Q: Tell me about your work, how you got started. Interview with Dr. Mesfin Wolde Mariam by Wendy Belcher
Held Wednesday, May 6, 1998
at the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
A: How I got started in this human rights work is a bit torturous. I started by studying famine in this country. There have been repeated famines in this country for the last thirty years now, and I wanted to study this. It took me seven years to study it in great detail, in all parts of Ethiopia, and I came out with a book in 1984 under the title Rural Vulnerability to Famine in Ethiopia, 1958-1976. 1984 being the very year there was a terrible famine in Ethiopia.
My conclusion was that famine was not, fundamentally, the consequence of natural factors like drought or pests or so forth, as we so often hear, but is the result of the consistent and persistent exploitation of peasants and their oppression, to the point that they simply don't have any savings whatsoever. They normally live from hand to mouth: whatever they produce in a given year lasts only for six to nine months, and every year for three months they are in hunger, starvation of some sort. So it was the consequence of exploitation and oppression that peasants didn't accumulate savings, either in cash or in kind. That was my conclusion.
Then some questions remained, and I went into great detail to verify my findings, engaging in another, more thorough research with sample peasants. This time I did it at different altitudes. Going from under 1,000 meters to over 3,000 meters, I selected various villages, and from each village I selected five peasants and interviewed them intensively and after that I went around and had conferences with ten to twenty peasants in each district. During one whole day session with them, I taped them and asked them all sorts of questions. Then, in 1991, I came out with a book of this second research, Suffering under God's Environment: The Predicament of Peasants in North Central Ethiopia.
My previous conclusions were confirmed to my satisfaction and I was convinced that if Ethiopian peasants are to be free from famine, first and foremost they have to free themselves, they have to be liberated, they have to be masters of their own destiny, they have to think for themselves, and they have to plan and work for themselves, and for this to happen, I thought the issue of human rights in Ethiopia was really fundamental, especially for peasants. So, that's how I came to human rights via famine, it's a rather torturous way.
Q: What are the conditions for peasants today?
A: At the moment, as you know, the previous regime, the Dergue, nationalized all land in Ethiopia, both rural and urban land, and no person now in Ethiopia owns land, only the regime owns land. And this new regime has inherited the whole of Ethiopia's land, and so it is now in a position to control Ethiopian peasants as much as it wants. They can kick out the peasant from some farm, they can reduce the size of his farm, they can take it away completely, so every peasant now lives under this threat of losing this land. And therefore, they cannot do anything other than the EPRDF cadres tell them. This is one of the principle ways by which the EPRDF is controlling Ethiopian peasants. In the same way, the EPRDF is controlling the civil service. If some civil servant has dissenting views and so forth, he loses his job, automatically, and so they have to be silent, they have to be subdued, they have to submit to EPRDF rules.
Q: So, are things better or worse?
A: We are occupied now with all sorts of gross violations of human rights, including extrajudicial killings, torture, involuntary disappearances, and illegal detentions. These go on all the time. And very often the question is asked by Western government officials, embassies, and so forth, "But isn't this regime better than the previous regime?" Now, in the first place, obviously they are not the judge for this, they do not live the life that we live. We have lived under the Dergue, we are living under this regime, so we should be the ones to say who is better than whom. It would be better for them to not make such rash judgments. Second, it is true that the Dergue was brutal, a very brutal regime, it killed lots of people, and brazenly, openly. It never concealed what it did as this regime does. It never even lied. They killed and then in the evening they told us they were annihilated. That was it. But if the Dergue was, let's say, killing 1,000 persons a year, and this regime kills 100 persons a year, should we say this regime is ten times better than the Dergue? Is life to be calculated in such a fashion?
Every human life is unique. You cannot come to say that this is better than the other on the basis of numbers. What we in the Ethiopian Human Rights Council do, we take seriously the principle that a human life is sacred, the sanctity of life. If this principle is violated once it is violated. Twice is redundant, three times is redundant. So, if a person violates this principle, has a tendency to violate this principle, he can violate it as many times as he wants when the need arises. And that is what is happening in Ethiopia today. And so, for me, this regime, as long as it goes on killing innocent people, is no better than the Dergue. As long as it goes on torturing people, maiming people, as long as it has thousands of people in detention without a day in court, for seven years some of them, then it is no better than the Dergue.
This regime is even worse in certain cases, because the Dergue, in its first seven years, had at least once or twice pardoned a large number of people. So far, in seven years, this regime has not had the heart or mercy to pardon anybody. Some of those people who are languishing in prison, if they had had anything to incriminate them, if there was any evidence, and if they were convicted, most probably it would have been a sentence of five years, or three years, and so they have overdone their prison terms already.
Q: Why does this government persist in such gross violations of human rights?
A: The problem goes on despite good laws. We have excellent laws. The constitution provides in detail for the respect of human rights, and Ethiopian criminal law, civil law, provides also for the protection of human rights. The problem is implementing these existing laws. The thing is that these laws, the constitution, are simply window dressing. Window dressing for the Western world, whose economic and technical assistance is sought by this regime. And so, it had to come up with such laws, such a constitution, most probably against its will and with the clear intention of never implementing it. This is what is happening. So we have this dilemma: the West sees what is on paper, we live the practice. And so, we can never communicate our plight, because the West sees the laws: "Ah, there is a search law."
Look at the United States State Department annual report on Ethiopia, their human rights reports, they tell you about the laws, how good the laws are in this country. We know that. But if they really want to report honestly, truly, about the human rights situation in Ethiopia, it is not the laws that they should be reporting about, it is the fact of the violations of human rights. And that they do not do, either because they have some interest at stake in this country that is tied to the regime, or there is some element of racism, that is, because Ethiopian life, perhaps, is not that important. As one person once told me, since so many more people die of starvation, famine, in this country [than of human rights violations] we might as well kill them. That is one way of looking at it. Such persons cannot think in terms of human rights, the universality of humanity, or the universality of human rights, they cannot. They have to look at it in terms of their own interests, close their eyes here, open their eyes there, when it is politically wise to do so.
Q: What pattern do you see in the human rights abuses here?
A: One pattern that you see is that this regime does not have a political base of any kind. It really doesn't have a political base even in Tigray, it is there hanging, as it were, by force of arms. This is a terrorist regime, it wants to terrorize people. That is how it operates. Let me give you some examples.
Let me start with what you see in the paper today. This woman was arrested with her husband [I interviewed her later in the EHRC offices and she told me her own story as Dr. Mesfin reported it]. Her husband was suspected of having some mercury [a valuable commodity] and some other things. He has concealed it, they believe, somewhere. The wife is beaten, tortured, even though she was two-three months pregnant. She was bleeding while they were torturing her and they still went on torturing her. This inhuman act was done on a person who herself is not suspected of any crime. Her husband is suspected of some crime. It is guilt by association. They wanted to extract information from her and they beat her like mad.
There was a woman, sixty-five years old, about two years ago, whose son was presumably a rebel, who had gone to the woods and was fighting. They took the mother and her younger son to prison, they kept them there for a long time, and then they took them both into the woods and shot them dead. Now, this mother's crime is that she gave birth to a son who happens to have become a rebel. She didn't plan it, she didn't know about this, she is just a mother, and the brother, the same way, guilt by association.
There was a woman whose husband also had disappeared, gone into the woods, they suspected to fight against the regime. They take her and ask her where her husband is. Now, can you imagine, if a man wants to go out in the woods to fight the regime, would he tell his wife where he is going? [laughs] He would have to be utterly stupid. And she didn't know where he went, so they beat her, they broke her bones, her hand, to extract information. This sort of thing is rampant in this country.
So there is a pattern. All the Amharic speaking people are suspected of being either members or sympathizers with AAPO (the All Amhara People's Organization). All Oromoigna-speaking persons are suspected of being members of sympathizers of the OLF (the Oromo Liberation Front). So, whenever there is the slightest suspicion that somebody is doing that, they are taken in. Either they are disappeared or they are killed or they are in prison and tortured. The recent wave of violations against the Oromos is like that, many were killed, many have disappeared, many are still in prison.
Q: I know you don't have your statistics in front of you, but what would you say would be the numbers on these different instances of violations of human rights?
A: In our latest report, the twelfth report, covering the last three-four months, we see many extrajudicial killings, tortures, and so forth. This pattern that you ask about, the pattern is not the same, except for the fear, the paranoia of the regime. That is, a pattern is the paranoia of the regime in respect to the two largest linguistic groups in the country, the Amharic and the Oromigna speakers. This is, of course, understandable, since the regime has no base, no legitimacy, and stays in power simply through the support of Western external powers, the guns it has, and the tight organization it has. Fear is natural, paranoia is natural. And they are paranoid.
The best example of this is that when Meles Zenawi comes out of his palace to go anywhere, the road to the airport is closed to traffic, not a soul moves, not a soul. Even if you have a house near the road there, you have to close the door, you have to look the other way, you cannot stand in the window, there will be a whole army, so when he goes, he sees only armies, nobody else. When Mengistu Haile Mariam was here, he had one route blocked, but the other route was open to traffic. There wasn't this sort of paranoia, fear. Now, if this person is afraid to that extent, then that tells you how they are living. Only once did he come out in public, in the Meskal Square, and that one time, he had bullet proof glass around him. You can imagine our situation then. Ethiopia is ruled by people we do not see, they are invisible. You cannot approach them, you cannot talk to them, there is no dialogue of any kind with the opposition, with other groups, nothing. They make their decisions from behind their curtains, and that is the pattern: fear, paranoia.
Q: What would your answer be to someone who says that this is a democratically elected government?
A: Well, you see, the problem is that we have some misunderstandings, some misuse of terms. I find it very difficult to understand, for instance, the term "government." When you say the American government and the Ethiopian government, or the British government and the Ethiopian government, this government and that government, the meaning of the word is not the same. And when you talk of the American congress and the British parliament and then you talk of the Ethiopian parliament. As if these terms mean the same thing. They don't mean the same thing. And then you talk of elections. You can talk of the American election, British election, German election, and so forth, and then of the Ethiopian election. It is farcical. Because they do not mean the same thing.
Here there are no elections. Or at least, as some people say, only African elections. That is a slightly better use of the term, it qualifies it. Because in African elections one party gets 99 percent of the vote. In no truly democratic country would there be such a vote, it is impossible. If this is democracy, then it is a misnomer. First and foremost, there must be more than one party contesting, these two parties must have level ground, and they must have equal opportunities. They must be able to meet the Ethiopian people, freely, as they chose, anywhere, and with that goes the public resources to run an election: money, vehicles, housing, assembly halls, media, television, and newspapers. When one party controls all of these and uses all the resources of the state as if they were its own, and another party doesn't have anything and the police and the bureaucracy harass it, making it impossible to meet the people, to campaign, and so forthwhat sort of election is this? There is no election. So it is that even the donor group that came up with the election report last time, they recognized these facts. But that was a secret document, a confidential document where they could say it, but out in public they talk about free elections.
Q: Could you talk about these court cases that have been coming out in the public record, that are being published about in the government press?
A: The most interesting, the most revealing fact that has come out recently is about how the EPRDF operates to concoct charges against dissenters. The most celebrated cases are those against Prof. Asrat and Dr. Taye, of the Ethiopian Teacher's Association. The testimony of some of the witnesses is revealing and crucial, because some of them have categorically stated that they were taken from the streets. All these witnesses have never met Taye, many of them had never even heard of Taye. Some of them had heard about him in the newspapers, but they were beaten senselessly until they became absolutely numb, and were made to sign statements that their captors had written.
One person has said that he was standing on the street, talking to a friend of his, when his friend was shot in the leg. Somebody came up to him and clubbed him on the head, which gushed blood. They covered his face with his own jacket, they put them in cars, drove them somewhere he didn't know, and started beating them, torturing them, forcing them to admit they were working with Taye. Another person who is a diabetic, blood was oozing out of his eyes, he was really in agony. He asked to be taken to the hospital, to be given treatment, medicine. They said no, unless you admit this, and he signed the documents for them, and in court he said, this is how I signed this statement. And it is really fantastic how the regime is resorting to this sort of barbarity, this sheer irrationality of just picking innocent individuals, who know nothing of this case, who are carrying on their daily activities. Everybody is a means, therefore. If they want to get somebody, they will get him by any means and the strange thing is that the collaborators are free. The chap who testified that he was the one who organized this teachers' association, that he was the one who made Dr. Taye the chairman of this association, is now free. But Taye is in jail. [laughs] How is this possible? If the person who started the organization, who invited Dr. Taye in, is free, why would Taye be in jail? Obviously, that chap was uninformed. He collaborated with them and because he did his bit, he's out. The others are tortured.
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[Opinions in this article are solely that of the writer.]