Ethiopia has had little experience with elections. Several powerless parliaments were chosen over the decades, with few voters and minimal consequences. When the Derg fell and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was consolidating its power, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) realized that the invitation they got to participate in government and an election was intended to co-opt them, not to share power with them. The Oromos — the biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia — turned it down and and withdrew to the political margin where they have usually been. The government-created Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) remained their sole voice, such as it is, in the EPRDF.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi remains the only leader the EPRDF, the ruling party, has had since before they took over in 1991. The Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) created and still controls the EPRDF. Although there are non-Tigreans in the power structure, even in senior positions, the TPLF dominates the party and Meles controls the TPLF.
How to square this with elections? The answer is simple: you can’t. By definition, elections are intended to distribute power according to ballot results. In Ethiopia — not alone in this — being voted out is not an acceptable election result. It will not be allowed to happen.
In 2005, Ethiopia was recovering from war and drought. It had successfully broken its promise and dodged the postwar border decision from The Hague. All four guarantors of the agreement (the UN, US, EU and AU) looked the other way. There had been several good harvests, foreign aid was pouring in and coffee prices were recovering.
A few small parties emerged to contest the election. Several of them combined to present a meaningful challenge. Badly misreading the public mood, the overconfident EPRDF allowed unprecedented public debate on the all-important broadcast media. The public was riveted by the broadcasts and voter registration surged. An opposition rally in Addis Ababa just before election day drew a crowd some estimated at close to a million! Even if inflated, it was a huge and peaceful assembly. The government’s counter-rally gathered a respectable but smaller crowd.
On election day so many voters lined up that some polling stations were forced to stay open well past midnight. Some estimated that an unheard of 90% of registered voters actually turned out. Why did they show up in such numbers? What where they thinking? In a country without a democratic tradition, with low rates of education and literacy, why were so many people willing to stand in line for hours to vote…a concept many probably didn’t fully understand? And what happened to those emotions?
Many voted against the government. The EPRDF lost the entire City Council in Addis Ababa and was badly beaten in parliamentary races in many urban areas, where the results became known quickly. In a panic, the government barred election observers (including the Carter Center) as the majority of the ballots — Ethiopia is 80%+ rural — were counted. The opposition, without evidence, claimed it had won. The government, also without evidence, claimed it had won. To no one’s surprise, the government won big.
The streets of Addis were soon filled with uniforms and armored vehicles. I saw them myself, having arrived in Addis a few days after the election, and was there when violence broke out. It followed a familiar pattern, one that I had also seen in the 1960s when student protesters marched against Emperor Haile Selassie. Angry students gathered, shouting abusive language and refusing to disperse when ordered to do so. Shots were fired, far more shots than in the 1960s and with many more casualties. There were several public clashes and altogether nearly 200 were killed.
When the dust settled, tens of thousands had been rounded up and sent to detention camps. Most were soon released. Many opposition leaders were arrested, charged with treason and released 18 months later in a deal intended to blunt their political careers. The parties they had created were infiltrated, splintered and effectively neutered. One, Birtukan Mideksa, the most popular opposition figure in the country, was rearrested. She remains in jail.
The EPRDF is not going to let history repeat itself. Under intense pressure, the surviving opposition have tried to mount election campaigns, but they are small, weak, underfunded and harassed by government supporters. A few have been killed, including both candidates and supporters. The government claims that one of its people has been killed. Much of the violence is in Oromia, but also in Tigre, where an embarrassing home-province challenge to the TPLF emerged.
The number of victims is small but the message is unmistakable. Running against this government is dangerous. There are periodic reminders of just how dangerous. With the outcome never in doubt, the courage of the opposition is impressive. The strength of the government’s response reveals its anxiety.
Questions come to mind. What happened to 2005’s enthusiasm? Forgotten? Stored away for another time? No one saw trouble coming in 2005. Could something similar happen in 2010…after the elections, if not before? The students again? Is the government show of force aimed at them in particular, reminding them of the cost of protest? The EPRDF’s own leadership — Meles himself — left the campus to fight the Derg…
(Shlomo Bachrach was on the staff of Peace Corps/Ethiopia following several years as a lecturer at Haile sbachrachSelassie I University in Addis Ababa. He is currently editor of East Africa Forum, a news group and online archive of news from the Horn of Africa at EastAfricaForum.net. Shlomo has another blog on our site: The Arts: Music of the World.)
For David McKernan, it all began with a trip to Ethiopia in 2005. The boss of the coffee chain Java Republic demanded that his hosts take him to the remote region where the country’s best coffee is located.
But this part of Africa proved to be grittier than anything the businessman had imagined. “The place was a kip,” says David. “I’ve been to other places in the Third World, but I’d never seen anything like the poverty of Ethiopia.”
The horror of his surroundings, and the stark contrast with the Celtic Tiger grandeur back home, stirred something in the Malahide-based entrepreneur. “We were sitting around a fire one night, and I said ‘I want to build a school’ — I wanted it for my ego,” recalls David, who founded Java Republic in 1999 after a stint with the Campbell Bewley Group.
With a throng of restaurateurs and colleagues in tow, David approached the elders of the Illili Daratu village in the Ethiopian coffee region of Harar. “We asked them what they wanted, expecting them to say a school,” he recalls.
“They asked for water and we all sat there looking at each other like eejits.”
The elders explained that locals faced a 12-hour round trip to get fresh water, only to end up with something that “looked like tea and tasted like shit”.
Dumbstruck though he was, McKernan vowed to make the water project happen.
Ken Healy, the owner/manager of Barberstown Castle, Co Kildare, was on the Ethiopian trip too and offered to lay on a spread at his hotel for a fundraiser. “In one night we made €140,000,” David recalls. “It was a Celtic Tiger night. In the auction alone we made €70,000.”
Another €30,000 in donations came in over the coming months, but McKernan had a problem — working out how to translate the money into fresh water for Illili Daratu. “The money sat in an account for about 18 months,” he admits. “We couldn’t give it to local people because it would have been stolen. Even if we’d given it to the government water agency, there’s a fair chance that chunks of the money would have gone missing.”
Accepting his own limitations, David decided to develop the water project in partnership with Plan Ireland, an Irish Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that has offices in 48 developing countries. The money was handed over and a local Plan Ireland worker began sending regular updates on the project’s progress.
By January, David was so enthused by what he was told that he travelled back to Illili Daratu, expecting to see people celebrating in the streets of his coffee village.
But McKernan’s recent visit turned into a series of shocks that left the coffee boss disillusioned and despairing.
The first blow was the realisation that his beloved coffee region had changed beyond recognition. The endless fields of coffee plantations he remembered had been almost entirely replaced by acre after acre of a shrub that produces Chat, a high-inducing amphetamine and cathine that’s illegal in many developed countries.
Easier to produce and up to four times more lucrative than coffee, Chat had become the region’s new “cash crop”.
As well as devastating the region’s coffee production, Chat had become the local pastime of choice in Harar, and McKernan observed that “most of the men sat out of the sun and chewed their way through the leaf from noon until evening”.
The drug triggered breakouts of “crazed, aggressive and somewhat psychotic behaviour” and the long-term health dangers are unknown, but that didn’t stop the locals letting young boys join in.
“If I lived in the same squalor I may very well chew the Chat all day, but what makes me so angry is the encouragement of young boys to chew Chat — that’s unforgivable,” fumes David, himself a father of three.
He is also afraid that the conversion to Chat will see the farmers being exploited and eventually losing their lands to “narcotic criminals and gangsters”.
“The kids will be so addicted to the Chat, they probably won’t care,” he says, adding that the situation left him with “little hope for these people and little sympathy for the path they have chosen”.
Trekking deeper into the Harar to the village of Illili Daratu did little to improve his mood. “I expected there to be free flowing water in the village, I thought they’d all be celebrating,” McKernan says.
“I knew the minute I landed that it wasn’t going to be like that.
“There was no sense of celebration; we weren’t treated the way we were the first time we came — we were just another gang of white coffee guys.”
McKernan quickly discovered the root of the villagers’ apathy. His free-flowing water was 5km from the town, and getting it the rest of the way was going to cost another €200,000 — money the village hadn’t got.
“It wasn’t that they (the people sending the reports) lied to me, I just think the way I think — you start a project and you get it done,” he says. “We were just shocked (by how much was left to do).”
Plan Ireland boss David Dalton says the delays stemmed from the complexity of the project and the extreme remoteness of the village, which had no NGO infrastructure, no electricity and no water.
Before construction began, Plan Ireland engaged in “prolonged negotiation” with local authorities to make sure they would maintain the well once it was up and running.
“There’s no way you would go ahead with a project like this without making sure someone was going to look after it when it was finished,” says Dalton. “If getting that takes six or 12 months, it takes six or 12 months.”
Once the local authorities came on board, a feasibility study was carried out which showed the nearest water was 7km from the village, and even then it was 122m down so it was “no joke pumping it”.
The work was put out to tender among local contractors, and Plan Ireland has a full-time consultant engineer on site overseeing progress.
While Dalton admits the project is a “little bit slower” than he’d have hoped for, he insists it’s “going according to plan” with the delays typical of those you’d expect doing such a big project in such a remote area.
After three years on this project, Dalton hopes Plan Ireland will stay involved in the region once it’s done, building programmes that will help the village develop.
“When they have water there’ll be a lot more they can do,” he says.
Without the benefit of David Dalton’s lengthy experience on development projects, David McKernan’s initial response was to get “very annoyed” with himself and brand the whole project a “waste of time” when he saw the apparent lack of progress.
But he’s now back in Ireland, determined to raise another €200,000 from Java Republic’s customers to finish the ‘disaster” of a project, hopefully by 2011.
He feels no burden of pressure from the donors who’ve already given him €170,000 — “they gave me the money, I promised I’d spend it right and I will” — but the experience has clearly marked him.
“I don’t regret it, there’s something about Ethiopia that gets under your skin, and we will finish the water project,” he says.
“But I will never, ever get myself into making a promise to a village again and leaving myself wide open by not delivering on something I said I’d do.”
LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA — In December, an Ethiopian court sentenced Bucknell University Professor of Economics Berhanu Nega, former mayor of Addis Ababa, to death in absentia for terrorism.
Q: Your colleagues and friends understand that this charge is bogus, but do you hear from others who don’t?
A: I haven’t heard from anyone who takes this as a serious judicial decision — only the Ethiopian government and its blind supporters. Even the government knows that the decision of the court is nothing but a reflection of the regime’s desires rather than based on any reasonable evidence. It sends a message to the public — there is no court to save you, you live by our rules, if you question our rules, we will do what we want, and no one will stop us.
Q: The death sentence is real, and you were jailed under the Zenawi government. Are you afraid?
A: One of the reasons you struggle for freedom and liberty is because you feel that life isn’t meaningful without liberty. I am not worried — not because the government would not try to harm me, but I now live in a society of laws that will protect me. You can’t live in fear. If you allow this kind of fear to determine your actions, dictatorships will exist forever.
Q: What sustained you while you were imprisoned?
A: First, the Ethiopian people and their yearning for freedom. While I was incredibly disappointed by U.S. and European policymakers and diplomats when I was in prison, I also was hearing about Bucknell, my colleagues, students and people at other universities supporting freedom. This connection at the human level, that people love and support freedom everywhere, recognizing that freedom is a human condition, is the hope for humanity that keeps you going. It was a source of hope for me when I was in prison, and I suspect for all people fighting for liberty around the world.
Q: What is your hope for Ethiopia?
A: Unless the international community takes the position of outrage as it did in Guinea, the government will not change. The brutality of this regime is mind boggling. This is a government known for committing genocide against its people. Its basic strategy is to stay in power by terrorizing people and by dividing them on primordial grounds. There are several groups fighting against the government. Unless there is a serious intervention, the whole region will blow up. I encourage Western policymakers to recognize what is happening and adjust their policy before it is too late to make a difference. The only credible and durable solution for the region, in my view, is the democratization of Ethiopia.
Ethiopia’s ruling junta (Woyanne) has turned the city of Gonder is into a militarized zone by deploying tens of thousands of additional troops. Woyanne suspects that fighters of armed resistance groups have entered the city to carry out attacks on regime forces during this month’s general elections that will be held on May 23.
According to eyewitnesses, movements in and out of the city has been restricted and soldiers are conducting house to house searches. Check points have also been set up through out the city.
Meanwhile, in southern Ethiopia, Woyanne claims that a police officer was stabbed to death by members of the Forum for Democracy and Dialogue (Medrek) party in the Oromya region on Saturday.
“Supporters of Medrek stabbed to death policeman Hassan Regasa last night in the Oromya region,” according to a police statement.
On Thursday, in the town of Adaba, Orimya region, attackers threw a bomb at a meeting of a party from the ruling coalition, killing two people, according to the state media.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (Bloomberg) — An activist campaigning for Ethiopia’s opposition Medrek alliance was shot dead in a rural part of Oromiya, the third killing in a week in the southwestern region ahead of elections on May 23.
Girma Kabe was killed on May 4 in the North Shewa district, Negasso Gidada, a Medrek official, said in a mobile-phone interview today.
“He was posting posters in daylight and he was shot,” Negasso said. “Our people say it was a deliberate political killing.”
Tensions have been rising in Oromiya ahead of this month’s vote. On May 7, two people were killed in southern Oromiya when an unidentified person threw a hand grenade at a meeting celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization, which support’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
The man who killed Girma may be a member of a militia loyal to Meles’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, said Merara Gudina, a leader of Medrek’s ethnic Oromo wing. The EPRDF said Girma was involved in a personal dispute and was a supporter of Meles’s party, which has ruled the Horn of Africa country for the past 19 years.
“He was not killed by our security and our militia,” said Zelalem Jamanie, an executive committee member of the EPRDF’s ethnic Oromo wing, when reached on his mobile phone today. “The person who killed him, he has his own private gun. There is some problem between them.”
Oromos are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, though national politics in the country has been dominated for more than a century by politicians and feudal lords from the smaller Amhara and Tigrayan ethnic groups.
Security forces loyal to Meles killed at least 193 people in the aftermath of Ethiopia’s disputed 2005 elections. Medrek leader Birtukan Mideksa remains in jail under a life sentence after being charged with treason following that poll.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at [email protected].
Chris Flaherty is the producer of the movie called Migration of Beauty, which shows the struggle of Ethiopians for democracy in Ethiopia in the context of an American experience Chris Flaherity undoubtedly loves our historical and great country Ethiopia and our people, above all he is steadfast to Dr. Martin Lutherkings’ principle which says that Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
It’s based on such conviction that Chris a month ago has declared his plan to hunger strike in front of white house in demanding the Obama adminstration to make pressure on Meles regime to release UDJP Chairwoman Birtukan Mideksa as well as to support the struggle for a democratic change that she is paying a huge sacrifice for.
As he is a man of his word, now he has already started his hunger strike and in doing so he has beyond a shadow of doubt proved to be a friend of Ethiopians and a strong defender of justice and Democracy.
As the saying goes to a friend in need is a friend indeed, and his engagement in being the Voice of the Voiceless Ethiopians is a priceless gift to every justice and democracy thirsty Ethiopians.
UDJP Sweden Chapter would therefore like not only to express its deep appreciation to his conviction to his principles, but also endorse his action and gives him full support to make his effort successful.
UDJP Sweden Chapter therefore calls upon all Ethiopians in Washington and beyond to support this important act of courage by visiting and staying with Chris at Lafayette Park in front of the White House.
(Raswork Mengesha is Chairman of UDJP Sweden Chapter)
