It has finally come to this: an emerging consensus in the journalism profession that the nation’s free press — our most important government watchdog — needs some level of government bailout.

Total job loss in the U.S. newspaper industry has been about 40 percent since 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In real numbers, roughly 14,000 reporters and editors – about a fourth of the nation’s total – having lost their jobs since 2000 as the Internet has drained away advertisers and readers.

“This is a dire moment for democracy,” write the progressive media critics John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney in a new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism. “It requires a renewal of one of America’s oldest understandings: that a free people can govern themselves only if they have access to independent information about the issues of the day and the excesses of the powerful.”

Government Rescue

Which leads Nichols and McChesney to their prescription: “It is the duty of government to guarantee both the promise and the reality of a free press.”

About $30 billion a year in subsidies should do the trick, they say, with the money spent on massive increases for local news startups; an AmeriCorps-style project putting thousands of young people to work in digital newsrooms; and a nationwide project to transition failing commercial news ventures into “solvent non-profit or low-profit” entities.

Nichols and McChesney write from the pretty-far left, but today even the “neutral” mandarins of mainstream journalism are warning of an advanced crisis in American journalism — and are recommending at least a partial government rescue.

“American journalism is at a transformational moment,” write Leonard Downie, Jr., the former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a Columbia University journalism professor, in a 24-page report in the latest Columbia Journalism Review.

“The economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers, long supported by advertising, is collapsing,” Downie and Schudson say. To keep journalism alive, they recommend a five-step program including Congressional authorization of tax breaks, expanded government funding for public media news reporting, and a national fund for local news.

Post Office

The strong instinctive objection to government subsidies, of course, is that they would lead to government control of the press. But the advocates of government support for journalism cite countries such as Sweden and Norway, where strong government subsidies and a free press coexist.

Even in the U.S., the public option advocates add, government support in the arts and sciences hasn’t prevented tax-funded agencies in those fields from sometimes harshly criticizing the U.S. government and its policies.

The ace-in-the-hole argument for government subsidies of journalism, though, is that the U.S. government itself – working closely with entrepreneurial publishers — started American journalism in the first place.

Indeed, the U.S. Postal Service was formed in 1792 primarily to deliver newspapers to the furthest corners of the new nation.

The revolutionary leader Benjamin Rush, in 1787, in his “Address to the People of the United States,” articulated this founding vision of the U.S. Post Office:

“For the purpose of diffusing knowledge, as well as extending the living principle of government to every part of the United States, every state, city, county, village and township in the union should be tied together by means of the post-office. It should be a constant injunction to the postmasters, to convey newspapers free of all charge for postage.”

Little Rebellions

The nation’s founders believed that strong newspaper subsidies, linked to strong protections from government control, was the formula to an enduring free press.

If that formula was good enough for the Founders, why not for us?

Many of the Founders also argued that strong government support of public education should go hand in hand with support of the free press.

Basically, they believed that without literacy, how can journalism work as a binding cultural force?

That’s helpful to recall today as declining news readership habits, increasing multilingualism and other trends make clear that strong efforts to build demand for journalism, as well as shoring up dwindling supply, is needed.

In a famous letter to James Madison, dashed off in Paris in January, 1787, Thomas Jefferson offers a unifying metaphor that remains potent today.

In the letter, Jefferson admits he is not too concerned about a popular uprising against the Massachusetts government, because “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

The best journalism offers a daily “little rebellion” of truth that can heal our communities, our states and our nation.

The U.S. government should support journalism during this crisis, while building in restraints against government as our constitutional tradition holds.

And if we can’t trust our government to do that, we’ve got bigger questions to discuss than the future of news.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/publicoption

The woman is Birtukan Mideksa, a 34-year-old mother and charismatic political leader who has been attracting millions of young followers – and who a year ago paid the price by being sentenced to life in prison by an Ethiopian government that is cracking down hard on all opposition ahead of national elections coming this May.

With representatives of virtually every one of Ethiopia’s many opposition groups living in Minnesota, freeing Birtukan Mideksa has become a rallying cry for many of them – and a unifying one among dissident groups that usually would not work together.

At a commemorative event marking Birtukan’s first year in prison, held last month at at the Longfellow Park Recreation Center in Minneapolis, members from many of those groups met to share a meal and discuss strategies to release Birtukan. Flyers were also distributed at the Medhanealem Orthodox Ethiopian Church in Minneapolis.

“Birtukan is a prisoner of conscience but there are many others, from many ethnic groups, who are also in prison because of their political opinions,” said Asheber Worku, the organizer of the December commemoration. “The issue of Birtukan embraces all these other political prisoners and we are working together to pressure Meles Zenawi.”

In October 2007, Birtukan drew the largest-ever crowd of Ethiopian refugees in Minnesota – more than 700 people – to a rally held at the First Christian Church in Minneapolis. The excitement was an early sign of the political potency of a young icon of democracy – an Aung San Suu Kyi of Africa she is often called – that surrounds her still.

The comparison was too close for her own safety. In December 2008, while walking in downtown Addis Ababa, five cars pulled up and Ethiopian police jumped out, gun-butted Birtukan’s companion into submission, pushed her into a car and sped away.

According to Amnesty International, Birtukan is presently being held at the Kaliti Prison in Addis Ababa as a “prisoner of conscience” in a cell that is two-meters wide, and was “arrested solely for the peaceful exercise of her right to freedom of expression and association.”

Ethiopian immigrants in Minnesota say that Birtukan’s illegal confinement is only one of sweeping criminal acts committed by the Ethiopian regime, led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, designed to quash all opposition in the May elections, and to further secure his grip on power.

“They have imprisoned all opposition party leaders, the independent media has been closed, and many people have gone into exile,” said Berhane Worku, an engineer at the Metropolitan Council in St. Paul who is running an email campaign, supported by Amnesty International, to pressure U.S. elected officials to push for Birtukan’s release.

Meles Zenawi took power in Ethiopia in 1991, overthrowing the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, known for its corruption and ruthless suppression of all dissent. Hailed for several years as a hope for democracy in Africa, over the past decade Meles has instead transmogrified into a horrifying replica of Mengistu or even worse.

In 2003, a genocide carried out by the Ethiopian military against the Anuak tribe of western Ethiopia was uncovered. Over the past two years, similar widespread crimes against humanity have been documented in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, where entire villages of Somali-speaking Ethiopians have been wiped out by Ethiopian soldiers in the name of fighting a supposed “terrorist insurgency” brewing in that region.

Birtukan’s troubles began in 2004 and 2005, when during a period of unprecedented political openness in Ethiopoia she publicly emerged as a fiercely intelligent, pragmatic opposition leader who united enough votes to seriously threaten Meles and his governing party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).

When it became obvious that the EPRDF would lose substantially to an opposition led by a vital young woman who was drawing throngs of young people, the crackdown began. The election results were nullified and when protesters gathered in Addis Ababa to express their displeasure, Ethiopian soldiers opened fire on them, killing at least 187.

Hundreds of opposition political figures, dissidents, journalists and human rights workers were imprisoned at the time – with many, like Birtukan, receiving life sentences.

Also like Birtukan, many of these were released 18 months later after a pardon was brokered. But when Birtukan kept up her political activity by founding the Unity, Democracy and Justice Party (UDJP) and started travelling overseas – to places like Minnesota to drum up support for her cause – that was too much for the regime. She was re-arrested, her pardon revoked, and returned to her closet-sized cell.

For the past year, the only people who have been allowed to see her are her 72-year-old mother, Almaz Gebregziabhere, and her three-year-old daughter, Halle, who visit for one hour a week.

She started a hunger strike early during her latest jailing but abandoned it after her mother and others begged her to stop.

Birtukan’s mother appeared on a live radio interview last month at KFAI in Minneapolis.

“Free Birtukan” t-shirts – wearing one in Ethiopia will get you jailed immediately if not tortured or killed – are being worn by many of Ethiopian immigrants in Minnesota, as are “Birkutan – Prisoner of Conscience” wristbands, and flyers describing her plight are being widely posted in schools and churches.

“What motivates me is the moral question,” Asheber Worku said. “What I see here in America is democracy. I want to see it in my home country, too.”

Copyright @ 2010 The McGill Report

So many people in this world are suffering.

I could describe one or two of these insistent, important messages. But with fresh snow flakes falling and warm family gatherings planned for the days just ahead, another kind of story –- with a more uplifting holiday message — comes to mind.

One evening last week, I was at the Rochester International Airport with a small group to greet a family of Iraqis who were soon to arrive from Jordan, where they’ve been living as Iraq War refugees for the past two years.

As we waited, I chatted with an Iraqi refugee, a man in his 30’s who has lived in the U.S. for only three months. He was forced to flee his Baghdad home because he worked for the Red Cross in Iraq, which made him a target for assassination by local militias. He said he had a wife and three young children.

“Were you able to bring your family?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he answered. “I would rather have died than leave my family.”

Christmas Gift

It’s not every day that you hear life, death and the family so matter-of-factly assumed – and acted upon — as equivalents. My Iraqi friend spoke with the authority of one who very recently made this calculation every morning as he got up, made his breakfast, sent his kids to school and went off to his dangerous work.

Do I think of my own family in the same way? Do I touch base with them enough, both literally and in the sense of remembering and being grateful for them? Or do I just possibly take them for granted more than I should?

In any case, I’m thinking of my family much differently today than I did yesterday, thanks to my Iraqi friend, and I’m grateful.

I received his fresh perspective as a beautiful Christmas gift.

In its essence, I’ve always felt, working with immigrants and refugees is deeply spiritual work. Because it brings me face to face not just with others, but through others to myself at the ground-floor level of values, morals and ideals – to what really counts. Immigrants always, always show me high ideals to live up to.

Our Souls

Often a spiritually-rich confrontation comes via citizens who’ve lived longer in the U.S. – although not always that much longer – than newly-arrived refugees.

“We already have so many problems in this country,” the question goes. “Why don’t we fix those before we bring in more people with more problems?”

It’s wonderful when that question is asked, I think, because it offers us a chance to mull it over. Especially, to ask that question of ourselves not just with our  intellects but within the space of our hearts, our souls and communities.

Can the newcomer, the stranger, perhaps help us to fix the problems we’re not doing so well at solving ourselves?

What gifts and wisdom does the stranger bring?

It’s the essence of spiritual work – and community work – to find that out.

And it is an absolute ton of wearying work. Every immigrant’s story is a cross-cultural epic and refugees, who often suffer the effects of war and psychological trauma, have that extra challenge. Always, there are tears and exhaustion.

Only Love

But there is also always a flip side, which happens when the tears and exhaustion suddenly resolve into a knowing with absolute certainty that no kind of work matters more in this world, than the work of welcoming strangers.

At this point there is a kind of lifting up, a second wind, a stiffening of the spine and a resolve to take up any burden against all of the injustice, ignorance, and hurt.

Only now it doesn’t feel like a burden any longer.

It simply feels like life’s right and proper work.

“It’s like a paradox,” another refugee social worker told me recently. “You can always give something. You give until it hurts a little bit. You give until it hurts and then you find there’s no hurt left, only love.”

When we help refugees resettle in this country, we help to give them a new life.

This Christmas, what I remember is that they also give us a new life in return.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

MINNEAPOLIS — Who knows the Minnesota Oromo?

Who knows their dark secret?

Fifteen thousand Oromo live in Minnesota but they blend in almost invisibly, like a stealthy, anonymous population in the state.

They are teachers, doctors and lawyers; they run retail shops and corporations; they attend Viking games, relax at coffee shops and stroll at malls. They are sometimes called “Ethiopian immigrants” because they are indeed from Ethiopia.

But among friends and family, or if you ask them specifically, they carefully call themselves “Oromo.”

Who are the Oromo?

They are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, numbering 31 million, and they are the subject of a new report, “Human Rights in Ethiopia: Through the Eyes of the Oromo Diaspora,” prepared by The Advocates for Human Rights, based in Minneapolis.

State Power

The report describes how the Oromo began immigrating to Minnesota from their homeland 30 years ago, and in the process explains why, despite their mostly successful assimilation, they remain relatively little-known here.

First, though, a warning. This column contains language that represents an awful reality, an affliction that at first may seem distant from us, but is actually as near to us as our neighbors — that fellow at the football game, the woman at the mall.

A century of history, summarized in the report, provides the context for understanding the Oromo in Minnesota. From the days of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia in the late 19th century, and continuing through the tyrannical regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi today, the Oromo have been crushed down by state power.

The Oromo’s low profile in Minnesota reflects a century of focused, systematic, brutal campaigns by Ethiopian rulers to render them impotent and voiceless.

Limited Rights

Successive Ethiopian governments for more than a century have defined the Oromo as second-class citizens holding severely limited rights to government representation, education, employment, free speech and property.

These strictures have prompted the Oromo to flee their homeland to a worldwide diaspora that numbers in the tens of thousands or possibly more — with Minnesota hosting probably the largest concentration of Oromo refugees in the world.

But there is yet another reason for the Oromo’s relatively quiet presence in Minnesota all of these years.

That reason is their secret, which is that they have been tortured, or deeply scarred by torture they have personally witnessed, or suffered in their family or among their friends.

“Few Oromos that the Advocates for Human Rights interviewed were unaffected by torture,” the report says. “The particular experience of the Oromo people, victims of torture in extremely high numbers and of repressive practices designed to undermine their very culture, also continues to be felt by those in the diaspora.

“Traumatic experiences are relived over and over again by torture
victims, and this trauma has lasting effects on even those not directly on the receiving end of the torturer’s abuse,” the report says.

Here are three personal stories told by Minnesota Oromo, chosen at random from scores of similar interviews collected in the new report:

“I was turned upside down. They started beating the bottoms of my feet with a piece of tire. Each time they whipped me they ripped my skin. The brought a bucket full of water and bleach in it. When they stopped beating me they put my face in the bucket. I thought I would die.”

And this story:

“The killing of Mustapha created fear in us. They brought him to the city center where everybody could see his body. They nailed him to the ground. They removed his skin and took out his two eyes. They forced people to come and watch. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t recognize him. I fainted when I saw him.”

And this:

“It is hard for us to talk about this. They put flashlights in the sexual organs of the ladies. There is a woman that they put flashlight batteries in her vagina. She couldn’t hold her urine and she used to urinate on herself.”

Let me confess, I have some beefs with The Advocate’s new report.

The biggest is that its historical sweep dilutes its potential present-day impact.

As horrific as they were, the human rights crimes of earlier Ethiopian dictators are now a part of history.

Meanwhile, the current dictator, now a bloody 18 years in office, urgently requires accountability that a more contemporary report could have provided with greater force.

The report’s scope also leads to weakness in specifics. The cursory treatment of a massacre of 426 men of the Anuak tribe of Western Ethiopia, on Dec. 13, 2003, fails to mention the exhaustive evidence that the massacre was part of a government-planned genocide of the tribe.

The scant two-paragraph mention of the most urgent crisis in Ethiopia today, in the Ogaden region, is also troubling. As is the timidity, even the naivete, of calling upon the present Ethiopian government, which long ago showed the world its spots, to “immediately cease” its abominations.

Yet the report fulfills its most important function.

It helped the Oromo of Minnesota reveal their long-held secret.

With help from The Advocates, the Oromo have shown great bravery in speaking out. Will we return that courage by bravely listening?

After that, what will we do?

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/oromoreport

Anyway, could such an extreme scenario, of serial societal extinction no less, really be happening in the world today? An apocalypse of nations falling one by one?

If it is, surely it would be news of the highest order, worthy of shouting from the streets and rooftops, Paul Revere-style.

Because if it were true, it would warn the world of yet another mode of societal collapse — distinct yet closely interlinked with the more familiar human health, environmental, and economic modes — that is stalking the globe today.

It’s already happening in the Horn of Africa, was the message persuasively argued last Friday by four experts on the region. The seven countries of the Horn– Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda and Kenya — form the elbow (or horn) of the northern African continent that juts into the Indian Ocean.

At the Africa Peace Forum held last Friday at the Hubert Humphrey Institute in Minneapolis, the speakers argued that the Horn of Africa is crumbling due to a combination of brutal dictatorship, climate change and global inaction.

Complex Emergencies

The presentations began with an overview from the American Relief Association of the Horn of Africa (ARAHA). The group showed a documentary film citing a recent United Nations report that about 20 million souls – fully 10 percent of the Horn of Africa’s total population — need immediate urgency assistance simply to stay alive.

The same UN report describes the Horn of Africa as suffering from interlocking “complex emergencies” originally triggered by government corruption, but which have now been massively accelerated by drought, disease, religious war, and the global financial crisis that has driven food prices to the heavens and humanitarian aid funding into the ground.

Neither the grimness of the scenario nor its daunting complexity can overshadow the plain and simple fact: The Horn of Africa is dying.

Anuak Genocide

Each speaker described the apocalypse from a different nation’s perspective.

“Can Somalis survive their own political death?” asked Ahmed Samatar, a professor of international studies at Macalester College. “I’m not so sure. One never gives up on others who are still alive, but I’m not sure.” Nearly half of Somalis living today in the Horn of Africa are malnourished, Samatar said, adding that Somalia today “is now objectively speaking the worst country in the world.”

For Obang Metho, another conference speaker and a member of the Anuak tribe of western Ethiopia, the apocalypse of the Horn began on December 13, 2003.

On that one day, uniformed Ethiopian troops massacred 426 Anuak men and boys, dragging them from their homes and shooting them in the streets. That single day set in motion the likely eventual death of his tribe, Metho said, because the Ethiopian soldiers on that day targeted only the educated men to kill in a tribe of only 100,000 or so – decapitating the tribe by killing its educated male leadership.

An audience member from eastern Ethiopia stood up to urgently inform the conference of staggering crimes against humanity being carried out against the country’s five million Somali-speaking Ethiopians.

In the country’s eastern Ogaden region, the Ethiopian government is carrying out a “war on terror,” sometimes by wiping out entire villages in mass killings reminiscent of Rwanda and Darfur.

Alarm and Response

In eastern Sudan, a long-running refugee crisis virtually hidden from the world’s view is worsening daily with thousands of refugees fleeing from Eritrea into 35 camps in Sudan, according to Mohamed Idris, executive director of ARAHA.

“It makes you wonder whether life is worth living” to fully absorb all these crises, said Bereket Habte Selassie, the key speaker at the forum and the chief architect of the Eritrean Constitution. Selassie fled Eritrea and the constitution was never ratified because the country’s President, Isaias Afwerki, assumed dictatorial power by canceling national elections, shutting down the press and jailing his opponents.

Here in the U.S. we are quick to panic, but then are quick to mobilize, upon learning that even a single man or woman in China has contracted a new form of the flu.

Why don’t we respond then with equal alarm – and likewise mobilize to address to the obvious threat — at the news that entire nations are dying one after another?

Throughout history, the fall of nations in sequence was usually due to conquests that swept across continents, often as new borders and empires were created.

Low-Grade Fever

The lesson of the Horn of Africa today is that a new mass death of nations is possible. But this time it spreads not by imperial conquest but instead more like an epidemic or a plague, as one nation after another succumbs to the “complex emergency.”

What will be left behind is not a new empire but a charnel ground.

How long will it take for this virus to reach the United States? Or has it already reached us in the form of a low-grade fever that might one day fatally explode?

The lesson of the forum was simple.

We should care about the Horn of Africa, not just on behalf of those who are already suffering terribly there – but also for ourselves.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/dyinghorn

BY DOUGLAS MCGILL

ROCHESTER, MN — I’m going to break one of my own writing rules today.

In the six years that I’ve written about Ethiopian immigrants and politics in Minnesota, I’ve never editorialized directly against the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi.

Instead, I’ve limited myself to reporting on the experiences, outlooks and opinions of Ethiopian immigrants who live in Minnesota, a hub of the global Ethiopian diaspora.

Today I’m making an exception, though, because of what strikes me as the exceptional danger posed by  Meles’ most recent global political moves — a grave danger for Ethiopians and Africans, and possibly far beyond.

For once, I’ll offer my personal view.

I’m talking about Meles’ theft-in-plain-sight of the African leadership role at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins in Copenhagen next Monday. As the spokesman for the 52 African nations at the conference, Meles holds potentially enormous disruptive power over agreements reached among the 190 total nations represented in Copenhagen.

Meles has already threatened to lead a walk-out of the African delegation if their demand for hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation payments from developed nations aren’t met.

Arrest and Torture

It’s crazy for one of the world’s bloodiest dictators to hold such global power.

It’s a farce that Meles, whose environmental and human rights polices in Ethiopia are profoundly retrograde, has been given a global platform from which to scold other nations.

Meles runs his own country by a “divide and conquer” strategy and through the  systematic, brutal dispensation of arbitrary arrest and torture – hardly the best model for global collaborative decision-making on the world’s most pressing environmental crisis.

To be more specific, the Meles regime has held its grip on power the past 18 years through the use of genocide, ethnic cleansing, gulag prisons, a sham court system, medieval property laws and the jailing, torture and lawless execution of civilians and political opponents.

Why would Denmark even allow this man to step foot in their country?

Directly to the point of the hypocrisy of Meles’ role as Africa’s chief climate change negotiator, Ethiopia is now facing one of the worst famines in its history as a consequence of his own environmentally disastrous laws and policies.

Absolute Power

These include property laws that prevent farmers from owning their own land; that forbid foreign research and aid groups from entering the country; and a governing system that prevents orderly agriculture and environmentalism, because Meles stays in power by keeping his country mired in a permanent state of war.

The evidence for Meles’ crimes is far too extensive, public, and exhaustively well-documented to summarize in detail here.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Genocide Watch, the International Crisis Group, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, countless other aid groups and even the U.S. State Department have all for years now published report after detailed report on Meles’ crimes – reports stuffed with details of collective punishment, prison torture, slaughter of street protestors, on and on.

The picture painted is of a shrewd, pitiless tyrant who stays in power through total control of his country’s political, economic, legal, media and military systems.

The only mystery that remains is why the world appears simply not to notice, to respond, or even to care in the least about the Ethiopia’s abysmal suffering.

Rule of Terror

It’s Rwanda and Darfur all over again. And it has been that way, although getting progressively worse, since 1991, the year that Meles took power in a coup and immediately began ethnic cleansing as a central tactic of his governing style.

Meles’ 18-year rule of terror in Ethiopia has easily earned him a place alongside dictators such as Kim Jong-Il, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, Than Swhe, and Ali Khamenei.

Would any of these despots be welcomed in Copenhagen?

Would any be given the chance to potentially veto a global climate accord?

Of course, Meles won’t do that. What he will do, though, is maximize his leverage through every means possible to further secure what for 18 years he has ruthlessly sought and won in Ethiopia, which is absolute power.

He’d let the world burn to a crisp before he relinquished that.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

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

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

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