The journalist followed up his question with: “who was the president a decade ago?” “I was,” came the surprise response, which prompted Sacker to stare Meles in the eye, and said, “You have been in power for 14 years?”
If there is one question that haunts Mr. Zenawi, it is a firm: “When are you to step down?”
Lately, the response has been: “This would be my last term.”
Ethiopians have their worst fears though. They see Mr. Zenawi as a menacing force who would – for years to come – adversely affect the future of the impoverished nation of 80 million people.
Last Sunday April 13 Zenawi’s party fielded a staggering 4 million candidates in the local elections where there were no other contenders.
Asked how he viewed the elections, noted human rights activist Alemayehu G. Mariam says everybody knows that the “April 13 elections are staged for public relations purposes, mainly for the benefit of international donors. The Ethiopian people do not have a choice. There are no real opposition parties to challenge the regime.”
Challenge? The regime was challenged and was believed to have ended its tenure in power at the May 2005 elections when the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopain Democratic Forces (UEDF) virtually swept most votes. Meles Zenawi declared a state of emergency, withheld election results for months, and ventured into a terror spree that killed 193 civilians within a space of two weeks. Inquiry Commission officials who investigated the killings held the Zenawi regime responsible for the murders. They fled the country following imminent death threats. With opposition leaders locked up for nearly two years, Meles consolidated his power beyond anyone’s imagination that the latest elections were no different than the ones that used to be held during the Derg military dictatorship.
Reminiscing about the last elections, and how there could never be any genuine polls after that, Aklog Limenih, chairman of the North American Kinijit (CUD) Support Association, wonders, “Can a country hold another election after the tragic miscarriage of the 2005 election? The simple answer is a resounding no.”
Aklog says the politics of intolerance was so vividly demonstrated in the 2005 election that nobody has any doubt about the objectives and goals of the current election. If there are still doubters of the intentions of the ruling party, one can only wish them well. Everybody knows that Ethiopia is currently being ruled by an unelected party bent on staying in power no matter what the wishes of the Ethiopian people are.
Other Ethiopians have interpreted the latest elections as Zenawi’s attempt to spread his Stalinist structure out of Tigrai and throughout the rest of the country.
Says Giday Assefa, a political scientist based in Frankfurt: “Fielding about 4 million EPRDF candidates throughout the country means launching a huge project at building a one-man dictatorship.”
This is an attempt at turning Ethiopia into the Tigrai that Zenawi has held hostage for years, says Giday.
TPLF-seat Tigrai has long been held hostage, and there has never been any semblance of democracy since 1991, when the previous Derg was replaced by a more divisive, destructive and profoundly anti-Ethiopian force that first set out to accomplish the breaking away of Eritrea from Ethiopia.
TPLF is believed to have annihilated over 50,000 civilian Tigraians, most notably the elders and the educated who exposed TPLF’s hidden agenda – like the goal of turning Ethiopia into a landlocked nation by forcefully handing over its entire Red Sea frontier to Asmara. In TPLF-held Tigrai, the leaders in power in Addis are loathed as Eritrean mercenaries than Ethiopian dictators.
“Now Ethiopia is in a more dangerous and more precarious situation than it had ever been in the last 17 years. Meles has learned lessons from the 2005 elections he wants to make sure there is no attempt at bringing him down,” adds Tesfay Atsebaha, a longtime TPLF critic, also based in Colon, Germany, and who was a senior TPLF commander until he abandoned TPLF in 1988 as a thinly-veiled mercenary group designed to carry out anti-Ethiopian goals.
Human rights activist Obang Metho rejects the idea of boycotting the elections, even though he admits there can’t be any genuine elections under Zenawi.
“At the very moment when an opportunity arises for Ethiopians to go to the polls in local government elections, to seek political change away from the autocratic regime of Meles Zenawi, the opposition has decided to `wither away’ by engagingin a boycott of the elections. Ethiopians are to be `voiceless’, denied the opportunity to choose their governors democratically, he says.
Obang adds the Zenawi regime can only celebrate its good fortune. I profoundly regret the decision of some of the opposition parties to choose the boycott option. Even if this local elections were to be flawed, as they most certainly will be given the record for electoral manipulation under Zenawi, at least Ethiopians would be able to express their preferences. Otherwise, the citizenry will be left, `screaming in silence’.
But Ephrem Madebo, a commentator known among the Ethiopian Diaspora, blasts loyal opposition groups who say they are boycotting the elections.
“Take Beyene Petros” Ephrem says. He is making some noise because he is completely rejected by the people he was supposed to represent in earlier times [Beyene was representing the Southern Ethiopian people’s group]. This guy is claiming to be leader of what the media has reported as the largest opposition group while everyone knows there is no such thing as the largest opposition group after 2005.”
Tesfay agrees. Loyalists like Beyene Petros render service to Meles far more important than the combined service of the army generals of Meles. “By his actions, Beyene is desperate to justify the presence of democratic pluralism and dissent in a political system controlled by one ruthless dictator.”
Political observers agree when an opposition party is reported withdrawing from elections, the point it is trying to get across is that there has been a space for opposition politics despite harsh conditions around election time in Ethiopia.
“If one can’t tell a fantasy election from a real one, they’ve got a problem,” says Prof. Al Mariam. “It seems to me that someone is part of the game! Someone is in cahoots with somebody. I will tell you. It makes for good headlines: ‘Opposition party withdraws from elections.’”
“It is a foregone conclusion that EPRDF
candidates will take most of the seats in local and
municipal electoral precincts, thus creating a
launching pad for the 2010 national elections,” adds Aklog, before summing up, ”
Yet,
the moral ground that EPRDF stands on is so thin that
nothing can change the public imaginary that EPRDF
stands for one party dictatorship. It is probably
better to see the current election as a political
gymnastic on the part of the ruling party to
legitimize itself before a tired public.”
