Berhanu Nega: The Quest for Change in Ethiopia

By Laura Secorun Palet, Ozy

It was the spring of 2001 and 43-year-old Berhanu Nega was optimistic. His homeland, Ethiopia, was recovering from decades of conflict, he had just given a speech to university students about academic freedom, and now he had landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport for a business conference in Paris.






Then he turned on his phone. The students he’d spoken to hours earlier had staged a peaceful protest that the police answered with brute force and live ammunition, leaving 40 people dead. A week later, Nega was back in Ethiopia, behind bars.



So began a 14-year-long ordeal that has seen Nega, one of Ethiopia’s leading activists, arrested and jailed twice — once for almost two years — exiled to the United States and finally, condemned to death, in absentia. These days, the would-be mayor of Addis Ababa (he was detained right after he won the election) is an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University. But Nega remains a prominent opposition leader: He is the co-founder of Ginbot 7, an outlawed political party that he leads from the sleepy Pennsylvania campus town of Lewisburg.




Of late, Ethiopia has been a darling of Western powers. The landlocked country is considered an island of stability in the otherwise turbulent Horn of Africa. Yes, its name was once synonymous with starving children and charity concerts, but today, Ethiopia posts GDP growth numbers in the double digits. In the past year, foreign investment has skyrocketed. The country is also a valuable partner against the threat of Islamist terrorism — here, in the incarnation of al-Shabab in Somalia, which killed 148 students in April at a Kenyan university.






In Nega’s view, that’s why the the U.S. donated $340 million to a country with such a horrible human rights record. Under Meles Zenawi, who ruled from 1991 until his death in 2012, the government ostracized the opposition and imposed a system of ethnic-based federalism, which enhanced divisions and was useful for repressing certain ethnic groups. Zenawi’s successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has carried on his legacy of media muffling, extrajudicial executions and torturing dissidents. Nega says protecting a regime that most citizens resent will backfire in the long run: “Ethiopia is ready to explode, it just needs a little match to light it up,” he says. “The West is not going to give Africans democracy, Africans have to fight for it.”

The U.S. State Department did not comment on Nega’s criticisms of U.S. policy in the Horn of Africa. Via email, a representative described U.S relations with the Ethiopian government as “robust” and said it partners “with Ethiopia and its people, as we do with people and governments across Africa, to pursue shared goals of democracy, peace and prosperity.”

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