I am really Surprised when i listening this wonderful profesional analyses Dr Abeba Fekade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvcC4ZM-AiU&list

EITI or Clare’s Corruption Club?

by Alemayehu G. Mariam

Clare Short has won! Congratulations, Clare! Brava!

Last week, Clare Short, Chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), succeeded in bullying the EITI Board members into voting to admit the ruling regime in Ethiopia into her Club.  She did it the old-fashioned way— arm-twisting, browbeating, bulldozing, rear-end kicking, a little bit of jawboning and sweet-talkin’ and a whole lot of temper tantrum throwing. She had learned her lessons well. In 2003, when Short ripped into Tony Blair and threatened to resign her position as Secretary of State for International Development over the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, she fulminated defiantly, “But they were going to war anyway and they were going to bully and pressure countries to vote for it.”

Clare, we knew “you were going to bully and pressure your Board members to vote and let the corrupt regime in Ethiopia into EITI anyway.” Brava! You have won. Take a victory lap. Raise the roof. You have vanquished the “human rights campaigners”, humiliated and mocked the civil society representatives on your Board in front of the whole world and chased those hapless and voiceless Diaspora Ethiopians right out of town. Now, it is time for you to go to Addis and celebrate. You’ve earned it. Let the champagne and cognac flow. You now own EITI. It’s your baby! While you’re at it, make it real. Give EITI a new name. How about Clare’s Corruption Club? Has a nice ring to it. “The Triple C.”

What is truly fascinating is the fact that Short’s philosophy (she calls it “principles”) of controlling corruption in the mining and extractive industries in the most corrupt countries of the world has prevailed. In batting to admit the regime in Ethiopia into the EITI, Short advanced a short-sighted theory of mining corruption control, which can be reduced to the following simple proposition: Admit the most corrupt regimes in the world into EITI by having them playing-acting transparency and accountability. Have them do a little shuffling and song and dance.  Insist that they make a public confession by babbling a few trendy phrases about transparency and good governance. Have them complete a make-believe application form with a lot of feel-good bureaucratic mumbo jambo. Demand that they publicly pledge allegiance to mining best practices. Then wine and dine them. In other words, dress up crooks, thugs and racketeers  in designer suits, parade them in public like respectable national leaders, groom them for three years and re-introduce them to the world as  anti-corruption warfighters in Clare Short’s Army. That’s the Clare Short Way of cleaning up the corrupt mining, mineral and oil sectors in Africa and elsewhere.

The decision to admit the regime in Ethiopia into EITI was a complete fraud done with smoke and mirrors. When the regime’s application was rejected in 2010, the reason given was that the

board concluded that Ethiopia’s ‘Proclamation on Charities and Society’ would prevent civil society groups from being sufficiently independent and meaningfully participate in the process.  The board decided, in effect, not to admit Ethiopia ‘until the Proclamation on Charities and Society is no longer in place.’ This is the only such instance in the history of EITI where a country has failed to be admitted and the grounds for this action was clearly rights-based. (Emphasis added.)

Was the “Proclamation on Charities and Society” changed to justify admitting Ethiopia now? Of course not. What has changed for civil society in Ethiopia since 2010? As a direct result of the “Proclamation”, in 2010, “the number of civil society organizations in Ethiopia was reduced from about 4600 to about 1400 in a period of three months in early 2010.  Staff members were reduced by 90% or more among many of those organizations that survive.”

In one fell swoop, within a span of three months, the “Proclamation” had wiped out 70 percent of the civil society organizations in Ethiopia. In February 2010, the regime froze the assets of Ethiopia’s Human Rights Council, Ethiopia’s oldest human rights organization, and the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, effectively incapacitating these two vital institutions; indeed for all intents and purposes outlawing them.

After the Board rejected the regime’s application in 2010, one thing had changed for sure. In March 2011, Clare Short was elected chair of EITI. Short is a longtime cheerleader and champion of the ruling regime in Ethiopia and a groupie of the late Meles Zenawi. She worshipped Meles, and not necessarily in a figurative way. Perhaps she felt she had to avenge the honor of her comrades and avatar for the drubbing they got in 2010 at the hands of the civil society board representatives. After all, when the regime’s application was rejected, that was “the only instance in the history of EITI where a country has failed to be admitted” on “clearly rights-based grounds”. Short set out to get even and avenge the “dishonor” of Meles & Co., by humiliating before the entire world the civil society representatives on the EITI Board who were instrumental in defeating Meles’ first application. Clare, the Avenger got even!

When Short launched her brazen lobbying campaign (I did not say bullying) on behalf of the regime in Ethiopia in her March 11 “Open Letter”, she hectored the civil society representatives on the EITI Board like juvenile delinquents. She also made a maddingly flabbergasting observation. “As I look around the EITI implementing countries, I do not accept that the situation for civil society in Ethiopia is worse than a great many of them,” bloviated Short.  What did she mean by that? Who are the members of EITI?

EITI now has some 40 plus members. A good many of the member countries are under the thumbs and boots of some of the most corrupt and brutal regimes in the world. Among them include  Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon,  Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Kazakhstan, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan and  Yemen. In her “no worse than a great many of them” parallelism, Short was actually declaring a manifest and undeniable truth: The regime in Ethiopia is no worse than or different from many of the current EITI members who engage in gross and massive abuses of human rights. They are all corrupt to the core; they have all crushed and decimated civil society institutions; and they are thugs and gangsters in designer suits sporting bridle leather briefcases. Her real message to her Board, human rights organizations and the Diaspora Ethiopians was simple. “Chill out y’all. Don’t get bent out of shape. Let’s put lipstick on the corrupt thugs and continue with business as usual. Can’t we just get along?”

I agreed with candidate Barack Obama when he said, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper and call it change; it’s still going to stink.” EITI can dress up thugs in designer suits, put makeup on them and call them “transparent” and “accountable”, but they are still thugs. You can wrap corruption in EITI logo and call it clean, but it is still going to stink. EITI is the lipstick put on African thug regimes to make them look pretty and clean.

In a strange way, Short is actually quite right. Mea culpa! It is true that many of the African countries in EITI are run by a bunch of wolfish corrupt thug regimes. I actually theorized about them in my commentary, “Thugtatorship, the Highest State of African Dictatorship.” Short is right on the money. Why exclude the thug regime in Ethiopia from its rightful place at the EITI Grand Table of Corruption? It is not fair.

In an even stranger way, Short proves my point perfectly. EITI is indeed mining Corruption Club Central. It reminds me of Alibaba and the 40 Thieves.

Strangest yet, I am grateful to Short for what she has done in her Open Letter fighting tooth and nail to get the regime in Ethiopia admitted into the EITI system. I admire her fighting spirit. Short is the type who will take down anybody to the mat if they stand in her way.

In bullying her Board to approve the regime’s application, she did us all a great service. She inadvertently exposed EITI for what it truly is, a protection and extortion racket. In organized crime enterprises, protection rackets  operate in situations where the police and judiciary are unable, unwilling or are incapable of  providing legal protection to the community. In exchange for a  “small protection fee”, the racketeers effectively maintain “law and order” for their clients and ensure that they are not bothered by other gangsters and hooligans.

Many of the EITI member countries are incapable of controlling corruption through their own legal institutions. The vast majority of them are one-man, one-party jobs. Political institutions are corrupted to the core. They have rubberstamp parliaments. Their prosecutors are benighted goons and party hacks with make-believe law books under their armpits. The judiciary is in the back pockets of the regime leaders. The anti-corruption commissions are used as guided missiles to wipe out political opponents, including dissenters within the regimes. There is no rule of law, only the rule of ignorant thugs.

Comes now EITI ready to impose a new world order of morality and integrity on age-old mining corruption in Africa and elsewhere. Supposedly, that is what EITI has been doing for the past decade. Truth be told, EITI is actually a protection racket for all of the corrupt regimes in its Club. It serves as a safe harbor to corrupt thugs who rapaciously plunder and steal their national resources away from any prying eyes. All the corrupt regimes have to do to be born again and attain the kingdom of EITI is go through a rite of passage: 1) Sign up and recite the EITI catechism. 2) Get baptized and be anointed by the Priestess. 3) Perform a few acts of contrition in public. 4) Give indulgencies for all prior acts of corruption. 5) Wait in limbo for three years in preparation for beatification from corrupt to clean.

It is a great scam for the thug regimes. They get to wear the EITI badge of (dis)honor and swagger about pontificating about how free they are from corruption. The EITI badge will give the corrupt thugs in Ethiopia bragging rights. They will flaunt their EITI good housekeeping seal of approval in the face of the international human rights organizations and the voiceless Diaspora Ethiopians. “In your face Human Rights Watch! In your face, Diaspora Ethiopians! We’re clean as a hound’s tooth, and we can prove it. Check out this cool badge!” They will continue to ply their mining corruption above suspicion, aboveground, aboveboard and above the law. EITI membership gives them the license and to steal, wheel and deal their natural resources to unsuspecting investors and the moral legitimacy to squeeze the loaners and donors for some mo’ extra cash.

EITI’s charade about its standards and criteria for admission is its omerta (code of silence) and its method of silencing not only its external critics but also internal dissenters. EITI shrouds itself in a whole litany of bureaucratic mumbo jambo about admissions criteria, accountability and transparency. Short dismissed all that as nice PR verbiage in her Open Letter when she wrote, “the entry bar to candidates should be clearly and simply whether there is enough space for civil society to work with EITI.” What about those high-falutin’ and pretentious official standards? Are they mere ritual songs and dances?

By any objective measure, the admission of the regime in Ethiopia into EITI shows that the EITI standards are hollow and vacuous. EITI proclaims that to join the Club, a “government is required to issue an unequivocal public statement of its intention to implement the EITI.” Big deal! A government “must appoint a senior individual to lead on the implementation of the EITI.” Sure, corrupt Tweedle Dee appoints corrupt Tweedle Dum to lead the implementation.  A government is “required to commit to work with civil society.” What civil society? Not a problem. Since the corrupt thugs have decimated all real civil societies in their countries, EITI gives them permission to invent their own. That is precisely what the regime in Ethiopia did when it invented out of whole cloth the “Ethiopian National Journalists Union”. What a joke! The Meles Zenawi Prison in Kality, just outside the capital city of Addis Ababa, warehouses all of the real journalists — internationally celebrated ones and multiple recipients of the most coveted and prestigious press awards in the world — including Eskinder Nega, Reyot Alemu and Woubshet Taye. Eskinder was sentenced to 18 years for criticizing the late Meles Zenawi and for commenting on the Arab Spring. Reeyot and Woubshet were handed 14 year sentences for expressing their views in their weekly magazines.

Expecting the “Ethiopian National Journalists Union” to press for real accountability and transparency in the mining sector is like expecting an accurate accounting of missing hens from the fox guarding the hen house. The basic idea in the EITI regime is to facilitate the publication of accurate and verifiable data on the mining, mineral and oil sectors under strict independent public oversight and scrutiny with direct public engagement. The ultimate aim is to make sure “Revenues generated from the extraction of natural resources are available for the public to see.”

When it comes to data, the regime in Ethiopia is notorious for cooking the books. As I demonstrated in my commentaries “The Voodoo Economics of Meles Zenawi” and “The Fakeonomics of Meles Zenawi”, the Meles regime had been cooking the economic statistics to falsely claim that under his leadership Ethiopia achieved “double-digit economic growth” for a full decade. What is fascinatingly instructive is the fact that Meles cleverly fed his bogus economic growth data to the World Bank (WB)  and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so that they can blow his trumpet. Even though they knew better, the WB and IMF were willing accomplices in the perpetuation of one of the greatest and boldest economic canards in recent times.

I shall argue that the regime in Ethiopia will pull the same tricks and hide behind EITI’s skirt to report all kinds of bogus statistics about mining production and revenues, while siphoning off hundreds of millions and depositing them in their personal offshore accounts. In due course, I expect to write a commentary entitled, the “The Voodoo Statistics of Mining Corruption in Ethiopia Through EITI”.

EITI aims to create the illusion of legitimacy, credibility, transparency and accountability through its lofty-sounding standards while in fact legitimizing and giving cover to corruption in the extractive industries in Africa and other developing countries. EITI is the “stealth technology” the corrupt regimes in Africa and elsewhere having been looking for so that they can cruise in plain view while ripping off the resources of their people without suspicion or detection. EITI is one of the slickest, sleaziest and slimiest con games to be played out on the world stage in a long time.

Demanding a double apology and insisting on one

In my last commentary, Mining Corruption in Ethiopia: A Reply to Clare Short, I suggested that Short should offer an apology to Diaspora Ethiopians for her monstrous fatwa demanding that they be shut out of the debate over Ethiopia’s  admission into EITI. She urged her Board to “listen to [the]…clear and united voice of civil society in Ethiopia, rather than opposing voices from the Ethiopian diaspora.” She effectively argued that the voice of Diaspora Ethiopians should be  silenced.

The  “clear and united voice of civil society of Ethiopia”, of course, is only a figment of Short’s unhinged imagination. There is neither clear, united nor even a voice of civil society in Ethiopia. The real civil society organizations have been muzzled, gagged and bagged years ago. But Short for some reason wants to perpetuate the myth that there is “civil society” in Ethiopia. Perhaps like her bosom buddy Meles Zemawi, she must love telling bedtime stories. I am actually cool with fairy tales. I also like Dr. Seuss. “One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue Fish.” One civil society organization. Two. Red civil society organization. Blue.

Really, I was somewhat wishful that Short may issue an apology to Diaspora Ethiopians out of a sense of magnanimity and noblesse oblige. Perhaps she might have said, “Sorry, I have been misunderstood and quoted out of context.” She does not actually have to mean it, just a nice PR exercise. Short does not have the generosity to apologize to the victims of her misguided wrath. She has a long reputation for being a bully bordering on “thuggy”, to use the contemporary parlance of youth. Short is known for being short-fused and short-tempered. Richard Dowden, the respected British Journalist, recounted his experiences with her in 2011. “I once interviewed her on a plane and when I pressed a point about human rights in Rwanda she threatened to have me thrown off. Since we were over Guinea at the time, I backed off. Now we meet in the genteel tranquility of London’s Commonwealth Club and she is calm and reflective – though still capable of taking a swipe at anyone who tries to tinker with her creation.” Short don’t play. She bullied Tony Blair into submission. (No wonder Blair confessed, “I feel like an abused and bullied wife.” It’s Short’s short way or the long highway! I have to give her credit though. She is a formidable apologist for the thugs in power in Ethiopia.

No need to apologize to Diaspora Ethiopians. But Short must apologize to Ali Idrissa, Faith Nwadishi and Jean-Claude Katende, the civil society representatives on her Board,  and the other members of Publish What You Pay. I insist on it! In her “Open Letter”, she unjustly lambasted the trio for being stooges of the international human rights organizations.  She accused them of being “unhelpfully influenced by strong voices from a special interest group with perfectly well-meaning intentions but who have too much of a ‘north telling the south what to do mindset’”. She hectored them for putting the fate of EITI in the balance by opposing the application of the regime in Ethiopia.

Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende respectfully replied  to short’s Open Letter and told her she had jumped the gun. They said, “Ethiopia’s application to join EITI was not on our agenda at the regional PWYP meeting in Pointe Noire, although the issue did come up when we held our session on the enabling environment.” They explained that there were two views aired at Pointe Noire, one to admit the other to oppose. They challenged her “neutrality” stating, “You have openly taken a position in favour of admitting Ethiopia as an EITI candidate country, going against the principle of neutrality that should characterise your chairmanship. The trust from which you benefit as a chair is grounded in this essential principle.” They expressed puzzlement over her bizarre Open Letter.  “On this issue, we would like to note that we do not understand to what end the letter was made public when it was only addressed to a few people… We would also appreciate if our letter, like yours, would be published on the EITI website. In addition to that, it will be made available to our coalition members on the PWYP-International website.”

Short responded to Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende, not directly, but through her secretary, Jonas Moberg.  It was her way of adding insult to injury. She had no problems writing Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende in her Open Letter and hectoring and pleading with them before the whole world, but when they talked back, how dare they?! They needed to be put in their place. Moberg was the man given the dirty job. I personally felt deeply humiliated when I read the following:

Clare has asked me to answer your letter. Your points are fully noted, except the so called neutrality of the chair. As I have mentioned to Jean-Claude, the chair does not need to be neutral. She should not act as a representative of any of our stakeholders, which is not the same as being neutral.  The chair serves the EITI because she believes in its principles. It is her duty to defend those principles and act in the interest of the EITI, which is what she was doing when she wrote to you. There was no breach of her role in her letter.

Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende are not worthy of a direct response from Her Majesty?!

As I re-read Moberg’s letter, I was pissed off like a squirrel with a frozen pine cone. How dare Short respond to them through her secretary! Who the hell does she think she is?! Couldn’t she have had the grace, no! the simple human decency and courtesy to have her secretary draft the letter for her to sign.  Obviously, Short wanted to send Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende a clear message. She wanted to show them who’s the boss and what it’s all about. She is the Boss and it’s all about mind over matter. Short does not mind and Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende don’t matter!

I am going to apologize to Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende in the name of human decency, respect and honor. I have never met them or talked to them, but as fellow Africans I want them to know that their humiliation is my humiliation. My pride as an African was hurt to see them treated that way, but I want them to know that I am mighty proud of them. Their reply to Short’s off-the-wall Open Letter was an example of  rationality, logic and common sense. In their reply, they showed restraint, professionalism, equanimity and intellectual  honesty. They also showed that their generation of Africans will never say, “Yes! Bwana!”, “Whatever you say Bwana!” Short and her ilk should know that the new generation of Africans will not kowtow to anyone.  The days of “yes suh massah” are long gone. All Africans should be proud of Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende because they showed  dignity and grace in the face of disgrace and outrageous indignity. They did it all in class. Bravissimo! Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende!

I also plead with Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende not be overly offended by Short’s repeated injuries and usurpations.  After all, Short worshiped the late Meles Zenawi. In April 2013, Short spoke of her unbounded admiration for Meles “Superman” Zenawi at a memorial service. She said Meles was  “the most intelligent politician I’ve ever met in my life”.  (Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Ed Milliband, David Cameron, John Major, Maggie Thatcher, eat your heart out!) I don’t know about “Meles the Omniscient,” but I have no doubt he was the pick of the litter. Just look around; they are all chasing their tails.

Meles, like Short, was an arrogant man who “thugged” those who opposed or criticized him. He routinely called his opponents “idiots”, “dirty”, “mud dwellers”, “pompous egotists” and “good-for-nothing chaff and husk.” He also called them names that cannot be repeated in polite company. After Meles jailed Birtukan Midekssa, the first woman political party leader in Ethiopian history, he called her a  “chicken” who has “gained weight (while she was in solitary confinement in prison) due to lack of exercise.” He took sadistic pleasure in humiliating and demeaning parliamentarians who challenged him with probing questions or even merely offered an alternative perspective. His put-downs, sarcasm and jibes were so humiliating and eviscerating that few parliamentarians dared to stand up to his bullying. When the European Union Election Observer Group confronted Meles with the truth about his theft of the May 2010 election by 99.6 percent, Meles condemned the entire EU Group for preparing a “trash report that deserves to be thrown in the garbage.” What can I say? Like demigod, like acolyte!

Did Short “defend EITI principles” or was she a lobbyist/agent for the regime in Ethiopia?

Short via Moberg’s reply to Idrissa, Nwadishi and Katende said that she was not being partial to Ethiopia but discharging “her duty to defend [EITI] principles and act in the interest of the EITI” when she wrote her Open Letter. Really?

Was Short “defending EITI principles” or pandering to the regime in Ethiopia when she wrote the following in her Open Letter:

I do not accept that the situation for civil society in Ethiopia is worse than a great many of them.

I must add that I find the discussion on Ethiopia to have been unhelpfully influenced by strong voices from a special interest group with perfectly well-meaning intentions but who have too much of a “north telling the south what to do mindset”.

Rejecting Ethiopia’s application will leave Ethiopian civil society with nowhere to go.

I also believe that we should listen to what strikes me as a clear and united voice of civil society in Ethiopia, rather than opposing voices from the Ethiopian diaspora.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is a strong group of activists who mean well but are quick to pick on some African countries which, whilst far from ideal, are no worse on human rights than many other countries.

There is also a serious problem of double standards. For example, removing the Occupy protesters from outside St Paul’s Cathedral by force in my own country hardly raised a murmur. The existence of Guantanamo and use of torture has not been mentioned in relation to the US application.

If [EITI] it is seen as a tool of campaigners it will lose effectiveness and support.

Fall on the sword for what?

Short has fought tooth and nail for the regime’s admission into EITI.  She proclaimed in her Open Letter that she is passionate in her advocacy for admission of the regime in Ethiopia. I respect anyone who has passion for a cause and fights for it, even if I disagree with them. I admire Short for having the balls to stand up for what she believes in. But I do wonder, really wonder! What the price is for her passion? What is the price for Short to fall on the sword for the thugs in Ethiopia? What is the price of Short’s soul?

Who really cares about EITI?

EITI, CCC, EEITI, whatever! Who cares? Who gives a damn!? You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig. You can put a whole lot of African thugtators in EITI and call them transparent and accountable. At the end of the day, they are still thugtators in designer suits and fancy briefcases.

The suffering, violence and cruelty is going to go on and on in Ethiopia

Short once ruminated, “I think the suffering, violence and cruelty and Guantanamo and the rest is going to go on and on in Iraq.” Well, I feel the same way about Ethiopia. The suffering, violence and cruelty in Ethiopia is going to go on and on. Journalists will be jailed, civil society will be crushed, opposition leaders will be harassed and jailed, dissidents will be kicked around and elections stolen in broad daylight. That will not stop the struggle for peaceful nonviolent change. That will go on and on and on… Ethiopia’s young daughters and sons will rise up and shout out,

We can’t take it anymore! We are hungry! We need freedom! We need freedom! Free Eskinder! Free Andualem!  Free Abubaker! Free Reeyot! Free political prisoners! We need justice! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Don’t divide us! Ethiopia is One! One Ethiopia! We can’t take it anymore! We are hungry…”

Just as Short holds American presidents responsible for the suffering, violence and cruelty in Guantanamo and Iraq, I hold Short responsible as an accessory after the fact for the  decimation of civil society in Ethiopia.

Clare  Short, “J’Accuse…!”

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.” Emile Zola

Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam teaches political science at California State University, San Bernardino and is a practicing defense lawyer.

Letter to My Son – By Eskinder Nega

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by Eskinder Nega
Kaliti Prison, Addis Ababa

The mistakes of my life. Ah! I could go on and on and on about them. (Warning, I am aiming for your sympathy.) There are the missed opportunities. (God is generous, I squandered them all, literally.) There are the wrong choices (Hey there is at least the adrenaline rush that comes with every wrong move.) There is the conceited self-absorption (Obviously more and more as I rush through middle age.) There is the lack of direction (Bitter to admit, but true.) There is the incapacitating self-doubt. (Question: are you teary-eyed or disgusted?)

But here is what my strategy is not: a crafty debasement of expectation at the outset, so that by the end the balance of sympathy could sway no way but in my favor. I simply hanker honesty.

Indeed, I too yearn to be a hero in my son’s eye. Somehow privy to the notion that a male child’s first hero is the father, I dream to play the role. That this phase of the child is posed to pass quickly matters not an iota to me. I insist on my 15 minutes of fame. But I am also interested in the most enduring kind of appraisal, that of respect. While the former, unexplored adoration, is innate in every child, the latter, empathy and regard of the person, is the result of a complex process. And it has to be earned. Whether I merit this honor should be clear by the end of this letter.

I have reluctantly become an absent father because I ache for what the French in the late 18th century expressed in three simple words: liberté, egalité, fraternité. Before the advent of my son in my life, I was a nonchalant prisoner of conscience on at least seven occasions. The blithe was hardly unnoticed by my incarcerators.

It troubled them greatly because they did not know how to defeat it. Tyranny is a function of fear: the terror of state violence, the menace of imprisonment, the dread of imposed penury. None of these, however, could be applied against an entire population. But strike only against a handful and copious number of peoples are hypnotized into inaction. Our collective dignity, as the world’s oldest black nation, demands that this spell be broken irrevocably.

No myth has had wider resonance than the supposed gulf in history, lifestyle, psychology and hence politics between nations. Indeed the measure of progress has trended at varying pace for disparate peoples. But between antiquity and the 16th century, when the first flicker of scientific revolution appeared with the works of Copernicus in astronomy, the rift between the most advanced and the primal was inconsequential. It took two more centuries, until the invention of the steam engine in 1789 in Britain, before science commenced to transform society. Up to this time, the structural gap between Europe, the most advanced, and Africa, perhaps the least developed, was no more dramatic than the cleavage between rural and urban Europe itself. Only in the last 100-150 years was there a recognizable paradigm shift, with rural Europe finally overtaken by the rise of cities.

No country save the British, with their Magna Carta in 1215 and bill of rights in 1689, could claim centuries old evolution of democratic institutions. The rest of the world plunged haphazardly and unceremoniously into an unexplored world of democratic reconfiguration. The trail blazer, revolutionary France, in 1789, did not seek space for evolution to abscond from the bosom of one of Europe’s most strident monarchy to the enduringly seminal rights of men men and citizen; which enshrined not merely for France but for all humanity the principle of a government constrained by law. No less significantly France and many parts of Western Europe were democratic well before a sizable middle class emerged. The same holds for Britain. The U.S., too, was not only securely democratic in the early 19th century, but was also a nation with an overwhelmingly rural citizenry.

But fast forward to the mid-20th century and democratic countries were still far from the norm. It took a world war between 1939 and 1945 for democracy to reverse catastrophic slide and settle for an uneasy parity with ascending totalitarianism in Europe. An additional four-decades long cold war, spanning 1945 to 1990, was needed to decide the winner convincingly. Only then did democracy attain momentum.

Despite the popular convention mischievously amplified by most autocrats, to deter demands for rights, no people or country could plausibly claim an extended tradition of democracy. Unless, that is, the last 200 years of humanity’s 5,000 years of communal history is deemed as elongated.

And it seems Africa has finally moved to aptly realign with history. The tempo is to boldly march the French way. The result is breathtaking. Over two decades, the period between the collapse of Communisim, in 1989, to the end of the first decade of the new millennium, Africa was transfigured from a repository of fatuous dictators to a stronghold of more democracies than Asia, the continent with the fastest growing middle class in history. How Ethiopia lagged in this transformative saga of African renaissance and reformation accounts for my imprisonment, cruelly and yet impersonally imperiling my prized duty as a father.

My parents brief matrimony was an early causalty of the intractable tension between tradition and modernity in post-liberation Ethiopia. Gruesome though the Italian occupation was, in the late 1930s, it tore down a smug culture of complacency. The need to modernize, to embrace the know-how of the outside world, was no more in doubt. The ease with which the nation had fallen to fascist Italy was proof beyond reproach. That my parents, both hailing from profoundly conservative Orthodox families, who traditionally equated modern education with Catholicism, were allowed to attend school is testimony of how deep feelings run.

Modern Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, idealizes, by way of his still ongoing great marriage debate, the kind of union my parents forged. Highly intelligent, both had won super-competitive scholarships to do tertiary studies in American universities. Father was in New Jersey at Rutgers University for six years. Mother’s tenure at the American University of Beirut, the jewel of higher education in the Middle East, was shorter, having pursued post-graduate studies for a year. Both returned home full of energy, with [a] plethora of bright ideas, and a healthy dose of the sanguine optimism of the inexperienced.

Like many of htier contemporaries, their rise was swift, easy and assimilated in style. Both were successful, upwardly mobile, and still hungry for more when they met. The only predicament was in how they personally embraced modernity, an allegory of the dilemma at the national level.

To his credit father did not yield to the sentiment which Lee Kuan Yew ruefully laments about: the compulsion of educated young men to marry down. In mother he met a remarkably rare Ethiopian woman: financially independent, educated, emotionally secure as a single woman, and no less ambitious than himself. But unlike many of his peers he did not dive for cover. He was in fact a persistent pursuer, her repeated protestation notwithstanding. She was not particularly wary of him, rather she was circumspect of her odds in a primeval society. But in the end, I presume, his charm, and certainly family pressure, inexorably prevailed. A lavish wedding sealed the pact.

Unlike virtually all the women of her generation, education had emancipated mother not only financially, but crucially, emotionally. Reversal of either was unsavory, to be fended off at any cost. She was in a sense a feminist, absent the creed. There was little of the past she cared for. To exemplify her feelings, she started smoking, though discretely. Had he known, her devoutly religious father would have simply died of grief. Neither, as far as I could discern, did father. He would have certainly balked at the prospect of a smoking wife. Even if he had wanted to oblige her, society, his friends and kin would have censured him. But every puff was an exhilarating expression of freedom for her. Freedom not from want, but the strictures imposed by tradition. When she finally stopped, after her divorce, it was for my sake. I was trying to emulate the only parent I knew. And by this time she also had a more serious diversion to engage her energy; the quest, unprecedented in Ethiopia, to prove that there can be a better life for a single woman after a divorce. Her vindication came, in little over five years, by way of the most successful clinic in the country, which she owned and managed. Father, awed and embarrassed, could only watch from the sidelines. A rebellious wife customarily returned to her husband chastened and humbled.

To all appearances, father was the quintessential modern man. He was moderately liberal, he lived in the right neighborhood, he dressed fashionably, his English was faultless, and until the rise of communism drove the latest cars. And he had money. But this was only the façade. His acquiescence to modernity extended only slightly beyond these parameters. The nucleus of the values he internalized from society, which were in need of metamorphosis to complement his public image, remained intact.

In this sense his profiles outlines the paradox that is the modern Ethiopian intellectual. There is the fixation with the façade of modernity—the technology, the infrastructure, the economy, the lifestyl. But there is also the corresponding resistance to its essential modus operandi—a radically transformed worldview. This means redefined relationships between husband and wife; parents and children; individual and society; the state and its citizens.

To mother, on the other hand, most established values were anachronistic. She had no compunction discarding them. In their place, a singular fixation with independence took hold. Society was, of course, less than ready to accommodate her. Though unexpressed, her husband had expected blunting of the fiery spirit, a gradual but inevitable acceptance of a place in life as a stay-at-home-mom. She thought otherwise. Forsaking a secure and well-paying job, when females with jobs were a rarity, for a precarious entrepreneurial venture was inexplicable. Both departures from convention were broadly misread as expressions of aggressive disposition. Few were able to see an indomitable spirit of individualism that make a modern society possible. This discord between a cumbersome past and a future grappling to unfold is also at the core of our national dispute over democracy.

A coarse encounter between the novel and the archaic is as old as history itself. The anecdotal evidence is rarely for the new to relinquish to the old. After all, women no[w] live in a far more liberate milieu than the yesteryears when few brave souls like mother were challenging convention.

Our modern politics has its genesis in a coup attempt in 1960. Though overwhelmed with relative ease, it left a lasting imprint on history by precipitating the rise of a fiery student movement, a precursor to the nation’s major political parties. Inspired by Egypt’s much romanticized coup, in 1952, which propelled young left-leaning revolutionary officers to power, Ethiopia’s was the first shot by soldiers to seize state power in black Africa. But while Egypt’s was conscientiously planned and executed to eschew violence, Ethiopia’s was marred by wanton carnage. Thus the debut of modern Ethiopian politics shadowed by unbridled violence. Fifty years later, the menace of brute force still lies at the heart of politics.

By the reckoning of the imperial government, father, like many of the intelligentsia, harbored suspect reformist sentiments. Though rewarded with high positions at an early age, there was tension in his relationship with the government. But it was tension devoid of danger for both sides. For the government, father and many of the young Turks, as they were propitiously called by some, posed no danger of subversion. They were impatient for hasty reform from inside, not calamitous revolution from outside. Even if the young Turks had their way, the result would be far less than catastrophic, with some measure of discomfort, they were tolerated. And indeed no sedition was ever intended by the young Turks. All they wanted was to upgrade, not change, the software. This somewhat cozy but uneasy bond between government and intelligentsia was upstaged the day university students flooded the streets in support of the coup attempt.

In 1960, the year of the coup attempt, Ethiopia’s elite center of learning was cloistered in a lone university college. A full-fledged university had yet to be realized. This was almost a generation after liberation from the Italians. In about the same interval, war-ravaged Germany and Japan had not only reconstructed but were on the verge of crossing new economic frontiers. Ethiopia’s shortcoming was manifestly evident. And finally a new generation scandalized by the inertia, indolence, stoicism and cynicism had risen. It was palpably time for change.

The 1960s could be credibly dubbed as the decade of student movements. But at its dawn, students nurtured no greater ambition than to be part of the global post-war economic boom. The revered genre of the silent, strong male, which dominated the 1950s, was still paramount. By the mid-1960s, Vietnam radicalized American youth, primarily on its colleges and universities. In France it was another war, Algeria, that was the impetus for campus militancy. In Iran and Europe [think he meant Ethiopia] it was a coup, successful in the case of the former, [a] debacle in the latter. The quartet gave the world the most animated students in history. By the mid-1970s, however, the Americans and French had fizzled out. The Ethiopians and Iranians peaked in the late 1970s, and quietly faded into oblivion in the early 1980s.

But their fleeting existence notwithstanding they left behind powerful legacies. The backlash against the counter-culture (contempt for authority and tradition) the students triggered in the US made the seminal presidencies of Nixon and Reagan possible. It took the coalition forged by Obama to win a second term to alter the dynamics of American politics. At their peak, Iranian students mesmerized the world by storming the US embassy in Tehran and humiliating a proud superpower. In less than a decade and a half, Ethiopian students inspired a nation to uproot a monarchy that had preserved for a millennium.

Though they were from four far-flung continents, had distinct histories, and promoted radically different visions, the students shared a common denominator: disdain for the status-quo. To the Americans no one older than 30 was trustworthy. As a way to unshackle tradition, they attacked its prudish sexual mores. The French were unduly agitated against their government, and vented their anger on the streets of Paris with passion unseen since the storming of the Bastille. After rejecting the modernizing pretensions of their foreign-tainted monarch, Iranian students yearned for the purity of a lost age. To the Ethiopian students, groomed by rote learning rather than critical thinking, Marxism became the Holy Grail, the panacea to all the nation’s ills.

But a pivotal divide also separated them. The Americans and the French lived in free societies. There were adept political parties, vibrant free press, useful civic organizations, multitude of professional and trade unions to channel grievances and represent interests. None of these were about to be supplanted by students. The Ethiopians and Iranians lived in tired monarchies. There were no conduits for dissent. Here was an opening for transformative impact.

Unlike the Japanese and the Chinese after the madness of the Cultural Revolution, Ethiopian students never really made the crucial connection between the indigenization of science and development. They saw national redemption primarily in the social sciences, and many of the best students flocked to them in droves despite steady underperformance on standardized reading and comprehension tests. To father and his generation, the monarchy was sacrosanct. Very few of them flirted with republicanism. Their ideal was a British monarchy. To the students who were embittered and abruptly radicalized by the events of 1960, the monarchy, and the US, which was implicated in the reversal of the coup attempt, became loathed icons. Embracing socialism seemed only logical and inevitable. And here is where an academic culture chronically short on critical thinking was to have detrimental effect. Whereas in the U.S. and France deep scholarly foundations mitigated against the swamping of the student majority by extremism, in Ethiopia and Iran intellectual buffers against infantile radicalization were ominously absent. But while Iranian students rallied around grassroot sentiments for religious chastity and nationalism, only Ethiopian students militated against all things aboriniginal. Nothing was sacred to them. The emperor was lampooned. Religion was rejected. Culture was mocked. Tradition was attacked. History was disputed. Ethnicity was politicized. It was a tsunami at full thrust against all things established. A good measure of excitement was the intriguing possibility of engineering society from scratch.

But rejection is virtually a carefree venture. There is little strenuous intellectual effort involved. The demanding undertaking lies in the pursuit and nourishment of an alternative consensus. Ultimately, this is where the students failed calamitously. Singularly transfixed with rebellion, and only perfunctorily with its aftermath, they were governed by no moral codes, were disciplined by no hierarchy, and were direly lacking sense of proportion to temper emotions. In this sense, they had no analogue in the Americans or the French. Nor indeed in the Iranians. The Americans and the French were ultimately anchored by nationalism and ingrained identity. The Iranians of course had religion. Having rejected both nationalism and religion, Ethiopian students had nothing durably satiating to replace them with. This was the pristine environment in which militancy thrived. Extremism thus became not a mere idiosyncrasy, but rather the structural building block of the movement. Tragically, what the Ethiopians radicalized was really nothing more than nihilism. The mania was to tear down an existing order. In the end, after the collapse of the imperial order, only a small minority, by now metamorphasized into armed insurgents, had the energy to tread o. The majority was too exhausted to continue, opting for exile and a well-earned rest in the West.

Of [A] multitude of vague memories from my distant childhood, the sense of dread that permanently enveloped my grandmother’s home, where my mother and I lived intermittently after the divorce, still lingers with me. Years later, in the 1990s, I was to learn, rather to my shock, ours was only one of a handful of families in the neighborhood that mourned the fall of Haile Selassie, the diminutive king who had held sway over the nation for over half a century. Initially I thought it was loss of privilege that explained our anomalous. But I know now there was more.

If one word was to render the spirit of the revolution, it would certainly be equality. An inordinate passion for equality suddenly bewitched the public—what in theory could only have meant equality of opportunity was in practice subverted to imply equality of merit. Not even the elderly, the repository of wisdom in traditional thinking, were to be deferred to anymore. The nation’s best and brightest, whose income, lifestyle and manners marked them from the majority, became more subjects of derision than role models. They were no more in vogue. It was time to celebrate mediocrity, to artificially elevate it to a higher podium. This atmosphere endured, with disastrous consequences for the entire reign of the military dictatorship, the guardian of the revolution and still influences the present. It is this pauperization of value that lies at the provenance o fthe national malaise that has numbed the intellectual elite.

To be fair, many nations, including the meritocratic U.S., where guilt-ridden 2008 (2012?) presidential candidate Mitt Romney was bullied for his wealth, occasionally toy with debased populism, but rarely has it persisted with the kind of intensity evident in Ethiopia. It was this slide to debauched populism that distressed grandmother’s household. It was a prescient reserve that anticipated an impending moral morass.

The ultimate failure of the military dictatorship, including its gross human rights violations, is the failure of Communism. But even within the narrow constraints of communism, more was possible. The Soviets failed broadly but compensated with a world-class military-industrial complex. Nothing works in Cuba except health services, one of the best in Latin America. Mao’s China at least liberated a billion plus mass of humanity from worry about its quotidian meals. Ditto for many Communist countries, where a lone bright spot attested to the restrained potential of an oppressed people. But because the principal consensus in post-revolutionary Ethiopia had been an unremitting joy derived from the leveling of society, a culture against exceptionalism gained traction. Blending became the default modus operandi both at the individual and group levels. No distinction was made between superiority stemming from privilege and superiority attained by merit. For a government fighting multiple insurgencies, this was a fatal shortcoming. Unable to build a professional army based on merit, it eventually succumbed not to superior force but to weaker adversaries who had assembled meritocratic fighting machines. It took seventeen years, but there was no avoiding it: grandmother was vindicated. And she lived to see it all. God bless her soul.

Sadly, the implosion of the military dictatorship did not necessarily entail reorientation of national disposition. On the contrary, unlike their less fortunate, American, French and Iranian brethren, Ethiopian students, untempered by outside influence, ascended to power in 1991 and had their nation at their complete mercy. And they did what was unthinkable to everyone but the puritan nihilist: facilitated—nay, promoted—the secession of Eritrea, the heartland of historical Ethiopia. Whether the nation will survive the shock that ensued is still an open question.

But while this is where we are, our future is not predestined. The future is malleable, at least in its mid to long-term facets. This is God’s way of internalizing hope into our existence. And best of all, the age of the students is fading. Consider recent events.

Even in sane democracies, the death of a nation’s leader can be the slow motion drama that it customarily is in autocracies. In contentedly democratic Ghana, where the specter of succession no more bodes the possibility of bloodletting, the president’s ill-health was the state’s most guarded secret. When John Atta Mills finally spoke of his illness, it was to insist of a successful cure. In the spirit of the famous adage, he wanted a return to normalcy. What he lacked, though, was an obliging public. This is Ghana, after all. Cynicism, one could argue plausibly, is a national brand. But in the end, even his deputy and successor, John Mahama, could not help but be caught unawares by his boss’s abrupt transition.

In increasingly Orwellian Ethiopia, the mere mention of the leader’s ailment required a radical departure from an entrenched—and prized—ethos of opacity. The enduringly hapless Ethiopian public does not expect to be told the truth by its government. The absence, not the histrionics itself, would have surprised Ethiopians. Thus only the hopelessly guileless were surprised by the delayed news of the leader’s death.

The paranoia is hardly misplaced. The death of despots has altered the course of national histories scores of times, and sometimes even world history.

One of the greatest empires in world history, that of Alexander the Great, simply collapsed with news of his early death; clearing the path for the rise of the Romans. The inopportune death of Odedai Khan saved Europe from an unstoppable Mongolian invading army in 1241. Had the Mongolians overrun Europe as they did China, world history would have changed beyond recognition. Along with the body of Oliver Cromwell was buried the political prospect of republicanism in 17th century England. Ominously, cautionary tales from local history are hardly in want. The legacies of Ethiopia’s last four kings, stretching from mid-19th century to mid-20th century, have all been marred by lack of continuity. And now there is the instinctive inkling by Ethiopia’s ruling party that history is about to repeat itself. But this time, absence of an enduring legacy awaits not merely a leader or party but an entire generation, the spirited students of the 1960s. Theirs will mostly be a legacy of infamy. To paraphrase Reagan, a legacy meant for the trash bin of history.

Life is tragically short. But only when challenged by a mid-life crisis, or when shock is triggered by illness or accident, does existence’s fleeting status dominate consciousness. How people react to the challenge is a measure of character. The broad motions people go through, however, are well established. There is the initial dazed realization of how disloyally momentary life is, then a reaction abounds, and finally, either stoically or grudgingly, acceptance of the inevitable assumes primacy. Prison has been the triggering element for me. And however exalted, the cause of justice is that has landed me here. I miss you and your mother terribly. The pain is almost physical. But in this plight of our family is embedded hope of a long suffering people. There is no greater honor. We must bear any pain, travel any distance, climb any mountain, cross any ocean to complete this journey to freedom. Anything less is impoverishment of our soul. God bless you, my son. You will always be in my prayers.

Eskinder Nega
Kaliti Prison

In the name of democracy, landgrab and genocide in Ethiopia

By Nebiyou Alemayehu & Natnael kabtimer (oslo) 

On 6th March 2014 Frontline club Oslo organized an event in collaboration with NEW FRONTIERS entitled “In the Name of Democracy: Land Grabbing and Genocide in Ethiopia” at Filmen Hus Oslo. As it is known Norway is the only Western country that has signed a bilateral agreement with the Ethiopian intelligence service facilitating forced return of refugees, even if the Ethiopian dictatorial government always receives strong international criticism for its gross human rights violations. In the event, four different individuals from similar and different point of view about Ethiopia and Ethiopians have been invited to present their standpoint about the current Ethiopian regime.
Abdullahi Hussein was the president’s adviser and head of the Ogaden TV channel Cakaara News. He had responded to the abuses and atrocities against civilians and for a few years he copied the president’s secret video files. Files included the internal meetings where individual officers and soldiers in the regional militia testify arbitrary arrests, torture, murder, extortion and rape. He presented unique video documentation revealing the dictatorship’s harsh treatment of its opposition, which he has smuggled out of the government and is taking to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In general he has presented about the horrific circumstances in the Ogaden region, the handling of the evidence, and the process towards the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The other presenter was Mr Obang Metho. He is a human rights activist who has tirelessly advocated for human rights, justice, freedom and environment, enhanced accountability in politics and peace in Africa for over 10 years. He has briefed leaders and officials at United Nations, the European Parliament, the US Department of State, the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the World Bank and the Council for Foreign Relations, amongst others. From Norway, Artist Solveig Syversen, who works with Ethiopian refugee status in Norway, has presented her work-in-progress documentary about the Norwegian-Ethiopian agreement of returning refugees.

The fourth person who presented his opinion about the current Ethiopian regime was, One Norwegian researcher from Bergen . His presentation was different from the other three in many ways and he seems to have a close relationship with the current Ethiopian regime. He presented verbal presentation in favor of the current Ethiopian regime specifically about the development of Ethiopia by referring the regime’s problems presented by Mr Hussien and Mr Metho as an “Exception”. His whole presentation has created great deal of disappointment in the audiences. He left at the middle of the event by avoiding questions from audiences.