online violence? 'not sure I know what you mean'

and looking back at 2019

May 13, 2024

Hi there,

Thanks to everyone who shared their enthusiasm and ideas for the Sifter community after-work hang-out idea from last week. I’m checking out two venues this week, and I’ll be back in your inbox with more concrete steps.

Before we head on over to the weekly round-ups, a couple of notices. As some of you may already know, I am a proud board member of the Ethiopian Media Women Association. The Association, made up of over 200 women media professionals working across all the regions of Ethiopia, is now hiring for two positions - a Project Officer and a Finance Officer. If you know anyone interested, willing, and able - please share the word!

Now, to the news.

Online safety: research backs lived experience

I love when research tells us what we already know. And I don’t say that to be funny, but it does seem strange when sometimes it’s the only way to get some people to listen.

Women in Ethiopia (myself included), have faced varying degrees of online abuse. Some of my more outspoken sisters, (including my literal sister, Lella Misikir, a social media activist) have faced more serious forms of hate speech as well as threats to their lives.

This has pushed many to be silent or retreat from online presence. We’ve all seen this happen around us, and last week, the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), backed this lived experience of women in Ethiopia with its latest research on online violence across three platforms; Telegram, Facebook, and X (formerly known as a decent place for interaction).

The findings say that not only is online abuse pushing women away (in politics, in government, in media, etc) from public engagement - both online and offline - it has become ‘normalized to the point of invisibility’. It’s so pervasive that we no longer see it as the issue that it is.

Here’s an excerpt from a story I covered for VOA:

Over 2,000 inflammatory keywords were found in the research, which looked at three Ethiopian languages — Amharic, Afan Oromo and Tigrigna — as well as English. The list is the most comprehensive inflammatory word lexicon in Ethiopia, according to the researchers.
Over 78% of the women interviewed reported feelings of fear or anxiety after experiencing online abuse.

The full story on VOA here, and the summary of the report, available in all three local languages as well as in English, here.

Human rights: 2019 (better days)

It’s been nearly five years since Ethiopia submitted its last UPR (Universal Peer Review).

What’s the UPR? A peer review - as the name implies - that UN member states must undertake every 4.5 years on the human rights situation in their country.

I spoke to the head of the Consortium of Ethiopian Human Rights Organizations, which led a joint submission process with 35 other organizations in the country. He said the assessment points to the fact that five years later, we’re worse off than where we started, in 2019. They outlined 12 thematic areas, which include an assessment of internally displaced people, persons with disabilities, and the conditions of detention centers.

The same conclusion was reached by Human Rights Watch, which submitted its review along with Physicians for Human Rights. The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region from November 2020 to November 2022, conflict in Ethiopia’s Amhara region since April 2023, and continued insurgency in the country’s Oromia region since 2019, all have added to, ‘grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law’.

Here’s one excerpt from what the report says happened in Ethiopia since 2019:

Since then, Ethiopia has witnessed an alarming increase in extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions by government security forces as well as by non-state armed groups in response to situations of unrest and during armed conflict.

I believe the stories under the 12 thematic areas reviewed by the Consortium of Ethiopian Human Rights Organizations deserve a story of their own as they look deeply into our society and what we are living through. I plan on doing stories around this - my inbox is open to collaborators!

The full report on Human Rights Watch, here.

Travel: savoring a sweet moment

In the past couple of weeks, updates on Sifter have included the recent decision by the European Union Council to further restrict visa processes for Ethiopians (which I did not think was humanly possible - each time I have but humbly asked to set foot into that promised land, I have submitted nothing short of my memoir to be let in).

Anyway, the Council said the Ethiopian government was not very cooperative in repatriating Ethiopians who were there illegally.

The Ethiopian government had initially responded with a diplomatic version of, ‘let’s not do this’. Since then, they’ve taken a much more satisfying response stating that if the EU doesn’t change its stance, the Ethiopian government will be taking a similar approach, according to a story on The Reporter.

More stringent visa requirements for Europeans traveling to Ethiopia? The story doesn’t say and while I can already anticipate the response to this: ‘This is not good for Ethiopia, which has more to lose’, I’m still going to enjoy the moment for as long as it lasts.

The full story, in Amharic, on The Reporter, here.

Investigation: looking into Bate’s killers

In April, I wrote about the killing of Bate Urgessa, a politician and spokesperson of the opposition political group, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). Bate had been imprisoned a few weeks prior alongside visiting French journalist Antoine Galindo.

His death was shocking and many asked for an investigation into his assassination at the time. But the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which had been collecting testimonies has now been forced to quit the investigation into his killing, according to a report by Addis Standard.

The testimonies collected by the Commission had implicated government security forces in his death.

So why was the Commission (EHRC) forced to quit the investigation? Here’s an excerpt on that:

EHRC’s letter further stated that although the Commission made “great efforts to ensure the safety of our witnesses” during the investigation process, the police did not only arrest the same witnesses whom the Commission’s investigators spoke to but when the Commission’s team moved around in the city of Meki to carry out the investigation, “unidentified people and vehicles followed the investigation experts and disrupted the movement…”. Furthermore, the police also detained Bate’s family members who were cooperating with EHRC’s investigation.

I would describe this as blatant disregard for the law, but what then would I call his actual assassination?

The full story on Addis Standard, here.

Minority rights: a community in danger

The Irob community is about 50,000 people who live in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and a recent report by Addis Standard says that their continued existence is now at risk, due to the war in the region.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Eritrean troops are accused of perpetrating human rights abuses against the Irob population, including extrajudicial killings. They imposed assimilation measures, specifically targeting Catholic clergy and churches. As a consequence, numerous Irob individuals were displaced from their homes and now confront challenges in accessing humanitarian aid and food supplies, compelling some to flee and seek refuge in other countries.

The full post by Addis Standard can be found here, but I ask you to exercise caution if you’re going to go through the publication that this was sourced from as there are some questionable pieces on the website. But don’t throw away the baby with the bath water as they say, and so I’ve decided to include the piece for this week.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next week with more updates!

In the meantime, you can help support my work by forwarding this to friends and family (and help them keep up with what’s going on).

Was this forwarded to you by someone? Then hit the button below to subscribe and get free weekly updates.

Sifter