A mental health care worker at the Amanuel Psychiatric Hospital watches a special millennium program on Ethiopian State Television

The Ethiopian government threw a $1.6 million party for itself on September 11 to celebrate the Coptic millennium. Good thing the world was not watching. By Amanda Rivkin

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was declared the official victor in the country’s last elections in 2005. Before the vote counting and ballot stuffing was over, the streets of Addis Ababa were awash with the blood of demonstrators and opposition members. Numbers do not exist in Ethiopia, my translator reminded me repeatedly. Western news agencies reported 193 demonstrators died.

For the U.S. government’s closest ally in the horn of Africa, the situation has been uncomfortable at times, but seldom has America’s friendship with Prime Minister Zenawi been inconvenient. Last December, a rising group of Islamists sought to control Somalia, the perilously broken nation on Ethiopia’s Eastern border. The last time the U.S. military overtly entered Somalia in 1993, a U.S. black hawk helicopter was shot down over the streets of Mogadishu during a doomed humanitarian effort. The plane’s charred skeleton landed in one entrepreneurial woman’s backyard. She transformed the site into a museum.

In lieu of a sequel, the U.S. government subcontracted the fight against Somalis ascending Islamist leaders to the Ethiopian military. Within days of last December’s invasion, the Ethiopian government overtook the Mogadishu. Then the Ethiopian military quickly withdrew from Somalia. The Ethiopian government announced they could not afford a sustained military presence in Somalia.

 

For their part, the Americans decided that they could not monetarily afford the cost of another lost peace. While victory came swiftly, the brief Ethiopian-Somali Proxy War of 2006 ended with everyone a loser.

Marching Bands, Balloons and a Brokedown Minibus

My translator and I began each day by placing a phone call to the bureaucracy in charge of official merriment, the Ethiopian Millennium Festival National Council Secretariat. We asked the same questions. What events were scheduled for the day? Which foreign officials would be in attendance at Millennium Hall on New Year’s Eve?

 

The daily phone calls to the millennium festival secretariat turned up news of events like “a clean-up campaign” in the capital and “a balloon receiving ceremony.” A few days ahead of the millennium, I covered a military marching band in downtown Addis Ababa. The band led with four female baton twirlers in knee-high white plastic boots. They pulled passed the gates of city hall. Dressed in red with train conductor-style blue caps, the band members looked like toy soldiers.

An Ethiopian military marching band in downtown Addis Ababa.

A broke-down minibus was unwillingly parked in the middle of the road. The minibus driver and his assistant, the man who shouts the stops while leaning half his body out the window, worked fast to push the blue and white bus to the side of the road. The passengers, trapped inside, pressed their hands against the windows, looking on bewildered by the passing spectacle.

On the day of millennium eve, my translator located someone in the millennium merriment secretariat who would tell us why no one would say who would be attending. Many invitees had not responded while others had cancelled. During the live broadcast from Millennium Hall on Ethiopian state television, the secretariat of millennium merriment greeted presidents and heads of state from Rwanda, Cameroon, Sudan, among a few others.

From an image-boosting standpoint for the government, eager to cleanse its name against accusations of human rights abuses and undemocratic practices, the millennium celebration was a fiasco.

Return to part I.

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Die Bildrechte liegen bei Amanda Rivkin.