Conspiracies Abound!
So, the recent furor on Ethiopian cyberspace (or lack thereof) is the apparent blockage of all blogspot sites (including mine.) No one can access these from Addis. Thus, I’m posting blind because I managed to get onto my editing page, at least. Hopefully this will get up there for Stateside viewers.There is a good article on the US military presence in the Horn of Africa written for the Sub-Saharan Informer and posted here: http://noyau.com/~rwalsh/wordpress/?p=75. Most interesting are the comments posted below the article in a debate about the nature, intent, and impact of the US’ military and political presence in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.
Incidentally, also among the comments is a complaint by “Bearded Rabbit”:
“I haven’t confirmed this, but word has it that the Ethio Telecom has blocked access to ALL Blogger content. All the best Ethio blogs - Weichegud, YekoloTemari, Ethiopundit, OneEthiopia… etc. are down. And I can’t post to meskelsquare.com.” He continues in, ah, stronger language.
Www.meskelsquare.com discusses the issue with more tact. It’s certainly suspicious, but I remember there was a time I couldn’t access Google because they were constructing the Google-Ethiopia site and it wouldn’t load on my computer for about two weeks.
I have learned here that cultivating a culture of fear and suspicion is far easier than one might think. Coming from the States, it’s difficult to imagine how an entire nation could be muffled by a particular regime. But after a little bit of time spent in an environment characterized by no remotely reliable sources of news, secrecy, paranoia, whispered horror stories, and nebulous, opaque operations, it’s depressing to realize just how quickly one might succumb to silence in order to survive. It also makes it all more the admirable--if scary--when people do manage to speak out and make themselves be heard.
posted by Margot @ 2:40 AM
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