Friday, September 27, 2013

Sakharov and the fight for a free press in Ethiopia

Ethiopian journalists Eskinder Nega and Reeyot Alemu. (Lennart Kjörling and IWMF)
Ethiopian journalists Eskinder Nega and Reeyot Alemu. (Lennart Kjörling and IWMF)
In 1968, Andrei Sakharov braved censorship and personal risk in the Soviet Union to give humanity an honest and timeless declaration of conscience. That same year, Ethiopia's most prominent dissenter, Eskinder Nega, was born. In January 1981, a year into Sakharov's exile in the closed city of Gorky, Reeyot Alemu, another fierce, Ethiopian free thinker, was born.
In considering both Eskinder, a veteran journalist and free speech activist, and Reeyot, a teacher and newspaper columnist, for the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize, the selection committee is recognizing two uncompromising idealists and indomitable free thinkers who have stubbornly persisted in telling inconvenient truths about their government in a country silenced by fear.
For Eskinder, who has spent the last two decades in and out of jail enduring arrests, intimidation, the closures of his newspapers, and the arrest of his wife and the birth of his son in prison, you would think fear, anger, and bitterness would be natural emotions. Instead, the writings of the American-educated journalist have consistently reflected a clear commitment to peaceful reform with pointed, thoughtful critiques of the unkept promises of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which maintains a tight stranglehold on the country.
In a 2010 interview--in between two prison confinements--he argued that Ethiopia needs democracy "to moderate the [ethnic] differences" and prevent violent conflict or revolution. Asked whether he believed the EPRDF could reform, his answer was unequivocal: "That's the only way. We have to hope against hope."
Then, he added: "I believe in forgiving, by the way, that we shouldn't have any grudge against the EPRDF, despite what it has done. I believe that the best thing for the country is reconciliation. I believe in the South African experience."
At the onset of the Arab Spring, Eskinder, inspired by the Egyptian military's decision not to attack anti-government protesters, wrote an online article urging Ethiopian soldiers not to crush the people, as they had done in 2005, should demonstrations break out. The ruling party and the state security's overreaction to the column betrayed its paranoid insecurity: a top police official issued a death threat and a final warning to Eskinder, accusing him of inciting the public against the regime.
In a first-person account of the experience, Eskinder wrote that he left the police station hopeful, and heartened to hear one of the officers escorting him say, "We are all children from one country. We are all human beings. Political differences can be resolved by peaceful dialogue, and we don't have to kill each other."
A few months later, as the EPRDF invoked a nebulous terrorist plot to round up dissident journalists, lawyers, teachers, and academics, Eskinder aired what weighed on his conscience again. "None of the recent detainees under the terrorism charges remotely resemble the profile [of a terrorist]. Debebe is probably the ultimate antithesis of the fanatic, his pragmatism, his easy nature, defines him," he wrote, referring to prominent actor Debebe Eshetu. "Neither do journalists Woubshet [Taye] and Reeyot [Alemu] and opposition politician Zerihun Gebre-Egzabher fit the profile. The same goes for the calm university professor, Bekele Gerba." Just five days after writing those words, Eskinder was arrested, joining Alemu behind bars.
The daughter of a lawyer, Alemu was known for her very sharp reproaches of the societal ills under the EPRDF's Orwellian system, including dogmatic narrow-mindedness, the stifling of creative thought, and human rights abuses. Alemu attributes her intellectual courage to parents that encouraged her to speak her mind and Arthur Shopenhauer's maxim that "truth works far and lives long."
Passionate about education and politics, she taught English at a secondary school and launched a newspaper aptly called Change, before becoming a freelance columnist in Amharic-language newspapers. In 2012, a collection of her articles were published in a book called The EPRDF's Red Pen, a critical examination of what she deemed as the detrimental effects of the party's repressive policies on Ethiopian society. The book could be an Ethiopian version of "The Inertia of Fear," the scathing 1968 commentary on the Soviet system by Valentin Turchin, a Sakharov contemporary and fellow dissident.
The comparison is apt when you consider Ethiopia's past as a Soviet-style, totalitarian state, and its current reincarnation as an African model of China's authoritarian, one-party capitalism.
The current rulers overthrew the pro-Soviet regime in the name of establishing what they deemed true socialism and freedom of self-determination. It is a tragic irony that the once idealist freedom fighters have come to use their power to banish journalists, teachers, lawyers, actors, and other intellectuals to a 21st-century gulag for using peaceful means, i.e., writing articles, to demand reform.
It is an irony that was not lost on Eskinder. "Martin Amis wrote, quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that Stalinism (in the 1930s) tortured you not to force you to reveal a secret, but to collude in a fiction. This is also the basic rationale of the unfolding human rights crisis in Ethiopia. And the same 1930s bravado that show-trials can somehow vindicate banal injustice pervades official thinking. Wont to unlearn from history, we aptly repeat even its most brazen mistakes," he wrote in a letter from prison published in The Independent.
Eskinder and Reeyot's principled defense of intellectual freedom has exposed the Ethiopian government's methods of fear and intimidation as crude and impotent. Reading the article Eskinder published five days before his arrest, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author Carl Bernstein described him as "the embodiment of the greatness of truth, of writing and reporting real truth, of persisting in truth and resisting the oppression of untruths."
In a note from prison, Reeyot, upon accepting the International Women's Media Foundation's Courage in Journalism Award last year, wrote: "For EPRDF, journalists must be only propaganda machines to the ruling party. But for me, journalists are the voices of the voiceless. That's why I wrote many articles which reveal the truth of the oppressed ones. Even if I am facing a lot of problems because of it, I always stand firmly for my principle and profession."
Dr. Sakharov would be very proud.

No Human Rights = No Development

Oakland Institute and the Housing and Land Rights Network
Submit Human Rights Report on Ethiopia to the United Nations 

By Anuradha Mittal amittal@oaklandinstitute.org; Emily Mattheisen emattheisen@hic.mena.org
September 27, 2013


OAKLAND CA - In a report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on September 15, 2013, the Oakland Institute and the Housing and Land Rights Network outlined the human rights and international law violations perpetrated by the government of Ethiopia in the name of country's development strategy.

Drawing clear links between recorded testimonies on the ground and breaches of specific international covenants and articles in Ethiopia's constitution, the joint submission to the UN Human Rights Council also responds to Ethiopia's draft National Human Rights Action Plan for 2013-2015. "Rather than working to build a development strategy grounded in human rights, the Ethiopian government is attempting to hoodwink its human rights record, leaving unmentioned its villagization program and the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation-both used by the government as significant justifications for forced resettlement, arbitrary detentions, and politically motivated arrests," said Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute.

As previous Oakland Institute reports have chronicled, the Ethiopian government's efforts to clear land for large-scale foreign investment has entailed widespread violations of human, social, economic, and political rights. Violations of citizen's rights to self-determination, housing, land for subsistence production, and free political association--enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution, the Rural Land Administration and Land Use Proclamation, and in United Nations international covenants--are carried out in the name of development.

The joint UPR submission suggests that the ruling party's ability to implement country's unpopular villagization program rests in its monopoly on force and dominance over the allocation of humanitarian assistance. "Authoritarian governance and the methods used in implementing development projects have combined to violate human rights to livelihood and culture for land-based peoples, especially in the peripheral regions," said Joseph Schechla, Coordinator of the Housing and Land Rights Network. "Involuntary resettlement, a form of forced evictions, accompanies deprivation of the right to food, including the right to feed oneself, particularly for agropastoralists. On the other hand, the ability to control information and stifle dissent has enabled the ruling party to present a positive face to the international community, which has dubbed Ethiopia a nation in "renaissance", he continued.

The joint submission presents undeniable evidence that should compel the international community to advocate for a human rights centered development strategy that would benefit all Ethiopians.


=>ethiomedia

Ethiopia bans access to student's critical article

Cristina Holtzer / Staff Writer |


Abigail Salisbury is an enemy of the state of Ethiopia because of an op-ed column she published online. 
Salisbury, a student in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, spoke about her article to an audience of about 10 in a “Let’s Talk Africa” lecture on Wednesday in 4130 Posvar Hall from 1:30 to 3 p.m. The Ethiopian government blocked her article, titled “Human Rights and the War on Terror in Ethiopia,” one day after she published it online.
While in Ethiopia, Salisbury noticed an extreme lack of freedom of speech and press for Ethiopian people and decided to write the piece, which criticizes the Ethiopian government.
Salisbury was working as an assistant professor at Mekelle University Law School, a small college outside of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, when she published the article. After the university administration discovered her article, Salisbury said the university “basically asked [her] not to work there anymore.”
“I was told that, based on what I wrote, that if I had been an Ethiopian person, I would have been put in prison,” Salisbury said. “I don’t think they want me back.”
Ironically enough, Salisbury said, she was in the country teaching international human-rights law, a class required for graduation from law school in Ethiopia.
Anna-Maria Karnes, a representative of the Africana studies department, also attended the lecture and interjected throughout. Karnes, whose parents live in Ethiopia, has a thorough grasp of the political climate in the country.
“Skype was outlawed two years ago in Ethiopia,” Karnes said. “There were people jailed for using Skype.”
When Karnes first discovered the Skype law, she worried that she would not be able to get in touch with her parents because that was their primary source of communication. But Skype was illegal only for Ethiopians, not for foreigners.
“As a Westerner, you are treated differently,” Salisbury said. “Better.”
Ethiopians subscribe to a different race and caste system than many Americans are used to. Salisbury said that when African-Americans traveled to Ethiopia, they were treated the same as whites. Ethiopians believe that everyone else in Africa is black but that they, themselves, are red skinned. 
Salisbury recounted a story of when someone in the street approached her and asked, “Have you seen any black women today?”
Salisbury said she was surprised by the scale of differences between the learning environments in Ethiopia and the U.S.
Because of the country’s limited resources, students learn to memorize verbatim what professors say in lecture. Salisbury said she’s seen students reproduce a lecture right down to the “ums” and “likes.”
Ethiopian education also differs from Western education because, Salisbury said, there could be “watchers” present at any time, in any classroom. Watchers are government representatives on the lookout for those speaking out against the government.
“What would creep me out if I were in that class?” Salisbury said. “I don’t know if I would be raising my hand with opinions.”
In addition to an extreme lack of freedom of speech, Salisbury said Ethiopians also struggle with tough racial tensions and “ethnic federalism,” or preferential treatment for one ethnic group that is officially recognized by the government. With Ethiopia located in a contentious part of the world, Salisbury said U.S.-Ethiopia relations are crucial.
“Ethiopia is really instrumental in the U.S. agenda and the global war on terror that we’re engaged in,” she said.
Salisbury and Karnes opened the presentation with an activity about African knowledge. They divided the audience into small groups and asked them to label a map of Africa with the names of as many countries as they could. Even with several African students and faculty in the audience, no one was able to label the entire map.

“You can’t know the whole of Africa,” Director of Africana Studies Macrina Lelei said. “That’s part of why we have African studies here at Pitt ... to share those experiences.”

The Brain of the Bale Rebellion, Sheik Musa Bati, Died at the Age of 70

By Kadiro Elemo | September 26, 2013
The Oromo nation is saddened by the news of the death of Musa Bati, on Wednesday, September 24, 2013, in Nagelle Borana, Southern Oromiya. Musa Bati, who earned an honorific title of Sheikh—elder, in Arabic—at his salad age, because of his knowledge of Arabic and Somali, was among the pioneers of the Bale peasants’ resistance against the Ethiopian rule in 1960s and 1970s to end the humiliating yoke of tribute-giving, land dispossession, and cultural suffocations. A close confidante of General Waqo Gutu, Sheikh Musa led the Oromo fighters during many ferocious battles including the landmark battle of Dhombir, 1963. Because of the heroic activities of Sheikh Musa against Ethiopian army and naftanya marchers, his family paid a heavy cost. In one morning of the early 1960s, when Ethiopian jets raided his village, his family lost their entire stock, more than 300 cattle and camels. In the raids, which lasted for three days, the Oromo peasants lost more than 12,000 livestock and an untold number of people. At the time when the Oromos were unwelcomed in the administration, civil service, schools, media, justice systems of the empire, this tragedy was a major turning point in his life. This increased, according to Zaytuna Bati, a niece of Sheik Musa, the determination of the Sheikh, and his friends, to fight for the right of his people until they achieve victory over the invaders that despised their culture and robbed their land.
As a prolific writer, who earned a name of “brain of the revolution,” Sheikh Musa was a man in charge of keeping the diaries of the struggle and negotiating with enemies. In the late 1960s, when he met Emperor Hayla Sillase to negotiate an armistice and a peace deal, the emperor hardly believed his eyes when he saw a young man in the early 20s. The skinny boy did not meet the expectation of the emperor who heard a lot about bravery of an imaginary Sheikh. Then, the emperor said, “I want to deal with Sheikh Musa, a big one, not a baby one.” A witness had to come to prove to the emperor that he was dealing with Sheikh Musa, the real and the only one. When the confused emperor offered him a chance to go to school and a car, Sheikh Musa told him that his main demand was to ask the empire stop its abuses and violent repressions of the Oromo people, and he rejected his offer until the same chance extended to all Oromo children.
Except a brief exile in Somalia, Sheikh Musa refused to leave the country he loved most, Oromiya. He returned to the country after the fall of the military dictatorship of Mangistu Hayla Marya in 1991. He participated in the Transitional Government of Ethiopia, during the Transitional Charter Period. He remained in Oromiya even when the EPRDF government, after the transition charter period, led a monstrous clamped down on all democratic rights and brutally suppressed the Oromo people’s quest for self-determination. A fearless advocate of the Oromo people, Sheikh Musa of “dubbii sibilaa” (hard talk) was arrested for many years, at Hurso and Agarfa, along a prominent Oromo activists and elders. He was released after his health deteriorated, and when Mahmud Bune, a brother of Colonel Hussein Bune, another icon of the Bale rebellion, died in a prison. Sheikh Musa was 70 and survived by more than 20 children, some of whom still languishing in prison houses of Ethiopia on concocted charges of supporting anti-peace elements. We shall have ample occasions to remember the legacy of Sheikh Musa Bati during a commemoration of the 50th year anniversary of the modern Oromo military struggle against the Ethiopian rule. We shall display a video message of the Sheikh Musa Bati to the Oromos and friends of the Oromos, on October 20, 2013, in Minnesota, during the 50th year anniversary celebration, via Facebook, and YouTube. Maatii Sheekh Muusaafi firoota isaaniif Rabbin obsa haa kennu.