Tuesday, October 23, 2012

For being critical of Meles, couple separated in prison

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO 
When Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died on August 20, he took with him not just a secret about him but about other strongmen-cum-reformist African leaders.
That secret is why they resort to pulling fingernails and become intolerant of dissidence – when they don’t have to and could do much better with a more liberal and democratic approach.
For nearly three weeks before Meles died, the Internet had been abuzz with gleeful claims that he had passed away in a Belgian hospital. And when it was officially announced that he had, there was no shortage of his many enemies celebrating his death. The excitement of it all was shocking.

I met Meles for the first, and last, time in early March of 2006. There had been hotly contested elections in March 2005. The opposition accused Meles and his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition of a massive theft of the vote. There were protests all over the country with the most violent ones being in the capital, Addis Ababa.

Meles cracked down on the protests with a vengeance that shocked his international allies and horrified many Ethiopians. He pulled pages out from the darkest days of Ethiopia’s murderous military junta leader Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Nearly 100 people were killed.
I was part of a delegation picked by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) – together with CPJ Africa Programme Director Julia Crawford, and veteran journalist and CPJ Board member Charlayne Hunter-Gault – to travel to Ethiopia to plead for the many journalists who had been arrested in the crackdown and charged with treason.

We met Serkalem Fassil, then a 26-year-old beautiful Ethiopian woman. She was, officially, publisher of the Asqual, Menelik and Sanetaw titles. She was five months pregnant, and had been in prison since November 2005.

Eskinder Nega, her fiancé, had been in and out of prison seven times in the past few years. He was the real power behind Asqual, Menelik and Senataw but put Serkalem’s name on the titles as publisher because she was less controversial.
Eksinder and Serkalem were both being held at Kaliti Prison on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Kaliti was then a sprawling prison. In the hot season, according to prisoners’ accounts, the cells turned into a sauna. In the cold season they became an ice box.

Until our visit, Eskinder and Serkalem had not been allowed to see each other. That, however, was not their main concern: their biggest fear was whether their child, their first, would be born in prison.

They were among the nearly 27 journalists arrested in a crackdown on the independent media in the wake of the protests.

In addition to the journalists, more than 100 opposition politicians, NGO activists, lawyers and trade union leaders had also been arrested and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the constitutional order and to commit genocide and other serious crimes for which punishment ranges from 15 years in prison to death.

Scary place to be a journalist

Eskinder and Serkalem were likely to spend the rest of their lives behind bars – if they survived the hangman’s noose.
Ethiopia then, as today, was a very scary place to be a journalist. At that point, if you threw in other cases of journalists who had been arrested over cases unrelated to the post-election fallout, Ethiopia had the highest number of scribes in prison in Africa, and the third highest in the world after China and Cuba. Many had fled – and continued to flee – into exile.

It’s a situation that seemed unlikely even in the final days of the campaigns in May 2005. At that time the government gave the opposition unprecedented access to state broadcast media. On weekends they got as many as four hours of airtime.
While up to 2001 the government had been one of the leading jailers of journalists in the world, it improved its record dramatically and opened 2005 with hardly any in prison.


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