Ethiopia: Return to Normalcy

By Jill Smolowe

Looking backward, life seems to shine with new promise. The civil war that ravaged Ethiopia for 30 years is over. In the five months since Mengistu Haile Mariam, the country's hard-line Marxist dictator for 14 years, was driven from power, the competing guerrilla bands have achieved a relative peace and joined in a transitional government. The death toll has fallen from 10,000 people a , month to a few hundred. Where torture and disappearances once silenced opposition voices, Ethiopians now feel free to voice their demands and even shout insults at President Meles Zenawi, a democratic exercise he withstands calmly. "That's their right," says Meles. With the recent rains, even the gods seem to be smiling on the drought-ravaged land.

The view ahead, however, is clouded. The shattered economy remains moribund, the country's 53 million citizens impoverished. The treasury is empty, half the factories are closed and much of the farmland is eroded. Famine still threatens millions of people. Foreign aid has amounted to a mere trickle as potential Western donors wait to see if Ethiopia's much vaunted turn toward democracy is a genuine renunciation of years of Marxism or just a good sales pitch. The government careens from one crisis to the next -- banditry in the east, smuggling in the west, demobilization of Mengistu's army -- with no road map to guide it. Where most of black Africa has opted to quell tribal rivalry by imposing strict one-party rule, Meles has embarked on a daring multiparty experiment that acknowledges ethnic differences. But many of the country's 70- odd ethnic groups continue to view one another over the barrels of the guns that were never confiscated when the civil war ended. "This is a country without any democratic experience," says Meles, "plunging into it with arms in hand."

It is something of a miracle, then, that the political center fashioned after Mengistu's flight is holding. Though the interim government is dominated by Meles' Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, its ruling council includes representatives from 35 different parties. Last July it adopted a charter ensuring each ethnic nationality the right to self- determination. Step One -- 12 regional elections to be held by the end of the year -- will pave the way for local autonomy or even secession. Already, the Red Sea province of Eritrea has set up its own provisional government and will hold a United Nations-sponsored referendum on independence in two years.

All this could quicken Ethiopia's total disintegration. The many tribes have always been held together by force only. But Meles, the man shepherding this unorthodox democratic experiment, is remarkably serene about the unpredictable prospects. "A feudal monarchy and a repressive dictator couldn't hold Ethiopia together," he says. "Now we are trying another way. If Ethiopia breaks apart, then it wasn't meant to be."

Pragmatic beyond his 36 years, Meles responds to trying circumstances is untried approaches. Take his tactic for dealing with tribal violence. Over the past few months, hostilities have raged between the Afars and Tigreans, the Gurages and Wolaytas, the Anuaks and Nuers, and the Oromos and Tigreans. Meles could try to pacify them all by force. Instead, he has approached tribal elders to find less drastic compromises. In the case of the Afars, for instance, he has asked the elders to designate which tribesmen should be armed. "To disarm them all is unacceptable to the Afars," Meles explains. "So the choice is to disarm the irrational elements and arm the rational elements." By this risky equation, he is calculating that if only the most cool-headed are armed, perhaps they will choose not to use their weapons.

Meles is also throwing out the textbooks on capitalism to fashion distinctly Ethiopian economic policies. In August his government unveiled a draft program that elicited skeptical grimaces in the West. While the plan opens up road transport and retail trade to private capital, it also maintains government control of the petroleum, mining and chemical industries. Even less encouraging to potential aid donors, who want to see evidence that capitalist inclinations have buried socialist leanings for good, private ownership of land is still forbidden. Meles regards this as critical to protecting the interests of the poor peasant farmers who constitute almost 90% of the population.

Meles sees this solution as practical, not polemical. "If the economic policy doesn't address the peasant's concerns, if the cities are bleeding the peasants as in most of Africa, then you cannot have democracy," he says. But such approaches have kept the foreign aid dollars from flowing. Some Ethiopians are resentful that the foreign aid spigot is still dry. "You said you would help those countries that formed democracies," says Tekola Hagos, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs. "Where's the beef? Please send cash." But Meles appears more tolerant. "For us there is a commitment to democracy even without aid," he says, "so whatever funding the U.S. gives us is a plus."

Other crises press on the government, giving rise to the phrase most commonly heard around the capital city of Addis Ababa: "We're still working on that." One troubling issue is the detention of nearly half of Mengistu's 400,000-strong army in two dozen camps around Ethiopia and over the border in the Sudan. Meles is worried that if the troops are released en masse, they will return home to find no food and no jobs. With half the population unemployed or underemployed, freedom for the soldiers is not likely to come soon. "You'd have people trained to kill with nothing else to do," says Meles. "That's a recipe for political disaster."

There are also thousands of civilian detainees, former sympathizers of Mengistu, who are being held without trial in Addis Ababa. The conditions are better than tolerable, and there have been no charges of torture. But few are being released. "We can't deal with them without a new judicial system," Meles explains. He believes that the establishment of courts must take a backseat to political and economic agendas, and offers no apology for the delay.

Meles knows he must move quickly to entrench reforms and win the respect and trust of all the Ethiopian people. But the young President is determined not to be diverted from his political priorities, even if each step forward is followed by multiple steps backward. "Democracy is the only way to unify the country," he insists. And if ethnic or economic problems overwhelm this unorthodox venture, sending Ethiopia the way of Yugoslavia? Then that too will be an exercise in democracy. For if the grand experiment fails, it will be the choice -- and fault -- of all Ethiopians.

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Addis Ababa