PT Data wrangler

Tag: corruption

  • Freedom of the press in Ethiopia

    Article 29 of the Ethiopian Constitution declares that every individual has the right to their opinions and freedom of expression without any interference. The article covers freedom to speak, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art or through any media of their choice.

    The article stipulates that any form of censorship is prohibited and full access to public information is guaranteed. It further states that in the interest of the free flow of information, ideas and opinions which are essential to the functioning of a democratic order, the press shall, as an institution, enjoy legal protection to ensure its operational independence and its capacity to entertain diverse opinions.

    The reality in Ethiopia is, however, entirely different from these statements. And the reason for this is directly related to the nature of the government.

    The ruling party in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), came to power through armed struggle. The all-inclusive name hides, in reality, an ethno-centrist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Other ethnic groups in the EPRDF are puppets, there in order to pretend that it has a broad ethnic base. They do not have any freedom to decide their own fate, let alone any national issues. The TPLF is the only visible and decisive power in Ethiopian politics today, even though Tigrians represent just 5% of the Ethiopian population and are only one of 80 ethnic groups. They have had a monopoly over the country’s resources for the last 24 years and are now controlling not only political power but also the economy, military and security establishments.

    The EPRDF has also long been a fanatic pursuant of communist ideology and even now, after the fall of the Eastern Bloc when Ethiopia hastily converted to being a champion of democracy, continues to mistrust free press and free expression.

    The current sustained crackdown of the free press started after the 2005 elections. The government had been confident to win, given the weak position of the opposition parties and their lack of organization. But despite these challenges Ethiopians exercised their democratic right for once in the country’s history and voted comprehensively for the opposition parties. It was a moment when the Ethiopian public denied the EPRDF government any legal basis.

    After the elections, however, the opposite story was told to the Ethiopian people and the world. Harsh measures were used to reverse the election results. Some 200 innocent people were shot dead in broad daylight in the streets of Addis Ababa during a protest against the false results. 10,000 opposition sympathizers were jailed and tortured. All opposition leaders and independent journalists were put behind bars and many independent newspapers were shut down.

    The aborted elections of 2005 set the pace for political struggle in Ethiopia. It became clear that the regime could not win through peaceful and fair elections. Thus the government restricted the free space for any political exchange. It introduced repressive laws such as: the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, the Freedom of the Mass Media and Access to Information Proclamation, and Charities and Civil Society Law that silenced any opposing voices.

    These laws allow the prosecution of journalists writing articles critical of the government or reporting on corruption, maladministration, human rights violations etc… They have become powerful tools of intimidation and harassment. As a result, several dozens of independent journalists have fled Ethiopia and many others are in jail.

    The regime has continued to accuse the independent press of conspiracy and alliance with the opposition forces, described as terrorists, though they are not labeled as such by any international body. Arbitrary detentions, torture, disappearances and killings of those who don’t conform to the new laws are common.

    Additionally, it is impossible to provide decent information to the public on anything connected to defence, security and international relations; cabinet documents and financial information are out of bounds for reporters. Neither domestic nor foreign journalists are allowed to go to areas where serious human rights abuses are allegedly occurring.

    The Ethiopian government doesn’t seem satisfied with harassing and suppressing journalists. It is also obsessed with blocking and censoring the websites of political parties, bloggers and individual activists and it invests a lot of money in jamming radio and television stations.

    These restrictions extend to the operations of any potential opposition party. The government claims there are 60 or so registered political parties in the country. The truth is that there is no more than one independent party, known as the Blue Party, ‘Medrek’, which is very weak because of the constant harassment and harsh government measures. The rest are pseudo-parties claiming to be independent but which are actually created and manipulated by the government and appear on government-run media. Genuine opposition parties are not allowed to call rallies, disseminate their ideas or interact with their supporters at any time including during the campaign period.

    The Ethiopian public expects that the ruling front (EPRDF/TPLF) will stay in power indefinitely, and that it is unlikely that any geo-political conflict or internal turmoil will bring it down. In the last elections the regime allowed only one person from the opposition and another independent competitor to hold seats in the 547-member EPRDF/TPLF parliament. What is not yet known to the Ethiopian people is the number of seats to be awarded to the opposition in the future government. It may be none, one, two, three or five. This May the government will shamelessly tell the Ethiopian public once again that it has won a ‘landslide victory’. Let us see whether the government improves on the remarkable 99.6% of the votes that it claimed in 2010.

  • The optimist's words

    Transformations require a big effort, even when the leaders of a country understand what’s at stake in a crisis and what needs to be done. But when the leaders of a country are entrenched and protective of their privileges, then transformation is not something that can be entrusted to them. That is exactly the situation in Mexico right now, where our economic and political elites don’t seem to understand what they have to do, or even what they have to say, in order to solve the two most urgent problems in the country: all-pervading impunity and rampant corruption.

    When President Enrique Peña Nieto visited the state of Guerrero for the first time after the kidnapping of forty-three students on 26th September 2014 by organized crime and the local police, he asked the public to make an effort to get over the ‘moment of pain’ and to rebuild the state with a ‘propositive and constructive attitude’.

    That was on December the 4th, less than two and a half months after the events. None of the students had been found by then. A few weeks before, the Attorney General had presented a hypothesis of what had happened: following orders by the mayor of Iguala, he said, the local police had kidnapped the students and delivered them to a group of narcos, who then murdered them, incinerated them and threw their remains into a river. But he had presented no hard evidence to support his theory. Still, the President decided it was time to get over the episode, a mere ‘moment of pain’.

    Moreover, the next time he referred to the case, on January 27th, still with no mention of where the students could be, he said that we must not ‘get trapped’ in the case, and asked the nation to move forward with optimism. Solving a case so horrendous and so symptomatic of the entanglement of politics and criminal business was apparently not urgent any more; it was a sort of ‘trap’.

    Following this logic, a few weeks ago a prominent businessman, Lorenzo Servitje, co-founder of one of the biggest junk food companies in Mexico, expressed his concerns about the social unrest, stating that some (unnamed) groups were taking advantage of a situation that had been blown out of proportion (‘se le ha dado una dimension que no tiene’). In this, he aligned himself with the leadership of the business council who, after initially demanding a thorough investigation, eventually pressured the government to put a stop to the growing protests around the country, to make them respect the law.

    But none of these people said a thing when it was revealed that many of their colleagues had been part of a laundering scheme by HSBC that included politicians, criminals and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Neither did they ask for ‘mano dura’ when the same bank was fined in 2012 for laundering billions of dollars for terrorists and drug cartels. So much for going after the ‘vandals’.

    All this has been happening in the context of another story that puts into question how our elites understand the rule of law. In the last few months there have been revelations that the President and several other high-ranking government officials have acquired properties with the help of huge government contractors. After weeks of simply assuring everyone there was no wrongdoing, the President appointed a Minister of Public Service whose first task was to look into the cases and determine if there had been any conflict of interest. The problem is that the person he appointed is not an independent investigator but a bureaucrat on Peña Nieto’s payroll, who also happens to be a close friend. Upon finishing the press conference in which he announced this, the President looked a bit embarrassed by the silence that hung in the room. Pointing at the press corps, he said to one of his aides, ‘I know they don’t applaud.’

    It’s easy to mock a politician for a lack of cheering, or his mispronunciation of the place where the kidnapped students come from (he repeatedly referred to ‘Ayotzinapan’ instead of ‘Ayotzinapa’, as if he didn’t know what he was talking about). Scorn towards the powerful is healthy, but sometimes it doesn’t allow us to see what’s behind their ‘slips’ and ‘fumbles’. People used to make jokes about how the former President Calderón said that he never pronounced the word ‘war’ to define his irresponsible strategy towards organized crime, even though he did precisely that on at least eight occasions. But when a man in charge of an army declares war and then forgets about it, it’s more than a funny story about his forgetfulness.

    The words of a president are more than his personal quirks; they are the explanation of his policies, no matter how clumsy those words may be. So, when our current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, says that a tragedy as horrendous as the one that took place in Ayotzinapa is just a ‘moment of pain’, and when he expects to be applauded for pretending that he is doing something against corruption, it is not surprising that he and his billionaire allies see the protesters —and not the people who have been financing mass murderers for years now— as the biggest danger to our stability. Mexicans cannot feel frustrated with their ‘leaders’, because they have been very clear about their priorities. But we have to be clear that, when they talk about reforms, they are just talking about minor adjustments to business as usual.

    Signs Preceding the End of the World is available to buy from Foyles book shop.

    Read English PEN’s open letter to President Nieto on the occasion of his visit to the UK.

  • The optimist’s words

    Transformations require a big effort, even when the leaders of a country understand what’s at stake in a crisis and what needs to be done. But when the leaders of a country are entrenched and protective of their privileges, then transformation is not something that can be entrusted to them. That is exactly the situation in Mexico right now, where our economic and political elites don’t seem to understand what they have to do, or even what they have to say, in order to solve the two most urgent problems in the country: all-pervading impunity and rampant corruption.

    When President Enrique Peña Nieto visited the state of Guerrero for the first time after the kidnapping of forty-three students on 26th September 2014 by organized crime and the local police, he asked the public to make an effort to get over the ‘moment of pain’ and to rebuild the state with a ‘propositive and constructive attitude’.

    That was on December the 4th, less than two and a half months after the events. None of the students had been found by then. A few weeks before, the Attorney General had presented a hypothesis of what had happened: following orders by the mayor of Iguala, he said, the local police had kidnapped the students and delivered them to a group of narcos, who then murdered them, incinerated them and threw their remains into a river. But he had presented no hard evidence to support his theory. Still, the President decided it was time to get over the episode, a mere ‘moment of pain’.

    Moreover, the next time he referred to the case, on January 27th, still with no mention of where the students could be, he said that we must not ‘get trapped’ in the case, and asked the nation to move forward with optimism. Solving a case so horrendous and so symptomatic of the entanglement of politics and criminal business was apparently not urgent any more; it was a sort of ‘trap’.

    Following this logic, a few weeks ago a prominent businessman, Lorenzo Servitje, co-founder of one of the biggest junk food companies in Mexico, expressed his concerns about the social unrest, stating that some (unnamed) groups were taking advantage of a situation that had been blown out of proportion (‘se le ha dado una dimension que no tiene’). In this, he aligned himself with the leadership of the business council who, after initially demanding a thorough investigation, eventually pressured the government to put a stop to the growing protests around the country, to make them respect the law.

    But none of these people said a thing when it was revealed that many of their colleagues had been part of a laundering scheme by HSBC that included politicians, criminals and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Neither did they ask for ‘mano dura’ when the same bank was fined in 2012 for laundering billions of dollars for terrorists and drug cartels. So much for going after the ‘vandals’.

    All this has been happening in the context of another story that puts into question how our elites understand the rule of law. In the last few months there have been revelations that the President and several other high-ranking government officials have acquired properties with the help of huge government contractors. After weeks of simply assuring everyone there was no wrongdoing, the President appointed a Minister of Public Service whose first task was to look into the cases and determine if there had been any conflict of interest. The problem is that the person he appointed is not an independent investigator but a bureaucrat on Peña Nieto’s payroll, who also happens to be a close friend. Upon finishing the press conference in which he announced this, the President looked a bit embarrassed by the silence that hung in the room. Pointing at the press corps, he said to one of his aides, ‘I know they don’t applaud.’

    It’s easy to mock a politician for a lack of cheering, or his mispronunciation of the place where the kidnapped students come from (he repeatedly referred to ‘Ayotzinapan’ instead of ‘Ayotzinapa’, as if he didn’t know what he was talking about). Scorn towards the powerful is healthy, but sometimes it doesn’t allow us to see what’s behind their ‘slips’ and ‘fumbles’. People used to make jokes about how the former President Calderón said that he never pronounced the word ‘war’ to define his irresponsible strategy towards organized crime, even though he did precisely that on at least eight occasions. But when a man in charge of an army declares war and then forgets about it, it’s more than a funny story about his forgetfulness.

    The words of a president are more than his personal quirks; they are the explanation of his policies, no matter how clumsy those words may be. So, when our current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, says that a tragedy as horrendous as the one that took place in Ayotzinapa is just a ‘moment of pain’, and when he expects to be applauded for pretending that he is doing something against corruption, it is not surprising that he and his billionaire allies see the protesters —and not the people who have been financing mass murderers for years now— as the biggest danger to our stability. Mexicans cannot feel frustrated with their ‘leaders’, because they have been very clear about their priorities. But we have to be clear that, when they talk about reforms, they are just talking about minor adjustments to business as usual.

    Signs Preceding the End of the World is available to buy from Foyles book shop.

    Read English PEN’s open letter to President Nieto on the occasion of his visit to the UK.

  • Instructions for writing a corrupt novel

    Nepotism, sinecures, blackmailing paedophiles, bribing officials… Juan Pablo Villalobos writes for PEN Atlas this week, explaining how a writer can expose and enable the general corruption of his countryThe writer is preparing to write a corrupt novel, a novel that reflects the state of general corruption in his country, which – let’s say – is called Mexico. It’s not a question of writing a novel about corruption, no, that wouldn’t be at all original or provocative. What he’s trying to do is to write a novel in a corrupt way, trying to imitate the corruption that prevails in his country. And so before picking up his pen, or switching on his computer, before even coming up with an idea that might become a novel, what he needs is peace and quiet to write the novel, he needs a salary so as not to have to worry about a matter as banal as money as he writes his masterpiece, the corrupt novel. But the writer can’t have a job, no, if he has to follow a schedule from nine in the morning to five in the evening, when is he going to write the corrupt novel? And this is where the corrupt novel starts: at the moment the writer asks his uncle (it could be his father, a cousin, a buddy, even a childhood friend), who turns out to be the deputy minister in some government department (he could be a secretary, a civil servant, a chief of staff, whatever) to put him on the payroll, without him being employed, that is, to employ him as what is known in Mexico as an ‘aviator,’ or a phantom employee. Great: now the writer has a salary without having to work and can devote himself to what really matters, to writing the corrupt novel. But there’s a problem, now that he thinks about it: his computer is old, and it’s not a Mac! Plus he doesn’t have a printer. And so he calls up his uncle (or cousin, or buddy, or whoever it is) and his uncle takes a Mac and an HP printer out of the federal budget. Perfect, now it really is time to start writing, to think about the novel’s structure, for in order to be a corrupt novel it must be governed by the principle of maximum economic efficiency. That is to say: how can I get more money out of my corrupt novel? This has nothing to do with thinking about sales of the novel, oh no. We can think about that later. Right now it has to do with thinking about getting money from the contents of the novel – what is the theme of the corrupt novel? Two options make themselves quite clear to our writer: extortion or publicity. Find a theme that could make things awkward for a person or a company and demand money for him not to write the novel. Or offer to write the novel praising a personality or a company, so that it functions as a veiled form of publicity, as propaganda. And why not both these things? Why not extortion first, and then veiled publicity? Brilliant. The writer finally gets down to work. He extorts money from a paedophile. Then he sells the project of writing a novel to the government of one of the central states in the country (it could be the north or the south, too). It will be a great corrupt novel about the magnificent achievements of the state governor. An epic the likes of which has not been written since the novels of the revolution. But the writer of the corrupt novel cannot write and, in any case, is far too busy spending: a) the money from his aviator’s salary, b) the extortion money, and c) the advance paid him by the state government. And so, for a ridiculous wage, he hires an intern, a young, very enthusiastic kid who’s attended eight hundred literary workshops. It’s an ingenious strategy: the corrupt novel can only be written by a literary ghost writer. While the literary ghost writer drafts the novel, the writer must concern himself with the things that really matter when dealing with a corrupt novel: the publication and mass-marketing of the book. Who is going to publish the corrupt novel? Easy. Here his deputy minister uncle (brother or father) again comes into play, as well as the governor who is the protagonist of the corrupt novel, who both bribe the owner of a publishing house to publish it. Sorted. And it’s not even a cash bribe, no – it’s a promise that the government, by way of the system of state schools, the network of libraries and the various programmes encouraging reading, will buy thousands of copies of the corrupt novel. The circle is complete when thousands of shelves in bookshops throughout the country are filled with copies of the corrupt novel. It’s now that the corrupt writer will reveal the true story of the corrupt novel, its genesis and development, will explain to everyone that the corrupt novel was actually a performance to expose the generalized state of corruption in the country. But as he is about to do so, just as he is about to upload to his blog (and to Twitter and Facebook) a text with the explanation, he receives the offer of a tremendous bribe if he decides to keep his mouth shut (if he doesn’t accept, he will have to live with the consequences). And the writer, who over the course of writing the novel has been converted to corruption, the writer who is now a corrupt writer, takes the bribe and keeps quiet.Additional InformationRead the original piece in Spanish.About the authorJuan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel Quesadillas was published in English in 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.RosalindHarvey_Pro-picAbout the translatorRosalind Harvey lives in Bristol where she translates Hispanic fiction. In 2011 she was one of the first translators in residence at the Free Word Centre in London. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and her co-translation of Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She is a committee member of the Translators Association, a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, and also runs regular translation-related events in and around London. Her most recent translation is Villalobos’ Quesdillas, with And Other Stories. 

  • Roots of Corruption: the perils of free expression in Azerbaijan

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece Azerbaijani writer and dissident Emin Milli discusses the power – and corruption – of words and reflects on journalist Khadija Ismayilova’s recent experience of blackmail by the authorities

    In Azerbaijan, you often hear from all sorts of different people that words do not matter. Expressions like “bosh-bosh sozler” (empty-empty words) or “bosh-bosh danishir” (empty talking) are common. Our society is extremely sceptical about the power of words. This, in my opinion, has been the major victory and achievement of the autocracy in our country since 1993. But how is it possible to make the whole nation believe that words do not really matter, that they are empty and meaningless? How is it possible? Well, it is possible when people who present themselves or are presented to a society as masters of words, written or spoken, shapers of forms and meanings of the words, start to use the words as barriers behind which they hide their cowardice, venality and hypocrisy.To corrupt the whole of society the regime decided to corrupt words first, to deprive them of their true meaning. Corrupt authoritarianism needs words to lose their meaning. But the victory of corruption here is only temporary. It is temporary because we always have rebels who believe that words are not dead and who bring the words back to life by standing behind them and often suffering the consequences. These people are on the frontline of the struggle for the purity of words, they fight for words free from corruption and thus fight for a society free from corruption.These people have courage not to run away when the corrupt state wants them to pay a high price for reinstating words with their true meaning. One of those courageous people is Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova. She started to investigate and write about businesses owned by the family of the president in Azerbaijan and around the world. Of course, she had to be punished for writing the truth and exposing the regime. It was decided that her private life would be exposed in order to tarnish her reputation and to provoke “natural” attacks on her. The regime planted a hidden camera in her bedroom. Her relatives received the incriminating photos of her with her boyfriend. When she refused to be silenced, a video of her and her boyfriend was put online. The official newspaper of the ruling party started to accuse her of lax morals hinting at the video with its intimate content available online.Azerbaijan is a country where the majority of the population considers itself to be Muslim. It is fairly secular after 70 years of communist rule, but socially, it is still very conservative and increasingly more religious. To show a woman in this way is to invite her relatives to defend the honour of the family, to possibly kill her and to invite society to condemn her for her liberal lifestyle. Khadija is also an outspoken atheist who provokes religious circles and there was genuine fear that the masses might want to lynch her in the streets. That might have been “the grand plan” of the regime. But the opposite happened, something miraculous, deeply touching and human. The most conservative religious circles issued a statement in her support praising her courage in exposing the lies and corruption of the ruling elite. Everyone was appalled and even those who usually remain silent and live in fear, spoke up against such an immoral attack against a powerless woman. The government suddenly formally condemned “this crime” despite the prosecutor’s office ignoring Khadija’s officially lodged complaint for several days. The video was not shown on any television in Azerbaijan during prime time, something that had happened before with other journalists and unfortunately had silenced them.Questions keep going through my mind when I think about Khadija’s case. Why did the corrupt state with their billions of dollars and the absolute monopoly on violence fail to silence one woman and basically step back, why were religious and conservative circles on her side and not against her, why was a socially conservative society overwhelmingly on her side? Perhaps because everyone in our society started to feel in this particular case the power of true words and saw the courage of this woman who stands behind her words no matter what the consequences? She tried to fight the root of corruption in our society – the corruption of words. Only free words can liberate millions of hearts and minds from fear and corruption.Khadija today is the center of the Free Word in Azerbaijan. It is one of those cases when one person turns into an institution and becomes the symbol of struggle for freedom of expression. She made many people believe again that words are not empty, but can become powerful tools in the transformation of human conscience and social reality. There is still a long way to go for our society to declare independence from corruption, but her act of courage undoubtedly leads us in that direction.About the AuthorEmin Milli is a writer and dissident living in Azerbaijan. In 2009, he was imprisoned for two and a half years for his critical views about the government of Azerbaijan. Amnesty International considered that Emin Milli was a  prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression and association and campaigned for his release. He was conditionally released in November 2010, after serving 16 months of his sentence.

    Additional Information

    Khadija Ismayilova is an award-winning professional journalist based in Baku. Between 2008 and 2010 she served as Bureau Chief of RFE/RL which she left to host full-time apopular phone-in radio programme, ‘After Work’, on the Azerbaijani RFE service, Azadliq Radio. She has held editor positions with several Azerbaijani newspapers since 1997 and as a reporter for EurasiaNet and Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.”Taken from News Xchange You can read more about Khadija’s case here in Index on Censorship and here, in the Independent.