From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Tue Mar 02 2010 - 10:28:01 EST
Ethiopian Opposition Parliamentary Candidate Killed (Update1)
March 02, 2010, 9:45 AM EST
(Adds comment by opposition leader in third paragraph.)
By Jason McLure
March 2 (Bloomberg) -- An Ethiopian opposition candidate was stabbed to
death by six unidentified men in an attack described by government opponents
as part of an intimidation campaign by the ruling party ahead of elections
in May.
Aregawi Gebre-Yohannes was killed this morning at a restaurant he operates
near his home in the northern region of Tigray, Gebru Asrat, chairman of the
Arena party, said in a phone interview today from Addis Ababa, the capital.
Communications Minister Bereket Simon, a member of Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, said the killing
wasn’t politically motivated.
“These guys who had been engaged in artisanal gold mining went to his bar to
drink and finally there was a quarrel somehow between the killer and this
person,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s not political, it’s a personal
quarrel.”
Ethiopia holds presidential and parliamentary elections on May 23. The last
vote in 2005 was marred by a crackdown on opposition protesters that left
193 people dead. Government opponents have complained that state media,
which controls virtually all of Ethiopia’s broadcasters, is being used for
pro- Meles propaganda in this year’s vote.
Last month, state radio reported that political opponents of Meles are
“covertly and overtly” collaborating with neighboring Eritrea, Ethiopia’s
arch-enemy.
Followed
Aregawi, a merchant and restaurant owner, had been arrested twice since
December for attending opposition meetings and distributing Arena
literature, Gebru said. The six men had followed him to his restaurant,
provoked an incident late in the evening, and stabbed him, he said.
Members of the Arena party are facing harassment and intimidation by ruling
party supporters in the Tigray region ahead of the vote, Gebru said.
“This is what the strategists tell the members of the ruling party, I think
this is the direction they want to follow,” he said. “It’s becoming very
difficult for us to run.”
A second Arena candidate for parliament, Ayalew Beyene, was beaten by
soldiers on Feb. 28 near the northern town of Axum, said Negasso Gidada, a
leader of the opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice party. Like
Aregawi, he had previously been arrested for attending an Arena meeting. No
arrests have been made in connection with the beating, he said.
“It is believed that they are normal federal army members,” said Negasso, a
former president of Ethiopia.
‘Pressurized’
Bereket, the government’s communications minister, also disputed this
report, saying Ayalew had “tried to pressurize a student to read Arena”
campaign literature, and that the student and the candidate began fighting.
Both Ayalew and the student were detained by police, he said.
“There is an absolute guarantee” that the safety of opposition candidates
will be protected, Bereket said.
Calls to Demsash Hailu, a spokesman for Ethiopia’s federal police, didn’t
connect. Tesfaye Mengesha, chairman of the National Electoral Board of
Ethiopia, said in a phone interview he did not have any information about
the killing and referred queries to a spokesman.
The Atlanta-based Carter Center has declined to observe this year’s
elections, the Addis Ababa-based Reporter newspaper said. A visiting
electoral group from the European Union said last month it had not yet
decided whether to send an observation mission.
The opposition has claimed that Western powers, including the U.S. and the
U.K., have refrained from criticizing Meles in order not to offend a key
ally in the Horn of Africa and preserve international aid efforts in the
famine-prone nation.
‘Free and Fair’
“It would be premature to pronounce the Ethiopian elections either good or
bad prior to the holding of those elections,” Johnnie Carson, the Obama
Administration’s top diplomat for Africa, told reporters on Feb. 24. “We
hope that this election will be run freely and fairly.”
Yesterday, Ethiopia opposition leader Lidetu Ayalew criticized the ruling
party for dividing the nation along ethnic lines, a move he said would
endanger the unity of the country.
The ruling party’s administration “is structured on our differences, it has
no space for the things we have in common as a nation,” Lidetu, chairman of
the Ethiopian Democratic Party, said in a televised debate last night. “The
basis for federalism should not only be language.”
After Meles’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front rebels seized power in the
country in 1991, Ethiopia’s administration was divided along ethnic lines,
with administrative districts named after the largest ethnic group living
there.
Critics including the International Crisis Group have said the system has
fomented ethnic conflict, particularly since members of Meles’s minority
Tigrayan ethnic group retain a disproportionate number of senior posts in
government and the army.
--Editors: Paul Richardson, Karl Maier.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via
Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Richardson at
pmrichardson@bloomberg.net
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