The Parable of Two Cheetah Cubs and 77 Million Ethiopians

For a country such as Ethiopia, it is always tough to be noticed by the West. It is not a Thailand or a Tahiti with white sands and tropical resorts to which the affluent hordes from the North come for some sun and fun in the din of winter. Nor is it an oil rich Saudi Arabia or a Venezuela whose every move is monitored by nervous bankers and commodity traders in New York and Zurich. So, it was a surprise and a nice change of pace to see so many Western news outlets carrying an AP wire story datelined from Ethiopia this Thanksgiving weekend.

For a change, a country that had suffered so much over the last six months, nearly out of sight of Western media, was being written about by great city papers and talked about by small town radio and TV stations. This Thanksgiving weekend, this ancient land of 77 million people was finally getting its share of publicity. All sorts of papers from Europe to North America and from Australia to South Africa, French and Spanish wire services, online specialty journals and trade publications carried reports on Ethiopia.

Like millions of Ethiopians that immigrated to the West over the last three decades, I find the lack of reliable news coverage of Ethiopia during times of crises to be disconcerting. I spend hours every day trying to find news on developments in my homeland where so many of my family still live. Often, I have to settle for press releases issued by one contender or the other – reading between the lines to finagle the small credible nuggets of truth from the pile of partisan spin. So, I was ecstatic when my news search engine returned several pages of listings of news items on Ethiopia on the morning of November 26, 2005. I poured a nice big cup of coffee and sat on my comfortable chair in front of my computer and anxiously clicked the first Item of note.

It was a report from eitb24 (http://www.eitb24.com/noticia_en.php?id=107926), a website which proclaims to be The Basque Information Channel. It carried a news curiosity about a pair of cheetah cubs discovered by U.S. troops scouring the Ogaden region of Ethiopia for the trails of Al Qaeda. It seems that a small town innkeeper in the tiny eastern town of Gode is raising two cheetah cubs for the amusement of his patrons. The GIs, candidates for PETA membership back home or just properly raised Midwestern boys, were upset by the sight of two hungry young cheetah cubs and sought to persuade the innkeeper to free the cubs only to be told that he had invested some $2000 to acquire them from a poacher and would not relinquish them without due compensation. That is the Somali equivalent of “Joe, let Uncle Sam rescue them for a measly $2000”. These poor souls patrolling the Ogaden were touched by the incredible cruelty of it all and reported the story to the wild life offices in Addis Ababa which in turn leaked the news to the AP scribe in the area.

The rest as they say is history. For the period beginning 12:00PM on November 25 and ending 6:50AM on the 27th (EST), my news search engine picked 182 separate html links about this story. No other news event pertaining to Ethiopia this weekend or, as best as I recall, during any other 43 hour period garnered even half of 182 English language reports on the internet.

The historic election of May 15, 2005 where more than 90% of Ethiopia’s registered electorate waited in line for up 24 hours to cast its vote did not merit reporting on 182 independent occasions. The suspension of the vote counting when it appeared that the ruling party of Meles Zenawi was loosing and loosing badly did not merit 182 independent English language reports. Not even when the EU election observer team rang the alarm bell on May 22nd that the government of Ethiopia was in the process of stealing the vote did 182 English language news outlets in the West find the event worthy of their web space or airtime. When 42 protesters were shot dead by the government’s security forces on June 8 following Mr. Meles’ decision to extend Marshall law for another month, western media did not find it interesting news – at least not as interesting as two cheetah cubs held for the entertainment of bar patrons in a far away border town known for illegal guns and other contraband. During the first week of November, when the government resumed its murderous ways killing to the tune of hundreds, when all of the leaders of the main opposition party were arrested, when elected parliamentarians were killed by police, when the elected mayor of the city of Addis was arrested, when boys as young as six and mothers trying to shield their husbands from beatings were killed by the security forces with the aim of intimidating the population, when tens of thousands of citizens were rounded up and barricaded in malaria infested open air concentration camps (in actuality holding pens reminiscent of cattle stockades except these are made of razor wire high fences) western media did not find any of it worthy of its efforts or of its readers time.

The media sure enough got word of these lovable cheetahs holed up in the remote eastern town of Gode and of the GI’s heroic act of rescue. As it so happens, only a week earlier more than 30 political prisoners were killed purportedly trying to break out of prison in the town of Kebridehar, some 100 miles away. When that story was not carried even by a single news outlet (recorded on the internet) save for a few Ethiopian websites, I thought that it was perhaps on account of the inaccessibility of the region. Now, of course, I know better.

I have lived most of my life in the West. Yet, I still don’t know what it is a nation must do to get a little attention. Over the years, I have heard comments made in jest (or so I believed) about Africa’s best hope. The best thing going for Africa, the comment goes, is the wild beast which lives there -- the lion, the elephant, the giraffe, the great ape and of course the loveable cheetah, that sleek model of efficient locomotion. The people, they say, only get in the way of our enjoyment of those great creatures of the savanna and of the jungle. Perhaps that comment is not too far removed from mainstream opinion, at least as perceived by the media which must seek to select the news that is worthy of circulation in the mainstream.

Using Your Loot Wisely: Lessons from the Final Days of a Tyrant

When I read Mr. Paul B. Henze’s “Comments on Comments”, I thought I was finally seeing some wisdom in the way the Great Leader and Chairman of the Politburo, aka PM Meles Zenawi, spends the billions he accepts from his sponsors on behalf of the Ethiopian people. By all accounts, much of what he has bought with the billions he has spent to date has been farcical.

To the uninitiated, let me recount just a couple of Meles’ investments and what he netted from them. Meles financed a two and half year war with Airtra, a war considered by all (and recently even by the Great One himself) to have been a meaningless war. By most estimates, the Great Leader and Chairman not only expended the lives of some 70,000-100,000 of our young men, he also pumped more than $1 million per day to feed and equip the fighting men. If you just count the material loss, that right there comes to well over $1 billion. Considering what he got out of the deal (of course we don’t ask what we the people get out of the deal for it is never about us, it always about him), that was a foolish way to spend money even when it is not his own money. After all, what did fighting two and half years costing the lives of well over 70,000 young men and expending $1 billion plus netted the Great Leader? The conquered territory was given back gratis. The military victory was not leveraged to extract settlement terms to our liking….whatever it is we were after at that point. Instead, out of the jaws of victory, the Great One finagled a great loss for Ethiopia via international arbitration.

Another investment outlet Mr. Meles chose for the loot was hiring a high powered international legal team to defend the good name and honor of the Great One and of his circle of friends in an alien court. That adventure turned out to be comedic. Like all good lawyers do (here is hoping that my own offspring who is in training would not be as good as them), these great legal minds took the money, initiated legal action in a Virginia court and then disclosed to the Great One that, of course to proceed, he and his associates must abandon their immunity. Not exactly a small matter for one who for 14 years has done all sorts of things behind the veil of immunity. So, he plucked a few from the newest checks he received, paid his bills and withdrew his petition from the court. In the process, he has opened himself for further action under U.S. law. The whole idea turned out to be just a few million dollars misspent.

Now comes evidence that the Great One might have wisely invested some of the funds he received from his sponsors. As everyone knows by now, anyone and everyone in the world with any conscious has been lining up to politely point to him that neither ordering the security forces to shoot into peacefully assembled crowds nor killing women and children in any circumstance is civilized behavior. It looked like old friends and allies were abandoning ship as fast they can and even people who hardly know him or Ethiopia were coming out of the woodworks to condemn his handy work. For five months now, he has been truly in need of friends.

Just like that a friend from whom we have not heard for quite some time dropped in last week to stand up and get counted. I am speaking of none other than the one and only Paul B. Henze.

My thoughts when I saw his byline on the internet was about the bundle the Great One was preparing to pay to setup a spin network. Henze was quite agitated as if something personal has happened to him – not just like a well compensated aide de camp ought to be. For a guy who spent much of his adult life in the spin business, his message was neither smooth nor effective. One gets the sense that he was either awakened in the middle of the night and ordered to send out something or was given a statement to which to affix his name and to simply transmit to the usual media outlets.

So, Henze writes “having been in close and almost continual contact with the TPLF leadership since 1990, I find it difficult to regard these men as dishonest and inclined toward fraud.” That is political speak for “I have been continuously on Meles’ payroll since 1990 and he has always paid me on time”. As if God or the Ethiopian people did not know, then came the confession that Meles and his boys “started out as student rebels infected with Marxism-Leninism… They did not find it easy to shed the illusions that Soviet propaganda among students in the 1960s had left with them”.

I did not make that up. Henze wrote that Meles and his boys have had a hell of a time shedding their Marxist-Leninist ways. I guess at some point Meles’ analyst must have ordered him to jut reconcile with his deformity and live with it, because that is how he has been ever since the rest of us became acquainted with him in 1991. I don’t think any Ethiopian had detect Meles trying to shed his commy pinko ways.

If truth be told, Ethiopians always believed that the TPLF was never a born again democratic party and that Meles had never really been baptized in the holy spirit that is free market capitalism. Well, Mr. Henze now declares that we had been right all along. Henze writes, “they did not find it easy to shed the illusions that Soviet propaganda had left with them. But the best of them--Meles, Seyoum, Berhane Gebre Christos and others--were mentally sharp and had the independence of mind, in spite of their isolation in Tigray, to realize what was happenin! in the world of the 1980s.”

By the 1980s, what Ronald Regan used to call the ‘evil empire” was collapsing and the West was decisively winning the cold war. By the late 1980s, those mentally sharp boys could see that anyone caught worshiping at the altar of Marx, Lenin, Mao or Hoxha would be condemned to eternal banditry. Like the rest of us, Henze infers that Meles and his boys did what any mentally sharp person would do in the circumstances: confess seeing the error of their ways and profess rebirth as democrats entrenched in the Jeffersonian tradition.

I found this to be interesting reading. I could only imagine how Henze’s paymaster must be thinking when he reads this piece. Meles must be asking whether Henze too was not trying to distance himself from the train wreck that is the Meles regime. Aren’t good buddies supposed to go down with the captain of the ship? I was contemplating these thoughts as I read the initial paragraphs. Then came the mea culpa. Henze actually writes that Meles’ policy on “ethnic structuralism”, “his reliance on peoples democratic organizations” as his vehicle for dividing and weakening the population and his “dogma on land ownership” were bad decisions.

Wow!! Is that a split or what?!

Then in an angry outburst that seems to be screaming “we did not do everything wrong!!”, Henze brags about the great things his employers did over the years. As evidence of the highlights of the mentally sharp Meles’ 14 years in office, Henze tells us that Meles and his boys
“(1) opened the society to creation of free institutions--political parties and other kinds of organizations; (2) they encouraged exiles to return and be active politically; (3) they removed restrictions on internal movement of citizens and granted passports freely; (4) they adopted a completely neutral, but not hostile, stance toward religion; (5) they permitted an independent press; (6) they committed themselves to establishing a system of rule of law and set in motion a process for drafting a new constitution; (7) they restored relations with the outside world.”

Like something uttered in a fit of rage very little of this comes even close to being right. Let me just point to the absurdities of some of these claims.

So, Meles opened the society to free political parties and other organizations? Let us see. First there were those exile organizations, including COEDF, who were invited to discuss potential participation in the transitional process. The U.S. government certified the sincerity of the offer, and so opposition organizations sent delegations to Addis to participate in what was to have been a conference of reconciliation. There was one little problem however. As each of the delegates arrived at the Addis airport, they were picked not by officials riding limousines but by the TPLF security forces riding military trucks and were taken to prison. One by one, all of those who did not get word about what was waiting for them and did not abandon their flights in Cairo or Frankfurt, were put in jail without trial and without charge. After many months, many managed to get out but one brave delegate, Ato Abera Yemaneab, still remains in prison some 12 years later. Of course, there was also the expulsion of OLF as well as the never ending persecution of AAPO and its leaders. I do not know what Mr. Henze had in mind when he speaks of the opening to establish free political parties. Perhaps he means the OPDO, APDO, AAPDO, SPDO or some other PDO. Until this last election cycle, there was NOTHING which even resembles free political activity in Ethiopia.

They encouraged exiles to return and be active in political activity. Which exiles might they be? Is he speaking of Ato Abera Yemaneab here again?

Mr. Henze credits Meles with the distinction of “removing restrictions on the internal movement of citizens” – the very same Meles who granted every Ethiopian with his/her very own Bantustan to belong to. I can only conclude one of two things is going on here. Either Mr. Henze is swallowing hard and paying back his paymaster or perhaps Meles is really that good…so good that he can keep even his closest allies in the dark.

Ethiopians, Mr. Henze tells the reader, are blessed with an independent press. Well, there is Walta, there is Iftin and of course there is Addis Zemen and the Herald. I don’t know why he stopped there. He should have also reminded us of the free electronic media law authorizing privatly owned and independently operated radio and television companies such as ETV, Radio Fana, etc..

According to this witness, Meles and his mentally sharp boys “committed themselves to establishing a system of rule of law”. He is quite right there. They did establish a system of rule of law. That fills the bill unless you are so picky that you point to the small matter that under this system, the law is malleable and may be altered at the whim and discretion of these boys. If they want to charge someone with corruption as a convenient way to remove him out of sight, they cook such a law overnight. If the judge orders bail for those charged under the law, the boys just cook another law making the offense not bail-able. Even better, they make the law such that the executive could disobey with impunity any decisions of the court. Heck for a small mater as disobeying the court, they don’t even have to write up a whole law. The judge commands no army so they just tell the judge “make me release him if you can”. If the executive wants to arrest the entire leadership and membership of the largest opposition party including elected parliamentarians, just cook a law to withdraw the constitutionally guaranteed immunity from the parliamentarians and charge them with treason. That is the system of law Mr. Henze is crediting Meles and his brainy boys.

I am not sure how Mr. Henze finds the government’s position towards the Ethiopian Orthodox church neutral when Mr. Meles removed the head of the (independent) Ethiopian Orthodox Church and appointed a political hack as its patriarch? It just so happens that church doctrine forbids the deposing of a patriarch and grants the power to elect a patriarch only to a duly constituted synod, not to the infidels of the politburo.

Oh, yes Mr. Meles and the boys have friends – powerful and influential friends allover the world. They have all kinds of relationships with all kinds of people – politicians, rock stars, ex-presidents, renowned academics and fertilizer merchants. Recently, though, these friends are getting less cozy with the mentally sharp boys and increasingly less happy with them as some of the blood in Mr. Meles’ hands splatters on to them.

Although the attempt turned out to be ineffective, quite unlike Meles’ other friends, Mr. Henze made a valiant (and may be even an earnest) effort to earn the retainer the Great One has been paying him of the years. Too bad he looked so feeble in the process. I guess, the deeds of some individuals are just indefensible.

It Is All About the Show

A couple of days ago, the VOA Amharic program broadcast an interview with Dr. Beyene Petros – a man that has come to represent the grace and calm which once was the hallmark of what is to be an Ethiopian. The interviewer wanted to know why he and his associates abstained from voting on the bill authorizing the establishment of a mechanism to investigate the state sponsored terror against the Ethiopian people. In explaining the vote of his block in parliament, Dr. Beyene spoke of the language in the resolution which presumes the guilt of the CUD and of other improprieties which reduce the entire exercise to one of confirming Meles’ allegations. He explained why it would not be appropriate to cast even a no vote. He stated that because there exists an urgent need for an independent investigation to identify and bring to justice those who gave the shoot to kill order, his party could not vote no on a bill to investigate the murders of innocent citizens. However, given that the modalities outlined in the draft bill fall far short of establishing an appropriate process for achieving that goal, they could not vote yes. So, the only real option was to vote no.

I got curios as to the language in the bill. Hoping to find out the exact language of the bill, I logged on to the Ethiopian Parliament website http://www.ethiopar.net/. What I found was that, just like everything else in Meles’ Ethiopia, the parliament and its website is all about show and no substance.

A website is God’s gift to those who seek the cheapest way to publish the most current information about the product or service of an organization. As best as I can tell, the only service a parliament performs is to initiate, debate and enact laws. So I expected to see perhaps the transcript of the debate or at least a copy of one of the two most important pieces of legislation acted upon by the third parliament of the FDRE. Oh, but no! Neither the draft bill nor the final piece of legislation were to be found anywhere in that website. For that matter there exist no entries about the work of parliament over the last five years. The last entry for bills adopted or debated was during the 1999/2000 session. It is as if the parliament did not exist over the last five years. Of course I know that many have said that it never really existed and still does not.

The front page of the website greets the visitor and announces itself to be the website of the Ethiopian Parliament. At the top of the page, there is a scrolling banner which reads “DRAFT RESOLUTION ON THE REPORT SUBMITTED BY THE GAMBELLA CONFLICT INQUIRY COMMISSION”. I looked further down the page and noticed a choice of Amharic, English or archive. I paused for a moment to consider what these choices might imply but my attention was drawn to an html link The Seventh ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly 16-19 February, 2004 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I clicked the ACP-EU link only to find an old general information packet prepared of the delegates of a joint assembly of the parliaments of ACP and EU countries held nearly two years ago. So I proceeded to select the English language choice and went to the main site.

That takes you to a page which gives you choices of going back to the parliament home page, or proceeding to Basic Information, General Information, The House of Peoples' Representatives, The House of the Federation and Current Developments. I was attracted to the current developments sub-heading. The tag line for this link reads “Current Developments will treasure a wealth of information for you on what is currently happening in parliament, what the committees are doing, and the day to day schedules of various activities of the two Houses. It also provides you with information about the day's agenda, minutes of the parliamentary sessions, news and press releases.” The Ebonics aside, it still seems to be the most likely place for me to find the information I need. And so I eagerly clicked the current developments link and presto! that took me to another page with the following links: The House of Peoples' Representatives, The Committees of the House of Peoples' Representatives, The House of the Federation, The Committees of the House of the Federation, and The Press of the Parliament. Well guess what is behind each of these curtains! Well door number one contains nothing as did door number two and every other door. When I clicked, I found empty pages.

So I went back and visited each of the other links on the main page. The Basic Info link gives you information about the country: geography, demography, history, etc. The General Information link takes you to a page which reports on the government of the FDRE and the history of parliament. The link for the House of Peoples’ Representatives has many html linked pages which contain no information. It has a list of bills passed but the link to only one of them actually takes you to a Negarit Gazeta. The rest don’t take you anywhere.

Interestingly enough, of the many other links on that page, the only one that has the info it alludes to is the one titled Educational Status of the Members of The House of Peoples' Representatives According to their Electoral Region (2000-2005). It reminds you of the elite school listing the SAT scores of its freshman class and/or the educational background of its faculty – no mention of what the members have done individually or collectively in their capacity as parliamentarians. What there is, is a long expose on their educational attainments.

In the end, I could not find either the draft submitted to parliament or the approved bill authorizing the establishment of a body to investigate the government’s murderous spree. The website of the Parliament of the FDRE contains no mention of what the Parliament did in this or any other matter over the last several years. Of course this is in keeping with the reality of the Ethiopian parliament. After all, in 14 years, it has never initiated a bill. It has never successfully amended a bill or voted down a bill. It is meant to serve as a rubber stamp body. No more, no less. Its mandate is to assume the position of the legislative branch only for the purpose of completing the organizational chart outlined in the constitution. It is there to show the world that there is a legislative body. Its existence presumes that the observer would not have any reason to look beyond the form and dig into whether this parliament actually does any thing.

In EPRDF land, it is form over substance. It is all about the show!!

The West's Urge to Cuddle With a Tyrant

I often wonder why a people who have been so successful in nearly all walks of life can sometimes be utterly wrong and disdainfully stupid when it comes to their understanding of the issues that matter to people of other cultures. I am of course speaking of Americans and Brits in general but especially of the foreign policy wonks who are assigned to any African, Middle Eastern or Asian desk by these two otherwise very successful nations. They miss the most obvious shift in public attitudes. They mistake a people’s patience for either fear or love. They routinely miscalculate the balance of political power in emerging civil and military conflicts. The people who report on developments in these regions fare no better.

A case in point is a recent article by the Eocnomist.Com on the unfolding political drama in Ethiopia. I was disappointed to note that a publication which has served its readers with distinction for so long got the current Ethiopian problem so wrong. The intro appropriately refers to these developments as “the carnage committed by Meles Zenawi”. The facts reported in the first few paragraphs thus are consistent with what has been reported elsewhere. Its transgression perhaps arose for the urge to make its report “fair and balanced”. It ran into difficulties trying to find creative ways to balance the report on the carnage with something, anything positive to say about Meles. In the process it insulted the dead, it infuriated at least one reader and it broke its reputation for intelligent but thorough reporting.

Mr. Editor;

In your assessment of how the west might encourage Mr. Zenawi not to be so callous with the lives of Ethiopians, you ruled out using the west’s purse strings as leverage because you believed that to be “not a very effective stick for beating Ethiopia”. You cite as the basis for your conclusion the fact that “Mr Zenawi's supporters argue that his authoritarian methods, however ruthlessly on display in the capital, have helped to complete roads, clinics and agricultural extension projects in the famished countryside, where most Ethiopians live”.

Given all that has gone over the last several months, one wonders who these supporters might be. One also might wonder how these supporters failed to give some consideration for the possibility that those who live in Mr. Zenawi’s beloved and famished countryside might actually consider living under ruthless tyranny to be too high a price to pay for roads, clinics and agricultural extension projects. Of course, there remains the matter of the unfounded premise that there are roads completed, clinics built or agricultural extension works carried out in that famished country side. Except if one takes the work of the fertilizer businesses of Mr. Zenawi’s party companies to constitute the agricultural outreach of Mr. Zenawi’s government, there is no evidence of any of these alleged gains.

I found your very next sentence even more troubling. You write that “blood-spattered as he now is, Mr. Zenawi has earned plaudits for growing more food and overseeing one of Africa's more effective strategies for reducing poverty.” Again one would have expected the Economist to have considered the sources of those plaudits and to have expended some effort to substantiate whether the claims are reasonable.
You are well aware that Mr. Zenawi has held absolute power for fourteen and a half years. He has held power without checks either by a legitimate and organized political opposition, an independent judiciary or a meaningful legislative body. He has had a decade and half of free reign where his word has been law. He came to office pledging to end hunger in Ethiopia and to achieve food self-sufficiency within five years. Never mind that most observers believed that the target date was movable, but nearly all believed that the objective of working towards food self-sufficiency was real.

Fourteen and half years later, there are more Ethiopians who rely on food aid than when Mr. Zenawi came to power. Indeed more people rely on food aid now than at the height of the 1984 great Ethiopian famine. Every year Mr. Zenawi has been in office, millions of those who live in Mr. Zenaw’s beloved countryside, millions of the very farmers who were to feed everyone else have had to rely on food aid. As to reducing poverty, the World Bank reports that per capita income in Ethiopia has declined from about $120 when Mr. Zenawi came to office to just under $100 now. Yes, $120 is not something you can brag about. But when that paltry sum declines by one-sixth after 15 years of “growth” and after being nurtured under “one of Africa's more effective strategies for reducing poverty”, I’d say it is time to revisit Mr. Zenawi’s strategy.

Without citing when your poll was conducted or when and by whom it was conducted, you reported that “many, perhaps most, Ethiopians and many foreign observers argue that, despite the government's recent bloody brutality, Mr. Zenawi is still the best man to keep Ethiopia on a path to development.” I know in economics, you are supposed to have empirical bases for statements such as that. I suspect, that journalism schools too instruct their pupils that summative statements which claim to point to the preferences of others be based on direct measurement, or at least on second had data -- be it sample data or census data. I cannot say whether your statement about foreign observes has some factual bases. However, I very much doubt that there are a million much less tens of millions of Ethiopians who hold the opinions you ascribe to them. Look at the election results. Except if you were to suggest that the May vote was simply a protest vote and not a reflection of the true sentiments of the population (a point Mr. Zenawi once sought to make to the BBC’s Hard Talk reporter while challenging the opposition for a rerun of the election) or that the people’s vote does not reflect their economic calculus, then the majority of the voting public emphatically declared Mr. Zenawi to be the worst man not the best man for Ethiopian development. Of course, his actions ever since have exonerated the voters’ contempt for the man.

I take issue not only with your characterization of Mr. Zenawi’s record but also with your assessment of the readiness of the opposition to assume state power. While assessing that readiness, you wrote “nor is there a clear alternative to him” as though what is called for is another strongman to replace Mr. Zenawi. It might come as news to you, but the opposition has dozens of experienced, intelligent and patriotic leaders who are ready to take significant leadership within a democratic government structure. Yes, there is no strongman among them who would insist on assuming all of the roles Mr. Zenawi had amassed for himself. In the eyes of Ethiopians, that, believe it or not, is viewed to be good thing. There is room for many strongmen and strongwomen in Ethiopian public life. We have had thirty years where one man (first Colonel Mengistu and then guerilla fighter Meles) had thought of everything on our behalf. For thirty years one of these two men had designed the nation’s economic plan, thought of educational reform, came up with foreign policy, health policy, farm policy, designed the highway network and did everything else. And look where that has taken us. Ethiopians reject the need for another strongman with and a one man show.

I understand that you and many others in the west would prefer the simple nation state where you don’t have to deal with too many (potentially crazed, semi-retarded, corrupt and greedy) leaders. You want to know who is in charge and who makes the call in specific countries. You like the simplicity of thinking of the Shah or the Ayatolla Khomeni when you think of Iran or of Mobutu in Zaire. It is much easier to deal even with crazy places such as North Korea, because you know who is in charge. An Ethiopia run by a consultative democratic government would be too ambiguous for you to feel comfortable with.

You would not be bothered by the absence of a clear alternative to Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair. You would not even care who would lead Israel if Mr. Sharon steps aside, but you would most certainly loose sleep over the possible replacement of Mr. Mahmoud Abas. That perhaps reflects one of the more egregious strains of western prejudice towards third world politics. You would not count on the democratic process to produce capable leadership in these countries. The opposition in Ethiopia worries you because you don’t know who the next big man or big woman to sit in the big chair is. Sadly, that is reflected not just in your journalistic preference. It is the common denominator of western foreign policy toward third world countries.

You seem to also be uncomfortable with the possibility that many of the opposition leaders do not come from among Mr. Zenawi’s Tigrayan clansmen. I am perplexed that a paper which for so long has been both a benefactor and a contributor to the distinguished British democratic heritage, would find the disproportionate accumulation of political in the hands of a small minority comforting. You seem rather concerned with the possibility that the division of political power among Ethiopia’s diverse population might actually be changed to reflect that diversity.

According to Mr. Zenawi’s 1994 census, Ethiopia’s population is Oromo, 32%; Amhara, 30%; Tigray, 6%; Somali, 6%; Guragie, 4%; Sidama, 3%; Wolaita, 2%; Afar, 2%; Hadiya, 2%; and Gamo, 1% http://www.ethiopianembassy.org/population.shtml. Yet Mr. Zenawi and his Tigrayan inner circle control nearly everything. What is different about the opposition is that both its leadership and its membership come from all walks of life and from all corners of the country. That is one of the things that Ethiopians find refreshing and enjoyable. For 15 years, Mr. Zenawi told Ethiopians that there are no such people as Ethiopians, only captive nations called Amar, Oromo, Tigrey, Somali, Gorage, each belonging in its own place and belonging to its own political organization. The opposition parties created forums where Ethiopians can work together across ethnic lines to build their common future for a common destiny without shame or fear.

The Economist in particular and western media in general would best serve their readers and the people of whom they report if they spend just a bit more time to speak with truly ordinary people; not just with the “guide and driver” the ministry of “information” assigns to you, not just with the women who hangout in the international hotel lobby nor with the NGO fellows who have to carefully manage careers. To detect the heartbeat of Ethiopia, go to Nekempte, to Dangila, to Assosa, to Dilla, Dire Dawa, to Debre Birhan and/or to any number of small and medium sized towns. You will find that Mr. Zenawi’s loyal rural population which has reaped the benefits of those great development works you so frequently write about does not exist. What you will find instead is a people which have been held hostage for 14 years by a cynical Marxist power monger, heart broken with the disappointment of their failed attempt to liberate themselves by selecting an alternative.

Of the many critical comments you make about the opposition, perhaps your comment about the oppositions attitude towards Eritrea come close to being true. Even then, at least in the eyes of Ethiopians, the disposition of the opposition towards Eritrea is far more consistent with Ethiopia’s national interest than that of Mr. Zenawi’s. Mr. Zenawi did not consult the Ethiopian people when he endorsed the secession of Eritrea. Furthermore, intoxicated with his new found power, he agreed to Eritrea’s secession without clear demarcation of the boundary between what were to be two sovereign states. Some estimate that that mistake cost Ethiopia up to 100,000 of her children in the war of 1998-2000. In an even more egregious move, Mr. Zenawi surrendered the ground gained at the expense of those 100,000 lives without arriving at a final agreement over the issues that lead to the conflagrations. Hence, Ethiopia will fight at least one more war with Eritrea to settle the issues which, as the victor, it should have been able to settle to its satisfaction at the end of the last war. Here too, Mr. Zenawi has undermined the country’s interest and in the eyes of many if not most Ethiopians (to borrow your phraseology) he has engaged in what amounts to treasonous activity not just for lack of foresight, but perhaps because he is half-Eritrean surrounded by Eritreans in his inner circles.

Of Murders, Kidnapings, etc...

Last week, we observed yet another surreal drama in the life of the people of Ethiopia play out. Incredible events unfolded across the country as ordinary people came face to face with their government and the government greeted them with gun shots, beatings, imprisonment and, in a new twist, kidnappings. The ugliness of the Ethiopian landscape which we saw last week was only surpassed by the reaction of Meles and the United State Government -- his primary sponsor.

The body of a week’s worth of work of the man Tony Blair calls “a new kind of African leader” consisted of: (1) killing a dozen or so boys and girls but also numerous innocent men and women first in Addis and then across the country, (2) detaining nearly the entire leadership of the largest opposition party, the editors and publishers of the private papers and the leaders of civil society organizations, (3) beating the detained leaders, holding them incommunicado and denying them access to medical care, even to their prescriptions, and finally (4) kidnapping family members of those political and civic leaders who have eluded capture and are in hiding and offering to exchange them for the wanted leaders.

Thanks to the information revolution, all of this is going on in full view of the entire world—not behind closed doors or behind an iron curtain of the sort they have in North Korea. So what did the world say? How did the citizens and governments of this global village react? Ethiopia is, after all, part of the global village. Or is it?

This is a particularly important question for two reasons. First, from day one (1991), Meles had always sought to be in good standing with the west in general but specially with the United States. Now that he has attained such a hallowed position in western power circles as a new kind of African democrat, keeping that standing and maintaining the appearance is important to his ego and to his goal of staying in power indefinitely. Second, the strategists of the opposition long ago concluded that dismantling Meles’ fake democratic mask and striping him of the unwarranted support he receives from western democracies can be a usefull tactical manuver. Consequently, the reaction of the world, but specially that of the United States, was important for Meles and for the opposition.

The first official reaction from the United States came from Sean McCormack, spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State. In his briefings on November 2nd, a day after Meles’s murderous spree began, speaking for the government of the United States, McCormack told the assembled reporters that:

“We deplore the use of violence and the deliberate and synical attempt to invoke violence in a misguided attempt to resolve political differences. We call on the opposition to refrain from inciting civil disobedience during this time of heightened tension.”

The statement was stunning in its unusual undiplomatic clarity and brevity. It was devastating in its attack of the people of Ethiopia for aspiring to the innocent ideal of democracy. It was a complete and an unconditional endorsement of what Meles had done. Never mind that he had also had a similar episode of street killings some four months earlier over this same election. Never mind that the confrontation between the people and their government was still unfolding. The Ethiopian people were told that to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right of assembly in a peaceful manner was to provoke the other side into violence. The opposition was told that a call for a stay at home strike was a cynical and deplorable attempt to incite the other side into violence. Meles was told to go for broke. And for the rest of the week he did.

The continued killings in Addis did not rate any mention at the November 3rd press briefings McCormack gave at the State Department. When the issue resurfaced in the November 4th briefings, McCormack stated that the U.S. continues to urge both the government and the opposition “to resolve whatever differences they may have through peaceful means”. But he continued to insinuate that the guilty party was the opposition. He reported that “it furthers no one's cause to try to manipulate situations in order to provoke a violent reaction. We think that peaceful dialogue is the way to resolve what is in fact a political issue.” I rate this as less abrasive and less dismissing of the opposition but still pointing the finger of guilt in their direction. He also said that “anybody who might have been arrested in these demonstrations for a political reason should be released immediately (and those) accused of acts of violence in the demonstrations (should be) granted the full rights under the judicial system that they have a speedy hearing of their cases and that those cases proceed in a transparent manner.” While this is a further lowering of the rhetoric against the opposition, what followed was an even more interesting interjection. McCormack reported that “Under Secretary Burns reiterated our call to establish an independent commission and investigate the demonstrations, including those on June 8th, in which dozens of people were killed.”

Of course by then the carnage had spread to the rest of the country. Perhaps that is what gave Washington pause. Perhaps Washington had bought into Meles’s lies that the opposition’s support is limited just to Addis Ababa. The foreign press was actually calling Addis the opposition strong hold. It is likely that the spread of the resistance to Awassa in the South and Bahir Dar, Gonder and Dessie in the North and Dire Dawa in the East changed Washington’s mind. Whatever the cause, that last one – call for an independent commission to investigate these killings as well as the killings of June 8th -- was a definite change.

As though trying to set some sort of record, the killings continued. After the 3rd, the killings took place primarily outside of Addis. If words mean anything, the international community was finally beginning to pay attention to Ethiopia’s travails. First it was Europe alone that had it right. But soon, the U.S. joined the EU in a declaring "We urgently call upon all political parties to desist from further violence and to abide by the rule of law,” Never mind that one side engages in violence with heavily armed storm troopers, armored personnel carriers and snipers and the other side engages in violence by refusing to accept the authority of a tyrant. At the worst, you might have kids throwing stones. But, the joint statement was still progress in that it is tacitly asking the murderers to stop murdering.

Yet I must admit that I felt a small knot in my belly when I read that last part about abiding by the rule of law. Those who authored that declaration knew that one side makes the law on the fly and flaunts the law when it does not like it. The other side fears nothing more than the law. So, I was not sure if that statement was not meant to provide another cover for their favorite African leader.

The joint declaration also backs McCormack’s call for “An independent investigation of the deaths and injuries arising from recent events and the events in June” but left it to Meles (I assume) to establish the independent commission. That of course is pure cynicism. Of course the difficult process issues were left unsaid. Who is to appoint this independent body and who is to take part in it? What and who is to be investigated when the answer is already known. On May 16, one person assumed command of all security forces, mapped out the deployment of these forces and decided on the rules of engagement. The rules of engagement on June 8 and during the first week of November amounted to shoot for maximum impact. Shoot to kill. Shoot live ammo. Forget the soft stuff such as crowd control. The objective was to intimidate and cow-down the population. So what is there to investigate? Perhaps it is to find an escape goat. On the aftermath of the June killings, the Federal Police Commissioner had meant to provide a helpful explanation when he reported that the Agazi army was not trained in crowed control and hence the death. But, alas, that implied that Meles should not have had the army play police and so he was told to be quiet. So I must ask what poor soul is going to be dirtied by this fake exercise that Meles will set up which has a predetermined outcome?

Then came word from Meles himself. He was caught in the glare of European media and forced to answer questions about these killings. His response was vintage Meles. "It was not a normal demonstration," Meles said while attending a conference convened by German President Horst Koehler. "And I don't want to justify it when policemen get in a panic, but I can understand it when there are people throwing hand grenades and using guns."

Never mind that the last part about throwing grenades and using guns is entirely made up, but what kind of police force do we have here? So according to Meles the police panicked on June 8th. They panicked in the Merkato and Piassa on the 2nd of November. They panicked all across Addis on the 3rd. They panicked in Addis and Bahir Dar on the 4th. They panicked in Debre Markos, Gonder, and Dessie, and Dire Dawa, and Awassa and Arba Minich on the 5th. They Panicked in Debre Birhan on the 6th. They are panicking in Dangila and Northern Gonder today. They may panic yet again all over Ethiopia tomorrow and the day after.

What kind of a police force do we have here, any way? Well of course we don’t have a police force trained in crowd control. We did not have a police force deployed at all. What we have instead is an army trained to dispense maximum punishment on the enemy. This army has been set on its own people. What we have is what the ever so clever Meles set to motion. The army was told that the enemy is no longer at the border but among us. The enemy is not an alien people but their veryown brothers who have turned treasonous. The army was then ordered to do what they were trained for…engage the enemy for maximum effect…shoot live bullets into crowds because the crowd is the enemy.

Of course it was not a normal demonstration. There was never a demonstration at all but ordinary people going about their ordinary daily chores provoked into confrontation so that the ever so clever Meles could use maximum force to intimidate the people not to take part in a demonstration which was scheduled for sometime in the future.

And what is this thing about "We regret the death but it was not a normal demonstration"? Does he regret the loss life? Heck, no! To him all life is expendable in the pursuit of absolute power. One only need to go back and view that horrendous interview he gave the BBC’s Hard Talk program. The reporter tried really hard to get this ever so clever man to express remorse at the loss of life. Only on the very last prodding did he notice how incredulous the reporter was at his refusal to express remorse at the loss of life. Well he has learned his lessons. They say he is a quick study. So he said “we regret the death”. Note that he did not say I regret but we regret as in we the people or we the party or we the government. Furthermore, note that he did not just say “we regret”. No, no, no. “We regret…but it was not a normal demonstration”. In his mind this killing spree that has been going on for 6 days and counting is justifiable because this was not a “normal demonstration”.

What saddens me is that the masses of people, farmers from Gore to Gode merchants of Mekelle to Moyale had actually finally bought into the alien notion that democracy is both a desirable and attainable arrangement for organizing public life in Ethiopia. The other casualty of Meles’s killing spree is the slow death of hope and of faith in the possibilities of a democratic order.