March againist the Tribalist and Dictator Meles Zenawi

Ethiopia Ruling Party Leads Vote Marred by Intimidation Reports

By Jason McLure

May 24 (Bloomberg) -- Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling party headed for victory in the Horn of Africa nation’s first national elections since 2005 after a campaign that was marred by allegations of intimidation.
With about 7.3 million votes tallied of an estimated 29 million cast yesterday, Meles’s Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front had 6.8 million, compared with 458,242 for the opposition Medrek alliance, Mergera Bekana, chairman of the National Electoral Board, said today.
The EPRDF was ahead in 20 of 23 seats in the capital, Addis Ababa, with Medrek leading for one parliamentary seat and two constituencies not yet reporting, he said.
“In all regional states, EPRDF is leading,” Mergera said in the capital.
Government and ruling party official used a combination of harassment and arrests and withholding food aid and jobs to thwart Medrek in the weeks running up to the polls, New York- based Human Rights Watch said in a statement today. The government has denied the allegations, saying economic growth in Ethiopia of more than 7 percent annually over the past five years has bolstered its support.
About 31.9 million registered voters were eligible to cast ballots to elect 547 members of parliament and representatives to regional councils.
A former Marxist guerrilla leader who has ruled Africa’s second-most populous nation since 1991, Meles, 55, has been a key ally in the fight against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia. Under Meles, Ethiopia, Africa’s top coffee producer, has pursued an economic model that mixes a large state role with foreign investment in roads, dams and power.
The government controls the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp., a state-run monopoly, and owns all the land, while companies owned by the state or the ruling party dominate banking and trucking. Almost a sixth of its 85 million people depend on food aid.
Medrek is a coalition that includes jailed opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa’s Unity for Democracy and Justice party and a number of ethnic-based parties.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

EU needs consistency in human rights

New Europe: May 09 2010

EU's foreign policy on human rights can only be effective if  linked to the promotion of democracy, the rule of law and the strengthening of civil societies. Credibility in human rights advocacy worldwide requires the EU to also pay attention at its own Member States laws and practices, in particular towards minorities, migrants and refugees. The collaboration of European governments with the "extraordinary renditions programme" of the Bush Administration badly affected the general perception on the EU commitment to international human rights law. A strategic reading of all situations and crisis in terms of human rights and democracy implications is essential for the EU, as much as policy coherence in the use of the different instruments must improve. Human rights should be the cornerstone of EU foreign policy to comply with EU principles and values, but they are often left in the shadow of other priorities. "Stability" is regularly invoked when human rights deserve mere lip service from  EU officials, even if  avoiding conflict means perpetuating oppression.         
One particular case of inconsistency and incoherence is the EU approach towards Ethiopia, a main recipient of EU ODA, a partner bound by the Cotonou Agreement clauses on human rights, the second most populous country in Africa and the headquarters of the African Union.  As Head of the 2005 EU Election Observation Mission, I witnessed the incredible hopes of the proud Ethiopian people be brutally suppressed by a ruling party which prevented international observers to watch the counting of votes in order to manipulate results, once the Addis Ababa tabulation showed a landslide in favour of the opposition. Today basic conditions for democratic elections are even worse: there are thousands of political prisoners, many arrested after the demonstrations that contested the 2005 election results and which were violently put down by governmental forces, killing more than 200 people. Birtukan Midekssa, a young mother and the leader of a main opposition party is in jail, serving a life sentence, instead of running for elections. There is no media freedom and the work of NGOs has been severely limited by a law which criminalizes human rights work. The Ethiopian government formally rejected the EU EOM 2005 report, but not even that has stopped the European Commission and EU governments from continuing "business as usual" with the totalitarian regime of Meles Zenawi - they just sent a new EU Election Observation Mission, at his request, in the hope of legitimizing the electoral farce his party is organising for the coming 23 May.
The EU - now through the voice of its High Representative Catherine Ashton - needs to be consistent, credible and bolder  in condemning human rights abuses and delegitimizing human rights violators. It also must make a greater effort to match policy commitments with practice. The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights is an important tool, but its financial envelope needs to be considerably increased and better used  in support of human rights defenders and in strengthening civil society in different countries - these should be the main partners of the EU in many countries all over the world.
 
Ana Gomes is a Portuguese Member of the European Parliament and a Member of the Human Rights Committee

Foreign aid subsidizes repression in Ethiopia

Expert accuses foreign donors of subsidizing a regime 'that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent'

Note from Guest Editor Ory Okolloh: This is a blog from allAfrica.com, which aggregates, produces and distributes news from across Africa. The site has given The Globe permission to reprint its staff-written articles. I chose this piece because Zenawi will be one of Africa's representatives at the G-20. His repressive regime in Ethiopia continues to be ignored by his friends in the donor community ... and then later the same people will complain about Ethiopia's lack of development years from now. An example of bad aid.

A month ahead of national elections, the Ethiopian government has come under critical Western scrutiny in an article which accuses foreign donors of "subsidizing a regime that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent."

Writing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Helen Epstein suggests that Western aid officials "seem reluctant to admit that there are two Prime Minister Meles Zenawis.

"One is a clubbable, charming African who gives moving speeches at Davos and other elite forums about fighting poverty and terrorism. The other is a dictator whose totalitarianism dates back to cold war days."

Epstein, a specialist in public health in developing countries, declares in an extensive analysis:

"The problem with foreign aid in Ethiopia is that both the Ethiopian government and its donors see the people of this country not as individuals with distinct needs, talents, and rights but as an undifferentiated mass, to be mobilized, decentralized, vaccinated, given primary education and pit latrines, and freed from the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, and backwardness."

She says Meles' government has received U.S. $26 billion in development aid from the West in an experiment "to see whether 'the big push' approach to African development will work." In 2008 it received more aid than any other sub-Saharan country.

"The big push," writes Epstein, "has financed 15,000 village health clinics, seventeen universities, countless schools, and the beginnings of a new road network that will bring trade and services to many previously isolated rural areas."

But the aid subsidizes repression, she adds.

"On May 23, Ethiopia will hold its first parliamentary elections since 2005, but the results seem foreordained.

"Opposition groups have been prevented from opening local offices and some opposition candidates have been assaulted by [ruling party] officials or arbitrarily detained by the police.

"The government uses Chinese spy technology to bug phone lines and Internet communications, and countless journalists, editors, judges, academics, and human rights defenders have fled the country or languish behind bars, at risk of torture.

"New laws passed since 2005 have made political activity more difficult than ever."