This is all caused by the U.S.-backed invasion of Somalia by the butcher of east Africa, Meles Zenawi.
(The Associated Press) UNITED NATIONS: The humanitarian situation in Somalia is deteriorating faster than expected with the number of people in need of emergency aid increasing from 315,000 to 425,000, the U.N. humanitarian office said Friday, quoting two U.S.-funded groups that monitor food security.
The Nairobi-based Food Security Analysis Unit, which focuses on Somalia and is managed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a lead organization in predicting food security problems in sub-Saharan Africa, also reported that the number of newly displaced people in Somalia increased from 705,000 to 745,000, the U.N. office said.
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA, said three key factors contributed to the deterioration: an extremely harsh dry season from January to March with higher temperatures than normal and unusually dry winds, the growing lack of security, and the increasingly high inflation rate.
The most severely affected areas are Galgaduud and Mudug in central Somalia, Hiraan and coastal Shabelle in the south, and pockets in Sool, Nugal and Hawd in the north, OCHA said.
Somalia has not had a functioning government since clan-based warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, sinking the poverty-stricken nation of 7 million into chaos. Its weak U.N.-backed transitional government, supported by Ethiopian Woyanne troops, is struggling to quash an Islamic insurgency, resulting in the deaths of thousands of civilians.
OCHA said the deteriorating security situation all over the country is slowing the delivery of humanitarian aid and affecting the ability of aid agencies to help people in need. It cited clashes between Ethiopian Woyanne-backed government troops and anti-government forces in the past week in many parts of south central Somalia.
In the south central region, it said, the price of locally produced maize and sorghum has increased by 300-400 percent in the last 12 months and the price of imported food including rice and vegetable oil has gone up 150 percent. At the same time the value of the Somali shilling has depreciated by an average of 65 percent.
OCHA reported an outbreak of acute diarrhea in the Dhahar district of Sanaag in northern Somalia caused by contaminated underground water, resulting in 300 cases and 7 deaths since March 10. Diarrhea is now spreading to rural settlements in the district and health authorities are not able to deal with the caseload because of limited staff, it said.
“The situation in Somalia is part of the continuation of unusually dry conditions in the Horn of Africa in general, including Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and parts of Kenya which are further aggravating food insecurity, water and pasture shortages and outbreaks of drought associated diseases,” OCHA said.
Djibouti has declared a state of emergency due to high rates of malnutrition which exceed the critical threshold of 15 percent, it said.
But OCHA said the “full-blown impact of a drought” will only be felt in certain areas of the greater Horn of Africa in July and August, according to food security analysts and weather forecasters.
Mugabe, like Meles, is just another ravenous African vampire who is sucking the life blood of his country. At the same time, the comment by U.S. State Department’s spokesman regarding Mugabe’s action is steep in obscene hypocrisy and double-standard. While condemning Mugabe, the State Department is creating havoc in eastern African by supporting Meles Zenawi’s murderous regime that had lost the 2005 elections in Ethiopia.
————–
(New York Times) JOHANNESBURG — A day before southern Africa’s leaders hold an emergency session on Zimbabwe’s disputed election, the government of the beleaguered nation appeared to tighten its control on Friday, banning political rallies, continuing its crackdown on the opposition and arresting the lawyer of its chief rival, Morgan Tsvangirai. The Movement for Democratic Change, Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, said Friday that more than 1,000 of its supporters had been attacked or arrested since the voting took place on March 29, fueling a growing chorus of international criticism of President Robert Mugabe’s handling of the elections… Continue reading >>
Opposition Candidates, Voters Silenced Ahead of Local Polls
(New York, April 11, 2008) – The Ethiopian government’s repression of registered opposition parties and ordinary voters has largely prevented political competition ahead of local elections that begin on April 13, Human Rights Watch said today. These widespread acts of violence, arbitrary detention and intimidation mirror long-term patterns of abuse designed to suppress political dissent in Ethiopia.
“It is too late to salvage these elections, which will simply be a rubber stamp on the EPRDF’s near-monopoly on power at the local level,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Still, officials must at least allow the voters to decide how and whether to cast their ballots without intimidation.”
Human Rights Watch carried out two weeks of field research during the run-up to the polls and documented systemic patterns of repression and abuse that have rendered the elections meaningless in many areas. That research focused primarily on Oromia, Ethiopia’s most populous region and one long troubled by heavy-handed government repression.
The nationwide elections for the kebele (village or neighborhood councils), and wereda (districts made up of several kebeles administrations), are crucially important. It is local officials who are responsible for much of the day-to-day repression that characterizes governance in Ethiopia. Many local officials in Oromia have made a routine practice of justifying their abuses by accusing law-abiding government critics of belonging to the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which is waging a low-level insurrection against the government.
Candidates allied with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) will run unopposed in the vast majority of constituencies across Ethiopia. On April 10, one of Ethiopia’s two major opposition coalitions, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF), pulled out of the process altogether. UEDF officials complained that intimidation and procedural irregularities limited registration to only 6,000 of the 20,000 candidates they attempted to put forward for various seats. By contrast, state-controlled media reports that the EPRDF will field more than 4 million candidates across the country.
Violence, Arbitrary Detention, and Intimidation
Local ruling party officials have systematically targeted opposition candidates for violence, intimidation, and other human rights abuses since the registration period began three months ago. Particularly in areas with established opposition support, local officials have arbitrarily detained opposition candidates, searched their property without warrant, and in some cases physically assaulted them.
Credible reports collected by Human Rights Watch indicate a pattern of cooperation among officials across all three tiers of local government – zone, wereda, and kebele administrations – in carrying out these abuses. Victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch across different locations in Oromia recounted a consistent narrative. Some were arbitrarily detained and then interrogated or threatened by wereda administration officials in the presence of zonal officials. Others were arbitrarily detained by wereda police and then transferred to the custody to zonal security officials or federal soldiers.
One 31-year-old school teacher in western Oromia was detained by police and then interrogated by wereda and zonal security officials when he sought to register as an opposition candidate. “I was afraid,” he told Human Rights Watch. “They accused me of being on OLF member and said I would be shot… They put a gun in my mouth, and then made me swear that I wouldn’t go back to the opposition.” He was released nine days later, after the deadline for candidate registration had passed. Human Rights Watch interviewed other OPC candidates who had also been detained after trying to register in other constituencies.
Prospective voters who might support the opposition have been similarly targeted by the government. Secondary school students in Oromia’s Cheliya wereda, many of whom are of voting age, reported to Human Rights Watch that they have been compelled to provide a letter from representatives of their gott/garee – unofficial groupings of households into cells that are used to monitor political speech and intimidate perceived government critics – attesting that they did not belong to any opposition party. Local officials said that unless they produced those letters, they would not be allowed to register to vote. One civil servant in Gedo town was warned by a superior that he would lose his job if he supported the opposition.
“The same local level officials who are directly responsible for much of the day-to-day political repression that occurs in Ethiopia have their jobs at stake in these elections,” Gagnon said. “As such, their efforts to intimidate ordinary people into returning them to office are especially intense.”
Local authorities have also prevented the registration of opposition candidates in many constituencies where the opposition’s success in 2005 parliamentary polls appeared to give them a chance at winning. In Fincha in western Oromia, for example, the opposition Oromo People’s Congress (OPC) made three attempts to register a candidate for an open parliamentary seat. The seat had been vacated by an OPC candidate who won 81 percent of the vote in 2005 but was later forced into exile after local authorities accused him of being an OLF supporter. The OPC tried to replace him on the ballot with three different candidates but each was prevented from registering. All three candidates were physically threatened by members of the wereda administration and police and one was detained for more than a week when he tried to register.
The opposition Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM) has encountered similar problems in western Oromia, with 10 of its 14 candidates resigning in response to pressure from local officials. In February, police in Dembi Dollo arrested 16 OFDM members and accused them of belonging to the OLF. Although a court ordered them all released two weeks later when police could provide no evidence to support their allegations, they were subsequently threatened with physical harm by local officials.
The home and crops of one OFDM member in the same area were burned. He reported this to the police with the aid of OFDM officials but alleged to Human Rights Watch that the police then failed to investigate the incident.
Such repression has been widespread in Oromia. The OPC gave Human Rights Watch the names of more than 300 party members it claims have been detained since November 2007. Investigations carried out by the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO), Ethiopia’s preeminent human rights monitoring organization, corroborate claims that many opposition supporters in Oromia have been arrested or illegally detained for periods ranging from days to months, often on the basis of alleged links to the OLF.
Procedural and Other Bars to Opposition Participation
In many cases, acts of intimidation have gone hand-in-hand with unjustifiable bureaucratic and procedural bars on free opposition participation in the polls. Some representatives of the NEB responsible for the registration of candidates at the constituency level have worked with local officials to block opposition registration. In some cases NEB agents have cancelled the registration of opposition candidates either without explanation or based on age and residency criteria despite clear evidence to the contrary. In other instances, NEB representatives provided the names of opposition candidates to local officials and to the police. Police in some of those constituencies then cordoned off access to NEB offices and physically prevented suspected opposition candidates from entering.
Across western Oromia, the country’s largest state, local officials have refused to allow candidates of the two main opposition parties there, the OPC and OFDM, to register more than a token share of candidates. In some constituencies, authorities have closed down OPC and OFDM offices and threatened their candidates with arrest if they persisted in competing.
In some cases, local authorities offered bribes to opposition candidates to withdraw. One OFDM candidate interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that local ruling party leaders offered to pay his college tuition and guaranteed him a job in the local administration if he withdrew from the election.
“The run-up to these elections illustrates how meaningless the process of voting can be in an environment of intimidation and fear,” Gagnon said. “The Ethiopian government must publicly commit itself to ending the systemic human rights abuses that have become part of the foundation of its hold on power.”
Background
The patterns of repression and procedural manipulation that surround the upcoming polls are motivated in part by the increased importance that control of wereda and kebele administration has taken on since 2001. Financed in part by the World Bank and other donors, the Ethiopian government has decentralized the provision of basic services such as health and education. This has effectively empowered wereda administrators, who are appointed by the elected councils, with greater discretion in the allocation of budget expenditures.
The kebele system in particular is also a central part of the ruling party’s elaborate system of surveillance, intimidation, and coercion of ordinary people who are perceived as being unsympathetic to the government. The kebele were originally created by the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam for precisely this purpose and have been put to the same use by the current government since Mengistu’s ouster in 1991. Because of the kebele system’s importance in this regard, the EPRDF is particularly loathe to contemplate losing control over them.
A dominant theme in the EPRDF’s political discourse on Oromia is the need to combat the activities of the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which has been fighting a low-level insurrection against the government for years with Eritrean backing. Across much of Oromia, local officials have routinely and for many years used unproven allegations of links to the OLF as a pretext to subject law-abiding government critics to arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and other forms of human rights abuse.
Local officials in Oromia have also made extensive use of the kebele system, along with smaller cells called gott and garee, to keep residents under constant surveillance for signs of government criticism. The overwhelming majority of local and regional authorities in Oromia belong to the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), which is the regional arm of the EPRDF.
Ethiopia’s last elections were parliamentary polls in 2005. The run-up to the elections saw signs of openness in some areas, though in most constituencies the same patterns of repression documented above prevailed. Following the elections, opposition efforts to contest the results sparked a heavy-handed government crackdown that saw several hundred people gunned down in the streets of Addis Ababa, mass arrests of perceived opposition supporters, and several prominent opposition leaders jailed on charges of treason that were ultimately dropped.
Elections for city councils, kebele councils, and vacated parliamentary seats will be held on Sunday, April 13, 2008. Elections for the wereda councils will follow on April 20. The exercise is a vast one – Ethiopia is made up of 547 weredas, and each of those is broken up into numerous kebeles whose governing councils each seat 300 representatives. The weredas are grouped into zones, whose administrations are not at stake in these elections, and the zones are grouped into nine ethnically-based regions.
Ethiopia’s government is highly dependent on donor assistance but donor governments, including the United States and United Kingdom, have largely refused to criticize repression in Ethiopia or to demand improvements in the country’s human rights record. The United States in particular views Ethiopia as a key ally in the “war on terror,” and donor governments in general often express fear that Ethiopia’s government will react poorly to human rights-related criticisms. The Ethiopian government has refused to allow any foreign observers to monitor the upcoming elections.
ER had predicted at the start of the Somalia invasion in December 2006 that Mogadishu will be Woyanne’s grave yard. It is happening. The following is a Newsweek interview with Woyanne chief Meles Zenawi, the butcher of East Africa.
———————-
Ethiopia’s prime minister discusses how the U.S. helped his country oust the Islamists from Mogadishu.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is easily Washington’s most important African ally in its war on terrorism. In 2006, the United States quietly helped Zenawi’s forces invade neighboring Somalia after a U.S.-financed coalition of warlords lost the capital of Mogadishu to an Islamist alliance known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). The Ethiopian forces ousted the UIC but have been bogged down since then fighting an Iraq-style insurgency by Somali Islamist and clan militias. The current round of violence has driven 750,000 from their homes, and Ethiopia’s allies in the United Nations-backed transitional federal government [TFG] have been unable to control Mogadishu, much less the rest of the country.
Only a quarter of the 8,000 peacekeeping troops promised by the African Union last year have shown up to relieve the Ethiopians. Meanwhile Zenawi has resuscitated Ethiopia’s economy, but he faces criticism over his government’s record on democracy and human rights. Following disputed elections in 2005, security forces killed at least 193 civilians and jailed most of the major opposition leaders (though they were later pardoned). This week the Ethiopian prime minister spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Jason McLure about Ethiopia’s archenemy, Eritrea; its exit plan from Somalia, and its alliance with the United States. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What is Ethiopia’s plan to withdraw from Somalia?
Meles Zenawi: There are two issues here. First is the threat that was posed by the Shabaab [the radical wing of the Union of Islamic Courts] to Ethiopia, when they threatened to take control of the whole of Somalia and at the same time declared jihad against Ethiopia. That threat had to be neutralized and we believe we did that the first weeks of our intervention … We were told by the African Union [AU] and others that in our withdrawal we shouldn’t create a vacuum, at which point we indicated we could wait a bit longer so long as the African Union was in a position to replace our troops. That has taken an inordinate amount of time.
So withdrawing unilaterally without AU peacekeepers is an option that you’re looking at now?
Well that’s an option. It’s an option we will not take lightly. But it’s an option.
How long will you wait for the African Union or the United Nations or outside peacekeepers to intervene?
We are most certainly not going to wait another year. It’s my hope that a number of things will happen that will make it possible for us to withdraw. First is the full deployment of African Union troops. Second is the continued consolidation of the TFG security forces. Thirdly we hope that the local process of reconciliation that is going on, particularly in Mogadishu but also some other places in Somalia, will make progress.
Does Ethiopia have a contingency plan should the TFG collapse or be unable to extend its power over Mogadishu?
As I said earlier on, we could have withdrawn weeks after our intervention. But that would not create a stable situation in Somalia. And creating a stable situation in Somalia is in the long-term interest of everybody. I have no reason to believe the TFG will fail. It may not make spectacular progress, but I have no reason to believe that it will simply collapse.
A number of analysts believe Ethiopian troops have had a positive effect short term on the TFG by providing security assistance, but in the long term are undermining the TFG by fomenting nationalist and Islamist sentiments in Somalia.
An oversupply of national sentiment is not the problem in Somalia. The problem in Somalia is a lack of it. The problem in Somalia is an oversupply of sub-sub-clannish attitude. Our efforts together with the TFG have been focused on bridging the gaps of the sub-sub-sub-clans of Somalia. As far as Islamist fervor is concerned. Ethiopia was not in Somalia when the Shabaab took control of Mogadishu and threatened to take control of the whole of Somalia. Ethiopia was not in Somalia when the Shabaab declared jihad on Ethiopia. What Ethiopia did through its intervention is take the bubble out of this Shabaab phenomenon.
How many Ethiopian troops have died in Somalia since December 2006? How many injured? Quite a few.
Do you have more precise numbers? Hundreds? Thousands?
In the hundreds.
How many troops are in Somalia right now?
A few thousand. Two, three thousand. [He is lying. At least 20,000.]
How much has the invasion cost Ethiopia in money terms?
Substantial amounts.
A hundred million dollars?
No. It’s a low-tech, low-cost intervention on the part of Ethiopia. That doesn’t mean that every cent we spent on Somalia couldn’t have been better spent in Ethiopia. But on the whole, we have managed without breaking our back economically, to sustain our presence in Somalia.
How much direct financial support has Ethiopia received from the United States to help pay for this intervention?
Zero.
Has Ethiopia been disappointed in the level of assistance by Western nations to the TFG and Ethiopia?
The response of the international community and the United Nations in general has been less than stellar. We understand why the U.N. could not send a peacekeeping mission. But we do not understand why the U.N., through the Security Council, could not provide some funding to the African Union to carry out the peacekeeping responsibilities. The United Nations insisted that the AU mission in Darfur should be taken over by the U.N. and funded by the U.N., [but] they refused to provide budgeted support to the AU peacekeeping operations in Somalia.
The U.S. has been a bit more forthcoming. They have provided support, for example, to the Ugandans [peacekeepers], to deploy their troops in Mogadishu. They have diplomatically been broadly supportive of the TFG and stabilization in Somalia. But that does not mean the Security Council–and the United States is an important part of the Security Council–has not delivered as many of us in the region would have expected.
Some say the U.S. government is working at cross purposes in that U.S. intelligence agencies are supporting elements nominally within the TFG but that aren’t helpful to the reconciliation process– particularly the mayor of Mogadishu, Mohammed Dheere, a former warlord.
Well before the Shabaab took over in Mogadishu [in 2006], some in the intelligence community in the United States were playing a very negative role through their support of all sorts of warlords who were brought together in the vain hope that they could stem the tide of the Shabaab. That policy failed miserably. I believe since then it has not been pursued in the manner it was pursued before. Since then the main efforts of the United States are through the African Union and the TFG. There is still the focus on individual terrorists harbored in Somalia, particularly among some intelligence entities and some of them tend to look at this issue in isolation. But the overall U.S. policy has changed since those days.
When you say that some in the U.S. government tend to look at the terrorism issue in isolation, what effect does that have on broader policy?
Not much. There have been operations to try to kill some of these terrorists. That’s OK, because neutralizing these terrorists has to be part of the solution. But when a disproportionate amount of resources and time is spent on hunting them down, as opposed to creating the right context [for nation-building], it can be counterproductive. So there is that risk. There are some institutions in the U.S. that put too much accent on that aspect of the operations.
Because in total there may be at most a dozen high-value targets there that the U.S. would really like to get.
Yes.
And so in pursuit of those dozen or so targets, maybe there are other things the U.S. could be giving resources or attention to.
Yes, there’s a question of balancing the deployment of your time and resources.
The U.S. State Department recently listed the Al-Shabaab militia as a terrorist group. What effect does that have on the reconciliation process?
I am at a loss to understand why it took the United States so long to put Al-Shabaab in the terrorist list. If one believes that one can reconcile with Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists whose sole agenda is to establish a caliphate in the Horn of Africa centered on Somalia, then of course characterizing this institution as a terrorist organization hinders that type of reconciliation. If one however recognizes that that type of reconciliation is a code word for surrender, then characterizing this organization as a terrorist organization doesn’t make any difference. There are many in the opposition in the so-called Islamic Courts movement who are not Al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab is a very small kernel of hard-core terrorists. Apart from that small kernel, everybody else could be talked to, and even individuals within the Al-Shabaab core movement could be won over.
With regard to the counterinsurgency in the Ogaden, what’s the status of the fight against rebels in eastern Ethiopia and what sort of links are there between the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and the insurgency in Somalia?
There was a broad front organized by the Eritreans involving all sorts of Ethiopian rebels and the Islamic Courts movement in Somalia. The ONLF constituted a very important part of that broad front. We believe the back of the ONLF insurgency in the region has now been broken.
Ethiopia Woyanne has faced a number of accusations of atrocities in the Ogaden during the counterinsurgency. U.S. satellites have identified some burned villages in the region. Are there atrocities happening now?
No. There are no atrocities happening in the Ogaden. Naturally, when there is fighting, there is death, and sometimes death of civilians. But in this case because it was low-tech, labor-based type of fighting, collateral damage was minimal. I am not aware of any U.S. intelligence assessment that shows there was widespread violation of human rights or killing of civilians or burning of villages.
With regard to Eritrea, the U.N. peacekeepers are mostly gone from the border area. What’s keeping the two countries from going to war again?
We’re not going to war with Eritrea because we don’t want to. One stupid war is enough. On the Eritrean side, I think what’s keeping them from going to war is the recognition that if they were to do so they would not profit from it. [Yes, a stupid war that resulted in the death of 150,000 young Ethiopians who were made cannon fodders. You and Seye Abraha will be brought to justice for waging this ‘stupid’ war.]
Will you stay as prime minister after your term expires in 2010?
This is likely to be my last term.
Local elections are approaching and a number of major leaders of the opposition who were jailed after 2005 aren’t participating. Some of the remaining opposition parties say they’ve faced intimidation, harassment. What can you tell us about the status of Ethiopia’s democracy efforts?
We are consolidating democracy with every step. After 2005 we discussed with the opposition who were in Parliament to address some of their concerns. We changed the way the national election board was organized. We have changed the bylaws of Parliament to make it possible for the minority to set the agenda for debate on specific dates. We are now processing a new press law that we very much hope will put our legislation on par with the best in the world. So we have continuously been addressing any shortcomings with the institutions in our country. Now, every time there is an election here, somebody cries foul. That unfortunately appears to be the normal practice in the continent, whether there is substantial evidence to back it or not. That we all have to live with.
Ethiopia is Africa’s fastest-growing non-oil economy, but the U.S. Agency for International Development says that 9 million people in Ethiopia will require food assistance this year.
We have not had as much success in the pastoralist areas of our country as we have had elsewhere in terms of growth. And the pastoralist areas are very vulnerable to changes in weather. We need to move on the one hand to make pastoralism more productive, and on the other hand to try and encourage people, the pastoralists, to settle voluntarily. Secondly, we need to do more in the way of irrigation-related infrastructure, particularly in the drought-affected areas so that people benefit. And then in recent years poverty, which was largely rural is now shifting as the urban poor’s income fails to improve as much as that of those in rural areas. So there are a lot of challenges that we need to address, in spite of the fact that we have had five years of double-digit growth.
The facts of his life are well known. Haile Selassie’s influence on the world is his most enduring legacy. Born Tafari Makonnen in 1891, Haile Selassie came to be identified inextricably with Ethiopia. Only rarely in the modern world does the story of a man become so closely linked to the story of a nation. It is said that great events beget great men, but they beget failures as well, and the boundary between the two is often defined by singular acts of courage. These the Ethiopian Emperor did not lack.
Not surprisingly, the fortitude of the man sometimes referred to as “The Lion” inspired Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and even Malcom X, each of whom corresponded with Haile Selassie –who advocated civil disobedience when it was necessary to remedy fundamental social injustice or restore freedom to the oppressed. The Emperor’s presence at President Kennedy’s funeral is still remembered.
One speaks of leaders of men as though their public lives were completely divorced from their private ones. For a hereditary monarch, this should not be the case. What his children think of him is as important as what everybody else thinks. Haile Selassie was a devoted husband and father. His wife, Empress Menen, died in 1962. His sons, Sahle Selassie, Makonnen, and Asfa Wossen, had a great sense of duty to their father and to their people. Of his daughters, Princess Tenagne, in particular, excercised various official duties.
Haile Selassie ascended the throne in the era of polar exploration and slow communication. Africa’s oldest nation was little more than a footnote to the great stories of the day –something that Americans and Brits read about in the pages of the National Geographic. Some people still called the country Abyssinia. In certain countries far beyond Ethiopia’s borders, segregation and apartheid were long established and little questioned. Most other African “nations” were colonies. Even at home, slavery was technically still legal.
In such an era, words like “pan-Africanism” and “civil rights” were little more than esoteric philosophical notions entertained by an enlightened few.
That a country as backward as Italy, whose widespread poverty prompted the emigration of millions, would seek to devour a nation like Ethiopia, was an irony too subtle to raise eyebrows outside the most sophisticated intellectual circles. With British backing, Haile Selassie returned to defeat the Italian army which, in the event, the Allies never viewed as much more than a nuisance. The British themselves considered the Ethiopian campaign in its strategic context –as a way to free the Red Sea from possible Axis control– as much as the liberation of a sovereign nation. To the Ethiopians, it was as much a moral victory as a military one.
The Emperor’s speech to the League of Nations denouncing the Italian invasion is remembered more than the aggression itself. It prompted essentially ineffectual international trade sanctions against a European nation but, like the Battle of Adwa four decades earlier, represented in a tangible way one of the few occasions in the modern era that an African nation defied the arrogance of a European one.
There were very few world leaders of the post-war era who had actually led troops in combat. Haile Selassie and Dwight Eisenhower were exceptional in this respect, which partially accounts for their close friendship.
Even when the foe is truly formidable, courage has a psychological side that has little to do with combat or physical victory. One may seem defeated materially without being defeated morally. Perhaps it’s a question of confidence, values or knowledge. Haile Selassie’s greatest strength was as a builder of bridges –across rivers but also between cultures. His travels took him to many countries, and he became one of the most popular heads of state, and one of the most decorated men in the world.
It was during one such voyage, in 1960, that he had to rush home to confront an attempted overthrow of the existing order. This perhaps served as a reminder that the most dangerous revolutions are found in one’s own house. The sovereign who was once known as a reformer now found himself resented by many members of the very social class his economic and educational policies had helped to create. Internationally, however, his prestige did not suffer. The Emperor established the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, with a headquarters in Addis Ababa.
The revolution of 1974 was supported by outside forces, and while its roots were domestic, its covert objectives cannot be said to have been supported by more than a small fraction of Ethiopians.
Truth be told, administrative practices which worked well in 1950 were terribly inefficient by the 1970s, and a series of problems were cited as a pretext for a full scale coup d’etat. Ethiopia’s pre-industrial economy was no better prepared for Marxism than Russia’s had been in 1917.
Communism’s ultimate social and economic failure, in Ethiopia as well as in Russia, certainly indicates democracy’s superiority, whether that democracy is embodied by a republic or a constitutional monarchy. The Derg’s alliance with the Soviet Union made Ethiopia the instrument of a foreign power, precisely the thing Haile Selassie resisted.
He had a Solomonic pedigree, but Haile Selassie was a man of the people. Perhaps that’s how he should be remembered.
The Ethiopian government’s repression of registered opposition parties and ordinary voters has largely prevented political competition ahead of local elections that begin on April 13, Human Rights Watch said today. These widespread acts of violence, arbitrary detention and intimidation mirror long-term patterns of abuse designed to suppress political dissent in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government’s repression of registered opposition parties and ordinary voters has largely prevented political competition ahead of local elections that begin on April 13, Human Rights Watch said today. These widespread acts of violence, arbitrary detention and intimidation mirror long-term patterns of abuse designed to suppress political dissent in Ethiopia. “It is too late to salvage these elections, which will simply be a rubber stamp on the EPRDF’s near-monopoly on power at the local level,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Still, officials must at least allow the voters to decide how and whether to cast their ballots without intimidation.”
Human Rights Watch carried out two weeks of field research during the run-up to the polls and documented systemic patterns of repression and abuse that have rendered the elections meaningless in many areas. That research focused primarily on Oromia, Ethiopia’s most populous region and one long troubled by heavy-handed government repression.
The nationwide elections for the kebele (village or neighborhood councils), and wereda (districts made up of several kebeles administrations), are crucially important. It is local officials who are responsible for much of the day-to-day repression that characterizes governance in Ethiopia. Many local officials in Oromia have made a routine practice of justifying their abuses by accusing law-abiding government critics of belonging to the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which is waging a low-level insurrection against the government.
Candidates allied with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) will run unopposed in the vast majority of constituencies across Ethiopia. On April 10, one of Ethiopia’s two major opposition coalitions, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF), pulled out of the process altogether. UEDF officials complained that intimidation and procedural irregularities limited registration to only 6,000 of the 20,000 candidates they attempted to put forward for various seats. By contrast, state-controlled media reports that the EPRDF will field more than 4 million candidates across the country.
Violence, Arbitrary Detention, and Intimidation
Local ruling party officials have systematically targeted opposition candidates for violence, intimidation, and other human rights abuses since the registration period began three months ago. Particularly in areas with established opposition support, local officials have arbitrarily detained opposition candidates, searched their property without warrant, and in some cases physically assaulted them.
Credible reports collected by Human Rights Watch indicate a pattern of cooperation among officials across all three tiers of local government — zone, wereda, and kebele administrations — in carrying out these abuses. Victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch across different locations in Oromia recounted a consistent narrative. Some were arbitrarily detained and then interrogated or threatened by wereda administration officials in the presence of zonal officials. Others were arbitrarily detained by wereda police and then transferred to the custody to zonal security officials or federal soldiers.
One 31-year-old school teacher in western Oromia was detained by police and then interrogated by wereda and zonal security officials when he sought to register as an opposition candidate. “I was afraid,” he told Human Rights Watch. “They accused me of being on OLF member and said I would be shot… They put a gun in my mouth, and then made me swear that I wouldn’t go back to the opposition.” He was released nine days later, after the deadline for candidate registration had passed. Human Rights Watch interviewed other OPC candidates who had also been detained after trying to register in other constituencies.
Prospective voters who might support the opposition have been similarly targeted by the government. Secondary school students in Oromia’s Cheliya wereda, many of whom are of voting age, reported to Human Rights Watch that they have been compelled to provide a letter from representatives of their gott/garee — unofficial groupings of households into cells that are used to monitor political speech and intimidate perceived government critics — attesting that they did not belong to any opposition party. Local officials said that unless they produced those letters, they would not be allowed to register to vote. One civil servant in Gedo town was warned by a superior that he would lose his job if he supported the opposition.
“The same local level officials who are directly responsible for much of the day-to-day political repression that occurs in Ethiopia have their jobs at stake in these elections,” Gangon said. “As such, their efforts to intimidate ordinary people into returning them to office are especially intense.”
Local authorities have also prevented the registration of opposition candidates in many constituencies where the opposition’s success in 2005 parliamentary polls appeared to give them a chance at winning. In Fincha in western Oromia, for example, the opposition Oromo People’s Congress (OPC) made three attempts to register a candidate for an open parliamentary seat. The seat had been vacated by an OPC candidate who won 81 percent of the vote in 2005 but was later forced into exile after local authorities accused him of being an OLF supporter. The OPC tried to replace him on the ballot with three different candidates but each was prevented from registering. All three candidates were physically threatened by members of the wereda administration and police and one was detained for more than a week when he tried to register.
The opposition Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM) has encountered similar problems in western Oromia, with 10 of its 14 candidates resigning in response to pressure from local officials. In February, police in Dembi Dollo arrested 16 OFDM members and accused them of belonging to the OLF. Although a court ordered them all released two weeks later when police could provide no evidence to support their allegations, they were subsequently threatened with physical harm by local officials.
The home and crops of one OFDM member in the same area were burned. He reported this to the police with the aid of OFDM officials but alleged to Human Rights Watch that the police then failed to investigate the incident.
Such repression has been widespread in Oromia. The OPC gave Human Rights Watch the names of more than 300 party members it claims have been detained since November 2007. Investigations carried out by the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO), Ethiopia’s preeminent human rights monitoring organization, corroborate claims that many opposition supporters in Oromia have been arrested or illegally detained for periods ranging from days to months, often on the basis of alleged links to the OLF.
Procedural and Other Bars to Opposition Participation
In many cases, acts of intimidation have gone hand-in-hand with unjustifiable bureaucratic and procedural bars on free opposition participation in the polls. Some representatives of the NEB responsible for the registration of candidates at the constituency level have worked with local officials to block opposition registration. In some cases NEB agents have cancelled the registration of opposition candidates either without explanation or based on age and residency criteria despite clear evidence to the contrary. In other instances, NEB representatives provided the names of opposition candidates to local officials and to the police. Police in some of those constituencies then cordoned off access to NEB offices and physically prevented suspected opposition candidates from entering.
Across western Oromia, the country’s largest state, local officials have refused to allow candidates of the two main opposition parties there, the OPC and OFDM, to register more than a token share of candidates. In some constituencies, authorities have closed down OPC and OFDM offices and threatened their candidates with arrest if they persisted in competing.
In some cases, local authorities offered bribes to opposition candidates to withdraw. One OFDM candidate interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that local ruling party leaders offered to pay his college tuition and guaranteed him a job in the local administration if he withdrew from the election.
“The run-up to these elections illustrates how meaningless the process of voting can be in an environment of intimidation and fear,” Gagnon said. “The Ethiopian government must publicly commit itself to ending the systemic human rights abuses that have become part of the foundation of its hold on power.”
Background
The patterns of repression and procedural manipulation that surround the upcoming polls are motivated in part by the increased importance that control of wereda and kebele administration has taken on since 2001. Financed in part by the World Bank and other donors, the Ethiopian government has decentralized the provision of basic services such as health and education. This has effectively empowered wereda administrators, who are appointed by the elected councils, with greater discretion in the allocation of budget expenditures.
The kebele system in particular is also a central part of the ruling party’s elaborate system of surveillance, intimidation, and coercion of ordinary people who are perceived as being unsympathetic to the government. The kebele were originally created by the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam for precisely this purpose and have been put to the same use by the current government since Mengistu’s ouster in 1991. Because of the kebele system’s importance in this regard, the EPRDF is particularly loathe to contemplate losing control over them.
A dominant theme in the EPRDF’s political discourse on Oromia is the need to combat the activities of the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which has been fighting a low-level insurrection against the government for years with Eritrean backing. Across much of Oromia, local officials have routinely and for many years used unproven allegations of links to the OLF as a pretext to subject law-abiding government critics to arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and other forms of human rights abuse.
Local officials in Oromia have also made extensive use of the kebele system, along with smaller cells called gott and garee, to keep residents under constant surveillance for signs of government criticism. The overwhelming majority of local and regional authorities in Oromia belong to the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), which is the regional arm of the EPRDF.
Ethiopia’s last elections were parliamentary polls in 2005. The run-up to the elections saw signs of openness in some areas, though in most constituencies the same patterns of repression documented above prevailed. Following the elections, opposition efforts to contest the results sparked a heavy-handed government crackdown that saw several hundred people gunned down in the streets of Addis Ababa, mass arrests of perceived opposition supporters, and several prominent opposition leaders jailed on charges of treason that were ultimately dropped.
Elections for city councils, kebele councils, and vacated parliamentary seats will be held on Sunday, April 13, 2008. Elections for the wereda councils will follow on April 20. The exercise is a vast one � Ethiopia is made up of 547 weredas, and each of those is broken up into numerous kebeles whose governing councils each seat 300 representatives. The weredas are grouped into zones, whose administrations are not at stake in these elections, and the zones are grouped into nine ethnically-based regions.
Ethiopia’s government is highly dependent on donor assistance but donor governments, including the United States and United Kingdom, have largely refused to criticize repression in Ethiopia or to demand improvements in the country’s human rights record. The United States in particular views Ethiopia as a key ally in the “war on terror,” and donor governments in general often express fear that Ethiopia’s government will react poorly to human rights-related criticisms. The Ethiopian government has refused to allow any foreign observers to monitor the upcoming elections.
