Ethiopia Opposition Parties Demand Fair Elections

Unified Ethiopian Opposition Demands Fair Elections

By Martha van der Wolf

VOA News

ADDIS ABABA — Thirty-four Ethiopian opposition parties have signed a petition to demand the elections next April - on the district, regional and city levels - be free and fair.
Opposition parties were invited by the Election Board last week to discuss the schedule of the polls. When the parties asked to discuss irregularities that occurred during previous elections, the meeting was adjourned.

Alessa Mengesha, chairman of the Gedeo People’s Democratic Organization opposition party, says several issues need to be discussed in depth.

“We have seen elections in Ethiopia in the past couple of years and decades, and those elections have always been marked by irregularities. And those irregularities include irregularities during voting registration, irregularities during election campaigns, irregularities during vote-counting and even post-election irregularities," he said. "We have witnessed all those.”
Thirty-four of Ethiopia's 75 opposition parties have signed a petition demanding the next vote be free and fair.
The petition lays out 18 points of how the Election Board can ensure a better process. Among other things, the parties say they want to be involved in the election administration, and request equal access to government media.

Asrat Tassie, secretary-general of the Unity for Democracy and Justice party, the only opposition party that holds a seat in parliament, says it is very important that the opposition can freely name and put in place their own election observers.
“A candidate has its own observers. So what happens is they ask the names of those observers 10 days before the election. So as soon as the election board receives the names of those observers, the government harasses them," he said. "Some will be arrested; some will be chased out of the town and so on. So we don’t want to give them the names of our observers.”
European Union observers said the previous election in 2010 fell short of international standards. They said resources of the state were used to support the campaign of ruling party EPRDF, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The ruling party and its allies won all but one seat in the 546-member parliament.

The elections of 2005 resulted in mass demonstrations against the government. Nearly 200 people were killed in election-related violence, and dozens of people, including prominent opposition leaders, are still imprisoned.

The Election Board said it has received the opposition parties' petition but needs more time to respond to the demands

Swedish journalists tell of time in Ethiopia jail

Swedish journalists Johan Persson and Martin Schibbye have been speaking to the BBC about their time in prison in Ethiopia. They were recently freed after serving more than 400 days of an 11-year sentence. The pair were found guilty of entering the country illegally and supporting a rebel group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). Their lengthy jail terms put the treatment of journalists in Ethiopia under the international spotlight. Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson were captured along with ONLF rebels in June 2011. They maintained that they were only doing their jobs, and human rights group Amnesty International said the journalists had been prosecuted for doing "legitimate work". But Ethiopian government spokesman Bereket Simon previously defended the decision to jail the pair, saying the journalists were caught "red handed" co-operating with "terrorist organisations". Former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi reportedly pardoned the journalists before his death in August, leading to their release.

Ethiopia's prime minister: The man who tried to make dictatorship acceptable

Who exactly was he? As leader of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, an ethnic militia from the country’s north, he presented himself to his countrymen as a severe, ruthless revolutionary; yet Westerners who spoke to him in his mountain hideouts found a clever, understated man who laid out, in precise English, plans to reform a feudal state. In 1991, after the fall of the last Derg leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the 36-year-old Mr Meles (pictured above) took power, becoming Africa’s youngest leader. He had moral authority as a survivor of various famines. Western governments and publics, who became aware of Ethiopian hunger through the Band Aid and Live Aid charity concerts, gave freely. Mr Meles was often able to dictate terms under which donors could operate in Ethiopia .

Read Full Story≫

The unfulfilled promise of Meles Zenawi

By Editorial Board, Published: August 22

THE PARADOX OF Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia who died Monday at 57, was that he might have been so much more. A friend who knew him for two decades recalled that he was sharp, articulate, well-read and a patient listener. When President Bill Clinton visited Africa in 1998, he singled out Mr. Meles as an example of the African renaissance, a new generation of leaders. Beyond a doubt, Mr. Meles, who ruled Ethiopia for 21 years, managed to elevate the nation of 75 million people into a regional economic and political power. Although most of the population is still desperately poor, Ethiopia has attracted foreign investment and built a middle class with an authoritarian, state-driven capitalism based loosely on China’s model. Mr. Meles, who quit medical school to join the guerrilla force that toppled the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991, put Ethiopia on the front lines of the war on terrorism, dispatching troops to Somalia against the radical Islamic Courts movement linked to al-Qaeda. He also played a key role in attempting to bridge the gap between warring Sudan and South Sudan, and under his leadership, Ethi­o­pia has been an important U.S. ally, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. But Mr. Meles’s promise as a leader was marred by contempt for the rights of his people. When internal discontent boiled up during the 2005 general election, international observers witnessed extensive vote-rigging. Demonstrations turned violent. The government cracked down on the protests, and at least 193 people were killed, thousands arrested and dozens of opposition activists and journalists arrested and charged with treason. When a friend asked Mr. Meles after these events how he could oversee the shooting of innocent people in the streets, the prime minister shook his head and replied, “There was a serious threat. The system needed to be protected.” Mr. Meles’s desire to protect his political “system” grew more and more repressive. Under the guise of national security, the parliament passed legislation between 2007 and 2009 to stifile dissent. According to Amnesty International, an anti-terrorism law “effectively criminalizes freedom of expression.” The State Department’s 2011 human rights report notes that the government arrested more than 100 people between March and September, including opposition political figures, activists, journalists, and bloggers. For decades, the United States has struggled with valuable allies who were intolerant dictators at home. The Cold War often provided a reason to look the other way. So did the need for oil imports. Over the last decade, the war on terrorism offered a similar pretext. The world is full of trade-offs and tough choices. But the passing of Mr. Meles ought to underscore once again that, no matter what the imperative for embracing a tyrant, it is essential and healthy to declare: Democracy and human rights are universal values, not to be forgotten with the next aid check.

Ethiopian police detain VOA reporter, interpreter

Ethiopian police detain VOA reporter, interpreter Source: CPJ Nairobi, May 25, 2012--Police in Ethiopia today detained Peter Heinlein, a correspondent for the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Voice of America, along with Simegnish Yekoye, a freelance reporter and Heinlein's interpreter, according to Jennifer Janin, the Africa coverage editor for VOA, and local journalists. Heinlein and Simegnish were detained while covering a demonstration of Muslims protesting alleged government interference in religious affairs, Janin said. They were being held late today at Maekelawi federal detention center in the capital, Addis Ababa, local journalists said. In recent weeks, members of Ethiopia's estimated 30 million Muslims have been staging protests on Fridays in Addis Ababa to oppose government policies they say interfere with religious affairs, according to news reports. The protests are a highly sensitive issue for the government, which fears a hardline Islamist influence within the country, according to wire reports. Shimeles Kemal, a spokesman for the Ethiopian government, said that Heinlein was being held because he was allegedly using a diplomatic car and refused to show his press identification, local journalists told CPJ. No official charges have been filed, the journalists said.

Read Full Story≫

United Nations Rights Advocates Criticise Ethiopian Use of Anti-Terror Law

The United Nations criticized the Ethiopian government’s use of an anti-terrorism law to curb freedom of expression by jailing opposition politicians and reporters critical of the state.

In December, two Swedish journalists were sentenced to 11 years each by an Ethiopian court for supporting terrorism after being captured with a banned rebel group. An exiled journalist, two writers, a politician and one other individual, all from Ethiopia, were given terms ranging from 14 years to life last week for plotting terror acts.

Journalists “should not face criminal proceedings for carrying out their legitimate work, let alone be severely punished,” Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, said in a statement posted on the website of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Ethiopia holds journalists accountable when they commit crimes, Communications Minister Bereket Simon said.

“Ethiopia clearly differentiates between freedom of expression and terrorism,” he said in a phone interview from the capital, Addis Ababa, today. “This is simply a very wrong defense of foreign journalists who have been caught red-handed when assisting terrorists.”

Ethiopia was the third-largest recipient of humanitarian aid in the world in 2009, receiving $3.8 billion, according to Global Humanitarian Assistance, the Wells, England-based research group. There are 26 UN agencies operating in Ethiopia, according to the Addis Ababa-based Development Assistance Group, which represents Ethiopia’s donors.

Read Full Story≫