Ethiopians elect new parliament, police accused of rounding up opposition
By CHRIS TOMLINSON
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, May 15, 2005 (AP) — Ethiopians lined up before dawn on a cool, misty morning Sunday to vote in the country’s third election in the country’s 3,000-year history, making a choice between the ruling coalition that ended a brutal dictatorship in 1991 and new opposition parties who promise greater liberalization.
Wrapped in white prayer shawls as Orthodox priests sang hymns over loudspeakers, voters waited patiently outside polling stations in the capital, Addis Ababa, where opposition support is high. In some places, voting started late and lines stretched for hundreds of meters (yards).
Derje Woubeshet, an unemployed 29-year-old, said he was voting for the Coalition for Unity and Democracy because he felt the ruling party had failed to create jobs.
“They brought me disaster, all the people are fed up,” he said outside a primary school in Addis Ababa. “They have been supported for the last 15 years, now we need a new government.”
Wahib Toure, a cotton producer, said complaints do not make a political agenda and that he would vote for the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front.
“The opposition talked about grievances, but that is not enough to be elected, they are not organized,” Wahib, 60, said.
Late Saturday, opposition leaders accused the police of rounding up hundreds of opposition candidates and poll observers in order to rig the elections in the rural areas.
“We are extremely distressed, having worked very hard … The reports we are receiving are only the tip of the iceberg,” said Beyene Petros, vice chairman of the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces.
Petros produced a marked ballot with an electoral seal which was already marked for Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling coalition. He said thousands of such ballots began circulating Saturday.
Government officials denied the allegations, which follow a campaign that foreign election observers have said has been largely free and fair.
Information Minister Bereket Simon said that he called police stations across the country to investigate the opposition claims. “This is absolutely false,” Bereket said.
More than 500 foreign election observers will be monitoring the elections for the first time in Ethiopia’s history. Ethiopia was an absolute monarchy under Emperor Haile Selassie until the mid-1970s, when a brutal Marxist junta overthrew him.
Civil wars wracked the ethnically fractured country in the 1980s, and famine took as many as 1 million lives. Meles’ rebel group overthrew the junta in 1991. Meles became president, then prime minister in 1995, and is now seeking a third term.
More than 25 million in the country of 70 million people have registered to vote, and the electoral board predicts 90 percent will cast their ballot in one of 34,000 polling stations. Provisional results will be announced in each polling station on Monday and official results will be certified on June 8.
In the 2000 vote the ruling coalition took 534 of 547 seats in the lower house of parliament. The country is divided into nine states along ethnic and linguistic lines and each state has equal representation in the upper house of parliament.
Hohit Seyoum, a 28-year-old economics consultant, declined to say who she would vote for, but was excited to vote.
“This is a great day because I am able to vote freely and that is a new thing in Ethiopia,” she said.