ETHIOPIA TODAY

By SIR SIDNEY BARTON*

FFOR more than a year after the Emperor of Ethiopia re-entered his capital of Addis Ababa on May 5th, 1941, the absence of any postal service available to Ethiopians prevented any news reaching the outside world from native sources. The British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration held sway, and a cloud born of the difficulty of harmonising military necessity with political justice overshadowed the land. With the signing of the agreement between the British Government and Ethiopia on January 31st, 1942, the cloud began to lift, and with the appearance of the First Number of the Negarit Gazeta, or Official Gazette, published in Amharic and English on March 30th, 1942, we catch a glimpse of the machinery of government at work, not in the Darkest Africa of 0.E.T.A., but in the free and independent State of Ethiopia, with its lawful ruler the Emperor Haile SeHassle I true to his coronation pledges, re-establishing his government, but eager to receive advice and financial assistance from the British Government in the difficult task of reconstruction and reform.

The Gazette contains in its first issues a number of proclamations which tell, in the usual formal official language, a striking story of the progress of reconstruction. The extra-territorial privileges granted to British subjects in 1849 are abrogated ; the G.O.C. British Forces in East Africa is given powers to evacuate all Italian civilians from Ethiopia ; various security measures are announced ; the training of a police force is entrusted to British officers ; a uniform tax on land is imposed in lieu of the old customary and inequitable levies in kind ; nine Cabinet Ministers are appointed, including the Ethiopian Delegate to the League of Nations, a former Minister to Great Britain, and the well-known Abeba Aregai (as Minister of War) who was Chief of Police in Addis Ababa in 1936, and after that as a guerilla leader successfully defied the Italian armies for five years from the old Shoan fortress of Ankober only eighty miles from the capital.

So much for the official framework of the restored Ethiopian State. But there is a good deal to be painted in warnier colours than that. To picture conditions in E:hiopia today, we must first sketch in the background, which is one of five years' occupation by the Italians, during which their whole endeavour was directed towards making the country part of a vast East African colony, settled by Italians and productive of good for the Italians alone. This deeper background merges into the clearer and closer outlines of six months of war-devastation, ending with the complete break-up of the Italian system of Government and its temporary replacement by British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration. Against this we see in the front of the picture the Emperor, Haile Sellassie, as the central figure of a purely Ethiopian form of government endeavouring with increaging success to pick up the loose threads of native administration as it existed before 1936, to re-create purely Ethiopian national forces, to settle peaceably and employ usefully the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians who were conscripted by the Italians for labour or military service, and to try to establish a new system of national economy based, not on the colossal subsidies of a European Power, but on the natural potentialities of the country, now made more easy of access by the gift of one of the best road systems in Africa. These magnificent new roads, which cost the Italian Government

over £20,000,000 sterling, will be the most flattering memorial of the Fascist imperium. They are, however, more than a memorial, for their existence means a complete re-orientation of traditional Ethiopian policy. That policy, which the present Emperor strove himself to modify during the four or five years of his reign before the Italian invasion, was to rely upon the fastnesses of the mountains to secure the heart of the country inviolate against attack. The result was that trade within the country itself and from the outlying provinces to the assembly points for export along the Franco- Ethiopian railway was by caravan, and that turbulent or ambitious rulers of provinces could enrich themselves and develop their strategems safe from interference by the central government. The new roads mean not only that the administration of the outlying

* British Minister at Addis Ababa. 1929-1937. provinces and the maintenance of law and order on the frontiers is now much simplified and that the movement of trade is more rapid and free, but also that the ways are open to any Power able to assemble armoured and mechanised forces at the gates.

The Emperor therefore now finds himself with a number of material assets resulting from the events of the past five or six years, including industrial plant, such as boot-factories, cotton-mills, rope and hessian factories, motor-assembly and repair shops, a certain amount of motor transport, several well-made airfields and a quantity of arms, mostly rifles ; but also, on the other side of the ledger, the moral liability to ensure that these industries do not remain idle but contribute their quota to the Allied war effort, that the agri- cul,:ural areas suitable for cattle-raising and grain-growing, which for the most part were hardly touched by the Italian colonists, are rapidly developed in the same cause, and last, but not least, that his people are united again in confidence under his own leadership.

The Italians meanwhile are by no means idle. Their propaganda is still active, and there are not a few Ethiopians who were happier in the days of the Italian Empire as members of the comparatively well-paid, if unruly, banda groups, and who are now ready to put it about that sooner or later the Italians will return, as they said they would, with the help of the Germans or Japanese and exact retribu- tion from all those who have served their enemies. They have in fact caused trouble among some of the tribesmen, but that situation is now well in hand. Much has been said of the danger to the Central Government which might result from the ambitions of " The Rases," and it has been claimed that some of these hereditary lords, such as Ras Hailu and Ras Seyum, who made their submission to the Italians, since they did not flee the country in 1936 now exercise more authority than the Emperor and those Rases who left the country with him, such as Ras Kassa. Events have shown, however, that much of what was said on these lines was false, and that the Emperor is well able to cope with the existing situation.

The Abyssinian scene is thus—once again—dominated by the figure of the Emperor. He is a genuine reformer and a true patriot. He is a religious man and strives always to make his religion a practical day-to-day business. Like his people, he is courteous in his dealings with everyone, especially foreigners, and has a marked sense of humour which makes it easy for Englishmen to get on to common ground with him. He is intransigen: and inflexible on matters of principle. He never ceased to believe, through the years of his exile, that the wrong that had been done his country would one day be righted and that he would return to his throne, and he refused ever to treat with his country's enemies. His sense of humour was illustrated at the showing of a news-reel recording the entry of General Cunningham and his forces into Addis Ababa. Ras Ghetachau, fat and smiling somewhat uneasily,

was to be seen in the forefront of those Ethiopians who welcomed General Cunningham on his arrival at the Duke of Aosta's palace.

This traitor Ras, who had sold his country even before the Italian

invasion and had attended upon the conquerors with servility ever since, now appeared in the guise of a welcoming friend, grateful for

liberation. The spectacle was certainly amusing to those who knew the Ras, whose appearance was greeted with roars of laughter in which the Emperor heartily joined.

The Emperor's clemency is strongly reflected in the way in which Ethiopians generally have held their hand towards the defeated Italians during the months preceding their evacuation to prison or internment camps in British territory or their repatriation to Italy. This has been much commented upon by people who expected wholesale massacres. To those who remember the holocaust that followed the attempt on Marshal Graziani's life in February, 1937, and the way in which the Italians tried in the early days of their conquest to annihilate the Amhara race as a necessary preliminary to the peaceful settlement of the land by the surplus population of Italy, it would not have been surprising if fathers and brothers and sons had exacted revenge for the cruelties done to them and their families. But the Emperor constantly reminded his people, by proclamations dropped from the air by British aircraft when first our assault on Italian East Africa began and later by timely injunc- tions from the capital itself, that they must behave in a Christian manner towards their former oppressors and must not deal with them as they had been dealt by. Thus the dismal forebodings of a St. Bartholomew's Eve for the celebration of Maskal, the Feast of the Cross, in September, 1941, proved unfounded. Even the unveiling in February of this year of a memorial to the thousands who were killed when the Italians ran amok in February, 1937, passed off without vindictive incident of any kind.

In the realm of social endeavour, the Empress still takes a leading part. Children's clinics and hospitals are again being. organised and it is the Emperor's intention that education, which he has always sponsored, shall be given the high place in his budget necessary to lay the foundations of liberal thought and of learning for its own sake in the next generation.

Outwardly, Addis Ababa looks very like the capital of 1935. Italians are no longer seen in the streets. The few new houses the Italians built are now occupied for the most part by British officers of the Military Mission and by British advisers and technicians who have been engaged by the Ethiopian Government to help in the work that lies ahead. Even the bronze equestrian statue of the Emperor Menelik, which was ' unveiled with great ceremony during Coronation Week in 1930 and was removed to Italy, as it was thought, during the Fascist regime, has been un- earthed from the rubbish leap near Addis Ababa in which it had in fact been dumped, and re-erected on its former site outside the Ethiopian Cathedral of St. George. It stands today as symbol of the restoration of Ethiopia's full independence.