Aid Should Not Sustain Repression in Ethiopia (Indepthnews)

Ethiopia is in fact one of the most aid-dependant countries in the world and received more than US$2 billion in 2009, but its major donors have been unwilling to confront the government over its worsening human rights record.Two months after the HRW report was released, executive director Kenneth Roth admonished the Addis Ababa based Development Assistance Group (DAG) -- comprising 26 bilateral and multilateral development agencies -- for its failure to "initiate a credible and independent inquiry" into "serious allegations about the misuse of donor-supported programs for repressive purposes by the government of Ethiopia".Also the European Union team, monitoring the May 2010 polls, criticized in its November report the ruling party's misuse of state resources during the election campaign. Ethiopia's ruling party won more than 99.6 percent of parliamentary seats in an election that, according to European observers, "fell short of international standards". Following are extracts from the interview: Read more...

Human rights group says democracies ignore abuses, opt for dialogue (Macleans)

Human Rights Watch's list of most abusive countries included Belarus, China, Colombia, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. Without outside pressure, Roth said, the list will grow.
"A dictator will weigh this cost-benefit analysis and decide that repression pays. The aim of the international community is to make repression not pay," he said.
The group also complained about what it called the West's "soft reaction to certain favoured African autocrats, such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia." ..read more..

Ethiopia: Talking Trash, Speaking Truth(Huffington Post_

The interesting thing about the EU EOM Report is that it is as balanced as any report compiled by an independent group of observers following specific guidelines could reasonably be. I concede that grudgingly because I have a lot of bones to pick with the Report. I could rattle off 41 objections to the report in one breath. For instance, I believe the Report could have been more resolute in its findings and conclusions about the rampant irregularities and illegalities on election day and the days immediately preceding that. The Report could have comprehensively documented the massive diversion of aid for political purposes. The Report could have responded more aggressively in verifying and pursuing opposition complaints of pre-election harassment and voter intimidation on election day, and so on....more...

Why Are We Supporting Repression in Ethiopia? (NYR)

Indeed, many aid officials interviewed in the Human Rights Watch report admit that they were aware of these abuses. As one western donor official said, “Every tool at [the government’s] disposal—fertilizer, loans, safety net—is being used to crush the opposition. We know this.” Yet the umbrella group representing 26 donors in Ethiopia (the Donors Assistance Group, or DAG), suggests that aid agencies intend to continue more or less with business as usual. Their overall response has been to reject the conclusions of the Human Rights Watch report, noting that, in their own research, they have not found “any evidence of systematic or widespread distortion.”...read more...

Is humanitarian aid bad for Africa? ( The Globe and Mail)

In 1991, the rebel army won the war and its leader, a polished tyrant named Meles Zenawi, took power. He soon became chummy with Mr. Geldof and many Western leaders. Bill Clinton hailed him as one of the “new breed” of African leaders. With Tony Blair, he co-authored a high-profile report in 2005, released at the time of the famous G8 meeting at Gleneagles, where Mr. Geldof and Bono cranked the heat up with their Make Poverty History campaign. Most people politely glossed over the recent election in Ethiopia, which featured massive fraud, violence, intimidation and imprisonment of political opponents. More recently, in 2008, the Meles regime brutally put down a Somali rebellion. Human Rights Watch accused government forces of torture, torching villages and other war crimes.
Mr. Meles has an explanation for all this. As he told Mr. Gill, Ethiopia will have to stay undemocratic until the important work of development is done. ..read more...

Ethiopia's Zenawi and the Willing Stooges ...(Nazret)

....If however you stay the course, and continue terrorizing opposition parties and their leaders, and keep the armed forces and the federal government as exclusive Tigrean entities diluted with few lackeys for good measure, if you keep masking your inner vulnerability by overreacting with disastrous consequences, if you keep using foreign aid, on the one hand, as a weapon against the poor and the peasants inside country forcing them to support your rule, and on the other hand, use the rest of the foreign funds to bribe the diaspora for image building and glorification purposes with fictional development and non-existent prosperities, you live in the land of fantasy. And you will deceive no one, but yourself!
So, Mr. Zenawi, the choice is yours. Either reverse the disastrous trend, or keep deceiving yourself. As we learned from the bleak history of so many tyrants, including Mengistu, your predecessor, time is not on your side!...read the whole article...

Ethiopia: Birtukan Unbound! (Huffington Post)

Birtukan is let out of prison, but tens of thousands of others remain imprisoned for their political beliefs. We must continue to work arduously for the release of so many other political prisoners whose names and faces are known but to their families and their torturers.
There are also other prisoners who are in dire need of help. These inmates inhabit a prison of their own making. They are the prisoners of hate "locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness", as Mandela would describe them. They live in a prison of the closed mind dwelling in a body with a stone cold heart. Our sister Birtukan has been to hell and back; but her tormentors still live there; or in the verse of Mark Spencer:
So here sits the prisoner,Shackled in his cell.Wrestling with the demons,Of his private hell.
In the right season and at the right time, I have no doubts that Birtukan and her generation will free those shackled in the cells of their private hell because they know all too well the wages of hate. Birtukan and her generation will rise up and declare in the words of Martin Luther King: "We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate." It is now the right time and right season to rededicate ourselves to Birtukan's "future country of Ethiopia." No more bitterness, no more hatred, no more cruelty and no more inhumanity. Read more..

Ethiopian Opposition Leader's Release: For Show? (Time)

Over the past several years, Ethiopia's government, which cherishes its role as a U.S. ally in the volatile Horn of Africa, has steadily chipped away at political freedoms, arresting the opposition and quashing the free press. So it was hard not to be skeptical about its move this week to release Birtukan Mideksa, the country's best-known opposition leader. Read more....

Mr. Zenawi Goes to College! (Huffington Post)

...

Since Prof. Stiglitz is interested in having a "conversation", here are a few topics he should ask Zenawi to talk about. How is it that Ethiopia, under his "seasoned" leadership, managed to rank:

138/159 (most corrupt) countries on the Corruption Index for 2010.

17 among the most failed states (Somalia is No. 1) on the Failed States Index for 2010.

136/179 countries (most repressive) on the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom.

107/183 economies for ease of doing business (investment climate) by The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 2010.

37/53 (poorest governance quality) African countries in the 2010 Ibrahim Index of African Governance.

101/128 countries in 2010 on the Bertelsmann Political and Economic Transformation Index, and

141/153 (poorest environmental public health and ecosystem vitality) countries in the 2010 Environmental Performance Index....read more..

Columbia’s invitation to Zenawi sparks outrage (Columbia Spectator)

“I hope PrezBo [University President Lee Bollinger] gives him the kind of welcome he did Ahmadinejad,” Odu said in an email, referencing Bollinger’s harsh introduction to the Iranian president’s speech in 2007. “I’m not a fan of the president of Iran, but at least he’s not pandering to Western governments while systematically terrorizing, disenfranchising, and stunting the development of his own citizens.”..read more..

Cry the Beloved Country: Ethiopians Criticize Columbia for Hosting Meles (AID WATCH)

...I am very happy to feature both sides to the debate, just as I want to also provide an alternative viewpoint to the support of Meles by Professors Stiglitz and Sachs at Columbia. Unfortunately, this debate cannot happen within Ethiopia because Meles suppresses dissent, and even this very blog post is almost certainly blocked from anyone trying to access it from within Ethiopia...Read full text here

Open Letter to President Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia University (The Huffington Post)

Petty and cruel dictators, Mr. President, have also infested the African continent and threaten the lives of African peoples on a daily basis. In Ethiopia, for nearly two decades, Mr. Zenawi has lorded over one of the cruelest dictatorships in the modern world. Let the facts speak for themselves:...Read more..

Oromsis' Open Letter to Columbia University (Oromsis)

As rightly stated, dubbed “the cradle of mankind” – Africa’s second most populous country, characterized by rich but complicated history, it suffices to say, Ethiopia is making strides in areas such as the economy and education, albeit overly exaggerated. However, it must be clear that under Meles Zenawi’s ever tightening grip, Ethiopia has jettisoned the path to democratic governance and the respect for human rights. With no free press to speak of and the once vibrant opposition effectively muzzled, Meles Zenawi has managed to set up a de facto one-party system in Ethiopia....read more...

EPRDF Conference: Reshuffling or Repositioning? (Oronsis)

So how about this talk about delivering “the country from dependence on food aid within five years”? The ruling party is an upright ghost of broken promises. From multiparty federal government structure to an admittedly “dominant party state”, the country have all but reverted back to the pre-1991 era. VOA’s Peter Heinlein writes, the next five years pledge “contrasts with the most recent five year period, when a protracted drought left one out of every six Ethiopians in need of food assistance, and the United States shipped in more than half-a-billion dollars worth of commodities in a single year.”..read more..

Can democracy thrive in Africa? (CNN)

Cargill argued that Africa reached its peak in Western-style democracy between the late 1990s and mid 2000s, but had slipped into greater authoritarianism in the last three or four years, as leaders forged partnerships with new powers such as China and India and became less reliant on Western approval.
He said a wave of "new African leaders" including Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia became the "darlings" of Western democracy in the 1990s.
They promised a fundamental change in African politics towards Western-style democracy and found favor with President Clinton's administration in the U.S.
"President Museveni came to power in 1986 saying African leaders stayed in power too long and wrote into Uganda's constitution that presidents should only serve two terms," said Cargill.
"However, in 2005 he changed the constitution to allow him to serve a third term and will probably stay for a fourth term in 2011."..read more..

Switching Viewpoints: Africa Is Not a Victim of Nature; It Is a Victor of Nature. (Huffington Post)

With at least 80 million people living in Ethiopia, it is difficult to believe that one could not find a few hundred people out of these millions or the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians living abroad, who are capable and willing to learn how to run large-scale farms. Ethiopia is blessed with enough land and hardworking people to feed itself and many other countries. It also has many other natural resources including gold, platinum, copper, potash, natural gas, and hydroelectric power potential. And don't forget the high elevations that can be used as training venues for athletes, especially long distance runners...read more

Fears for South Africa's Press Freedom (IPS)

In Ethiopia, the government closed down 13 publications in 2005, then passed the Proclamation Governing the Media in 2008, which Kajee said has since been used to threaten fines and defamation cases against media outlets. A dozen journalists fled Ethiopia in 2009 after being intimidated, harassed or censored, according to a report from the CPJ, and there are currently five journalist imprisoned in the country, making it the second biggest jailer of reporters on the continent, after Eritrea..more..

Identity politics and the struggle for liberty and democracy in Ethiopia1(Advocacy for Ethiopia)

..The myopic and rather destructive politics of TPLF in the past 19 years has brought havoc to the country’s body politic and alienated a large section of the population. Organized opposition to the TPLF led regime comes from a variety of groups and a multiplicity of political views and positions. For our discussion, we can categorize them into four major groupings: ..Read more PDF

The Ethiopian Flag: Stop putting political symbols on it (Brown Condor)

...While each group can argue passionately about the symbol, one thing that most will not argue is that the basic premise of the flag, the green, yellow, and red, is the one uniting force. So why argue about the various symbols, why not instead take the symbol off the flag and leave the green, yellow, and red speak for itself, the true colors of Ethiopia. It is time for successive regimes to stop using the flag as their personal tool of propaganda and return the flag to the colors that are familiar to all without a symbol embedded in the middle. Governments should have their legacies determined by the good work that they accomplish not based on the propaganda they propagate through symbols they keep erasing and adding to our flag....Read more...

Clinton says steel vise crushing global activists (Yahoo)

By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer.

KRAKOW, Poland – Intolerant governments across the globe are "slowly crushing" activist and advocacy groups that play an essential role in the development of democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday.
She cited a broad range of countries where "the walls are closing in" on civic organizations such as unions, religious groups, rights advocates and other nongovernmental organizations that press for social change and shine a light on governments' shortcomings.
Among those she named were Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.
"Some of the countries engaging in these behaviors still claim to be democracies," Clinton said at an international conference on the promotion of democracy and human rights. "Democracies don't fear their own people. They recognize that citizens must be free to come together, to advocate and agitate."..read more..