Democracy

One day in Mekele I found myself heading off to a meeting on my own in the car with one of the drivers. As soon as we had pulled out of the parking lot of the hotel, he turned to me and told me, “TPLF is democracy”.

TPLF is the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. It started out as a resistance group that built an army, launched a war, and eventually managed to defeat the military regime in Ethiopia, the Derg, in 1991. It then became a political party and has since been the ruling party of Ethiopia. The problem is that the ruling party was responsible for the massacre of 60 unarmed protestors last year (some in the back). Supposedly, they thought they were facing an insurrection driven by the Diaspora which explains why the government-owned cell phone company (a monopoly) has banned text messaging. So Tigray, the strong-hold of the party, is a very politically contentious region that is pretty much despised by the rest of the country. At the same time, the people of Tigray are desperately poor as it is a very arid region and has frequent famines and is in the far north on the border with Eritrea and has been the battleground for almost all of Ethiopia’s wars over the past few centuries, including the Ethiopian-Eritrean war from 1998-2000 which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I am here evaluating a project that provides funding directly to the government of Tigray, so it is a very politically contentious evaluation. The staff of the organization implementing the project does not even think that the organization should be supporting the government in this way or working here at all and many of the staff avoid coming to the project area as much as they possibly can. On the other hand, the few staff that are based in Tigray support the government and the project. A very difficult evaluation.

The driver had obviously overheard conversation from the backseat and perceived that we were not exactly supportive of the TPLF (although I have made an effort not to openly discuss local politics here as my view is not the general view of the population). The driver wanted to be sure that I heard his side of the story. He told me in broken English that since the TPLF came to power the living conditions of the people of Tigray have improved and are vastly better than they were under the Derg. It is impossible to make him believe that the economic situation could be even better and it should not be traded off against his freedom.