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ETHIOPIAN REALITY: QUO
VADIS* OPPOSITION?
By Tecola W.
Hagos
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CONTENT
PART ONE:
I.
Introduction
II. Brief Recoup
of Three Ethiopian Regimes
A.
Emperor Haile Selassie I
B.
Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam
C. Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi
PART TWO:
III. Bad Habits Die
Hard, But They Do Die
IV.
Election 2005: Protest Voting v. Participatory Voting
V.
Solutions: The New Leadership of the Opposition
V1.
Is it Possible to Overcome the Current Political Bottleneck
A.
Model One: Accept Election Result
B.
Model Two: Reject Election Result, and Prepare For Long
Costly Struggle
VII. Recommended
Steps to Save Ethiopia:
Establish
Caretaker Government
VIII.
Conclusion
ETHIOPIAN REALITY: QUO
VADIS* OPPOSITION?
[ETHIOPIAN REALITY: WHERE TO FROM THIS
POINT ON?]
By Tecola W. Hagos
PART ONE:
I. Introduction
A series of Press Releases recently issued by the
Executive Committee of the EPRDF, the Office of the Prime Minister,
the National Electoral Board et cetera was meant to inform or
enlighten Ethiopians on the Election of 2005; however, it failed
miserably. For example, the Deputy Prime Minister made a rambling
statement on the topic of �democracy� punctuated with
threatening accusations against alleged anarchical behavior of the
opposition. The Information Minister parroted the same type of
threat later. All these discordant statements and near chaotic
situation within the government of Meles Zenawi did not help
alleviate the political anxiety of Ethiopians. The brutal
suppression of the demonstration of Addis Ababa University students,
and later in June 6-7 the violence unleashed by fully armed military
and police forces on peaceful demonstrators resulting in the murder
and wounding of a couple of hundred people, simply increased the
fear of wide spread violence and unprecedented level of political
turmoil.
So far, the government of Meles Zenawi only
succeeded to give us the impression that Ethiopia is still run by
individuals who have no sentimental or patriotic connection with the
Ethiopian people. Nowhere did any of the statements coming from the
mouthpiece of the EPRDF or the officials of the Government of Meles
Zenawi contained anything that reflects, even remotely, the election
reality (process) as experienced by the people of Ethiopia for the
last five years of grinding systematic emasculation and
disfranchisement. It confirms to me the fact that all Ethiopians
suffer a common enemy in the person of Meles Zenawi.
Ethiopia�s current problem is not with the
opposition or with the people of Ethiopia�it is not even with the
ghost-like leaders of EPRDF�s affiliated political organizations,
such as ANDM, OPDO et cetera. Ethiopia�s greatest problem and the
most serious obstacle to peace is Meles Zenawi. It is Meles Zenawi
and his treasonous government that led us to the present political
and economic deplorable condition in Ethiopia. I have discussed in
detail on Meles Zenawi�s treason and criminal activity against the
State of Ethiopia and Ethiopians in several lengthy articles and
essays posted in this Website and others for the last ten years. If
we just concentrate on the election of 2005 for the duration of this
article, we can see how such Government sponsored corruption of the
election process has led to a dangerous bottleneck at this time.
All the threat of violent crackdown on members of
the opposition is a symptom of an unpopular government tittering on
its last leg and holding on to dear life before its complete
destruction under the popular uprising of the people of Ethiopia.
Some of the threat by the government of Meles Zenawi is being
carried out, as we speak, against opposition leaders and
demonstrators wherein thousands were detained over two hundred
Ethiopians killed and wounded since June 6, 2005. It is sad that
dictators and their supporters never learn the fact that people,
sooner than later, will find a way of destroying such dictatorial
governments and the leaders thereof. Ethiopia is no exception to
that timeless truism, especially considering the fact that
Ethiopians have overthrown several brutal dictators in the past.
The election of 2005 may be a true watershed
event and a new beginning in the long political life of Ethiopia and
Ethiopians. It seems that we have been a nation of a string of
beginnings without successful follow-ups to date, and may be this
time we may break that trend. The 2005 Election may as well be
considered as the awakening of the democratic and freedom loving
spirit of the people of Ethiopia. The election of 2005, for the
first time in Ethiopian history, brought together for peaceful
political purposes individuals and groups of diverse background,
ethnicity, political agenda, government philosophy et cetera
voluntarily in an effort to counter and boot out a very unpopular
and anti-Ethiopia government. However, before we get to the main
purpose of this article, I believe a brief recoup of the leadership
of the last one hundred years in Ethiopia may help us put things in
some perspective. Without sounding judgmental, if that is possible
in a situation of this nature, I must point out our (Ethiopians)
tendency of having short memories, and a disconcerting willingness
to forgive the violence and abuse of our leaders. In order to have a
good understanding of what is taking place at this time in Ethiopia,
we need to put the whole event surrounding the 2005 Election in its
historical context.
II. Brief Recoup of Three Ethiopian Regimes
Professor Bahru Zewde, the outstanding Ethiopian
historian, wrote ten years ago, about our national fixation with
categorization of our leaders in terms of a Manichean world-view. He
wrote by asking rhetorical questions, �Will we ever see the day
when Ethiopian rulers will be viewed as human beings who operated
within the context of their times rather than as demy-gods or
monsters? Or is the present going to be the perennial millstone of
the past? While it is an inescapable fact that history can be
written only from the perspective of the present, it need not be the
case that it be completely subservient to the needs and requirements
of the Present.� [Bahru Zewde, �Hayla-Sellase: From Progressive
to Reactionary,� Northeast African Studies, Vol.2
No.2 (New Series), 1995, p 100.] At a deeper level, no time
sensitive principle can be held as �a principle� normative or
otherwise. I, as a person who does not think of time as segmented,
consider all references to �a past,� �a present,� or �a
future� to be based on illusion. All fundamental values are
eternally in �the present� since time itself is a �category�
of the mind as Kant put it; therefore, sequencing events in time to
give such events privileged consideration does not make much sense.
I am amazed how often Ethiopian leaders have
flaunted several promising �beginnings� over the last two
hundred years. If we just focus on events after the death of Emperor
Menilik II (in 1913), starting with the types of changes that
Emperor Haile Selassie I instituted in the 1920s to the election of
2005 under Meles Zenawi, we see numerous opportunities that our
leaders have wasted from using effectively to improve our political
and economic situation. One excuse, often cited by scholars and lay
people alike, for such continuous screw-ups may be our culture�a
culture thorn between religious restraints and natural tendencies
without the intermediary rationalist development necessary to any
political and/or economic development�and the never-ending
internal and external conflicts and wars to preserve our identities
of plurality and oneness at the same time. However, no matter how
grim our political and economic history may have been, as a �People�
we have maintained our humanity to an amazing high degree of
morality. I know of no other �people� who had such a degree of
sense of justice or assumption of individual responsibility for
individual actions, and great restraint from punishing innocent
people by association.
Successive Ethiopian leaders could have done
miraculous things with such highly receptive and cooperative
constituents, had they for the briefest of moments faith in the
people they governed. Ethiopian leaders mostly failed repeatedly in
their responsibilities to bring peace and prosperity to this day,
never learning from history or their predecessors� mistakes.
Because of our tendency of having a �debo� mentality of
being moved by ongoing events in a reactive and emotional manner, I
have restated in compact form, as a reminder, the state of
leadership in Ethiopia from the 1920s to date.
A. Emperor Haile Selassie I
Emperor Haile Selassie started out as a great
reformer as Regent during the reign of Empress Zewditu and continued
his reformist policy as the newly crowned Emperor after the death of
Zewditu until he was driven away to exile in 1935 by the Italian
occupation of Ethiopia. Being the first Ethiopian Emperor ever to
have been driven off by an occupying force must have had a lasting
traumatic effect on his personality. After the Italians were kicked
out of Ethiopia in 1941, Haile Selassie was restored to his Throne
in 1941 after a five-year exile in a foreign and strange country.
There was a distinct shift in his behavior after his return to power
in 1941. He seems to have lost his way after his restoration as
Emperor. Something must have happened to him in his stay as a
refugee for almost five years in England in a modest home in Bath,
England.
His long reign from 1941 to 1974 is characterized
by cosmetic and imitative changes that did not affect the
fundamental flawed relationship that had existed in the archaic
traditional political structure, which he inherited along his Crown,
as part of Ethiopia�s tradition and history. His overemphasis on
non-technical and elitist academic learning leading to ever growing
bureaucratic white-collar profession marked Ethiopia for failure.
His concentration of development in discrete areas mostly in areas
close to Addis Ababa, where most of Ethiopia�s feudal lords have
their estate, devoured almost all of Ethiopia�s meager resources.
Especially the effort to develop Addis Ababa and the region around
that single area had left the rest of Ethiopia with a devastating
poverty and underdevelopment. Most importantly, the consequence of
such disparity of treatment, of lopsided economic development was
the build up of tremendous resentment and ethnic conflict. Several
regions such as Gojjam, Gondar, Wollo, and particularly Tygraei were
almost entirely left out from much of the national development
effort. The underdevelopment of Tygraei, Wollo, and later Gojjam has
a particularly insidious personal vendetta type element. [The
periphery areas close to international boundaries between Ethiopia
and Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan were the lest integrated regions of
Ethiopia.]
As a matter of fact, the indiscriminate bombing
by British war plans during the Woyane uprising devastated the
livestock, farmland, and villages to such a degree that Tygraei
could not recover from such devastations for decades. Some people
even attribute the chronic famine in Tygraei was partially caused in
a chain of events, by that bombing in addition to natural disasters.
It is a fact that Haile Selassie throughout his long reign neglected
Tygraei. The rest of the Ethiopian population did almost nothing to
help stop the famine in Tygraei. It is only when the devastation
spread into Northern Wollo in 1971-72 that ultimately the revolution
that swept away Haile Selassie started.
To this day, one reads articles by chauvinistic
individuals from other ethnic groups, full of contemptuous
disparagement of Tygreans because of their suffering as victims of
famine due to the discriminatory policy of an absolute monarch. It
is also true in private homes the contempt for Tygreans is built
around the fact that they sought their lively hood in order to
survive in other parts of Ethiopia especially in Addis Ababa. It is
amazing to see how individuals, who by accident of birth are from
the area and who are beneficiaries of the lopsided economic
development of Addis Ababa and vicinity where the wealth of the
nation is poured into, disparage other Ethiopians unfortunate to
have been born elsewhere in Ethiopia. Due to such historic
antagonism, the contempt on the chauvinists� side and the
resentment of the general population from areas mentioned above
remains to this day a polarizing factor in our political and
economic lives.
Haile Selassie�s other monumental error was his
total immersion in international relations in a manner that did not
commiserate with the political and economic reality at home. It is
another example that had resulted in devastating social, economic,
and political disasters. The polarizing effect of the presence of
massive international organizations in Addis Ababa is of a magnitude
that will continue to affect the well-being of Ethiopia for decades.
Failure to reform the land ownership laws and failure to concentrate
on rural development were probably the most serious errors of the
long reign of Haile Selassie that resulted in massive famine, death,
and displacement affecting the lives of millions of Ethiopians.
Haile Selassie minimally prepared the Ethiopian
People for political and economic independence. He left a political
and economic structure that has no self-sustaining safety structure
against military takeover or tyranny. The system collapsed on its
own with minimal threat from a single rebellious garrison hundreds
of miles far from the Capital City. We read very elaborate stories
how Haile Selassie manipulated his way into acquiring political
power and ultimately the crown. No matter how interesting such
stories are, the one thing that comes across from all of those
stories is the fact that Haile Selassie was a superb strategist with
extremely well developed self-discipline and great intelligence. His
problem was that he did not use all of his talent to improve the
political and economic lives of Ethiopians. He left Ethiopia poorer
than he started out with at the beginning of his leadership. Despite
the fact of what I have stated above, Haile Selassie was a better
leader than Mengistu or Meles. Haile Selassie missed a great
opportunity to transform Ethiopia into a truly great self-reliant
nation. When his end came, it was swift and monumental. He died in
the hands of Mengistu Hailemariam, alone old, sick, his family
imprisoned, and some scattered in the World.
After 1974, the first true immigration and
refugee waves of Ethiopians left Ethiopia and sought refugee in
other African nations (the Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, etc.), and
European and North American countries. Those refugees were almost
all former officials of Haile Selassie and their children mostly
from Addis Ababa, Shoa, and are now mostly part of the opposition.
They tend to be part of non-ethnic political associations except a
few who have formed the core of �Shoa� Amhara associations
centered around some of the Ethiopian Orthodox Churches in
Washington, DC and in other parts of the United States, Canada,
Europe et cetera. By comparison to other groups, their politics is
quite sophisticated and their associations and organizations quite
exclusive. Some of the leading Ethiopian intellectuals are part of
this group. Even though Menilik II is a none negotiable item for
them, I tend to have faith in their sense of Ethiopian history,
their faith in Ethiopia�s destiny, and their Ethiopian
nationalism, at times too narrow, than in members of any other
group.
B. Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam
With nothing more than street-smart, a former
military depot supervisor for a military garrison in Harrar
Province, Mengistu Hailemariam, crept into a position of power and
stayed in power for seventeen years unleashing one of the most
brutal and violent governments in Ethiopian history. The fact that
such low-ranking soldier could carry out a military coupe contrasts
sharply with other military coupes in Africa where usually
high-ranking officers led such takeovers. It also confirms to us how
far Haile Selassie had emasculated the people of Ethiopia from
developing institutional political structures to insure and
safeguard our human rights, which would have effectively contained
any up-start from usurping political power. �Apr�s moi, le
d�luge.�
Mengistu goaded with radicalized Ethiopian
students, both locally and from abroad, transformed himself from a
barroom brawler (which he was) to a fire spitting revolutionary.
Most Ethiopians were involved in the political orgy that followed in
the lawlessness, dehumanization, torturing, and murdering of fellow
Ethiopians accused of being members of the aristocracy, feudal
landowners, rich merchants, et cetera. The first act of political
�development� of Mengistu�s version of revolution was to
expropriate the cars of wealthy individuals and drive around at high
speed about the city.
The Seventeen years of Mengistu�s violent reign
exposed the soft under-belly of the so-called educated revolutionary
Ethiopians, often-idolized Ethiopian peasants, workers, urbanites
and most every ethnic group. During that period, we witnessed how
such individuals were willing to commit atrocities on fellow
Ethiopians, where even pregnant women, young children, elderly men
etcetera were not spared the brutality and violence of a nation in a
bloody political orgy. Those murdered by Mengistu and his thugs of
Kebeles in one single program that Mengistu unleashed as the �Red
Terror,� supposedly to counter the �White Terror� of
opposition groups (mainly EPRP), is numbered conservatively over a
hundred thousand in a period of three to four weeks.
The atrocities committed by Mengistu did not even
spare our Church Fathers. He murdered the Patriarch and several
other high-ranking officials of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. One
must not forget the fact that all the atrocities, murders, tortures,
mutilations et cetera were not all carried out by Mengistu in
person. He had his legal prosecutors investigating possible victims
and findings by the same for execution and imprisonment; he had
political �experts� and agitators expressing the necessity of
the extermination of the members of the old-regime, in their
newspapers and magazines. He had diplomats out in the international
arena denying if they could and justifying if they must all those
atrocities and murders and mynham of hundreds of thousands of
Ethiopians, and misinforming both the Ethiopian public and the World
in general.
Lest we forget that we have lived through
(experienced) the most brutal and blood socked regime in Ethiopia�s
long history that led directly to the rebellion of OLF, TPLF and
several others, let us recoup the atrocities Mengistu committed in
Tygreai and Eritrea, the two northern regions that experienced the
long running scourge under military rule. It is the outrageous and
brutal violence against the civilian population where tens of
thousands lost their lives or were uprooted from their homes into
refugee camps in neighboring countries. The atrocities of Mengistu
were the triggering causes, in addition to the economic neglect
specially suffered by Tygreai for years, which led to the formation
of liberation movements in the 1970s including the predecessor of
the EDU in the area. There is clear historical context that led to
the formation of the TPLF and the other movements elsewhere in
Ethiopia.
Let us pause and reflect on the joy expressed by
the majority of the residents of Addis Ababa when the EPRDF entered
Addis Ababa in 1991. (Of course, members of Mengistu�s security
forces tried the same strategy Saddam Hussein�s thugs are doing in
Iraq at this time in 2005, but such effort failed because there was
no popular support and due to the cowardice and opportunistic nature
of the members of the security forces of Mengistu, wherein some of
whom promptly offered their services to the new leaders.) The next
important issue is to consider how Meles Zenawi squandered all the
good will of the people of Ethiopia in the fourteen years he had
been in power. One way of measuring his errors is to study the way
he managed the in-fighting within the TPLF and the EPRDF. The other
is to study his activities in the larger political arena of the
Ethiopian �governmental� activities some of which could pass as
a policy but most activities were improvisations and personal
manipulations with neither strategic nor tactical value. .
The second wave of Ethiopian refugees with the
largest concentration of ex-military personnel left Ethiopia in the
year of the defection of Mengistu Hailemariam and the fall of the
caretaker government a few months later. Except for a limited number
of people, this group of refugees is a typical �mass� with
individuals with all kinds of background from Red Terror
executioners to high-ranking political functionaries that include
Ministers and Ambassadors. The members of this second wave of
refugees tend to support CUD and to a lesser extent UEDF. A number
of those second-wave refugees and those who were members of the old
Workers Party of Ethiopia (WEP) back in Ethiopia are in leadership
positions in the Member organizations of CUD. Specially, the former
commanders and foot soldiers in Mengistu�s military, the officials
and organizers of the now defunct Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE),
and a large number of its members are part of the most effective
campaign structure Ethiopia had ever seen as part of a
non-governmental organization. To their great credit, they have
effectively routed EPRDF in Election 2005.
C. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi
The reception to the EPRDF coming into Addis
Ababa in 1991 contrasts sharply with the one we witnessed in 2005
where nearly two million people residents of Addis Ababa, the same
City residents who welcome EPRDF with open arms, came out to show
their solidarity with the opposition against the EPRDF and Meles
Zenawi. What did Meles Zenawi do that soured the People of Ethiopia
so much that in Addis Ababa, Dessie, Gondar, and several areas all
over Ethiopia except Tygreai people voted overwhelmingly to oust
Meles Zenawi and his party from office?
I am amazed every time I consider the background
of Meles Zenawi, how such an individual could end up becoming
President then Prime Minister of Ethiopia. His Grandfather and
Father were identified by the community where he grew up as Italian
Fascist supporters during the occupation of Ethiopia for five years
(1935-41), as some of Haile Selassie�s high officials were too.
Moreover, when he started out in the TPLF, he was a junior to
everyone in the leadership of the TPLF. It was only in 1983 that he
popped out suddenly as leader of that movement. Over the years I
have learned from documents and people who knew him well that he
identified with the Eritrean cause for independence all of his
political life including his time as a lowly functionary in the TPLF
before he became the leader of the TPLF, more than he did with the
welfare of Ethiopia. Nevertheless, as I have written several times
before, Meles has shown great skill in manipulating his comrades to
get to the top, and also displayed great courage in confronting and
taking the initiative to quash extremely adverse challenges to his
leadership by very formidable leaders within the TPLF.
There are those who dispute the fact that Meles
and his TPLF forces did commit as much atrocities as Mengistu and
his forces did. In fact, the comparison may be inappropriate.
However, the recent indiscriminate shooting at peaceful
demonstrators in Addis Ababa murdering and killing of score of
Ethiopians indicates that Meles may be heading in the direction of
becoming the worst mass murderer in Ethiopian history. At any rate,
it will be a mistake to justify any degree of atrocities by claiming
that it is less than some other atrocities. Even a single act of
murder by a political group is a serious breach and criminal act
against the democratic and human rights of the victim and that of
society. Moreover, Meles and his supporters have committed far worse
crimes against the State of Ethiopia and Ethiopians than just
physical atrocities. By agreeing readily to the independence of �Eritrea,�
and by agreeing to the Algiers Agreement of 2000, Meles Zenawi and
associates have preemptively left Ethiopia without its historic Afar
Coastal Territory and its territorial waters in the Red Sea and also
territories in the Northwest and middle North borderlands. They have
disfranchised millions of Ethiopians in the above-mentioned areas
from their Ethiopian citizenship by such international agreements.
President Carter, probably to clear his
conscious, wrote in his recent report on the Ethiopian Election 2005
the following telling characterization of Meles Zenawi as the one
person who is responsible for the landlocking of Ethiopia and for
�Eritrea�s� independence: �During these months, in 1989 and
1990, I also became acquainted with Meles Zenawi, the leader of
Tigraean revolutionaries. He would meet me at airports in Paris,
Atlanta, and London when I came into the region, spread his war maps
on the floor, and describes his progress against Mengistu's forces.
After Meles prevailed in 1991 and despite my concerns about Eritrean
leadership, he granted Eritrea complete independence in 1993,
cutting Ethiopia off from the Red Sea and making it the most
populous landlocked nation in the world.� [Jimmy Carter, Ethiopia
Trip Report: May 11- 17: Ethiopia National Parliamentary and Local
Elections, 19 May 2005] [In a different context dealing with
the landlocking of Ethiopia, Herman Cohen, a former State Department
official, had written also regretting the role he played undermining
Ethiopia�s territorial integrity leading to the independence of
Eritrea.] Several Ethiopians including myself have written several
articles, held multiple conferences, conducted interviews, wrote
petition statements et cetera for almost ten years trying to reverse
the betrayal of Ethiopia by its leaders and by supposedly friendly
governments of Western nations including the Government of the
United States.
Meles Zenawi had one of the best chances
(beginnings) to bring about enduring and beneficial political and
economic changes in Ethiopia than any other leader since Menilik
when the EPRDF overrun the remnants of the Military Regime of
Mengistu Hailemariam. He came into absolute power after tremendous
manipulation and elimination of a number of TPLF veteran members
since 1991. No leader could ask for a better political asset than
such grand entrance. Because of his anti-Ethiopian sentiments and
half-baked ideas about state formation and political processes, and
due to his appalling disregard of Ethiopia�s rich history as a
nation built out of several ethnic and religious groups in a process
that was centuries old, he led Ethiopia into a disastrous
international political bottleneck encumbering us with illegal and
treasonous international �agreements.� On the national front
too, he introduced one of the most hurtful politically divisive
ethnic based political structure fragmenting the nation into several
mini-states. Such form of �federalism� will continue for a
longtime to be the source of our ethnic conflict undermining
Ethiopia�s long-standing nationalist movement from being an
effective building process for unity and solidarity.
The creation of business enterprises as an
extension of the TPLF in the guise of non-profit organizations,
supposedly aimed to make-up for the neglect of Tygreai by the two
successive previous governments of Haile Selassie and Mengistu
Hailemariam, was a serious strategic error. The same goal could have
been achieved under a national budgetary financing and planning
process open to public comment and scrutiny. Even though the people
of Tygreai minimally benefited from all the investment and business
activities of enterprises spawned by the TPLF, the scheme did
backfire against Tygreans leaving most Ethiopians with a sense of
being betrayed of their trust by Tygreans in general. The one entity
that gulped up all the wealth created by such enterprises is the
TPLF and a handful of its high officials and relations and not the
simple farmers, traders et cetera of Tygreai. Fair play and justice
are values that Ethiopians uphold the most and expect from their
leaders throughout Ethiopia�s long history. A leader who breached
such profoundly Ethiopian sentiment is despised, hated, distrusted
and often overthrown. Meles Zenawi and associates did not have the
depth of understanding nor the disposition to live by such elevated
standard of behavior expected of them by most Ethiopians. Thus, the
feeling of a sense of disparity of treatment of Tygreans from the
rest of the Ethiopian population resulted in tremendous resentment
and hate toward Tygreans in general.
The most criminal act Meles Zenawi committed,
even before he became a national leader as President of the
Ethiopian Transition Government and Prime Minister, against the
State of Ethiopia and Ethiopians was his full scale participation
and conspiracy with the EPLF leadership to help �Eritrea�
achieve its independence and to cede legitimate Ethiopian Afar
Territories to an Eritrea yet to be a nation. In furthering his
mission to support and strengthen Eritrea, he signed the treasonous
Algiers Agreement of 2000 preempting the historically supported
legitimate sovereign rights of Ethiopia over territories much of
what is now claimed by �Eritrea,� Ethiopian Afar Coastal
Territory, and the territorial waters on the Red Sea. Contrary to
international law and practices and the Vienna Convention on the Law
of Treaties, the Algiers Agreement revived long dead international
agreements from the Colonial era, agreements supposedly signed
between Emperor Menilik II or his representative with the Italian
Government in 1900, 1902, and 1908.
The moral of the story, at this point in our
history, is a warning to all political parties that direct
involvement in investments and enterprises by political parties
through surrogates is a divisive and destructive scheme that will
accelerate the breakup of the nation on ethnic lines. Meles Zenawi
and associates are responsible for the current resentment directed
against Tygreans and the economic polarization and monopolistic
economic system prevalent in Ethiopia. If there is resentment
against Tygreans at this point, it is due to the fact of Meles
Zenawi, with the TPLF, identifying and projecting himself as �conquerors�
and �Tygreans� and not as Ethiopians, and the direct involvement
of Meles Zenawi in the loss of Ethiopian territory, disfranchisement
of Ethiopians on the basis of their ethnic identity, lopsided
economic development concentrated in Tygreai, and the political
empowerment of individuals whose loyalty to Ethiopia is
questionable.
Members of the TPLF and the umbrella
organization, EPRDF, can salvage the situation by ejecting Meles
Zenawi and appointing someone else to lead the TPLF and the EPRDF.
They must take the initiative to mend or build new bridges of
connections with the opposition groups in order to establish either
a government by the Opposition after proper accounting of vote
tampering and corruption has been cleared, or to form a new
transitional or caretaker government, which will be responsible to
draft a new constitution and to hold free election in two years. To
wait for two years is nothing if the ultimate result will be setting
us in the right direction.
PART TWO:
III. Bad Habits Die Hard, But They Do Die
I have been reading several well thought out and
constructive articles and open letters by concerned Ethiopians, such
as articles by Abegaz Belette, Bereket Kiros. Fekade Shewakena, et
cetera in different Ethiopian websites expressing views that may
help us build understanding and cross-ethnic communication in order
to maintain our national independence, our unity, and national
identity without quashing our cultural diversity in the process. I
was particularly impressed how well Fekade Shewakena has understood
the problem of being identified with a hated ruling party through
ethnicity rather than ideology. That was the subtle theme underlying
his reasoning in his �Open Letter� article. The �Open Letter�
is a masterly defense and promotion of democratic pluralism and the
democratic process written with the right degree of parody. The
following is a quotation from the �Open Letter� that best
illustrates my point:
�All patterns of the results so far show that
the people have chosen your [referring to Meles] opposition. We may
differ on the detailed interpretations of the results of this
election even at this preliminary stage, but we can agree on one
thing. The Ethiopian people have just said that the status quo as
represented by your leadership and the EPRDF is unacceptable. They
can't say this any louder. The complete wipe out of your party
from Addis Ababa, which is the microcosm of the country, speaks
volumes if you listen carefully. Add to this the humiliating
defeat of all your important ministers. For anybody with little
common sense the fact that the people have rejected your party is
clear. It is hard to imagine that you can sit in the middle of a sea
of people that rejected you with such overwhelming vote and rule the
country in peace. The right thing for you to do now is to
congratulate the winners, the Ethiopian people and, of course, the
opposition that found their voices and be a part of the celebration.
The people just made a referendum on the fourteen years of your
rule. It is too late to make any corrections now. You must be
familiar with a famous saying in Ethiopia, birilie keneqa ayhonim
iqa.� [Emphasis added]
Of course, in the background of all these
transformative hope, we still have the cacophony of hate filled
voices of individuals throwing barbed darts of hate and goading
people trying to incite ethnic conflict, and some even going to the
extent of calling for ethnic warfare to expel or exterminate
Ethiopians with certain ethnic background. One individual has even
the gull of reposting the Fascistic hate filled article/interview of
Tilahun Yilma from a few years back. [For all I know, Tilahun Yilma
may have reconsidered his ideas and may be thinking as an Ethiopian
in a holistic manner rather than as a victim of ethnicity advocating
for tiny ephemeral solutions.] I understand that some of the
statements one reads in Ethioindex and other Ethiopian chat websites
may be the works of agents of foreign governments trying to create
an atmosphere of confusion and distrust among Ethiopians that may
lead to civil war and atrocities in Ethiopia like events that took
place in Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi. If such individuals are
writing such outrageous and criminal instigations for genocide, the
very least they could do is to write their moronic ideas in correct
grammar and in proper sentence structure.
I have also read few individuals� writings
still simmering on my criticism of Emperors Tewodros and Menilik II
of almost a year ago, as if such writers (contemporaries) were
attacked personally by my critical articles. I stand by my criticism
of both individual Emperors and the feudal tradition of Ethiopia. I
make my stand firmly because it is simply a matter of history and
its interpretation and not any personal biases or narrow ethnicism
on my part. I never criticized any Ethiopian leader whether it is
Emperor Menilik or Emperor Tewodros based on their ethnic identity.
Conversely, I have never praised any Emperor either based on his
ethnic identity. My effort in setting �historical� records
straight, which I find distorted by court-historians and repeated
thereafter uncritically in popular stories, has nothing to do with
my family background, relationship with my contemporaries, or my
biased love and admiration of Ethiopians and Ethiopia.
My critical writing is simply part of my
struggles for a better future for all Ethiopians, and an effort to
introduce critical thinking and reevaluation of some of our most �sacred�
assumptions and distortions of real events in our past relationship
with each other. I even received one of the most insidious letters
ever written to me, by none other than by a very close friend of
over thirty years because I pointed out the violence of Tewodros and
how he committed atrocities against innocent Ethiopians in his reign
of terror. In that letter, I was threatened with blackmail, with
exposure of my past youthful �misdeeds,� insulted in guttural
language et cetera. No matter what I may have done in my own
personal life, in no way would have aggravated or diminished the
brutality and treasonous activities of some of Ethiopia�s Emperors
and leaders I wrote about�irrespective of the fact of my
criticism, their misdeeds and brutality stands as a monument to our
failure and not as a trophy to our success.
Let me put it bluntly, in plain words, that a
living breathing Ethiopian is far more important and precious to me
than all the Emperors and Kings (includes Empresses and Queens) from
our history combined. If one cannot care about real people with real
pain and suffering, disfranchised and under the yoke of relentless
tyranny in the here-and-now, such a person�s indignation about my
criticism of long-dead emperors and kings is hollow and
hypocritical. My criticism of past leaders is based on historical
facts and not something I made up. At any rate, what is the
connection between the lives and activities of our past Emperors and
my contemporary Ethiopians? If we are interested in hero-worship,
there are other Emperors of great achievement and moral standing for
us to admire without going into a swoon over Tewodros and Menilik,
such as Emperors like Zera Yacob, Fasiledas, Iyasu the Great, Haile
Selassie et cetera. And who would not admire the aesthetic and
artistic impact of my favorite Salessawi Dawit of Gondar, otherwise
known as Emperor Dawit III. I have repeatedly pointed out in a
number of articles and essays about the virtue and greatness of some
of our past leaders. The history of our Emperors and Kings is
valuable to the extent that we learn about our tradition and
ourselves, but not to be consumed by such history to the extent of
viciously hurting friends and family members who happen to differ on
the evaluation of such leaders. If individuals have a personal
dislike to my person or my personal activities, there is no need to
connect their personal dislikes of me to my writing that ought to be
evaluated on its own merit.
I am writing all this side issues in order to
remind how deep our hate for each other can turn friends to mortal
enemies that it can override friendship, family relationship, even
national interest. I hope the examples I gave above would help us to
go beyond our petty differences as individuals and focus on the
current real-life problems facing us all. As the saying goes, even
fingers on ones own hands are not of the same size. No one should
expect us all to fall into one single mold of Ethiopianness; in our
unique ways we are singularly Ethiopians. Our cultural, linguistic,
social differences should be a source for the beauty of our
diversity like in a mosaic work enriching as all in the final
masterwork of life�s tapestry. Rather than brood on our diversity,
let us instead focus on the singular immediate danger facing us all
in the person of Meles Zenawi and his murderous group of associates.
No need to remind my fellow Ethiopians that Meles Zenawi is in
command of a military and security force fully armed and ready to
commit carnage for political and economic power in order to promote
his selfish interest and those of foreign governments at an
exorbitant cost to our nation.
I do regret the fact that the current opposition
politics is a reactive one. It is tragic that the opposition in
Ethiopia is an opposition of protest because it is an opposition
created out of the experiences of persecuted and violently abused
Ethiopians whose experience or contact with Ethiopian leaders of the
last fifty years is negative. The opposition is made up all kinds of
people that includes individuals who have personal grudge against
the EPRDF, such as former officials and soldiers of Mengistu. Others
are in the opposition because they hate Tygreans and cannot bear
having a Tyrolean as a leader of Ethiopia; however, the majority of
individuals are in the opposition because they love their country
and want to save Ethiopia from further destruction in the hands of
Meles Zenawi and his foreign masters. Unemployment and the daily
grinding of poverty is another motivation for opposing Meles and his
Party. Still others are in the opposition because they believe they
can provide a better leadership than Meles and his associates have
provided so far. What ever the motivation for opposing Meles, such
purpose is acceptable to me. I find Meles Zenawi to be our common
and most dangerous and most powerful enemy.
Putting the �mass� characteristics of the
opposition in mind, I want to make it clear that one has to work
with ones contemporaries no matter how flawed they maybe. Life is
not a TV set where you could change channels if you do not like the
one you happen to be watching. It is not either a game where you
could call �time-out� and change players. We have to work with
our contemporaries the best we could. I realize that the opposition
groups are not the ideal opposition I would have loved to follow,
but they have proven to be extremely courageous and up to the task
of leading Ethiopia to far more equitable democratic governance
where the individual Ethiopian�s fundamental rights will be
respected under a political structure that will be inclusive of all
Ethiopians. Even though the opposition is made up of groups with
diverse political outlooks and programs, I believe the leadership of
such groups will settle on fundamental principles of political and
democratic rights as well as human rights that will be the basis for
all future relationships of the diverse people of Ethiopia.
IV. Election 2005: Protest Voting v.
Participatory Voting
An opportune moment in history unless ceased at
the very instance it shows up, one may lose such a chance forever.
Political opportunity is ephemeral, fragile to the touch, and simply
dissipates out of existence if one hesitates to use it at the right
time. Election 2005 seems to have moved Ethiopians to a higher form
of existence. Even the fact that so many Ethiopians, by some
estimate over 75% of the legible voters, showed up to vote, at times
enduring for hours the heat and the elements not to mention the
harassment by the Government cadres, is a great testimonial as to
the commitment by Ethiopians to the democratic process. Ethiopians
are very intelligent and sophisticated people who have a one of the
oldest record of continuous national government on Earth having
lived within a national governmental structure for thousands of
years. The 2005 Election simply brought out the courage of
Ethiopians against extreme form of oppression, even though the
Government has done everything it could to corrupt the election
process.
The 2005 Election process itself was marred with
numerous violations by the Government of Meles Zenawi with a willing
participation of the National Electoral Board (NEB), supposedly an
independent organ from the Government, but in reality very much part
of it. There was lip service arrangement to convince the world that
the election of 2005 was fair and democratic by inviting
international monitors mostly from European Union and the United
States and Canada. Over three hundred international monitors were
concentrated in a couple of hundred polling stations mainly in Addis
Ababa and few other urban centers out of thirty six thousand polling
stations. Even in the best of circumstances, no one could be able to
reach a generalized conclusion from such limited number of
observations to declare a fair and democratic election. As we found
out later, the monitoring device was simply part of the scheme to
blind us all from the manipulation and fraud perpetuated against the
people of Ethiopia by the Government.
To begin with, the monitors were not allowed free
movement to visit any polling station as they please in the country,
by the Ethiopian Government; moreover, they were also limited by
their own inadequacy. They had no way of accessing and monitoring
the day to day intimidation, undue influence, violent ejection and
harassment of the rural population as part of the campaign of the
ruling party in rural Ethiopia away from the prying eyes of western
journalists or local ones as well. EPRDF members or individuals with
close affiliation with the EPRDF administer most of the rural area
in Ethiopia. Under such monolithic structure of Government and
rigged election, EPRDF�s boastfulness on how successfully it
conducted a democratic election is a hollow triumph. As evidence of
the democratic nature of the election, EPRDF cites the assessment of
international monitors involved in assessing the election process.
Who are the monitors any way? They are international human rights
NGOs whose governmental affiliation is by far too subtle to detect
even by the monitors themselves.
Former President Jimmy Carter in his Report of 19
May 2005 plainly put the problem as follows:
�The most highly publicized event was the
expulsion of observer teams from the National Democratic Institute,
International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation
for Electoral Systems. Although I appealed personally to the Prime
Minister, he refused to reverse the decision. This left our Center
(50 persons), the European Union (160 persons), African Union (31
persons), and several others as international observers, a total of
about 330. All of us had unimpeded access to opposition leaders,
polling sites, and other aspects of the electoral process.
�Ethiopia is a large nation, with a population of more than 70
million, 30 million of whom are eligible to vote, with 25.6 million
registered to cast ballots in 36,000 polling stations. Thirty-seven
political parties have qualified candidates to seek the 547
parliamentary seats plus local community posts. Meles's ruling
party, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)
now holds 481 of the seats, and there are two significant coalitions
among the opposition: Union of Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF)
with 12 parties and a better organized Coalition for Unity and
Democracy (CUD) with four parties.� [Jimmy Carter, Ethiopia
Trip Report: May 11- 17: Ethiopia National Parliamentary and Local
Elections, 19 May 2005]
I am not going to argue the corruption of the
Ethiopian election process by showing how non-Ethiopian non-profit
organizations �promoting� democracy all over the world are
corrupt. I just simply want to point out how humanly impossible it
is for any group of people being stationed at very limited polling
stations and with limited access to events prior to the election to
make any kind of assessment on the general election process that
took place allover Ethiopia, an area consisting of 90% of the voting
population. It is our responsibility to bring about democratic
governance to our country. The dice is cast, and it has come up with
winning numbers�the opposition�s numbers. We already have proven
capable leadership in the opposition. We have long sought good
leaders, and here they are now at last. Would it not be logical to
support and help them bring about political and economic sobriety to
the drunken stupor of the last fourteen years of Meles Zenawi?
From World history and political science theories
we learn that governments established pursuant to protest-votes are
rarely successful. Usually such governments end up being booted out
even before completing their first terms of offices. A great example
for such thesis may be found in the political turmoil that followed
the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1980s. Protest-votes are
votes against an existing government and its policies, but
technically votes for the opposition to that government. It is in
the nature of such protest-vote that once such unpopular government
is thrown out of office that the problem of direction, the
formulation of economic policy, political appointment et cetera
would become an overwhelming challenge to the new government. Since
people were focusing on voting against the unpopular government and
its leaders, they were not internalizing and digesting the political
program(s) of the opposition group they end up supporting into
office. Once the unpopular government is out of office, the many
defects of the opposition, now in power, start to emerge with
startling clarity to the voters or the general population that
succeeded in throwing out the unpopular government. In order to
overcome such weakness in the connection between voters and the
opposition group, and in order to build solid bridges to counter
such defects, the current Ethiopian political bottleneck situation
must be considered and solved in a creative manner.
We have suggested several solutions here below.
The issue of �votes� for either the EPRDF or the Opposition
Group should be seen having basic structural flaws. In case of
EPRDF, it is corruption and coercion; in case of the Opposition, it
is protest voting. The remedial action would take into account the
best possible arrangement that will lay out solid foundation for
future democratic structure, which will be immune to corruption,
manipulation, and polarizing effect of ethnic politics, and most
importantly a vote for a particular political party supporting or
approving the economic and political programs of such a party.
V.
Solutions: The New Leadership of the Opposition
Now that the genie is out of its confining
bottle, no one can put it back, not even �Suleiman.� What
we are witnessing happening in Ethiopia in 2005 may be the beginning
of Ethiopia�s salvation, and the dawn of new form of leadership
and political democratic processes. However, even though I am very
much encouraged by the types of sober, intelligent, and lawful steps
taken by the leadership of the opposition on one side, I have been
receiving also alarming reports from reliable sources from inside
Ethiopia about the development within the opposition of utterly
irresponsible tiny group of individuals who want to turn this
wonderful tide of change and unity into an ethnic cleansing orgy of
murder and torture and uprooting of Tygreans. The influence of such
group at this point on the larger membership of the opposition is
very limited. The leadership of the opposition must take visible
steps to nib in the bud such divisive schemes of very few
individuals. It must do more by way of public statements to contain
and ostracize such individuals with such moronic ideas.
I see several encouraging actions being taken by
the leadership of the opposition. The recent decision to go to court
for an injunction to stop the National Electoral Board from
declaring the result of the election while there are still hundreds
of contested results in several election districts (polling
stations) is a good indicator of the type of sophisticated
leadership evolving right in front of our eyes. Giving law a place
in ones politics is a great contribution to the ongoing political
development in Ethiopia. Of course, we all know the courts in
Ethiopia are staffed with judges appointed by the ruling party, but
I also believe individuals when called upon on major national issues
will also transcend their particular individual interest and make
decisions in the best interest of the nation. The legal course of
action ultimately will fail because it will be like trying to stop a
lick in a dam by patching it up with some plaster. Even though there
is much to be said about using existing structures, in as far as
they are useful in promoting democratic systems of conflict
resolution, there are limits how far such structures could be of use
in times of great social upheavals where the very foundation of an
existing political and economic structure is being shaken. It may
even be necessary in time of shortfalls one may have the right to go
beyond the limitations set by democratic purposes on such
institutions.
We all must understand that the leadership of the
opposition is faced not only with the responsibility of promoting
the political programs of individual political parties that
constitute the �opposition� but also must struggle to cut a new
path of democratic methodology and ways and means to move Ethiopia
in the direction of democratic governance. The task is overwhelming.
The responsibility to carry out such lofty goals puts on the
shoulders of every leader great weight of self-sacrifice and
discipline. I have faith that this time around the leaders of the
opposition will meet the challenge headlong and do the right thing.
By way of a reminder to those who are in the forefront laying the
foundation of a democratic Ethiopia, I have outlined herein some of
the pitfalls they may come across in their important undertaking to
restore Ethiopia to her rightful place as a democratic, wealthy, and
powerful nation. The most subversive pitfalls facing the opposition
are the following:
a) the possibility of vicious infighting
among the leaders of the opposition for power;
b) the polarization and corruption of the
process of political change that is underway due to the
participation of Mengistu�s lieutenants and supporters;
c) the infiltration of Mengistu in the
opposition and his participation in the future of Ethiopia;
d) the acceptance of the demands of foreign
nations without due consideration of the interest of Ethiopia;
e) the continued presence in large numbers of
international organizations and international personnel in
Ethiopia;
f) the financing of programs that grossly
benefit a limited number of Ethiopians in a limited area such as
urban centers;
g) problems of ethnic based political
organizations;
h) the persecution of people on the basis of
their ethnic identities;
i) the continuation of the degradation and
abuse of Ethiopian young females in Ethiopia and in Arab
nations;
j) the recapitulation or compromising of Ethiopia�s right to
its Afar Coastal territories and the Territorial Waters on the Red
Sea.
V1. Is it Possible to Overcome the Current
Political Bottleneck ?
A. Model One: Accept Election Result - Ethiopia in
Grave Future
The simple solution is to accept the announcement
of the National Electoral Board and live with Meles Zenawi for the
next five years and watch the slow destruction of Ethiopia. Such
simple solution is very attractive only to Meles Zenawi. To the
opposition and to most Ethiopians such prospect is most traumatizing�and
rightly so. It is also a form of defeatist solution. May be if we
look at solving political problems as long-term processes, we may
not be discouraged by such prospect. My personal choice is never to
accept any government that has Meles Zenawi as a leader or in some
other political position. For example, the thirty-eight
representatives from Tygreai were all from TPLF, there were almost
no contenders from any other group except a couple independent
candidates. The major opposition parties have issued statements
deploring the violence and intimidation directed at their
candidates. The first step, to be taken in order bring some
semblance of legitimacy to the Election of 2005 and adopt this Model
One, all representatives elected from Tygreai should be vacated and
the election nullified. And a new election will be held for
representatives later under the set-up by the new government with
the supervision of international observers.
If we look at the political and economic program
of the dominant opposition group that of CUD and to a limited extent
that of UEDF, we can see immediately points of irreconcilable
differences between what EPRDF has followed as its political and
economic program for the last ten years with that of the Opposition.
The first and foremost is the question on how to resolve the border
conflict with Eritrea. The Opposition group will certainly would
want to reexamine all treaties and agreement signed by Meles Zenawi
with political content dealing with national sovereignty,
territorial integrity, national resources, international rivers, et
cetera. The Opposition will find a number of such agreements
unacceptable and some downright illegal or unconstitutional. Meles
will refuse access to such documentation, and will not allow its
executives (Ministers, and other political appointees) from
cooperating with the Opposition in that form of parliamentary
investigation. Such conflict could easily be turned into a national
crises leading into violence and detention and a breakdown to the
parliamentary system.
The same types of conflict between the Opposition
in parliament and the Executive on issues dealing with education,
commerce, land ownership, media and information, rural development,
urban development, funding, international loans, the budget of the
nation, security issues et cetera would be a constant and paralyzing
items of conflict. There are also extremely serious and immediate
problems of massive unemployment, pestilence, AIDS health issues, or
famine on biblical proportion to deal with. The question is how a
house divided so drastically within itself could cop with such
national problems. Added to these insurmountable problems, we have
the constant controversy between what is political and public with
what is economic and private involving the non-profit role of the
hundreds of organizations in some way or other connected with or
controlled by political organizations. The Opposition members may
want to abolish all such organizations or they may want to create
their own. To date, such organizations have been politicized to a
great degree by the TPLF that they seem to form part of the
political arm of the Government of Meles Zenawi. Non-profit
organizations controlled by political parties have tremendous power
to influence the local population for political purposes.
The opposition group by accepting the result of the Election of
2005 could use effectively the Ethiopian parliament as a forum to
expose the many weaknesses, corruption, betrayal, treason et cetera
of Meles Zenawi and his political Party. That, in itself would be a
great service to Ethiopia. However, we must not undermine the
destructive power, and craftiness of Meles Zenawi and his group of
associates. The power of the opposition is also in another area
where its impact may be felt almost instantly. It has a great
capacity to reach the Ethiopian urban population in a short period.
It has also the network to reach the world through various websites
around the world. These are all very powerful tools to impede
further erosion of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of
Ethiopia in the hands of Meles Zenawi.
B. Model Two: Reject the Election Result, Prepare
for Long Costly Struggle
It is impossible to form a government that will
protect the interest of Ethiopia with Meles Zenawi as Prime Minister
or in any position of political power. Meles is in a mission to
fulfill the destruction of traditional Ethiopia and to create a
State of Tygreai, and Eritrea as his primary goal, and that of
Oromia, Somalia et cetera as part of a grand scheme conceived by
Ethiopia�s historic enemies in the area and in the West. Because
of his anti-Ethiopia goals, he had already committed numerous
treasonous crimes against the State of Ethiopia and Ethiopians. If
he is allowed to form a government, there will follow a disastrous
relationship with the opposition, especially an opposition that will
be commanding tremendous voice and support from the Ethiopian
people. Any such government will result in prolonged uncertainty,
civil unrest, demonstrations, murders and detentions. Meles and
group most certainly will try to use the maneuver they used to get
rid of OLF, which will not work this time with the opposition for a
number of obvious reasons.
Unlike the OLF, the opposition movement is a
grassroots tsunami type movement, and nothing Meles Zenawi may do
will be sufficient to stop the political upturn. Meles by his
continued political presence and maneuver, will simply aggravate the
situation. As he has already started committing murdering of
demonstrators, he will be escalating his violence. He may imprison
and even murder the opposition leaders, by so doing he will only
succeed in irrevocably alienating Tygreans from the rest of Ethiopia
who then will be attacked in a situation reminiscent of the Red
Terror of Mengistu. Of course, Ethiopia is not going to be like
Rwanda or Serbia, but it sure will be like Somalia with ethnic
groups organized in much more structured system of ethnicism and
nationalities rather than clans. We are heading to the period of Zemene
Mesafint.
The question that everyone, including the leaders
of the United States, Canada, England et cetera, should be asking is
whether Meles Zenawi is worth that much that leaders of the Western
world, and Ethiopians within the EPRDF would allow so much
bloodshed, carnage, and chaos in Ethiopia in order to maintain in
power such a treasonous leader. A leader who had unabashedly served
the interest of foreign governments above the interest of his own
people? If the opposition chooses not join the new government with
Meles Zenawi as Prime Minister for the next five years, it must
ready itself for a long, vicious, and extremely violent struggle. In
the finally analysis, I have no doubt in my mind that Meles will be
driven out of office, arrested, or resign. I do not see any peaceful
future for a third term in office.
I realize the question of the convoluted
relationship of Meles Zenawi with the people of Tygreai is a
mind-boggling one to unravel even for sophisticated thinkers and �Webmasters.�
We see the wait-and-see attitude with some of the Websites, which
attitude seems to be also the attitude of a number of �Tygreans.�
One should not have any hesitation about Meles Zenawi and his
treasonous activities. At the same time, one must not be coerced or
scared into acting irrationally anticipating the worst would happen
to Tygreans if Meles loses power. The point is that Tygreans as a
population lost power a long time ago before 1991. The fact that
Meles is now masking himself in Tyrolean identity should not confuse
us from holding him responsible for several crimes including treason
undermining Tygreans and the Ethiopian nation as a whole. Meles�s
attempted effort to project himself as Tyrolean is simply a
political game, in fact, a form of blackmail; he is holding Tygreans
as hostages by stating in speeches and through his network of cadres
that if he loses power, Tygreans will be massacred as in Rwanda.
It is also asserted by some observers of the
current political situation in Ethiopia that the Minister of
Information has been distributing pamphlets as if written by
opposition groups threatening Tygreans. It is up to the leadership
of the opposition to counter such divisive propaganda by issuing
repeatedly to all people that no such ethnic �cleansing� will
ever occur under their watch. Tygreans should be calm and not jump
with alarm every time they hear such propaganda. We all must have
faith in our ethical culture and humane relations of centuries of
living together as one people that such things will never happen in
Ethiopia. Nevertheless, vigilant caution is necessary not only in
the way ethnic identification is used against Tygreans but also
against other ethnic groups.
Ethiopians are very much worried how things are
unfolding because they/we are witnessing an election process fast
becoming worse day by day into an Ethiopian nightmare. The recent
murder of demonstrators by police and military forces in Addis Ababa
is only the beginning of violence and detentions if Meles Zenawi
continues to be in power. The struggle by Meles Zenawi and his
supporters in an effort to stay in power will be the fiercest
Ethiopia had ever seen. Meles and company have much to lose in
addition to political power: they will lose control of hundreds of
enterprises that has been generating hundreds of millions of dollars
or equivalent. Most importantly, Meles will lose the forum from
which to serve and safeguard the interest of Eritrea. Furthermore,
Meles and his associates will be vulnerable to criminal prosecution
for all kinds of crimes they committed while in office if they lose
power and control of the government of Ethiopia.
There is much to be done by the people of the
many regions who have voted for Meles Zenawi and other members of
the TPLF in Tygreai even if it is generally acknowledged their vote
was won under a situation of tremendous coercion and intimidation.
It is clear from the very start in 1991 that TPLF had a vise-like
grip on the people of Tygreai. It is a mistake for the rest of the
population of Ethiopia to think of Tygreans as �willing�
participants in the treasonous government of Meles Zenawi. Please,
put in mind the fact that the EPRDF is made up of organizations
representing diverse ethnic groups from all over the country,
individuals representing disfranchised and marginalized people
during the long reign of Haile Selassie and also persecuted with
violence for seventeen years under the government of Mengistu. There
are several unresolved grievances of millions of people represented
by the members of the EPRDF.
It is also clear that Meles Zenawi and his Party,
the TPLF, will not hesitate in attempting to create a strong hold in
Tygreai as an independent nation and seek recognition from the rest
of the world if Meles Zenawi loses power. One must not make the
mistake of attributing the desire of a mad dictator to that of his
victims the Tygraean people. Tygraeans overwhelmingly will oppose
such move by Meles, for Tygraeans, there is only one Ethiopia and
that Ethiopia includes all of the diverse people of Ethiopia
including Tygaeans. The improvement of infrastructure although long
overdue to the region, may have the unintended effect of creating a
sense of less dependence on the rest of Ethiopia for power and
economic developments. The huge hydroelectric dam and the Technology
Institute, et cetera may be seen as preparation for such
eventuality. On the other hand, the announcement of OPDO of last
week that it will move its �Capital� for Oromo �administrative
region/State� to Addis Ababa is a sort of stakeout of claim of
territory if there is to be such breakup of the nation with �Oromia�
as one of the fragments of future independent nations. Of course,
such a move may be a simple political game to counter the full
control of Addis Ababa by the opposition. We can see now that
organizing the internal political structure with �States� as
governmental unites was a grave mistake and a dangerous structure
that weaken and finally break up Ethiopia into several mini-states.
For the people of Tygraei, Meles Zenawi is not a
savior but someone whose leadership is disastrous not only to
Tygreans but to Ethiopians in general. Ethiopians must fight against
such fragmentation. However, the first initiative against such move
to break Tygraei from the rest of Ethiopia in any form must come
from the people themselves. We have been reading for sometime now
about �putting fence� or carrying out the stated goals of
Tilahun Yilma also a defeatist solution. He wrote �So we must ask
what benefit for Ethiopia exists in the uneasy association with
Tigray/Eritrea. They have brought only poverty, war, misery, and the
cultural poisoning of the Ethiopian people by waging ethnic
conflict. They are like a malignant cancer that has been eating away
at our vital parts. If we don't excise this cancer promptly,
Ethiopia will cease to be a nation. Tigraeans/Eritreans have drafted
into the so-called New Ethiopian Constitution articles allowing
secession and requiring restriction of ethnic groups to their tribal
regions or "kilils." We now should demand that they be the
primary beneficiaries of their own laws: they should be deported to
their own kilil, and Ethiopia as a nation should secede from the
Tigrigna-speaking regions of the Provinces of Tigray and Mereb
Melash.� [Interview of November 1996, Ethiopian Review Magazine]
With that type of rhetoric and folly, no less from a distinguished
microbiologist, we sure would have been in dire circumstances.
However, the people of Ethiopia, being far more intelligent than the
folly of some of their children, will only laugh at such effort.
An apparently irate reader of the many websites
with a spectrum of extreme views responded in one of the Websites by
stating, �The Ethiopian Opposition has been
inciting violence and ethnic hatred since the beginning of the
election campaigns saying �Tigrians go home� as if the Tigrians
are not Ethiopians. Who are more Ethiopians than whom? Are not the
Tigrians the very people who created Ethiopia and formed the first
Ethiopian government? Who are Birhanu Nega and Hailu Shawl to tell
the Tigrians to go home? What kind of Ethiopia do they have in mind
without Tigray?� [Atnaf Segued, �We are Watching You CUD and
UEDF,� Dekialula, June 10, 2005] it is quite irresponsible
of some of the leaders in the opposition to use terms in interviews
that could be easily interpreted as a call for ethnic war against
Tygreans.
I am quoting the above statements by Tilahun
Yilma as an example of how far people can deteriorate or become
defensive in their thinking if pressed down under tremendous
pressure of the feeling of being unable to improve a particularly
difficult situation. For example, it is quite insane for any one to
think in such stark manner of ethnic cleansing as suggested by
Tilahun Yilma. If that happens Tilahun Yilma and his likes may find
themselves in the unexpected situation of being deported to �Antarctica.�
In short, this is not the way to build a nation by alienating
individuals with the idea of �them� and �us� and by creating
dividing lines that should not be there. Ethnicity is a cultural
phenomenon and should not be the basis for political institutions
and structures.
VII. Recommended Steps to Save Ethiopia:
Caretaker Government
Meles Zenawi is the single most polarizing
individual in Ethiopia whose continued presence continues to be the
source of all disagreements and conflicts in Ethiopia. The TPLF with
the other members of the EPRDF must decide whether a single
individual is worth murdering tens of thousands of Ethiopians and
driving the nation into civil war. I am sure the day Meles Zenawi is
out of Ethiopian politics, peace and brotherly understanding and
good will among the people of Ethiopia will descend on all.
This is a very significant time for the
leadership of OPDO, ANDM, et cetera to reconsider their political
options. No one disputes the fact that there are Ethiopian voters
who support the EPRDF and its members. The number of representatives
announced by the National Electoral Board is an announcement about
representatives elected through illegal means. However, it does not
rule out completely the fact that those political organizations as
part of the EPRDF do have millions of supporters too. It is simply a
matter of holding free election under the administration of a
neutral body to insure that all representatives are elected freely
under a fair process. These means that EPRDF and its member
organizations have a future to participate as political parties in
the reconstituted revitalized Ethiopia as long as they are willing
to remove Meles Zenawi from political power and stop him from
manipulating the situation to serve his own self-interest.
If the situation was reversed and if it were
Meles Zenawi who had a chance to continue as a political leader
working with the opposition in a revitalized Ethiopia, he would not
have hesitated a second to abandon the leaders of ANDM, OPDO et
cetera to their fate as he had done with his own party die-hard
supporters and others. Just look at his record of discarded
colleagues, such as Tamrat Lyne, Seye Abraha, the Twelve Dissenters
of TPLF�s Central Committee, and several others.
The following are steps and cursory sketch of
compromise between the Opposition leaders and the leaders of the
EPRDF that would save Ethiopia from descending into utter chaos.
This is an alternative to having the rigged voting as final and
participating as a minority opposition in a government setup that
will have Meles Zenawi as its Prime Minister or some one controlled
by Meles Zenawi. At any rate, I believe the Opposition has won, and
EPRDF has lost the 2005 Election. However, through fraud and
corruption the National Electoral Board has unofficially given out
numbers crowning EPRDF with victory. It is quite tricky to solve
this political bottleneck without resorting to violence. This is the
reason why I am suggesting a creative solution to the crisis by
stepping away from strictly enforcing the election results fraud and
all by forming a compromise caretaker government.
1. The first and most important step is for
members of the EPRDF to remove Meles Zenawi from playing any
political role in Ethiopia, by replacing him with a less polarizing
individual from that organization.
2. The opposition Group and the EPRDF members
must negotiate and agree on a caretaker government to be headed by a
neutral body of administrators agreed upon by the two groups.
3. The caretaker government will be responsible
for the administration of the country for two years while organizing
the nation for free election according to the electoral districts
devised according to the current 1995 Constitution for the limited
purpose of organizing election districts without the �State�
implication. .
4. The elected Representatives will revise the
1995 Constitution or write a new one and prepare the necessary
documents for a referendum.
5. The Military forces will be under the command
of the neutral caretaker government. The police force will be under
the elected representatives.
During such period, Ethiopia will be administered
as a nation in a transition period with limits as to the scope of
the activities of such transient government would have on
international relations, structuring of local
governments/administrations, and long-term policies.
VIII. Conclusion
I have a good feeling about the direction the
struggle of the last fifteen years is taking by gauging the process
by recent events. This is simply a matter of intuition. On the other
hand, when I look at the facts and the creeping changes taking place
in the last fourteen years objectively with cold-blooded
rationality, there is not much hope for Ethiopia in terms of
economic development in the near future; however, the story is quite
different when it comes to political matters. No matter how we may
disagree on issues dealing with political and economic programs, or
how we look at the characteristics and lives of our previous
Emperors and leaders, or any number of social issues, there is one
item we must all agree on�the point that Meles Zenawi is the most
dangerous enemy of the people of Ethiopia. Everything he has done
since 1991 is aimed at the complete destruction of Ethiopia.
In order to build the Ethiopia of our future, we
need to be cognizant of our past and current history in order to
learn to avoid similar mistakes of our predecessors. We need to use
history in a creative manner to solve future problems. We should not
be held hostages by our history or put in a straightjacket of
history. We should be able to communicate with each other in a
non-confrontational manner to resolve political and economic
problems. Our national security depends on how well we work with
each other. This seems to be a new beginning for all of us. Some of
us have hurt Ethiopia much more than others; nevertheless, there
need be a change of attitude from feelings of being victim to
feelings of empowerment. For whatever has happened in our past, in
some way, we all are collectively responsible. My advice for caution
does not me building barbed wire around our ideal Ethiopia, but
exposing all of us to Ethiopia�s potential for greatness as much
as possible. We are going to be a great people and a great nation
with our humanity intact and our prosperity assured. End.
[Note to all my Readers: I have no
affiliation whatsoever with any of the members of the Opposition. I
have no affiliation with any other political group; however, I am
with a small group of dedicated Ethiopians loosely organized to
promote and defend the interest of Ethiopia and all Ethiopians at
all cost. For those of you who may question my support of the change
underway in Ethiopia, I urge you to read my past writings including
books and short studies. My only interest is to see Ethiopia and
Ethiopians as a prosperous, democratic, and powerful people and
nation. I will die a happy man if I have just a glimpse of the
bright future of Ethiopia.]
Tecola W. Hagos
June 12, 2005
[* Quo Vadis Latin word
meaning �where to,� a phrase taken from what St. Peter said,
fleeing Nero�s persecution in Rome, when he encountered Christ and
asked Him: �Domine quo vadis?� (Whither goest Thou, Lord?)
Christ replied: �I go to Rome to be crucified again.�
Ashamed of his fear, Peter turned back to Rome where he was
crucified.]
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