House Hearing on Review of Current Development in Ethiopia
Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Addis Ababa, July 2008
one.
Parts of southern Ethiopia resemble the scenery in a Tarzan movie. When I was in that location last fall, the green forested hills were blanketed in white mist and pelting poured downwardly on the minor farms and homesteads. In the towns, slabs of meat hung in the butchers' shops and donkeys hauled huge sacks of coffee beans, Ethiopia's major consign, forth the stony dirt roads. And so I was surprised to see the signs of hunger everywhere. There were babies with kwashiorkor, a disease acquired by malnutrition, which I'd causeless occurred only in state of war zones. Many of the older children were clearly stunted and some women were and then deficient in iodine they had goiters the size of cannonballs.
This East African nation, famous for its ancient stone-hewn churches, Solomonic emperors, and seemingly intractable poverty, has a long history of dearth. Merely I had always assumed that food shortages were more mutual in the much drier due north of the country than in the relatively fertile s. Although rainfall throughout Federal democratic republic of ethiopia had been erratic in 2008 and 2009, the stunting and goiter I saw were signs of chronic malnutrition, which had clearly existed for many years.
What was causing it? Ethiopia's long history of nutrient crises is shrouded in myths and political intrigue. In 1984, famine killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions destitute. At the fourth dimension, the Un attributed the famine to drought. But about witnesses knew it had far more than to practice with a military entrada launched past Federal democratic republic of ethiopia's and then-Soviet-backed dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam against a rebel group based in the northern province of Tigray, known as the Tigrayan People'south Liberation Front end (TPLF).1 Authorities forces isolated the peasantry, destroyed trade and markets, and diverted nutrient help to their own troops.
Western governments were slow to respond to this humanitarian crisis, simply a global charity campaign led past the rock vocalist Bob Geldof's Band Help concerts and albums raised more than $100 one thousand thousand for relief organizations like Christian Aid and Oxfam. Considering Tigray was under assault, these organizations established bases in neighboring Sudan. They handed food shipments over to the TPLF, which was supposed to deliver them to starving peasants in Tigray. However, it now appears that the TPLF may also have been using some of the aid to feed its soldiers and purchase weapons. In a March 2010 BBC study, a quondam TPLF fighter described masquerading equally a Sudanese merchant and selling bags of "grain"—many containing only sand—to the aid workers, who and then passed the sacks on to other TPLF cadres, who returned them to the "Sudanese traders," who resold them to the aid workers, so on. In this way, bags of grain/sand circulated back and forth beyond the border, as money poured into TPLF coffers. The CIA plainly knew about the scam.2
The TPLF's political leader at the time is at present Ethiopia's prime number government minister, Meles Zenawi. Since information technology ousted Mengistu and took power in 1991, Meles's government has received some $26 billion in development aid from Western donors including the US Agency for International Evolution, the Globe Bank, the European Marriage, and Britain's Section for International Development. Meles, along with Geldof, has vehemently denounced the BBC's written report and demanded a retraction. But many help workers who were effectually then have indicated that there is probably some truth to the story.3 Either manner, it's worth asking where Federal democratic republic of ethiopia'southward development aid is going today, bearing in mind the theatrical inclinations of its prime minister.
two.
Shortly before its victory in 1991, the TPLF joined several other groups and changed its name to the Ethiopian People'due south Revolutionary Democratic Front end (EPRDF). Meles was an instant success with Western leaders including President Bill Clinton, who hailed him every bit a member of a "new brood" of postal service–cold state of war Africans who would bring stability and prosperity to their troubled continent. In 2005, Meles was a coauthor with Tony Blair of the report of the British regime's Commission for Africa, entitled Our Common Interest,four which argued that reducing poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and the spread of AIDS and other diseases would create the foundation for economic growth, political stability, and democratic governance. The written report, released amid a huge publicity entrada known equally "Make Poverty History" led past the stone star Bono, called for sharply increased levels of foreign aid, which the authors referred to as "the big push."5
Meles'due south Ethiopia is now the subject of an informal experiment to see whether "the large push" approach to African evolution volition work. Its strange assist receipts, which have tripled since 2000,half-dozen amounted to some $3 billion in 2008, more than than any other nation in sub-Saharan Africa.7 A nominally Christian country surrounded by largely Islamic Somalia, Sudan, and Republic of kenya, Federal democratic republic of ethiopia is also a key Western ally in the "war on terror," and this is certainly a factor in how much foreign aid it receives—though most of the money goes not to the military just to development programs, especially health, pedagogy, and agronomics projects.8 The big button has financed 15,000 village health clinics, seventeen universities, countless schools, and the beginnings of a new road network that volition bring merchandise and services to many previously isolated rural areas.
Unfortunately, this aid is likewise subsidizing a government that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent. During Federal democratic republic of ethiopia's nearly recent parliamentary elections in May 2005, the government suspended the vote count in some areas when it seemed that the opposition was winning more seats than expected. When the results were somewhen announced, Meles'southward EPRDF, to no one's surprise, had won. European union observers criticized the conduct of the elections, and opposition supporters organized demonstrations that before long turned violent. Security forces shot into the crowds, killing some two hundred people, and thousands of others, including journalists and human rights activists, were arrested. Seventy opposition leaders were charged with treason. Although near were afterward pardoned, several, including the leader of the opposition party Unity for Democracy and Justice, Birtukan Mideksa, remain backside confined.9
On May 23, Ethiopia will hold its first parliamentary elections since 2005, just the results seem foreordained. Opposition groups have been prevented from opening local offices and some opposition candidates accept been assaulted by EPRDF officials or arbitrarily detained by the police.x The authorities uses Chinese spy technology to problems phone lines and Net communications, and countless journalists, editors, judges, academics, and homo rights defenders accept fled the country or languish behind bars, at risk of torture. New laws passed since 2005 take made political action more than difficult than ever. The Anti-Terrorism Announcement of 2009 makes hearsay admissible every bit evidence in court, and one of Ethiopia's few remaining independent newspapers recently closed afterward its editors learned that charges against them were being prepared under the human action. Phonation of America and other international radio programs are routinely jammed before elections, including this one.xi
These events are unfolding as billions of dollars in foreign aid pour into the state. Strange assistance is important. It helps needy people, information technology creates allies for our causes and markets for our products, and redeems some of the damage inflicted on the third earth during the cold war. Just help agencies demand to ensure that their programs don't exacerbate the political problems that are keeping people poor in the first place.
When I asked aid officials why Meles, who seems then committed to poverty alleviation, seems so antagonistic to man rights, most pointed to the nation's volatile ethnic politics. Federal democratic republic of ethiopia's roughly 80 million people are divided among some ninety different groups.
A quarter of the population is Amhara, historically the most powerful tribe, with origins in the northern highlands where traditions of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity engagement back to the 4th century. Closely related are Prime Government minister Meles's Tigray people, who make up about seven percent of the population and whose grip on power is increasingly resented by others. The largest tribe, comprising some 40 percent of the population, are the Oromo, who traditionally herded livestock in the southern, central, and western regions of the country. Other groups include the Somalis, the Afar camel herders, and the Mursi and other southern pastoralist groups famous for their lip rings and colorful body paint. About half the population is Muslim, but at nowadays, ethnic, not religious, tensions are central to the nation's politics.
Equally a Tigrayan, Meles would face challenges from parties aligned with the far more numerous Amhara and Oromo no matter what he did, but his repressive policies have often made things worse. In November 2009, a group of military officers, furious that over ninety percent of Federal democratic republic of ethiopia's generals are Tigrayan, were bedevilled of plotting a insurrection. Ethnically based insubordinate groups, including the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), are engaged in vehement antigovernment insurgencies, and dozens of local conflicts have erupted amongst diverse tribes and clans in recent years.12 Just these problems have often been exacerbated by a regime that allows no genuine opposition or even constructive policy debate. The OLF fought alongside the TPLF against Mengistu, and in 1991 it attempted to transform itself into a peaceful political party. But after facing widespread vote-rigging and harassment of their candidates, its leaders shortly returned to armed struggle.
As this vicious cycle of repression and rebellion has escalated, Western officials accept tended to express a diplomatic sense of optimism that Ethiopia'due south political issues will iron themselves out. In 2007, former United states Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer praised Federal democratic republic of ethiopia for the "monumental advancement in the political environment" since the bloody 2005 election.xiii At the fourth dimension, the Usa was backing Ethiopia'south 2006 invasion of Somalia, on the belief—largely mistaken at that time—that it had become a oasis for al-Qaeda terrorists.14
At first, the Europeans threatened to cut off aid until Ethiopia made more progress on human being rights, but so reconsidered. The Europeans had their own security and strategic interests in the region, and may have reasoned that without American cooperation, an aid boycott of Federal democratic republic of ethiopia would have piddling leverage over Meles's human rights violations. These were likewise the days of Our Common Interest, Bono, and "Brand Poverty History," and cutting off assistance to one of the poorest countries in the globe might have been seen as a bad PR move. Withal, the Europeans resolved to channel their aid directly to local district authorities, bypassing the key authorities. This would prevent its use for political purposes, or so it was hoped.
The program was not a success. Every bit local elections scheduled for 2008 approached, opposition groups, mindful that so much money was now flowing into district coffers, feared widespread rigging. Local government officials earn meager salaries, just are enormously powerful considering they control access to food help programs, fertilizers, educational opportunities, jobs, plots of land, small business organization loans, and even health care.15 The opposition groups unsuccessfully petitioned the US and other donors to fund independent poll monitors, but when the EPRDF won 99.99 percent of the seats, US officials said they could not comment on the fairness of the elections because they hadn't monitored them.16
Scholars and homo rights groups had for years been alerting the international community to the fact that EPRDF officials frequently deny the benefits of foreign assist programs—food, fertilizers, training, and then on—to known opposition supporters.17 When I asked Earth Bank officials whether they were concerned nigh these allegations, they said that they'd heard a few anecdotal reports, but had even so to see disarming testify that political diversion of resources was a systematic problem in their programs.
No doubt conducting a systematic survey would be difficult. A Human Rights Watch researcher was deported last November while attempting to investigate the politicization of a World Banking concern food aid plan, and a announcer who tried to follow up the investigation was arrested and jailed for 2 days.eighteen In Dec 2009, the Western printing began publicizing these stories, and the donors finally agreed to conduct a study of the "distortions" in the uses of aid in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, this investigation will exist overseen by the government.
For years, Federal democratic republic of ethiopia's strange donors supported a fledgling human rights customs that provided voter instruction, documented political repression, and advocated for the rights of rape victims, driveling children, the blind, deaf, and other vulnerable groups. In response to increasing criticism from some of these groups, the government recently enacted a Charities and Societies (CSO) law, forbidding them from receiving all but minimal funding from non-Ethiopian sources. Since few Ethiopians can afford to donate to charity, numerous human rights programs accept shut downwardly. The donor bureau officials who once supported these programs have protested in internal reports and private meetings with the prime minister, but their public pronouncements accept been conciliatory. On the mean solar day the EU announced a new €250 one thousand thousand aid package for Ethiopia, information technology expressed the promise that the CSO law would exist "implemented in an open-minded and constructive spirit."19
3.
Western aid officials seem reluctant to admit that there are ii Prime number Minister Meles Zenawis. One is a clubbable, charming African who gives moving speeches at Davos and other elite forums nigh fighting poverty and terrorism. The other is a dictator whose totalitarianism dates back to cold war days. During the early on 1970s, when Meles was a medical educatee in Addis Ababa, he joined a Marxist study grouping that somewhen became the TPLF. Meles'south armed forces functioning was undistinguished, but he had a talent for speech-making, and was appointed head of the TPLF'due south political fly. In the training courses he ran for recruits, he celebrated Stalin's achievement in modernizing Russia, just didn't dwell on the blood that was shed in the process.
In 1985, Meles founded a unit of measurement inside the TPLF known as the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray, which was guided past the Leninist principle of "Autonomous Centralism." In pursuit of revolutionary socialist goals, the peasants were to be mobilized by a "vanguard elite," which would exert total ideological and economic control over lodge.20 But after taking office in 1991, Meles downplayed his Marxist past and even enrolled in a correspondence course in business assistants at United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's Open Academy. In discussions with United states of america officials and journalists, he indicated that his Marxism extended to antifeudalism, equality, country reform, and didactics farming skills to women, but not to the nationalization of private enterprises or 1-party rule.21
At commencement, Meles'south regime allowed a caste of press freedom, multiparty democracy, and privatization of some state-owned enterprises. Just as rigged elections and arrests of journalists continued, some observers wondered whether Meles's political modify of heart was genuine.22 In official English-language documents written for the World Bank and other agencies, his government expressed a commitment to human rights and democracy,23: merely Ethiopian-language documents intended for internal government or EPRDF consumption told a different story. These documents outlined a policy known as "Revolutionary Democracy"—essentially the same Leninist programme that Meles taught to his TPLF cadres in the 1980s, involving top-downwardly controlling, regular sessions of "self-criticism," and unmarried-party rule for generations. Revolutionary Democracy would exist promoted through the gradual EPRDF takeover of all organs of "propaganda," including schools, the civil service, the press, and religious institutions.24 "When 'Revolutionary Democracy' permeates the entire [Ethiopian] order," Meles wrote in 2001,
individuals will start to think akin and all persons volition cease having their ain independent outlook. In this order, private thinking becomes simply office of collective thinking considering the individual will non be in a position to reflect on concepts that have not been prescribed by "Revolutionary Democracy."25
Consequent with this aim, the EPRDF has used World Bank funds to purge much of the senior civil service of opposition supporters and replaced the independent Ethiopian Teachers Association with a party-affiliated body.26 Meles concedes that a Leninist economic plan would not be possible every bit long as Ethiopia is dependent on strange aid from capitalist countries,27 but his government still controls all land and telecommunications, and much of the cyberbanking and rural credit sectors. According to the Earth Bank, roughly half of the rest of the national economic system is accounted for by companies held past an EPRDF-affiliated business group chosen the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT).28 EFFORT's freight transport, construction, pharmaceutical, and cement firms receive lucrative foreign help contracts and highly favorable terms on loans from authorities banks.29 Ethiopia is not a typical African kleptocracy, and at that place is no evidence that Meles personally benefits from these businesses. Rather, they are function of a rigid system of command that aid agency officials, beguiled by Meles'southward plain pro-Western exterior, have only recently begun to recognize.
There is a type of Ethiopian verse known as "Wax and Golden" considering information technology has 2 meanings: a superficial "wax" meaning, and a hidden "golden" one.30 During the 1960s, the anthropologist Donald Levine described how the popularity of "Wax and Golden" verse provided insights into some of the northern Ethiopian societies from which Prime Minister Meles would later sally. Even ordinary conversations oftentimes comprise double entendres and ambiguities. Levine theorized that this enabled the expression of satire, humor, and fifty-fifty insults in an otherwise strictly controlled and hierarchical society of all-powerful kings, peasants, and serfs.
Yet, he worried that this mode of communication would hold Ethiopians back in their dealings with Westerners, who tend to value concreteness and rationality. Double meanings and poetry provide no advantage when drafting legal contracts, filling out job applications, or designing nuclear reactors. Information technology didn't occur to Levine that "Wax and Gold"–manner communication might give Ethiopians like Meles an advantage in dealing with Westerners, especially when the Westerners were aid officials offering vast sums of money to follow a form of development based on liberal democracy and human rights, with which they disagree.
iv.
I first traveled to Ethiopia in 2008 to study the country'due south new public health strategy. Most every regime and aid agency official I met expressed enthusiasm for the many programs underway. Rates of AIDS, malaria, and infant mortality were falling,31 and Ethiopian health officials told me that there was no corruption; medicines were ever in stock, even in faraway rural clinics; and community wellness workers were trained, efficient, and never absent from their posts. The government newspaper kept readers abreast of development news with such headlines as "Reinforcing UNDAF to meet PASDEP, MDGs"32
(UNDAF is the UN Development Framework, PASDEP is Program for Accelerated and Sustained Evolution to End Poverty, and MDGs are the Millennium Evolution Goals).
Near of these programs were in rural areas far from the capital, Addis Ababa, where my interviews took place. I wanted to see them for myself, not least because I knew that some of the claims I was hearing weren't entirely true. Government officials claimed that in 2005, 87 percent of children had received all major vaccines, merely an independent survey suggested that the figure was closer to 27 percent.33 Similarly, the fraction of women using contraception was 23 pct, non 55 percent as government officials claimed. The annual growth in farm production was also probably nowhere near the government'southward own figure of 10 percentage.34
One mean solar day, I heard an aid official give a lecture most a small nutrition project in i of the poorest regions of the country. She showed pictures of the area and that's when I noticed how green information technology looked. "It'southward called 'Green Famine,'" she said, but when I asked her what caused it, her respond rambled from rainfall patterns to soil erosion to local preferences for nutrient-poor root vegetables and made little sense.
Nevertheless, a few days later I visited the region myself. I was amazed by what I saw there. Roads were nether construction, a university had recently opened, and crowds of children were on their manner home from a new schoolhouse. Health workers spoke enthusiastically virtually the malaria bednet program, the immunization program, the pit latrine program, and the family planning program. I attended a village meeting at which some fifty "model families" who had followed all the government-prescribed practices of a "salubrious household" were awarded diplomas. Local officials gave speeches, everyone cheered, and a basket of popcorn was passed effectually.
But when I went to visit the nutrition projection, my enthusiasm faded. It was intended for children, only many of their mothers were besides malnourished. Several had obvious goiter, and a few were then anemic they nearly fainted while they were speaking to me. When I asked these women why they could not fairly feed their children or themselves, nigh replied that they didn't have enough land, and therefore couldn't abound enough food either to consume or to sell.
There is a long history to their predicament. During the nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up the rest of East Africa into colonies, Amhara rulers from the northern highlands extended their power southward and established the boundaries of what would become Regal Ethiopia. As they did and then, they seized land, exacted tribute, and turned the one time independent peoples of this region into serfs. When the last emperor, Haile Selassie, was overthrown in 1974, the new authorities immediately enacted a state reform program that assigned each old serf a plot of his own. This was fine for one generation, but in rural Ethiopia, women have on average six surviving children. Now, thirty-five years later, millions of peasant families alive on plots also small to support them.35 The regime retains all belongings rights, so if the poor leave their tiny plots, they lose their simply asset. Most remain where they are, living on the verge of starvation.
Half a dozen food security programs existed in the area, but for reasons no i, including the aid workers who managed them, could explain, they were having little result. Co-ordinate to a government survey, half the families enrolled in the largest food aid plan had, in society to feed themselves, been forced to sell what few assets they had, including goats, chickens, pots, and buckets.36 One household in eight had lost a child to hunger. All the same, competition for a slot in the programme was so trigger-happy that when the food trucks arrived, riots sometimes broke out. The truly destitute received barely enough to survive. Ane woman I met said that her family of five was somehow living on 5 kilos of cornmeal a calendar month.
Francesco Zizola/Noor/Aurora Photos
A centre for children suffering from severe malnutrition, Sembete, Oromiya region, July 2008
There is no simple solution to this crisis, merely equally the Ethiopia expert Siegfried Pausewang has long argued, only the peasants themselves accept any hope of finding 1. Working with agronomists and other experts, they could face up such issues every bit security of state tenure, the onerous rural tax government, political favoritism, the low prices offered by party-run cooperatives, and compensation for those whose tiny country parcels can no longer support them. Even so, at that place are no independent organizations or other forums in which peasants can openly discuss these problems, air grievances, or advocate for their rights. Under the CSO police such forums are unlikely to emerge.
Federal democratic republic of ethiopia has an agricultural extension program, but it merely gives orders. "They make a plan, they have over, they command us to do this, practice that," a farmer told Pausewang in 2001.37 If the peasants openly disagree with the plans the regime has for them, they chance beingness denied fertilizers or credit, or even losing what land they accept. As one farmer, who keeps his back up for the opposition political party a secret, told Human Rights Watch in 2009, "I am a member of EPRDF because I need relief assistance…. The list of receipts—the proof that I am paying my dues to the political party—are required to get [information technology]."38 While assistance officials may lecture about how hunger in Ethiopia is due solely to climate change, soil erosion, and the preference of poor people for root vegetables, this crisis, similar the 1984 famine, is also primarily caused by politically motivated human rights violations.
five.
Before I left Ethiopia, I visited an one-time church in the Amhara highlands. Orthodox Christian traditions in this function of the country date back ane,600 years, and it'due south astonishing to think that these impoverished people had a written language and a sophisticated clerical hierarchy that long ago. I was shown a beautifully illuminated set of liturgical manuscripts created in the 1700s, in which images of almond-eyed saints loomed amid the gospels written out in Federal democratic republic of ethiopia'due south ancient Ge'ez script. In some of the paintings, y'all could run across the artists' struggles to reconcile their turbulent cultural heritage by combining the doctrinal power of the sacred give-and-take with the abstruse flourishes more typical of the cultures of the African interior.
Outside the church, I noticed that some of the pocket-size children hanging around had leather pouches tied effectually their necks. "That's to protect against 'evil eye,'" an Ethiopian friend explained. "The pouches accept fragments of scripture inside. They believe the Bible is 'the give-and-take made flesh,' and those pieces of newspaper volition preclude their children from getting ill."
In 2007, Meles called for an "Ethiopian renaissance" to bring the country out of medieval poverty, simply the Renaissance he'due south thinking of seems very different from ours. The Western Renaissance was partly fostered by the openness to new ideas created by improved transport and merchandise networks, mail services, printing engineering, and communications—precisely those things Meles is attempting to restrict and control.
The Western Renaissance helped to democratize "the word" so that all of us could speak of our own private struggles, and this added new meaning and urgency to the alleviation of the suffering of others. The problem with strange assistance in Federal democratic republic of ethiopia is that both the Ethiopian government and its donors see the people of this state not every bit individuals with distinct needs, talents, and rights just as an undifferentiated mass, to be mobilized, decentralized, vaccinated, given primary teaching and pit latrines, and freed from the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, and backwardness. It is this rigid focus on the "backward masses," rather than the unique human person, that typically justifies appalling cruelty in the proper noun of social progress.
—April fourteen, 2010
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Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/05/13/cruel-ethiopia/