Ethiopian police crack down on Muslim press

In recent
months, Ethiopian Muslims have begun staging protests on Fridays to oppose
government policies they say are interfering with their religious affairs,
according to news reports
. These protests are a highly sensitive issue
for the government, which fears a hardline Islamist influence within the
predominantly Christian country, news reports said. Local journalists believe
the recent harassment of Muslim journalists and newspapers are part of an
attempt by Ethiopian authorities to quell coverage of the ongoing protestsin
the capital.

At least
eight police officers raided the home of Yusuf Getachew,
editor of YeMuslimoch Guday
(Muslim Affairs), in the evening of July 20 in the capital, Addis Ababa, and
took the journalist to the Maekelawi
Federal
Detention Center, according to local journalists. The police also confiscated
four of Yusuf’s mobile phones, his wife’s digital camera, books, and 6,000 birr
(US$334), the same sources said.

Yusuf was
charged the next day with treason and incitement to violence, but the state
prosecutor did not cite any YeMuslimoch Guday articles as evidence, local journalists told CPJ.
Yusuf has not been granted family visits, and his defense lawyer saw him for
the first time on Wednesday, the journalists said.

Two other YeMuslimoch Guday
journalists, Senior Editor Akemel Negash
and Copy Editor Isaac Eshetu, have gone into hiding,
local journalists told CPJ. The police had the homes of both journalists under
surveillance since late July, and had stopped only recently, local journalists
said. YeMuslimoch Guday,
which had once actively covered the Muslim protests in the capital, has not
been published since Yusuf’s arrest, the same sources said.

On July
20, police also raided the offices of the privately owned Horizon printing
press in Addis Ababa and confiscated copies of Selefiah
andSewtul Islam, two Muslim
weeklies, according to news reports. Authorities detained Horizon’s owner
overnight, and neither Selefiah nor Sewtul Islam has been published since,
according to reports and
local journalists. Local journalists told CPJ that the government had ordered
the printer to stop publishing the newspapers.

Ethiopian
government officials did not immediately return CPJ’s calls for comment.

“Ethiopia
has reached a high level of harassment of the press by attempting to censor
coverage of the protests,” said CPJ East Africa Consultant Tom Rhodes.
“The harassment of journalists and news outlets covering protests must
stop, and Yusuf Getachew should be released
immediately.”

Also in
late July, authorities blocked 30,000 copies of the critical weekly Feteh
, which contained
front-page coverage of the Muslim protests and the health of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, according to CPJ research.

The weekly’s printer, the state-run Barhanena Selam,

has suspended all further publications of Feteh
until further notice, local journalists told CPJ.