newsweek.com 27,07,2010

When leaders of rogue nations hire Washington lobbyists, opposition voices get crowded out.

Ethiopia’s lobbying, meanwhile, has helped to defuse charges that the government has turned increasingly authoritarian. In a memo sent to congressional offices, DLA Piper, representing Ethiopia, argued, “The terms ‘political prisoners’ and ‘prisoners of conscience’ are undefined and mischaracterize the situation in Ethiopia,” and should be removed from a bill that condemned the Ethiopian regime for detaining opposition activists.

Once the province of a few fringe players operating on the margins of Washington, lobbying for foreign countries has become big business for the most prestigious firms in D.C. According to data from the Department of Justice, the number of registrants—forms submitted by people registered to represent foreign countries—grew from about 1,800 in the first half of 2005 to 1,900 in the first half of 2009, the most recent data available. Human-rights activists say there has been a steeper rise, particularly in terms of dollars spent, among some of the most brutal regimes on earth, including several sanctioned by the U.S. for their human-rights abuses.

In today’s Ethiopia, the grip of real power is blurred as a real political system has given way to the rise of a dictatorship that sustains its existence on sheer power, brute force and arbitrary actions.

Under a democratic system, power emanates from the will of the people and no one is attributed with any power that is exercised without the legal framework or outside of the institutions that lubricate the rule of law. Now Ethiopia’s government has increasingly fallen under the rule of strongmen of the security intelligence apparatus (a.k.a. hizb dehnibet) than the rule of law. This is not more vividly seen than in the security intelligence’s awry and disarrayed scramble for power that is traditionally known to have been exercised by the courts, the police, the army or other executive and judicial bodies. Now the forces that make up the security intelligence can make or break anything in Ethiopia in a form and magnitude that has become even untamable to the creators of this apparatus. One source describes the intelligence’s building muscle and growing influence as the lions in a zoo that had gone astray and uncontrollable to the political leadership that created it.