New York (CPJ) — Ethiopian authorities have been holding a newspaper columnist incommunicado since Tuesday, local journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reeyot Alemu, a regular contributor to the independent weekly Feteh, was expected to spend the next four weeks in {www:preventive} detention under what appears to be Ethiopian regime’s sweeping anti-terrorism law.
Alemu, at left, is the second journalist picked up and held without charge in less than a week and taken into custody at the federal investigation center at Maekelawi Prison in the capital, Addis Ababa. Deputy Editor Woubshet Taye of the weekly Awramba Times has been held since Sunday, according to CPJ research.
Authorities have not disclosed the reason for Alemu’s arrest, but a local lawyer who requested {www:anonymity} for fear of government reprisals told CPJ that she has been transferred into preventive detention for a period of 28 days, pending further investigations. This is the minimum period for preventive detention under Ethiopia’s 2009 anti-terrorism law, according to legal experts. Ethiopia’s code of criminal procedure allows for preventative detention for a minimum of 14 days, they said.
Ethiopian government spokesman Bereket Simon told CPJ on Friday that he was not immediately available to comment. Local journalists said they believe Alemu’s arrest could be related to her columns critical of the ruling EPRDF. Alemu’s June 17 column in Feteh criticized the EPRDF’s public fundraising methods for the Abay Dam project, and made parallels between Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, according to local journalists
“We condemn the ongoing detention of Reeyot Alemu without charge,” said CPJ Africa Advocacy Coordinator Mohamed Keita. “Since Alemu is frequently critical of the government, we are concerned about the possible use of far-reaching and vaguely worded provisions of Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law to prosecute her. We call on authorities in Addis Ababa to release Alemu immediately.”
The sweeping anti-terrorism law criminalizes any reporting authorities deem to “encourage” or “provide moral support” to groups and causes the government labels as “terrorists.”
Alemu was picked up at a high school in Addis Ababa where she teaches English, according to local journalists. Police then searched her house, according to the same sources.
Ethiopia has six journalists currently behind bars, behind only Eritrea as the nation detaining the largest number of journalists in Africa. Eritrea holds at least 17 members of the press in its secret prisons, according to CPJ research.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called on Ethiopian authorities today to immediately release journalist Woubshet Taye, who has been held since Sunday.
Police picked up Taye, deputy editor of the leading independent weekly Awramba Times, at his home in the capital, Addis Ababa, at 3 p.m. and confiscated several documents, cameras, CDs, and selected copies of Awramba Times, local journalists told CPJ. The newspaper covers politics in-depth.
Taye is being held incommunicado at the federal investigation center at Maekelawi Prison in the capital, local journalists said. In an interview with CPJ, Shemelis Kemal, a government spokesman, denied any journalists were in detention in the country. “I will check but there are no journalist arrests, incarcerated in Ethiopia,” he said. “We have a law prohibiting pretrial detention of journalists. No arrest could be initiated on account of content.”
Ethiopia’s press law prohibits pre-trial detention of journalists, but two journalists of the state-controlled national broadcaster have been held on vague criminal charges for over a year, while two Eritrean journalists have disappeared in government custody since 2006, according to CPJ research. Also, under the Ethiopian constitution, police must charge or release citizens within 48 hours.
“The detention of Woubshet Taye is unlawful,” said CPJ East Africa Consultant Tom Rhodes. “We call on Ethiopian authorities to release him at once.”
Awramba Times Managing Editor Dawit Kebede, who was imprisoned for 21 months for critical coverage of a brutal government crackdown following disputed elections in 2005, has been the target of ongoing harassment by the Ethiopian administration and pro-government media outlets, according to CPJ research. Kebede won CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2010 for his commitment to journalism despite the repression. The Amharic-language weekly was launched in 2008 after Kebede’s release on conditional pardon and is today the second-largest newspaper in circulation in Ethiopia, according to CPJ research.
There is the economics of Adam Smith, the intellectual father of capitalism. There is Levitt & Dubner’s freakonomics of weird stuff. Then there is the fakeonomics (economics by gimmickry) of Meles Zenawi, the dictator in Ethiopia and author of the five-year “Growth and Transformation Plan” (GTP). Zenawi forecasts a “not unimaginable” 14.9 percent economic growth for Ethiopia over the next five years after devaluing the currency by 20 percent, slapping price controls on many food items and watching from the sidelines annual inflation galloping at 34.7 percent. He has accused the country’s business community of price gauging and hoarding and threatened to shut them down, jail them and literally cut the hands of any business person caught in the illicit trade of coffee.
The GTP is a make-a-wish list of stuff. It purports to be based on a “long-term vision” of making Ethiopia “a country where democratic rule, good-governance and social justice reigns.” It aims to “build an economy which has a modern and productive agricultural sector with enhanced technology and an industrial sector” and “increase per capita income of citizens so that it reaches at the level of those in middle-income countries.” It boasts of “pillar strategies” to “sustain faster and equitable economic growth”, “maintain agriculture as a major source of economic growth,” “create favorable conditions for the industry to play key role in the economy,” “expand infrastructure and social development,” “build capacity and deepen good governance” and “promote women and youth empowerment and equitable benefit.”
The ‘economic plan’ (“GTP”) itself floats on a sea of catchphrases, clichés, slogans, buzzwords, platitudes, truisms and bombast. Zenawi says his plan will produce “food sufficiency in five years.” But he cautions it is a “high-case scenario which is clearly very, very ambitious.” He says the ‘base-case’ scenario of ‘11 percent average economic growth over the next five years is doable” and the ‘high-case’ scenario of 14.9 percent is ‘not unimaginable’. The hype of super economic growth rate is manifestly detached from reality. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative Multidimensional Poverty Index 2010 (formerly annual U.N.D.P. Human Poverty Index) ranks Ethiopia as second poorest (ahead of famine-ravaged Mali) country on the planet. Six million Ethiopians needed emergency food aid last year and many millions will need food aid this year. An annual growth rate of 15 percent for the second poorest country on the planet for the next five years goes beyond the realm of imagination to pure fantasy. The IMF predicts a growth rate of 7 percent for 2011, but talking about economic statistics on Ethiopia is like talking about the art of voodoo.
Strong growth has continued in 2010/11 that the mission estimates at 7.5 percent (compared to an official estimate of 11.4 percent)…. The mission sees lower growth for 2011/12, at about 6 percent, on account of high inflation, restrictions on private bank lending, and a more difficult business environment… The growth and investment objectives of the new five-year Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) are ambitious. The mission urged the authorities to the pace implementation of the plan to avoid any further overheating of the economy. Success will also hinge on allowing room for the private sector to thrive and maintaining a low risk of debt distress…
Ethiopia’s dependence on foreign capital to finance budget deficits and a five-year investment plan is unsustainable… I can’t see it’s sustainable short of discovering huge oil reserves, essentially an unexpected windfall… I don’t see how they can sustain such an aggressive investment plan without getting into serious problems… If you’re not as a nation saving enough, you are dependent on foreign capital or other means of financing investment in an unhealthy, unsustainable way… That’s the sort of trap they seem to be falling into… On debt there is a danger… If this public investment-led growth at some point really stumbles or stagnates for a while then all these debt equations could unravel. … I do worry that without the private sector expanding much more vigorously then rapid growth is not likely to be sustainable and if that’s the case then all these debt balances could go out of control.
On June 6, Zenawi’s finance chief said the WB and IMF are all wrong. He insisted the GTP will “double economic growth by registering 14.9 percent growth on average”. He proclaimed that in the next five years there will be “fast and sustainable economic growth,” and “food security at household and national level.” There will be “more than 2000 km of railway networks would be constructed” and power generation will be in the range of “ 8,000 to 10,000 MW from water and wind resources during the next five years.”
On June 9, Zenawi’s deputy, Hailemariam Desalegn, offered assurances that “economic expansion won’t drop below 9 percent in the fiscal year to July 7, 2012, from 11.4 percent this year.” He boasted that “the whole community has mobilized to buy bonds. This huge savings and mobilization is used for infrastructure development… We are getting loans from China, India, Turkey and South Korea, so all these foreign savings are also mobilized… So I think we can perform on the ambitious plans that are in place.”
Cutting Through the Diplomatic Bull
For the last several months, Zenawi has been staging one farcical political theatre after another to distract attention from his brutal repression and to pretend that he is the one immovable object in the Sub-Saharan universe come the gusting southerly winds of change from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya or high water. He has been engaged in belligerent talk of regime change in Eritrea, inflammatory water war-talk with Egypt, wild allegations of terrorist attacks, proclamations for the construction of an imaginary dam over the Blue Nile, vicious attacks on international human rights organizations and wholesale jailing and intimidation of opponents.
Now Zenawi is shifting from political to economic theatre. As the country convulses in spiraling inflation Zenawi says, “It’s all good. Not a problem.” But the verdict of the big time bankers is in: Zenawi’s GTP is pure fantasy, a figment of his imagination. Of course, bankers like diplomats avoid straight talk and prefer to tip-toe and tap-dance around the truth. When they can say the GTP has as much chance of success as a snowball in hell, they would say the plan is “ambitious,” “unhealthy” and “unsustainable.” Instead of saying the plan is manifestly doomed to failure, they hedge on absurd contingencies that the plan will work only if “huge oil reserves are discovered” or the country gets an “unexpected windfall”. When they can say the Ethiopian economy has collapsed, they hem and haw about their concerns that the plan could “further overheat the economy”. They twiddle their thumbs and “worry about the private sector not thriving,” and express concern over Ethiopia’s “dependence on foreign capital”, the “unraveling of debt equations” and “debt balances getting out of control.”
Fakeonomics 101
As I have demonstrated in a previous commentary, Zenawi’s economic planning is based on juggled figures, massaged statistics and irrational exuberance about overrated and illusory economic development. Systematic falsification of economic data, fraudulent statistics and creative accounting in economic reports have largely gone unchallenged for years by the learned economists. The lack of systematic and sustained critique by Diaspora economists is all the more surprising and baffling given the fact that the economic swagger and wind-bagging about stratospheric economic growth and development comes from a regime not known for its economic “literacy”. The Economist Magazine in its November 7, 2006 editorial, in the context of the Starbucks coffee row, bluntly stated: “The Ethiopian government, one of the most economically illiterate in the modern world, would do well to take Starbucks’s advice.” The same observation was repeated in 2009 at a high level meeting of Western donor policy makers in Berlin where, according to a Wikileaks cablegram, a German diplomat suggested that Ethiopia’s economic woes could be traced to “Meles’ poor understanding of economics”. Today, to the surprise of many observers, the IMF and WB who have previously swallowed whole the regime’s preposterous economic claims are openly echoing the views of the German diplomat and the Economist Magazine.
Deceit, chicanery, paralogy and sophistry are the hallmarks of Zenawi’s regime. For many years, that regime has managed to scam the multilateral bankers and donors by talking about “sustainability,” “double-digit growth”, “renaissance” and “accelerated development in the developmental state”. It has even sought to shame and intimidate Western banker and donors by moral hectoring of the evils of “neoliberalism”. Zenawi seems to follow the old principle that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” In the Information Age, if you tell one big lie and embellish it with little lies every day, you will end up fooling yourself and no one else. (That obviously does not apply to Ethiopia which is hopelessly stranded and trapped in the Censorship and Disinformation Age).
The economic facts about Ethiopia are plain for all to see: The economy is in the stranglehold of organized racketeers and regime cronies. Regime-affiliated businesses and enterprises control “freight transport, construction, pharmaceutical, and cement firms receive lucrative foreign aid contracts and highly favorable terms on loans from government banks.” According to the regime’s data, by the end of the 2009 fiscal year, Ethiopia’s outstanding debt stock was pegged at a crushing USD$5.2 billion. Remittances by Diaspora Ethiopians were the mainstay of the economy, and in 2008 Ethiopians in the U.S. alone sent $1.2 billion. “Ethiopia is Africa’s largest recipient of foreign aid (at $3.3 billion in 2008 and rising).” The regime has auctioned off millions of hectares of the country’s best land for less than pennies. “For £150 a week (USD$245), you can lease more than 2,500 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset, England – for 50 years, plus generous tax breaks.”
According to the regime’s data, Ethiopia’s year-on-year rate of inflation jumped to 34.7 percent in May (2011) from 29.5 percent a month earlier; and food prices rose 40.7 percent during the year. Every year, Zenawi’s regime runs up the SOS flag begging for emergency humanitarian aid . So far in 2011, humanitarian pledges, commitments and contributions to the regime exceed USD$212 million. To get a government job or higher education, one has to be a member of Zenawi’s party. Ethiopia’s current population of some 80 million is expected to double in the next thirty years. It is mind-numbing to imagine the number of people who will be living in abject poverty without access to health care, education and employment in Ethiopia in three decades. The regime has failed to implement any policy aimed at controlling population growth.
One has to assume that those in the inner circle of the regime are aware of the massive economic crises in the country despite their manifest lack of “economic literacy.” But that assumption may be questionable given the fact that the regime appears to be in denial and has used its modest economic ingenuity to pin the blame for Ethiopia’s galloping inflation and the rest of that country’s economic problems on global market forces. Zenawi now offers the GTP as a “pie in the sky” plan that will not only provide food security but also catapult Ethiopia into becoming a middle income country like Malaysia in five years. The fact of the matter is that the regime’s self-centered short-term interests in accumulating wealth for its members and determination to cling to power forever have trumped the long-term strategic interests of the country.
Zenawi now is not only having difficulty persuading its bankers that it has the right economic policy, but the bankers are looking at his plan with increasing derision and cynicism. Ohashi says the GTP will work if Ethiopia “discovers huge oil reserves” or gets “an unexpected windfall.” Ohashi might as well have said the plan will work if manna falls from the sky.
Zenawi’s fakeonomics is nothing new. The old communist regimes in Eastern Europe used to pull the same types of political and economic stunts. They would hold “elections” and declare they won it by 99 percent (to their credit not by 99.6 percent). They also had their “five-year economic plans” in which they predicted and “achieved” incredible economic growth. For instance, they would set a production target of ten thousand tractors a year and actually produce five thousand. They would publicly report they produced fifteen thousand tractors and give the factory bosses increased wages and bonuses for exceeding the production target. The communist regimes would even say they did not have inflation just high prices and deny high quality food items and other amenities to the masses while the nomenclatura (party bosses) and their cronies wallowed in luxury. The reality in Ethiopia is that basic necessities are unavailable and unaffordable to the vast majority of the people, and even those who could afford the inflated prices must have the right connection to get an adequate supply. A regime incapable of providing sugar, cooking oil and other basic staples to the people now boasts of making Ethiopia a middle income country in five years.
Are Ethiopians better off economically today than they were five years ago? The answer to that question will be the answer to what they will be five years from now!
In the final analysis, it is not about the plan. It’s about the man. As George Ayittey said, “Africa is poor because she is not free.” I say Africa is poor because of dictators who cling to power like ticks on a milk cow.
Previous commentaries by the author are available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/ and http://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/
Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa residents had some thing to be cheerful about Saturday after Buna defeated the Woyanne-affiliated football team Dedebit 2-1.
In a typical Woyanne fashion, the game was full of controversy and intrigue, but Buna were able to overpower the better financed and trained Dedebit to victory. The stadium was full of Buna supporters and the game felt like it was a match between a foreign team vs. an Ethiopian national team, according one spectator.
A worldwide boycott of Chinese products may need to be organized to let China know that it needs to stop helping brutal dictators in the third world silence independent media. The following is a press release from ESAT.
ESAT accuses China of complicity in jamming signals
The Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT), which resumed transmissions to Ethiopia last week after nearly two months of interruption, has urged the government of the People’s Republic of China to desist from providing technology, training and technical assistance to the regime in Ethiopia to enable it to jam shortwave radio and satellite transmissions to Ethiopia.
The Meles regime is currently blocking independent news websites and jamming the Amharic services of the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and the Ethiopian Satellite Television, among others, with the help of technology and technical assistance provided by the Chinese government.
Since its launch in April 2010, ESAT has faced intense and persistent signal interference that has disrupted its transmissions six times in its short span of life. ESAT’s management has investigated the matter thoroughly and confirmed from reliable sources inside Ethiopia that the government of China has been actively working with the Meles regime to jam ESAT’s transmissions.
Mr. Kilfe Mulat, the exiled President of the Ethiopian Free Press Journalists Association (EFPJA), has said that China’s complicity in stifling freedom of expression and undermining efforts to spread democratic values in Ethiopia is shameful and sets a bad precedence in the whole of Africa. “Ethiopia is not only the seat of the AU but also a historic symbol of freedom in Africa as the only African nation that has never been colonized. Aiding tyrants to stifle their people and block the free flow of information is tantamount to committing unwarranted crimes against the freedom-loving people of Africa that are making sacrifices to exercise their inalienable rights and free themselves from corrupt tyrants that are hampering progress in the continent.”
The President of EFPJA also urged organizations and nations promoting freedom and democracy to provide resources and support to the Ethiopian Satellite Television to overcome the China-backed jamming challenge that has seriously threatened the survival of ESAT, a grassroots media project totally funded by the Ethiopian Diaspora.
Mr. Mulat further noted that the government of China must realize the fact that collaborating with African tyrants and exporting tools of repressions to countries like Ethiopia is an inexcusable act that will further tarnish the image of China as a sponsor of tyranny and oppression.
ESAT, which was set up by a group of Ethiopian exiled journalists and pro-democracy activists to fend off Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s war against every avenue of freedom, has been facing attacks and interference by the Meles regime.
“In addition to building Internet firewalls for the regime, China has emerged as one of the most formidable enemies of freedom in Ethiopia and the entire continent of Africa. China should realize the fact that the Meles regime is violating its own constitution that guarantees freedom of expression to citizens. By assisting the Meles regime in jamming ESAT and other reputable broadcasters illegally, China can only earn the condemnation of freedom-loving Ethiopians who do not wish to see their liberty trampled upon by internal and external powers,” ESAT’s management said.
Article 29 of the current Ethiopian constitution stipulates: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression without any interference. This right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of his choice.” But the Meles regime is widely known for violating basic rights with impunity.
ESAT has been forced to change satellite service providers at least four times in the last one year. It started broadcasting its programs to Ethiopia on Arabsat but was forced off air due to intense signal interference and diplomatic pressure. Similarly, an effort to continue broadcasting on Thaicon was interrupted after a few months, once again, due to intense diplomatic pressure. But ESAT’s tenacious management team continued transmissions on Intelsat, an American satellite company. While a diplomatic effort to disrupt ESAT transmissions failed, the Meles regime managed to jam ESAT’s signals using the jamming equipment provided by the Chinese government.
ESAT, the first independent TV station viewed by millions of Ethiopians, has reiterated its commitment to making every effort to continue its transmissions and find ways of overcoming the Sino-Ethiopia jamming and censorship project.
ESAT, which has studios in Amsterdam, Washington DC and London, is currently transmitting 24/7 on ABS1 Satellite, C-Band at 75 East Downlink: 3.480 GHz Vertical (3480), Symbol: 1.852 Msps (1852), FEC 2/3. It has plans to transmit on a Ku-Band and shortwave radio with a view to reaching wider audience in Ethiopia. ESAT also webcasts its transmissions on www.ethsat.com.
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For further information on ESAT or this press release contact:
Abebe Gellaw, Washington DC, email: [email protected] , tel. +1 650 387 4940
Kinfu Asefa, Amsterdam, email: [email protected] , tel. +31 652006062
Professor Messay Kebede’s challenging essay, “The fallacy of TPLF’s developmental state,” makes a lot of fresh arguments and suggestions. Some of them are deeply unsettling to many of us who consider ourselves to be part of a pro-democracy struggle in Ethiopia. To the extent that we believe Messay himself is a member of our community — a towering intellectual figure at that — it is hard to escape a sense of deep {www:disenchantment} with what appears to be his abandonment of our deepest convictions. But that is not a good enough reason to react negatively towards the article. I agree with American political philosopher Michael Walzer that the internal critics, the {www:incrementalist}s and foot-draggers, the prophets that are honoured in their own city, are better in achieving the goals of their criticism than the external hammer-on-the-skull critics. But the axe and the furious witnessing (to use Kafka’s phrase) are needed if communities are not to stagnate beyond {www:reprieve}, as ours seems to be heading towards. It is refreshing to see that Messay is willing to stick his neck out in service of reason and progress. But alas, most of his arguments, at least the arguments which matter, are far from persuasive.
The main point in Messay’s article is that it is not beyond Meles Zenawi to establish a developmental state provided that the present political structure is reformed in such a way that leaves, at least for some time, the ruling elite in power, but does not exclude the opposition from participating in the act of governing. This is an authoritarian scheme, insofar as its grounding is elite agreement, not voter choice. But Messay takes a hopeful, if not an overconfident, view that democratization is possible under the {www:tutelage} of these power sharing authoritarian elites.
The relevant literature in political science and political economy shows that this overconfidence is misplaced. There are diverse explanations of the democratization process, and Messay is on point to claim that elite-conceded or – to a lesser degree – elite-imposed democracy are not implausible. But there are few places where these democratization processes have started with power-sharing arrangements among competing political parties. As Harvard Political Scientist Pippa Norris argues, there is little evidence that power sharing “serves the long-term interests of democratic consolidation and durable conflict management”. As it turns out, the bulk of literature points to an opposite conclusion: that power sharing arrangements in full-scale authoritarian systems unravel quite quickly since the currency of trust and strength of agreement-enforcing political institutions on which the effectiveness of these arrangements rely are very low, or even worse, they lead to exclusionary bargaining systems and political culture that frustrate the emergence of democracy. It is good to note that in the very few cases where power sharing schemes have positive democratization effects, including some of the examples mentioned by Messay, the authoritarian states happened to have strong selectorate accountability, or they were less than full-scale authoritarianisms. In a simple language: the more the scale of authoritarianism, the less the actual democratization effect of power sharing arrangements. If what Messay says about the nature of Meles Zenawi’s rule is true, it makes his idea hopelessly mistimed.
It seems to me that what prompts Messay to consider this path to democratization is his enthusiasm for the developmental state. In a way, his aim is to kill two birds with one stone. But accepting elite authoritarian tutelage would not have been necessary had Messay been less dismissive of the concept of a democratic developmental state. Messay insists, plausibly enough, that the concept ignores the “defining characteristics of Asian Developmental States”. But that is not a good reason to reject altogether its realizability. Indeed, the histories of post-war Germany, Botswana, South Africa and many other countries suggest that a developmental state can be democratic. I do not know the “serious literature” on this issue to which Messay refers, but my understanding is that a good many developmental scholars agree that such states are possible, in both an ideal and non-ideal sense. If such agreement exists for political reasons as Messay contends – which I think is an implausibly strong claim – he fails to offer any evidence.
Also, Messay makes two rather common errors – both of the conflating sort – when he constructs his argument. First, he takes it for granted that neo-liberalism = liberalism. I think it is fair to say that this is a troublesome position. Philosopher John Holbo rightly calls the general tendency to conflate the two as “strawman-ing liberalism”. Some of the most vociferous critics of neo-liberalism – an economic philosophy that is best represented by the ”Washington consensus” – including Joseph Stiglitz, Meles Zenawi’s unabashed champion, are self-proclaimed liberals. The dominant thought in liberalism qua philosophy (to which such egalitarian stalwarts as Ronald Dworkin, Richard Arneson and John Rawls belong) doesn’t {www:prima facie} reject a developmental role for the state since the {www:underpinning}s of this thought are not property rights. Second, Messay seems to think that democracies are ipso facto liberal. I am sympathetic to the view that no democracy can be illiberal. This is not, however, similar to saying that no democracy can be non-liberal. Certainly, in Messay’s exalted field (political philosophy) there is a rich scholarly work on normative non-liberal democratic theories. The institutional implications of these theories have also been a subject of serious discussion by political scientists. It is not my aim to nitpick Messay for trivial purposes. It is to show that once one escapes such confusions, one can imagine the possibility of a democratic developmental state, and, dare I say, a liberal democratic developmental state.
Messay has much else to say, not least in his kicking of opposition parties in the shin for failing to grasp that Meles Zenawi had no intention to “go back to the situation of 2005”. This is an odd claim. My impression before the 2010 election was that if there was any single point that Ethiopian opposition groups agreed on, it was that Ethiopia was backsliding towards absolute authoritarianism. Am I missing something here? Some believed that their only way of connecting to Ethiopians was to use whatever political space the system provided them; some decided that this was a naïve view and chose a different path; there was a minority who continued to participate in the process with the hope that Meles Zenawi would come to see the follies of his ways. If members of this latter group committed any offence, it is in their anti-determinism, a view with which Professor Messay openly associates. I do not see how a person who advises Meles to make concessions can hold it against the opposition for acting on a similar belief unless the advice is intended to be no more than gestural.
I believe that Messay’s attempt to reflect on the matter of development and democracy in a decently {www:nuanced} manner is commendable. The Ethiopian opposition seems unwilling to give up the tiresome but emphatically false argument that democracy is a precondition for economic development. Democracy needs a better and a more convincing defence than one that tastes as a picked cherry or is based on {www:dogmatic} assertions that fly in the face of well-grounded knowledge. I can’t emphasise enough how emancipatory Messay’s article is. But its emancipatory value is in the freshness of its approach, not the force of its reason.
New York (CPJ) — Ethiopian authorities have been holding a newspaper columnist incommunicado since Tuesday, local journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reeyot Alemu, a regular contributor to the independent weekly Feteh, was expected to spend the next four weeks in {www:preventive} detention under what appears to be Ethiopian regime’s sweeping anti-terrorism law.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (