Ethiopia From Bullets to the Ballot Box: The Bumpy Road to Democracy and the Political Economy of Transition (review)

Book Reviews 149 The political context in which complex emergencies now occur make it more and more difficult to avoid repeating in future relief operations the mistakes of the two Sudanese crises examined by Deng and Minear. The introduction of armed troops wearing United Nations helmets exponentially increases the potential for problems arising with coordination of relief activities, cooperation with government, counterinsurgency representatives, and information sharing. The Sudanese emergencies of the 1980s and early 1990s have presented a challenge to the United Nations to acknowledge the political nature of humanitarian emergencies and to learn how to adapt its managerial practices to that reality. Only by learning from past experience can the UN hope to mitigate the effects of future emergencies. Laura Hammond University of Wisconsin-Madison Ethiopia From Bullets to the Ballot Box: The Bumpy Road to Democracy and the Political Economy of Transition Abraham Kinfe Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1994. Pp. xxvi, 300. Maps and tables. The shelf life of a social scientist's book about contemporary Ethiopia is remarkably short. Change occurs so rapidly that ideas thought worthy of chronicling at a particular time seem anachronistic only a short time later. Such is the case with Kinfe's book that might have been interesting reading in 1991 when Mengistu, the Red, fled and a new Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE) headed by the TPLF/EPRDF had come to power with promises of democracy (and the backing of the U.S. and other donor nations). At that time, friends of Ethiopia were willing to give the TGE the benefit of the doubt about reforms in virtually all aspects of Ethiopian governance. There was still a USSR, and Eritrea was not an independent nation. And Kinfe could write, one assumes in seriousness, that Ethiopia was "at the threshold of an era of multinational harmonization." What a difference a few years make. The opacity of the immediate is cleared by hindsight. What Kinfe could see as the "laying [of] the groundwork for a pluralistic democratic order" by the TGE turned into a revolution of rising frustrations. The lack of pluralist elections rendered 150 Book Reviews the bona fides of the ballot box open to question by international observers. Ethnic federalism proved to be something other than a process of harmonization. Human rights abuses by the TGE and its successor FDRE provided a negative charge to Kinfe's observation that all pointers including the external perception of the government were positive. To a reader in 1996, Kinfe's book provides a "politically correct" (from a pro-Meles perspective) apologia for the TPLF's political philosophy. Couched in the TPLF's Marxist jargon (e.g., "nations and nationalities," "ethnic and linguistic configurations," "petit bourgeoisie," "marginal groups"), the author presents a history of Ethiopia, with emphasis on the Derg era, in the hope of shedding light on what should be done to address problems "at present and in the future." From his opening remarks, it is obvious what biases the author brings to his task. He rehearses what he sees as the suffering of Tigreans under the regimes of Menelik, Haile Selassie, and Mengistu. Although he gives cursory mention to the Oromos and the Afar, Kinfe focuses on the success of the "Wayane," ultimately atoning for their wounded cultural pride through military and diplomatic victories in the early 1990s. While paying obeisance to TPLF dogma and its ethnic numbers game, the author analyzes the economy, population pressures, agricultural policy, and education. Statistics in a series of tables present data no more recent than 1990. Kinfe likes Swedish aid donors, reforestation projects, young Ethiopian nationalists in the 1970s, rural dwellers, and Herman Cohen. He does not care for the elite of the power, intellectual, or urban varieties, nor "their bureaucracy." The strongest part of the book is a critique of the Derg and its shortcomings, the bumpy road, as seen through a TPLF prism. Kinfe carefully spells out the sins of the Mengistu regime, and one is struck by the similarity of human rights transgressions continued by the TGE and FDRE. In the concluding chapter, Kinfe takes on the role of a spin doctor and outlines a regimen of image enhancement for the TGE...