Why have they locked Birtukan in jail?

Why have they locked Birtukan in jail?

12 December, 2009 | By Abiye Teklemariam Megenta

One blazing hot Sunday afternoon in

December, I drove my old BMW 316i to

Ferensay Legacion, an area in North East

Addis Ababa dotted with clusters of

shanties.

The roads were layered with unevenly

carved cobble stones and red sand which

made driving nearly impossible. Outside

most of the small hovels, which were made

of mud walls and corrugated tin roofs,

stood people–mostly women, talking to each other and fetching water
from public spigots. Most of them were dressed in threadbare clothes
and dust-covered sandals. A young woman with a baby tied on her
back waved her right hand as I drove by. Birtukan Mideksa, the young,
charismatic leader of Ethiopia’s biggest opposition, had lived in the
village all her life except when she was in Kaliti, the notorious Ethiopian
jail. “This is who I am. Ferensay is not just a village to me. It represents
the ethos of solidarity, self-sacrifice and fighting to succeed in spite of
adversity,” she told the crowd of adoring villagers, who gathered to
celebrate her courage and leadership in late August 2007.

Birtukan, who is 35, lived in a three room house set behind a crumbling
tin fence with her three year old daughter, her mom and niece. She met
me just outside of the house where I parked my car and led me to her
room. She was dressed ordinarily; tight jeans and blue linen shirt. No
make-up. Her hair was pulled back tightly, and her high cheek bones
and soft facial features were fully exposed. Her eyes were wet and lined
in red. “Sleepless nights?” I asked her. She proffered an inscrutable
smile in response. A neatly organized shelf lined by books with broad
ranging themes occupied the left corner of the room. There were Jean
P. Sarte’s “Being and Nothingness,” Messay Kebede’s “Survival and
Modernization,” and John Austin’s “The Province of Jurisprudence
Determined.” “Most of them were sent to me by friends and people I
don’t even know when I was in prison,” she said, pointing to the shelf.
The right side of the room was dominated by a big poster of Aung San
Suu Kyi, her idol. She directed me to her bed and said, “You can sit
there if you don’t mind, or I will ask them to bring you a stool.” She sat
on the opposite end of the bed.

This was one day before a re-arrest which would condemn her to life in
prison, and she knew what was coming. Did she think they would put
her in jail? “You have to know that they are paper tigers. They are
weak, but want to appear strong. They would think caging a woman
with a three year old daughter who lives under their firm surveillance
every day demonstrates their toughness.” She smiled nervously. “I don’
t want to go to jail. It is terrible, but defiance is the only way to beat
them.” Birtukan has a well-earned reputation of fearlessness, but here
she seemed shaken. She folded her arms over her stomach, and
disappeared into herself for a few minutes. “I am apprehensive of
prison,” she said as her daughter poked her head in and looked playfully
at her mother. “I have a daughter who needs me, a mother who is old.”
Then her passion flares. Her hands unfold; her face frowns. “They
forcefully make people hostage to their family and social commitments.
They compel you to choose between freedom and family.”

Over the past 15 years, Ethiopians have become accustomed to politico-
criminal arrests and trials. Journalists accused of threatening the
national security of the country, opposition politicians put in trial for
treason and attempted genocide, regime-opponent artists jailed for
crimes petty and serious, and government officials charged of
corruption- coincidentally, most of them after they started raising their
voices against Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. But no affair has
befuddled and stunned as many as the Birtukan case. Why have they
imprisoned her?

A month earlier, Birtukan arrived in London in a driving downpour,
hustling through umbrella-wielding political friends to reach the car
awaiting her. This was the start of her two-week trip to Europe. She
would visit supporters of her party, raise funds, explain her party’s
political objectives and strategic choices, and meet officials of different
countries. She had delayed her trip for weeks because she wanted to
follow the US elections from home. “Obama dazzled her. She read his
two books, listened to his speeches and, like millions, thought he was
the real deal,” said journalist Tamerat Negera. “She saw herself in him.
Her political ambition has always been to seek a common ground in a
country which is polarized by ethnicity, conflict and ideology.”

The trip to Europe was one of the biggest challenges to this ambition.
After the internal feud which rent apart the Coalition for Unity and
Democracy (CUD), a party to which numerous Ethiopians pinned their
hopes, many Diaspora Ethiopians had become frosty and suspicious
towards opposition politicians. Her newly- minted party’s claim of the
mantle of a CUD successor had serious doubters. In the ten months
since the split of the CUD, even her ardent supporters questioned
whether she had the necessary leadership skills and toughness to revive
the opposition movement. Critics accused her of “surrender” to the
EPRDF when she declared that her party had chosen “peaceful
struggle”. Ethiopianreview, an influential website published in America,
declared that the “Lady Liberty became Lady Surrender.” Europe was
experiencing one of its coldest autumns in history; Birtukan hoped her
political trip didn’t mirror the weather.

She also knew she had to walk a tightrope. Critics of the Meles
government would blow horns in support if she made high-pitched,
passionate anti-government remarks. But she cared about the
consequences of her actions. She thought she was in a long-term
political game and there was no reason to endanger her new party.

Generally, the European trip went well. Her critics were polite; her
unenthusiastic supporters were galvanized. There were a few spats
with activists, but they were all behind the screen. But a statement she
uttered at a meeting in Sweden would trip her up. She told an audience
of not more than 30 Ethiopians that the pardon she and other opposition
leaders signed as a condition for their release from prison was the result
of a political process and had no formal legal force.

On December 12, 2008, Birtukan was summoned by Workneh
Gebeyehu, Ethiopia’s Federal Police Commissioner, and asked to issue
an apology for the statement she made in Sweden. Workneh, a man of
considerable bulk, is regarded by his colleagues as “a small time boss
with big title.” The real power behind the curtain at the Federal Police is
the lesser known Tesfaye Aberha, the assistant commissioner.
Workineh is, however, the force’s public face. “He does all the dirty
laundry and the floor-sweeping as Tesfaye makes decisions out of
public and media sights,” said one of Workine’s close friends. He also
has a reputation for ruthlessness and Byzantine intrigue, so atypical of
the place he came from, the swinging Shashemene.

With him was one of the Prime Minister’s trusted men, Hashim
Tewfeik, former State Minister of Justice, now working as a legal
advisor to the Federal Police. I first met Hashim in December 2005 at
his office in the green and white boxy building which housed the
Ministry of Justice. The newspaper I edited was closed by the
government and I had submitted a complaint to the Ministry of Justice.
Hashim’s secretary arranged the meeting. He was skinny with tapered
fingers and thin lips. He wore a blue suit and white shirt. Soft-spoken,
articulate and with owlish visage, there was nothing to hint about him
the EPRDF official who deliberated in decisions to terrorize the press
and opposition leaders and supporters.

Hashim, a close relative of former Supreme Court Chief Justice and
Election Board President, Kemal Bedri, was a popular lecturer of law at
the Civil Service College before he left to Australia to study
constitutional law at the Melbourne Law School. His doctoral
dissertation, Ethiopia: the challenge of many nationalities, was a rather
unabashed defense of EPRDF’s system of ethnic federalism. In 2004,
he returned to Ethiopia; a year later, he was appointed State Minister of
Justice, and quickly transformed into one of the regime’s most ardent
political operatives.

“I am a student of this constitution and I defend it with all my
capacities,” he spoke to me in modest whisper. It was a concealed
suggestion that my newspaper had gone over the constitutionally
prescribed limits of free speech. When I met Hashim again two years
later in a barber shop around Sar Bet, he was already on the verge of
leaving the Ministry of Justice to the Federal Police. Befitting such
transfer, he was reading “At the Center of the Storm: My Ten Years at
the CIA,” a book by former CIA boss, George Tenet.

Birtukan sat in the room, listening patiently to the two talking about her
transgression of the law as they delivered the ultimatum: retract her
Stockholm statement within three days, or she would face life
imprisonment. She didn’t interrupt them, but her demeanor suggested
that she was unfazed. When she spoke, her statement was a question
packaged in mischievous brevity. “By what authority are you giving me
this ultimatum?”

Two days later, she wrote her last word on the issue in Addis Neger, a
weekly newspaper. This was Birtukan in her defiant and fearless mode.
“Lawlessness and arrogance are things that I will never get used to, nor
will cooperate with,” she penned. “…For them, a peaceful struggle can
only be conducted within the limits the ruling party and individual
officials set, and not according to the provisions of the constitution. For
me, this is hard to accept.” In less than 72 hours, her pardon was
revoked and she was dragged to Kaliti federal prison to serve a life
sentence.

Why have they arrested her? For many Ethiopians, the entire Stockholm
controversy was a grand ruse. Other opposition politicians, including
former CUD leader Hailu Shawel, had questioned the credibility of the
process of pardon even more forcefully. But not a finger was raised
against them. Her accruing days in prison reinforced that suspicion.
Even by Ethiopian standards, her treatment has been harsh. She spent
more than two months in solitary confinement; she was denied access
to books, newspapers and radio. The only people who are permitted to
visit her are her mother and daughter; her lawyers have been refused to
see her several times. “She is not a normal political prisoner. I have
never seen the prime minister so infuriated as when he is asked about
her arrest,” says Tamrat Negera. “The notion that her arrest is related
to the pardon stuff was hogwash.”

In mid-January, two lawyers appeared on State TV to defend the
decision of the government to re-arrest Birtukan. One of them was
Shimeles Kemal, a tall man with a narrow face and long chin. Shimeles
is such a complex and contradictory character that if he didn’t exist,
someone would be obliged to invent him.

At the end of 1970s, Shimeles was a radical, rebellious teenager who
dreamed of the formation of an Ethiopian socialist republic. He
distributed propaganda leaflets of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary
Party, a Marxist group which was battling a powerful military junta,
and agitated his friends for struggle. But like most of his compatriots,
he paid dearly for his views and actions. In 1991, the same year armed
rebels toppled the junta, the former teenage idealist added a law degree
to a CV which included seven years of prison life. His relationship with
the new leaders was a roller coaster. As a judge, Shimeles convicted
and sentenced the famous dissident Professor Asrat Woldayes, who
died of a debilitating disease he acquired in prison. Then he was
disgracefully removed from his judgeship while he was presiding over
the case of another prominent dissident, Taye Woldesemait.

At the end of 1990s, he turned himself into a defender of free speech,
writing brilliant legal and philosophical articles in the weekly newspaper,
The Reporter. His friends claimed that the new image he tried to
cultivate was so contrary to the decisions he made while in black robe
that people stopped taking him seriously. With no allies, he ran into the
embrace of Bereket Simon, the ruling party’s powerful propaganda
man, and effortlessly turned back the clock. By 2006, he had already
started drafting laws which would unduly constrain free speech and
freedom of the press, prosecuted political detractors, journalists and
human rights activists and overseen the expulsion of foreign journalists.
His victims included his best friends and ex-girlfriends. Commingled in
his brilliant mind are the ideas of the law as an instrument of political
power and an utter contempt for political opposition. He has turned into
the quintessential lawyer who has no moral qualms, the Jacques Vergas
of the Ethiopian government.

In the TV appearance, Shimeles shook his fists threateningly and
declared that the members of the press who tried to “patriotize and
beatify” her would face criminal prosecution. After the interview, he
rushed to his office to prepare a propaganda manual for political
discussion. The right side of the first page of the manual was marked in
black ink with these words: Attn: to all federal civil servants and
regional public relations bureaus. The manual served as a document of
discussions which were held in government offices, public corporations
and regional public relation offices in February and March. The main
theme of the discussions was: Why was Birukan rearrested? The
answer was unlikely to emerge either from Shimeles’ TV interview or
the manual he had prepared. Both doggedly stuck to the official line. In
Addis Ababa, a city given to conspiracy theories, the discussions
inflamed speculations and questions: why would they force civil
servants to discuss Birtukan’s arrest?

Saturday, March 14, 2009, was the day of off-putting tasks. I had to
clear my office desk, pack my bags, and call my friends to say
goodbye. A day later, I would board an Ethiopian airlines plane leaving
to the US. I put my books and some documents in the trunk of my car
and went back to the second floor of my newspaper’s building to fetch
old newspapers. Before I left the documentation room, my phone rang.
It was my informant, Ashu – name changed to protect his security –
who had close contacts with people high up in the EPRDF’s power
hierarchy. He wanted to meet me before I left Ethiopia. “Can I see you
at Chinkelo Butchery in 30 minutes?” he asked.

When I arrived 15 minutes late, Ashu was already half way through his
raw meat, cutting the meet systematically with falcate-shaped knives
and eating the slices with injera and spicy awaze sauce. When I told
him I couldn’t cut meat, he rolled his eyes in disbelief. Ashu is a plump,
moon-faced man with a proclivity for sybaritic life. His “business”,
never clearly defined, gave him access to many of the country’s
corrupt elite, including some of the biggest officials of the ruling party.
As he sat in the butchery wearing a brown Aston Nappa leather jacket
and track pants, drinking a bottle of Gouder wine and eating raw meat,
many people going in and out of the butchery stopped to greet him, or
at least waved at him. His reactions revealed that he loved the attention.
In January, I asked Ashu to find out the real reason behind Birtukan’s
arrest and he was here to tell me what he discovered. “If you want to
know why Birtukan was arrested, follow Siye,” he said.

Birtukan had a gibe she used often in her conversations about politics.
“Ethiopia,” she would say, “is the country of the future.”
Demographically, her statement makes sense. More than 70% of
Ethiopians are less than 30 years old. Politically, young Ethiopians
wonder when the supposed generational power shift would occur. “Our
politics is all the continuation of the psychodrama of the 60s and 70s,”
said Dagnenet Mekonnen, a journalist. “Birtukan is one of the very few
exceptions.”

Siye Abraha is among those old political elites. Before the split within
the ruling party’s core political group, the Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation
Front (TPLF), Siye was one of the most powerful Ethiopian politicians,
known for his dismissive political statements. In 2001, his opposition to
Prime Minister Meles landed him in jail. After six years in jail, he came
back to the country’s political scene a changed man, both physically
and mentally.

His hair was buzzed to a gray stubble; his forehead speckled with a
plethora of lines. He speaks with the calmness and patience of a
Scandinavian scholar. Over tea and biscuits in his house in early
January 2008, he confided to me that he thought the way forward for
Ethiopian politics was consociationalism. A former defense minister and
the leader of the military wing of TPLF during its days of armed
struggle, talk was cheap for him. He started plotting the creation of a
consociational party immediately.

Birtukan was integral to his plans. She was young, energetic, articulate
and charismatic. She was the de facto leader of the integrationist
movement in Ethiopian politics. But more than anything else, she was
regarded as authentic, a person who could rally people. Even after the
daily flogging in the headlines, there were few who questioned her
integrity. The two started a long political discussion. He wanted to unite
all major opposition parties, regardless of their ideologies, based on
common minimal principles. She wasn’t entirely convinced of its
practicality, but wanted to listen. “I like this guy. Although he may not
be telling me all what I want to know, I will patiently listen,” she told
me in June 2008. Siye helped create a coalition of some of the major
political groups under an umbrella called Medrek, but by the time
Birtukan was arrested, the coalition was sorely missing the membership
of an important group–Andinet, Birtukan’s party. “It is very close to
happening. I don’t know in which form we join Medrek, but we will
join them eventually,” she told me a week before her arrest.

“They knew that. They were worried about the two forming a political
partnership. He would appeal to members of the EPRDF. She would
appeal to a lot of Ethiopians, and with all major groups in it, they
thought Medrek would be a formidable coalition,” Ashu said. “I heard
that from a top official.” I was skeptical. “So they arrested her just to
thwart the formation of a strong political alliance?” His answer was
firm. “Yes!”

“But why her? Why not him?” I asked.

He shook his head in irritated disbelief. “You seem to have no clue
about the internal dynamics of the TPLF, and I am not going to recite
the alphabet with you.”

On April 28, 2009, Washington presented me with a contrary
hypothesis. Addis Neger asked me to write about the government’s
allegation of a “Ginbot 7” orchestrated attempt to topple it. I rang a
Horn of Africa expert whom I met while reporting the 2008 US
elections. Sitting at the Thai Coast restaurant near Foggy Bottom, we
walked through Ethiopian politics. “Do you think Meles will leave
office?” “No.” “What is the perception of Birhanu at Foggy Bottom?”
“Mixed, but not enough information.”….And then Birtukan “I think
Birtukan grew too big too quickly. She was turning into a darling of
foreign diplomats,” he said. “Meles might have wanted to show who
was in charge.”

Among the foreign diplomats, nobody loved Birtukan more than
Stephane Gompertz, the articulate, ex-French Ambassador in Addis
Ababa. Gompertz is an Ethiopia-enthusiast. A skinny man in his late 50s
with a retreating hairline, he collected Ethiopian art even before he
became his country’s ambassador in Addis. For a person who just
served as a Minister Counselor at the French embassy in London, an
ambassadorship to Ethiopia might not feel like a promotion, but
Gompertz tried hard to get the post. In late 2005, a few months after
his arrival in Addis Ababa, he found himself in the middle of one of the
country’s worst political problems. Diplomatic efforts to solve the
stand-off between the government and the CUD failed, opposition
leaders were jailed and the democratic space narrowed significantly.
Gompertz continued to push the Meles government to relent. At the
same time, he was also making visits to Kaliti prison to meet with
Birtukan.. A strong bond developed. “Birtukan could be a great leader of
the country in the future. She has some great qualities. She just needs
to be a smart political player,” he told me during a lunch at Hotel de
Leopol in Kazanchis in April 2008.
And then there was Donald Yamamoto, the diminutive, soft-spoken ex-
US ambassador in Addis Ababa who was the classic citizen of the
deceptively smooth diplomatic world. But when it came to Birtukan,
Yamamoto occasionally meandered off script. “Ladies and Gentlemen,”
he said to politicians in one of the US embassy’s famous cocktail
receptions, “I am proud to introduce you to the rock star of Ethiopian
politics.” At the time when the media buzz about the rock star appeal of
Barack Obama, the ambassador’s statement was interpreted by most
guests as a masked comparison of the then Illinois Senator and
Birtukan. Similar sentiments were echoing throughout other diplomatic
offices in Addis Ababa. Even Vicki Huddelston, the former US charge
D’affairs, who had no sympathy for the Ethiopian opposition was said
to be in awe of Birtukan.

But Birtukan never let the soft air kisses touch her face. One evening, I
watched her talk to a group of young activists from her party at their
office in Meshulekiya, a village in South East Addis Ababa. Her clear,
distinctive voice flowed at a consistent volume with varying pitch; her
hands sliced angular patches through the air. There was no prepared
text; rather, a stream of passionate, flowery words gushing from the
lips and heart of a politician who was living her life on a dramatic scale.

“When I was at the beginning of my political career,” she began and
then paused.
“When did I begin politics? Was it last week?” she said, poking fun at
herself and her short political career and provoking laughter from her
audience. “I thought that diplomatic battle was a major part of the non-
violent struggle. In politics, as they say, a week is too long. I have
learnt my lessons. This is our fight. We ask them to join the fight for
freedom and justice. We ask them to live up to their rhetoric and
supposed creed. But we don’t beg them. This is our fight, not theirs.
They would come running when they think they think that we have
won it.”

Later in her office, she was drinking strong coffee, one demitasse after
another. I asked her about the speech. “We have to stop
overemphasizing their value,” she answered. “They like winners. They
have strategic objectives which only winners can help them achieve.
We should show them that we are winners, not beggars.” If Birtukan
had, in talks to activists and private conversations, discounted the role
of western countries and their diplomats in Ethiopia, she nonetheless did
sometimes flirt with them. They had to be seduced, not trusted.

But are words of affection from diplomats enough to be Birtukan’s ‘La
Brea Tar Pits’? In February this year, Meles seemed to lay out the
terms. In a characteristic outburst, he contemptuously suggested that
Birtukan had thought deliverance would come from “powerful people in
powerful positions.” It was a clear finger pointing towards Western
diplomats and politicians. “Had we indulged her assumptions, the
message that we would have conveyed would be ‘nothing happens to
you no matter what you do. If you have friends in higher places, you
can ride roughshod with everything. That message I think is a very
dangerous political message to convey in an emerging democracy. The
rule of law and equality involves everyone.”

Scratch the surface and his statement might not be as significant as it
seemed. The Ethiopian prime minister had used explosive accusations
against Western nations when he arrested dissidents at home to preempt
them from pressuring him to release the jailed. In truth, Meles had given
the diplomats an opportunity for that deliverance. Days before her
arrest, some asked Birtukan if they could help her escape the country-
no doubt on Meles’ nod. Her emphatic “nay” to the offer brought much
disappointment. Meles had told them ‘what’ was to come. He had used
them as a conduit for communicating his intention to Birtukan, and
these actions spoke louder than his calculated outbursts. Birtukan is as
far removed from Melesian political values and behavior, but in the
understanding of the actions and objectives of the West and its
diplomats, they shared the same hemisphere.

“It was never more than ‘she is a decent woman; we like her’ stuff,’
said a political analyst in Addis Ababa, in reference to the statements of
the diplomats. “Look, this is about tough-minded realism. No
sentiments. While they were blowing kisses to Birtukan, these guys
were bedwetting with the thought that Meles was going to resign.
Meles knew that. So hopefully did Birtukan. There was no reason for
him to arrest her owing to their comments. There must have been other
factors. ”

At the beginning of the year, Birtukan’s name was on the lips of many
people and the pages of international newspapers. With only days
remaining before the first anniversary of her arrest, the outcries have
quieted and the ink has dried up. Meanwhile, robbed of Birtukan’s
leadership, the opposition coalition is struggling to gain attention and
credibility. Western diplomats have also hit the refresh button. The
political consequences of her arrest are becoming clearer. The question
is: Were they designed?

Abiye Teklemariam Megenta was the Executive Editor of Addis Neger
newspaper which announced its closure owing to harassment last week.
He can be reached at abiye.megenta@gtc.ox.ac.uk.