Five officials and activists of Ethiopian opposition parties that operate inside the country have joined the armed resistance against the Woyanne genocidal regime, according to the Press Office of Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF).
One of them is Seid Ali Tegegn, an Ethiopian Democratic Party (EDP or Edepa, as commonly known) candidate in the town of Bahr Dar. Seid, who competed for the regional council, told the EPPF press office that Woyanne thugs had tried to convince him to support the ruling party during the May 23, 2010, elections. When that failed they attempted to kill him by throwing a hand grenade on his house.
Abera Kasse Zewdie is another member of EDP who has recently joined EPPF. Abera was assigned to observe the May 23 election in the town of Bahr Dar’s Kebele 17. Abera said people in his Kebele are convinced that the only alternative left for them is to wage armed struggle against the ruling Woyanne junta.
The following three opposition officials have also joined EPPF in the past few days:
* Demilew Yigzaw Fente, a representative of All Ethiopian Unity Party (AEUP), in Gonder, Dabat Woreda
* Tekle Takele Gezahegn, Chairman of AEUP’s Youth Association in Dabat Woreda of Gonder
* Dereje Woreta Kebede, Medrek representative in Metemha
All three have similar stories regarding the brutal repression in Ethiopia during last month’s elections.
Ato Tekle Takele further explained that many among the peasant population in rural areas of the country are joining EPPF.
More details in Amharic below.
For the latest information about EPPF visit ArbegnochGinbor.com or contact Demis Belete, Head of the EPPF Press Office, Email: [email protected]
EDITOR’S NOTE: By supporting and covering up for Meles Zenawi’s genocidal dictatorship, the American embassy in Ethiopia remains one of the main sources of misery in the Horn of Africa. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reports about a recent finding by the U.S. State Department’s Inspector General about administrative problems that have plagued the embassy.
More than a dozen top American diplomats have come and gone at the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia, a front-line nation in the battle against Islamic extremism, in less than a year, the State Department’s inspector general reported Monday.
The problem starts at the top, the auditors said.
“This situation reflects, in part, questionable personnel decisions by the previous leadership in the Bureau of African Affairs (AF) that also have impacted negatively on the political/economic section,” their report said.
With the added burden of an impending move to a new embassy and a sharp growth in personnel, the auditors said, the embassy operates “too often in crisis mode.”
The report was signed by Harold W. Geisel, the State Department’s deputy inspector general.
Blame for the spinning door in Addis Ababa seemed to be levied at Jendayi E. Frazer, a former assistant secretary of state who headed the Bureau of African Affairs under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, although she was not mentioned by name.
Now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, Fraser could not be reached for comment.
The latest American ambassador to Ethiopia, Donald E. Booth, a career foreign service officer and longtime Africa hand, arrived in Addis Ababa in April.
Despite the leadership turmoil, the senior embassy staff is doing a pretty good job, the auditors found.
“Executive direction at Embassy Addis Ababa is good for a front office in prolonged transition,” they said, “with seven chiefs or acting chiefs of mission, five deputy chiefs of mission (DCM), and several office management specialists since July 2009.”
Morale has been helped by love bombs from the home office in Foggy Bottom, the report suggested, citing “evident Washington interest and a strong sense of task.”
Morale “has remained good, surprisingly so, given local conditions,” the auditors found during their inspection trip in February
“Employees work out of a dilapidated embassy in a construction zone, commute in chaotic traffic, fight a fusty bureaucracy to get cars, household effects, and consumables shipments delivered, and go without reliable Internet service at home,” the report said.
But help is on the way.
“A stellar project director overseeing the construction of a new embassy building has achieved exemplary coordination with Embassy [personnel],” the auditors said.
“This will facilitate the moving-in process scheduled for September 2010.”
To a casual observer, the tens of thousands of people who poured into the central square of Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on May 25 to peacefully celebrate the country’s elections might have been mistaken for a massive symbol of democratic progress in a poor and troubled part of the world. In fact it was quite the opposite.
The demonstrators were there to denounce Human Rights Watch for criticizing the victory of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front and its allies, who claimed 545 out of 547 seats in Parliament following a massive campaign of intimidation against opposition supporters. Many of the protesters were paid the equivalent of a day’s wage for a few hours of shouting against Human Rights Watch. They were emblematic not only of Ethiopia’s return to a one-party state, 19 years after the fall of a communist regime, but also of a growing trend away from democracy in wide swaths of Africa. The trend includes not only pariah states such as Sudan, but key Western allies and major recipients of foreign aid such as Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which offers the world’s richest prize package to African leaders who both help their countries and peacefully leave office, decided not to offer an award each of the last two years.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has become a darling of the West for leading an economic renaissance in a nation traumatized by the 1990s genocide. But in upcoming August elections, Kagame looks set to duplicate his implausibly high 95 percent victory in the last vote and is pressing charges against an opposition leader for “divisionism,” namely downplaying the genocide. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who denounced dictatorship in Africa when he took power in 1986 and was seen as another great democratic hope, has said he’ll try to extend his 24-year tenure in presidential elections next year. In Gabon and Togo, the deaths of long-serving autocrats Omar Bongo and Gnassingbé Eyadéma has meant elections in which power was smoothly transferred—to their sons. Disastrous polls in Nigeria and Kenya in 2007 were worse than those countries’ previous elections, and current trends show little hope for improvement. Mauritania, Guinea, Madagascar, and Niger have all had coups since 2008, while Guinea-Bissau has been effectively taken over by drug cartels.
Africa’s own institutions have been unable to halt the trend, which has gained speed since a period of openness following the end of the Cold War. “The democratization process on the continent is not faring very well,” says Jean Ping, the Gabonese chairman of the African Union Commission, which has overseen a host of Pan-African agreements on democracy and human rights that many member states have either ignored or failed to ratify. “The measures that we take here are taken in a bid to make sure that we move forward. The crises, they are repeating themselves.” In country after country, the recipe for the new age of authoritarianism is the same: demonization and criminal prosecution of opposition leaders, dire warnings of ethnic conflict and chaos should the ruling party be toppled, stacking of electoral commissions, and the mammoth mobilization of security forces and government resources on behalf of the party in power. “The really powerful governments learned how to do elections,” says Richard Dowden, director of the London-based Royal African Society. That’s not to say the continent doesn’t retain some bright spots. In Ghana, presidents have twice stepped down to make way for leaders from the opposition. Democracy has flourished in Botswana and Benin, while regional giant South Africa continues to have a vibrant opposition and free press despite the African National Congress’s dominance of post-apartheid politics.
But backsliders have them outnumbered, a shift that hasn’t gone unnoticed in the West. Political freedoms declined in 10 countries on the continent in 2009, while they improved in just four, according to an annual report by Washington, D.C.–based Freedom House, which dropped three African countries from its list of “electoral democracies” last year. “Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty,” President Obama told Ghana’s Parliament last year. His top diplomat for Africa, Johnnie Carson, took office last year listing the continent’s democratization as his top priority.
Yet despite the rhetoric, the Obama administration and its European allies, which spent $27 billion on African development aid in 2009, according to the OECD, have largely acquiesced to the shift away from open politics on the continent. In some cases the rise of China means oil exporters such as Nigeria and Gabon have alternative markets for their production, thus reducing Western leverage to push for political reforms. In others, the refusal to challenge autocratic regimes has been driven by security—Ugandan, Burundian, and Ethiopian troops have functioned as de facto Western proxies in battling radical Somali Islamists in Mogadishu.
“The expectation was that this administration would give greater weight to issues of democracy and governance,” says Jennifer Cooke, an Africa analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But this tepid response to Ethiopia’s ruling party’s 99.6 percent victory and the pre-cooking of the upcoming polls in Rwanda and Uganda show the boundaries of its willingness to push key allies.
Beyond security and the scramble for resources, a third factor in the West’s acceptance of Africa’s political retrenchment is the increasing influence of aid groups like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.K.’s Department for International Development over their countries’ foreign policies. International pressure to get closer to the U.N. goal of giving 0.7 percent of their gross national income to development has led to steadily increasing aid budgets—even if there is evidence that aid is easily manipulated by authoritarian governments to suit their own ends.
“The aid departments are saying, ‘Don’t upset the politics of these countries because we’ve got all this aid to push out,’?” says Dowden of the Royal African Society. “But I would say these states need development work because the governance is so bad. You’ve got to put the politics first.”
Take Inderaw Mohammed Siraj, a 60-year-old Ethiopian opposition candidate who lost a finger after being beaten by ruling-party cadres in 2008. Last year, he says, he was kicked out of a food-aid program funded by the U.S., the World Bank, and the European Union when a local official from his village in a remote corner of northeast Ethiopia told him: “We will not feed opposition members.”
With virtually no opposition representation in Parliament, the independent press and local human-rights groups now closed or under attack, and the prospect of his children begging for food, he has realized life would be easier if he gave up politics. “I decided to stop being part of the opposition,” he says. “The party couldn’t help me. Foreigners didn’t do anything. Democracy isn’t working here.”
But cutting aid to authoritarian states like Ethiopia means not only halting some programs that help the poor but also losing influence in the region, a move that could haunt Western policymakers in future crises. “In Pakistan we cut the ties for the military in the 1990s,” says J. Peter Pham, a professor at James Madison University who was an Africa adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “As a result, today the officers coming up to flag rank weren’t trained in U.S. institutions. We don’t have their mobile-phone numbers. Our diplomats rue not having that influence.”
Similarly with the U.S. and its European allies reluctant to send their own forces to halt African crises in Darfur, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, good relations with local strongmen like Museveni, Kagame, and Meles is a must. Today’s dictators may not be as cruel as Zaire’s Mobutu or other Cold War despots, nor Western aid so overt. But the strategy of backing nasty allies to influence events in a tough part of the world remains the same. That just means Obama’s next African speech on democracy may be greeted with more skepticism on the continent than last year’s delivery in Accra. “If this is their representation of democracy and human rights, they shouldn’t talk about it anymore,” says Hailu Shawel, an Ethiopian opposition leader. “They should shut up.”
(Jason McLure a correspondent for NewsWeek and Bloomberg in Addis Ababa.)
Ethiopian Orthodox Church preacher Memher Zebene is once again causing havoc inside the Medhanialem Church in Maryland by turning members against each other so that he can overthrow the elected board members and make the church his personal property.
Most Ethiopian churches in the Diaspora are fulfilling the spiritual need of Ethiopians and providing essential services to our community quietly and with little or no controversy. In this regard, the St. Mary Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Atlanta is a great role model.
But in some church that are infiltrated by individuals like Zebene, there is always chaos. Recently, at a Dallas church, a church official had called police officers on church members who spoke out against the way the board conducts. The police officers entered the church — without taking off their shoes — and removed individuals whom the officials wanted to silence. This has occurred after the church board was taken over through shenanigans.
Memher Zenebe is trying to do the same thing at the Medhanialem Church that has served the Washington Metro Area for over a decade.
The problem started when the Board hired and brought Zenebe from Ethiopia to teach Bible. His hip hop style of preaching gained him popularity — mainly among the young members — and he soon managed to get himself selected to the Board. He has also accumulated a great deal of personal wealth since he arrived in the Washington DC area. A few years ago, he went to Addis Ababa to get married at a lavish wedding party where Woyanne cade Ato Gebremedhin (formerly Aba Paulos), who claims to be the Patriarch of Ethiopian Orthodox Church, was invited.
Memher Zebene’s recent actions, his endless squabbles with church elders and board members, his power struggle to take over the church all point to the conclusion that he is serving not the church but himself — he is after fame (vainglory), wealth and power over others. It is said that vanity is Devil’s favorite sin.
Click here to read a recent article posted about Zenebe for more information.
This is my third commentary on the theme, “Where do we go from here?”, following the rigged elections in Ethiopia last month.[1] In this piece, I urge Ethiopian intellectuals to exchange their armchairs for the public benches and leave their comfort zones of passivity and silence to become advocates of peaceful change and democracy in their homeland.
Where Have the Ethiopian Intellectuals Gone?
The Greek philosopher Diogenes used to walk the streets of ancient Athens carrying a lamp in broad daylight. When amused bystanders asked him about his apparently strange behavior, he would tell them that he was looking for an honest man. Like Diogenes, one may be tempted to walk the hallowed grounds of Western academia, search the cloistered spaces of the arts and scientific professions worldwide and even traverse the untamed frontiers of cyberspace with torchlight in hand looking for Ethiopian intellectuals.
Intellectuals — a term I use rather loosely and inclusively here to describe the disparate group of Ethiopian academics, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, physicians, philosophers, social and political thinkers and others — often become facilitators of change by analyzing and proposing solution to complex problems and issues facing their societies. Their stock-in-trade are questions, endless questions about what is possible and how the impossible could be made possible. There are engaged and disengaged intellectuals. Those engaged are always asking questions about their societies, pointing out failures and improving on successes, suggesting solutions, examining institutions, enlightening the public, criticizing outdated and ineffective ideas and proposing new ones while articulating a vision of the future with clarity of thought. They are always on the cutting edge of social change.
The purpose of this commentary is not to moralize about the “failure of Ethiopian intellectuals”, or to criticize them for things they have done, not done, undone or should have done. The purpose is to begin public discussion that will make it possible to find ways of making them a powerful force of peaceful change in Ethiopia. I make no attempt here to conceal my agenda with the Ethiopian intellectual community; in fact, I proudly proclaim it. I believe Ethiopian intellectuals have a moral obligation not to turn a blind eye to the government wrongs in their homeland, and an affirmative duty to act in the defense of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. I see many of them religiously practicing self-censorship and self-marginalization. I would like to see them enter the public arena and take on the issues. I see an artificial deficit in the supply of transformational and visionary Ethiopian thinkers, with revolutionary ideas to re-invent Ethiopian society. Such thinkers are out there but have chosen to remain disengaged. I would like to see them engaged more. At this critical time in Ethiopia’s history, I believe Ethiopian intellectuals must take a leading and active role in the public debate to shape the future of their homeland. I am unapologetic in demanding their intense involvement in teaching, inspiring and preparing Ethiopia’s youth within and outside the country to build a fair and just society and forge a united Ethiopian nation. I always pray that Ethiopian intellectuals will never become “whores” to dictators as the distinguished Ghanaian economist George Ayittey has warned of African intellectuals in general.
As a member of the Ethiopian “intelligentsia” and now its humble critic, I do not want to sound “holier-than-thou”. I will admit that I am just as guilty as any other for the sins of commission or omission I ascribe to others. Truth be told, I was just as invisible and silent on the issues in Ethiopia as those with whom I plead here until dictator Meles Zenawi slaughtered 196 unarmed demonstrators, and shot and wounded nearly 800 more in the streets after the 2005 election in Ethiopia. That act of total depravity, cold-blooded barbarity and savagery, vicious inhumanity and pure evil was a pivotal point in my own transformation from a complacent armchair academic to an impassioned grassroots human rights advocate, as the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 in which apartheid policemen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed black protesters killing 69 was a transformational event in the lives of so many South Africans
Role of Intellectuals in Africa
An old Jewish saying teaches that “A nation’s treasure is its scholars (intellectuals).” Unfortunately, in Africa that “treasure” has taken a decidedly loathsome character. Well over a decade ago, George Ayittey, the distinguished Ghanaian economist, and arguably one of the “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” worldwide who “are shaping the tenor of our time”, likened African intellectuals to “hordes of prostitutes.”[2]
Time and time again, despite repeated warnings, highly “educated” African intellectuals throw caution and common sense to the winds and fiercely jostle one another for the chance to hop into bed with military brutes. The allure of a luxury car, a diplomatic or ministerial post and a government mansion often proves too irresistible…
So hordes of politicians, lecturers, professionals, lawyers, and doctors sell themselves off into prostitution and voluntary bondage to serve the dictates of military vagabonds with half their intelligence. And time and time again, after being raped, abused, and defiled, they are tossed out like rubbish — or worse. Yet more intellectual prostitutes stampede to take their places….
Vile opportunism, unflappable sycophancy, and trenchant collaboration on the part of Africa’s intellectuals allowed tyranny to become entrenched in Africa. Doe, Mengistu, Mobutu, and other military dictators legitimized and perpetuated their rule by buying off and co-opting Africa’s academics for a pittance. And when they fall out of favor, they are beaten up, tossed aside or worse. And yet more offer themselves up.
The Crises of Ethiopian Intellectuals
Perhaps Prof. Ayittey takes poetic license in his analogies to provoke serious debate over the role of intellectuals in Africa. I much prefer to think of Ethiopian intellectuals as their country’s “eyes” in the sense of the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The office of the scholar (intellectual) is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye.” Though I will not challenge the fact that some Ethiopian intellectuals have “sold themselves off into prostitution and voluntary bondage”, I do not believe that the vast majority of them are the wretched members of the world’s oldest profession ready to “hop” in bed with the dictators lording over Ethiopia. I do believe, however, that many of us in the Ethiopian intellectual community could be fairly accused of turning a blind eye to the injustices in our homeland, not having a vision for our people and walking with blinders on so as to avoid making eye contact with the unpleasant facts of the current dictatorship in Ethiopia.
Many of us in the Ethiopian intellectual community have lost our “eye” sights because we are in crises. Some of us are mired in a moral crisis of knowing what is right but being afraid to do the right thing, and ultimately doing nothing. When Zenawi massacred hundreds of unarmed protesters and jailed tens of thousands more, few of us stood up to publicly protest. When elections are stolen in broad daylight and the country sold in bits and pieces and given away, far too many of us stood by in silent indifference. It seems many of us have developed titanium-clad consciences to keep out the reality of corruption and brutality of the dictatorship in Ethiopia.
Some of us suffer a crisis of critical thinking. We are quick to make conclusions based on hunches and speculations than rigorous analysis based on facts. We are given more to polemics and labeling than evidence-based analysis. We rarely examine and re-examine our assumptions and beliefs but cling to them as eternal truths and propagate them as such. It is embarrassing to admit that the rigorous intellectual challenge to Zenawi’s neatly packaged lies has come not from Ethiopian intellectuals but from the empirical research and analysis of foreign social scientists, researchers, journalists and human rights organizations. By failing to take a rigorous approach to the study and analysis of the myriad issues in Ethiopia, we have made it possible for Ethiopia’s dictators to write a gospel of lies and erect monuments to celebrate the living lies of non-existent accomplishments.
In one form or another, many of us in the Ethiopian intellectual community suffer a crisis of self-confidence and a deficit of intellectual courage. We criticize and castigate the dictatorship in private but are afraid to repeat our strongly-held views in public. Even in the Diaspora, some of us feel compelled to use pen names to express our opinions in the blogosphere. We would like others to admire us and accept and act on our ideas while we hide our real identities behind aliases and fictitious names. Many of us are afraid to make our views known because we fear the ridicule and ostracism of our associates and peers. We are afraid to take ownership and responsibility for our ideas for fear of being proven wrong and mask our intellectual cowardice with meaningless dogmas and abstractions. Lacking self-confidence, many of us have resolved to live out our lives quietly and anonymously on remote islands of self-censorship and self-marginalization.
Most of us also suffer from a crisis of foresight. We can argue the past and criticize the present, but we do very little forward-thinking. As Ethiopia’s “eyes”, we are ironically afflicted by myopia (nearsightedness). We can see things in the present with reasonable clarity, but we lack the vision to see things in the distance. We can see the potential problems of ethnicity in Ethiopia, but we are blinded to its solutions in the future. We see the country being dismembered in pieces but lack the vision to make it whole in the future. We can see ethnic animosity simmering under the surface, but we have been unable to help create a new national consciousness to overcome it. We can articulate a present plan for accession to political power but we lack the foresight and contingency planning necessary to ensure democratic governance.
We have a serious crisis of communication. Many of us talk past each other and lack intellectual honesty and candor in our communications. We pretend to agree and give lip service to each other only to turn around and engage in vile backbiting. We speak to each other and the general public in ambiguities and “tongues”. Often we do not say what we mean or mean what we say. We keep each other guessing. We do not listen to each other well, and make precious little effort to genuinely seek common ground with those who do not agree with us. We have a nasty habit of marginalizing those who disagree with us and tell it like it is. We hate to admit error and apologize. Instead we compound mistakes by committing more errors. We tend to be overly critical of each other over non-essentials. As a result, we have failed to nurture coherent and dynamic intellectual discourse about Ethiopia’s present and future.
We have a crisis of intellectual leadership. There are few identifiable Ethiopian intellectual leaders today. In many societies, a diverse and competing intellectual community functions as the tip of the spear of social change. In the past two decades, we have seen the powerful role played by intellectual leaders in emancipating Eastern Europe from the clutches of communist tyranny and in leading a peaceful process of change. No society can ever aspire to advance without a core intellectual guiding force. The founders of the American Republic were not merely political leaders but also intellectuals of the highest caliber for any age. They harnessed their collective intellectual energies to forge a nation for themselves and their posterity. Their conception of government and constitution has become a template for every country that aspires for the blessings of liberty and democracy. Despite some major shortcomings, the Americans got it right because their founders were visionary intellectuals.
Ethiopian Intellectuals Through Zenawi’s Eyes
Zenawi regards himself to be an intellectual par excellence based on the available fragmentary corpus of his written work, numerous public statements and anecdotal narratives of those who have interacted with him. In August 2009, the Economist magazine described him as silver-tongued conversationalist with a “sharp mind, elephantine memory and ability to speak for two hours without notes. With his polished English, full of arcane turns of phrase from his days at a private English school in Addis Ababa, the capital, he captivates foreign donors.” Jeffrey Sachs, the celebrated shaman of Western aid to Africa and Columbia University professor, often patronizes Zenawi for his “intellect” and “vision”. (In January 2008, Sachs expressed euphoric fascination over “Ethiopia’s 11 or 12 percent economic development year after year [which makes] people say oh…what’s going on there?” under Zenawi’s leadership. Zenawi is said to be an assiduous autodidact. He reputedly harbors much distaste and contempt for the Ethiopian intellectual community in much the same way he does for his political opposition. His attitude is that he can outwit, outthink, outsmart, outplay, outfox and outmaneuver boatloads of Ph.Ds., M.Ds., J.Ds. Ed.Ds or whatever alphabet soup of degrees exist out there any day of the week. He seems to think that like the opposition leaders, Ethiopian intellectuals are dysfunctional, shiftless and inconsequential, and will never be able to pose a real challenge to his power.
Regardless of the merits of Zenawi’s purported views, the fact of the matter is that few Ethiopian intellectuals have bothered to scrutinize his ideas or record in a systematic and rigorous manner. When he made manifestly false and outrageous claims of “economic growth” and “development”, few Ethiopian economists challenged him on the facts. It took foreign scholars, researchers and journalists to undertake an investigation to expose Zenawi’s fraudulent claims of success in health, education and social welfare programs. Few Ethiopian historians, political scientists, sociologists and others have come forward to challenge his bizarre theory of “ethnic federalism”. Nor have there been any rigorous analyses of the slogan of “revolutionary democracy” palmed off as a coherent political theory. Few Ethiopian lawyers have examined his constitution and demonstrated his flagrant violation of it. Given these facts, all that can be said in defense of Ethiopian intellectuals is: “If the shoe fits, wear it!”
The Challenge: Becoming Public Intellectuals
The challenge to Ethiopian intellectuals is to find ways of transforming themselves into “public intellectuals.” In other words, regardless of our formal training in a particular discipline, we should strive to engage the broader Ethiopian society beyond our narrow professional concerns through our writings and advocacy efforts. We should strive for something far larger than our disciplines, and by speaking truth to power metamorphosise into “public intellectuals.” Here are a few ideas for this enterprise:
Get involved. I hear all sorts of excuses from Ethiopian intellectuals for not getting involved. The most common one is: “I am a ‘scholar’, a ‘scientist’, etc., and do not want to get involved in politics.” Albert Einstein was not only one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time, he was also a relentless and passionate advocate for pacifism and the plight of German-Jewish refugees. Others plead futility. “Nothing I do could ever make a difference because Ethiopia’s problems are too many and too complex.” The answer is found in an Ethiopian proverb: “Enough strands of the spiders’ web could tie up a lion.” Let each one do his/her part, and cumulatively the difference made will be enormous.
Articulate a Vision. Ethiopian intellectuals need to articulate a vision for their people. It is ironic to be the “eyes” of a nation and be visionless at the same time. What are our dreams, hopes and aspirations for Ethiopia? What are the values we should be collectively striving for? Why are we not able to come up with an intellectual framework that can provide a bulwark against tyranny, and restore good governance to a nation of powerless masses and broken institutions? As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
Create and Maintain a Think Tank. Think tanks are “policy actors in democratic societies assuring a pluralistic, open and accountable process of policy analysis, research, decision-making and evaluation.” There are thousands of them worldwide. It is necessary to establish such organizations for Ethiopia to conduct research and engage in advocacy and public education. On various occasions, I have publicly called for the establishment of an informal policy “think tank” to research and critically evaluate current and emergent issues in Ethiopia. Would it not be wonderful if there could be union of concerned Ethiopian scholars, scientists, intellectuals and professionals who could come together as the tip of the spear in seeking to institutionalize democracy, human rights and rule of law in Ethiopia?
Create a Legal Defense Fund. Frequently, I am asked why Ethiopian lawyers do not get together and from a legal action group to study and litigate human rights issues. Wherever I give a speech, I am always asked the question about why “you Ethiopian lawyers are not doing something about human rights, political prisoners, violations of international law….in Ethiopia? There are many examples in the U.S. of global campaigns for human rights undertaken by groups of dedicated lawyers supported by dozens of cooperating attorneys across the country. Ethiopian lawyers need to step up to the plate.
Establish Expert Panels. We have few experts available to serve as resources on issues affecting Ethiopia. Many Ethiopian experts are unwilling to come forward and give interviews to the media or to offer testimony in official proceedings. We need a roster of experts to represent Ethiopia on the world stage.
Teach the People. Zenawi often claims that Ethiopian intellectuals, particularly in the West, do not really understand the situation in the country and are merely speculating about conditions. He says our notions of democracy based on Western models are fanciful, desultory and inappropriate for Ethiopia and an “ethnic basis of Ethiopia’s democracy [is necessary] to fight against poverty and the need for an equitable distribution of the nation s wealth: peasants must be enabled to make their own decisions in terms of their own culture. Power must be devolved to them in ways that they understand, and they understand ethnicity….” It our role as intellectuals to discredit such manifestly nonsensical political theory by teaching the people the true meaning of democracy based on popular consent. We must teach the Ethiopian people that it is a travesty and a mockery of democracy for one man and one party to remain in power for 25 years and call that a democracy. We must find ways to empower the people by teaching them.
Act in Solidarity With the Oppressed
As intellectuals, we are often disconnected from the reality of ordinary life just like the dictators who live in a bubble. But we will remain on the right track if we follow Gandhi’s teaching: “Recall the face of the poorest and the most helpless man you have seen and ask yourself whether the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he be able to gain anything by it? Will it restore to him a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj (independence) or self-rule for the hungry and spiritually starved millions of your countrymen? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.” Let us always ask ourselves if what we do and whether our actions will help restore to the poorest and most helpless Ethiopians a control over their own life and destiny.
As I point an index finger at others, I am painfully aware that three fingers are pointing at me. So be it. I believe I know “where all the Ethiopian intellectuals have gone.” Most of them are standing silently with eyes wide shut in every corner of the globe. But wherever they may be, I hasten to warn them that they will eventually have to face the “Ayittey Dilemma” alone: Choose to stand up for Ethiopia, or lie down with the dictators who rape, abuse and defile her.
Alemayehu G. Mariam, is a professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and an attorney based in Los Angeles. He writes a regular blog on The Huffington Post, and his commentaries appear regularly on pambazuka.org, allafrica.com, afronline.org and other sites.
Every year the Ethiopian Media Association International (EMAI) gives recognition award to the top Ethiopian news websites. These ranking come from independent reports and the Web Information Company – ALEXA.com, which is the leading method of ranking online media popularity around the world.
Below is a mid-year EMAI report that shows the ranking of Ethiopian media outlets as of June 18, 2010. The mid-year ranking shows that the popular media Ethiopian Review is leading the pack once again and it is the #1 website during the first 6 months of 2010. The ranking also shows that the new online version of the newspaper Addis Neger has quickly become very popular among Ethiopians worldwide. It has qualified as a top 20 website in a very short amount of time.
The information below gives more information about each of the top 20 Ethiopian websites. The first bracketed data shows the GLOBAL ranking of the websites compared with non-Ethiopian websites around the world. The Second bracketed information tells the affiliation of the websites that shows if they are “in general” pro-government or pro-opposition or independent.
