Ethiopia: an aid success story or a tyranny? (Times Online)
Two weeks ago, the US State Department listed a vast range of human rights abuses in Ethiopia, from torture to detention without charge. It also cited “credible reports that the ruling EPRDF used humanitarian assistance to gain support for the party by denying opposition political party supporters access to humanitarian assistance, including relief food, public services, and microfinance loans”. The charge is not that aid is being siphoned off, but that it is being used to entrench one-party rule.
Those allegations are reinforced today in a report by Human Rights Watch. It describes farmers denied seeds, teachers sent on propaganda training and people unable to get a government job without a reference from a party official. It accuses the Government of building a culture of fear ahead of elections in May.
The last elections, in 2005, were the most democratic the country had seen. Too democratic: as opposition parties made big gains, the vote descended into violence. Thousands were arrested. Some are still in jail, including the 34-year-old woman who leads Ethiopia’s Unity for Democracy and Justice Party.
The bloody crackdown shocked the West. Donors suspended “budget support” (direct aid, not for specific projects) to the Ethiopian Government. But not for long. Direct aid soon resumed under a different label, the “Protection of Basic Services” (PBS) programme. Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), an enthusiastic supporter, says PBS “shifts power from the centre” because it funnels money to the regions.
But far from decentralising power, Human Rights Watch warns that PBS is reinforcing Mr Meles’s apparatus of control. It says that the Government has jacked up the number of local officials to four million, that these control access to everything from food to microcredit, and that many villages are organised in cells that encourage neighbours to spy on each other.
Can a Maoist system have been built under donors’ noses?
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