Serkalem Fasil, a 2007 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winner, has packed a lot into her 27 years. She grew up an avaricious reader and learned the ropes of reporting in secondary school. She had no role models or mentors, but she was active in an amateur journalists association. There are no journalism schools in Addis Ababa where she grew up, so she took useful courses at the British Council and at university.
She began working for the Amharic weekly, Wenchef, a decade ago, full of optimism about the possibility of a free press in her country. Her optimism didn’t last long. Before she had written many articles, she was summoned to come down to talk to the police because her writing had gotten their attention.
Within a year, she had borrowed money to open her own newspaper. By 2004, she owned and operated three independent weeklies: Menelik, Asqual and Satenaw. Each of the weeklies sold between 15,000 and 80,000 copies, the highest circulation in the country, with sales peaking right before and after the May 2005 presidential elections.
The Ethiopian government owned the printing presses, however, and began delaying and then restricting publication of Fasil’s papers, while at the same time increasing the print run of media companies supportive of the government. In November 2005, as protests about the elections escalated, the government shut down her papers and arrested Fasil, her husband Eskinder Nega and her brother, along with a dozen other editors and reporters and dozens of anti-government activists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, up to 190 people were killed in anti-government protests in 2005; CPJ ranks Ethiopia as the third worst country in the world for treatment of journalists, after China and Cuba.
The Federal High Court acquitted Fasil of treason and other charges in April, after she spent 18 months in prison. Although she and her husband were freed; her brother Dawit Fasil remained in jail. He has since been released.
In July, the government appealed her acquittal to the Supreme Court and brought new charges against her. They were similar to the original ones, but this time she was charged as an editor rather than as a publisher, posing a significant new threat. She briefly went to Kenya, but has since returned to Ethiopia because the Supreme Court isn’t scheduled to hear the case until November. If the Supreme Court agrees with the prosecutor, Fasil will be tried again. The implications of the charges are not yet clear.
Fasil will fight hard to avoid returning to prison, where she experienced horrendous conditions.
“There might have been more rats and mice than people,” she said. Someone even smuggled a cat into deal with the rodents, but the cat escaped rather than confront the critters.
Fasil was two months pregnant when she was arrested and although she was not tortured, conditions were primitive to cruel. For the first two months, she was restricted to three 30-minute bathroom visits within a 24-hour period. When she was moved to a second prison, she was kept in a wire-mesh enclosure with 30 other prisoners, including some who were mentally ill, so they could be scrutinized constantly.
In Fasil’s eighth month of pregnancy, her blood pressure spiked to dangerous levels. She was under observation in the prison hospital when her water broke. After a day and a half of labor, she underwent a caesarian operation. Her son weighed only 2.1 kilograms (about 4.5 pounds) as a newborn, and dropped to 1.6 kg within a week. This is half the average birth weight of 8 pounds. A prison hospital nurse rushed the infant to a general hospital where he could be put in an incubator. “But the hospital required the signature of a parent, either the mom or dad,” Fasil said. Prison officials refused to let either Fasil or her husband sign the papers.
The prison nurse did what she could to simulate an incubator with “heavy lights in a separate room,” said Fasil. Prison officials turned down Fasil’s request “for a small private place to nurse this small, premature baby.” Then they told her the crowded prison hospital posed a risk to the newborn, “an environment where everybody breathes on him.” At that point, Fasil’s mother came for him.
Fasil had her infant with her only 15 days, in the prison hospital where she recuperated from the C-section and got treatment for her still-high blood pressure. Fasil and her husband named the baby Nafkot, which “means ‘longing,’ as in a longing to see them.” Today, he is a year old and weighs 7 kilos, or about 15 pounds. He is getting to know his parents, now that they are free.
After her release, Fasil scrambled to recreate the diaries she had kept in prison which were seized upon her release.
She said she learned a lot from the harrowing experiences. Many prison workers were sympathetic to prisoners “but there is fear. And those who helped with medical assistance always paid a high price,” she said. “The Ethiopian government has spies even in prison. So there is a complete denial of freedom of expression.”
“If you are smart, you also learn – to be patient, to get along with even the crazy people who are there. And since there are many people who have varied experiences, you also learn from others. You get to meet and talk to interesting people,” she said.
Always the reporter, she said her papers never had written about prison conditions. Now she hopes to do that, in the future.
“I have no plans to change my profession. I want to write. We’re waiting for government permission for us to exercise our right,” she said.
She has petitioned to get back the equipment confiscated by the government when they closed her papers. For now, she cannot rehire her 15 employees. “It is impossible to think of working in a newspaper right now. There is a lot of fear,” she said.
Under Ethiopian law, to get a newspaper permit, an owner had to deposit 5,000 birr – about $625 – in a bank. She borrowed the money, got the license, and took the money out of the bank to use for startup operations. But she can’t even think of starting her own printing plant because of the formidable costs.
Fasil mourns the absence today of a free media and a free flow of information to the 70 million rank and file Ethiopians. Unlike in such countries as China, where an authoritarian government tries to curb news it doesn’t like but can’t stop millions of ordinary Chinese from logging onto the Internet, newspapers are still the main source of news in Ethiopia.
Fasil said few Ethiopians even know the existence of the Internet “and the number who have Internet access are very few. The only option for Ethiopia to go forward is to have press freedom and for people to have the freedom to start writing, to start venting and expressing themselves again.”
She says there can’t be democracy “where there is restriction of ideas.”
Fasil demurs when asked if she sees herself as courageous. “I haven’t done anything courageous. I’m still young. I dream a lot. I want to accomplish a lot,” she said.
“I’m not familiar with international journalists,” she said, “but journalists who are on death row anywhere in the world or who lost their life in reporting – or Ethiopians who are on death row: they are my heroes.”
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Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
The Kinijit Washington DC Metropolitan Area chapter issued a statement explaining why it is boycotting the public meeting with Ato Hailu Shawel, which is organized by the Shaleqa-EPRP alliance called the KIC (keysi). Click here to read.
Several independent Ethiopian groups have also come together to organize a protest rally in front of the hotel where the meeting will take place on Sunday. The protest rally’s objectives are:
1) To respectfully express disappointment at what Ato Hailu Shawel is doing — his recent dictatorial actions.
2) To demand that Shaleqa Yoseph Yazew & Co. return the Kinijit funds that they diverted to their personal accounts.
3) To ask Dr Taye Woldesemayat and EPRP to stop trying to divide Kinijit.
The protest rally will start at 1:30 PM in front of the Renaissance Hotel, 999 9th Street, Washington DC.
A high-level delegation of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit) is due to arrive in Atlanta for a six day working visit beginning Friday.
The delegation, including Wzt. Bertukan Mideksa, Dr Hailu Araya, Ato Gizachew Shiferraw, Ato Brook Kebede and Dr Berhanu Nega, is expected at the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport at 3:00 PM EST.
After taking a brief rest, the delegation will meet with American civil rights leaders, including Dr. Joseph Lowery, a renowned civil rights activist, and Mr. Michael O’rally of Amnesty International.
Ethiopia’s ruling Tigrai Liberation Front (TPLF) would like us to believe Eritrea is threatening Ethiopian sovereignty. In truth, the war is a grand strategy to divert attention from human rights abuses and to crush all democratic opposition in Ethiopia. Such as strategy will allow the TPLF to stay in power indefinitely.
The push for war also emanates from Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s desire to destroy Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea and to replace him with a compliant Eritrean government. Under this scenario, Zenawi will emerge as the uncontested strongman and a regional power broker.
An impoverished Ethiopia cannot afford yet another war. If the last war is any indication, 100,000 or more could be killed and hundreds of thousands wounded. In financial terms, the war can easily cost anywhere from 10 to 12 billion birr.
We therefore call on all Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia to speak up against this war before it is too late.
Why Ethiopians should not support Zenawi’s war
It is immoral. Ethiopia still cannot feed itself and every year the government goes begging for international handouts. It is therefore unconscionable for two of the poorest countries in the world to waste their human and financial resources to keep a minority elite in power.
There is no good reason for Ethiopia to invade Eritrea. One could endlessly debate who is worse — Meles Zenawi or Isaias Afewerki. But Zenawi had no qualms about pushing for Eritrea to break away from Ethiopia or sign away Badme after so much bloodshed. But now that his ego is being challenged, he wants to start a war.
Unproven charges. Zenawi claims Eritrea is undermining Ethiopian sovereignty. Once again, these are just allegations. He provides no proof. Unlike previous Ethiopian leaders, Zenawi was quick to strike a deal that made a nation of 70 million people landlocked. Why? It served his purpose of coming to power at the time.
Changing colors. Once in power, Zenawi began to double-cross his Eritrean mentor, Isaias Afewerki. The one-time rebel, Albanian-style Marxist Zenawi has turned into a regional snitch at the service of a big power quick to accuse the hands that fed him. Why? Because he smells a lot of money and the opportunity to stay in power.
Ethiopians need to think this war through
Political opposition. Pro-democracy forces in Ethiopia need to carefully think through issues surrounding this looming war and not fall into Zenawi’s trap of defending the motherland. They have to be clear that this is not Ethiopia’s war, but an optional war waged by a minority regime to confuse the issues and stay in power.
The Ethiopian military. The patriotic armed forces also need to think this war through. Young Ethiopians are being killed in the streets of Mogadishu to server Zenawi’s agenda. The lesson learnt from the 1998-2000 war with Eritrea is that 70,000 Ethiopians were sacrificed and hundreds of thousands wounded for no good reason.
Disfavored ethnic groups such as Oromos and Amharas were callously used for cleaning minefields. We all remember the bodies of young Ethiopian soldiers unceremoniously left on the battlefield to be devoured by vultures. As is customary with the TPLF, the dead and wounded were used and immediately forgotten – never to be mentioned again. Zenawi quickly agreed to hand over Badme – the flashpoint over which the war started.
Financial cost. Ethiopia wasted over 8 billion birr on the last Eritrean war. Imagine if that 8 billion was used to build dams that will irrigate Ethiopian farms. Imagine an Ethiopia that can feed itself, an Ethiopia that is not a beggar nation and a burden to the world.
Unfortunately, the TPLF’s knee jerk reaction to any crisis is to employ propaganda first and then follow that up with brute force. Such has been the pattern for the last sixteen years.
Why does Zenawi want to start a war?
He sold himself to the West as a budding, well-intentioned African democrat. The propaganda has turned out to be a lie. He has proven to be more autocratic than the Burmese junta or Robert Mugabe who is conveniently vilified by the Bush administration.
Zenawi’s democracy has no place for the separation of the judicial and executive branches. The twenty-month trial of pro-democracy opposition forces elevated the meaning of Kangaroo court to new heights.
Zenawi never gained the respect of the Ethiopian people. Whatever credibility he had came from foreigners. Now even foreigners have come to see the true colors of the Prime Minister. The TPLF capo really has no cloth.
It is under these circumstances that Zenawi is choosing to go to war. He is also afraid Eritrea will give sanctuary to opponents running away from persecution by the regime’s secret services.
Zenawi, the Ahmed Challabi of the Horn of Africa, is feeding the United States lies about Eritrea as he did about Somalia prior to the invasion. He wants to entangle the US in his squabbles and to underwrite his adventures. Emperor Yohannes would roll over in his graves if he new an Ethiopian leader had become a puppet mercenary of foreign powers.
Conclusion
Neither Somalis nor Eritreans are the real enemies of the Ethiopian people. The number one enemy is the ruling minority Tigrai Liberation Front. And, as such, all efforts should go to liberating Ethiopia from this secretive and evil force.
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The writer can be reached at [email protected]
National Press Club to Host Media Briefing on Ethiopia and Human Rights with Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ)
Monday, October 22, 2007
10:00-11:00 a.m.
National Press Club (Lisagor Room)
Rep. Christopher Smith, R-NJ
House Foreign Relations Committee will discuss
Ethiopia and Human Rights
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Africa and Global Health Subcommittee, will be speaking about his efforts to advance human rights reform in Ethiopia as well as recent legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives that aims to hold Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government accountable for their abuses and promote change in the country’s human rights practices.
Smith, the author of the “Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights Advancement Act of 2006” (H.R. 5860) which was introduced during the 109th Congress, will discuss that legislation and the efforts that led to House passage of a similar bill earlier this month.
Last year, an Independent Commission of Inquiry established by the Ethiopian Parliament reported that Ethiopian security forces fatally shot, beat or strangled 193 people protesting election fraud in 2005 — a number that far exceeds the Government’s official death toll.
The following is a statement posted by Ato Mesfin Mekonnen (Dr Taye’s agent) on the EEDN email list in response to Ethiopian Review’s expose of the egregious lies he told the Washington Post. Ato Mesfin insists that he and Hailu Shawel were in Congress on Tuesday, Oct. 3, when the U.S. House of Representatives voted on H.R. 2003. On the other hand, Ato Hailu told the Washington Post yesterday that he came to Washington DC on day earlier, Oct. 2, held a meeting with Congressman Smith and returned to Minnesota early Tuesday, Oct. 3 without going to Congress to witness the bill pass.
So who are we to believe here? Hailu Shawel? or Mesfin Mekonnen? As a matter of fact, both of them are lying.
I am going to comment on the article by Elias Kifle of October 5, 2007 published by the Ethiopian Review. There were several errors of fact that were presented as corrections to my previous writings. For example this piece stated that “the Sept. 21 issue of The Hill newspaper falsely reported that Kinijit delegates Gizachew Shiferraw and Brook Kebede do not support H.R. 2003, while Hailu Shawel does.”
Engineer Shawel has repeated over and over in public discourse his enthusiastic support for passage and enactment of H.R. 2003. Please check this out with Congressman Chris Smith’s office for confirmation. So, this first assertion about Engineer Shawel is obviously untrue and the “blatantly false report” is that of the ethiopianforum.com. H.R. 2003 has received bipartisan support from Chairman Donald Payne and all the Democrats and Republicans on the House Subcommittee on Africa and in turn from the Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Congressman Tom Lantos and all the Democrats and Republicans on the full committee.
I cannot speak for the EPRP, as I am not a member of that organization. We should focus our writings and activities on achieving Senate support for H.R. 2003. Then the piece goes on to say, “Yesterday, another false report appeared. This time it was in the Washington Post which reported that Ato Hailu Shawel and Ato Mesfin Mekonnen were at the Congress when the vote H.R. 2003 took place.”
The piece went on to add, “The fact is that Ato Hailu was and still is in Minneapolis getting medical treatment. Ato Mesfin was also not there on Tuesday.”
This statement is absurd on the face of it! Attendance at Congressional sessions are hardly anonymous affairs and the presence of Ato Hailu Shawel and myself was noted by dozens of members, staffers, press, and other interested persons. To state the contrary in light of such obvious proof is to act the buffoon — (for what end? Serving what purpose? to whose benefit?).
So, it continues, “Asked to correct the report, Nora Boustany, the Washington Post correspondent who wrote the report, responded ‘they were both sitting in the gallery and I reached them by cell phone while the session was going on. You can probably find out by contacting the office of Rep. Smith. You can check this out independently.'”
Who asked the distinguished journalist Nora Boustany, the chief Diplomatic writer for the Washington Post to ‘correct’ the report? Her response was quite clear and even directly quoted in the piece in ethiopianreview.com.
This is the verbatim quote from Ms. Boustany as published on that site:
“they were both sitting in the gallery and I reached them by cell phone while the session was going on. You can probably find out by contacting the office of Rep. Smith. You can check this out independently.”
What part of “both sitting in the gallery, reched by cell phone contact(ing) the office of Rep. Smith” is even discussable?
The only correct use of the word “correct” is the usage by Ms. Boustany politely requesting of the Ethiopian Review to correct its false assertion regarding Engineer Shawel’s and my attendance at the Congressional vote!
Not to end there with his double flip backwards – untruths, i.e. stating untruths, repeating the untruths, citing the Post for not having the facts, being corrected by the Post after publication. He dares to persist to demand that the Post correspondent
“correct” her truthful statement to further the goals of Ethiopian Review whatever they are.
He goes on to say, “This is the work of Ato Mesfin Mekonnen, an EPRP operative in Washington DC who is recruited by Taye to join the now defunct KIC (keysi).” Anyone who knows of my involvement over the years in the Ethiopian-American community knows that I am not now or ever have been a member of EPRP. KIC is far from
“defunct”; it is alive and well under the direction of Dr. Taye and placed at the service of Engineer Hailu Shawel.
He ends with a jaw dropping statement that can only be answered with: HUH??? That
“The misinformation can easily be discovered and disproved.”
Of course it can! I just did that!
Then he closes:
“misinform(ing) the American media the way he (Mesfin Mekonen) did acting as a representative of a major Ethiopian opposition party can have a negative impact on the whole Ethiopian community.”
I am almost at a loss for words as to how to describe the outrageous accusation here. It is as if Elias Kifle was really not in support of H.R. 2003, or democracy, human rights, and development in Ethiopia. Perhaps we should learn more about his position and motives. Just whom is he supporting — and — JUST WHO IS SUPPORTING HIM FINANCIALLY!
