What’s He Got to Hide?

Dictator Meles Zenawi

The case of two Swedish journalists imprisoned in Ethiopia sheds light on a harsh campaign of repression.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 28, 2012


IN a filthy Ethiopian prison that is overridden with lice, fleas and huge rats, two Swedes are serving an 11-year prison sentence for committing journalism.

Martin Schibbye, 31, and Johan Persson, 29, share a narrow bed, one man’s head beside the other’s feet. Schibbye once woke up to find a rat mussing his hair.

The prison is a violent, disease-ridden place, with inmates fighting and coughing blood, according to Schibbye’s wife, Linnea Schibbye Steiner, who last met with her husband in December. It is hot in the daytime and freezing cold at night, and the two Swedes are allowed no mail or phone calls, she said. Fortunately, she added, the 250 or so Ethiopian prisoners jammed in the cell protect the two journalists, pray for them and jokingly call their bed “the Swedish embassy.”

What was the two men’s crime? Their offense was courage. They sneaked into the Ogaden region to investigate reports of human rights abuses.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s increasingly tyrannical ruler, seemed to be sending a signal to the world’s journalists: Don’t you dare mess with me!

So the only proper response is a careful look at Meles’s worsening repression. Sadly, this repression is abetted by acquiescence from Washington and by grants from aid organizations.

Those Swedish journalists will probably be released early because of international pressure. But there will be no respite for the countless Ethiopians who face imprisonment, torture and rape.

I’m in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, and so is Meles. I’ve been pursuing him for the last few days, trying to confront him and ask him about his worsening pattern of brutality.

He has refused to see me, so I enlisted my Twitter followers to report Meles sightings. I want to ask him why he has driven more journalists into exile over the last decade than any other leader in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York City.

Meles has done genuine good in fighting poverty. He has some excellent officials under him, including a superb health minister, and Ethiopia’s economy is making progress in health and agriculture. Ethiopia is full of aid organizations, and it has a close intelligence and military relationship with the United States government.

Yet since 2005, when an initial crackdown left 200 protesters dead and 30,000 detained, Meles has steadily tightened his grip. A Human Rights Watch report this month noted that the government is forcibly removing tens of thousands of people from their rural homes to artificial villages where they risk starvation. Those who resist endure arrests, beatings or worse.

“The repression is getting worse,” notes Tamerat Negera, who fled to the United States after the newspaper he edited was closed down in 2009. “His vision seems an attempt to root out any dissent.”

Meles has criminalized dissent, with a blogger named Eskinder Nega now facing terrorism charges, which could mean a death sentence. His true crime was calling on the government to allow free speech and end torture.

Appallingly, the Meles regime uses foreign food aid to punish his critics. Ethiopia is one of the world’s largest recipients of development aid, receiving about $3 billion annually, with the United States one of its largest donors. This money does save lives. But it also “underwrites repression in Ethiopia,” in the words of Human Rights Watch.

Families and entire areas of the country are deliberately starved unless they back the government, human rights groups have shown. In Ethiopia, the verb “to starve” is transitive.

Look, I’m a huge advocate of smart aid to fight global poverty. But donors and aid groups need to ensure that their aid doesn’t buttress repression.

The Meles regime, run largely by a coterie from his own minority Tigrayan ethnicity, has been particularly savage in the Ogaden region, where it faces an armed uprising. When Jeffrey Gettleman, a colleague at The New York Times, went to the Ogaden in 2007, he found a pattern of torture and rape. The government then arrested Gettleman and two colleagues, detaining them for five days in harsh conditions.

The two Swedish reporters illegally entered the Ogaden and met a rebel group to examine that human rights wasteland. In December, they were sentenced to 11-year terms.

Steiner, Schibbye’s wife, said of the harsh conditions: “Eleven years in an Ethiopian prison is equal to life, because you do not survive that long.”

Amnesty International says that in the last 11 months, the government has arrested at least 114 Ethiopian journalists and opposition politicians. It described this as “the most far-reaching crackdown on freedom of expression seen in many years in Ethiopia.”

Prime Minister Meles, you may have dodged me in Davos, but your brutality toward Swedish, American and Ethiopian journalists will not silence the world’s media. You’re just inviting more scrutiny.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opini ... .html?_r=3

Ethiopia:
Journalists Live in Fear of 'Terror' Law



By Charlayne Hunter-Gault, 19 June 2012


Nowhere across Africa is the message that its people want a way out of what I call "the four Ds" - death, disease, disaster and despair - more resounding than among the continent's journalists.

In nation after nation, they are attempting to inform their people of their rights and encourage them to hold their governments accountable. For that, many of them are being held accountable in the most draconian ways.

I have seen this first hand in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's regime has long attempted to conceal the repression of its people. Journalists have fought back and continue to yell truth to power, although they still face the prospect of jail as a consequence.

And most recently, I have seen it in Ethiopia, where Eskinder Nega, a journalist I visited seven years ago in Kalati Prison, along with his pregnant wife, Serkalem Fasil (who gave birth in prison) is back there on charges of terrorism. What appears to have been his crime is that he also continues to tell, if not yell, truth to power, although the government is actually prosecuting him for what they say is his membership in a terrorist network that advocates violence. As proof, during his trial they showed a video in which he questioned whether an Arab Spring-type uprising could ever happen in Ethiopia.

The government has empowered itself to prosecute what they see as dissent like this with a sweeping anti-terrorism law that is, effectively, a weapon that can be used against anyone daring to criticize the government in a way the government doesn't like.

One journalist who published Eskinder's statement in court was also convicted, but got a suspended four-month sentence. Dozens of journalists have fled into exile and six have been charged with terrorism in absentia, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

When I visited Ethiopia earlier this month with a colleague from the CPJ and the continent-wide project called the African Media Initiative, journalists we met with told us they all live in fear, calling the terrorism law a "game changer." One foreigner working in Ethiopia told me: "There is a red line. The problem is, we don't know where it is."

When we met Simon Bereket, Ethiopia's Minister of Information, he defended the incarceration of Eskinder and the seven other journalists locked up with him on the grounds that they were involved in terrorism. In a polite but firm dissent, he said neither Eskinder nor any of the other journalists were in prison for what they wrote.

When we asked to see Eskinder and the others in prison, we were told that it was not likely and that turned out to be the case. But his wife, Serkalem, who was recently in New York receiving on Eskinder's behalf a prestigious freedom of the press award from PEN America, told us when we met her in Addis that Eskinder had asked her to tell us that he was in no way connected with any terrorist group-there or in the United States.

She also told us that he said that if the price of telling the truth was imprisonment, he could live with that. Of course, when the verdict is handed down - which is scheduled to happen Thursday - Eskinder could be sentenced to life in prison or death.

Part of the reason for my involvement with journalists and their issues in Ethiopia and other parts of the continent is to try to present a much-maligned continent in a light different to that in which it is often portrayed elsewhere in the world: in a light that makes it clear that Africans want as much as anyone else to make choices about themselves and their children in an informed way, and that they have the same hopes and aspirations for themselves, their families and their communities as do people in democracies the world over.

Imperfect as many democracies are, their governments do not put people in jail for words that come out of their mouths and the freedom-loving desires that live in their hearts. That's why, as an American, I hope that my countrymen and women who have that right should get on Ethiopia's case. They should insist that a U.S. government which is pledged to ensure those rights in America should also help ensure them in Ethiopia. And I hope they will be joined by freedom-loving people all over the world, including on the African continent.

But Ethiopia stands as a partner with the United States, in particular, in fighting REAL terrorists, including Al Qaeda, in a strategic part of the world. Surely the economic assistance the U.S. has provided Ethiopia in the past and the $350 million in assistance it is asking for in 2013 gives it some weight in pressing Addis Ababa to live up to the same principles enshrined in their constitution as in ours?

Freedom of speech is a crucial cornerstone of democracy. It should not be a death sentence.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201206191560.html

Detained: Three days in Ethiopia



by Hadas Gold and Tamara El Waylly
Hatchet Staff Writers

Issue: September 10, 2009 | News

On an early July morning in Awwadaay, Ethiopia, senior Emma McCormick was sick and contemplating the cancellation of her morning's English class. As she lay on her bed in the eastern part of the country where she and six other GW students were volunteering for the summer, she heard a knock at the gate.

Knowing that her host mother was an important figure in the town and often received visitors, McCormick never paused to wonder who might have knocked.

Greeting her at the door were men with assault rifles.

Three Ethiopian military police officers stood in front of her, commanding McCormick to gather all her belongings - she was being detained.

Outside, a military bus decked with more soldiers waited, and other volunteers that McCormick had come to Ethiopia to teach English with were there as well. A 10-hour journey to the country's capital, three days of detainment, and, finally, a return flight, lay ahead.

McCormick and the other GW students were among 15 Americans detained in and deported from Ethiopia this summer, after volunteering as part of Learning Enterprises - a nonprofit, U.S.-based and student-run organization dedicated to sending college students to teach English to children in developing areas around the world.

Field, jail, or hotel

After rounding up the volunteers in McCormick's town, the soldiers continued to round up the volunteers stationed in the towns of Haramaya, Gobboo, Chelenqo and Deder, all in eastern Ethiopia, and not far from the Somalian border.

Having spent the night in a village next to that of his host family, sophomore Tim Savoy woke up to a call demanding he return to his original place of stay, Chelenqo - where the Ethiopian police were already waiting.

Savoy remembers no one having "any idea, none whatsoever" as to the reason of their arrest. That includes the LE staff member that was detained along with the volunteers.

Stripped of their cell phones, their bags searched, and escorted by Ethiopian soldiers, the volunteers spent the next 10 hours traveling to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where they were questioned at the city's main immigration center.

"(The soldiers) declined to tell us anything," McCormick said. "It's like they couldn't say anything, or like they didn't know of anything to say."

Sophomore Chelsea Millar had already been in detainment for six hours at a local police station in her town before joining the others for the 10-hour ride.

"The whole (drive) we were under police observation with guns, AK-47s, we weren't fed," Millar said.

For the next two days, the students were given the option of sleeping in fields or jail for the night, or paying for their own hotels.

While in custody, the volunteers were prohibited from calling their families or even the U.S. Embassy.

"I tried to sneak away and call home, tell them to call the embassy," Savoy said, but an officer followed him without his knowledge, "ripped the phone out of the wall," and told him that outside communication was not allowed.

Once in Addis Ababa, their passports were confiscated and the volunteers were each questioned separately, and as the list of volunteers to be interrogated grew shorter, the inventory of the possible reasons for their detainment grew longer.

According to the students interviewed, reasons for their detainment ranged from, at first, being a possible security threat to having the wrong visa.

"By the time they got around to me, they had formed this idea that... we weren't there to start a revolution, weren't teaching political propaganda. They decided to deport us on a technicality regarding our visas," Millar said.

The students said Ethiopian government officials informed them that their tourist visas were illegal because they were teaching English, a service, which, under a tourist visa, was not permissible. Despite the fact that some of the students did have business visas, the Ethiopian officials were deaf to the claims that no money was being exchanged.

Having had their visas revoked, the government officials ushered them to the airport, where the volunteers remained without their passports.

Finally, only hours before some of their flights were set to take off, the volunteers spied the sight that McCormick called "the best moment of my life."

U.S. Embassy officials finally appeared at the scene, carrying with them the volunteers' passports.

"I don't think anyone in that room had been so overjoyed, so overwhelmed and over-enthusiastic over anything as when we saw the people from the embassy," Millar said. After being under police supervision for 60 hours, "it was just an awesome feeling to be able to have some freedom back."

What the embassy never knew

The embassy and the participants' parents had been aware of the situation from the day they were first detained. The students would later learn that part of their problems stemmed from the fact that LE never required them to register with the U.S. Embassy before they traveled to Ethiopia.

The organization recommends students register with the U.S. Embassy before entering the country, but does not require it, Director of Programming Katrina Shankland said.

"This is completely unprecedented," Shankland said. "The prior two summers of our involvement (in Ethiopia) had absolutely no problem. Of course we're baffled and a little bit shocked but we're happy the participants are home."

Millar said that when embassy officials came to their aid, they told the participants that if they had informed the U.S. officials of where they were planning on working, they would have been warned about going there.

"The area we were in was closer to the Somalian side, it was just an area of the country we weren't necessarily supposed to be in," Millar said. "That was something that we didn't even realize when we had left."

Specific information about the incident cannot be divulged because of privacy laws, State Department spokesperson Laura Tischler said. Information and travel warnings about the region are on the State Department's Web site, she said.

The site reminds American citizens that the U.S. Embassy strongly discourages travel to Ethiopia's Somali region. The students were in the Oromiya region, where the Web site states that armed insurgent groups operate.

"Now after coming back I've looked in books that talk about traveling to Ethiopia and in those books they say making sure you have the right visa," Millar said.

Masked by speculation and confusion, the true nature of the July arrest still remains without official Ethiopian explanation. Neither Ethiopian Embassy in D.C. nor the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia returned multiple requests for comment.

After being told that they had been followed for an extended period of time without their knowledge - a surprise that would shock them over a month after the arrest - Savoy and McCormick both suspected the true motive of their arrest was political.

Millar said that LE's country coordinator in Ethiopia, Mahdi Ibrahim, is a member of the Oromo, a minority group. In the past, she said, he had been a political activist and speaker for the Oromo people, who live in the villages where the volunteers were working. Shankland said she could not confirm whether or not Ibrahim had worked as an activist.

"It makes sense," Savoy said. "They said it was a security threat, then a wrong visa... but they would not have brought guns if it was something that minor."

Although absolutely frustrated, the students said their experience, while shorter than intended, was worth the distress.

"I don't necessarily hold LE accountable," Millar said. "It's a new organization and it's student-run. They weren't really ready to handle it. It's a learning experience for them. Now they know."

http://www.gwhatchet.com/2009/09/10/det ... -ethiopia/

Genocide Watch
The International Alliance to End Genocide
http://www.genocidewatch.org/ethiopia.html
The Meles Zenawi Regime committing genocide in Ethiopia

Press Release

June 27, 2012, 4:23 p.m. EDT

Leahy: In Wake of Ethiopia's Verdict on Eskinder Nega, Time to Put U.S. Values Over U.S. Aid to a Government That Misuses The Law to Silence Its Critics



WASHINGTON, June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Following is the reaction of U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the State Department and Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on the conviction Wednesday in Ethiopia of journalist Eskinder Nega:

"The Ethiopian Government's use of vague anti-terrorism laws to silence the press has been widely and rightly condemned. The conviction of Eskinder Nega and other journalists, who are accused of nothing more than the peaceful exercise of rights clearly recognized under international law, is the work of a regime that fears the democratic aspirations of its own people. Over the years, United States administrations have provided Prime Minister Meles a veneer of legitimacy due to our shared interest in countering real terrorist threats, but he has exploited the relationship for his own political ends. It is time to put the values and principles that distinguish us from terrorists, above aid to a government that misuses its institutions to silence its critics."

SOURCE Office of U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/leahy- ... 2012-06-27

US concerned over Ethiopia 'terror' convictions

WASHINGTON, June 28, 2012 (AFP) -The United States is "deeply concerned" about the conviction of prominent Ethiopian journalists and opposition members under the African ally's controversial anti-terrorism law.

"This practice raises serious questions and concerns about the intent of the law, and about the sanctity of Ethiopians' constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement late Wednesday.

The State Department said it had urged Ethiopia, a military ally, to guarantee freedom of expression and freedom of the media. US Ambassador Donald Booth attended Wednesday's trial.

The statement mentioned journalist Eskinder Nega, accused of having tried to destabilize the country by encouraging Arab Spring-style protests against the government.

He and 23 other Ethiopians, including prominent opposition member Andualem Arage, face life in prison after having been convicted Wednesday on charges of terrorism that Amnesty International said were "trumped up."

Although under the anti-terrorism legislation, the defendants could face the death sentence, the prosecutor recommended life sentences for the 24, only eight of whom appeared in court.

Five of the defendants, including Eskinder and Andualem, will reappear in court on July 13 to present their mitigating circumstances.

Eskinder, who in May was honored with the "freedom to write" award by the US-based writers' freedoms watchdog PEN, was jailed in 2005 following national elections.

He nevertheless continued writing a blog and remained critical of the government.

Rights groups have said Ethiopia's anti-terrorism law is vaguely worded and often used to quash freedom of speech and peaceful political dissent.

Press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists also condemned Wednesday's conviction as "baseless and politically motivated". They say Ethiopia has one of the most restricted media in the world.

http://www.arabtimesonline.com/NewsDeta ... fault.aspx

Dictator Meles Zenawi gets money from Piracy: Wikileaks

Meles Zenawi, the head of the TPLF terrorist Organization is Dead, but his tentacles still remain in the country!