TALKING WITH STRANGERS

By Douglas McGill

Okwa Omot is sleeping safely in a warm bed at his home in Washington, D.C. this week.

That is something of a miracle considering that only a week ago – and for 107 days before that – he was sleeping on freezing cold concrete floors in Ethiopian prisons, accused of treason and threatened with execution.

The 32-year-old hotel housekeeper and U.S. citizen had traveled to Ethiopia in July to visit family members he hadn’t seen for nine years.

Instead, he was arrested for inciting revolution and shut away in prison.

He was released last Tuesday after friends in Minnesota and U.S. Embassy officials in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopia capital, worked for weeks to convince Ethiopian authorities that Omot posed no threat to their country.

The prison system of Ethiopia is one of the world’s great, dark secrets.

The Ethiopian government denies that systematic human rights abuses occur there, even as human rights groups, with support from the U.S. State Department, claim that Ethiopia runs one of the most brutal penal systems on earth – a system that is a linchpin in a dictatorship that rules Ethiopia through raw fear under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Omot’s experience supports that bleak view of Ethiopia’s prisons, and the story of his three-month ordeal offers a rare inside glimpse into that world.

Ethnic Cleansing

On July 26, Omot was arrested near the village of Dimma, Ethiopia, by nine Ethiopian police who grabbed him under a tree where he was resting.

“We heard you were coming,” the police told him. “We know that in America you plot against Ethiopia, but we have our supporters in America too, and they told us to expect you.”

Omot is a member of the Anuak tribe, whose indigenous territory  straddles southeast Sudan and western Ethiopia. Since 1991, when the present Ethiopian regime took power, the Anuak have been the target of intense ethnic cleansing by the Ethiopian government according to Human Rights Watch and other groups.

Omot fled that ethnic cleansing in 1992, spending three years in refugee camps in Kenya before settling in the U.S. in 1995. He became a U.S. citizen last year.

Never politically active, Omot raised suspicions on his recent trip by entering Ethiopia not through airport customs in Addis Ababa, but rather by the traditional Anuak way, which is walking across the border from an Anuak village in Sudan, to the Ethiopian Anuak village of Dimma.

Old-Timers

Omot feared for his life every moment in prison.

‘“You will die like a dog now there is no one to defend you,”’ Omot recalls his jailers in Dimma taunting him. “They said, ‘In America, black people are treated like slaves and there are no white people who will come from America to save your life.’ I told them, ‘Did you see that in America we now have a black president?’ They said ‘Shut up!’”

After five days in Dimma, Omot was moved to a bigger prison in the town of Gambella, the capital of the western state of the same name, and the heart of the Anuak’s indigenous homeland.

The Gambella prison has for many years housed hundreds of Anuak men accused of plotting against Ethiopia.

Although Omot was not able to count the number of prisoners himself, old-timers in the prison told him there were 475 prisoners being held there, of whom only 20 or so were not Anuak.

“One night a group of soldiers came to me and said ‘We are going to teach you something,’” Omot recalls. “They blindfolded me and shoved me into a pickup truck. When they took off my blindfold they pushed me to the ground and I was surrounded by dead bodies. They were mostly skeletons but with pieces of clothing still stuck on.

‘The soldiers told me, ‘Unless you confess you will look like those bodies. You will die just like they did. We will kill you right now.’”

Independent Reports

Instead of collapsing, Omot became calm.

“‘A man can never live to 200 years,’” Omot told his captors. “‘Life comes to an end for everyone. I have nothing to tell you. If you want to kill me, kill me.’ They put the blindfold back on and drove me back to the prison.”

Another day in Gambella, Omot was snatched from his cell and taken to the office of Omot Olom, the governor of the region.

Olom is deeply feared among the Anuak as a planner of one of the worst massacres ever carried out against their tribe, on Dec. 13, 2003, when uniformed Ethiopian soldiers moving door to door executed some 425 Anuak men and boys in Gambella on a single day.

The fact of the massacre, and Olom’s involvement in it, have been corroborated by independent reports including a 2004 report by Genocide Watch, and a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch connecting Olom to “crimes against humanity” committed against the Anuak.

Now meeting Olom face-to-face, Omot again feared for his life.

“He called me an American terrorist,” Omot said. “He said, ‘Omot, we know your history. You killed Ethiopian people before you left to live in America, and you have been sending money from America to kill Ethiopians. And now you are coming back to support terrorists living in Gambella. We are either going to kill you or destroy your passport.’”

Maekelawi Prison

A ray of hope appeared for Omot when a consular official from the U.S. embassy, who had been alerted to Omot’s arrest by Anuak friends living in Minnesota, flew from Addis Ababa to visit him in the Gambella prison.

That visit saved his life, Omot said. Thanks to the embassy’s intervention, he was transferred to the Maekelawi federal prison in Addis Ababa, where U.S. embassy officials were able to visit him more often.

But his trials were not yet over, as Maekelawi is an infamous dungeon of horrors.

Tales of torture, extrajudicial execution, solitary confinement in shackles, and brutal conditions at Maekelawi are legion in Ethiopia.

Tens of thousands of street protestors, journalists, and opposition politicians over the years have spent long stretches in Maekelawi – sometimes never leaving.

Lights Off

At Maekelawi, Omot was thrown into a dark basement cell, which he shared with another inmate.

“It was cold as a refrigerator,” Omot said. “I thought I was going to die from the cold. I had one thin blanket but I needed much more to stay warm.”

In his 17 days underground, the dim overhead lights mysteriously went off on four different occasions, after which each time he heard shuffling sounds in the darkness.

His cellmate told him that when a person died in prison, the lights were turned off while the body was picked up and taken away.

Michael Gonzales, a U.S. embassy spokesman in Addis Ababa, confirmed that Omot is a U.S. citizen and that a consular official met with him in Gambella and the Maekelawi prison in Addis, to win his release last week. Senior U.S. embassy officials also contacted Ethiopian officials on Omot’s behalf, Gonzales said.

Apee Jobi, an Anuak American who lives in Brooklyn Park, MN first alerted the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia about Omot’s arrest in early August, and worked with embassy officials towards his release.

Jobi said Omot’s arrest and imprisonment was standard operating procedure today in Ethiopia, as part of the system of fear that supports the regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Many ethnic groups in Ethiopia are suppressed using these tactics, Jobi said.

“From the point of view of the government, loyalty means innocence,” Jobi said. “But if you are a stranger, you are guilty.  But it doesn’t mean you have committed a crime.”

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

AUSTIN, MN – When Giselle Stern Hernàndez finished writing her one-woman show, “The Deportee’s Wife,” not in her wildest dreams did she imagine she’d one day perform it for neo-Nazis. 

That would have been like a sick joke or an awful nightmare.

After all, Stern Hernàndez is the daughter of a Polish Jewish father and a Mexican mother – and her play tells of her struggle to bring her Mexican husband back into the U.S. after he was deported to Mexico. 

Yet when Stern Hernàndez took the stage last Thursday at the Riverland Community College here, she found herself standing before a crowd of 120 people – including four neo-Nazis.

Sitting about ten feet ahead of her in the theater’s front-row-center seats were two men and two younger companions wearing black stadium jackets and T-shirts emblazoned with symbols of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a group that advocates the deportation, “peacefully or by force,” of all people in the U.S. except citizens of “pure White blood.”

Bullhorn Rants

Stern Hernàndez delivered her lines while looking almost directly into the eyes of Sam Johnson, the NSM’s “Unit Leader” in Austin and the organizer in recent months of several attention-getting rallies opposing liberal immigration reform. 

Burly and bald-headed, Johnson is known throughout southern Minnesota for his bullhorn rants at public rallies, his racist outbursts and for wearing swastikas.

In a typical appearance last July, he disrupted a pro-immigration event in Albert Lea by standing close to Mexican migrant workers while shrieking, spittle-mouthed: “You think America’s going to let you get away with this? Not a chance! You don’t belong here, this is our country! Stop taking food out of our children’s mouths! Go home! Good-bye! You’re illegal, get out!”

As the minutes ticked by before her show started, Stern Hernàndez paced around stiffly backstage, sipping bottled water, frozen with fear.  Nervous aides came by periodically, providing her with updates. 

“It didn’t hit my body until someone came and told me they are really here, sitting front row center,” Stern Hernàndez said. “I opened the door to the stage a few times to take a peek and I saw them sitting there. They are big guys and I’m up there by myself. If they wanted to tackle me they easily could.”

Extreme Example 

She took deep breaths and steadied herself by recalling a solemn vow she’d made while writing “The Deportee’s Wife,” which dramatizes the need for progressive U.S. immigration reform.

“I promised myself that I would start entering spaces that were a little more unfriendly,” Stern Hernàndez said. “This was an extreme example of that, but it’s all about walking the talk. It’s a part of my role.” 

So at 7 p.m. sharp she strode to center stage and delivered the play’s first line: “I wasn’t really listening for many years.” She told the story of meeting her husband, Mexican-born Roberto, and falling in love with him because he “smiled with integrity and he laughed honestly.”

She confessed in her monologue to sometimes less-than-noble motivations for hooking up with Roberto: “I loved having an undocumented boyfriend. I thought it made me look edgy, cosmopolitan.” At the same time she admitted that back then, “Mexico to me was a scary, dirty country my mother had had the good sense to leave.” 

Her play recounts how in 2001 Roberto, married to her but without a valid visa, was during a single shattering day discovered, deported back to Mexico, and barred from re-entering the U.S. for 20 years.

Automatic Pilot 

The couple’s ensuing Kafkaesque struggles with the U.S. Immigration Service to win permanent residency for Roberto – while at the same time trying to save their marriage from a system straining with its every fiber to break them apart — is the play’s gripping theme.

Her mind racing and her heart beating, Stern Hernàndez was on automatic pilot for the first 15 minutes of the show, she said. 

She was just mouthing the words as her mind raced, trying to decide whether to catch the gaze of the neo-Nazis in the front row, staring at her intensely.

She was even calculating the odds of her survival. 

“I was wondering ‘Are they going to jump me? Do they have a gun?’ Their body postures were scary. They wanted me to see their T-shirts and they were very open in their postures, as if they could jump up any time.”

But then, quite suddenly, something changed.

In an instant she saw the men sitting in the front row not as neo-Nazis but rather as human beings, perhaps suffering ones like herself. 

Soft Eyes 

“At that point I got my control back,” Stern Hernàndez said. “I said to myself ‘I’m going to start looking at them, and I’m going to look at them with love in my eyes.’ I looked at them with soft eyes for the rest of the show and it was a conscious decision, very purposeful.”

Whatever happened, it did the trick. The show ended without a hitch. That included the Q&A at the end of the show, when Stern Hernàndez sat on stage and answered questions audience members had written on cards. 

Kirsten Lindbloom, the chairwoman of the Austin Human Rights Commission, which brought Stern Hernàndez to Austin, said “The Deportee’s Wife” fulfilled the commission’s goal to offer a “soft voice” forum for discussing charged immigration issues in public.

“This year we’ve had four rallies which were loud, where people are standing with bullhorns yelling at each other, and people are getting arrested,” Lindbloom said. “As a commission we are not willing to be in discussion at that level.” The show last Thursday was co-sponsored by the The Advocates for Human Rights.

Immigration is a major issue in Austin because several large employers in town rely heavily on immigrant labor – mainly Hormel Foods, which is based in Austin, but also Quality Pork and Weyerhaeuser.  

Swastika Patches

The non-white population of the Austin Public School District has doubled in the past eight years, to 31.8 percent this year from 15.2 percent in 2001, Lindbloom says. Young families account for most of that increase, and one elementary school already has a majority of non-white children, she said.

Long a site of anti-immigration activity, 2009 was an especially busy year in Austin with Johnson and other neo-Nazis, garbed in all-black paramilitary fatigues and swastika shoulder patches, staging multiple rallies there and throughout southeast Minnesota.

The rallies have captured widespread attention in the blogosphere; inspired local newspaper editorials decrying Johnson and the NSM; and sparked a debate between bloggers and newspaper journalists over how to responsibly write about racist provocateurs like Johnson and the NSM.

The progressive Minnesota blog Bluestem Prairie published a three-part series documenting the NSM’s activities, as well as quotes from a 90-minute interview with Johnson in which he asserted that “minorities should not be citizens,” that “white people are better than black people in terms of intelligence,” and that the Talmud is a “filthy” document that advocates sexually abusing gentile girls.

During the Q&A at the end of “The Deportee’s Wife,” one or two of the questions sounded as if they’d been written by the men in the front row.

Greater Hopes

One of those questions was: “Is this play an attempt to gain sympathy for your Marxist ideals and to push for open borders?”

To which Stern Hernàndez replied: “I’m not here to change anyone’s feelings. People come feeling one way and leave feeling that way. I’m here to make people think. I want you to feel uncomfortable.”

The next day though, after an early morning run, Stern Hernàndez admitted to harboring higher hopes for her art.

“I was thinking ‘You may pretend to not be listening, but something of what I’m saying will make you think of me and Roberto in the future. It’s going to bump up against everything you know and believe in. It’s a love story. So if you love someone or ever loved someone, you know.”

What else was she thinking on her morning run?

“I’m happy to be alive and to be here. I was always told that my physical safety was not at risk. But it’s different when you are on stage, and Roberto was so far away.”

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

ROCHESTER, MN – That our news media is busted will come as no surprise to consumers of vanishing newspapers, shoutfest TV “news shows” and the unchecked political soapbox called the Internet.

But the devolution of our news media has now reached a point that is in some ways so extreme, and with the stakes for democracy so high, it seems useful to take stock.

Larger and larger swaths of the news media now embrace sensation and celebrity, harshly partisan rhetoric and gossip, rumors and lies to beat the competition and grab market share.

Trusted sources of information are fading into irrelevance as we race into a new golden age for anarchists, demagogues and online pamphleteers.

The Web, to be sure, puts masses of indisputably proven facts at our disposal. Yet millions of people remain stubbornly faithful to discredited nonsense, conspiracy theories and urban legends.

Sometimes it’s not the content but simply the overwhelming bulk of news being delivered every minute to our fingertips (our dazed mindtips!) that grates. We can sicken on a sheer surplus of words, including well-intentioned ones.

Artists and writers saw the dangers of a dysfunctional mass media and news media long ago. But they also saw something else, which was a deep misunderstanding of the mass media itself.

They’ve often used metaphors depicting an idiot monster that’s simply too big and shape-shifting for logic and reason to spot.

For George Saunders the dysfunctional news media is “The Brain Dead Megaphone;” for John Cheever “The Enormous Radio;” for Jonathan Schell “The Uncertain Leviathan;” for Jeffrey Scheuer “The Sound Bite Society;” for Larry Beinhart “The Fog of Facts;” for Tony Schwartz “The Second God;” and for the jazzy word artist and media critic John Durham Peter’s it’s simply “The Abyss.”

But literary metaphors aside, what clear definitions and categories can we rely upon now that our news media is failing so badly in its mission to inform democratic society, and to model modes of conversation that create community and hasten social healing?

Take three recent examples:

• Two highly-skilled, well-respected Washington Post political reporters start an online web site devoted to covering inside-the-beltway news. Instead of raising the level of online journalism the web site, Politico.com, largely sinks to the blogosphere’s standards, touting stories about the sartorial habits of presidential candidates, hyping gossipy tidbits, and relying heavily on unnamed operatives, aides, and “sources close to the administration.”

• If any two facts of current and critical public importance qualify as being indisputably proven, they are the safety (if not the absolute efficacy) of the H1N1 vaccine, and where President Obama was born. Yet despite widespread dissemination of the facts and figures establishing both of these facts, millions of people believe that the H1N1 vaccine is deadly, and that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore is unqualified to be the U.S. president.

• The host of a popular TV “public affairs” show, ranting about the U.S. president, douses an actor with liquid from a fake gasoline can and lights a match while shouting bug-eyed: “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?” Later five teenage boys in Florida pour rubbing alcohol on another boy and light him on fire. No definitive link is made connecting the one incident to the other, yet what does your gut say? How is what this host performed on TV different from a cross burning carried out in a front yard?

Free speech doctrine, that cornerstone of our constitution and our journalism, says it’s our solemn and patriotic duty to suck it up, to grit our teeth and stomach whatever garbage comes along to safeguard everyone’s freedom.

But what happens when the news media itself — by distorting facts and dividing community — becomes a potential threat to public health, national safety, and to the very workings of democracy?

What’s our best response then?

II

A promising answer to that question is taking shape today in the work of a new breed of brain scientists who are studying the influence of emotions, instincts and other innate human traits on human reasoning and moral decision-making.

That’s significant because so many of our assumptions about how the news media works in a democracy are based on the premise of rational actors, i.e. the assumption that citizens act on the news primarily in a rational manner by sorting fact from fiction, weighing certain facts against other ones, and so on.

But what if reason is not the main cognitive mode by which citizens read, watch and act on the news? This possibility was flagged by the journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann in the 1920s and has been a theme of media criticism ever since.

And it’s mostly led to the depressing solution, embraced by Lippmann and many others, that basically journalism must act like propaganda, by distilling complex ideas into digestible symbols that manipulate more than inform.

That doesn’t sound like democracy. Yet until recently, no more promising answer has been found on which both producers and consumers of the news could depend.

Now, though, such an answer is taking shape in the work of these scientists who are objectively demonstrating how the true source of human wisdom is not pure reason, as in the Enlightenment view. Rather, it is rooted in an organic mind-body process in which genetics and morality, brain structure and subjective feeling, reason and emotion are enmeshed every moment in a never-ending dance.

Using technological devices capable of measuring the brain at incomparably closer levels than before, these scientists are demonstrating how decision-making and moral actions are not primarily the product of reasoning, but rather are largely emotion-based and hard-wired into the human genome.

The developmental psychologist Jonathan Haidt can predict if a person is liberal or conservative based on a few inherent and measurable personality traits such as “openness to new experience.”

The psychologist Drew Westen has proven how neuronal networks that stimulate strong emotions are expertly activated by political wordsmiths on the left and right. The cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman uses MRI techniques to show how human brains change in predictable ways when  their owners, across cultures, are persuaded by arguments in text and video form.

In terms of the news media, the promise of this new research is to make us more aware, as both producers and consumers of media, of what is actually transpiring in our minds and bodies when we make and consume the news, and act thereupon.

As a result of this research, a substantially new model will replace the “rational actor” model because reason, we are finding out, is not as pure as we thought it was. As we learn more about the real picture, which is based more on genetics and emotions than the old one, we’ll become more able to use it to our advantage.

In other words, these new findings highlight the need for a new decision-making template in democracies. They make clear the need, especially, for new ethical guidelines by which both individuals and society at large can make decisions that are rational and moral.

In the past, moral decision-making has generally meant recourse to an analytical framework such as those offered by Aristotle’s “virtue ethics,” Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” or John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.”

Besides being too complex and bookish for popular adoption, these ethical answer-machines all work mechanically: complex real-world conditions in, tidy morality out.

But what if, as the new neuroscientists are saying, morality works more like a subtle and intricate dance than a crank-turned machine?

What if the great swirl of emotions plays the primary role in moral decision-making? That’s where a new ethical approach is needed when it comes to the realm of the news media, for both producers and consumers. I can suggest one.

It’s not new, actually, but its application to modern-day conditions certainly would be. It’s the “Right Speech” ethic of the 5th century BC spiritual teacher and moral teacher Siddhartha Guatama, popularly known as the Buddha.

III

The Right Speech doctrine has much to commend it for application to our mass media and news media issues, I think.

Perhaps its very first qualification is how seamlessly it complements the findings of the new neuroscientists. As the Buddha himself preached not a religion but rather a practical psychology – centering on a meditation practice designed to reveal to each person the true workings of their own minds – Right Speech totally complements any scientific approach.

By the same token, its lack of political origin likewise commends Right Speech to contemporary application as, theoretically at least, its political neutrality would allow it to sidestep the distraction of political debates. The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ethical systems – of Kant, Mill, Rawls, etc. – can’t avoid those problems as our present free speech tradition, which largely guides ethical decision-making in the news media, is thoroughly grounded in political liberalism.

But what exactly is the Right Speech ethic? What does it say is “right speech”?

You could write down the Right Speech ethic on a matchbook cover.

Boiled down, it defines ethical speech in four ways, each way having a positive and a negative phrasing. The positive way defines the qualities that each speech act ideally will have; with the negative way defining types of speech to avoid.

The best-known Right Speech formulation offers four types of speech to avoid including speech that is 1) lying, 2) divisive, 3) hurtful, or 4) idle. Phrased positively, ethical speech is thus 1) true, 2) healing, 3) gentle, and 4) useful.

The timeliness of ethical speech is also greatly stressed. The Buddha many times reminded his monks that if delivered at the wrong moment even an absolutely true and useful statement can be divisive and hurtful. In addition, the intention behind every speech act is always determinative. Thus, a lie spoken with a genuine intention to heal, and in the genuine belief that it would cause the least amount of harm in a given situation, would be acceptable in the Right Speech code.

That’s about it. Beyond this core, though, exists a rich literature of parables, stories and commentaries on Right Speech that clarifies its meaning, describes its relation to underlying Buddhist psychology, and provides countless examples of skillful and unskillful daily life applications of the Right Speech ethic in personal, family, governmental and even political settings (6th century BCE Indian politics, that is).

At least three notable traits of the news media today also suggest the ready adaptability of the Right Speech ethic to contemporary conditions.

First is how the Internet has empowered millions of people to become not only consumers but also producers of news via personal blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts, cell phone photography, etc. Their dispatches may on most days be read or viewed by only a handful, but on other days they may get the attention of millions. More people than ever, ordinary citizens as well as news professionals thus need today to seriously consider issues of journalism ethics.

Second, any adequate speech ethic today must be equally adaptable to consumers of public speech, as well as its producers. There is increasing understanding that language, like food, is absorbed with both potential benefits and potentially serious harm ensuing to its consumers. Therefore, an ethic of speech consumption, similar perhaps to diets and nutrition regimes for food, is needed and which the Right Speech ethic provides.

Third, of all the challenges presented by today’s dysfunctional news media, the most serious perhaps are the deep social divisions that it creates, exacerbates and sustains. The increasing partisanship and rancorous tone of the national public dialog calls out for a speech ethic that explicitly addresses that problem and offers ready avenues for redress, which the Buddhist Right Speech ethic does.

How much would newspapers, TV news shows and the blogosphere be transformed if only these four injunctions – to avoid lies, harsh speech, divisive and idle speech — were honored? And if the urge to go to press or to air was  delayed until to the moment of maximum helpfulness and healing?

It’s perhaps a useful thought experiment, anyway.

Here’s another one, from a short discourse the Buddha used to remind his followers that words, so seemingly weightless and ephemeral, can actually be lethal:

 ”Every person who is born
  is born with an axe in his mouth.
  A fool who uses abusive language
  cuts himself and others with that axe. “

One huge obstacle, though, blocks Right Speech from being widely adopted as an ethical touchstone in western democracies and their news medias.

That is the idea that “Right Speech” and “Free Speech” are in conflict.

Next week, I’ll explain why they’re not.

Part 2 of a Three-Part Series
 Part 1: The Politico Paradox — Feeding the Media We Hate
 Part 3: Free Speech vs. Right Speech (Coming soon)

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report