Choosing stability over democracy in Ethiopia

By Lauren Gelfand

NAIROBI, Kenya [March 10, 2010]-- It's easy to confuse the interior of Nairobi's Habesha restaurant with a lost corner of Ethiopia. The smell of frankincense and thick, dark coffee waft through the air as the latest tunes by Teddy Afro vie to be heard over the Amharic-language patter of denizens from Addis Ababa, Lalibela, Mekele and Gonder. There's a good reason for the resemblance: Many of Habesha's clients are in exile for speaking out against the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

And if the 2005 elections as well as this year's campaign season are any indication, it might be even harder to find a table at Habesha come May's parliamentary polls.

On the surface, Ethiopia is a stable, prospering nation, cultivating strong relationships with the international donors who have for more than a generation funded food, health and infrastructure projects for the country's 85 million people. The United States has called Ethiopia a key ally in the Horn of Africa, representing a bulwark against increasingly isolated and sanctioned Eritrea and a comparative oasis of calm compared to perennially chaotic Somalia.

But according to human rights advocates, free speech campaigners and opposition politicians, beneath the surface is a regime that wields power with impunity, repressing dissent, opposition and difference of opinion.

The aftermath of the 2005 elections -- which saw the defeat of the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy -- sent hundreds to the morgue, thousands to jail and countless others into exile. Meles subsequently tightened restrictions on charities and civil society groups, implemented an anti-terror law and forced through the passage of a media law that has silenced virtually all of the country's independent press.

International media operations have also been restricted: Voice of America has reported that since Feb. 22, static has clouded its daily Amharic-language shortwave broadcasts. A government spokesman has denied any impropriety on the part of Meles' administration, instead accusing VOA of capitulating to a "smear campaign" by "opposition Web sites in the diaspora" ahead of the polls.

Violence has also clouded the electoral campaign. On March 2, two opposition politicians were brutally beaten -- one of them fatally -- in Meles' home turf, the Tigray region in the north, on the border with Eritrea.

Despite representing a fraction of the population, the Tigrayans have made up a substantial portion of the political and military elite since Meles became prime minister in 1995. They also control the country's leading corporations and, by extension, most of its trade. The vast majority are loyalists of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, the guerrilla movement cum political powerhouse that seized power in a 1991 coup.

But in the aftermath of the violent and still-unresolved conflict with Eritrea that ran from May 1998 until June 2000, Meles' one-time Tigrayan allies have become nemeses, among them the former Defense Minister Seye Abraha. This splinter movement, amalgamated into a coalition of opposition parties, has emerged as a significant threat to Meles' monopoly on power, presenting the only viable challenge he has seen from his own ethnic group since he took office.

The coalition -- known as Medrek (the Forum) -- groups together ethnic and non-sectarian parties, both new and old, into an emboldened opposition movement that has confronted Meles and his ruling coalition on a number of fronts, with varying degrees of success. That success has come at a cost, however, with the fatal beating of parliamentary candidate Aregawi Gebreyohannes being a grim example.

But Meles is facing difficulties as well, with the recent emergence of evidence suggesting that food aid was once again being politicized by the ruling party. In a country where one in five people faces chronic food shortages, millions of dollars in international assistance in the form of grain, cooking oil and even cash, were allegedly being diverted to ruling-party politicians to buy the loyalty of the citizenry. It was, Abraha said in a widely circulated article in January, "the weapon of choice to squeeze [Ethiopians] into following the one-party system lockstep."

The revelation was all-the-more damaging in the context of a new BBC investigation into TPLF machinations in the 1980s, at the height of the Ethiopian famine, through which millions of dollars in food aid was diverted to buy weapons.

The food aid revelations have coincided with a newfound coordination of donor government policy toward Ethiopia, suggesting a shift from the previous emphasis on stability at the expense of democracy and republican values.

In the past, U.S. and European policy toward Ethiopia often worked at cross purposes, with a hard line from one meaning a soft touch from the other, and vice versa. The differing responses to 2009's Anti-Terror law illustrated the contrast in sharp relief: While condemned by the U.S., the law's passage was followed by a European assistance package worth some €250 million, according to Human Rights Watch. More recently, opposition parties have excoriated the Obama administration for its perceived failure to address human rights abuses by the Meles government, though they were heartened by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's decision to leave the country off of her first Africa tour.

Now, however, support for the opposition -- both overt and tacit -- seems to be coalescing, with donors ascribing a legitimacy to the upstart coalition that none of its predecessors ever enjoyed.

This is not, however, likely to translate into a stunning upset at the polls. Meles' ruling coalition is too entrenched, too powerful and too committed to its own survival to compromise its position, and the risk of violence continues to overshadow poll preparations. None of the four major election observer groups from the United States is planning to monitor the voting, while the European Union is so far only "considering" whether to dispatch its own team.

Nor is it going to impel the release of five independent journalists languishing in prison on trumped-up charges of treason and malfeasance.

"The West thinks stability in Ethiopia is more important than democracy," one rueful exile at Habesha says, sipping coffee that smells like home. "Destabilization is the only way to change."

Lauren Gelfand is a freelance journalist and analyst now based in Nairobi, Kenya, with an interest in security and defense issues. After beginning her career as a wire service correspondent, working on three continents for Agence France-Presse, she currently serves as Middle East and Africa editor for Jane's Defence Weekly magazine. She writes in French and in English for a variety of publications.
Source: [World Politcs Review]