Ethiopia lessons in repression: violations of academic problems, HRW

Subsequent Arrests
Police silenced the protesters by arresting thousands on the spot and hunting down others in the days and
weeks that followed. Many were beaten and ill-treated. Family members, if they knew where their loved ones
were detained, were harassed when they tried to visit or bring food to the places of detention. Some of the
detainees were released after eight to ten days; most university students were released within a month. Others
including high school students, unemployed youths, and members of opposition parties were held for months.
At midnight on April 18, police brought seventeen large trucks and two buses to transport some 3,000
students, many of whom had sought refuge at St. Mary’s church, to the Sendafa Police camp. One told Human
Rights Watch he was beaten on the back with a club as he boarded a truck. 100 Another said he was beaten when
he was arrested and when he was brought to Sendafa. 101 The students were also ill-treated while in detention at
Sendafa, including being beaten with rifle butts. A third student detained there said, “The commander kicked me,
walked on me with his boots, and inserted his [pistol] into my mouth.” 102 The detainees received no food or drink
for the first thirty hours of captivity. Most were held in a single barracks where, because of lack of space, they
had to take turns lying down on the cement floor to sleep. They were compelled to engage in “sports” consisting
of barefoot running and kneeling races on gravel. Some reported that police beat their backs, shoulders, and
buttocks while they performed these “exercises.” 103 A Sendafa resident told Human Rights Watch that police did
not allow students’ families to give them food, clothes, or blankets and even abused those who came to Sendafa in
search of their detained family members. “When the AAU students were here, their families came with food and
clothes. This whole street was crowded with their families. The police stopped them and beat them. I saw them
make a fifty-five year-old man take his shoes off and walk fifty meters barefoot.” 104 These students were freed
after ten days, after being fingerprinted and forced to sign confessions.
Hundreds more students, and thousands of local residents, were arrested in Addis Ababa in the following
days. Police at campus gates reportedly had a list of 125 students to be arrested. One, a Tigrean student of
political science named Muzgede, was reportedly briefly detained and seriously beaten. 105 Fasil Eshetu,
spokesman of the student movement, was abducted near the campus on April 20. He told Human Rights Watch
he was held for nine days during which police tortured him.
They pushed me into a police car and took me to an unknown place. I later learned it was
Ketema Hulet [a village] where there was an old, unused air force military compound. They
started shouting at me even when I was just in the car. They shouted, “You are the one! You are
the leader causing these problems!” They started beating my legs in the car. Once we arrived at
the compound, they pulled me out of the car. They started beating me everywhere. They
slammed me on my ears, and blood started to come out. They beat me on my back, legs, arms
and hands. I don’t know how I spent that night—I was unconscious much of the time.
Then, two uniformed higher officers came. They were called Tesfaye and Genano. They said
“you are the one coordinating this against the government.” . . . The officers tied my hands and
my ankles together with rope. They threw me down into the sand, and at night they torched me
with electricity. When they beat me, they did it with a stick. They pushed my head into a bucket
of water so I could not breathe, and I was so weak I couldn’t resist, and my hands were tied
together. The hardest thing for me is that those people knew my feelings, they were also
Ethiopians. They knew what they were doing to me . . . . They tortured me like that for three
days.
100 Human Rights Watch interview, Addis Ababa, July 22, 2002.
101 Human Rights Watch interview, Nairobi, July 12, 2002.
102 Human Rights Watch interview, Addis Ababa, July 17, 2002.
103 Human Rights Watch interviews, Nairobi, July 12, 2002 and Addis Ababa, July 22, 2002.
104 Human Rights Watch interview, Sendafa, July 30, 2002.
105 Human Rights Watch interview with a student, Nairobi, July 10, 2002.
Human Rights Watch
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January 2003, Vol. 15,No. 2 (A)