As a reader during the past 25 years of political commentary by the Ethiopian diaspora and based on my own contacts with that community, I am struck by the prevailing belief that the U.S. government has the ability to change Ethiopian polices and alter the fundamental direction of events in Ethiopia. This view is misguided.
The policy conundrum came to my attention again recently as I read an opinion piece in The Hill by Mesfin Mekonnen.
Ato Mesfin begins by urging a hastened review of U.S. policy towards Ethiopia. This is a reasonable request. Every new American administration should review its policy with counties that are as important as Ethiopia and where there is controversy about the nature of the bilateral relationship. The opinion piece goes on to state that “Congress should hold hearings and enact legislation to help Ethiopians create the conditions that are necessary to ensure that food aid is never needed again.” The implication is that the U.S. government can resolve Ethiopia’s governmental, demographic, political and social issues.
I beg to differ.
The United States can impact the situation on the margins, but it does not have the power to force fundamental change even if there was agreement on what that change should be.
While the United States does have influence in Ethiopia, in fact, more than most countries, there are distinct limits to that influence. Not only is Ethiopia a sovereign state but it interacts with dozens of other important countries and organizations.
Those in the Ethiopian diaspora who oppose the Ethiopian government usually suggest that American assistance to Ethiopia can and should serve as the leverage for forcing change in the country. The level of U.S. assistance in recent years has been impressive. In fiscal year 2007, it was about $474 million and in fiscal year 2008 about $456 million. It is important, however, to look more closely at this assistance.
In an essay in the November/December 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, three former administrators of USAID — J. Brian Atwood, Peter M. McPherson and Andrew Natsios — wrote that in fiscal year 2007 about 50 percent of U.S. assistance to Ethiopia went to HIV/AIDS prevention, 38 percent to emergency food relief and 7 percent to child survival, family planning and malaria prevention and treatment. Only 1.5 percent went to agriculture, 1.5 percent to economic growth, 1.5 percent to education and 1 percent for improving governance.
In fiscal year 2008, by my calculations, 73 percent of USAID’s budget for Ethiopia went to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, 12 percent to child survival and health, 9 percent to development assistance, 5 percent for food aid and less than 1 percent for a combination of foreign military financing (FMF) and international military education and training (IMET). The amount for FMF was $843,000 and for IMET $620,000.
This is not an assistance program that has significant political leverage. In 2007, almost 95 percent of the assistance program went to HIV/AIDS, emergency food aid and child survival. In 2008, the figure was about 90 percent for these programs.
There are very few members of Congress and even fewer in the Executive Branch who are interested in cutting funding for HIV/AIDS, child survival and emergency food aid in an effort to change governmental policies in Ethiopia.
While Ethiopian officials also listen to the United States for reasons unrelated to foreign aid, the fact is that U.S. leverage is much more limited than most in the Ethiopian diaspora believe.
(Amb. David H. Shinn is an adjunct professor of international affairs at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Amb. Shinn, who received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from GW, is a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia (1996-99) and to Burkina Faso (1987-90).)
NEW JERSEY (BBC) — An American man residing in New Jersey is suing the FBI for mistreatment while he was held in jail in Kenya and Ethiopia in 2007.
Amir Meshal was arrested on the Kenyan border as he fled Somalia after the ousting of the Islamist administration.
According to the lawsuit, FBI agents interrogated him there, saying he had received al-Qaeda training in Somalia.
Mr Meshal says he was then returned to Somalia and sent on to Ethiopia for three months where US agents threatened him with torture and death.
He repeatedly denied the allegations and was released in May 2007 and returned to the United States after media inquiries and protests from human rights groups.
The US State Department said it formally protested at the time about Mr Meshal’s removal from Kenya to Ethiopia, the Associated Press news agency reports.
In April 2007, the Ethiopia government admitted that it had detained 41 “terror suspects” captured in neighbouring Somalia.
It defended the action as part of the “global war on terror”, but denied the detainees had been held incommunicado or were mistreated.
An FBI spokesman has said officials will not comment on the case.
In September, an Egyptian man received a $250,000 payout from the FBI because of the way he was treated following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Mr Meshal’s lawsuit has been filed on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“American citizens abroad who seek refuge from hostilities deserve the assistance of their government in getting home safely,” AP quotes ACLU lawyer Nusrat Choudhury as saying.
ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia’s Ministry of Mines on Tuesday announced the discovery of a mine containing more than 40 tonnes of gold deposit worth 1.7 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros).
The state-run Ethiopian News Agency reported that the new find, announced by the ministry of mines and energy, will require some 200 million dollars to extract and process.
“Geological survey indicates that… an estimated 500 tonnes of gold deposit is found in the country,” the agency said, providing a figure for the whole of Ethiopia.
Some 44 companies are engaged in gold exploration, earning Ethiopia about 105 million dollars in export every year.
As health ministers from around the world meet in the Ethiopian capital to tackle maternal mortality, women suffering birth-related injuries are given a new lease of life through a simple operation.
Hailemariam Workneh is trying to amuse his son outside the Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa.
They have one toy – a small rubber crocodile which two-year-old Awel squeals and runs away from, before edging back towards it and squealing again.
Hailemariam says it’s not easy to keep his son distracted while his mother gets treated for fistula. But he is glad to be here. Finally.
It took him five years to save up the money to bring his wife here from their village in the north.
He is the only husband we see at the clinic.
Fifty per cent of women who have fistula are abandoned by their husbands because they leak urine or faeces, or both.
The staff at the Hamlin Hospital are full of admiration for Hailemariam for sticking by his wife.
They keep telling me how unusual it is.
When his wife Zeinat wakes from her surgery she says the same thing.
Needless shame
“I was too ashamed to leave the house because of the smell, I couldn’t see my friends,” she says. “It was so hard being alone. But my husband is a good man, he didn’t neglect me while I was leaking.”
Most women, she says, will “cry every day”, because they have no-one to help them.
Zeinat’s surgery is successful and afterwards, she cannot stop smiling.
“I am excited at participating in life again,” she says.
The last five years have involved needless pain and shame.
The causes are in part a lack of resources, in part gender inequality, according to the United Nation’s Population Fund.
Like 94% of women in Ethiopia, Zeinat had to give birth without the help of a properly trained health worker.
As is often the case for small-framed Ethiopian women, the baby was too big for her to deliver normally.
Midwife shortage
Prof Gordon Williams, medical director at the Hamlin Hospital, says women in rural areas are often stopped from eating much during their pregnancy, and are worked extra hard in the belief it will stop the baby from growing too big in the womb.
It does not. Instead, by the time she comes to give birth the woman will be weak and malnourished.
When she realises there is a complication with the birth it is usually too late.
The nearest health clinic can be more than 100km (62 miles) away – a distance women often walk, while in labour.
But even at the health clinic it is unlikely there will be the equipment to perform a caesarean section, which routinely saves the lives of mother and baby in the West.
It is unlikely there will even be a midwife.
It is said there are more Ethiopian midwives working in Chicago than Addis Ababa.
What is left after the brain drain is one midwife to every 20,000 women of childbearing age.
And they are not in the rural areas, where 85% of Ethiopians live.
Social stigma
So like Zeinat, the woman will have to give birth alone.
And like Zeinat she may lose the baby, and be left suffering with obstetric fistula – a tear between the vagina and the bladder or the rectum, making her continually incontinent.
In the five years since her first child died during labour, Zeinat conceived several times.
Having sex and giving birth again must have been excruciatingly painful.
Awel is the only one of her children to have survived birth.
But it is the social stigma that the women with fistula talk about.
Baysade Shoke is waiting to be operated on.
She has lived with fistula for 43 years.
“I have lived in darkness,” she says.
“I hardly considered myself a human being because of the smell.”
Prevention
She says she is hopeful that the surgery will bring her “out into the light”.
When it is over and she feels ready, the hospital will give her money to get back to her village and a new dress to go back in.
But Abarash Muskun preferred not to make that journey.
Her surgery was not successful and the stigma of living with the smell of leaking urine is too much so she has stayed on at the hospital, working as a nurse aide.
Abarash is one of the patients the Hamlin Hospital treats each year, but is unable to cure.
What she and the doctors would like to see is prevention; health professionals in well-equipped health centres throughout the country so women do not lose their babies, and do not develop fistula in the process.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following report by the BBC is one more evidence that the IMF and World Bank are corrupted organizations that are causing havoc in 3rd world countries such as Ethiopia by fueling brutal dictatorships with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Senegal admits IMF ‘money gift’
(BBC) — Senegal has confirmed it gave money to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) official earlier this month, after previously denying the allegations.
Alex Segura was given almost $200,000 (£122,000) at the end of his three-year posting – money which the IMF says was paid back as quickly as it could be.
Prime Minister Souleymane Ndene Ndiaye said it was a goodbye present — part of an African tradition.
But opposition activists have condemned what they regard as a corrupt payment.
The fund said in a statement Mr Segura was given the present after a dinner with President Abdoulaye Wade, but did not realise the gift was money until he was about to leave the country for Barcelona.
“With Mr Segura worried about missing his flight, and concerned that there was no place to leave the money safely in Senegal, he decided to take the money aboard the plane,” Reuters quoted the IMF as saying.
The cash was handed over to Senegal’s ambassador in Spain.
Government ‘exposed’
The BBC’s Hamadou Tidiane Sy, in Dakar, says the affair has sparked anger and outrage in Senegal.
He says Senegalese want to know why an IMF official was allowed to leave the country with so much money, and they also want to see whether anyone will be punished.
Anti-corruption campaigner Mamadou Mbodj said the case should be referred to the country’s High Court of Justice.
“It is unacceptable in a poor country like ours to use the taxpayers’ money to reward international civil servants who are already highly paid for their jobs”, he told the BBC.
Aissata Tall Sall, spokeswoman for the Socialist Party, said the government had “exposed its true nature to the rest of the world”.
She called for international sanctions and said it was unacceptable for the IMF and government to consider the issue closed.
The president has not commented on the affair, but Mr Ndiaye admitted the gift was given, while denying corruption.
“We in Africa have a tradition – when someone visits you, you give him a gift at departure,” he told local media.
SANA’A, YEMEN (Saba) – Yemeni security services in Abyan Province have arrested 112 Ethiopian refugees, including 19 women, who illegally entered Yemeni territories by sea, Interior Ministry has reported.
According to the security services, the Ethiopians have been arrested at the coast of Ahwar District.
The security forces also said that 90 Somali refugees, including 25 women and 7 children have arrived in Abyan and Taiz provinces, 22 of them landed on Ahwar coast in Abyan province, while the remaining 68 refugees disembarked on Thubab cost in Taiz province.
The police detained all the refugees from both coasts and transported them to the refugee camp in Lahj province.
