Washington increasingly critical
ION: May 13, 2005
A discreet meeting of American officials took stock recently of the pitfalls laying in wait for the Ethiopian regime on the eve of its elections.
According to information gathered by The Indian Ocean Newsletter in Washington, around fifty delegates from American government organisations met discreetly in the last week of April to discuss the situation in Ethiopia, just before general elections are to be held there. However, apart from the former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, David Shinn, this informal hearing did not include the same speakers as the official meeting on the same subject held on 5 May by the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operation of the US Chamber of Representatives.
The attendees of this discreet meeting at the end of April in Washington were able to listen to speeches by Shinn, by a certain Dinkins that we have been unable to identify, by Siegfried Pausewang, the Norwegian member of the delegation of European Union observers expelled from Addis Ababa last month, and Robert Houdek, a former number two at the US embassy in Ethiopia (1988-91), then ambassador to Eritrea and now security advisor on Africa to the State Department. No Ethiopian took part in this meeting, attended by several US State Department officials.
The speakers are believed to have each in turn agreed that the regime of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, governing) in Addis Ababa is not truly democratic and that it was not on the right path to become so. Some of the speakers also looked into the problem of the opposition and notably the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF, opposition). They considered that unless this organisation is involved in the race to power in Ethiopia, peace and stability will remain uncertain in the long term.
ION: May 13, 2005
A discreet meeting of American officials took stock recently of the pitfalls laying in wait for the Ethiopian regime on the eve of its elections.
According to information gathered by The Indian Ocean Newsletter in Washington, around fifty delegates from American government organisations met discreetly in the last week of April to discuss the situation in Ethiopia, just before general elections are to be held there. However, apart from the former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, David Shinn, this informal hearing did not include the same speakers as the official meeting on the same subject held on 5 May by the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operation of the US Chamber of Representatives.
The attendees of this discreet meeting at the end of April in Washington were able to listen to speeches by Shinn, by a certain Dinkins that we have been unable to identify, by Siegfried Pausewang, the Norwegian member of the delegation of European Union observers expelled from Addis Ababa last month, and Robert Houdek, a former number two at the US embassy in Ethiopia (1988-91), then ambassador to Eritrea and now security advisor on Africa to the State Department. No Ethiopian took part in this meeting, attended by several US State Department officials.
The speakers are believed to have each in turn agreed that the regime of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, governing) in Addis Ababa is not truly democratic and that it was not on the right path to become so. Some of the speakers also looked into the problem of the opposition and notably the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF, opposition). They considered that unless this organisation is involved in the race to power in Ethiopia, peace and stability will remain uncertain in the long term.
