Ethiopia Stifles Dissent, While Giving Impression Of Tolerance, Critics Say

June 8, 20164:06 PM ET

Gregory Warner (NPR)

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn (left), walks alongside President Obama during the U.S. president's visit to the African nation last July. Critics say Ethiopia has cracked down hard on the opposition, but makes modest gestures to give the impression it tolerates some dissent.

SIMON MAINA/AFP/Getty Images

The Oromo Federalist Congress, an opposition party in Ethiopia, represents the largest ethnic group in the country, the Oromo.

Yet its office in the capital Addis Ababa is virtually deserted, with chairs stacked up on tables. A chessboard with bottle caps as pieces is one of the few signs of human habitation. In a side office, the party's chairman, Merera Gudina, explains why the place is so empty: Almost everyone has gone to prison.

The deputy chairman? Prison. The party secretary general? House arrest. The assistant secretary general? In prison. Six members of the party's youth league? All in prison.

Critics of the Ethiopian government regularly land in prison. So why isn't Merera Gudina, the chairman of the party and an outspoken critic of the regime, also behind bars?

The reason, he says, is what he calls "the game of the 21st century." Less-than-democratic regimes are getting more sophisticated, and instead of completely crushing dissent, they seek to create the appearance of tolerance or even a multiparty democracy, explains Merera. (Ethiopians go by their first names).

In the case of Ethiopia, a strategy was laid out by the late former prime minister, Meles Zenawi, after the 2005 election, in which opposition parties won 32 percent of parliament and appeared poised to challenge the government.

"Wait for the opposition to grow legs," Meles said in a meeting with top party officials. "And then cut them off."

Merera says he is the current example of that strategy. He describes himself as a "floating head," while the legs of his party — all his deputies, his candidates, his organizers — are either imprisoned or threatened.

Criticism On Human Rights

Human rights groups are extremely critical of Ethiopia, but it is a member of the international community in good standing.

President Obama paid a visit in July of last year, the first ever by a sitting U.S. president, and held a press conference with Ethiopia's Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.

"We are very mindful of Ethiopia's history, the hardships that this country has gone through," Obama said. "It has been relatively recently in which the Constitution that was formed, and elections put forward a democratically elected government."

A number of human rights groups criticized Obama, saying he should have pressed much harder.

Shortly before Obama's visit, Ethiopia released several noted opposition journalists and politicians. The deputy chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress, Bekele Gerba, was among those freed, and he promptly flew to Washington to sound an alarm bell.

"Every one of us is in a very high risk," he told NPR's Michele Kelemen. "Because anybody who criticizes the government is always a suspect."

Bekele said his wife, a high school teacher, was also forced out of her job because of his politics. Bekele declined to use this trip to the U.S. to stay and apply for asylum. Instead, he said, he was determined to go back to Ethiopia, no matter what would happen.

Opposition Figure Re-Arrested

Soon after his return, Bekele was arrested again, and remains in prison today. Bekele is considered a moderate and he counsels nonviolence. He used his free time in prison to translate the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Merera, the party leader, says that targeting Bekele has a boomerang effect.

"When you are suppressing the moderate voice, then what you get is the radical voice," he warns.

The arrest of moderates inside the country may be amplifying more radical rhetoric in the diaspora, such as rhetoric about "government overthrow" that Ethiopian officials are quick to highlight.

Genenew Assefa, a government spokesman, points out that Ethiopian opposition "tends to be extremist," but also takes his own Justice Ministry to task for arresting so many opposition members.

"And then we put them in jail, and then it's a vicious circle," he says with a sigh. "And this is how it works. I personally, you know, would like to deal with this differently."

He says that he would like Ethiopia to counter criticism with politics, not with police.

But Ethiopian politics appears to be moving away from democratic freedoms, not toward them. In last year's election, the ruling party won 100 percent of the seats in parliament. Even the "floating heads" no longer have a token parliamentary seat.

Merera says that the Ethiopian strategy isn't working.

"You can't arrest everybody," he says. He says that what is brewing is "an intifada (uprising), an Ethiopian intifada — even now, they don't need leadership."

Last November, ethnically Oromo regions of the country erupted in popular protests. Activists say 350 people have been killed, and thousands more arrested. There's a growing fear that Ethiopia's "cut off the legs" strategy is splitting the country.

Freed From Prison, Ethiopian Bloggers Still Can't Leave The Country

By National Public Radio (NPR)

June 1, 2016

Zelalem Kibret remembers the day: July 8, 2015. He was in a prison library reading a biography of Malcolm X, his own copy, when some guards called his name and handed him a piece of paper. The message: All charges against him were withdrawn. He was being released.

"I was asking why," says Zelalem, a 29-year-old lawyer and blogger. "And nobody was giving us a reason."

Zelalem, who'd been in jail for more than a year on terrorism charges related to his blog posts, suspected the reason. His release, he believes, was a "personal gift" to President Obama, then three weeks away from an official visit to Ethiopia, the first ever by a U.S. president.

The U.S. had been pushing quietly the release of Zelalem and five other members of Zone 9, his blogging crew. Zone 9 takes its name from the eight zones of the infamous Kality Prison outside Addis Ababa, where political prisoners and journalists are held. Activists joke that the 9th Zone is everything outside the prison walls — the rest of Ethiopia.

"Zone 9 is Ethiopia with relative freedom, but still you felt that you are in detention," Zelalem explains.

Zelalem and the other Zone 9 bloggers had been critical of corruption and repression by the Ethiopian government, but their blogs and Facebook posts were seen as a relatively safe space for criticism in a country with about 3 percent Internet penetration.

But the arrest of six bloggers, including Zelalem, and three other journalists in 2014 sent a signal that as Facebook was becoming more popular in Ethiopia, digital reportage might now become just as censored as print journalism. Journalists are regularly imprisoned under Ethiopia's wide-ranging anti-terrorism law, which makes it a crime to have contact with any group that the Ethiopian government deems is trying to overthrow it.

At a press conference during Obama's visit, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn conceded, "We need many young journalists to come up." But, he said, "We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism."

The phrase "capacity limitations" — and its cousin, "capacity building" — came out of development lingo of the 1990s. Ethiopian officials often use "capacity" explanations to assert that journalists are jailed not because they are critical of the government — but because they are less professional, more unethical and more incendiary than Ethiopia's fledgling democracy can tolerate.

In keeping with this theme, Hailemariam nodded to Obama's traveling press corps and asked them to "help our journalists to increase their capacity."

Obama had offered an opportunity for just that, promoting his Young African Leaders Initiative, which gives scholarships for 1,000 African leaders to study in the U.S. each summer.

Zelalem, out of prison but unable to get back his university teaching job, followed Obama's advice. He applied and was accepted to the Young African Leaders Initiative. This summer, he was supposed to study civic leadership at the University of Virginia.

He won't be going. Ethiopian immigration officials confiscated his passport at Bole International Airport in November. They also took away the passports of four of his five colleagues who were released in advance of Obama's visit.

That's when Zone 9 became more than a metaphor. They were literally imprisoned in their own country.

Zelalem sees this as evidence of a new strategy. In past years, Ethiopia has been willing to let its critical citizens flee the country. (For several years, Ethiopia has ranked on or near the top of the list of countries with the most exiled journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.) Now, Zelalem says, the government may be deciding that it's better to keep critics close by.

"Especially for people like us working on social media," Zelalem says. "Whether we are here or in America or somewhere else, we may write and we can reach our audiences. Therefore, it's better to keep [us] here and silence [us]."

When I brought up Zelalem's case with Ethiopia's Minister of Communication, Getachew Redda, he said he wasn't familiar with it. But he offered a different explanation for the blogger's rough treatment at the hands of Ethiopian Immigration: Ethiopia's young institutions, he said — including its judges and immigration officials — could zealously overstep their bounds. They could even make mistakes that would take months or years to correct.

The minister's solution? "More capacity building."