Concerned Ethiopians in Seattle have forced the cancellation of an event at the Seattle University where Woyanne ambassador and full time drunkard Samuel Assafa was scheduled to speak. It was rumored dictator Meles Zenawi might also appear at the event.
The event, which was named “Understanding Ethiopia,” was scheduled to coincide with the exhibition of Lucy (Dinknesh).
The University has canceled the meeting after Dr Shakespear Feyissa, a prominent Ethiopian attorney in Seattle, demanded a meeting with the president and other high level officials of the university to lodge a complaint. Shakespear, on behalf of the Ethiopian community in Seattle, informed the university about the atrocities of the Woyanne regime and appealed that the prestigious Seattle University should not provide a forum to mass murderers.
The University agreed and has canceled the meeting as shows below.
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Source: World Affairs Council
Understanding Ethiopia Today – Cancelled!
His Excellency Dr. Samuel Assefa, Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States
This event has been cancelled.
What ties exist between the Northwest and Ethiopia and how are they changing? What role is Ethiopia playing in the War on Terror? What is the significance for Ethiopia of the exhibit “Lucy’s Legacy: Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia” on display at Pacific Science Center? In what ways are trade and investment between the Pacific Northwest and Ethiopia making us more connected?
The World Affairs Council presents His Excellency, Dr. Samuel Assefa, Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States. Dr. Samuel Assefa, a well-known academic and public figure in Ethiopia, was Vice-President of Addis Ababa University, the country’s leading institution of higher education, prior to his appointment as Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States on January 9, 2006.
Dr. Assefa pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in the United States. He taught at Williams College and Rutgers University before returning to Ethiopia in 1994, where he held teaching and leadership positions at Addis Ababa University. In 1993, shortly after the fall of the military regime, he took a leave of absence from his teaching duties and returned to Ethiopia to work closely with the Chair of the Constitutional Commission in deliberations toward the framing of the new Ethiopian Constitution. In 1996, Dr. Assefa also helped found the African Institute for Democratic Deliberation and Action (AIDDA), a non-government organization dedicated to research and public deliberation on the problems and possibilities of transitional democracy in Africa.
A Private Members-only reception will be held at 6:00 pm. Location information will be sent to reception attendees prior to the event. Registration for the reception includes admission to the evening lecture.
Co-sponsored by Seattle University, Pacific Science Center, PATH.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — After nearly 20 years of violent chaos, Islamic extremism and failed peace talks, impoverished Somalia might seem to have hit rock-bottom. But things are getting worse. The crisis is exceeding even the direst scenarios laid out nearly two years ago, when troops from neighboring Ethiopia arrived to oust a radical Islamic militia and support the Western-backed government.
The troops, whom many Somalis consider an occupying force, are seen by some as a catalyst for the violence rather than a cure.
“The nature of the crisis is much more dangerous now,” Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College in North Carolina, told The Associated Press. “The level of indiscriminate violence is worse than at any time.”
The Meles regime in Ethiopia says that it wants to withdraw, but its opponents say it has calculated that an open-ended occupation of Somalia is better than having an Islamist regime next door.
“The Ethiopians Woyanne will make it impossible for the Islamists,” said Daud Aweys, a Nairobi-based Somalia analyst. “The Ethiopians Woyannes are more powerful, and they have more weapons.”
Meanwhile, the result is a stalemate, seemingly impervious to U.N.-brokered peace talks, international pressure and even the daily carnage in Mogadishu, the capital. The Somali government would likely crumble without Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s muscle, but al-Shabab, a radical group at the heart of the insurgency, refuses to negotiate as long as the Ethiopians remain.
The United States worries that Somalia could be a terrorist breeding ground, particularly since Osama bin Laden declared his support for the Islamists. It accuses al-Shabab of harboring the al-Qaida-linked terrorists who allegedly blew up the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
The U.S. sent a small number of special operations troops with the Ethiopian Woyanne forces in 2006 and in early 2007 conducted several airstrikes in an attempt to kill suspected al-Qaida members. But the fact that Ethiopia Woyanne is a key U.S. ally, and most Somalis loathe America, doesn’t help matters.
Al-Shabab, which means “the Youth,” mounts almost daily mortar attacks, suicide bombings and ambushes.
The result is civilians streaming out of Mogadishu, the capital, many of them gravely wounded, and sheltering on roadsides or fleeing the country. A local human rights group says the insurgency has killed more than 9,000 civilians to date.
The streets of Mogadishu, once a beautiful seaside city, are now bullet-scarred and stained with blood. On Monday 30 people were killed in fighting in the capital and at least 11 civilians died during an overnight attack on an African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu.
Al-Shabab has taken over the port town of Kismayo, Somalia’s third-largest city, and effectively closed Mogadishu’s airport by threatening to attack any plane using it.
Al-Shabab’s attacks look likely continue indefinitely, with the goal of simply crippling and humiliating the government. Reprisals by government and Ethiopian Woyanne forces are swift and heavy-handed, but have not eradicated the insurgency.
“If your principal interest is quelling the political violence, then an Ethiopian a Woyanne withdrawal will help,” Menkhaus said. “That will take away the principal grievance.”
The African Union has sent about 2,600 peacekeepers to Somalia. But their mandate is limited to protecting key sites such as the airport and seaport, and they generally are confined to the airport for their safety.
The U.N. has tried to push peace talks between the government and the opposition, but a recent deal with a more moderate faction of the Islamic group seems only to have worsened the violence.
“We have started building up our military strength because some of our fellow insurgents seem to have been corrupted by the enemy, like those who signed the so-called deal with the puppet government,” said Sheik Muhumed, an al-Shabab commander.
(Elizabeth Kennedy has covered East Africa since 2006.)
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Judges at the International Criminal Court have summoned the chief prosecutor for a first hearing next week on his request to charge Sudan’s president with genocide in Darfur, the prosecutor said.
In July, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accused Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of launching a campaign in 2003 that has killed 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through starvation and disease and forced 2.5 million from their homes. Sudan says 10,000 died.
The African Union, Arab League and other alliances have urged the U.N. Security Council to block moves to indict Bashir to avoid shattering the fragile peace process.
It is unclear when the judges will make a decision on Moreno-Ocampo’s application, which he said was the ICC’s biggest and most complex case to date. However, they invited him to an initial hearing to explain the case next Wednesday.
“They called us for the first hearing on Oct. 1,” Moreno-Ocampo told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. “Normally in the past they call for hearings to request clarifications, some other documents, to (ask) questions about the case.”
U.N. diplomats following the case have said the judges might not make a decision until November.
Earlier this week French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that Paris could support a suspension of the investigation if Khartoum ended the killings and removed a minister indicted by the ICC.
Moreno-Ocampo declined comment, saying his job was to uncover and present the facts.
Under Article 16 of the ICC statute, the U.N. Security Council can suspend investigations and indictments for up to one year at a time.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have issued strong statements against intervening in the Bashir probe, saying that doing so would give him impunity.
Although the bulk of the deaths in Darfur may have taken place years ago, the prosecutor said his investigation shows people are still being killed.
“It’s a more subtle genocide, but it’s ongoing. And because it’s more subtle, we are (accustomed) to being used to it,” he said. “The weapons of the genocide are not machetes, not gas chambers, but hunger and rape.”
“That’s what we have to stop,” he said.
A joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force has only some 10,000 of the 26,000 soldiers and police in Darfur that were promised in a Security Council resolution from July 2007.
Meanwhile, rebels accuse Sudanese government forces of stepping up attacks on civilians and villages. Khartoum says it is restoring law and order to rebel enclaves in Darfur.
Once again, the twin spectres of drought and starvation stalk the land of Ethiopia. UN sources suggest that four million Ethiopians now need what they call “emergency assistance,” while another eight million need what is more vaguely described as “food relief.”
Already, thousands of people are dying. The first to expire are the very young and the very old. In some areas of the country, people are dying of starvation and malnutrition while their goats and sheep get fat eating crops that will not be harvested until late September.
Few saw this coming. Two years ago, Ethiopian officials boasted that food surpluses would allow their country to sell corn to neighbouring Sudan. The government has been investing more than a sixth of its budget in agricultural development, far above the average in other African countries. Child mortality has been reduced by 40%, and the agricultural sector has been growing by 10% annually over the last few years.
But in this part of the world, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said, “one unexpected weather event can push us over the precipice.” Only 1% of Ethiopia is irrigated, meaning that a lack of rainfall can produce catastrophic results for the five-out-of-six Ethiopians who eke out a living through subsistence agriculture.
Famine-relief food distribution is never a straightforward affair in an African country. Those (mostly southern) regions where voters did not support the regime in recent elections typically complain that they are cheated of food aid at the expense of more “loyal’ parts of the country in the north.
Inter-regional friction is no stranger to Ethiopia. Five hundred years ago, Cushitic-speaking Muslim tribesmen from the desert plains of (what is now) southeastern Ethiopia and the borderlands of Somalia declared a jihad and attacked the Semitic-speaking Christian highland kingdoms whose emperors claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba. With the timely help of Portuguese musketeers under the leadership of the son of Vasco da Gama, the southerners were repelled. The next 400 years of Ethiopian history led to a gradual domination and conquest of these southern tribes, who were vanquished once and for all by the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Hailie Selassie.
Selassie himself was overthrown by a group of Marxist revolutionaries, who plunged Ethiopia into a brutal civil war. Then came the famous drought of 1984, which brought us We Are the World.
One of the reasons so many people starved in Ethiopia during that time was that the ruling regime would not let food from food-rich areas go to food-poor areas — because the latter were dominated by opponents of the government. Nor would they allow people to migrate from food-poor to food-rich districts. “Starve or submit” became the watchword of this new regime.
The Derg, as this new regime called itself, was then ousted by a coalition of central and northern Semitic-speaking Ethiopians who considered themselves Marxists. But when they came to power, the Berlin wall had fallen already — so they made peace with the West, joined the war on terror, and started taking baby steps toward liberal democracy and the liberalization of their economy.
Nevertheless, the country remains riven by old conflicts. The governing elites are suspicious of the southerners, especially their newfound interest in radical Islam.
It comes as no surprise that, in the current crisis, some of the worst-affected and most neglected areas are in the southeast corner of the country, where Muslim peasants have been in open rebellion for over a decade.
According to “Radio Freedom” — operated by the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Army — on July 4, 2008, at least 13 Ethiopian government soldiers were killed; 15 others were reportedly killed in an attack in the Galalshe district. The Ethiopian government claims these rebels get support from sympathetic Arabs, and has accused Qatar of meddling in Ethiopia’s internal affairs. (Qatar, for its own reasons, supports the neighbouring Red Sea state of Eritrea, which just a few years ago fought a border war with Ethiopia and expresses support for Ethiopian rebels of Somali ethnicity in the southeast of the country.)
Ethiopia has neither confirmed nor denied that such attacks have taken place on its soldiers. But either way, it is understandable that Ethiopian government employees may be less than enthusiastic about personally overseeing food aid in the southern parts of the country.
Exacerbating these regional frictions, and this year’s extreme weather events, are what may be considered the two root causes of the famine: population growth and land tenure.
In 1984, during the height of the drought and civil war, Ethiopia had just under 34 million inhabitants. The population now stands at 77 million: In just more than one generation, the population of the country has doubled. Despite the government’s investment in agriculture, overall investment in education has gone down, which stifles the possibility of rural innovation. And, although overall food production has increased, the World Bank has noted that per capita production has declined. That is to say, each peasant produces less food than he once did. Even during good years, 6% of the rural peasantry is supported by government-and donor-delivered food relief.
After the murder of Hailie Selassie by the Derg in the early ’80s, the government revolutionized the land-tenure system by giving peasants enough land to till according to the number of children they then had. This simplistic tenure system has been kept intact by the present government. Peasants do not have title to their own plots, and there is an incentive to get more land by having more children to till it. But there is little incentive to make that land more productive: Farmers are fearful that if they invest in any aspect of land improvement they could lose their plots to local elites with political connections.
As peasants do not own their own land, they cannot use it as collateral to get loans they need to buy seed or fertilizer, which could in turn be used to create a food surplus to be used in case of drought. They also are denied the right to sell their land and move somewhere else– to a more fertile region or to the city to try their luck in urban occupations.
More food aid will help prevent mass starvation in Ethiopia in the short term. But in the long-run, it needs something else: a peasantry with the same right to own and control their land that most farmers in the world take for granted. Freed from government shackles, they will unleash a green revolution that will feed their families.
(Geoffrey Clarfield, a Toronto-based writer, can be reached at [email protected])
Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ), the heir to the former CUDP, wishes to announce to the local and international media community that it is officially ready to operate as a duly registered national party and to launch its programme of activities for the year 2001 (E.C). UDJ has pledged to pursue the goals, objectives and the inspiring vision of CUDP with a new spirit and greater determination.
To achieve its objectives successfully, UDJ needs the support of many sectors of the national society and international community. One of these sectors is the local government and private as well as the international media community. UDJ believes that seeing democracy take root and flourish in Ethiopia is the wish of the government, private and international media. Therefore, it hopes that in its endeavor to contribute its share to the fulfillment of this common cause, it will enjoy the support and cooperation of the media.
The purpose of this first get-together is to share views on how, through concerted efforts, we can complement each other’s contribution to the common cause and avoid communication and interaction problems experienced in the past.
. In view of the fact that working together for mutual benefits and resolving communication problems through dialogue takes time, UDJ has worked out a programme of regular meetings with the media. Today’s meeting is the beginning of the continuous and regular dialogue that UDJ wishes to maintain with the media.
UDJ will contribute its share to enabling multiparty system to flourish in Ethiopia. Even though recent legislations affecting political parties, the press and civil societies threaten to further narrow the political space severely, UDJ believes strongly that if we worked diligently and with determination and patience, it is possible to widen the political space that, we believe, is deliberately being narrowed and to revive the hope of the Ethiopian people to see democracy flourish in their country. UDJ calls upon the Government to contribute its share to the fulfillment of this hope by broadening the political space in a manner that demonstrates responsible leadership.
UDJ wishes to see the media as a true mirror through which it looks at itself and as a cause for continuously correcting and improving itself. It is ready to learn from your insightful editorials and reportings and to be your steady partner in your endeavors to bring reliable information to the people.
Current Ethiopian political leaders can learn a lot from Atse HaileSelassie.
By Prof. HG Marcus
Much has been written about HaileSelassie’s style of political leadership. We have been told about his ability to balance various courtly factions, and about the “capacious bins of memory,” which the emperor used for reference. We have been regaled about his charisma, his charm, his modesty, and his invariable good intentions. In his guise as a novelist, Bereket HabteSelassie has given us an insider’s view of HaileSelassie’s effective use of anger. Such personal characteristics would not, however, impress those leftist oriented radicals who viewed the emperor’s exercise of power as stemming from the country’s political economy and its objective conditions. They disregarded any notion of the person making history, since, for them, the correct line has it the other way around.
Yet, HaileSelassie as emperor was a palpable presence for Ethiopians of all kinds. They believed that they had a personal relationship with him, even if they disliked his policies and government. In the countryside, many peasants identified the emperor as their personal monarch, just as they believed they had a relationship with God. Practically to the end of his rule in September 1974, the emperor retained the support of the countryperson and the urban dwellers. The Derg self-consciously had to undermine his reputation and tarnish his charisma before he could be deposed. How was Haile Selassie able to hold the allegiance of his varied subjects; how did he establish so many connections to his people; why did so many of them regard their association with the monarch as private?
Many Ethiopians have a Haile Sellassie story to tell because the emperor was active and energetic. Never the captive of the gibbi or his people, he was always on the move in the capital or the countryside. He was therefore seen and was accessible to his subjects. In this sense, he touched the people and he listened directly to complaints against his officials and to denunciations of government policies. In a more formal sense, he acted as the country’s supreme court in the zufan chilot, where he exercised his prerogative to provide justice in difficult cases. Even the humblest person had the right to petition the monarch and to seek redress for wrongs. Doubtless the emperor saw many of his representational activities within the stylized paternalism so characteristic of his reign. At the same time, one wonder if he had an astute sense of modem public relations. However one explains his behavior, HaileSelassie was a hands-on leader who preferred to be seen.
During his exile in Europe, 1936-41, he wanted to be seen and heard and took every opportunity to travel and to show himself as the unbowed emperor of an Ethiopia that continued the anti-fascist struggle. When Italy entered the war in 1941 on the side of the Axis, Prime Minister Churchill had HaileSelassie transported to Sudan to help prepare an Ethiopian army for a combined operation against Italian East Africa. On arrival in Khartoum, he sent a message to the British people repeating his long-standing refrain that “Our people have never ceased to struggle… The country has NOT been defeated by Italy.” As for himself, “I have not abdicated my throne and… my old coronation name.” In a separate broadcast, the emperor advised Ethiopians to fight harder against the enemy and urged Eritreans to abandon their colonial masters: “Do not fight your Mother Ethiopia…! know the wishes of your hearts. It is the wish of the rest of the Ethiopian people as well. Your fate is tied to the rest of the Ethiopians.” While in the Sudan, 26 June 1940 until 21 January 1941, HaileSelassie surrounded himself with Ethiopians, great and small, and was seen daily by the men of Gideon Force, being trained by British, Jewish Palestinian and Ethiopian officers under the command of the idiosyncratic General Orde Wingate.
Throughout the campaign against the Italians, he was always in evidence. On the difficult road from the lowlands border region to Gojam’s high plateau, the emperor joined in the hard work of his soldiers in constructing the road, cutting trees and leveling the ground. He was delighted finally to arrive in Beleya on 6 February 1941, where he was “welcomed… in a heartwarming manner with songs and cheering.” Only in Debre Markos, on Sunday, 6 April, did HaileSelassie know that Ethiopians regarded him as their once and future sovereign. The irascible Ras Hailu — to be sure in the uniform of an Italian general — was there to welcome him and to recognize his suzerainty, “along with many [other] collaborators”; and the emperor received the homage of a congeries of patriot leaders, among them Lij Yohannes, the son of the uncrowned emperor lyasu, deposed in 1916 and dead in mysterious circumstances in 1936. More important, he was “welcomed tumultuously by chanting men, ululating women, and cheering patriots.” Ever the conciliator, the emperor advised his people “not to create anarchy and chaos by incriminating each other, using acrimonious labels such as shifta and banda.” HaileSelassie ordered a unity feast drawn from captured Italian stocks of food and drink. The next day the emperor received ever increasing numbers of fighters, who paraded in front of their sovereign, recounting their exploits.
En route to Addis Abeba, the emperor stopped at Debre Libanos, where fascist troops had destroyed and looted the monastery and killed the monks; and at nearby Fiche, where Dejazmach Aberra Kassa and his brothers had been executed and buried. After these visible gestures to the political and religious order, HaileSelassie went on to Addis Abeba, which he entered 5 May 1941, exactly on the fifth anniversary of his flight into exile. As he came down from Entotto Mariam, where he had attended a service of thanksgiving, over 100,000 Ethiopians were on the streets to welcome their monarch. Order was maintained by Ras Abebe Aregai’s armed patriots and Commonwealth soldiers. HaileSelassie delivered an eloquent speech at Menilek’s Grand Palace, then as now Ethiopia’s locus of power and, surrounded by his subjects, slowly made his way to the Genet Leul Palace, his residence. The next day, he presided over a huge parade marshaled by Ras Abebe, who introduced the sovereign to the main patriot leaders.
The emperor’s theme throughout his exile and his return was the survival of Ethiopia’s independence and his sovereignty. Throughout 1941 and 1942, he was determined to avoid any suggestion of British suzerainty in Ethiopia. On 10 May 1941, he named a seven-person cabinet, which made him unpopular with the so-called Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA). In June and July, the emperor continued to ignore the British military by assigning “his own men” to the provinces, placing “political expediency” before “administrative desiderata,” as the arch-colonialist General Sir Philip Mitchell put it. At least one high-ranking officer regarded HaileSelassie’s maneuvers as justifiable: “[the] emperor never made peace with [the] Italians nor recognized [their] conquest. We found some of his forces still in the field from 1935. He and [the] patriots took [a] prominent and active part in [the] conquest.” Their rights to sovereignty, he found, were probably better than British claims to jurisdiction, since the Ethiopians had “never surrendered… independence,” whereas London had recognized Italian East Africa in 1938. Nevertheless, the OETA tried to retain authority over Tigray by dealing directly with Ras Seyoum and Dejazmach HaileSelassie Gugsa, the notorious traitor. The British sought to keep the emperor from traveling to Harer and the Ogaden. They it tried to evacuate all Italian personnel to Europe, even those necessary to ruin the modem infrastructure built by the fascists. The British also it took all war booty without any regard for the role of the Ethiopian patriots in the war.
The emperor was furious, especially about the insult to the patriots and to the loss of materials necessary to rebuild the economy. Many years later, in the final chapter of volume II of his memoir, My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress, he railed that the British “broadcast over the radio their victories and the amount of booty they captured [but] did not mention the names of Our patriots.” He criticized the British command as racist: they “took all the [captured] military equipment… openly and boldly saying it should not be left for the service of blacks.” They acted as if they would retain Eritrea as a permanent colony, and, in the emperor’s view, British activities in the Ogaden and in southern Ethiopia “divided Our people and made the government hated.” Yet, he was content to call upon them for air power and advice when he needed to put down a rebellion in Tigray. Above all, HaileSelassie was a pragmatic politician who did what was necessary to retain power and authority.
During 1942, he promulgated important legislation which consolidated and subsequently characterized his regime. For the time, the laws were interventionist and progressive, giving substance to the emperor’s war-time promise to his people that: “We will improve and perfect the system of Our government. The administration of Our country will be replaced by a new and civilized one.” The new laws came thick and fast throughout 1942: courts were established, taxes set, enemy property was classified, officials named, export controls were implemented, the legal status of slavery abolished, new institutions set up, currency and specie regulated, licensing promulgated, the duties of ministers were defined, and provincial administrative regulations gazetted. The last piece of legislation revealed the activism and aims of the emperor. It made the provincial governor an employee of the central government, nominated by the emperor but responsible to the Minister of the Interior, who had sent his name forward. The governor was to reside in his own capital and send in monthly reports on the state of his administration. He could recommend subordinate officials to the emperor, who in turn would name them. The governor would make expenditures only with the authorization of the province’s director, an imperial appointee, who also controlled the principal secretary and his staff. The emperor had the power to make all judicial assignments and to select a provincial military commander. Thus, HaileSelassie effectively centralized provincial power, completing a process that had moved in fits and starts before the war. Never again would any Addis Abeba government be threatened by a provincial figure, however powerful.
Immediately at the beginning of 1943, through “An Order to Define the Powers and Duties of Our Ministers,” the emperor imposed the same kind of dominance over the central government. The decree established a council of ministers “under Our presidency… [to] advise Us on matters of State.” All ministers had to “take an oath of allegiance tendered by Us,” and they were unable to dispose funds until approved “by Us and the Council of Ministers.” The council’s secretariat was placed under “the direction and supervision of Our minister of Pen,” the official closest to the crown, then the devoted WoldeGiorgis WoldeYohannes. The Minister of Pen was not only the dynasty’s official chronicler and guardian of all important state documents, but he also coordinated the government’s work through regulating the flow of proclamations, decrees, and official documents; counter-signing monetary and other orders; supervising information services, the government press, and the imperial court; and heading the imperial auditing service. The minister uniquely had the official authority to communicate directly “with all officials in Our service.” Thus the minister of pen was the emperor’s major-domo, working with full authority to keep the central government under the crown’s control.
Besides ensuring Ethiopia’s national status and his primacy within it, the emperor worked assiduously to ensure his subjects’ loyalty and to instill in them patriotism and nationalism. On a visit to Teferi Makonnen school in late 1943, he told the students that the country awaited their contribution to its future prosperity. Speaking at the Officers Club in Addis Abeba, Haile Sellassie admonished his cheering audience always to consider their motto, ‘For the Honour of the King and the love of the Nation.” In March 1944, he advised parliamentarians going on recess to tell their constituents that the constitution of 1931 had undermined feudalism and allowed them to participate in all levels of government. He asked the lawmakers to inform the populace that “We are thinking of their prosperity and well-being. Let them know We are doing everything possible to guide them on the right path.”
Often Haile Sellassie would himself inform the people of his thoughts and plans. In early March 1944, he set off for Jima, with lengthy stops en route. The people fought to see him, and members of his bodyguard had “to make a cordon to keep off excited throngs who threatened to climb all over his car.” In Jima, the emperor reported that the centralization of government would help to maintain the development which “the highly financed Italian administration had undertaken.” He saw importance in the fact that Addis Abeba controlled the province’s appointees; that its governor operated within clearly defined rules and regulations, “especially in matters of finance, which are now centrally administered.” Finally, Haile Sellassie crossed the bridge across the Gojeb river, becoming the first emperor in 300 years to set foot in Kefa. There he gave traditional petitioners, “who spoke quite openly before him,” the opportunity to seek his intervention. Throughout his visit to Jima and Kefa, the emperor moved quickly: “it was obvious that quite a number of people had difficulty keeping up with him.”
HaileSelassie knew the importance of appearing to be everywhere, doing everything. In late March 1944, he witnessed many events at the Army Sports Week, distributing medals daily and providing short homilies about the goodness of physical fitness. On 5 May 1944, the emperor opened the National Library and said, “As we celebrate the liberation of Our people [the 3rd anniversary of his return to Addis Abeba], We lay the foundations for the liberation of their minds.” A few days later, he went to the Imperial Race Course, where he was not only the patron but also a winner. On 23 May, the monarch motored to Debre Birhan to dedicate a water fountain. He pointed out that, whereas the materials were Ethiopian, the work was not. He strongly advised the people to send their children to school “to leam something to help the country.” Then the emperor left for a week in Gojam, but was back in Addis Abeba on 29 May, to witness the country’s soccer finals and to give the first prize to a British army team. He was a busy monarch who, at this time in his reign, engaged his people in every possible way. It was no fluke that shortly before his deposition in September 1974, only thirty years after the period with which this essay is concerned, he went to Addis Abeba’s merkato to be seen by and to talk to his people. Ethiopia’s subsequent rulers had neither the confidence of the people nor the security of their convictions to interact so freely with their countrymen. Given Ethiopia’s current social development, perhaps the country once again needs a hands-on leader.
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The late Professor Harold G. Marcus wrote this article for 12th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies.
