Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
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withdrawn.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.”
Source: npr.org
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