You Can Fool a Lot of People For a Long Time!

I know what a democracy looks like, because I live in one. I also know what a communist dictatorship is, for I once lived under such a system. I have traveled and lived in many parts of the world including in Soviet Russia, in the United States, in Tito’s Yugoslavia as well as in numerous places across Europe, Africa and Latin America. I have personally experienced and witnessed the workings of a broad range of political systems: political systems ranging from democratic to autocratic and everything in between. I have observed feudalism at work just as I have fascism. I have studied theocratic governments centered on Islamic and Christian doctrines. There was a time I believed I had seen it all. But then I came face to face with what had befallen the people of Ethiopia – the government of Meles Zenawi. It is one of a kind and I know not what to call it.

In all of my years, in all of my travel and study, I had never seen a system quite like the system installed to enable Meles Zenawi to rule over the people of Ethiopia in perpetuity. His methods for keeping his hold on power are incomparable. His ability to corrupt any national institution from the church to the mesjid, from the courts to the armed services and from the press to the judiciary is unmatched by any I had come across in my many years. His willingness to resort to violence at the slightest hint of dissent, no matter how meekly it is expressed, is unprecedented in modern history. We who live in the information age can be forgiven if we believe that the violent spasm we now see repeated daily was unleashed only because the people rejected him at the polls. Those butchered in Gambella were not engaged in a heated argument over an election. The Sidama people who met a similar fate in Awassa had no election to decide the fate of their home town. Neither the parishioners of Lideta Mariam in Addis Ababa nor those of Qusquam Mariam in Gondar were threatening the regime when they perished in the hands of Mr. Meles right smack in the middle of church services.

He came to power as the leader of the Marxist Leninist League of Tigrai. He ascended the throne of Menilik by vanquishing the Workers Party of Ethiopia, an organization separated from his own only by a minor ideological schism. Someone once reported that when his TPLF forces “liberate” a town, they take down the pictures of Marx, Lenin and Engles from the town square and replace them with larger pictures of Marx, Lenin and Engles. He kept intact all of the systems his predecessors installed to control the population of Ethiopia. The kebele association, the peasant association, the cadre network and the people’s militia, all of them creations of the Dergue were kept essentially intact with the only changes being the identity of people who manage them. He continued the state’s absolute control over the economic life of the population. Every square inch of land stayed in the hands of his government so that every farmer, every homeowner and every business in the land is his tenant. Every line of business was either subject to tight government regulation or set aside exclusively for state enterprises.

The one notable difference from his predecessor was his radical notion of allowing commercial enterprises to be owned and operated by political entities other than the government proper. He created a series of enterprises directly controlled by him and his inner circle and operated for the benefit of that inner circle. He transferred ownership of some of the most lucrative state enterprises to these party owned firms. He afforded these firms first dib at any business transaction in the land, subverting all principles of the market economy. Yet he sold his program of diversion of public property into sectional ownership and control as part of his agenda for the privatization of state enterprises in the context of the liberalization of the Ethiopian economy. Consequently, actions which under the laws of much of the free world would constitute theft by conversion, were successfully sold as just one of the bold steps of a determined adherent to free market capitalism in the long process of freeing the Ethiopian economy from the tight grip of government.

Amazingly, despite the overwhelming evidence attesting to the barbarity and indecency of the principal actors of his regime, people who should know better, prominent citizens and leaders of governments around the word, proclaim him a disciple of liberal democracy and a champion of free market economy. The World Bank, the IMF and the United Nations, institutions which for decades stood as the incorruptible symbols of hope for oppressed people everywhere, sing their praises to him as they honor and decorate him as a living legend. Diplomats whose profession elevates making statements with room for equivocation into an art form, dare make unequivocal statements profusely attesting to his virtues: a renaissance man, a new kind of African leader, the only leader in the region who is moving his country towards democracy and development. The leaders of two of the world’s most democratic countries single him out for praise as a peace seeking terrorist fighter committed to drag his country and all of Africa kicking and screaming into the era of liberty, prosperity and peace.

The people of Ethiopia of course have always known something entirely different. From the very first days of this regimes’ ascendance to power, Ethiopians everywhere have sought to unmask the nature of the regime for all to see. Many in the international community are only now beginning to see the barbarity of this regime. Over the last twelve months, nearly all of the large international human rights organizations ranging from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International as well as free speech campaigners such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN have launched major campaigns to bring to light the story of the Ethiopian people’s struggle for freedom and the nature and tactics of the oppressive regime that seeks to keep them in fear and bondage through sheer brutality.

From time to time I have wondered aloud just how this regime succeeded in keeping a barbaric repression carried out in full view of 77 million Ethiopians a secret from the world. Sure, the regime sought to keep prying foreign eyed away from what goes on in the country. But it never fully succeeded. There have been recurring alarms and warnings given by many a report about the unparalleled control the regime exercises over the lives of the Ethiopian people. Only the international community’s eagerness to go along with the charade kept the secret going.

The IMF and the World Bank are fully aware of the slight of hand of the regimes minions in their reportage on the purported reform agenda. They simply chose to look the other way. These institutions ignore the dirty little secrets of government control over every aspect of the life of the Ethiopian farmer, from deciding on the size and location of his plot, to determining access and pricing of fertilizers and credit, from the marketing of his produce to its pricing. They ignore the fact that the regime retains approval authority over every aspect of private investment, from the selection of the line of business, to facility location, to capitalization to the marketing plan. In the face of the regimes absolute control over the economy, a control scheme which would have earned the envy of many a Marxist dictator, these institutions praise the country’s progress on such obscure standards as the Millennium Development Goals or its performance on such macroeconomic parameters as growth, rate of inflation and external reserves.

All of the major countries of the world have adequate representation in Ethiopia. After all Addis is still the diplomatic capital of Africa. Every single one of them can be assumed to be fully apprised of humanitarian record of the regime. As can the United Nations and that disgraced organization which calls itself the African Union, each with thousands of officers stationed in their headquarters there. So if they sing the praises of the democratic transition unfolding in the country, it is not necessarily because they lack information. Other considerations influence their judgment.

Among the Diaspora, there has been much said about what the international community does and does not know; much talk about what the international community should have and could have done. Yet, deep down, Ethiopians have known all along that in the end it is up to them, the victims of this regime, to decide how and when it is to be removed. It would have been naïve to expect a not-so-enlightened world to rush to the rescue of the Ethiopian people. It did not happen in 1936, it did not happen in 1976 and it would not happen in 2006. We have to dig our way out of this and we will.