(Distributed with the author’s permission.)
5 December 2005
H.E. Takeda Alemu,
State Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Addis Ababa

Dear Takeda,

Thank you for your open letter of 17 November, raising some points about my earlier ‘Comments on the Ethiopian Crisis’. I have received so many messages of thanks and congratulations since those comments were published on the internet that it is entirely right that I should also be subjected to some more critical observations, both from yourself and from others. Ethiopia is an extremely complex country, about which there is understandably a great variety of opinions, which are held with sincerity and – especially at times like the present – often with passion. All I can do is put forward my own views, together with the reasons that lead me to hold them, and leave to others the opportunity to present alternatives. I was particularly pleased to receive your comments, not only because of your deservedly high position in the Ethiopian Government, but because I have known you since we both taught together in the Department of Political Science and International Relations in Addis Ababa University exactly twenty years ago, when I was a visiting professor there and you were teaching with great dedication on a part-time basis, while already holding a high position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Thank you also for referring so generously to the presentation about Ethiopia that I made at a meeting in South Africa which we both attended in April 2004. It may be helpful to note the circumstances both of this presentation, and of my more recent comments, to help explain the differences in tone (though not, I think, in basic argument) between them. The meeting at Tswalu was a gathering by invitation of a number of very notable Africans, together with a few external commentators, to think over some of the issues facing the continent in the relaxed atmosphere provided by a private game lodge in the Kalahari. The theme on that occasion was the particular problems involved in governing Africa’s largest states – including Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo – and I was particularly honoured to be invited to make the initial presentation on the Ethiopian case, to which (as you note) it was expected and intended that Ato Meles Zenawi would reply. In the event, other urgent commitments of the kind that a Head of Government can never escape prevented his attendance, and you very ably substituted for him – though, inevitably, without quite being able to fill the gap left by such an articulate leader. Since the whole object of the occasion was to promote a friendly and constructive discussion, and since in any event there are proper diplomatic courtesies which need to be respected when addressing a national leader about issues in his own country, the misgivings which I already felt about some of the developments in Ethiopia were couched in a coded form with which Ethiopians are perfectly familiar, and which Ato Meles would undoubtedly have decoded and taken up. Your own comments on my presentation at the time were much kinder than I suspect that Ato Meles’ would have been. The paper has since been revised, in the light of comments at the meeting (including your own) and subsequent developments, and will be published early next year in a volume on governing large states in Africa by Witwatersrand University Press. The most important of those subsequent developments are of course the May 2005 elections in Ethiopia and their repercussions. Since these had not occurred at the time of the original presentation, I obviously could not take them into account, and it was only fair to maintain an open mind tinged with optimism towards the future. Sadly, some of my misgivings have now been realised.

The paper with which you compare it, my ‘Comments on the Ethiopian Crisis’, was written in response to a request from my old friend Paul Henze for my views on what was happening in Ethiopia at the present time. Paul and I have talked and corresponded over Ethiopian affairs for many years, and I was happy to take this opportunity to do so. In the event, my views turned out on this occasion to be rather different from his, and he replied with a statement of his own position which you will certainly have read. Since I had also sent my comments to a number of other people who had asked for them, Paul’s response followed, and before we knew where we were, an exchange of views between friends had turned into what I have seen referred to on the internet as ‘the great Clapham-Henze debate’, to which other commentators including yourself have in turn contributed. A paper written originally as a personal letter will inevitably differ in tone from one written for a public occasion in the presence of the national leader, but the underlying argument is the same. There are not two Professor Claphams, as you are inclined to suppose, but just the one. Nor do I in any way regret that my comments have now become public. For one thing, when academic commentators express opinions that may (if your own assessment is correct) have some impact on events, it is only right that they should do so in a form in which they can be openly assessed and criticised, rather than through secretive channels. And equally, I feel that one thing that concerned outsiders such as myself (and of course Paul Henze and others) can do to help Ethiopia at times such as the present is to make our expertise (such as it is) available in the form of open comment and analysis. I am deeply aware that as a retired academic I have a position of privilege denied to many others (including yourself) who are necessarily constrained in what they can write, and which should not be abused.

To come onto the substance of your comments, I would certainly start by agreeing that in a great many respects, the EPRDF regime has been a very significant improvement over its immediate predecessor – not, admittedly, that this would be difficult. Considerable improvements have been made in liberalising the economy (despite some continuing weaknesses), and there has been a dramatic improvement in the openness of the society, notably through the emergence of a free press. The EPRDF likewise came up with an imaginative policy for resolving the age-old problem of ‘nationalities’ in Ethiopia, through the recognition of the right to autonomy and (in extreme cases) secession. This policy certainly carried considerable dangers, and would inevitably be subject to criticism, whether on the one hand for destroying the unity of the Ethiopian state and nation, or on the other for serving as a cover for continuing highland (and in this case notably Tigrayan) rule; but there was a clearly articulated rationale for it, for which the government deserves credit. There was certainly a basis for the positive elements to which I drew attention in my Tswalu paper, and which you recall in your open letter.

The problem with which I was concerned in my recent Comments was however a different one: to explore the evident weaknesses in the government’s political position that were made all too apparent by the elections and their aftermath, and to ask how these could be explained. I am somewhat reassured that neither you nor any of the other critical commentators on my paper have seriously undertaken to challenge the analysis that I made in the first two pages or so of my Comments, and which therefore continues to stand. This analysis was not concerned with whether the EPRDF regime should be regarded as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – something that I am quite prepared to leave to Ethiopians to decide for themselves – but rather why it had failed to translate its achievements into electoral support. In some respects, indeed, the EPRDF regime may be compared to the Haile-Selassie monarchy, whose slow demise I observed some forty years ago, and which had likewise created expectations that it was then unable to realise. Just as Haile-Selassie did much to create the class of educated Ethiopians who eventually turned against him, so the EPRDF, through its opening up of political space and especially the mobilisation of ethnic identities, has helped to create the forces that are now challenging it.

The central problem has been its failure to foster the political institutions and processes that were needed to make the new system work. ‘Politics’, in a pluralist society such as Ethiopia has now become, is a process that involves recognising the autonomy and legitimacy of different sources of organised political power, and then devising mechanisms for achieving agreement, by arguing, listening, persuading, forming common cause with people and groups with which you agree on some things (though not everything), and symbolising identities and aspirations that large numbers of your fellow citizens share. I recognise, as I noted in the Tswalu paper, that this has been particularly difficult to achieve in Ethiopia, but there is nonetheless no alternative to it. It is something that Ethiopians have to learn, however hard it may be. And it is also something that the EPRDF government has been particularly poor at achieving. This would have required the government, having created regional autonomy on a ‘nationality’ basis, to recognise the right of the different nationalities to choose their own leaders, who would necessarily have held rather different views from the government in Addis Ababa, and have been answerable to their own peoples. They would in turn then have needed to bargain over policy with the leaders of other nationalities and with the central government. This has never been allowed to happen, and the EPRDF is paying the price for it. A particularly telling example was the killing in May 2002 of Sidamas who were peacefully demonstrating over an issue as manageable as the status of the city of Awassa.

In making these comments about the failures of the government, it was certainly not my intention to express unqualified support for the opposition, and notably the CUD. They too, like the EPRDF and other opposition groups such as the UEDF, have their weaknesses, and they too need to learn the arts of political management. The same goes to an even greater extent for those groups and individual commentators who pass judgement on Ethiopian affairs from the sanctuary of the diaspora, and because they need only to address external audiences, have no need to adapt their comments to political realities in the country itself. One of the great hopes opened up by the recent elections was that they would encourage open political argument to take place within Ethiopia, and would enable groups which have hitherto engaged in exile politics (among which the OLF is particularly significant) to return home and participate in the complex and extremely difficult task of devising an acceptable political order for Ethiopia and its peoples. Correspondingly, the greatest tragedy of the recent developments is that those who did with great courage engage in democratic politics within Ethiopia, and who showed themselves in the process to enjoy very considerable popular support, have been imprisoned and charged with capital offences by the government of which you form part, while some of their supporters have been killed on the streets of Addis Ababa. While there must be considerable doubt about whether the leaders of the opposition parties deliberately engaged in violence, and I am inclined to accept the view of Amnesty International that they did not, there can be no doubt at all that the present Ethiopian government was prepared to engage in very considerable violence as soon as it found that its position was threatened. In these circumstances, those who continue to criticise the present government from the safety of exile can scarcely be blamed for refusing to risk their own necks by doing so at home.

Politics is a trade in which there is no alternative to experience: it is only by engaging in the very challenging task of attempting to govern a country as difficult as Ethiopia that politicians can learn what is and is not practicable, and acquire the skills needed for the purpose. The EPRDF showed rapidly after 1991 that the attitudes gained in opposition could rapidly be adapted to the needs of government, under circumstances very different from those to which they had become accustomed during their long struggle against the Derg regime. They were greatly assisted in the process by the willingness of dedicated civil servants such as yourself to remain at their posts, and guide them in the learning process that they certainly required. (It was, I suspect, in large part because they lacked the stabilising influence of an inherited state apparatus that the EPLF in Eritrea was quite unable to make the same transition as the EPRDF in Ethiopia.) The leadership of the present domestic opposition parties, as I pointed out in my previous Comments, come from a far more conducive environment than did Ato Meles and his colleagues. But they too have a lot to learn, and it is a tragedy that the opportunity for them to do so now appears to have been irreparably lost.

The principal task facing whoever governs Ethiopia is clearly to find some way (or indeed, at worst, to find whether there is a way) of reconciling the different social and political communities of which the country is composed. The CUD, in seeking to represent the aspirations of those many Ethiopians who feel that the country comprises, as base, a single political community, was certainly speaking for a legitimate political community that had every right to a voice. But those who seek to represent other constituencies, and notably those of specific nationalities such as the Oromo, the various southern peoples, and the Somalis, likewise have a legitimate voice that has every right to participate fully in the political process. Should the leaders of the CUD have supposed that they could reconstitute the kind of relationship between the central government and the various nationalities that existing under the Haile-Selassie or Derg regimes (and I have no reason to believe that they were so foolish), then they would rapidly have discovered that this is no longer an option in today’s Ethiopia. That is what a democratic learning process is about. Such a process is needed every bit as much on the part of those who claim to represent the various leading nationalities. I would in particular very much welcome a considered analysis of recent developments, including the levels of support gained in the recent elections by the different opposition parties in various parts of Oromia, from a qualified Oromo commentator, and much regret that I have not yet seen one.

I likewise make no apology for referring at a number of points to the distinctively Marxist intellectual frame of reference of the leading members of the present government, and to its influence on many of their attitudes and policies. It is certainly the case, as you point out, that almost all educated Ethiopians of their generation held Marxist views; many did so with great dedication at times of intense danger, and lost their lives as a result. This was not mere student fashion, but a serious attempt to work out an intellectual response to the evident problems of Ethiopia, for which I have every respect. For many of those who remained in Derg-controlled Ethiopia, Marxism lost its allure as a result of the brutality and appallingly mistaken policies committed in its name. But for those like Ato Meles and his colleagues, who adapted it as an ideology of insurgent warfare (which across the world, from China through southeast Asia to southern Africa, Yugoslavia and Cuba, has unquestionably been the role in which Marxism has been most successful), their deeply held Marxist precepts could only be reinforced by their eventual triumph. Despite their evident success in adapting to the changed global situation since the end of the Cold War, these precepts continue in my view to inform their behaviour, across a range of policies from land tenure to their own conception of their right to rule, and the ‘democratic centralist’ organisation of the EPRDF itself.

One area in which I am happy to acknowledge an improvement is in Ethiopia’s receptivity to foreign investment, even though little investment has actually been received, and much remains to be done. The impressions cited in my Comments derived from the time of the Tswalu conference. However, Ethiopia’s position is dramatically less favourable than the impression given by your colleague suggests. On the website most widely used by corporations for assessing the ease of doing business around the world, www.doingbusiness.org, Ethiopia ranks 101st out of 145 national economies in the overall ease of doing business. On the specific indicator that you cite, the time taken to start a business, Ethiopia ranks 94th, with a time required of 32 days – a far cry from the 2 hours that you claim. I suggest that you ask your colleague to check his own figures against those of an objective external source, and either draw attention to any ways in which he may feel that Ethiopia’s performance has been undervalued, or else adapt his assertions to achieve some measure of credibility.

On the other hand, since you choose to liken the Ethiopian political process to a soccer game, in which there are rules administered by referees, I must also suggest that this analogy becomes somewhat misleading when the referee is also one of the players. Neutral referees can only be found amongst those who do not themselves have a stake in the outcome of the game, two examples of which to whom you refer are Dr. Pausewang of the Christian Michelson Institute in Norway and Ms. Ana Gomes of the European Union observer mission. In each case, you repeat allegations that the referee was biased against you. On the basis of my own long familiarity with his work, I can only testify that Dr. Pausewang is an experienced observer of scrupulous honesty and impartiality, who has the interests of Ethiopia and of all Ethiopians very much at heart. Ana Gomes earned widespread respect for her courage and integrity in East Timor, and attempts to disparage her can likewise only be counterproductive, especially in Europe. The team that attacks the referee is usually the one that has been committing the fouls.

I am sorry that my views on recent issues should have set me at odds with two such old friends as yourself and Paul Henze, but hope that the expression of our respective opinions will help to contribute to constructive discussion on issues which are very much in need of public debate. I appreciate that you write as a member of a government whose views must necessarily reflect those of the administration that he serves, and would like to assure you that my respect for your abilities is in no way diminished by the opinions that you have been called on to express.

Yours sincerely,
Christopher Clapham
Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge