It came to our attention that you are going to host the Ethiopian ruler Meles Zenawi in Camp David for a session on food security in Africa at the annual G8 summit this month.
The brutality, mass violence, and gross human rights violations committed against the Ethiopian population on Meles Zenawi’s watch is well documented by numerous established international rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Committee to Protect Journalists, and many more, and has been reported on repeatedly by all major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, the BBC, to name only a few. Meles Zenawi exercises unlimited power to incarcerate his opponents and to torture and murder his fellow country men and women. The food and nutrition insecurity that threatens Ethiopia is in great part caused by Zenawi’s autocratic rules and policies that disregards the voices of poor, marginalised Ethiopians. For example, Zenawi’s law—Ethiopia’s Charities and Societies Proclamation (CSP)—severely restricting the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), most of which are active on food security related issues, is significantly affecting the promotion and protection of the rights of the Ethiopian people and aggravating food insecurity in the country.
Your invitation of a dictator of these proportions to attend a session on food security in Africa is very embarrassing, and an affront to all Africans and in particular to those men and women (opposition party members, civil society representatives and journalists) languishing in various Ethiopian jails or locked into exile unable to return to their home country. The choice of Zenawi to attend the important meeting on food security in Africa, instead of many other statesmen honorably leading several democratic and well-governed African countries, is an insult not only to Ethiopians but to all Africans.
The invitation of a dictator who is well known for his government’s arbitrary arrests, torture, use of rape as a weapon of counterinsurgency, killings of innocent civilians as methods to undermine the movement for freedom and democracy, and who reigns with an iron fist for over 20 years and counting, is a disgrace to the White House, the USA and your administration. It also makes your administration appear to be a tacit supporter of social injustice, human rights abuses.
Promoting and allowing a tyrant of Zenawi’s proportions to attend a session on food security in Africa is incredibly inappropriate. Therefore, we strongly urge you to disinvite Meles Zenawi from attending the G8 summit at Camp David.
