Ethiopian family struggles to escape a lethal legacy

A Canadian siblings is in jail, and the rest say they are on the run from persecution for the sins of their forefather

David Macdougall Garissa, Kenya — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009 10:41PM EST Last updated on Friday, Nov. 20, 2009 11:42AM EST
During the first month of her imprisonment in Ethiopia, Rukiya Ahmed Makhtal was blindfolded and beaten. “You are Makhtal's family,” she recalled her persecutor saying. “If you are Makhtal's family, that means you are one of the problems.”
Ms. Makhtal, 53, is the older sister of Ethiopian-born Bashir Ahmed Makhtal, the Canadian citizen and former Toronto information technologist who has spent the past three years in Ethiopian prisons. Convicted of terrorism-related charges, he was sentenced in August to life in prison, but is scheduled to appear before an appeal court today. His family, who maintain his innocence, say they have been persecuted because of the actions of his grandfather.
After spending 14 months in various Ethiopian prisons where she says she was bound, blindfolded and badly beaten, thrown in isolation, raped and told she would be executed, Ms. Makhtal was at last transferred to a crowded low-security prison where family scrounged for 1,000 birr (roughly $80) and paid the guards to look the other way while she walked through the prison gates and, like so many of her kin, away from Ethiopia for good.
For two days, she trudged across the Ethiopian desert, struggling from poor health and the wounds on her body, trying to blend in with a train of nomads and fearful she might be spotted before reaching the border.
During the past year, others in Bashir Makhtal's family have trickled into Hagadera, a notoriously squalid and overcrowded refugee camp at Dadaab in Kenya's North Eastern Province.
Ms. Makhtal, who is asking for resettlement in Canada as a refugee and whose case is being followed by Amnesty International, is now among 16 people sleeping in the sand under scant shelter, all of whom say they are related to Bashir Makhtal and the victims of persecution in Ethiopia.
Bashir Makhtal and his sister, Rukiya, are the grandchildren of a founding member of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a separatist movement in the ethnic Somali region of eastern Ethiopia, though both deny having been involved in the group.
“He was my grandfather,” Ms. Makhtal says. “We didn't even know him.”
After an April, 2007, ONLF attack on a Chinese oil field at Abole in eastern Ethiopia that left 70 Chinese and Ethiopian workers dead, Ethiopia drastically stepped up a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the region.
A 2008 Human Rights Watch report accuses Ethiopian soldiers of burning down entire villages, mass detentions and even demonstration killings, “with Ethiopian soldiers singling out relatives of suspected ONLF members,” and of conducting widespread “military attacks on civilians and villages that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Abdi Mohamed Ahmed, 29, who says Ms. Makhtal is his aunt and who denies ever being involved with the ONLF, remembers the night in late 2007 the Ethiopian National Defence Forces came for his family, circling his house before dragging out his entire family, beating them and hauling them off to different jails.
“They used to tie our eyes, torturing and beating. They used to tie our hands and legs together and they hang us up from the ceiling. And everybody was alone.”
This was when Bashir Makhtal's sister, his older brother Hassan Ahmed, and several of their children were also arrested.
Last Thursday, Hassan Ahmed Makhtal, who had been imprisoned for 22 months and was serving a life sentence, died in the Ethiopian capital after being released early to receive medical attention. A press release issued by the Ogaden Human Rights Commission claims he “died from wounds sustained during his detention,” though the cause of his death could not be independently verified.
According to several family members, two of Hassan Makhtal's children – a 27-year-old son and a 25-year-old daughter – were beaten to death in military prisons less than a month after their arrest in 2008.
“They are not targeting ONLF. Our army is very strong now,” said Abdirahman Mahdi, a central committee member of the separatist group, who spoke during a recent interview in Toronto. “What they do is they target the weak spot, the civilians, the women and children.”
“This isn't just something personal with respect to Bashir Makhtal, although he clearly is one of the figures at the centre of this drama,” said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, which has monitored Mr. Makhtal's case since his arrest. “It's family-based persecution, and I think that also underscores the nature and the severity of the repression the Ogadeni population is experiencing in Ethiopia.”
Mr. Makhtal was arrested by Kenyan authorities in December, 2006, as he attempted to flee the suddenly rising violence in neighbouring Somalia, where friends and family say he had travelled for business.
He was among 90 prisoners, including American, British and Kenyan nationals, who were forcibly deported, in violation of both Kenyan and international law, first to Mogadishu and then to Ethiopia. While every other Western country managed to secure the release of its citizens, Mr. Makhtal, the only Canadian arrested, alone remains in Ethiopian custody.
Said Makhtal, Mr. Makhtal's cousin in Hamilton, Ont., says he's optimistic about tomorrow's outcome, but added: “I don't know how much more I can count on the Ethiopian court system.”
In the meantime, many of Mr. Makhtal's family are left to wait in the refugee camp while Amnesty International Canada puts forward their case to the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi.
“The life of Hagadera is too difficult,” Mr. Ahmed said. “There is no life, there is no health. There is not even enough water, the air of that place is not even good.”
“And still this moment we live under fear because there may be Ethiopian security,” he added, pointing out that Kenya already delivered his uncle, Mr. Makhtal, to Ethiopian authorities.
“Obviously, Canada continues to face difficulties in ensuring the safety of Mr. Makhtal himself,” Mr. Neve said. “At least we do have the opportunity to try and ensure safety for these other family members.”
Special to The Globe and Mail

Geoffrey york Addis Ababa — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009 8:51PM EST Last updated on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009 4:29AM EST

Six months before a crucial election, one of Ethiopia's small band of opposition MPs has a simple question: How can he campaign for votes when he cannot even hold a public meeting or meet voters freely?

Negaso Gidada, a former president of Ethiopia and now an independent MP, tried to visit his constituents in southern Ethiopia recently. It was an arduous journey.

He was not permitted to hold any meetings in public places. He was kept under surveillance, and his hosts were interrogated. Those who met him were questioned by police. He was given no coverage in the media.

“People are so intimidated that they are afraid even to speak to me on the phone,” he says. “Campaigning is totally impossible. How can it be a fair election?”

Four years ago, foreign election observers concluded that the last Ethiopian election had been rigged. Opposition supporters took to the streets, and an estimated 30,000 people were arrested in a crackdown on dissent. Nearly 200 people were killed when Ethiopia's police opened fire on the protesters. Dozens of opposition leaders and activists were jailed.

This time, with an election scheduled for May, the ruling party is taking no chances. Ethiopia is sliding deeper into authoritarian controls. Police agents and informers are keeping a close eye on the population, with harsh restrictions imposed on opposition leaders and civil society groups.

The election matters because Ethiopia is strategically important. It is the second most populous country in sub-Saharan African, and a key U.S. ally in the Horn of Africa, where Ethiopian troops have repeatedly intervened in Somalia. And it is one of the biggest recipients of Canadian foreign aid, with $90-million donated by Canada in 2007 alone.

Mr. Negaso, who was president of Ethiopia from 1995 to 2001 but later split from the ruling party of autocratic Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, has managed to hold only a few public meetings as he travelled around the country in the past year.

One meeting in August was broken up by dozens of thugs, including some whom he recognized from the ranks of the ruling party. They shouted, whistled, grabbed the microphone and prevented people from speaking. “We were chased out,” Mr. Negaso said.

In another district, he said, the police told opposition leaders that they needed a special permit if they wanted to use a megaphone.

Even his e-mail messages and phone calls are monitored, he said. But he refuses to be intimidated. “If you are afraid,” he says, “you can't do anything.”

Another opposition leader, Seeye Abraha, is a former close ally of Mr. Meles from the early 1970s when they were both young revolutionaries fighting the military junta known as the Derg, which they finally overthrew in 1991. He became the defence minister but was jailed for six years on corruption allegations after a falling out with Mr. Meles. Now he says he is under constant surveillance, his phones and e-mails monitored, his movements constantly followed by security agents.

Seeye Abraha, an opposition leader in Ethiopia, is a former defence minister and was once a close ally of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He says he is under constant surveillance by government agents who follow him and his children.

“In restaurants, spies sit close to me, and you can't ask them to leave,” he says. “There is no private life, no private property. And there is nowhere you can complain. You can go to the police, but they will do nothing.”

In a desperate effort to communicate with voters, the opposition sometimes tries to distribute cellphones to its supporters. If it sends campaign letters to voters, the letters must be kept hidden from security agents. “Families are afraid to pass the letters from one to another,” said Bulcha Demeksa, an MP who heads an opposition party.

Earlier this year, eight of Ethiopia's opposition parties formed a coalition with Mr. Negaso and Mr. Seeye in a bid to defeat the ruling party, but the move has been little help. “If tomorrow I go to my constituency and speak to people under a tree, the police will disrupt it,” Mr. Bulcha said.

The International Crisis Group, an independent think tank based in Brussels, says the Ethiopian government is controlling its population with neighbourhood committees, informers, media controls and high-tech surveillance.

“Thanks to Chinese electronic monitoring-and-control software, the government is able to block most opposition electronic communications when it desires,” the group said in a recent report.

“Few journalists, academics, human-rights advocates and intellectuals dare to publicly criticize the government. While self-censorship existed before the 2005 elections, it has now become widespread.”