Ethiopia: The Outcast August 23, 2010: Ethiopia announced that it had negotiated a peace deal with a large faction of the ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front). Last month, the Ethiopians signed a peace deal with one of the smaller Somali rebels groups in Ogaden province. This area, on the Somali border, is populated largely by Somalis and has long been claimed by Somalia. There is oil in Ogaden (worth up to $100 billion or more), and Ethiopia is willing to wheel, deal and fight to protect this resource. As fierce as the Somalis are, the Ethiopians can match them in combat. So the Somalis have been offering gifts, and peace, to make deals with the Ogaden rebels. This approach has apparently included some nasty violence against Ogaden rebels, to make the point that the alternative to peace is very painful. The ONLF denies that there has been any peace deal, but the Ogaden has been quiet over the Summer, and calls talk of peace government propaganda. Lack of violence is what passes for peace in this part of the world. Eritrea continues to wallow in dictatorship, poverty and paranoia. The government is currently denying that there is a major drought and food shortage. The government's main concern is hanging on to power, and keeping opposition non-existent. The situation is not much better next door in Ethiopia, where there is a bit more prosperity, attention to the drought and political opposition. But Ethiopia also has one party rule. Nevertheless, inflation and food prices are down in Ethiopia, and up in Eritrea. While Ethiopia and Eritrea host each other's rebels, Eritrea has the most to fear from this. Ethiopia is a larger place (a million square kilometers and 79 million people, versus 118,000 square kilometers and 5.7 million), and the various rebel groups have plenty of places to hide. Not surprisingly, Eritrea is a major source of refugees in the region. Those with money flee across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen and exile in the Middle East and beyond. Those without money go to Ethiopia, where the government there recently allowed these 36,000 refugees to live outside the refugee camps. Ethiopia continues to maintain thousands of troops on the Somali border. Since these troops are also in Ogaden, they keep Somalis out, and local ethnic Somali rebels under control. Islamic rebel groups in Somalia still talk of invading Ethiopia, but none have tried it in months. China has replaced Germany as Ethiopia biggest export customer. China bought 36 percent of these exports (which totaled $2 billion in the last year), the biggest item being sesame seeds. Coffee and khat (an addictive leaf that is chewed fresh to obtain the narcotic effect) are the two biggest exports overall. Eritreas economy is increasingly dependent on gifts from Iran, which uses Eritrea as a base to support Islamic radicals in the region. August 15, 2010: The ONLF claims attacks on Ethiopian troops in four Ogaden towns, killing 44 soldiers. But there was no way to confirm this, and the Ethiopians denied any such activity. The ONLF has claimed non-existent attacks in the past, and this appears to be more of them. July 29, 2010: The Ethiopians signed a peace deal with the UWSLF (United West Somali Liberation Front) to reduce the amount of violence in Ogaden. July 11, 2010: In Uganda, Somali Islamic terrorists set off several bombs, killing over 70 people. Most African nations condemned this, but not Eritrea, which supports Somali Islamic terrorist groups. Eritrea provides safe bases for Somali Islamic terrorist groups and allows illegal arms to be brought to Eritrea, where they can be flown into Somalia. In the face of these attacks on Uganda, Eritrea is even more isolated.

How Did al-Shabab Emerge from the Chaos of Somalia?

An al-Shabab fighter runs for cover near a burned African Union military tank in Mogadishu on July 2, 2010

The concerns and agenda of Somalia's al-Shabab militia are very much rooted in local politics. However, its rise to prominence is tied to decisions taken by the U.S. and its regional allies in pursuit of the Bush Administration's global war on terrorism.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. deemed the 10-year power vacuum in Somalia a potential refuge for al-Qaeda, one that prompted Washington, together with African allies, to arm and fund various Somali warlords. In 2004, some warlords were drawn together into the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). However, successive attempts to establish a government were based on clan alliance and were inherently unstable because of the zero-sum character of the clans' competition for resources. (From TIME's archive: America's misadventure in Somalia.)

The TFG failed to transcend the predatory warlord politics that had prevailed for 15 years, and in 2006, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist alliance that eschewed the politics of clans, seized control of Mogadishu, rapidly bringing order and economic improvement to their expanding areas of control, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the Somali business community. Thousands of men and women welcomed them, clapping and singing in joy as the ICU's victory convoy coursed through formerly warring neighborhoods.

But the movement's Islamist colors, and the fact that the ICU was said to have given shelter to a handful of wanted al-Qaeda suspects, did not sit well with the U.S. State Department's sole Somalia analyst in the region at the time. And for Washington, the ICU became an intolerable alternative.

With apparent U.S. approval, Ethiopia used funds provided by Washington to buy weapons from North Korea, smuggling them in through Somaliland — a breakaway region of Somalia desperate for international recognition. The U.S. then backed an Ethiopian invasion to restore the TFG to power. During the ensuing fighting, up to 16,000 Somalis were killed and 1 million were displaced. The Islamist leadership was driven out of Mogadishu. The ICU's armed wing, known as al-Shabab (the Youth), initiated an insurgency against the Ethiopian occupation and its Somali accomplices and used tactics seen in Iraq, such as improvised explosive devices and suicide bombings. The Shabab had been a radical faction of the ICU, but was far from dominant. The Ethiopian invasion not only ended the ICU experiment in governance but also legitimized the more militant outlook of the Shabab. (Does al-Shabab want to join terror's big league?)

The resulting instability in Somalia has been infused not just with the U.S. global agenda against al-Qaeda, but also with the agendas of regional adversaries — the proxies of Ethiopia against Eritrea and even those of Egypt, Yemen and other Arab states against Ethiopia. Those agendas further complicate Somalia's political-military landscape, propelling the country into cyclical foreign interventions. If the African Union forces pulled out, the TFG would almost certainly disappear. But if the Shabab then managed to plant its flag and declare that it was in control, the U.S. would once again find the situation intolerable. Disengagement is unlikely. And every time there has been an increase of foreign involvement, the Shabab — or its equivalent — only grows and becomes more radicalized.

Is there an exit strategy? One reason the ICU was able to take power was that it provided the best environment for business, and offered a better deal for Somalis than the warlords did. Ultimately, it may be the business communities of the various clans that will be the kingmakers, and perhaps the key to stability.

Rosen is a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of the forthcoming book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World

Somalia's al-Shabab: A Global or Local Movement?

When Somalia's al-Shabab militia claimed responsibility for the July 11 suicide bombings that killed 76 people watching soccer on TV in Uganda, the media described the event as an al-Qaeda attack on the World Cup. That's a misrepresentation, of course, but one that illustrates many of the problems with viewing and reacting to events in Somalia through a war-on-terrorism paradigm. The Shabab certainly has a relationship with al-Qaeda, but it is an independent organization, and the Kampala bombings were motivated not by some global jihadist agenda but by the Shabab's ongoing struggle against foreign military intervention in Somalia. That primarily means Uganda, which is a key component of the African Union (A.U.) mission in Somalia. That mission props up the beleaguered remains of a government that is widely seen as corrupt, greedy, inefficient and illegitimate. The Shabab perceives that government as a foreign-imposed regime; in fact, it does not even qualify as a regime, simply the faction that controls the airport and the presidential villa — buttressed by Ugandan arms. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2010700,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopularemail#ixzz0xA76O4Hz

Ethiopia Faces Era Of One-Party Rule

Ethiopia's 2010 election all but wiped out the country's once vibrant political opposition. This means that Ethiopia faces the prospect of one-party rule for the foreseeable future. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi categorically rejects characterizations of Ethiopia as a one-party state. Speaking to reporters last week, he likened the Horn of Africa nation to Japan or Botswana, where opposition groups operate, but one party dominates the political landscape. "Ethiopia is not moving towards a single-party system," said Zenawi. "It can, with some credence, be said that it is a dominant party system, but there is a fundamental distinction between a dominant party system and a single-party system. The democratic system in Japan has been a dominant party system for half a century, but it has not been a single-party system." ...More story

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