The following points are elements for a discussion of a roadmap, which UEDF, and its member organizations should consider in the upcoming Congress as well as UEDF’s supporters throughout the world should give serious attention.
1) UEDF should continue pushing for the free and fair elections criteria presented to the Meles regime, namely reforming the electoral law, dissolving the partisan National Election Board and replacing it with an independent and all inclusive Election Commission, access to media, funding for elections, International observers and security, guarantee for political forces that have been made illegal by the regime.
2) There should be a concerted, systematic, and highly coordinated lobby campaign on the international community to put pressure on the Meles regime to accept these demands for internationaly accepted standards of free and fair elections to take place in Ethiopia. Promising efforts are underway to that effect here in the United States. Again such ongoing efforts of lobbing the international community should be redoubled and replicated elsewhere with the support of UEDF. Mechanisms for setting up workable structures and bodies to lobby the international community should be an item on the agenda that the Congress should address.
3) UEDF should continue invigorating and revamping its political and organizational activities in the country in a dynamic fashion. The leaders and functionaries of UEDF should go to cities, towns and rural areas of the south, west, east and north of the country, to mobilize and organize the Ethiopian people towards the elections, educating the public about its minimum platform and making the public aware of the conditions needed for free and fair elections as presented to the Meles regime. Recent and very successful UEDF public rallies and public meetings in Addis Ababa and the town of Awassa must be duplicated and made routine part of UEDF’s political and organizational activities. ORGANIZE! MOBILIZE! And ORGANIZE the people for mass actions are still the relevant classical slogans, valid today as yesterday;
4) UEDF should forge an alliance with the major civic organizations inside the country that have a mass base like ETA, EFJA, and other members of the civil society including individuals and members of the academia both inside and outside of Ethiopia. The alliance should have a covenant or an agreement on a roadmap for post EPRDF/TPLF Ethiopia. It should also engage other sectors of the civil society and mobilize them for peaceful struggle–from elections to civil disobedience up to popular uprising.
5). Supporters of UEDF in US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and even Africa need to continue to carry on heavy and vigorous, consistent fundraising, with monthly contributions, and among other things, to open offices in all the regions and woredas to pay for full time activists and organizers who can go to the valley and fields throughout the country in order to organize the rural majority as well as those in the towns and cities. Ethiopians in the Diaspora should come up with mechanisms at local, state, national, and regional levels to bombard the international community with our demands for free and fair elections. Donor countries, international organizations, and other relevant entities of the Western countries should be made to listen and heed our demand to bear their weight on Meles regime to accept the conditions put forth by UEDF for free and fair elections to take place in Ethiopia. Only such an organized and dynamic route would have the maximum impact in order to affect the desired result of heeding to our calls by the international community to act and act without delay.
6). If the Meles regime does not fulfill the conditions for free and fair elections as presented to it by UEDF, then UEDF and all other oppositions organizations must boycott the 2005 elections. The next move should be mobilizing the Ethiopian people for popular uprising similar to those expressions of popular will we have witnessed in recent years in Georgia, Bosnia and elsewhere.
The precondition for such a crude roadmap is the unity of the opposition forces and the much lacking wisdom in elements of the leadership; and the overcoming of ego among the leadership in putting their current differences and petty agendas aside and making the interest of the Ethiopian people and that of our nation supersede their party and personal interests. The interest of all individual parties in making their political and economic program as well as the political ambition of the individual leaders a reality can await for a time when we have all the conditions fulfilled for genuinely free, democratic conditions that would allow all parties with varied hues to compete freely for political power in a pluralist and united Ethiopia where the rule of law reigns supreme.
As there are many other unanswered questions and unpredictable senarios that may unfold in these modest prescriptions outlined above as they may, Ethiopians can make it a reality if we all have the vision and the much needed dedication and tenacity for real change in Ethiopia.
The prescription that has been advanced by some elements within the opposition camp will not change the current abominable conditions of our country and our people, in the iron grip of the Meles regime. In this ill-advised, isolated and unilateral action of a few opposition parties, at the very best, they could only manage to acquire a few more seats in the rubber stamp EPRDF parliament than they currently enjoy. They may even mange to win 100 seats in the same rubberstamp parliament. But these political forces that heading towards such a slippery road cannot change any of the policies of the Meles Zenawi regime. If such is the best of possible results from the unilateral activities and misguided direction of one or two opposition parties, then it is tantamount to condemning the Ethiopian people for another five years of tyranny under the Meles regime.
