Mr. Obama needs to reset his Ethiopia policy

President Obama yesterday announced $113 million in addition to $870 million emergency aid to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia because of, he said, recent drought and famine. Mr. Meles Zenawi says there is no famine [only terrorists?] in Ethiopia [at 1.09 mark]. To prove his point he talked to Christian Science Monitor correspondent William Davison [his prey] who posted a video of a productive farming community in Regional State 1 [Mr. Meles’s region] carefully selected for the occasion. Mr. Meles is for some reason in the habit of taking his foreign dignitaries [British Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell, his friend Bob Geldof, EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard, and so on] only to his region. You may want to check the list of such visitors and not take our word for it – that is, if you are serious about unearthing few facts. And the dignitaries almost always assume conditions in other regions are at least similar to the region they visited. 

We believe Mr. Obama was handed a report that Mr. Meles routinely uses food aid and development money to punish those who did not agree with him – country folk who did not vote for him, for example. And then there is the Financial Integrity document about the nearly 12 billion dollars illicitly transferred to foreign banks. We are not trying to be a pain but what about Mr. Meles’s penchant for shipping journalists to exile or to jail for writing about corruption, about mistreatment of women, ‘sale’ of children as orphans [click], and the case of unaudited business holdings by Mr. Meles’s party and his wife [we might add the start-up of which was rolled in from the 1980s famine relief aid].  So what do you make of all this? Should we conclude Mr. Obama really does not see any problem with Mr. Meles Zenawi remaining in power indefinitely even when the public is tired of him [and his wife] and he continues to chuck out human freedoms and has in fact resurrected Mengistu-style one-party police state?