Head office of the Ethiopian Teachers’ Association (ETA) Ransacked
The Central Council of The Ethiopian Teachers Association (ETA)
Addis Abeba, Ethiopia
To Education International, Brussels – Belgium
Ref.No ETA/136/44-5-96
Date March 20,1996
Dear Colleagues,
We regret to inform you that the head office of the Ethiopian Teachers’
Association (ETA) was ransacked
and sealed by the government security forces on March 18, 1996. The
security forces who wore
police uniforms and civilian clothes came to ETA’s Premise and:
a. harassed every individual found there.
b. arrested Ato Abate Angore, an executive committee member of ETA. He is
now detained in Criminal
Investigation Bureau.
c. broke into the office of the president, Dr. Taye Woldesemayat, and
seized his personal
notebooks, books and some documents of the Association.
d. sealed some doors of the head office.
We have also been informed lately that another group of the security force
broke into Dr. Taye’s residence
house and took away all items he had there.
The security forces were not willing to tell us the reasons why they took
such actions against ETA. We
expect that all of us might be imprisoned very shortly.
Please do not hesitate to write a letter of protest to Ato Meles Zenawi, the
Prime minister and Pressure his
government to:
– release Ato Abate Angore immediately
– open ETA’s head office without any precondition
– refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of ETA.
Yours Sincerely,
Signed
Gemoraw Kassa
Secretary of ETA
________________________End of ETA’s Press Release——————–
> From ——- SHINE
Dear Netters (EEDN, Ethiolist), Human Rights Groups, Newsmagazines, etc
On 19 March 1996 we in SHINE posted a message pertaining to the
Ethiopian Teachers’ Association
(ETA). Then we stated that there was an “unconfirmed report” about ETA’s
head office in Addis Abeba
being surrounded by armed EPRDF troops and security men. In the mean time we
have made efforts to
verify this report. We have confirmed that the premises of ETA in Addis
Abeba have indeed been
surrounded and that illegal searches were conducted by EPRDF soldiers and
security men on March 18,
1996. Above, we have reproduced the full text of the appeal letter which
ETA’s secretary Mr. Gemoraw
Kassa has written to the head office of Education International (EI) – the
largest professional teachers’
organisations that has more than eighty million (80,000,000) teachers across
the length and breadth of the
world. As is evident from ETA’s appeal letter sent to EI, it has not only
been ETA’s head office that has
been subjected to illegal searches and ransacking but also the residence of
Dr. Taye Woldesemayat, ETA’s
chairman who is currently on a work visit here in Europe. They broke into
his house and took away valuable
items belonging to him.
Observers closlely monitoring developments in Ethiopia say that the
timing of this illegal and dictatorial
action on the part of the TPLF(EPRDF) regime has to do with the following
things :
1 – The EPRDF regime has consistently sought to portray ETA and other
independent professional
organisations opposed to its undemocratic practices as “nothing more than
oppositon political
organizations working under the cloak of trade unions, human rights groups,
professional organizations”,
etc. Hence the effort of EPRDF to look for evidences that would help it
prove its paranoic fantasy about
ETA’s alleged contacts with political groups. This was the reason why they
broke into ETA’s office to look
for incriminating evidences that would help the EPRDF regime as a pretext to
dismiss and eventually ban
ETA as “political organisation”. Unfortunately for the dictatorial EPRDF
regime, its armed soldiers and
security men could not find a single material that incriminates ETA nor
could they find leads that point to
ETA’s involvement in oppositonal politics. It was this frustration which
observers beleive prompted them to
imprison the elderly ETA leader Mr. Abate Angore.
2 – With this action, the EPRDF government has sought to scare ETA’s
president, Dr. Taye
Woldesemayat, who is currently in Europe so that the latter may not return
to his country for fear of
EPRDF’s belligerent attitudes as witnessed by what took place in Addis abeba
on March 18, 1996. Given
ETA’s courageous record of peaceful struggle to champion the cause of
Ethiopian teachers and the cause of
education in Ethiopia, such ridiculous move on the part of EPRDF prove its
incapacity to engage ETA
peacefully. If anything, such moves reflect badly on the bully boy and
gangster character of the EPRDF
government in its dealings with civic and professional organisations like
ETA.
3 – The move is meant to pre-empt any possible resistance of ETA
against EPRDF’s move to lay off six
thousand teachers (6000 teachers) that are slated for dismissal indefinitely.
We would like to remind readers of this report that the EPRDF regime
has in the past tried to destroy free
trade unions as witness its attempt to ban the Confederation of Ethiopian
Trade Unions (CETU) under the
leadership its courageous chairman Mr. Dawe Ibrahim (for a detailed coverage
of ETA’s travails we refer the
reader to the exclusive interview of Mr. Dawe Ibrahim with the Ethiopian
Register (EtR) magazine in the
August 1995 issue of EtR pp 59-66). EPRDF tried to create and court a rival
group within CETU by picking
up its own henchmen (mostly Tigrigna speakers). This move did not succeed.
Later it froze CETU’s bank
asset worth millions of Birr deposited at the Commerical Bank of Ethiopia
which is owned by the EPRDF
controlled state of Ethiopia. CETU’s building has been illegaly occupied by
EPRDF and CETU’s leaders
harassed, thrown out on the street and some others thrown into prison. Some
are under house arrest, some
have fled to neighbouring countries like Kenya where they are forced to stay
and some have decided to
stay, however temporarily, in countries such as Switzerland. This is the
ethnocratic minority government
which the 18 embassies of western governments have dubbed “democratic” when
they issued a joint
communique (in December 1994) panegeryzing EPRDF’s “democratic constitution”
that has enshrined
institutional fragmentation of Ethiopia on ethnic lines. It is this
“demnocratic” government which is bank-
rolled by western governments that has failed to allow elbow-room to civil
instituions such as trade unions
and professional organisations let alone accomodating political groups
harbouring different views and
divergent political programmes. This is democracy a la EPRDF – the
ethnocratic cabal whose records do not
even remotely smack of democracy. If the records of the last 5 years are
anything to go by, democracy and
EPRDF are strange bed-mates.
We in SHINE strongly condemn EPRDF’s dictatorial move to efface genuine
instituions of the civil
society such as ETA. We ask human rights groups and institutions concerned
with the cause of democracy
to register their protest against the intolerable actions of EPRDF. We urge
netters of the two Ethiopian
computer network groups (EEDN, Ethiolist), news magazines etc to spread the
press release of ETA to all
appropriate bodies in the respective countries in which they reside. EPRDF
is out to stamp out all traces of
civil institutions voicing the plight of the civil society. First the victim
was CETU, followed by EHRCO
(following EHRCO’s publication of a book on the human rights records of the
incumbent reggime) and today
it is ETA. Should we Ethiopians and Ethiopiansists sit idly by and watch in
silence as the basic building
blocks of a civil society are being dismantled piece by piece ? For how long
should we observe such
undemocratic forays into civil society with obmutescence ? Should we not
rise up to the occasion in the
face of such destructive drives of EPRDF to dismantle institutions of the
civil society by the ethnocratic
cabal – the EPRDF ?
Recommended Actions:
Reach with ETA’s press release of 20 March 1996 the following
instituions :
1 – National Associatons of Teachers in the respective country of your
residence.
2 – Human Rights orgnaizations like Amnesty International, Africa
Watch, etc.
3 – Parliamentarians, journalists, church organisations, etc
Ethiopian Information Service Network In Holland (SHINE )
Assefa Negash,
Amsterdam (Holland), March 21, 1996