By Sonia Verma | The Globe and Mail
When Daniel Bekele, an Ethiopian lawyer, takes the stage at a Human Rights Watch dinner Friday in Toronto honouring his bravery, he will give a speech but he won’t tell his story.
He fears his government will send him back to the same prison from which he has just been released if he reveals too much about his ordeal.
“In my country I know how every word would be interpreted, so when you ask me a question about what happened and I try to answer it, my mind is also thinking how every word I say could possibly be interpreted in a hundred and one ways. So, unfortunately, I can’t speak freely,” Mr. Bekele explained in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
Mr. Bekele, 42, was among an estimated 30,000 civil-society leaders, journalists and politicians arrested in the wake of Ethiopia’s disputed 2005 election, in which the opposition won an unprecedented number of parliamentary seats but failed to topple Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
The opposition claimed the vote had been rigged, as did a team of European Union election observers. A parliamentary inquiry concluded that nearly 200 civilians were killed in a subsequent government crackdown on the opposition.
Mr. Bekele was charged with inciting violence against the government, punishable by life in prison or death.
A human-rights lawyer who had led election-monitoring efforts, he refused to sign a letter of apology, choosing instead to go to trial to test the rule of law.
He was convicted and spent 21/2 years in prison before being released by presidential pardon.
Fearing repercussions when he learned Human Rights Watch was honouring him with an award, he requested his name not be published until he and his family had left the country.
Birtukan Medekssa, an Ethiopian opposition politician who was also jailed in 2005 and subsequently released was rearrested last year after reports suggested she publicized certain conditions of her release.
“For this reason I find it difficult to go into this story of my arrest, what I was accused of and what I did to defend myself,” said Mr. Bekele, a husband and father of two.
He hopes his silence will serve to underscore the dangers still faced by human-rights advocates who are continuing to press for change in Ethiopia in the run-up to a new round of parliamentary elections in May.
“The challenge is that there is still a huge mismatch between what the constitution says and the reality on the ground,” Mr. Bekele said.
He is currently completing a PhD at Oxford University, but eventually plans to return to Ethiopia to continue his work: “I have every intention of going back and that’s why I have to be so careful,” he said.
“I need to continue to do this. Somebody needs to do this job.”
By Cleve R. Wootson Jr
CHARLOTTE, NC (Charlotte Observer) — Staying in Ethiopia was a death sentence for the pretty, thin 17-year-old girl with a heart defect.
Tigist Yemane was weak. She couldn’t walk more than a few steps without passing out.
Without an operation, doctors told her in 2004, she would be dead in six months.
In the United States, the operation to fix her mitral stenosis is relatively simple and involves an overnight hospital stay. In her native Ethiopia, the operation was out of her reach.
Yemane had become the woman of the house after her mother died when she was nine. Her father, she told friends, was an alcoholic and mostly out of the picture. She cooked and cleaned and looked after her younger siblings. And as her ailment progressed, Yemane got weaker and weaker.
John Cederholm, a Charlotte heart surgeon visiting a missionary friend in the Addis Ababa slum, thought he could help. He and Brian Davidson, who runs a sports-based outreach program in Ethiopia, convinced authorities there to give Yemane a temporary visa, telling them they’d ensure her return. For the first time, Yemane had hope for living beyond her teenage years.
But nearly six years later, Yemane is dead – the 45th homicide victim this year in Charlotte, the city where she floundered for a foothold in America.
‘This is your opportunity’
In 2004, Yemane flew to Charlotte where Dr. Cederholm performed surgery at the Sanger Clinic, replacing one of the valves in her heart.
The Ethiopian teen stayed in the Cederholm’s Charlotte home and absorbed American culture as she healed and got stronger.
“She came over with a little bit of broken English,” Cederholm said. At first, “she didn’t know how to turn on a shower. She didn’t know how to turn on a stove.”
When she was better, Cederholm fulfilled his promise to Ethiopian authorities and put Yemane on a plane back to her native country. But her visa was still valid and people close to her in Ethiopia saw it as her ticket out of the slums.
“They told her, ‘This is your opportunity for a new life. This is your chance to escape,'” Cederholm said.
Family and friends collected money to pay for another flight to the U.S.
Cederholm and Davidson are unsure when Yemane returned to the United States.
They do know she arrived in Washington D.C. with little money and the phone number of a family she hoped to stay with.
“It’s only human and natural to want something better,” Davidson said. “Unfortunately, the reality of the fact is (the U.S.) is not what it looks like in the movies.
“Her life, it was a hardship.”
Back in the U.S., but alone
Yemane made the phone call but the family said they didn’t have the money or space to take her in, Cederholm said.
Yemane was homeless and alone.
For three years, she flitted from home to home, staying with Ethiopian families who took her in, sometimes sleeping on the streets or in shelters. She was married briefly to a man who friends said abused her, but she managed to get away.
Her compass always pointed to Charlotte, the only real home in the United States she knew. Around 2006, Cederholm said his family took her in once again for about a month.
In 2007, she met Loretta Caldwell, who runs a Charlotte ministry that takes in homeless women. The police were trying to take Yemane to a homeless shelter on the westside, but she’d been there before and didn’t want to go back.
“She started running up to my car saying ‘Lady, help me, help me, please help me,'” Caldwell said.
“And I pulled off looking back at her and said ‘She’s so beautiful. What happened to her?'”
Caldwell took her in.
Over the next two years, in a stable and permanent home, Yemane thrived. Caldwell helped her get a visa and a job. She used pink paint on the walls of her room, which was larger than the apartment she shared with her siblings in Ethiopia. She set up profiles on Facebook and MySpace, and her accent became fainter as she burned through calling cards talking to her siblings in Ethiopia.
One of her brothers just had a baby, and she was collecting baby clothes to send to him.
She called Caldwell “mother,” and the older woman began to think of Yemane as her daughter.
‘Are you OK? Are you safe?’
Caldwell says she was overprotective of her surrogate daughter. Even though Yemane was 23, Caldwell ran criminal background checks on the men she would date, and set a curfew.
She said she trusted Yemane’s latest boyfriend, Davon Thomas, because she knew his mother, and they seemed like “good, Christian people.”
Caldwell said she last spoke with Yemane on Friday night. Yemane had called to say she might break curfew.
“Are you OK?” Caldwell asked. “Are you safe?”
Yemane said “yes” to both, and Caldwell said she was going to bed.
The next morning, Yemane’s pink room was still empty.
“I started calling her. And I started calling him. And then I called around to find her,” Caldwell said.
“Within 30 minutes … the detectives were at my front door.”
Police say Thomas shot Yemane to death early Saturday morning inside his parents’ house in the Reedy Creek Community. Police called it a domestic homicide and searched for Thomas for two days before he turned himself in.
Thomas, 27, is in Mecklenburg jail, charged with Yemane’s murder. And the Charlotteans who helped bring a sick teenager over from Ethiopia six years ago were raising money to send her body back.
ATLANTA — Bartow County Sheriff’s Office Investigators have arrested two Atlanta men — who are natives of Ethiopia — in connection with more than $2,000 worth of fraudulent purchases.
According to Sheriff’s Office reports Asaye H. Tewolde, 33, of Atlanta and Henok Biede Weldemicael, 26, also of Atlanta each have been charged with 72 counts of financial transaction card fraud from purchases they made in Bartow County over the last several weeks.
The two are accused of using invalid gift cards to make purchases at a Mapco Express in Cartersville in October and November. According to investigators, the pair were interfering with the satellite transceiver that verifies the credit card purchases, enabling them to buy numerous items on the invalid cards.
The pair were arrested when they attempted to use the cards at the same store again and store employees contacted deputies.
Investigators have recovered more than 75 invalid gift cards that were allegedly being used by the pair to purchase cigarettes and other items. Tewolde and Weldemicael also are suspected of the same crime in other jurisdictions.
Both men are being held at the Bartow County Jail pending a bond hearing.
By Ely Portillo | Charlotte Observer
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA — A man accused of murdering his girlfriend Saturday turned himself in to authorities Monday night, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police.
Investigators say Davon Londell Thomas, 27, shot his girlfriend, 23-year-old Tigist Yemane, a native of Ethiopia, shortly before 5 AM Saturday morning at his parents’ home on Willowglen Trail near Reedy Creek Park.
They say he then fled into woods near the house.
A murder warrant was issued for his arrest, but on Saturday Thomas eluded search dogs, a helicopter and dozens of officers combing the surrounding area for him.
Police warned the public that he had military training from serving in the Army National Guard and should be considered armed and dangerous.
But on Monday he surrendered at CMPD headquarters uptown.
Court records show Thomas pleaded guilty in 2008 to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
His sentence was suspended and he was given probation until 2011.
Last month, he pleaded guilty to resisting a public officer and was given probation and ordered to perform community service.
He was also forbidden to possess any firearms.
