We were not entirely surprised by the Easter Week High Court assault but we must admit that we harbored some hope that Ethiopia’s best minds relegated to Kaliti’s dungeons may have a courageous ally on the Federal bench. But hope, as Red warned, and as we frequently forget in EPRDF’s Ethiopia, “is a dangerous thing [that] can drive a man insane.”
So how did we all get here? How did Ethiopia’s voices of democracy end up facing treason charges by the very government that shed the blood of the innocent in the wake of the May 2005 elections?
For the EPRDF, the modus operandi was simple. It just took it right out of Peter Willem Botha's and Robert Mugabe's playbooks of power retention: you send high velocity bullets in the general direction of the heads and chests of the governed who demonstrate, drop them dead, then send your secret police frocked in garbs of the federal police to roam your cities and countryside to hoard the young by the thousands into your notorious detention centers. You do what governments who are not supported by their people have always done—you unleash your hounds of hell to excise hope from the hearts of the hopeful and you force in a frigid climate of fear in your country.
Then you turn a page in the Botha-Mugabe playbook. You cherry pick those who led the freedom movement and place them before un-judicious men cloaked in black robes and accuse them of a plethora of offenses found in Chapter One of the Pretoria-Harare codex: treason, inciting, organizing, or leading armed rebellion, obstruction of exercise of constitutional powers, and impairing the defensive powers of the state.
You then throw a monkey wrench in the playbook and charge them of a crime usually reserved for those in power—incitement to commit genocide. It doesn't end there—in interviews your primo ministro drops the "I" word—insurrection. But that wouldn't carry the imprimatur of legitimacy unless you throw into the mix foreign journalists and dissidents whom you charge with the catch-all crime of "outrages against the Constitution." We held our breaths for the added charges of Celibacy, Gluttony, and Sloth.
Then comes a drawn-out game of charades. You conduct false trials and present a parade of coerced witnesses, illegally obtained “confessions” and evidence that is circumstantial only to the deficiency of its prosecutors and judges. Trials are then started, adjourned, postponed, postponed, and postponed.
The irony in all this is that if the EPRDF's charges carried an iota of truth—had the detained leaders of the CUDP preached to their followers to violently dispose of the governmental order, millions would not have marched to the voting booths on May 15, 2005. The opposition gained the support of Ethiopians from all walks of life in the days leading up to the May elections by its ideas of hope. Not violence. Populist ideas have a way of drawing populations to embrace change and a peaceful future for their children. If the EPRDF’s charges were indeed true, the ruling party would have won a landslide victory unseen in the nation's short electoral history. But the Ethiopian Ministry of Justice’s charges are simply, as Amnesty International describes them, absurd.
So here's what the EPRDF expected the governed to do on May 15, 2005: ignore the opposition's legal, non-violent, and convincing call to the governed to vote the EPRDF out of office because it had failed to deliver sound policy in the agrarian, economic, monetary, and foreign policy realms.
The EPRDF knows if can never successfully convince Ethiopians that the opposition leaders are guilty of the charges extracted from the Botha-Mugabe playbook. It knows that its High Court edicts could never rewrite the May 2005 elections.
Then why is it going through these motions? Like the ZANU-PF the Ethiopian ruling party is bidding for time. Time to rule a few more years; time to realign its forces; time to entrench deeper into a society that is teetering between life and death, with a majority of its citizens who lead a life wondering where their next meal would come; time to overwhelm a nation with its sheer force; time to realign its wealthy and entrenched supporters and to close ranks by separating the weed from the chaff; time for another opportunity to redefine itself, to make a pitch to a nation of kind people for whom forgiveness is an endemic part of life.
But it ignores a powerful lesson in history that even though men are besieged by poverty and disease, the call to an end to tyranny can never be extinguished. The EPRDF is not prepared to heed this powerful lesson in history and today's decision should be viewed in that light.
A repressive government needs to count on the fear of its people to rule in perpetuity. What inspired millions of Ethiopians to follow Engineer Hailu Shawel, Dr. Berhanu Nega, Dr. Yacob Hailemariam, Professor Mesfin Woldemariam (and yes, Lidetu Ayalew) and others to the voting stations in 2005 was the absence of fear in the eyes of their leaders. Messengers of hope possess that peace of mind.
And for that, whatever happens in the EPRDF's "High" Court in 2007, our belief in the powerful ideals of democracy unleashed by the CUDP--the institution of a free press, an independent judiciary, and a representative government that draws its legitimacy only through the consent of the governed will never be extinguished.
