But for a lucky few, there is sanctuary and support at the Ma’agan safe house, an Israeli government-funded programme for survivors of slavery.
Photographer Leila Segal visited the safe house for Voice of Freedom, a project by UK charity PhotoVoice. She has put cameras into the hands of three Ethiopian survivors so they could speak about their lives. The women talk us through their pictures, below.
LS: Desta, 22, was living alone in Addis Ababa when a friend said he could help her get a job in Sudan, but when they reached the border he sold her to traffickers. She survived the Sinai camps and made it to Israel. Desta is a force to be reckoned with and was keen to share her experiences.
A type of truck used by traffickers
DG: This is exactly the type of truck that we were travelling in after we were sold. They put us in here so it looked like goods being transported. They showed us that if anybody tried to scream they would kill them right there; nobody wanted to ruin his or her life, so nobody did that – or if they did, they would kill that person and set an example in front of us.
LS: Desta set this photo up. She chose the location, knelt on the ground and said to her friend Zenebech “tie my hands behind my back and get a stick to show how they beat us”.
A demonstration of how the women were bound and beaten
DG: Refugees who pass through this are really different, although we are human beings and we still have our bodies on us after the experience. After you have passed through this, you will be really new.
LS: Desta is returning to Ethiopia and wants to work at grassroots level there to prevent trafficking. She fell victim to it because she did not know the risks – now she wants to educate others.
A plant that thrives without water mirrors the ability of some to survive the harshest experiences
DG: This plant is on a stone – there is no watering to it and there is no food to it, but it still exists. Some people are like that. There are people who are surrounded by nothing, there is nothing left in their life, but it’s amazing how they are still standing. My dream is to give voice to people – I want to do that for people who are represented by this picture.
Tizalu Brahan
LS: Tizalu is from rural Ethiopia. She left home to find work in Sudan after her mother died, but the broker betrayed her and sold her to traffickers.
She was very shy at first but flourished as the project unfolded, taking hundreds of pictures. When she spoke about this picture, we could not believe it – the red earth had allowed a very reserved woman to speak about what happened in Sinai.
Red soil – a reminder of the Sinai journey
TB: This is nice, but the red soil that we saw on our journey was different – everyone was sick and people were falling … there were men with us and we were on top of each other and some people were just abandoned. It was so dusty in Sinai, you have to eat it. Yes, the red earth reminded me of that. I’ll never forget it. It’s linked with my bone.
Room in the safe house
TB: This is my room [in the safe house]. I took this picture because I always like to see it. This is the first place I was happy after they stole me and I didn’t see my father again. Here my life is really nice. There, in the Sinai, there were no clothes and the place was not clean; the sand and the not clean place – it was all trouble. But here they treat us very nicely: they give us clothes and they give us money.”
A first look at the sea
TB: I have never been to the sea before – this was the first time. Because I really liked it, I took a picture of it. It wasn’t too cold, it wasn’t too hot. Yes, it was exciting to experience something new.
Zenebech Zeleke
LS: Zenebech was a passionate student – she loved the photography. She and Desta are very close friends; they were trafficked together. She is returning to Ethiopia, and hopes to develop her photography there, with our support, using it to tell her story.
Zenebech Zeleke on being blindfolded
ZZ: The one thing I want to portray is how people can without their consent, without their will, be taken from where they are to a place that they never wanted to come to. For example, a person from one border is blindfolded, beaten and taken away from the border to another place.
Dolls, not people, were her only friends as she grew up
ZZ: Ever since I was a really young person, up until two years ago when I left Ethiopia, people were not my friends. The dolls were my friends. I started having people friends after I left Ethiopia, on my journey, that’s when I started knowing people – I really had a very lonely life when I was there.
LS: Zenebech is a committed Christian – taking strength from her faith during her ordeal. She took this picture at The Church of the Annunciation on our field trip to Nazareth.
Zenebech took strength from her Christian faith
ZZ: There are many ways to tell my story to other people, to tell about these types of journeys, and if we can do it using photography, that’s great. There are things that you go through and want to share, and it makes you feel better. Some of the things that could be told are: they used to force us into taking hashish or drugs and used to bury people alive and we have seen them beheading people.
The light gets in – you can let it in and it’s positive. But the darkness, it doesn’t let you in, it just swamps you, and that’s what it does.
Photography from Voice of Freedom will be exhibited at Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre in London, from 20 March until 6 April.
After suffering years of persistent harassment, violence, and surveillance at the hands of his oppressive government, Tadesse Kersmo had enough. Tired of living under constant monitoring, Tadesse and his wife escaped Ethiopia, where they had been politically active for years, and were granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 2009.
It was only a few years later that they discovered that this escape was an illusion, and that they had been followed from Ethiopia to England. He may have left his country, but Tadesse was still a target.
He wasn’t followed physically, however - the surveillance was much more clandestine. Tadesse appears to have been tracked through his computer via a Trojan that is part of a commercial intrusion kit called FinFisher.
Examinations undertaken by Privacy International in collaboration with a research fellow of the Citizen Lab suggest that Tadesse’s computer, which was the main way he remained in touch with his friends and family back home, and continued to advocate for democracy back in Ethiopia, was totally taken over. With his chats and Skype calls logged, his contacts accessed, and his video and microphone remotely switched on, it was not only Tadesse that was being threatened, but also every single person who was part of the movement.
What is frightening is that even if one manages to flee from oppression, when it comes to this type of technology, there are no borders.
Years of surveillance and harassment
Surveillance is not new to Tadesse. Up to 2009 he had been living in Addis Ababa where he and his wife were already politically active before the May 2005 elections. During these elections his wife, then a member of the opposition party Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), was elected to the Addis Ababa city council. The elections however ended in protests because of alleged rigging of the elections by the ruling party, and the demonstrations were broken up with considerable violence. Scores of people died and opposition supporters were arrested throughout the country on charges of seeking to overthrow the government.
Under pressure from the authorities, Tadesse’s wife gave up her seat and years of harassment by those in power followed. Both Tadesse and his wife continuously received warnings, were being monitored, and repeatedly jailed without being charged and then released after a few days. Over the course of 2006 and 2007 Kersmo was beaten up three times. An employee of state-owned telecommunications company Ethio Telecom informed Tadesse that the phones of opposition members, including his phone, were being tapped.
FinSpy and the targeting of Ethiopian opposition
After coming to the UK in 2009, they enjoyed the freedom to be politically active in the Ginbot 7 Movement for Justice Freedom and Democracy (Ginbot 7), an Ethiopian opposition party in exile that has been labelled as a terrorist organisation by the Ethiopian government as part of their crackdown on political opposition. The use of the overbroad and vague anti-terrorism laws to crack down on peaceful critics, journalists and political opposition in Ethiopia has been roundly condemned by Human Rights Watch.
It was when Tadesse was in the UK that he read reports of the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto on politically motivated spying in Ethiopia. After reading the report, Kersmo and fellow Ginbot 7 members became concerned their computers might be infected with malware as well.
Citizen Lab previously had reported that a FinSpy command and control server, which is indispensable for the use of FinSpy, was located in Ethiopia. Another Citizen Lab report revealed that Ginbot 7 members in particular were the targets of malware attacks that used pictures of senior members of Ginbot 7 as bait to download what was actually a Trojan called FinSpy.
When Tadesse recognized himself in one of the pictures used as bait presumably to target people interested in Ginbot 7, he contacted Privacy International with a request to scan his computers for the presence of malware. With the help of Bill Marczak of Citizen Lab, an examination of Tadesse’s computer by Privacy International suggested that FinSpy had been active on Kersmo’s computer in June 2012, which means that this intrusive form of surveillance may have been used to monitor Tadesse after arriving in the UK.
Once downloaded onto a target’s computer, FinSpy allows the operator of the Trojan to have total access to the computer. This means that it was possible to read Tadesse’s email correspondence, even when encrypted, search the documents on his computer, monitor his web surfing, listen in on Skype calls he had with other members of Ginbot 7’s executive committee, follow chat conversations, and even to remotely switch on the computer’s webcam and microphone to extend surveillance beyond the computer to what was happening around it in the privacy of Tadesse’s home.
Speaking with Privacy International, Tadesse said that being spied on via his computer made him feel insecure and very uncomfortable, as if he was constantly being watched. He hopes that sharing his experience will make other vulnerable groups such as human rights activists and journalists aware of the risk that their computers may be compromised without them knowing as well.
As FinSpy is designed not to be noticed by the target or his anti-virus software, Tadesse had never noticed that a Trojan had been active on his computer. He had not only used his computer in his work as a university lecturer and for personal communications, but also for his political activities.
Intrusive surveillance of these activities is not only a grave violation of Tadesse’s privacy, but also of the privacy, freedom of expression and political rights of both him and fellow Ginbot 7 members he has been in contact with in the course of his political work. The internet is crucial for the Ethiopian diaspora to freely exercise their political rights and as such they are especially vulnerable to becoming targets of surveillance. No one should have to live under this constant threat, and authorities here must investigate any illegal surveillance that may have taken place.
Egyptian Water Minister Mohamed Abdul Muttalib listens to a member of his delegation during tripartite talks in Khartoum about Ethiopia's Great Renaissance Dam, Jan. 4, 2014. (photo by EBRAHIM HAMID/AFP/Getty Images)
CAIRO — Cairo has begun a diplomatic campaign on two tracks, one explicit and one undeclared, with European countries and donor parties. This came after the Egyptian government escalated its campaign against the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam under its current specifications to protect Egypt’s historic interests in Nile water, following failed technical negotiations with Ethiopia.
“The campaign initiated by Egypt is on two tracks, one that is explicit and involves meetings by Egypt’s ministers of water and foreign relations with their counterparts in countries with influence in the Nile Basin, and one that is undeclared and involves meetings by Egypt’s ambassadors in these countries. The two tracks aim to persuade the international community to reject the dam’s construction because it may lead to further conflict and instability in the region of the Nile Basin,” a diplomatic source in contact with the Egyptian government told Al-Monitor.
The source, who preferred to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue with the Egyptian government, said, “More negotiations with Ethiopia only waste time and directly threaten Egypt’s water security. We realized that Ethiopia doesn’t want genuine solutions to end the crisis, but is only trying to portray Egypt as approving of the dam’s construction to facilitate access to funding. But [Ethiopia] didn’t provide genuine guarantees that the dam will not affect Egypt and has shown no intention to amend the technical specifications to minimize the potential risks according to the report by the international experts’ committee, which recommended reconsidering the dam’s safety studies.”
On Feb. 6, Egypt’s minister of water resources and irrigation visited Italy, where he explained the critical water situation in Egypt, the water problems that recur every year and Egyptian fears of the dam’s impact on the country’s water security. Afterward, Egypt’s Ministry of Water said in a statement, of which Al-Monitor has obtained a copy, that “the visit has achieved its goal. Italy has understood Egyptian concerns.”
The Italian Salini Construction company is building the Renaissance Dam after it signed a contract with the Ethiopian government in December 2010 worth 3.377 billion euros ($4.64 billion), with the dam due to be completed in six years.
Al-Monitor spoke to a government source familiar with the file of the Nile Basin. “Egypt’s open move, for the first time, and the visit by Italy’s irrigation minister has had an impact on Ethiopia, which invited us for dialogue again on Feb. 11 in Addis Ababa. However, Ethiopia again stuck to its point of view and rejected all confidence initiatives put forward by Egypt,” the source noted.
“Egypt will continue its international escalation and all options are open to us to protect our share of the Nile waters. And this decision was made after exhausting all attempts at dialogue with Ethiopia. Now visits are being planned to Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and France. … We have also contacted all international donors such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank to demand they not give any technical support for the construction of the dam without making sure it will not cause damage to Egypt,” the source said.
“A copy of the report by the international experts’ committee that was signed by Ethiopia was sent. [The report] proves the existence of a potential risk to building the dam. But Ethiopia has not committed to finding solutions to reduce these risks,” the source stressed.
During a news conference on Feb. 13 after the Egyptian delegation returned from Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said that his country will not back down from building the Renaissance Dam. He noted that if Egypt wants to internationalize the issue and send it to the United Nations, this will not help because there is no court specializing in arbitrating water disputes, and Egypt has no choice but to negotiate and engage in dialogue to reach a solution acceptable to everyone.
The water ministers of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia met in Khartoum in three rounds of negotiations last year on how to implement the recommendations of the experts’ report. But they did not reach a clear agreement. Egypt insisted on sending foreign experts to follow up on how to implement the report’s recommendations. Egypt also put forward an initiative to build confidence whereby Ethiopia would provide guarantees to implement any new recommendations, but Ethiopia and Sudan rejected that.
Egypt rejected participating in the ministerial meeting of the Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO), which is affiliated with the Nile Basin Initiative held in Addis Ababa on Feb. 4. The Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation said in an official statement, “We will not participate in the meeting in line with the Egyptian position taken in 2010 to freeze our activities in the Nile Basin Initiative after the unilateral signing of the Entebbe Convention by the Nile headwaters countries without reaching an agreement on the contentious items and without recognizing the legitimacy of any decisions that may be issued by ENTRO.”
For his part, Ambassador Gamal Bayoumi, the secretary-general of the Egyptian-European partnership at the Ministry of International Cooperation, said in an interview with Al-Monitor, “The issue of the Renaissance Dam has become very complex, and we have a state that is violating international customs and traditions. Egypt’s moves now target all countries that provide technical assistance for designing and building the Renaissance Dam through private contractors and also the states likely to fund the construction of the dam. … Discussing this crisis during the visits of Marshal [Abdel Fattah al-] Sisi and of the Russian foreign minister [Sergey Lavrov] has had a good effect because Russia’s relations with Ethiopia are still good, and can be leveraged for the benefit of Egypt.”
Bayoumi asserted, “We are still at the stage of dialogue. And we are trying, as much as possible, to attract Ethiopia to talk and negotiate. But [Ethiopia] is being stubborn and the impact of the dialogue session broadcast during [former President Mohammed] Morsi’s era has clearly caused the collapse of trust between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia.”
Aside from the language of political escalation, there has been an increased state of anxiety within the institutions concerned with studying the effects of the Renaissance Dam after Al Jazeera broadcast a report from the dam’s site showing initial construction, showing that Ethiopia is serious about building the dam.
The expert in the national committee to assess the effects of the Renaissance Dam, Alaa al-Zawahiri, told Al-Monitor, “Despite the lack of detailed and specific information that can be analyzed, the recording aired by Al Jazeera shows that concrete has started to be poured, which is the second phase after laying soil for the base. According to the dam’s stated specifications, laying the soil should be done over an area of 100 meters [328 feet], but there is no doubt that Ethiopia has completed all the initial work first and has put part of the concrete on the surface to gain time and impose a fait accompli on Egypt.”
“If this construction continues at that pace, there will be a fait accompli, and it will be difficult to persuade the Ethiopian side to amend the dam’s specifications or height after that,” said Zawahiri.
Egypt’s moves are still constrained by its difficult internal transitional phase. It’s important for Egypt to resolve its internal problems so that the water issue and the Renaissance Dam can return as a political priority for the next president.
The content of this paper is based on observations and outcomes of discussions the author had with various people from Marsabit County in general and mostly with those from Moyale. Included in this paper are also information gleaned from local media reports on Moyale conflict and write-ups posted on various websites. This paper is not an objective research work as such but it is more of personal reflection and interpretation of the information received which seem to lean more on perspective shared by most people who are sympathetic to Borans cause in the on-going conflict
The author begins by giving a brief historical overview of Marsabit County with focus on fluctuating relationships between its communities at various times. He goes to narrate highlights of key events that fed directly into escalation of current conflict. An insight analysis of key actors in the conflict including their role and objective are aptly captured. After pointing out what he sees as the limitations and shortcoming of past attempts at resolving conflicts in the north, he offers the suggestions on possible resolutions mechanism with immediate shot term and long term time frame.
