NAIROBI LETTER:Intimidation and deportation of journalists and rights activists are common in Ethiopia and growing more so in Uganda and Tanzania
SIX MONTHS ago, Abede Gachaw (not his real name) was a reporter with a US newspaper in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Then he wrote an article about a drought in the country. “They refused to renew my press card and were going to charge me with three offences. Propagating false information, working with destabilising elements [international observers], and consorting with terrorists. After three years of this kind of intimidation, I had enough.”
Gachaw fled for Kenya, after receiving reliable information that he was about to get dragged to court.
In a country that Human Rights Watch described this week as waging a co-ordinated and sustained attack on journalists and rights activists, Gachaw’s story is not unique. But it is another sign of a worrying trend sweeping the country. Last year, at least 12 independent Ethiopian journalists fled because of intimidation.
In January, the Bloomberg news correspondent was detained and threatened with deportation for investigating public complaints about government abuses of food aid. Any form of government criticism is not tolerated, with articles deemed favourable to terrorist groups carrying sentences of up to 20 years. “So sweeping is the legislation that a terrorist entity could be an opposition group,” says Mohamed Keita of the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The draconian laws haven’t been confined to journalists. Ben Rawlance, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, was deported last year for trying to speak with seven farmers who alleged that they had been denied participation in the Safety Net Programme, which provides food for work for the needy. “I was picked up and deported [before the meeting],” he says, after which the farmers were detained and threatened themselves.
“Government services are being used as a carrot to join the ruling party,” with intimidation stepped up recently ahead of elections in May. Last week, the government admitted that it was jamming the Amharic language broadcasts of Voice of America.
To a journalist in media-friendly Kenya, this might all sound rather unreal. But as Joseph Odindo, managing editor of the Nation Media Group in Nairobi, points out, governments in Uganda and Tanzania have also started playing “fast and loose” with media freedom.
In Uganda, for example, new offences could lead to prosecution for everything from undermining relations between the country and its neighbours to economic sabotage.
“But who decides on that? And why should that be an offence anyway? If you expose the corruption in a multibillion- shilling project, and as a result the corrupt investor is exposed, does that amount to sabotage or are you offering a public service?
“I don’t know whether one would say the situation is deteriorating,” he says. “My own sense is that after years of one-party rule, there is discomfort among politicians in the region about this new sense of open government. And I think it is because open government means accountability, being clean and on the straight and narrow, which politicians find hard to do.”
But if the regions’ governments are uneasy about press freedom, some journalists have only themselves to blame. In Rwanda, several journalists have recently been charged with writing about the private sex lives of the mayor of Kigali and a government minister. “To the point,” says Steve Terrill, an American journalist in Rwanda, where “they were describing exactly what was happening in the bedroom. There is no way these guys could have known that.
“Press freedom is really important. But for these guys to talk about what kind of sex they were having skews the issue when I have to write about police brutality and women being raped in refugee camps.”
However, as the biggest advertiser in newspapers, the government does have another tool at its disposal when it comes to controlling the press, says Terrill. “If you have a small newspaper, they can say ‘no more ads’. And that would be a death sentence.” In a country that the CPJ says has just two independent media houses left, that is worrying. “If you don’t have an independent media, you can’t hold the government to account and scrutinise the way they manage public affairs,” says Keita. “If the press isn’t free, you are more likely to have a lot of bad governance. And that’s bad for development.”
Indeed, one could even say it is unpatriotic, something that Gachaw knows all about. “They think that I am being unpatriotic because I am writing stories that the government doesn’t like.
“But they confuse love of the nation with love of government. Being critical of the regime is not the same as being critical of your country.”