Since 2003, the opposition had been pleading with the Government and the National Election Board to revise the out-dated, incomplete and biased electoral law. The opposition had submitted at least two complete drafts of an electoral law for discussion, but they were rejected since election rigging would then be impossible under a neutral, independent and professional election management body guided by an electoral law of international standard. The opposition was forced to go into elections that had none of the makings of free and fair elections.

In April 2005, during the political discussions at Africa Hall and in Sheraton Addis, it was public knowledge that Meles Zenawi’s EPRDF had lost the political debates. EPRDF had fielded its topmost guns, except Meles Zenawi, and those included Addisu Legesse, Deputy Prime Minister and de facto Ruler of the Amhara Region under strict TPLF directions, Bereket Simon, the Minister of Propaganda, Gennet Zewde, the Minister of Education, Tefera Walwa, the Minister of Capacity Building, Kasu Ilala, the Minister of Infrastructure, the Governor of the National Bank, the Minister of Commerce and Industry, among other less well-known political cadres.

None of those EPRDF ministers was a match for the more educated, articulate and experienced representatives of CUD and UEDF. Hence, Meles Zenawi was increasingly more desperate; EPRDF had to change the direction and tone of the political debates to a more EPRDF-familiar ground like terror and harassment by accusing the opposition as “Interahamwe”. This deceptive twist, very much characteristic of EPRDF, came first from the Deputy Prime Minister and it was then repeatedly echoed by Bereket Simon; Meles Zenawi also repeated it latter on so that it was then clear that that was EPRDF-driven.

Meles Zenawi and his accomplices certainly knew that “Interahamwe” was a government-organized and armed terrorist militia of the then Government of Rwanda . Hence, if any of the Ethiopian parties can ever have any resemblance to “Interahamwe”, the only such party is EPRDF since it has full control over all armed groups in the country, and since it has a well-documented experience in terrorizing the public ever since the 1970s, and latter on in 1991, 1992, 1993 and afterwards.

CUD and UEDF could never ever have any resemblance to any terrorist group, but EPRDF went ahead all the same to defame them, taking comfort in the well-known Marxist principle that if you repeated even false accusations, some of those might stick in due course in the peoples mind to give EPRDF an opportunity to make the final kill of the type that we saw on June 8, 2005 in Addis Ababa, and latter on in all parts of the country.

EPRDF was free to terrorize CUD and UEDF using the public mass media since it operated the television stations and all radio stations in the country. This illegal monopoly is against the constitutional provision in Art. 29, but EPRDF has never had any respect for the rule of law or for the Constitution in all its repressive 14 years of rule.

Further provocation of the Ethiopian public came when a strong coalition of CSOs was refused recognition by the National Election Board of Ethiopia ( NEBE) when they requested for authorization to field some 3500 observers, mostly in rural Ethiopia. The CSOs went to court, and they won by May 12, 2005 but they had time to field only some 250 observers in Addis Ababa and other towns. Hence, the EPRDF-appointed NEBE successfully shut out independent observers from rural Ethiopia, thereby preparing the ground for election rigging..

The next line of attack at voters’ rights came on May 15, 2005 when (i) hostile and provocative armed militia and members of the police and Defense Forces were fielded around polling stations in rural Ethiopia to bar opposition supporters from coming in, (ii) EPRDF armed agents drove away agents of opposition parties from polling stations to prevent them from observing the voting process, (iii) Agents of EPRDF confiscated voters’ identity cards from opposition supporters, (iv) armed agents of EPRDF drove out party agents that had managed to stay on from polling stations during the vote counting, and (v) EPRDF resorted to outright ballot box stealing when it had no other options to rig the elections. These practices were wide-spread in Afar, Amhara, Oromia, Tigray and SNNPS.

After it was clear early on May 16, 2005 that EPRDF had lost badly in all towns and in several rural areas, NEBE suspended all vote counting to buy time for vote stealing to bring back EPRDF to power using any deceptive method.

To make matters still worse and to instigate trouble, Meles Zenawi issued an illegal order to suspend political rights on May 16, 2005; what was obnoxious in that order was that (i) there was absolutely no reason for issue it, and (ii) Meles Zenawi had no constitutional right to issue it in the manner that he did without the approval of the Council of Ministers and the final approval by House of Peoples Representatives within the prescribed time limit. This unconstitutional act was also exposed by EPRDF’s constitutional lawyer, Dr. Fassil Nahom in his recent communications with the Weekly Reporter. This was another line of EPRDF instigation to disturb the peace!

After mid-day of May 16, 2005 ballot boxes containing counted and uncounted ballot papers started to disappear throughout rural Ethiopia; party agents and party supporters in rural Ethiopia continued to be harassed and beaten with still more intensity, and several thousands were rounded up and thrown into rural jails by armed government militia for supporting the opposition. That happened more openly in Afar, Amhara, Oromia, SNNPS and Tigray.

Again starting on May 16, 2005, fabricated election results started to be announced by NEBE , and even those officially recorded and reported constituencies won by the opposition in Addis Ababa, Mehal Meda in North Shoa, Amanuel town in East Gojjam, among several others, were reversed by NEBE and reported as having been won by EPRDF.

NEBE’s continuous announcement of “ provisional results” and EPRDF’s continued false claims that it had won the elections went against the provision in Electoral Proclamation No. 111/1995, and CUD was, therefore, compelled to go to court to stop that; it won in a federal court, but NEBE appealed to the Supreme Court where Kemal Bedri, the Chairman of NEBE, is also the President. The case has bogged down at that level so far.

Frustrated by the stolen elections in rural Ethiopia, students of Addis Ababa University planned a peaceful demonstration on June 6, 2005. That was understandable since most university students have their parents in rural Ethiopia which was openly denied a voice in the elections as a result of the connivance of NEBE and EPRDF in the nation-wide vote stealing drama.

Tensions ran high on account of the increasingly illegal announcements of NEBE, and the opposition continued to express its objections, but NEBE refused to listen. On June 2, Tim Clark of the European Union took the lead to broker an agreement between EPRDF and the opposition to settle differences by discussing issues at a joint forum under the NEBE. The opposition agreed, but EPRDF started to break the agreement by imprisoning and shooting still more opposition supporters in increasingly more numbers in both rural and urban Ethiopia right away.

To add fuel to the fire, EPRDF ordered the police to invade the dormitories of Addis Ababa University at mid-night on June 5, 2005 to grab 5 students without any court warrant. Woken up rudely, university students attempted to stop the bandit-like invasion, but with little success. Hence, students spent the balance of the night condemning the fascistic police acts and demanding the release of their fellow students; early next morning, the police returned to take three more, again without court warrant, thereby coaxing students to react in a violent manner. Fortunately, students remained peaceful and on campus, but continued to demand the return of their fellow students. At mid-day, the police have had enough of the peaceful student demonstrations on the campuses, and they brought in trucks and drove away with some 1000 students to rural detention camp.

While the students were being driven out of town on June 6, 2005, high school students came out to stop that, and parents and concerned elderly citizens also joined in, with a brutal police force on one hand and students and citizens on the other. Taxis also stopped work in protest.

By June 8, 2005, EPRDF had succeeded in provoking practically every sector of society in Addis Ababa, and some frustrated parents came out to demonstrate peacefully. They were mowed down with guns in areas which had no banks or police stations, but EPRDF came out with the false accusation that they were all bank robbers and thieves.

Some 40 innocent civilians were murdered by police guns, and over 3000 were thrown into jails from Addis Ababa alone, whereas some 10,000 helpless farmers were also subsequently dumped into dirty rural jails at the same time all over the country, accused of supporting the opposition; life in Addis Ababa froze for at least a week. That was reminiscent of the brutal acts of January 1993 when EPRDF also gunned down several peacefully demonstrating students of Addis Ababa University without any risk of any response from the IFIs, or from generous bilateral donors such as the USA and the United Kingdom.

Today, the United Kingdom appears to have had a second thought, but the reaction of the USA is still uncertain in spite of the gross violations of all the democratic principles enshrined in the US Constitution and in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There is considerable worry among thousands of those educated in the USA about a possible Chester Crocker-type of “Constructive engagement ”, as employed with apartheid South Africa and also with Samuel Doe’s Liberia in 1985 when Samuel Doe stole the elections, in spite of the fact that none of that ever worked in Liberia, South Africa or elsewhere in Africa.

As a distinguished Chair of the House Sub-committee on Africa had said in 1985,

Now the Cold War is in the archives of history, and President Bush’s “ just government”, and “ respect for human rights”, as enunciated in the Millennium Challenge Account, is what Ethiopia needs to come out of chaos, poverty and to become a credible international partner in the fight against international terror in the Horn of Africa.

South Africa has been able to come out of war and chaos after some 100 years of turmoil by employing only one democratic election in April 1994. In a similar way, Ethiopians have demonstrated their commitment to democratic principles and their high regard for law and order in the mammoth but peaceful opposition-based demonstration of May 8, 2005 in Addis Ababa. That and the orderly and very long queues of may 15, 2005 are solid evidence that Ethiopia is ready for a democratic election, and it has been just as ready for that as South Africans have been in April 1994. The wide-held view abroad that democratization is a process that takes time is, at best, an apology to support African dictators like Meles Zenawi and the likes of former Samuel Doe.

Ethiopians were determined to have free and fair elections in May 2005, but EPRDF was not since it had steadfastly refused to revise the biased Electoral Proclamation 111/1995, refused to build a credible and independent institution for managing the elections, and to organize all public mass media in a manner that makes them neutral and independent instead of employing them to propagate destructive and false propaganda to incite some segments of society against others.

Given the sequence of EPRDF provocations given above, is it fair to accuse the opposition of provoking EPRDF to commit the criminal murders of June 8, 2005, or to continue to violate the Constitution by sending some 15000 innocent civilians to prison without due process just because they are supporters of the opposition ? Is it fair to condemn the opposition for any provocation of EPRDF and for any breach of the peace without any data to support such a gross assertion ? The answer, in each case, is an unequivocal “ No !”.

EPRDF is the sole criminal; it is the one that has created all the turmoil and it is the one that is the murderer everywhere ! This is also equally vigorously shared by young officers from the Ethiopia Air Force in the recent defections, clearly telling Meles Zenawi that they will not be part of any impending criminal act against Ethiopians !. All Ethiopians of 2005 are united against EPRDF, and they have a radical different perception of government today since they now have a credible alternative in CUD and UEDF; peace is unthinkable under Meles Zenawi unless his rule is legitimized by absolutely free and fair elections !

The opposition has been extraordinarily patient with the dictator who has lost whatever little confidence he has had in the past, but still continues to implement sinister designs to steal the elections. The international community, but most importantly the EU and the USA, need to say “ No !” to election stealing and side with the people of Ethiopia in their struggle to defend their political rights. The USA’s diplomatic mission is not clearly demonstrating that it stands for America’s democratic ideals !

The Diaspora needs to intensify its campaigns all over the globe to convey the message to all democratic governments that Meles Zenawi is creating all this chaos, shedding innocent blood using the excuse of an EPRDF-created and nurtured insecurity to convince his IFI backers, the EU and the USA to assist him once again to continue his repressive rule for 5 more years to divide, plunder, steal and impoverish Ethiopia. Ethiopia has said it has had enough of him and EPRDF for now ! The votes of rural Ethiopia must be freely given and counted fairly to ensure lasting peace and stability in Ethiopia and in the Horn of Africa.