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When it was announced last month that the ruling party of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had swept local polls in this vast Horn of Africa nation, few expressed surprise.

“These elections weren’t even good enough to be rigged,” asserts Bulcha Demeksa, a former United Nations and World Bank official who currently leads the OFDM and serves in Ethiopia’s parliament. “A genuine dictatorship has been evolving.”

The situation of the Oromo people — who form the majority in Ethiopia’s largest and most populous state, Oromia — is but one of the thorny poltico-ethnic quandaries confronting Ethiopia’s ruling party today.

Running the gamut from the democratic advocacy of the OFDM to the violent militarism of the Oromo Liberation Front guerilla group, the struggle of the Oromo — the Oromo were conquered and consumed into the Amhara-Ethiopian empire emanating from the nation’s north near the end of the nineteenth century — has found echoes in other regional struggles in the country.
In the southeastern Ogaden region, which abuts volatile Somalia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) has been fighting to make the region an independent state since 1984. In a report earlier this month, New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused the Ethiopian government of having “deliberately and repeatedly attacked civilian populations in an effort to root out the insurgency.” The attacks were by way of reprisal following an ONLF attack on a Chinese-run oil installation in April 2007 that killed at least 70 Chinese and Ethiopian civilians.

Amidst such internal dissent, several areas of the country currently are on the brink of famine, with the Word Food Program currently estimating that, of Ethiopia’s 80 million citizens, 3.4 million will need emergency food relief from July to September, a number that comes in addition to the 8 million currently receiving assistance. (see Q&A: Ethiopia’s Urban Poor Cannot Afford To Eat)

Given such a volatile political landscape, some observers have looked upon the EPRDF’s crushing victory in the polls in an extremely circumspect manner.

“The complete lack of any semblance of organized opposition in most of the country reflects how difficult it is in Ethiopia for dissenting voices to emerge with out facing a huge level of harassment,” says Chris Albin-Lackey, senior researcher with the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch.
Another source of concern to observers is the Ethiopian government’s “Charities and Societies Proclamation,” a copy of which has been obtained by IPS.

For the full story, visit IPS News.