Ethiopia's Heroic Journalist-Dawit Kebede

Courtesy of Free African Media

The 21 months that Dawit Kebede spent in a jail cell with 350 other prisoners in Ethiopia is a stark reminder of that country’s assault on press freedoms. Kebede’s crime was that he wrote an editorial criticising his government following the post-election violence that swept Ethiopia in 2005. Many journalists were detained at that time and some chose exile after being freed, but not Kebede. When the editor-in-chief of Ethiopia’s only independent, political newspaper was released he waited two days and then petitioned the federal government headed by Meles Zenawi for a license to continue running his newspaper.