Ethiopia lessons in repression: violations of academic problems, HRW

were obliged to move to other areas of the country to accommodate the language change, and many of these were
demoted, sent to remote areas, or otherwise harassed as punishment for having criticized the policy. 187
Fasil, who taught in Hossana from 1992 to 1998 and has now been granted asylum in Canada, was one of
the teachers who complained. He described the impact being “blacklisted” had on him as follows:
I was blacklisted three times, once for dissenting over the language policy. . . . For example, they
wrote the education office and told them to cut off my salary as a warning, when I went to
complain they said they would make enquiries. . . . Because I am not married and I do not have
wife and children to support, these problems don’t hurt me as much. I could eat with friends.
Another physics teacher and a math teacher were also blacklisted. They had families . . . . At one
time, they demoted me to teach in junior high school (seventh and eighth grades), and not in my
specialized field.
I applied for teacher training in Nazret, and was denied. I got no response to requests to attend
summer courses for continuing education. The government refused to let me go accept a
scholarship for further studies in Germany. I was the only teacher who had studied electricity,
but when I applied to Nazret Teachers College to study teaching electricity, the Education Office
refused to issue me a letter saying that I had been a teacher during the past years. I complained to
the ministry of education that I was refused these opportunities and tried to assure them that I
only wanted further training so I could come back and teach. The ministry did not respond. 188
Many teachers continue to suffer abuses as a result of the still-evolving policy of ethnic federalism, as
they were when ETA sent the above-mentioned memorandum of teachers’ concerns to the government in July
1992. In Nazret, for example, in the Oromo Regional State, Amharic-speaking teachers complain that all non-
Oromos are treated as second-class citizens. At the same time, Oromo-speaking teachers who have chosen not to
join the OPDO lament that they are branded as sympathizers of the OLF. A government delegate present at the
mandatory July teachers’ workshop in Nazret did not dispute that non-party members may be marginalized:
“There is no seat between two chairs,” he told the Oromo teachers, suggesting that failure to belong to the
government satellite party could lead to their dismissal. 189
Thirteen Oromos including seven teachers, a former teacher who produced educational radio programs for
the Oromia State Education Bureau, a twelfth grade student, a civil servant, and two traders were arrested and
detained in Sendafa from May 1 to June 21, 2002 on charges they collaborated with the OLF. 190 One of the
detained teachers said his sister had come to visit him at the Sendafa police camp and, while one guard had told
her she could speak to her brother, another came and threatened to beat her if she didn’t leave. Family members
of another said that police had insinuated they must be OLF members if they were visiting OLF members in
prison and threatened to arrest them if they continued to visit. A lawyer who attempted to visit one of the
detainees said the guards refused to allow him in.
One of the teachers said that police officers told him that the district court declined to release them on bail
earlier because high-level politicians had instructed them not to. They appealed the denial of bail to the Oromia
State Supreme Court, which later ordered their release on bail. When Human Rights Watch interviewed them in
late July, they had yet to be reinstated in their jobs despite written requests to local, state, and national authorities.
187 Human Rights Watch interview, Addis Ababa, July 20, 2002.
188 Human Rights Watch interview, Nairobi, July 10, 2002. Fasil enrolled in AAU in 1999 to study educational
administration. He was active in the student community and became spokesman for the students during the strike. As noted
above, he fled the country after being arrested and tortured in the wake of the 2001 student strike.
189 Human Rights Watch interview, Addis Ababa, July 25, 2002.
190 The following is based on Human Rights Watch interviews and review of documents, Addis Ababa and Sendafa, July 30,
2002.
Human Rights Watch
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January 2003, Vol. 15,No. 2 (A)