Prof Mesfin goes on hunger strike

By Our Contributor

February 11, 2006

Jailed CUD official, Dr. Hailu Araya, was admitted to Police Hospital last week. International calls for Meles Zenawi to release the elected leaders of the Ethiopian people have fallen on deaf ears, thus jeopardizing the future of the country.

ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopia’s leading human rights activist, Prof. Mesfin Woldemariam, has gone on a hunger-strike to protest against government injustice throughout the country. The 75-year-old academic, who along with leaders of the country’s popular opposition party, has been in prison on fabricated charges of “treason” and “genocide,” is the founding father of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (Ehrco), a watchdog which has reported for years gross human rights violations by the incumbent Meles Zenawi regime.

Given his decades of service for the reign of the rule of law and the respect of the human rights in the country, Prof. Mesfin is revered as one of the fatherly figures who have been in and out of prison for defying the policies of successive regimes in country. Recently, he was reported to have suffered from a lingering back injury. Similarly, Dr. Hailu Araia, one of the top Kinijit leaders and an academic reputed for his outspokeness against the tyrannical regimes of both Meles Zenawi and Mengistu Haile-Mariam, was discharged from Police Hospital last week. He is also one of the those languishing in prison and facing wild accusations of “treason and genocide.”

General Situation

The general situation in Ethiopia is one in which fear rules.
Following the second crackdown on mass protest, the government security
forces have violently crushed the spate of student protests in Addis
Ababa, Bahir Dar, Gonder, Dessie, Jima, Ambo, Gimbi, Nekmt, and a number of
other towns in various regional states.

Several students were beaten and suffered severe injuries to their heads and limbs. Even teachers and headmasters
in some schools were not spared. Many students were put on trucks and
driven to unknown places where they could not easily be visited by friends and
families. These students have also missed their semester exams because
of the detentions. Parents were coerced into signing pledges to pay heavy
penalties for any property damaged during student riots. Several
teachers have been victims of politically motivated threats and intimidation in
the form of written warnings of penalties and some have been arbitrarily
suspended or dismissed from their teaching position without due
process. The reason given is inciting students to riot.

However, none of these brutal methods of suppression appear to have
stopped
the protests against the regime. On 19th and 20th January, a number of
people celebrating Epiphany were killed by the police because there
were
protests against the continued incarceration of opposition leaders.
Scores
of people were also detained.

During his report to Parliament last week, the Prime Minister rejected
international calls for the release of the jailed opposition leaders.
He said that their case is now in the hands of the court. However, in a
statement they prepared for the Court on 4th January and later
circulated to the public, the opposition leaders and journalists accused of treason
declared that they will not participate in the court trial, saying that
they were being prosecuted on trumped up charges, that the judiciary was not
independent, and that this trial was nothing more than a political
exercise aimed at fragmenting and weakening the main opposition party (CUDP).
Where this latest development will lead to is hard to say.