• How are key internal actors in Ethiopia big factors in denying freedom and democracy in Ethiopia?
• Will the ruling EPRDF/TPLF government use the upcoming elections to further legitimize its stranglehold on 93 % of Ethiopians?

Five years, hundreds of dead bodies, thousands of imprisonments, disappearances, evictions and land confiscations later after the 2005 parliamentary elections , Ethiopia is yet to stage other sham elections for its total seats of 547 in the House People’s Representative— commonly known as ‘national parliament’—in May 210.

The least obvious and tricky factors when discussing the complex Ethiopian political turmoil is the role of key international actors in thwarting the freedom and democracy Ethiopians have been long yearning for. Naming and identifying the influences of these key actors is no longer a myth or speculation. As we know it and as the 2009 Human Rights Watch World Report makes it clear, they are two relatively wealthy and democratic western nations. They are the United States and the United Kingdom. Many in Ethiopia worry that financial assistance from these two countries will be used to shatter the freedom and democracy they yearned for in the coming May 2010 national elections as in the previous three parliamentary elections the country had held. I would like to quote a relevant text from Human Rights Watch (HRW) report to illustrate and argue how foreign funding from the UK and the U.S makes Ethiopian human rights records not only poor, but also non-existent in all its dimensions be it elections, political repression, war crimes by the Ethiopian military forces, regional refugee renditions, civil society and free expression, inter alia:

The United States and European donor states provide the Ethiopian government with large sums of bilateral assistance, including direct budgetary support from the United Kingdom and military assistance from the US. The US is Ethiopia's largest bilateral d... [Read More]

President Barack Obama's Inaugural Speech Analysed from African Perspective

Opinion | Qeerransoo Biyyaa

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.

I followed the coverage of Barack Obama’s Inauguration on television with fascination. Indeed, I was happy and fortunate to witness with the rest of the globe the rise of the first African-American to the highest office in the world. I assume this event was one of the most widely covered, if not the most, by global media networks. Television pundits and reporters have approached Obama’s presidential speech from almost every angle, but I feel that pundits glossed over a part of his speech, where he warns dictators, perpetrators of genocide across the world. The lines from his speech I quoted above mean a lot to the people of some African countries, suffering under brutal dictatorships and ethnically motivated ongoing genocides and exclusions from national economies and benefits of citizenship.

If Obama translates those lines into foreign policy ideas on Africa, extending a hand to unclench the clenched iron fists of dictators, who cling to power through corruption, deceit and silencing of dissent is nowhere urgently needed than in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Democratic Republic of Congo. The current leaders of Zimbabwe and Ethiopia alone have been in power for over 46 years combined, which is a total number of years Barack Obama has lived so far. In these years, these dictators have not been building, but destroying the fabrics of their societies—massacring the population, sending millions into exile in neighboring countries and thousands into western nations, displacing millions inside, and forcing families to move apart.

It is... [Read More]