ADDIS ABABA – Meles Zenawi said on Friday that his ruling party was elected by the Ethiopian people for five more years and had no concern a North African type of popular revolt would bring down his government.
If the people don’t like the ruling party, they have the constitutional power to remove it after the end of the contract, he tells a captive audience of state-run media workers that may appear “independent” to the outside world but are actually party members who are orientated what type of questions to ask.
Of course no one takes seriously his talk about the “constitutional right of the people.”
The brief detention and warning against the journalist was swiftly considered by the public as a sign that the government remains fearful even at the slightest attempt that links the ruling party in Ethiopia to those longtime dictators that went down under popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
What also makes Meles Zenawi’s “constitutional power” of the people an empty rhetoric is the still-fresh memory of the bloody aftermath of the 2005 elections.
Once Meles knew that his party had suffered a huge defeat, so huge that his side lost all 23 parliamentary seats in Addis Ababa to the opposition (and largely was true in the rest of the country despite Zenawi’s lie that his support was rooted in the countryside), he declared a state of emergency, and launched state-sponsored terrorism.
Officially, 193 protesters were killed, though many observers say those killed were in thousands. Many deaths occurred at the five concentration camps the government hastily opened across the country. Each camp housed between five to 30,000 detainees.
The fear of the those days of state terrorism still pervades the society, which remains fully aware that if uprisings erupt, the regime would simply resort to mass murder and walk free as the Western world’s “partner in the war on terror.”
Meles often plays up the threat of terrorism, and blames neighboring Eritrea for sowing the seeds of chaos in the region, including in war-torn Somalia. For his vigilance, the benevolent West pumps $2 billion into his coffers every year.
Their power fragmented along ethnic lines, the Ethiopian people credit Meles for turning their country into a landlocked nation that is permanently ravaged by government-induced poverty and hunger.
