Carpe Diem Ethiopia

Early this morning, the Ethiopian Federal High Court, under the guise of prosecuting acts of treason, decided on a course to continue the process of silencing Ethiopian voices calling for free, fair, and transparent elections. A dose of sulfuric acid has just seared through the arms of the torchbearers of Ethiopian democracy yet the silence of the international media (including that of the BBC’s that has attempted to keep Ethiopia’s authorities honest ) is deafening. We were not entirely surprised by the Easter Week High Court assault but we must admit that we harbored some hope that Ethiopia’s best minds relegated to Kaliti’s dungeons may have a courageous ally on the Federal bench. But hope, as Red warned, and as we frequently forget in EPRDF’s Ethiopia, “is a dangerous thing [that] can drive a man insane.” So how did we all get here? How did Ethiopia’s voices of democracy end up facing treason charges by the very government that shed the blood of the innocent in the wa...

Image by permission ( Ethio Zagol ) Every now and then individuals unjustly incarcerated by their governments create documents that leave enduring words of freedom for generations to come. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is one such document. Birtukan Mideksa’s Second Letter from Kaliti addressed to U.S. Ambassador Vicki Huddleston is an enduring voice of freedom for all Ethiopians. An admirer of the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes , Bertukan Mideksa’s yearning for an Ethiopian government of checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and a free media are lessons in tempered advocacy befitting a former judge of the Ethiopian Federal High Court . Judge Bertukan’s disgust with the U.S. Ambassador’s duplicity, however, is a searing indictment of the neocon dilemma: support for governments that repress their people but are declared allies in the U.S.-led war against terrorism. Judge Birtukan’s epistle, like Martin Luther King’s, documents a lead...