Is this wagging the tail or not believing a popularly elected govt, for real?

Zeru Hagos

Nov 02, 2010

Comment on Addisfortune editorial on Human Right Watch Report on the EPRDF governemnt and its handling of Aid

Fortune in its editorial (included below) is questioning the government of PM Meles Zenawi’s response to unfounded Human Right Watch Report that alleges wrong doing on the part of the government in distributing Aid. The Human Right report was not only condemned by the government but also by the Donor community and other individual writers. And to my amusement the editorial also chastises the donor community for trying to hide their” weakness and shortcomings” in monitoring!

Fortune obviously is giving the benefit of the doubt to HRW. The question is why? Is fortune trying to justify the report by comparing it to HRW’s report on Mengistu Hailemariam’s atrocities? How does a law abiding, born and bred Ethiopian even contemplate to trust a foreign group with ulterior motive over a popularly elected government?

Fortune editor, why did you believe and put your trust on HRW to tell you the truth and not PM Meles’ government? And if I can follow up with a question, how could you give the benefit of the doubt to HRW investigators who are far away and not to the folks in the EPRDF government? It is no secret that the EPRDF led government is a pioneer to democracy and development and they were living and dying with the poor without any one paying them.

On my account, EPRDFites were not collecting millions of dollars from people like George Soros when they were fighting the Derge. Instead they were protecting the poor and the hungry then and it is that unwavering conviction that brought the Transformation and Growth Plan that will change the fate of the poor for better once and forever.

It is quite amusing to think any one can think PM Meles’ government will deny the hungry and poor a sterilized wheat!

Dear Fortune editor, if you were sincere, as a good journalist, you would have at least tried to verify one part of HRW’s report but you did not, on the contrary you simply endorsed the report. The worst part and what is disheartening is you are appearing as if you are in the payroll also. I hope this is not the case of wagging the tail, Ethiopian style!

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Senseless Back and Forth Following Rights Critique, Unconstructive Here it goes again; a tug of war between a self declared global human rights watchdog and an Ethiopia government which has a poor record in respecting the human rights of its subjects.

The New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) released yet another damning report on Ethiopia this month, accusing the EPRDF government of employing international development aid to advance its partisan political agenda. The 111-page report described claims of progress and development in Ethiopia as “development without freedom”. It criticised the government for deliberately depriving those in need of help due to their political opposition to the ruling party or their refusal to be a part of it.

The latest is the 11th report on the country which the organisation has produced over the past 10 years.

From criticising what it called an erosion of academic freedom and Ethiopia’s involvement in Somalia to opposing the atrocities in Gambella and the government’s scorched earth policy in the Ogaden, the report hardly stopped targeting Ethiopian authorities.

HRW also pointedly recommended 100 ways in which to put pressure on the government in a bid to influence the latter’s respect for citizens’ freedom of expression and rights of association.

HRW has come a long way in its thorny relationship with governments of Ethiopia. Its first 27-page report in July 1990, accusing Mengistu Hailemariam’s (Col) regime of bombarding civilian targets and causing mayhem for thousands of civilians and non-combatants, including women and children.

If the Ethiopian authorities of today, who, as rebels, were pleased with the report back in 1990, are not happy with such thorough attention from an internationally renowned nongovernmental organisation (NGO) whose self professed job is “to name and shame” alleged wrongdoers, it would be understandable.

However, this is only true in a regional context. During the same period, HRW produced only four reports on Eritrea and none on Djibouti. Sudan and Somalia, which was each granted more reports than Ethiopia, have extraordinarily different circumstances.

The two have since been at loggerheads, and, ironically, the pattern remains the same. HRW produces a report accusing the government of systematic and gross violations of fundamental human rights, which the Ethiopian authorities categorically deny, questioning the motives and financial sources of the organisation.

To its credit, HRW is a globally respected organisation. Charity Navigator, an American organisation which evaluates over 5,000 United States (US) based charities, gives it four stars, a rating deemed “exceptional.” This rates HRW as highly as the Carter Center and two stars above Amnesty International.

Better Business Bureau (BBB) attests to HRW not only meets its fundraising, expenditure, and financial accountability standards, but also its quality and accuracy standards in information it releases.

HRW has a profound history, too. It was first established in 1978, after an accord was signed in 1975 in Helsinki, Finland, to improve the West’s relations with the Communist Bloc. Helsinki Watch was born with the aim of monitoring whether the former Soviet Union complied with the agreement in the accord, a.k.a. Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The organisation branched out to several chapters on other continents during the subsequent decade. In 1988, the year it set up Africa Watch, all the chapters were consolidated to create HRW as it is known today.

The organisation has grown incredibly large since then. In 2009, it commanded a budget of 37.4 million dollars of which it spent a little over 78pc on its global programmes.

Among its major financiers is George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has pledged to donate 100 million dollars over the next 10 years, the largest donation in the organisation’s history, boosting its budget to an annual 80 million dollars.

A US citizen, Soros is known for making his fortune (of one billion dollars) from the currency crisis in England in 1992. He is also credited with helping Hungary, his native land, to make a smooth and peaceful transition from a communist to a liberal society. Soros, through his Institute for Open Societies, is keen to fund initiatives to help emerging countries in their efforts to transform theirs to democratic societies.

Meles Zenawi has never been enthusiastic about Soros’s interest in promoting the ideals of open societies in emerging countries, despite his pledge of 50 million dollars to the Millennium Promise, an initiative started in 2006 and the brainchild of Jeffrey Sachs (PhD), who is one of Meles’s intellectual gurus. Ironically, the Millennium Promise has Millennium Village projects around Africa one of which is in Koraro, Tigray Regional State, to show how foreign aid can work.

Whether similar projects are producing the expected results or not, HRW challenged both the government and its international supporters with its claim that foreign aid in Ethiopia is not only being misused, but used by the EPRDF to reward its supporters, punish its opponents, and silence its critics.

Following the release of the report, Leslie Lefkow, director for HRW Africa, and Ben Rawlence, an author who met Meles last year, continued to campaign against the government, writing op-ed pieces and granting interviews to US and Canadian newspapers.

Members of Western donor organisations, such as the World Bank (WB), the British Department for International Development (DfID), and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), have been criticised for being “indefensibly naïve,” “lacking the interest to stop the abuse of their assistances,” and “turning [a] blind eye” to what it alleged is “aid as a political weapon to control the population.”

The donors are quick to defend their reputation, vindicating the ruling party in its denial of the accusations. Yet, the allegation should not be new to them, either.

It was harped on a few months prior to the May 2010 national elections, after opposition party candidates claimed that such practices occurred. Donors like USAID commissioned investigations, particularly in the South, where a huge majority of the voters were known to historically be against the ruling party.

An investigator hired by USAID was told in Hadiya, once the stronghold of Beyene Petros (Prof), an opposition figure, that should local authorities deny aid to suspected opposition supporters, they ought to deny it to almost everybody as there were few people supporting the governing party. That picture has changed, since the ruling party won the majority of seats from Hadiya, uprooting Beyene from his otherwise solid position for two consecutive electoral terms.

To be fair, donors have mechanisms and instruments to monitor how and where their money is spent. A disclosure agreement has also been made with the government, which is evident from the posting of all the money transferred to a wereda on notice boards in wereda office compounds. They regularly send their people out in an attempt at finding out how their money is spent.

The fact that HRW researchers did not acknowledge this illustrates their lack of balance. Despite all the praise HRW receives, it is not free from criticism for ideological bias; one comes from none other than their own founder, Robert Bernstein, who was not happy with HRW’s failure to “distinguish between wrongs done in self-defence and those perpetrated intentionally.”

Despite the allegations, international support for Ethiopia has borne fruit. More children go to school than ever before - the number of students enrolled in primary schools exceeds 15 million (over 96pc).

The provision of health services has improved significantly across the country. Close to 4,000 health posts were built and the administration has trained close to 60pc of the 30,000 health extension workers.

Over four million farmers were trained as agricultural extension workers instead of the one million planned. This would have hardly been possible without the donors putting their money where it is needed.

The changes that are evident in Ethiopia are impacting on the lives of tens of millions of people and it is very difficult to justify a claim that everybody is coerced to toe the line of the regime.

Nonetheless, completely brushing the HRW report aside does not help to address real issues. It is true that the distinction between party and state resources is not clear to many of the cadres in the ruling party and there is strong evidence that the ruling party and state are tangled in many instances. Neither is HRW off the mark in claiming that a general climate of fear, whether perceived or real, prevails in this country.

Yet, where this ought to effect change is in the engagement between the two, particularly the response of Ethiopian authorities. While they may be convinced that the people at HRW harbour an ideological bias against them, there is little they can do to stop the release of more damning reports in the future.

HRW has interests in Ethiopia and dedicates its people and resources to learning the truth in defence of the fundamental rights of Ethiopians, which should be appreciated and acknowledged.

Ethiopian authorities could use such opportunities to commit themselves to correcting the wrongs uncovered by HRW or any other credible organisation, however bitter the findings may be. This is also true for donor agencies based in Ethiopia, which are now defensive and losing the public relations battle.