Insight

Bad Party

By John Fleming
06-05-2005

Election officials in Ethiopia checked names on a voter list on May 15. Those officials said that more than 90 percent of the country’s 25.6 million voters came to the polls. Photo special to The Star from The Carter Center/Art Wasserman

• Observing Ethiopia’s election, including the shenanigans of the dominant political party, leaves one with a sense of foreboding for the future of vibrant democracy in the African nation.
GIMBI, Ethiopia — Tucked up in the corner of the Horn of Africa, shy of the Sahara, adjacent the chaos of Somalia and the madness of Sudan, is this peaceful, sometimes green spot called home to more than 70 million souls.
Ethiopia is, the World Bank tells us, the 16th most populous country on earth and the second only to Nigeria on the continent. Difficult times most of us remember from the early 1980s prompt one to think — upon hearing this statistic — about what a lot of mouths that is to feed. No doubt about that. In fact, Ethiopia cannot feed its own people even in a stellar crop year.
Ethiopia has what aid workers call a structural food deficit, something that affects about 5 million people a year. When the rains don’t come and the crops fail, well, that deficit quickly turns into famine.
The danger of starving millions is forever present here, but Ethiopia’s problems and its promises are not so one-dimensional. For starters, Ethiopia is, like most African countries, incredibly ethnically diverse. The difference here is that there are so many groups with many, many people in them. What is almost unbelievable is that a nation as populous as this one, with as many different cultures and traditions has actually managed, for the most part with the exception of Eritrea, to stay together.
The how of that is complicated too.

Observers from the Carter Center walked up hill to get from one polling site to another in a rural region. Some sites were inaccessible by vehicle. Photo special to The Star from The Carter Center/Jeffrey Mapendere

Foreign powers — except for a brief period before World War II when the Italians set up shop here — have been absent. In fact, this is the only nation not colonized in Africa. So the people, for the most part, looked to the long-standing monarchy for leadership and they relied on their rich history to rally around the notion of nationhood.
That all started to unravel, however, in 1973 when a group of ultra-left military officers overthrew Haile Selassie and drew on the Soviets to build a Marxist regime. Almost right away, they proceeded to viciously violate most everyone’s human rights and promptly drove what was left of the place into the ground. It was only in 1991 when that regime, known as the Derg, was overthrown.
What’s come in its place is a government that has slowly developed the trappings of democratic rule. There is a parliament and there have now been three national elections since the fall of the Derg.
Underneath, it’s a bit more complex. The Tigrayan ethnic group, which makes up only 7 percent of Ethiopia’s population, manages to hold power through a complex web of what might be called puppet parties and what many would call outright intimidation. Before the mid-May elections, of the 547 seats in the lower house of parliament, the ruling party and its allies controlled 519.
The ruling party’s way of ruling and its challenges were on display recently in this town, about a 12-hour drive from Addis Ababa. It is smack dab in the middle of the Oromia region, home of the Oromo peoples, an ethnic group consisting of more than 20 million souls. In the recent past, nearly all political parties here might have had the name of Oromo in the party name, but rest assured they were allied with the ruling party dominated by the Tigrayans.
Last month’s election in Ethiopia is already the subject of controversy. A coalition of opposing political parties has already challenged how the vote was conducted, filing a lawsuit against Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. These images show officials going through the election process in rural parts of Ethiopia. Photos special to The Star from The Carter Center /Art Wasserman and Jeffrey Mapendere
In the run-up to the May elections, however, legitimate opposition parties started appearing on the scene and an atmosphere of political openness seemed to settle in. Party candidates actually appeared in televised debates and almost daily rallies took place. But at the same time, the ruling party quietly used the instruments of government to try to squelch the opposition.
Neighborhood councils, called “kebeles,” have since the days of the Derg, exerted the ruling party’s influence in the cities and the countryside by doing everything from having people arrested for various questionable offenses to extending and withdrawing credit and fertilizer to farmers.
The government, however, didn’t seem happy with the extent of the reach of the kebeles in the Oromia region of late. So new structures, called “the gott” and “the garee” were created below the kebeles. These are truly Maoist in nature and seem to have as their main point, to encourage neighbor to spy on neighbor on behalf of the party.
The effects of all this will remain muddy for a little while longer, for although the election was in May, the official results won’t be known until this Wednesday, and might be delayed even more.
What is clear is that intimidation took place before the election. Human Rights Watch, in an exhaustive study, detailed many stories of threats made to people.
A number of people also told me they had been threatened. But just as many people told me that they planned to vote for the one legitimate opposition party on the ballot in the area. And at the end of election day, the ruling party had been thoroughly trounced at the one polling station where results were available in Gimbi.
National preliminary results show the opposition parties will no doubt make serious inroads. They are set to gain at least 120 seats, but in the end, how far they really get depends on the good will and honesty of the ruling party.
Currently, most everyone is unhappy about the way things are going. The opposition has protested the results of more than 150 results and the ruling party has said there were problems with more than 50. Opposition supporters among Washington’s huge Ethiopian community staged protests last week in the District of Columbia.
The results in Ethiopia will also depend on how things go in the rural areas, home to 80 percent of the population. My witness of the trouncing of the ruling party was in a city. Down the road a few hours, in where you might call, the middle-of-nowhere, I spied a polling station a few hundred yards down a beaten path. As I left the rutted dirt road and rounded a corner I came across a cluster of friendly enough men dressed in ragged clothes, shoeless, and carrying Kalashnikovs. They were hovering just outside a room where the village fathers were counting ballots.
They were hours away from completion, but I couldn’t help thinking as I headed back toward the capital which way that box might go.