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| Professor Ephraim Isaac has just led a 'council of elders' to break a political deadlock that threatened to throw Ethiopia
into crisis. Orly Halpern |
In Ethiopia, elders dissolve a crisis the traditional way
Harvard-educated Ethiopian scholar Ephraim Isaac just led a 'council of elders' to broker a high-stakes political deal.
from the August 9, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
How the crisis developed
The problems began after the 2005 elections. The opposition had gone from 12 seats to over 170 out of 547 seats in Parliament. But it refused to take them because it accused the ruling party of rigging the elections and cheating them of a bigger victory. Foreign observers, such as the European Union, also noted evidence of fraud during the vote.
Demonstrations broke out across the country in June and November of 2005. Security forces cracked down on demonstrators who they say turned violent. Nearly 200 people, mostly protesters, were killed and thousands were jailed.
Many of those jailed were US-educated and highly respected internationally, including a consultant for the UN Economic Commission for Africa, a former UN Special Envoy and prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a former chairman of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council.
Isaac immediately took upon himself the goal of mediation. His inspiration, he says, comes from the peaceful traditions of his mother's birthplace in Western Ethiopia and the Judaism of his Jewish Yemenite father. He chants long verses from the Bible and tells of mediation and forgiveness throughout Ethiopia's history of ethnic and religious conflict.
He met with the jailed opposition leaders and began a traditional Ethiopian mediating process, which relies heavily on the shuttle diplomacy of respected elders.
Today that method is commonly used to resolve small fights between family members and neighbors. A grandmother or elderly neighborhood shopkeeper might be asked to arbitrate.
For a crisis of this scale and import, numerous nonpartisan mediators were needed. Isaac had no problem organizing it: he is famous in Ethiopia for pioneering in the late 1950s the first organized campaign to eradicate illiteracy, which affected over 2.5 million citizens in two decades, and for being the first Ethiopian to get a PhD from Harvard. He also helped establish Harvard's African Studies department.
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