By Simona Foltyn April 20 at 3:30 AM
Washington Post
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — They met online in 2010 while raising money for a charity case: nine young university-educated Ethiopian professionals. Eventually, they decided to launch a blog about social and civic issues in Africa’s second-most-populous nation.
“Initially, it was not about political activism or about criticizing the government. It was to connect with like-minded people,” said Soliyana Shimeles, 28, one of the founders of the blog Zone 9.
Today, six of the bloggers are in jail facing terrorism charges in what human rights and press-freedom advocates call an example of an alarming crackdown on government critics.
The Zone 9 bloggers are accused of “creating serious risk to the safety or health of the public” under the country’s controversial anti-terrorism law passed in 2009. The charges further allege that the bloggers were linked to Ginbot 7, an opposition movement based abroad that the government labeled a terrorist group in 2011. The bloggers have pleaded innocence.
Their attorney, Ameha Mekonnen, has complained that the charges offer few particulars. The trial began at the end of March but was adjourned until after the national elections in May. If convicted, the defendants could receive death sentences.
Soliyana Shimeles’ graduation picture, taken in 2007. She studied law at Addis Ababa University, with a focus on human rights. She has been working with the U.N. and international organizations on human rights issues in Ethiopia. (Simona Foltyn/Washington Post)
Members of Ethiopia’s online community say the case has had a chilling effect on freedom of expression. The U.S. State Department criticized the Ethiopian high court’s decision in January to proceed with the trial, saying that it “undermines a free and open media environment.”
Ethiopia has been an important American ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Islamist militant group based in Somalia. But while Ethiopia is a multiparty democracy on paper, its ruling party controls all but one seat in Parliament.
The “Zone9ers” hail from a relatively privileged urban educated class in one of the world’s poorest countries. Only 2 percent of Ethiopian households have access to the Internet in this Horn of Africa nation, whose outdated state-run telecommunication infrastructure ranks among the continent’s least developed.
The nine bloggers — three journalists, a human rights lawyer and professionals working in business, government and academia —met online while raising money for the family of an Ethiopian maid who died while working in Lebanon. They called their blog Zone 9, a term said to be used by political prisoners in the capital’s Kaliti jail to refer to an outside world they viewed as equally shackled by the lack of civil liberties.
The bloggers, part of a generation that came of age after a Marxist dictatorship was toppled in 1991, said they wanted to raise awareness about political and social issues in a society disengaged from civic matters. Their blog posts called on young Ethiopians to demand rights set forth in the constitution and to put into practice the democracy that the government had promised.
“I used to think our discussions could transform our audiences into the kind of society we want. I was very naive,” said a close friend of the bloggers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government, which controls the country’s main media outlets, has displayed varying degrees of appetite for free political discourse. National elections in 2005 were preceded by a relatively open climate, allowing the opposition to win a third of the seats in the 547-member Parliament. But after the vote, there were mass arrests of opposition politicians and student protesters. In the years that followed, several newspapers and magazines were shuttered.
“The ruling party has become wary of media they cannot directly control,” said Daniel Berhane, an Ethiopian blogger and editor of the current-affairs Web site Horn Affairs, referring to the Zone 9 case.
Yet many Ethiopians believe that the group’s blog posts, which had an average of 18,000 readers in a country of 94 million, were not what landed them behind bars.
The “Zone9ers” attended events organized by international human rights organizations. The Ethiopian government has frequently been critical of such groups, accusing them of being politicized.
The bloggers also attended training sessions held abroad and in Ethiopia on Internet security, which may have upset a government that has been accused of surveillance of its critics’ online activity.
The bloggers regularly visited jailed dissidents, including prominent journalist Eskinder Nega and opposition member Andualem Aragie, to express their support.
Shimeles’s mother, Yikanu Yelma, said the young blogger drew inspiration from her father, who had been jailed in 1977 for opposing the communist regime in power. “She used to say my dad contributed something during his time. I need to contribute something during my time,” Yelma recalled in an interview in Addis Ababa, the capital.
Yematamata (የማታ ማታ) 