May 28, 2014
“The current regime follows this pattern: immediately before elections, they start to muzzle every critical voice,” protests Endalk Chala, a co-founder and member of the Ethiopian blogging collective called “Zone 9” – a proverbial reference to Ethiopia’s situation beyond the eight zones that divide the notorious Kaliti prison, where many journalists and political prisoners are kept behind bars.
While pursuing his doctorate in the United States, Endalk recently saw six of his colleagues arrested along with three independent journalists on April 25 and 26. The detainees face charges related to accepting assistance from a foreign human rights group and “inciting violence” through social media, though no formal charges have been filed. The youngest of the collective, 25 year old Atnaf Berahane, was reportedly tortured during police investigations.
Launching their blogging collective in May 2012, the Zone 9 members had visited fellow journalists in jail and advocated for the respect of the constitution and against censorship through several online campaigns. “Our language was highly polished and polite. We did not want to provoke the government and invite them to arrest us, because we wanted to remain outside the prison and work a little bit so that we could start a discussion,” explains Endalk.
But pressures to silence the bloggers escalated; even after they decided to go offline in September 2013, they claim to have been followed. Their decision to re-engage with the online platform sparked an ultimate backlash: “In April we met and decided that even though we stopped, these people were still targeting us. So we decided to write again and wrote a comeback blog. We gave our reasons for our disappearance to the public. Then exactly three days later, all of them were detained.”
