German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on her first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, called on Thursday for more democratic opening in Ethiopia, a key ally of the West now under scrutiny over rights issues.
On the first leg of a five-day tour also taking her to South Africa and Liberia, the German leader urged Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to provide greater space in Ethiopia for both political opposition and the media.
”We favour opening the country, opening the political system with the possibility for the opposition to air their views, and respecting freedom of the press,” she said at a joint news conference, according to a translation of her remarks in German.
”All these characteristics of a country are the main pre-conditions for economic development.”
Merkel’s comments came two days after the United States House of Representatives passed a Bill that would force Ethiopia to make democratic changes or else lose security aid.
Meles said the draft law, which still needs Senate approval and a presidential signature, would not affect ties with Washington, one of Ethiopia’s strongest allies.
But Meles criticised the Bill’s sponsor, Democratic Congressman Donald Payne.
”If this man is really concerned about human rights issues, he should talk about human rights violations in Eritrea, not Ethiopia,” Meles said referring to Ethiopia’s arch-foe.
Former donor darling
Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous country, ranks 170 out of 177 on a UN development index.
Once a darling of the West, former guerrilla leader Meles’s reputation suffered badly from post-election violence in 2005, when nearly 200 people died during protests over alleged vote-rigging, and the subsequent jailing of activists.
Meles says his government held the fairest multiparty polls in Ethiopia’s history, and has been forced to crack down on would-be destabilisers of public security.
It recently freed most of the activists.
Merkel praised Meles for allowing Ethiopia to undergo a peer-review mechanism in an African initiative to improve government accountability across the continent.
She said they had discussed the conflicts in Somalia and Sudan’s Darfur region. Ethiopia has thousands of troops in Somalia to help the interim government against an Islamist-led insurgency, and it has offered 5 000 peacekeepers for Darfur.
The pair also touched on Ethiopia’s border dispute with neighbour Eritrea. Merkel said she had offered German help to implement a boundary commission ruling on the border after a 1998 to 2000 war that killed 70 000 people.
Merkel was due to visit the African Union’s base in Addis Ababa later in the day, then fly on to South Africa.
In Johannesburg, she is expected to press President Thabo Mbeki to take a tougher line on neighbouring Zimbabwe, in the grip of an economic crisis critics blame on the government of President Robert Mugabe.
Germany is one of the biggest single aid donors to Africa, but does not have the same extensive colonial links as Britain, France and Portugal.
Merkel noted multibillion-dollar aid pledges to Africa made by the Group of Eight industrialised countries during Germany’s presidency this year. She added that a meeting of European and African leaders later in the year would monitor progress. — Reuters