Surveillance, Renaissance and Revolutionary Democracy: An Ethiopian Dystopia

May 6, 2014

by Harben Seyoum

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas? Joseph Stalin.

It has finally come to the world’s attention that repression and internet-based surveillance in Ethiopia has grown extensive and routine. The Stalinesque TPLF-EPRDF regime keeps electronic tabs on its citizens, at home and abroad, to better survey and repress any emergent dissidence to the reigning ethnic paradigm. If push comes to shove, it uses its draconian Anti-Terrorist Decree to justify its extra-judicial practices against its subjects. This means, censors monitor citizens around the clock and normalize the unequal politics of bloodlines (ethnic federalism), and blunt criticisms of government policy in general. The entire Killil conception of governance is neither new nor federal. It goes back to the Italian fascist occupation of Ethiopia between1936-41. This unpopular “ethnicization” of the country was specifically designed by Mussolini for the conquest and occupation of Ethiopia. It was used by the TPLF in 1991 to disenfranchise Ethiopians and to empower the minority Tigrai-Tigrign population of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The core of the TPLF-EPRDF regime may be anti-Shabiyan, but it is fervently pro-Eritrean in sentiment. In fact, the ruling ethnic group stretches across the dividing Mereb line.

In this system, the ethnically forged state has become an occupier and the ethnically divided population becomes the occupied. Some call the arrangement internal colonization. At any rate, the apartheid-based TPLF state disrupts ethnic solidarities, as well as the flow of information and public communications. All this control is to remain in power. Consequently, the aid-dependent TPLF-EPRDF regime has purchased the capacity to scrutinize the communications of its citizens, and by extension, to limit the type of information and ideas that are being infused and accessed among the occupied populace. Minority ethnic groups do not rule by consent, but rather by security police, espionage and intimidation. Steven Biko said it well, when he re-read the Stalinist dictum from the point of view of oppressed Africans. The most dangerous weapon of the oppressor, he wrote, is “the mind of the oppressed.” Indeed, notwithstanding the FDRE’s Constitution Article 29, why should the occupiers let Ethiopians have ideas and opinions that differ from the party line? Anyways, liberating ideas are usually fought for and rarely given.

In Ethiopia, access to water, power and the internet is quiet limited and unpredictable, in addition, various websites are censored and cannot be accessed at all. Also, phones are commonly tapped and calls monitored. The party-regime’s control of communications channels is near absolute. Glyn Moody recently reckoned that Ethiopia was fast evolving towards a Total Surveillance State system. He highlights the appalling human rights record (HRW) of the regime, to underscore the misuse of advanced electronic technologies as a means of domination and repression. The influence of surveillance technologies today is not to be underestimated at all. Ironically, the TPLF-EPRDF’s Ethiopia does not appear to have the resources and capacity to feed its extensively deprived people, but can certainly find the funds for to purchase advanced surveillance technologies to silence dissent. The regime’s priorities in public spending should not be missed here.

Information is neither free nor absolutely clandestine anymore. The famed US General and CIA chief Patreus’ compromising extra-marital affair was caught, as it were, by the forensic powers of electronic surveillance techniques. The point is that nowadays, no one can escape their electronic footprint. Online surveillance has also ensnared and incarcerated a number of Ethiopian journalists (Eskinder Nega), political activists and human rights defenders in their line of duty. This was all achieved without a search warrant and other relevant court orders, or even a real living judge for that matter. Out of the blue, in Ethiopia you can be accused of a crime you did not commit and arrested. The arrest of the Zone 9 bloggers is a case in point. Blogging is a crime apparently. Federal agents or state security police can haul you out of your house, arrest and torture you, or even throw you into a party-run dungeon or exile you. Thus, the TPLF state’s spying-cadre reserves to itself the right to survey, judge, and discipline and punish its fellow compatriots. In effect, it reserves the right to make normalizing judgments for Ethiopian society and to punish those who stray from the perverse ethnocentric mould and truths embedded in the regime’s sectarian, supremacist ideology. The citizen’s role is to be submissive and foolishly admire the buildings and highways rising seemingly out of nowhere. Never ask who they belong to. This is the miracle of state-led development and evolutionary democracy. This is how totalitarian regimes dubbed “state enemies of the Internet” function with impunity in the contemporary world order. They violate the citizen’s freedom of thought and most of the other basic human rights added in their own Constitution, all in the name of advancing economic development (GDP-ism) and revolutionary democracy. In this process, the people must be subdued, passive and apolitical in their own affairs.

From Authoritarianism to Totalitarianism

Suppression of the freedom of expression is, by any standards, a symptom of tyranny. A society becomes totalitarian, suggested Orwell “when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial” or in other words,” when the ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Force and fraud have been the hallmarks of Melesism since its inception. We know of the nation’s betrayals over Eritrea, the Algiers Treaty etc., the Sudanese boundary etc. In all these cases, there is no commitment to the national interest of Ethiopians whatsoever. What matters only is TPLF’s ethnic interests in the short and long-run. The country is led by an Eritreanist “Banda” leadership, well schooled in betraying the national interests of the country to foreign powers, near and far. Meles’ grandfather was in the employ of the Italian occupiers. So were the parents of most of his colleagues. We may also recall what happened during the 2005 national elections in Ethiopia, the rapid urban losses for the ruling party, followed by a massacre (collective punishment) and subsequently declared “victory” of the ruling party by 99.6% of the popular vote! This is a remarkable reversal of fortunes. Was it not comrade Stalin who said something like “what really counts in an election in the end is who counts the ballot.” The experiences of Ethiopia’s activists speak to this maxim.

The ruling party is fortunate if it can garner 10% of the national vote. Its constant surveillance of the population heralds the emergence of a tyrannous super-surveillance era in national politics. The trend is global to be sure, as Mr. Snowden and the US’s NSA can testify. This, in fact, may well be a new phase in international politics. The unregulated international trade in “digital weaponry” and all sorts of malicious surveillance software is intensifying as well, compelling Bruce Schneier to suggest that the Internet is, in fact, facilitating the construction of a surveillance state par excellence. The idea of being “tracked” at all times, in his view, gives the contemporary surveillance-police states all but unlimited powers to bend behavior, subjugate language and thinking “beyond the wildest dreams” of George Orwell’s 1984. This is a frightening development for anyone working in the realm of ideas, education, human rights etc., journalism and “knowledge workers” as a whole. In fact, it is a worrisome development to all humans, because the totalitarian TPLF regime and its allies make a mockery of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well. I am thinking about everyone’s right to hold opinions, to seek, receive and impart ideas and information, regardless of frontiers. This universal right is denied to Ethiopians and most Africans by force of arms, fraud and surveillance. No wonder, nearly half the population of Ethiopia wishes to migrate somewhere, some even want to return to brutish Saudi Arabia, Lebanon etc.

A Prison of Ethnicities

The scholar Foucault created a number of theoretical ideas contributing to the underlying structure of sociological thought. He can help us shed some light here too. For instance, he held an abiding interest in the intersection between knowledge and power and how knowledge gives way to technologies of power. That is, technologies that effectively exert power over people, like the bureaucracies and internet spywares. The play between power and knowledge interested him a great deal. He was particularly preoccupied with thinking about the relentless spread of the state-police apparatus in the modern capitalist world. This creates the conditions in which entire societies can become fields of perception, and hence objects of surveillance. Discipline in the name of national security/anti-terrorism and development (fighting poverty) becomes the new mantra in multilateral relations. Terrorists are apparently teeming everywhere. Washington is spying on its citizens and China is spying on Washington. The US is spying on the Middle East, Germany, and its Europeans allies in general. Even the Brazilian head of state is not immune from Washington’s planetary electronic surveillance networks. Ethiopians are spying on Ethiopians too.

With high-tech surveillance tools in flagrant abuse worldwide, society begins to resemble a large prison or as Foucault puts it: at this moment the notion of discipline is transported “from the penal institution to the entire social body” of the entire world system. This is achieved by way of various modern technologies of power available to the state on the international market. According to Citizens Lab (a Toronto-based center focused on security and human rights online), Ethiopians living in the US, U.K., Norway, and Switzerland are among those known to have been targeted with Addis Ababa’s sophisticated surveillance spyware. These “spywares” of various capacities are apparently designed and sold on the market by several European and Chinese companies. In Ethiopia, the main electronic accessory culprit appears to be a spyware known as FinFisher GmbH, based in Munich, Germany. China and Italy are all providers of varied spywares. Clearly, these “corporate enemies” of the internet will not forsake their profits for the rights of the African man.

The “donor” democracies apparently see no contradiction in their hypocritical practices of demanding political freedoms and liberty while condoning repression, all at once. Was it not one of the founding fathers of America who remarked, that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers? This is precisely how Ethiopians feel at the moment.

With these powerful technologies on offer, independent media outlets, newspapers, blogs, and several international media sites and university students are routinely snooped on and blocked by government censors, acting much like penitentiary officials.

Moreover, the TPLF’s party-state in Ethiopia “has a complete monopoly over its rapidly growing telecommunications sector” and controls it and its revenues through its state-owned operator, Ethio-Telecom. This corrupt and inefficient monopoly over phone and internet usage in the country effectively limits Ethiopian’s access to information sector. There is no variety in provision and Internet penetration remains dismally low and periodic in a country said to be undergoing a Renaissance. In fact, Telecom’s spying activity curtails freedoms of expression and information without any oversight since, according to Horne, independent legislative or judicial mechanisms governing these issues do not exist in Ethiopia. With this monopoly along with absence of law on the matter, the TPLF-EPRDF party-state monitors dissidence and enforces the discipline of revolutionary democracy and the prevailing rule by ethnicity. It preaches the cult of Meles and the wisdom of the developmental state (DS) at will. It is as if the deceased leader of the TPLF had invented the whole notion of revolutionary democracy and DS and transmitted it through the person Haile-mariam Dessalegn (the current PM). What is important, however, is that the view of the world that the surveillance regime spreads and enforces on the captive subjects must mirror that of the dominator minority caste that commands the state apparatus and monopoly of powerin Ethiopia. Its interests are presented as the nation’s common interest. This is a subtle process of indoctrination pure and simple. The goal is the Aiga-ization of popular perceptions, so to speak.

What is taking place is what Foucault called The Panopticon Effect. In other words, the new electronic technology of surveillance is built on the Panopticon model. Briefly, a Panopticon is a late 18th century institutional structure (a circular tower etc.) that allowed prison officials the possibility of complete observation of inmates in all cells of the penitentiary. This is a tremendous source of power for prison officials because it gives them the possibility of total surveillance and control of the criminalized subjects. The Panopticon is also known as “a kind of a laboratory for the gathering of information about people” their relationships and their inter-communications. In analogous fashion, the internet serves the same purpose in the present-day world, and state authorities begin to resemble prison officials overseeing potential prisoners of conscience. On the other hand, the possibility that they may actually be constantly tracked surveyed and abusively interrogated presumably leads potential opposition forces to a certain level of insecurity and self-censorship. A certain climate of fear must reign in what an observer has called the Stasi-ization of the ethnocentric state.

What’s more, this new method of operation switches emphasis from the provision of discipline by arresting and punishing the body exclusively to the punishment of the mind, the soul or the will, if you wish. It is an insidious and cerebral form of domination. It involves a wholesale violation of the right to freedom of thought also known as freedom of conscience, or ideas. This fundamental freedom is known as the precursor of all other liberties like freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Even the African Commission (2002) recognizes this freedom as an individual human right, and as a cornerstone of democracy. It is clear that without freedom of speech, this new condition of cyber subjugation leaves no possibility for democratic engagement of any sort in Ethiopia. Free and fair elections are unworkable, and a hoax under these circumstances. This is indeed the perfect prison where authorities oversee their entire domain with a single gaze on the screen, and think they can engineer public consciousness. This is how you manufacture public opinion and adjust the status quo in a tyranny.
Advanced Surveillance technologies extend the police powers of the state to all its nationals beyond its borders. Consequently, different spywares developed globally have been bought and used to target the computers of certain Ethiopians living abroad.

The spying dragnet of the TPLF’s regime is truly global. This is a formidable and unlegislated power that the TPLF-led police-national security state apparatus holds over the head of its subjects. Unless the so-called Wassenaar controls are promptly implemented and enforced in policy form, none of us can truly live and walk with any semblance of freedom and dignity. Let me end by paraphrasing a wise man, namely when you give up your fundamental rights for total security you get neither; what you get is unlimited despotism of one minority ethnic group over all others.

Harben Seyoum is a social commentator and writer on matters African, lives in the DC area, USA.