By Nathaniel Myers | ForeignPolicy.com

A government clampdown has rendered the outcome of Sunday’s parliamentary elections a foregone conclusion. Washington doesn’t seem to mind that its ally, Prime Minister tribal warlord Meles Zenawi, is assured a win.

I first glimpsed the depth of suppressed urban anger toward the Ethiopian government a few hundred paces into the annual 10-kilometer Great Ethiopian Run in Addis Ababa in November 2008. An immensely popular fun-run organized by Ethiopia’s most famous marathoner, it is one of the very few occasions when the government still allows citizens to gather en masse. And the runners took advantage; as we surged through the city’s main artery in matching red race T-shirts, anti-government slogans began to rumble across the crowd around us. The chants rose in volume and intensity whenever we passed a bastion of federal power — the Justice Ministry, the Supreme Court, the presidential compound. One recurring refrain combined a demand for the release of a popular political prisoner with a rhythmic, insistent, “O-bam-a!” It had been just a few weeks since Barack Obama’s election, an event that had inspired many in Addis to hope that change would come not just to the White House, but to its approach toward their country and eventually to their own government.

On Sunday, May 23, Ethiopians will be out politicking again — this time heading to the polls to vote in parliamentary elections. But few will harbor any illusions about the likelihood of voting in a change. In the 18 months since that race, there has been no meaningful revision in U.S. policy toward Ethiopia, and there is today even less reason to anticipate change in the country’s leadership. As one opposition leader has put it, the question is not whether the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) will defeat its intimidated and harassed opponents, but whether this will turn out to be the election in which Ethiopia takes the last step toward becoming a truly one-party state.

This is what passes for democracy in Ethiopia today. As the election has drawn closer, the government has done everything it can to push the result in its favor, waging what Human Rights Watch called in March a “coordinated and sustained attack on political opponents, journalists, and rights activists.” That was the same month that Prime Minister Meles Zenawi took  aim at one of the few independent sources of news still available, comparing the Amharic-language Voice of America programming to the genocidal Radio Mille Collines of Rwanda and ordering its broadcasts jammed. Journalists have fled into exile at an escalating pace over the last year, while civil society has been effectively neutered by a deeply oppressive NGO law. Political activists on both sides have been killed in recent weeks, and the government has publicly accused the opposition of planning violence, raising fears that it might be laying out a pretext for a crackdown.

All this has revealed a deep-seated unwillingness on the government’s part to even contemplate sharing political power — an instinct that emerged out of the last set of parliamentary elections in 2005, when Meles was dangerously close to forfeiting his majority. That proximity to losing — and the subsequent crackdown that ensured he didn’t — has hung like a cloud over Ethiopia ever since. Indeed, as this year’s election approaches, memories of that vote are pronounced. On election night, Meles banned public demonstrations. Then, as the vote count proceeded and protests grew, he assumed direct control over the security services, which, in separate incidents over several months, killed nearly 200 demonstrators. At least 30,000 people were detained, and much of the opposition’s leadership was arrested on charges including treason and “attempted genocide.” When the official results were finally released nearly five months later, the opposition had been awarded just a third of the country’s parliamentary seats — while the EPRDF won with a comfortable majority.

The ruling party has spent much of the subsequent five years ensuring that this year’s vote would not be nearly so close. Proffering theories to account for the government’s iron grasp of power is a popular parlor game in Addis’s diplomatic circles; they range from the cynical (the leadership enjoys the financial benefits of power) to the strategic (Meles’s circle, as members of a minority ethnic group, doesn’t believe it could win a fair election) to the psychological (Meles and his team believe that by defeating the Soviet-backed military dictatorship in 1991 they won the right to rule).

Whatever its motivations, one might expect such unapologetic repression to trigger policy reassessments in Washington and the capitals of Europe. If recent history is anything to go by, however, this is unlikely. The 2005 violence did initially cast a pall over what had until then been an internationally popular administration, poisoning Addis’s relations with eager foreign donors. But the dollars continued to flow; even the $375 million that the World Bank and its donors withdrew from direct budget support was soon routed through a newly designed program. In total, foreign assistance actually increased slightly in 2006 — from $1.91 million to nearly $1.95 million — and by 2007, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, was congratulating the Ethiopian government on its improved political climate.

Today, Ethiopia receives the largest amount of aid of any country in sub-Saharan Africa. And while the diplomatic atmosphere in Addis remains suspicious and often tense, Meles is again a partner foreign capitals can and do work with. Depressingly enough, Meles’s Ethiopia, autocracy or not, is a near paragon of responsibility in an unstable and strategically important region that otherwise includes the roguish likes of Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan. The United States and its European counterparts appreciate Ethiopia’s contributions to the fight against extremists in the region. George W. Bush’s administration provided considerable support to Ethiopia’s costly invasion and occupation of neighboring Somalia. And the U.S. Defense Department today continues to maintain close ties with the Ethiopian military, despite widely reported abuses in its campaign against insurgents in the eastern part of the country.

But politicians are only half the problem. The development community also seems willing to hold its nose, determined to prioritize Ethiopia’s development gains (and the prevention of future food crises) over democratic qualms. Those development gains are real and impressive: In Meles, the donors have also found a capable and effective administrator. Ethiopian GDP grew annually at double-digit rates from 2005 to 2008, making it one of the best performers on the continent, though millions of Ethiopians are still at risk of starvation every year. [This is according to numbers cooked by the Meles regime lie factory, not based on fact.]

Wary of alienating Meles, the Obama administration has publicly criticized only the Ethiopian leader’s most blatant assaults on democracy. And indeed, with the failure to permanently reduce aid budgets following the 2005 violence, the West lost its trump card. At the end of the day, Meles knows that the United States and his other foreign friends can’t afford to back out.

All signs suggest that little about this will change with Sunday’s preordained election, barring any unexpected violence. Indeed, at least one country is already looking beyond the vote: Canada announced on May 8 that it had invited Meles to be one of two non member African representatives to the G-20 summit in Toronto next month. When runners next take to the streets of Addis this November, they’ll have even more to be angry about.

By Zoe Alsop | TIME

Ethiopia is quiet as it heads into Sunday’s parliamentary elections — and that is part of the problem. The somberness of the capital Addis Ababa is in stark contrast to the massive demonstrations led by the opposition that took place before the vote in 2005. Though the opposition won an unprecedented number of seats that year, many international observers judged the electoral exercise as flawed. When opposition supporters took to the streets to protest results, the government reacted by having security forces open fire — more than 200 people died. Tens of thousands were detained. The legacy of that repression continues. When the editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Arwamba decided to remark upon the quiet in this campaign season, he says he was directly warned by the government that it was watching him and his paper closely. Woubishet Taye, 32, chose to resign instead. He had simply entitled his essay, “Where did the people go?”

It’s not that there isn’t any campaign activity. In the streets of the capital rumble scores of buses, emblazoned with the industrious bumble bee symbol of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and carrying flag-waving party members to rallies held across Addis Ababa. But bystanders on the street grumbled that the demonstrators were being paid. Meanwhile, a solitary truck carrying a banner for the opposition coalition puttered in the opposite direction. There were no opposition rallies. It wasn’t that they hadn’t tried. Behind a cemetery and down a dirt alley flanked by sleeping beggars is the tattered headquarters of the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement. There, parliamentarian Bulcha Demeksa explained that Addis Ababa’s municipal council had refused the opposition coalition, known as Medrek — meaning the Forum — permission to hold rallies. “We asked two weeks ago for permission to rally in the new stadium today,” says Demeksa. “They said it was busy.” As it turned out, the ruling party was holding a rally there. “As the incumbent government, we get the incumbent’s advantage,” explains the EPRDF’s parliamentary whip Haile Mariam Dessalegn. “But that is true everywhere.”

The diplomatic community, which considers Ethiopia to be a cornerstone in Africa’s volatile Horn and relies on Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as a staunch ally in the global war on terror, has offered scant criticism of the country’s brand of democracy and free speech. The EPRDF likes to show off what it calls its economic successes. “We knew that we had to address the urban population properly with job creation,” says Dessalegn, who pointed to new city jobs in construction, food production and parking lots. “Five years of double digit growth has yielded fruit, which has created huge support among the youth.” The frustrated urban youth who were behind demonstrations in 2005 are employed and happy now, an EPRDF leader told TIME pointing to statistics that rank Ethiopia the fifth fastest growing economies in the world — though it is still a microscopic economy. Ethiopia receives more foreign aid than any other sub-saharan country according to 2008 statistics. Malnutrition is on the rise in the country, according to the U.N.; more than 6 million Ethiopians rely on food aid. (See pictures of Ethiopia’s harvest of hunger.)

There is certainly unhappiness beneath the surface. “The silence doesn’t reflect what’s on the ground,” says Eskinder Nega, a journalist whose wife and publisher gave birth during the two years they spent in prison after the 2005 elections on charges of inciting genocide and treason. “Whatever the ruling party has achieved in terms of growth, after 19 years, people want change.”

In the fertile, rolling countryside some 200 miles to the west of the capital, opposition candidates told TIME that local officials from the ruling party had buttressed their incumbents’ advantage with force, driving rivals from their constituencies with beatings, threats and guns. Opposition members from East Wellega, part of the Oromo region — Ethiopia’s largest and most populous — are necessarily a hearty lot. Take Seleshi Belay. Elected to regional parliament in 2005, Belay, 30, spent three of the past five years in cramped jails as a suspected member of the Oromo Liberation Front, an armed insurgent group. His case was not heard until last year, when he was released for time served. Belay’s first three attempts to speak to his constituency were foiled. On his first, armed community police allegedly surrounded his mother’s house, detained her and jailed him. He has not spoken with her since. He says he walked away from his second visit with just a beating. The third time he turned up in East Wellega authorities forbade hotels from giving him a room, the police allegedly smashed his car with rocks, then threatened to fire-bomb it when he tried to get a bit of sleep in a parking lot.

“Militias, local officials and police were there,” he says. “There were more than 50 people there with rifles. They said they would bomb the car. That’s when people told us to flee, because there was a gas station nearby.”

It was not until his fourth try that, for the first time in five years, with less than two weeks to go to Sunday’s election, he finally managed to address the people of his district for about an hour. As he spoke, he noticed a lone woman, on the fringes of the crowd, trying not to look as though she might be listening. “I saw my mom on the outskirts of the group,” he told TIME. “She was crying. She is always asking me to leave this work. She is always thinking that I may die. I am her only son and she raised me without a father.”

As if to underscore his mother’s fears, gunmen in an unmarked car stopped Belay and his colleagues as they were trying to drive to a rally in a neighboring town, quieting their 2010 campaign after just an hour. But Belay will be standing in Sunday’s election. Though the ruling party is projecting a landslide victory, he expects to win. “People were very grateful when we came and they were giving us support and the spirit was good,” he says. “I faced all of this because I want change. If you want change, you have to face difficulties and that’s what I chose.”

By Jason McLure | Bloomberg.com

Ethiopian Prime Minister tribal warlord Meles Zenawi, whose nation receives billions of dollars in Western aid, is headed for an easy re-election on May 23 after stifling the opposition, according to analysts and human-rights groups.

“The government has pretty effectively disbanded the leadership of the opposition and undercut its ability to undertake any effective challenge,” Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a May 13 phone interview from Washington.

A former Marxist guerrilla leader who has ruled Africa’s second-most populous nation since 1991, Meles, 55, has been a key ally in the fight against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia. Development aid to Ethiopia from the U.S., U.K., the World Bank and other donors rose to $3.3 billion in 2008 from $1.9 billion in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Canada invited Meles to represent Africa at the June Group of 20 meeting in Toronto.

Under Meles, Ethiopia, Africa’s top coffee producer, has pursued an economic model that mixes a large state role with foreign investment in roads, dams and power. The government controls the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp., a state-run monopoly, and owns all the land, while companies owned by the state or the ruling party dominate banking and trucking. Almost a sixth of its 85 million people depend on food aid.

Chinese Model

“What Ethiopia is doing is looking at the Chinese model and taking bits and pieces of it and adapting it to their own context,” David Shinn, the U.S. ambassador to the country from 1996 to 1999, said in a May 11 phone interview from Washington. “I think they’re comfortable with the way China does things and the way China handles human rights issues.”

The government dismisses opposition charges of harassment as false and intended to discredit the vote. It says economic growth in Ethiopia of more than 7 percent annually over the past five years is the main reason it will win re-election.

“Regarding governance, regarding social development, the people of Ethiopia know for sure the future of Ethiopia lies with this government and so we have no need to compete in an undemocratic way,” Communications Minister Bereket Simon told reporters on May 12.

Harassment And Arrests

Meles’ Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has used a combination of harassment and arrests and withholding food aid and jobs to thwart the opposition Medrek alliance, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a March 24 report entitled “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure.”

Medrek Chairman Beyene Petros said the authorities blocked opposition rallies in the capital, Addis Ababa, and security forces collected voter identity cards of known supporters of rival parties.

“The U.S., the U.K., they just accept this,” he told reporters yesterday. “That’s how they relate to the ruling party.”

The U.S., under presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, hasn’t criticized Meles’ growing authoritarianism, Jeffrey Steeves, an African politics specialist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, said in a May 12 phone interview.

“Obama has been largely silent on human rights issues in Ethiopia,” Steeves said. “It’s quite ironic that we have the rhetoric about transparency, good governance and human rights and yet Ethiopia remains at the top of the aid list.”

Opposition Leader

Opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa, 35, has been jailed for life since Dec. 29, 2008, for violating conditions of her earlier pardon. The United Nations Human Rights Council has said she was the victim of arbitrary detention, and the U.S. State Department in March labeled her a political prisoner.

“The State Department fully understands the negative effect that the jailing of Birtukan Mideksa and others has on the overall political climate in Ethiopia,” Alyson Grunder, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa said in a May 14 e-mail. “We pursue human rights issues within the context of a broad governance and democratization agenda that we have with Ethiopia.”

Medrek says that three of its activists have been murdered during the campaign and that hundreds more have been beaten and jailed on trumped-up charges.

“The EPRDF wants to totally block any opposition presence in the next parliament,” Merara Gudina, a Medrek leader and founder of the Oromo National Congress, said in a May 12 phone interview.

‘Conducive Environment’

The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia “believes it has created a conducive environment to carry out a standard election,” its Chairman Mergera Bekena said yesterday.

This year’s campaign has been significantly less free than the last election in 2005, when state television broadcast live debates between the ruling party and opposition and newspapers gave widespread coverage of politics, says Dan Connell, a lecturer in African politics at Simmons College in Boston.

The opposition won a record 172 seats in the 547-member parliament in that election as well as control of the Addis Ababa city government. The largest opposition alliance accused Meles’ party of pervasive fraud, and dozens of members refused to take their seats in parliament.

In demonstrations afterward, security forces loyal to Meles killed 193 people in Addis Ababa and arrested tens of thousands of opposition supporters, including Birtukan and Addis Ababa mayor-elect Berhanu Nega.

“The regime has already done so much to weaken its opposition and to set up the outcome in advance that they will not face the same contest,” Connell said in a May 13 e-mailed response to questions.

(Editors: Karl Maier, Paul Richardson)