Independent reports by the World Bank, the U.S. State Department, and the Economist Inteligence Unit have long established that Mr.Zenawi’s political party runs business conglomerates and its private enterprises get preferential treatment and in most cases do not even pay taxes. The U.S. government’s reports confirm that even the country’s trade regulations favor businesses run by Prime Minister Zenawi’s party. Transparency International Global Corruption Report (2003) notes “Ethiopia’s coalition government is generaly held together by the ability of the ruling party to keep the pockets of its partners oiled, while it openly suppreses the opposition.”

What is more atrocious is the government’s use of its monopoly over land rights to extract both economicrent and political support from the destitute peasants. The European Election Observers Mission to Ethiopia has documented cases where peasants were forced to sign acommitment to vote for the government in the May 2005 election, under the “threats of land dispossession or deprivation of free ration”or even dismisal of their children from government run schools.

Siegfried Pausewang, Senior Research Fellow at Chr. Michelsen Institutes and the author of “Peasants, Land, and Society: A Social History of Land Reform in Ethiopia,” who has worked on Ethiopia since 1967, recently wrote that the state’s control over land property is used to keep peasants hostage to government authorities. Chris Albin-Lackey, Sandler fellow at Human Rights Watch, has found that “control over fertilizer and
agricultural inputs in general have given Meles’ government an effective tool for quashing dissent in rural Ethiopia.”

Remarkably
Profesor John Harbeson, Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the author of “The Ethiopian Transformation”, notes that Mr. Zenawi’s core constituency comes from his Tigrayan ethnic group representing only 10 percent of the population. The professor further asserts that Mr.Zenawi’s authoritarian government is dependent on its “superior military muscle with too little regard for reconstructing the Ethiopian polity.”

This is a view shared by all independent observers who are familiar with Ethiopian current politics. Jonathan Manthorpe, who has followed Mr.Zenawi since his time as a guerilla fighter in the1980s and through his15-year reign as the Prime Minister of Ethiopia recently wrote for Vancouver Sun that M r. Zenawi “has stayed in power for nearly15 years by running a political machine that allows the minority Tigrayans to keep control of the eight primary ethnic groups that make up Ethiopia’s 77.4 million people.”

Obviously, the interest of a10 percent minority at the expense of a 90 percent majority cannot be peacefuly enforced. Amnesty International’s 2003 report gives a glimpse of the all too familiar atrocities of the Prime Minister’s government to squash those who refuse to submit. “Police shot dead over 230 people and detained several hundred more in Oromia and the southern region in connection with peaceful demonstrations. Many human rights violations including torture, rape and extrajudicial execution were reported. According to the Human Rights Watch the government justifies the use of brutal police force by “asserting that the police had no funds to purchase non-lethal crowd controle equipment.”

Ethnic-based genocide is in the making in Ethiopia, but the world seems to ignore the cries of the Ethiopian people to avert an inevitable but avoidable humanitarian crisis. What is more scandalous is that unlike in Rwanda where theWest played a passive role to avert an inevitable disaster, American and European taxpayers are financing the perpetrator of a looming humanitarian tragedy in Ethiopia, to the tune of U.S.$1.5billion per annum. Ana Gomez,a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and the head of the European Union (EU) Election Observation Mision in Ethiopia, recently wrote an open letter to the EU member governments and Commission to help averta humanitarian crisis. She opened her appeal by noting “Another bloodbath is taking place in Ethiopia,” and ended it by pleading with them to “help stop the killing of Ethiopians who dare to believe that democracy is possible in Ethiopia.”