March 31, 2014
by Alemayehu G. Mariam
“Big Brother is Watching You!” secretly: The snooping thug state in 2014 Ethiopiana
The secrecy-obsessed regime in Ethiopia has a huge creepy dragnet of
secret electronic surveillance programs to sniff out the deeply-buried
secrets of the people of Ethiopia. They spend sleepless nights
interrogating themselves about what the people could do to them. Who do
they talk to secretly? What do they secretly say about them? Do the
people secretly despise them as much as they think they do? (That’s an
open secret.) Are the people secretly planning to overthrow them? Who
are the secret conspirators? Where are they? In Ethiopia? Europe?
America? Could the secret enemies be extraterrestrial Ethiopians from
Planet X?
For the regime knowledge is strength. No! Ignorance is strength. The
regime must find out by hook or crook. Bug the landlines. Intercept the
mobile phones. Hack the personal computers. Filter the critical
websites. What else? They rack their brains and spend sleepless nights
not only because they don’t know but also because they do. They know
what they have done; and now they want to know what could be done unto
them, secretly. They turn and toss. In their nightmares, they are
chased by the Truth. They wake up in cold sweat. Such is the secret
night life of ignorant thugs in power in Ethiopiana.
Secrecy is the brick and mortar in the architecture of oppression
established by the regime in Ethiopia over the past two decades. The
regime is so obsessed with secrecy that nearly two years after the
passing of Meles Zenawi, its “Great, Visionary, Heroic, Renaissance,
etc., Leader”, there is no official word on the cause of his death. It
is a highly guarded state secret. From their days in the bush, those
running regime have cultivated a stenchy culture of official secrecy and
corruption (what I call a “culture of secrruption” for readers familiar
with my neologisms). In fact, they have refined official secrecy and
corruption to an art form. They make decisions under the proverbial cone
of silence and secrecy. A secret shadow government (a “state within a
state”) of faceless, nameless and conscienceless power-brokers makes all
of the important decisions in the country. The regime operators and
their cronies stash their stolen millions in secret off shore accounts.
Global Financial Integrity not long ago reported that since 2000,
Ethiopia has lost nearly USD$12 billion in secret illicit financial
outflows. A cloak of secrecy shrouds public works and projects contracts
which are back-channeled secretly to regime supporters and cronies.
The country’s best lands are given away (excuse me, “leased for 99
years”) for pennies to Saudi, Indian and Chinese “investors” in total
secrecy. An Indian multinational actually claimed it acquired “
2,500 sq km of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset, England-”
in Ethiopia, together with generous tax breaks, for £150 a week
($USD245). (Yeah! Right. If anyone believes that, I have the Brooklyn
Bridge for sale at rock bottom prices. Somebodies got big secret paydays
from that deal.) The regime operators are secret (silent) partners in
all of the investments and procurement deals they hand out.
Winston Churchill once observed that, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma.” I would say the ruling regime in Ethiopia is
a riddle wrapped in secrecy inside corruption. It is comically ironic
that the secrecy-obsessed regime recently sought membership in the
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international
organization dedicated exclusively to promote openness, transparency and
accountability in the global mining industry. It is like the
proverbial Ethiopian wolf who sought membership among a flock of sheep
by wrapping himself in sheep’s wool to keep his identity secret. (
Could EITI be a pack of wolves wrapped in sheep’s wool?)
“They Know Everything We Do”
Last week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its report on the secret
massive electronic surveillance program of the regime in Ethiopia. In
its report entitled, “‘
They Know Everything We Do’: Telecom and Internet Surveillance in Ethiopia”,
HRW concluded, “The Ethiopian government is using foreign technology to
bolster its widespread telecom surveillance of opposition activists and
journalists both in Ethiopia and abroad… The government is using
control of its telecom system as a tool to silence dissenting voices…”
The report documents the regime’s “complete control over the telecom
system… (and the fact that) Ethiopian security officials have virtually
unlimited access to the call records of all telephone users in Ethiopia.
They regularly and easily record phone calls without any legal process
or oversight. Recorded phone calls with family members and friends –
particularly those with foreign phone numbers – are often played during
abusive interrogations in which people who have been arbitrarily
detained are accused of belonging to banned organizations.”
The regime has gone to extraordinary lengths to “curtail access to
information by blocking websites and bloggers that offer any independent
or critical analysis of political events in Ethiopia.” The regime has
used “mobile surveillance” and “frequently targeted the ethnic Oromo
population.” It has used “taped phone calls to compel people in custody
to confess to being part of banned groups, such as the Oromo Liberation
Front.” The surveillance technology is provided by China which has been
the “exclusive supplier of telecom equipment from 2006 to 2009.” A
number of “European companies have also provided advanced surveillance
technology to Ethiopia, which have been used to target members of the
diaspora.” The report points an accusatory finger at the “foreign firms
that are providing products and services that facilitate Ethiopia’s
illegal surveillance are risking complicity in rights abuses.”
Redwan Hussein, an apparatchik in the regime’s “Ministry of
Information”, regurgitated the now familiar litany of demonization
against Human Rights Watch: “This is one of the issues that it [HRW]
has in the list of its campaigns to smear Ethiopia’s image, so there is
nothing new to respond to it, because there is nothing new to it.”
The regime is simply not constructed to handle the truth. Time and
again, it has shown unwillingness and inability to defend against the
truth; so it reverts to its favorite and predictable five-pronged PR
tactic: Deny the truth. Dismiss the truth as “smear”. Disguise the
truth. Divert attention from the truth. Denigrate the truth-sayers and
truth-diggers. But resistance to truth is futile.
When the European Union Election Observer Group confronted the late
Meles Zenawi with the truth about his daylight theft of the May 2010
election by 99.6 percent, he denied and dismissed the truth and
denigrated the entire EU Group for preparing a “trash report that
deserves to be thrown in the garbage.” In August 2005, Meles, following
the electoral drubbing of his party by a coalition of opposition parties
in May, unleashed his wrath on European Union parliamentarian Ana Gomes
and her election observer group. “We shall, in the coming days and
weeks, see what we can do to expose the pack of lies and innuendoes that
characterise the garbage in this report.”
So it is with the HRW and its report on internet and telecom
surveillance in Ethiopia. All the regime can say in its defense is, “It
is a campaign to smear Ethiopia’s image.” Truth be told, when it comes
to “fear and smear campaigns” and fabrication of falsehoods, the regime
in Ethiopia takes the cake. In my commentary, “
The Politics of Fear and Smear”
in Ethiopia, I demonstrated the regime’s propaganda campaign of smear,
falsehoods and defamation against Ethiopian Muslims protesting political
interference in their internal religious affairs.
The Federal Republic of Dystopia Ethiopia
With every passing day, Ethiopia is becoming a hardcore dystopia
(that would be the exact opposite of a utopia.) Dystopia Ethiopia is a
frightening place. It is a place where thugs rule! It is a place where
humans are dehumanized, civilization is barbarized, justice corrupted,
ethnic cleansing practiced, people impoverished and hungry, the youth
gagged, bound and canned, the environment destroyed, dams used to damn
indigenous peoples and society in cataclysmic decline. If that sounds
like George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” Oceania, it is not. It is
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” in 2014 Federal Republic of Dystopia Ethiopia!
In Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” Oceania, there is omnipresent
government surveillance, public manipulation and thought-control by a
regime under the control of a privileged “Inner Party” elite that
persecutes all dissent and prosecutes freedom of thought as “thought
crimes”. The state in Oceania thrives on deception, secret surveillance
and mass psychological manipulation. The head honcho tyrant is an
elusive “Big Brother” who is worshiped as a demigod. Orwell writes,
“Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings and a
voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never
die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was
born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit
itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for
love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards
an individual than towards an organization.” The slogans of Big
Brother’s party are: “War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Slavery is
freedom.”
The “state” in 2014 Ethiopiana is uncannily similar to Orwell’s
fictional Oceania. Big Brother Meles is the infallible and all-powerful
leader from the “telescreen” when he was alive (he never mingled with
people in the street) and now from the grave. To Big Brother Meles
belongs, “Every success, every achievement, every victory, every
scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all
virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and
inspiration.” To his party acolytes, Big Brother Meles the omniscient,
was, is and will forever be the fountainhead of knowledge and wisdom.
He is the source of all good and great ideas.
Meles’ handpicked replacement, Hailemariam Desalegn, in his eulogy at
Meles funeral spoke of the “great and exemplary leader” who created the
“grand vision of what we can achieve and become in the future.” He
described Big Brother Meles as the man with the plan who led Ethiopia to
stratospheric heights. Hailemariam said, the “wise, insightful and
decisive leader established the EPDRF party and was the chief architect
and engineer of Ethiopia’s developmental plan”. Hailemariam credited
Meles for singularly designing policies and strategies for the country
and creating an economy that produced 10 percent plus growth over a
period of 9 years. Meles was the “Renaissance and heroic leader who gave
Ethiopia economic growth and transformation. Even though he left us,
his vision will remain nor only with the party but also every individual
in the country,” eulogized Hailemariam.
Big Brother Meles is “superman”, if not demigod, in the imagination
of a few of his powerful foreign Little Sisters. Clare Short, Tony
Blair’s former Secretary for International Development and the current
chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative spoke of her
unbounded admiration for Meles as “the most intelligent politician I’ve
ever met in my life.“ Ditto for Susan Rice, the former U.S. ambassador
to the U.N. and the current national security advisor to Obama. In her
eulogy Rice said, “The Meles I knew was… the smartest person in the
room, and most of the time Meles was right…” Big Brother Meles of
Ethiopiana, like the Big Brother of Oceania, comes alive today not only
on the telescreen, but also from the grave, to guide and goad his Little
Brothers, “War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Slavery is freedom.” He
taught his Little Brothers, “Surveillance is the soul of secrecy.”
Indeed, in Ethiopiana war is peace (though the society is seething
with rage and rebellion but they can pretend it is all peaceful);
ignorance is bliss (the less the people know, the happier they will be
and therefore it is necessary to twist and distort the truth to keep the
people ignorant) and freedom is slavery (“Secrecy is the freedom
tyrants dream of”, said Bill Moyers.)
The freedom to think freely is the death knell of tyranny. The
unshackled mind is the terror of the ignorant. In Oceania, 2+2=5,
because everyone is manipulated to believe it to be so. In Ethiopiana’s
voodoo economics, 6.5% annual economic growth= 11-15% annual economic
growth, if there is anyone to believe it (that is, other than he World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Orwell’s formulaic slogans
for Nineteen Eighty Four Oceania have been updated for 2014 Ethiopiana:
Poverty is prosperity; famine is feast; government wrongs are human
rights; repression is expression and thugogcracy is democracy. Ignorance
is illuminance. Ignorance in Ethiopiana is the national equalizer. The
purpose of the state is to twist, stretch and massage the truth to keep
the people ignorant, dumb and unquestioning.
Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you
can use to change the world.” Knowledge, information, consciousness and
enlightenment are the most powerful weapons in the hands of 21
st
Century men and women to change their lives, the lives of their
families and communities and control the destiny of their nations. For
the regime in Ethiopia, the reverse is true: Ignorance and secrecy are
the most powerful weapons they can use to prevent change and cling to
power. The singular motto of the “Little Brothers of Dystopia Ethiopia”
is, “Secrecy is power. Secrecy is strength.” Secrecy combined with
ignorance yields absolute power. Absolute power in the hands of the
“ignorati” (willfully ignorant) ensures the manipulation, emasculation
and subjugation of the masses. “Keep ‘em ignorant, impoverished, hungry
and divided and they will be your door mats,” is the mantra of the
“Inner Party” (the “state within the state’) of Ethiopiana.
As I have argued on numerous occasions, the
regime knows that it is detested and contemned by the vast majority of
the population. Thus, the sleepless nights. They have done everything to
get a little peace of mind, but to no avail. They have undertaken
vicious propaganda campaigns to pit one ethnic group against another.
They have tried to create war between Christians and Muslims; and thank
God, they have completely failed! They have unleashed a barrage of
propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, indoctrination, worn out
slogans and sterile dogmas from a bygone era to cling to power. They
have tried to clothe their deplorable human rights record with bogus
statistics of economic growth and economic development.
For over two decades, Meles and his gang have tried to keep
Ethiopians in a state of blissful ignorance. At gunpoint, they have
forced the people speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil about
them. Meles and his posse have spent a king’s ransom to jam
international radio and satellite transmissions to prevent the free flow
of information to the people. They have blocked internet access to
alternative and critical sources of information and views. According to
a 2012 report of Freedom House, the highly respected nongovernmental
research and advocacy organization established in 1941, “Ethiopia has
one of the lowest rates of internet and mobile telephone penetration on
the continent. Despite low access, the government maintains a strict
system of controls and is the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa to
implement nationwide internet filtering.” They have shuttered
independent newspapers, jailed reporters, editors and bloggers and
exiled dozens of journalists in a futile attempt to conceal their
horrific crimes against humanity and vampiric corruption. Their “growth
and transformation plan” has succeeded in transforming Ethiopia from the
“Land of 13 Months of Sunshine” to “Ethiopiana, the Land of Perpetual
Ignorance and Darkness”.
All of the surveillance and spying program is part of an elaborate
conspiracy by the regime to create the “Benighted Kingdom of
Ethiopiana”, where ignoramuses are kings, queens, princes and
princesses. The educational system in Ethiopiana is corrupted and
serves as a system of indoctrination. By providing the youth with
substandard education, the regime aims to permanently cripple them
intellectually not only by denying them formal learning opportunities
but also the chance to acquire knowledge on the Internet and transform
their lives and take control of the destiny of their nation. In my
September 2010 commentary, “Indoctri-Nation”, I criticized the Meles
regime for politicizing education. The “Ministry of Education” (reminds
one of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” (Ignorance)) a few years ago issued a
“directive” effectively outlawing distance learning (education programs
that are not delivered in the traditional university classroom or
campus) throughout the country. (Interestingly, Meles and his top
lieutenants got their “graduate education” using foreign distance
learning programs.) The regime also sought to corner the disciplines of
law and teaching for state-controlled universities, creating a monopoly
and pipeline for the training of party hacks to swarm the teaching and
legal professions. There is no academic freedom in Ethiopiana. I have
previously commented on the lack of academic freedom in Ethiopian higher
education and the politicization of education in Ethiopia. In my
February 2008 commentary “
Tyranny in the Academy”, I called attention to the lack of academic freedom at Mekelle Law School.
Why does the regime spy on the people?
The regime secretly spies on the people because it is afraid of the
people. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy cautioned the American
people, “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with
unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive
values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth
and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its
people.” The regime in Ethiopia is afraid of the people and seeks to
overcome its fear through secret surveillance programs and open
harassment.
What is tragically ironic is the fact that the official secrecy
religiously practiced by the regime today is a constitutional anathema.
The Ethiopian Constitution mandates government transparency and
accountability under Article 12 (1) (“Functions and Accountability of
Government”): “The activities of government shall be undertaken in a
manner which is open and transparent to the public.” The regime has
translated that constitutional mandate to mean, “The activities of
government shall be undertaken in a manner which is totally secret and
non-transparent to the public.” Secrecy is a powerful tool to deceive
the people.
The great French man of letters, Victor Hugo observed, “You can
resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.”
The Internet is an idea whose time has come. B.I. (Before the Internet)
will never come back, only A.I. (After the Internet). The Internet,
not ignorance, is the great equalizer and democratizer in the world.
With an inexpensive personal computer or mobile phone, knowledge and
information in any language are at one’s fingertips. The regime in
Ethiopia is fighting a losing war against the invisible empire of ideas
and knowledge. The Internet is the 21
st
Century’s evergreen Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The regime in
its assumed divinity wants to impose an edict on the people of Ethiopia:
“Thou must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for
when you eat from it you will certainly die.” The Internet “Tree of
Knowledge” shall give life to all those that have been rendered zombies
by ignorant tyrants. The Internet genie is out of the bottle, and there
is no way of putting it back. Neither telecom filters, electronic
monitoring nor ownership of entire telecom systems will deter the
determined “cyber-warriors” from empowering themselves with the truth,
knowledge and information. In the Internet Age, resistance to truth,
knowledge and information is futile!
Well, Big Brother Meles is gone (sort of) from Ethiopiana but he
shall live on the “telescreen” and in the grave for his ”Little
Brothers” of his “Inner Party”. They shall go on visioning, watching,
looking, peeping, observing, surveilling, ogling, listening, sniffing,
and yodeling:
…The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power,
pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are
different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are
doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards
and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very
close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to
recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed,
that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that
just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be
free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes
power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it
is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a
revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the
dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of
torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to
understand me.
Ethiopiana’s Inner Party should know a few truths about the 21st
Century: Secrecy is impotency. Ignorance is indolence. Freedom is the
essence of humanity; and the truth shall make them and all Ethiopians
free. Orwell wrote, “During times of deceit, telling the truth becomes a
revolutionary act.” But what happens when silence is accepted as a
revolutionary act?
“When an entire generation of Ethiopian scholars, academics,
professors and learned elites stands silent as a bronze statute
witnessing the tyranny of ignorance in action, the burden on the few who
try to become the voices of the voiceless on every issue is enormous.”
From my commentary,
“Edu-corruption and Mis-education in Ethiopia”.
Oceania Ethiopiana! Welcome to the Federal Republic of Dystopia Ethiopia!
Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam teaches political science at
California State University, San Bernardino and is a practicing defense
lawyer.
