Ethiopia is quiet as it heads into Sunday’s parliamentary elections — and that is part of the problem. The somberness of the capital Addis Ababa is in stark contrast to the massive demonstrations led by the opposition that took place before the vote in 2005. Though the opposition won an unprecedented number of seats that year, many international observers judged the electoral exercise as flawed. When opposition supporters took to the streets to protest results, the government reacted by having security forces open fire — more than 200 people died. Tens of thousands were detained. The legacy of that repression continues. When the editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Arwamba decided to remark upon the quiet in this campaign season, he says he was directly warned by the government that it was watching him and his paper closely. Woubishet Taye, 32, chose to resign instead. He had simply entitled his essay, “Where did the people go?”
It’s not that there isn’t any campaign activity. In the streets of the capital rumble scores of buses, emblazoned with the industrious bumble bee symbol of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and carrying flag-waving party members to rallies held across Addis Ababa. But bystanders on the street grumbled that the demonstrators were being paid. Meanwhile, a solitary truck carrying a banner for the opposition coalition puttered in the opposite direction. There were no opposition rallies. It wasn’t that they hadn’t tried. Behind a cemetery and down a dirt alley flanked by sleeping beggars is the tattered headquarters of the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement. There, parliamentarian Bulcha Demeksa explained that Addis Ababa’s municipal council had refused the opposition coalition, known as Medrek — meaning the Forum — permission to hold rallies. “We asked two weeks ago for permission to rally in the new stadium today,” says Demeksa. “They said it was busy.” As it turned out, the ruling party was holding a rally there. “As the incumbent government, we get the incumbent’s advantage,” explains the EPRDF’s parliamentary whip Haile Mariam Dessalegn. “But that is true everywhere.”
The diplomatic community, which considers Ethiopia to be a cornerstone in Africa’s volatile Horn and relies on Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as a staunch ally in the global war on terror, has offered scant criticism of the country’s brand of democracy and free speech. The EPRDF likes to show off what it calls its economic successes. “We knew that we had to address the urban population properly with job creation,” says Dessalegn, who pointed to new city jobs in construction, food production and parking lots. “Five years of double digit growth has yielded fruit, which has created huge support among the youth.” The frustrated urban youth who were behind demonstrations in 2005 are employed and happy now, an EPRDF leader told TIME pointing to statistics that rank Ethiopia the fifth fastest growing economies in the world — though it is still a microscopic economy. Ethiopia receives more foreign aid than any other sub-saharan country according to 2008 statistics. Malnutrition is on the rise in the country, according to the U.N.; more than 6 million Ethiopians rely on food aid. (See pictures of Ethiopia’s harvest of hunger.)
There is certainly unhappiness beneath the surface. “The silence doesn’t reflect what’s on the ground,” says Eskinder Nega, a journalist whose wife and publisher gave birth during the two years they spent in prison after the 2005 elections on charges of inciting genocide and treason. “Whatever the ruling party has achieved in terms of growth, after 19 years, people want change.”
In the fertile, rolling countryside some 200 miles to the west of the capital, opposition candidates told TIME that local officials from the ruling party had buttressed their incumbents’ advantage with force, driving rivals from their constituencies with beatings, threats and guns. Opposition members from East Wellega, part of the Oromo region — Ethiopia’s largest and most populous — are necessarily a hearty lot. Take Seleshi Belay. Elected to regional parliament in 2005, Belay, 30, spent three of the past five years in cramped jails as a suspected member of the Oromo Liberation Front, an armed insurgent group. His case was not heard until last year, when he was released for time served. Belay’s first three attempts to speak to his constituency were foiled. On his first, armed community police allegedly surrounded his mother’s house, detained her and jailed him. He has not spoken with her since. He says he walked away from his second visit with just a beating. The third time he turned up in East Wellega authorities forbade hotels from giving him a room, the police allegedly smashed his car with rocks, then threatened to fire-bomb it when he tried to get a bit of sleep in a parking lot.
“Militias, local officials and police were there,” he says. “There were more than 50 people there with rifles. They said they would bomb the car. That’s when people told us to flee, because there was a gas station nearby.”
It was not until his fourth try that, for the first time in five years, with less than two weeks to go to Sunday’s election, he finally managed to address the people of his district for about an hour. As he spoke, he noticed a lone woman, on the fringes of the crowd, trying not to look as though she might be listening. “I saw my mom on the outskirts of the group,” he told TIME. “She was crying. She is always asking me to leave this work. She is always thinking that I may die. I am her only son and she raised me without a father.”
As if to underscore his mother’s fears, gunmen in an unmarked car stopped Belay and his colleagues as they were trying to drive to a rally in a neighboring town, quieting their 2010 campaign after just an hour. But Belay will be standing in Sunday’s election. Though the ruling party is projecting a landslide victory, he expects to win. “People were very grateful when we came and they were giving us support and the spirit was good,” he says. “I faced all of this because I want change. If you want change, you have to face difficulties and that’s what I chose.”
Ethiopian Prime Minister tribal warlord Meles Zenawi, whose nation receives billions of dollars in Western aid, is headed for an easy re-election on May 23 after stifling the opposition, according to analysts and human-rights groups.
“The government has pretty effectively disbanded the leadership of the opposition and undercut its ability to undertake any effective challenge,” Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a May 13 phone interview from Washington.
A former Marxist guerrilla leader who has ruled Africa’s second-most populous nation since 1991, Meles, 55, has been a key ally in the fight against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia. Development aid to Ethiopia from the U.S., U.K., the World Bank and other donors rose to $3.3 billion in 2008 from $1.9 billion in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Canada invited Meles to represent Africa at the June Group of 20 meeting in Toronto.
Under Meles, Ethiopia, Africa’s top coffee producer, has pursued an economic model that mixes a large state role with foreign investment in roads, dams and power. The government controls the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp., a state-run monopoly, and owns all the land, while companies owned by the state or the ruling party dominate banking and trucking. Almost a sixth of its 85 million people depend on food aid.
Chinese Model
“What Ethiopia is doing is looking at the Chinese model and taking bits and pieces of it and adapting it to their own context,” David Shinn, the U.S. ambassador to the country from 1996 to 1999, said in a May 11 phone interview from Washington. “I think they’re comfortable with the way China does things and the way China handles human rights issues.”
The government dismisses opposition charges of harassment as false and intended to discredit the vote. It says economic growth in Ethiopia of more than 7 percent annually over the past five years is the main reason it will win re-election.
“Regarding governance, regarding social development, the people of Ethiopia know for sure the future of Ethiopia lies with this government and so we have no need to compete in an undemocratic way,” Communications Minister Bereket Simon told reporters on May 12.
Harassment And Arrests
Meles’ Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has used a combination of harassment and arrests and withholding food aid and jobs to thwart the opposition Medrek alliance, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a March 24 report entitled “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure.”
Medrek Chairman Beyene Petros said the authorities blocked opposition rallies in the capital, Addis Ababa, and security forces collected voter identity cards of known supporters of rival parties.
“The U.S., the U.K., they just accept this,” he told reporters yesterday. “That’s how they relate to the ruling party.”
The U.S., under presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, hasn’t criticized Meles’ growing authoritarianism, Jeffrey Steeves, an African politics specialist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, said in a May 12 phone interview.
“Obama has been largely silent on human rights issues in Ethiopia,” Steeves said. “It’s quite ironic that we have the rhetoric about transparency, good governance and human rights and yet Ethiopia remains at the top of the aid list.”
Opposition Leader
Opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa, 35, has been jailed for life since Dec. 29, 2008, for violating conditions of her earlier pardon. The United Nations Human Rights Council has said she was the victim of arbitrary detention, and the U.S. State Department in March labeled her a political prisoner.
“The State Department fully understands the negative effect that the jailing of Birtukan Mideksa and others has on the overall political climate in Ethiopia,” Alyson Grunder, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa said in a May 14 e-mail. “We pursue human rights issues within the context of a broad governance and democratization agenda that we have with Ethiopia.”
Medrek says that three of its activists have been murdered during the campaign and that hundreds more have been beaten and jailed on trumped-up charges.
“The EPRDF wants to totally block any opposition presence in the next parliament,” Merara Gudina, a Medrek leader and founder of the Oromo National Congress, said in a May 12 phone interview.
‘Conducive Environment’
The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia “believes it has created a conducive environment to carry out a standard election,” its Chairman Mergera Bekena said yesterday.
This year’s campaign has been significantly less free than the last election in 2005, when state television broadcast live debates between the ruling party and opposition and newspapers gave widespread coverage of politics, says Dan Connell, a lecturer in African politics at Simmons College in Boston.
The opposition won a record 172 seats in the 547-member parliament in that election as well as control of the Addis Ababa city government. The largest opposition alliance accused Meles’ party of pervasive fraud, and dozens of members refused to take their seats in parliament.
In demonstrations afterward, security forces loyal to Meles killed 193 people in Addis Ababa and arrested tens of thousands of opposition supporters, including Birtukan and Addis Ababa mayor-elect Berhanu Nega.
“The regime has already done so much to weaken its opposition and to set up the outcome in advance that they will not face the same contest,” Connell said in a May 13 e-mailed response to questions.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (Reuters) — The Ethiopian government ruling Woyanne ruling in Ethiopia confirmed on Wednesday that insurgents had attacked an army base five days before national elections, but denied the rebels had seized control of the garrison town.
The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), which wants autonomy for the Ogaden region and its ethnic Somali population, said on Tuesday it had captured the garrison town of Malqaqa and killed 94 soldiers.
“Some insurgents belonging to the ONLF have tried to attack our local militia and the police,” government spokesman Shimeles Kemal told Reuters.
“In retaliation, the militia was able to defeat the attack completely, killing all of the rebel forces. Only minimal casualties have been sustained by our local militia. No garrison town has been captured,” he said.
Reporters and aid groups cannot move freely in the area without government escorts and regular accusations from both sides are hard to verify.
The Ogaden region is said to contain mineral deposits and foreign firms including Malaysia’s Petronas [PETR.UL] and Vancouver-based Africa Oil Corporation (AOI.V) are exploring for oil. The ONLF regularly warns foreign firms against prospecting.
Ethiopian forces launched an assault against the rebels — who have been fighting for more than 20 years — after a 2007 attack on an oil exploration field owned by a subsidiary of Sinopec, China’s biggest refiner and petrochemicals producer.
Analysts say the rebels are incapable of ousting the government but can hamper development and weaken security forces in the Ogaden with hit-and-run attacks.
The ONLF accuses the Ethiopian Woyanne military of killing and raping civilians and burning villages in the region as part of its effort to root out them out.
In November, the group said it had captured seven towns in the region and killed almost 1,000 Ethiopian Woyanne troops.
The government Woyanne confirmed then that the rebels had launched an assault but Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told reporters they had been “crushed”.
The government Woyanne has also said that neighbouring Eritrea may try to spoil the May 23 elections using Ethiopian rebel groups. Ethiopia Woyanne accuses its arch-enemy of funding the ONLF.
Ethiopia’s last elections in 2005 ended with street riots after the ruling party and the opposition both claimed victory.
The government Woyanne said the violence was planned by the opposition to force unconstitutional change. Security forces killed 193 people and seven policemen also died.
Forty policemen march two-by-two through a remote Ethiopian town drawing stares from local farmers for their incongruous high-tech stab vests, body armour and riot helmets.
“Look, they are trying to terrify us,” says opposition politician Teshale Idosa, his eyes widening. “And it is working. They are terrifying. We are terrified.”
The tension is palpable in the Horn of Africa nation’s Oromia region ahead of national elections Sunday, with six people killed in just four weeks.
The region is home to the Oromo, Ethiopia’s biggest ethnic group with 27 million out of 80 million people. The area also produces most of the coffee in Africa’s biggest grower, along with oil seeds, sesame and livestock, which are all key exports.
Oromia is seen by analysts as key to the future of sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous nation, a country that is Washington’s main ally in the region and a growing destination for foreign direct investment.
On the road to Midakegne, soldiers and police stop and search cars, pat people down and check IDs, sometimes taking notes. Locals often seem frightened to talk about politics.
The eight-party opposition coalition, Medrek, says two of the six dead were theirs, while the ruling party says it has lost one candidate and a policeman was killed.
Another two died when a grenade was flung into a meeting of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organisation (OPDO), part of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition
VOTER CONFUSION
Also playing on people’s nerves is the fact that Ethiopia’s last national elections in 2005 ended with a disputed result. Seven policemen and 193 protesters died in street riots in the capital Addis Ababa and top opposition leaders were jailed.
The opposition argues it would sweep to power if the ruling party stopped intimidating and jailing its members. The government dismisses that accusation as nonsense and says it will win easily on its development record.
The ruling party has embarked on massive investment in infrastructure such as roads and energy. The International Monetary Fund said last month that Ethiopia would excel this year with growth in excess of 5 percent.
Many people in Oromia told Reuters they were confused about how to vote, with some towns overwhelmingly supporting the opposition coalition Medrek, and others the OPDO.
Opposition figures say the Oromo have never had any power despite the OPDO’s place in the government. They see that party as controlled by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s Tigrayan People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (TPLF) — which they say runs the other three parties in the ruling coalition.
Some farmers told Reuters that officials deny them seeds and fertilizer to force them into joining the OPDO. One man said he was fired after 20 years as a chemistry teacher because he joined Medrek. OPDO members denied the allegations.
“Our party is fully independent and Oromo,” OPDO official Alemayehu Ejio, told Reuters. “We are even more popular now because of our development work.”
ELECTRICITY AND WATER
In Midakegne, 40 km (25 miles) from the nearest Tarmac road, the opposition says a 23-year-old activist, Biyansa Daba, was beaten to death. The government says he died of cancer and that the opposition is trying to spoil a poll it will lose.
Merera Gudina, leader of Medrek member party, the Oromo People’s Congress, is tailed on the road to the secluded town by three men in a pick-up truck. His car, and another containing Medrek activists, are stopped and searched by soldiers.
When Merera arrives and makes a speech, promising more power to the Oromo people, he is filmed and photographed by the three men while armed police watch.
OPDO officials in Midakegne repeated that Biyansa died of cancer, but three people separately approached Reuters to say he was severely beaten.
Earlier the same day, as the OPDO held a large rally in the town of Gorosole, locals told Reuters they would vote for the ruling party because they were grateful for electrification and the provision of safe drinking water to the town’s school.
The ruling party often points to its development achievements. Signs of progress in Oromia since the 2005 elections are evident.
An impressive road network has been built, towns have electricity and telephone masts are everywhere.
Just as the meeting is about to reach its climax — the unveiling of the new water tap for the school — Merera and his supporters appear in two cars and drive through the crowd. They throw leaflets into the air, and at the OPDO officials.
“Look at them,” shouts Yohannes Mitiku, Merera’s rival for the area’s parliamentary seat. “They are trying to ruin our rally because they see that people support us.”
“They say we intimidate them but yet they feel free to do this,” he told Reuters.
Once the tap is unveiled, people filter back to villages in the surrounding hills, their absence revealing an empty street littered with leaflets and flags.
“Yes, the OPDO have been developing Oromia,” says an old man who has watched the commotion. “But it’s development and repression at the same time. They can build roads to the moon but I won’t vote for them until we’re equal.”
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Afrigue en ligne) — Western diplomatic missions in Addis Ababa have sent out warning messages to their citizens in Ethiopia or those planning to travel there, as tension builds in the Horn of Africa country ahead of the 23 May polls.
The French Embassy, in an email sent to the country’s citizens Thursday Morning, advised them to avoid public places, public transportation systems and stay away from any demonstrations and public gatherings by Ethiopians.
The Embassy also warned the citizens to prepare stocks of food, water, electricity sources and fuel ahead of the polling day.
For those out of the capital, Addis Ababa, the Embassy has also announced a 24-hour-ready telephone service through which that they can contact the diplomatic mission in case of trouble.
Few days earlier, the U.S. Embassy had sent out a similar message to U.S. citizens in Ethiopia and those planning to travel to Addis in the coming weeks.
Amid fear of violence, tension is rising in Ethiopia ahead of the national elections, with accusations and counter-accusations of harassment and killings by the opposition and the government.
Already, violence has erupted among students in the countries major public universities.
Though government said a conflict last Saturday among Addis Ababa University students of the Oromo and Tigre ethnic groups was due to mobile phones theft, its spokesperson Wednesday admitted that it later took an ethnic dimension and blamed it on two opposition parties under the largest opposition coalition, Medrek.
‘Starting points might be the mobiles,’ Bereket Simon, chief of Government Communication Affairs Office, said Wednesday. ‘But hard core supporters of Arena and OPC trying to rally each other have had their hands adding fuel to the fire’.
Reports indicate that conflicts have expanded to Haromaya and Mekele ” public universities in the hearts of Oromia and Tigray regions, home to Arena and OPC, respectively â” but Bereket said he was not aware of such incidents.
Government said on Saturday a grenade thrown into a meeting of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organisation (OPDO), part of the ruling coalition, killed two and injured 14.
On Sunday, a policeman was stabbed to death by OPC members following an order by an officer of the party, government alleged. On Monday, the ruling party accused opposition members of killing one of its candidates.
The coalition of eight opposition parties, Medrek, said three of its members have been killed since campaigning began over two months ago.
Medrek is fielding the second-highest number of candidates after the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Front (EPRDF).
A 24 March Human Rights Watch reports accused Ethiopian government of waging a coordinated and sustained attack on political opponents, journalists and rights activists ahead of the elections.
In the midst of the growing tension, however, government said its security forces would not use live ammunition or lethal weapons if violence occur during the elections.
Though it said it expected peaceful elections this time, the government has also warned that the police are prepared to handle any outbreak of violence ‘professionally’.
Ethiopia has had little experience with elections. Several powerless parliaments were chosen over the decades, with few voters and minimal consequences. When the Derg fell and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was consolidating its power, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) realized that the invitation they got to participate in government and an election was intended to co-opt them, not to share power with them. The Oromos — the biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia — turned it down and and withdrew to the political margin where they have usually been. The government-created Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) remained their sole voice, such as it is, in the EPRDF.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi remains the only leader the EPRDF, the ruling party, has had since before they took over in 1991. The Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) created and still controls the EPRDF. Although there are non-Tigreans in the power structure, even in senior positions, the TPLF dominates the party and Meles controls the TPLF.
How to square this with elections? The answer is simple: you can’t. By definition, elections are intended to distribute power according to ballot results. In Ethiopia — not alone in this — being voted out is not an acceptable election result. It will not be allowed to happen.
In 2005, Ethiopia was recovering from war and drought. It had successfully broken its promise and dodged the postwar border decision from The Hague. All four guarantors of the agreement (the UN, US, EU and AU) looked the other way. There had been several good harvests, foreign aid was pouring in and coffee prices were recovering.
A few small parties emerged to contest the election. Several of them combined to present a meaningful challenge. Badly misreading the public mood, the overconfident EPRDF allowed unprecedented public debate on the all-important broadcast media. The public was riveted by the broadcasts and voter registration surged. An opposition rally in Addis Ababa just before election day drew a crowd some estimated at close to a million! Even if inflated, it was a huge and peaceful assembly. The government’s counter-rally gathered a respectable but smaller crowd.
On election day so many voters lined up that some polling stations were forced to stay open well past midnight. Some estimated that an unheard of 90% of registered voters actually turned out. Why did they show up in such numbers? What where they thinking? In a country without a democratic tradition, with low rates of education and literacy, why were so many people willing to stand in line for hours to vote…a concept many probably didn’t fully understand? And what happened to those emotions?
Many voted against the government. The EPRDF lost the entire City Council in Addis Ababa and was badly beaten in parliamentary races in many urban areas, where the results became known quickly. In a panic, the government barred election observers (including the Carter Center) as the majority of the ballots — Ethiopia is 80%+ rural — were counted. The opposition, without evidence, claimed it had won. The government, also without evidence, claimed it had won. To no one’s surprise, the government won big.
The streets of Addis were soon filled with uniforms and armored vehicles. I saw them myself, having arrived in Addis a few days after the election, and was there when violence broke out. It followed a familiar pattern, one that I had also seen in the 1960s when student protesters marched against Emperor Haile Selassie. Angry students gathered, shouting abusive language and refusing to disperse when ordered to do so. Shots were fired, far more shots than in the 1960s and with many more casualties. There were several public clashes and altogether nearly 200 were killed.
When the dust settled, tens of thousands had been rounded up and sent to detention camps. Most were soon released. Many opposition leaders were arrested, charged with treason and released 18 months later in a deal intended to blunt their political careers. The parties they had created were infiltrated, splintered and effectively neutered. One, Birtukan Mideksa, the most popular opposition figure in the country, was rearrested. She remains in jail.
The EPRDF is not going to let history repeat itself. Under intense pressure, the surviving opposition have tried to mount election campaigns, but they are small, weak, underfunded and harassed by government supporters. A few have been killed, including both candidates and supporters. The government claims that one of its people has been killed. Much of the violence is in Oromia, but also in Tigre, where an embarrassing home-province challenge to the TPLF emerged.
The number of victims is small but the message is unmistakable. Running against this government is dangerous. There are periodic reminders of just how dangerous. With the outcome never in doubt, the courage of the opposition is impressive. The strength of the government’s response reveals its anxiety.
Questions come to mind. What happened to 2005’s enthusiasm? Forgotten? Stored away for another time? No one saw trouble coming in 2005. Could something similar happen in 2010…after the elections, if not before? The students again? Is the government show of force aimed at them in particular, reminding them of the cost of protest? The EPRDF’s own leadership — Meles himself — left the campus to fight the Derg…
(Shlomo Bachrach was on the staff of Peace Corps/Ethiopia following several years as a lecturer at Haile sbachrachSelassie I University in Addis Ababa. He is currently editor of East Africa Forum, a news group and online archive of news from the Horn of Africa at EastAfricaForum.net. Shlomo has another blog on our site: The Arts: Music of the World.)
