 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Harvard Alumnus and OLF Foreign Affairs Representative Protests Meles Zenawi's Visit to Harvard Date: September 1, 2000 Dear Prof. Sachs, I am writing in regard to a visit by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia to speak at Harvard University on September 5, 2000. I am an Oromo and alumnus of Harvard Law School (1973). Currently, I am the representative of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in the United States. I, as a victim of torture and imprisonment from 1980 to 1989, suffered the type of brutalization successive Ethiopian regimes inflict the Oromo people. The invitation of Mr. Zenawi to speak at Harvard reminds me -- with regret and shame as an alumnus -- that Professor Samuel P. Huntington, a prominent Harvard professor, visited Ethiopia just for five days (March 28 to April 1, 1993) and recklessly prescribed for Mr. Zenawi's party a paradigm of domination over the Ethiopian political life. Since then, the Ethiopian regime under the domination of Mr. Zenawi's Party, the Tigrean People's Liberation Front (TPLF), has decimated hundreds of thousands of the Ethiopian population to achieve its view of unity of Ethiopia, economic development, and political order -- all to have, as wrongly suggested by the professor, primacy over respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms enshrined in International Bills of Rights. Pervasive violation of human rights by the PM Zenawi's regime is sufficiently documented by independent human rights advocates such as Amnesty International. There is strong evidence that violations of human rights in the case of the Oromo people are systematic and of a genocidal proportion. For instance, Mr. Henoc Yonatan Isaac was killed by government security and kept -- rotten in an open field for several days -- for demonstration. His father, Yonatan Isaac, brother of Professor Ephrem Isaac (my colleague from Harvard days and currently teaching at Princeton University), was arrested and kept in detention for years without due process of law, apparently for complaining about the extrajudicial killing and denial of decent burial of his son. Yonatan himself died while in detention. The sponsoring of PM Zenawi to speak at Harvard ignores the appalling records of human right violations that speak loud and clear to deny him and his regime international recognition. I understand that Harvard knows its responsibility under International Bill of Rights to "strive for protection and observance" of human rights. To maintain the client relationship with Prime Minister Zenawi's regime clearly is not consistent with that responsibility. On the contrary, Mr. Zenawi's visit serves to improve international legitimacy for his regime at the expense of victims of human right violations. It is demeaning for the image of Harvard. The effort to strengthen the client relationship may even help the TPLF to prolong its tyrannical rule at the expense of the Oromo and other oppressed peoples. The university community and others who attend Mr. Zenawi's speech will not have a balanced view of the situation in Ethiopia. I, therefore, strongly protest Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's visit to speak at Harvard University. Sincerely, Abiyu Geleta, LLM (HLS) cc: Dr.
Neil L. Rudenstine Prof.
Robert C. Clark
|
|
|
