December 6, 2013
Editors Note:
The prime TPLF website Aigaforum republished the long letters to the editor written by Meles Zenawi in order to spare him of Mrs Ana Gomez’e absolutely correct evaluation of him recently. Mrs. Anna Gomez, who recently travelled to Addis Ababa has given interviews to local news papers where she described the now diseased Prime Minister as a brute and crooked person. Just in case Aiga has forgotten here under is an analytical response to Meles’s Letters to the editor by Fekade Shewakena at the time that exposed the many lies in Meles’s long letter. We hope it will be an interesting reminder to the folks at Aiga and their tribal minions that we haven’t forgotten. Read.
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From Stealing the Election to Stealing the truth
Quick observations of Meles Zenawi’s letter on the EU-EOM Report
By Fekade Shewakena
I know many Ethiopians who recoiled in disbelief and shame when the Head of the EU-EOM, Mrs. Anna Gomez, was accused of taking financial bribe from the opposition and maligned together with Mr. Tim Clark, head of the EU delegation in Ethiopia, on the government daily, the Ethiopian Herald, prior to the issuance of the 10-page Preliminary Report. Decent Ethiopians felt ashamed because they have every reason to suspect that the article of blackmail printed on the Ethiopian Herald is the work of senior officials of the EPRDF (the PM being a prime suspect) written under a pseudonym, as the paper routinely screens authors of opinions on issues as high profile and sensitive as this one. It is now clear that was an apparent preemptive strike, conceived out of fear that the truth about widespread electoral malpractice of the EPRDF was on its way to be exposed for the world.
Now as the truth about this fraudulent election begins to sink in, and is laid bare for the world to see, it appears EPRDF’s officialdom is becoming more desperate and berserk than we even imagined. The desperation has now reached its peak with the PM’s personal letter of distortions, outright lies and less than diplomatic language used to respond to the EU-EOM Report and the shameless name calling of Mrs. Anna Gomez, the head of the Mission. This time, the PM seems to have set out not only to steal the election, but the truth too. The only thing the prime minister does not do on his letter is establishing a motive for the EU-EOM to lie in favor of the opposition. It now appears that the bribe theory was floated during the period of the preemptive strike for this purpose. The Prime Minister, deep inside him, knows the operations that have been carried out to steal the election once it was found out on Election Day that the results were trending in favor of opposition. The PM’s long diatribe and tantrums are therefore nothing more than an attempt to create reasonable doubt by pulling every conceivable technique of distortion and lie making. Whether this technique of throwing tantrums and babyish techniques would yield the expected results of mild retribution and continued political aid from the West remain to be seen, but it is hard to doubt that this is the goal the PM is aiming at.
The Outline and Strategy of the PM’s letter:
The amazing long letter of the PM, which many believe may have broken world record, by being the longest letter to the editor on any newspaper, is 13,248 words long of which 1.439 words, more than 10%, come from direct quotations from the EU-EOM Report itself. There are 19 direct quotations, an average of 2 quotations per page without including the rephrases. The EU-EOM Preliminary Report may also be a record case for being the only 10-page document that has ever been quoted to death. Mind you, this is not the full and detailed report that may perhaps span into over a hundred pages. I am afraid the PM would have had to write a book with the current pace had he waited for the final report. Perhaps more importantly, the letter also provides a rare window into the operation of the mind of a dictator suffocated with arrogance and hubris and unmitigated greed for power. It is an exhibition of unbelievable certitude and self-righteousness for a person who has been caught red handed while making daylight robbery. How, at least, the loss of every vote in entire Addis Ababa, the capital city, the seat of his government, can’t even give him a humbling experience is beyond reason.
In any case, the PM seems to follow a systematic strategy when he set out to write the letter. The first thing he did was to disaggregate the EU Report and put it onto four plates. Parts of the Report that seem to favor his position are put on his side of the plate. The parts of the report that expose the excesses and fraudulence of his regime are put on the “ridicule and attack” plate. The third, some of the distortable items that could be made to read outside context are put separately on Tina Turner’s tray, the “what’s this got to do with it” category. In some cases, where the reported incidents are uncontestable, they are duly admitted and put on the “so what, even big democracies make electoral mistakes” plate. The letter is characterized by amalgams of cheap shots, unbelievable insinuations, and laughable assertions and easy to discover lies. This is the fantastic scheme, the outline, if you will, of the PM’s letter.
The Garbage Dump and the search for edible items:
PM Melese’s letter has a bad stench that begin from its head, not because it talks about garbage and garbage dumps, but because it begins from the smell of an elementary logic that died on arrival. Elementary logic has it that if a given statement contains both False and true constructs, it be wholly treated as a false and thrown out that way altogether. It is therefore one thing to dismiss the entire EU report as “garbage” as the PM and his acolytes tell us it is, it is altogether another to go in the garbage dump to scrape for edible items in it. PM Meles, in the cleverest of his cleverness chose the unthinkable. He carried the whole garbage dump home to scavenge for edible items. Accordingly, the first thing he set out to do was to surgically scrape out the things he considers good and edible on his side of the tray, no matter how that smells. The findings of his hard labor of digging and scavenging from the garbage dump are summarized in the following words:
the statement has some big, really big, lumps of truth in it, and it is relatively easy to remove the garbage that has covered those lumps of truth. While I was expecting a huge garbage damp (sic) all I got was newly started garbage damp (dump?) that was unable to bury the truth. The letter cannot but therefore start by identifying and highlighting the lumps of truth in the statement. (Emphasis Mine)
Once the scavenging for edible items, the so-called truths is finished, the next step on the strategy of Mr. Zenawi is to employ the technique of the little hungry baby. Yes, the little baby’s technique known in Amharic as “bilt lij eyebela yaleksal”, (roughly translates as “a clever baby cries demanding more food while chewing what he already has). The honorable PM is chewing and crying at the same time.
The tactic of let’s be judged by the Mechanics of the election alone:
Mr. Zenawi wants this election to be judged by the mechanics of it rather then the whole process of counting the votes and outside the context of the reign of terror that took place throughout the election and investigation process. The surprising reasoning he employed is that you can’t say good things about the election infrastructure and the mechanisms and conclude that the election result is not trustworthy or fraudulent. The inclusion of other substantive factors into the judgment process is considered making a contradiction. If you, for example, say PM Meles is a bald man, it would be a contradiction to talk about the remaining hair on his head. You will be accused of making contradictory statements and “laughed out of town”.
PM Meles quoted nearly everything the EU Report considers positive attributes of the election process – that there is a “complex system to address complaints”, that there exists aMechanism to sort out disputes between political parties”, that the CIP worked in accordance with the terms of reference in at least the observed localities, etc. The honorable PM has successfully cleaned the garbage dump of virtually every edible item. The items he thinks good for his case are quoted without a single drop of a word and coma. The sickeningly too many “sic”s are also provided to help us avoid any confusion that may arise due to syntax and grammatical errors. Phrases like “in many occasions” are to be read as “on many occasions” to help us avoid confusion. When you are out to defend the truth you found out by toiling in a large dump, you need to clean it neat and be error free, you see.
For example he quotes the following statements from the EU Report and gloats over it.
EPRDF evidence was better substantiated; their CIPs representatives were better prepared and their witnesses (often members of the local administration) more impressive.”
And boldly, perhaps also proudly, asserts – “No wonder the EPRDF won most of the cases”.
The thing Meles forgot to note or failed to pick from the garbage dump while scavenging for the above quote, however, is that somewhere toward the beginning, the Report also says the following:
“the complaint investigation process took place in the context of serious violations of human rights and freedoms, namely of opposition leaders and suspected supporters” and another damning statement which says, “ de facto there was no playing field”
The possibility that the opposition could have come out with more impressive witnesses and evidence had there been no serious widespread rights violations is not even a consideration in his mind. No, actually to him, there were no human rights violations. After all, the people that were being herded in jumbo prisons or killed and maimed in the streets in mass are “unemployed youth” who have brought it upon themselves by trying to rob banks. Never mind about these intimidating reasons as to why the opposition was unable to present its case. Being better organized with more resources including taxpayer resources puts you in a better position to claim the truth.
Sometimes scavengers feeding on garbage dumps make a mistake of confusing the edible from the inedible. In at least one case, Meles says he agrees with the EU assessment and in effect tries to give us an implication that the EU Report said the mechanism worked good and served a positive purpose for this investigation. This is a lie. Here is what he says
I would fully agree with the EU-EOM on this. The mechanism that was set up to investigate complaints with the agreement of all concerned parties was indeed a very good mechanism that provided for a peaceful solution to the disputes with respect to the elections. It was the appropriate mechanism for an environment that the EU-EOM characterizes as tense. The system designed for previous elections could not work in the new environment of tension, and a new system that can work in such an environment had to be designed with the agreement of all the concerned parties.
There are two disingenuous insinuations by the PM in here.
(i) The Report says the mechanism is a positive development that needs improvement for future use taking stalks of lessons from the practices this time. In plain English this means the report does not say the mechanism has succeeded in solving the substantive problem with regard to vote counting and adjudication of contentions between the parties in this election.
(ii) The insinuation that the so called new system was designed with the agreement of all concerned parties is dishonest as the opposition was made to agree after a lot of arm-twisting by the international community, particularly donor embassies in Addis Ababa, and after a lot of intimidation and harassment on the leadership of the opposition and their supporters. This is a case of flat out dishonesty that exceeds even conventionally accepted boundaries of lies that politicians are often tolerated to make. We know for fact that the opposition entered into the election after Mr. PM said changing personnel at the Election Board would be done over his dead body. Early on, the opposition has told us that they would enter into the election, not because of the existence of laws and institutions that guarantee the election’s fairness, but trusting the Ethiopian people who are dying to see change.
The Tactic of Surgical Quotations:
PM Meles’s advisors or the people who taught him how to do literary criticism have obviously not taught him a simple thing – the smaller the size of the document subjected for criticism, the better it is not to make many quotations. The EU Document, unlike a book or an analytic paper, is a summary of a much larger and detailed report yet to be published. In such cases, making surgical quotations cannot mean anything unless you see it inside the whole. Here is an excellent example of this case where the PM did a very disingenuous job of leaving out a statement immediately preceding his quote. He quotes:
“Tension was exacerbated by the fact that, since polling day public demonstrations were banned and media openness ceased, with the official media back under tight control and spinning (sic) of the ruling party and opposition parties denied access to them. Also journalists were intimidated and arrested. The government, in the meantime, rejected (sic) to agree on a code of conduct for the free and responsible operation of the media. The governmental control of state media compromises (sic) the credibility of electoral process since May 15….”
After quoting this statement Meles asks the EU Mission Tina’s question and also gives her the answer.
“So what has the ban of demonstrations got to do with the investigation? Nothing!”
But Oopse! He left out the sentence immediately preceding the quote, which would have answered Tina’s question in the affirmative. Put the following right in front of the preceding quote:
The Context of the complaints investigation was marked by an ongoing high tension in the country, and stalemate between the government party and the opposition. This was aggravated by the handling of the June disturbances by government forces in violation of human rights and citizens rights enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution.
Tension was exacerbated by the fact that.……………….
You see, Tina was not asking about the ban of demonstrations alone. She wouldn’t have any question if she was given the full information or if at all she asks she would have formulated her question as follows.
“What has the ongoing high tension in the country, the violation of human rights of citizens, the handling of the Jun protests by the EPRDF and the ban on demonstration got to do with the investigation process?”
The proper answer for Tina’s question would then be that people fear to testify at the CIP’s for the opposition even if they know the truth while the EPRDF is wildly shooting at opponents, knocking doors in the middle of the night and mass-detaining and torturing citizens in Ziway and Sendafa jumbo prisons and, of course, banning demonstrations for anyone to express any opposition or raise questions. You see my dear Tina, the potential witnesses are not dogs you see, they fear for their lives. Tina would have no problem understanding that few would dare to involve themselves in testifying for the opposition under these circumstances and while they hear wailing mothers on the voice of America and Radio Douche Wale and seeing pictures of dead bodies strewn all over the verandas of hospitals.
It should also be pointed out to Mr. Prime Minister that Anna Gomez and the EU-Mission are not alone in assessing this horrible investigation environment. Did you see the actual footage on an Australian Television, where that Anna Gomez looking like Aussie, Olivia Rousset, recorded real pictures at an investigation site somewhere in the rift valley? (see both footage and transcript here)
Meet the young lady, Fasika, an opposition witness, who tells Olivia and the world “ they(your cadres) warn us by staring at us”. Or listen to Tesfaye’s father Mr. Adana. Have you heard of Tesfaye Adana, the MP elect your people killed in Arsi Negele in cold blood? Listen to his father crying:
“One innocent child is shot by a gang of six policemen. After shooting him they gutted him like an animal and kicked him and kicked him until his guts fell out. How can one be punished for participating in an election? …….. Because of the inhuman way they killed my son, I have pursued them and taken them to court. I accused six policemen. Although they’re prisoners, they are allowed to enjoy a normal life.”
In a country where killers of an MP elect are allowed to enjoy normal life, how can an opposition persuade a witness to testify on their behalf. Mr. Prime Minister, I am sure Tina will get her questions answered beyond the shadow of doubt but if you only put the right questions in her mouth. Don’t you think people would come out to demonstrate to bring this inhumanity to your attention if demonstrations were not banned? All of these, of course, have a lot to do with the investigation process and the EU-EOM is right on the mark when stating this point on the Report.
On what the Media has to do with the Investigation:
According to the prime Minister once Election Day is over, there is no need for the opposition to be anywhere near to the taxpayer owned government media. Look at this relatively long but necessary quote to understand him and perhaps also help us answer another Tina Turner question:
One can also contest the validity of the assertions of the EU-EOM with regard to the media. But that would take us too far from the real agenda of complaints investigations. The election campaign had ended before May 15. All observers agree that during the election campaign all parties had fair access to public media. Just before polling day, electoral campaign through the public media ended as is the accepted practice everywhere. After May 15, the issue at hand was to investigate complaints. Such investigations cannot be carried out through media campaigns or debates. It could only be carried out by investigative panels based on evidence presented to them. But such ordinary logic is beyond the EU-EOM. If access to public media is denied to the opposition then the investigations must be flawed, they declare. But what has access to the media got to do with the investigations? Nothing!
Let’s for the time being forget asking what right in the world would justify denying the opposition access to taxpayer owned media and justify TPLF/EPRDF’s unmitigated use of it. That may be too much to ask from a totalitarian government that has totally mixed government and party work in violation of the basic rules of civilized governance. But let’s ask PM Meles another question. What was the government media doing throughout the period of election observation? Why was the opposition, CUD at least in one case, denied access when it requested to use the media to pass stabilizing messages to its followers and the public at large? Now instead of Tina’s question let me ask you your question, Mr. Prime Minster – “Why? Why? Why?” The honorable PM knows as well as all of us including the EU-Mission that government radio, television and newspapers were in a state of relentless attack and onslaught against the opposition, any idea they stand for and their supporters throughout the whole process. I am not sure if the Prime Minister thinks Anna Gomez has no translators? That was what Anna Gomez’s Report is talking about when it says the investigations were carried out in an environment of high tension you see. Boom! Tina’s question is answered – of course access to the media had a lot to do with the investigation. But my question of your question is not answered Mr. Prime Minister. Why, Why, Why? should an opposition that apparently has shown huge following among the populace be denied access to the media to reassure and advice its followers just as your party was able to? Was Democracy over after Election Day? You see, that is why many of us say that this election was a show for donor consumption. The show was over on May 16, the day the numbers began to come in drips and drabs heavily swung to something the PM never imagined- the ousting of EPRDF from power. Here is what Tim Clark, who cannot be suspected of having a motive for lying told the Australian Television about what went wrong with the election.
You can’t put your finger on the reason why it went wrong. But what did happen was that there was a massive, landslide swing away from the ruling party to the opposition parties, particularly in the urban areas but also to some extent in the rural areas.
The Prime Minister also made one staggering lie regarding the difference between his party and the government. Believe it or not he says the following.
The EU-EOM alleges that the government refused to agree on a code of conduct on the utilization of the media. That is a lie. The government was not and could not be part of the negations on the code of conduct.”
The truth of the matter actually is that the EU-EOM and the Ethiopian people are on the same page on this one. Instead of calling the EU Commission or us liars, Mr. Bereket and Ato Meles should first be kind enough to wear different uniforms when they do government business and that of their party. This should, at least, save us a trip to the tenquay. In civilized democracies, the resources of the government and the party are clearly marked. They don’t even use the government phone in their offices to do calls for party business. Had you withdrawn Mr. Bereket Simon from his responsibility of presiding over one of the most important government ministries that have to do with the election, then it would have been easier for you to make the argument you made or the unbecoming insult you lobbed at the EU Mission. If I were Mrs. Gomez, I would ask you a non-Tina question. How in the world would I know which hat you are wearing while you were sitting in the negotiations? May be she should say How? How? How?. Mrs. Gomez, thank you for finding out one of our greatest conundrums in Ethiopia in such a short time. Poor us, 14 years and we still can’t differentiate between EPRDF’s program and the constitution let alone know when Mr. Meles and Bereket transmute from party to government and back to party.
One outstanding disingenuous attempts of the PM to put the truth on its head is to be found on his statistical analysis of turnouts in the election re-runs, particularly, in that funny re-run election (read coronation) of Bereket in Bugna woreda and Judedin Sedo, and Abadula Gemeda in Iteya For an excellent exposure of this lie, I invite you to read an analysis by Dagmawi. (see here ). Had the prime Minister thrown at least some bones to the opposition instead of “winning” all the rerun elections, it is perhaps probable that he could have created some reasonable doubt among the unsuspecting. How in the world he wants anyone to believe that the opposition was so powerful in being able to cheat and rig all the contested elections is really astounding. The opposition, no doubt, must have literally detained all the election and local government officials and candidates of the EPRDF on May 15 to be able to do this. How the PM believes “ordinary mortal” (your word Mr. PM) would buy this crap, which even a three-year-old kid would not buy, is unthinkable?
The Prime Minister wants us to believe that turnouts are measured by counting ballots instead of head counts of people who actually voted. The EU-EOM observers were counting real voters. Mr. Statistician PM is counting ballots. The strange figures that even he himself admits shocked him, tell a different story from what he wants to tell us. In fact, he shouldn’t have been shocked. The mathematics is so easy that even any layman can do it. If 5 people can put five ballots each in Bereket’s box, then there are 100 votes to be counted. Get relieved of your shock Mr. PM. The turn out is 5 voters not a hundred sir. As people in these localities attest, what the EPRDF did during the reruns is “operation ballot stuffing”. Ballots were made up of the lists of voters in the possession of that paragon of an independent institution, the Election Board, and were stuffed in the boxes of the disgraced Ministers. Since the opposition boycotted the rerun elections and its representatives were not around, this was done with relative ease. Mr. PM to use your own word you were doing this “very democratic” practice with “vengeance”.
Dear readers, I have left out the response about PM Melese’s accusations of the EU-EOM of making him guilty until proven innocent to avoid any heart problem that may come together with the laughter. I know people who have languished for years and died in his jails before even hearing the charges against them let alone be considered innocent until proven guilty.
The PM’s sanctimoniousness with which he talks about the peasants of Ethiopia deserves a bigger and separate evaluation, but it would be unfair to leave it without at least a sentence here. I agree with the PM that Ethiopian peasants hate “injustice like no other abomination”. The Ethiopian peasants I lived and grew up with also hate liars, sir. The peasants of Bugna, for example, and Amhara peasants all over Ethiopia are wondering, how Mr. Bereket Simon, who was born and raised by two Eritrean parents can mutate into suddenly becoming, not only an important Amhara, but also their top representative in the country’s ethnic politics. You sir, the harbinger of the interest of the Ethiopian peasants, must also tell them why their life gets more miserable with every passing year despite their being some of the hardest working people on the face of the earth. They need answers as to how you ended up getting kickbacks from a fertilizer company while they have to sell their cattle to pay the debt for your party’s fertilizer selling company and languish in your prisons for their inability to pay. As I am writing this Bereket Simon, that protector of the Amhara peasants, was telling a Washington DC audience on a radio station that he is set out to squeeze the peasants to produce more in order to overcome a possible cut of EU aid.
For those of us who have been rooting for democracy to take hold in Ethiopia, more than which party wins the election democracy in our tormented country is extremely distressing. Yes, as the EU Observer Mission in its report stated, the results of the election have fallen far short of the aspirations of the Ethiopian people for democracy and, of course, the need for it. The huge turn out of our people to vote in unprecedented numbers, unparalleled even in many democracies, stands testimony to the fact that the Ethiopian people needed change and needed it big. They saw an opportunity to make a difference in their lives and believed in themselves. Perhaps for the first time in their history, they wanted to be masters of their own destiny. They never want to let go the light at the end of the tunnel. Unlike the previous two nominal elections, where people cared little even to register to vote, now they saw the presence of alternative parties who articulate their needs and aspirations. They wanted to take a chance on them and, of course, they elected them coming out in droves. Nothing explains the historic turn out and patience of the people, the young and the old and the rich and the poor, who stood in the rain and under the backing tropical May sun to cast their votes other than their desire to see the EPRDF go off their backs. This is the story of the May 2 elections that will be told again and again and again and again and again in our history. No amount of spinning, no diatribe and no propaganda or no repeated lie can change this truth.
The PM Minister and his cronies need to take some breath now and see the tidal wave for change in Ethiopia. It is going to be more and more difficult to kill your way to staying in power now. There is a generous and wise offer the opposition made. In her wisdom, Mrs. Anna Gomez has also seen the relevance of this wisdom of forming a government of National Unity. She should be commended for seeing our problem and suggesting a solution, not the heap of scorn the PM put on her.
Mr. Prime Minister, you have in no uncertain terms told us that you have successive contingent plans to continue your rule. Plan B when Plan A fails and Plan C when Plan B fails. Plan X is expected to be taking Ethiopia into the pockets of the Chinese like Mughabe of Zimbabwe. No wonder they happened to be the first to recognize your election “victory”. You can plan for how many you can kill and how many you can imprison, which one to destroy and which to plant. One thing should be clear to you – you can only continue your neo Stalinist revolutionary democracy over the dead bodies of many Ethiopians. There seem be no more peasants to baby sit or anyone to accept your bullying tactics, When is enough is enough clear enough?
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