[A-List] ETHIOPIA: A Tangled Political Landscape Raises Questions About U.S. Ally

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

In contrast to their coverage of Zimbabwe and other "usual suspects,"
the media are nearly silent on the dictatorship in Ethiopia, where, it
is said, the "elections weren't even good enough to be rigged." --
Yoshie

<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42906>
POLITICS-ETHIOPIA:
A Tangled Political Landscape Raises Questions About U.S. Ally

Michael Deibert

ADDIS ABABA, Jun 21 (IPS) - When it was announced last month that the
ruling party of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had swept local polls in
this vast Horn of Africa nation, few expressed surprise.

Zenawi's Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)
coalition was declared by the country's national electoral board to
have won 559 districts in the kebele and woreda divisions of local
government and all but one of 39 parliament seats contested in the
by-election. Out of a total of 26 million registered voters, the
electoral board claimed that 24.5 million, or 93 percent, voted.

April's ballot was the first chance for the EPRDF to flex the muscles
of its electoral machinery since general elections in May 2005. Though
early returns that year suggested an electoral triumph for the
country's two main opposition parties, the Coalition for Unity and
Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF).
Prime Minister Zenawi declared a state of emergency before final
results were announced. In the unrest that followed, hundreds of
people were arrested and at least 200 killed by Ethiopian security
forces. Official results -- not released until September -- gave 59
percent of the total vote to the EPRDF.

Cries of fraud stained the reputation of one of Washington's closest
African allies. to whom, according to U.S. defense department figures,
the Bush administration sold $6 million worth of weapons to in 2006,
more armaments than went to any other African country. The weapons are
used in part to aid Ethiopia in its war against Islamic militants
based in neighboring Somalia, which Ethiopia invaded in late 2006 and
where it remains involved in active combat to this day.

Some observers contend that this year's ballot was even more
compromised than the 2005 vote. With an estimated 3.6 million posts up
for election, Ethiopia's opposition parties were only able to register
some 16,000 candidates due to obstacles placed in their path by the
country's electoral council. In response, the UEDF, now the largest
opposition party in Ethiopia's parliament, and the Oromo Federalist
Democratic Movement (OFDM) -- a political party claiming to represent
the interests of the Oromo ethnic group (Ethiopia's largest) -- both
boycotted the final round of voting.

Though international observers were not permitted, an electoral law
passed in June allowed domestic organizations to formally monitor the
ballot. However, local observers such as the Ethiopian Human Rights
Council never received responses from the electoral board to their
requests to monitor the elections.

One official at a foreign diplomatic mission in the capital, who
surveyed polling places on the days of the vote, told IPS that "what
we saw in Addis Ababa did not correspond" to 93 percent participation
total announced by the electoral council.

"These elections weren't even good enough to be rigged," asserts
Bulcha Demeksa, a former United Nations and World Bank official who
currently leads the OFDM and serves in Ethiopia's parliament. "A
genuine dictatorship has been evolving."

The situation of the Oromo people -- who form the majority in
Ethiopia's largest and most populous state, Oromia -- is but one of
the thorny poltico-ethnic quandaries confronting Ethiopia's ruling
party today.

Running the gamut from the democratic advocacy of the OFDM to the
violent militarism of the Oromo Liberation Front guerrilla group, the
struggle of the Oromo -- the Oromo were conquered and consumed into
the Amhara-Ethiopian empire emanating from the nation's north near the
end of the nineteenth century -- has found echoes in other regional
struggles in the country.

In the southeastern Ogaden region, which abuts volatile Somalia, the
Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) has been fighting to make the
region an independent state since 1984. In a report earlier this
month, New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused the Ethiopian
government of having "deliberately and repeatedly attacked civilian
populations in an effort to root out the insurgency." The attacks were
by way of reprisal following an ONLF attack on a Chinese-run oil
installation in April 2007 that killed at least 70 Chinese and
Ethiopian civilians.

Amidst such internal dissent, several areas of the country currently
are on the brink of famine, with the Word Food Program currently
estimating that, of Ethiopia's 80 million citizens, 3.4 million will
need emergency food relief from July to September, a number that comes
in addition to the 8 million currently receiving assistance. (see Q&A:
Ethiopia's Urban Poor Cannot Afford To Eat)

Given such a volatile political landscape, some observers have looked
upon the EPRDF's crushing victory in the polls in an extremely
circumspect manner.

"The complete lack of any semblance of organized opposition in most of
the country reflects how difficult it is in Ethiopia for dissenting
voices to emerge without facing a huge level of harassment," says
Chris Albin-Lackey, senior researcher with the Africa Division of
Human Rights Watch.

Albin-Lackey says that he regards the April ballot as "a stark
illustration of just how far Ethiopia's political space has been
closed off since the limited opening that preceded that 2005 polls."

The EPRDF has governed Ethiopia since 1991, when in its initial
incarnation as a rebel army, it succeeded in ousting the violent
Marxist military junta known as the Derg that had ruled the country
since 1974.

In a statement put out before the April ballot, the EPRDF wrote that
the vote "underscores the fact that the people and government of
Ethiopia are making relentless effort toward the development and
democratization of the nation."

Another source of concern to observers is the Ethiopian government's
"Charities and Societies Proclamation," a copy of which has been
obtained by IPS.

The proposed law seeks to strip domestic civil society organization of
access to foreign funding by defining a "foreign" organization
operating in the country as any body that receive more than 10 percent
of its funding from abroad or has any members who are foreign
nationals.

Such "foreign" bodies are also thus barred from addressing such issues
as human rights and governance in their work. Any foreign human rights
organization seeking to conduct research in Ethiopia would have to
obtain the written permission of the Ethiopian government. A Charities
and Societies Agency composed entirely of government officials and
appointees would be charged with overseeing domestic organizations,
maintaining the power to curtail the activities of or disband such
organizations at will should they be deemed to be "contrary to the
public or national interest."

Heavy fines and prison terms are mandated for those who contravene the
new law, which bears more than a passing similarity to a draconian law
overseeing civil society organizations passed by the government of
Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 2004.

(END/2008)