Mastewal Birhanu, who co-founded the independent Ethiopian newspaper Feteh, told the Regina Leader-Post in 2019 that security forces beat and jailed him before he fled Ethiopia and resettled in Canada.
Men reading a newspaper in Addis Ababa, photographed on October 6, 2004. (Terje Skjerdal / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0) [file photo]
Born in Addis Ababa in 1987, Mastewal was assigned to study journalism at university but dropped out after six months because of strict surveillance of students under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, reporter Ethan Williams wrote. He graduated in marketing management from a private college in 2010.
That year he and his friend Temesgen Desalegn started Feteh, Amharic for “justice,” an independent paper focused on human rights and government corruption. Eight people worked in its Addis Ababa office, and subscriptions grew within a year, Mastewal said.
“They charged us (with) 132 defamation (charges) and inciting violence,” he said. He told the paper that security forces tapped the staff’s phones and laptops, and that one day they opened the office with a master key and poured water into the computers. He said he broke his arm when he was beaten on the street and fell into a ditch.
In 2012, as Meles Zenawi’s illness was kept secret, Feteh obtained information that the prime minister had died, Mastewal said. Government forces stormed the office before it could publish and burned nearly 40,000 copies of the paper, and he and Temesgen were jailed on defamation charges.
Mastewal said he was beaten in custody and released after a few days on 30,000 birr bail, while Temesgen suffered worse treatment, losing hearing in his left ear. Feteh shut down in 2012 on government orders, he said.
A human rights organization he declined to name urged him to go to Kenya, where he campaigned for jailed Ethiopian journalists. “(When journalists) were in prison, I was a voice for them,” he said. In 2015 he learned that Canada had selected him for resettlement in Regina.
In Regina he worked part-time as a janitor at Pasqua Hospital while studying social work at the University of Regina, and he joined the local Amnesty International chapter in 2016, the Leader-Post reported. “Life is nothing without freedom,” he said. “You have to express your feelings, your opinions, your ideas.”
“Sometimes when I listen to the radio here, I laugh,” he said. “(Journalists) can criticize Prime Minister Trudeau. They can criticize the economy, the budget. Not (in Ethiopia).”
Ethiopia’s Federal High Court convicted Temesgen on Oct. 13, 2014 of incitement, defamation and false publication over opinion pieces in Feteh and sentenced him on Oct. 27 to three years in prison, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported. He was released from Zeway Correctional Facility on Oct. 15, 2017, The Reporter said.
Sources: Regina Leader-Post (Ethan Williams), Committee to Protect Journalists (Oct. 15, 2014), Committee to Protect Journalists (Oct. 27, 2014), The Reporter Ethiopia (2017)