Ethiopia makes help difficult for world donors advocating civil society, rights Posted: 05 Mar 2013 11:50 AM PST

By William Davison, Correspondent / February 28, 2013 Of the many outreach programs run here by Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, one caused special alarm for an official new Ethiopian agency that is starting to block and restrict the promotion of civil society ideas. The Böll program, "SurVivArt: Art for the Right to a Good Life," dealt with notions of healthy, intelligent, and successful living, and illustrated differing concepts of home, food, and choice consumer goods – all done through sculpture and video arts. To a Western-oriented eye, it seemed harmless. But officials at the "Charities and Societies Agency" fairly flipped when they saw a word implying "rights" in the program title. "‘Why has this got right in it?’ they asked," remembers Patrick Berg, the foundation’s former Ethiopia director, who just returned to Germany after deciding that the agency and its zealous application of a restrictive new law made meaningful work impossible. For years, Heinrich Böll’s activities included training regional parliamentarians, running a forum to discuss gender issues, and organizing a modelAfrican Union for students. But no more. The new law, adopted several years ago but only now being enforced, bars charities that receive more than 10 percent of overseas funds from engaging in the promotion of a panoply of human rights ideas, including for children and disabled, for democratic education, and for other staples of civil society. "First we were forced to abandon rights-based work, now even art has become suspicious," says Mr. Berg of the law, called the "Charities and Societies Proclamation," or CSO law. Foreign charities and NGOs in Ethiopia are all currently undergoing an annual audit to weed out funding and ideas that break the law. The law is a legacy of the late prime minister Meles Zenawi who wanted to curb foreign groups unaccountably advocating their own values in sensitive areas. The Ethiopian leader of 21 years, who died in August, said that Western societies evolved without external meddling, and so should Ethiopia. But critics, while commending Ethiopia’s desire to be independent, say in fact the law is being used as a political sledgehammer to thwart and crush dissent. Amnesty International argued in 2009 the law was hostile to freedom of expression and association and was harmful to Ethiopia’s fledgling civil society. Some NGOs and donors say the zeal of the new agency threatens to drive off assistance that likely helps the nation and, more particularly, vulnerable people. (The Monitor also reported today on Egyptian government efforts to clamp down on foreign-funding of NGOs.) Some one-third of Ethiopia’s 90 million people live on under $1.25 a day, making it one of the world’s poorest nations and one of the top aid recipients. It received $3.6 billion in 2011 from donors, over 11 percent of national income, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Part of the complaint against the new official restrictions are that they are applied willy nilly and are confusing. Many NGOs use "rights" as a standpoint of civil society virtue, such as a right to education, or clean water. But one executive in a NGO that wished not to be named said the agency told his outfit not to promote the rights of girls and women not to be circumcised or forced into marriage – but that advocating for other rights seemed acceptable. "Charities like ours are here to work with the government on improving the lives of Ethiopians," he says. "The uncertainty surrounding the law wastes time and prevents us from focusing fully on developing and delivering good programs." The British government this month however was promised a written assurance that all organizations working on violence against women and issues like female genital mutilation will be allowed to continue. Another major complaint is that new laws stipulate that only 30 percent of budgets go to administration, interpreted in 2011 to include most travel and training cost. This is proving unworkable. Some 80 percent of groups defaulted on these terms last year. Of 29 charities funded by US Agency for International Development, 27 can’t comply, according to knowledgeable sources. Nigist Haile, an Ethiopian, runs the Center for African Women’s Economic Empowerment (CAWEE) in the capital, Addis Ababa. The aim of the organization funded by Canada’s development agency and the United Nations and WTO’s International Trade Center is to help female entrepreneurs access international markets. CAWEE is assisting Hilina Enriched Foods Processing Center develop a marketing strategy to export spicy peanuts to the Middle East by providing consultants. Boosting sales abroad is a crucial objective of a foreign-exchange starved country. Ethiopia’s imports cost $7.5 billion more than exports last year. "I think they are the only one who are working with women very practically," says Deputy General Manager Hilina Belete about CAWEE. Ms. Nigist also hires consultants to train businesswomen. The law classifies the consultants’ fees as an administrative cost, giving CAWEE a "very serious problem" in meeting the 30 percent administration rule. Unless special consideration is granted, sessions will be stopped, Nigist says. "Again the women are suffering," she says. "We should be considered a development partner, but they are not seeing it that way." Ethiopia’s government has been popular with donors such as the US, EU, and UK partly because it’s seen as prioritizing the poor and spending on them effectively. It is also seen as a reliable ally in the unstable Horn of Africa. Daniel Bekele, director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, says the agency and laws are not a rejection of international partners for Ethiopia, but about domestic politics and a response to the power shown by civil society groups in previous elections. "I believe the CSO law was a response to 2005 [elections]," Mr. Bekele says, a time when voter education campaigns led to huge turnouts, civil society monitored polls and mediated disputes. "Unfortunately it was perceived as a political activity … or as a politically-biased activity." Getachew Reda, a government spokesman says the law is needed to stop corrupt charities "running amok" and using "per diems for vacations in Honolulu." If training is a "stock in trade" and done in a cost-efficient manner to benefit Ethiopians, then it won’t be classed as an administrative cost, he says. But he adds that if charities make it their business to "criss-cross Africa paying all sorts of stipends to employees, then it will be."

Ethiopia’s ‘jihadi’ film and its boomerang effects Posted: 05 Mar 2013 03:42 AM PST By Awol K Allo   : Tuesday, March 5, 2013 , Awol K Allo, is the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholar at the University of Glasgow Law School, UK. Previously, he was a lecturer in law at St Mary’s University College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.   The film seeks to transform the “demands for freedom of religion” into a joint criminal enterprise with terror groups. On February 5, 2013, Ethiopia’s only and publicly funded Television Station, ETV, aired a controversial documentary during prime time in violation of an outstanding court injunction. Oddly subtitled “Boko Haram in Ethiopia”, Jihadawi Harekat – Arabic for “jihadi movement” – ­denounces leaders of Ethiopia’s year-long protest movement for alleged links to foreign terrorists. Muslims in Ethiopia have been protesting the government’s control of the Supreme Islamic Council and its imposition of al-Ahbash, an unknown Islamic sect across mosques in Ethiopia. In a press statement last year, the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom said: “The Ethiopian government has sought to force a change in the sect of Islam practiced nationwide and has punished clergy and laity who have resisted.” Elected to represent the movement, the accused Muslim leaders were arrested and charged under Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law when negotiations with the government failed last July. A joint production of the Ethiopian National Security Agency, the Federal Police and ETV, the film draws a parallel between a local protest movement recognised for its peaceful acts of resistance with Africa’s most notorious terrorist groups such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Mali’s Ansar Din and Somalia’s al-Shabaab. With dozens of journalists, politicians and activists already charged or convicted under its vague and broad anti-terrorism law that criminalises all forms of dissent, the fight against terrorism has become the primary juridical framework within which to legitimise and justify war against political foes. It is the new legal ideology in which these political motives are institutionalised to provide long-standing relationships of domination some legal pretext. In Ethiopia today, America’s “war on terror” is used to short-circuit both the constitution and international criticism. Making fiction intelligible  Made to portray the Muslim community’s struggle for religious freedom as a terrorist ploy designed to “establish an Islamic state”,Jihadawi Harekat is less about what it describes so much as the alternative reality that it depicts and crystallises. By drawing politically explosive parallels between groups with radically different political presuppositions, the film dramatises and escalates the gravity of the threat. It replays deeply held narratives of the past and accentuates the “evil” embodied by the committee in its attempts to frame them as “public enemies” working towards a common goal with groups that inhabit an entirely different political universe. To amplify this new reality, that is, the cinematic production of new subjects of terrorism, the film appropriates pre-existing frames of reference that sociologists call “processes of signification”. To augment the parallel, it situates the protest movement in the context of terrorism – a discourse whose antecedent is always Islamic and “whose stereotypical characteristics are already part of socially available knowledge”. Just because the protest movement shares the antecedent “Islam” with al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, the signification equates a peaceful movement that operates within the framework of Ethiopia’s own constitution with violent groups on the sole basis of their imputed common denominator. The exemplar images of violence embodied by al-Shabaab and Boko Haram are situated within the geopolitical context and cultural idiosyncrasies of Ethiopia to essentialise the association and ultimately render its absurd collocation socially intelligible. There are temporal, spatial, material and editorial questions that the film cannot account for. By connecting events that took place from East Africa to West Africa, from North Africa to the Middle East, by gathering actors of differing ideological persuasions into unity, by reducing complex and contingent historic and political issues into self-evident mathematical varieties, Jihadawi Harekatinadvertently slips into a crisis it cannot contain or suppress. One excellent example is a hinge the film uses to connect the leaders of the protest movement to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. In an unedited interrogation clip wrongly broadcasted after the film, the interrogators coerce Abubakar Ahmed – the chairman of the committee chosen to be representative of the Muslim community – into accepting their conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis have the ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic world under Sharia law. While the reduction of such complex and contingent issues of historical and theoretical specificity into an either-or binary is emblematic of the logic through which the film establishes its central thesis, I am interested in the logic used to connect the ideologies of the Brotherhood in the Middle East to the protest leaders in Ethiopia. This pivot is a distinguished Qatari public intellectual, Jassim Sultan whose teachings two members of the protest leaders were said to have attended. In an article that examined the increasing role of Qatar in the politics of the Middle East, The Economist holds up Sultan as an exemplary figure known for his “middle-of-the road” politics, not the extremism depicted in Jihadawi Harekat. Sultan, whom the film accuses of being a middle man between the “extreme ideological orientations” of the Brotherhood and Ethiopia’s “jihadists”, was praised by The Economist as, “a renowned Qatari intellectual, [who] strikes a chord by rejecting the Brotherhood’s demand for strict obedience… derides its slogan, ‘Islam is the solution’, as facile”. By editing conversations about conversations, copy-pasting interrogations about different spatial, temporal and material co-ordinates into a coherent Ethiopian story, the film seeks to transform the most basic demands for freedom of religion into a joint criminal enterprise with terror groups near and far. Nowhere else is the conjuncture between words and images, facts and fictions, times and spaces, persons and events manifestly absurd as in Jihadawi Harekat. Instead of generating a moral panic that serves as the material fabric for social control, the film generated consequences that are destabilising the regime. In a statement to the press, a coalition of 33 political parties emphatically denounced the film as yet another spectacle that epitomises the ruling party’s contempt for the constitution and the rule of law. Boomerang effects  The film, along with the ongoing trial, offers an important window into the cleavage that divides the old Ethiopian Muslim subjectivity from the new. Thanks to the government that never ceases to generate crisis and mobilise the law and its court system to cement this crisis, these events have opened up a space for critical cultural-political awareness. Muslims in Ethiopia, who conceive their religious subjectivity as apolitical and go about their lives, have begun to realise that their religious identity can be a potent site of subjectification and domination. As one of 20th century’s prescient political thinkers, Hannah Arendt formulates this point; an attack against a specific identity creates spontaneous moment of political self-awareness. “If one is attacked as a Jew,” Arendt said, “One must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.” Because of the events of last year, there emerged a critical space in which a society that rarely, if at all, engages in questions of law and politics, protested the usurpation of its constitutional guarantees. In their struggle, Muslims in Ethiopia began to see unfair closures and systematic subjections taking place at sites and moments they could not have seen before. The government’s uncanny response to basic demands of religious freedom has created a rare opportunity for a decisive break with a docile political past and for the formation of a new collective consciousness.