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.
