Ethiopia- Berhanu on his imprisonment “I will do it again”

Jimma Times staff
The recently released opposition CUD party leader, Dr Berhanu Nega, spoke in front of a packed auditorium in the New School University of New York City, where he received his PHD less than a decade ago. To the delight of his Ethiopian and American supporters who arrived more than an hour early to see him, he confirmed that he would do it again and choose imprisonment rather than enter the Ethiopian parliament.
In response to questions of whether his party has made any mistakes that they have regretted, he said that in light of what was at stake, he couldn’t see where his group has done wrong. Though he admitted that his party needed better organization, faced internal dissidents and lacked the financial resources; he claimed that his party is far more democratic than there is in Ethiopia. He attributed the 2005 sub-party breakups and other issues with some members to the “openness” of his party.
Regarding the days after the elections in 2005, he described them as extremely tense for the movement and a “nightmare” for his colleagues who he said were under daily “harassment” by the government. After the post election demonstrations, which some described as violent riots, Berhanu stated that his party took another path. Detailing the mentality of his party’s executive members, he said they were willing to accept the result of the elections
which declared the ruling party won a majority, even though his party knew it was fraud. However, his colleagues pleaded to the ruling party to “at least make sure the next election would be democratic” and thus forwarded an eight point demand to make the election board independent and create democratic institutions through out the country. Thus in a choice between going to prison and parliament, Berhanu said “with all honesty, I would do it again” and choose prison because without the eight point requests being met, his party saw that “joining the parliament was useless.”
Plea to U.S. government
The central statements of his speeches and responses through out the event were filled with calls to an end of U.S. support to the Prime Minister Meles Zenawi government. He asked “on whose side would the US stand…on the side of forces that want democracy or on the side of authoritarianism?” Despite such recommendations, Berhanu declared that Ethiopia is moving in the right direction, though not because of the government, but according to him, because “the yearning for democracy…can not be defeated by any force any longer.”
He spent the majority of his opening statements claiming that any progress that might have occurred in Ethiopia was not the ruling party’s accomplishment, but all were due to international pressure and assistance. He said, the ruling party abandoned its Stalinist pro-Albania ideologies after it saw the fall of such ideas and because “the only game in town was capitalism” in 1991. He said the current GDP economic growth in Ethiopia was mostly due to large foreign aid flow and the ruling party applied “some mixture of liberization on the one hand and state control on the other hand,” thus giving detrimental “mixed signals.” In general, Berhanu claimed that the elections were also as a result of western pressure, but still without the necessary democratic institutions, it was futile for his party to join the new parliament in 2005.
In response to the strong American alliance with the ruling party, he said “at the least, [what] the West can do, if it can’t support the struggle for democracy, is to avoid helping the enemies of democracy in Africa.” He concluded by stating that “irrespective of US policy, the fight for democracy in Ethiopia will continue, and will eventually win.”