For all the hand-wringing about the financial woes of the journalism industry, a free press remains a sacrosanct component of American democracy. While American journalists are worrying about losing their jobs, some foreign journalists have much more at stake when they go to report a story.
Habtamu Dugo has lived in New York with asylee status since 2008. He emigrated here from Ethiopia, where he worked as a journalist for a decade. His work, which often detailed government-sponsored violence, exposed him to beatings and death threats.
“I wrote stories of violent governmental abuses against specific designated ethnic groups, and that put me at loggerheads with the ruling regime,” Dugo said. “Every healthy statement that’s critical of how the government operates risks your life.
Dugo is a member of the Oromo tribe, which faces systematic discrimination despite representing the largest ethnic group in the country. Dugo said that the silencing of Ethiopian intellectuals has precipitated a mass exodus of educated professionals. Journalists in Ethiopia often publish anonymously, or using pseudonyms.
Currently, Dugo travels around the country raising awareness about the situation in Ethiopia. He has spoken at conferences in Washington, DC and Atlanta, on Voice of America and at middle schools in Colorado. He said that even diaspora Ethiopians are often unaware of the enormity of conditions in state prisons and the repression of certain ethnic groups.
The situation in Ethiopia, Dugo said, is unlikely to improve soon. In the absence of a healthy Ethiopian press, able to hold the government accountable, his current work is the next best thing.
“I’m just working for the people who don’t have a chance to speak for themselves,” he said. “I am doing that until I can see a change back home. I am doing that in every capacity I can, and this is the best place to do it.”
— Jeremy B. White
December 14th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
all of us ethiopians are facing problems and dictatorship in ethiopia, not just Oromos. First of all, oromos are not the largest group in ethiopia. ethnically mixed people are almost 40% of ethiopia, then the oromos, amharas, somalis, tigres are the next in order.
anyway, in my opinion, Dugo is no better than the TPLF tribalist racist dictatorship government who try to push ethnocentric political ideologies in our throats. UNLIKE IN AMERICA where german-americans are the largest groups but where tribalism does not shape politics and federalist, these tribalists (like TPLF, OLF and Dugo) are preaching tribalism, hate, revenge, bitterness in africa… instead of preaching love, development and democracy