as they fled their villages to escape an impending famine.
This land deal, now popularly known as “land grab” among other names, and becoming epidemic in desperately poor, irresponsible and corrupt African countries, is a neocolonial venture where land is being sold to foreigners at bargain prices. The “investors” are salivating over the cheap access to agricultural land, water and cheap labor which would definitely make them even richer in the lucrative food markets whose growing trends they are very aware of. This is in addition to helping them find a solution to the problem of serious food insecurity in their own countries. The Meles Zenawis of Africa are salivating over the quick cash that will go to temporarily solve their hard currency crunch and the opportunity of swelling their individual bank accounts. Those who likened these secret deals to the colonial scramble for African land, where some local chiefs signed and sold off tract after tract of land to colonialists under the influence of alcohol supplied by the colonialist and some glittering gifts, are not very far from an accurate description of these transactions.
The Ethiopian land grab, as we are gradually learning now, is such a huge undertaking, which according to various sources, involves millions of acres of fertile land, nearly the size of the former province of Arsi. The land for sale is spread across all regions of the country except Tigrai and the Somali region. Interestingly, this is being done in the dark, without a minimal of discussion, even a symbolic one, at least in that rubberstamp parliament, or on any national media. It is very ironic that an English newspaper in Addis Ababa named Addis Fortune, which also has an online version and hardly an opponent of the government, has to raise the more suspicious aspects of the land deal on its gossip column while also reporting on the same day about the activities of Shiek Mohammed Al Amoudi who is serving as a salesman to his wealthy Saudi friends that are heavily backed by Saudi Royal officials. I also saw an Amharic editorial on the Reporter the contents of which speak volumes about how the authors feared to directly talk about the land deal than the deal itself. But these papers should be commended at least for raising the issue.
I am sure the Ethiopian officials will sugarcoat this venture with such jargons as development needs, poverty alleviation, generating capital, and all the language of development they seem to have mastered. I am also sure many members and supporters of the ruling clique and its ethnic associates who are following the regime blindfolded would call me or any critic of this deal as anti-investment, anti-development or extremist, Tigre hater, as they often do when challenged with serious and substantive questions and criticisms. I know the drill. I am all for investment and opening the country to foreign capital. Our poverty is so real and tragic that I am not even romanticizing that my country, once a place where foreigners were asked to shake of their feet before they leave the country lest they take our sacred soil on their shoes, has come to this level of disgrace; nor am I troubled by the morally reprehensible thought that some of these investors are planning to grow barley to feed their camels when at the same time the children of the Ethiopia are dying of hunger. I believe this venture is distasteful on basic economic grounds and the long term problems it is bound to create.
I am one Ethiopian who feels deeply humiliated by the kind of poverty our people live under and the worsening spread of unmitigated hunger and famine. More importantly, I see the indicators and worry that the worst may be yet to come. So, I am not against investment in Ethiopia. But this secret deal is not an investment in Ethiopia’s interest by any stretch of imagination. For a starter, name me a country that has ever developed or solved a single major problem by selling itself to the highest bidder and I will buy you a pig that can fly.
Granted, some of the money may raise hard currency to buy fuel oil for the country for a year or two. Even some economy may trickle down to make a handful of people wealthy. But it may not also be worth the cost to be paid for the security of the farms which are likely to be targets of angry people that are being fenced off of their ancestral land. It is not difficult to predict that these people will organize and fight back or feed into some of the insurgencies that already vow to fight. In Madagascar, where the regime sold nearly half the country’s arable land for $12 an acre to a Korean agribusiness company, much more than what Meles is said to be ready to sell ours for, it did not take a long time before the people saw both their fortunes and their country going down the drain and rose in resistance, overthrew their government out of power and nullified the shoddy agreements. Responsible, intelligent, and patriotic citizens of that country saw the deal was incompatible with and dangerous to their fragile ecology and environment as well as the country’s posterity. I hate to see our problems solved though violence but I will be one Ethiopian who will not speak against any which may arise as a result of this theft.
A report cited here states that Shiek Mohammed Al-Amoudi is charged by the Saudi King to spearhead and facilitate the venture in Ethiopia and that the shiek has gained the support of Meles Zenawi. His agribusiness company has recently sponsored some 50 Saudi companies to attend an expensive promotional exhibition and party in Addis Ababa though his company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development Plc. which is already producing rice for the Saudis. I have seen many people who hated the Shiek for being a supporter of the TPLF regime, for corrupting officials with generous gift, and giving extravagant parties. To be frank, I argued in his favor and considered all of those his rights. As a wealthy person he has every right whatever he wants to do with his money. But buying and selling our country is not one of them. Now this Shiek has crossed the line by turning himself into a salesman of our land to his fellow rich petrodollar swollen sheiks. It appears that he has crossed the Rubicon.
Who are this wealthy individuals and corporations and what drives them into this dangerous scramble on our land? These are basically people and entities from the oil rich Middle East and from rapidly industrializing East and South Asia. Most of the Asians are from countries heavily populated. They have virtually little land for extensive agriculture and a huge and growing population to feed. Most have chemicalized their soil to perdition over three decades of green revolution but have fortunately helped themselves to industrialization. The others are from wealthy oil rich Middle East and Arab Sheikdoms that are alarmed by the dwindling ground water in their own countries to support agriculture and a growing population to feed. More importantly they are attracted by the lucrative market and the rising trend of the cost of food products. Over the last several years, they have made their studies and consulted economists who delivered this “innovative” idea of land grab. That is when they began roaming the continent of Africa looking for corrupt and desperate governments that would sell agricultural land along with scarce water and cheap labor to meet their consumption needs. That is how they met the Meles Zenawi’s of Africa. Mr. David Hallam, deputy director at FAO, who I believe is privy to these transactions is quoted on a Washington Post Article as saying that the contracts being signed “ are thin” and “have no safeguards” adding that he sees “ statements from ministers where they’re basically promising (to the wealthy foreign companies) everything with no controls, no conditions”. This is from the mouth of an expert of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
What is happening in Ethiopia is sad on another very important level. Ethiopia has an economic geographic advantage it potentially enjoys in the part of the world it is located. With its huge agricultural potential it is strategically located in close proximity to reap the benefits of exporting food to these oil rich but agriculturally poor customers most of which survive by importing their food. Their demand and Ethiopia’s potential for supply was a perfect match. In the past, Ethiopia had not had the opportunity to harvest this potential. It is a failure of all past governments including this one. Had Ethiopian rulers were wise and thinkers beyond their political shelf lives, they could have already exploited it. But this potential can be maximized only if we Ethiopians are the producers and sellers of our own agricultural products. What Meles Zenawi is doing now is putting this upside down. He, in effect, made our potential buyers the sellers of our commodity. He is helping them sit on both the demand and supply side of the equation. Have you heard of a saying in Amharic- “kemogn dej Mofer Yikoretal”. This is an economic suicide that no country with rational people living inside it should even think of doing. I think Ethiopians need to seriously discuss impending problem and create public awareness before it is too late and too costly.
Some points we need to understand clearly:
1.The idea of unused land, idle land or virgin land is a complete misnomer. True, there is a lot of uncultivated arable land in Ethiopia. That doesn’t make it unused or idle. Land must not necessarily be cultivated to be classified as utilized. The term I am comfortable with is underused or underutilized. Anybody who has seen these areas identified as unused understands that there is no land in Ethiopia that has no owners and users. In areas where we have more land relative to the inhabitants in the area, it is often that the way of life of the population requires more land per person. Nomadic areas and food gatherers in west and southwest Ethiopia need more land per person to survive for the type of economy they practice. But even in situations where land is least economically utilized, if often helps keep the ecological balance in the area and the region. I should add that these lands are not used to their maximum potential mostly because of the wrong or misguided government policies and interventions and that seems to be where the central problem is located.
2.Second, for agriculture to prosper, it is not necessary that we have large scale commercial farms. Small holder farms of reasonable size can be economically as effective. If we are, for example, able to produce organic food products by small holder farmers, it is possible to get as much money or even better money than large scale plantations that use chemical fertilizers. In other words, you don’t need billionaire investors to cultivate the underutilized land. It is not difficult to find some 50 Ethiopians that will amount to one Arab millionaire investor. The problem is that the government policies are faulty and unattractive to Ethiopians. There was a time in the early seventies where fresh graduates from Haramaya University were able to start farms in the Awash valley with loans from government banks who did it with brilliant success. Does anybody remember AMBASH, a farm operated by a group of young graduates of Agriculture from Haramaya College? If it was possible thirty five years ago, it should be more possible today.
3.The land currently under intensive cultivation which is mostly overused and becoming unproductive, as in northern and north central Ethiopia, needs to rest and remain fallow for many years if we want the soil to regenerate and become supportive again. We also currently farm a lot of marginal lands that should not be cultivated at all. Farm lands are running uphill in most parts of Ethiopia as farmers try to bring more and more land to cultivation in response to population pressure. This is a big rational for resettlement programs and developing underused arable lands. Selling more existing underused land apparently means more pressure on existing peasant farms which are already being pressure. So the impact of selling this land to foreigners reverberates throughout the agricultural system and is not limited to the areas where the farms for sell are located.
4.Water is increasingly becoming a scarce resource and global trends are that it will get more and more scarce and expensive. When we are selling land to these so called investors we are also selling water that comes in the form of precipitation, overland flow and ground water. In some cases the water is more expensive than the land. Allowing foreign investors to engage cultivating water intensive crops such as rice is a bound to create a disaster.
5.Economic prosperity, even in poor countries like Ethiopia, does not necessarily have to depend on farming land alone. Only stupid minds think that the region of Gambella is more useful when cultivated than left for the tropical forest that it is. Rich people in the west who live in concrete jungles and monotonously humanized landscapes would pay a lot of money to pass weekends in that beautiful wilderness if we do some investment. If we do the thinking as to what we can do with the forest without destroying it, I am sure we can come up with something to generate the hard currency that being worshipped in Ethiopia. If we develop a good hospitality industry and promote it, it is possible to make much more hard currency than what Al Amoudi pays us for his rice farms.
Conclusion:
The ultimate solution to the country’s economic woes, to this grinding poverty, to the hunger and famine that is eating down into our humanity, must begin with an honest reexamination of the failed agrarian and all economic policies in the country. It has to be a reexamination that is dispassionate and free of politics. We are a people that have gone though enough hardships to learn from our past. We are a textbook case of how bad governance and misguided policies can crush a country with rich agricultural potential. Unfortunately, we live under a dictatorship that is willing to believe its own lies than learn from these experiences. That we are the original home of some of the worlds cultivated crops and still beg to feed our people should be unconscionable to all decent Ethiopians irrespective of their politics. Meles Zenawi and Bereket Simon do not seem to have any sense of humiliation. Their narcissism is over their head. That we are selling out our land to others to produce their food while parading our own famine stricken bodies is downright shameful but more importantly economically senseless. Yes, there is a need for hard currency and there is a need to plug into the globalizing economy. As others, including the aspiring new colonizers are showing us, financial and capital strength can be achieved in various ways. Some did it by educating their people for the future. If Meles, for example, folds down these jokes he calls universities and chooses to work on having one or two good institutions where you teach good math and science and finds some way of retaining the educated people in the country, we can do much to generate foreign currency than sell our last belonging.
The most crucial policy is one that makes the country attractive first and foremost to its own citizens. This means freedom and the rule of law. The scary regulations being issued by the TPLF and the ethnicization of politics may have served TPLF’s success in staying in power for long, but it is not helping the country and the people a bit.
If we have a government that works extra time to resolve internal conflicts, potential investors would come in droves and will be willing to pay large sums of money. We see them do it on a daily basis in other countries where that is the case. Capital moves to where it gets a higher rate of profit and safe and secure operation zone. Unfortunately, the TPLF is the biggest manufacturer of conflicts in the country and the source of all potential instability.
By providing incentives for Ethiopians at home and abroad to engage in agriculture it is possible to transform the country’s food production and the general economy. Many returnee Ethiopians who open go-go clubs in Addis would not hesitate to take their money to agriculture if they are given appropriate incentives. It is not necessarily expensive to engage in farming at least as compared to engaging in extractive industries such as mining.
When Meles Zenawi landlocked the country and told us that losing direct access to the sea “is not going to affect us 5 cents worth” with a straight face, we sat back and listened and perhaps laughed. Now we are told we are paying a billion dollars a year for the port to Djibouti. The cost is rising every year.
We have seen our beautiful sisters travelling to the Middle East as domestic workers. We are sitting and watching as our sisters are abused and dehumanized in these countries and the government that eats their remittance refuses to say a pip or anything on their behalf. We are watching this unfold under our eyes helplessly.
Now the rich guys from the Middle East themselves are coming to buy our land at bargain prices, suck up our water, fence off our children from the land of their forefathers, in order to produce food for themselves and their camels using our cheap slave labor. All of this while we beg food for 13 million destitute people!
These deals are like dragging your mother by her hair to give her to a rapist for scrape money. I don’t know how many of you would contemplate doing this and for what amount of money. Yet this is what is happening to Ethiopia right now. I was once a kid who was crying “land to the tiller” on the streets of Addis fighting to make life better to exploited peasants. Some of the TPLF people now in power were there singing the same song. How regressive is it that our children are to sing the same song three and half decades letter?
How did we come to this? When is this going to end? And, by the way, what kind of people are we?
Addis Neger Publishing today announced that its major publication, Addis Neger Newspaper, ceased circulation due to constant harassment and intimidation by the ruling Woyanne junta in Ethiopia. Saturday November 28, 2009 saw the final edition of the paper.
“Addis Neger, one of the few leading independent voices in Ethiopia, became the victim of yet another crackdown on free speech and the freedom of the press in Ethiopia,” said Mesfin Negash, Managing Editor of the Paper. “Our newspaper was one of the country’s best examples of what independent journalists can accomplish in being the platform of public opinion. Unfortunately, the regime had made our task impossible.”
Three of Addis Neger’s editors left the country this week after the paper learned that the regime was preparing criminal charges against its top editors, reporters and owners based on the new anti-terror law and the criminal code. The decision of the publishing company to close down the newspaper was made to protect its owners and journalists from this onslaught by the regime government.
“This is the culmination of months of persecution and harassment” by the regime in Ethiopia, said Abiye Teklemariam, the paper’s Executive Editor. “The preparation to use the new anti-terror law against our journalists and editors was just throwing the last wood in the chimney.”
Addis Neger was established in September 2007. Its twin editorial plans had been “the Idea of Public Reason” and “Integrity and Independence.” In the last two years, these pillars served as the backbones of the paper’s interaction with the public, helping it to register phenomenal growth in its circulation, influence and investment.
Addis Neger also introduced a new model of media ownership. Founded by six former journalists who were victims of the media crackdown following post election crisis in 2005, it was expanding its ownership base to other journalistic members of the paper. It was hoped that the model would bring sustainability to the press as an institution.
Addis Neger Publishing Company promised to be back to the media scene in the future. According to Mesfin Negash, the company would venture into a new multimedia format whenever is possible. “We hope that things will change and we will be back to our country. But our immediate plan is to ensure the physical security of our staff members. Let’s keep the spirit of freedom alive.”
A mind-boggling usurpation of moral authority at the highest global level is set to unfold at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins in Copenhagen next Monday.
Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and one of the world’s worst dictators, is preparing to use that global platform to scold other nations for their irresponsible energy policies – and to demand hundreds of billions of dollars for African nations to compensate for global warming damage done to the continent.
The hypocrisy of Meles playing a role in Copenhagen – indeed a leadership role where he could potentially block a global agreement – is outrageous.
As Africa’s top negotiator in Copenhagen, Meles in recent weeks has already begun posturing as the moral environmental voice of Africa by criticizing industrialized countries for their “lack of seriousness” on global climate policy, and by threatening to lead a walk-out of the 52 African countries at the conference (out of 190 total participating nations) if their demands for compensation aren’t met.
Gulag Prisons
This theft-in-plain-sight of a critical global role is being carried out by a man who runs his own country by a “divide and conquer” strategy – hardly the best model for global collaborative decision-making.
Why would Denmark even allow this man to step foot in their country?
Directly to the point of the hypocrisy of Meles’ role as Africa’s chief climate change negotiator, Ethiopia is now facing one of the worst famines in its history as a consequence of his own environmentally disastrous laws and policies.
These include property laws that prevent farmers from owning their own land; that forbid foreign research and aid groups from entering the country; and a governing system that prevents any orderly agriculture and environmentalism, because Meles stays in power by keeping his country mired in a permanent state of war.
Ethnic Cleansing
By now the evidence for Mele’s crimes is far too extensive, public, and exhaustively well-documented to summarize in detail here.
The picture collectively painted is a tyrant who stays in power through total control of the political, economic, legal, media and military systems.
Here in Minnesota, where thousands of Ethiopians refugees have fled Meles’ brutality, tales of personal witness to all of these crimes, and many more, abound.
Minnesota, and other centers of the global Ethiopia diaspora, are often the best sources of close-to-firsthand information about Meles’ savage rule, because refugees stay in constant contact with friends and family at home while foreign journalists, aid workers and human rights workers are banned from the country.
Unstoppable Hatred
By no means least in the way of evidence against Meles is the Ethiopian blogosphere which is a bitter veil of tears, a deeply wounded cry of the heart.
In this global forum thousands of Ethiopians every day figuratively rend their garments, cry out to God, offer first-person testimonials of beatings and torture, and maintain online records of Meles’ crimes against humanity. Sometimes, overflowing with unstoppable hatred, they violently attack each other with words.
The only mystery that remains is why the world appears simply not to notice, to respond, or even to care in the least about the Ethiopia’s abysmal suffering.
It’s Rwanda and Darfur all over again. And it has been that way, although getting progressively worse, since 1991, the year that Meles took power in a coup and immediately began ethnic cleansing as a central tactic of his governing style.
And now the world’s leaders at Copenhagen have embraced this man into their highest deliberative council, and given him voice. What are they thinking?
Absolute Power
Meles’ 18-year rule of terror in Ethiopia has easily earned him a place alongside dictators such as Kim Jong-Il, Slobodan Milosevich, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, Than Swhe, and Ali Khamenei.
Would any of these despots be welcomed in Copenhagen?
Would any be given the chance to potentially veto a global climate accord?
Of course, Meles won’t do that. What he will do, though, is maximize his leverage through every means possible to further secure what for 18 years he has ruthlessly sought and won in Ethiopia, which is absolute power.
He’d let the world burn to a crisp before he relinquished that.
I last saw Aregawi Berhe in the summer of 1976. The big news gripping Britain was the heatwave — back then, the hottest since records began — and the dramatic Israeli commando raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda to rescue 100 hostages held by pro-Palestinian hijackers.
My mind was focused on neither. Aregawi Berhe had kidnapped me, and I was concentrating on survival.
At the time, Aregawi was a fierce young guerrilla leader in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province. I was a young reporter on assignment for The Sunday Times, covering Ethiopia’s separatist wars.
On June 1, 1976, I was on a local bus on a winding mountain road between the towns of Axum and Mkele when Aregawi’s men ambushed it. Finding me on board, they seized me on suspicion of being an “imperialist spy”. My protestations that I was a journalist came to nothing.
For three seemingly interminable months, from June to September, they held my life in their hands as they marched me under guard through the rugged hills and barren deserts of Tigray and through the breakaway province of Eritrea.
We trudged at night under the stars to escape the unforgiving sun and to avoid being spotted and fired on by patrols of the Ethiopian army. In moonlight, we panted up steep, bare, eroded hills, scrabbled over rocks, pushed our way through thorn bushes.
On one occasion, worn out and parched in an area of desert, I had to suck water from cactuses to keep going. My 500-mile forced march under armed guard was the toughest thing I had ever done.
I was not alone. They had also kidnapped an entire British family, the Tylers. Lindsey Tyler was a veterinary surgeon working in Ethiopia on an aid project, vaccinating cattle against rinderpest. He was on a trip with his wife, Stephanie, and children, Robert, 8, and Sally, 5, when the guerrillas fired on their Land Rover. “We have children, for God’s sake … we have little children,” Stephanie shouted as bullets ricocheted off the stones.
Ultimately, we were freed unharmed. But being kidnapped was a jarring experience — physically exhausting, mentally dispiriting and, above all, lonely.
After my release, I buried Aregawi in my memory. I wanted to forget the whole sorry experience. My life was the future, not the past. But some things one does not ever quite forget. Being kidnapped is one of them.
The tangled memories have come and gone over the years, sometimes so vivid that they hurt. Those three months as a prisoner in Ethiopia taunted and haunted me — until last week, when I met Aregawi again for the first time in more than three decades.
I had considered sometimes going back to Ethiopia to find and confront my captors; but in that vast land, I thought, I would never find them. In any case, I suspected most of them had been killed in their long struggle against the Derg, the Soviet-armed military committee that ruled Ethiopia after it overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.
One of Africa’s worst military dictatorships, the Derg held onto power until it was itself toppled in 1991 by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the guerrilla organisation that had kidnapped me.
Back in 1976 the TPLF was still a ragtag group of about 130 fighters whose goal was autonomy for Tigray province. Over the years it grew in strength, numbers and ambition, until it became the backbone of a revolutionary movement that took over the country with between 60,000 and 70,000 fighters. Aregawi, a founder member who rose to army commander, played no small part in its success. Then he vanished.
In 2004 the Ethiopian driver of a taxi I hailed in Washington DC revealed that not only was Aregawi alive; he was living in exile somewhere in Europe, after losing out in an internal TPLF power struggle. Perhaps I could find him after all.
A few weeks ago a chance discussion with Martin Plaut, the BBC’s Africa editor, put me onto my quarry. Plaut had met Aregawi recently in Holland and said that he wanted to meet me to say sorry.
I did not hesitate. After all these years I wanted to meet Aregawi again and discover what made him tick. I wanted to believe that, somewhere, there was an honourable man. I think it is a basic instinct that one does not want one’s suffering to be in vain. I wanted there to be some purpose to the hardships he had put me through.
When I telephoned Aregawi, I recognised his voice immediately. But I was surprised by his next words: “Come and stay.”
We laughed at the absurdity of it. While I bore him no grudge now, I would have liked to choose whether to be his guest or not 33 years ago.
Last week I drove in a taxi through the tranquil streets of the Hague to confront him. I never dreamt I would find my old kidnapper in this lawabiding city where the international criminal courts are trying Radovan Karadzic and Charles Taylor, the former leader of Liberia, for crimes against humanity.
I felt a twinge of apprehension as the taxi approached Aregawi’s flat in a working-class district. I need not have worried. In 1976 Aregawi was a strange, taciturn man. A political science graduate at Addis Ababa University, he had become a fanatical Marxist. Tall and thin with a wispy beard, he spouted wooden communist jargon and fiercely defended kidnapping as a legitimate political weapon. He gave me the impression that the sacrifice of an innocent life was less important than his own political ideals. His opinion of Britain seemed to have been fashioned by the day he stood in a line of Boy Scouts and welcomed the Queen, opening Axum cathedral during her royal visit to Ethiopia.
Now, instead of the rabid revolutionary I remembered, an avuncular figure stood before me, his hand held out in friendship. He said he was genuinely sorry for the hardship and trouble he had put me through.
We talked in his flat. On the wall was a small reproduction of that famous portrait of Che Guevara in his beret. It was clear Aregawi could not quite bring himself to turn his back on the revolutionary hero of his youth, even if he had ditched communism and no longer believed in armed struggle as the way to change Ethiopia.
“If I calculate the cost benefit, I would say gradual change would have been better than revolutionary change when I look back,” he said. “Revolutionary change was meant to transform society quickly, abruptly. But we were naive. You cannot switch on change like electricity; it has its own dynamics. We were not mature enough to see these things.”
Later, as we walked on a windy Dutch beach — I used to dream wistfully of the sea while I was being held in the hot Ethiopian desert — I asked Aregawi to give me his side of the kidnapping story. He was anxious not to be put in the same league as the vicious kidnappers who behead their hostages today. These vile killings horrified him.
“These days kidnapping has been given a religious dimension. There is no reasoning at all,” he said. “Today’s kidnappers are broken, blinded by hatred, not even merciful for their own life. You cannot compare their kidnappings with ours, which were for publicity, for a bit of money.”
Aregawi was adamant that he wished no harm to me or the Tylers. Of course I did not see it like that at the time. I was concentrating on surviving from one day to the next, on building the sort of relationship with my captors that would make it harder for them to kill me if I outlived my purpose.
As we talked, he seemed mildly hurt at having read in a book I wrote after my release that being his prisoner had been a low point in my life. “Nothing bad happened except taking you against your will,” he said, with a plea in his voice. “I had rough words for you. We had a cause. We had certain objectives. But I felt we were handling you as best we could.”
He still did not see that there were moments when, as a prisoner, I had feared circumstances might arise, as the unexpected tends to do in guerrilla struggles, that meant I might not survive. I don’t think Aregawi realised how difficult it sometimes was to feel I could be struck from the book of life and nobody would ever know what had happened to me.
After that interminable march through the mountains, I ended up in a guerrilla encampment in the northern desert of Eritrea, living under a bush, still under guard, while Aregawi decided what to do with me.
There followed more weeks of despair, during which I exchanged hardly more than three sentences a day with my captors. But on that long march I had begun to appreciate the misery and injustices that had driven Aregawi to rise up in armed rebellion at great personal cost to himself.
One in three children born in the villages we passed through died in infancy from disease or malnutrition. The nearest health and educational services were at least two days’ walk away, the nearest well three miles.
As the son of a district judge, Aregawi had been brought up with a sense of right and wrong. His social conscience made him aware of these glaring inequalities, and he wanted to change them. The pity of it, as he now recognises himself, was that he chose to do it by armed struggle. Despite thousands of deaths and regime change, that part of Ethiopia is about as backward and impoverished now as it was then.
My captivity went on and on until one day, after a long camel ride through a sandstorm, I was finally freed into Sudan. Soon the Tylers were released too, after being held even longer than I was. The guerrillas did not collect the $1m ransom they had demanded from the British government.
So, after all these years, what is Aregawi’s story? In exile, unable to go back to Ethiopia for fear of losing his life at the hands of his former comrades, he wonders whether the huge sacrifices he and other young idealists made were worthwhile.
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country, is still confronted by extreme poverty and massive rural starvation. Its leader is one of Aregawi’s old revolutionary comrades, Meles Zenawi. This former medical student has turned into a virtual dictator — little better, said Aregawi, than those he replaced.
The need to strive for a brighter future for his people still dominates Aregawi’s life, although the reasons “are not the same”. He is driven by the memory of those countrymen whom he brought into the struggle and who “paid with their lives” for something good to come. “I must not betray these people,” he said.
He and his comrades shared a fine, idealistic vision, but, he admitted, none had a clue how to implement it. For a while their politics was inspired by Enver Hoxha and his mad Albanian “road to socialism”. Soon there came years of infighting within the TPLF, and disillusionment set in.
In the mid-1980s, during one of those terrible famines that have gripped Ethiopia in the past 30 years, millions of dollars flowed from western donors into Rest, the so-called Relief Society of Tigray, which was purportedly the humanitarian wing of the TPLF.
Aregawi told me that, instead of using the money to save lives, Rest gave it to the TPLF. He remembers sitting with central committee members preparing a budget; they agreed that 95% of the Rest money should be used for the cause.
“It bought weapons, ammunition and clothes for the fighters and paid for TPLF propaganda work,” he said. “It was very depressing. It made me very angry. The leadership literally had no sympathy for the people.”
Aregawi noted that western aid organisations had allowed their money to be misappropriated and that massive armaments flowing into Ethiopia from outside made the conflict more deadly. No power had offered the help that, in Aregawi’s view, they really needed to “give them the correct orientation to help themselves to establish a stable government”.
When, after building up a secret power base of loyalists within the TPLF, Meles Zenawi seized control of it in an internal coup, Aregawi finally split from the movement he had helped to build. He had enough friends to be able to escape with his life, first to Sudan and then to Holland.
Others were not so fortunate. Shawit, the handsome young fighter who in 1976 had led the attack on my bus and made me a prisoner, was imprisoned and killed by Zenawi for opposing his control, Aregawi said.
The TPLF developed into the mighty military machine that took over Ethiopia, and now “again we are in a situation where another dictator is in power. Getting rid of one dictator does not mean bringing justice, fairness and democracy. In fact we ended up changing the face of the dictator only. That is a tragedy”.
By kidnapping me, Aregawi caught me up for a very short time in his struggle for Ethiopia. If I feel personally disappointed that the struggle has not led to something better, how much stronger must the feelings be of a man who has devoted his life to this cause?
He confessed he had no real family life as such. He had had a fiancée when he was fighting in the bush, “but we couldn’t agree on many things so we separated”. He married much later in life, but the woman he calls the “mother of my kids” lives separately in Geneva with his two children. He visits regularly, but it is clear that family takes second place to Ethiopia.
He still harbours a strong vision for his country and a driving sense of duty to see this vision through.
The last time Aregawi and I parted — in 1976 — neither of us knew what the future held, but both of us had hope. Mine was immediate and selfish: I wanted to be free to get back to my own life. His was generous: he wanted democracy for his people and was prepared to make tremendous personal sacrifices for them.
Our parting this time was different. I am glad to have met him again. Hearing his side of the story helped to lay my old ghosts to rest. At the same time there was something sad about this goodbye.
He hopes his dream of a better future for the Ethiopian people can still be realized, and as I walked away I hoped so too. But the world, I felt, had let him down. It has, over the years, backed wrong-minded rulers in Ethiopia, set on repression and dictatorship, instead of supporting those who reject violence.
It is my strong wish that this aging revolutionary, who once held my life in his hands, should be able eventually to go back to Ethiopia in peace. That would be a clear sign that one of Africa’s many shameful scars had begun to heal.
When it comes to the ruling tribal junta in Ethiopia, there is no one who has as much clarity as President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea. He knows their real nature, what and how they think, their weaknesses, strength, and modus operandi. This is hardly surprising since he is the one who guided them all the way to Menelik’s palace in Addis Ababa. A few years later they turned around and stabbed him in the back and waged a war of attrition against Eritreans. Simply put, to Isaias and the Eritrean leadership, Woyanne is an experiment that went terribly wrong. To Ethiopians, it is a long nightmare. This monster must be eliminated soon in order for peace to prevail in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and whole Horn of Africa region.
Meles Zenawi and members of his Woyanne junta know full well Isaias Afwerki’s intention and what he is capable of. They live in constant fear with the realization that their treachery, as well as the ethnic cleansing they perpetrated against Eritreans will not go unpunished. That is why mere mention of the name Isaias, and discussions about cooperation between Ethiopian opposition groups and the Eritrean government send chills through their spine.
To protect themselves from Eritrea’s wrath, Woyannes have stationed over 80,000 troops right at the border in Tigray and moved most of their air force from central Ethiopia closer to Eritrea. They are also laboring day and night to have the U.S. Government and European Union to label Eritrea as a terrorism sponsoring state, to no avail so far.
Meles and gang, however, need not worry too much about Eritrea, because when the time comes, they will face fire not just from the north. Even the Agazi, Meles and Azeb’s Praetorian Guards, could turn against them. A few months ago the Deputy Commander of Agazi, Col. Alebel, has defected and he is now advising EPPF and Ginbot 7. We all remember what happened to Romanian dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu in not too distant past. They appeared invincible, protecting themselves with layers of secret and intelligence services, while perpetrating horrible crimes against their people. The two monsters were later executed by their own special forces after a hasty trial and conviction on genocide and corruption charges when the people of Romania finally said enough.
Meles and Azeb are similarly responsible for genocide and massive corruption. They have committed mass murder against the peoples of Ogaden and Gambela where they burned entire villages, and in Somalia where Meles Zenawi’s soldiers raped Somali women, slit the throats of religious leaders, slaughtered over 20,000 Somali civilians and made 2 million Somalis homeless. Woyanne crimes in Addis Ababa, Gonder, Gojjam, Wollo, Ambo, Beninshangul, and other cities and regions of Ethiopia are too numerous to list. A time will come to account for all of them.
Discussion with Isaias Afwerki
It is with all this in mind that I met with President Isaias for the second time last month at his office in Eritrea’s capital Asmara. I went to Asmara on my way to visit leaders and fighters of the Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF) and attend their 2-day conference. The President invited my colleague Sileshi Tilahun and I for tea, which turned into a long conversation that took almost 3 hours. A few months earlier, in May this year, he gave us a 4-hour interview that has created a political wave in both the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities.
What I found striking when I met with Isaias Afwerki on both occasions was how humble, casual, and approachable he is. In describing President Isaias, the Woyanne propaganda machine tries to draw a picture of a power crazed madman, some one like Stalin or Idi Amin — chest full of medals, protected by a battalion of heavily armed, bulking bodyguards, living in huge palaces. I have seen none of that. There is no pomp and circumstance around Isaias Afwerki, and I did not see a horde of assistants circling him. I saw only one secretary who let us into his office. There is a spartan simplicity to the office itself — little decoration and some very uncomfortable chairs. I was told later that he made the chairs himself in his workshop.
The president received us warmly, with a broad smile and genuine sense of friendship. Sipping tea, we began our conversation. Sileshi and I started out by discussing the effect of his May 2009 historical interview. We delved into specific examples of the impact it is having. We summed it up by saying that there is now a much more improved atmosphere between Ethiopians and Eritreans as a result of what the president said in the interview. For many Ethiopians, the president’s words had a transformational effect on their view of Eritrea and its current leadership.
As some one who keeps himself well informed (some say he is an information addict), President Isaias is well aware of what is being said and discussed in the Ethiopian community. And he seems to be encouraged by the numerous positive comments he has heard and read, many of which were coming from some of his harshest critics in the Ethiopian community. He said that awareness of the need to come together “is now better than a year ago.”
The president is eager to build on the success of his outreach to Ethiopians. He urged us to help organize dialogue — similar to the public meeting that was held in Washington DC on August 9, 2009, by the EPPF chapter — between Ethiopians and Eritreans around the world.
On Ethiopian opposition parties
In this our second meeting with Isaias Afeworki, the other main topic of discussion was the current state of the Ethiopian opposition movement. The President is straightforward about it. He said that “the leadership is detached from the people.”
Indeed, the only reason Woyanne continues to cause havoc in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa is that there is no viable opposition party that is prepared to take over power from Woyanne. Most of the Ethiopian opposition leaders are halfhearted about the struggle. As the president put it, “there has to be an effective leadership in the field. The country is vast. You can lead an opposition group from right outside of Addis Ababa. There needs to be action on the ground.”
President Isaias told us that “Ethiopian political leaders continue to fail their people.” He recommends that the opposition leaders need to leave their comfortable homes in Europe and the U.S. and relocate to Ethiopia’s mountains and jungles, if they are serious about bringing change. Any opposition leader who is not willing to do that cannot and should not be taken seriously.
“Woyanne will collapse through evolution. Let’s revolutionize the process,” the president said. To that end, Ethiopian opposition groups need to come together and craft a “common political platform, which is lacking today.”
He expressed his hope that such a common political agenda and an inclusive united front of Ethiopian opposition parties will be formed before the end of this year (European calendar).
President Isaias says that his government is not shy about supporting Ethiopian freedom fighters. But the actual struggle must be waged by Ethiopia’s opposition groups themselves. What Eritrea wants to get in return is a “safe neighborhood,” a peaceful region, according to the president. He also envisions the creation of an economic integration among Horn of African nations. That is not possible as long Ethiopia continues to be ruled by a ravenous tyranny that attacks any thing it cannot control and leach on.
Even though currently there are some encouraging signs — such as an increased effort to form a united front — the foot-dragging by many of the leaders of the opposition parties continue, unfortunately. If they don’t come together and form an effective united front before Woyanne’s fake elections in May 2010, there needs to be a revolution in the opposition camp itself — all the leaders of these parties must resign and give a chance to the younger generation to take the lead.
Would a Jewish, Russian, or Polish journalist ask Hitler such a question? Unthinkable.
It is what EthiopiaFirst.com editor recently asked Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Hitler, who is currently carrying out a campaign of genocide against our people in the Ogaden region, not to mention the countless crimes he has perpetrated against all Ethiopians. A more apt question would be, “How many babies did you kill today?”
Ethiopia is being ruled by thugs and murderers because our so-called elite, those who are educated and fare better in life, have a conscience comparable to that of a pig — i.e., purely selfish, no sense of justice, no moral compass.
Meles, arrogant as ever, did not want to answer the idiotic question, but when Ben pressed him if he likes Tilahun, he said “yes, and foreign songs, too.”
The hate Meles has for any thing Ethiopian would not allow him to call out Ethiopian singers.
But what is new? We all know that Meles is thoroughly anti-Ethiopia. What irks many Ethiopians is the blase attitude of individuals like Ben — those who claim to care about their country — toward an individual who is systematically destroying Ethiopia and commits gruesome crimes against Ethiopians (watch these photos).
The interview serves only to expose Meles Zenawi’s contempt for Ethiopia. But it is also an indictment against the likes of Ben who are trying to humanize a monster and give legitimacy to his murderous regime.
Angry readers asked me to remove the interview from the comment section some one posted yesterday (click here to see). I feel differently. Let every one watch the monster and get angry enough to take action — such as starting to support those resistance groups that are fighting to overthrow him. – Elias Kifle
If you are wondering why the government of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia is doing the secretive land deals with Arab and Asian tycoons and agribusiness corporations without any public discussion and scrutiny, and why the officials are handling it in much the same way like thieves who sell their stolen stuff on street corners and dark alleys, you have asked a serious question and probably have almost gotten some of your answers. This is pure theft and burglary sugarcoated as investment — only in this case that the burglar has someone to open the door from inside. It is a dangerous venture that has little to do with solving Ethiopia’s economic problems but bound to negatively impact the country’s most strategic resources, land and water, and its posterity. It appears that we have reached a point where we are selling out our last belongings just like the desperate peasants I once saw in 1984 sell their last belongings for scrape as they fled their villages to escape an impending famine.
When it comes to the ruling tribal junta in Ethiopia, there is no one who has as much clarity as President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea. He knows their real nature, what and how they think, their weaknesses, strength, and modus operandi. This is hardly surprising since he is the one who guided them all the way to Menelik’s palace in Addis Ababa. A few years later they turned around and stabbed him in the back and waged a war of attrition against Eritreans. Simply put, to Isaias and the Eritrean leadership, Woyanne is an experiment that went terribly wrong. To Ethiopians, it is a long nightmare. This monster must be eliminated soon in order for peace to prevail in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and whole Horn of Africa region.
Ethiopia is being ruled by thugs and murderers because our so-called elite, those who are educated and fare better in life, have a conscience comparable to that of a pig — i.e., purely selfish, no sense of justice, no moral compass.