Society
Michela Wrong asks why Blair backs a brutal regime
Published 14 November 2005
A regime hailed as progressive by Tony Blair has shot women and children in the streets and detained thousands
Watching western governments engage with Africa is like watching a doctor trying to bully a perfectly sane individual into a straitjacket. "It's for your own good," smiles the doctor. "You'll thank me in the end." For a while the man allows himself to be coaxed, until, registering the implications, he scatters his minders with a few well-aimed blows and heads for the open air.
The chasm of understanding between supposed benefactor and reluctant patient has been at its most gaping in the Horn of Africa this week. In the Ethiopian capital, a regime that has been hailed by Tony Blair as an example of progressive African government has shot women and children in the streets, detained thousands, and rounded up the opposition leaders who accuse it, with ample justification, of rigging elections in May. Embarrassingly, the forces involved in these abuses were trained by British police officers, at British taxpayers' expense.
At Ethiopia's border with Eritrea, in the meantime, troops and armour are massing on both sides in possible preparation for a war over a badly defined colonial frontier. A new conflict, which might allow the leaders of each nation to rally evaporating domestic support, would undoubtedly claim more lives than the 90,000 lost in the 1998-2000 war.
This wasn't supposed to happen. Fourteen years ago, when an Ethiopian rebel coalition backed by an Eritrean guerrilla movement toppled the reviled Mengistu, the west piled in with promises of aid. The rebel movements that took power in both countries were communist in inspiration but seemed willing to shelve their rigid ideals and sign up to multi-party democracy if that was what their future partners demanded. Their populations were poor and vulnerable to famine. The new regimes knew they would need help feeding their people and keeping their ethnically disparate states together.
The Eritrean president, Isaias Afewerki, abandoned any pretence of swallowing his medicine four years ago when he arrested the ministers and journalists who had dared criticise his leadership. Since then he has put two fingers up to the international community, even expelling Usaid, the agency on which nearly two-thirds of his population depend for food.
In Ethiopia, the moment of truth came last week when the adamantine realities of power that always lay below the delightful froth of democratic process were exposed. The prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is probably Africa's cleverest leader, yet it does not seem to have occurred to him until the moment the votes were being counted that the electorate might reject a system in which all key decisions rested with a Tigrayan minority. How could it, when he had put the electorate's interests at the heart of his policies of rural development and market-oriented economic reform?
Yet most of the voters did exactly that, although we'll never know exactly to what extent, thanks to a panicky bout of last-minute ballot-stuffing. Infuriating, how voters simply refuse to recognise what's good for them! But Meles's party, no more respectful of the proletariat than most Marxist organisations, is not about to allow an ungrateful bunch of illiterate peasants to ruin everything.
The regime's latest actions, which include raids on independent newspapers, arrests of editors and promises to prosecute opposition leaders for incitement to violence, smack more of a concerted top-level drive to cripple the opposition as an effective political force than any genuine attempt to bring order to now-deserted streets.
Like Isaias, Meles has tried democracy and found it doesn't work for him. Throwing off the straitjacket, he has in the process revealed some basic truths about power in Ethiopia. In a nation that until 1974 was ruled by Haile Selassie, an emperor who declared himself directly descended from Solomon, and which afterwards was run by one of the bloodiest military strongmen of all time, power is seized by force, not politely surrendered. Meles has explicitly said as much in the past, telling the opposition that if it expects to run the country it should follow his own guerrilla route and go into the bush. It seems Addis Ababa's admiring foreign diplomats weren't listening.
At our end, the blundering goodwill of the Live Aid concert is exposed for the naivety it always was, the Africa Commission's confident talk of "a new breed" of leaders merely ludicrous. Western donors, who fund Ethiopia to the tune of $1.3bn a year and are scheduled to write off its external debt, must now take some difficult decisions in the uneasy knowledge that regimes in the Horn have an ignoble history of placing their own survival ahead of their citizens' need to eat. Faced with what they clearly regard as fundamental challenges to their existence, neither the Eritrean nor Ethiopian regime is likely to be swayed from its chosen path by threats of aid being severed or international ostracism.
If the donors manage to emerge from that quandary, they could try asking themselves an even more fundamental question: just how helpful, just how appropriate, is the missionary zeal with which the west keeps pushing a one-size-fits-all political model on governments that are willing to believe democracy is a fine and wonderful thing, so long as they remain in power?
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