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 he withstands calmly. "That's their right," says Meles. With the recent rains, even the gods seem to be smiling on the drought-ravaged land.
The view ahead, however, is clouded. The 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 most of black Africa has opted to quell tribal rivalry by imposing strict one-party rule, Meles has embarked on a daring multiparty experiment that acknowledges ethnic differences. But many of the country's 70- odd ethnic groups continue to view one another over the barrels of the guns that were never confiscated when the civil war ended. "This is a country without any democratic experience," says Meles, "plunging into it with arms in hand."
It is something of a miracle, then, that the political center fashioned after Mengistu's flight is holding. Though the interim government is dominated by Meles' Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, its ruling council includes representatives from 35 different parties. Last July it adopted a charter ensuring each ethnic nationality the right to self- determination. Step One -- 12 regional elections to be held by the end of the year -- will pave the way for local autonomy or even secession. Already, the Red Sea province of Eritrea has set up its own provisional government and will hold a United Nations-sponsored referendum on independence in two years.
All 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 to be."