Nick Wadhams

Strong U.S. Allies

America loves Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi. He's one of those leaders who projects a nice-guy image abroad and then crushes dissent at home. In the U.S., Ethiopia is seen as an important ally in the War on Terror. It also contributes lots of troops to U.N. and African Union peacekeeping operations, which is important to western countries which wouldn't think of deploying their own soldiers to Darfur.

Meles Zenawi's contradictions have been common knowledge in Afria for a long time. But he seems to have charmed U.S. officials by playing up this image of a hard-nosed African leader who is going to shape things up and get things done. We Americans seem particularly susceptible to this kind of talk, particularly in Africa. Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni are two other examples. 

To wit, this excerpt from a recent briefing by William Ward, commander of AFRICOM, before the U.S. Senate. Here he is being questioned by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has close ties to Meles and to Ethiopia (his daughter adopted a child there).*

Another warning (a bit late)

Yesterday, the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia issued a public alert to warn American citizens about the possible danger of attending Ethiopian millennium celebrations. Except that the whole thing was over before the warning was released.

Par for the course for the Americans around here. We routinely get warnings about things that have already happened. More and more, interactions with the American diplomatic corps here have a whiff of a Soviet-style bureaucracy. I recall fondly the spokeswoman in the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia who said that the Americans supported the "Elders Process" in Ethiopia as a way to win the release of political prisoners. What was the Elder's Process? "I don't know," she said. "But I know we support it."

My first real taste of this bizarre new way of thinking was at a news conference in Baghdad in 2006. The speaker set the ground rules from the start: He would read out an on-the-record statement, and we would then be allowed to follow with questions. Their answers would be off the record.

This happened to be a news conference in which the paving of a  10-mile stretch of road was cited as progress in Iraq. Yikes.

Embassy warning below.

Ethiopia's donkeys

Donkey abuse in Ethiopia seems to get lots of attention these days. Everyone loves a cute story now and again, but a guy kind of wishes there would be more mention of the human being abuse that is so rife under Meles Zenawi.