A petition is currently being circulated on behalf of Human Rights defenders Daniel Bekele and Netsanet Demissie. Daniel and Netsanet's verdict is set for next Thursday, 22th of November. Given previous patterns of delay and confusion by the court, it is not clear whether it would deliver its verdict at the scheduled date or if its verdict would lead to the acquittal and release of the prisoners of conscience, which is the only just outcome in this case.

 

Please take few minutes to sign the following petition to  be sent the Governments of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, the European Union, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, The African Commission on Human and People's Rights, International Human Rights and Civic Organisations.

On March 21, 1960, apartheid security forces in the township of Sharpeville, South Africa fired 705 bullets in two minutes to disperse a crowd of protesting Africans. When the shooting spree stopped, 69 black Africans lay dead, shot in the back; and 186 were severely wounded. The Sharpeville Massacre drew international attention to the plight of Africans in South Africa; and annually, it is commemorated as a watershed event, a turning point in the modern history of South Africa.

In November, 1938, the Nazis burned thousands of Jewish synagogues and businesses throughout Germany, killing nearly 100 and arresting and deporting over 30,000 to concentration camps. That was Krystallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). It was the forerunner to the Jewish Holocaust. Every November, Jews commemorate Krytallnacht.

In June and November, 2005, 193 unarmed men, women and children were massacred by paramilitary police units in Ethiopia as they engaged in ordinary civil protest.[1] Many thousands before them had suffered the same fate. The massacre of these unarmed protesters seared the consciences of Ethiopians, and laid bare to a candid but silent world the utter moral depravity of the ruling regime.

But two years later, the silence of the lambs from their mass graves echoes faintly among us, the living. But our own silence in the Diaspora is deafening. And we have turned mute and deaf. Why aren’t we commemorating the sacrifices of these martyrs? In our churches and mosques? In our homes among our families? At our social gatherings with our friends?
Shouldn’t we remember the martyrs of June and November, 2005?