The Ethiopian 2005 Election: Pseudo-democracy at its best

Ethiopia is a failed political experiment. Feudalism, Communism, and now Psedo-democracy. Psedo-democracy is type of defunct government systems that only exists in countries like Ethiopia where regime change first happens through violence followed by installment of pseudo-democratic regime often as a result of external pressures. It is chiefly characterized by pseudo-elections, pseudo-economic developments. It assumes that resources are centrally controlled by few elites and that the common people, incapable of taking care of themselves, should be fed with loans and alms from external sources to be topped up by empty promises.

Greater chunk of their meager funds get consumed in overheads such as a bloated bureaucracy, defense, misuse of authority, wastage of resources, corruption, faulty decisions and ill planned incomplete projects. The state borrows heavily to support staff salaries, corruption and repaying of unproductive loans. Unable to deal with poverty, its important contribution is evolution of a number of poverty indicators whereby all indices of misery point toward that country. All these descriptions fit Ethiopia like key and lock.

One of the notorious traits of such systems can never be best demonstrated than it was seen in this year’s Ethiopian election drama. Pushed by their generous Western lifeliners they opened their door narrowly, only enough to let in Neo-nafxanya political groups. Allowed them to get airtime, engaged them in open debates and finally allowed them to participate in the election. In doing so the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), for one thing, assumed that neo-Nefxanyas would perform poorly based on their historic records and their political programs. On the other hand, TPLF elites seem to have believed the often fabricated or exaggerated reports filed by their satellite organizations that colorfully narrate about unprecedented support their government enjoys in every corner of the country.

Both assumptions were foolish and dead wrong to say the least. They failed to realize that they delivered nothing good to the people of the country through their skewed economic policy that revolves around one region. To make their foolishness even worse, they failed to suspect that their 14 years of partiality would annoy the Ethiopian mass in general and the killings and mass imprisonment they perpetrated against the Oromo people in particular would make the Oromos vote for anyone who stands against them.

That foolishness cost them heavily. Regardless of neo-Nafxanya’s backward-looking political programs that call for war with Eritrea (with the hope of capturing Assab), eliminate nations’ rights to establish their identities, eliminate nations’ already nominal federalism and privatize land. They plan all these priori measures to prepare the ground to eventually roll the nation back to the Nafxanya system should they win this election. Despite all these potentially catastrophic missions of the neo-nafxanya political organizations, the people, especially the Finfinne population, elected the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) politicians to power.

Having panicked by CUD victory in Finfinne, the regime is now resorted to the customary behaviors of pseudo-democrats. It banned reputable foreign media, declared state of emergency out of the blue, dispatched their cadres to rural areas to do the dirty job of sabotaging vote counting and ballot box looting in the areas they felt are out of the sight of election observers. They put their armed forces on standby to safeguard and make sure their safe return to power. They moved Melles’s loyal commando unit to Finfinne to crash any eventuality that might compromise their return which was perhaps the only thing they have predicted right in this election period. As expected, the neo-Nafxanyas took their supporters to the street in protest of election riggings. TPLF’s brutal commando acted as ordered and indiscriminately massacred close to 40 people in broad daylight. With that, the TPLF took off its false mask of democracy and acted as the real TPLF. As events unfold in the coming weeks and months, they might commit more and more crimes, let’s wait and see, they got more in store.

This is the TPLF we have been warning Ethiopians and the international community about, all along. We again urge the international community to take a good note of this regime. It swears by the name of democracy only to evade the international community. As it has clearly demonstrated in this election, the regime does not have the slightest of respect for democratic principles. It has never been committed to the principles of democracy and, judging from its nature, probably never will.

Generally, TPLF win or loose, the future of the country is very bleak. We have witnessed the TPLF rule and what it did to the country in the past 14 years. The competing candidate, the CUD, is the greater of the two evils. The neo-Nafxanyas never learn from history. They are set to repeat all the mistakes of their Nafxanya predecessors. This group will not hesitate to revive the old Nafxanya policy of divide and rule. Even before grabbing power, they are busy planning how to partition the Oromos and other nationalities along rivers and hills into miniature provinces to effectively weaken the unity of the Oromo and other southern peoples so that they could easily prey on them. They are busy preparing to deny nations’ their constitutional rights to self-determination etc. These are deportments that might lead hell to break loose in that country leading to another round of civil war, shames and woes.

What Ethiopia needs is neither CUD’s backward-oriented government nor TPLF’s minority terror reign. What it needs is a democratically elected government with broader mass base and that is willing to effectively answer the root problem of that country; the question of oppressed nations and nationalities. With these contestants both having no intensions to deal with that country’s root problem, once again, the country is standing at another crossroads: Salvation by adequately answering the question of nations and nationalities or plunge into another round of war and eventually disintegrate.

The above discussion and evidence substantiate that all Ethiopian regimes Empire States, were and are essentially anti-human rights. The incumbent TPLF Ethiopian regime also, rhetoric and posturing aside, is in essence perpetuating its predecessor regimes’ anti-human rights policy.

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2 Suppressing Dissent- Human Rights Abuses and Political Repression in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region.

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