The Election.

I mentioned a while ago that anyone who knows anything about Ethiopia remembers that there was a serious famine in 1983-85, but like many people our age that was pretty much the only thing we knew about Ethiopia before we agreed to move there for three years. So our first few weeks in the country were a simplified but intensive course in the political and cultural history of Ethiopia in the 20^th century.

We had, of course, heard of Haile Selassie, the emperor who ruled the country in one way or another for almost sixty years, from 1916 until he was deposed by revolutionaries in 1974. We didn’t know much about the difficult decades that followed, under the brutal regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and the military junta that came to be known as the Derg (Amharic for “Committee”). Mengistu and his cronies in the Derg abolished the imperial government – most Ethiopians believe Mengistu executed the ailing Haile Selassie with his own hands – and established a Marxist-Leninist system that nationalized land and industries, resettled peasants, and aligned Ethiopia with the Soviet Union. In their effort to quell political opposition, the Derg implemented a campaign of intimidation and murder that came to be known as the Red Terror. The campaign lasted for two years, from 1977-1978, and was responsible for the deaths of as many as half a million people, including women and children. A missionary friend of ours remembers driving her kids to school during these years, chatting away in an effort to distract them from the dead bodies that were hanging from lampposts or lying in the streets of Addis Abeba.

Instead of silencing opposing voices, the Red Terror strengthened and consolidated rebellion against the Mengistu regime. Resistance groups throughout the country – Tigray and Eritrea in the north, Oromia in the south – organized insurrections against local Derg strongholds. In 1989 (when we were in college) the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TLPF) joined with the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement and other groups to form the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). As the EPRDF advanced on Addis Abeba in 1991, the government collapsed. With help from the US government, Mengistu and his family fled to Zimbabwe, where he still lives in luxury under the protection of dictator Robert Mugabe.

By the time we arrived in Ethiopia, the Transitional Government had written a new constitution and had called for a general election to take place – in May 1995. Although Ethiopia’s parliament dates back to Haile Selassie’s 1931 Constitution, this was the first multi-party election in the country’s history. It was kind of a big deal. International observers came from all over the western world, including – it was rumored – former US President Jimmy Carter. There were more than 40,000 polling stations established throughout the country to accommodate nearly twenty million voters. Four of the seven major political parties boycotted the process; as expected, the EPRDF – which had been transformed from a military force into a political coalition – won an overwhelming majority of seats in the House of People’s Representatives. Meles Zenawi, who had dropped out of medical school in 1974 to join the TPLF and had risen to become chairman of the EPRDF, was elected as the first Prime Minister of Ethiopia. (He was re-elected three times, in 2000, 2005, and 2010, and he died in office in 2012. But that’s another story).

As newbies, we didn’t have much of a grasp of the import of the election, and we didn’t know our Ethiopian colleagues well enough to talk about politics back in those days. It had been – and for many it still was – a life-or-death kind of topic in a way that we couldn’t understand. (It became more real to us a few months later, when one of our work colleagues was arrested for his collaboration in the Red Terror. He would have been a teenager at the time. We never heard from him or about him again).

One of my lasting memories about the election is from an early visit to the Cheha site, where I saw a printed handbill pasted up on the wall of a building. I couldn’t read it, but I could see that there were several simple pictures of common household items on it – a jebena (coffee pot), a basket, a spoon. I wish to this day I had taken a picture of it. Curious, I pointed it out to one of the project staff and asked him what it was for. He told me it was a sample ballot designed for areas with limited literacy. Each candidate or political party (I forget which) had been assigned a picture, so if a voter couldn’t read the candidate’s name, he or she could still remember to vote for the coffee pot. Brilliant. These days it’s easy to be cynical about the democratic process, but I will always appreciate how intentional this developing country was about ensuring the right to vote even for its most disadvantaged citizens.

Edit 2/23/2016: Here's a link to an image of the type of ballot I described above. I don't read Amharic well enough to know which election this is from, but you can see the coffee pot, there at number five.