Dr. Berhanu Nega, Mayor-Elect of Addis Ababa,Ethiopia, former prisoner of concise and Economist.
From His Speech @Bucknell University, February, 2008
I. Introduction
It was a clear Thursday evening in March 2006 when two prison guards armed with their AK47’s called me outside my prison cell. The sky was full of beautiful sparkling stars. I and my colleagues in the Coalition for Unity and Democracy ( CUD) had been in prison already for five months by then. Since prisoners were herded inside their cells at about 5:30 every afternoon, we didn’t have a chance to see the stars at night. At the time I was in a warehouse converted into a prison cell with some 350 inmates, most of them common criminals. The guards told me to get dressed and cleaned up because I had “important” visitors waiting for me at the main prison office. Followed by my two escorts and enjoying the stars that I had not seen for months, I went to the office to meet these “unknown” guests. But, when I got to the office, I saw the familiar figures of Vicky Huddleston, the Charges d’ Affaires for the U.S. Embassy along with her young assistant and the French Ambassador. Since we all knew each other from previous meetings and Embassy functions, we shared a few pleasantries before we started with the more serious business that brought them to the Kaliti prison.
I was happy to see them initially, thinking that the West had finally seen the madness of the Meles Zenawi government and might be looking for a negotiated way out of the political crisis. Even after these five months in prison, the political instability had continued unabated and some important small rural towns in Oromia were being rocked by demonstrations. I knew the U.S. was nervous about the instability and wished it to end. What I didn’t know was how far they were willing to go in pushing the government to clean up its act and respect its own laws, since that was really what was at issue here.
No comments:
Post a Comment