I have just spent the weekend in Addis Ababa with two colleagues — Rob Mahoney, deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), on whose board I serve, and Dele Olojede, a board member on the African Media Initiative (AMI), which I co-chair. We had gotten word that the government would meet with us, provided we got beyond where such meetings have been in the past: criticism of the government’s record on press freedom and intense condemnation by journalists, human rights advocates and some Western governments.
And while we had every intention of being critical of journalists’ incarceration and calling for their release, we believed we could go beyond that with the participation of both CPJ, which fights for press freedom all over the world, and AMI, which helps media owners and journalists to be the best they can be, with workshops and other kinds of professional assistance.
We asked for but failed to get permission to meet with the prisoners to hear their side of the story. But before we met the minister, we had spent some time with Fasil. She said that during an earlier visit to the prison to take her husband food — prison food is sparse — Nega asked her to tell us that under no circumstances was he connected to or supportive of any terrorist organization, inside or outside the country. One of his alleged crimes was to speculate in his blog about whether an Arab Spring-type movement would take place in Ethiopia.
