Ethiopia ranks again Second Worst Place For Journalists: CPJ

The International Press Freedom Watchdog, CPJ ( Committee to Protect Journalists) in its annual report for this year released today disclosed that 2013 is  the worst for journalist worldwide and Ethiopia is one these places where the safety of journalists is under extreme threat. Our country again named the second journalist jailer in Africa and our competitor, Eritrea is clinching its first place by holding twenty-two journalists behind bars for another reason doing their job - journalism. What makes our country is unique that it is incarcerating not only Ethiopians but two journalists from Eritrea who were captured in Somalia during TPLF's military adventure back in 2006. The whereabouts of these two Eritrean journalists are unknown, according to CPJ's report. In the meantime, our rulers are denying that there are no journalist who are jailed due their profession; an insult to our intelligence. But, I still wonder why is my colleague Shifferaw Insermu, who is the longest serving Ethiopian journalist since April 2004 and whose whereabouts is still unknown to these days,
is missing again in CPJ's report? So, the number of journalists imprisoned in Ethiopia should be 8 not 7. According to Amnesty International's report in 2004, Insermu was one the doezens of Oromos who were arrested following a grenade attack in schools and a university college which the government blamed on the outlawed guerrilla fighting group called OLF ( Oromo Liberation Front). It said the following,  The government has blamed the OLF for instigating the demonstrations and bombings, which it has denied. During this time several other Oromos have been arrested in Addis Ababa and accused of links with the OLF. They are held incommunicado, their whereabouts not known, and they may be prisoners of conscience. Among them are people connected with the MTA: board members Dechassa Benti (m) and Shane Korma (m), and former Secretary Legesse Detti (m), arrested in mid-March; Dabassa Wakjira (m) and Shifferaw Insermu (m), from the state-controlled Oromo-language television service, who were arrested on 22 April and accused of passing information to the OLF; Ashebir Kebede (m), Lelisse Timkata (f) and Fikreselassie Bulcha (m) of development NGO Hundee, and Dirar Abdissa (m) of Finfine Oromo Self-Help Organization.  

Ethiopia: 8

Reeyot Alemu, freelance

Imprisoned: June 21, 2011

Ethiopian security forces arrested Reeyot, a prominent, critical columnist for the leading independent weekly Feteh, at an Addis Ababa high school where she taught English. Authorities raided her home and seized documents and other materials before taking her into custody at the Maekelawi federal detention center.

Ethiopian government spokesman Shimelis Kemal said Reeyot was among several people accused of planning terrorist attacks on infrastructure, telecommunications, and power lines in the country with the support of an unnamed international terrorist group and Ethiopia's neighbor, Eritrea, according to news reports. Authorities filed terrorism charges against Reeyot in September 2011, according to local journalists.

The High Court sentenced Reeyot in January 2012 to 14 years in prison for planning a terrorist act; possessing property for a terrorist act; and promoting a terrorist act. The conviction was based on emails she had received from pro-opposition discussion groups; reports she had sent to the U.S.-based opposition news site Ethiopian Review; and unspecified money transfers from her bank account, according to court documents reviewed by CPJ.

CPJ believes Reeyot's conviction is due to columns she wrote that accused authorities of governing by coercion, by (for example) allowing access to economic and educational opportunities only to those who were members of the ruling party, according to CPJ's review of the translations in 2013. In the last column published before her arrest, she wrote that the ruling party had deluded itself in believing it held the legitimacy of popular support in the way of late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, according to local journalists.

In August 2012, the Supreme Court overturned Reeyot's conviction on the planning and possession charges, but upheld the charge of promoting terrorism. The court reducedher sentence to five years.

In January 2013, the Ethiopian Court of Cassation, the last resort for legal appeals in Ethiopia, rejected Reeyot's appeal, according to news reports. She is being held at Kality Prison in Addis Ababa.

In March 2013, prison authorities threatened to place Reeyot in solitary confinement for saying she would publicize the abuse of her rights, according to her lawyer and family members. The same month, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment issued a report that determined Reeyot's rights under the U.N. Convention Against Torture had been violated by the government's failure to respond to allegations of her ill treatment. Reeyot's health had deteriorated while she was held in pretrial detention, reports said.

In April 2013, Reeyot won the 2013 UNESCO-Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in recognition of her courage and commitment to freedom of expression.

In September 2013, prison officials limitedReeyot's visitors to her parents, denying visits from her fiancé, relatives, and friends. The journalist waged a four-day hunger strike in protest. Kemal said that Reeyot was being disciplined for violating prison laws, but did not elaborate, according to news reports.

Eskinder Nega, freelance

Imprisoned: September 14, 2011

Ethiopian security forces arrested Eskinder, a prominent online columnist and former publisher and editor of now-shuttered newspapers, on vague accusations of involvement in a terrorism plot. The arrest came five

days after Eskinder published a column on the U.S.-based news website EthioMedia that criticized the government for misusing the country's sweeping anti-terrorism law to jail prominent journalists and dissident intellectuals.

Shortly after Eskinder's arrest, state television portrayed the journalist as a spy for "foreign forces" and accused him of having links with the banned opposition movement Ginbot 7, which the Ethiopian government designated a terrorist entity. In an interview with Agence France-Presse, government spokesman Shimelis Kemal accused the detainee of plotting "a series of terrorist acts that would likely wreak havoc." Eskinder consistently proclaimed his innocence, but was convicted on the basis of a video of a public town hall meeting in which he discussed the possibility of a popular uprising in Ethiopia if the ruling party did not deliver democratic reform, according to reports.

In July 2012, a federal high court judge in Addis Ababa sentenced Eskinder to an 18-year prison sentence, according to local journalists and news reports. Five exiled journalists were convicted in absentia at the same time.

Also in 2012, a U.N. panel found that Eskinder's imprisonment came as "a result of his peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression," according to a report published in April 2013.

In May 2013, Ethiopia's Supreme Court rejected an appeal and upheld the sentence.

CPJ believes the charges are part of a pattern of government persecution of Eskinder in reprisal for his coverage. In 2011, police detained Eskinder and threatened him in connection with his online columns that drew comparisons between the Egyptian uprising and Ethiopia's 2005 pro-democracy protests, according to news reports. His coverage of the Ethiopian government's repression of the 2005 protests landed him in jail for 17 months on anti-state charges at the time. After his release in 2007, authorities banned his newspapers and denied him licenses to start new ones. He was first arrested in September 1993 in connection with his articles in the Amharic weekly Ethiopis, one of the country's first independent newspapers, about the government's crackdown on dissent in Western Ethiopia, according to CPJ research.

Eskinder was being held at Kality Prison in Addis Ababa, with restricted visitation rights, in late 2013.

 Shiferraw Insermu - Ethiopian Television (ETV)

Imprisoned: April 22, 2004 

Shifferaw Inesrmu is missing

Insermu was jailed along with  another colleague Dhabassa Wakijira of the Ethiopian Television and Radio Agency  in late April 2004 and is missing since he was re-arrested on 11^th of January 2005, after being released and re-arrested several times. Inserum and Wakijira, journalists for the Oromo-language service of the state-owned Ethiopian Television (ETV), were arrested two months before the May 2005 general election, accused of having links the separatist group called OLF.  Based on local newspaper reports, both journalists were held in darkened rooms and they were allegedly tortured. I Googled about him and asked the two Swedish journalists, Johan Persson and Martin Schibbiye, to find out about Inesarmu; but sadly, nobody knows his recent whereabouts. Dhabassa, who had been imprisoned for more than three years since 2004, went in to exile after being released. His wife, Lelise Wodajo who was also jailed and sentenced to ten years with same charges, fled the country with three of their children and reunited with her husband in the Netherlands last August after being released serving three years without trial. I still don't understand why neither local and international rights groups nor the donor communities are interested to question his jailers where they put Insermu or at least put his name in their report. One doesn't have to be a prominent journalist to be arrested in present day Ethiopia; anybody who has an opinion (political or/and religious) other than the TPLF junta authorizes will be behind bars, that's the eye witness accounts of the two imprisoned Swedish journalists who were “pardoned” at the eve of the Ethiopian New Year last year.

Woubshet Taye, Awramba Times

Imprisoned: June 19, 2011

Police arrested Woubshet, deputy editor of the independent weekly Awramba Times, after raiding his home in the capital, Addis Ababa, and confiscating documents, cameras, CDs, and selected copies of the newspaper, according to local journalists. The outlet's top editor, CPJ International Press Freedom Awardee Dawit Kebede, fled the country in November 2011 in fear of being arrested; the newspaper is published online from exile.

Government spokesman Shimelis Kemal said Woubshet was among several people accused of planning terrorist attacks on infrastructure, telecommunications, and power lines with the support of an unnamed international terrorist group and Ethiopia's neighbor, Eritrea, according to news reports. In January 2012, a court in Addis Ababa sentenced Woubshet to 14 years in prison, news reports said.

CPJ believes Woubshet's conviction was in reprisal for Awramba Times' critical coverage of the government. Prior to his arrest, Woubshet had written a column criticizing what he saw as the ruling party's tactics of weakening and dividing the media and the opposition, Dawit told CPJ. Woubshet had been targeted in the past. He was detained for a week in November 2005 during the government's crackdown on news coverage of unrest that followed disputed elections.

In April 2013, authorities transferred Woubshet from Kilinto Prison, outside Addis Ababa, to a detention facility in the town of Ziway, about 83 miles southeast of the capital, according to local journalists and the Awramba Times. Ziway, one Ethiopia's largest prisons, is a maximum-security jail designed for those convicted of serious offenses, according to local journalists. The authorities did not provide a reason for the transfer. In November, Woubshet was transferred back to Kality prison because he was in poor health, according to local journalists.

Woubshet did not appeal his conviction and applied for a pardon, according to local journalists. In August 2013, the Ethiopian Ministry of Justice rejected the request for a pardon, the Awramba Times reported.

In October 2013, Woubshet was honored with the Free Press Africa Award at the CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards in Cape Town, South Africa.

 

Yusuf Getachew, Ye Muslimoch Guday

Imprisoned: July 20, 2012

Police officers raided the Addis Ababa home of Yusuf, editor of the now-defunct Ye Muslimoch Guday (Muslim Affairs), as part of a broad crackdown on journalists and news outlets reporting on protests staged by Ethiopian Muslims. The Muslims were demonstrating against government policies they said interfered with their religious freedom. The government sought to link the protesters to Islamist extremists and tried to suppress coverage by arresting several local and international journalists and forcing publications to close down, according to local journalists and news reports.

After Yusuf's arrest, other Ye Muslimoch Guday journalists went into hiding, and the publication ceased operations, local journalists told CPJ.

Yusuf spent weeks in pre-trial custody at the Maekelawi federal detention center without access to his family and limited contact with his lawyer, according to local journalists.

In October 2012, he was formally charged under the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Law with plotting acts of "terrorism [and] intending to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause," according to local journalists. Yusuf told the court he had been beaten in custody, local journalists told CPJ.

Prosecutors accused Yusuf of inciting violence in columns in Ye Muslimoch Guday by alleging that the government-appointed Supreme Council for Muslim Affairs was corrupt and lacked legitimacy, according to local journalists and court documents obtained by CPJ. The prosecution also used as evidence Yusuf's CDs with Islamic teachings even though these were widely available in markets, according to local journalists.

The editor is being held at Kality Prison in Addis Ababa. The trial was ongoing in late 2013.

Solomon Kebede, Ye Muslimoch Guday

Imprisoned: January 17, 2013

Police arrested the managing director of the now-defunct Ye Muslimoch Guday (Muslim Affairs), as part of a broad crackdown on journalists and news outlets reporting on peaceful protests staged by Ethiopian Muslims against government policies they said interfered with their religious freedom. The government sought to link the protesters to Islamist extremists and attempted to suppress coverage by arresting several local and international journalists and forcing publications to close down, according to local journalists and news reports.

Solomon was held at the Maekelawi federal detention center for weeks without access to his family and with limited contact with his lawyer, according to local journalists.

A few weeks after his arrest, Solomon was formally charged under the Ethiopian anti-terrorism law, according to local journalists. Authorities have not disclosed any evidence against him. His case was ongoing in late 2013, according to a human rights lawyer familiar with matter.

Saleh Idris Gama, Eri-TV
Tesfalidet Kidane Tesfazghi, Eri-TV

Imprisoned: December 2006

Tesfalidet Kidane Tesfazghi

Saleh Idris Gama

Tesfalidet, a producer for Eritrea's state broadcaster Eri-TV, and Saleh, a cameraman, were arrested in late 2006 on the Kenya-Somalia border during Ethiopia's invasion of southern Somalia.

The Ethiopian Foreign Ministry first disclosed the detention of the journalists in April 2007, and presented them on state television as part of a group of 41 captured terrorism suspects, according to CPJ research. Though Eritrea often conscripted journalists into military service, the video did not present any evidence linking the journalists to military activity. The ministry pledged to subject some of the suspects to military trials but did not identify them by name. In a September 2011 press conference with exiled Eritrean journalists in Addis Ababa, the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said Saleh and Tesfalidet would be freed if investigations determined they were not involved in espionage, according to news reports and journalists who participated in the press conference.

But Tesfalidet and Saleh had not been tried by late 2013, and authorities disclosed no information about legal proceedings against them, according to local journalists. Authorities also did not disclose any information about their health or whereabouts.