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Ethiopian Opposition Leader Says Supporters `Hunted' After May 23 Election
Hundreds of opponents of Ethiopia’s government have been beaten and arrested in a government crackdown following this week’s national elections, a leader of the opposition Medrek alliance said.
“My members are really being hunted down,” Merara Gudina, a leader of the Oromo wing of the Medrek alliance, said in a mobile-phone interview today. He blamed security, police and militia loyal to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi for the attacks.
“Two opposition members have been shot to death and six others wounded by bullets from security officials since Saturday as part of a widening crackdown,” Merara said.
Communications Minister Bereket Simon told reporters in the capital, Addis Ababa, that one of those killed, in the central town of Ginchi, died after opposition supporters tried to storm a polling station to steal a ballot box. He declined to comment on claims that opposition members are being targeted.
Meles’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front won at least 98 percent of the seats in the country’s 547-seat parliament in the May 23 elections, the National Electoral Board said yesterday. Tens of thousands of ruling party supporters gathered in the streets of Addis Ababa yesterday to protest against criticism of the vote by human-rights activists.
Another person died in the town of Ambo and six others were wounded in separate incidents across the Oromiya region, Medrek’s Gudina said. He denied any wrongdoing by opposition supporters.
Medrek today rejected the results as did The All Ethiopia Unity Party, Ethiopia’s second-largest opposition grouping.
‘Observers Beaten’
“In view of the fact that both the election process and the voting day was not free and fair and because in most polling stations throughout the country our party observers were beaten and driven away from observing the voting process, AEUP has decided not to accept the results of the election,” Yacob Likke, a spokesman for the party, told reporters today in Addis Ababa.
Hailu Shawel, chairman of the AEUP, said the U.S., the U.K. and other Western nations shared responsibility for the problems during the election by failing to speak out against rights abuses or use their hundreds of millions of dollars of aid as leverage.
Medrek’s Chairman, Beyene Petros, called for a re-run of the election with international observers.
The European Union’s chief observer of the election, Thijs Berman, yesterday criticized the electoral process, saying the “playing field is not level.” The U.S. National Security Council said it was “concerned” that observers found the vote “fell short of international commitments.”
Berman, a Dutch member of the European parliament, said he had refrained from issuing a more critical report so as not to jeopardize European aid efforts in the Horn of Africa country.
“I want this country to develop, not close its borders,” Berman said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa at jmclure@bloomberg.net.
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