The Washington Post
August 17, 2001

A high-ranking Ethiopian official said yesterday she would seek political asylum in the United States to escape "government persecution" of her Oromo people, the country's largest ethnic group.

Almaz Meko, 39, speaker of the Council of the Federation, Ethiopia's upper house of Parliament, arrived Saturday in Washington with her 8-year-old daughter. She said she has hired a lawyer and informed the State Department of her intention to apply for asylum in the next two weeks.

But the motivation and importance of her defection already are a subject of debate among Ethiopians and U.S. experts on Africa.

Almaz said she feared she would be targeted by her government for speaking out about the treatment of Oromos, who make up about 40 percent of Ethiopia's 65 million people.

"I have been very vocal that situations need to be changed," she said. "If I go back now, it's very clear they will persecute me."

The Ethiopian government has played down the significance of her defection, suggesting that it was driven more by internal politics than by ethnic persecution.

In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Almaz Mekonnen, the parliament's spokeswoman, said that "in over 10 years, [Almaz Meko] was never seen as an Oromo activist and didn't ever mention ethnic politics. It is surprising now she has jumped on the Oromo rights bandwagon."

Spokesmen for the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service said their policy is not to comment on individual asylum requests.

However, a State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that Almaz was a member of Ethiopia's ruling elite.

"Her name has been mentioned as the next president of Ethiopia. She didn't face political persecution," the official said. "This may just be a tactical move on her part to remain relevant while the political tide is turning."

Almaz arrived in New York last week on her way home to Addis Ababa from a conference of female parliamentarians in Jamaica. Her husband and two sons, ages 16 and 17, remain in Ethiopia.

"I'm very much concerned because they could be attacked at any time because of my decision," she said.

Almaz, who was elected speaker in 1995, said she renounced that position Sunday and would automatically be dropped from the Central Committee of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, the country's ruling coalition.

She said she had quit the Oromo People's Democratic Front, a small party aligned with the government, and last Saturday joined the Oromo Liberation Front, an opposition group created in 1973 to "lead the national liberation struggle of the Oromo people." The group is engaged in a long-running armed conflict with the government and is outlawed in Ethiopia.

Almaz said she decided to break away because she believed Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and his Tigray People's Liberation Front, a powerful member of the ruling coalition, were responsible for the detention, torture and disappearance of thousands of Oromos.

In its 2001 human rights report, Amnesty International said detentions by the Ethiopian government have been "particularly frequent in the Oromo and Somali regions, where some thousands of detainees arrested over the previous eight years continued to be" held without charges or trials.

"I have a strong fear that if the current government is not able to invite the opposition forces and conduct discussions with them and reach some kind of consensus, there's going to be tragedy," Almaz said. "The country is very much divided between different political forces. I have great concern that it will turn bloody."

Chester A. Crocker, professor of strategic studies at Georgetown University and a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Ronald Reagan, said Almaz's asylum application raises difficult questions.

"We have proud traditions of offering amnesty when there's a well-founded fear [of persecution], but I'd sure like to know about the well-founded fear before we say yes," Crocker said. "If I were in the State Department, it would be a tough choice for me."

Recently, he noted, Ethiopia's prime minister has experienced the assassination of one of his closest aides, criticism about the way he conducted a border war with Eritrea and growing doubt about whether he can remain in power.

"Many of the people who used to run Ethiopia are very unhappy that Meles Zenawi is in charge," Crocker said. "There are a lot of Ethiopians disaffected from this government, and she is one more disaffected voice."

Almaz, who holds a master's degree in international law, said the government recently increased her security detail from one bodyguard to five, ostensibly to protect her but in fact, she believes, to keep tabs on her.

"I cannot move around freely," she said. "I cannot meet with the people. . . . I don't have privacy."

Lencho Bati, a spokesman in Washington for the Oromo Liberation Front, predicted that Almaz's defection would be "a major blow" to the Ethiopian government. "She's a very popular woman. This will contribute to damaging the image of the prime minister," he said.

But a spokesman for the Ethiopian Embassy, Taye Atske Selassie, said her departure would make little difference.

"Her party has hundreds of thousands of members who can take over her post," he said. "The most stunning thing is not her decision to defect, but her decision to defect from a democratic organization to join a terrorist organization."