20101020
africanews

Ethiopian authorities are accused of using development aid as a political tool. Human rights group said farmers who do not support Ethiopian's ruling party led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi are rejected loans, fertilisers and seeds.

The group also said that families of opposition members are banned from a food for work project which supports seven million poor people in Ethiopia.

"The Ethiopian government is routinely using access to aid as a weapon to control people and crush dissent," said Rona Peligal, the rights watchdog's Africa director.

"If you don't play the ruling party's game, you get shut out. Yet foreign donors are rewarding this behavior with ever-larger sums of development aid," added Peligal in a statement.

A New York base HRW interviewed more than 200 people in three Ethiopia regions in six months last year. HRW released a new 105 page report named: "Development without Freedom: How Aid Underwrites Repression in Ethiopia."

The report quoted a rural farmer as saying: "leaders have publicly declared that they will single out opposition members and those identified as such will be denied privileges."

Ethiopia, one of the world's major consumers of development aid, is a key western ally in the horn of Africa. The country received more than three billion dollars in aid in 2008 alone, according to Human rights Group.

The World Bank and other donors briefly stopped direct budget support to the Ethiopia government after 2005 election disputes which led around 200 deaths.

But the donors later increased aid to Ethiopia. The watchdog said donors doubled aid support to Ethiopia between 2004 and 2008.

"In their eagerness to show progress in Ethiopia, aid officials are shutting their eyes to the repression lurking behind the official statistics," Peligal said.

"Donors who finance the Ethiopian state need to wake up to the fact that some of their aid is contributing to human rights abuses.

The Ethiopia government has not yet commented on the report but it has denied similar allegations in the past.