Addis Neger Publishing today announced that its major publication, Addis Neger Newspaper, ceased circulation due to constant harassment and intimidation by the ruling Woyanne junta in Ethiopia. Saturday November 28, 2009 saw the final edition of the paper.
“Addis Neger, one of the few leading independent voices in Ethiopia, became the victim of yet another crackdown on free speech and the freedom of the press in Ethiopia,” said Mesfin Negash, Managing Editor of the Paper. “Our newspaper was one of the country’s best examples of what independent journalists can accomplish in being the platform of public opinion. Unfortunately, the regime had made our task impossible.”
Three of Addis Neger’s editors left the country this week after the paper learned that the regime was preparing criminal charges against its top editors, reporters and owners based on the new anti-terror law and the criminal code. The decision of the publishing company to close down the newspaper was made to protect its owners and journalists from this onslaught by the regime government.
“This is the culmination of months of persecution and harassment” by the regime in Ethiopia, said Abiye Teklemariam, the paper’s Executive Editor. “The preparation to use the new anti-terror law against our journalists and editors was just throwing the last wood in the chimney.”
Addis Neger was established in September 2007. Its twin editorial plans had been “the Idea of Public Reason” and “Integrity and Independence.” In the last two years, these pillars served as the backbones of the paper’s interaction with the public, helping it to register phenomenal growth in its circulation, influence and investment.
Addis Neger also introduced a new model of media ownership. Founded by six former journalists who were victims of the media crackdown following post election crisis in 2005, it was expanding its ownership base to other journalistic members of the paper. It was hoped that the model would bring sustainability to the press as an institution.
Addis Neger Publishing Company promised to be back to the media scene in the future. According to Mesfin Negash, the company would venture into a new multimedia format whenever is possible. “We hope that things will change and we will be back to our country. But our immediate plan is to ensure the physical security of our staff members. Let’s keep the spirit of freedom alive.”
A mind-boggling usurpation of moral authority at the highest global level is set to unfold at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins in Copenhagen next Monday.
Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and one of the world’s worst dictators, is preparing to use that global platform to scold other nations for their irresponsible energy policies – and to demand hundreds of billions of dollars for African nations to compensate for global warming damage done to the continent.
The hypocrisy of Meles playing a role in Copenhagen – indeed a leadership role where he could potentially block a global agreement – is outrageous.
As Africa’s top negotiator in Copenhagen, Meles in recent weeks has already begun posturing as the moral environmental voice of Africa by criticizing industrialized countries for their “lack of seriousness” on global climate policy, and by threatening to lead a walk-out of the 52 African countries at the conference (out of 190 total participating nations) if their demands for compensation aren’t met.
Gulag Prisons
This theft-in-plain-sight of a critical global role is being carried out by a man who runs his own country by a “divide and conquer” strategy – hardly the best model for global collaborative decision-making.
Why would Denmark even allow this man to step foot in their country?
Directly to the point of the hypocrisy of Meles’ role as Africa’s chief climate change negotiator, Ethiopia is now facing one of the worst famines in its history as a consequence of his own environmentally disastrous laws and policies.
These include property laws that prevent farmers from owning their own land; that forbid foreign research and aid groups from entering the country; and a governing system that prevents any orderly agriculture and environmentalism, because Meles stays in power by keeping his country mired in a permanent state of war.
Ethnic Cleansing
By now the evidence for Mele’s crimes is far too extensive, public, and exhaustively well-documented to summarize in detail here.
The picture collectively painted is a tyrant who stays in power through total control of the political, economic, legal, media and military systems.
Here in Minnesota, where thousands of Ethiopians refugees have fled Meles’ brutality, tales of personal witness to all of these crimes, and many more, abound.
Minnesota, and other centers of the global Ethiopia diaspora, are often the best sources of close-to-firsthand information about Meles’ savage rule, because refugees stay in constant contact with friends and family at home while foreign journalists, aid workers and human rights workers are banned from the country.
Unstoppable Hatred
By no means least in the way of evidence against Meles is the Ethiopian blogosphere which is a bitter veil of tears, a deeply wounded cry of the heart.
In this global forum thousands of Ethiopians every day figuratively rend their garments, cry out to God, offer first-person testimonials of beatings and torture, and maintain online records of Meles’ crimes against humanity. Sometimes, overflowing with unstoppable hatred, they violently attack each other with words.
The only mystery that remains is why the world appears simply not to notice, to respond, or even to care in the least about the Ethiopia’s abysmal suffering.
It’s Rwanda and Darfur all over again. And it has been that way, although getting progressively worse, since 1991, the year that Meles took power in a coup and immediately began ethnic cleansing as a central tactic of his governing style.
And now the world’s leaders at Copenhagen have embraced this man into their highest deliberative council, and given him voice. What are they thinking?
Absolute Power
Meles’ 18-year rule of terror in Ethiopia has easily earned him a place alongside dictators such as Kim Jong-Il, Slobodan Milosevich, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, Than Swhe, and Ali Khamenei.
Would any of these despots be welcomed in Copenhagen?
Would any be given the chance to potentially veto a global climate accord?
Of course, Meles won’t do that. What he will do, though, is maximize his leverage through every means possible to further secure what for 18 years he has ruthlessly sought and won in Ethiopia, which is absolute power.
He’d let the world burn to a crisp before he relinquished that.
COLORADO — In the developing world, a person born with cleft palate, cleft lip or other facial deformities will suffer not only from medical issues but also from social censure. That’s why organizations like Operation Smile exist — to bring a smile and to give life to people who otherwise would not be able to have one.
“The problem is no worse in developing countries than in developed countries, said Carol Lockhart, a teacher at Swink High School in Swink, Colo. “In a developed country the problem is taken care of soon after birth. A developed country can give the needed surgery because of the strength of its finances.”
Lockhart and Swink junior Jolysa Gallegos recently traveled to Jimma, Ethiopia, on a 14-day medical mission with Operation Smile to help entertain children and adults who were awaiting the longed-for surgery. Children and adults who are eligible for the free surgery must sit for hours in hospital waiting rooms, so volunteers play games with them and draw pictures. They even share personal pictures and a little about their lives.
“Many of the people they helped are poor and can’t go home so they hang around the hospital waiting,” Lockhart said.
“Some traveled 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) to get there and that was a big shock,” Gallegos said. “Some came from Somalia. One little girl had an abscess on her cheek and had to be given antibiotics so that it would go down before she had the surgery. We were just cheering for her because she had come so far.”
Cleft palate and cleft lip cause problems with breathing, talking and eating. Also, because the deformities are so prominent, they have a “huge psychological effect.”
“One little boy wouldn’t let me take a picture of him until he was in pre-op,” Gallegos said. Another 15-year-old boy was eager to receive an education after his surgery. He had never been denied education, Lockhart said, but he had been made to feel “uncomfortable and remorseful about his appearance.”
In Ethiopia, education is free to the public.
“The people are obsessed with education,” Lockhart said. “They want to be engineers, architects and doctors to make their country better.”
The cause of cleft palate and cleft lip is unknown. Some believe that the deformity may be caused by a lack of folic acid during pregnancy or because the mother smoked during pregnancy. Mothers of children receiving surgery are asked about their pregnancies. They are also asked why they believe their children were born with the deformity.
“The vast majority of people responded that it was the will of the true God or they believed that when the mother was pregnant, she saw someone with a cleft lip or palate,” Lockhart said.
During their mission, Gallegos said that she played a lot of volleyball with the kids, using beach balls that they had brought.
“The Ethiopian children are natural volleyball players,” Lockhart said. “They also play soccer, so they never catch the ball.”
Funds to purchase toys, including bubbles, funny sunglasss and beach balls, were donated by local chapters of Operation Smile’s Student Youth Programs. Both Swink School and Otero Junior College in La Junta, Colo. have chapters.
Gallegos and her partner Nicky from Colorado Springs had fun painting finger nails, an activity that the women from Somalia especially enjoyed. The people also enjoyed wearing paper crowns from Burger King.
“Nicky asked Burger King for donations and they gave her 80 crowns,” Gallegos said. “Both parents and kids wanted the crowns.”
“I also learned that the teddy bear is not a universal thing,” Gallegos said. “We had brought stuffed animals and we wanted to give one to a little girl. When I gave it to the father he and the other men in the room started laughing at me. They didn’t know what it was.”
Gallegos got to watch a surgery. She and her partner also made presentations at local schools about hygiene and dental care. The children, Gallegos said, were very excited to receive toothbrushes and kept getting back in line to get more. The small group also toured a Missionaries of Charity Home for the Sick and Dying Destitutes, an organization founded by Mother Theresa.
“They said no pictures,” Gallegos said. “The sicknesses were so bad. It was a very tough situation and hard to accept the fact that the people were there because they were dying and they didn’t have money.”
Although there was not much chance for tourism, Lockhart and Gallegos learned much about the people and their surroundings. They found that wherever they went, the people “swarmed” them, some just wanting to touch them. One little boy, a street child in the marketplace, wouldn’t let go of Gallegos’ hand.
“It’s hard to walk away from that,” she said.
“The people are very proud of their country,” Lockhart said. “Normal, everyday people are printed on their money because they believe that the future of the country lies in its people. They were very interested in us because we are blessed beyond measure. We didn’t see any obvious discrimination. The parents loved their children and there was lots of love and acceptance in the hospital.”
“They are a quiet and beautiful people,” Gallegos said.
I last saw Aregawi Berhe in the summer of 1976. The big news gripping Britain was the heatwave — back then, the hottest since records began — and the dramatic Israeli commando raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda to rescue 100 hostages held by pro-Palestinian hijackers.
My mind was focused on neither. Aregawi Berhe had kidnapped me, and I was concentrating on survival.
At the time, Aregawi was a fierce young guerrilla leader in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province. I was a young reporter on assignment for The Sunday Times, covering Ethiopia’s separatist wars.
On June 1, 1976, I was on a local bus on a winding mountain road between the towns of Axum and Mkele when Aregawi’s men ambushed it. Finding me on board, they seized me on suspicion of being an “imperialist spy”. My protestations that I was a journalist came to nothing.
For three seemingly interminable months, from June to September, they held my life in their hands as they marched me under guard through the rugged hills and barren deserts of Tigray and through the breakaway province of Eritrea.
We trudged at night under the stars to escape the unforgiving sun and to avoid being spotted and fired on by patrols of the Ethiopian army. In moonlight, we panted up steep, bare, eroded hills, scrabbled over rocks, pushed our way through thorn bushes.
On one occasion, worn out and parched in an area of desert, I had to suck water from cactuses to keep going. My 500-mile forced march under armed guard was the toughest thing I had ever done.
I was not alone. They had also kidnapped an entire British family, the Tylers. Lindsey Tyler was a veterinary surgeon working in Ethiopia on an aid project, vaccinating cattle against rinderpest. He was on a trip with his wife, Stephanie, and children, Robert, 8, and Sally, 5, when the guerrillas fired on their Land Rover. “We have children, for God’s sake … we have little children,” Stephanie shouted as bullets ricocheted off the stones.
Ultimately, we were freed unharmed. But being kidnapped was a jarring experience — physically exhausting, mentally dispiriting and, above all, lonely.
After my release, I buried Aregawi in my memory. I wanted to forget the whole sorry experience. My life was the future, not the past. But some things one does not ever quite forget. Being kidnapped is one of them.
The tangled memories have come and gone over the years, sometimes so vivid that they hurt. Those three months as a prisoner in Ethiopia taunted and haunted me — until last week, when I met Aregawi again for the first time in more than three decades.
I had considered sometimes going back to Ethiopia to find and confront my captors; but in that vast land, I thought, I would never find them. In any case, I suspected most of them had been killed in their long struggle against the Derg, the Soviet-armed military committee that ruled Ethiopia after it overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.
One of Africa’s worst military dictatorships, the Derg held onto power until it was itself toppled in 1991 by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the guerrilla organisation that had kidnapped me.
Back in 1976 the TPLF was still a ragtag group of about 130 fighters whose goal was autonomy for Tigray province. Over the years it grew in strength, numbers and ambition, until it became the backbone of a revolutionary movement that took over the country with between 60,000 and 70,000 fighters. Aregawi, a founder member who rose to army commander, played no small part in its success. Then he vanished.
In 2004 the Ethiopian driver of a taxi I hailed in Washington DC revealed that not only was Aregawi alive; he was living in exile somewhere in Europe, after losing out in an internal TPLF power struggle. Perhaps I could find him after all.
A few weeks ago a chance discussion with Martin Plaut, the BBC’s Africa editor, put me onto my quarry. Plaut had met Aregawi recently in Holland and said that he wanted to meet me to say sorry.
I did not hesitate. After all these years I wanted to meet Aregawi again and discover what made him tick. I wanted to believe that, somewhere, there was an honourable man. I think it is a basic instinct that one does not want one’s suffering to be in vain. I wanted there to be some purpose to the hardships he had put me through.
When I telephoned Aregawi, I recognised his voice immediately. But I was surprised by his next words: “Come and stay.”
We laughed at the absurdity of it. While I bore him no grudge now, I would have liked to choose whether to be his guest or not 33 years ago.
Last week I drove in a taxi through the tranquil streets of the Hague to confront him. I never dreamt I would find my old kidnapper in this lawabiding city where the international criminal courts are trying Radovan Karadzic and Charles Taylor, the former leader of Liberia, for crimes against humanity.
I felt a twinge of apprehension as the taxi approached Aregawi’s flat in a working-class district. I need not have worried. In 1976 Aregawi was a strange, taciturn man. A political science graduate at Addis Ababa University, he had become a fanatical Marxist. Tall and thin with a wispy beard, he spouted wooden communist jargon and fiercely defended kidnapping as a legitimate political weapon. He gave me the impression that the sacrifice of an innocent life was less important than his own political ideals. His opinion of Britain seemed to have been fashioned by the day he stood in a line of Boy Scouts and welcomed the Queen, opening Axum cathedral during her royal visit to Ethiopia.
Now, instead of the rabid revolutionary I remembered, an avuncular figure stood before me, his hand held out in friendship. He said he was genuinely sorry for the hardship and trouble he had put me through.
We talked in his flat. On the wall was a small reproduction of that famous portrait of Che Guevara in his beret. It was clear Aregawi could not quite bring himself to turn his back on the revolutionary hero of his youth, even if he had ditched communism and no longer believed in armed struggle as the way to change Ethiopia.
“If I calculate the cost benefit, I would say gradual change would have been better than revolutionary change when I look back,” he said. “Revolutionary change was meant to transform society quickly, abruptly. But we were naive. You cannot switch on change like electricity; it has its own dynamics. We were not mature enough to see these things.”
Later, as we walked on a windy Dutch beach — I used to dream wistfully of the sea while I was being held in the hot Ethiopian desert — I asked Aregawi to give me his side of the kidnapping story. He was anxious not to be put in the same league as the vicious kidnappers who behead their hostages today. These vile killings horrified him.
“These days kidnapping has been given a religious dimension. There is no reasoning at all,” he said. “Today’s kidnappers are broken, blinded by hatred, not even merciful for their own life. You cannot compare their kidnappings with ours, which were for publicity, for a bit of money.”
Aregawi was adamant that he wished no harm to me or the Tylers. Of course I did not see it like that at the time. I was concentrating on surviving from one day to the next, on building the sort of relationship with my captors that would make it harder for them to kill me if I outlived my purpose.
As we talked, he seemed mildly hurt at having read in a book I wrote after my release that being his prisoner had been a low point in my life. “Nothing bad happened except taking you against your will,” he said, with a plea in his voice. “I had rough words for you. We had a cause. We had certain objectives. But I felt we were handling you as best we could.”
He still did not see that there were moments when, as a prisoner, I had feared circumstances might arise, as the unexpected tends to do in guerrilla struggles, that meant I might not survive. I don’t think Aregawi realised how difficult it sometimes was to feel I could be struck from the book of life and nobody would ever know what had happened to me.
After that interminable march through the mountains, I ended up in a guerrilla encampment in the northern desert of Eritrea, living under a bush, still under guard, while Aregawi decided what to do with me.
There followed more weeks of despair, during which I exchanged hardly more than three sentences a day with my captors. But on that long march I had begun to appreciate the misery and injustices that had driven Aregawi to rise up in armed rebellion at great personal cost to himself.
One in three children born in the villages we passed through died in infancy from disease or malnutrition. The nearest health and educational services were at least two days’ walk away, the nearest well three miles.
As the son of a district judge, Aregawi had been brought up with a sense of right and wrong. His social conscience made him aware of these glaring inequalities, and he wanted to change them. The pity of it, as he now recognises himself, was that he chose to do it by armed struggle. Despite thousands of deaths and regime change, that part of Ethiopia is about as backward and impoverished now as it was then.
My captivity went on and on until one day, after a long camel ride through a sandstorm, I was finally freed into Sudan. Soon the Tylers were released too, after being held even longer than I was. The guerrillas did not collect the $1m ransom they had demanded from the British government.
So, after all these years, what is Aregawi’s story? In exile, unable to go back to Ethiopia for fear of losing his life at the hands of his former comrades, he wonders whether the huge sacrifices he and other young idealists made were worthwhile.
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country, is still confronted by extreme poverty and massive rural starvation. Its leader is one of Aregawi’s old revolutionary comrades, Meles Zenawi. This former medical student has turned into a virtual dictator — little better, said Aregawi, than those he replaced.
The need to strive for a brighter future for his people still dominates Aregawi’s life, although the reasons “are not the same”. He is driven by the memory of those countrymen whom he brought into the struggle and who “paid with their lives” for something good to come. “I must not betray these people,” he said.
He and his comrades shared a fine, idealistic vision, but, he admitted, none had a clue how to implement it. For a while their politics was inspired by Enver Hoxha and his mad Albanian “road to socialism”. Soon there came years of infighting within the TPLF, and disillusionment set in.
In the mid-1980s, during one of those terrible famines that have gripped Ethiopia in the past 30 years, millions of dollars flowed from western donors into Rest, the so-called Relief Society of Tigray, which was purportedly the humanitarian wing of the TPLF.
Aregawi told me that, instead of using the money to save lives, Rest gave it to the TPLF. He remembers sitting with central committee members preparing a budget; they agreed that 95% of the Rest money should be used for the cause.
“It bought weapons, ammunition and clothes for the fighters and paid for TPLF propaganda work,” he said. “It was very depressing. It made me very angry. The leadership literally had no sympathy for the people.”
Aregawi noted that western aid organisations had allowed their money to be misappropriated and that massive armaments flowing into Ethiopia from outside made the conflict more deadly. No power had offered the help that, in Aregawi’s view, they really needed to “give them the correct orientation to help themselves to establish a stable government”.
When, after building up a secret power base of loyalists within the TPLF, Meles Zenawi seized control of it in an internal coup, Aregawi finally split from the movement he had helped to build. He had enough friends to be able to escape with his life, first to Sudan and then to Holland.
Others were not so fortunate. Shawit, the handsome young fighter who in 1976 had led the attack on my bus and made me a prisoner, was imprisoned and killed by Zenawi for opposing his control, Aregawi said.
The TPLF developed into the mighty military machine that took over Ethiopia, and now “again we are in a situation where another dictator is in power. Getting rid of one dictator does not mean bringing justice, fairness and democracy. In fact we ended up changing the face of the dictator only. That is a tragedy”.
By kidnapping me, Aregawi caught me up for a very short time in his struggle for Ethiopia. If I feel personally disappointed that the struggle has not led to something better, how much stronger must the feelings be of a man who has devoted his life to this cause?
He confessed he had no real family life as such. He had had a fiancée when he was fighting in the bush, “but we couldn’t agree on many things so we separated”. He married much later in life, but the woman he calls the “mother of my kids” lives separately in Geneva with his two children. He visits regularly, but it is clear that family takes second place to Ethiopia.
He still harbours a strong vision for his country and a driving sense of duty to see this vision through.
The last time Aregawi and I parted — in 1976 — neither of us knew what the future held, but both of us had hope. Mine was immediate and selfish: I wanted to be free to get back to my own life. His was generous: he wanted democracy for his people and was prepared to make tremendous personal sacrifices for them.
Our parting this time was different. I am glad to have met him again. Hearing his side of the story helped to lay my old ghosts to rest. At the same time there was something sad about this goodbye.
He hopes his dream of a better future for the Ethiopian people can still be realized, and as I walked away I hoped so too. But the world, I felt, had let him down. It has, over the years, backed wrong-minded rulers in Ethiopia, set on repression and dictatorship, instead of supporting those who reject violence.
It is my strong wish that this aging revolutionary, who once held my life in his hands, should be able eventually to go back to Ethiopia in peace. That would be a clear sign that one of Africa’s many shameful scars had begun to heal.
Eleven new immigrants from Ethiopia have yet to be placed in Petah Tikva schools, and some have been waiting as long as three weeks for an assignment.
Municipal officials claim that the city’s private religious schools – which sparked a nationwide outcry when they refused to accept Ethiopian students at the start of the school year – are also refusing to accept these new students. However, the schools rejected this charge.
A few hours after Haaretz submitted inquiries to the relevant agencies, the municipality announced that all the children would be sent to a school today, and “we hope they’ll be admitted.”
However, the problem is unlikely to go away: Later this year the city is expected to get another group of 15 to 30 school-age immigrants from Ethiopia, and it is not clear where they will study.
“We get up in the morning, drink tea and watch television. There’s nothing else to do,” said Temasgen Mola, 12, who came to Petah Tikva with his parents and older brother two weeks ago from the Mevasseret Zion absorption center. On Wednesday, like many of the other immigrants, he was once again sitting in the municipality’s offices, hoping for a school placement.
Arega Gaton was also there, hoping to receive a placement for his 7-year-old daughter. “They keep telling us there’s no school for the girl,” he said. “We thought everything would be good here – that there would be a school and work. But she sits at home, and I can’t go to work because I need to take care of her.”
Under an Education Ministry decision that stemmed from an agreement reached before the start of the school year, most of the new immigrants were supposed to be absorbed by the town’s three private religious schools. But according to the municipality, all three have evaded this commitment using various pretexts.
“One principal said the last open slot in the class had just been filled, and afterward it turned out that this was inaccurate,” a municipal official said. “Another agreed to accept only 4th-grade boys, but there aren’t any in this group. The third simply refused to return phone calls.”
Only the mayor has the legal power to order the private schools to accept students. But Petah Tikva educators said that Mayor Yitzhak Ohayon has political obligations to certain National Religious Party activists who are also involved in the three schools, and has therefore refused to exercise this power.
The schools, however, deny that they are to blame.
“We’ve been absorbing [Ethiopian immigrants] for three years now, and will continue to do so,” said Hagai Unger, principal of the Darchei No’am school. “We will gladly accept anyone the city sends us.”
Another school, Merhav, said it had been asked to accept only one student, and did so.
An official at Da’at Mevinim, the third school, said it has already accepted 20 Ethiopian immigrants this year and will continue to comply with any “reasonable” request. “But so far, we haven’t received the financial support the Education Ministry promised us,” he charged.
Would a Jewish, Russian, or Polish journalist ask Hitler such a question? Unthinkable.
It is what EthiopiaFirst.com editor recently asked Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Hitler, who is currently carrying out a campaign of genocide against our people in the Ogaden region, not to mention the countless crimes he has perpetrated against all Ethiopians. A more apt question would be, “How many babies did you kill today?”
Ethiopia is being ruled by thugs and murderers because our so-called elite, those who are educated and fare better in life, have a conscience comparable to that of a pig — i.e., purely selfish, no sense of justice, no moral compass.
Meles, arrogant as ever, did not want to answer the idiotic question, but when Ben pressed him if he likes Tilahun, he said “yes, and foreign songs, too.”
The hate Meles has for any thing Ethiopian would not allow him to call out Ethiopian singers.
But what is new? We all know that Meles is thoroughly anti-Ethiopia. What irks many Ethiopians is the blase attitude of individuals like Ben — those who claim to care about their country — toward an individual who is systematically destroying Ethiopia and commits gruesome crimes against Ethiopians (watch these photos).
The interview serves only to expose Meles Zenawi’s contempt for Ethiopia. But it is also an indictment against the likes of Ben who are trying to humanize a monster and give legitimacy to his murderous regime.
Angry readers asked me to remove the interview from the comment section some one posted yesterday (click here to see). I feel differently. Let every one watch the monster and get angry enough to take action — such as starting to support those resistance groups that are fighting to overthrow him. – Elias Kifle
Ethiopia is being ruled by thugs and murderers because our so-called elite, those who are educated and fare better in life, have a conscience comparable to that of a pig — i.e., purely selfish, no sense of justice, no moral compass.