For two hours every Wednesday evening, David Del Conte, a U.N. official in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 2012 to 2016, would hold unofficial office hours at the Greek Club cafe. Dessu Dulla, a leading Ethiopian journalist at the time, usually came for the off-the-record conversation at one of its cloth covered tables.
The two would discuss issues not openly debated in Ethiopia at the time, Del Conte, who served there until 2016, recalled in an interview. Dessu asked about the true extent of the drought, food assistance going to the majority but disenfranchised Oromo ethnic group, and how the U.N. addressed issues of fairness in famine aid distribution. “He wasn’t asking me softball questions,” said Del Conte, who described Dessu as a journalist trying to do his job.
In late 2021, Dessu, editor-in-chief of the social media-based Oromo-language broadcaster Oromia News Network, was arrested on charges of “destabilizing the government and anti-government activity,” according to Muthoki Mumo, sub-Saharan specialist at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
On May 3, 2022, the government charged him with more serious “outrages against the constitution.” Dessu, another ONN reporter, Bikila Amenu, and 15 co-defendants are now accused of having connections to the opposition Oromia Regional National Transitional Government and face up to life in prison or the death penalty, according to his lawyer, Gudane Fekadu. They are accused of trying to foment a rebellion against the government.
On Dessu’s behalf, his lawyer Gudane has denied Dessu is anything but an independent journalist.
A friend and former colleague of Dessu, Kiya Segni, said he thought Dessu was arrested because he was a widely-read journalist critical of the government. “If you kill the shepherd, the shepherd and the sheep are going to go away,” Segni said.
“Dessu is very much about the principle of media and tries to follow the guidelines by making sure that the news they are producing is balanced,” Segni said.
Long walk to democracy, then a setup
Ethiopia’s four largest ethnic groups are Oromo, Amhara, Somali and Tigray. Tigray, the smallest of the four, has historically dominated positions of power in both the economy and politics while Oromos, the largest group, has not had much of a political voice, according to experts.
Ethiopia was under a Tigrayan-led authoritarian government for nearly thirty years after overthrowing the prior communist regime. During this time, independent media was largely prohibited and dozens of opposition journalists were imprisoned on allegations of being terrorists, a move frequently criticized by Western democracies and international media advocacy groups.
But in 2018, shortly after Abiy Ahmed was appointed prime minister, he released journalists imprisoned under his predecessor, lifted restrictions on independent media, abolished press censorship and brought widespread hope that the Horn of Africa nation was finally on a pro-democratic path. A year later, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the 20-year conflict with neighboring Eritrea.
In less than two years, Abiy had reversed course. He launched a war against the ethnic Tigray population in the north in 2020, postponed scheduled elections, imposed a media blackout during the COVID-19 pandemic, and began imprisoning and banning journalists who appeared to support opposition parties, according to the Washington-based nonprofit group Freedom House.
By 2021, 46 journalists were detained in Ethiopia, placing it once again among the top jailers of journalists in the world, according to Voice of America. Opposition to Abiy nearly disappeared because most critics, both journalists and activists, were imprisoned on allegations of threatening the government.
Dessu had fled Ethiopia’s authoritarian government for the Netherlands in 2004 and returned after Abiy came to power. But, as tension between the feuding ethnic groups and political parties intensified, his media network came under government scrutiny as an outlet opposed to Abiy and his government policies.
In March 2020, Dessu was briefly detained for the first time after visiting an Oromian political activist in prison. Six months later, he was arrested again, this time for filming outside a hotel in Addis Ababa. He was not charged after either incident. In November 2021 he was finally arrested and not released, said CPJ’s Mumo.
Nine journalists, including the two from ONN, are in prison in Ethiopia, according to CPJ’s 2021 prison census, which includes data as of Dec. 1, 2021.
“Oromia News Network is generally perceived as critical of the current government and of the [ruling] Prosperity Party and likely to publish content that those in power and others may not always want to have published,” Mumo added.
Abiy, who imposed a state of emergency on Nov. 2, 2021 to wipe out the opposition Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the political party that held power before Abiy, used it as a reason to monitor the press and arrest any journalists or activists he believed to be against him, experts said. The majority of the 20,000 people arrested under the state of emergency have been released from prison.
The Ethiopian Embassy did not respond to several requests for comment. The United States Embassy in Ethiopia also did not respond to requests.
Chronic drought and famine heighten the political divide
The country is facing its fourth consecutive year of drought, and war in the Tigray region has killed a half a million people, according to international aid groups and media reports, making it the deadliest war on the planet.
The war in Ukraine and the two-year-old COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated famine, inflation, refugee displacement and shortages of food. Ethiopia imports approximately 66% of its wheat from Ukraine and Russia, according to the World Food Programme. Economist Wondimagegn Mesgin described Ethiopia as having one of the highest inflation rates in the world.
“Ethiopia is getting hit in the top of the head. It’s getting hit in the cheek, and it’s getting hit in the stomach,” Del Conte said.