Protesting Jimmy Carter

We had a successful protest against former President Carter on Sunday (Nov 20) in Edina, MN. Somewhere between a 100 and 150 people attended. The following is the text of a flyer that was distributed at the demonstration to attendees of Carter's event (click here to download in pdf). He was here as part of a tour promoting his latest book. If he is coming to your city, feel free to distribute this flyer to those attending his book signing. Mr. Carter will be at the following locations in the coming days...

11/22/05 11:30 AM at Borders Books – South Decatur Blvd. Las Vegas, NV.

11/22/05 6:00 PM at Barnes and Noble Booksellers – McIntyre Center . Salt Lake City, UT.

11/23/05 2:00 PM at Davis-Kidd Book Sellers– Perkins Road Extended. Memphis, TN.

Please confirm event times by calling your local bookstore. If he is coming to your city, please leave a comment so that the list can be updated. The aim is to raise awareness of Mr. Carter's role in legitimizing a dictatorship in Ethiopia. We hope this campaign will encourage Mr. Carter to disassociate himself from the leadership in Ethiopia and to condemn the gross violations of Human Rights being perpetrated by the government.

STOP SPONSORING VIOLENCE IN ETHIOPIA!

START PROTECTING HUMAN RIGHTS IN ETHIOPIA!

Please help us to convince President Carter to condemn the brutal actions of the Ethiopian government now.

President Carter, in a press briefing he gave in Ethiopia on the 16th of May 2005, claimed that his team of 50 election observers had seen very little fraud in Ethiopia’s elections despite the negative statements that were coming out of all other observer missions. Furthermore he supported the government’s ban on the rights of free assembly by saying “[Prime Minister] Meles had told him that he feared the opposition’s strong showing in the capital might enrage ruling party supporters and spark confrontations with overly jubilant government foes.” President Carter’s endorsement of the prime minister’s threats flew in the face of his past efforts to protect human rights.

President Carter’s comments could not have been more shocking to the Ethiopian people, European Union observers and all decent people around the world who were witnessing Ethiopia’s turmoil. The European Union observer mission which had over 300 observers in Ethiopia accused President Carter of undermining the electoral process by his early favorable pronouncement of the polls. The conclusions of Mr. Carter’s final report on the election were a slap on the face of the Ethiopian people while these conclusions overjoyed the ruling party. The Ethiopian government has since been riding on President Carter’s comments and his center’s election report for international legitimacy. The European Union observer mission, which concluded that the election didn’t live up to international standards, was vilified by the Ethiopian Prime Minister. The EU report indicated serious irregularities, intimidation, and even murder. The Ethiopian Human Rights Council, which had over a thousand observers agreed with the EU report.

• The Ethiopian government continued to rig the election results, coerce local and international election observers and instituted draconian measures that rendered any representation in Parliament useless by requiring majority support to even propose a Bill. As its first order of business, the new parliament revoked the immunity of opposition MPs.

• The Ethiopian government continued to kill over 40 civilians in June of 2005 in response to peaceful demonstrations against the apparent vote rigging by shooting protestors in the head using special military units.

• The Ethiopian government continued the oppression of Ethiopians through out the summer months and in November has shot over 45 civilians dead and imprisoned over 15,000 people. It also arrested the entire leadership of the main opposition party and is charging them with treason, which if convicted carries the death penalty.

• There were no attempts reported of police using water cannons or plastic bullets to disperse the crowd, instead the police and special military forces shot to kill. All the dead recieved shots to the head, chest or stomach.

Please help us to convince President Carter to distance himself from Ethiopia’s brutal leaders whose only remaining legitimacy is derived from the use of violence and the abuse of human rights.

Concerned Ethiopians and Ethiopian Americans in Minnesota

Ethiopia on the brink of civil war

On the current crisis in Ethiopia, the French paper Le' Monde had the following to say...

Ethiopia on the brink of civil war

By René Lefort for Le Monde
November 17, 2005

Within the space of a few hours, the protest that broke out on 1 November in the streets of Addis Ababa had spread to other Ethiopian towns. Vigorously suppressed, it became a riot and Ethiopia found itself on the brink of civil war. Elite troops brought about a blood bath. Will the dozens of deaths, the thousands of arrests, the detention and isolation of the leaders of the opposition finally sweep away the three myths that surround the regime of Meles Zenawi, the country's master since 1991?

The first one, the most unknown, is probably the most tragic. The government would have us believe that self-sufficiency in food is within sight. Nevertheless, if aid now prevents famine in the countryside, where 85% of the 77 million Ethiopians live, chronic hunger is spreading. In a "good" year, like 2005, more than ten million of them have a vital need of external aid. If nothing else changes and in a "normal" year, within twenty years there will be some forty million of them, according to the most reliable independent Ethiopian research institutes, such as the Ethiopian Economic Association.

The forecasts are equally pessimistic in the event of widespread drought, such as those that recur on average every five years. In 1984-1985, with a million deaths, some five million Ethiopians were affected. In 2003, thirteen million were involved. The next major drought will concern eighteen to twenty million people.

Since he seized power in 1991, Meles Zenawi has pursued a development strategy based on raising the productivity of the mass of peasants. However pertinent this was, its implementation did not succeed. At the very best, yields stagnate. The increases in production, due mainly to extending the cultivated area, could not keep pace with population increase, which doubles every twenty-five years. Production and revenue per rural dweller are still below those in the last years of the reign of Haile Selassie, who was overthrown in 1974.

The natural, technical and demographic obstacles that always receive the blame obscure the fundamental reason for this failure: the ever-spreading and insatiable authoritarianism of the public powers which stifles the peasants. The former take the decisions; the latter carry out massive schemes involving compulsory labour and "voluntary" contributions. This forced development absorbs a quarter of a peasant's working time. They are obliged to do it: the land that they cultivate belongs to the State which possesses practically a monopoly of agricultural inputs. The result is that the capacities of the authorities and those of the farmers cancel each other out in a smouldering confrontation instead of reinforcing each other. The burden imposed on the peasantry undermines rural development, which first of all needs democracy.

One could hope that, based on the promises of the Prime Minister, the general elections of 15 May would, for the first time, be "free and fair", to the great satisfaction of international donors. Right up until the final weeks of the campaign, this was more or less the case, for, if Meles was anticipating a rejection in the towns, he was counting upon a plebiscite in the countryside. However, as soon as the first vote counts indicated a tremendous rise in support for the opposition and its possible victory, the second myth, the myth of Meles Zenawi as a democratic, fell to pieces. The counting of votes had barely begun when he declared a state of emergency, announced his victory and then, after three long months of fraudulent manipulations, officially awarded himself 360 seats out of the total of 547. But this first bid for power was not enough. He then requested a double surrender on the part of the opposition parties: they had to accept their electoral "defeat" and then agree to play only a silent walk-on role so that the regime could call itself pluralist, without the oligarchy relinquishing one iota of their formidable political and economic powers.

In a hasty move, the out-going parliament decided that, the agreement of 274 members was needed (compared to twenty previously) to place an item on the Assembly's agenda. Afterwards, the newly elected parliament cancelled the parliamentary immunity of those members coming from the main opposition party, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (CUDP), which refused to take up its seats. To every concession agreed by the Coalition, even including its tacit acceptance of the official results, to every request to launch a true dialogue, to its calls simply for "civil disobedience" as the only way of protesting, the regime's only reaction was to blacken and repress the opposition. Meles Zenawi could not have done otherwise if he wanted that the outcome of his rejection in the ballot boxes to be a popular explosion that the opposition parties would be unable to contain-but for which they were made responsible-and which could be crushed in the name of maintaining public order.

Enthralled, the international community worshipped Meles Zenawi. They had been won over by his claim that his declared liberalism was successful and by the sincerity of his break with the ultra-Maoist stance of his guerrilla years, as well as with the ancient Abyssinian culture of his predecessors, where power was neither won nor lost except by force. They even believed-and this is the third myth-that the introduction of federalism after years of runaway centralization would finally achieve balance in the relations between Ethiopia's nations and peoples.

However, behind this façade of federalism, the reign of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) of Meles Zenawi had been fanning ethnic tensions. What is worse, as if to deflect a political clash into an obviously unacceptable ethnic settling of scores, the Coalition has been accused of embracing the anti-Tigré "chauvinism" of its most extreme wing, and even of nurturing a design for genocide that would make what took place in Rwanda look like child's play.

Despite this situation, international donors have accepted that their aid, amounting to a quarter of gross domestic product and with Ethiopia being the primary recipient in Africa, is not under their control. They also chose to ignore that the regime's authoritarianism neutralizes their development assistance and brought emergency aid under political control. The diplomatic community has supported the power play of Ethiopia's "strong man" without any sharp question. It has acknowledged the "unprecedented openness" of the electoral campaign which signified "an important step" towards democracy. It has endorsed the official electoral verdict, while accepting that the process was tarnished with "irregularities"-as if judgment about expressions of democracy had double standards. It has only been the observers in the mission of the European Union who considered that the ballot "failed to meet international standards".

Finally, the mediation led by the United States and the United Kingdom to defuse the crisis only played into Meles' hands. On the pretext of the scrupulous respect of legality, it obliged the opposition to accept the one-sided arbitration of so-called "independent" institutions, such as the National Electoral Board. The mediators then urged the opposition to take up their seats in parliament.

At no stage have the mediators obtained the least concession on the part of the regime, nor played their master card: the volume of aid or at least the ways it is used. The G8 Summit in Gleneagles in July, to which Meles Zenawi had been invited alongside five other leaders from Black African countries, linked an increase in aid to respect for "good governance, democracy and transparency". Nevertheless, the donor countries immediately promised to double their aid to match the "democratization" of Ethiopia. In their eyes, nothing matters so much as the stability of Ethiopia in the turmoil taking place in the Horn of Africa. In reality, they consider the present leadership to be a better guarantor of stability, all the more so because Meles has firmly decided to stay in power at all costs and when his replacement by the opposition would be hazardous undertaking given the evident weakness of its leadership.

When foreign protests against the "excessive" repression, as well as the calls for "dialogue", became more energetic, Meles responded to them by declaring that the leaders of the Coalition would be charged with "treason" and could face the death penalty for having called for an "insurrection". Nothing can dissuade him from the conviction that he still has a green light from the international community. But, at the same time, the ultimate hope of the Ethiopian democrats lies on this same community.

A Call to Protest

All Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia are called to a protest in front of Barnes and Noble Book Store in Edina, Minnesota on Sunday 20th of November at 6:00 pm. No less than Jimmy Carter himself, the former President of the United States of America and one of the most influential supporters of the Dictatorial Meles Zenawi regime will be there.

President Jimmy Carter will be in Minnesota to promote his latest book that discusses endangered US values and what he sees as a moral crisis in the country’s political system. He is able to discuss these issues openly and promote his idea because of the liberal politically permissive environment that he himself helped build in this country.

For President Jimmy Carter to support Meles Zenawi’s regime and deny similar freedoms to Ethiopians at a time when they are fighting for it desperately represents a blunder of great magnitude on his part. His misguided quiet support for the tyrannical regime in Ethiopia is absolutely dumbfounding when one adds to his achievements a 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for working to end violence and spread human rights around the world.

It might be cold and dark at 6:00pm on Sunday afternoon. Ethiopians and their friends have no cold to fear however. Their people are continuing to be killed and imprisoned for asking for their basic freedoms. Standing out in the cold for a few hours will only help to further demonstrate to President Carter, the media and citizens that rain or shine Ethiopians in Minnesota are by their people’s side. It will emphasize to all that some rights are non-negotiable and songs of freedom will fill the air for President Carter to hear even in a small city somewhere out in the Midwest.

Address of Protest
Parking Lot at: Galleria (Intersection of W. 69th St. and York Avenue)
3225 W. 69th
Edina, MN 55435

Concerned Ethiopians and Ethiopian Americans in Minnesota