Dear Prime Minister Meles Zenawi:

I know you are a smart person. I have nothing but appreciation for that. You have impressed many westerners as a smart person that some of them even tolerate your many transgressions. All citizens of a country should appreciate having a smart leader. It is not at all bad to have an above average person to lead your country, except that this smartness could also be used for purposes other than our good. That is where I have a problem with you sir. I now think you are made too conscious of your smartness that you are overusing it to our determent. Some of it could be due to people who mislead you by extolling you, sometimes beyond recognition, by telling you that you are the smartest man in the world. Such praises can create some self aggrandizement syndrome in you. That idiot AAU professor, who told you that your head is better than ten of them combined together has not done you a favor. I am told he pulled off a position at the University’s senior academic management for that complement. We have seen the same thing happen to Mengisu. I remember when some people use to fill him with glee by telling him that he is the shining light and the single most important son Ethiopia ever produced - the wise, the korat and what not. At some point, I sensed that he seriously believed that some of that crap they tell him could be true. I am not sure if you reached that stage yet, but I must tell you, I am detecting some symptoms of it. This self perception of I know it all can sometimes become as dangerous as the story of that proverbial girl we have in our folklore. I am talking about that girl who washed the book with soap to prove her smartness beyond a reasonable doubt. “Awoksh Awoksh biluat Metshaf Atebech”, so goes the saying.

I have listened to your recent interviews with government journalists in which you spent a lot of time on legalisms with regard to solving the current election impasse in Ethiopia. Your repeated use of the “law” and some so called “principle” to defend an openly fraudulent election result, as well as the manipulative legalisms you employ to force the opposition and the Ethiopian people to accept these results is a source of huge disillusionment among millions of us right now. It disturbs most of us because we are clearly seeing that you are taking our country in a deadly direction. As a poor country with a myriad of problems, we can’t afford to have a fiercely divided country and fight our ugly poverty at the same time. I believe you can understand more than many of us that the size and complexity of Ethiopia’s problems demands that we all hold our differences and unite and bring all our resources together. I see no miracle other than patriotic unity to get us out of our problems and join the community of civilized nations. When I see you engage in unnecessary legalisms for not accepting the offer of a Government of National Unity by the opposition, I can only see that you only have your political power and personal benefits to mind more than the welfare of 75 million people. You told us the law wouldn’t allow that. But I could not conceive what law in the world should be a reason not to take an offer that can help us better fight our obscene poverty. Why should any law be an impediment against solving our poverty anyway? That is mind boggling.

Dear Prime Minister,

I am not a lawyer. My lawyer friends and some of the books I read on societal laws tell me that there is a big difference between “legal manipulations” and “the formulation of laws”. I have learnt that societal laws are essentially codifications of principles and ideas to best govern relationships between people in society, their environment and their governments – all for the benefit of society. I am told that society has law schools since the beginning of civilization to study ways of governing their relationships through codes based on reason, justice, fairness and above all decency. With all due respect sir, your laws and your idea of the law are totally devoid of any semblance of fairness and decency.

The bold face you put out to tell us about the law and lawfulness of your laws in successive interviews and statements recently totally defies the essence and the real purpose of humanly acceptable norms. If you have one law while you are in power and formulate another minutes after you are out of power, you are not making laws as much as you are essentially engaging in a fraud sir. You have a right to call it a law, but lawyers and scholars of the law have a different name for it. They call it manipulation. If your lame duck outgoing parliament drops existing rules and regulations and promulgates new ones, for the purpose of making the job of the incoming opposition difficult, you are not formulating laws to benefit society as much as you are doing an abuse of power. When you drop existing laws and set new ones for the administration of Addis Ababa, as you just did after finding out you lost the election by a hundred percent margin, you are no where near making decent and fair laws to benefit the people as much as you are doing it to punish them for throwing your party out of power. When you are telling us that these draconian laws have to be obeyed, what you, in reality, tell us is that you are the law. I am sure you know this is called tyranny.

In such cases, people have every right to disobey and defy these laws. You may order the army to shoot them on the head and accuse them of defying the law as you did a few months ago. But no reasonable person should say that these people have defied anything other than defend themselves against tyranny. That, I believe, was what you did while fighting the former regime. Calling these manipulations laws cannot hide the fact that you are actually working against the will of our people. You can even go ahead and formulate laws that justify robbery. You have the power to do it right now. This does not also mean you can’t call it the law. It simply means you are committing a crime against society. But you also should know people disobeying these laws have done nothing other than fight injustice.

Mr. Prime Minister,

Deep in your heart, you know all the problems we have in relation to this election resulted from your manipulation of the laws. The electoral laws, as many of us very well know, were made with a primary objective of ascertaining your stay in power while at the same time portraying an image of democracy for the ferenge donors, your admirers, who don’t see what we, your subjects, see. It was somewhat a smart move on you part. You selected your loyal people to the election board yourself 10 years ago (this must be the longest serving election board on the planet), you got them approved by a parliament constituted almost exclusively of your own party, you call them an institution and a body formed according to the “letter of the law’. You even made the Supreme Court justice the leader of the Election Board. How many of us in Ethiopia do you think are so dumb to think this is a law made to deliver justice? If anything we have seen that once before. That murderer dergue also had an “elected” parliament constituted according to its laws. It also had an election commission that made sure the pre-selected people were elected. What you, in effect, did is nothing but refine that technique sir. The Ethiopian people have every right not to accept these self serving laws as laws, just as you defied those self serving laws made to serve Mengistu and went to the bush to fight it. Now the difference is our people have decided to fight it peacefully, by dying themselves and killing nobody.

Your other point on the interview that nearly made me puke is your insinuation and attempt to draw a parallel between the resolution of the 2000 election in the US, Gore Vs Bush, and the one in your hands now. This is a particular case of exceeding your limits of knowledge and information. You are mixing apples and grenades here sir. The way elections are managed and administered in the US and the case of Gore Vs Bush has no resemblance to help us solve the problem you now have in your hands, none what so ever. My first reaction when I heard you try to make a parallel and imply an analogy was to consider it one of your many gaffs. But I realized that your interviews are scripted and prearranged. I realized that poor interviewer who only serves as a tape recorder has no right to ask you follow-up questions and you were giving prepared responses. I was amazed by your callousness and failure to think that there could be fact checkers somewhere.

Dear Prime Minister,

There is virtually no single instance that can help you compare elections in the US and what you now have in Ethiopia. First, in the United States the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is composed of six members appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. No more than 3 Commissioners are elected from a single party. Four votes are required to make a decision. The term of office of the members is six years and two of the commissioners are appointed every two years. The point here is that both members of the opposition and the incumbent are represented in the Commission and are represented in a way that their decisions can only be arrived at through consensus rather than blind partisanship. This body, is an overseer of elections and how best to conduct elections in the country. They have little influence or involvement in conducting elections at State levels. This is oceans apart from your Federal Election Board. That is one.

Second, your attempt to draw a parallel between Gore Vs Bush as useful in the resolution of our current electoral crisis is pure non truth. As you may remember very well, the federal government presided by the incumbent party, President Clinton, was totally out of meddling in the process throughout the Florida crisis of 2000. There were no tanks and army or even unusual police presence in Washington DC or Tallahassee throughout the crisis. President Clinton, who headed the incumbent political party, was not dishing out intimidations every day demanding that Mr. Bush surrender. The US government is much poorer than you, Mr. Prime Minister, when it comes to media ownership. The most powerful government on the planet does not own a single television or radio station or newspaper to tell the people what to do. There was no tax payer paid government television or radio station calling the opposition “enemies of the oppressed people of America” and threatening them with arrest and death. There was no one who spoke about drawing red lines, bomb lines and threatening to burn anyone who crosses the lines as you promised in one of your public addresses. There were no gangs of security forces who drive behind the leaders of the Republican Party throughout the day. Mr. Bush was not put under house arrest like Hailu Shawul and the rest of the CUD leaders. My point is there is a BLIND LAW that works for both the opposition and the incumbent impartially irrespective of who is in power. That is what is called “the law” - one which cuts both ways. In your case you can go out and order your army to kill protesting students without even giving them a warning to disperse. You even choose the time and place of when to make investigations as to whether that was justified or not. In countries where the law is supreme and principles come first, you can’t have that luxury. You can’t kill someone’s child, go home, have fun and play with your children and sleep in peace. Aside from the law and as a father yourself, I always wonder how this stacks up in your head. Just think of those kids you killed as your children and see how it feels. I know you will tell me that usual crap that Ethiopia’s democracy is at an infant stage. I have heard this baloney time and time again. I don’t think the level of democracy has anything to do with respect for human life. We don’t need a full-fledged democracy like the west to value human life. They don’t do what you did even in animal kingdoms.

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

When Gore and Bush went to court, there was no American who was sure which way the verdict would go. You see how much the people have trust in their court systems? No genius political pundit would tell you who the winner would be before the court’s decision. This is a measure of the strength and impartiality of the law sir. In your case, no one would doubt who the court and the election board would side with. We only have a question of how far it would go in your favor. Were you not amazed when the Election Board came out with that fantastic finding that the opposition has cheated and stolen the election to defeat your Information Minister, Ato Bereket, and the Defense Minister, Aba Dula? Just like the rat taking the cat’s dinner out of her mouth. Such applications of the law would be fodder for late night comedians had it happened in countries where you want to take your examples from.

I am sure you have heard that the Florida secretary of State, who was also a republican and the accusation against her that she sided with Bush. Yes, in many states appointed Secretaries of States from either party are chairs of the State election management. They oversee and certify the election after votes are counted and approved at precinct and district levels. But the thing you forgot to tell us, when you stretch it to help your case, is that they are there to work according to the law formulated by the legislatures of both parties. In some states it is a Republican Secretary of State in others it could be from the Democratic Party. More importantly, all possibilities of these officials abusing their power are tied up to the law and rigorous transparency. The lady could be a partisan, and may even have wanted to help her republican candidate. But she has to first jump a mountain before doing that. As a matter of fact, the lady ended up becoming fodder for late night comedians than helping President Bush. Sir, you are comparing the most lawyered country on the planet with one that is in the woods yet.



Dear Prime Minister,

Speaking of the law, I found out that you and your fellow government officials and your wife have pressed charges in an American court against some Ethiopians living in the US, alleging that they have wrongly accused you of stealing money from the Ethiopian people and stashing in foreign Banks. I couldn’t have believed this story had I not read it on government media. This, in my view, is a foolish thing to do on your part. In the US, the law also allows your opponents to make political theaters outside of the court house as the court proceeds with the case. I am sure you are not aware of how much damage this could do to you. To be frank, I did not believe the story of you and your colleagues stealing that amount of money. But how do you want me not to believe it now, if you have the ability to pay expensive American lawyers. I am, of course, assuming you will not take tax payer money from those hungry children to pursue personal cases in foreign courts. I hope you will not embarrass yourselves and many of us by doing this ridiculous thing. For your information, I have heard many Ethiopians saying ‘bring it on”.

Let me come back to my main point Mr. Prime Minister,

Unlike Mr. Kemal Bedri, your head of the Election Board, Mrs. Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State of Florida, was not, and could not be the President of the Florida Supreme Court or any court at the same time. For your information, Al Gore’s presidential fate was not decided by the Republican Mrs. Harris. He could probably have won had he not decided to do the recount in Democratic counties instead of the entire state, as some journalists claim later. But finally the case had to be litigated at the Supreme Court.

The US Supreme Court does not have an iota of similarity to the one you have in Ethiopia to enable you draw any analogy or any implication to justify your case. It is filled with justices elected by presidents of both parties and approved with overwhelming votes by the senators of both parties. US presidents, unlike you, do not always have their way in electing justices. Many are often rejected by the senate. Unlike your judges, these justices have nothing above them except their conscience. In the first place they earned their positions through years of display of excellence in the craft as well as intrusive examination of their academic and service credentials. They have a lot to fear and care for when making decisions, unlike your judges, who I am told, are trained in a political school called the Civil Service College. In other words, everybody is bound to accept their verdict because they are accepted by all parties and the people. Whether they do good or bad, the opinions these justices write on many cases go to law schools for educational purposes and into history. Mind you, these judges care very much about the judgment of history too. They make mistakes like any human being but that can be tolerated by society. That was why, minutes after the verdict, Al Gore stood up to accept their verdict even if he disagreed with it.

Look, Mr. Prime Minister, Americans would be the first to tell you that their election system is far from perfect. But they have trust in the system and respect for it, trust being the operational word here. They trust it because it is theirs and own it collectively. Your courts work for you. They protect you against us, the people. To their virtue, all political parties, citizens and their supporters openly discuss and come up with ideas on how best to refine their election system, unlike in your Ethiopia where everyone has to listen to your lectures only.

I am sure you know there is a million mile distance between the election laws and procedures in Ethiopia and the United States. I wrote this only to caution you not to stretch your neo Stalinism near to a system that humanity looks up as a great model. The greatest secret that produced American democracy is that, years ago, their geniuses came up with the idea of devising laws to work out a contract between the people and their government. They did not copy the program of a political party into their constitution. If they set out like you, making a contract between the government and one powerful party, you wouldn’t have seen the wonders of technology we now have and the aid they are pouring in your bottomless pockets today.

Dear Prime Minister,

Fourteen years in power and look what you gave us. More people in famine, more prevalence and incidence of infectious diseases, more malnutrition, and higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, more unemployment, lower per capita income, more brain drain, more degradation and desertification of our beautiful land, more corruption and looting of public wealth, more conflicts between ethnic groups, more hatred, perennial beggary for food, more of our beautiful sisters slaving throughout the Middle East, more humiliation, more loss of pride and dignity, the most populous landlocked country on the planet, a failing system of education. I am sick and tired of seeing this endless list of misery sir. And now you are telling leaders of the opposition to go into exile instead of asking them to join hands in fighting this misery. Our backs are broken. What more do you want us to carry sir. What sane human being would fault the people of Ethiopia if they defy your laws in order to come out of this hellhole?
________
Note: I found out that some private newspapers in Addis Ababa are publishing translations of my articles into Amharic. While I appreciate spreading my views to a larger audience, I was disappointed that the translations were terribly bad. I kindly ask anyone who wants to publish a translation to contact me first.

Email: Fekadeshewakena@yahoo.com

I hope this is about how meles said that EPDRF democracy is better than that of U.S.
http://www.aigaforum.com/audiovideo/20050804MelesInterview.smi
Well, nice article Mr.Fekade Shewakena. I posted similar article in this forum on Aug 08 2005. Mr.Fekade, you forgot to mention about local election supervisors so here is my revised version.

Meles Zenawi on his interview about the so called intimidation meeting with the opposition wanted to teach the Ethiopian people that America had no independent electoral commission therefore Ethiopians should be grateful for NEBE. This is very nicely crafted smoke screen to brush aside the question of NEBE independence and neutrality. Meles was feeling at top of his game because of the opposition’s proposal. I would like to say “nice try” P.M Meles Zenawi. While what Meles said about Secretary of State being appointed by Governor is true but let me point out what he left out using the story emailed by a friend from Florida. There is one fact that Meles Zenawi did not mention and that's about independent election supervisors. Here is argument from someone who knows Florida’s system:
Before 2000 election Governor Jeb Bush appointed, the then Secretary of State Katherine Harris current congresswoman, and her Director of Elections, Clayton Roberts, to be head of election. Every county in the U.S has it own election supervisor elected from a local community and serves the people independent of the every branch to all county, state and federal election. The county election supervisor has one of the most independent powers that can not be challenged easily. For example, let us consider the infamous Broward county African American Election supervisor Ms. Miriam Oliphant's power and independence legaly. There were many irregularities in 2000 when the Ms. Oliphant managed the election. To name few:
-Absentee ballot not being mailed to the proper address
-Registration form not being sent to black communities in Miramar, Hallandale and Dania beach areas therefore security guards sending away black voters
-The old system not punching cards properly with the funny dimple and pregnant Chad
-Retired communities being informed to vote wrongly and so forth
Ms. Oliphant was so incompetent and extremely corrupt she mismanaged the election fund and went overboard $30,000,000 dollar before, during and after the election, giving excuses to computerize the election process and address all concerned issues. On similar note, the other two infamous counties Palm Beach and Miami–Dade improved their system with 2 to 3 million dollar budget surplus. The Hallandale mayor who was also Broward county chief was so embarrassed by Ms. Oliphant performance to elect republican president in a heavily democratic Jewish, Black and non Cuban Hispanic populated area, her only choice was to ask for the Florida senate to remove Ms. Oliphant. Ms. Oliphant went through 2 years process in Florida court and senate before being removed from office because she was an independent public official. The Governor actually refused to intervene because of his limitation of power. The whole point of electoral certification by governor appointed secretary of state is to determine whether there is a legitimate issue that the county election supervisor mismanaged the election or not.
Let Mr. Meles keep appointing NEBE official only to certify election but never interfere in the election process. Let every election supervisor be independently elected in all 500 plus precinct and district and run their own district, city, state and federal election with out any interference from any form of government at all. Let the freely elected precinct election supervisors be so independent that it would take only regional but not federal senate and judiciary system like U.S to remove the local election supervisor. To top that of, lets add term limit like Florida for the election supervisors as well as all elected officials.