Paris Calling

The Road to Tim Clark (II)

Shopping for new guards, an ex-pat I know spent a recent Saturday driving her NGO car around to embassies and aid agencies asking the guards in front what security company they worked for. She ended up having a meeting with the general manager of one of these companies. Soon after (and only because a friend she knows surfs opposition websites) she heard the company was very close to the government security apparatus. But before she knew this, she asked the man if he would hire some of her current watchmen if she decided to exchange them for a security company. Of course, he said. "But they'll object at first. Eventually they'll come around."

Welcome to the machine. Object, her NGO current guards certainly would. By simply hearing the name of the company, any Addis Abeban would know what they were getting into. But the benefits (or lack of options) to entering government enforcement, even this extended, indirect branch of it, would soon outweigh the political misgivings. Join they soon would as well.

Political machines have thrived everywhere in the world. Many a high-minded thinker  subtly believe that they are a necessary stop on the road to something bigger. What would modern Chicago be without Richard Daley and the machine that helped put Kennedy in power. Jacques Chirac, president of France, would be a mere of historical also-ran if it weren't for the machine he built around his Mayoralty of Paris. Machines often evolve into 'the way things are done' (a point that Joseph Steiglitz indirectly makes in a recent essay.)

Since taking power in 1991, the EPRDF has made quite a machine for itself here in Ethiopia. And it's no small feat.

Like so many others in the world, this machine is ethnically based. The Tigray elite who lead the ruling party have developed an apparatus that manages to keep them in power despite the fact that their actual ethnicity is less than 10pc of the population and that their part of the country is one of the poorest.

At its core, the machine works by quasi-federalism. There are various regional states in Ethiopia, each one - on the face of it - designed to empower ethnicities or "nationalities" that were historically subjugated by the Amhara and Addis Abeba elite, as represented by the Emperor and later, the Derg regime. Each of these regional states is run by members of ethnic-based parties that fall under the EPRDF umbrella, parties like the AAPO in Amhara, or the OPDO, in Oromia. The top guys of each of this parties take part in the central committee of the EPRDF, which itself is led by the overwhelingly Tigray Politiburo, topped by the Prime Minister.

The whole government system that exists today was designed out of nothing by the EPRDF, and therefore, by the Politburo. Parliament, the House of Federation, the court system and every government body originates from the will and execution of the EPRDF. They are the ones who defeated the Derg, and, once anointed by the US, they are the ones who built the system they currently rule with.

This system, this machine, is one the government takes pride in. Built to satisfy the high-minded whims of the donor community, it bears all the signs of a checked-and-balanced democratic society. The system is presented as a democracy in the making: soon-to-be timeless institutions that are (or will be) bigger and greater than one man or political party. And for the most part, Western donors, have accepted this as a given. It's from this machine that Prime Minister Meles became the oft-mentioned 'darling' of the donor community, until the events of last year.

In the run-up to the 2005 election, in order for government system to pass the smell test with donors and to keep potentially dangerous opponents 'inside the fence', real opposition parties were allowed to emerge. Since the Eritrean War, these parties were a diffuse, and conflicting bunch, often bickering against one another and self-sabotaging through interethnic suspicion. It was in this light that the 2005 elections were declared (keeping to constitutional schedule). The EPRDF had little doubt that the machine, even with these opposition parties, would vote itself back in.

But the unthinkable happened. A scattered opposition began coalescing. Suddenly, the ruling party was no longer facing an alphabet soup of meaningless initials, but one great umbrella organization, the CUD, consisting of intellectuals and surprisingly worthy political tacticians, led by Berhanu Nega, a one-time New York professor who came back home to lead.

There was extreme excitement about the election. Not dissimilar to images in Iraq last year or Congo this year. It was a sight to behold and the run up to the May 15 was intense, often joyful and filled with anticipation; men and women who had never participated in a vote came to the polling stations in droves.

What the ruling party only realized too late, was that much of this excitement, in Addis at least, was anchored in the belief that the ruling party was going to be voted away from power. And almost overnight, and too late for it to be finessed in a way that would not offend Donors (or at least put them painfully on the spot), the election was to take place with the outcome extremely uncertain. The opposition was set to thrive 'inside the fence', setting itself up for victory even, by playing within the rules of the Ruling Party machine…

Economist on Ethiopia

When you show up to Book World  and don't see The Economist, sometimes you think they've been  cleared from the shelves. Here is why.
But it always shows up. In the article , The Economist becomes, I think, the  first international news organisation to mention the Fantu case.

The Road to Tim Clark (Part I)

If you arrive to the recently opened (and majestic) Bole airport and drive around the closely adjoining neighborhoods with their restaurants, cafes and freshly built 10-story office buildings, you may be forgiven for thinking that the true Ethiopia is exactly what the government wishes you would think, (and, in all appearance, actually believes itself).

This Ethiopia, the idealistic one, is the diplomatic capital of Africa, the host city to the African Union and the Economic Commission of Africa - a UN branch that observes and researches Africa's troubles. It is a country that never knew colonialism so its people are free and proud without a defensive suspicion of foreigners you find in other African locales. With all its NGO's, UN agencies and diplomatic missions, Addis Abeba can also be perceived as a think tank capital. The restaurants and cafes of select areas of the city are teaming with people quite capable of expanding on malnutrition, Somalia, Socialism, folkloric art, or the latest statistics from the English Premiership league.

This vision of Ethiopia is in a sense partly true. All these things do exist. There is something about Ethiopia that is remarkably different from other African places. Totally undeveloped industrially, the limited areas in the city where wealth is concentrated end up having a campus-like, academic feel; there are a series of neighborhoods and avenues with fenced in blockhouses that almost feel like they could host a satellite office of Microsoft in Seattle or belong in a summery office park in suburban London.

But this is an artificial - or at least severely limited - vision of Ethiopia and one that - because largely successful in convincing western ex-pats of its veracity - continues to encourage certain biases that only put the country into more difficulty.

To get a more honest picture of the country as a whole, it is important to look at certain beggars on the street, but not for the emotional string-pulling reasons you would expect. Many of the beggars you see, especially the mothers with their small children, are peasant families; farmers. These women have "come down the mountain" to beg and increase their income so that a small investment, like buying tools or an ox, can be made. Indeed, for many farmers in the highland countryside, paying 100 Br to get the family to Addis once a year is part of the yearly agricultural cycle, a highly risky addition to harvest and soughing.

And the reason these beggars are so crucial is because 85 percent of the county is populated by farmers like them, and not the city folks you see maniacally running from one bus to another like in similar downtowns all over the world. Ethiopia is a rural nation par excellence, a country whose vast majority could just as well be living hundreds of years ago.

But you wouldn't know that by staying in Addis Abeba, especially in this cookie-cutter community that supports the rich, the foreigners and their clipped hedges. And this perceptual artificiality goes a long way to explaining the foreigners incapability of understanding what their dealing with. And the government gains an advantage from that.

Because if you buy into the cookie cutter image offered by these select areas of Addis and the fashionable people who populate them, then, much like the Bronx to those in the Upper East side of Manhattan, the rest of the country, the rest of the city even, becomes chaos. Chaos that the government has no shame in saying they have little means to handle on their own and that they need all the help the can get. Donors, diplomats and do-gooders come to see Ethiopia as a city that seems just fine ("on the cusp") and the hinterland as a series of emergencies caused by tragic acts of God. In the eyes of outsiders, then, the government becomes the humble witness and representative to some of the continent's most inexplicable injustices…

Associated (full court) Press

Blogs at work.

Somalia Update

Since 1991, Mogadishu has been in bitter, murderous chaos. Someone born that year would be about 15 today. Therefore, there is a whole generation of young Somalis who have come of age in the "worst ghetto there ever was". Theirs is a world worthy of Mad Max and worse (like Liberia).

Add Islamic extremism into this. The Islamist courts have indeed stabilized the city and its environs. One town near the Kenyan border resists the Courts, but this is largely because the religious hamper the khat trade, and getting in the way of khat chewers is at one's own peril.

Within this Islamic courts are some relatively moderate folk who use the Koran to basically stabilize the place. Jihad dead-endism is often rhetorically referred to, but usually tactfully avoided in reality (like in Iran?).

But kids who grow up in the "worst ghetto there ever was" aren't so moderate because they have no idea what that is. It is this young generation, led by old man and ex-torturer Aweys, that constantly attempts (and is now succeeding apparently) to shove the ICU movement into belligerency, especially, for starters, towards Ethiopia.

And this feverish push is beginning to be felt in the Somali region of Ethiopia. Two weeks ago, Islamists kidnapped and released aid workers from the International Red Cross. There have been skirmishes between Islamists (formerly known as Al Itayad) and the ONLF, a much more secular rebel group operating in the region. These Islamists are quietly but shrewdly making their presence known within the region and have made it clear that they don't like the UN, and do not even speak of Americans (and Kenyans for that matter.)

In the Ethiopian Somali region, Al Itayad reached a high tide of sorts in the late 1990's before being pushed out by the Ethiopian Army. Veteran observers of the area believe that al Itayad, fueled by an enraged Somali id that flourishes in Mogadishu, are in the midst of reclaiming that high water mark. This is done quite simply by showing up to the old villages and settlements (with a few dollars in your pockets) and saying, "remember me?"

Some of these observers aren't really sure that the Islamists can get any further than that, that because of clanism,  the Ethiopian Somali region's absorption of Islamism can only go as far as it did before. Other observers are not so sure. The 1990's, after Black Hawk Down, was a period when the proxy wars were at a lull; war motives at the surface were the same underneath.

Today is quite different. There are so many proxy players willing to invest a little something in armed insurgency that no one has a real clue of what exactly is happening underneath. Is al Quaeda here? Probably. Is the CIA here? Yes, along with loony Eritrea, Malaysian oil companies, hapless UNICEF, Saudi  financed Wahabis, Egyptian camel traders and god knows who else. And all this with the "War on Terror" theme music playing in the background.

By strafing and invading a Somalia border town last weekend, the Ethiopian army made it clear that they are not afraid to fuel the wrath of the kids in Mogadishu. The kids and al Itayad can't really respond to helicopters and howitzers. Their response will probably come from the village and clan-based networks they are trying to revive and expand well behind the border line, deep within Ethiopia (and in Addis Ababa?).

"Remember me…" indeed.