Standing with Ethiopia's tenacious blogger, Eskinder Nega

Standing with Ethiopia's tenacious blogger,
Eskinder Nega

14 January, 2012 | By Jason McLure/Guest blogger
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It would be hard to find a better

symbol of media repression in

Africa than Eskinder Nega. The

veteran Ethiopian journalist and

dissident blogger has been

detained at least seven times by

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's

government over the past two

decades, and was put back in jail on September 14, 2011, after
he published a column calling for the government to respect
freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and to end torture in
prisons.

Eskinder now faces terrorism charges, and if convicted could face
the death sentence. He's not alone: Ethiopia currently has seven
journalists behind bars. More journalists have fled Ethiopia over
the past decade than any other country in the world, according to
CPJ.

Eskinder could easily have joined them. In February 2011, he was
briefly detained by federal police and warned to stop writing
critical stories about Ethiopia's authoritarian regime. The message
was clear: it's time to leave. Eskinder spent part of his childhood in
the Washington D.C. area, and could have returned to the U.S.

He didn't. Instead he continued to publish online columns
demanding an end to corruption and political repression and
calling for the security forces not to shoot unarmed demonstrators
(as they did in 2005) in the event the Arab Spring spread to
Ethiopia. That's landed him back in jail--where he could remain
for years in the event he avoids a death sentence.

Since then a group of journalists, authors and rights activists have
organized a petition calling for the release of Eskinder and other
journalists unjustly detained by Ethiopia's government. Among the
signatories are the heads of the U.S. National Press Club, the
Open Society Foundations, Human Rights Watch and the
Committee to Protect Journalists.

The petitioners also include Maziar Bahari, the Newsweek
journalist jailed by the Iranian government for four months in
2009; three former BBC correspondents in Ethiopia; development
economist William Easterly; the Christian Science Monitor's
Marshall Ingwerson and others.

The campaign also included a letter published in The New York
Review of Books, contacts with the U.S. State Department, press
releases, and media interviews. Still, making an impact is difficult.
Eskinder was just one of 179 journalists jailed worldwide as of
December 1, 2011, according to CPJ data. In addition, Ethiopia
is viewed as a strategic partner for the West in combating
terrorism and instability in East Africa, making Western
governments less likely to press Zenawi on human rights abuses.

People have asked me why we should try to help someone who
could have saved himself by fleeing the country. It's a good
question. I suspect that even if he were to be released tomorrow,
Eskinder would stay in Ethiopia and continue writing and
publishing online--at the risk of being thrown back in jail.

After all, this is a reporter whose wife, journalist Serkalem Fasil,
gave birth while they were both in jail following the 2005
elections. When they were released in 2007, Serkalem and
Eskinder were banned from reopening their newspapers. To
survive, they rented their house in central Addis Ababa to a team
of Chinese telecom workers and moved to a poor neighborhood
on the outskirts of the city.

Like many good journalists, Eskinder is stubborn to a fault.
Standing for free speech in Ethiopia can seem a Sisyphean task,
but if Eskinder is principled enough to risk more years in jail - and
possibly the death sentence - it's our obligation to stand with him.

Jason McLure was Bloomberg News correspondent in
Ethiopia from 2007 to 2010.

Courtesy