Abiye Teklemariam

Abiye Teklemariam Megenta, also known as Abiye Teklemariam, is an Ethiopian print and radio journalist who co-founded the defunct Addis Neger, which was the largest private newspaper in Ethiopia before its closure in December 2009. Three top editors of the newspaper quietly slipped out of the country, accusing the Ethiopian government of relentless intimidation, harassment and persecution. Abiye, who was the newspaper's executive editor, had left the country two months earlier for the United Kingdom. On a BBC interview, he staunchly defended the decision of his colleagues to leave the country, claiming that the government's plan to bring charges against the newspaper's top editors made their tasks impossible to carry out. Presently, he is a vocal democracy activist and a student in Oxford, England.

Career

A lawyer and political theorist by training, Abiye started his media career writing on legal issues of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (1998–2000) on Ethiopian Reporter, a private weekly newspaper. He later wrote a mea culpa questioning his early “unskeptical” support of the war, in which he lamented that the war's popular support arose from jingoistic conceptions of patriotism. He criticized the forced expulsion of Eritreans from Ethiopia as a travesty of human values. His view was attacked for being insufficiently sensitive of political reality. He suggested that the two countries should adopt the European Union's economic and political model to avoid subsequent wars.