Ethiopia’s capital at crossroads
The Tide Online
December 15, 2005, This city fancies itself asthe capital of
Africa, the crossroads of the continent, a refined refuge where
African leaders gather to address the crises in unruly places
like Sudan, Ivory Coast and Congo.
The
city’s most powerful resident, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi,
has been deemed one of Africa’s new generation of leaders,
a rebel turned democrat and darling of the international donors.
But
after a months-long political standoff that has turned increasingly
bloody, Ethiopia’s capital has joined Africa’s more
ignominious places, becoming the latest continental crisis point
to attract the attention of the African Union, which has its
headquarters here. Mr. Meles now finds himself criticiSed as
a dictator, not a democrat.
“If
the situation deteriorates here, it’s a major symbolic
failure for the African Union,” said Abdul Mohammed, an
analyst with the Inter-African Group who huddled with African
Union leaders on November 4 to discuss the Ethiopia crisis.
“This is the home of the A.U. This is occurring in the
A.U.’s backyard.”
Quite
literally. The African Union’s crisis management team
did not have to consult a map to find the latest hot spot on
this continent. It could look out the window.
Ethiopian
security forces fired on stone-throwing protesters in the streets
around the African Union’s headquarters in early November.
Tyres were burned in the street. The lot next door to the organisation
was turned into a makeshift detention center as thousands of
opposition supporters were rounded up by the government.
Many
have been released, but treason charges have been filed against
some, and others are being held in rugged conditions outside
the capital.
The
discord stems from a democratic transition that has stumbled
and fallen flat. The government called parliamentary elections
in May and, unlike in the last two elections in 1995 and 2000,
actually allowed opposition candidates a chance to campaign.
The
election was considered a test of the fledging democracy in
Africa’s second most populous country. The results were
a shock.
The
opposition swept seats in Addis Ababa and finished strongly
in other urban areas. Little-known candidates managed to oust
several powerful government ministers, a sign that many voters
had lost confidence in the governing party.
“The
beauty of democracy is people have started to tell even the
ruling party they can vote it out if it does not address its
concerns,” said Bereket Simon, a top aide to Mr. Meles,
putting the best possible face on the surprise election results.
After
weeks of controversy over those results, the government announced
that it had won 296 seats in the 547-member Parliament, with
the opposition taking 176 seats, far fewer than the opposition
believed it was due.
Unused
to sharing power, the ruling party also hastily changed parliamentary
rules so that only a party with 51 per cent of the seats could
raise an issue for discussion, infuriating the opposition.
When
opposition supporters took to the streets in June to claim vote-rigging
by the government, security forces opened fire, killing about
40 of them.
The
African Union stayed silent, drawing the wrath of opposition
supporters who accused it of cozying up to the Ethiopian political
elite and acting like the old, ineffective Organization of African
Unity, which rarely criticized member governments, no matter
how repressive.
Ethiopia’s
political crisis blew up again on November 1 while the African
Union held a summit meeting here. Opposition supporters organised
a low-key protest to attract the attention of the visiting African
leaders: motorists were told to toot their horns from 8 to 8:30
a.m. for three days in a row.
But
heavily armed soldiers were on the streets. Tensions were high
and clashes broke out. Soon, soldiers were firing on demonstrators,
who were heaving rocks, smashing vehicles and burning tires
in the road.
The
African Union condemned the violence this time and asked Mr.
Meles to explain how so many people - 40 or more in the latest
bout of violence - died. The chairman, former President Alpha
Oumar Konaré of Mali, has met repeatedly with Mr. Meles
to discuss the crisis.
Mr.
Meles blames the opposition for the violence, accusing it even
of hurling grenades at security forces. Infuriated by the protests
against his rule, Mr. Meles has accused the opposition of trying
to topple the government through demonstrations, which he says
he will not allow.
To
control the dissent, soldiers and police officers have swept
through the city, arresting the top leadership of the main opposition
group, the Coalition of Unity and Democracy. Similar sweeps
have resulted in young men being taken away from neighborhoods
where trouble has broken out.
“What
we have detained is people who have tried to overthrow the duly
constituted government, and that in my view is treason under
the laws of the country,” Mr. Meles has told the BBC .
Print
journalists are also under siege. At least two reporters viewed
as sympathetic to the opposition have been detained. Other journalists
have gone into hiding, and the authorities took into custody
two journalists’ mothers as a pressure tactic.
The
Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York group that promotes
a free press, has told Mr. Meles in a letter that it is “deeply
troubled by your government’s harassment and censorship
of journalists.”
Alemzurya
Teshome, 25, the daughter of one opposition leader, said that
the police raided her home to take away her father and then
fatally shot her mother, who was screaming in protest. Ms. Teshoe
said the police also shot at one of her brothers, but missed
and hit a neighbor instead.
Distraught
as she recounted the incident, Ms. Teshome said neighbors who
went to the hospital to recover her mother’s body were
told that they had to sign a document saying that the opposition
party was responsible for the killing. “I was there when
they killed my mother,” she said, outraged by the request,
which was later dropped. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
The
opposition has said it will not join the Parliament until the
government agrees to investigate the killings, release political
prisoners and include the opposition on the electoral commission,
among other demands. Boycotts of ruling party businesses are
also planned. A strike by shopkeepers and taxi drivers planned
for the week of Nov. 7 did not succeed after the government
threatened to take away the licenses of those who did not report
to work.]
“This
was daylight robbery,” Hailu Shawel, a prominent businessman
who is president of the opposition coalition, said in a recent
interview, before his arrest. “The whole machinery of
the government went to war to overturn these results.”
Despite
little tradition of compromise - the word itself does not exist
in Amharic, Ethiopians say - negotiation is widely regarded
as the only way out of the standoff.
“Africa
is littered with the negative consequences of not compromising,”
said Mr. Mohammed, an Ethiopian political analyst who has been
trying to bring the parties together. “The African elite
sees compromise as a sign of weakness. It is not. A multiethnic
state like this cannot be governed anymore by a one-party state.”
What
makes Ethiopia’s turmoil all the more surprising is that
Mr. Meles has been heralded by the West as one of Africa’s
promising new leaders. He stayed in the good graces of the United
States and the European Union, the biggest donors to Ethiopia,
even after he and his rival, President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea,
waged a border war from 1998 to 2000 that resulted in a death
toll as high as 100,000. Tensions remain high between the countries,
with many diplomats fearing that Mr. Isaias may take advantage
of Mr. Meles’s domestic woes to take aggressive action
at the border.
Prime
Minister Tony Blair of Britain picked Mr. Meles, known for his
cerebral nature, as a member of his Commission for Africa to
help draft a blueprint for building wealth and democracy on
the continent. Even after the June killings, Mr. Meles was invited
to the Group of 8 meeting in Scotland to advise world leaders.
But
with the recent bout of violence, Mr. Meles’s image abroad
has begun to take a battering.
“Another
bloodbath is taking place in Ethiopia,” Ana Gomes, the
European Union’s chief election observer in the May polling,
said in a recent letter urging colleagues on the European Parliament
to end their chummy approach toward Mr. Meles.
