Imprisoning, Killing, Spying-Suppression of the Innocent Inside Ethiopia
by GRAHAM PEEBLES
Weekend Edition September 5-7, 2014
Wrapped in dishonesty, arrogance and paranoia, Ethiopia’s ruling regime is
following a nationwide policy of violent suppression and constitutional
vandalism.
It was the 24th June – midsummer’s day – in the adopted homeland of
Andargachew Tsige, when he was detained by ‘Yemeni officials’ (State heavies
in suits) whilst transiting through Sana’a to Eritrea. The British citizen
and leading Ethiopian political activist was quickly and quietly extradited
to Addis Ababa where he was imprisoned on spurious charges of treason or
some such trumped up, paranoid twaddle. He had been unfairly tried in
absentia in 2009, when Amnesty report he was “sentenced to death for an
alleged coup attempt. He was prosecuted in absentia again in 2012 on
terrorism charges, alongside other prisoners of conscience, and sentenced to
life imprisonment.”
Incarcerated he remains, hidden, abused and tortured by Ethiopian military
thugs; his “detention in Ethiopia means that his life and physical integrity
are in great danger…his incommunicado detention in an unknown location
increases this risk.” says MEP Anna Gomez in a letter to British Foreign
Secretary, Philip Hammond. In keeping with Britain’s consistent abdication
of donor duty in the face of the Ethiopian government’s unbridled abuse of
its people, the new Secretary of State at the FCO and his lieutenants have
done nothing of substance to support Andargachew.
The false arrest, imprisonment and mis-treatment of Andargachew Tsige is but
the most high profile recent example of a strategic policy of control and
suppression enforced by the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF). A range of weapons are employed by the regime to
stifle dissent and create an atmosphere of fear, including extrajudicial
executions, arrest, imprisonment and torture. HRW state the government
“regularly use abuse to gather information…. Ethiopian authorities have
subjected political detainees to torture and other ill treatment at the main
detention center [Maekelawi Police Station] in Addis Ababa.” Journalists who
challenge the government are intimidated (so too their families) and
silenced. Many have been arrested, and as the Committee to Protect
Journalists reports, “are languishing in Ethiopia’s prisons on trumped-up
terrorism charges for doing their jobs.” In their thorough report “They Want
A Confession”, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documents “serious rights abuses,
unlawful interrogation tactics, and poor detention conditions in Maekelawi
since 2010. Those detained …include scores of opposition politicians,
journalists, protest organizers, and alleged supporters of ethnic
insurgencies.” Public assembly, whilst not being outwardly criminalized is
effectively banned, despite the fact that it is a right enshrined like all
such liberal freedoms in the legally binding constitution. A dusty document
which has no influence over the ruling party, or indeed the judiciary, which
functions as a docile enforcer of government criminality.
The Guilty Trust Nobody
For a country beset with acute poverty, where it is conservatively estimated
30% of the population (World Bank figures) are living below the ‘official
poverty line’ (that’s income of $2 a day), the government somehow manages to
administer and fund (to the tune of $340 millions) the largest standing army
in Sub-Saharan Africa. They boast 560 tanks, over 80 warplanes, and out of a
population numbering 92 million, Global Fire Power reveals, 25 million are
armed and ‘fit for service’, with a further 10 million standing by. The men
in uniform are kept busy by their political masters – there is a whole
nation to suppress and control, including the people of Oromia (who are
calling for self-determination) and Amhara. There is the Ogaden region to
occupy and forcibly govern, innocent men and women – who seek nothing more
threatening than autonomy, their constitutional right – to murder, terrorise
and rape. There is Gambella in the far south west and the Lower Omo Valley
where women are raped by soldiers, men beaten, indigenous people (who have
lived on ancestral land for generations) herded into government camps (the
notorious Villagisation project – part funded by Britain and the World Bank)
as vast tracts of lands are sold for pennies to international corporations.
There is torture to be administered, assassinations to plan and execute,
rapes to be performed and surveillance of dissenting voices to be carried
out. And spying from villages to cyberspace to keep the EPRDF military men
active night and day; duplicitous, disingenuous and corrupt, they trust
nobody.
In their detailed study of government surveillance in Ethiopia, “They Know
Everything We Do”, HRW found the ruling party “is using foreign technology
to bolster its widespread telecom surveillance of opposition activists and
journalists both in Ethiopia and abroad,” and unsurprisingly there are no
judicial or legislative mechanisms in place to protect privacy. The Chinese
multinational ZTE is the primary supplier of telecommunication technology,
but HRW discovered that Britain (a major donor, whose unfathomable support
of the regime could be said to make Britain complicit in some of the
regime’s wide-ranging human rights violations) and Germany have also
provided surveillance software and know-how.
The government owns the country’s sole telecommunication company (Ethio
Telecommunication); awash with paranoia they control and monitor mobile
phone use and Internet access (coverage of which, at around 0.5% is the
second lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa) throughout the country. These
“surveillance practices violate the rights to freedom of expression,
association, and access to information,” HRW state. Security personnel have
unfettered access to call records of all telephone users – particular
attention is given to foreign numbers. Calls are recorded without legal
process or oversight, and replayed “during abusive interrogations in which
people who have been arbitrarily detained are accused of belonging to banned
organizations.” [Ibid] A former Oromo opposition party member told HRW, that
“one day they arrested me and they showed me everything. They showed me a
list of all my phone calls and they played a conversation I had with my
brother.” He was arrested for the heinous act of discussing “politics on the
phone,” – a criminal activity in this supposedly democratic African nation.
Access to websites that offer independent critical analysis of political
events, including opposition party sites, media and bloggers is denied by
government controls. The Ethiopian people, both inside the country and
within the diaspora are extremely fearful; as a result a great deal of
‘self-censorship’ takes place. People are afraid to call or receive phone
calls from abroad (where many have family working), they are reluctant to
publicly criticize the government and refrain from discussing a variety of
topics openly or during ‘private’ telephone calls. The “main mode of
government control is through extensive networks of informants and a
grassroots system of surveillance,” HRW report. And in a society where
secrecy and mistrust of one another is common, silent suppression and
distrust of others is fostered. And where unity is needed – for if there is
to be change within the country, the people must come together – community,
ethnic and tribal divisions are strengthened. All of course by EPRDF design.
Legalizing Suppression
The legislative weapon of choice used to gag and imprison is the universally
condemned 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation (ATP), which when introduced HRW
described as “a potent instrument to crack down on political dissent,
including peaceful political demonstrations and public criticisms of
government policy”; it allows for “long-term imprisonment and even the death
penalty for “crimes” that bear no resemblance, under any credible
definition, to terrorism.” Since the ATP was written into law, “the
independent media have been decimated by politically motivated prosecutions
… The government has systematically thwarted attempts by journalists to
establish new publications. Blogs and Internet pages critical of the
government are regularly blocked, and in 2012 printing houses came under
threat for printing publications that criticized the authorities.”
The EPRDF has used this and other repressive laws to decimate civil society
organizations and independent media and target individuals with politically
motivated prosecutions. It is a paranoid, cruel and violent regime that
ignores human rights law, violates its own constitution and is causing
extreme suffering amongst its people. And donor countries ¬– America,
Britain and the European Union primarily, appear content to ignore wide
ranging atrocities (some of which deep inside the Ogaden region for example
constitute crimes against humanity), in exchange for what – for the illusion
of stability in the centre of a region dominated by failed states and
warring fanatics? There is not stability and harmony within Ethiopia, but
cruel suppression, terror and simmering anger. Whilst the responsibility for
bringing lasting change rests firmly with the people acting in unity, there
is no excuse for allowing indeed supporting a regime that throws a dark dank
shroud of fear over the country. Responsible allegiance entails holding
regimes accountable and supporting the people of the nation state, not the
state dictators, defending human rights, insisting on justice and the
implementation of federal and international law.
The impunity and arrogance of the EPRDF was blatantly displayed in April
this year when, just days before American Secretary of State John Kerry
visited the country, “six bloggers for Zone 9, an Amharic-language website
whose writers have criticized the government, and three freelance
journalists were arrested,” reported the New York Times.
In addition to donor indifference, the wide-ranging human rights violations
taking place daily within Ethiopia go virtually unreported. The Ethiopian
people repeatedly ask why their plight is not reported, why do donors not
act, or use what is assumed to be their considerable influence on the EPRDF
leadership. Why, for example, isn’t British citizen Andergachew free? Is it
because he is Black, poor, a migrant to Britain born in Ethiopia. They
rightly ask why the state terrorism taking place within Oromia, Gambella,
the beautiful Lower Omo Valley, and, perhaps worst of all, in the Ogaden
region – where murder of the innocent is routine, where men and women are
imprisoned without trial, tortured, the women violently mass raped – is
allowed to go unchallenged. Legitimate questions passionately asked by a
people violently suppressed, living in fear in a corner of Africa, suffering
and desperate.
Graham Peebles is director of the <
http://www.thecreatetrust.org> Create
Trust. He can be reached at: graham_at_thecreatetrust.org
Received on Fri Sep 05 2014 - 17:05:07 EDT