Army ‘is keeping food from rebel areas’

By Jonathan Rugman, Times Online

JIJIGA – Ethiopia has been accused of deliberately underestimating the scale of a deadly drought facing millions of its people, some of whom are being deprived of emergency food aid by the country’s military.

The humanitarian crisis, caused by three years of failed rains, currently affects about 4.6 million people, though the official number could jump to as high as 6.7 million this week.

United Nations agencies say that the real number at risk is above 8 million, an estimate disputed hotly by Addis Ababa, which is insisting on publishing a much lower figure.

“The figure has risen very substantially, maybe even doubled,” said Sir John Holmes, the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, who visited Ethiopia earlier this month. “Any government doesn’t want to be perceived as always in the position of receiving aid.”

The crisis is at its most worrying in the vast deserts of the Ogaden region, where the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says in a confidential alert to donors that it is receiving “increasing reports of hunger-related mortality”. About two million people are at risk until the main rains fall next spring – if they fall at all. The Ogaden is Ethiopia’s biggest and most remote state.

Nomadic tribes there are resorting to eating dead leaves and cactus fruit to survive the worst drought since the famines of 1984-85, when an estimated one million Ethiopians died.

A twenty-mile trek on foot into the bush revealed mediaeval mud-hut villages, where ethnic Somali herdsmen say that their children have died after eating poisonous buds from trees, for lack of anything else to eat. Others say that they depend on camel milk and meat because cattle, sheep and goats have perished in their thousands.

“I am ill and hungry,” said one man, removing his shirt to reveal his rib cage visible through taut skin. “Because of the drought we have nothing to eat. The only people who receive food are the military forces.”

The UN has raised about 60 per cent of $325 million (£181 million) it is seeking in emergency relief for Ethiopia and says that it is suffering a shortfall of about 300,000 tonnes of aid.

The WFP has told donors that it blames Ethiopia’s “delays in recognising the extent of need” for causing the rapid depletion of existing food stocks. But a Channel 4 News investigation tonight claims that the army has withheld food from villages in the Ogaden deliberately as part of a “scorched earth” policy against separatist rebels of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).

Herdsmen in villages almost completely cut off from the outside world said that many of their animals had been killed by Ethiopian soldiers, who also deprived them of water.

“We walk for eight hours to collect water,” said Abdi, a villager about three hours from Jijiga, the regional capital. “Then the military take the water from us. They say the rebels pass through our villages and that we give them supplies. But what can we give? We are dying of hunger. We have nothing to give to our own children.”

The UN says that it has negotiated with the Ethiopian army for the military’s role in food distribution to be kept to a minimum. “If there is a situation where food is taken by the military, we protest,” said Mohammed Diab, the WFP’s Ethiopia director.

However, a confidential investigation by USAid, the US Government’s disaster relief agency, complained in March that “literally hundreds of areas . . . have neither been assessed nor received any food assistance”, with “populations we met terrorised by the inability to access food”.

“This situation would be shameful in any other country,” the report concludes. “The US Government cannot in good conscience allow the food operation to continue in its current manifestation.” The US is spending more than £230 million on food aid for Ethiopia this year but is hamstrung from being too critical in public; Washington sees Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, as an ally in the War on Terror after Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2005, which ousted an Islamist administration from power.

Britain has doubled its annual aid to Ethiopia in the last three years to £130 million, including £15 million this summer through the UN’s Humanitarian Response Fund, while Save the Children (SCF) is halfway through a campaign to raise £10 million for the country. Two SCF workers were expelled from the Ogaden last year amid allegations – rejected by SCF – that they had diverted food to ONLF rebels. The British charity abandoned a full-scale feeding programme, fearing supplies could be diverted.

By Kim Fellner

The following is a book excerpt from Kim Fellner’s Wrestling With Starbucks (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia, an organization of 115 cooperatives representing more than 102,000 coffee growers, apparently had mixed feelings about Starbucks. In an interview transcript from a June 2006 Starbucks meeting on African coffees, he spoke warmly about the company’s rle in advancing the well-being of Ethiopian coffee farmers: “This year we sold more coffee to Starbucks and they paid us a very good price, which is better than Fair Trade price. So we want this type of pricing for our coffees to improve the lives of coffee growers.”

Yet there he was in Black Gold, a documentary released that year to wide acclaim. Filmed between 2003 and 2005, it followed Tadesse’s valiant struggle to increase the income that Ethiopian coffee farmers realize from their crops. It also featured Starbucks as villain, implying that the company made its millions off the backs of poor farmers.

For a while Dub Hay, Starbucks’ senior vice president for coffee purchasing, wondered if Tadesse had been unaware that the film was going to portray Starbucks as a bad guy. After all, the company had been involved with Ethiopia for more than thirty years, even before the arrival of Howard Schultz, and had been buying coffee from the Oromia Farmers Union since 2003. But Dub hoped in vain. Tadesse was in fact a man on a mission; and in the fall of 2006, he emerged as a key spokesperson for the Ethiopian government and for the international anti-poverty NGO Oxfam. Their prime demand was that Starbucks recognize Ethiopia’s right to trademark the names of its gourmet coffee regions. “Coffee shops can sell Sidamo and Harar coffees for up to $26 a pound because of the beans’ specialty status,” Tadesse said in an Oxfam press release. “But Ethiopian coffee farmers only earn between sixty cents to $1.10 for their crop, barely enough to cover the cost of production. I think most people would see that as an injustice.”

If Starbucks felt betrayed by the two faces of Tadesse, Tadesse felt betrayed by the two faces of Starbucks. Yes, it pays better than fair trade prices and is arguably the most ethical major coffee company in the world. But it also uses its reputation to avoid sharing real power.

Global Coffee

The conflict over Ethiopia’s right to trademark its coffee lasted for roughly two years and involved three continents, a slew of public demonstrations, and a steady stream of media reports. The themes echoed those that had ignited the 1999 Battle of Seattle: economic relations between the global south and the global north and the role of corporations in translating capitalism for performance on the world stage. While flat-worlders like New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman enthused over the opportunities, not to mention the inevitabilities, of globalization, detractors saw it as a new version of imperialism, a way for the north to munch up both material and cultural assets. “Do we really need a Starbucks on every corner of every city in the world?” asked political theorist Benjamin Barber in the Philanthropy News Digest. “That’s not economic competition; that’s cultural monopoly, and it ends up destroying local cultures.” Even Friedman acknowledged that, without some pushback, the “electronic herd” of global finance will turn indigenous culture “into a global mush, and their environment into a global mash.”

By 2006 Starbucks was certainly a global player. Though Schultz originally conceived of the company as a vehicle to import coffeehouse culture to the United States, he soon discovered he could export his own version back to Europe and to anywhere else in the world that seemed ready for the Starbucks coffee experience. As he told his shareholders at the 2006 annual meeting, “In 1996, we began to dream we could be an international business”; and that same year the company opened its first overseas store, in Tokyo. By 1999 Starbucks was solidifying its presence in Britain and aiming to have five hundred European stores by the end of 2003. By early 2006 , Starbucks had more than 3,000 company-owned and licensed stores outside the United States in thirty-seven countries. Its feet were firmly planted in China, its toes testing the market in Brazil, its eyes turned toward India. To Starbucks, this behavior was in no way predatory. The company was merely sharing the delight of Starbucks at an international level and, of course, increasing the bottom line.

There were difficulties, of course. In China, state news anchor Rui Cheggang took aim at a Starbucks store lodged in a corner of the imperial palace of the Forbidden City, calling it “a symbol of low-end U.S. food culture” and “an insult to Chinese civilization” and generating a torrent of response that pitted cultural nationalism against imperialism in round after round of heated blogging. And sometimes the war of words concerned real wars. One set of bloggers castigated Schultz as a Zionist and accused Starbucks of anti-Arab bias, while others condemned Starbucks for closing its Israeli outlets. In fact, Starbucks had closed its stores in Israel because of poor management and performance, while maintaining numerous stores in Arab countries; and Schultz, in real life, appeared to favor a two-state solution. In 2006, when fighting in Lebanon temporarily shut down the Beirut Starbucks, the company continued to pay staff wages and benefits throughout the conflict.

Ethiopia’s Strategy

Ethiopia is blisteringly poor country, ranked at 170 out of 177 countries in the 2005 United Nations Development Program Human Development Report. More than 25 percent of its people survive on less than a dollar a day; the average per-capita gross domestic product is less than 1,000 dollars. Although the country produces barely 6 percent of the world’s coffee, more than 1.5 million smallholders grow the crop, which sustains 15 million people and accounts for 40 to 60 percent of the country’s total exports. A significant percentage of the crop (estimates vary widely, depending on whom you ask, from a low of 15 percent to a high of 45 percent) is specialty coffee from the Harar, Sidamo, and Yirgacheffe regions, all prized for their quality and unique flavor.

In 2006 Starbucks purchased fewer than 10 million pounds of coffee from those regions, the equivalent of 2 to 3 percent of the company’s worldwide coffee purchases and a relatively small percentage of Ethiopia’s total coffee exports. Most of the nation’s coffee ends up on the arabica commodities market, where world overproduction has kept prices low. Moreover, because the country has no port, coffee must travel 1,000 miles to be shipped from Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden. In short, low prices and high marketing costs, combined with an outdated coffee auction system and a weak infrastructure, mean that most small coffee farmers stay poor.

To combat this destitution, the Ethiopian government decided in early 2005 to pursue an innovative strategy: it wanted to trademark, or brand, the names Harar/Harrar, Sidamo, and Yirgacheffe to command a greater share of the prices that its best coffees fetched at the retail end in the global north. With trademarks, the country could charge distributors a licensing fee for their use. The European Union, Japan, and Canada all approved this trademark scheme. But when the Ethiopian intellectual property office approached the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register Sidamo, they were surprised to discover that something called Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo was already in the pipeline. Starbucks had gotten there ahead of Ethiopia, and the patent office refused to consider another trademark that included Sidamo.

Trouble began when the Ethiopian government tried to contact Starbucks to resolve the matter. Yet the origins of the conflict were innocent enough. In 2002, Starbucks had approached the Fero Farmers Cooperative in Ethiopia and asked members to experiment with a different way of processing their coffee. Dub Hay explained, “We took the cherry, did not ferment or process it, just put it on drying beds and let it dry in the sun. There’s mucilage around the seeds, and when you don’t wash that off and allow it to sit, some of that flavor and the sugars are absorbed in the bean. It’s more bold, more up front, not as crisp, clean, or lemony, but you get all these wild flavors.”

It wasn’t an instant success. “We had to convince the farmer co-op it would be a good experiment, and the first year we did it, it was a complete disaster,” Hay recalled. “The coffee was undrinkable. We didn’t have all perfectly ripe berries, so some of the flavors were bad. We paid them for the 40,000 pounds of coffee and threw it away. But we convinced them to try again using only perfectly ripe beans, and we got this unique flavor; I’d never tasted anything like it. We asked the co-op to help us name it and called it Shirkina Sun-dried Sidamo, Shirkina meaning “partnership” in the local language. It became a Black Apron special and was a huge partner and customer favorite.” At this point Starbucks applied to the U.S. Patent Office for the right to trademark Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo.

Copyrighting Coffee?

Most of us are generally familiar with the notion of copyrighting original literary and artistic work, patenting inventions, and trademarking brand names and logos. According to the Patent Office, “A trademark includes any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination, used, or intended to be used, in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others, and to indicate the source of the goods. In short, a trademark is a brand name.” But as a new era of global trade has developed under the jurisdiction of the World Trade Organization, a new raft of intellectual property laws has also emerged. Known as Trade Related Aspects of International Property (TRIPs), they were passed in 1995 to prevent entities (mostly in developing nations) from stealing or misusing corporations’ intellectual property. TRIPs place the burdens and costs of enforcement on the poorer countries. Yet its proponents argued that strict adherence would encourage affluent nations to lavish their poor cousins with new business ventures and inventions to address problems of hunger and health.

Nor surprisingly, however, the results are hardly salubrious. In addition to normal corporate battles to protect brand and lucre, there have also been breathtakingly venal moves to assert dominion over various kinds of property. Most notorious have been the efforts of big pharmaceutical companies to protect drug patents against the development of cheaper generics to treat HIV/AIDS and cancer. Although the TRIPs had originally included a few safeguards so that developing nations could produce generics, companies such as Novartis and Pfizer have lobbied to weaken even these modest protections. They argue that the monetary rewards promised by intellectual property are necessary to encourage scientific innovation. India, which rejected the patent for a cancer drug because a similar generic was available at one-tenth the cost, has been sued by Novartis to capitulate.

The story is similar in agriculture, where Monsanto has become a monster, harvesting seeds for subsistence crops such as maize, rice, and cotton from developing countries and then subjecting those seeds to genetic engineering. The new seeds, ostensibly engineered to withstand disease and produce higher yields, are then resold to the very same countries. The genetically engineered strains supplant heritage varieties and are often bred to germinate for one year only, forcing farmers to buy new seeds every year rather than save part of the crop for replanting. In other cases, farmers in the origin countries are prohibited by law from creating their own supply. Thus, Monsanto both wipes out native species and forces poorer nations into greater dependence and poverty.

Starbucks’ invocation of intellectual property laws has been less disastrous, but it’s often been silly. A number of conflicts have arisen over store names deemed too similar to Starbucks’ own. Targets have included tiny Sambucks in Astoria, Oregon; HaidaBucks on Queen Charlotte Island in Canada; and Starstrucks in India. This seems rather like the lord of the manor pursuing poachers: both predatory and petty. But Starbucks also protects particular blends or products. You would, for example, be unwise to market Gazebo blend coffee or a Frappuccino. Thus, the Ethiopian situation was a notable reversal in the pattern. When the company tried to brand its new method of processing Sidamo beans, it was accused not of overzealous trademark enforcement but of stealing Ethiopia’s birthright.

Ron Layton, an attorney from New Zealand, has developed and promoted intriguing ideas on the use of intellectual property as a tool for development in the global south and started a company called Light Years IP to advance the work. In a 2004 World Bank publication titled Poor People’s Knowledge, he argues that intellectual property provides more profit than manufacturing and agriculture do: “The IP laws, although somewhat disadvantageous to developing countries, are available for enforcement in the developed markets. Fair trade interventions offer the needed model for market access and delivery systems that ensure that revenues from IP exports do alleviate poverty.”

In The Coffee Paradox, authors Daviron and Ponte note that specialty coffee commands high retail prices not because of its tangible qualities but because of the symbolic qualities of the brand or experience. Ironically, they find, the higher the quality of the coffee, the lower the percentage of its retail price that goes to farmers. So long as farmers in producing countries sell commodities and distributors in consuming countries sell brands, the suppliers at the beginning of the chain will suffer increasing income disparity; they can only change the equation by capturing some of that intangible value for the countries of origin.

“It’s not really value-added,” Ron Layton corrected me when I used the term. “I call it ‘value inherent.’ We are shifting away from competing as a commodity to the inherent value of the coffee. If you have a shirt by a major designer and an identical one from an unknown, what makes you pay two hundred dollars for one and not the other? It’s the brand, the nonphysical enhancement . . . So we realized there’s a big intangible value to this coffee that they’re not getting a share of, and how do we get hold of that?”

Ethiopian coffee was a test of the intellectual property approach: the names of the indigenous coffees were already somewhat familiar in the developed world, and fair trade models were already in play. Layton and his firm assisted the newly formed Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office and its director Getachew Mengistie to formulate a plan that led them to the U.S. Patent Office, to Starbucks’ Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo, and to the company’s wall of silence.

No one at Starbucks is willing to say how this happened, but unfortunately for all concerned the original correspondence from the Ethiopian embassy was routed to an intellectual property attorney in the Starbucks legal department and was ignored by anyone whose viewpoint might have transcended legal considerations. Beginning in March 2005, K. E. Kassahum Ayele, a former Ethiopian ambassador to the United States, tried to meet with Howard Schultz to resolve the issue of the Shirkina application. He received only a curt response from a company attorney and an invitation to a dinner honoring Schultz. A press release from the Ethiopian embassy quoted Ayele as saying, “I asked to engage in substantive discussion with Mr. Schultz on the issues, not to have a debate with a lawyer and attend award ceremonies. I expected reasonable consideration and friendly dialogue, but was shocked at Starbucks’ refusal to meet and to discuss the situation.”

The Oxfam Intervention

Then Oxfam stepped onto the scene. The U.K.-based nonprofit describes itself as a “development, relief, and campaigning organization that works with others to find lasting solutions to poverty and suffering around the world.” With the millennium coffee crisis, Oxfam’s “Make Trade Fair” campaign focused on the plight of coffee growers.

In the past, Starbucks and Oxfam had been wary partners in several small projects. For instance, they had collaborated to help a small Mexican farmers’ cooperative improve the quality of its fair trade coffee; and in 2004 Starbucks U.K. had contributed 179,000 dollars to a jointly sponsored rural development effort that included irrigation and women’s literacy programs in Ethiopia’s East Hararge region. To avoid the appearance and prevent the reality of selling out, each party reserved the right to criticize the other. At the time of the East Hararge effort, Phil Bloomer of Oxfam U.K. told the Financial Times, “We want to maintain a constructive and critical relationship with Starbucks. We hope they’ll challenge us, and we know we’ll continue to challenge them.”

When the Ethiopian trademark became an issue, the moment of challenge arrived. Seth Petchers, head of Oxfam America’s coffee campaign, knew one of Ron Layton’s Light Years staff members and had been following the new strategy with interest. “In the spring of 2005,” he told me, “I got a call from Light Years and the Ethiopian government, expressing frustration about not being able to get in touch with Starbucks. Since we knew about coffee and had a relationship with the company, we got involved.”

Oxfam and Starbucks tell somewhat conflicting stories about communications during the eighteen months between Ethiopia’s first effort to talk with the company and Oxfam’s public campaign to change the company’s mind. It rapidly became apparent, however, that the issue involved more than miscommunication. Starbucks did not want to sign a licensing agreement. “It’s not a good solution, and the details are unacceptable,” Dub Hay protested to me early in the conflict. “We’d have to consult with them about how we package and market our coffee. It’s just not tenable. And there’s no guarantee that the fees would ever reach the farmers. It’s not good for them either.”

The company expressed agreement with the underlying goal of getting more money to the Ethiopian farmers but advocated instead a geographic certification, or appellation<M>something comparable to the name protections granted to Wisconsin cheddar and French champagne. Certification would allow Ethiopia to protect the product’s good name and authenticity. Yet as its advocates pointed out, the appellation approach relies on market demand to set higher prices rather than paying direct fees for use of a name.

According to Oxfam, both the farmers’ welfare and Starbucks’ own reputation were indisputable arguments for signing the licensing agreement. By obstructing the trademark filing, the company was depriving Ethiopia of critical additional revenues, a figure that advocates estimated at 88 million dollars roughly eighty cents more per pound of coffee. There were also behind-the-scenes discussions at the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) and the National Coffee Association (NCA); and reports of those discussions slipped into advocates’ hands and into cyberspace, alleging that Starbucks was obstructing the trademark filings while publicly denying any such role.

Yet there’s ample evidence that many association members agreed that licensing was a bad idea. “Ethiopia got some very poor advice from both the marketing and legal standpoint” was the personal assessment of Ted Lingle, former director of SCAA. “No one wants to beat up on the Ethiopian farmer; there’s no PR value that comes out of that. But the specialty market doesn’t really need Ethiopian coffees.” He noted that, out of 3 or 4 million bags of coffee from Ethiopia, perhaps half a million are high-end coffees. “The world has otherwise thought of them as a Brazil substitute, a commercial supply. Their market reputation really isn’t much, and now they feel they can inflate what little they have. The market is not going to support it. The effort is misguided and doomed to fail.”

Black Gold

Nonetheless, in 2006 Oxfam and Light Years convened a cadre of progressive advocates, including Co-op America and Catholic Relief Services; they envisioned a “big noise” strategy waged with street demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, and a heated Internet presence to pressure Starbucks into an agreement. These factors alone would have been enough to create a collision course. But Starbucks was about to be hit from another quarter as well. In 2003, two young British filmmakers, Marc and Nick Francis, decided to make a documentary on how the poverty crisis in Ethiopia was intersecting with the coffee industry. Nick Francis told me:

I first went to Ethiopia in 1997, and when I was there, I was thinking, “I’m in the birthplace of coffee, yet this is one of the poorest countries. How can that be?” Then in 2003, we learned that Ethiopia was facing another famine, like the one in ’84 that led to the Live Aid concert. But unlike ’84, even the richest coffee-growing areas were caught up in the crisis. At the same time, we were seeing more and more coffee shops everywhere, in Britain, in the U.S. There was this mushrooming coffee industry, but the people who grew it were in this absolute humanitarian emergency. We wanted to make the connection between the two, between the coffee-consuming public and the growers.

The result of their two-year odyssey was Black Gold, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2006, generating a buzz of its own. The documentary follows Tadesse Meskela from the Ethiopian coffee fields and the Oromia offices in Addis Ababa to the trade shows of Europe and the United States to seek a market for the beans. “We wanted to feature a protagonist from Africa who is out there doing something rather than waiting for charity and goodwill,” Nick explained. For the filmmakers, Tadesse’s work challenged our western notion that Africa survives solely on aid from the developed world.

By way of the farmers in the cooperative and Tadesse’s efforts on their behalf, the film exposes the web of trade regulations that keep farmers in developing countries poor, even while transnational corporations in the global north prosper. Women painstakingly sort millions of beans; and viewers observe the hunger and substandard housing that accompany poverty. Juxtaposed with these images are the cosmopolitan cafés of Europe and America, the comfort of conspicuous consumption, the places of commerce where deprivation in one part of the globe is turned into the wealth of another.

And like most recent efforts to hold the coffee industry accountable for the plight of the farmers, the film can’t resist featuring Starbucks as a predatory Goliath. In a scene praised by Washington Post film reviewer Ann Hornaday, the camera pays a call on the original Starbucks store at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where two ever-so-bubbly baristas welcome the crew. Hornaday comments, “During the film’s most painful sequence, his [Tadesse’s] efforts and Ethiopia’s persistent, crushing famine are juxtaposed with the vapidly cheerful corp-speak of two Starbucks baristas.”

Yes, the baristas are excessively perky as they purvey coffee and the Starbucks experience; yet they are also model employees, supportive of each other, efficient, and proud of their company. At the time of the filming, the young women were entertaining a tour from the Specialty Coffee Association, to which the filmmakers had attached themselves to avoid asking Starbucks or its employees for permission to film. How could these young women know that they would be featured as unwitting symbols of the harm that transnational coffee giants inflict on poor Ethiopian farmers? At the progressive screening I attended, they were also the objects of disparaging audience laughter. Great, I thought. Because these Brit filmmakers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, interview Howard Schultz, they’re making two low-wage workers the target of their comparison.

Nick assured me this wasn’t his intention: “People are laughing at what they’re saying, like ‘Starbucks touches people’s lives all over the world,’ not at who’s saying it. The intention is not to mistreat them but to illuminate the issues, because they are the foot soldiers.” He said that the filmmakers had spent six months trying to interview someone from Starbucks for the film, to no avail. Former director of media relations Audrey Lincoff recalled meeting the filmmakers after a conference presentation and told me they had once asked to interview Schultz on very short notice, which he was unable to accommodate. The filmmakers claim that subsequent calls went unanswered. The final frames of the film say that the big-four coffee transnationals and Starbucks refused to comment.

When I noted that Starbucks, which buys just a small percentage of Ethiopian coffee, had been made the villain of the piece rather than Nestlé, Proctor & Gamble, Kraft, and Sara Lee, which buy exponentially more coffee, Nick suggested that my cultural bias was influencing my viewpoint. “The film isn’t about Starbucks,” he insisted. “They’re a very tiny part. It’s just that in the U.S. people look for Starbucks; it’s the cultural reference point that gets illuminated. It’s very much a lifestyle, and people may see it as a critique of their own lifestyle choice.” Nevertheless, the film sent a far sharper message about Starbucks than it did about the companies more accountable for Ethiopia’s plight. And with the conflict about trademarks mushrooming, Black Gold itself had struck gold: the filmmakers had received the perfect media hook for their film, and they lost no time in making it part of their publicity campaign.

Growing Criticism

Starbucks’ response to the film was curiously flat-footed. At the beginning of June 2006, the company held an African Coffee Celebration, touting the continent’s gourmet coffees and implicitly Starbucks’ good works. Although the producers of Black Gold suggest this was purely an effort to counter the bad publicity generated by their film, the event had actually been planned many months earlier, and Tadesse Meskela had been invited to participate. As it turns out, Tadesse did speak at the Starbucks event, praising the company’s prices and projects in Ethiopia. Then he attended the Seattle screening of Black Gold, where he condemned the company’s perfidy. Meanwhile, although the Starbucks staff had seen the film, no one seems to have approached Tadesse to acknowledge or discuss his concerns or explore ways to blunt the mounting crisis.

There were other missed opportunities. Not only had the coffee purchasing department been working with Tadesse and his cooperative for a number of years, but Seth Petchers of Oxfam and Starbucks vice president Sue Mecklenburg had developed a working relationship during prior collaborations. Both Petchers and Mecklenburg sidestepped questions on these matters, but sources suggest that Mecklenburg had advocated a course of engagement different from the one the company actually followed and that she met internal opposition from hardliners. As a result, chances to engage the parties went begging, apparently overcome by distrust and organizational tensions about how to respond.

Faced with growing criticism and the threat of a public confrontation, Starbucks decided to back off. When the trademark for Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo was approved on June 25, 2006, the company walked away from the application. “We dropped it,” Dub Hay told me. “All we had wanted was to protect this coffee, the shirkina sun-dried process that we had worked on.” He was aggrieved and angry. “Hurting farmers was the farthest thing from what we were trying to do. Our purchases in Ethiopia over the last four years are up 400 percent, our prices are up 40 percent. We’re buying more Ethiopian coffee than we’ve ever bought before and paying premiums no one else has paid. So here we are, thinking we’re doing absolutely the right thing helping the farmers and the co-ops, and someone’s thinking that we’re hurting them. It wasn’t worth it. We gave it up.”

But despite Starbucks’ withdrawal, criticism continued. To make matters worse, Ethiopia’s advocates again accused the company of pressuring the National Coffee Association to oppose the trademark filings in its stead. Starbucks and the NCA both vigorously denied this assertion, but none of the advocating groups believed them. “From my own experience of Starbucks in 2005 and nearly all of 2006,” wrote Ambassador Ayele, “ . . . this looks to me like a clear attempt of the company to hide behind an industry association, while Starbucks continued in its determination to prevent Ethiopia from carrying out its trademark program.”

When I saw Dub Hay in mid-October 2006, he was still convinced that trademarking was a poor strategy. “Oxfam wants us to sign, and they won’t listen to why we don’t think it’s a good idea,” he lamented. At the end of that month, the story broke in the foreign press, with Oxfam in particularly strident form. “Starbucks’ behavior is indefensible,” Petchers inveighed to a reporter. “Starbucks works to protect and promote its own name and brand vigorously throughout the world, so how can it justify denying Ethiopia the right to do the same?” Another Oxfam spokesperson told the BBC that the company’s behavior “stinks of corporate bullying.”

To stave off the escalating controversy, Starbucks again offered to help Ethiopia develop and implement a geographic coffee certification, but the offer did nothing to diffuse the conflict. Oxfam New Zealand staffer Linda Broom told a reporter, “We’ve been lobbying from behind the scenes, but Starbucks has turned a blind eye, so now we’re hoping for a public backlash.”

By November, the Ethiopian government, Oxfam, and Light Years effectively mounted a coordinated effort to compel Starbucks to sign the licensing agreement. Over a period of a few months, more than 90,000 activists and consumers contacted the company to demand a change in its position. On December 16, 2006, Oxfam coordinated a day of action in the United States and abroad. Activists leafleted stores, picketed with posters picturing Ethiopian farmers, and enlisted the support of local Ethiopian communities. On a YouTube video, newly educated customers urged Starbucks to pay Ethiopian farmers more for their coffee and recognize the trademarks.

Dub Hay responded for the company with a YouTube offering of his own, sincere and low-key but wrongly impugning the legality of the trademark strategy. And according to reports, former Starbucks CEO Jim Donald, meeting with Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, didn’t seem to know the difference between a trademark and a certification. “I can’t talk about the details because I don’t understand them,” he told a London Times reporter. “I’m not a trademark lawyer.”

Honest Mistake?

Its more aggressive opponents remain convinced that Starbucks, like all corporations, is incapable of making an honest mistake. All errors are attributed to bad faith; the company’s motives are berated, its missteps celebrated, and all its actions viewed through a prism of cynicism. The supercynical argue that the accuracy or inaccuracy of the particulars doesn’t really matter because the company is surely bad enough to deserve the negative blast. Hence, Reverend Billy of the Church of No Shopping had no problem with saying, “You’re stealing trademarks from Ethiopian coffee farmers. Starbucks is the devil.”

But some progressives take a more nuanced approach. The National Labor Committee, run by Barbara Briggs and Charlie Kernaghan, was established to help protect worker and human rights in the global economy. Since 1991, the committee has focused U.S. consumers’ attention on offshore clothing sweatshops, most notably exposing the Honduran sweatshops that sewed the Kathie Lee Gifford line for Wal-Mart. Briggs and Kernaghan are masters at holding corporations accountable, often through the canny use of publicity to magnify their organizing. Over the years, they’ve developed a sophisticated view of corporations and tactics.

Briggs acknowledges that, in choosing a public target, “the calculus includes how well-known the brand is, and how much the brand will want to protect its image. It’s not so much how good or bad the company is on a theoretical level, but what we actually see on the ground.” She suggests that the difference in how to proceed depends a lot on what happens once a human or workers’ rights issue has been flagged. “We’ve found that even the best companies have some pretty lousy places,” she told me. “The difference is, the good companies called us and told us what they were doing to correct the problem. We didn’t hear that from Wal-Mart.”

A key criterion for a confrontation and the way in which it is waged is whether it benefits the people in whose name the effort has been undertaken. Not all struggles for greater justice can be won, certainly not in the short term, but it helps to have a meaningful and achievable outcome in mind. For some radical campaigners, like the IWW, the publicity sometimes seems more important than the outcome. Ethiopia, on the other hand, needed real solutions and an agreement. “Starbucks is a valuable partner,” Getachew Megistie of Ethiopia’s Intellectual Property Office told me. “We just want to make the relationship more meaningful. Both they and we want to stop the loss of farmers and small traders. And we want to resolve our differences amicably.”

It looks like Getachew will get his wish. At the fourth African Fine Coffee Conference in Addis Ababa in February 2007, Dub Hay announced that Starbucks would not oppose Ethiopia’s trademarking initiative: “It is Ethiopia’s absolute right to take the course they think is best for Ethiopia and we will not oppose that.” He sweetened the Starbucks response with commitments to double the amount of coffee the company buys from Africa, jumping from 6 to 12 percent of its total by 2009. He also promised a 1-million-dollar revolving microloan fund for Ethiopia and 500,000 dollars to CARE International for a literacy program in the country. And the company committed to opening a farmer support center in East Africa.

“We made a mistake,” Jim Donald told me, echoing, or maybe leading, others in the company to the well. “We treated it as though it was a legal issue. But it wasn’t. It was a relationship issue.” Bingo. Starbucks took a bit too long to reach this conclusion, but it finally did. Although company experts still seemed to think the licensing idea was misguided, they had decided to suspend judgment and help Ethiopia’s experiment move forward.

When I did my last interviews at Starbucks on April 3, 2007, Howard Schultz and Jim Donald were meeting with representatives of the Ethiopian government. A month later Starbucks agreed to negotiate a licensing agreement, and the deal was inked in late June. As has so often been the case, the conflict drew massive attention. By comparison, the resolution received little notice.

Given the trademarking scheme’s experimental nature, there is no way to know if the strategy will be successful. The greatest boon to farmers might be Starbucks’ commitment to buy more coffee, make more loans, and offer greater technical expertise. But at least the campaign had moved Africa’s plight to the head of queue.

For a company that likes to portray itself as artfully balancing the demands of profit and principle, the Ethiopian crisis was a hard test. Starbucks didn’t do a very good job of handling it, but the company survived and learned something more about its role in the world, although what and how much would have to await the next crisis. “When you sign a copy of the book for me, I’ll tell you whether I think the resistance was worth all the aggravation,” one Starbucks player ruefully told me. I thought I knew the answer.

But Getachew was thrilled with the outcome, and hopeful. “Once we were actually able to talk with them, we were able to start resolving the problems,” he told me. “It’s like me sitting here with you. We haven’t met before, but we get to know each other. And next time we know each other a little better, and we grow to understand each other.”

Fellner, a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, is a longtime progressive organizer and communication who currently works in the labor movement.

By Shumon Alam, Oxfam

It rains a lot in Addis Ababa. The day can start with nice bright sun, shining down on the highest city in Africa, but within hours it can become dark and gloomy, with drizzle pouring on the rocky soil. A little rain can bring the temperature to below ten degrees with a chilly wind. Since I have arrived in this beautiful mountain city, I have spent most of my late afternoons and early evenings on the balcony of a Family Guest House, sitting on a chair gazing at the sprawling city as rainwater washes the roads, buildings, trees and hills.

This downpour never stops the daily life in the city. From the balcony, I can see cars running on the Bole road. People are walking to and fro, holding umbrellas over their heads. I can see Shewangiazaw Derbe, the caretaker of this guesthouse, sitting on the chair, a sheet wrapped around his body, observing the raindrops on the ground with undivided attention. Once in a while the phone would ring and he would get up to answer it. Sometimes he would come up with a bottle of water or coffee to the guest on my floor. Sometimes he would stop at my request and chat with me.

The conversation always starts with rain. Shewangiazaw informed me that it is not typical for all of Ethiopia. Some areas in Ethiopia only have a few showers throughout the year and often face drought. His hometown Debre Birhin, in the Amhara region, has had little rain this year, though it is not as severe as other parts of the country. Through several rain-induced conversations I have got to know him a little better.

Shewangiazaw left his home almost six years ago to support his two brothers and younger sister. One of his brothers took up farming on the small land they had, producing beans, maze and Teff. The youngest brother and sister are still in school. His has four more sisters and all are married off.

He works seven days a week and only gets few days leave every year, with a salary of 500 Birr (approximately 30 GBP) and a room to sleep.  He tries to send half his salary to his siblings so they can continue with their education. However it has become harder by the day. Nowadays, he is spending more of his salary on food. He informed me that the price of food has gone up two to three times in the last year. “A kilo (2.2 pounds) of tomato used to cost 3 Birr few months ago, now it cost 7 Birr. 50 cents Injera cost almost 3 Birr”, Shewangiazaw said, “I don’t know why but the price is going up every day.”

The increase in food prices, coupled with two failed crops within the year because of lack of rain, has pushed millions of people in Ethiopia near to starvation. In an interview with the Financial Times, Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, said: “The increase in food prices has pushed a significant number of Ethiopians, particularly among the urban poor and in some pastoralist regions and areas of drought, to the brink…” Recently in a statement, the United Nations has described the food crisis in Ethiopia as “alarming”. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that “the food security situation in Ethiopia has deteriorated to alarming levels in the wake of drought conditions throughout much of the country”. The UN says that more than four million Ethiopians need emergency assistance and a further eight million need immediate food relief. The Daily Monitor reported, quoting WFP that around 737,000 Ethiopian are enrolled in its Targeted Supplementary Feeding programme (TSF), designed to address the problem of acute malnutrition among pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five.

Shewangiazaw started to repair his house but had to stop in this tough economic situation. “Money was good back then. Tips were good. Nowadays it is becoming less. People don’t have money to tip, I guess,” he said. He hopes the situation will become better and he will able to finish his house. Once he is done with the house and his brother and sister are out of school, he plans to become a taxi driver in Addis Ababa. As the new years starts in Ethiopia, people like Shewangiazaw have had to put their dreams on hold and hope for the best in the future.

In connection with the local elections of 2001 in Ethiopia, the Norwegian Institute of Human has had researchers in the field following up and reporting on the election processes in different regions of the country. These reports are a continuation of the Institute’s research on elections as a part of the democratisation processes in Ethiopia since 1991. The reports from 2001 also constitute an immediate follow up on the findings presented in the NIHR publication on the previous parliamentary elections, “The Ethiopian Elections 2000. Democracy Advanced or Restricted?” edited by Siegfried Pausewang and Kjetil Tronvoll.

The researchers Siegfried Pausewang and Lovise Aalen travelled to the Southern Region to follow the local elections there on 23 and 29 December 2001. The elections were initially to be conducted in July, but were postponed several times. Aalen and Pausewang followed the elections in the Zones of Sidama, Hadyia, Kambata-Alaba-Tambaro and Gedeo. This report is based on Pausewang and Aalen’s findings during their field research.

The report has been edited by Bergljot Hovland. All opinions expressed in the report are the authors’ responsibility and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights.

The Norwegian Institute of Human Rights / Nordem
University of Oslo
February 2002

Expectations unfulfilled

Despite the apparently reduced engagement in politics at the local level before and during the local elections, many observers and politicians at the national and regional level expressed high expectations for the upcoming elections. Both representatives from the Ethiopian Human Rights Council and Southern Front leaders at regional and zone level expected strong competition between the ruling party and the opposition. The Southern Coalition leader Dr Beyene Petros was relatively optimistic and expected that the Coalition would field candidates in most of the constituencies for the zonal and woreda elections. He complained, however, that imprisonment and harassment of candidates and a very short time for campaigning had reduced the party’s capacity to compete in the elections. As my descriptions below will show, the competition between the two parties on election day was much less that anticipated, due to large-scale withdrawal of opposition candidates immediately before and during the elections.

Both in written and oral form, ruling party leaders expressed expectations of better electoral performance for the upcoming local polls in the south. One of the main arguments behind these expectations was that the renewal (tehaddso) that allegedly had taken place within the party organisations during 2001 had strengthened the democratic nature of the party organisation. The EPRDF bulletin Tehaddso proclaimed that “The fact that this election follows soon after one of the most important renewal movements gives us great hope in avoiding the repeat of some of the most inexcusable mistakes committed by members of our party.”^[9]

The elected leaders at regional and zone level (represented by Haile Mariam Dessalegn, president of Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State (SNNPRS) and Abote Anito, chairman of KAT zone council) were openly discussing the challenges of implementing democracy at the ground level in Ethiopia. They were aware of the necessity of correcting violations conducted by lower party members and of the importance of training of kebele officials and local cadres in democracy and human rights in order to create a conducive atmosphere for fair elections. Nevertheless, the increased awareness of the regional and zonal leaders cannot be seen as a substantial progress in itself unless it leads to a behavioural change of the political actors in the woreda and the kebele. As my descriptions of the pre-election period and the election day will show, the message from above had not reached down to the grass root of the organisation. Although the elections were conducted without severe violence, many members of the lower party organisation and the representatives of local administrative bodies repeated past mistakes. For them, it seemed that the first priority was to prevent the opposition from winning seats like it had done in the 2000 elections. This priority was apparently hard to combine with the stated intentions of the tehaddso movement.

The election campaign

The elections in the south were postponed several times during 2001. This led to uncertainty and a weaker campaigning and mobilisation than in the previous election. Firstly, the elections were postponed from February/March to June because the electoral board needed time to ensure that the mistakes from the May 2000 elections would not be repeated. Secondly, the June elections were rescheduled until November allegedly because of the rainy season’s impact on the board’s logistical capacity. Thirdly, the November date was again altered, partly because the opposition claimed that there should be more time for releasing its political activists from prison before the elections started. Finally, the end of December was decided, despite protests from the opposition that they had too little time for campaigning and registering candidates and that the majority of the peasants in southern region would be pre-occupied with harvesting at this time and did not have time for voting.

Compared to the 2000 elections, there was little public debate about the upcoming polls. Neither Inter Africa Group nor Ethiopian Human Rights Council arranged party debates, and there were no other public arenas for both parties to discuss with each other. But the Southern Front had their own arenas for campaigning, for example evaluation of party candidates in public meetings in the kebele and meetings with regional and national members of parliament who went back to their home areas to propagate for the party. The Coalition also sent members of the national and regional parliaments back to their areas of origin to assist the campaigning, but the party leader Beyene Petros stayed in Addis Ababa. Although many party supporters argued that he had to stay in the capital to co-ordinate their activities and that it might not be safe for him to come to the south, they were also disappointed by his absence. “If he had been here for one single meeting, we would not have suffered from problems of mobilisation. More people would undoubtedly have voted for us if he had been here” stated one of the party leaders in Kambata.

In the local elections in Addis Ababa in February/March 2001, the public debates and mobilisation were also at low ebbs, but nevertheless the voters were subject to increased pressure through door to door campaigns from kebele officials^[10]. In the southern elections a similar pattern occurred. Many voters, particularly in Doyogenna area in Kambata, told that kebele officials had come to their homes to register and distribute election cards to the voters. This was interpreted by the voters as undue pressure to participate in the elections and vote for the ruling party. Such practise is against the election regulations, where it is clearly stated that “any registrar who registers voters outside the polling stations […] will be punished according with the penal code.”^[11]

Joint committees

Although the tehaddso did not lead to the improvements that the ruling party leaders had proclaimed, there was one achievement in the running of the local elections. This was the establishment of “joint committees” consisting of one representative each from the contesting parties and one from the National Electoral Board. These committees were meant to solve conflicts that arose in the pre-election period and on election day. In places like Shone and Durame they managed to correct some violations, but due to limited capacity and power they were able to intervene only in a small number of cases^[12]. One of the achievements the joint committee in KAT zone obtained was that candidates were allowed to hand in their supporting signatures directly to the woreda electoral board instead of to the kebele office. This made the registration of candidates less prone to political manipulation from the ruling party because the opposition felt less threatened by intimidation from the kebele officials. This is an example of how important it is to exclude overzealous kebele officials from the electoral process, and should be followed up by other measures to detach kebele and woreda offices from organising the elections. Nevertheless, in most places the strong power and presence of the kebele and woreda executives in the electoral process made the joint committees inactive or non-existent and generally they played no significant role in solving differences or mediating conflicts during the election.

Withdrawal and cancellation of opposition candidates

The joint committees were not able to prevent opposition candidates from withdrawing or being cancelled from the elections the week before the woreda and zone election and on polling day. In Kambata, where I did most of the interviews in the pre-election period, opposition candidates withdrawing or being cancelled was relatively widespread. In areas where strong competition was expected, like in Shinshicho and Angacha towns, only the ruling party candidates maintained their candidacy. When I visited those towns I was quite surprised by the absence of the opposition, because I was told by the Coalition that these places would probably be some of the hotspots in the elections. When I arrived, I approached the local authorities to ask them the reason. Members of the ruling party generally explained the absence of the opposition candidates either by the argument that the candidates were not really being members of the Southern Coalition and therefore had been cancelled by the local NEB, or that they had withdrawn voluntarily because they had realised that they did not have enough support from the people. One Southern Front representative in Angacha woreda stated that “many [opposition party] members withdraw because they haven’t been able to keep the promises they made for the last election. People are realising that the Coalition is lying. They promised free fertilisers supply from the party, but they did nothing! Many people withdraw their supporting signatures for the candidates and some even write a public letter stating that they do not support the party anymore.”^[13]

When I talked to the ex-members or ex-candidates of Southern Coalition without the presence of the EPRDF cadres, however, they told us that they had abandoned their party membership or candidature because they feared for their family’s security, and not because they rejected the ideas or the programme of the party. Threats concerned i.e. their access to land and community services, imprisonment and threats on their lives. One of them, who had written a public letter telling that he abandoned his involvement, told it in this way: “Some months ago I was a member of the Southern Coalition. In the last election I was campaigning for the party and it won here. But the EPRDF were forcing the Southern Coalition and our members were beaten and imprisoned, especially at the kebele level. So I decided to be neutral and withdraw from politics. At this time I live peacefully and feel happy for that. If I had continued with politics I would probably have been imprisoned now.”^[14]

In Shinshicho town in Kachabirra woreda the opposition candidates had apparently withdrawn voluntarily. I was not able to talk to any of the withdrawn candidates, but the opposition party leaders in the zone claimed that the candidates did not want to maintain their candidacy because their complaints to the local electoral board had not been taken seriously. One specific concern was that the local head of the electoral board was a known member of the ruling party, and he had not been replaced by a neutral person despite repeated complaints about him^[15]. In Sidama, many SLM candidates withdrew during election day because of alleged election fraud. They claimed that after seeing ballot boxes being stuffed before the polling stations were opened, they had withdrawn because they had realised that there was no chance of being fairly elected^[16].

In addition to the “voluntary” withdrawal of candidates there were several reports of opposition candidates being involuntarily cancelled from the lists during election day. Many of the Coalition candidates complained that they had not been issued ID cards, their names were not made public and some candidates were cancelled from the lists during the election day on allegations that they were not qualified candidates. Many of these cancellations were done without any formal decisions from the NEB^[17]. It was therefore difficult to trace who actually had done the cancellations and whether it was done on order from the electoral officials or the local kebele and woreda officials. But many opposition candidates claimed that the reason for cancellation was that kebele officials, when checking the validity of the supporting signatures collected, had claimed that they could not be accepted.

The role of armed guards

In the majority of the places I visited on election day, there were several armed guards at the gate and even inside of the polling stations. Some of the armed guards were local police or militia linked to the kebele, while others were demobilised soldiers who had returned to their home areas and were hired by the kebele authorities to take care of the security on election day. According to the election regulations published by NEB, the electoral officers are only allowed to assign the police for security, and persons carrying weapons should stay five hundred metres away from the polling stations (Election Officers Manual, April 2000, Addis Ababa, p. 180). Apart from being a violation of the electoral law, this armed presence had a negative psychological effect on the voters. In many cases, the voters expressed that they perceived the guards as agents of the ruling party and were reminded of the retaliating role played by armed personnel after the 2000 elections in Hadiya and Tambaro. There were also several reports on kebele officials and police shooting gunshots in the air during the counting of the votes, particularly in Angacha woreda (Dinika area). Southern Front members explained this as a way of celebrating the SEPDF victory, while the Southern Coalition saw it as a way of threatening their observers present in the polling stations at that time.

In addition to the kebele militia and the demobilised soldiers was the presence of regular armed forces stationed in many parts of the southern region. According to the regional president Hailemariam Dessalegn, there are six camps of soldiers within the region, located in Wolaita, Awassa, Arbaminch, Hossaina, Shone and the Jinka border area. He claimed that the location of the camps had nothing to do with the elections. The opposition, however, claimed that the armed forces were deliberately placed in some of these areas because they were expected to be contested. Although the armed forces allegedly had been told to stay in their barrack during the elections, the opposition claimed that large groups of soldiers had moved around to provoke and scare the voters, particularly in remote areas at night. During our stay in the region, we did not observe any regular army moving around and we were therefore not able to confirm or refute the opposition’s claim on army activity.

Kebele and woreda officials intervening

In addition to the strong presence of armed guards, the attendance of kebele and woreda officials in the polling stations added to the pressure on voters and the electoral board officials to favour the ruling party. In the majority of the polling stations I visited, kebele and woreda officials were the ones who approached us when we asked for admittance to the sites. In some cases they forwarded us to the electoral board officials, but more often they were the ones who took the decision whether we would be allowed to enter or not. This indicates that the local officials acted as organisers and controllers of the electoral process and intervened in the work, which the NEB officials were supposed to take care of. This is a clear violation of the electoral regulations, which states that members of the administrative bodies and kebele officials can show up at the polling stations only as voters. In the 2000 elections, this issue was raised by the National Electoral Board itself, when NEB urged administrative bodies to stay 500 metres away from the polling stations and prohibited them from appearing at the polling station from six a.m. until the results are officially known^[18]. Even EPRDF’s own “code of conduct” for this election clearly states that “during the election period government institutions and law enforcement agents should not be used in support of any political organisation or candidate”.^[19]

When I asked the local officials about their role in the elections, many of them told that they were assigned to take care of security issues and to see that everything went smoothly. They were apparently not intending to hide the fact that they played an important role in the conduct of the elections. This shows that the local executive can basically act according to their own interests without taking the electoral regulations into consideration. It also shows that the electoral board is too weak and lacks the independence from the local executive to prevent violations of the regulations, or that they are deliberately allowing the local officials to interfere because they basically share the same interests – those of the ruling party.

Imprisonment of opposition activists

A major complaint from the opposition was that their activists were frequently imprisoned on a short-term basis just before and during election day. In Kambata, we observed ourselves that police attempted to arrest an opposition activist after he had approached us to report on violations of the electoral law. My interpreter, who speaks both the local Kambata language and Amharic, was able to read the situation without the knowledge of the involved parties, and did therefore obtain information that was not intended to come through to us. He observed that the police officer that was assigned as a guard outside the polling station threatened the activist to imprison him if he did not keep quiet. When the activist protested, some woreda officials, who also were candidates, intervened and told the police to leave the man until “the guests” had left. In other places where opposition activists were imprisoned during election day, for example in Doyogenna town in Angacha woreda, representatives of the Southern Front claimed that the activists had been illegally campaigning. The opposition representatives, however, argued that the activists had just informed the voters about their symbols, as the ruling party candidates did routinely. This is another example of how the reality is twisted and that two contradictory stories of the same event are told. It is also representative for many of the cases where opposition candidates were kept in prison before and even after the elections started.

One of the most serious cases is the two representatives of the Southern Coalition for the regional parliament who are imprisoned in Durame in Kambata. They were detained in March 2001 after the instability in Tambaro, but were not accused before November 2001. The Coalition has appealed to release the candidates because of their immunity as regional MPs, but to no avail. The chairman of KAT zone, Abote Anito, explained that the two MPs were accused of murder and could not be released on bail. But the actual court charges which we have seen, concern only accusations of having agitated people to resist payment of taxes and fertiliser debts and to use force if payment was demanded – a charge often set forth and hard to disprove. Moreover, the charge is extended to include banditry and an attempt at destabilising the administration and jeopardising peace and security, after the people allegedly upon such agitation forcefully seized a gun from a kebele security guard.

The number of detainees allegedly members of the Southern Coalition seems relatively high in the southern region. Although many were released after the electoral board had proclaimed that political prisoners should be freed in August 2001, we have many reports on party activists still imprisoned. In these cases, two contradictory stories are again produced to explain the detentions. The Coalition claims that they are imprisoned because of political persuasion, and that the court charges in many cases are based on fabrication, while the Southern Front claims that the detainees have committed illegal acts and cannot be released, even if they are members of a political party. Which story is the most credible? We have had no mandate to visit the prisons and talk to the detained themselves, and it is therefore not possible to get their side of the story. A common claim from the ruling party is that many of the supporters of the opposition are ex-soldiers and unemployed youths seeking material benefit from being party activists and are essentially trouble makers. Even if this claim was true, it does not automatically prove that these people are criminals and must be imprisoned. On the other side, it might be in the interest of the opposition to deny that the detainees are ordinary criminals, and they might exaggerate the problem of political detentions. Criminals who are imprisoned might also have the interest of presenting themselves as party activists, so that they have a better chance of being released.

Although the reasons for imprisonment are a matter of speculation, there are certain conditions, which indicate that the process of detention and court decisions is strongly influenced by the interests of the ruling party. It is a general observation that the police and judiciary lack independence from the local executives in the woreda and the kebele and the local party cadres. This is a problem even acknowledged by the ruling party leaders in Awassa. Hailemariam Desselegn, the regional president, admitted that much more had to be done to separate the party from the other administrative bodies and the judiciary^[20]. A common statement from the people is that they cannot differentiate between the police, the court and the woreda/kebele authorities, because they all work for the interest of the ruling party. It is clear that the local executives do not have the right to arrest people, but still there is a widespread belief that it is the responsibility of the kebele officials to make detentions. This apparent political influence makes it credible that political detentions on short and long term basis take place.

Opposition withdrawing from the kebele elections

On the 28^th of December 2001, the Southern Coalition held a press conference in Addis Ababa, announcing that they would withdraw from the kebele elections on the coming Sunday. They stated that “to expect a democratic election competition from EPRDF is like expecting a pigeon from a snake’s egg”^[21] – there was no point in continuing for the kebele elections because the process was rigged. The Coalition denounced further that the result of the woreda and zone elections should be invalidated because of severe irregularities and that re-elections should be conducted. Their major complaints concerned the treatment of their candidates.

In addition to the specific complaints about the irregularities, the statement about the withdrawal contained essentially the same arguments as that issued after the woreda elections in the other parts in the country in February/March 2001^[22]. At that time, six different opposition parties behind statement presented a unified front against the EPRDF. Although it was only one party behind the statement this time, there were some signs of internal strain within the Coalition on the issue of withdrawal. The leadership in Addis Ababa decided to withdraw from the kebele elections, but this decision was apparently not co-ordinated sufficiently with all the parts of the organisation. One of its member organisations, the Sidama Liberation Movement (SLM), intended to continue for the kebele elections, and did partly so. The SLM party leader argued that although they knew that the kebele elections would be rigged, their candidates wished to maintain their candidacy for the coming Sunday^[23]. These internal differences indicate that there is a need to strengthen the Southern Coalition party organisation and build internal unity and make the internal decision making process more democratic and transparent, in order to continue being an efficient opposition.

Neither the SEPDF/EPRDF nor the electoral board made any public announcements to refute the accusations that the Coalition forwarded on the press conference on the 28^th of December. But the local ruling party representatives in Kambata and Badawatchu claimed that the opposition had withdrawn solely because they had lost in the woreda and zone elections. When the results of the elections were announced by NEB, it was however clear that re-elections would be conducted in 15 polling stations of the region where irregularities had taken place, mostly in Hadiya and Sidama zones. At the end of January, the Southern Coalition made another statement where they repeated their complaints. This led the head of the National Electoral Board, Aseffa Birru, to issue a personal attack on the leader of SEPDC, Beyene Petros. Aseffa Birru warned the SEPDC leader to refrain from defaming and insulting the board, otherwise he would be sued in court. The board described all of the Coalition’s complaints as unfounded allegations^[24]. But Beyene Petros rejected the warning from Aseffa Birru as illegal and claimed that he had evidence for the accusations that he had made^[25]. These incidents illustrate the fundamental lack of trust between the different actors in the electoral process in Ethiopia. There is generally an absence of dialogue between the actors, and if a dialogue takes place, it is essentially about mutual accusations. The opposition’s boycott of the kebele elections could have led to a public discussion on the conduct of the elections, but due to the polarised political climate, mistrust and hostility are nourished and a constructive dialogue is prevented.

Conclusion: elections as a “zero sum game”

The conduct of the local elections in southern region does not lead to any fundamental re-evaluation of the democratic situation in Ethiopia, but rather strengthens our conclusions made for the previous elections in the country. The EPRDF and its member parties do still not allow competition if it threatens its own position. The stated intentions of the tehaddso/renewal movement have not led to any fundamental changes in the behaviour of the local party cadres and administrators, who are still exceeding their mandate to maintain their positions and prevent the opposition from gaining support. Although the participants in the elections continue to give two fundamentally different stories of the events, one largely positive and the other utterly negative, there is no reason to doubt that the electoral conduct in southern Ethiopia must be dramatically improved to give the competitors equal chances of participation.

Although the national leaders of Ethiopia have another language than the party cadres and local officials at the grass root in southern region, they essentially tell the same story of why the EPRDF always defeats the opposition. Sebhat Nega, one of the most influential politicians in the EPRDF, claims that EPRDF’s repeated electoral victories are a result of the party’s political programme^[26]. My observations in the southern region do not support this explanation. As my findings from Kambata and Tambaro have shown, voters are to a very little extent concerned about party programmes in the selection of candidates. Their choice is more influenced by the decisions made by the elders in the community regarding the involvement in electoral politics. They were very much concerned as to whether their choice of candidates will improve or endanger their personal security and chances of survival. When support for the opposition leads to harassment and imprisonment from local authorities, voters may choose to vote for the ruling party.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi explains EPRDF’s monopolistic position by the fact that the party has based its support on the peasantry, which constitutes 85 per cent of the Ethiopian population. He claims that as long as the population of Ethiopia is as undiversified as this, the support for the party will remain strong^[27]. Although my observations in the southern elections do not converge with this view, the Prime Minister’s explanation points at one crucial issue, the relationship between the peasantry and the ruling party. My argument is that as long as the peasants in Ethiopia rely on the state for daily survival, and as long as agents of the ruling party act on the behalf of the state and control their means of survival to the advantage of the party, the people will continue to vote for the EPRDF. As observed in the elections in Ethiopia since 1992, the voters perceive the ruling party as agents of the state and vice versa, materialised through the omnipotent position of the kebele and woreda officials at local level. If the voters do not support the ruling party, they perceive it as an exclusion from essential resources distributed by the state. In connection with the tehaddso within the EPRDF, it has become apparent that leaders of the ruling party are aware of this lack of separation between the different branches of the government. But as the local elections in the Southern Region have illustrated, this awareness is still not present on local level.

One of the explanations on why the allegedly new awareness at higher level has not reached ground is that elections in Ethiopia are still perceived as a “zero sum game” for both the opposition and the ruling party. Electoral victory is seen as a guarantee for survival. If victory is secured, the party in power gains the control of the local administration and thereby the resources distributed by the government. Electoral loss, on the other hand, is perceived as an ultimate exclusion from resources and positions. In the worst case, as experienced by the opposition, the loss means deprived community services, resources and even personal freedom through imprisonment. Evidently, this “zero sum game” makes it very hard to make a conducive atmosphere for fair elections.

^[23] Interview of Jilma Chamola, Awassa, 28.12.01
^[24] See Walta Information Center, 6.12.01
^[25] See Reporter newspaper, 6.02.02
^[26] Personal communication in Addis Ababa, 14.01.02.
^[27] Recorded interview of Meles Zenawi by Kjetil Tronvoll, Addis Ababa, 16.01.02.