China wants bureaucrats to shut up - latimes.com

Less is more, top officials say, as they try to crack down on civil servants notorious for longwinded speeches. Reporting from Beijing — By John M. Glionna Chinese officials say they want to clean up a pollution scourge fouling the capital and government centers nationwide: bureaucratic gasbags. The problem, Communist Party functionaries say, is that civil servants talk too much — at meetings, in speeches and when speaking off-the-cuff in public. It's the official Chinese version of yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah. To set an example for his peers, Li Yuanchao, a top member of a key Central Committee department, told the state-run New China News Agency that he is keeping his speeches short during meetings. In one recent video-conference, he kept his remarks to just 10 minutes, officials said. Vice President Xi Jinping scolded underlings at a recent Central Party orientation meeting, declaring that bureaucratic long-windedness lengthened meetings and cut productivity. So there's a new unwritten policy among bureaucrats: when it comes to speechifying, less is more. Scholars say long speeches by Chinese officials are legendary, often making a U.S. congressional filibuster seem like a haiku in comparison...More story

Some see worsening rights situation in aid donor 'darling' Ethiopia - Los Angeles Times

Some see worsening rights situation in aid donor 'darling' Ethiopia The U.S. gives about $1 billion annually to Ethiopia. But even as U.S. and other international aid has surged in the last decade, activists charge that the government has become more authoritarian. August 12, 2010|By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times Reporting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — Like many in the West, former U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn watched the country's recent elections for signs that democracy was finally taking root. When the results of the May vote were announced, all but two of 547 parliamentary seats went to the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, the coalition that has been in power here for nearly 20 years, or its allied parties. "How do you win 99% of the vote?" Shinn said. "That's un-American." And yet, he said, "Ethiopia remains a darling of the donor community." The U.S. gives about $1 billion annually to Ethiopia, more than to any other country in sub-Saharan Africa except Sudan. But even as U.S. and other international aid to Ethiopia has surged in the last decade, activists charge that the government has become more authoritarian. "There's been an inverse ratio of rising donor aid and a worsening human rights record," said Leslie Lefkow, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's government has won a degree of favor from the West for sending troops to fight radical Islamists in neighboring Somalia, but reports of rights abuses and a string of draconian laws that have constricted political space have put donor countries in an awkward position. "It's a dilemma for the international donor community, which doesn't want to walk away from Ethiopia because the needs are so great," said Jennifer Cooke, the director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Recent allegations of aid corruption have caused further unease among donor countries. A March report by Human Rights Watch alleged a countrywide pattern of local government leaders denying aid to opposition supporters. Eligibility for many major aid programs is determined by local government officials — almost all of whom belong to the ruling coalition or its affiliates. One former Ethiopian aid worker, who didn't want to be named out of fear of government retribution, told The Times that aid is leveraged by local leaders to consolidate power. "Aid is a tool for development," the aid worker said. "It is also a tool for politics." Ethiopian officials deny such claims. Communications Minister Bereket Simon said Human Rights Watch was "engaged in the continuous fabrication of allegations" and said Ethiopia "has put in place a transparent mechanism for the distribution of food aid."...More story

UN welcomes Ethiopian policy to allow Eritrean refugees to live outside camps

UN welcomes Ethiopian policy to allow Eritrean refugees to live outside camps Young Eritrean refugees Ethiopia has recently decided to take a new approach to Eritrean refugees by allowing them to live outside camps, a move welcomed by the United Nations refugee agency. Under the so-called ‘out-of-camp’ scheme announced last week, Eritreans who can sustain themselves financially or have relatives or friends who commit to supporting them no longer have to stay in camps. The policy shift is due to discussions between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Ethiopian Government. “Given the fact that Eritrea and Ethiopia were a single political entity before the 1993 referendum, the new policy is also a response to refugees’ wishes and needs for strengthened people-to-people relations between the two countries,” UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic told reporters in Geneva.More than 60,000 Eritrean refugees have crossed the border into Ethiopia since the border conflict in the late 1990s between the two countries. More than 60,000 Eritrean refugees have crossed the border into Ethiopia since the border conflict in the late 1990s between the two countries. The new scheme now allows Eritrean refugees to live in urban areas, improves their access to services and helps build stronger ties with host communities. UNHCR said that once the policy has fully been implemented, the costs of looking after the refugees will be significantly lowered since those benefiting from the programme will be sustaining themselves. “It is our hope that this decision will eventually expand to include refugees from other countries as well,” Mr. Mahecic said. Refugees from Somalia and other countries – numbering 138,000 in all – already live in Ethiopian towns and cities, while more than 36,000 Eritrean refugees reside in three camps and two community centres that are set to be converted into camps. Any Eritrean refugee living in an Ethiopian camp who does not have a criminal record is eligible to take part in the new programme, which also involves skills training and educational opportunities. At present, many Eritreans in Ethiopia work in the informal sector and this is normally tolerated by the Government, the agency noted. UNHCR’s Addis Ababa office has found that a “good number” of Eritrean refugees plan to take advantage of the new policy, Mr. Mahecic said.

Obama’s African youth leaders forum

Ethiopia, 25 years later

The image most of us retain of Ethiopia is one of mass starvation and a glittery rock concert intended to ease the suffering. That famine and concert was 25 years ago, and Ethiopia has tried to move on. But just as the world at first overlooked the famine, it is now not aware of progress in the country. Economic and political strides have been made, but still many Ethiopians struggle just a bad drought or flood away from disaster. Peter Gill, who covered the famine and wrote “A Year in the Death of Africa,” now looks at Ethiopia over the past 25 years in “Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid,” out this month from Oxford University Press.

By Peter Gill

Ethiopia is desperate to live down its past – but not the story of an ancient empire founded in a union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; nor the tale of a Christian culture established before the conversion of much of Europe; nor the country’s crushing defeat of European colonizers. Rather Ethiopia is trying to get past its more recent history of famine and suffering.

The world has an image of Ethiopia based on the terrible events of 1984-5 when up to one million died of starvation and when rock stars in the United States and Britain sang ‘We are the World’ and ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ to raise money for famine relief.

All that has now changed, say the Ethiopians. But Western commentators are out of touch with the new reality. The former famine lands of the North have been at peace for the past 20 years and a stable government with a commitment to agricultural development has brought about real improvements. Overall the Ethiopian economy has boomed over recent years, with only a temporary check brought about by rocketing international commodity prices in 2008.

The big problem with the old image, officials complain, is that it is an active obstruction to Ethiopian progress. Every time a starvation story gets into on to television, potential investors think again about where they putting their money.

The West’s relentless focus on the aid relationship and how best to help relieve hunger and poverty dominates the official relationship and those same old tales of suffering discourage tourists from discovering the treasures of one of the world’s greatest cultures.

Friends of Ethiopia can sympathize with this impatience to shrug off the old and get on with the new. But in the memorable words of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (he was actually referring to ‘tribe,’ not ‘famine’) ‘a word will stay around as long as there is work for it to do.’

For all Ethiopia’s determination to live down the recent past, the unfortunate truth is that far too many of its people live on the margins of existence, that just one shock such as a drought or a flood tip them into destitution and the risk of death from starvation, and that upwards of ten million of them are dependent on an almost annual basis on foreign food aid.

A quarter of a century on from the rock star mobilization of the mid-1980s, the twin problems of backward agricultural practices and galloping population growth remain the same. At the time of the great famine Ethiopia had a population of 40 million. It now has 80 million people and that figure could double again in the next 25 to 30 years.

Yet Ethiopia’s own efforts in family planning and agricultural development have not always been endorsed by the aid-givers. The fashion-conscious rich world moved away from these development fundamentals to concentrate instead on the showier provision of education and health, and then more recently on democracy and ‘good governance.’

In the 20 years after the famine, western agricultural aid to Africa fell by almost two thirds, and in the past decade, thanks largely to Washington’s distaste for contraception, aid expenditure on family planning in Africa has also fallen. According to the United Nations, it now amounts to just one fortieth of spending on HIV/AIDS.

Not everyone rails against the injustice of Ethiopia’s characterization as the land of famine. Often in my discussions with him, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi took me by surprise. When I asked him about the western image of his country, I expected a politician’s defensiveness.

The answer I received was this: “Humiliation can be a very powerful motivation for action and therefore I don’t hate the fact that we get humiliated every day provided it’s based on facts ... if we feel we deserve to be treated like honourable citizens of the world, then we have to remove the source of that shame. There is no way round it.”

By Steven E. Levingston | August 4, 2010; 11:00 AM ET
Categories: Guest Blogger | Tags: ethiopian famine; live aid; 25th anniversary of ethiopian famine and live aid

Risk taking behavior: Another look at the Ethiopian economy �

Tigabu Molla Meresa† Mollameressa2005@yahoo.com

Economic analyses of growth have bewared that sustainable economic growth has been incumbent upon the level of technological development; which has also been the source of divergence in economic strengths and growth rates between countries across the world. The technological breakthrough that steered Industrial Revolution and its lasting effect on the global economy is one such triumphs of technology. For it is the main source of productivity increase, a failure to maintain a continuous technological progress would precipitate long-run growth to grind to a halt. So how to drive and sustain technological progress has been the nub of questions around economic growth. The steering wheel of this engine of growth is primarily Research and development (R&D) effort. Yet R&D is a risky activity, involving not only how much to invest but also how to invest. The amount of resources it requires and the uncertainty of its pay-offs makes it a risky strategy. Firms and other agents like governments that have, whatever happens, continually committed unflagging endeavor to R&D have been marks of economic success. In other words, risk-taking behavior has been the thrust of...More story

Uganda bombings bring Africa together. Except Eritrea.

By Max Delany, Correspondent
Kampala, Uganda

Shortly after marking two weeks since suspected twin suicide bombings killed 76 people watching the World Cup Final in Uganda's capital of Kampala, leaders from across the continent pledged to tackle the terrorist threat from Somalia at an African Union summit in the city. Skip to next paragraph After years of wrangling, underfunding, and broken promises, leaders agreed that the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia – AMISOM – would finally be boosted to its intended full strength of 8,000 soldiers and said that further pledges of soldiers from Guinea and Djibouti could see the mandated level rise still higher. But while presidents from Senegal to South Africa condemned the Kampala attacks as unjustifiable and called for more robust action against the Al Qaeda-linked Somali Islamist group Al Shabab, which claimed to be behind the bombings, one country had other ideas. IN PICTURES: Somali pirates Sometimes called Africa’s North Korea, Eritrea has hermetically sealed itself off from the outside world. Late last year, the Ohio-sized nation on the Red Sea was sanctioned by the UN for supporting Islamist insurgents in nearby Somalia. At the Kampala summit, an unusually high-ranking delegation from Eritrea – including the foreign minister and a key presidential adviser – opposed calls for more troops and a tougher mandate, reportedly asking why, if Afghanistan’s leaders can talk to the Taliban, Somalia’s leaders could not talk to Al Shabab. Does Eritrea have links to Al Shabab? In the aftermath of the Uganda bombings, US Congressman Edward Royce (R) of California wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton calling for the designation of Eritrea as a state sponsor of terrorism given what he called its “well documented” support for Al Shabab. But Eritrean officials have repeatedly denied the accusations in the past and consistently argued that opposition to more AU peacekeepers in the country is based on the belief that further foreign interference is not the way to solve the Somali crisis...

AFP: Kampala attacks were 'wake-up call' for East Africa: US

AFP: Kampala attacks were 'wake-up call' for East Africa: US Kampala attacks were 'wake-up call' for East Africa: US (AFP) – 6 hours ago WASHINGTON — Suicide bombings this month in Kampala by Somalia's Al-Qaeda-inspired Shebab militants served as a "wake-up call" about the wider terrorism threat in the region, a US official said Tuesday. "If the Shebab can strike Kampala, it's also a threat to all of Somalia's regional neighbors, from Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, all the way down to Tanzania," said Johnnie Carson, US assistant secretary of state for Africa. The Shebab, an Islamist extremist group that controls most of central and western Somalia, claimed responsibility for the attacks in Uganda's capital on July 11 that killed 76 people gathered to watch the World Cup final. Carson described the attacks as "a wake-up call," and said that regional states "now recognize that the threat emanating from Somalia is not only about refugees and illegal arms, but also one about terrorism." An African Union peacekeeping force, made up of 6,000 Burundian and Ugandan soldiers, has been fighting the Shebab and other insurgent groups street to street in Mogadishu since May 2009....

Kampala blasts thrust Somalia top of AU summit agenda

By Barry Malone

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Uganda had been ready to host the African Union summit for months before three bombs sent ball-bearings flying through two bars in its capital, killing 73 people watching the World Cup final.

Now, less than two weeks later, more than 30 African heads of state will gather for their bi-annual meeting and some will sleep just minutes from where Somalia's al Shabaab rebels launched their first attacks on foreign soil.

The festering Somali conflict has featured on African Union summit agendas for years, but analysts say the difference this time is that the assembled leaders feel pressure to act -- now the violence has exploded beyond Somalia's borders.

"It's all Somalia," a senior AU diplomat told Reuters. "Uganda has been attacked, Burundi is threatened, Ethiopia is threatened, the whole region is threatened. And the world's eyes are on Somalia now."

Somalia's near powerless Western-backed government is hemmed into a few streets of its capital Mogadishu by al Shabaab and another Islamist militia. The insurgent groups control much of southern and central Somalia, bordering Kenya and Ethiopia.

The Somali government's reliance on 6,300 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi to survive was the reason Kampala was targeted by suspected suicide bombers.

East African regional bloc IGAD last month pledged to send another 2,000 troops "immediately" to bolster the AU mission. It is unclear which country will contribute the soldiers.

There have also been calls in the region for the force mandate to be widened so they can go on the offensive against the insurgents, rather than just responding when attacked...Full story

Ethiopia’s election: all losers

Open Democracy, UK

René Lefort

René Lefort has covered sub-saharan Africa since the 1970s.

The crushing electoral defeat of the Ethiopian opposition does not actually help the ruling party and encourages its slide into authoritarianism

‘I really feel totally betrayed by the system,’ confessed Beyene Petros, one of the most respected leaders of the Ethiopian opposition, a few days after its crushing defeat in the general elections on 23 May 2010. ‘I thought that, if we competed in the elections, there would be a door ajar that could be made use of by competing parties. This assumption of mine was totally misplaced.’

But how could he have been so mistaken? Like most of the opposition, how could he have expected that the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the ruling party since 1991, would faithfully play the electoral game and run the risk of repeating the surprise scenario of the 2005 elections, where the opposition made such spectacular progress? How could he even imply, a few days later, that the voters voted for the opposition in the election and that cheating only defeated it? And what a defeat! 99.6% of the vote, just one opposition representative out of 547 elected members of the federal Parliament and just one out of the 1900 regional assembly representatives. In a nutshell: how and why did the Ethiopian opposition make such a mistake about its electoral chances, as if it had not fully realized that the EPRDF had systematically and implacably started immediately after its 2005 electoral blow to make sure it would win in 2010, at any price?

‘Whatever policy differences there might be among the opposition, I think we agree on the minimum issues of democracy and rule of law.’ This appeal from opposition leader, Seye Abraha, calls on the opposition to unite in order to recover from its defeat. Most commentators credit it with its disarray, which they see as aggravated by internal conflict and the lack of coherence in its policies but these explanations do not stand up to scrutiny.

In 2005, apart from its common hostility to those in power since 1991 and a shared desire for democratic change, the opposition was divided into two main camps: the Coalition for Unity and Democracy and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces. They also differed on some essential points, left-overs of a persistent divide, inherited from the conquests of the Abyssinian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Schematically, the electoral base of the Coalition was urban, led by Addis-Ababa, and northern, with the Amhara (26% of the population), the epicentre of the old imperial power. The UEDF found its support in the former conquered territories, among the Oromos (37% of the population) and the peoples of the South. The CUD and the UEDF both criticised the EPRDF’s policies on the two main problems confronting Ethiopia for decades – the ‘national question’ or how the 80 ‘nations, nationalities and peoples’ of Ethiopia could agree on a modus vivendi and poverty issues – but they disagreed on the solutions. The ruling Party has set up a federal system, with equal rights for all ‘ethnic groups’ as the basis for the “revolutionary democracy” it advocates, with individual rights taking a back seat. But this federalism is a smokescreen behind which Tigreans (6% of the population) held the reins of power, even in all the ‘non traditional’ sectors of the economy. The Coalition advocated a form of recentralisation borne by an ‘Ethiopianism’ that was supposed transcend ethnic differences while the UEDF advocated a genuine ethnic federalism to be implemented. The economic strategy of the EPRDF focused on the land which is the economic base of Ethiopia and public property, in which peasants – 83% of the population – have only temporary usage rights and more precisely, on the masses of subsistence farmers. The CUD quite simply wanted to privatise the land, to ‘liberate’ the peasantry from Party-State’s grip; the UEDF, however, was radically opposed, fearing that it would open the door to northern investors to corner the market of southern land once again.

In 2010, the main opposition force, the Medrek (Forum), had a support base extending over almost all the country, with the notable exception of the Amhara region. On paper at least, its eight components had reached a common position on the ‘national question’ and on the issue of land. Thus, the gulf that separated 2005 when the opposition had drawn with the governing party in the elections with the extent that the governing party was forced to cheat to ensure a comfortable official victory, the 2010 defeat cannot be explained by an intrinsic weakening of the opposition.

The second reason most often put forward to explain the ‘landslide victory’ of the EPRDF is the undeniable intensification of its authoritarianism. This led to ‘the lack of a level playing field for all contesting parties,’ according to the European Union Observation Mission. But several opposition leaders and commentators have only taken this into account within certain limits, i.e. when and where they themselves or their own milieu were directly affected by it. In social terms this means urban dwellers and more precisely the thin slice of them that makes up ‘civil society’. In temporal terms, it means during the two years in the run-up to the elections and during the electoral campaign, when the government stepped up its control even further. Once again, the opposition succumbed to that almost systematic tropism of the Ethiopian elite – navel-gazing, which led it to distance itself from the ‘real country,’ for which it has a kind of ‘blind spot’, starting with the rural areas, where 83% of the population and therefore 83% of voters live.

So, it was on the three recent ‘villainous’ laws on information, NGOs and the fight against terrorism that they concentrated their denunciation of the regime’s shift towards increased authoritarianism. The media have almost no direct influence in the rural areas as there are no circulating newspapers. Very few people have a radio that works and those who do shamelessly confess that ‘political debates are not for us, we don’t understand what they are talking about.’ The only local NGOs are traditional community organisations run on age-old lines. So the anti-terrorist law has no effect here. Since time immemorial an official can punish any of those under his authority, even throwing him in jail, unless he has some form of special protection.

Similarly, while opposition campaigners were undeniably harassed during the elections, this had little real effect in rural areas, for the simple reason that, even if they had tried to campaign there, no-one would have listened to them, to the point of trying to avoid them altogether.

For at least two thirds of the peasant population, an election simply has no meaning. They have a vision of the world where absolutely everything is determined by divine will, including who is in power. They feel they have no right to choose. As they often say: ‘God only decides who rules,’ so an election is futile. Above all, it presents one major danger: voting for the loser. The winner will find out even though the ballot is secret, the election winner has mysterious ways of knowing how each person voted. It could then take revenge on the ‘culprits’ which means putting no less than their survival at risk. This is because all public services, from education to fertiliser, from health care to loans, depend on the good will of local officials of the Party-State, up to and including access to the peasant farmer’s only means of production – land. The only electoral challenge, then, is to try to figure out who is going to win and to slide the ‘right’ ballot into the box. To find this out, one can only turn to the ‘opinion leaders’ of the peasant community, in other words, its elite and then all vote the same way. That way, even if they get it wrong, there is safety in numbers – ‘it’s easier to punish one individual than a whole community.’

The elite have generally developed a more secular vision and therefore have started to claim for citizen’s rights. Thus it feels entitled in choosing the country’s leaders. In 2005, where these elite’s members opposed the ruling regime for many and several reasons – in most rural areas at least – they were easily able to persuade people to vote against it, especially given that they could put forward tangible arguments for forecasting its defeat.

But just a few months after the elections, they were already disenchanted. The most visible opposition members were arrested while other opposition representatives were either totally powerless or even simply physically absent. ‘We voted for the opposition in 2005 and we got nothing from it,’ said these opinion leaders. ‘On the contrary, we suffered the wrath of the authorities.’ For them, ‘the 2005 elections taught us, above all, that however we vote, in the end the ruling power always wins.’ On the evidence that they had nothing to gain from joining the opposition except from being targets of harassment, these elite confided that ‘we remain strong opponents, but only in the remotest corner of our backyard.’ And the measures that the ruling party were to take in the following years, particularly 2006 to 2008, such as forced enrolment of this elite into the Party (see below), would only confirm this position. They repeatedly said it years before the electoral campaigns started – ‘we will not be campaigning for the opposition and will not even vote for them.’ Even supposing that the opposition had more ways and the elbow room to make itself heard, the ‘lesson’ of the 2005 elections as well as an omnipresent fear, would, in any event, have deprived it of the rural activists it needed to capture a decent share of the vote in the countryside.

Given the weight of the peasant vote, defeat was inevitable from as early as Autumn 2005. But the debacle only started to emerge in the last two years before the elections especially during the electoral campaign, when the urban voters, traditionally the bastion of the opposition, progressively adopted the same reasoning as those living in the countryside – that is, that they would have nothing to gain by voting for the opposition but a great deal to lose. The repression of criticism, muffling of civil society and finally, the incredible pressure that the EPRDF put on voters, all had an effect. But the opposition seems also to have underestimated a decisive factor that led to the loss of its urban support: the political shift in the ruling Party, intensified after 2005 and the concomitant multiplication by seven in its membership (from 700,000 in 2005 to 5 million today or around one in seven of the adult population).

Very schematically and in line with its original Marxist-Leninist leanings, it saw itself as the small elite – the self-proclaimed avant-garde – with the right and duty to direct the ‘development’ of the ‘broad masses’, which meant the mass of peasant farmers to lead them out of their incredible misery. In the same ‘socialist’ vein, it reined in private businesses. But some years ago, this ‘pro-poor policy’ gradually disappeared in the face of a form of development where the ‘developmentalist state’ continues to play a central role but essentially to benefit the ‘constructive investors’ to order to promote their entry into a ‘market economy’. It is these people that the Party has enrolled en masse, be it urban small entrepreneurs, intellectuals or especially, those very same, more dynamic farmers, all those who had provided the vast battalions for the opposition by rejecting the authoritarianism of the ruling party and its obstruction to their economic and social advancement. This membership is either purely utilitarian – ‘I am joining the Party because it will reward me in return’ or more often obligatory, where the Party forces the leading social and economic players to join. In a few words, the hard core of the EPRDF which once focused on the “toiling masses,” is now formulating its new political basis on an emerging middle class by promoting its advancement and by enrolling its members at the Party’s periphery. As a result, these former opponents have either actually been rallied round or at least politically neutralised. The opposition, therefore, lost most of its fighting forces and its ‘opinion leaders’, who brought with them the bulk of the electorate.

While it was, then, inevitable that the opposition would be heavily defeated, no-one expected it to be wiped out. This provoked just as much surprise as its massive push in 2005. When the Prime-Minister, Meles Zenawi declared that he expected to get ‘50% to 75% of the vote” and that “we neither projected nor expected to get 99%,’ they confirmed their vision of the electoral challenge facing them. This translated as a clear win over the opposition as well as making up for their humiliation in 2005, but via a sufficiently ‘clean’ election, at least on the surface, to avoid violent reaction by the people, as in 2005, to get the opposition to ratify the results and finally and above all to provide donors with the argument they had been lacking up until then, to justify their full backing of the regime: it would finally have gained a democratic legitimacy through the ballot box.

If, for the time being there is nothing to indicate that troubles like those of 2005 might break out – people have not forgotten the 200 demonstrators who lost their lives and the 30,000 members of the opposition who were arrested – the electoral plan of Meles Zenawi is in 2010 a failure just as it was in 2005. The reason is, once again, the disconnect between the party leaders and its apparatus, despite its rigid, ‘Leninist’ form of hierarchical management. In 2005, the local ‘cadres’ had tried in vain to alert the top leadership of the growing opposition in order to contain its push and to this end to throw the EPRDF in the electoral battle. But these appeals never reached the ears of the leadership, not least because of its blind confidence in victory. They only realised the danger a month before Election Day and the Party-State’s counter-offensive, from top to bottom, and from one day to the next, came too late not to have to resort to vote-rigging in order to win. In 2010, the party’s apparatus went much beyond the original intentions of its leadership. They set out on a frenetic local campaign of one-upmanship, probably motivated by their humiliating defeat in 2005 and with the particular aim of showing their superiors that they were even more zealous than their colleagues next door. They therefore over-reacted by over-pressuring the voters, which European Union observers did not fail to note and even with flagrant vote rigging, which could be noticed in the EU final report. Hence the 99.6% return which is so improbable that it makes the regime look ridiculous, even, it seems, discrediting the Party in the eyes of some of its own core members and once and for all negates any ambition it may have had of being seen as ‘democratising.’ As a result, the EPRDF did not have a ‘landslide victory’ so much as a serious defeat.

Despite the pressure and event threats from the government, the main opposition force continues to contest the election results. It also wonders whether their single representative should join Parliament or not, so as to refuse to legitimise the de facto reign of a single party. The USA, stalwart ally of Ethiopia, went further than ever by declaring that the elections did not meet ‘international standards’. The foreign press is of one voice in its judgement that the regime is authoritarian, if not totalitarian and even goes as far as comparing it to that of Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the communist-military junta overthrown by Meles – in both cases, ‘the state and the ruling party are one and the same’ (Wall Street Journal). The setback is so obvious that the demonstration held in Addis-Ababa by the EPRDF to celebrate its ‘victory’ aimed in fact to demonstrate that Ethiopians ‘have rejected election meddling by western powers under the guise of human rights.’

But all the signs are that this cooling in relations with the donors will not have a long-term impact. While they are openly critical of the elections, they have never put into question the pursuit of their aid. Following the 2005 elections they had suspended part of it, only to reinstate it and even increase it a few months later, with just a change to its distribution network. Ethiopia is the perfect illustration that those receiving aid are not necessarily obliged to those giving it but rather the reverse. They would find it hard to justify to their public opinion a suppression of aid on political grounds, while Meles, on the contrary, can reject any imposed conditions in the name of the ‘sovereignty’ of the country. Finally, and above all, he knows that the West see him as the sole guarantee of stability in Ethiopia, which is at the core of a Horn of Africa in the throes of innumerable conflicts, as well as being their inescapable ally in the ‘fight against terrorism,’ which is their strategic priority for the entire region.

Nevertheless, this forced electoral takeover will weigh heavily on the country’s internal development. The extra-parliamentary opposition sees in the 2010 election one more proof that any form of democratic contest would be meaningless, the only remaining option being the armed struggle. But the chances of such an uprising being successful are still as slight as ever, either because of the persistent weakness of its leadership (Oromo Liberation Front), or because a core leadership still has not found the leverage to mobilise a peasant army (Ethiopian Peoples Patriotic Front), the juncture between the former and the latter being the sine qua non of an armed struggle in Ethiopia. The legal opposition, which saw not a single one of its leaders re-elected, is out for the count with very few chances of getting back on its feet not least because the ruling party will not allow them an inch of room to rebuild.

The hypothesis of a brutal breakdown cannot be totally excluded, with an unexpected event such as some insignificant incident that flares up into urban riots, stirred up by ethnic tensions and/or a sudden rage against the regime that the police and the army would be unable to contain. But, any internal changes could most probably only come through developments within the ruling party itself, given the impotence of the opposition and aid donors’ support of the regime. The political shift by the EPRDF and the multiplication of its membership has already started a process of change. Added to this is a generation change in the leadership, which is inevitable given the advanced age of the present incumbents. The profile of the newcomers is quite different to that of their elders in two fundamental ways: they did not rise out of the Ethiopian student movement of the 1970s, which was the strongest and most radically Marxist in all of black Africa; they came to the party out of self-interest, or were forced to do so.

So, what will be the position adopted by the new leadership? Will they stick together, or will the old guard keep control from the sidelines? How, within the Party, will the old hardcore deal with this mixed mass of newcomers and if they do manage to have a say within this heavily hierarchic Party, what will be their political stance? The future depends very much on the answers to these questions.

Given that the deepest sense of hierarchy runs through Ethiopian society as a whole, and given that the emerging middle class largely overlaps with the traditional elites, who have always been the opinion leaders, the neo-patrimonial system under construction could become sustainable, in other words, could offer the Party a wide enough and attractive base to be legitimised through (at least superficially) ‘clean’ elections. But on one condition: that everyone can benefit from this system on equal terms, i.e. that an end is put to the privileges accorded to the Tigreans. But will the present beneficiaries accept it?

Maintaining Tigrean domination, which has prevented any real democratic opening, was and still is the main factor of instability in Ethiopia. And it will continue if ethnic inequalities are perpetuated under this new, neo-patrimonial Party. The ‘national question’ remains the key of Ethiopia’s future.