Opposition Candidates, Voters Silenced Ahead of Local Polls
(New York, April 11, 2008) – The Ethiopian government’s repression of registered opposition parties and ordinary voters has largely prevented political competition ahead of local elections that begin on April 13, Human Rights Watch said today. These widespread acts of violence, arbitrary detention and intimidation mirror long-term patterns of abuse designed to suppress political dissent in Ethiopia.
“It is too late to salvage these elections, which will simply be a rubber stamp on the EPRDF’s near-monopoly on power at the local level,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Still, officials must at least allow the voters to decide how and whether to cast their ballots without intimidation.”
Human Rights Watch carried out two weeks of field research during the run-up to the polls and documented systemic patterns of repression and abuse that have rendered the elections meaningless in many areas. That research focused primarily on Oromia, Ethiopia’s most populous region and one long troubled by heavy-handed government repression.
The nationwide elections for the kebele (village or neighborhood councils), and wereda (districts made up of several kebeles administrations), are crucially important. It is local officials who are responsible for much of the day-to-day repression that characterizes governance in Ethiopia. Many local officials in Oromia have made a routine practice of justifying their abuses by accusing law-abiding government critics of belonging to the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which is waging a low-level insurrection against the government.
Candidates allied with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) will run unopposed in the vast majority of constituencies across Ethiopia. On April 10, one of Ethiopia’s two major opposition coalitions, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF), pulled out of the process altogether. UEDF officials complained that intimidation and procedural irregularities limited registration to only 6,000 of the 20,000 candidates they attempted to put forward for various seats. By contrast, state-controlled media reports that the EPRDF will field more than 4 million candidates across the country.
Violence, Arbitrary Detention, and Intimidation
Local ruling party officials have systematically targeted opposition candidates for violence, intimidation, and other human rights abuses since the registration period began three months ago. Particularly in areas with established opposition support, local officials have arbitrarily detained opposition candidates, searched their property without warrant, and in some cases physically assaulted them.
Credible reports collected by Human Rights Watch indicate a pattern of cooperation among officials across all three tiers of local government – zone, wereda, and kebele administrations – in carrying out these abuses. Victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch across different locations in Oromia recounted a consistent narrative. Some were arbitrarily detained and then interrogated or threatened by wereda administration officials in the presence of zonal officials. Others were arbitrarily detained by wereda police and then transferred to the custody to zonal security officials or federal soldiers.
One 31-year-old school teacher in western Oromia was detained by police and then interrogated by wereda and zonal security officials when he sought to register as an opposition candidate. “I was afraid,” he told Human Rights Watch. “They accused me of being on OLF member and said I would be shot… They put a gun in my mouth, and then made me swear that I wouldn’t go back to the opposition.” He was released nine days later, after the deadline for candidate registration had passed. Human Rights Watch interviewed other OPC candidates who had also been detained after trying to register in other constituencies.
Prospective voters who might support the opposition have been similarly targeted by the government. Secondary school students in Oromia’s Cheliya wereda, many of whom are of voting age, reported to Human Rights Watch that they have been compelled to provide a letter from representatives of their gott/garee – unofficial groupings of households into cells that are used to monitor political speech and intimidate perceived government critics – attesting that they did not belong to any opposition party. Local officials said that unless they produced those letters, they would not be allowed to register to vote. One civil servant in Gedo town was warned by a superior that he would lose his job if he supported the opposition.
“The same local level officials who are directly responsible for much of the day-to-day political repression that occurs in Ethiopia have their jobs at stake in these elections,” Gagnon said. “As such, their efforts to intimidate ordinary people into returning them to office are especially intense.”
Local authorities have also prevented the registration of opposition candidates in many constituencies where the opposition’s success in 2005 parliamentary polls appeared to give them a chance at winning. In Fincha in western Oromia, for example, the opposition Oromo People’s Congress (OPC) made three attempts to register a candidate for an open parliamentary seat. The seat had been vacated by an OPC candidate who won 81 percent of the vote in 2005 but was later forced into exile after local authorities accused him of being an OLF supporter. The OPC tried to replace him on the ballot with three different candidates but each was prevented from registering. All three candidates were physically threatened by members of the wereda administration and police and one was detained for more than a week when he tried to register.
The opposition Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM) has encountered similar problems in western Oromia, with 10 of its 14 candidates resigning in response to pressure from local officials. In February, police in Dembi Dollo arrested 16 OFDM members and accused them of belonging to the OLF. Although a court ordered them all released two weeks later when police could provide no evidence to support their allegations, they were subsequently threatened with physical harm by local officials.
The home and crops of one OFDM member in the same area were burned. He reported this to the police with the aid of OFDM officials but alleged to Human Rights Watch that the police then failed to investigate the incident.
Such repression has been widespread in Oromia. The OPC gave Human Rights Watch the names of more than 300 party members it claims have been detained since November 2007. Investigations carried out by the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO), Ethiopia’s preeminent human rights monitoring organization, corroborate claims that many opposition supporters in Oromia have been arrested or illegally detained for periods ranging from days to months, often on the basis of alleged links to the OLF.
Procedural and Other Bars to Opposition Participation
In many cases, acts of intimidation have gone hand-in-hand with unjustifiable bureaucratic and procedural bars on free opposition participation in the polls. Some representatives of the NEB responsible for the registration of candidates at the constituency level have worked with local officials to block opposition registration. In some cases NEB agents have cancelled the registration of opposition candidates either without explanation or based on age and residency criteria despite clear evidence to the contrary. In other instances, NEB representatives provided the names of opposition candidates to local officials and to the police. Police in some of those constituencies then cordoned off access to NEB offices and physically prevented suspected opposition candidates from entering.
Across western Oromia, the country’s largest state, local officials have refused to allow candidates of the two main opposition parties there, the OPC and OFDM, to register more than a token share of candidates. In some constituencies, authorities have closed down OPC and OFDM offices and threatened their candidates with arrest if they persisted in competing.
In some cases, local authorities offered bribes to opposition candidates to withdraw. One OFDM candidate interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that local ruling party leaders offered to pay his college tuition and guaranteed him a job in the local administration if he withdrew from the election.
“The run-up to these elections illustrates how meaningless the process of voting can be in an environment of intimidation and fear,” Gagnon said. “The Ethiopian government must publicly commit itself to ending the systemic human rights abuses that have become part of the foundation of its hold on power.”
Background
The patterns of repression and procedural manipulation that surround the upcoming polls are motivated in part by the increased importance that control of wereda and kebele administration has taken on since 2001. Financed in part by the World Bank and other donors, the Ethiopian government has decentralized the provision of basic services such as health and education. This has effectively empowered wereda administrators, who are appointed by the elected councils, with greater discretion in the allocation of budget expenditures.
The kebele system in particular is also a central part of the ruling party’s elaborate system of surveillance, intimidation, and coercion of ordinary people who are perceived as being unsympathetic to the government. The kebele were originally created by the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam for precisely this purpose and have been put to the same use by the current government since Mengistu’s ouster in 1991. Because of the kebele system’s importance in this regard, the EPRDF is particularly loathe to contemplate losing control over them.
A dominant theme in the EPRDF’s political discourse on Oromia is the need to combat the activities of the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which has been fighting a low-level insurrection against the government for years with Eritrean backing. Across much of Oromia, local officials have routinely and for many years used unproven allegations of links to the OLF as a pretext to subject law-abiding government critics to arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and other forms of human rights abuse.
Local officials in Oromia have also made extensive use of the kebele system, along with smaller cells called gott and garee, to keep residents under constant surveillance for signs of government criticism. The overwhelming majority of local and regional authorities in Oromia belong to the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), which is the regional arm of the EPRDF.
Ethiopia’s last elections were parliamentary polls in 2005. The run-up to the elections saw signs of openness in some areas, though in most constituencies the same patterns of repression documented above prevailed. Following the elections, opposition efforts to contest the results sparked a heavy-handed government crackdown that saw several hundred people gunned down in the streets of Addis Ababa, mass arrests of perceived opposition supporters, and several prominent opposition leaders jailed on charges of treason that were ultimately dropped.
Elections for city councils, kebele councils, and vacated parliamentary seats will be held on Sunday, April 13, 2008. Elections for the wereda councils will follow on April 20. The exercise is a vast one – Ethiopia is made up of 547 weredas, and each of those is broken up into numerous kebeles whose governing councils each seat 300 representatives. The weredas are grouped into zones, whose administrations are not at stake in these elections, and the zones are grouped into nine ethnically-based regions.
Ethiopia’s government is highly dependent on donor assistance but donor governments, including the United States and United Kingdom, have largely refused to criticize repression in Ethiopia or to demand improvements in the country’s human rights record. The United States in particular views Ethiopia as a key ally in the “war on terror,” and donor governments in general often express fear that Ethiopia’s government will react poorly to human rights-related criticisms. The Ethiopian government has refused to allow any foreign observers to monitor the upcoming elections.
The facts of his life are well known. Haile Selassie’s influence on the world is his most enduring legacy. Born Tafari Makonnen in 1891, Haile Selassie came to be identified inextricably with Ethiopia. Only rarely in the modern world does the story of a man become so closely linked to the story of a nation. It is said that great events beget great men, but they beget failures as well, and the boundary between the two is often defined by singular acts of courage. These the Ethiopian Emperor did not lack.
Not surprisingly, the fortitude of the man sometimes referred to as “The Lion” inspired Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and even Malcom X, each of whom corresponded with Haile Selassie –who advocated civil disobedience when it was necessary to remedy fundamental social injustice or restore freedom to the oppressed. The Emperor’s presence at President Kennedy’s funeral is still remembered.
One speaks of leaders of men as though their public lives were completely divorced from their private ones. For a hereditary monarch, this should not be the case. What his children think of him is as important as what everybody else thinks. Haile Selassie was a devoted husband and father. His wife, Empress Menen, died in 1962. His sons, Sahle Selassie, Makonnen, and Asfa Wossen, had a great sense of duty to their father and to their people. Of his daughters, Princess Tenagne, in particular, excercised various official duties.
Haile Selassie ascended the throne in the era of polar exploration and slow communication. Africa’s oldest nation was little more than a footnote to the great stories of the day –something that Americans and Brits read about in the pages of the National Geographic. Some people still called the country Abyssinia. In certain countries far beyond Ethiopia’s borders, segregation and apartheid were long established and little questioned. Most other African “nations” were colonies. Even at home, slavery was technically still legal.
In such an era, words like “pan-Africanism” and “civil rights” were little more than esoteric philosophical notions entertained by an enlightened few.
That a country as backward as Italy, whose widespread poverty prompted the emigration of millions, would seek to devour a nation like Ethiopia, was an irony too subtle to raise eyebrows outside the most sophisticated intellectual circles. With British backing, Haile Selassie returned to defeat the Italian army which, in the event, the Allies never viewed as much more than a nuisance. The British themselves considered the Ethiopian campaign in its strategic context –as a way to free the Red Sea from possible Axis control– as much as the liberation of a sovereign nation. To the Ethiopians, it was as much a moral victory as a military one.
The Emperor’s speech to the League of Nations denouncing the Italian invasion is remembered more than the aggression itself. It prompted essentially ineffectual international trade sanctions against a European nation but, like the Battle of Adwa four decades earlier, represented in a tangible way one of the few occasions in the modern era that an African nation defied the arrogance of a European one.
There were very few world leaders of the post-war era who had actually led troops in combat. Haile Selassie and Dwight Eisenhower were exceptional in this respect, which partially accounts for their close friendship.
Even when the foe is truly formidable, courage has a psychological side that has little to do with combat or physical victory. One may seem defeated materially without being defeated morally. Perhaps it’s a question of confidence, values or knowledge. Haile Selassie’s greatest strength was as a builder of bridges –across rivers but also between cultures. His travels took him to many countries, and he became one of the most popular heads of state, and one of the most decorated men in the world.
It was during one such voyage, in 1960, that he had to rush home to confront an attempted overthrow of the existing order. This perhaps served as a reminder that the most dangerous revolutions are found in one’s own house. The sovereign who was once known as a reformer now found himself resented by many members of the very social class his economic and educational policies had helped to create. Internationally, however, his prestige did not suffer. The Emperor established the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, with a headquarters in Addis Ababa.
The revolution of 1974 was supported by outside forces, and while its roots were domestic, its covert objectives cannot be said to have been supported by more than a small fraction of Ethiopians.
Truth be told, administrative practices which worked well in 1950 were terribly inefficient by the 1970s, and a series of problems were cited as a pretext for a full scale coup d’etat. Ethiopia’s pre-industrial economy was no better prepared for Marxism than Russia’s had been in 1917.
Communism’s ultimate social and economic failure, in Ethiopia as well as in Russia, certainly indicates democracy’s superiority, whether that democracy is embodied by a republic or a constitutional monarchy. The Derg’s alliance with the Soviet Union made Ethiopia the instrument of a foreign power, precisely the thing Haile Selassie resisted.
He had a Solomonic pedigree, but Haile Selassie was a man of the people. Perhaps that’s how he should be remembered.
The Ethiopian government’s repression of registered opposition parties and ordinary voters has largely prevented political competition ahead of local elections that begin on April 13, Human Rights Watch said today. These widespread acts of violence, arbitrary detention and intimidation mirror long-term patterns of abuse designed to suppress political dissent in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government’s repression of registered opposition parties and ordinary voters has largely prevented political competition ahead of local elections that begin on April 13, Human Rights Watch said today. These widespread acts of violence, arbitrary detention and intimidation mirror long-term patterns of abuse designed to suppress political dissent in Ethiopia. “It is too late to salvage these elections, which will simply be a rubber stamp on the EPRDF’s near-monopoly on power at the local level,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Still, officials must at least allow the voters to decide how and whether to cast their ballots without intimidation.”
Human Rights Watch carried out two weeks of field research during the run-up to the polls and documented systemic patterns of repression and abuse that have rendered the elections meaningless in many areas. That research focused primarily on Oromia, Ethiopia’s most populous region and one long troubled by heavy-handed government repression.
The nationwide elections for the kebele (village or neighborhood councils), and wereda (districts made up of several kebeles administrations), are crucially important. It is local officials who are responsible for much of the day-to-day repression that characterizes governance in Ethiopia. Many local officials in Oromia have made a routine practice of justifying their abuses by accusing law-abiding government critics of belonging to the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which is waging a low-level insurrection against the government.
Candidates allied with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) will run unopposed in the vast majority of constituencies across Ethiopia. On April 10, one of Ethiopia’s two major opposition coalitions, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF), pulled out of the process altogether. UEDF officials complained that intimidation and procedural irregularities limited registration to only 6,000 of the 20,000 candidates they attempted to put forward for various seats. By contrast, state-controlled media reports that the EPRDF will field more than 4 million candidates across the country.
Violence, Arbitrary Detention, and Intimidation
Local ruling party officials have systematically targeted opposition candidates for violence, intimidation, and other human rights abuses since the registration period began three months ago. Particularly in areas with established opposition support, local officials have arbitrarily detained opposition candidates, searched their property without warrant, and in some cases physically assaulted them.
Credible reports collected by Human Rights Watch indicate a pattern of cooperation among officials across all three tiers of local government — zone, wereda, and kebele administrations — in carrying out these abuses. Victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch across different locations in Oromia recounted a consistent narrative. Some were arbitrarily detained and then interrogated or threatened by wereda administration officials in the presence of zonal officials. Others were arbitrarily detained by wereda police and then transferred to the custody to zonal security officials or federal soldiers.
One 31-year-old school teacher in western Oromia was detained by police and then interrogated by wereda and zonal security officials when he sought to register as an opposition candidate. “I was afraid,” he told Human Rights Watch. “They accused me of being on OLF member and said I would be shot… They put a gun in my mouth, and then made me swear that I wouldn’t go back to the opposition.” He was released nine days later, after the deadline for candidate registration had passed. Human Rights Watch interviewed other OPC candidates who had also been detained after trying to register in other constituencies.
Prospective voters who might support the opposition have been similarly targeted by the government. Secondary school students in Oromia’s Cheliya wereda, many of whom are of voting age, reported to Human Rights Watch that they have been compelled to provide a letter from representatives of their gott/garee — unofficial groupings of households into cells that are used to monitor political speech and intimidate perceived government critics — attesting that they did not belong to any opposition party. Local officials said that unless they produced those letters, they would not be allowed to register to vote. One civil servant in Gedo town was warned by a superior that he would lose his job if he supported the opposition.
“The same local level officials who are directly responsible for much of the day-to-day political repression that occurs in Ethiopia have their jobs at stake in these elections,” Gangon said. “As such, their efforts to intimidate ordinary people into returning them to office are especially intense.”
Local authorities have also prevented the registration of opposition candidates in many constituencies where the opposition’s success in 2005 parliamentary polls appeared to give them a chance at winning. In Fincha in western Oromia, for example, the opposition Oromo People’s Congress (OPC) made three attempts to register a candidate for an open parliamentary seat. The seat had been vacated by an OPC candidate who won 81 percent of the vote in 2005 but was later forced into exile after local authorities accused him of being an OLF supporter. The OPC tried to replace him on the ballot with three different candidates but each was prevented from registering. All three candidates were physically threatened by members of the wereda administration and police and one was detained for more than a week when he tried to register.
The opposition Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM) has encountered similar problems in western Oromia, with 10 of its 14 candidates resigning in response to pressure from local officials. In February, police in Dembi Dollo arrested 16 OFDM members and accused them of belonging to the OLF. Although a court ordered them all released two weeks later when police could provide no evidence to support their allegations, they were subsequently threatened with physical harm by local officials.
The home and crops of one OFDM member in the same area were burned. He reported this to the police with the aid of OFDM officials but alleged to Human Rights Watch that the police then failed to investigate the incident.
Such repression has been widespread in Oromia. The OPC gave Human Rights Watch the names of more than 300 party members it claims have been detained since November 2007. Investigations carried out by the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO), Ethiopia’s preeminent human rights monitoring organization, corroborate claims that many opposition supporters in Oromia have been arrested or illegally detained for periods ranging from days to months, often on the basis of alleged links to the OLF.
Procedural and Other Bars to Opposition Participation
In many cases, acts of intimidation have gone hand-in-hand with unjustifiable bureaucratic and procedural bars on free opposition participation in the polls. Some representatives of the NEB responsible for the registration of candidates at the constituency level have worked with local officials to block opposition registration. In some cases NEB agents have cancelled the registration of opposition candidates either without explanation or based on age and residency criteria despite clear evidence to the contrary. In other instances, NEB representatives provided the names of opposition candidates to local officials and to the police. Police in some of those constituencies then cordoned off access to NEB offices and physically prevented suspected opposition candidates from entering.
Across western Oromia, the country’s largest state, local officials have refused to allow candidates of the two main opposition parties there, the OPC and OFDM, to register more than a token share of candidates. In some constituencies, authorities have closed down OPC and OFDM offices and threatened their candidates with arrest if they persisted in competing.
In some cases, local authorities offered bribes to opposition candidates to withdraw. One OFDM candidate interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that local ruling party leaders offered to pay his college tuition and guaranteed him a job in the local administration if he withdrew from the election.
“The run-up to these elections illustrates how meaningless the process of voting can be in an environment of intimidation and fear,” Gagnon said. “The Ethiopian government must publicly commit itself to ending the systemic human rights abuses that have become part of the foundation of its hold on power.”
Background
The patterns of repression and procedural manipulation that surround the upcoming polls are motivated in part by the increased importance that control of wereda and kebele administration has taken on since 2001. Financed in part by the World Bank and other donors, the Ethiopian government has decentralized the provision of basic services such as health and education. This has effectively empowered wereda administrators, who are appointed by the elected councils, with greater discretion in the allocation of budget expenditures.
The kebele system in particular is also a central part of the ruling party’s elaborate system of surveillance, intimidation, and coercion of ordinary people who are perceived as being unsympathetic to the government. The kebele were originally created by the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam for precisely this purpose and have been put to the same use by the current government since Mengistu’s ouster in 1991. Because of the kebele system’s importance in this regard, the EPRDF is particularly loathe to contemplate losing control over them.
A dominant theme in the EPRDF’s political discourse on Oromia is the need to combat the activities of the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which has been fighting a low-level insurrection against the government for years with Eritrean backing. Across much of Oromia, local officials have routinely and for many years used unproven allegations of links to the OLF as a pretext to subject law-abiding government critics to arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and other forms of human rights abuse.
Local officials in Oromia have also made extensive use of the kebele system, along with smaller cells called gott and garee, to keep residents under constant surveillance for signs of government criticism. The overwhelming majority of local and regional authorities in Oromia belong to the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), which is the regional arm of the EPRDF.
Ethiopia’s last elections were parliamentary polls in 2005. The run-up to the elections saw signs of openness in some areas, though in most constituencies the same patterns of repression documented above prevailed. Following the elections, opposition efforts to contest the results sparked a heavy-handed government crackdown that saw several hundred people gunned down in the streets of Addis Ababa, mass arrests of perceived opposition supporters, and several prominent opposition leaders jailed on charges of treason that were ultimately dropped.
Elections for city councils, kebele councils, and vacated parliamentary seats will be held on Sunday, April 13, 2008. Elections for the wereda councils will follow on April 20. The exercise is a vast one � Ethiopia is made up of 547 weredas, and each of those is broken up into numerous kebeles whose governing councils each seat 300 representatives. The weredas are grouped into zones, whose administrations are not at stake in these elections, and the zones are grouped into nine ethnically-based regions.
Ethiopia’s government is highly dependent on donor assistance but donor governments, including the United States and United Kingdom, have largely refused to criticize repression in Ethiopia or to demand improvements in the country’s human rights record. The United States in particular views Ethiopia as a key ally in the “war on terror,” and donor governments in general often express fear that Ethiopia’s government will react poorly to human rights-related criticisms. The Ethiopian government has refused to allow any foreign observers to monitor the upcoming elections.
If Woyanne starts war, the people of Ethiopia, Somalia, and all people of the Horn of Africa will stand with the Eritrean army and crush the tribal junta.
——————————-
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Eritrea’s U.N. envoy said on Thursday he saw no need for U.N. peacekeepers to remain on its border with Ethiopia, despite U.N. fears that a total withdrawal could spark a new war in the Horn of Africa.
“We don’t need UNMEE anymore,” Eritrean Ambassador Araya Desta told Reuters in a telephone interview. He was referring to the U.N. mission on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border.
“The UNMEE issue is a dead issue,” he said.
Responding to fears of a repeat of the two countries’ 1998-2000 war, Desta said Eritrea was not planning to attack Ethiopia. But he warned Addis Ababa Woyanne that his country was prepared to fend off any invasions into Eritrean territory.
“If the Ethiopians Woyannes invade us, we’ll be forced to defend ourselves,” Desta said. [Ambassador Araya, please don’t call these Woyannes “Ethiopians.” You know they hate Ethiopia.]
UNMEE has already withdrawn nearly 1,700 troops and military observers who for the past seven years had been trying to prevent another war between the Horn of Africa neighbors.
Some 164 peacekeepers are left in Eritrea to guard equipment, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a new report circulated to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.
The 1,700 peacekeepers had been stationed in a 15.5-mile (25-km) buffer zone inside Eritrea. But Asmara turned against UNMEE because of U.N. inability to enforce rulings by an independent commission awarding chunks of Ethiopian-held territory, including the town of Badme, to Eritrea.
UNMEE pulled most of its troops out of Eritrea after the government cut off access to fuel and restricted deliveries of food and other essential supplies. Asmara denies this and accuses UNMEE of enabling Ethiopia to occupy its territory. that a total withdrawal of UNMEE could lead to a new war.
Most UNMEE troops have been sent home temporarily, Ban said in the report, obtained by Reuters.
There are also still a few peacekeepers on the Ethiopian side of the border, though Addis Ababa Woyanne had indicated that it does not want to be alone in hosting U.N. troops.
Ban’s report said Eritrea was refusing to discuss the issue of the future status of UNMEE and accused Asmara of a “military occupation” of the official buffer zone between the countries established under the cease-fire agreement.
Desta said his government had not prepared an official response to the report but he vehemently denied that Eritrean forces had illegally seized the territory, which he said was land that belonged to Eritrea.
ADDIS ABABA – In the old Falasha village of Ambober, 15 kilometers outside Gondar, there are only Christians living today. All the village’s original inhabitants left for Israel at least 17 years ago. The old ORT school which used to serve the Jewish community is now a government school. Opposite is the compound of the local synagogue. In the Beita Israel custom, there are two separate buildings, and while the women’s synagogue is still the original tuckul, made from lathe walls of mud and wood, someone has made a donation and redone the men’s synagogue as a sturdy, stone-walled building. No one prays there but it is one of the main stops on the routes of Jewish and Israeli groups who tour the Gonder region. Inside, there is a wooden bookcase that contains the siddurim (prayer books) and Hebrew books that served the community decades ago. They all bear the stamp of the religious services department of the World Zionist Organization. Among the dusty and time-eaten prayer books, bibles and Hebrew primers, I found one slim tome that seemed a bit out of place. It was a treatise on the laws of shehita printed by the famous “Brothers and Widow Rohm” Printers of Vilnius, in 1896. The incongruity of finding such a title in a Falasha village, a community with its own distinct laws of ritual slaughter, so different from those practiced by Orthodox Jews in late 19th Century, is incredible. The owners’ scrawl inside the cover leaves little doubt this book used to reside in the private library of a religious Jew somewhere in Eastern Europe before the Second World War. How did it find its way to the Horn of Africa?
The most likely answer is that many holy books that, unlike their owners, somehow survived the destruction of the Holocaust, were sent to organizations like the WZO in Jerusalem in the hope that someone might find use for them. It probably lay in storage for years until someone assembled a shipment of books for the Falashas, and without thinking also chucked in the shehita book. It is unthinkable that anyone in Ambober ever found any use for the book — it probably lay there unopened until the Jews left for Israel — but just think about the passage it made. From the devastation of Jewish life in Europe, to Jerusalem and from there to Ethiopia, only to be forsaken again when another Jewish community ceased to exist. No one has read it for at least 70 years, but what a romantic voyage.
One has only to spend 24 hours in Ethiopia to understand that logic simply does not apply when trying to understand the Jewish story of this land. You can only comprehend it from a romantic perspective. When you review the serious research done on the origins or the Beita Israel, it is almost impossible to escape the fact that there is no real historical evidence connecting this group with the scattered branches of the people of Israel. It is just as much, if not more, plausible that they were simply a sect of the ancient Ethiopian Christian civilization, one of the oldest churches in the world, who believed at the same time that they were the children of King Solomon’s first-born son Menelik. The last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the “Lion of Judah,” believed himself to be a direct descendant.
The Star of David with a cross in its center is ubiquitous on buildings throughout Addis Ababa, and the Ethiopian “Bible,” Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), which chronicles Menelik’s voyage to his father in Jerusalem and back to Ethiopian carrying the Ark of the Covenant, contains entire chapters that directly paraphrase the Old Testament. Seeing the Falashas as an outcropping of this culture – believing that instead of Zion moving to the ancient city of Aksum, the children of Israel should return to the original Zion – makes much more sense than imagining a section of the tribe that got lost for a millennium or two in Africa.
And yet the idea is so romantically appealing that normally levelheaded politicians, academics and rabbis just want to believe in it. After all, we are such a small and urban people, just imagine if there were indeed primitive tribes, scattered in exotic places around the globe. It would make being Jewish feel a lot less claustrophobic. That’s why Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, whose Halakha (Jewish law) rulings are usually based on a wealth of evidence, recognized the Beita Israel’s Jewishness in 1973 as the lost tribe of Dan, on the basis only of a ruling of a 16th-century rabbi who in turn based his on the writings of a mystical ninth-century figure, Eldad Hadani, a man who probably never existed, and even if he did, it is highly questionable whether Eldad had anything to do with the Falashas anyway.
In the same way, the current Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar, widely seen as Yosef’s anointed successor, ruled that the Falashmura, the members of Beita Israel who converted to Christianity, were “definitely” Jews. But how could he make such a sweeping ruling? Surely this should be a matter for individual judgment. Jewish leaders and activists were quick to sound the alarm on threats facing the Jews of Ethiopia, even when these were far from certain, out of real concern but also because a generation still traumatized by the Holocaust wants to feel as if this time around, it is saving Jews from the jaws of mortal danger.
Israel airlifting 14,000 Jews from Addis Ababa in 1991, at the height of the Ethiopian civil war, felt for many like the closing of the circle. The Jews of the world had been powerless to help their brothers in Poland 50 years earlier, but now had an air force and sufficient funds and influence to organize the airlift overnight. Whether or not the rebel army posed a threat to the Jews is immaterial. However, for the last 17 years, the question of the Falashmura has been anything but romantic. The lack of a clear government policy, combined with the machinations of various lobby groups and unhealthy measure of political interests has abused the whole process of bringing the Falashmura to Israel.
The government now wants to stop them from arriving, in two months. But if they are eligible according to previously-agreed criteria, why can’t the thousands of Falashmura in the Gondar compounds come to Zion? And if this is not enough for them to eventually become Israeli citizens, then why has Israel allowed at least 26,000 of them in so far, at a huge financial and social cost? Shouldn’t someone be called to account? It is about time reality intruded on the romantic dream.
Welcoming Remarks: Jacob Olupona, Chair, Committee on African Studies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Chair, Dept. of African and African American Studies and Acting Director, W.E.B. DuBois Institute
Keynote speeches by Dr. Getatchew Haile and Rebecca G. Haile
“Unto the Second Generation: Dual Perspectives on the Ethiopian Diaspora.”
Session Moderators: Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Steven Kaplan
MONDAY MORNING
(All Monday daytime sessions will take place at the Barker Center, Thompson Room 110, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge)
Monday Morning Session #1: 2000 E.C., Dawn of the Ethiopian Diaspora?
Welcoming Remarks: Diana Sorensen, Dean of the Humanities and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures
Solomon Addis Getahun, Jon Abbink, Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Session Moderator and Commentator: James McCann
9:00-10:30
10:30-11:00 Break
Monday Morning Session #2:
Reading and Discussion by Dinaw Mengestu from his novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Session Moderator and Commentator: Francis Abiola Irele
11:00-12:00
12:00-1:30 Lunch Break
MONDAY AFTERNOON
Monday Afternoon Session #1: Diaspora Links: Networks for Communication Among Ethiopian Americans Nancy Hafkin, Mahdi Omar, Elias Wondimu
Session Moderator and Commentator: Emmanuel Akyeampong
1:30-3:00
3:00-3:30 Break
Monday Afternoon Session #2: The Visual Arts in Ethiopian Diaspora Life Marilyn Heldman, Achamyeleh Debela, Leah Niederstadt
Session Moderator and Commentator: Ingrid Monson
3:30-5:00
Monday Afternoon Session #3:
Summary Discussion:What Does the Ethiopian Case Study Teach Us About New African Communities in the United States?
Donald Levine, Terrence Lyons, Steven Kaplan
Session Moderator and Commentator: Jacob Olupona
5:00-6:00
MONDAY EVENING
(Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge) MULATU ASTATKE AND THE EITHER/ORCHESTRA CONCERT
Works of Mulatu Astatke, performed by Mulatu Astatke and the Either/Orchestra, with premieres.
8:00-10:00
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS Jon Abbink, Professor of African Studies, VU University, Amsterdam, and senior researcher, African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands
Abbink has carried out fieldwork with Beta Israel in Israel, with various ethnic groups in Southern Ethiopia, and on political culture and religious relations in Ethiopia. He is the author of some 150 articles, several monographs and edited works, among them (with I. van Kessel) Vanguard or Vandals. Politics, Youth and Conflict in Africa (2005). _The recipient of various research grants, e.g., from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, CNRS, and various Dutch academic foundations, in Spring 2007 he was a visiting professor at the Asia-Africa Institute of Hamburg University, Germany.
Emmanuel Akyeampong, Harvard College Professor and Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Emmanuel Akyeampong is a social historian with research and teaching interests in environmental history, disease and medicine, and comparative slavery and the African Diaspora. Akyeampong is also the President of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (US), a non-profit organization of academic researchers, and African broadcasters and producers dedicated to research and the production of development-oriented programming for broadcast in Africa via television, radio and the Internet.
Mulatu Astatke, Composer and Performer, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)
Mulatu Astatke is a virtuoso vibraphonist and keyboardist known as a composer and the innovator of Ethio-jazz. Trained in Ethiopia, England, and at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he has lived a transnational musical life engaged with musical performance, research, and media work at home in Ethiopia and as a composer and performer in musical circles internationally. In 2005, Mulatu’s music was featured in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers and he received the 2006 SEED (Society for Ethiopians Established in the Diaspora) Award.
Achamyeleh Debela, Professor of Art, North Carolina Central University
Achamyeleh Debela specializes in multi-media arts, as well as computer graphics and painting. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa, as well as in Nigeria and the United States, he recently collaborated with curator Rebecca Martin Nagy in researching, curating, and publishing a catalogue for an exhibition titled Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists at the Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida.
Solomon Addis Getahun, Assistant Professor of History, Central Michigan University
Trained both in Ethiopia and at Michigan State University, Solomon Addis Getahun’s research spans African and African diaspora history, including contemporary African refugee and immigrant communities in the U.S., urbanization, identity politics in the Horn of Africa, and U.S. foreign policy towards the Horn. His recent publications include The History of Ethiopian Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S. (2007) and The History of the City of Gondar (2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Currently, he is collaborating on two book projects: Culture and Customs of Ethiopia with Prof. Hakeem Tijani and History of Ethiopian Refugees in Seattle with Professor Joseph W. Scott.
Nancy J. Hafkin, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa, ret. and Director, Knowledge Working
Nancy Hafkin worked for UNECA in Addis Ababa for 25 years, establishing the program to promote information technology for African development. Since her retirement, she has been writing on information technology in developing countries, with particular emphasis on gender issues. Recent publications include Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study (USAID, 2001), Cinderella or Cyberella: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society (Kumarian Press, 2006) and Engendering the Knowledge Society: Measuring the Participation of Women (ORBICOM, 2007). In 2000 the Association for Progressive Communication established an annual Nancy Hafkin Prize for creativity in information technology in Africa.
Getatchew Haile, Curator of the Ethiopian Study Center and Regents Professor of Medieval Studies at St. John’s University
Getatchew Haile is a scholar of Ethiopian literature and history who arrived in the United States in 1976. A MacArthur Fellow and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Dr. Getatchew is a former member of the Ethiopian Parliament and a leading figure in the Ethiopian diaspora. Among his recent scholarly publications are his editions and translations of The Ge’ez Acts of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende (2006) and The Mariology of Emperor Zär’a Ya’eqob (Tomarä Tesbet) (1992).
Rebecca G. Haile, Attorney and Author
Rebecca Haile is a graduate of Williams College and the Harvard Law School. Born in Ethiopia in 1965, she came to the United States at age 11 in the wake of the Ethiopian revolution. She is the author of Held at A Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia (2007).
Marilyn Heldman, Adjunct Professor of Art History, American University
An art historian, curator, and expert on Ethiopian painting, architecture, and manuscript illumination, Marilyn Heldman’s work has revealed the dialogue of Ethiopian arts with traditions abroad, including those of the Eastern Mediterranean world and of Europe. She is the author of African Zion: the Sacred Art of Ethiopia (1993) and The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre Seyon (1994), as well as numerous articles. Heldman has been a Fellow at the Harvard Center of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, and the recipient of foundation grants, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Francis Abiola Irele, Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures
Irele is the editor of many collections of African and Caribbean literature in English and French, and has published two collections of his own essays: The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora. He was President of the African Literature Association in 1992-1993 and is currently a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.
Steven Kaplan, Professor of Comparative Religion and African Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)
Steven Kaplan is a scholar of Christianity and Judaism in Ethiopia. His books and articles span a wide range of topics including the history of Ethiopian monasticism, studies of Ethiopian historical and religious texts, the Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia, as well as extensive fieldwork among the large Ethiopian (Jewish) community in Israel. Kaplan is currently researching Ethiopian Christian cultural adaptation in the United States.
Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago
Donald Levine is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (1965) and Greater Ethiopia (1974; 2nd ed, 2000), in recent years Levine has turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, in 2004 Professor Levine was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University.
Terrence Lyons, Associate Professor at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies, George Mason University.
Terrence Lyons specializes in comparative politics and international relations with particular emphasis on conflicts and transnational politics in Africa. He has authored and edited a number of academic and policy-oriented studies, including Conflict-Generated Diasporas and Transnational Politics in Ethiopia (2007) and The Ethiopian Extended Dialogue: An Analytical Report 2000-2003 (2004).
James McCann, Professor of History, Boston University
James McCann is an historian who has published books and articles on a wide range of subjects in Ethiopian history and environmental studies. A former fellow of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University (2005-2006), McCann recently won the George Perkins Marsh Prize for his book Maize and Grace (2005). He has just completed a book manuscript titled Stirring the Pot: African Cuisine and Globalization, 1500-2000.
Dinaw Mengestu, Author
Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Dinaw immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1980, where he attended Georgetown University and received an MFA from Columbia University. He has published the acclaimed novel, named a 2007 New York Times notable book, about the Ethiopian diaspora titled The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Dinaw Mengestu has been the Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University, and is the recipient of the National Book Foundations “5 Under 35 Award,” a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, and the 2007 Guardian First Book Award.
Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Supported by the Time Warner Endowment, Department of Music, and Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Ingrid Monson is Chair of the Harvard Music Department and both a scholar and accomplished performer of jazz. The author of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, which won the Sonneck Society’s Irving Lowens Award for the best book published on American music in 1996, she has edited The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000), and recently published Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967 (2007). Monson has also carried out fieldwork in Mali, where she specializes in the music of the balafon and of balafon virtuoso Neba Solo.
Leah Niederstadt, Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, Art History and Curator of the College’s Permanent Collection, Wheaton College
A 1994 Rhodes Scholar from the University of Michigan, Niederstadt completed graduate work in Anthropology at the University of Oxford (England) and in Museum Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She specializes in contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia and is particularly interested in the production and consumption of painting and sculpture and of HIV/AIDS-related performance. A contributor to Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw and Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists, Niederstadt will serve as co-editor for a forthcoming special edition on Ethiopia for the journal African Arts.
Jacob Olupona, Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard University
Jacob Olupona chairs the Committee on African Studies at Harvard. His publications include Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals (1991) and the forthcoming The City of 201 Gods. Olupona has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and many other agencies, and in 2000, received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Mahdi Omar, The African Television Network
Mahdi Omar is the founder and producer of The African _Television Network of New England, an innovative community-based network that brings African news, interviews, music and _information to Greater Boston neighborhoods.
Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago
Donald Levine is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (1965) and Greater Ethiopia (1974; 2nd ed, 2000), in recent years Levine has turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, in 2004 Professor Levine was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is an ethnomusicologist who has carried out fieldwork in Ethiopia, and with Ethiopians in Israel and the United States. She has published numerous books and articles on Ethiopian music, including the award-winning Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986/1989) and the three-volume Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant, An Anthology (1994-1997, with Peter Jeffery). A member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences and the 2007-2008 Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center, she has recently received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Elias Wondimu, Publisher
Elias Wondimu is the founder and head of Tsehai Publishers and Distributors in Los Angeles, which issues monographs and the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies. Former editor of the Ethiopian Review, Elias Wondimu arrived in the United States in 1994.
