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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 3 of 4
'Council of elders'
He quickly formed a shimagelewotch – or a "council of elders." It included 25 of the most prominent members of Ethiopian society, including the famed runner, Haile Gebreselassie; a woman imprisoned for seven years by the former ruling Durg; the chairman of the Ethiopian Lawyers Association; doctors; veteran journalists; former parliamentarians; and retired ambassadors.
"We called it the Coalition of Elders," says Isaac, who as its leader shuttled between the jail where the opposition leaders were held and the prime minister's office.
Twenty months later in a rare event in African politics, the political opposition leaders were granted freedom and the right to return to politics by the very party that had charged them with trying to overthrow the government through violence.
In exchange, the oppositionists signed an apology taking collective and individual responsibility for mistakes that led to the violence that erupted following the May 2005 electoral dispute, although a government inquiry had found the security forces to blame.
"As Ethiopians we have learned the important lessons from this episode in our history," declared Capital, a weekly based in Addis Ababa. "The most obvious one is that we have returned to Ethiopia's ancient tradition of mediated solutions."
However, critics such as Al Mariam, a lawyer and professor of political science at California State University in San Bernadino, Calif., says that the traditional mediation was a government tool used to avoid applying international and human rights conventions and Ethiopian constitutional and criminal law.
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