Naomi Klein guardian.co.uk
On the ninth day of the Copenhagen climate summit, Africa was sacrificed. The position of the G77 negotiating bloc, including African states, had been clear: a 2C increase in average global temperatures translates into a 3–3.5C increase in Africa. That means, according to the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, “an additional 55 million people could be at risk from hunger”, and “water stress could affect between 350 and 600 million more people”.
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it like this: “We are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale … A global goal of about 2C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development.”
And yet that is precisely what Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, proposed to do when he stopped off in Paris on his way to Copenhagen: standing with President Nicolas Sarkozy, and claiming to speak on behalf of all of Africa (he is the head of the African climate-negotiating group), he unveiled a plan that includes the dreaded 2C increase and offers developing countries just $10bn a year to help pay for everything climate related, from sea walls to malaria treatment to fighting deforestation.
It’s hard to believe this is the same man who only three months ago was saying this: “We will use our numbers to delegitimise any agreement that is not consistent with our minimal position … If need be, we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent … What we are not prepared to live with is global warming above the minimum avoidable level.”And this: “We will participate in the upcoming negotiations not as supplicants pleading for our case but as negotiators defending our views and interests.”
We don’t yet know what Zenawi got in exchange for so radically changing his tune or how, exactly, you go from a position calling for $400bn a year in financing (the Africa group’s position) to a mere $10bn. Similarly, we do not know what happened when secretary of state Hillary Clinton met Philippine president Gloria Arroyo just weeks before the summit and all of a sudden the toughest Filipino negotiators were kicked off their delegation and the country, which had been demanding deep cuts from the rich world, suddenly fell in line.
We do know, from witnessing a series of these jarring about-faces, that the G8 powers are willing to do just about anything to get a deal in Copenhagen. The urgency does not flow from a burning desire to avert cataclysmic climate change, since the negotiators know full well that the paltry emissions cuts they are proposing are a guarantee that temperatures will rise a “Dantesque” 3.9C, as Bill McKibben puts it.
Matthew Stilwell of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development – one of the most influential advisers in these talks – says the negotiations are not really about averting climate change but are a pitched battle over a profoundly valuable resource: the right to the sky. There is a limited amount of carbon that can be emitted into the atmosphere. If the rich countries fail to radically cut their emissions, then they are actively gobbling up the already insufficient share available to the south. What is at stake, Stilwell argues, is nothing less than “the importance of sharing the sky”.
Europe, he says, fully understands how much money will be made from carbon trading, since it has been using the mechanism for years. Developing countries, on the other hand, have never dealt with carbon restrictions, so many governments don’t really grasp what they are losing. Contrasting the value of the carbon market – $1.2 trillion a year, according to leading British economist Nicholas Stern – with the paltry $10bn on the table for developing countries for the next three years, Stilwell says that rich countries are trying to exchange “beads and blankets for Manhattan”. He adds: “This is a colonial moment. That’s why no stone has been left unturned in getting heads of state here to sign off on this kind of deal … Then there’s no going back. You’ve carved up the last remaining unowned resource and allocated it to the wealthy.”
For months now NGOs have got behind a message that the goal of Copenhagen is to “seal the deal”. Everywhere we look in the Bella Centre, clocks are ticking. But any old deal isn’t good enough, especially because the only deal on offer won’t solve the climate crisis and might make things much worse, taking current inequalities between north and south and locking them in indefinitely.
Augustine Njamnshi of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance puts the 2C proposal in harsh terms: “You cannot say you are proposing a ’solution’ to climate change if your solution will see millions of Africans die and if the poor not the polluters keep paying for climate change.”
Stilwell says that the wrong kind of deal would “lock in the wrong approach all the way to 2020″ – well past the deadline for peak emissions. But he insists that it’s not too late to avert this worst-case scenario. “I’d rather wait six months or a year and get it right because the science is growing, the political will is growing, the understanding of civil society and affected communities is growing, and they’ll be ready to hold their leaders to account to the right kind of a deal.”
At the start of these negotiations the mere notion of delay was environmental heresy. But now many are seeing the value of slowing down and getting it right. Most significant, after describing what 2C would mean for Africa, Archbishop Tutu pronounced that it is “better to have no deal than to have a bad deal”. That may well be the best we can hope for in Copenhagen. It would be a political disaster for some heads of state – but it could be one last chance to avert the real disaster for everyone else.
Friday, December 18, 2009
"Addis Neger": Addis Tiwuld
By Derese Getachew
Alan Paton once called his country - South Africa - ‘bewitchingly lovable’. I think Ethiopia deserves to be called one, looking at the consuming passion of her citizens – of all political dispensation - yearning for a just, democratic and developed nation. We have never agreed on how to reach at that much desired stage, but we all dream of it. No generation represents that quest for social justice and democratic transition than the generation of the 60. That generation, which many acclaim as “the generation”, pioneered the cause for the end of feudalism, the cultural and linguistic oppression of various ethnic groups, and proposed a ‘people’s democratic republic’ very much in the lines of the Marxist Leninism. Not only did the generation upheld these lofty ideals, it also fought for them, both from within and without over the last 40 years. Its tenacity and resolve border puritan asceticism. While it radically transformed the political landscape of Ethiopia from 1974 on, it never rested on its laurels. Almost all of the leaders of the incumbent regime - EPRDF and its opponents - are from that generation. Their persistence makes us question whether theirs is a cause that is eternal (ad infinitum) or a failure (moribund political practice).
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The recent closure of the Addis Neger and the discussion it raised about the status of the media in Ethiopia is one opportune moment to consider the ‘generational problem’ in the Ethiopian context. As Karl Manheim once argued, it is time to reflect on ‘the generational problem’. Many have already remarked that Addis Neger (unlike many of its predecessors) offered its readers credible and researched viewpoints quite independently. But more importantly, Addis Neger represented the coming of age of a generation with useful ideas and youthful enthusiasm. I would like to take this last point and expand on the notion of generational transition. In so doing I touch upon the ‘dialogical cultures’ that have profoundly influenced the generation of the 60s in Ethiopia indicating the need to move beyond that ‘field of discourse’. I will then discuss the role of Addis Neger in pioneering this task.
The Pedagogy of “The Generation”
Alan Paton once called his country - South Africa - ‘bewitchingly lovable’. I think Ethiopia deserves to be called one, looking at the consuming passion of her citizens – of all political dispensation - yearning for a just, democratic and developed nation. We have never agreed on how to reach at that much desired stage, but we all dream of it. No generation represents that quest for social justice and democratic transition than the generation of the 60. That generation, which many acclaim as “the generation”, pioneered the cause for the end of feudalism, the cultural and linguistic oppression of various ethnic groups, and proposed a ‘people’s democratic republic’ very much in the lines of the Marxist Leninism. Not only did the generation upheld these lofty ideals, it also fought for them, both from within and without over the last 40 years. Its tenacity and resolve border puritan asceticism. While it radically transformed the political landscape of Ethiopia from 1974 on, it never rested on its laurels. Almost all of the leaders of the incumbent regime - EPRDF and its opponents - are from that generation. Their persistence makes us question whether theirs is a cause that is eternal (ad infinitum) or a failure (moribund political practice).
Click on 'Read More' for the rest of the article.
The recent closure of the Addis Neger and the discussion it raised about the status of the media in Ethiopia is one opportune moment to consider the ‘generational problem’ in the Ethiopian context. As Karl Manheim once argued, it is time to reflect on ‘the generational problem’. Many have already remarked that Addis Neger (unlike many of its predecessors) offered its readers credible and researched viewpoints quite independently. But more importantly, Addis Neger represented the coming of age of a generation with useful ideas and youthful enthusiasm. I would like to take this last point and expand on the notion of generational transition. In so doing I touch upon the ‘dialogical cultures’ that have profoundly influenced the generation of the 60s in Ethiopia indicating the need to move beyond that ‘field of discourse’. I will then discuss the role of Addis Neger in pioneering this task.
The Pedagogy of “The Generation”
The record is clear. Ethiopia is not faring better than it was forty years ago. What factors would explain the apparent failure of the ‘trailblazing’ generation? I believe three domains of analysis are worth looking at to find an answer for this question. First is the world view of Ethiopians themselves which is featured by a stark duality of two forces that explain social change: dark and light, evil and right, good and bad, upright and corrupt. Even before the introduction of modern Education, traditional church and koranic education explain social change as an inevitable outcome of supernatural forces (good and bad) who battle it out in the heavens and impose their will on the natural or created world order. This prism of thinking is linear since it only assumes a single explanan for a single outcome (note the repeated use of the term ‘ye tigil mesmer’). It also has Manichean proclivities since the solution to a problem lies in eliminating the evil/wrong doer. Last but not least, it is dogmatic since belief becomes shorthand for “right”- unfalsifiable, and hence unreformable( note the frequent use of an oxymoron ‘bichejna amarach’).
Second, is the apparent introduction of Marxism Leninism and its dualist class-oriented approach of explaining social conflict. Allow me to quote Dr Yacob Hailmeariam, to explain the impact of Marxism Leninism on the world view of ‘the generation’. In his articles posted on Ethiomedia, he stated:
It is well known that Marxism-Leninism is alien or has little tolerance for civility and compromise. Being civil is a bourgeois nonsense which seeks to blur the real issues and blunt the sharp edges of class conflict thus inhibiting decisive class struggle. It is enough to recall Lenin’s reference to his opponents as scoundrels and vermin to know that Marxists do not mince their words when they deal with their adversaries. Since old habits do not die easily this modus operandi unfortunately informs political discourse in Ethiopia today both on the side of the opposition and more so with the ruling party even after the demise of Marxism-Leninism.
Finally, let us look at the ‘dialogic turn’ that ‘the generation’ made since the end of the Cold War. Today, the debates on the political trajectory of the country revolve around one major issue: nationalism. Two particular signposts are readable on that spectrum. There are many who espouse Ethiopian nationalism and others who rally under ethno-nationalism reacting to the former as hegemonic, exploitative and exclusive. Attempts to form ‘ center right’ or ‘center left perspectives’ always foundered mainly because in a political arena where nationalism is the only common denominator- polar viewpoints become the most celebrated ones.
Let me flesh out why the discourse on ‘nationalism’ seems to have entered an impasse in all its versions. First of all, nationalist narratives are difficult to work with since they posit one’s interpretation of identity, history, injustice and claims in a very subjective manner. Secondly, nationalism is an ideological project which attempts to conflate political and cultural boundaries of diverse community/communities through homogenization. This was the case for Ethiopian Nationalism that followers of Walelijn criticized as the imposition of Abyssinian culture and institutions over the rest of Ethiopia- hence attempting to homogenize the historic-cultural artifacts of such a diverse multi-ethnic state.. The same holds true for ethno-nationalisms. For example, much of the political agenda of Oromo nationalists draws from the history of dispossession, disenfranchisement and exploitation the Oromo people have experienced following Melelik II’s expansion. While I agree that there is a case for historic injustice against the Oromo people, I believe this history faces fundamental problems when turned to become a political project of decolonization. First, much of the emphasis in this political history has been only about the 19th century Oromo relations with the ‘colonizing’ Amharas and Tigrayans. The role of Oromo principalities in the politics of Abyssinia as early as the 16th century and in places like Gondar, the southern edges of Tigray and Wollo are sidelined. Oromo intermarriage, trade and political ties with their neighboring ‘colonizers’ are seldom discussed. Hence insurgent ethno-nationalisms repeat the same homogenizing tendencies. They harp on an “us- against- them” category and are not easily malleable to the working of a democratic system – one that recognizes plurality, compromises and cooperation.
‘Addis Neger’: ‘Addis Tiwulid’
What did Addis neger represent? An upcoming generation of Ethiopians who are convinced that much of the learning this far done by the political elite of Ethiopia needs to be unlearned. Addis Neger represents the quest for a subaltern generational discourse, struggling to break out of the homogenizing and hegemonizing molds of ‘the generation’. Right from the outset, it set the bar high. It became the most popular, credible and independent voice in Ethiopia. True to the conviction of its founders, Addis Neger represented public reasoning at its best. It featured researched and extensive articles on issues of national and regional importance. Not only the relevance of the issues but the sheer latitude of the coverage was astounding ranging from foreign policy to economic growth and development, from arts and music to culture and society, from celebrating national heroes to covering regional and continental events. Even more, the opinion corners invited civil yet critical and engaging debates between citizens of all political colors and dispensations. Needless to state that, EPRDF members and symphatizers also argued their case on the weekly. This sealed the independence of the newspaper and its conviction that no one idea, ideology or party deserves to be a meta- narrative, a ‘hegemony’, as Addis Neger editors usually refer to it.
In my opinion, dictatorships begin not when ‘liberators’ assume the helm of power but when they begin to convince themselves and others that theirs is an idea that solves everything under the sun!! If thinking is dominated by hegemonic indoctrination then practice would self-evidently follow. That is why the freedom of thinking and expression constitute the core of any democratic franchise. Simply put, democracies cannot operate unless there is a difference of opinions and viewpoints. Addis Neger fought hard to send that message home, sometimes at the cost of being bashed as ‘government supporters’ and other times regarded as “ people who endanger the very existence of the nation and the constitution!”. It was walking on a knife edge path, trying to show all parties concerned that the case for Ethiopia goes beyond party allegiance and acrimonious debates bent on settling short term political scores. Last but not the least, Addis neger represented a break away from the Marxist Leninist litany about class contradictions, the national question and socialist liberation in the literal sense of the term. The feature articles consulted the philosophical works of the Right( the writings of Mills, Rawls, Hume and Kant were household names), African American writers and intellectuals in the Civil Rights movement(Du Bois, ML King), and contemporary writers ( Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz etc). For the teeming youth of Ethiopia, Addis Neger was an introduction to multiple intellectual traditions and perspectives that would help it frame and understand the country’s predicament in more ways than one.
Being a closer friend of the writers, I witnessed how feature articles and opinion pieces emerge out of exciting, enriched, critical but constructive debates in Sheger’s coffee shops and restaurants. Addis Neger represented the public space where the youth of Ethiopia begun to toy with novel and youthful ideas of a brighter future. In other words, Addis Neger represented the birth pangs of an attempt to go beyond the shackles of polarized political viewpoints at logger heads with each other. It represented a broad church of ideas where such competing ideologies could speak to each other and learn to appreciate each other’s viewpoints. This was difficult since all nationalist discourses gravitate towards the us-against-them pattern. They also have very little room to tolerate dissenting opinions, ideologies, or narratives from within or without. The overriding urge is to ‘unite’ against the ‘other’. Addis Neger took up the challenge to domesticate them through encouraging a civil and democratic exchange of ideas. This was a tall order but impeccably undertaken.
________
The writer can be reached at derese@gmail.com
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Politics and the Press in Ethiopia: An Interview with Journalist Abiye Teklemariam
Ron Singer, The Faster Times
DECEMBER 8, 2009: ADDIS NEGER ANNOUNCES ITS IMMEDIATE CLOSURE, CITING PERSECUTION OF ITS EDITORS.
Abiye Teklemariam (b. 1978) is a founding editor of Addis Neger (”New Addis”), Ethiopia’s leading dissident newspaper. I was introduced to Abiye by the Committee to Protect Journalists, and took the opportunity to interview him on May 25, 2009 at Ledig House in Omi, New York, where he was in residence working on a book about the prospects for Ethiopian democracy. Currently, he is doing a media and democracy project as a researcher at the University of Oxford. A follow-up interview is anticipated for early 2011 in Addis. These interviews will form the basis for a chapter in my book, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with African Pro-Democracy Leaders (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press). -Ron Singer
[Note: all material in square brackets has been added by the author -RS]
RS: Tell me about your early life and motives for becoming a dissident journalist. [Abiye was raised in Addis, where he was educated and got his first degree, in Law.]
AT: I formed a lot of my opinions in later years, in university. The poverty, etc. a lot of things that were happening, led me to sympathize with the fate of others. I did not think at that time that my path was journalism. I turned to journalism in 1999, eight years after the Derg left power. [The Derg, a Marxist dictatorship mostly under Mengistu Halle Mariam, b. 1937, ruled Ethiopia from 1974-1991.] When I was working on my Masters, it gave me time for reflection. I realized we can’t practice law without the context of society-culture, the political regime, and so on. I decided I could best serve my country by working in either politics or political aspects of my country. [In 1999, still a lawyer, he started writing for newspapers about human rights and the law.]
RS: What is the relationship between Ethiopia’s two most recent governments?
AT: The Zenawi government [Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, b.1955, head of the Ethiopian People's Democratic Revolutionary Front, in power since 1995] is not like the Derg, which tortured and terrorized people. The Zenawi government sees itself as modern, democratic … but there is a gap between what it says it is and what it really is. It uses very systematic ways of harassing people. Despite the dramatic differences in style, both are, yes, dictatorships. Zenawi is one of the most educated guys in Ethiopia, has the best intellect and best understanding of the world even among the new breed of African leaders. He got his Ph.D. from Columbia -after seventeen years of leading the war against the Derg. There is none of that cult business, with pictures in public. He’s now fifty-four, knows how to trick the West. For example, he characterizes the press as “extremists,” but also cites the press as evidence that Ethiopia is a democratic country. Like all our leaders recently, he is very short! But no Napoleon complex, more of a self-effacing, thoughtful, measured manner that he assumes internationally, when he speaks English. He claims at conferences, and so forth, to be a mere spokesman for his party and people, and doesn’t go out of his way to demonize the opposition. But at home he is crude, a menacing bully and dictator. All the so-called independent elements in the Ethiopian government do what he says. He sounds a lot different in Amharic, arrogant and snarky. In Parliament, he demonizes the opposition. His command of language is excellent.
[I mentioned a panel discussion which I had attended at the 92nd Street Y, in New York, where Abebe Zegeye, an academic who studies human rights, was outspoken until asked a question by someone who identified himself as representing the Ethiopian Consulate. After that, Zegeye visibly clammed up. Abiye said that, yes, Zegeye, who works out of South Africa, would want to be able to get back into Ethiopia. He must have realized the man from the Consulate had been sent to spy on him.]
RS: What about the roles of well-known pro-democratic activists, Mesfin Wolde-Marriam [b.1930] and Adam Melaku [b.?]?
AT: They’re both teachers. Wolde-Marriam is a very principled man, he’s stood up for rights for years. I don’t consider him as a person who can forge a democratic way for Ethiopia. But his ideas have influenced a lot of the younger generation.
RS: What of the changes the Derg made: to redress long-standing ethnic and gender inequalities? Can’t those be characterized as “progressive”?
AT: The Derg was kind of a pseudo-Marxist organization, emulating eastern Europe and Russia. Some of their courses of action do make them appear “progressive,” but I don’t think they were, not at all. Women’s rights were pushed by the Derg, yes, but they had already been pushed by Haile Selassie [1892-1975]. “Equality” under the Derg was Robespierrean equality -everyone was poor, equal opportunity killing, equal opportunity torture. So, no, they were not progressive. The Derg was a reaction to Haile Selassie and to feudal systems. In their first few years, they redressed ethnic imbalances of power
RS: Isn’t that a good thing?
AT: Well, yes. But ethnic politics brought other problems, problems of national identity. The ethnic politics genie left the bottle and destroyed the raison d’etre of the state. Now the government is a weak confederation [although, on paper, a Federation], but also a dictatorship. In practice, it is a unitary government with Zenawi exercising all real power through his personal brilliance, brutality and tactics. As the years passed after the 2005 election, they became like all groups that stay in power too long. After seventeen years, a quagmire of corruption. And after all their sacrifices before that … . Even Mugabe [Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, b.1924] once had a vision for his country. What happened after he got in power was completely contrary to what he was before. The new Ethiopian government also had a vision, and they tried hard, at first. Now they’re interested in staying in power -that’s all.
RS: What type of journalist are you? Do you cover events?
AT: I’m a political analyst. Others on my paper cover; I analyze, afterward.
RS: How is the press in Ethiopia controlled?
AT: A predecessor paper to Addis Neger, called Meznagna, was shut down just after the 2005 election. Now they don’t shut you down, they harass and harangue and use trick tactics to scare you. You don’t know when they act, and when they don’t act. You write something very critical and important, expecting the worst. Nothing happens. But a month later, you write this innocuous, silly article, and suddenly you’re arrested and thrown in jail for ten days, released just before the CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists] can get involved. That has a chilling effect. You try to be as cautious as possible. They are very careful, very systematic.
RS: Has the diaspora played a role?
AT: Yes, the internet has enabled the diaspora to play a role in Ethiopian affairs. In 2005, at their long-distance urging, when it became apparent the election had been rigged, elected opposition legislators decided not to take their seats. This triggered an anomalous reaction by the President, who put the protesters, as well as their vocal press supporters and lawyers, in jail for eighteen to twenty-four months. In effect, this spelled the end of the Ethiopian opposition, at least until today.
RS: What role does ethnicity play in Ethiopian politics today?
AT: Zenawi’s base is very narrow, his own ethnic group, the Tigray [6.2% of the population], at the northern tip of Ethiopia. The Derg tried to eradicate this group and to give power to groups from the traditionally oppressed south. Haile Selassie’s dynasty was Amharic. The Tigray and Amhara are similar, two historically dominant groups, not numerically, but in terms of power. They also have had a serious, long-term power rivalry. In recent times, the Amaharic had ruled for a hundred years, then the Derg, so Tigreans had been out of power a long time before Zenawi.
RS: Can’t he expand his power base, get beyond ethnic support.
AT: Once ethnicity is injected into politics, as it has been, it is very difficult to get away from it. Even if you deliver important services to a region, they’ll still vote for their own. The same thing happened after the recent Kenyan elections [2007]. Once ethnic politics is out of the bottle, there is great trouble putting it back. Meles understands that, always tries to rally his base.
RS: What has Addis Neger said about Somalia?
AT: We think Ethiopia has exacerbated Somalia’s problems, which are very serious and complex. Our intervention there was mistimed, mismanaged, and there was a lot of bad calculation. They went in again last week [May 21, 2009], just after Susan Rice [Obama appointee as Permanent Representative to the U.N.] visited Ethiopia. Most Ethiopians have been in favor of the policy of weakening Somalia, continuously since the Derg, because of territorial issues raised since the independence of Somalia in 1960, with the subsequent attempt to unify all ethnic Somalis -including Ogaden [Ethiopian province]-into “greater Somalia.” Ethiopian governments have wanted to destabilize, to fragment, Somalia. In 2005, the Islamists looked like unifying and controlling Somalia, so Ethiopia stepped up interference. Neither did the U.S. want Islamist rule, but Ethiopia feared it more. The Ethiopian government has also used the Somalian scare to divert people’s attention from their own domestic failings.
RS: What approach does Addis Neger take to the Federation issue?
AT: We certainly don’t go out of our way to say we are ruled by a majority regime! There are groups in Ethiopia who say that the country is one nation, and there are groups in Ethiopia who say that it is not one nation. So what we say to them all is, okay, but we have to agree on a system, we have to come up with a solution in-between. Some think the second camp [those who say Ethiopia isn't one nation] is just a fake creation of the elite of some groups. But the hegemonic government is also the creation of an elite. Ethiopian politics is elite politics. No mass participation at all. The claim by elite groups that “the people want this or that” is just a claim. Nobody knows what the Ethiopian people really want, as Ethiopia has never had a grain of democracy. All these ideas are created by the elite, so the elite have to sit down and come up with a solution.
RS: So you favor more federalism and more democracy?
AT: Yes, we favor that., some kind of stronger federalism which incorporates the ideas of both groups and much more democracy, much more individual freedom and equality.
RS: Who is your paper’s audience? your readers? Are you elitists?
AT: We are criticized for this. Given literacy, education, and the structure of Ethiopian society, yes, we write for the elite. Even the figure 39% given for literacy is not for the kind of literacy needed for these arguments, for which functional literacy is more like 14%. The educated have a lot of influence, get a lot of respect, in a country like ours. If I go to my father and tell him to vote for an opposition candidate, he will do it. So we write for those who have this influence. Our paper is very analytic, like The Guardian.
RS: Tell me about your book.
AT: I’m dealing with the possibility of democracy in Ethiopia. Not the approach of looking for broad elements of Ethiopian history and culture as beacons for the future. But looking at how the progressive movements in Ethiopian history, where national identity was forged, like those in the history of Europe, can be seen as bases for future democracy.
RS: Are there any questions you’d like to ask me?
AT (laughs): No.
RS: Then we should stop. Thank you so much. What will you do now?
AT: Wait for my dinner.
DECEMBER 8, 2009: ADDIS NEGER ANNOUNCES ITS IMMEDIATE CLOSURE, CITING PERSECUTION OF ITS EDITORS.
Abiye Teklemariam (b. 1978) is a founding editor of Addis Neger (”New Addis”), Ethiopia’s leading dissident newspaper. I was introduced to Abiye by the Committee to Protect Journalists, and took the opportunity to interview him on May 25, 2009 at Ledig House in Omi, New York, where he was in residence working on a book about the prospects for Ethiopian democracy. Currently, he is doing a media and democracy project as a researcher at the University of Oxford. A follow-up interview is anticipated for early 2011 in Addis. These interviews will form the basis for a chapter in my book, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with African Pro-Democracy Leaders (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press). -Ron Singer
[Note: all material in square brackets has been added by the author -RS]
RS: Tell me about your early life and motives for becoming a dissident journalist. [Abiye was raised in Addis, where he was educated and got his first degree, in Law.]
AT: I formed a lot of my opinions in later years, in university. The poverty, etc. a lot of things that were happening, led me to sympathize with the fate of others. I did not think at that time that my path was journalism. I turned to journalism in 1999, eight years after the Derg left power. [The Derg, a Marxist dictatorship mostly under Mengistu Halle Mariam, b. 1937, ruled Ethiopia from 1974-1991.] When I was working on my Masters, it gave me time for reflection. I realized we can’t practice law without the context of society-culture, the political regime, and so on. I decided I could best serve my country by working in either politics or political aspects of my country. [In 1999, still a lawyer, he started writing for newspapers about human rights and the law.]
RS: What is the relationship between Ethiopia’s two most recent governments?
AT: The Zenawi government [Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, b.1955, head of the Ethiopian People's Democratic Revolutionary Front, in power since 1995] is not like the Derg, which tortured and terrorized people. The Zenawi government sees itself as modern, democratic … but there is a gap between what it says it is and what it really is. It uses very systematic ways of harassing people. Despite the dramatic differences in style, both are, yes, dictatorships. Zenawi is one of the most educated guys in Ethiopia, has the best intellect and best understanding of the world even among the new breed of African leaders. He got his Ph.D. from Columbia -after seventeen years of leading the war against the Derg. There is none of that cult business, with pictures in public. He’s now fifty-four, knows how to trick the West. For example, he characterizes the press as “extremists,” but also cites the press as evidence that Ethiopia is a democratic country. Like all our leaders recently, he is very short! But no Napoleon complex, more of a self-effacing, thoughtful, measured manner that he assumes internationally, when he speaks English. He claims at conferences, and so forth, to be a mere spokesman for his party and people, and doesn’t go out of his way to demonize the opposition. But at home he is crude, a menacing bully and dictator. All the so-called independent elements in the Ethiopian government do what he says. He sounds a lot different in Amharic, arrogant and snarky. In Parliament, he demonizes the opposition. His command of language is excellent.
[I mentioned a panel discussion which I had attended at the 92nd Street Y, in New York, where Abebe Zegeye, an academic who studies human rights, was outspoken until asked a question by someone who identified himself as representing the Ethiopian Consulate. After that, Zegeye visibly clammed up. Abiye said that, yes, Zegeye, who works out of South Africa, would want to be able to get back into Ethiopia. He must have realized the man from the Consulate had been sent to spy on him.]
RS: What about the roles of well-known pro-democratic activists, Mesfin Wolde-Marriam [b.1930] and Adam Melaku [b.?]?
AT: They’re both teachers. Wolde-Marriam is a very principled man, he’s stood up for rights for years. I don’t consider him as a person who can forge a democratic way for Ethiopia. But his ideas have influenced a lot of the younger generation.
RS: What of the changes the Derg made: to redress long-standing ethnic and gender inequalities? Can’t those be characterized as “progressive”?
AT: The Derg was kind of a pseudo-Marxist organization, emulating eastern Europe and Russia. Some of their courses of action do make them appear “progressive,” but I don’t think they were, not at all. Women’s rights were pushed by the Derg, yes, but they had already been pushed by Haile Selassie [1892-1975]. “Equality” under the Derg was Robespierrean equality -everyone was poor, equal opportunity killing, equal opportunity torture. So, no, they were not progressive. The Derg was a reaction to Haile Selassie and to feudal systems. In their first few years, they redressed ethnic imbalances of power
RS: Isn’t that a good thing?
AT: Well, yes. But ethnic politics brought other problems, problems of national identity. The ethnic politics genie left the bottle and destroyed the raison d’etre of the state. Now the government is a weak confederation [although, on paper, a Federation], but also a dictatorship. In practice, it is a unitary government with Zenawi exercising all real power through his personal brilliance, brutality and tactics. As the years passed after the 2005 election, they became like all groups that stay in power too long. After seventeen years, a quagmire of corruption. And after all their sacrifices before that … . Even Mugabe [Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, b.1924] once had a vision for his country. What happened after he got in power was completely contrary to what he was before. The new Ethiopian government also had a vision, and they tried hard, at first. Now they’re interested in staying in power -that’s all.
RS: What type of journalist are you? Do you cover events?
AT: I’m a political analyst. Others on my paper cover; I analyze, afterward.
RS: How is the press in Ethiopia controlled?
AT: A predecessor paper to Addis Neger, called Meznagna, was shut down just after the 2005 election. Now they don’t shut you down, they harass and harangue and use trick tactics to scare you. You don’t know when they act, and when they don’t act. You write something very critical and important, expecting the worst. Nothing happens. But a month later, you write this innocuous, silly article, and suddenly you’re arrested and thrown in jail for ten days, released just before the CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists] can get involved. That has a chilling effect. You try to be as cautious as possible. They are very careful, very systematic.
RS: Has the diaspora played a role?
AT: Yes, the internet has enabled the diaspora to play a role in Ethiopian affairs. In 2005, at their long-distance urging, when it became apparent the election had been rigged, elected opposition legislators decided not to take their seats. This triggered an anomalous reaction by the President, who put the protesters, as well as their vocal press supporters and lawyers, in jail for eighteen to twenty-four months. In effect, this spelled the end of the Ethiopian opposition, at least until today.
RS: What role does ethnicity play in Ethiopian politics today?
AT: Zenawi’s base is very narrow, his own ethnic group, the Tigray [6.2% of the population], at the northern tip of Ethiopia. The Derg tried to eradicate this group and to give power to groups from the traditionally oppressed south. Haile Selassie’s dynasty was Amharic. The Tigray and Amhara are similar, two historically dominant groups, not numerically, but in terms of power. They also have had a serious, long-term power rivalry. In recent times, the Amaharic had ruled for a hundred years, then the Derg, so Tigreans had been out of power a long time before Zenawi.
RS: Can’t he expand his power base, get beyond ethnic support.
AT: Once ethnicity is injected into politics, as it has been, it is very difficult to get away from it. Even if you deliver important services to a region, they’ll still vote for their own. The same thing happened after the recent Kenyan elections [2007]. Once ethnic politics is out of the bottle, there is great trouble putting it back. Meles understands that, always tries to rally his base.
RS: What has Addis Neger said about Somalia?
AT: We think Ethiopia has exacerbated Somalia’s problems, which are very serious and complex. Our intervention there was mistimed, mismanaged, and there was a lot of bad calculation. They went in again last week [May 21, 2009], just after Susan Rice [Obama appointee as Permanent Representative to the U.N.] visited Ethiopia. Most Ethiopians have been in favor of the policy of weakening Somalia, continuously since the Derg, because of territorial issues raised since the independence of Somalia in 1960, with the subsequent attempt to unify all ethnic Somalis -including Ogaden [Ethiopian province]-into “greater Somalia.” Ethiopian governments have wanted to destabilize, to fragment, Somalia. In 2005, the Islamists looked like unifying and controlling Somalia, so Ethiopia stepped up interference. Neither did the U.S. want Islamist rule, but Ethiopia feared it more. The Ethiopian government has also used the Somalian scare to divert people’s attention from their own domestic failings.
RS: What approach does Addis Neger take to the Federation issue?
AT: We certainly don’t go out of our way to say we are ruled by a majority regime! There are groups in Ethiopia who say that the country is one nation, and there are groups in Ethiopia who say that it is not one nation. So what we say to them all is, okay, but we have to agree on a system, we have to come up with a solution in-between. Some think the second camp [those who say Ethiopia isn't one nation] is just a fake creation of the elite of some groups. But the hegemonic government is also the creation of an elite. Ethiopian politics is elite politics. No mass participation at all. The claim by elite groups that “the people want this or that” is just a claim. Nobody knows what the Ethiopian people really want, as Ethiopia has never had a grain of democracy. All these ideas are created by the elite, so the elite have to sit down and come up with a solution.
RS: So you favor more federalism and more democracy?
AT: Yes, we favor that., some kind of stronger federalism which incorporates the ideas of both groups and much more democracy, much more individual freedom and equality.
RS: Who is your paper’s audience? your readers? Are you elitists?
AT: We are criticized for this. Given literacy, education, and the structure of Ethiopian society, yes, we write for the elite. Even the figure 39% given for literacy is not for the kind of literacy needed for these arguments, for which functional literacy is more like 14%. The educated have a lot of influence, get a lot of respect, in a country like ours. If I go to my father and tell him to vote for an opposition candidate, he will do it. So we write for those who have this influence. Our paper is very analytic, like The Guardian.
RS: Tell me about your book.
AT: I’m dealing with the possibility of democracy in Ethiopia. Not the approach of looking for broad elements of Ethiopian history and culture as beacons for the future. But looking at how the progressive movements in Ethiopian history, where national identity was forged, like those in the history of Europe, can be seen as bases for future democracy.
RS: Are there any questions you’d like to ask me?
AT (laughs): No.
RS: Then we should stop. Thank you so much. What will you do now?
AT: Wait for my dinner.
Africans slam Zenawi-Sarkozy appeal
Radio France International
African NGOs at the Copenhagen Climate Conference on Wednesday accused Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is selling out Africa after he backed a joint statement with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance say that Zenawi, whom African countries named their "chief negotiator" at Copenhagen, is "undermining" his fellow negotiators and endangering Africa's future.
They are furious that the joint statement called for a global warming limit a 2°C above pre-industrial levels - compared to the 1.5°C that poorer countries earlier said was the highest figure they were prepared to accept.
A 2°C rise would mean a 3.5°C rise for the African continent, the campaigners claim, "threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including the Ethiopian people".
And they point out that promises of aid to vulnerable countries at the moment seem to be no higher than ten billion dollars (seven billion euros) over three years, starting in 2010, which they consider a derisory sum.
Meanwhile Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt declared Wednesday that he is unsure that the conference will even agree the 2°C target. Reinfeldt was speaking at the European parliament in Brussels, before travelling to Copenhagen where he will represent the European Union along with Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
In what officials are describing as a protocol formality, the Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen is taking over as chairman of the climate tlalks, replacing Coni Hedegaard who will lead informal talks.
Danish police on Wednesday fired tear gas and arrested more than 100 activists, who were among 1,500 who tried to march on the Copenhagen conference centre.
The protesters accuse the politicians from 194 countries of preparing an inadequate response to global warming.
NGOs are also angry that thousands of their members have been refused entry to the Bella Conference Center, despite having badges.
Organisers have accepted the blame for the problem, saying that 46,000 people want to attend but that the centre has only a 15,000 capacity. The NGOs say the politicians do not want to hear their voices.
African NGOs at the Copenhagen Climate Conference on Wednesday accused Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is selling out Africa after he backed a joint statement with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance say that Zenawi, whom African countries named their "chief negotiator" at Copenhagen, is "undermining" his fellow negotiators and endangering Africa's future.
They are furious that the joint statement called for a global warming limit a 2°C above pre-industrial levels - compared to the 1.5°C that poorer countries earlier said was the highest figure they were prepared to accept.
A 2°C rise would mean a 3.5°C rise for the African continent, the campaigners claim, "threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including the Ethiopian people".
And they point out that promises of aid to vulnerable countries at the moment seem to be no higher than ten billion dollars (seven billion euros) over three years, starting in 2010, which they consider a derisory sum.
Meanwhile Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt declared Wednesday that he is unsure that the conference will even agree the 2°C target. Reinfeldt was speaking at the European parliament in Brussels, before travelling to Copenhagen where he will represent the European Union along with Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
In what officials are describing as a protocol formality, the Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen is taking over as chairman of the climate tlalks, replacing Coni Hedegaard who will lead informal talks.
Danish police on Wednesday fired tear gas and arrested more than 100 activists, who were among 1,500 who tried to march on the Copenhagen conference centre.
The protesters accuse the politicians from 194 countries of preparing an inadequate response to global warming.
NGOs are also angry that thousands of their members have been refused entry to the Bella Conference Center, despite having badges.
Organisers have accepted the blame for the problem, saying that 46,000 people want to attend but that the centre has only a 15,000 capacity. The NGOs say the politicians do not want to hear their voices.
Why have they locked Birtukan in jail?
By Abiye Teklemariam
One blazing hot Sunday afternoon in December, I drove my old BMW 316i to Ferensay Legacion, an area in northeast Addis Ababa dotted with clusters of shanties. The roads were layered with unevenly carved cobble stones and red sand which made driving nearly impossible. Outside most of the small hovels, which were made of mud walls and corrugated tin roofs, stood people--mostly women, talking to each other and fetching water from public spigots. Most of them were dressed in threadbare clothes and dust-covered sandals. A young woman with a baby tied on her back waved her right hand as I drove by. Birtukan Mideksa, the young, charismatic leader of Ethiopia’s biggest opposition, had lived in the village all her life except when she was in Kaliti, the notorious Ethiopian jail. “This is who I am. Ferensay is not just a village to me. It represents the ethos of solidarity, self-sacrifice and fighting to succeed in spite of adversity,” she told the crowd of adoring villagers, who gathered to celebrate her courage and leadership in late August 2007.
Birtukan, who is 35, lived in a three-room house set behind a crumbling tin fence with her three-year -ld daughter, her mom and niece. She met me just outside of the house where I parked my car and led me to her room. She was dressed ordinarily; tight jeans and blue linen shirt. No make-up. Her hair was pulled back tightly, and her high cheek bones and soft facial features were fully exposed. Her eyes were wet and lined in red. “Sleepless nights?” I asked her. She proffered an inscrutable smile in response. A neatly organized shelf lined by books with broad ranging themes occupied the left corner of the room. There were Jean P. Sarte’s Being and Nothingness, Messay Kebede’s Survival and Modernization, and John Austin’s The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. “Most of them were sent to me when I was in prison by friends and people I don’t even know,” she said, pointing to the shelf. The right side of the room was dominated by a big poster of Aung San Suu Kyi, her idol. She directed me to her bed and said, “You can sit there if you don’t mind, or I will ask them to bring you a stool.” She sat on the opposite end of the bed.
This was one day before a re-arrest which would condemn her to life in prison, and she knew what was coming. Did she think they would put her in jail? “You have to know that they are paper tigers. They are weak, but want to appear strong. They would think caging a woman with a three year old daughter who lives under their firm surveillance every day demonstrates their toughness.” She smiled nervously. “I don’t want to go to jail. It is terrible, but defiance is the only way to beat them.” Birtukan has a well-earned reputation of fearlessness, but here she seemed shaken. She folded her arms over her stomach, and disappeared into herself for a few minutes. “I am apprehensive of prison,” she said as her daughter poked her head in and looked playfully at her mother. “I have a daughter who needs me, a mother who is old.” Then her passion flares. Her hands unfold; her face frowns. “They forcefully make people hostage to their family and social commitments. They compel you to choose between freedom and family.”
Over the past 15 years, Ethiopians have become accustomed to politico-criminal arrests and trials. Journalists accused of threatening the national security of the country, opposition politicians put in trial for treason and attempted genocide, regime-opponent artists jailed for crimes petty and serious, and government officials charged with corruption - coincidentally, most of them after they started raising their voices against Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. But no affair has befuddled and stunned as many as the Birtukan case. Why have they imprisoned her?
A month earlier, Birtukan arrived in London in a driving downpour, hustling through umbrella-wielding political friends to reach the car awaiting her. This was the start of her two-week trip to Europe. She would visit supporters of her party, raise funds, explain her party’s political objectives and strategic choices, and meet officials of different countries. She had delayed her trip for weeks because she wanted to follow the US elections from home. “Obama dazzled her. She read his two books, listened to his speeches and, like millions, thought he was the real deal,” said journalist Tamerat Negera. “She saw herself in him. Her political ambition has always been to seek a common ground in a country which is polarized by ethnicity, conflict and ideology.”
The trip to Europe was one of the biggest challenges to this ambition. After the internal feud which tore apart the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) apart, a party on which numerous Ethiopians pinned their hopes, many Diaspora Ethiopians had become frosty and suspicious towards opposition politicians. Her newly- minted party’s claim of the mantle of a CUD successor had serious doubters. In the ten months since the split of the CUD, even her ardent supporters questioned whether she had the necessary leadership skills and toughness to revive the opposition movement. Critics accused her of “surrender” to the EPRDF when she declared that her party had chosen “peaceful struggle”. Ethiopianreview, an influential website published in America, declared that the “Lady Liberty became Lady Surrender.” Europe was experiencing one of its coldest autumns in history; Birtukan hoped her political trip didn’t mirror the weather.
She also knew she had to walk a tightrope. Critics of the Meles government would blow horns in support if she made high-pitched, passionate anti-government remarks. But she cared about the consequences of her actions. She thought she was in a long-term political game and there was no reason to endanger her new party.
Generally, the Europe tour went well. Her critics were polite; her unenthusiastic supporters were galvanized. There were a few spats with activists, but they were all behind the screen. But a statement she uttered at a meeting in Sweden would trip her up. She told an audience of not more than 30 Ethiopians that the pardon she and other opposition leaders signed as a condition for their release from prison was the result of a political process and had no formal legal force.
On December 12, 2008, Birtukan was summoned by Workneh Gebeyehu, Ethiopia’s Federal Police Commissioner, and asked to issue an apology for the statement she made in Sweden. Workneh, a man of considerable bulk, is regarded by his colleagues as “a small time boss with big title.” The real power behind the curtain at the Federal Police is the lesser known Tesfaye Aberha, the assistant commissioner. Workineh is, however, the force’s public face. “He does all the dirty laundry and the floor-sweeping as Tesfaye makes decisions out of public and media sights,” said one of Workine’s close friends. He also has a reputation for ruthlessness and Byzantine intrigue, so atypical of the place he came from, the swinging Shashemene.
With him was one of the Prime Minister’s trusted men, Hashim Tewfeik, former State Minister of Justice, now working as a legal advisor to the Federal Police. I first met Hashim in December 2005 at his office in the green and white boxy building which housed the Ministry of Justice. The newspaper I edited was closed by the government and I had submitted a complaint to the Ministry of Justice. Hashim’s secretary arranged the meeting. He was skinny with tapered fingers and thin lips. He wore a blue suit and white shirt. Soft-spoken, articulate and with owlish visage, there was nothing to hint about him the EPRDF official who deliberated in decisions to terrorize the press and opposition leaders and supporters.
Hashim, a close relative of former Supreme Court Chief Justice and Election Board President, Kemal Bedri, was a popular lecturer of law at the Civil Service College before he left for Australia to study constitutional law at the Melbourne Law School. His doctoral dissertation, Ethiopia: the challenge of many nationalities, was a rather unabashed defense of EPRDF’s system of ethnic federalism. In 2004, he returned to Ethiopia; a year later, he was appointed State Minister of Justice, and quickly transformed into one of the regime’s most ardent political operatives.
“I am a student of this constitution and I defend it with all my capacities,” he spoke to me in modest whisper. It was a concealed suggestion that my newspaper had gone over the constitutionally prescribed limits of free speech. When I met Hashim again two years later in a barber shop around Sar Bet, he was already on the verge of leaving the Ministry of Justice to the Federal Police. Befitting such transfer, he was reading At the Center of the Storm: My Ten Years at the CIA, a book by former CIA boss, George Tenet.
Birtukan sat in the room, listening patiently to the two talking about her transgression of the law as they delivered the ultimatum: retract her Stockholm statement within three days, or she would face life imprisonment. She didn’t interrupt them, but her demeanor suggested that she was unfazed. When she spoke, her statement was a question packaged in mischievous brevity. “By what authority are you giving me this ultimatum?”
Two days later, she wrote her last word on the issue in Addis Neger, a weekly newspaper. This was Birtukan in her defiant and fearless mode. “Lawlessness and arrogance are things that I will never get used to, nor will cooperate with,” she penned. “…For them, a peaceful struggle can only be conducted within the limits the ruling party and individual officials set, and not according to the provisions of the constitution. For me, this is hard to accept.” In less than 72 hours, her pardon was revoked and she was dragged to Kaliti federal prison to serve a life sentence.
Why have they arrested her? For many Ethiopians, the entire Stockholm controversy was a grand ruse. Other opposition politicians, including former CUD leader Hailu Shawel, had questioned the credibility of the process of pardon even more forcefully. But not a finger was raised against them. Her accruing days in prison reinforced that suspicion. Even by Ethiopian standards, her treatment has been harsh. She spent more than two months in solitary confinement; she was denied access to books, newspapers and radio. The only people who are permitted to visit her are her mother and daughter; her lawyers have been refused to see her several times. “She is not a normal political prisoner. I have never seen the prime minister so infuriated as when he is asked about her arrest,” says Tamrat Negera. “The notion that her arrest is related to the pardon stuff was hogwash.”
In mid-January, two lawyers appeared on State TV to defend the decision of the government to re-arrest Birtukan. One of them was Shimeles Kemal, a tall man with a narrow face and long chin. Shimeles is such a complex and contradictory character that if he didn’t exist, someone would be obliged to invent him.
At the end of 1970s, Shimeles was a radical, rebellious teenager who dreamed of the formation of an Ethiopian socialist republic. He distributed propaganda leaflets of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party, a Marxist group which was battling a powerful military junta, and agitated his friends for struggle. But like most of his compatriots, he paid dearly for his views and actions. In 1991, the same year armed rebels toppled the junta, the former teenage idealist added a law degree to a CV which included seven years of prison life. His relationship with the new leaders was a roller coaster. As a judge, Shimeles convicted and sentenced the famous dissident Professor Asrat Woldayes, who died of a debilitating disease he acquired in prison. Then he was disgracefully removed from his judgeship while he was presiding over the case of another prominent dissident, Taye Woldesemait.
At the end of 1990s, he turned himself into a defender of free speech, writing brilliant legal and philosophical articles in the weekly newspaper, The Reporter. His friends claimed that the new image he tried to cultivate was so contrary to the decisions he made while in black robe that people stopped taking him seriously. With no allies, he ran into the embrace of Bereket Simon, the ruling party’s powerful propaganda man, and effortlessly turned back the clock. By 2006, he had already started drafting laws which would unduly constrain free speech and freedom of the press, prosecuted political detractors, journalists and human rights activists and overseen the expulsion of foreign journalists. His victims included his best friends and ex-girlfriends. Commingled in his brilliant mind are the ideas of the law as an instrument of political power and an utter contempt for political opposition. He has turned into the quintessential lawyer who has no moral qualms, the Jacques Vergas of the Ethiopian government.
In the TV appearance, Shimeles shook his fists threateningly and declared that the members of the press who tried to “patriotize and beatify” her would face criminal prosecution. After the interview, he rushed to his office to prepare a propaganda manual for political discussion. The right side of the first page of the manual was marked in black ink with these words: Attn: to all federal civil servants and regional public relations bureaus. The manual served as a document of discussions which were held in government offices, public corporations and regional public relation offices in February and March. The main theme of the discussions was: Why was Birukan rearrested? The answer was unlikely to emerge either from Shimeles’ TV interview or the manual he had prepared. Both doggedly stuck to the official line. In Addis Ababa, a city given to conspiracy theories, the discussions inflamed speculations and questions: why would they force civil servants to discuss Birtukan’s arrest?
Saturday, March 14, 2009, was the day of off-putting tasks. I had to clear my office desk, pack my bags, and call my friends to say goodbye. A day later, I would board an Ethiopian airlines plane leaving for the US. I put my books and some documents in the trunk of my car and went back to the second floor of my newspaper’s building to fetch old newspapers. Before I left the documentation room, my phone rang. It was my informant, Ashu – name changed to protect his security – who had close contacts with people high up in the EPRDF’s power hierarchy. He wanted to meet me before I left Ethiopia. “Can I see you at Chinkelo Butchery in 30 minutes?” he asked.
When I arrived 15 minutes late, Ashu was already half way through his raw meat, cutting the meet systematically with falcate-shaped knives and eating the slices with injera and spicy awaze sauce. When I told him I couldn’t cut meat, he rolled his eyes in disbelief. Ashu is a plump, moon-faced man with a proclivity for sybaritic life. His “business”, never clearly defined, gave him access to many of the country’s corrupt elite, including some of the biggest officials of the ruling party. As he sat in the butchery wearing a brown Aston Nappa leather jacket and track pants, drinking a bottle of Gouder wine and eating raw meat, many people going in and out of the butchery stopped to greet him, or at least waved at him. His reactions revealed that he loved the attention. In January, I asked Ashu to find out the real reason behind Birtukan’s arrest and he was here to tell me what he discovered. “If you want to know why Birtukan was arrested, follow Siye,” he said.
Birtukan had a gibe she used often in her conversations about politics. “Ethiopia,” she would say, “is the country of the future.” Demographically, her statement makes sense. More than 70% of Ethiopians are less than 30 years old. Politically, young Ethiopians wonder when the supposed generational power shift would occur. “Our politics is all the continuation of the psychodrama of the '60s and '70s,” said Dagnenet Mekonnen, a journalist. “Birtukan is one of the very few exceptions.”
Siye Abraha is among those old political elites. Before the split within the ruling party’s core political group, the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF), Siye was one of the most powerful Ethiopian politicians, known for his dismissive political statements. In 2001, his opposition to Prime Minister Meles landed him in jail. After six years in jail, he came back to the country’s political scene a changed man, both physically and mentally.
His hair was buzzed to a gray stubble; his forehead furrowed with deep lines. He speaks with the calmness and patience of a Scandinavian scholar. Over tea and biscuits in his house in early January 2008, he confided in me that he thought the way forward for Ethiopian politics was consociationalism. A former defense minister and the leader of the military wing of TPLF during its days of armed struggle, talk was cheap for him. He started plotting the creation of a consociational party immediately.
Birtukan was integral to his plans. She was young, energetic, articulate and charismatic. She was the de facto leader of the integrationist movement in Ethiopian politics. But more than anything else, she was regarded as authentic, a person who could rally people. Even after the daily flogging in the headlines, there were few who questioned her integrity. The two started a long political discussion. He wanted to unite all major opposition parties, regardless of their ideologies, based on common minimal principles. She wasn’t entirely convinced of its practicality, but wanted to listen. “I like this guy. Although he may not be telling me all what I want to know, I will patiently listen,” she told me in June 2008. Siye helped create a coalition of some of the major political groups under an umbrella called Medrek, but by the time Birtukan was arrested, the coalition was sorely missing the membership of an important group--Andinet, Birtukan’s party. “It is very close to happening. I don’t know in which form we join Medrek, but we will join them eventually,” she told me a week before her arrest.
“They knew that. They were worried about the two forming a political partnership. He would appeal to members of the EPRDF. She would appeal to a lot of Ethiopians, and with all major groups in it, they thought Medrek would be a formidable coalition,” Ashu said. “I heard that from a top official.” I was skeptical. “So they arrested her just to thwart the formation of a strong political alliance?” His answer was firm. “Yes!”
“But why her? Why not him?” I asked.
He shook his head in irritated disbelief. “You seem to have no clue about the internal dynamics of the TPLF, and I am not going to recite the alphabet with you.”
On April 28, 2009, Washington presented me with a contrary hypothesis. Addis Neger asked me to write about the government’s allegation of a “Ginbot 7” orchestrated attempt to topple it. I rang a Horn of Africa expert whom I met while reporting the 2008 US elections. Sitting at the Thai Coast restaurant near Foggy Bottom, we walked through Ethiopian politics. “Do you think Meles will leave office?” “No.” “What is the perception of Birhanu at Foggy Bottom?” “Mixed, but not enough information.”….And then Birtukan “I think Birtukan grew too big too quickly. She was turning into a darling of foreign diplomats,” he said. “Meles might have wanted to show who was in charge.”
Among the foreign diplomats, nobody loved Birtukan more than Stephane Gompertz, the articulate, ex-French Ambassador in Addis Ababa. Gompertz is an Ethiopia-enthusiast. A skinny man in his late 50s with a retreating hairline, he collected Ethiopian art even before he became his country’s ambassador in Addis. For a person who just served as a Minister Counselor at the French embassy in London, an ambassadorship to Ethiopia might not feel like a promotion, but Gompertz tried hard to get the post. In late 2005, a few months after his arrival in Addis Ababa, he found himself in the middle of one of the country’s worst political problems. Diplomatic efforts to solve the stand-off between the government and the CUD failed, opposition leaders were jailed and the democratic space narrowed significantly. Gompertz continued to push the Meles government to relent. At the same time, he was also making visits to Kaliti prison to meet with Birtukan.. A strong bond developed. “Birtukan could be a great leader of the country in the future. She has some great qualities. She just needs to be a smart political player,” he told me during a lunch at Hotel de Leopol in Kazanchis in April 2008.
And then there was Donald Yamamoto, the diminutive, soft-spoken ex-US ambassador in Addis Ababa who was the classic citizen of the deceptively smooth diplomatic world. But when it came to Birtukan, Yamamoto occasionally meandered off script. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said to politicians in one of the US embassy’s famous cocktail receptions, “I am proud to introduce you to the rock star of Ethiopian politics.” At the time when the media buzz about the rock star appeal of Barack Obama, the ambassador’s statement was interpreted by most guests as a masked comparison of the then Illinois Senator and Birtukan. Similar sentiments were echoing throughout other diplomatic offices in Addis Ababa. Even Vicki Huddelston, the former US chargé d'affaires, who had no sympathy for the Ethiopian opposition was said to be in awe of Birtukan.
But Birtukan never let the soft air kisses touch her face. One evening, I watched her talk to a group of young activists from her party at their office in Meshualekiya, a village in southeast Addis Ababa. Her clear, distinctive voice flowed at a consistent volume with varying pitch; her hands sliced angular patches through the air. There was no prepared text; rather, a stream of passionate, flowery words gushing from the lips and heart of a politician who was living her life on a dramatic scale.
“When I was at the beginning of my political career,” she began and then paused.
“When did I begin politics? Was it last week?” she said, poking fun at herself and her short political career and provoking laughter from her audience. “I thought that diplomatic battle was a major part of the non-violent struggle. In politics, as they say, a week is too long. I have learnt my lessons. This is our fight. We ask them to join the fight for freedom and justice. We ask them to live up to their rhetoric and supposed creed. But we don’t beg them. This is our fight, not theirs. They would come running when they think that we have won it.”
Later in her office, she was drinking strong coffee, one demitasse after another. I asked her about the speech. “We have to stop overemphasizing their value,” she answered. “They like winners. They have strategic objectives which only winners can help them achieve. We should show them that we are winners, not beggars.” If Birtukan had, in talks to activists and private conversations, discounted the role of western countries and their diplomats in Ethiopia, she nonetheless did sometimes flirt with them. They had to be seduced, not trusted.
But are words of affection from diplomats enough to be Birtukan’s ‘La Brea Tar Pits’? In February this year, Meles seemed to lay out the terms. In a characteristic outburst, he contemptuously suggested that Birtukan had thought deliverance would come from “powerful people in powerful positions.” It was a clear finger pointing towards Western diplomats and politicians. “Had we indulged her assumptions, the message that we would have conveyed would be ‘nothing happens to you no matter what you do. If you have friends in higher places, you can ride roughshod with everything. That message I think is a very dangerous political message to convey in an emerging democracy. The rule of law and equality involves everyone.”
Scratch the surface and his statement might not be as significant as it seemed. The Ethiopian prime minister had used explosive accusations against Western nations when he arrested dissidents at home to preempt them from pressuring him to release the jailed. In truth, Meles had given the diplomats an opportunity for that deliverance. Days before her arrest, some asked Birtukan if they could help her escape the country - no doubt on Meles’ nod. Her emphatic “nay” to the offer brought much disappointment. Meles had told them ‘what’ was to come. He had used them as a conduit for communicating his intention to Birtukan, and these actions spoke louder than his calculated outbursts. Birtukan is as far removed from Melesian political values and behavior, but in the understanding of the actions and objectives of the West and its diplomats, they shared the same hemisphere.
“It was never more than ‘she is a decent woman; we like her’ stuff,’ said a political analyst in Addis Ababa, in reference to the statements of the diplomats. “Look, this is about tough-minded realism. No sentiments. While they were blowing kisses to Birtukan, these guys were bedwetting with the thought that Meles was going to resign. Meles knew that. So hopefully did Birtukan. There was no reason for him to arrest her owing to their comments. There must have been other factors. ”
At the beginning of the year, Birtukan’s name was on the lips of many people and the pages of international newspapers. With only days remaining before the first anniversary of her arrest, the outcries have quieted and the ink has dried up. Meanwhile, robbed of Birtukan’s leadership, the opposition coalition is struggling to gain attention and credibility. Western diplomats have also hit the refresh button. The political consequences of her arrest are becoming clearer. The question is: Were they designed?
_________
Abiye Teklemariam Megenta was the Executive Editor of Addis Neger newspaper which announced its closure owing to harassment last week. He can be reached at abiye.megenta@gtc.ox.ac.uk
Birtukan, who is 35, lived in a three-room house set behind a crumbling tin fence with her three-year -ld daughter, her mom and niece. She met me just outside of the house where I parked my car and led me to her room. She was dressed ordinarily; tight jeans and blue linen shirt. No make-up. Her hair was pulled back tightly, and her high cheek bones and soft facial features were fully exposed. Her eyes were wet and lined in red. “Sleepless nights?” I asked her. She proffered an inscrutable smile in response. A neatly organized shelf lined by books with broad ranging themes occupied the left corner of the room. There were Jean P. Sarte’s Being and Nothingness, Messay Kebede’s Survival and Modernization, and John Austin’s The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. “Most of them were sent to me when I was in prison by friends and people I don’t even know,” she said, pointing to the shelf. The right side of the room was dominated by a big poster of Aung San Suu Kyi, her idol. She directed me to her bed and said, “You can sit there if you don’t mind, or I will ask them to bring you a stool.” She sat on the opposite end of the bed.
This was one day before a re-arrest which would condemn her to life in prison, and she knew what was coming. Did she think they would put her in jail? “You have to know that they are paper tigers. They are weak, but want to appear strong. They would think caging a woman with a three year old daughter who lives under their firm surveillance every day demonstrates their toughness.” She smiled nervously. “I don’t want to go to jail. It is terrible, but defiance is the only way to beat them.” Birtukan has a well-earned reputation of fearlessness, but here she seemed shaken. She folded her arms over her stomach, and disappeared into herself for a few minutes. “I am apprehensive of prison,” she said as her daughter poked her head in and looked playfully at her mother. “I have a daughter who needs me, a mother who is old.” Then her passion flares. Her hands unfold; her face frowns. “They forcefully make people hostage to their family and social commitments. They compel you to choose between freedom and family.”
Over the past 15 years, Ethiopians have become accustomed to politico-criminal arrests and trials. Journalists accused of threatening the national security of the country, opposition politicians put in trial for treason and attempted genocide, regime-opponent artists jailed for crimes petty and serious, and government officials charged with corruption - coincidentally, most of them after they started raising their voices against Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. But no affair has befuddled and stunned as many as the Birtukan case. Why have they imprisoned her?
A month earlier, Birtukan arrived in London in a driving downpour, hustling through umbrella-wielding political friends to reach the car awaiting her. This was the start of her two-week trip to Europe. She would visit supporters of her party, raise funds, explain her party’s political objectives and strategic choices, and meet officials of different countries. She had delayed her trip for weeks because she wanted to follow the US elections from home. “Obama dazzled her. She read his two books, listened to his speeches and, like millions, thought he was the real deal,” said journalist Tamerat Negera. “She saw herself in him. Her political ambition has always been to seek a common ground in a country which is polarized by ethnicity, conflict and ideology.”
The trip to Europe was one of the biggest challenges to this ambition. After the internal feud which tore apart the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) apart, a party on which numerous Ethiopians pinned their hopes, many Diaspora Ethiopians had become frosty and suspicious towards opposition politicians. Her newly- minted party’s claim of the mantle of a CUD successor had serious doubters. In the ten months since the split of the CUD, even her ardent supporters questioned whether she had the necessary leadership skills and toughness to revive the opposition movement. Critics accused her of “surrender” to the EPRDF when she declared that her party had chosen “peaceful struggle”. Ethiopianreview, an influential website published in America, declared that the “Lady Liberty became Lady Surrender.” Europe was experiencing one of its coldest autumns in history; Birtukan hoped her political trip didn’t mirror the weather.
She also knew she had to walk a tightrope. Critics of the Meles government would blow horns in support if she made high-pitched, passionate anti-government remarks. But she cared about the consequences of her actions. She thought she was in a long-term political game and there was no reason to endanger her new party.
Generally, the Europe tour went well. Her critics were polite; her unenthusiastic supporters were galvanized. There were a few spats with activists, but they were all behind the screen. But a statement she uttered at a meeting in Sweden would trip her up. She told an audience of not more than 30 Ethiopians that the pardon she and other opposition leaders signed as a condition for their release from prison was the result of a political process and had no formal legal force.
On December 12, 2008, Birtukan was summoned by Workneh Gebeyehu, Ethiopia’s Federal Police Commissioner, and asked to issue an apology for the statement she made in Sweden. Workneh, a man of considerable bulk, is regarded by his colleagues as “a small time boss with big title.” The real power behind the curtain at the Federal Police is the lesser known Tesfaye Aberha, the assistant commissioner. Workineh is, however, the force’s public face. “He does all the dirty laundry and the floor-sweeping as Tesfaye makes decisions out of public and media sights,” said one of Workine’s close friends. He also has a reputation for ruthlessness and Byzantine intrigue, so atypical of the place he came from, the swinging Shashemene.
With him was one of the Prime Minister’s trusted men, Hashim Tewfeik, former State Minister of Justice, now working as a legal advisor to the Federal Police. I first met Hashim in December 2005 at his office in the green and white boxy building which housed the Ministry of Justice. The newspaper I edited was closed by the government and I had submitted a complaint to the Ministry of Justice. Hashim’s secretary arranged the meeting. He was skinny with tapered fingers and thin lips. He wore a blue suit and white shirt. Soft-spoken, articulate and with owlish visage, there was nothing to hint about him the EPRDF official who deliberated in decisions to terrorize the press and opposition leaders and supporters.
Hashim, a close relative of former Supreme Court Chief Justice and Election Board President, Kemal Bedri, was a popular lecturer of law at the Civil Service College before he left for Australia to study constitutional law at the Melbourne Law School. His doctoral dissertation, Ethiopia: the challenge of many nationalities, was a rather unabashed defense of EPRDF’s system of ethnic federalism. In 2004, he returned to Ethiopia; a year later, he was appointed State Minister of Justice, and quickly transformed into one of the regime’s most ardent political operatives.
“I am a student of this constitution and I defend it with all my capacities,” he spoke to me in modest whisper. It was a concealed suggestion that my newspaper had gone over the constitutionally prescribed limits of free speech. When I met Hashim again two years later in a barber shop around Sar Bet, he was already on the verge of leaving the Ministry of Justice to the Federal Police. Befitting such transfer, he was reading At the Center of the Storm: My Ten Years at the CIA, a book by former CIA boss, George Tenet.
Birtukan sat in the room, listening patiently to the two talking about her transgression of the law as they delivered the ultimatum: retract her Stockholm statement within three days, or she would face life imprisonment. She didn’t interrupt them, but her demeanor suggested that she was unfazed. When she spoke, her statement was a question packaged in mischievous brevity. “By what authority are you giving me this ultimatum?”
Two days later, she wrote her last word on the issue in Addis Neger, a weekly newspaper. This was Birtukan in her defiant and fearless mode. “Lawlessness and arrogance are things that I will never get used to, nor will cooperate with,” she penned. “…For them, a peaceful struggle can only be conducted within the limits the ruling party and individual officials set, and not according to the provisions of the constitution. For me, this is hard to accept.” In less than 72 hours, her pardon was revoked and she was dragged to Kaliti federal prison to serve a life sentence.
Why have they arrested her? For many Ethiopians, the entire Stockholm controversy was a grand ruse. Other opposition politicians, including former CUD leader Hailu Shawel, had questioned the credibility of the process of pardon even more forcefully. But not a finger was raised against them. Her accruing days in prison reinforced that suspicion. Even by Ethiopian standards, her treatment has been harsh. She spent more than two months in solitary confinement; she was denied access to books, newspapers and radio. The only people who are permitted to visit her are her mother and daughter; her lawyers have been refused to see her several times. “She is not a normal political prisoner. I have never seen the prime minister so infuriated as when he is asked about her arrest,” says Tamrat Negera. “The notion that her arrest is related to the pardon stuff was hogwash.”
In mid-January, two lawyers appeared on State TV to defend the decision of the government to re-arrest Birtukan. One of them was Shimeles Kemal, a tall man with a narrow face and long chin. Shimeles is such a complex and contradictory character that if he didn’t exist, someone would be obliged to invent him.
At the end of 1970s, Shimeles was a radical, rebellious teenager who dreamed of the formation of an Ethiopian socialist republic. He distributed propaganda leaflets of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party, a Marxist group which was battling a powerful military junta, and agitated his friends for struggle. But like most of his compatriots, he paid dearly for his views and actions. In 1991, the same year armed rebels toppled the junta, the former teenage idealist added a law degree to a CV which included seven years of prison life. His relationship with the new leaders was a roller coaster. As a judge, Shimeles convicted and sentenced the famous dissident Professor Asrat Woldayes, who died of a debilitating disease he acquired in prison. Then he was disgracefully removed from his judgeship while he was presiding over the case of another prominent dissident, Taye Woldesemait.
At the end of 1990s, he turned himself into a defender of free speech, writing brilliant legal and philosophical articles in the weekly newspaper, The Reporter. His friends claimed that the new image he tried to cultivate was so contrary to the decisions he made while in black robe that people stopped taking him seriously. With no allies, he ran into the embrace of Bereket Simon, the ruling party’s powerful propaganda man, and effortlessly turned back the clock. By 2006, he had already started drafting laws which would unduly constrain free speech and freedom of the press, prosecuted political detractors, journalists and human rights activists and overseen the expulsion of foreign journalists. His victims included his best friends and ex-girlfriends. Commingled in his brilliant mind are the ideas of the law as an instrument of political power and an utter contempt for political opposition. He has turned into the quintessential lawyer who has no moral qualms, the Jacques Vergas of the Ethiopian government.
In the TV appearance, Shimeles shook his fists threateningly and declared that the members of the press who tried to “patriotize and beatify” her would face criminal prosecution. After the interview, he rushed to his office to prepare a propaganda manual for political discussion. The right side of the first page of the manual was marked in black ink with these words: Attn: to all federal civil servants and regional public relations bureaus. The manual served as a document of discussions which were held in government offices, public corporations and regional public relation offices in February and March. The main theme of the discussions was: Why was Birukan rearrested? The answer was unlikely to emerge either from Shimeles’ TV interview or the manual he had prepared. Both doggedly stuck to the official line. In Addis Ababa, a city given to conspiracy theories, the discussions inflamed speculations and questions: why would they force civil servants to discuss Birtukan’s arrest?
Saturday, March 14, 2009, was the day of off-putting tasks. I had to clear my office desk, pack my bags, and call my friends to say goodbye. A day later, I would board an Ethiopian airlines plane leaving for the US. I put my books and some documents in the trunk of my car and went back to the second floor of my newspaper’s building to fetch old newspapers. Before I left the documentation room, my phone rang. It was my informant, Ashu – name changed to protect his security – who had close contacts with people high up in the EPRDF’s power hierarchy. He wanted to meet me before I left Ethiopia. “Can I see you at Chinkelo Butchery in 30 minutes?” he asked.
When I arrived 15 minutes late, Ashu was already half way through his raw meat, cutting the meet systematically with falcate-shaped knives and eating the slices with injera and spicy awaze sauce. When I told him I couldn’t cut meat, he rolled his eyes in disbelief. Ashu is a plump, moon-faced man with a proclivity for sybaritic life. His “business”, never clearly defined, gave him access to many of the country’s corrupt elite, including some of the biggest officials of the ruling party. As he sat in the butchery wearing a brown Aston Nappa leather jacket and track pants, drinking a bottle of Gouder wine and eating raw meat, many people going in and out of the butchery stopped to greet him, or at least waved at him. His reactions revealed that he loved the attention. In January, I asked Ashu to find out the real reason behind Birtukan’s arrest and he was here to tell me what he discovered. “If you want to know why Birtukan was arrested, follow Siye,” he said.
Birtukan had a gibe she used often in her conversations about politics. “Ethiopia,” she would say, “is the country of the future.” Demographically, her statement makes sense. More than 70% of Ethiopians are less than 30 years old. Politically, young Ethiopians wonder when the supposed generational power shift would occur. “Our politics is all the continuation of the psychodrama of the '60s and '70s,” said Dagnenet Mekonnen, a journalist. “Birtukan is one of the very few exceptions.”
Siye Abraha is among those old political elites. Before the split within the ruling party’s core political group, the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF), Siye was one of the most powerful Ethiopian politicians, known for his dismissive political statements. In 2001, his opposition to Prime Minister Meles landed him in jail. After six years in jail, he came back to the country’s political scene a changed man, both physically and mentally.
His hair was buzzed to a gray stubble; his forehead furrowed with deep lines. He speaks with the calmness and patience of a Scandinavian scholar. Over tea and biscuits in his house in early January 2008, he confided in me that he thought the way forward for Ethiopian politics was consociationalism. A former defense minister and the leader of the military wing of TPLF during its days of armed struggle, talk was cheap for him. He started plotting the creation of a consociational party immediately.
Birtukan was integral to his plans. She was young, energetic, articulate and charismatic. She was the de facto leader of the integrationist movement in Ethiopian politics. But more than anything else, she was regarded as authentic, a person who could rally people. Even after the daily flogging in the headlines, there were few who questioned her integrity. The two started a long political discussion. He wanted to unite all major opposition parties, regardless of their ideologies, based on common minimal principles. She wasn’t entirely convinced of its practicality, but wanted to listen. “I like this guy. Although he may not be telling me all what I want to know, I will patiently listen,” she told me in June 2008. Siye helped create a coalition of some of the major political groups under an umbrella called Medrek, but by the time Birtukan was arrested, the coalition was sorely missing the membership of an important group--Andinet, Birtukan’s party. “It is very close to happening. I don’t know in which form we join Medrek, but we will join them eventually,” she told me a week before her arrest.
“They knew that. They were worried about the two forming a political partnership. He would appeal to members of the EPRDF. She would appeal to a lot of Ethiopians, and with all major groups in it, they thought Medrek would be a formidable coalition,” Ashu said. “I heard that from a top official.” I was skeptical. “So they arrested her just to thwart the formation of a strong political alliance?” His answer was firm. “Yes!”
“But why her? Why not him?” I asked.
He shook his head in irritated disbelief. “You seem to have no clue about the internal dynamics of the TPLF, and I am not going to recite the alphabet with you.”
On April 28, 2009, Washington presented me with a contrary hypothesis. Addis Neger asked me to write about the government’s allegation of a “Ginbot 7” orchestrated attempt to topple it. I rang a Horn of Africa expert whom I met while reporting the 2008 US elections. Sitting at the Thai Coast restaurant near Foggy Bottom, we walked through Ethiopian politics. “Do you think Meles will leave office?” “No.” “What is the perception of Birhanu at Foggy Bottom?” “Mixed, but not enough information.”….And then Birtukan “I think Birtukan grew too big too quickly. She was turning into a darling of foreign diplomats,” he said. “Meles might have wanted to show who was in charge.”
Among the foreign diplomats, nobody loved Birtukan more than Stephane Gompertz, the articulate, ex-French Ambassador in Addis Ababa. Gompertz is an Ethiopia-enthusiast. A skinny man in his late 50s with a retreating hairline, he collected Ethiopian art even before he became his country’s ambassador in Addis. For a person who just served as a Minister Counselor at the French embassy in London, an ambassadorship to Ethiopia might not feel like a promotion, but Gompertz tried hard to get the post. In late 2005, a few months after his arrival in Addis Ababa, he found himself in the middle of one of the country’s worst political problems. Diplomatic efforts to solve the stand-off between the government and the CUD failed, opposition leaders were jailed and the democratic space narrowed significantly. Gompertz continued to push the Meles government to relent. At the same time, he was also making visits to Kaliti prison to meet with Birtukan.. A strong bond developed. “Birtukan could be a great leader of the country in the future. She has some great qualities. She just needs to be a smart political player,” he told me during a lunch at Hotel de Leopol in Kazanchis in April 2008.
And then there was Donald Yamamoto, the diminutive, soft-spoken ex-US ambassador in Addis Ababa who was the classic citizen of the deceptively smooth diplomatic world. But when it came to Birtukan, Yamamoto occasionally meandered off script. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said to politicians in one of the US embassy’s famous cocktail receptions, “I am proud to introduce you to the rock star of Ethiopian politics.” At the time when the media buzz about the rock star appeal of Barack Obama, the ambassador’s statement was interpreted by most guests as a masked comparison of the then Illinois Senator and Birtukan. Similar sentiments were echoing throughout other diplomatic offices in Addis Ababa. Even Vicki Huddelston, the former US chargé d'affaires, who had no sympathy for the Ethiopian opposition was said to be in awe of Birtukan.
But Birtukan never let the soft air kisses touch her face. One evening, I watched her talk to a group of young activists from her party at their office in Meshualekiya, a village in southeast Addis Ababa. Her clear, distinctive voice flowed at a consistent volume with varying pitch; her hands sliced angular patches through the air. There was no prepared text; rather, a stream of passionate, flowery words gushing from the lips and heart of a politician who was living her life on a dramatic scale.
“When I was at the beginning of my political career,” she began and then paused.
“When did I begin politics? Was it last week?” she said, poking fun at herself and her short political career and provoking laughter from her audience. “I thought that diplomatic battle was a major part of the non-violent struggle. In politics, as they say, a week is too long. I have learnt my lessons. This is our fight. We ask them to join the fight for freedom and justice. We ask them to live up to their rhetoric and supposed creed. But we don’t beg them. This is our fight, not theirs. They would come running when they think that we have won it.”
Later in her office, she was drinking strong coffee, one demitasse after another. I asked her about the speech. “We have to stop overemphasizing their value,” she answered. “They like winners. They have strategic objectives which only winners can help them achieve. We should show them that we are winners, not beggars.” If Birtukan had, in talks to activists and private conversations, discounted the role of western countries and their diplomats in Ethiopia, she nonetheless did sometimes flirt with them. They had to be seduced, not trusted.
But are words of affection from diplomats enough to be Birtukan’s ‘La Brea Tar Pits’? In February this year, Meles seemed to lay out the terms. In a characteristic outburst, he contemptuously suggested that Birtukan had thought deliverance would come from “powerful people in powerful positions.” It was a clear finger pointing towards Western diplomats and politicians. “Had we indulged her assumptions, the message that we would have conveyed would be ‘nothing happens to you no matter what you do. If you have friends in higher places, you can ride roughshod with everything. That message I think is a very dangerous political message to convey in an emerging democracy. The rule of law and equality involves everyone.”
Scratch the surface and his statement might not be as significant as it seemed. The Ethiopian prime minister had used explosive accusations against Western nations when he arrested dissidents at home to preempt them from pressuring him to release the jailed. In truth, Meles had given the diplomats an opportunity for that deliverance. Days before her arrest, some asked Birtukan if they could help her escape the country - no doubt on Meles’ nod. Her emphatic “nay” to the offer brought much disappointment. Meles had told them ‘what’ was to come. He had used them as a conduit for communicating his intention to Birtukan, and these actions spoke louder than his calculated outbursts. Birtukan is as far removed from Melesian political values and behavior, but in the understanding of the actions and objectives of the West and its diplomats, they shared the same hemisphere.
“It was never more than ‘she is a decent woman; we like her’ stuff,’ said a political analyst in Addis Ababa, in reference to the statements of the diplomats. “Look, this is about tough-minded realism. No sentiments. While they were blowing kisses to Birtukan, these guys were bedwetting with the thought that Meles was going to resign. Meles knew that. So hopefully did Birtukan. There was no reason for him to arrest her owing to their comments. There must have been other factors. ”
At the beginning of the year, Birtukan’s name was on the lips of many people and the pages of international newspapers. With only days remaining before the first anniversary of her arrest, the outcries have quieted and the ink has dried up. Meanwhile, robbed of Birtukan’s leadership, the opposition coalition is struggling to gain attention and credibility. Western diplomats have also hit the refresh button. The political consequences of her arrest are becoming clearer. The question is: Were they designed?
_________
Abiye Teklemariam Megenta was the Executive Editor of Addis Neger newspaper which announced its closure owing to harassment last week. He can be reached at abiye.megenta@gtc.ox.ac.uk
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