From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Jun 07 2010 - 12:12:12 EDT
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89382 ETHIOPIA: Government
denies food aid "manipulated" for political gain
ADDIS ABABA , 7 June 2010 (IRIN) - After harvesting just 50kg of grain last
year from his tiny plot in an arid corner of Ethiopia’s Amhara region,
Asmenaw Keflegn knew he would have to ask for help. But when the 44-year-old
member of the opposition All Ethiopia Unity Party asked his village chairman
to put him on a list of those eligible for emergency food aid from foreign
donors, he was refused. The chairman told him, “Let the party that you
belong to give you aid.”
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF) and its allies won 545 out of 547 seats in the
parliament in May elections, amid opposition charges - dismissed by the
government - that it employed a broad-based campaign of harassment,
intimidation and coercion, including the systematic denial of food aid to
opposition supporters. Despite annual economic growth of over 7 percent in
the past five years, about 13 million Ethiopians - nearly one-sixth of the
population - receive some form of foreign aid.
The ruling party vigorously denied the reports and said the opposition was
fabricating such evidence to discredit the elections and undermine the
government. The accusations are “outrageous and stupid”, Meles told
reporters. “There is no such system. There will never be such a system.”
“The government at this level of development doesn’t need any coercive
measures [in order] to be elected,” says Bereket Simon, Minister of
Communication Affairs. “Regarding governance, regarding social development,
the people of Ethiopia know for sure the future of Ethiopia lies with this
government and so we have no need to compete in an undemocratic way.”
However, a March report from New York-based Human Rights Watch, A Hundred
Ways of Putting Pressure <http://www.hrw.org/node/89128>, states that
government services, including food aid distributions, are “tools used to
discourage opposition to government policies, deny the opposition political
space, and punish those who do not follow the party line”.
*Food for votes *
In the district of Tembien in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Seeye
Abreha, a losing candidate from the opposition Unity for Democracy and
Justice (UDJ) party of jailed opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa, said the
two main donor-funded relief programmes were manipulated by the ruling party
before the election.
>From 17 May, farmers who were owed three months of relief payments under the
Productive Safety Net Program, a western-funded food-for-work scheme, were
given one month’s payment and told by local government officials they would
receive the remainder after the election “provided they let down Seeye and
vote for the EPRDF candidate”, says Seeye, a former minister of defence
under Meles.
“Emergency food aid and Safety Net were very much employed as a tool for
influencing the result of the election,” he added. “I am not against the
distribution of food aid because there are a lot of people who need it very
badly. My point is that the food provision should be independent of
politics.”
Donors say they have no evidence to prove their aid has been used as a
campaign tool. The US, which gave Ethiopia US$937 million in aid last year,
sent a team to southern Ethiopia accompanied by government officials in
December to investigate the allegations. US efforts have found “no evidence
that food aid is being denied to supporters of the opposition”, wrote Alyson
Grunder, a spokeswoman for the US embassy, in an e-mail to IRIN.
A team led by the World Bank analyzed data on aid distortion from the PSNP
and found no widespread pattern of aid misuse, said Kenichi Ohashi, the
World Bank’s country director for Ethiopia.
*Paying the price*
Noting that Ethiopia is a major ally in western counter-terrorism efforts in
Somalia and one of the largest aid recipients on the African continent,
rights groups and opposition leaders suggest such investigations have been
half-hearted.
“When all of their development programmes are being administered by the
Ethiopian government, there is a structural incentive to underplay the human
rights situation and to believe what the Ethiopian government tells them,”
says Ben Rawlence, an HRW researcher. “This becomes a particularly difficult
and embarrassing contradiction when faced with a more than 90 percent
election victory.”
“The US can launch an investigation and it may work if it’s done
independently, but if it goes around accompanied by government officials
it’s not going to find out anything,” says Hailu Araaya, a leader of the UDJ
opposition party.
The Bank’s Ohashi says donor efforts to investigate the issue have not been
designed to uncover such problems. “These mechanisms are essentially not
able to catch the kinds of things Human Rights Watch alleged to be
happening,” he said. “Unless you go and do some undercover investigation
you’re not likely to find it.”
In December, the government detained seven farmers from northern Ethiopia
who travelled to the capital Addis Ababa to testify about aid politicization
to foreign donors and human rights groups.
Rawlence was expelled from the country, and a foreign journalist who later
travelled to northern Ethiopia to meet the farmers was detained for two days
and threatened with expulsion, according to HRW.
Photo: Jason McLure/IRIN
<http://www.irinnews.org/photo.aspx><http://www.irinnews.org/PhotoDetail.aspx?ImageId=201006070908100573>
The
ruling party of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi (shown on poster) won a
landslide in May pollsThe government has criticized HRW for what it views as
the organization’s flawed methodology in reporting about human rights
violations in Ethiopia. “Basically it is the same old junk,” says Bereket.
“It has nothing to do with human rights or any discrimination or
intimidation whatsoever. It’s a report that intends to punish the image of
Ethiopia and try if possible to derail the peaceful and democratic election
process.”
*Protests *
But opposition supporters in the countryside say the denial of food aid has
proven to be a potent political weapon in a famine-prone country. Yimer
Ahmed, 45, an opposition candidate for the regional council in the central
Amhara region, said his wife recently divorced him because his membership
of an opposition party had kept their family from receiving US food aid.
“Because life is hard, people are saying that being a member of the
opposition will invite hunger,” he says. “This aid is coming through the
government and without this aid they will starve, so they don’t want to have
any problems with the government.”
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