Jeffrey Gettleman and Courtenay Morris with a rebel army in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, 2007. (Some of the men in this picture were killed or have died since.)CreditVanessa Vick for The New York Times
To be fair to my wife, Courtenay, it was scorching that day. And as we trudged along, filthy and exhausted (our typical condition), surrounded by rebels waging a guerrilla war in one of the hottest places on earth, Ogaden Desert in Ethiopia, we realized we had run out of water.
“Don’t be a wimp,” Courtenay hissed. “Do something.”
“Like what?” I croaked.
She stopped walking and her forehead creased, which is always a bad sign, like a horse’s ears going back.
“I don’t know!” she screamed. “But get me some [expletive] water!”
Getting chewed out by your wife, in front of several hundred dumbstruck, armed men, while on assignment, covering a war, isn’t something you typically read about in the International pages of The New York Times.
Or what about knifing through the Congolese rain forest on the back of a motorcycle, enveloped by giant trees bending over the path, smelling all the decaying leaves and rich, loamy soil, and then suddenly emerging into a sun-flooded grove full of thousands of white butterflies, wrapping the tree trunks, flickering in the air like falling snow, sticking to the shirtless backs of the men working in the grove, who were essentially wearing lab coats of delicate white insects?
These moments, among the brightest memories of my decade-plus as The Times’s correspondent in East Africa (which came to an end this week), never made it into a news story. Neither did the broader experience of plunging into this world with my spouse, Courtenay Morris, a lawyer who spent years as a Times videographer. All that happens between couples anywhere else happened out here: the quiet moments of tenderness, the rivalry, the partnership, the sharing of beauty, and yes, also the hatred — so many days Courtenay may have still loved me, but she definitely didn’t like me.
In 20 years of journalism, I’ve gotten comfortable in my role as the observer. I know how to use my job as a shield. Much of what I covered in Africa — children starving to death, right in front of me, or people bleeding to death, right in front of me — would have paralyzed me had I not compartmentalized and switched so quickly into the more detached journalism mode.
But as the years passed, I grew less comfortable being comfortable. A friend of mine once said: You should be nervous at least once a week in your job or it’s time to do something else. After investing so much of our lives telling others’ stories, the point comes when some of us reporters ask: Am I allowed to tell my story?
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying journalists are any more interesting than anyone else. But I’ve often felt that my experience chasingthe story was as interesting as the story itself, but within the confines of a traditional news article, it was difficult to convey the full power of those experiences.
So I went for it. Last month I published “Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival,” my attempt to illuminate the warring roles many of us play: spouse, parent, worker, curious traveler, person striving to grow up, with Africa as the backdrop. I tried to write from the point of view (alien to much journalism) of a three-dimensional human being moving through a beautiful but troubled world, dragging along his own baggage, literal and metaphoric, trying to connect with the people he was writing about for this newspaper and at the same time honoring the primary relationship in his life.
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Mr. Gettleman and Ms. Morris, stranded at an airport in Baidoa, Somalia, during Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, 2007.CreditMichael Kamber for The New York Times
There was so much to unlearn. Newspaper writing is tight, skipping from detail to detail, avoiding contradictions. But, this doesn’t work when you’re writing a book. Instead, you need to open up, draw out scenes, write about complicated feelings. Otherwise, there are no characters to hold on to. And what happens when that character is you and the co-star your wife? Isn’t that a little too much information, as they say?
Perhaps. But for me, there was no separating my love for this part of the world from my love for my wife. At the end of the day, those were the two forces that made me feel less alone in the world.
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Mr. Gettleman and Ms. Morris in the Ogaden Desert of Ethiopia with rebel forces, 2007. (The journalists were imprisoned by government agents shortly after this picture was taken.)CreditVanessa Vick for The New York Times
Students watch a movie being projected in the playground of the African Hope Learning Center. Photo: Marwa Abdallah
A couple of weeks ago, a video that made the rounds on social media showed an Egyptian man chanting during an Oromo conference in Egypt that the Oromo will get their rights and come to power in Ethiopia.The video resulted in minor disturbances in the otherwise stable Egyptian-Ethiopian relations for a few days, with a spokesman from the Ethiopian government accusing “elements” in Egypt of financing, arming and training armed groups in Ethiopia to undermine the government.
Egyptian authorities swiftly denied all such accusations, reiterating its full support and respect of Ethiopia’s sovereignty.
Although the rift was short-lived and has since been forgotten, it is a fact that the presence of the Oromo people in Egypt has been increasing as of late.The Oromo are the single largest ethno-national group in northeast Africa. In Ethiopia, they are estimated to comprise 50 million out of the country’s total population of 100 million.
Although the Oromo group is the largest among the country’s 80 ethno-national groups, it is the most oppressed group in Ethiopia and is subjected to torture and arrests from the government for demanding their rights.
Among the Oromo community, the majority is Christian, while Muslims represent an almost equal percentage of the community. Muslims, Christians and individuals of other religions living together in harmony without any discrimination within Oromia territory.
Since the Ethiopian government decided to implement the so-called “Integrated Addis Ababa Master Plan” to expand the Ethiopian capital, which is classified as one of the capital cities witnessing the greatest growth, it started dislocating the Oromo people from their farms without giving proper compensations.
Oromo demonstrations surfaced in Ginchi – about 80 kilometers southwest of the capital – in November 2015, with the Oromo protesting against the selling of the nearby Chilimongo forest, land seizures and the ongoing evictions of Oromo farmers.
Human Rights Watch accused Ethiopian security forces of killing 400 people during the protests. The chaos from the protests resulted in the imposition of martial law in the country, which remains under effect until this moment.
Last August, the Oromo and Amhara groups – which, together, form 80% of Ethiopia’s population – protested against the government for marginalizing the two groups, depriving them of their rights and barring them from holding top positions in the country.
Clashes during the protest resulted in the death of seven protestors who were calling for the release of political prisoners, freedom of expression and an end to human rights violations.
The Ethiopian authorities’ violations against the Oromo people have pushed many of the latter to flee the country, with some of them seeking refuge in Egypt.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Egypt, there were 11,192 Ethiopian asylum seekers in Egypt as of September. The number increased noticeably after the clashes between the Oromo and the Ethiopian authorities.
“Of course there’s a significant increase in numbers of Ethiopian refugees,” Tarek Argaz, a media official at UNHCR, told Egyptian Streets. “Since a year and a half, the number of asylum seekers was around 5,000.”
“The reason behind the increased flow of Ethiopian refugees to Egypt is that the Ethiopian authorities can’t arrest us here,” said 25-year-old Abdi Boushra, Director of the Oromo Volunteering Association School in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Maadi.
Boushra says he fled Ethiopia after being detained for a year after being accused of being a member of the Oromo Liberation Front, an armed group that is outlawed by the Ethiopian government.
“You’ll be oppressed just for being an Oromo; I was a teacher and I was telling students how to protest peacefully against what our territory is facing and the violations the government made,” Boushra told Egyptian Streets.
“I got arrested for a year. Then I fled from Ethiopia to Sudan. I’m like many people who fled from Sudan to Egypt by smugglers through the desert. We paid around USD 300 to reach Egypt.”
Boushra says he spent three months in Sudan but described his time there as a “nightmare,” saying that Sudanese authorities extradite asylum seekers back to Ethiopia.
“If we went there, we will be killed,” Boushra says. “We never imagined to live in Egypt before because of the different culture and language but we come here to feel safe.”
Ashraf Melad, a lawyer and researcher on refugee affairs, described the legal situation of Ethiopian refugees in Egypt.
“The 2014 Egyptian constitution insisted to protect any asylum seeker but there’s no refugee law in Egypt. Egypt is only permitting asylum seekers to live on its land,” Melad told Egyptian Streets. “In case of committing crimes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs alerts the country of the asylum seeker who committed the crime.
“In [Sudan’s case], there’s an implicit convention between the Sudanese and Ethiopian governments of extraditing Ethiopian opposition and asylum seekers. It’s a deal which had no place in Egyptian-Ethiopian relations,” Melad added.
“The UNHCR is keen on giving each refugee his right and make sure that he deserves our help. We decreased the period for discussing the papers of people who seek asylum after they got the yellow card to live legally in Egypt from 28 months to 16 months to accept him as a refugee or not,” UNHCR’s Argaz said. “I consider this as an achievement because we have an increasing flow and a limited budget.”
Noura Mohamed, a house maid who fled from the conflict in Oromia with her 14-year-old son, resorted to smugglers to help her make her way to Egypt through Sudan, like many other Ethiopians fleeing their country.
“The [situation] in Oromia was unbearable. The security comes to arrest you in your home just for being Oromo,” Mohamed told Egyptian Streets. “The government killed my father during clashes.”
Mohamed says that, after working as a maid in Kuwait, she returned to Ethiopia, where she and her husband were detained for demonstrating “and for being an Oromo citizen in the first place.”
Mohamed was released after three months, while her husband is currently still in prison in Ethiopia.
“I wanted to bring up my only son, so I decided to flee no matter what will happen; there’s nothing worse than what we experienced,” Mohamed says.
However, she says that she is struggling in Egypt, where her monthly salary is EGP 1,500 but her rent is EGP 1,000 per month.
“The UNHCR gives me EGP 1,050 in annual expenses for my son but of course this isn’t enough,” she says.
To add to Mohamed’s woes, schools are not accessible to many asylum seekers in Egypt, making it difficult for her to secure an education for her son.
“Asylum seekers have no right to [enroll] their children in Egyptian schools; there are schools for refugees but we noticed that many Oromo children evade these schools because they’re irrelevant to their identity and language,” Boushra says.
In an attempt to address this issue, Boushra says that the community decided to establish a school to teach Oromo children the Oromo language, as well as English, Arabic and other subjects such as math and science.
“We are working in the school as volunteers and there are no fees for children,” Boushra says, adding that the school currently has 150 students but remains free of the supervision of any educational authority.
The school was established in hopes of helping the Oromo people in Egypt maintain their identity as they work to integrate themselves into the society as a whole.
While a number of Ethiopian refugees say they don’t face racism or ethnic discrimination in Egypt, seeking refuge in Egypt is not without its challenges.
Everyday, many refugees who enter Egypt illegally gather in front of the UNHCR headquarters in the 6th of October satellite city, waiting for their turn to be accepted as asylum seekers and begin integrating themselves in Egyptian society.
THE LOCAL independent Ethiopian citizens’ news agencies are reporting outside the country that there is a huge popular mobilization against the government.
Bet Selam synagogue in Kechene, Ethiopia. (photo credit:IRENE ORLEANSKY)
In January, 2016, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom was nominated as Africa’s candidate for director general of the UN World Health Organization.
Just this past week, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was named global ambassador for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) by the WHO, a position in which he will serve under whoever is ultimately appointed as the WHO’s director general. While Bloomberg, with his impeccable record of public health advocacy and international philanthropy, is clearly over-qualified for this role, what frightens me is the potential appointment of Adhanom as his superior. A rudimentary comparison of these two men’s records highlights the latter’s extreme unfitness for the office he seeks to assume and the absurdity of his even being considered.
During his unprecedented three-term tenure, mayor Bloomberg took direct control of the troubled New York City school system and oversaw a marked increase in children’s test scores; he banned smoking in restaurants, bars, parks and other indoor and outdoor public arenas; he partnered with and empowered citizens of the city by calling upon them to notify authorities of suspicious happenings they observed; he established a comprehensive information hotline that provides vital factual data to city dwellers and visitors in more than 170 languages; he banned trans-fats and mandated the posting of calorie counts in New York restaurants, measures that have since been adopted in major cities throughout the nation toward combating rising obesity rates in both adults and children; he used his own private funds to pay for a Super Bowl ad promoting stricter gun control.
And this is a mere sampling of his contributions to the quality of life of the people he governed. Now that his terms as mayor have ended, he has expanded his health, well-being and justice initiatives to the broader global community and continues to work tirelessly, and to donate generously, to promote causes at the core of human flourishing.
No model of leadership could be more divergent from Bloomberg’s than the one Ethiopian Foreign Minister Adhanom, along with his political associates, represents. The current Ethiopian government is widely recognized as a criminally organized group with high rates of human rights abuses. According to The New York Times and Human Rights Watch, tens of thousands of peaceful protesters against the government have been incarcerated, and over 700 have been killed, in recent months. The Ethiopian athlete Feyisa Lilesa made a powerful public gesture in solidarity with his oppressed countrymen at the Summer Olympics in Rio last month and was warned not to return home afterward.
The International Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Ethiopia is among Africa’s leading jailers of journalists and has destroyed its own independent civil society. The UN Commissioner for Human Rights has requested an independent evaluation of the deaths of hundreds of peaceful civilian protesters in recent months at the hands of the Ethiopian army. However, Foreign Minister Adhanom and his government have refused external evaluation of human rights abuses complained of by large numbers of citizens.
THE LOCAL independent Ethiopian citizens’ news agencies are reporting outside the country that there is a huge popular mobilization against the government.
The local citizens are demonstrating peacefully, with the following complaints: that the government is killing them indiscriminately and robbing the country of power and economic resources, which are being funneled to one small, elite tribal group (known as the Tgria Peoples Liberation Front), and that their land is being sold to the Tgrian tribe, or that this tribe is selling their land to foreign investors.
On the day that the athlete Lilesa showed his support at the Olympics in Rio, there was a demonstration planned in the capital city of Addis Ababa, but the government deployed military force to put down the peaceful citizens who organized it. Only Lilesa could make his statement, safely insulated, for the moment, from the army’s threatened violence, by a couple thousand miles.
His fellow citizens at home were not so fortunate. Just this past week, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn announced on national television that all military personnel would be ordered to open fire on peaceful demonstrators, which, on the first day following, resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
Britain Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond recently warned, in a meeting with Adhanom, that Ethiopia’s “repeated failure to deliver on our basic requests” regarding an Ethiopian-born English citizen being held on death row simply because he is the opposition party leader had led him be begin “looking carefully at the bilateral relationship” between the two nations. This is yet another example of the current Ethiopian government’s pervasive corruption and lawlessness.
As a chief agent of this depraved, bloody government body, how can Adhanom be considered as a prospective director general of the WHO? How does his candidacy reflect on the WHO itself, or, more broadly, the UN’s role as the world’s moral anchor and arbiter? Clearly, there is no just way forward but for the UN to investigate the current Ethiopian government’s reported abuses and to renounce the candidacy of its foreign minister for the position he seeks at the WHO.
It is perhaps in the values that underlie the actions of Bloomberg and Adhanom, respectively, that the starkest contrast between these two men might be drawn. Bloomberg has often been quoted as saying, “The thing about great wealth is that you can’t take it with you,” by way of explaining why he is choosing to give so much of his private fortune away – a total of $4.3 billion thus far, including $510 million distributed by his philanthropies in 2015 alone. Adhanom, on the other hand, is a prominent member of the Ethiopian government whose former leader, Meles Zenawi (the man who appointed Adhanom to his position), had a reported net worth of over $3b., having amassed this amount entirely during his years in office.
He took power in 1991 with an officially listed salary of $220 per month, and had no private financial resources to his name at that point. Today, all the top leaders of the TPLF are billionaires, though their nation remains an impoverished member of the Third World. Sadly, the source of these leaders’ newfound wealth is not too hard to surmise.
I have lived, for years, under the governance of both mayor Bloomberg and Finance Minister Adhanom and can thus attest, on a personal level, to the disparate impact of their leadership on the people they’ve ruled. I know, first hand, what it has been like to live under the policies of Bloomberg’s and Adhanom’s administrations, and how each has affected the daily life of his constituency.
More than all the facts and figures I have cited above, these real-life, on-the-ground experiences have shaped my conviction that Adhanom and his cronies must go if my native land is ever to prosper as my adopted city has in the past few decades. The WHO’s recent appointments, within the broader context of rising unrest in Ethiopia, where my family resides, and my own relatively secure life in New York, have brought this realization home to me as never before. I can only hope that the world will begin to see things in kind.
The author, a social activist on behalf of the Ethiopian Jewish community, served in the Israel Police. He holds a master’s degree in community leadership and philanthropy from Hebrew University and is currently pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership and administration, while studying for rabbinic ordination.
Horn of Africa nation has seen months of protests during which rights groups say security forces have killed hundreds.
Oromos have long complained of marginalisation by the government [Tiksa Negeri/Reuters]
Protesters in Ethiopia have attacked foreign businesses, according to the owners of a flower firm, as demonstrations in which rights groups say hundreds of people have been killed continued.
The Dutch company said crowds of people in the Oromia and Amhara regions torched flower farms as they targeted businesses with perceived links to the government. Flowers are one of the country's top exports.
The Esmeralda Farms statement came after weeks of escalating protests that started among the Oromo, Ethiopia's biggest ethnic group, and later spread to the Amhara, the second most populous group.
Both groups of protesters are demanding more political and economic rights, and say that a ruling coalition is dominated by the Tigrayan ethnic group, which makes up about 6 percent of the population.
According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch group, security forces have killed at least 500 people since the unrest began in November and thousands of people have been arrested.
The government has denied that violence from the security forces is "systemic" and pledged to launch an independent investigation, blaming opposition groups inside and outside of the country and what it called "anti-peace" elements for the chaos.
Esmeralda Farms said its 10 million euro ($11.1m) investment went up in smoke this week in Bahir Dar city and that several other horticulture companies were also affected.
Remco Bergkamp, assistant manager at Esmeralda Farms in the Netherlands, told Al Jazeera that the company would probably leave Ethiopia, rather than rebuild the farm.
"The situation is not stable enough to run a business. You just don’t know where the country is headed," Bergkamp told Al Jazeera.
Ethiopia has seen sustained economic growth in recent years and the government has been keen to attract foreign investors, often offering attractive incentives to firms who want to do business there.
Government opponents, though, say the country's poorest have seen little benefit from the investment.
"The government sent security forces to protect the farm. Eventually the group of protesters grew so large that the soldiers were forced to flee and the property was torched," Bergkamp said.
"One of our Ethiopian staff members was wounded in the attack."
Protests in Oromia started in November last year when the government announced a plan to expand the capital - a city state - into the surrounding Oromia region.
Many Oromos saw that as a plan to remove them from fertile land. The scheme has since been dropped but the unrest spread as demonstrators called for the release of prisoners and for wider freedoms.
In the Amhara region, demonstrations began over the status of a district - Wolkait - that was once part of Amhara but was incorporated into the neighbouring Tigrayan region more than 20 years ago. Those demonstrations have also since widened.
The governing Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front last month rejected a United Nations request that it send in observers, saying it alone was responsible for the security of its citizens.
The government, a close security ally of the West, is often accused of silencing dissent, even blocking internet access at times. At elections last year, it won every seat in the 547-seat parliament.
It is true that, as the editorial board put it, “the United States has long relied on Ethiopia as a partner in the fight against al-Shabab’s terrorism in Somalia and sends the country tens of millions of dollars in development assistance.” But this characterization, which substantially underestimates the amount of aid we devote to propping up this tyranny, implies that we’re at least getting something in return for turning a blind eye to its crimes against humanity.
In fact, when one considers that the regime’s leaders are faking their claims of economic success, covering upthe extent of the biggest famine in the country’s history, secretly trading with al-Shabab, embezzling $2 billion every year, enforcing policies that have killed millions of their citizens through neglect and malfeasance, and have perpetrated outright genocide, it becomes clear that we’ve gained nothing that could justify our shameful complicity in this holocaust. Our policy is a strategic failure and a moral stain that history will judge harshly.
