The Race To Save Berhanu Nega

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON – A New York-educated economist is languishing undernourished in an Ethiopian prison, facing possible execution for his work as a democracy activist.


Academics from the economist’s alma mater, the New School, are calling on Secretary of State Rice, Senator Clinton, and Ethiopia’s representatives at the United Nations to intervene and help to free Berhanu Nega, who was arrested earlier this month for efforts to liberalize his homeland.


“He’s there trying to be an advocate for democracy,” the president of New School University and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, Robert Kerrey,said of the imprisoned alumnus.


Mr. Nega, 47, was captured and detained by Ethiopian authorities earlier this month after participating in peaceful demonstrations against the government on October 31, which turned violent in the following days after Ethiopian police fired on protesters, killing dozens.


The rallies were timed to coincide with a meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital and the union’s headquarters.


Staged primarily by the country’s opposition party, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy, the demonstrations were meant to protest the government’s alleged rigging of national elections in May, and its slaying in June of more than 40 activists protesting the questionable election results.


According to Amnesty International, the CUD’s vice chairman, Mr. Nega, is one of hundreds of Ethiopians detained by the government in the wake of the protests. Along with almost a dozen CUD leaders and journalists, the economist has been listed by the organization as a “prisoner of conscience.” Students at New School working on behalf of Mr. Nega’s release said he is reported to be in solitary confinement, limited to one meal a day.


According to press accounts, Mr. Nega – who is married and has two children – is being held on charges of treason, punishable by death in Ethiopia.


In addition to being the vice chairman of the CUD and a democracy activist, Mr. Nega is also an economist who received his Ph.D. in economics at New School in 1991 and served as a professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania for three years before returning to his homeland in 1994.


The discovery that a member of the New School economics community faced possible execution for trying to effect democratic reform in Ethiopia stirred the president of the university’s 80-member Economics Student Union, Keith Blackwell, to involve the school in securing Mr. Nega’s release.


Mr. Blackwell enlisted other students in a massive petition-gathering and letter-writing campaign, dispatching 400 signed missives each to Ms. Rice, Mrs. Clinton, and Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Teruneh Zenna, asking that they demand Mr. Nega’s release.


The letter to Mrs. Clinton from the New School students, for example, describes Mr. Nega’s suffering and urges: “As our Senator and someone with a strong stance on human rights, we urge you to use the resources at your disposal to direct the full force and attention of Congress and the State Department to this important issue as soon as possible.”


Mrs. Clinton’s office, reached yesterday afternoon, said they “would look into the matter.”


A State Department spokesman said yesterday that the department was unable to comment on the Nega situation, and efforts to reach representatives of the Ethiopian mission to the United Nations yesterday were unsuccessful.


The letters, Mr. Blackwell said, were part of a strategy to draw as much attention as possible to the case of Mr. Nega to create a groundswell in New York, Washington, and abroad to insist on the scholar’s release. The New School students, Mr. Blackwell said, will be expanding their petitioning campaign to other area universities, including Columbia and New York University, which participate in a graduate-school consortium with New School.


To Mr. Blackwell, other economics students, and Mr. Kerrey, the campaign to free Mr. Nega was also a fight for their school’s principles.


Mr. Kerrey said yesterday that Mr. Nega was “one of ours, and he’s obviously in danger – and he’s in danger for all of the right reasons.” New School, Mr. Kerrey said, “has a history … of being a vehicle where voices otherwise silent could be heard, and this is another case of it.”


The former Nebraska senator added that Mr. Nega’s case “further demonstrated that people throughout the world often take a lot more risks for democracy than we do here at home, and that if we align ourselves with them, it can make a big difference.” Mr. Kerrey pledged to keep on the Nega case and to redouble the school’s efforts if the petitioning campaign proves unsuccessful.


A professor of economics at New School who worked with Mr. Nega on his dissertation, Edward Nell, described his former student as a dedicated democrat focused on the economics of African development.


“One got the impression that it was, in a way, kind of a tug-of-war between staying and working on these problems intellectually, and going back and working on them practically,” Mr. Nell said of Mr. Nega.


During his time at New School, Mr. Nell added, Mr. Nega earned a reputation as “a good economist” and “a good, popular teacher” who “was well liked by his classmates, and the other economics students, and the graduate faculty.”


Mr. Nell said that other members of the economics faculty who had visited their colleague in Addis Ababa found him an activist popular among his fellow citizens, adding that Mr. Nega came from a prominent family with a long history of trying to make Ethiopia more democratic.


Mr. Nega also has a personal history of fighting for Ethiopian democracy: While a freshman at Addis Ababa University, Mr. Nega was forced to flee the country and seek refuge in Sudan after participating in a pro-democracy student movement that led to a crackdown by Ethiopia’s military regime. According to the Association of Concerned African Scholars, Mr. Nega was granted political asylum in America, where he completed his undergraduate studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz, before pursuing graduate studies at New School.


The economist’s present detainment is part of what has been described in press accounts as a “crisis” in Ethiopia following the May elections. For the first time in more than a decade, the government of the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, allowed for elections to include opposition candidates, who won a surprising number of parliamentary seats.


Democracy activists grew outraged when, after the elections, the government said the opposition had captured only 176 seats, a number that struck many Ethiopians as suspiciously low. The Meles regime also changed parliamentary bylaws so that issues for debate may be raised only by the party possessing 51% of the body’s seats.


According to press accounts, the election and ensuing acts of repression have struck many observers as a disappointment, owing to expectations that Ethiopia would serve as a model for emerging African democracies.


The New York Sun

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