Few
extracts from John W. Harbesons critic of Paul Henze's misleading
account of EPRDF
The
following evidence surely explains whether Paul Henze is a TPLF
cadre or a scholar. In his article titled: "A Bureaucratic
Authoritarian Regime: Is Ethiopia Democratic?" in Journal
of Democracy 9:4 (1998) page 62-69, Harbesons enumerates the following
faults in Paul Henze account of EPRDFs Ethiopia
Harbenson
argues:
Ethiopia
has engaged in its own post-Cold War experiment with democracy,
under the aegis of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic
Front (EPRDF). I would summarize the record of that experiment
since 1991 by saying that Ethiopia has acquired virtually all
the forms of democracy but little of its substance. I therefore
differ in a major way with Paul Henze's view of Ethiopian politics
under the EPRDF regime. Since I believe that our differences derive,
to a very large extent, from dissimilar theoretical and methodological
perspectives, I will briefly explore these dissimilarities before
turning to Henze's misleading account of contemporary Ethiopian
developments".
Although
Henze does appear generally to accept the widely recognized statement
of essential democratic norms offered by Robert Dahl, he implicitly
chooses not to work within the framework of contemporary empirical
democratic theory.
Henze
is right to remind us that the experiential foundations of empirical
democratic theory remain disproportionately those of Europe and
the Americas. He would also be right to raise the question of
what is universal about democracy and what is not, what is changing
and changeable and what is not; and he would be right to ask us
to explore how normative formulations of democracy's essence can
accommodate differences among countries and cultures. But rather
than tackle this difficult assignment, he implicitly turns away
from the task.
Several
unfortunate consequences attend Henze's approach. Having dismissed
Western democratic norms as possibly inapplicable in the circumstances
of countries like Ethiopia, he inconsistently falls back on just
those standards to evaluate Ethiopian democracy. ("The [new
Ethiopian] Constitution passes almost all the tests by which democratic
constitutions are judged.") Moreover, by confining his assessment
of Ethiopia's democratic credentials to what its new constitution
normatively ordains, while virtually ignoring the literature of
contemporary empirical democratic theory, he leaves himself without
the analytical tools needed for assessing Ethiopia's claims to
practice democracy. He is left with no evident empirical or behavioral
criteria for determining to what extent, if at all, Ethiopia puts
its own constitutional principles into practice or departs from
its own political heritage. Similarly, he deprives himself of
an analytical basis for assessing Ethiopia's growing resemblances
and continuing dissimilarities with other African and less developed
countries now purporting to sail under democratic colors. Most
important, by declining to refine or employ democratic theory
in empirical analysis, Henze lacks an analytical basis for distinguishing
what might be Ethiopian adaptations of democratic theory to its
own circumstances from de facto departures from democratic practice.
Long on Symbols, Short on Substance.
Paul
Henze's and my contrasting analytical approaches lead us to emphasize
very different features of Ethiopia's pre-1991 as well as post-1991
political trajectory. Fundamentally, Henze tends to treat the
initiatives of all Ethiopia's twentieth-century governments as
issuing in constitutions (ideologies in Mengistu's case) whose
norms, however imperfectly and incompletely realized, became at
least roughly descriptive of actual practice. This approach appears
to derive naturally from Henze's reliance on normative democratic
theory alone. By contrast, most scholarship on Ethiopia has treated
these initiatives as what the late Robert Hess termed "veneers,"
masking sharply contradictory realities of actual practice.
Harbeson
writes:
There
is no difference of opinion among observers of Ethiopian politics,
Henze included, regarding the overwhelming and ultimately self-destructive
brutality of Mengistu Haile Mariam's military dictatorship. There
may be room for potentially important debate, however, over the
significance and long-term consequences of official Marxist-Leninist
ideology during this period. Henze credits Mengistu with "bludgeon[ing]
his country into a model Stalinist 'people's democracy.'"
Obviously, political practice always falls short of formally proclaimed
principles, but the question remains as to whether Marxism-Leninism
under Mengistu bore any closer resemblance to practice than the
rhetoric of constitutional and economic development did under
Haile Selassie. Indeed, Marxism-Leninism's fiercest critics would
argue that such contradictions between ideology and practice are
intrinsic to its very nature.
The
EPRDF in Power
In
my view, Henze conveys a highly misleading account of Ethiopia's
post-1991 political transition by glossing over or completely
overlooking some of its most important dynamics. He presents what
I believe is a fundamentally inaccurate picture of a generally
benign regime, animated by the principles of the new constitution,
and seeking to steer the ship of state in uncharted ideological
waters toward a less Western and as yet unsighted African democratic
harbor. Even most of the EPRDF's critics would agree that it represents
a marked improvement over its predecessors, both politically and
economically. Yet the fact remains that the constitutional structure
it has designed is merely a façade. The reality that it
covers over is an essentially bureaucratic-authoritarian regime
dependent upon the EPRDF's superior military muscle. The EPRDF's
leadership, whose core Tigrean constituency represents perhaps
10 percent of the population, has used its military supremacy
to secure political hegemony with too little regard for two fundamental
tasks:
1)
reconstructing the Ethiopian polity; and
2)
doing so on democratic foundations.
The
problem began even before the EPRDF came to power. At the London
conference at which Herman Cohen, then U.S. Assistant Secretary
of State for African Affairs, sanctified the EPRDF's military
advance on Addis Ababa in order to save needless bloodshed, he
also issued his well-remembered injunction: "No democracy,
no cooperation." The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), already
distrustful of the northern-based EPRDF, was further alienated
by Cohen's failure to follow through on his pledge by recognizing
the political importance of the militarily weak OLF to a new democratic
regime and insisting on some sort of EPRDF-OLF transitional coalition.
The EPRDF responded by creating the Oromo People's Democratic
Organization (OPDO) to compete with the OLF among Oromo, the first
of many such satellite parties that the EPRDF was to establish
in ethnic communities outside its base in Tigre. This signaled
to the OLF that the EPRDF was seeking to create a dominant party--multiethnic,
but Tigrean-led and secured by EPRDF military supremacy--rather
than to build a true transitional coalition among independent
ethnically based political parties.
The
EPRDF deserves credit for assembling in July 1991, within weeks
of its military takeover, the almost all-party conference that
produced the Transition Charter. As Henze explains, this document
endorsed human rights, self-determination for all nationalities,
and early elections. Reflecting the EPRDF's commitment to ethnic
federalism, the Charter provided that regional elections were
to be conducted before national elections. But Henze's characterization
of these 1992 regional elections as "chaotic" glosses
over their profoundly negative impact on Ethiopia's projected
dual transition--from an ethnically dominated empire to an ethnically
egalitarian nation-state and from authoritarian rule to democracy.
Far from being a crucial step toward both objectives, the elections
established a degree of one-party hegemony that precluded the
empirical realization of these normative aspirations. Whether
through excessive optimism or Machiavellian calculation, the elections
were held before essential foundations for a new and democratic
polity were (or could have been) laid. Soldiers of all armies
were supposed to be encamped prior to the elections, but in the
absence of even the beginnings of an integrated army or police
force amid the wreckage of civil war, the EPRDF exempted its own
armies from encampment and put them in charge of security. The
inequity of this arrangement eliminated any residual OLF confidence
in EPRDF leadership, driving it and the EPRDF's other erstwhile
military allies to boycott the elections, which effectively became
a plebiscite on EPRDF single-party rule.
Harbeson
argues:
In
this environment of disarray, insecurity, and lack of preparation,
the EPRDF became both umpire and participant in the electoral
"contest," committing irregularities perceived to be
of sufficient magnitude for international observers to deem the
whole process seriously flawed. In its wake, the OLF decamped
its armies to mount a brief and disastrous military challenge
to the EPRDF. In short, the 1992 elections shattered--permanently,
it now seems--the possibility for empirical realization of the
norms of all-party cooperation enshrined in the Transition Charter.
Subsequent constituent-assembly elections and the parliamentary
elections that brought the transition officially to a close also
proved to be little more than plebiscites on EPRDF hegemony.
Henze's
account of "ethnic federalism" overlooks entirely its
significance for both state reconstruction and democracy in Ethiopia.
First, the EPRDF's initiative did far more than "arouse .
. . misgivings among many Ethiopians." It was a daring initiative
to reconstruct the Ethiopian empire as a highly decentralized
confederation of ethnic nations, each armed with the right of
secession if it felt its fundamental interests or equal right
to self-determination were endangered. Moreover, the initiative
has been immensely controversial. It appealed to longstanding
Oromo preferences but, particularly after the experience of the
1992 elections, many in the OLF concluded that it was only another
constitutional veneer intended to mask continued EPRDF--indeed
Tigrean--domination.
Harbeson
concludes:
Finally,
the outcome of the 1992 elections essentially shipwrecked any
political basis for genuine multiparty democratic deliberation
and brokerage on this most fundamental constitutional issue. Numerous
efforts were made after 1992 to bring the EPRDF and the opposition
parties together to find a consensus on ground rules for political
competition, including a notable one by former U.S. president
Jimmy Carter. Reasonable observers have differed over who is most
responsible for the failure of all these efforts. Divisions, weakness,
defensiveness, and lack of vision within the opposition parties
no doubt played a role, as Henze suggests. But so did the stubbornness
and the poor human rights record of the EPRDF. Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, and other groups have sharply criticized EPRDF
restraints on press freedom, nongovernmental organizations, and
trade unions at the national level, and an even more pervasive
pattern of violations of due process--including torture--at local
levels. Thus, following part of Winston Churchill's famous injunction,
"In victory, magnamity," I believe the larger responsibility
for the failure at reconciliation lies with the EPRDF. It had
greater opportunity and strength, and thus a larger obligation,
to work to establish viable political foundations for the democratic
reconstruction of the Ethiopian polity. That Ethiopia today is
in many respects a de facto bureaucratic-authoritarian regime
dressed in the garb of a constitutional democracy must principally
be blamed on the EPRDF.
John
W. Harbeson, professor of political science in the Graduate Center
and at City College in the City University of New York, is a Jennings
Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace
during 1998-99. He is the author of The Ethiopian Transformation:
The Quest for the Post-Imperial State (1988) and coeditor (with
Naomi Chazan and Donald Rothchild) of Civil Society and the State
in Africa (1994).
