LAGOS — “We have to learn from our experience. This is not a short period, and I don’t think Revolutionary Democracy will bring basic change in our country. It has proved a failure. Do we have to spend another nineteen years to understand that there is a failure in our country by the leaders of Revolutionary Democracy?”
(Algeria Adei, a top officer in the ex-T.P.L.F. guerrilla movement, during the armed struggle of the 1990’s. Now, she is the opposition candidate challenging Prime Minster Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia in forthcoming elections).
“Revolutionary Democracy is an ideology that categorizes society into classes. Some of the classes are enemies; the others will be friends. That is class analysis; and this class analysis is basicallya a Leninist policy. Then, this policy will crush the enemies, using friendly classes. This does not work. The failure of the Soviet Union was this.”
(Opposition spokesman and candidate for Tigre’s regional parliament, Beharnu Beheig)
In another two weeks or so, the people of Ethiopia in East Africa will be voting in crucial parliamentary elections. This five-yearly election is important, because it is one that has the potential to bring in a new government in the only country on the continent that did not really undergo colonial rule. Similarly, the parliamentary seat of the man who has led Ethiopia for the last 19 years or so will also be at stake in the forthcoming polls.
However, this discussion will be restricting itself to the importance of just one region to the elections. It is remarkable, for instance, that Ethiopia’s Tigre region is seen as, possibly, holding the key to the political future of Africa’s third most populous country behind Nigeria and Egypt.
Eighty million people live in Ethiopia, just over six per cent of that figure can be found in the region of Tigre. The sparsely-populated region might well be referred to as Ethiopia’s battleground state, in more ways than one. First and foremost, a homegrown rebel group, the Tigre People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F, waged a vicious guerrilla war back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. During the war, which overthrew Ethiopia’s Soviet supported military regime known as the Derg, the Tigre region was the epicenter of a famine. That natural disaster succeeded in killing as many as a million people, mostly women and children.
Tigre was also the front-line state in the two-year-long conflict between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea. The T.P.L.F. and the Eritrean Revolutionary Front had been staunch allies in the war that toppled Col. Mengistu’s Derg dictatorship. Two years after the Derg were overthrown, the T.P.L.F allowed the Eritreans to secede from the rest of Ethiopia.
However, in the 1998-2000 war between the two countries, well over 70,000 lives were lost, and there can be no denying the fact that Tigre was key to the eventual victory achieved by the Ethiopians against the Eritreans.
Nowadays, the leaders of the T.P.L.F are Ethiopia’s leaders. They make up the core of the ruling party in the populous east African country, known as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (E.P.R.D.F), starting with the man who has been head of state for nearly two decades now, namely, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
Elections are just about a fortnight or so away; and yet again Tigre has taken the position of a battleground. After nineteen years at the helm of affairs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s ruling party is facing its first significant electoral challenge in its own stronghold. What has made the challenge more eye-catching, so to speak, is this fact: that the challenge is coming from within, and it is being led by members of a break-away T.P.L.F faction.
In this election, the opposition appears to be focusing its attack on the ruling party on two sensitive and emotional issues. One of the two issues has been at the heart of Prime Minister Meles and his ruling party’s ideology and it is the concept of “revolutionary democracy”. The other issue, one that has involved many a foreign government, is the troubled relationship with neighboring Eritrea.
The opposition continues to refer to “revolutionary democracy” as a Marxist-Leninist receipt for a one-party dictatorship. It is true that many members of the break-away faction of the T.P.L.F. once shared the dream of a so-called revolutionary democratic Ethiopia whose primary objective was to bring justice and economic development to the country. But, they are now arguing before the electorate that 19 years of bitter experience has shown otherwise.
Officials of the ruling party, including Mr. Meles, are not taking kindly to opposition’s criticism of “revolutionary democracy”. They find such attacks infuriating. They refer to any talk of dictatorship as a ridiculous allegation. In one angry response to his movement’s critics, the T.P.L.F’s spokesman, Tedrus Hago, told reporters in Addis Ababa that the questions of who is right and who is wrong will ultimately be decided by the voters.
He accused the opposition of making outrageous allegations in order to whip up passion among their supports. The opposition, nearly forty of whose leaders were tried and convicted of treason in an unprecedented mass trial after the last polls five years ago, say they had never favoured violence. They have argued, instead, that any out-break of violence would be a set back to their strategy of building a strong base in the backyard of the ruling party.
The region of Tigre is again a battleground. But, as in the past, no-one expects the T.P.L.F to lose. Given the movement’s near total control of the government of the day, analysts are of the view the opposition are banking its hope on one thing: namely, that they may eventually be able to awaken, as someone put it, “a sleeping giant of anti-government sentiment”.
