Financing rural repression By Feyissa Woyessa: Feb 20, 2005

The temperature of Ethiopian politics has been on the rise due to the
coming
drama to be staged by Meles and his gang. He has two reasons to
celebrate;
one, he is going to declare himself a landslide winner as expected
and
pursue with his heinous crime of destroying Ethiopia. Second,
his
donors will reward him generously for playing and being an agent of
their dirty
game (being the good boy of the West) in Africa. His crimes and
intentions are
well known for Ethiopians who are not united and strong enough to stop
him.

The Ethiopian diaspora living and working in the West from whose
governments
Meles has been garnering economic and political support in the name of
development aid should mobilize to shut off this source.

The so called development assistance is in infact a mechanism by which
the west
channels financial resources and other forms of help to selected
pro-western or
surrogate regimes or states. By doing so the west wishes to keep or
prop up its
friendly politicians and governments in the developig world. The
fundamental
aim is to control and exert maximum influence through their financial
as well
as technical support. It is mainly designed and geared to promote the
interests
of the donors and that is largely why development assistance has not
been
successful or useful in fighting and alleviating poverty.For example,
Ethiopia
under Meles has been among the biggest recipients of western aid land
loans but
the chronic poverty including famine has been on the rise concomitant
with the
nominally increasing aid. I do not know of any country picking off as a
result
of western aid (the Marshall Plan is a different story).

It has become
clear
that development assistance is apparently a term coined to cover its
true
content and intentions to mislead the tax payers in the west. The
preferntial
treatments applied by the donors when it comes to who gets it and who
does not,
in accordance with their predetermined criteria (the main one being
friendly to
the west and conformity to their norms) shows that it is not all about
development.Governments that do not agree with the west are excluded
and even
punished in the form of sanctions even though their countries are faced
with
pressing needs for development help and have sound domestic policies.

These
countries do not accept the order or conditions attached to the aid or
loan
because they know that attached aid does not benefit the recipient in
its
effeort to achieve its goals (so called boring topic of poverty
reduction). If
it were about development, then leaders like Meles Zenawi would be
disqualified
from receiving assistance because he has utterly failed in development.

We have
seen some cosmetic changes in ethiopia as a result of increased aid but
most
are projects picked from the shelves of the previous government. They had
planned
and produced viable development projects but implementation was not
possible
owing to the prevailing conditions then. The West in effect imposed
sanctins on
that government because it was anti-west (not because it violated human
rights).

A close examination of Meles´s government development policy shows
that it is
rural based, and it appears sound. It looks as if it would lift up the
rural
population out of poverty. This is what the blue print tells. The
concealed
motive behind such a strategy is the Stalinist political machination of the
Meles regime
to strenghten its grip on the rural population by subjugating and
stifling it.

As part of its revolutionary democracy, it has trained and deployed
hundreds of
thousands (a million) of its oppressive cadres in the country side. These
cadres form a network of its eyes and ears well integrated into its
security
structure to maintain its hold on political power. It is a Stalinist
system
incorporated into a development strategy to secure financial resources
from its
friends in the West carefully disguised as rural development. The
greater part
of the resource is thus utilized to pay and maintain its huge network
of spies
and repressive security personnel in the countryside.

Briefly, this is
the
crux of meles´s rural development program. The regime is well aware of the fact
that
growing dissatisfaction in the country would lead to public upheaval
and the
the rural population is potentially the most dangerous source of
threats to its
survival and rule. Therefore it has made the countryside its exclusive
domain
of power through this mechanism. Every effort is made by its cadres to
curb
free speech or free media in this section of the society.

Meles has
realised
that the urban oppostion alone would not even scratch his skin because
it is
simply like a barking but non-biting dog. So immobilising the countryside has
been his primary task to maintain his power. He can use it as he
wishes.

The Ethiopian diaspora working and paying taxes in their respective
western
governments have a responsibility to mobilise in a kind of public
awareness
campaign to expose this abuse of their tax money. Specially those
living in the Franco-German club (the European union) have a big task
in this
regard. Germany is the chief of EU and those living in Germany hold the
key to
the success of the campaign. I am not against development assistance
but the
way it is being appropriated, misused and the corruption associated
with it
have a negative impact on our country. It has hindered the emergence of
democracy in the country. It has even contributed to the suffering of
our
people by enhancing the power of dictators. Meles begs not for
development. He
does so for his rural cadre production factories or his tools of
repression. He
is building his own defence at the expence of the country. We know he
is not
building the nation’s defence. His ethnic business enterprises also
siphon off
aid money enriching his gangs. We can not afford to just sit and watch
him
entrench his power, the power he uses to dig our graves and then depart
to his
beloved country, Eritrea or the West.