Ethiopia and human rights

Jailed for doing his job

The Economist

July 17, 2012

ETHIOPIA’S prime minister, Meles Zenawi, likes to present himself to the world as a peacemaker and a paragon of development. At a recent summit of African leaders in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, which is also the headquarters of the African Union, he sought to mediate between the two Sudans. He also made much of a huge loan to help connect Ethiopia’s mega-dam projects to a regional power grid.

The bad side of Mr Meles was on show before the African grandees arrived, when a prominent journalist, Eskinder Nega, was sentenced to 18 years in prison—for doing his job. He had persistently criticised the government for stifling dissent. After his newspaper had been shut down by the authorities, he had been publishing online.

Mr Nega, who won a major award in May from PEN America, a writers’ club that promotes press freedom, fell the victim to the same anti-terrorism laws he had tried to question. Shortly before his arrest in September last year, he had written a column criticising the government for jailing several of his colleagues, as well as two Swedish journalists, under vague anti-terror statutes passed in 2009. Along with 23 others, including opposition activists and fellow journalists, he was convicted of links to a banned opposition group based in the United States.

Mr Nega has been in and out of prison in his homeland since first opening a newspaper in 1999. His reports of violence by security forces that followed a disputed election in 2005 got him and his wife jailed for 17 months. Not everyone is as dogged as the 43-year-old blogger: the government’s willingness to jail critics has driven many journalists into exile. Many of those convicted alongside him had already fled abroad.

On a recent visit to Addis Ababa, Baobab attempted to set up a round table with local journalists to talk about challenges to freedom of expression. All but one of the participants withdrew at the last minute, several admitting that they were afraid of arrest. A veteran human-rights activist, Mesfin Woldemariam, did turn up to express his frustration at how Western governments friendly to Mr Meles are prepared to ignore his government’s human-rights abuses.

The American chapter of PEN is among many groups that have denounced Mr Nega’s sentence, calling on governments to reflect on their relations with Ethiopia. Many diplomats in Addis Ababa hoped that their polite lobbying and their presence at Mr Nega’s trial would soften the outcome. It did not.