Families await Ethiopian students’ freedom

By Katie Nguyen

SENDAFE, Ethiopia, July 11 (Reuters) – When Ethiopian security forces fired on students last month, killing 36 people in three days of post-election violence, Rahel feared the worst for her nephew.

Accompanied by his mother, she scoured the capital’s morgues and hospitals for word of the 18 year-old, an engineering undergraduate at Addis Ababa University.

“At the beginning we thought he had been killed,” she said. “It was almost a week before we heard through one of his friends that he was taken to a detention centre.”

Ethiopia’s human rights record — criticised by the United States for illegal killings, torture and arbitrary arrests — has come under increasing scrutiny after last month’s killings and the ensuing round-up of thousands of mostly young men by police.

Local human rights activists say about 200 students are still detained one month after opposition claims of vote-rigging in the second multi-party poll in Ethiopia’s history triggered Addis Ababa’s worst violence in four years.

They say the students are being held against the law, which stipulates that detainees should be brought before a court to face charges within 48 hours of arrest.

Most of them remain inside a military training college in Sendafe, some 50 km (30 miles) north of Addis Ababa, where relatives say they have been beaten and forced to engage in rigorous drills as punishment.

“At first, they made him run in the mountains, when he got tired they beat him,” said Rahel, 37, who was too afraid to give her real name.

“Once they put a gun in his mouth and threatened him,” she said, during her weekly pilgrimage to the college, set in lush green farming land.

IRON BARS

Rahel joined a handful of women, swathed in white robes, passing carefully wrapped bowls of spaghetti and njera, a soft spongy bread — Ethiopia’s national dish — through the iron bars of the camp’s gate.

Hanging over a low brick wall, a few inmates smoked cigarettes and talked to their family gathered on the other side, but reporters trying to interview them were quickly waved away by the police.

Information Minister Bereket Simon denied the students were beaten or forced to do hard labour.

“The International Red Cross and foreign ambassadors have visited them, and their report tells us that the detainees in general have been well treated,” he told Reuters.

Analysts say the government’s crackdown on public dissent was typical of political intolerance acquired over generations of dictatorship.

Partial results from Ethiopia’s most open election were released on Friday showing the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in the lead, but a further delay in the final tally has stoked tension among the population of 72 million.

Many fear renewed bloodshed if the final results, expected after investigations into claims of fraud are completed, award Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling party a third term.

“I am so afraid,” Rahel said. “I can only pray for peace.”