Befekadu Hailu
My friends and myself, who passed through Maekelawi's torturous experience, along with others campaigned and had the government decide to close the most notorious Detention Center that live three regimes and almost half a century in Ethiopia. In February 2019, Five years after I was detained and tortured in Maekelawi, I went to the closing Center to fetch my laptop confiscated five years before. I arrived while the name tag of the Center was being shattered and one of the uniformed guards said to me, “you have this place closed”; I shrugged like ‘proudly’. That little moment gave me a sense of victory, telling me that the activism and its subsequent sacrifice was not in vain. I felt we actually effected a change. Six years later, I started to doubt it all retrospectively.
The political transition that started six years ago is known by many as ‘the change’ (lewtu in Amharic), but what really explains it is ‘the violence’ (newtu in Amharic).
How Did We Get Here?
I have gotten the chance to take part in the Human Rights Forum 2024 hosted by The Carter Center in the third week of May 2024 in Atlanta, US. In my keynote address, I have spoken to participants with my reflection on the works of human rights defenders based on my experience in Ethiopia. I don’t know how resonating my speech was to the audience but it was my moment to pause and reflection.
Telling the story of how fast we dived from optimism to pessimism, I said:
“After 2018, the growing expectations of human rights defenders were dashed by a false promise of change.
“Retrospectively speaking, Ethiopian HRDs are not the only ones to lose momentum for a false promise of change. In the MENA region, most of the revolutions of 2011 have led to worse crises in their respective countries.
“Ethiopia's neighboring Sudan had had a very exciting street revolution against Omar al-Bashir’s 26 years of dictatorship. A couple of years later, two power mongering generals are waging war on each other and their people. In all their defense, the Sudanese activists have tried their best to ensure the establishment of a civil government but it was not as easy.
“The point is - we, human rights defenders, can force changes in protests or pressures; but, our commitment to maintain the changes with principles remains weak. We get fragmented, our priorities fast change, we retire early, we get burned out, we trust people in power forgetting that power corrupts people, and most importantly we forget that there won’t be democratization without the institutions. Then, we have the changes stolen and regret them.”
Apparently, Ethiopia was not an exception. Its opportunity to transition to a democratic settlement has been stolen by power mongering, violent preaching, political leaders. We lost the opportunity to progressive change because we were deceived by a false sense of victory. We didn’t know that most dictators ascend to power as liberators. They consider themselves like Messiah who saves the people from misery. However, the answer to people’s questions are never change of leading figures; it is change of institutions.
Lewtu vs. Newtu
The transition in Ethiopia which government authorities remember as ‘lewt’ (equivalent of ‘change’) is actually characterized by the different features of ‘newt’ (equivalent of violence) it brought on the people of Ethiopia.
Newtu (the violence) in Ethiopia started with mob violence having individuals stoned to death, and hanged upside down in a public rally, then communal conflicts among ethnic/tribal groups displacing millions of people, and then political assassinations targeted at officials like Amhara region’s president and his cabinet members and individual figures like the renowned singer Hachalu Hundessa of Oromia, and ending up with a fully-fledged war in Tigray. The war in Tigray was concluded (at least until now) with a peace deal and it is followed by the fighting in Amhara between armed groups and the government. The Oromia fighting between armed groups and the government is also continued after it started before the Tigray war. Therefore, to say that newt (violence) characterizes the transition is fair.
Sadly, whether the Ethiopian government starts the violence or not, there is little that deters Abiy Ahmed’s administration from using violence as a means of consolidating power. The administration used spreading of [mob] violence as a justification to disregard rule of law. The administration declared three state of emergencies in its six years. I will also demonstrate, in a couple of examples, how the government used violence to its advantage of consolidating power - encouraging it to embrace violence than dialogue and negotiation.
Firstly, the government used the violence in Oromia to justify its operations to dismantle the most prominent political party of Oromia, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), and to weaken the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC). Many leaders of OLF are still detained after court released them several months ago by the time of this writing. The regime had also arrested popular resistance figures like Jawar Mohammed (from OFC) and Eskinder Nega (Balderas Party for Genuine Democracy in Addis Ababa) following the violence triggered by Hachalu Hundessa’s murder in 2020. The two people could have potentially led big resistances during the general elections in Oromia and Addis Ababa, respectively. The elections were won by the ruling party in landslide votes while they were in detention. Then after about a year and half of imprisonment, the both of Jawar and Eskinder as well as their respective co-defendants were released because the Attorney General discontinued their cases. It sounds as if the government already achieved its goals and is not interested in the legal proceedings that was hugely followed because of its ‘association’ with the preceding violence that cost about 200 lives. Now, Eskinder Nega became one of the leaders of armed rebels in Amhara region, while Jawar is spending most of his time abroad only preaching for a peaceful resolution of the conflicts. Both have consequently been partially or completely removed from their popular constituency.
Second example is the Tigray war. Prime Minister Abiy removed TPLF and its affiliates from the civil service bureaucracy and intelligence apparatus following the Tigray war; this means also that the administration replaced these vacant places with his loyalists and minimized the risk of being challenged from within the public system. His government also waged a huge propaganda against his targets using state-run and affiliate media and taken full control of the intelligence apparatus. Now, the Tigray war has ended in a peace agreement after loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. But, Abiy’s administration is one power challenger less.
I had to write the above stories to explain why I decided newtu is a better expression for the past years than the lewtu.
In Conclusion,
EPRDF decided to close Maekelawi detention Center and to turn it in to a museum after its acclaimed 17 days of meeting in December 2017. Even though it is not turned into a museum, the Center is now closed. Maekelawi’s closing news and ceremony was more like a political stunt. There are now many detention centers that held prisoners of conscience. The trend of arbitrarily arresting dissents has worsened than before. What most of us thought is a change, a progressive one, is not. Perhaps, today is a moment when the trajectory of peace, human rights, and democracy falls down in the history of Ethiopia.
Personally, I acknowledge my initial optimism about the Maekelawi closure and the need to adjust my perspective on Ethiopia's progress. However, these setbacks shouldn't deter the ongoing fight for a better future. As Nelson Mandela said, the long walk to freedom is neither short nor easy. Yet, history demonstrates that positive change is inevitable when people speak out and act.
Dictatorships often crumble, empires fall paving the way for republics with greater citizen rights, and even barbaric practices like slavery eventually end. Each struggle, though marked by sacrifices and setbacks, contributes to a slow but undeniable march toward progress.
The fight for a just Ethiopia requires continued action, not hollow victories. We must remain pragmatic and committed to the long haul, recognizing that the path to a truly free society may leave scars on future generations too.
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