Ethiopian Millennium

A Potemkin Party

Amanda Rivkin for e-politik.de

October 12, 2007

A close friend, an Ethiopian journalist, first told me last June of his country’s plans to ring in the year 2000. Until September 12, 2007, it was still 1999 in Ethiopia. One of the world’s most underdeveloped countries, a recipient of high profile Western aid efforts, was throwing a party for itself. The occasion: a unique calendar that places the country seven years behind the rest of the world.

Ethiopia, with a high infant mortality rate and prevalence of HIV/AIDS, ranks near the bottom on almost every development index. An Ethiopian physician with years of experience in the United States told me malnutrition and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, and scabies, all but eradicated in the developed world, are the greatest public health problems facing the country.

Party Favors

What does it take for a country to celebrate being behind the rest of the world? When I arrived in Addis Ababa, the capital, a few weeks ahead of the millennium, there were unmistakable signs that a show was in the works. Banners draped over government buildings declared the country’s renaissance beside signs noting government efforts to weed out corruption. Meanwhile, the easiest way to get a laugh was to wish someone a happy millennium.

From the start, the September 11 millennium gala faced stiff competition on diplomatic calendars from the sixth anniversary commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks. But the Ethiopian Millennium Festival National Council Secretariat pushed on, inviting high ranking world leaders and heads of state to join them in celebration at Millennium Hall on New Year’s Eve. For weeks, rumors swirled in Addis Ababa.

A Saudi-Ethiopian national, Sheikh Al-Amoudi, known to most as simply “The Sheikh,” built Millennium Hall at a cost of an estimated $20 million, according to The Associated Press. Inside Millennium Hall, the Sheikh rang in the New Year with 22,000 of his closest friends among Ethiopia’s power brokers, diplomatic community and the elite.

The average monthly salary in Ethiopia falls well below the $150 entrance fee for the event, headlined by the American group the Black Eyed Peas. The facility barely surpassed two-thirds capacity on the occasion of the only semi-public event it was built for. A third of the reported 15,000 people in attendance received complimentary tickets.

Finding Little Gates

The government also sought to make it easier for foreign journalists to get into the country to cover the millennium festivities. The draconian array of permits and permission slips that greeted foreign correspondents and photographers at the gates made it difficult, but not impossible, to get in and generate the favorable coverage the government so desired. Competent bureaucrats faced barriers from their own bureaucracy, but the word “millennium” was a magical, door-opening buzzword.

In Ethiopia, failure to obtain proper accreditation can lead to arrest, imprisonment, and possibly expulsion from the country. Every major news organization, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Reuters, BBC has had at least one correspondent who spent weeks waiting for accreditation, waited so long they got tired of waiting, or had their correspondent arrested or evicted from the country.

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was declared the official victor in the country’s last elections in 2005. Before the vote counting and ballot stuffing was over, the streets of Addis Ababa were awash with the blood of demonstrators and opposition members. Numbers do not exist in Ethiopia, my translator reminded me repeatedly. Western news agencies reported 193 demonstrators died.

For the U.S. government’s closest ally in the horn of Africa, the situation has been uncomfortable at times, but seldom has America’s friendship with Prime Minister Zenawi been inconvenient. Last December, a rising group of Islamists sought to control Somalia, the perilously broken nation on Ethiopia’s Eastern border. The last time the U.S. military overtly entered Somalia in 1993, a U.S. black hawk helicopter was shot down over the streets of Mogadishu during a doomed humanitarian effort. The plane’s charred skeleton landed in one entrepreneurial woman’s backyard. She transformed the site into a museum.

In lieu of a sequel, the U.S. government subcontracted the fight against Somalis ascending Islamist leaders to the Ethiopian military. Within days of last December’s invasion, the Ethiopian government overtook the capital Mogadishu. Then the Ethiopian military quickly withdrew from Somalia. The Ethiopian government announced they could not afford a sustained military presence in Somalia.

For their part, the Americans decided that they could not monetarily afford the cost of another lost peace. While victory came swiftly, the brief Ethiopian-Somali Proxy War of 2006 ended with everyone a loser.

Marching Bands, Balloons and a Brokedown Minibus

My translator and I began each day by placing a phone call to the bureaucracy in charge of official merriment, the Ethiopian Millennium Festival National Council Secretariat. We asked the same questions. What events were scheduled for the day? Which foreign officials would be in attendance at Millennium Hall on New Year’s Eve?

The daily phone calls to the millennium festival secretariat turned up news of events like “a clean-up campaign” in the capital and “a balloon receiving ceremony.” A few days ahead of the millennium, I covered a military marching band in downtown Addis Ababa. The band led with four female baton twirlers in knee-high white plastic boots. They pulled passed the gates of city hall. Dressed in red with train conductor-style blue caps, the band members looked like toy soldiers.

A broke-down minibus was unwillingly parked in the middle of the road. The minibus driver and his assistant, the man who shouts the stops while leaning half his body out the window, worked fast to push the blue and white bus to the side of the road. The passengers, trapped inside, pressed their hands against the windows, looking on bewildered by the passing spectacle.

On the day of millennium eve, my translator located someone in the millennium merriment secretariat who would tell us why no one would say who would be attending. Many invitees had not responded while others had cancelled. During the live broadcast from Millennium Hall on Ethiopian state television, the secretariat of millennium merriment greeted presidents and heads of state from Rwanda, Cameroon, Sudan, among a few others.

From an image-boosting standpoint for the government, eager to cleanse its name against accusations of human rights abuses and undemocratic practices, the millennium celebration was a fiasco.