ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — It’s been exactly a month now since at least 41 people, including an 80-year-old father of an opposition leader, have been arrested, suspected, allegedly of a coup attempt against the Meles regime.
Within days of their arrest the coup attempt was turned into assassination attempts instead. According to the minister of information Bereket Simon, Ethiopia’s political system is such that it is now immune to coup d’etats.
Since their arrest the suspects never saw their families. But what is now unraveling is that amongst the initial people arrested featured the wife and 2 year old daughter of one the defendants. They were in the central prison for two weeks.
Then the wife of a colonel wanted by the government is also in prison, unable to see her relatives.
Then we found out that people have been arrested from Bahir Dar, Lalibella and Harar, and that most of those arrested are the main bread winners in their families, leaving their loved ones behind without any income.
We saw today the police making every effort for the public not to see who’s coming out of the car at the court, and preventing the defendants to wave at their loved ones. Everyone was shocked by their behavior.
We were told that even before the hearing today, the police knew they were given two more weeks to gather evidence.
Apparently, the police said it was the end of their investigation. If so, why are they given another 2-week to gather evidence?
The blatant abuse of power by the authorities today proved that the whole story is a smoke screen and seems to develop as days go by, like a bad movie script.
All the families have been denied their constitutional right to visit their relatives. No one is willing to grant them, and the government pretends it doesn’t know? Even during the CUD trial this didn’t happen.
As for the shortage of electrical power, it looks more and more as if we are on the verge of a total blackout: all major factories are temporarily disconnected from the electric network, and we’re left in the dark, literally.
(Report by Ethiopian Review associate in Addis Ababa)
Gen. Asaminew Tsige is one of the 41 suspects who are in jail without charge in Ethiopia
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Reuters) – A group accused of plotting to overthrow the Ethiopian regime were remanded in custody on Monday again after spending more than one month in prison without any charges or visitation rights, relatives said.
Ethiopian Woyanne regime security forces are holding 41 former and current army personnel from a “terror network” the government says was formed by Berhanu Nega, an opposition leader now teaching economics at a university in the United States.
“They will be held for another two weeks,” a relative who did not want to be named told Reuters outside the court in Addis Ababa. “They were not even charged today.”
The 41 are accused of planning to assassinate senior government figures and blow up public utilities to provoke street protests and overthrow the government.
“The investigation was now complete,” one lawyer said.
Security forces killed about 200 protesters after parliamentary elections in 2005 when the opposition disputed the victory of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government.
More than 100 relatives and supporters were gathered outside the courtroom. Ethiopian authorities have named only two of the prisoners despite calls from international rights groups that they name and charge all 41 detainees.
Neither family members nor lawyers have been able to visit the accused in prison, relatives said.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — Ethiopedia.com, an online encyclopedia of Ethiopia, is pleased to announce that world renowned Ethiopian scholar Prof. Ephraim Isaac has joined its team as an editorial adviser.
Ephraim Isaac is a founder and the first professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University when the Department was created in 1969. He is author of numerous scholarly works about the Late Second Temple period and Classical Yemenite Jewish and Ethiopic religious literature. He is currently Director of the Institute of Semitic Studies, Princeton, NJ, Chair of the Board of the Horn of Africa Peace & Development Committee, and President of the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America. He has taught at Princeton University, Hebrew University, University of Pennsylvania, Bard College, and other institutions of higher learning. He has received many honors including the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding’s 2002 Peacemaker in Action Award, honorary degrees from John J. College of CUNY, Addis Ababa University of Ethiopia, NEH Fellowship, among others. He knows seventeen languages, and lectures widely on the subject of “Religion & Warfare”, “Religion and Hate”, etc. and sits on Boards of some twenty-five international religious, educational, and cultural organizations.
Ethiopedia, which is based in Addis Ababa, strives to make knowledge about Ethiopia easily and freely accessible to any one in the world.
Ethiopedia is a collaborative project involving several volunteers from various field.
David Dadge, Director of the Vienna-based International Press Institute, the oldest press freedom organization in the world, recently wrote a compelling commentary in The Guardian which should be of special interest to all Ethiopian human rights advocates.[1] He suggested that the current dictatorship in Ethiopia operates in an entrenched culture of impunity (not to be confused with the equally gripping culture of corruption that afflicts it) in which gross human rights abuses are committed routinely without legal accountability of the abusers and active complicity of officials. He argued that this culture could be brought to an end or significantly curtailed by donor countries and international lending institutions.
Dadge offered a partial list of the crimes committed by the current dictatorship with impunity:
… An authoritarian government rules Ethiopia with virtual impunity. Prime minister Meles Zenawi, in power for 18 years, has crushed the opposition. His ruling party dominates public institutions. Worse still, in a vast and predominantly rural country, the prime minister’s underlings control broadcasting and maintain a choke-hold on other media… Four years ago this month, Zenawi’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Party (EPRDF) suffered its worst loss at the polls since the former guerrilla overthrew a ruthless, Soviet-backed regime in 1991. Rather than accept its losses, the EPRDF-run government responded with a brutal crackdown, claiming outright victory and accusing the opposition of trying to stage an insurrection. Security forces attacked peaceful protesters, jailed opposition leaders, sent thousands of their supporters to gruesome detention camps and accused independent journalists of treason – a crime punishable by death.
The Legacy of Impunity
Ethiopia’s modern history has been disfigured by unfathomable acts of official cruelty and inhumanity. Few have ever been held to account for criminal acts of depravity that can be soberly described as monstrous. The enduring legacy of impunity is too painful to remember: There was the criminal and extreme indifference of the imperial regime to the hundreds of thousands of famine victims in the early 1970s. The fire stoked by that famine consumed the monarchy, and from its ashes rose a military dictatorship of unimaginable savagery. Mengistu and his henchmen orchestrated official “terror” campaigns which resulted in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens. Justice has yet to catch up with those criminals. Today there is a diabolically cruel and wicked criminal enterprise masquerading as a government that has continued the sadistic and barbarous legacy of impunity. The current dictators in Ethiopia operate on the belief that they can commit any crime whatsoever without fear of punishment, legal accountability, or retribution. This culture of impunity must end!
Practicing the Culture of Impunity
Over the past decade, there has been massive documentation of human rights violations in Ethiopia. Yet there has not been a single independently verified prosecution of human rights violations under the current dictatorship. No regime official or member of its security or military force has ever been prosecuted for crimes against humanity. There have been no prosecutions even when there is clear proof of gross human rights violations in the possession of the regime. Just last year, Col. Michael Dewars, the internationally renowned riot control expert, hired by the dictatorship to make recommendations on riot control improvements stated in his report that the Director General of the Ethiopian Federal Police told him, “As a direct result of the 2005 riots, he [had] sacked 237 policemen.”[2] This evidence directly contradicts previous statements by the dictatorship denying specific knowledge of any criminal conduct by the riot policemen who fired into crowds of innocent protesters indiscriminately. It also shows the entrenched and hardcore nature of the culture of impunity in the dictatorship: Even suspects who are “directly” implicated in the massacres of nearly 200 protesters and maiming of nearly 800 others four years ago have yet to be brought to justice. On December 13, 2003, more than 400 Anuaks were massacred by uniformed soldiers of the dictatorship, and tens of thousands were forced to flee to the Sudan. Though there are multitudes of eyewitnesses to the massacres, not one of the implicated “soldiers” has been prosecuted.
Even when U.N. Undersecretary General John Holmes in 2007 visited the Ogaden region and later recommended to the leader of the current dictatorship that large numbers of civilians had been killed by regime troops, their homes burned and deprived of adequate food or medicines, the official response was, “There have probably been cases of [human] rights violations by government troops [but] the violations were not widespread or systematic.” No one was ever identified, investigated, arrested or prosecuted for these “human rights violations”. Indiscriminate shelling of civilians in Somalia by the regime’s troops have resulted in mind boggling civilian casualties and displacement of over 1.5 million people from their homes. No one has been charged with war crimes. There are also thousands of cases in which official criminal acts have been perpetrated against individuals in violation of the dictatorship’s own constitution and criminal laws as documented fully in the annual reports of the various international human rights organizations. No prosecutions in such cases have taken place. To add insult to injury, the dictatorship recently drafted a so-called antiterrorism law which aims to provide full “legal” armor to its decadent culture of impunity. (Legal history buffs will no doubt be amused by the curious similarity of the text, tenor and spirit of the dictatorship’s “anti-terrorism law” with the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree, which accelerated the entrenchment of the Nazis by giving them a legal cudgel to hammer down their opposition on mere suspicion of “terrorism”.)
Ending the Culture of Impunity
Dadge argues convincingly that donor countries and multilateral lending institutions providing “development” funds have significant leverage against the dictatorship in Ethiopia, and could help bring accountability for human rights violations and closure to the culture of impunity:
The European Union and the United States will pump about $2.5bn into Ethiopia this year, a sum that does not even begin to include the cost of medicines, famine relief and countless other services provided by non-profit groups… There are ways to pressure Zenawi: Donors should deny Ethiopian ministers a seat at diplomatic tables… The Development Assistance Group, created by the EU and other principal donors to co-ordinate aid projects in Ethiopia [should] ensure that international resources do not support policies that are anathema to human rights values…. The EU should aggressively enforce the Cotonou Agreement, which requires Ethiopia and other nations that receive European assistance to respect ‘human rights, democratic principles, and the rule of law’. The EU and the US should wield more of their clout at the World Bank and other international organisations to link development grants to progress on press freedom and human rights.
Implicit in Dadge’s argument are three vital propositions: 1) The indulgence and benign indifference of the EU, the U.S. and international lending organizations are partly responsible for emboldening the dictatorship to continue to practice its culture of impunity. 2) These same donors and lenders hold the key to ending that culture of impunity by making all non-humanitarian aid to the dictatorship contingent on improvements in human rights. 3) The dictatorship will continue to conjure up the specter of terrorism, regional instability and internal chaos to cling to power and perpetuate reflexive support from the donors and lenders.
We have witnessed the Bush administration turning a blind eye to massive human rights violations in Ethiopia so long as the dictatorship was willing to undertake a proxy war in Somalia. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown chose to be romanced by smooth talk of democracy and intellectual pretensions; they too turned a blind eye. Brown insulted the intelligence of all Africans when he invited the current dictator in Ethiopia, universally condemned for his dismal human rights record, to represent Africa at the G-20 meeting. But that has been the history of duplicity of the Bush-Brown-Gordon axis. The EU must also be outed for its hypocrisy. Not long ago, it rewarded the dictators in Ethiopia with a gift of €250 million shortly after they clamped down on NGOs and civic society institutions. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund suspended some aid in feigned outrage against the dictatorship following the 2005 elections, but later opened up the floodgates of loans to sustain it. None of the donors and lenders did much to stop the killings, mass arrests, imprisonments and persecution of innocent Ethiopians. It is self-evident that for more than a decade, there has been a tragic failure of donor and lender policy in not supporting good governance in Ethiopia based on the principle of the rule of law. Donors have sought to evade the truth about the dictatorship by justifying its egregious human rights abuses as manifestations of benign ignorance, inexperience, incompetence or lack of technical understanding of modern governance. Donors and lenders must be made to support democracy and the rule of law in Ethiopia!
From a Culture of Impunity to a Culture of the Rule of Law
Dadge is telling us that the culture of impunity practiced by the dictatorship could be changed by transforming international donor and lender policies. The first step in bringing about this change is to get donors and lenders to take moral responsibility for their complicity in the dictatorship’s human rights abuses. We must do everything possible to get them to publicly condemn the regime’s repression and atrocities. Second, we must demonstrate to them with empirical evidence that the aid and development loans they provide to the regime are pivotal in sustaining the system of repression and human rights abuses. We must make convincing moral, political and legal arguments that show the rule of law and growth of democratic institutions in Ethiopia will serve their practical and long term interests better than the expediency of supporting a regime that can sustain itself only through violence and brutality. In short, we must use all of our resources to force Western donor countries and multilateral lending institutions to publicly chose between democracy and the rule of law in Ethiopia on the one hand, and dictatorship and human rights abuses on the other. That should be the cornerstone of our global advocacy strategy!
We challenge Ethiopians exiled in Europe to do their part and follow up with Dadge’s suggested courses of action. They have a powerful legal tool to make their case before the European Union. They must insist that the EU live up to its legal obligations under the 2000 Cotonou Partnership Agreement, and deny aid and loans to governments that do not “respect human rights, uphold democratic principles based on the rule of law and maintain transparency and accountability in governance.”
We are not unmindful of the tired, worn out and silly sovereignty arguments (“no donor or lender can tell us to improve human rights”) of the dictatorship. There is one simple truth the dictators need to understand clearly: Beggars can not dictate terms to their benefactors! They accept graciously and gratefully what they are given. Taxpayers of Western donor countries have no moral or legal obligation to provide material support to regimes who use their aid to commit crimes against humanity. A truly sovereign government takes care of its people, abides by the rules of international law and does not depend on the perpetual charity and goodwill of others to feed its people, run its government and maintain its social institutions.
Zero Tolerance for a Culture of Impunity
We must consistently advocate a policy of zero tolerance of a culture of impunity in Ethiopia. This means torturers, killers and other violators of human rights must be thoroughly and independently investigated, prosecuted, convicted and punished. The time to build a transitional bridge from a culture of impunity to a culture of the rule of law is now. Exiled Ethiopians alone can not build this bridge. We must make allies of the citizens of the EU countries and the U.S. and convince them that their hard earned tax dollars must not be used to bankroll a depraved dictatorship in Ethiopia. In the U.S., many of us have taken that challenge directly. We shall continue to work with Congressman Donald Payne and Senators Russ Feingold and Pat Leahy to bring to fruition the “Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act” (formerly H.R. 2003), which links U.S. non-humanitarian aid to improvements in human rights in Ethiopia. We are also confident that the Obama Administration will be sympathetic to our cause of human rights accountability. We believe the new administration will not turn a blind eye, a deaf ear and a mute tongue to our plea for help in stopping human rights abuses, ending the culture of impunity and in establishing the rule of law in Ethiopia.
Letter writing campaigns, public demonstrations and petitions are important; but to end the culture of impunity and bring human rights violators to justice much more is needed. Persuasive, convincing and cold hard evidence is required. We must expand and develop an ongoing data collection effort that documents human rights violations on a systematic basis throughout the country. We must apply creative strategies to monitor harassment of human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists, use video and audio technologies to document incidents of abuse particularly by members of the security forces, locate and maintain witness lists for abuse incidents, keep photographic and documentary records of torture and abuse victims and perform other similar activities. We thank those courageous Ethiopians who have undertaken such tasks to date.
Those Who Refuse to Learn From History Should Learn From Their Constitution
George Santayana admonished, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we do not learn from the burdensome legacy of the culture of impunity, we shall be condemned to prolong and tolerate it for ages to come. The old adage holds true in Ethiopia’s case: “The limits of tyrants are set by the level of tolerance of those subjected to tyranny.” The people of Ethiopia have tolerated a ruthless dictatorship for eighteen years. They are now a hungry and angry people. They are hungry not only for food to sustain their bodies, but also a human rights culture anchored in the principle of the rule of law and democratic institutions to nurture their spirits. They are angry because their basic human rights are violated everyday. Freedom from the rule of those wallowing in a culture of impunity comes at a high price. Many Ethiopians pay that price on a daily basis. We believe history is a great teacher; but the law is a formidable disciplinarian. Article 28 of the dictatorship’s constitution is prophetically instructive:
Crimes Against Humanity. There shall be no period of limitation on persons charged with crimes against humanity as provided by international conventions ratified by Ethiopia and other laws of Ethiopia. The legislature or any other organ of state shall have no power to pardon or give amnesty with regard to such offences.”
Those who refuse to learn from history would be wise to learn from their own constitution!
The writer, Alemayehu G. Mariam, is a professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and an attorney based in Los Angeles. For comments, he can be reached at [email protected]
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (The Reporter) — The Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) party dismissed its plan to hold a public meeting at Meskel Square on Saturday, 23 May 2009, as it was not able to secure permission to hold the event from the City Government of Addis Ababa.
In a letter issued by Markos Bizuneh, officer of Peaceful Demonstration and Public Meeting Notification of the City Government, the party was told that it can only hold its meeting in halls of the party’s choosing.
Dr. Hailu Araya, UDJ’s public relations head and vice president, said that the demonstration notification office told them that they can only make facilities available for the party to hold its meetings in a hall.
Although the party notified the city administration on Monday, the response came after three days which, according to him, contravened the law.
Article 6 (2) of Proclamation No. 3/1991 which provides for the establishment of the procedure for peaceful demonstration and political meeting says, “Where the municipal or Awraja administrative office is of the opinion that … it is preferable for the peaceful demonstration or public political meeting to be held at some other time or place, it shall so notify the organizers by giving reasons, in writing, within 12 hours of the time of submission of their notice.”
”We submitted our request on Monday but they responded on Thursday. Here you can see the law had been breached,” Dr. Hailu said.
Denying the party a space to hold its activities has its own danger, Dr. Hailu said.
“In many places, especially in Amhara and Oromia regions, many of our offices have been closed, party members detained and intimidated,” he added.
Despite the problems that the party is facing, they will continue the peaceful political struggle, according to him.
The Woyanne regime in Ethiopia has issued the following statement in response to President Isaias Afwerki’s interview. It must be a joke for Woyanne, the author of ‘Article 39’ (that gives ethnic groups the right to secede from Ethiopia), to accuse others of being anti-Ethiopia. By his actions, including his vehement opposition to ‘Article 39’ and supporting Ethiopian freedom fighters who stand for united Ethiopia, President Isaias has demonstrated that he is indeed a great friend of Ethiopia.
Read below the laughable statement by the Woyanne junta:
——————————–
President Issayas lectures the World, masquerading as defender of Ethiopia Unity
(MOFA 05/22/09):- President Issayas is taking the opportunity of Eritrea’s 16th anniversary of independence (May 24) to offer the region, Africa and the Middle East, his thoughts on world and regional problem, and at length. In a whole series of interviews, with regional media and those in the Middle East, and more widely, he has been telling the region, Africa, and indeed the world, how to behave and pointing out where they have all been going wrong. Every night for weeks, viewers of Eritrean TV have been able to hear their President’s thoughts at considerable length.
President Issayas finds little to welcome in the world or even in Eritrea. The words that most commonly appear are challenge, conspiracy, hostility, sacrifice, hard work and yet more hard work. The rewards are all far in the future; and Eritrea is always the target. “The United Nations, including the Security Council, has become an unjust and inequitable tool of a few nations” indulging in “illegal and unconstructive” positions, as well as baseless slanders against Eritrea over the supply of arms to Al-Shabaab and opponents of the Somali Government, although the Somali Prime Minister said only this week that the Somali Government had detailed evidence of arms flights arriving from Eritrea. President Issayas told Egyptian State TV this week that the problems in Somalia mainly emanate from the illegal actions of the UN Security Council itself. In a comprehensive attack on the Council, President Issayas claimed it had taken illegal and unconstructive positions, breaching the UN Charter and international law. This, he claimed, had caused the present vacuum in Somalia and become the source for piracy and other activities. He said a government “imposed” from outside had further aggravated the problem. In this context he told Kenyan TV that IGAD was a tool in the service of foreign agendas and was the source of the problem in Somalia. Eritrea, he said, expected nothing good from such an impotent organization and this was why it had suspended its membership.
The African Union came in for similar strictures as doing nothing more useful than “talking about a vacuum”. He referred to the behaviour of its leaders as corrupt and despicable, and in this connection he had much to say about democracy and the media in Africa. According to President Issayas, (talking to SABC TV at the weekend) Africa needs “genuine” democracy. Surprisingly, in view of South Africa’s recent Presidential election, he specifically noted that the South African experience proved that one cannot speak of real democracy when holding elections in which there is no equitable distribution of resources and where the majority of the population lived below the poverty line. President Issayas’ version of democracy, which ignores elections or political parties, does not equate with other peoples’ views. He is against such “meaningless exercises or manifestations of ostentatious behaviour”. In fact, democracy is an ideal and a set of institutions of practices. As an ideal it involves the concept that members of a group should have the determining control over rules and policies, and that members of the group should treat each other as equals. In a modern state this ideal is realized through a framework of citizens’ rights, institutions for representative and accountable government (in particular through a freely elected parliament), an active civil society and a number of mediatory elements of which the most obvious are political parties and an independent media. None of these are present in Eritrea and President Issayas specifically rejects most of these, even claiming, in defiance of Eritrea’s still unimplemented constitution that the people of Eritrea do not want either political parties or an independent media. It was in an interview with Al-Jazeera last year that the President actually put a time frame on elections. Eritrea would have, he said, to wait three or four decades before it held elections, and possibly longer. On the media, President Issayas claimed there was no free press any where in the world today. However the Eritrean people, he claimed, possessed media organs that served as forums for expressing their views and opinions as well as providing them with correct and objective information. Eritrea, of course, has had no independent media outlets since they were all closed down abruptly in 2001 and at least two dozen journalists detained and dozens more exiled.
Few international bodies or countries have escaped President Issayas’ attacks: “conspiracies and hostilities weaved in the name of regional, international and non-governmental organizations,…under the pretext of free press or [humanitarian activities] or…charity are some of the instruments of neo-colonialism masterminded by intelligence agencies.” The US has been one of the President’s main targets. He said it has a strategy of domination through creating problems and crises with the aim of strengthening US influence throughout the region. He attacked the CIA for encouraging and sponsoring human trafficking and encouraging Eritrean youth to flee their country. Hundreds of Eritreans cross into Ethiopia and Sudan every months to avoid conscription and repression. President Issayas told Asharq Alawat newspaper that lying was the culture of the CIA and the “baseless” anti-Eritrean defamatory campaign currently including allegations of Israeli and Iranian bases in Eritrea was no more than a continuation of this historic activity.
Uganda and Burundi are attacked for sending forces for AMISOM in Somalia. They are categorized as far from stable countries, experiencing civil unrest as well as internal opposition. These governments should, said President Issayas, concentrate on their own problems rather than meddle elsewhere. Indeed, the only viable solution for Somalia, said President Issayas was for outsiders to stop meddling in its affairs. He did not include Eritrea in this however. Eritrea’s support for the Somali people was, he said, a moral and legal obligation; and peace and stability could only be achieved by creating a conducive ground for the Somali people to resolve the issue themselves. Kenya was held responsible for the disappearance of three Eritrean journalists in Mogadishu and President Issayas added, ominously, that Eritrea would never overlook the issue. Last weekend it was the turn of long-time ally, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement. President Issayas, claiming he had the right to criticize the organization, attacked it for failing to fulfill its commitments to the people of Sudan, for corruption and for failing to be definitive on unity or separation.
Perhaps, most bizarrely, in one four hour interview with what claims to be an Ethiopian website though undoubtedly in the pay of the Eritrean Government, President Issayas even tried to portray himself as a defender of Ethiopian unity. The interview indeed appears designed to allow President Issayas to appear in this guise. The truth of the matter is that no other person has worked so tirelessly for the demise of Ethiopia as a country. This is by no means an exaggeration. President Issayas has never been supportive of Ethiopian unity as his current efforts at destabilization make all too clear. Ethiopian officials, of course, are privy to what President Issayas was telling many African leaders during the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia (1998-2000): there is no such thing as Ethiopia and what there is, is no more than a shadow of a country – a country that cannot be taken seriously as a state. In terms of historical background, we would remember what President Issayas told an American, Paul Henze, on 11th March 1991, before he entered Asmara:
“The only reason that there is an Ethiopia is that the US needed it for the Cold War, and recreated it, otherwise it would have disappeared at the end of World War II.”
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA —