“I don’t expect any formal answer, I expect action in order to correct some of these areas of concern, not even verbal promises — I’m expecting actions,” Ana Gomez told AFP.

Even as she and other EU officials praised the unprecedented openness of the campaign to date, Gomez said she had been disturbed by an apparent pattern of harassment of opposition figures and increasingly vitriolic campaign rhetoric.

In a May 4 letter to the National Election Board of Ethiopia, she said she had spoken of “situations of intimidation everywhere,” including beatings and arrests of opposition candidates and supporters, disruptions of rallies and reports of murders.

“I myself spoke with people who have been beaten,” Gomez said, adding that EU observers had documents containing “inflated propaganda” on both the government and opposition side that could affect Sunday’s election.

Of primary concern, she said, were statements claiming the opposition was engaged in fomenting ethnic hatred that could result in a disaster like that in Rwanda where some 800,000 people were killed in the 1994 genocide.

Despite the concerns, Gomez and other EU officials in Ethiopia went out of their way on Monday to praise the manner in which both sides had been able to get out their message.

“Despite some problems which have already been overcome (and) others which still need to be overcome, they do not taint the overall picture that is still very positive,” Gomez said.

Earlier, Tim Clarke, the chief of the EU delegation in Addis Ababa, described the current situation, in which the rival camps held peaceful mass rallies in the capital at the weekend, as a “miracle.”

“Never before in Ethiopian history has there been such an open debate in the country,” Clarke told reporters. “For people who have been here a long time, it’s a miracle what is happening these days.
“Yes, there are deficiencies, (but) this is only the third election in the country.”

The election will be the third in the impoverished Horn of Africa nation since the fall of communist rule in 1991 and the first to be monitored by international observers.

Rob Vermaas, the Dutch ambassador to Ethiopia who represents the rotating EU presidency currently held by Luxembourg, said public interest in the hotly contested polls was particularly encouraging.
“The attention to the election in Ethiopia is remarkable because democracy in Ethiopia is still in its infancy,” he said.

The comments came after hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians attended rival weekend rallies in the capital without incident.

On Sunday, at least 250,000 supporters of the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) turned out for a rally in the capital’s main Meskel Square, demanding an end to the 14 years in power of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

On Saturday, Meles’ Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) attracted about 600,000 people to a rally at the same venue.
The EPRDF currently holds 481 of the 547 seats in parliament. The CUD, an alliance of four parties, was created only at the end of last year, and therefore has no seats in the outgoing assembly.