Power Politics Trumps Democracy in U.S.-backed Ethiopia (The indypendent )

“I was in an isolation cell at that time. They came for me in the middle of the night,” Nega recalls, calmly explaining how one night he was blindfolded and dragged by his armpits into another room he can only refer to as the “torture chamber.”

“They flip you over onto your back with your feet in the air, and then hit you on the bottom of your feet, and everywhere with an electrical cord. I couldn’t move for weeks afterward.”

Nega’s story echoes accounts of intimidation, arrests and beatings recounted by journalists in many parts of the world. Alarmingly, these accounts of iron-fisted censorship emerge not only from the notoriously repressive regimes that often make the news such as North Korea, Burma or Iran. Just as often they come from the political darlings of the United States’ foreign policy; places like Pakistan, Egypt and more recently Ethiopia....more..