Letter to Editor of The Washington Post

By an Ethiopian

January 4, 2006

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Dear Editor of the Washington Post,

Thank you for being one of the disproportionately few media outlets that puts Ethiopia on the map of the world. As media in this hemisphere chooses to ignore political developments that could make or break our nation, the Washington Post was one of the very few papers that gave us a mention.

Apart from finding ourselves in a critical juncture in our history with the historic first election, we are also faced with a very alarming trend of political oppression and human rights abuse.

Every coverage by the media, every line of a paragraph or every second of a footage, helps Ethiopian lives and livelihoods. Every chance their plight gets an audience is a chance that the dictatorial government is confronted and outed. Every opportunity is a step closer to ending killings, mass arrests, torture, intimidation and political treachery. Every decision to cover an ignored and yet severely charged political event on the globe contributes to powerful nations examining their foreign policies. And every opportunity of constituents coming across a coverage is an opportunity for them to examine how their tax money is being spent on the global arena, and an opportunity for elected officials in the respective committees to examine their involvement.

Having said that, I would like to share with you my opinion the above mentioned article. While we in the diaspora appreciate Emily Wax’s interest in the matter, it was a slap in the face for us Ethiopians in the diaspora given the critical issues of this moment in time. We equate it to putting genocide in Dafur on the back burner to cover aspiring Dafurian runners on the front page of the Washington Post. I apologize for choosing a possibly cruel analogy, but to put it into a better graspable context, I would also equate it to finding a big spread with a headline on the front page of a major news paper, something mundane and of very little consequence, on the morning of September 12, 2001.

Again I would stress on my appreciation to Emily Wax on giving Ethiopia a day of her time. But as she covers that story, human rights abuse runs rampant in our nation. People are being intimidated, tortured, killed, carted away into detention camps by tens of thousands, and mothers are running from one Red Cross or Police station to the other to find out the whereabouts of their young children. Donor nations’ pleadings, warnings, and ultimatums are falling on deaf ear as the government is scrambling to purge the opposition, incidentally an unarmed one whose ideology and methodology employed nothing but peace and peaceful means, and one that won the historic may election.

Dear Washington Post editors, your front page is your privilege. But in recent times, it has proven to be our life line. When you choose to put an article that is more relevant to the ongoing political tension, it confronts the government and stops it on its track. And maybe just maybe a decision to arrest or to intimidate someone is postponed with resources engaged in damage control. And just maybe lives are saved and mothers are spared grief. Your decision to go with an article of Emily Wax instead however changes the score to Dictator 1- people 0. It compliments the government propaganda machine that tries to paint a picture of normality and stability.

Dear Ms Emily Wax,

How much does a front page article go for these days?

How is it that, over the past six months, after all the death, the rounding up and country-wide human rights abuses following an election that tragically led to a winning opposition being purged, the Washington Post was generous enough to lend you its front page and you had articles about Ethiopia twice in less than a week? The Ethiopian diaspora in the Washington metro area is the largest community of Ethiopians outside Ethiopia. It is a very well known fact that all the diaspora’s efforts to get the attention of the international community about the current situation got a microscopic coverage compared to the magnitude of their efforts. But thanks to you a fourteen year old story of Ethiopian poverty and destitution is being deconstructed in a series on the front page of the Washington Post.

I was naive enough to believe that if I appeal to your conscience, maybe you will put your series on a back burner and head to the detention camps in Ziway, Dedesa, Bir Sheleko, Denkoro Chaka to cover the plight of tens of thousands, where dozens are shaved with one razor, where they are fed a roll of bread a day, where they are eaten by alligators, where they are thrown into a mass grave upon their death from malaria, beatings and malnutrition. And I was surprised to see the second episode today. but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a third one in less than a week and I have a feeling that there would be one. Because it occurred to me that the donor community recently suspended 375 million dollars ear marked for Ethiopia. And what better way to appeal to the donor community not to follow through with the suspension than show the woes of every day Ethiopians in a series of front page articles. I just hope that you are doing this on your own initiative and not on behalf of a dictatorship preoccupied with damage control.

Sincerely

Articles in Question