ETHIOPIA-MEDIA: Muzzling the Independent Press

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jan 13 1997 (IPS) - Ethiopian journalist Kassahun Seboqa Negewo has travelled over 1,000 kilometres, crossing rivers, mountains and forests, to flee the regime of President Meles Zenawi which, he says, forced him to give up his job.

Negewo, who is now in Kenya, fell foul of the Ethiopian authorities when ‘Tomar’, the independent Amharic-language weekly he edited, ran a story in which a former Ethiopian ambassador, Yodit Imiru, called Zenawi’s regime despotic and urged his country’s more than 40 million people to rise up against it.

Imiru is a member of the late emperor Haile Selassie’s family, which ruled Ethiopia for several centuries until 1974.

The Zenawi administration, in power since May 1991, saw Imiru’s interview as linked to a campaign by the late emperor’s supporters and other opposition groups to seize power in Ethiopia.

“Following the publication of the story, I was taken before the attorney-general by Ethiopian authorities and imprisoned for one day,” Negewo told IPS. “Soon after my release … I was given my last warning through a telephone call that I give up my job or else harsh steps may be taken.

“Having no alternative, I abandoned my job on April 15, 1995 and since then went on hiding until I was informed by my workmate, who had also been arrested and ordered to report on my whereabouts. Then, the police chief in charge of the area where I was detained announced through the media that either I surrender or face the consequences.”

Negewo said he was faced with two grim alternatives: either to flee Ethiopia or face death, as he could have been gunned down by security forces.

“I left Addis Ababa on December 11th, 1996 and crossed into Kenya on foot on December 13th 1996,” he said.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says in a recent report titled ‘Clampdown in Addis: Ethiopia’s Journalists at Risk’ that more than 50 Ethiopian journalists were imprisoned from 1993 to 1995. “Of those, 31, were behind bars at the beginning of 1996,” it said.

The CPJ works to get detained journalists out of jail, directs international protest campaigns against repressive governments and provides practical safety information to reporters assigned to dangerous areas. It says Ethiopia’s independent journalists work under threat of arrest and prosecution by either a poorly trained police force or an inexperienced, partisan judiciary working in a backlogged court system.

“Both are spurred on by government officials who are easily offended by public criticism of their policies,” says the report.

The CPJ urged the United States, which supports the Zenawi government and gives Ethiopia the second highest amount of U.S. aid allocated to individual sub-Saharan African countries, to influence the development of a free press in Ethiopia.

It also called on Washington to give media training higher priority when allocating funds for democratization in Ethiopia.

Negewo, who is in touch with the Nairobi office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), claimed that Ethiopian agents were tracking him down so as to kill him. “I feel insecure here,” he said. “There are many Ethiopian hitmen in Nairobi and in various refugee camps in Kenya.”

The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) says his security and safety might be compromised if he continues to stay in the country. “Some Ethiopians have been threatened and in some cases attacked by agents of their government in Kenya,” it said in a Jan. 8 letter to the UNHCR, a copy of which has been made available to IPS.

KHRC’s Njuguna Mutahi urged the UN refugee agency to seek an alternative settlement for Negewo to prevent him from suffering a fate similar to that of Ali Jalani, an exiled Ethiopian opposition politician murdered here in 1992.

Kihu Irimu, secretary-general of the Kenya Union of Journalists, says Negewo has even received threats in Nairobi from people associated with Ethiopian police hunt-down gangs.

“Any assistance given him will go a long way in encouraging other courageous journalists who are today operating under extremely oppressive regimes throughout Africa and the Third World in general,” said Irimu.

Before he fled his country, Negewo received a support letter, dated Dec. 1, from the Ethiopian Free Press Journalists Association (EFJA) in Addis Ababa to highlight his plight to the international community in the Kenyan capital.

“According to his recent written appeal to our office, Kassahun was unable to move freely in Addis Ababa, work and earn his bread due to the persistent hunt-down by the security police, who at one instance in the past had announced over the state radio that a warrant to track him down and arrest him was still in force,” wrote EFJA President Kefale Mammo.

“Kassahun…is under a permanent death threat…the security police might get hold of him and shoot him dead on the spot. He believes … that he has definately lost his right to life in Ethiopia, and that he was forced to look for a better alternative till conditions in Ethiopia improves,” wrote Mammo.

However, President Zenawi recently denied that his government was muzzling freedom of expression. “People are free to express their views in Ethiopia,” he said.