NOVANEWS
By Graham Peebles
Graham Peebles looks at how the mixed motives for the aid given by Western donor countries to Ethiopia mean that these countries – in effect, US, British and other European taxpayers – are funding a deeply repressive and violent regime that uses aid as a political weapon to control the population, punish dissent and undermine political opponents.
An ideological poison is polluting all life within Ethiopia, flowing into every area of civil society. Local governance, urban and rural neighbourhoods, farming, education and the judiciary all are washed in “revolutionary democracy”, the doctrine of the ruling party. Human Rights Watch (HRW), in its detailed report “Development without Freedom” (DWF), quotes Ethiopia’s prime minister for the last 20 years, Meles Zenawi, explaining that
when revolutionary democracy permeates the entire society, individuals will start to think alike and all persons will cease having their own independent outlook. In this order, individual thinking becomes simply part of collective thinking because the individual will not be in a position to reflect on concepts that have not been prescribed by revolutionary democracy.
A society of automatons is the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) vision for the country, a Borg Collective in the Horn of Africa – men women and children of the 70 or so tribal groups of Ethiopia all dancing to one repressive tune sung by the ruling EPRDF.
Dollars and nonsense
Ethiopia receives around 3 billion US dollars in long-term development aid each year (second only to Indonesia); this is more than a third of the country’s total annual budget. Funds and resources donated to support the needy are being used by the Meles Zenawi regime as a means of manipulating the Ethiopian people along partisan ideological lines. As HRW states in its DWF report, “the Ethiopian government is using development aid as a tool of political repression by conditioning access to essential government services on support for the ruling party.”
The EPRDF has complete control of funds donated to Ethiopia by the Development Assistance Group (DAG), a consortium of the main donors, including the World Bank, the USA, the European Commission and Britain. The government holds the purse strings to every dollar and cent allocated for the four major areas of development work: Protection of Basic Services (PBS), the Productive Safety Net Programme, Public Sector Capacity Building and the General Education Quality Improvement.
The largest single donor is the USA, which in 2011, according to US state department figures, “provided 847 million dollars in assistance, including more than 323 million dollars in food aid”. The European Commission gives 400 million euros and Britain, via the Department for International Development (DFID), has committed GBP 331million (516 million dollars) per year until 2015. British taxpayers’ pounds, according to DFID, “will meet the needs of the very poorest and support proven, results-driven programmes that will bring healthcare, education and water to millions of people”. Well intentioned perhaps, but in attempting to “meet the needs of the very poorest”, as DFID claim, HRW research found that all international development aid “flows through, and directly supports, a virtual one-party state with a deplorable human rights record, [whose] practices include jailing and silencing critics and media, enacting laws to undermine human rights activity, and hobbling the political opposition”. These facts are well known to donors, who are content, it seems, to allow – indeed support – the politicization of aid, human rights violations and the widespread suppression of the people, who are forced to live in an ideological straightjacket fastened tight by agents of the Meles government, at national, regional and community level.
Conditional support
The EPRDF controls all areas of government and civil society in Ethiopia, from the judiciary to the classroom, the media to the farm, telecommunication and the banks. Its reach into urban neighbourhoods and rural communities was greatly increased before the 2008 elections, when the number of seats in the districts (woreda) and neighbourhoods (kebele) were expanded from 15 to 300. Only the EPRDF was able to field candidates in all councils and, with opposition parties largely boycotting the unfair elections, the EPRDF “won” over 99.9 per cent of the seats, meaning, as HRW states, “the ruling party had total control of the rural majority of the Ethiopian population”.
Through the regional offices of the woreda and kebele the government controls ordinary rural and urban Ethiopians – it is here that the administration of daily life takes place. Local offices approve or reject applications from farmers for seeds and fertilizer, decide on micro credit support, distribute food to the needy (10 – 20 million rely on food aid), allocate education and employment opportunities and issue business permits and identity cards. The result, as HRW states, is that “state/party officials have significant influence over the livelihoods of citizens”. An understatement – in fact, they govern all aspects of life, within the city or the village, for the teacher or the judge, the women seeking to start a small business or the mother desperate to feed her family. All are at the mercy of government officials.
Emergency food relief is given as part of the PBS programme, a highly expensive and complex development scheme which assigns around 1 billion dollars a year. As HRW reports, in a “block grant to the federal government” they disperse the funds through their kebele and woreda offices. Distribution is based not on need, but on political association: support the opposition groups in Ethiopia and you will find your name scratched from the food aid list and go hungry. According to HRW, “the partisan allocation of food aid, [is] a problem that has been anecdotally reported in many areas and over many years in Ethiopia, especially in recent years in Somali region”. Such political discrimination of food aid distribution is not only immoral; it is in violation of international law. Farmers who express dissent towards the government have the agricultural seeds and fertilizer needed to grow crops for their family and community withheld, voice concern over local governance as a teacher and find your career destroyed and your job taken away. HRW found that “the EPRDF controls every woreda in the country, and can discriminate against any household orkebele within these administrative areas”. Given such repressive illegal actions, it is inexplicable that the DFID, in its Plan For Ethiopia (PFE), state the government shows “a strong commitment to fight corruption”. What the EPRDF shows is a strong commitment to suppress dissent, silence all critical voices and control the people utterly.
Big Ethiopian brother
Ethiopia is a one party state, with no freedom of speech, or assembly nor freedom of the media and where opposition forces critical of the government are silenced in the most brutal fashion. It is puzzling then, that the DFID’s Plan for Ethiopia states that “Ethiopia has also made some progress towards establishing a functioning democracy”. It is certainly not an image of democracy recognizable to anyone who holds human rights and freedom of expression central to such an ideal, and it is contradicted by USAID’s statement, in its Strategy Plan for Ethiopia, where it acknowledges the “13 million-plus dollars that USAID/Ethiopia invested between 2006 and 2010 specifically to promote democratic transition produced little in the way of tangible results, and specific programmes have been the subject of stalling and even outright hostility.” The DFID, however, goes on to compound the misrepresentation by asserting that “Ethiopia has achieved a strong degree of political stability through decentralized regional government”. If by “stability” the DFID means lack of popular resistance to imposed governance, through the fearful subjugation of the people, then yes this the EPRDF has succeeded in doing.
Opposition to the government is not tolerated, nor is there decentralized governance. As Thomas Staal, USAID Mission Director to Ethiopia, recently stated, “the [Ethiopian] government wants to be able to control political space very carefully”. The kebele, woreda and sub-kebeles are extensions of central government, carrying out the divisive partisan policies of the EPRDF. The sole expressions of democratic principles in Ethiopia are those found within constitutional articles, which sit neatly filed upon ministerial shelves, collecting dust. As HRW makes clear, “democracy [is] a hollow concept in a country steered by a powerful party-driven government in which the distinction between party and state is almost impossible to define”. Moreover, in its report “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure: Violations of Freedom of Expression and Association in Ethiopia”, HRW echoes USAID’s comment, observing that “despite the lip service given to democracy and human rights, respect for core civil and political rights such as freedom of expression and association in Ethiopia is deteriorating”. DFID officials, it seems, have been duped by a plethora of conformist federal laws and signatures to multiple international treaties into accepting the word of a government that terrifies its people and tramples on international human rights law.
Partisan monitoring
Not only are all key development programmes implemented by the EPRDF, but monitoring is also undertaken in partnership with government agencies. Objective, accurate monitoring is essential in determining the effectiveness of development programmes. But it is difficult to see how unbiased data can be collected under such highly restrictive circumstances. HRW makes the point that “donors should recognize that Ethiopia’s own accountability systems are moribund, and that the principal barrier to detecting distortion is the Ethiopian government”. Their view that independent monitoring “is needed (without the participation of the Ethiopian government)” is clearly correct and is the minimum donors should insist on.
In its wisdom, however, the DFID, while recognizing the importance of monitoring, appears happy to rely on the Ethiopian government, in which it naively invests such trust. It plans to “continue to monitor progress using national data drawn from administrative and survey sources”, i.e. the Ethiopian government. This demonstration of neglect by the DFID is an abdication of duty not only to British taxpayers, but also to the people of Ethiopia, who the EPRDF, with the help of international donors, continue to suppress and intimidate. The Ethiopian government cannot and should not be trusted. As the deputy director of HRW, Jan Egeland, makes clear in an open letter to Britain’s secretary of state for international development, Andrew Mitchell, “the Ethiopian government is extremely resistant to scrutiny” and “the British government and other donors to Ethiopia should not allow the Ethiopian government to dictate the terms on which British public money is monitored, and every effort should be made to prevent British development aid from strengthening authoritarian rule and repression”.
Ideological imposition
At the core of the EPRDF’s suppression and disregard for human rights is an ideological obsession – revolutionary democracy. Evangelical party political indoctrination takes place in schools, teacher training institutions, the civil service and the judiciary. This is contrary to the Ethiopian constitution and federal laws, which are composed to conform to universal legal standards and conveniently cited by politician and diplomats but, ignored and un-enforced, mean nothing to the people.
School children above grade 10 (aged 15/16 years) are required to attend training sessions in the party ideology, policies on economic development, land sales and education. Admission to university is implicitly dependent upon membership of the party. HRW found that “students were under the impression that they needed party membership cards to gain admission to university”. The EPRDF stamp is also required to secure government jobs after graduation. All teachers, civil servants and judges are under pressure to tow the party line, to join the EPRDF and follow its doctrine. Failure to do so would impact on employment and career prospects. Ethiopia’s largest donor, the USA, in the State Department human rights country report for 2011, notes:
Students in schools and universities were indoctrinated in the core precepts of the ruling EPDRF party’s concept of “revolutionary democracy … the ruling party “stacks” student enrolment at Addis Ababa University… Authorities did not permit teachers at any level to deviate from official lesson plans and actively prohibited partisan political activity and association of any kind.
Educational brainwashing of course contravenes the Ethiopian constitution, which clearly states in Article 90/2 that “Education shall be provided in a manner that is free from any religious influence, political partisanship or cultural prejudice”. Words, righteous and legally binding, are of no concern to Meles, his ministers, foreign diplomats and the cadres or spies who patrol the city neighbourhoods, university campus and civil service offices, and infiltrate the villages and towns of rural Ethiopia, intimidating and blackmailing the people. International donors, however, should be deeply concerned and take urgent actions to stop such violations of national and international law and the politicization of aid distribution, including emergency food relief.
Mixed motives distorted action
The reasons given by Western governments for providing development aid to Ethiopia are both humanitarian and strategic. In its country plan, USAID calls Ethiopia “the most strategically important partner in the region”, and the DFID states that “Ethiopia matters to the UK for a range of development, foreign policy and security reasons”.
Regional stability and the “fight against terrorism” are cited as justifications for continuing to support the EPRDF, in spite of extensive human rights abuses, the partisan distribution of aid and state terrorism. In fact, far from bringing stability to the area, the Meles regime is a cause of instability, a point made clear by Anna Gomez who says that “the Al-Shabab militia [Islamist group in Somalia] have only grown stronger and survival has been made more difficult since Ethiopian troops invaded in 2006, at the behest of George W. Bush”.
With conflicting interests, some might say corrupt and corrupting, donor countries find themselves funding a deeply repressive and violent regime, enabling a coordinated policy of ideological indoctrination to take place. As HRW found, “the government has used donor-supported programmes, salaries and training opportunities as political weapons to control the population, punish dissent and undermine political opponents”. Western donors silence and complicity in the face of such violations of international law is, as Anna Gomez rightly says, “letting down all those who fight for justice and democracy and increasing the potential for conflict in Ethiopia and in Africa”.
The politicization and manipulation of aid distribution by the EPRDF violates international law and all standards of moral decency. Those providing aid must take urgent action to ensure this illegal practice comes to an end. Donors are well aware of the human rights abuses taking place, but have turned a blind eye to the repression of civil and political rights and a deaf ear to the cries of the many for justice and freedom. The silence of Western governments amounts to collusion; it is a gross misuse of taxpayers’ money and a betrayal of international human rights laws and the Ethiopian people.
