የኢትዮዽያውያን ዴሞክራቶች ድረ-ገፅEthiopian Democrats' Website

Terje S. Skjerdal  &  Hallelujah Lule

Introduction

Ethiopia has had press freedom for almost 20 years, since 19911. Freedom of the press was proclaimed by the transitional government as soon as it entered office in 1991

(proclamation no. 1/1991 and no. 6/1991), and was secured in a separate press law in 1992 (proclamation no. 34/1992). Principles of freedom of expression were further laid down in the national constitution of 1995. The opening up for private publications immediately led to a mushrooming of newspapers. Many were closed after a short period, but Ethiopia has since 1991 had at least 20 different private newspapers at any time. Today there are approximately 64 newspapers in circulation in Ethiopia (MoI, April 2008), most of which are private (58 titles).

What we set forth to do in this article is to examine the role of private (non-governmental) press in Ethiopia in the 1990s and 2000s. We want to find out whether the role of the private press has been as pivotal as press organizations and commentators often claim. The popular assumption is that the private media make up a „fourth estate‟ which is as central to democracy as the three other estates. This is for instance the basic assumption behind the Windhoek Declaration of 1991, where it is made clear in the first paragraph that “the establishment, maintenance and fostering of an independent, pluralistic and free press is essential to the development and maintenance of democracy in a nation” (UNESCO, 1991). We want to take a retrospective look at the development of democracy in Ethiopia since 1991 and query the extent to which the presence of the private media has had significant influence on the growth and maintenance of democracy in the country.

We realize that methodologically speaking, this is an almost impossible task to carry out. How can we possibly establish a researchable link between democracy and the role of the press? Which are the ideal parameters to use? Obviously the nature of democratic development in a nation is of such complexity that isolating one agent, the media, would make an incomplete and reductionist analysis at best. There is also a danger that when studying the media outlets themselves, one narrows down the research to available measurable units, such as the quantitative coverage of different political parties and of candidates during election times, but ignores potentially more important factors such as the change in the behaviour of the government because of inherent anxiety about retribution from the international community if it were to violate the freedom of the press.

Despite such constraints, we make an effort in this paper to analyse and discuss the role of the private media in establishing and developing Ethiopian democracy. In so doing, we make use of 15 informants as our main sources of information. These are persons who have held important positions in Ethiopian political establishment or in the media during the last two decades. They come from the media (8), the research community (3), the government (3) and the political opposition (1). In-depth interviews were conducted between April and July 2007. We found the informants whose assessments are included in this research to be surprisingly open to disclose information, and to even be self-critical. We think this is mainly because of the time lapse between many of the events that the research is concerned with and the conduct of the interviews. Seeing events in retrospect and from a certain distance seemed to have prompted the informants to be open and direct and less concerned, in some of the cases, with safe-guarding their own political allies.

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