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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Nov 09 2010 - 07:02:18 EST
Ethiopia's Ruling Party `Heavily Favored' in Election, European Union Says
By William Davison - Nov 9, 2010 5:25 PM GMT+0100
<http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/africa/ethiopia_pol99.jpg> Ethiopia's
electoral playing field was "heavily" balanced in favor of the ruling party
in a May vote in which Prime Minister
<http://search.bloomberg.com/search?q=Meles%20Zenawi&site=wnews&client=wnews
&proxystylesheet=wnews&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=p&getfield
s=wnnis&sort=date:D:S:d1&partialfields=-wnnis:NOAVSYND&lr=-lang_ja> Meles
Zenawi and allied parties won all but two of the 547 seats in parliament,
the European Union said.
Local administrations that are almost entirely controlled by the Ethiopian
Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front should in future have a reduced role
in elections to make the process fairer, the EU said in its final report on
the vote published on its website today. The EPRDF controls more than 99
percent of local administrations in the country.
Ethiopia's government rejected the criticism of a process it has described
as free and fair.
"The report casts doubt not on the standards of the election, but on the
integrity of the observers," government spokesman Shimeles Kemal said in a
mobile-phone interview today.
The report was presented in Brussels, the Belgian capital, after observers
failed to get permission to deliver the report in Addis Ababa, said
<http://search.bloomberg.com/search?q=Thijs%20Berman&site=wnews&client=wnews
&proxystylesheet=wnews&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=p&getfield
s=wnnis&sort=date:D:S:d1&partialfields=-wnnis:NOAVSYND&lr=-lang_ja> Thijs
Berman, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who led a team to the Horn
of Africa country in May.
Shimeles said he had "no idea" why the report wasn't presented in Ethiopia.
The <http://www.eprdf.org.et/> EPRDF used a combination of harassment and
arrests and withholding food aid and jobs to thwart the opposition Medrek
alliance ahead of the election, <http://www.hrw.org/> Human Rights Watch, a
New York- based advocacy group, said in a March 24 report entitled "
<http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/03/24/one-hundred-ways-putting-pressure>
One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure."
'Curtail Suspicions'
The EU mission recommended that if the National Electoral Board relied less
on local administrations it could "could prevent and curtail suspicions of
governmental control of the electoral process." The ruling party alliance
won all but four of the 1,904 seats for the regional state councils in this
year's elections.
Changes to the legal framework and the fragmentation, imprisonment and exile
of opposition figures following disputed elections in 2005 have made it
difficult for opponents of the ruling party to operate in Ethiopia, the EU
said.
The mission said the EPRDF used state resources to fund its campaign and
reporting by state media ahead of the vote was biased in favor the ruling
party. Freedom of assembly was sometimes not respected for opposition
parties, and the volume of complaints of intimidation against the ruling
party, local administrations and police was a "matter of concern," it said.
Meles is a former Marxist guerrilla leader who has led sub- Saharan Africa's
second-most populous nation and top coffee producer since 1991. Under his
rule, Ethiopia has pursued an economic model that mixes a large state role
with foreign investment in roads, agriculture and power. Last year, almost a
sixth of the population relied on food aid.
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