“Freedom is partial to no race. Freedom has no religion. Freedom favors no ethnicity. Freedom discriminates not between rich and poor countries. Inevitably freedom will overwhelm Ethiopia.”
These are the words of Ethiopian journalist and dissident blogger Eskinder Nega, published in dissident blogs five days before he was arrested by Ethiopian authorities on charges of terrorism on Sept. 14, 2011.
Shortly before, he had published an online column criticising the Ethiopian government’s use of terrorism laws to silence dissent, and calling for an end to torture in the nation’s prisons. Having been charged in with “plotting terrorist acts to create public chaos,” he is currently an inmate at Maekelawi Prison in Addis Ababa. He faces the death penalty for his perceived transgressions.
Nega has a history of detention by Ethiopian authorities. He was charged with treason after the nation’s disputed general elections of 2005, in which 193 people were killed by security forces. Also charged were dozens of other journalists, including Nega’s wife, Serkalem Fasil, along with human rights activists and political opposition leaders. Nega spent 17 months in jail, but upon his release, did not leave the country. Rather, he chose to stay and continued his work, and some might say his dissidence.
He was detained again early in 2011 after the publication of his online column, asking members of the security services not to shoot unarmed demonstrators, as they had in 2005, in the event that the Arab Spring spreads to Ethiopia. Danger of imprisonment and persecution has driven many potential dissidents into exile, including almost all of Ethiopia’s opposition leaders and independent journalists.
According the Committee to Protect Journalists, more journalists have fled from Ethiopia in the past decade than from any other country in the world, including Iran and Cuba, countries often considered to have the most repressive media constraints. Of those who remain, a total of 11 independent journalists and bloggers have been charged with terrorism in the past year. Seven remain imprisoned. According to both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, they are at risk of torture. Ironically, it was for speaking out against such brutal treatment in prisons that Nega had originally been imprisoned.
The case of Eskinder Nega has been brought to worldwide attention in a number of ways. The arrest of Swedish journalists Martin Schibbye and Johann Persson in Ethiopia in July 2011 began to bring international attention to the repressive media policies of the authoritarian regime, and may well be believed to have created heightened awareness of the media repression underlying Nega’s arrest two months later. Somewhat fittingly, since his arrest, the world has witnessed a huge online campaign for his freedom, stretching from amateur websites to news analysis articles. Due to his position as a primarily online writer, his work continues to be read despite media repression and government censorship in Ethiopia. Just as many websites are censored, more come to fruition, and awareness of Nega’s cause continues to grow in a way which would not be possible through print media alone.
Moreover, in January of this year, a high-profile letter in the New York Review of Books featured the case of Eskinder Nega and petitioned the Western nations to “publically repudiate Ethiopia’s efforts to use terrorism laws to silence political dissent,” highlighting both the large sums of financial aid sent to the country annually and the way in which these must not be used toward “repression.” In the process of such campaigning, it seems clear that Eskinder Nega – in all his courage, persistence and persecution – has become a key symbol of media repression in Africa.
