The Grind

They have finally seen the outside gates of Kality Prison. (Can we hear a Hallelujah?) Some of the members of the Coalition of Unity & Democracy Party (CUDP) are senior citizens who languished in jail in bodies wracked with old age and rapidly deteriorating health. Others are parents to young children. They needed to be among their families, their followers, and their supporters, and only the most contemptuous would ignore the human story behind last week's negotiated release. And this is essentially what all of us sought: in numerous petitions, protests, articles, blogs, and support for various proposed legislative acts, Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians alike lobbied for the day to see the men and women who led the campaign to realize the electoral demise of the ruling party walk away from prison intact.

Then there's the issue of the July 16, 2007 admission of culpability. The letter to the Prime Minister included language that frankly shocked our conscious, including admission to attempting to usurp power through non-constitutional means, and a promise to refrain from engaging in similar conduct in the future. Many who supported the opposition movement in Ethiopia, particularly the CUDP, were in utter disbelief that its leaders and members signed a document not just admitting guilt but asking the very forces that engaged in extra-judicial killing of young children for forgiveness. A friend described this development as a bitter taste he had difficulty rinsing from his mouth; an infectious mucus he couldn't spit out. Our initial reaction was not that far off.

A quick Timeline

July 9, 2007 = the ruling party seeks the death penalty;

July 16, 2007 = the ruling party hands down life sentences;

July 20, 2007 = the ruling party issues "pardons."

In just ten days, the EPRDF's Ministry of Justice went from arguing that the most ultimate, cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment should be visited upon some of the most respectable members of Ethiopian society, to four days later, in an act of seeming penance, setting aside that call and passing life sentences, and to finally absolving them of their purported sins. All it took was their placing their signatures on a pro forma document that is silent on the level of culpability of each defendant and the manner, time, and place of the supposed constitutional violations. So much for establishing legal precedence.

Forgive what?

Never recognizing the jurisdiction of the court, the accused maintained that the ruling party's genocide and treason charges were nothing but an attempt to rewrite the fraudulent elections of May 2005 and the ensuing EPRDF violent crackdown. They argued, in our opinion, rightfully, that they would not receive justice in a court that is subservient not to the rule of law but to the dictates of the Office of the Prime Minister. They maintained that the EPRDF's incantations of a divided government, checks and balances, and independence of the judiciary were a collection of phrases designed to keep Western donors at bay.

So while the EPRDF information machinery engaged in a sustained media blitz declaring the government’s non-interference in the judicial process underway, the ruling party was steeped in negotiations to secure a negotiated settlement. In what is perhaps the world’s longest plea-bargain-but-soon-to-be-post-conviction-pardon, both parties ultimately obtained what they apparently sought—for the EPRDF, both a conviction and an admission that the defendants engaged in extra-judicial political activities; for the CUDP, a political as opposed to a legal resolution and reinstatement of the right to participate in future political activity.

Gambling with Human Lives

The benefit of hindsight rewards the CUDP. The treason and genocide charges and the courtroom proceedings were merely a drawn-out process designed to accomplish at least three objectives: (1) alienate the most critical and popular voices of dissent from their supporters and the public, (2) create a rift within the CUDP and to hasten factionalism among its leaders and supporters, and to (3) grind the CUDP leaders toward an unfair bargaining table. After all is said and done, the enduring reality will be that the EPRDF’s prosecutions were not designed to meet out justice or to set a precedent for the adjudication of the laws of treason, insurrection, and genocide. The unproven charges, repeated delays of courtroom proceedings, the government’s in- and out-of-court repetition of unsubstantiated legal theories were designed to vilify men and women whose worst sin was to vociferously campaign for the EPRDF’s electoral demise. What makes the ruling party reviled among the governed is its willingness to use the country’s legal arms to wrangle political outcomes. The governed are left with a deep-seated resentment that this type of activity is par exellence governance without accountability to the rule of law.

The process by which the EPRDF has arrived at the latest “pardon” does not necessarily usher hope into the hearts of the governed. It merely completes the monstrous noose the government has placed around the fragile neck of Ethiopian democracy. We have repeatedly argued that democracy is not just about reaching the right outcome; its the tedious processes are perhaps more important. We recall one of our earlier postings where we hypothesized a scenario where the CUD was indeed guilty of the crime of treason as charged:

[L]et’s assume for a moment that the EPRDF is right—that those who disagreed with its policies violated basic tenets of democratic debate and engaged in acts of treason. Winston Churchill once remarked that “one of the most unfailing tests of civilization lies in how a country treats people accused of crimes.” The EPRDF’s treatment of those it accuses of committing crimes has rendered the ruling party and the government it leads utter failures under both the civilization and fear tests.

And who speaks for them?

Even though history will not be kind to the EPRDF on its treatment of political dissent, there is the nagging issue of the admission of guilty signed by the detained members of the CUDP. The people of Ethiopia deserve to hear from the leadership as to the degree of culpability they’ve owned up to. Saying that the admission was a result of a drawn-out and complicated elder process (Shemgilina) or that it was signed under duress is not enough. It also leaves both the democracy movement and the people of Ethiopia uninstructed on the limits of constitutionally protected speech and dissent. The people of Ethiopia deserve it.

Ultimately, the EPRDF, as the government, bears the ultimate burden to show that both the process and the outcome of the political settlement were fair. But the ruling party does not seem concerned about fairness. Instead, it is gambling on a scenario where, at best, a mutually assured interpretive destruction ensues where both parties will either be winners or losers, or at worst, to leave a lasting perception in the hearts and minds of the governed that it has the power to ultimately decide the fate of all that cross its path. This list includes individual voices of dissent, opposition parties, civil society, the private media, foreign journalists, and blogs.

So here were are, elated that the leaders of the opposition who have taught millions to advocate for democracy (regardless of its consequences) will no longer have to breath the putrid smell of their prison cages. At the dawn of the Coptic Ethiopian millennium, we must, however, reluctantly believe in Bernhard Meltzer's oft-repeated aphorism: "when you forgive, you in no way change the past—but you sure do change the future."

The opposition will continue to do what it does—oppose. The issue is how the EPRDF will deal with that opposition. Once again, the ball is in the ruling party’s court.

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• Andrew Heavens' departure from Ethiopia has left a void in the Ethiopian blogsphere. We thank Andrew for his work during his stay in Ethiopia and his apparent affection for Ethiopians from all walks of life regardless of the situation in which life has placed them. We hope to soon write a piece on Meskel Square's important contributions to the development of Ethiopian democracy.

The Perfect Genocide Memorial

Following the failed December 1960 coup d'état led by Columbia U-grad Girmame Neway and his brother Mengistu, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I is said to have shuddered at the very thought of returning to his blood-drenched palace at Sidist Kilo.

The carnage at Genete Leul Palace took place in the Green Salon, two floors below the monarch's bedroom. In that conference room—named after its lustrous olive-green drapery, the Emperor lost his closest and most trusted allies. The coup that began with lofty ideals and promises of a new age in Ethiopia had taken a nasty turn when the two brothers made a fatal decision to engage in a murderous rampage that set Ethiopia toward the now familiar path of extra-judicial killings of political opponents.

Before HIM moved out of Genete Leul in1961 where he had lived since 1932, he donated the palace and its grounds to HSU (now AAU). Today, the university president and his staff occupy the first floor of Genete Leul while the rest of the palace has been converted into a museum, which also houses the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. It is unfortunate the Green Salon is not part of the museum--it just sits there, a stone's throw from where the university president's assistants mill aimlessly about, and hidden from the eyes of visitors who leave the former palace without spending a second in the room where so many who played significant roles in writing Ethiopia's modern history lost their lives.

The Jubilee Palace was completed in 1955 to commemorate HIM's jubilee anniversary of his coronation. Most of us have seen glimpses of the palace through tall eucalyptus trees on our way down Menelik Avenue. As your car hurls down the steep decline the splendor of the palace and the formidable grounds on which it sits take a backseat in anticipation of that hump that allows every Addis resident the opportunity to experience, if only for a second, what it feels like to be on a ferenj rollercoaster. Alas, it is common to see grown men gunning their engines to get maximum thrill from a gut-wrenching leap, only to immediately hit their brakes in sheer terror with the possibility they may send their car careening over the bridge at the bottom of the hill.

Despite the various rulers that have entered the gates of the Jubilee as leaders of Ethiopia since 1974—Aman Andom, Teferi Benti, Mengistu Hailemariam, Girma Woldeyes, and Meles Zenawi—one glance at the Jubilee today, and you associate it with the Conquering Lion of Judah. And it is under the gigantic portico of the palace that the Emperor entered the Volkswagen and was driven to his dethronement and subsequent death by strangulation. On that day, Ethiopia's history began to unravel, and soon, Ethiopians turned into violent killers.

On its face, the EPRDF's announcement would build "a 1 million dollar mausoleum" at Meskel Square to honor Ethiopian victims of genocide is commendable. But its timing reeks of a self-serving act of deflective culpability. I say this with a heavy heart: it bleeds for the families of the victims of the Derg—my own included—but two wrongs can never make a right and at some point, the EPRDF must realize that the generation of kids that perished in the 1970s would have suffered the same fate under its rule. Most of the victims of the Red Terror were kids—mostly boys who knew little of governance, representative democracy, constitutionalism, or international politics, but knew one thing when they saw and experienced it: tyranny. For demanding the right to fairly elect their leaders, Ethiopian kids have been mowed down by their own governments since the mid-1970s. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Only those governments whose hands are clean of the blood of their people have the right to build edifices that honor victims of genocide. The EPRDF cannot claim that right and at this point it should instead use the mausoleum funds to compensate the victims of the June and November 2005 killings as well as the thousands of Ethiopians who have been unjustly arrested and detained for disagreeing with electoral fraud. This author is willing to wait a bit longer for a Red Terror Memorial. 

But that memorial has already been built. The Emperor's dethronement was a watershed moment in modern Ethiopian history. On September 11, 1974, when HIM was led out of his palace, Ethiopia changed forever. The significance of that moment had dire consequences for millions of Ethiopians and perhaps it is time to give that time, place, and moment, the appropriate historical pause it deserves. We should never forget the Emperor was a victim of genocide, too.

Here's one suggestion: The Jubilee Palace where the big man now resides belongs to the Emperor. It belongs to HIM as Versailles does to Louis XIV. In its marble halls echo the voices of the descendants of a long and ancient line of Ethiopian monarchs (the Solomonic, if you believe). But most important, it belongs to the people of Ethiopia. The Jubilee must therefore become (1) a museum of an ancient Ethiopian monarchical past now gone; (2) a memorial for all those who have died in the name of Ethiopia—in foreign wars (against Great Britain, Italy, Somalia, and Eritrea) and in the name of democracy (while protesting tyranny). I want every Ethiopian mother who lost a son or a daughter in the name of that country, wearing her tattered clothes, adorned in her butter-soaked hairdo, smelling of the rustic aromas of Ethiopian life, to remember her child while standing on an engraving of her child's name on the floors of the pristine palace.

As every high school kid in the U.S. gets to visit Washington, D.C. its memorials, national archive, and its constitution, every Ethiopian child should enter the Jubilee Palace and walk through its halls and hollow grounds to remind herself of what it took to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I dream to live long enough to see that day.

To my brother M--hoping to see your name engraved. And to the doc. Also, to all the kids who perished then and now.