Posted by OromianEconomist in #OromoProtests.
Tags: #OromoProtests, Africa, Ethiopia, Ethiopia: enemies internet freedom, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF/ EPRDF) Ethiopia, Internet, Internet Censorship, Newsweek, The Tragedy of Ethiopia’s Internet, Tyranny and Internet
Ethiopians may have experienced a frustrating sense of déjà vu when they tried to log on to social media or use the internet on their cellphones Wednesday.
That’s because the Ethiopian government has terminated mobile internet connectivity, a tactic the administration has used repeatedly in recent years to quell anti-government sentiment.
Ethiopia’s deputy communications minister, Zadig Abrha, confirmed to AFP on Wednesday that “mobile data has been deactivated,” but declined to provide any further information. The country’s sole telecommunications provider, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, has also refused to comment.
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Preliminary data from Google showed a dramatic fall in search traffic from the Horn of Africa country from Tuesday afternoon, which did not appear to have returned to normal by Wednesday evening. It is unclear whether both mobile and fixed internet connections were blocked, but the majority of Ethiopians who do use the internet do so on mobile devices: The country has 11.95 mobile-broadband subscriptions per 100 people, compared to 0.66 fixed-broadband subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunications Union.
Read more: Ethiopian athlete urges the world to help stop “persecution of Oromo people”
Julie Owono, the director of Paris-based internet freedom organization Internet Sans Frontières (ISF), says that the latest reports she has received were that internet connectivity had returned by Thursday morning, but that connectivity was not stable or fast. Owono tells Newsweek that access to some social media websites remains restricted.
Despite being one of Africa’s fastest-developing economies, Ethiopia has an extremely low internet penetration rate of just 2.9 percent, according to U.S. NGO Freedom House; in neighboring Kenya, penetration stands at 43 percent.
Internet access has been patchy since the government imposed a six-month state of emergency following a year of protests that were concentrated in the Oromia region, surrounding the capital Addis Ababa, and resulted in hundreds of protesters being killed by security forces. (The state of emergency was extended by four months in March.)
A woman walks past an Ethio Telecom office in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, on November 9, 2015. Ethiopia only has one telecommunications provider and a very low internet penetration rate.TIKSA NEGERI/REUTERS
This time, the internet shutdown appears to be linked to university entrance exams taking place across the country this week. Around the same time in 2016, Ethiopia blocked access to social media sites—including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram— after copies of the exams were leaked online.
The Ethiopian government has not confirmed whether the exam period, which ends on Friday, is the reason for the shutdown. Newsweek contacted the Ethiopian embassy in London for a comment, but received no immediate reply.
But Owono says that the risk of an exam leak does not justify shutting down mobile internet for the entire population, and that the Ethiopian government’s repeated use of the tactic shows that it “fears connectivity.”
“For the wrong reasons, [it] sees the internet as a threat rather than as an opportunity,” says Owono. She points out that increasing internet connectivity and availability is part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, a global agenda for development. “The reaction of the Ethiopian regime is contrary to this global aim.”
Ethiopia is not alone in Africa in closing down the internet to deal with social issues. In April, Cameroon lifted a three-month internet blackout in the country’s English-speaking regions, home to about one-fifth of the population, following mass protests there in late 2016. Egyptian authorities have ordered internet service providers to block access to 21 news websites, claiming that they backed terrorism or reported fake news, in a move criticized by press freedom activists.
Internet blackouts have also proven to be financially costly to countries. Between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016, the internet was shut down for a period of 30 days in Ethiopia; this cost the country’s economy $8.6 million, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.
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Global Voices:Ethiopia Imposes Nationwide Internet Blackout
Ethiopia said on Wednesday it had deactivated mobile internet service, but offered no explanation for the countrywide outage that also briefly affected the African Union headquarters and a massive UN facility.
This is the second time in recent months that Africa’s second most populous country has turned off its mobile data service, which most businesses and consumers rely on for internet access.
Abdur Rahman Alfa Shaban with REUTERS
The media advocacy group, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has slammed the Ethiopian government for an internet shutdown believed to be linked with upcoming national exams.
According to RSF, the action was “a danger to freedom of information and press freedom.” The nationwide blackout started late Tuesday without formal communication.
A deputy communications minister later confirmed to the AFP news agency, Zadig Abrha as simply saying “mobile date has been deactivated.” It is not known when services will be restored.
The shutdown is aimed at preventing a repeat of leaks that occurred last year. We are being proactive. We want our students to concentrate and be free of the psychological pressure and distractions that this brings.
The government subsequently confirmed the shutdown and said it was to protect the integrity of high school exams. Thousands of students will take the Grade 10 exams between May 31 until June 2 whiles Grade 12 papers will be taken between June 5 and June 8.
The respective exams are for university entrance purposes and also for enrollment into national vocational courses. “The shutdown is aimed at preventing a repeat of leaks that occurred last year,” Mohammed Seid, public relations director of Ethiopia’s Office for Government Communications Affairs, told Reuters.
“We are being proactive. We want our students to concentrate and be free of the psychological pressure and distractions that this brings.”
There was a widespread leak of exams papers last year leading to a cancellation of papers. Beside shutdowns related to education, the government has also blocked internet in the wake of anti-government protests that hit the country last year.
Even though it is not known exactly when services will be restored the government says only access to social media was blocked and that other essential services like airline bookings and banking outfits had access to internet. Diplomatic outfits and international organizations operating in the country also have connection.
Posted by OromianEconomist in #OromoProtests, Human Rights.
Tags: #OromoProtests, Africa, Enemies of Press Freedom, Ethiopia, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF/ EPRDF) Ethiopia, Genocide Against Oromo People, Human rights, Internet Freedom, Oromia, Oromo
Violence Against Free Media and Knowledge Dissemination in Ethiopia: An Analysis of the Mechanisms of Restrictions on Information Flow
By Habtamu Dugo, Visiting Professor of Communications,
University of the District of Columbia
hab.dugo@gmail.com
Abstract
This article examines multiple mechanisms the Ethiopian state has been using to implement information blackout throughout the country in order to distort, misrepresent, hide and deny massive human rights infractions perpetrated by the military against citizens demanding self-government, basic rights and justice across Oromia state and Ethiopia. The data for this research were obtained through multiple research approaches, which included reviewing three relevant Ethiopian laws that justify information blackout; reviewing reports by human rights organizations; reviewing news stories on the topic in multiple languages; and reviewing audio-visual materials containing press releases from Ethiopian authorities. The study finds that the Ethiopian government has used a mixture of mechanisms to restrict the free flow of information by: introducing a slew of draconian proclamations, resorting to suppressing and removing communications applications and hardware and engaging in robust local and global misinformation and denial campaigns in times of unprecedented domestic political upheavals.
Key words: press freedom, freedom of speech, media control, social media control, information blackout, state-led violence, Oromo, Ethiopia, East Africa, Horn of Africa.
Introduction
In the summer of 2014 Ethiopian government police, security forces and commando units shot live ammunitions into crowds of peaceful protesters killing at least 100 (OP, 2014). The protesters were opposed to a city planning scheme known as the Addis Ababa Integrated Development Master Plan (IDMP). By the time this plan was released, Addis Ababa’s expansion had already displaced 150, 000 families of Oromo farmers and was set to displace millions more across Oromia (Legesse, 2014).
Demonstrators demanded that the IDMP be halted immediately and the Oromo people’s constitutional right to self-rule be respected. The Ethiopian government did not respond to the popular demands. Instead, authorities promised massive violence against civilians in an attempt to continue the implementation of the draconian plan (Biyyaa, 2014), characterized by the Oromo as “master killer.”
In a compressive study released in 2014, Amnesty International (2014) reported that between 2011 and 2015, “at least 5000 Oromos have been arrested based on their actual or suspected peaceful opposition to the government.” The popular understanding of the IDRP among the Oromo is that it will continue to uproot millions of Oromo farmers from their land and lead to the eventual splitting of Oromia into two halves—the east and the west. This will separate the Oromo people who share the same language, identity and a regional state from each other. Even families would be separated as they have been in North and South Korea.
None of the perpetrators of the April and May 2014 massacres were brought to justice nor was there an independent investigation into the mass killings by government security. Instead,some government officials such as Abay Tsehaye, the former Minister of Federal Affairs, threatened to take more actions against anyone who is opposed to the plan (OMN, 2014).
Oromia-wide protests against the IDMP recurred in mid-November 2015 in small town west of the capital city “when the government transferred the ownership of a school playground and a stadium to private investors, in addition to clearing the Chilimo natural forest to also make way for investors,” (AI, 2015). In just over a few weeks, the protests spread to all parts of Oromia, involving people from all walks of life. The government responded with lethal force which resulted in the death of more than 200 people, including children, women and the elderly (HRLHA, 2015). Thousands of Oromos were wholesale labeled as “terrorists”, giving a blank check to government officials and commanders of the security forces to act with impunity. Hundreds were killed, thousands maimed and several thousand imprisoned. The government placed a ban on domestic and international human rights organizations, media, journalists, bloggers and citizen journalists to cover up the use of lethal force to suppress the protests and the staggering number of casualties.
Human Rights Watch noted the government’s tight chokehold on information as follows: “Ethiopia’s pervasive restrictions on independent civil society and media mean that very little information is coming from affected areas although social media are filled with photos and videos of the protests,” (HRW, 2016). This has left the global community in the dark about the real magnitude of the crimes security forces have committed. This paper analyzes the different facets of the Ethiopian government’s restrictions on information flow focusing on actions taken during the Oromo protests of 2015-16.
I contend that the government’s endeavors to create an information blackout was designed to avoid responsibility for the mass killings, maiming, detentions, rape and other crimes that the federal police, the Agazi Special Forces, and other state security units have committed against unarmed Oromo civilians. The study also reveals that the government has used a number of ‘legal’ and coercive strategies and tactics to exercise monopolistic control over information.
Disinformation
One of the ways in which the government uses to conceal its atrocities is the state-controlled media and crackdown on alternative media. With near monopoly on media outlets in the country, top government officials appear on state-controlled television (formerly ETV) and make statements that cannot stand to simply scrutiny. On December 15, 2015, for instance, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn threatened to take “merciless actions” against Oromo protestors whom he labeled “terrorists,” “anti-peace forces” and “destabilizing “forces”. He indicated that the government’s Anti-Terror Task Force will take swift measures to restore order. While the security forces have indeed carried out the orders, the purpose of the threats was to cow people into submission. In other words, the media is used to carry out disinformation battles that parallel the real actions.
violence-against-free-media-and-knowledge-click-here-to-read-in-pdf
Posted by OromianEconomist in #OromoProtests, Internet Freedom.
Tags: #OromoProtests, Africa, Amnesty International, Amnesty International Reports on Oromo, Ethiopia, Ethiopia and Internet censorship, Ethiopia: enemies internet freedom, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF/ EPRDF) Ethiopia, Genocide Against Oromo People, Oromia, Oromo, WhatsApp
- Google transparency report shows dramatic drop in internet traffic out of Ethiopia on two days when at least 100 people were killed by security forces during protest
- 16 news sites and access to WhatsApp blocked between June and October
“As far as the Ethiopian government is concerned, social media is a tool for extremists… The reality, though, is very different” – Michelle Kagari
The Ethiopian government systematically and illegally blocked access to social media and news websites in its efforts to crush dissent and prevent reporting of attacks on protesters by security forces during a wave of protests over the last year, a new report released today shows.
Research conducted by Amnesty International and the Open Observatory of Network Interference shows that between June and October this year during times of heightened tension and protests, access to WhatsApp and at least 16 news outlets was blocked, especially in the Oromia region.
Since November last year, thousands of people from Oromia have taken to the streets to protest against possible land seizures under the government’s Addis Ababa Masterplan, which aims to expand the capital’s administrative control into the region. The government declared a six-month state of emergency in October this year in response to the protests.
The study was conducted to investigate whether and to what extent internet censorship was actually taking place after contacts of Amnesty and the Open Observatory of Network Interference in Ethiopia consistently reported unusually slow internet connections and inability to access social media websites.
Testimonies gathered by Amnesty from different parts of Oromia found that social media mobile applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, have been largely inaccessible since early March this year, especially in the Oromia region where residents were waging protests against the government since last November.
The Ethiopian government is also reported to have blocked access to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Viber during the National University Exam week (9 – 14 July 2016) so as “to prevent students being distracted from studying during the exam period”.
Amnesty contacts also reported that internet access on mobile devices had been completely blocked in Amhara, Addis Ababa and Oromia in the lead up to protests in the three regions on 6 and 7 August.
This was confirmed in Google’s transparency reports for the period between July and November this year, which showed a dramatic drop in internet traffic out of Ethiopia on the two days when at least 100 people were killed by security forces during the protests.
Amnesty International’s Deputy East Africa, the Horn and Great Lakes Director Michelle Kagari said:
“It’s clear that as far as the Ethiopian government is concerned, social media is a tool for extremists peddling bigotry and hate and therefore they are fully justified in blocking internet access. The reality, though, is very different. The widespread censorship has closed another space for Ethiopian’s to air the grievances that fuelled the protests.
“The internet blocking had no basis in law, and was another disproportionate and excessive response to the protests. This raises serious concerns that overly broad censorship will become institutionalised under the state of emergency.
“Rather than closing off all spaces for people to express their concerns, the authorities need to actively engage with, and address the underlying human rights violations that have fuelled the protests over the last year. “We urge the government to refrain from blocking access to internet sites and instead commit its resources to addressing its citizens’ legitimate grievances.”
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology used to filter websites
The report also found that the Ethiopian government uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to filter access to websites. DPI is a technology that can be bought and deployed on any network. Though it has many legitimate functions, it can also enable monitoring and filtering of internet traffic.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference’s Maria Xynou said:
“Our findings provide incontrovertible evidence of systematic interference with access to numerous websites belonging to independent news organisations and political opposition groups, as well as sites supporting freedom of expression and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights.
“Tor Metrics data illustrate that more and more people were trying to access censorship circumvention tools, such as TOR, which indicated that the internet was inaccessible through the normal routes. This all paints a picture of a government intent on stifling expression and free exchange of information.”
Background
Ethiopia has been hit by a wave of protests since November 2015 when ethnic Oromos took to the streets to protest against possible land seizures under the government’s Addis Ababa Masterplan, which aimed to expand the capital’s administrative control into Oromia.
The protests later spread to Amhara, with demands for an end to arbitrary arrests, as well as respect for regional autonomy rights enshrined in the constitution.
Most of the protests were met with excessive force from the security forces. The worst incident involved the death of possibly hundreds of protesters in a stampede on 2 October at Bishoftu.
Protest groups say the stampede was caused by the security forces’ unnecessary and excessive use of force. The government has denied this, instead blaming the deaths on “anti-peace forces.”
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.
Tags: #OromoProtests, Africa, Alert, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF/ EPRDF) Ethiopia, Grand #OromoProtests, Oromia, Oromo, Quartz
Nearly 100 deaths and thousands of arrests have been reported in Ethiopia over the week, as part of protests against the marginalization and persecution of the Oromos and Amharas, Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups. But the attacks and arrests may not have been the only forms of retribution carried out by the Ethiopian government in its crackdown against protesters.
Last weekend, the internet was reportedly shut down in the country.
In an attempt to understand whether the internet was in fact shut down, we looked at some public sources of data that contain information about internet traffic. Such data provides strong indicators that the internet was most likely shut down during the Ethiopian protests last weekend, though it remains unclear if this occurred in all regions and/or on all types of networks across the country.
Ethiopian protests
Ongoing protests have been carried out by Ethiopia’s Oromo people since November, marking one of the most significant political developments in Ethiopia in recent years. These protests were sparked by the introduction of the Addis Ababa City Integrated Master Plan, which aims to expand the territorial limits of the country’s capital into neighboring Oromo towns, threatening to displace millions of Oromo farmers and bring the Oromo-dominated region under the Tigray-led federal government.
The unprecedented wave of protests has resulted in more than 400 deaths since November, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report.
Protesters relied on the internet to plan and mobilize so this may have prompted the Ethiopian government to pull the plug.
More protests sprung up in the Amhara regional state, with protesters requesting political reforms and specifically, the Welkait community demanding that ancestral land currently administered by the Tigray regional state be moved into the neighboring Amhara region.
The new-found unity between the two historically antagonistic communities of the Oromo and Amharas against a common adversary, the TPLF-led government, seems to have raised the tension in the country. The security forces response has been extreme, with observers comparing it to the 2005 post-election violence where nearly 200 people were killed. This time though, at least 30 people were reportedly killed in the Amhara region in one day alone.
Internet shutdown
Protesters relied on the internet to plan, mobilize and coordinate with each other and this may have prompted the Ethiopian government to pull the plug on the internet even before the planned protests started.
But this is not the first time that the Ethiopian government appears to be restricting access to the internet this year.
Last month, the government reportedly blocked social media platforms across the country after university entrance exams were leaked on Facebook by an Oromo activist, as a form of protest against the government.
Public data from last weekend indicates that the internet was shut down in Ethiopia during the heat of the protests, but it remains unclear if this occurred nationwide.
The graphs below illustrate that while internet traffic appeared to be originating from Ethiopia up until Aug. 5, such traffic was suddenly terminated until August 8th, indicating that the internet was probably shut down.
Read more at:-
How the Ethiopia protests were stifled by a coordinated internet shutdown
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.
Tags: #OromoProtests, #OromoProtests: What You Need to Know About Ethiopia’s Crisis That No One Is Talking About, Africa, Ethiopia Locks Down Digital Communications in Wake of #OromoProtests, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF/ EPRDF) Ethiopia, Global Voices, Oromia, Oromo, The tyrannic Ethiopia
By Endalk, Global Voices, 14 July 2016
When students in Ginchi, a small town 75 km west of Addis Ababa, organized a demonstration in November 2015, US-based opposition media activist Jawar Mohammed, began posting minute-to-minute ‘live’ updates of the protest on his massively popular Facebook page, which has over 500k followers.
What started as a small-scale student protest over Ethiopian government’s plan to expand Addis Ababa into adjacent farm lands of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest constitutionally autonomous state, evolved into a series of largest and bloodiest demonstrations against Ethiopian government in a decade leaving at least 400 people killed, many more injured, and thousands jailed.
Along with Jawar’s live updates about the protests on Facebook, netizens saw a flood of digital photos, videos, blog posts, and tweets on other social media platforms coming from inside Ethiopia, mostly under the hashtag #OromoProtests.
For over a decade, the Ethiopian government has been violently cracking down on protesting students in Oromia, but these incidents have never garnered the online attention they did this time around. With scant coverage by foreign media from the front lines, and silence and misinformation coming from Ethiopia’s largely pro-government media outlets, the Internet emerged as the main channel used to disseminate information about protests. Jawar’s Facebook page and Twitter feedbecame the official-yet-unofficial story of the protest, leading diaspora writers to identify Jawar as a key shaper of public opinion on the events.
Though these networked communication dynamics are commonplace in many parts of the world, they are novel in Ethiopia, where Internet penetration hovered just below 5% in 2013, which is the last time that Internet access data was collected there by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency.
The steady stream of #OromoProtests content triggered various attempts by the government to limit digital traffic and block telecom services in Oromia.
In a bid to quell the growing role of social media in magnifying the stories of protests and to regain the upper hand, Ethiopia’s state-owned telecommunication monopoly EthioTelcom blocked social media platforms including Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in Oromia for at least two months. Around the same time, EthioTelecom also announced plans to begin charging customers for using popular voice over internet protocol (VoIP) applications such as Viber, Facebook messenger, Skype, and Google hangouts.
According to local media reports, EthioTelecom plans to enforce a new price scheme for VoIP data usage by deploying technologies that will more heavily regulate data plans and what kinds of apps operate on devices of each subscriber active on EthioTelecom network. In an unprecedented move, EthioTelecom also announced a plan to track, identify and ban mobile devices that are not purchased from the Ethiopian market. This move will allow EthioTelecom to keep a track of exactly what data is being sent to and from each subscriber active on the network. It remains unclear exactly how this technology will work, but it unquestionably demonstrates EthioTelecom’s intention to take full political advantage of its monopoly.
Despite being one of the poorest countries in terms of Internet penetration in Africa, #OromoProtests garnered wall-to-wall coverage by the US based Ethiopian diaspora satellite television stations, particularly OMN and ESAT. Both stations picked various stories of #OromoProtests from social media and rebroadcast them to millions of Ethiopians living off the grid of mobile phone infrastructure.
To top all this off, on the heels of the protests, the parliament passed a stringent computer crimes law that looks very much like an effort to criminalize protest-related online speech and to more effectively utilize digital communication as a tool of public surveillance.
In a critical piece about the new law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote,
Ethiopia’s prosecutors have long demonized legitimate uses of technology, claiming in court that the use of encryption, and knowledge of privacy-protecting tools is a sign of support for terrorists….By criminalizing everyday actions it ensures that anyone who speaks online, or supports online free expression, might one day be targeted by the law…. [This regulation] will intimidate ordinary Ethiopian citizens into staying offline, and further alienate Ethiopia’s technological progress from its African neighbors and the rest of the world.
According to reports, the new legislation further limits already-diminished digital rights such as freedom of expression and privacy, criminalizing and levying severe punishments for defamatory speech online. The legislation also obliges service providers to store records of all communications along with their metadata for at least a year.
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.
Tags: Africa, Enemies of Press Freedom, Ethiopia, Ethiopia and the social progress index, Ethiopia: enemies internet freedom, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF/ EPRDF) Ethiopia, twitter, Viber
Viber, twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp Are strictly forbidden in Fascist regime (TPLF) Ethiopia
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Social Progress Index 2016: Ethiopia continue to make one of the worst performers
https://oromianeconomist.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/social-progress-index-2016-ethiopia-continue-to-make-one-of-the-worst-performers/
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