Word: ethiopia
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Looking backward, life seems to shine with new promise. The civil war that ravaged Ethiopia for 30 years is over. In the five months since Mengistu Haile Mariam, the country's hard-line Marxist dictator for 14 years, was driven from power, the competing guerrilla bands have achieved a relative peace and joined in a transitional government. The death toll has fallen from 10,000 people a , month to a few hundred. Where torture and disappearances once silenced opposition voices, Ethiopians now feel free to voice their demands and even shout insults at President Meles Zenawi, a democratic exercise...
...shattered economy remains moribund, the country's 53 million citizens impoverished. The treasury is empty, half the factories are closed and much of the farmland is eroded. Famine still threatens millions of people. Foreign aid has amounted to a mere trickle as potential Western donors wait to see if Ethiopia's much vaunted turn toward democracy is a genuine renunciation of years of Marxism or just a good sales pitch. The government careens from one crisis to the next -- banditry in the east, smuggling in the west, demobilization of Mengistu's army -- with no road map to guide it. Where...
...this could quicken Ethiopia's total disintegration. The many tribes have always been held together by force only. But Meles, the man shepherding this unorthodox democratic experiment, is remarkably serene about the unpredictable prospects. "A feudal monarchy and a repressive dictator couldn't hold Ethiopia together," he says. "Now we are trying another way. If Ethiopia breaks apart, then it wasn't meant...
Other crises press on the government, giving rise to the phrase most commonly heard around the capital city of Addis Ababa: "We're still working on that." One troubling issue is the detention of nearly half of Mengistu's 400,000-strong army in two dozen camps around Ethiopia and over the border in the Sudan. Meles is worried that if the troops are released en masse, they will return home to find no food and no jobs. With half the population unemployed or underemployed, freedom for the soldiers is not likely to come soon. "You'd have people trained...
...Ethiopian people. But the young President is determined not to be diverted from his political priorities, even if each step forward is followed by multiple steps backward. "Democracy is the only way to unify the country," he insists. And if ethnic or economic problems overwhelm this unorthodox venture, sending Ethiopia the way of Yugoslavia? Then that too will be an exercise in democracy. For if the grand experiment fails, it will be the choice -- and fault -- of all Ethiopians...