Photo Cocktail

Photo: Meles and his family severely panicked

Dear readers, the above picture of PM Meles Zenawi ,daughter Semhal Meles and spouse Azeb Mesfin , all in an extremely terrified situation and severe panic, was taken last 14 November 2009 during the inauguration of the Tekeze Hydropower Plant .

Due to a mob , criticizing shouts and unaccounted security issues ,as can be seen in the photo above, Meles had to cut the inauguration session and be rushed to Addis Ababa palace “without visiting all the places he had intended to”. .The panic was exacerbated by the push of the crowd.

Japan, please don't go grabbing Ethiopians' land

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Active duty: Young Nic (right) on patrol while serving as a Game Warden in the Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia in the late 1960s. The man on the left, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, was Assistant Warden Mesfin Abebe, and the two men behind were local vigilantes who joined us in pursuit of illegal loggers. C.W. NICOL PHOTOS

OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

Reflections on feelings and farmland born of an exciting time spent serving Haile Selassie

By C.W. NICOL

On March 15 just gone, this newspaper carried an excellent but disturbing article by John Vidal, environment editor of the London-based Guardian newspaper. He wrote about food shortages and land-grabbing in Africa, and I was particularly troubled to read about deals going on to sell Ethiopian land to foreign investors. In the article, an Ethiopian government spokesperson was quoted as saying that "Ethiopia has 74 million hectares of fertile land, of which only 15 percent is currently in use — mainly by subsistence farmers . . . "

High tea: Senior Game Warden John Blower (right) takes a break and looks forward to a well-earned cuppa in a spectacular setting among the towering Simien Mountains. At the time, we were on one of our boundary-mapping treks that led to an Imperial proclamation in 1969 establishing the Simien Mountain National Park precisely within the area we had suggested.

From September 1967 until October 1969 I was the first Game Warden of what was soon to become the Simien Mountain National Park in the northern mountains of Begemdir province in Ethiopia — a 220-sq.-km expanse that was enshrined in law with a proclamation by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie printed in the Negarit Gazeta newspaper on Oct. 31, 1969. That proclamation defined the park's boundaries as those mapped out by myself and Senior Game Warden John Blower, the Addis Ababa-based Brit who was the boss of all the country's game wardens.

At the time, of course, that was encouraging news, soon after I left Ethiopia I started hearing about more wild land being plowed up, more forests cut down and — almost daily — rifle shots heard around the great Simien escarpment, home to the endangered walia ibex.

I had departed Ethiopia with a heavy heart, knowing it was heading for more chaos and internal strife, large-scale land erosion, loss of forests and wildlife — and inevitably, mass starvation.

Together with my very able assistant, Mesfin Abebe, a graduate of the Tanzanian College of Wildlife Management, and our 20 rangers, we had fought and struggled for two years to establish the park. We had done our best to deal with poachers, hill bandits, illegal loggers and illegal farming on vulnerable watershed slopes, all made worse by rampant corruption — from local governors and police to senior officials in our own central wildlife department.

Towards the end of my sojourn in Ethiopia, I drove the 800 km or so to the capital, Addis Ababa, for meetings about the new park boundaries. The city was in chaos. The university and nine secondary schools were closed. Truckloads of soldiers and police were everywhere and I saw jeeps mounted with 50-calibre machine guns. The students were not allowed to gather, even in small groups, and hundreds had been arrested. Wild rumors were heard and repeated — there was going to be a coup d'etat . . . some students had been thrown into a cesspit and drowned by the Imperial guard . . . the army was poised outside the city, ready to come in and take over . . . five young people had been jailed for five years for distributing pamphlets . . . all foreigners would be killed.

On that particular visit, I myself — with a machete in one hand and a Walther PPK in the other — faced down a vengeful mob as I was driving along a lonely, muddy track on the outskirts of the city. Two Ethiopian students of English tried to reason with the mob, saying that I was helping the country, but the mob wanted blood. I was pretty angry, and a bit of a wild man at that age, so after firing a couple of shots in the air, I tossed the machete onto the seat beside me, stuck the pistol in my belt, then quickly collared two rabble-rousers (as a Game Warden I had the rights to search, seize and arrest) and hurled them into the back of the vehicle. The people in front had to either scatter or get run down, but about 50 screaming men and boys chased after my vehicle, throwing stones and waving knives, machetes and sticks.

Why the fuss? I couldn't think of anything I'd done or said to get them so enraged, but I was a foreigner and all foreigners were suspect during that nervous time. I drove the captives to a hospital, had them checked out so they couldn't later claim I had run them down or something. Getting money out of scared foreigners that way was a minor industry back then in Addis Ababa.

If that wasn't enough, a friend from the Israeli embassy later told me that I was marked for assassination. An attempt had already been made on my life in Gondar, the old castled city and provincial capital of Begemdir, where I sent off reports to the capital and picked up supplies and wages for park staff and workers.

One night, walking back to my hotel from a bar along an unlit, deserted lane, two men came at me from behind wielding iron-tipped clubs. Thanks to my karate skills I was able to fight it out without drawing my pistol. After the skirmish I returned to my hotel to bandage up the wounds on my hand and forearm. The next morning, as I was having breakfast and getting ready to return to the park, a student I was friendly with came to the hotel and told me that, just after the fight, a police Land Rover drove up the lane with its lights out and officers dragged the two attackers I had left lying on the ground to the vehicle, tossed them into the back, and drove off. Later, other witnesses told me the police had driven the men beyond the city limits and dumped them in a field outside the local slaughterhouse, a place that attracted hungry hyenas.

On my next visit to Gondar, when I made inquiries to the police about the incident they claimed to have known nothing. This was not surprising, as the Chief of Police was involved in the illegal wild-animal fur trade, which we had been disrupting. That unsavory gentleman had already warned me to stay away from fur traders. I told him that as I was a Game Warden, it was my job not only to protect the park but also to find and arrest such criminals.

When I got back to Gondar from Addis Ababa after the park boundary meetings there were riots there too. A police Land Rover had been burned. Police with guns faced the students. At night, they dragged students out of their houses and beat them with clubs while their parents watched and pleaded for them. A couple of bright young men whom I knew vanished.

Then there were the anti-Arab riots.

The Eritrean Liberation Front had been blowing up planes and generally making a nuisance of themselves, and there had been reports in the press about links with Syria. A huge "spontaneous" anti-Arab parade was held in Addis Ababa, with Amhara warriors wearing their lion-mane headdresses, carrying round shields and curved scimitars. In cities and villages all over Ethiopia, Arabs were beaten up and their shops were stoned or even looted.

At that time, several cultured Ethiopians came to me, asking if I could get guns and ammunition for them. (Of course I could, but would not.)

I cannot imagine now, in 2010, that Ethiopians have changed so much that they will stay subdued and silent while being displaced from their land by foreign investors. I especially fear that the Amhara, who are Coptic Christians, will be incensed if Arab Muslims are involved in any moves to take away their land rights. The Amhara are an especially proud and ancient people. It was ordinary Ethiopians, many of them barefooted and lightly armed, who finally drove out the Italian invaders in 1941, despite their machine guns, howitzers, planes and tanks.

Nothing I can do or say will change any of this, but even so I, with deep respect for Ethiopians — and as a citizen of this country — urge Japan not to join in this greedy scrabble. We have far too much arable land going to waste here in Japan. Land and food is not only a question of money. People who live off their land feel deeply about it, no matter how poor and defenceless they may seem.

Japan should shun this new kind of colonization like a plague, no matter what well-paid city-based officials may say. As other people who have lived and worked in the country have noted, I can myself affirm a strong belief that there is no land in Ethiopia that has no owners or users.

Back in the late 1960s, we had enough problems establishing a national park, one in which farmers were allowed to keep on using their land. We tried to stop poachers and illegal loggers, and that was not easy. I doubt if we would have survived if we had tried to take the locals' land from them — even if it was for reasons of wildlife protection or water conservation.

Japan, please, by all means help poor African farmers — but do not have anything to do with displacing them!

Ethiopia: the hunger has never gone away

Ethiopia: the hunger has never gone away

March 19, 2010 - 7:00am

Lifestyle by Ronan Scully GalwayCityTribune

By Ronan Scully

‘I seek not aid, nor seek I gifts. I ask not for bounty nor ask for riches. I call for compassion. I call for care. I call for insight. I call for awareness. I call for thoughtfulness. I call for consciousness. I call for apprehension. I call for consideration. I call for recognition. I call for respect. I call for sanity. I call for real hope. All for our world and its children.’ (A Poem by Someone who can see and cares)

Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent country and, with the exception of a five-year occupation by Mussolini’s Italy, avoided colonisation. Unfortunately best known to many for its droughts and conflict, Ethiopia is surprisingly mountainous and lush. Known as the ceiling of Africa, two-thirds of the country sits on a plateau between 6,000 and 10,000 feet above sea level.

Throughout history this rugged terrain shielded Ethiopia from outside influence. Amharic is Ethiopia’s official language, but roughly 70 different other languages and 200 dialects are spoken. The country has its own alphabet, one of only 13 in the world, and its own calendar – this year is 2002 in Ethiopia.

Reading some of the stark facts about Ethiopia is depressing; approximately 15 per cent of the population of Ethiopia is concentrated in urban centers, while 85 per cent of the 80 million populations reside in rural communities. With such a significant portion of the population dependent on rain-fed subsistence agriculture, which accounts for approximately 42.1 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, the majority of Ethiopians are vulnerable to climatic shifts.

The country is one of the poorest in the world with approximately 44 per cent of the population living in extreme poverty; the people have a life expectancy of 49 years; the infant mortality rate is about 20 per cent, and over three quarters of the population live on less than a euro a day, a crushing poverty of such depth that we in Ireland could not even imagine.

But to witness it, as I just did recently, is enough to make you weep. There are twice as many Ethiopians hungry today as there were during the 1984 famine when one million people starved. This uneasy truth means that, every year, up to eight million people, twice the population of Ireland is starving and in need of some form of food subsistence.

Ever since I saw the BBC’s Michael Buerk’s report on the famine and heard Bob Geldof and GOAL’s John O’Shea shouting at the tops of their voices for the international community to wake up to the catastrophe there, I have wanted to work in Africa, especially in Ethiopia. Now, over 25 years later, having spent many years working for GOAL both at home and in the developing world, I recently got the chance to visit Ethiopia again for a fourth time for work and personal reasons.

Arriving in the region of Borena and Awassa after a 24-hour air and road trip was surreal. I had viewed photographs and read reports before I arrived there. This was not a photograph or a dream. I really had arrived in Ethiopia. In the span of two days travel I had left behind my family and friends and comforts of the Emerald Isle and travelled, what felt like, half way around the world.

It is only through the randomness of birth that I am Irish; I could easily have been Ethiopian (actually my daughter is a beautiful Ethiopian angel). My heritage was not my choice, but rather than focusing on our differences, meeting these people and children in Ethiopia has made me realise how alike we are. We breathe the same air. We walk the same way. Our spirits need love and acceptance. Our bodies need food, water and sleep. We share the same humanity. We are really not so different.

The facts of life don’t make for good reading as regards life in Ethiopia:

More than 80,000 children die from malaria each year yet untreated mosquito nets cost just €2 and treated mosquito nets cost only €5. Unemployment rests at around 80 per cent. Most of the 80 million people who live in Ethiopia survive on less than €1 a day. There are large amounts of orphans and street children – witnessing this, as I said before, is enough to make you weep.

HIV and AIDS is one of the contributing factors to why so many children live on the streets. As parents die and relatives prove either unable or unwilling to provide care, children are left to fend for themselves. Some street children are involved in high levels of sexual activity and, as the young girls rescued by GOAL have told us, many are raped and abused at the hands of older street children and men, putting them at risk of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS.

what is development? review of Ayittey's works in Ethiopia's context

"Development was almost everywhere in Africa misconstrued to mean "change" and the "adoption of modern and scientific methods." In this rote behavior the real meaning was not clear. The approach was akin to what educators call the "refrigerator fallacy." All teachers have refrigerators and therefore if one tried hard enough to acquire a refrigerator, one would become a teacher! The developed countries were industrialized and therefore if one acquired enough industries (and perhaps a nuclear bomb), presto one would become a developed country. " George Ayittey.

ACTING FOR DEVELOPMENT - applies to Meles and Co.

Clearly, this perverted way of looking at things shifted the emphasis away from the rigorous process of training to become a teacher to the rather facile task of acquiring the "symbol" of the occupation to be considered a teacher. Similarly in development, the emphasis was shifted from understanding the modus operandi to a preoccupation with its symbols. If an African head to state showed off a brand new shiny piece of imported tractor, it would "prove" that agriculture had been "mechanized." Precisely what that tractor was supposed to do to improve agricultural productivity or whether the support infrastructure existed or not was irrelevant. The mere presence of the tractor was of overriding importance. Such antics and obsession with symbolism betrayed a woeful lack of understanding of the development process.

he problems Africa faces today have little to do with the slave trade, colonialism or racism but more to do with bad leadership and bad governance, originating from the establishment of defective economic and political systems and the debauchery of state institutions. Cut these institutions loose from the clutches of the despots and the African people will do the rest of the job of transforming their societies.

Economic development does not mean the wholesale and blind acquisition of the symbols and signs of modernity. Nor does it mean everything about indigenous Africa must be rejected in favor of alien systems. In fact, the true challenge for development practioners is how to use the existing so-called "primitive, backward and archaic" institutions to generate economic prosperity. These institutions can never be alienated from Africa's peasants. They are part of their culture. One cannot expect these peasants to suddenly renounce their age-old traditions and ways of doing things. Nor is such abjuration absolutely necessary, as demonstrated by the stupendous success of the Japanese. The Japanese did not have to become "Americanized" or "Sovietized" in order to develop(Ayittey,2006) .

He also says Development deals with people. In Africa, the people are the peasants -- the majority in every African nation. The environment in the field of development is their socio-economic and political set-up. That is, the whole gamut of their social, economic, cultural and political institutions at the grass-root level. Like a seed, if a development project does not fit into this socio-economic milieu or set-up, it will fail.

Africa's current development crisis emanates from the defective approach adopted by African elites and leaders with considerable support from foreign governments and multilateral agencies. Once again, it is the approach which is being criticized, not the objectives of development.1 What occurred in Africa was development by imitation. Grandiose projects and schemes were copied abroad and transplanted into Africa.

American farmers use tractors and chemical fertilizers; so too must we in Africa. New York has skyscrapers; so too must Africa in the middle of nowhere. London has doubledeck buses; so too must Accra and Lagos. The Soviet Union has state farms; so too must Africa. In 1964, Nkrumah demanded a bylaw to require all advertisements in Accra to be lit by neon so that the streets of the capital would resemble Piccadilly Circle in London. France once had an emperor. So Bokassa of the Central African Republic spent $20 million in 1976 to crown himself an emperor. Rome has a basilica; so too must Ivory Coast. The United States has two political parties; so too must Nigeria. Accordingly, the military regime of President Ibrahim Babangida created two political parties: the Social Democratic Party and the National Republican Convention.2 To add more insult, the military regime also wrote their party manifestoes. The list of this type of unimaginative aping ("so-too-must-we" syndrome) in Africa is endless.

OF THE AFRICAN ELITES--this applies to Professor Andreas Eshete, Dr Samuel Assefa and the likes

The most painful and treacherous aspect of Africa's collapse was the wilful and active collaboration by Africa's own intellectuals, many of whom were highly "educated" with Ph. D.s, and who should have known better. Yet a multitude of them have prostituted themselves, selling off their principles and integrity to partake of the plunder, misrule and repression of the African people. In fact, according to Colonel. Yohanna A. Madaki (rtd), when General Gowon drew up plans to return Nigeria to civil rule in 1970, "academicians began to present well researched papers pointing to the fact that military rule was the better preferred since the civilians had not learned any lessons sufficient enough to be entrusted with the governance of the country" (Post Express, 12 November 1998, 5).

So hordes of politicians, lecturers, professionals, lawyers, and doctors sell themselves off into prostitution and voluntary bondage to serve the dictates of military vagabonds with half their intelligence. And time and time again, after being raped, abused, and defiled, they are tossed out like rubbish --- or worse. Yet more intellectual prostitutes stampede to take their places.

African countries that have imploded in recent years were all ruined by the military: Algeria, Burundi, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire, among others. In country after country in Africa, where military rule was entrenched, educational institutions (of the tertiary level - universities, and colleges) have all decayed --- starved of funds by the military. Although the official excuse is always lack of funds, the military predators always find the money to purchase shiny new pieces of bazookas for their thugs. But the real reason? "It is not in the best interest of these military governments to educate their people," says Wale Deyemi, a doctoral student at the University of Lagos. "They do not want people to be able to challenge them" (The Washington Post, 6 October 1995, A30).

"Swiss-Bank" Socialism --applies to EFFORT and Co. plunderers

The "socialism" instituted in Africa was a peculiar type ("Swiss bank" socialism) that allowed the head of state and phalanx of kleptocrats to rape and plunder their national treasuries for deposit in foreign banks. Julius Nyerere was perhaps the only true practicing socialist, but his Chama Chamapinduzi (CCM) party was hopelessly riddled with corruption. Even Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, generally regarded as the "father of African socialism," was reputed to have stashed millions away in Swiss and other foreign banks, according to the Azu Crabbe Commission of Enquiry set by the Government of Ghana in 1967 to probe Nkrumah's assets.

Only a few African countries, such as Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Kenya, Senegal and Togoland, spurned the "socialist path" and opted to stay with the "Western system." But this system too, like the indigenous African system, was not well understood either. Adopted in these countries were bastardized "Western models" that were characterized by heavy state intervention in the economy, a preponderance of state enterprises, one-party rule, declaration of life-presidents, personal dictatorships -- all of which were un-Western. In fact, beyond the diplomatic posturing and ideological rhetoric, there was little real difference between the "socialist" and "capitalist" (or pro-West and pro-East) African regimes.

Strictly from the African point of view, the ideological paradigm was irrelevant. Africans were not Americans, Chinese, Cubans, or Russians. In fact, it was probably for this reason that African heads of state declared themselves to be "non-aligned." But then, "non-alignment" turned out to be a strange type of movement that congregated in Havana and Harare to bash only the West. Insidiously, Marxism, Leninism, and all sorts of alien "isms," copied from abroad, were imposed on Africa by the same African nationalists preaching "non-alignment."

The portraits of Marx and Lenin graced the Red Square in Moscow. So too must go Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Cotonou (Benin), Luanda (Angola) and Maputo (Mozambique). Cuba had People's Defence Committees; so too must Ghana. The colonialists never accepted Africans for what they were and tried to remould them. In the post-colonial period, it was African leaders who were trying to reshape Africans in the image of foreigners.

ON PRESS FREEDOM-applies to the jamming of VOA by Meles

It is often easy to overlook the critical importance of "intellectual freedom" -- a catch-all phrase embracing freedom of expression, press freedom, and free flow of information. A pertinent characteristic of totalitarian or tyrannical political systems is the rigid control exercised over the content and flow of information: what can be said, printed or disseminated by the people, editors, and publishers. The free flow of information is vital for an economy if investors are to make sound decisions. It is thought that the manipulation and control of information triggered the Mexican peso crisis in 1994.

In Africa, the flow of information is severely restricted. Writing in Free Press (May 5-11, 2000), Ghanaian columnist, Eddie Fisher noted:

• Government or the politicians’ perception of a good press is the subservient and sycophantic one which exists to build them up, boost and promote them or propagate and publicize their activities. But where the press spurns such demands and performs its traditional role as the watchdog, it automatically incurs the wrath of the governing elite who take the offensive posture and resort to any available measure either to stifle it or silence it completely” .

Ethiopia's donors asked to condemn 'attack'

Last Updated: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 | 1:28 PM ET

CBC News

The Ethiopian government is waging "a co-ordinated and sustained attack" against its opponents ahead of May elections and countries like Canada that send aid to Ethiopia should condemn it, a new report says.

Georgette Gagnon, the executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division, released her group's report in Nairobi, Kenya, on Wednesday. (Human Rights Watch)

"Ethiopians, millions of them, are unable to speak freely, organize political activities, challenge their government's policies, either through peaceful protest, voting, or publicizing their views without fear of reprisal," said Georgette Gagnon, the executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, speaking at the report's release in Nairobi, Kenya, on Wednesday.

She slammed the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front for having "systematically punished opposition supporters" since it was elected in 2005 and called on foreign governments to step up and voice their concern.

If foreign governments do not speak before the May 23 elections, "election day is likely to be ... a veneer of democratic pretension hiding a repressive state apparatus," the report said.

Canada is 4th-largest donor

Canada contributed up $132 million in aid to Ethiopia in 2007-2008, according to the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA, making it the fourth-largest donor to the eastern African nation. One-third of Ethiopia's government expenditures come from foreign assistance, according to Human Rights Watch.

The Canadian International Development Agency provided aid to Ethiopia worth $132 million in 2007-2008. (Patti Gower/ACDI-CIDA)

Much of that aid is being used by the government to oppress, rather than help, the Ethiopian people, said the non-profit organization, which investigates human rights abuses worldwide.

The government has used "the full weight of its power" to silence its critics, the group said, including closing an independent newspaper in December and jamming the local language programming of Voice of America in February. In 2008, it also imprisoned opposition leader Birtukan Midekssa, of the Unity for Justice and Democracy Party.

Activists and other journalists have fled the country as a result, it said.

Call to action for foreign donors

Despite such actions, the country's principal foreign donors, including the World Bank, United States, United Kingdom, European Union and Canada, have been "very timid in their criticisms of Ethiopia's deteriorating human rights situation," Human Rights Watch said.

"Ethiopia's foreign backers should break their silence and condemn the climate of fear in Ethiopia," Gagnon said.

The group also called on the Ethiopian government to release all political prisoners, including Midekssa, end attacks against opposition members, journalists and civil society, and allow independent groups to investigate and report abuses publicly.

Ethiopia's ruling party came to power in 2005, when it won 327 seats in the country's 547-seat house. The party went on to win 99.9 per cent of the vote in local elections in April 2008, a landslide that allowed it to consolidate its control over local administrations and rule "with an iron grip," according to Human Rights Watch.

The group interviewed more than 200 people during 15 weeks of research in Ethiopia for its report, entitled One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure: Violations of Freedom of Expression and Association in Ethiopia.

Interviews were conducted with farmers, teachers, civil servants, activists, opposition and government officials, as well as foreign diplomats and aid officials.

Ethiopia's elections will be held May 23.

Ethiopia: an aid success story or a tyranny?

Our money is eradicating poverty. But it may also be used to prop up a repressive regime

Camilla Cavendis

Talking to an Ethiopian journalist who has fled his country rather than face charges under his Government’s new anti-terror law. Intimidating journalists is a pastime in Addis Ababa; few are left. “The country is very poor, it needs aid,” he says, “but the Government uses aid to repress dissidents.” A former aid worker I talk to goes one step farther. “Aid has become an instrument of coercion,” he says simply.

These whispers coming out of Ethiopia have been drowned out by the noise about the possible hijacking of some of Bob Geldof’s Live Aid money in the 1980s. The Mengistu regime then was shambolic and venal: it is plausible that rebel leaders did siphon off money to arm themselves.

But today’s Ethiopia is an aid success story. It is still desperately poor — ten million people live on the brink of starvation — but its urbane leader, Meles Zenawi, is making real progress in training health workers, vaccinating babies and getting more children into school. This potent combination of need and hope has made Ethiopia one of the biggest recipients of foreign aid in the world, and the second-biggest recipient of British aid.

To international donors Ethiopia is a precious example of poverty alleviation in a land plagued by drought and famine. But to human rights campaigners, and even some Western aid workers, it is a regime of increasingly sophisticated duplicity. Donors say that Mr Meles’s Government is delivering aid more efficiently to the poor than many other African countries. But it looks as though the machine he has built to deliver aid could also be a ruthless instrument of repression.

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? Or are these stories from the disaffected? Having been an aid worker in Bangladesh, I know that there is never enough aid to go round. I have doled out food to hungry people knowing that the queue is too long. The empty-handed can be bitter. But this sounds like something more. Last year Mr Meles passed two draconian laws that strengthen his grip on the country. A terrorism law criminalises many forms of dissent. A charities law so restricts foreign funding for civil society organisations that one aid official in Addis told me: “It will kill human rights NGOs.”

DfID has launched an investigation into the allegations. Officials point out that Mr Meles has vehemently denied the allegations, and promised to investigate any evidence. But when HRW sent a researcher to meet farmers complaining that they had been denied seeds, the farmers were arrested and the researcher deported. The same thing seems to have happened in January to a Bloomberg journalist.

Like Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Meles Zenawi won Western approval by talking the language of development. Like them, he has provided stability. Like them, he has improved lives at the expense of freedom. The question for the West is how far we accept that trade-off. There must come a point when cronyism and fear make it harder to pull people out of poverty.

I know full well that compromises must sometimes be made to keep people alive. Aid workers fear that reducing aid would hurt the poor. What they do not say is that this would also hurt the aid industry, which has so much vested in Ethiopia.

As Ethiopia has become more repressive, our aid to it has increased, from $1 billion in 2004 to $1.85 billion in 2008. Yet the West has made no meaningful representations against abuses. It is time to challenge Mr Meles to amend his new laws, end intimidation and let the media in. The people who have spoken to me for this article should not have to whisper. Nor should the West.

Aid workers shouldn’t think that they are above criticism

Published on 18 Mar 2010

Shampoo and bibles.

I remember looking at the cargo in the aircraft’s hold and thinking to myself this must be some kind of sick joke. What possible use could countless thousands of starving Sudanese people in the heart of the country’s remote Nuba mountains have for shampoo and bibles? Evidently, the supplier, a US Christian charity and aid organisation, seemed to think the items were indispensable.

The fact that the Nuba, far from being Christian themselves, were followers of Islam or continued to practice old shamanistic beliefs, appeared not to have registered on the cultural radar of their American benefactors.

Looking back now on that moment in 2001 at the airstrip in the Kenyan town of Lokichoggio it remains as surreal today as it did then. For the first time though, it really brought home to me the true nature of some so-called humanitarian aid and the often questionable uses to which it is put. In this instance, the US charity’s fundamentalist missionary zeal and determination to convert had clearly wiped out any understanding of the actual situation on the ground. As for the shampoo, well, apparently, a supermarket chain had donated it and the charity felt duty bound to deliver it, even if it did cost a fortune and their flights clogged up the congested makeshift runway and delayed others carrying life-saving food aid, medical supplies and other essentials into the region.

Let me be clear about what I’m saying here. Yes, humanitarian aid keeps people alive, gives them reason to hope and have faith, confidence and trust in others. But aid is also a propagandist tool, a weapon, a career move, a subterfuge for corruption, opportunism and dictatorship, not to mention an excuse for pop stars to mouth off and bible-bashers to preach.

Anyone in need of a reminder here need look no further than the current controversy surrounding the BBC World Service report claiming that millions of pounds of Live Aid money was siphoned off to buy arms for rebels fighting Ethiopia’s military dictatorship at the height of the famine there in 1985.

In the midst of the predictable rant that followed from an outraged Bob Geldof and barely comprehensible comments from Midge Ure – quoted in this newspaper earlier in the week – the real question, that of whether humanitarian aid actually works and just who really benefits, was duly obscured and drowned out. Aid is a strange thing. For a start there are different kinds, such as emergency aid, development aid and charity aid. Like aid itself, those who work in the industry – and these days that’s exactly what it is, a commercial industry – come in various types.

First, there are the holier-than-thous. Invariably, this category of aid worker tends to be faith-driven, hellbent on setting the world to rights with an evangelical zeal. Some years ago in Malawi I encountered just this kind of thinking among the ex-patriot staff at an orphanage for children whose parents had died of AIDs. To these ‘humanitarian workers’ AIDs prevention didn’t go beyond sexual abstinence, contraception being totally at odds with their own religious beliefs. Hardly surprising then that the orphanage they ran was constantly full to capacity.

Today though, far and away the vast majority of aid workers are of the professional type, their chosen careers little more than a modern day version of the colonial service. In my experience, usually the most impressive are the least politically correct. Pragmatists, they know that what they do is a drop in the ocean when it comes to alleviating human suffering, but still they get things done and win the trust of those they are trying to help. Such individuals however, are the exception.

A whole swathe of the humanitarian community remains riddled with the self-righteous. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of those aid workers who consistently believe that somehow because of what they do they are above criticism. It’s high time they realised that the money they spend – especially public donations – needs to be accounted for, and that if the work they do is of dubious intent, shoddily managed or ineffectual then they are open to questioning and where necessary investigation, just like any other industry.

Faced with an increasingly congested and competitive marketplace, aid organisations jockey constantly for the attention of the media whenever they spring into action in some disaster zone. Just take the recent earthquake in Haiti as one example. Yet, the moment the media does its job and turns the spotlight on their failings, like Geldof they jump up and down crying foul.

“Either as individuals or organisations, it’s about time a little humility was allowed into your closed self-regarding little media world,” accused Geldof rather ironically, in his rambling response to the BBC’s claims about the misuse of Live Aid money. I say ironic not least given that it was a media report, that of the BBC’s Michael Buerk and cameraman Mohammed Amin, that first alerted the world to the famine in Ethiopia in the first place.

As ever, Geldof’s latest reaction has been long on outrage and short on analysis. Precisely the sort of muddle-headed thinking that ensures well-intentioned do-gooders like him get taken to the cleaners by dodgy African regimes and despots, who can spot an opportunity a mile off.

To be fair to Geldof, admittedly the BBC’s programme was largely based on the claims of two former rebel commanders said to have political axes to grind. This however in no way justifies Geldof’s claims that the BBC simply had it in for him and Band Aid or failed in its journalistic role.

The politics of aid is a complicated business. Anyone who has spent any time in a disaster or conflict zone knows all too well that aid is a commodity to be exploited be it for weapons, financial gain or political power. We owe it to every person who drops a few quid into a can to help their fellow human beings, to make sure the money they give does just that, rather than subsidising some warlord. Journalism’s investigative role is as important in that capacity as it is in bringing the suffering to our attention in the first place. As for Geldof, he should stop bleating and let professional aid workers get on with what they do best. There is no shortage of need in the world today.

Sorry Bob, Band Aid millions DID pay for guns: Charity's man in Ethiopia tells his disturbing story Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl

By ZOE BRENNAN
Last updated at 12:01 AM on 19th March 2010

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Bob Geldof is furious with the BBC for reporting that his charity unwittingly funded weapons for warlords. So what's the truth? Here Band Aid's man in Ethiopia tells his disturbing story.

The images of starving children flickered across the screen - youngsters hardly conscious, possessing not even the energy to bat away the flies descending on their emaciated bodies.

BBC broadcaster Michael Buerk described the scene in Ethiopia 1984 as 'the closest thing you get to hell on earth'. The famine pictures awoke the conscience of the world. A year later, Britain was host to the biggest fund-raising event of all time, Live Aid.

Who can forget it? At Wembley, and in Philadelphia, pop stars including Queen, David Bowie and George Michael were part of a dazzling line-up determined to feed the world.

Full of hope: Midge Ure and Bob Geldof at Live Aid in 1985

And Bob Geldof demanded: 'Don't go to the pub tonight - please, stay in and give us the money. There are people dying NOW, so give me the money.'

Money poured in. The 16-hour rock concert on July 13, 1985 raised around £65million and was watched by a global audience estimated at 1.5 billion.

It was a moment of hope. But that was then.

Now the BBC has reported that substantial amounts of money - some of it raised by Band Aid - were siphoned away from relief efforts and went to fund guns for Ethiopian warlords during the Eighties.

Bob Geldof has responded with a vitriolic attack, dismissing the story as 'total b******s' and accusing the BBC of a 'total collapse of standards'. He has branded the BBC World Service a 'rotten old cherry'.

He said: 'Produce one shred of evidence, one iota of evidence, and I promise you I will professionally investigate it, and I will sue the Ethiopian government, who were the rebels at the time, if there is any money missing, for that money back now.'

He added: 'Let me be specific. There is not a single shred of evidence that Band-Aid money was diverted. It could not have been.'

So just what is the truth? And where did the money raised by Band Aid go?

Today, for the first time, the Band Aid man on the ground in Ethiopia speaks out exclusively to The Daily Mail, saying he believes it is possible that up to 20 per cent of donor's money went to fund the rebels.

Furthermore, he told me that he personally sympathised with the rebel cause he calls 'a liberating force', and travelled in convoys he suspected were transporting arms to them.

John James was Band Aid Field Director in Ethiopia from 1985-91 and was awarded an MBE for his charity work. He says: 'I would be surprised if it were any less than 10-20 per cent of funds were diverted to the rebels.

'Did I sympathise with the rebels? Yes. We would not have tolerated any direct assistance in the purchase of arms or condoned it, but just remember it was a highly complex situation.'

James, a farmer who is now 85 and living in Devon, adds: 'I think it is ridiculous for anybody to claim that not one penny of aid money was diverted.

'You couldn't help the hungry in the rebel-held areas without helping the rebels. You have to be realistic about that. It is probable that some money was diverted to buy arms. I believe a just use was made of the money. I think it fulfilled the interests of the donors.'

He recalls travelling on a rebel convoy, which he suspected carried arms, saying: 'I didn't know what was in the heavily sheeted tarpaulin load of the lorry in which I travelled, and I didn't ask. I would be surprised if it had not contained arms.'

Aid money: Was Max Perberdy fooled by Gebremedhin Araya and Tekleweyni Assefa?

To understand just how explosive his recollections are, let us turn to the BBC report that unleashed Geldof's temper, and caused ripples of alarm to reverberate around the world of charity fundraising.

Former rebel leaders told the World Service's respected Africa editor, Martin Plaut, that they posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money.

They say that their organisation, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) used the cash, meant to pay for food for the starving, to fund attempts to overthrow the government of the time in a bloody civil war.

One rebel, Gebremedhin Araya, estimated that $95 million (£63m) of aid money from Western governments and charities, including Band Aid, was spent on weapons and the political machinery of the rebel party. He believed just $5 million (£3m) was used to help locals.

James agrees with Araya that some money found its way into the rebel's hands - but denies it was the $95 million quoted. He believes that there is a 'strong probability' that five to ten per cent of funds was diverted for arms by the TPLF, and a further five to ten per cent used by them to finance their political 'hearts and minds' campaign - totalling up to 20 per cent.

If this is the case, by his own estimation, about $2m of aid money was misused.

So just how did Band-Aid money, given in such a wave of goodwill, come to fund guns?

At the time, the Ethiopian government was fighting rebellions in the northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigray.

It was the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, aided by Libya, poured $4billion into Ethiopia, sending 600 T-62 battle tanks to help the government fight rebels.

Dozens of giant Antonov An-22 military transport aircraft arrived, delivering a mighty war-chest of fire-power.

The communist leader Mengistu Haile Mariam - later found guilty of genocide - embarked on The Red Terror in 1977. He burnt rebel villages, and thousands were herded into churches which were set alight in appalling scenes of brutality.

Women were systematically raped, and the streets of the capital Addis Ababa were littered with the corpses of hundreds of child victims.

The rebels fought on - but they were out-gunned. They were kitted out with old Italian World War II machinery.

Then came the famine and huge amounts of Western aid arrived. Much of the countryside, where it was needed, was under rebel control. Some was in the form of food, some as cash.

Max Peberdy, a charity worker from Christian Aid, carried nearly $500,000 in Ethiopian currency across the border in 1984, which he used to buy grain from merchants. His story is central to the BBC claims. He insists the money he carried fed the starving.

But the merchant Peberdy dealt with was Gebremedhin Araya - who claims he was, in fact, a senior member of the rebel TPLF.

'I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant. This was a trick for the aid workers,' says Araya.

Taking advantage of the fact that the aid workers conducted just a random sampling of the grain bags purchased, Araya placed sacks filled with sand under the grain. He says he handed over the money to his leaders, including Meles Zenawi - now Ethiopia's prime minister. Zenawi refuses to comment.

Former TPLF commander Aregawi Berhe supports Gebremedhin's version of events. Now living in exile in the Netherlands, he says the rebels put on a 'drama' to get the money. 'The aid workers were fooled,' he says.

A candid black and white photograph from the time has come to light, graphically showing the set-up.

There is Peberdy - the cliche of the sandal-wearing foreign aid worker - opening a satchel full of Western cash, which is being counted by Araya and Tekleweyni Assefa, director of the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) - a group which was, in effect, run by the rebels.

BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar worked in Ethiopia in the early Nineties. He confirms the situation: 'REST was undeniably the humanitarian wing of the rebel movement. Of that, there is no doubt.

'The relief agencies had no way of knowing whether the official buying grain for them from REST was an independent local aid worker, or a member of the rebel group posing as one. The TPLF is the most ruthlessly organised and efficient guerilla group I have ever encountered.'

The BBC says that Band Aid's accounts show that it gave almost $11million to the society and other groups close to the rebels.

In response to questions from the Daily Mail, a spokesman for the Band Aid Trust said: 'Grants totalling $7,207,723 were provided to REST between 1985 and 1991.'

The CIA, in a 1985 report, also alleged aid money was being misused and 'diverted for military purposes'.

Plaut, who reported from Africa in 1985, spent almost a year researching the documentary, and the BBC is standing by his report.

For its part, the Band-Aid Trust has said it will report the BBC World Service to Ofcom and the BBC board of directors.

Surely, then, they are keen to disprove the allegations. On the contrary, when approached by the Daily Mail, The Band-Aid Trust proved extremely reluctant to hand over its accounts.

Charity Commission regulations require them to keep accounts for only six years.

Eventually, the Trust passed on accounts dating back to 1995. The files for the previous decades are archived, they say, and not available for some time. They could perhaps then be viewed - at a cost.

After much probing, some further figures are released by accountant Joe Cannon, with a message: 'Please note that there will be professional time costs for extracting the relevant information and responding to your emails, which will need to be recharged to the Daily Mail. We will forward full details of these costs to you in due course.'

In fact, the Trust proves elusive on every point - it does not have an office, questions have to be put, through its accountants, in writing to the trustees, who will decide if they deign to reply.

They do not reply. Hardly the transparency expected of a major UK charity.

After the extraordinary success of Band Aid, Geldof pledged to spend 20 per cent of the money on emergency relief, 20 per cent on logistics, and 60 per cent on long-term development.

Around £43 million was spent in the first year. Despite scrutiny and the efforts of charity workers in the field, it would have been impossible to account for every pound. In the years up to 1992, some £100 million was raised and spent.

So just what do the accounts show since 1995? Band Aid has made a large number of grants to different organisations. Its stated aim is the relief of hunger and poverty in Ethiopia and the surrounding area.

In 1995, it gave £231,808 to SOS Sahel, a development agency that works with herders and farmers in Africa.

The following year, Farm Africa received £25,000 and Oxfam £100,000. In the years to date, grants of up to £500,000 have been made to charities including Christian Relief & Development Association (an Ethiopian charity), UNICEF, Sudanese Relief and Water Aid. A total of £75million was handed out up to 2004.

Towards the 20th anniversary of the concert, Band Aid experienced something of a renaissance. The charity set up a trading subsidiary Woodcharm Limited, to handle royalties from a re-released DVD of the concert, and an auction of signed instruments donated by Band-Aid members.

Now, however, the charity is under fire. The aid agency world is understandably upset at the row - not least because tales of aid money paying for arms could cause donations to decline.

'If we were being conned, I think it was on a very small scale,' said Stephen King, who oversaw charity work in the region at the time.

Peberdy categorically denies being tricked, saying: 'We routinely monitored the trucks shipping aid across the border. The claim made by Araya is frankly absurd.'

Penny Jenden, director of Band Aid at the time, backs up Peberdy's statement. 'If this money had been diverted to rebels and not used to buy food you would have had thousands of people lying dead at the side of the road. The fact that there was no major death toll clearly demonstrates that the money was not diverted.'

Christian Aid has also refuted the allegations.

Others disagree, however. Richard Dowden, former Africa Correspondent for The Economist and director of the Royal African Society, tells me: 'I would be astounded if some of the money had not been used by the rebels. That is what happens in these situations'.

Indeed, the UN reported last week that up to 50 per cent of food aid in neighbouring Somalia is being stolen.

Perhaps, then it would have been wiser for Geldof to have been more measured in his response to the claims.

He has now tellingly conceded in a radio interview - which was very small print compared to the ferocity of his initial outburst: 'It's possible, in a war zone, in one of the worst wars, the longest-running wars in the 20th century, in a famine area, it's possible of course, that some monies were mislaid.'

David Anderson, Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford, says that it is naive to claim no money was diverted by warlords.

'You can't work in a warzone without some risk that you are giving money to some of the bad guys,' he says.

He believes Geldof was upset because news reports of the BBC programme have made it sound as if 95 per cent of money raised by Band Aid was diverted by rebels.

'Of course, that is not true,' he says. 'The programme claims a proportion of the money going into a small area of Ethiopia was diverted to buy arms. They claim that as much as £7million went astray.

'That sounds a lot, but it is a tiny proportion of the total amount of aid that went into the region.'

He adds: 'Some of the Band-Aid money will have been siphoned off, and we will never know how much went missing. That much we know.'

Now, John James has brought us far closer to knowing the truth. Whether Bob Geldof will eat his hat - and keep his promise to sue the Ethiopian government - is another matter.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259061/Sorry-Bob-Geldof-Band-Aid-millions-DID-pay-guns.html#ixzz0ibrzWI7o