Development without freedom: how aid underwrites repression in Ethiopia, by Human Rights Watch, New York, 2010, 105 pp., $10.00, ISBN 1564326977
For those who know Ethiopia this report will have come as no surprise. It will also have been no surprise to the various official donors, both bilateral and multilateral. What they won't have liked is the publicity. During the period June to December 2009 Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigators interviewed over two hundred individuals in Ethiopia, including peasant farmers, kebele (village or neighbourhood) and woreda (district) officials, teachers, representatives of major donors and government officials. In the course of interviewing many who had been excluded from the benefits of five major projects, including the Protection of Basic Services and the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), the investigators heard accounts of regular systematic political bias by officials which led to the exclusion from the programmes of many whose political views were not those of the ruling coalition party, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF); members of opposition political parties were particularly vulnerable. Many of those interviewed had been told that access to programme benefits was conditional on them joining the EPRDF or one of its member parties. Such micro-level incidence of exclusion and political pressure was, and is, possible because of EPRDF party influence throughout the local government system of kebeles which extends down to the smallest villages in the countryside and to local districts in towns and cities. HRW argues that donors are well aware of such abuses, a number of their representatives having spoken off the record, but they neither condemn them publicly nor introduce monitoring for political bias into their programmes. Most donors are reluctant to challenge the Ethiopian government on human rights issues.
One suggested reason is the prioritisation given by donors to meeting the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), where some progress in aggregate terms has indeed been made in Ethiopia, and that this has taken precedence over issues of human rights; hence HRW's conclusion that it has been ‘development without freedom’.
Following its investigation HRW sent a detailed letter to the Development Assistance Group via the Ethiopia Country Director of the World Bank summarising their findings and offering a number of proposals for donors to adopt to neutralise politically-based exclusion in the provision of assistance to individuals and households. The published report reproduces the response from the Co-Chair of the Development Assistance Group (DAG) in Ethiopia, its detailed content perhaps reflecting the international standing which HRW has gained over the years while also engaging in a deflection exercise. The DAG response was not so much to refute the findings as to attempt to place them in a more positive context, assisted by an array of surveys and figures; one example being that 88% of households surveyed on the selection process for the PSNP found the process to be fair. On each side of such data gathering exercises, of course, there are uncertainties. In official surveys, for instance, how willing are people to criticise a programme from which they are actual or potential beneficiaries, when the administrative system is as politicised as it is in Ethiopia? Or in the case of the HRW survey what proportion of respondents were disgruntled farmers who actually hadn't met the formal qualifications for a particular programme, regardless of their political affiliation?
Of course the DAG can easily respond, as it did, that standard monitoring and evaluation processes are not designed to pick up political biases in the allocation of aid. To a degree this reflects a technocratic ethos permeating the issue of aid effectiveness, creating an impression of being value free, or at least free of political intervention by host country agencies while in reality reflecting what Mark Duffield has termed ‘aid as a technology of control’ (Duffield 2002). There are many reasons why this is unlikely to change, and HRW risks being seen as naïve in expecting donors to be more up-front in exposing host country political biases. Moreover, for many aid workers on the ground, including the senior managers, keeping quiet is accepted as a necessary strategy to protect humanitarian programmes that could otherwise be put at risk if the host government believes it is being used as a vehicle for opposition. There is another, often overlooked, reality, which is that donor agencies such as DFID, CIDA, DANIDA, USAID and so on are frequently struggling to maintain their own institutional identity within their home government and its foreign affairs ministry. In such internal battles there will be no rocking of the policy boat.
Most importantly, however, in the Horn of Africa donors are operating within a wider agenda than the simple relief of poverty, a phenomenon only acknowledged in passing in the HRW report. Ethiopia, in particular, is a key regional ally of the West in the ‘War on Terror’ and, in its position as the most powerful state in the Horn, one where stability is more important to the interests of the West than human rights. With much of neighbouring Somalia (at the time of writing) still under the control of the Islamist group, Al Shabaab; with Eritrea to the north governed by a regime which has supported Al Shabaab; with Yemen, directly across the Gulf of Aden, harbouring Islamist militias operating in the north; and with uncertainties over the future of a divided Sudan, the political significance of the Ethiopia-Djibouti-Somaliland axis to the USA in particular is considerable. In this context, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the imperative of the ‘securitisation’ of aid will outweigh any concerns over human rights.
Finally, to the degree that official donors are inevitably subject to the same over-riding national policies which determine diplomatic objectives then the commercial interests of the donor countries will also take precedence over any criticisms of host governments that are likely to affect these adversely. Nevertheless, and taking all the above into account, the work of HRW, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations, including those which struggle against great odds inside many countries, is an invaluable resource to all those for whom human rights should never be sacrificed on the altar of that false god, the ‘national interest’.