Biased and centrally controlled news reporting, poor professional knowledge, endemic resignation amongst journalists and misleading directives—this is how author and journalist Abraham T. Zere...
Without investigative journalists, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how a dictatorship abuses the legal system and courts. Here, the well-known Ethiopian journalist Temesgen Desalegn describes such...
The problem is not just that advancements in women’s rights in Ethiopia seem to have come to a standstill—whoever calls to attention these grievances and the betrayal of the female half of the...
From afar, Ethiopia might seem like a success story—from the famine of the 1980s to a country in which the west and China are only too happy to invest. But the real threat to the country comes from...
No one who has not been wrongly imprisoned can really understand how the system, bit by bit, erodes one’s dignity and self-respect. Prizewinning Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu was sent down for...
Swedish journalist Martin Schibbye and photographer Johan Persson were held for one and a half years in Kality prison. Martin is very familiar with the environment described in many of the texts in...
Where does the idea of a just society begin? Perhaps in a sudden moment in the morning traffic. Author and chairman in Ethiopian PEN Solomon Hailemariam sees the biggest change in the smallest thing...
Being a journalist in Eritrea means risking your life every day. Here, the pseudonym Mussie Hadgu writes about what made him become a journalist. “The crimes I witnessed shook me to the core, and I...
On 2 June, it will be exactly 5,000 days since the imprisonment of Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak. A quarter of his life has gone to waste. Here, Esayas Isaak writes about his brother.
Poet and journalist Haile Bizen is known in his native Eritrea by the epithet “the man who broke the silence”. He was forced to flee the country after repeated persecution and systematic interrogation...
In 2001, mass protests broke out in Eritrea after a number of top officials and members of President Isaias Afewerki’s party publicly criticised his autocratic rule and failure to implement democratic...
Eritrea has long languished at the bottom of Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. Despite this, many journalists risk their lives to report on what is happening in the country. One of...
January saw the release on bail of six journalists from the radio station Bana in Eritrea. They had been behind bars since 2009, when the government launched a large-scale raid on journalists. Brendan...
Text: Brendan de Caires
April 08 2015
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