BY BEN RAWLENCE,
Despite
Meles' passing, Ethiopia is continuing to conduct repressive policies, and
international donors are continuing to ignore them.
Amid the
tributes to Ethiopia's recently departed prime minister was much twittering
(and tweeting) about 'stability' and the 'transition', especially from
Ethiopia's foreign donors. There is considerable concern that without Meles
Zenawi, the charismatic former rebel leader who ruled Ethiopia for 21 years
until his death, the country may implode, infighting might engulf the ruling
party or Ethiopia's fragile economic growth might reverse. While these fears
about the country's stability are warranted, there has been little recognition
of the role that human rights play in underpinning stability. Sadly that is
nothing new.
On
September 21, Meles' former deputy and foreign minister, Hailemariam Desalegn,
was sworn in as his successor as both prime minister and ruling party chief. In
his inauguration speech, Hailemariam pledged to continue Meles' policies.
These, it should be remembered, included not only far-reaching plans for
economic development, but crushing political opposition, the evisceration of
independent media and civil society, and the use of arbitrary detention,
torture, and other repressive measures to suppress dissent.
Three days
later, the World Bank approved its biggest grant to Ethiopia, $600 million, for
the third phase of its flagship Protection of Basic Services (PBS) programme,
along with a new Country Partnership Strategy for Ethiopia, largely drafted
before Meles died, that will underpin $1.15 billion in new loans. The new
Country Partnership Strategy makes no reference to the deteriorating human
rights situation over the past seven years or the complex political landscape
that Ethiopia now faces with Meles' death. The only glancing reference to the
profound political and human rights problems in Ethiopia comes in the last line
of the document, which reads, "In the longer term there is also a risk
associated with the next elections, scheduled for 2015". Indeed there is a
risk to the country's stability created by long-suppressed basic freedoms of
speech, association, assembly and democratic choice. But it is not a risk that
the World Bank and other donors have done anything to mitigate.
Ethiopia's
transition is an important opportunity for Ethiopia's friends and foreign
partners to pause and encourage the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary
Democratic Front to return to a democratic path, respect the constitution by
lifting restrictions on civil society and the press, and release political
prisoners - all steps that would go a significant way to releasing the building
pressure from years of repression.
So far,
the party has released two Swedish journalists jailed last year for trying to
report on rights abuses in Ethiopia's Somali Region, a positive step but one
that was in the works long before Meles' death. Meanwhile, donors have said
nothing about the nine local journalists who remain jailed on trumped-up
charges of terrorism, or the hundreds of other political prisoners. Business as
usual with Ethiopia apparently requires donors like the US, EU and UK with
human rights policies and commitments to develop a blind spot to legitimate
concerns that in other countries they routinely denounce.
A forgotten concern?
In 2005,
after 200 people protesting the elections were killed and at least 30,000
opposition supporters, journalists, civil society leaders (including the staff
of Action Aid and other charities) were detained, donors were forced to act,
suspending direct budget support to Ethiopia. Less than a year later, aid
resumed, albeit through different channels, although a 2006 interim Country Strategy
noted concerns over the overlap between the state and the ruling party and
risks that aid funds could be "captured" and used to bolster the
regime.
Two years
later, the 2008 strategy document minimised those earlier concerns, paving the
way for a massive increase in aid to Ethiopia. It turned Ethiopia's democratic
deficit into a technical issue, a problem that could be addressed by building
the capacity of parliament and other key institutions: in other words, not an
issue of political will, but a problem that could be solved with money.
Five years
on, the new country strategy published on September 25 ignores the thorny
questions of human rights, democracy and good governance completely, aside from
a focus on fiscal accountability. Early on the text declares that, "Good
governance and state building form the foundation of the Country Partnership
Strategy" - but that's it. The rest of the document is a thorough-going
plan for increasing the capacity of a one-party state in precisely the way that
the 2006 strategy feared.
At least
it has the advantage of clarity: it doesn't attempt to square uncomfortable
realities like how the World Bank's social accountability component - designed
to increase civic participation and programme accountability through monitoring
by NGOs - is compatible with Ethiopia's NGO law that has closed or shackled
nearly all independent organisations working on good governance, human rights,
advocacy and other sensitive issues. Nor does it answer the question of how a
programme founded on good governance deals with a government that won over 99%
of the vote in local and general elections.
The Meles conundrum
Working on
Ethiopia over the last four years I have become familiar with the confused
reactions of diplomats and aid officials as they struggle to reconcile the
official narrative about Ethiopia with their experience on the ground. As Human
Rights Watch has presented report after report of compelling evidence of human
rights abuses, some of them connected to foreign aid programs, donors have
agreed with us in private, promised to investigate, publicly dismissed our
findings, reneged on their promise to investigate, and then denied the problem
exists. They cannot seem to decide whether Ethiopia is a development miracle or
a brutal dictatorship. As one shrewd junior official put it to me, "Meles
Zenawi messes with your head".
Ethiopia's
vision that it will join the ranks of middle income countries by 2020 is
repeated throughout the World Bank's new country strategy but there is little
mention of the methods with which this growth is being achieved. I never
doubted Meles's intentions or his zeal. But the gap between his vision and the
reality was startling, and brutal. He pursued an approach to development that
would not fly in most of the countries that gave him money. Indeed, the
development economists from Western aid agencies I spoke to were a little
envious of his power to commission dams and lease thousands of hectares of
indigenous land without a nod to anyone. But the approach is founded on the
ruling party wielding complete and unchallenged power with no room for any
dissenting voices, and it relies on fear.
Meles made
this approach more palatable through a combination of shrewd arguments and by
limiting the contradictory reports from the ground. From 2005 onward, the
ability of foreigners to access sensitive information in Ethiopia, and the
ability of Ethiopians to access independent information in their own country,
has steadily shrunk. As bad news bubbled up from below, more journalists fled
the country after being threatened, more independent papers closed, and an
alarming number of journalists ended up in jail on vague charges.
The
experience of the 2010 elections was instructive. Human Rights Watch spent over
six months in the countryside documenting a subtle but systematic crackdown on
opposition offices, rallies, and membership through the ruling party's
pervasive state apparatus, including withholding food aid, seeds, fertilisers
and jobs. Meanwhile, in Addis Ababa, Meles invited the leadership of opposition
parties to conferences and, when they pulled out complaining of the noose
tightening around the neck of their membership, the government painted them as
spoilers. The ruling party won 99.6% of the vote, and all but two of the 547
seats in parliament.
When Human
Rights Watch presented its findings of the widespread manipulation of
development aid, donors claimed they had no evidence to support our
allegations, even though they hadn't really investigated. And had they tried,
officially, they would have been escorted by Ethiopian government officials who
would have tracked down their sources, forcing them to recant or threatening
their families.
Paid for by donors
In the
five lowland regions of Gambella, Benishangul-Gumuz, Afar, Somali and the
Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples' Region (SNNPR), large scale
"villagisation" programmes are resettling 1.5 million people,
purportedly so that the government can better reach them with schools,
hospitals and water pumps; services paid for by the PBS programme mentioned
above, recently renewed.
Villagisation
is not a new concept in Ethiopia; successive governments have tried to move
rural communities for ideological and practical agricultural reasons. Under
Mengistu Haile Mariam, it was known as collectivisation and it contributed to
appalling abuses, including the terrible famine of the 1980s. A major
difference in the contemporary version is that foreign donors are effectively
paying for it. As Human Rights Watch showed in a January 2012 report, many
people in the Gambella region are being forcibly displaced - away from existing
services to unfertile areas without amenities, and people have suffered food
shortages as a result.
Prior to
the Bank's decision to approve PBS III, Human Rights Watch called on the World
Bank to delay the decision on the $600 million, to trigger the Bank's
safeguards on forced displacement and indigenous peoples, and assess the very
real risks that Bank money might be contributing to rights violations. They
didn't.
Meanwhile,
in South Omo, Africa's tallest dam is being constructed in the absence of
proper environmental and social impact assessments. A power line to carry
electricity to Kenya is also being funded by the World Bank, although not the
controversial dam itself. Downstream, hundreds of thousands of pastoralists are
in the process of being 'villagised', their riverside gardens flooded and
grazing areas turned into enormous sugar plantations upon which they are
expected to work. The effect on Kenya's Lake Turkana - which is fed by the Omo
River - is uncertain and a further 300,000 people in Kenya risk impoverishment
too. The Ethiopian government, keen to show off its infrastructure, takes
journalists on guided tours of the dam but forbids the indigenous people of
South Omo from talking to the media - threatening those who do. The absence of
a free media to test and examine official claims allows donors the chance to
choose whom to believe.
Business as usual
But
stability and prosperity cannot be founded on repression, forced displacement,
interference in the courts and closing down the opposition, media and civil
society. Donors forget that, at least according to their own policies and
commitments, economic development and human rights go hand in hand.
They are
about to be reminded. A case in the UK is being brought by Leigh Day and Co. on
behalf of a man from Gambella. Mr O alleges that the UK Department for
International Development contributed to Ethiopia's villagisation programme
(via PBS) that displaced him and destroyed his livelihood. The case aims at a
judicial review of the department's human rights policy on Ethiopia. In
Washington, the day before the World Bank approved all that new money, another
group of residents from Gambella filed a complaint with the World Bank's own
accountability mechanism, contending that the Bank had ignored its own policies
on forced displacement and indigenous peoples in Ethiopia.
In the
risks to Ethiopia's expected economic growth that are enumerated in the Bank's
new country strategy, opposition from the people who are supposed to be
beneficiaries is not mentioned at all. That may be business as usual in
Ethiopia, where voicing your real opinion typically lands you in jail, but it
shouldn't be business as usual at the Bank.
Ben Rawlence is senior researcher on Africa at Human
Rights Watch. Follow him on Twitter
@BenRawlence.
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