By Barry Malone

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia’s main opposition coalition said on Wednesday that some of its candidates were being prevented at gunpoint from registering for national elections in May.

The eight-party coalition, Medrek, also said it had obtained a ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) newsletter calling on party officials to follow, photograph and document the movements ofopposition members.

“In a lot of areas we have faced serious problems,” Medrek spokesman Merera Gudina told a news conference.

“In some areas our candidates were turned back at gunpoint. A candidate’s driver was told to leave town immediately or his car would be burned,” he said.

The Horn of Africa country’s election will be the first since a government victory in 2005 was disputed by the opposition. About 200 street protesters were killed by security forces and the main opposition leaders imprisoned.

Analysts say Medrek is the main threat to the 18-year-old government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, but the ruling party is still expected to win the May 23 poll. [ID:nL1641132]

The opposition says this is because they are harassed and jailed. The government says the opposition is trying to discredit the poll because it has no chance of winning.

Meles was hailed as part of a new generation of democratic African leaders in the 1990s but rights groups have increasingly criticised him for cracking down onopposition in sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous nation.

GATHERING EVIDENCE

Meles has agreed an electoral code of conduct with three opposition parties — two of which are dismissed by opponents as EPRDF aligned. Medrek refused to take part in talks saying crucial issues such as electoral board reform were left out.

Government spokesman Shimeles Kemal told Reuters the code outlined complaint procedures but the opposition had not yet used it to make allegations about being threatened at gunpoint.

“If they want to make the complaints officially they can, and they will be investigated,” Shimeles said. “Why haven’t they? Most of the complaints theopposition have made publicly so far have been proven to be false.”

Medrek described the EPRDF members newsletter it had obtained as an “election manual”.

“It describes us as anti-Ethiopia, anti-people, anti-peace, anti-development, all kinds of anti,” Merera said, showing the document in Amharic to the media.

Former Ethiopian President Negaso Gidada, who joined the opposition after falling out with Meles, said the newsletter tells ruling party officials to track opposition members.

“It tells them to get any kind of document in your hand from opposition parties in your area,” Negaso told Reuters. “And these documents could serve as evidence to be used against opposition leaders to accuse them and bring them to court.”

Ruling party spokesman, Hailemariam Desalegn, acknowledged that EPRDF members had been told to observe opposition members, but only to ensure they were not violating the code of conduct or provoking civil disobedience.

“The opposition always makes unfounded allegations against us,” Hailemariam told Reuters. “We need to ensure that if we accuse them, we have evidence.”

Candidates have five more days to register for the poll.

(Editing by David Clarke and Jon Boyle)

By Tecola W. Hagos

A couple of days ago, I came across postings of some self-indulgent exercises by “scholars and prominent individuals” and very many readers/visitors of Ethiopian Review Website. It seems to me that the ever enterprising Editor of the Ethiopian Review had sent out questions to Ethiopian “scholars and prominent individuals” and posted the same question sometimes last Week to the general reader, probably the 11th of February 2010 or there about. The invitation reads as follows: “Ethiopian Review invites readers to share with us what 10 things you will do immediately if you are elected as the president or prime minister of Ethiopia. Your ideas will help parties to formulate their political program in line with what the people want. We are also asking Ethiopian scholars and prominent individuals the same question.”

This form of invitation reminds of the type of questions one asks grade school children. And the purpose in such types of questions is not aimed to gather wisdom from the children, but to stimulate the imagination and cognition of children at that tender age, children who have very limited knowledge or experience of the world around them. I find it insulting to ask such questions of adult Ethiopians let alone Ethiopian “scholars and prominent individuals.” I am even more disappointed in the responses I read posted in that popular Website, even if there were some competent and less polarizing answers, such as that of Engineer Sioum Gebeyehou. The views of the “scholars and prominent individuals” thus posted did address in very superficial manner specific problems the state of Ethiopia and the Citizens of Ethiopia are facing currently. They also attempted to deal, rather clumsily, with problems that were historic problems that had emasculated a people for generations. It seems to me in reading such comments, one cannot avoid the haunting and nagging feeling that no one had really grasped the extent and form of real problems in Ethiopia, which seems to me ever to require a leader to implement very drastic and revolutionary solutions.

To begin with, the question is misleading in the sense that it leaves it to the reader to construct context for it. If one considers the current Ethiopian Government power structure, the “President” has no executive “power” to initiate or execute Governmental policies. He is just a figurehead, and thequestion should be reframed to reflect that existing constitutional reality and the response need be limited to the office of the Prime Minister and his power. The more appropriate question would have been a conditional premised question: “If you have leadership power, what ten things you will do immediately in Ethiopia?” We must understand that the current situation of Ethiopia is not limited to the inadequacy of the current Government or that of the immediate past, but the culmination of poor governance, decomposing culture, atrophying and ever dysfunctional familial relationship of centuries. The inertia that ever pulls us back every time we make some forward stride is enormous and overwhelming.

The way to fulfill our individual aspiration and our collective human purpose is to recognize and guarantee human rights universally not in its reduced form as an aspect of particular culture or as a reward for performance or as a privilege but as an inherent and fundamental attribute of being a person — a human being. A poignant observation by a great scholar of constitutional law succinctly illustrated the paradox between fundamental rights and guaranteed rights. Corwin, writing about the Constitution of the United States, stated that “the course of our constitutional development has been to reduce fundamental rights to rights guaranteed by the sovereign from the natural rights that they once were.” The concentration on ethics brings forth the correct state of mind of universalism without having to forgo our identity and our search for justice for a particular group of people.

Some of the scholars suggested some form of blanket amnesty to criminals that smells of the stench of protecting their own friends and maybe themselves from being tried for crimes committed during past governments or in the workings ofpolitical parties. As far as I am concerned, those who ask or suggest such solutions do not seem to respect individual lives of those who were victimized bypolitical leaders like Mengistu Hailemariam, Meles Zenawi et cetera. The first duty of every Ethiopian is to identify and bring to some form of formal process those leaders who had committed serious crimes of murder, torture, detention of Ethiopians due topolitical differences and struggle for power. In fact, I will include on that long list of offenders military commanders who sent their troops into battle without proper preparation and logistic support resulting in the unnecessary death and destruction of thousands of brave soldiers and weapon.

The model I would use would be a cross between the governmental structures and the relationship with the respective armies of the two countries namely Turkey and South Korea that I believe would serve my purpose, with adaptation to the unique culture andpolitical history of Ethiopia. I would implement the following ten policies vigorously, not just as Prime Minister but also as a “dictator” if need be willing to use force with full support of committed military forces.

1. Establish and enforce the ownership of land and also allow all forms of ownership of property based on freedom of individual rights of free trade. Property and wealth is the biological and moral foundation of all individual rights. Without the right to private property and private ownership of land there can be no solid respect for and safeguard of individualpolitical , civil and fundamental rights. Void all lease of Ethiopian land to foreigners (individuals or nations) for farming and mining purposes. No private ownership of Gold mines in Ethiopia by foreign interests.

2. Remove all international organizations such as the African Union, United Nations’ Agencies, and other international organizations, with the exception of medical missions, from Ethiopia. Reduce drastically the number of Embassies. Declare the Algiers Agreement of December 12, 2000, null and void. Withdraw any recognition of an independent Eritrea. Promote strong ties with selected foreign countries on mutual respect and benefits of trade and cultural exchanges. [The State of Israel should be on that list no matter what other countries would be involved in close relationships with Ethiopia.] Reviewall international relationships and international agreements. It is unconscionable for a poor country with extremely polarized social and economic structure in the local population to host very expensive international institutions and personnel. It is worse than being colonized having such international presence in an utterly poor country where no less than five million of its population are permanently in famine conditions year after year for more than thirty years, and whose budgetary expense is more than by half subsidized by foreign aid. No one denies the fact that there are very many honorable international civil servants working to help disadvantaged populations around the world and in Ethiopia, but they are wasting their good will and hard work on bad policies that had never worked since the establishment of theUnited Nations nearly seventy years ago.

3. Charge Meles Zenawi and his close associate with treason against the state of Ethiopia and for violations of the Constitutional rights of Ethiopians (who were murdered, incarcerated or tortured) under their supervision and power, and for allowing and participating in international conspiracy to destroy Ethiopia by landlocking it and ceding Ethiopian controlled territories to the Sudan and other neighboring states. Establish a Tribune to try especially all pastpolitical leaders in political parties and those individuals involved in both Red and White Terror during the reign of terror of Mengistu Hailemariam. Additional civilian process should be initiated to recover the hundreds of millions of dollars and other hard currencies and Gold stashed around the World by Officials who run REST and later EFFORT. Meles Zenawi, Azeb Mesfin, Abadi Zemu, Sebhat Nega, Mohammed Al’moudi and others being the primary targets of such investigation and court proceedings.

4. Initiate foundational “Cultural Revolution” that promotes personal hygiene. Force equality within inter-family relationships of members, respect and freedom of children, respect and equality of females. Ban all forms of corporal punishment to children whether by parents, guardians, or teachers. Implement forcefully through education and demonstration, and with the assistance of religious leaders, to reverse the population explosion by allowing only two children per married couple.

5. Arm each Ethiopian Family with weapon for defense, at least with a modern gun. The Husband and Wife team is of equal status and with equal access to the family gun. Every Ethiopian shall be trained in self-defense and the use of weapon starting at a young age. There is a risk in that a well armed population may resist drastic changes in its established ways and entrenched interests. Nevertheless, it is the measure of a popular government to be able to implement highly revolutionary but extremely important and necessary changes.

6. Outlaw all forms of sex based trades, trafficking in female and male children, prostitution, pimping et cetera, and close all brothels, bars and camouflaged sex industries. Sexual contact can only be allowed through legitimate marriage. Rape and all other crimes of fornication and adultery will be severely punished. The main reason for the population explosion and moral deterioration in Ethiopia is due to the fact that the Ethiopian family has lost control of the sexuality of its members. In turn the community has turned a blind eye to the unrestricted sexual indulgence of its members. Access to Ethiopian females has become dirt cheap; the Ethiopian male has lost his initiative to upgrade his worth in order to be attractive to the female, for he can now buy sex cheaply because of loose communal control of the sexuality of the members of such communities. No marriage under the age of eighteen will be allowed for both sexes. Modesty in dress and purity in body and soul is the moral guide for all Ethiopians.

7. No Ethiopian female will be given an Ethiopian exit visa to work in Arab Countries or in the Middle East in general as domestic worker. All Ethiopian females in the Middle East will be removed and brought back to their home and provided with adequate means of living. It is established beyond any doubt that Arabs in general are the worst abusers of immigrant workers in the World. Especially the brutality and degenerate sexuality and misogynous culture of Arabs in general is horrendous and an affront to the decency of all Ethiopians Moslems and Christians alike, as was clearly recorded by the number of suicides and beheading or execution of Ethiopian females in the last twenty years.

8. Establish two new Capital Cities one in Northern Ethiopia (Bahr Dar or Gondar) and another in Southern Ethiopia (Assela or Bale). Addis Ababa will be considered as a “Historic City” and Free Trade Zone. The population of the City will be reduced to no more than half a million people, and the rest would have to be resettled elsewhere in Ethiopia. All of the Ministries and other Government Offices will be equally divided into two and removed and reestablished in the two New Capital Cities. I need not remind you the documented fact that Addis Ababa has underdeveloped the rest of Ethiopia because it had sucked over eighty percent of all available funding from international organizations and other nations, leaving next to nothing development funding to the rest of Ethiopia, for the last fifty years. It is immoral to have all the wealth poured in to developing Addis Ababa when Ethiopians within a stone throw are drinking bacteria infested muddy water, starving, and dying of treatable disease, and living in horribly unhygienic huts in shanty towns, no better than the congested nests of the colony of weaver birds.

9. Dissolve the current Killel system and ethnic language based “federal” political organization of the state of Ethiopia. I will enforce a new administrative structure that will be organized based on the small Woreda sized local administration structure. Ethiopia will have a unitary administrative internal structure. Ethnicity will have no role in such administration, and will only be recognized as a social and cultural reality. To date all of our leaders, past and present, bite more than they could chew, and as result we are now in such a state where we are writing self-indulgent elementary wishful thinking. Historically, Ethiopian administrators and civil servants may have succeeded in preserving the State of Ethiopia in an independent existence, but they failed miserably to develop the economic and civil involvement of the people of Ethiopia. Ethiopia remains the most primitive state in the World even though it had the luxury of never having been colonized and mostly left alone to its devices. It is incompetence and narrow vision, and fearful relationships of individual Ethiopians that led to our national sever stagnation.

10. Taking as model for excellence both the Continental and British (American) systems of education, establish and promote a new education system for Ethiopia by empowering communities to create and regulate their schools with close supervision of the Central Government’s Ministry of Education. Education will emphasize science and technology. Primary education up to Eighth grade will provide adequate and nutritious lunch services to all students.

There are several more policies that need be implemented by a responsible Ethiopian Leader and Government. I have only indicated in my ten points the most drastic but also the most needed policies.

(Dr Tecola Hagos can be reached at [email protected])