Will This British Citizen on Death Row in Ethiopia Ever Walk Free?

Six months after her partner Andargachew Tsege was abducted at an airport in Yemen in June 2014, Yemi Hailemariam says she remembers her phone ringing.

It was around 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning in December 2014, six month she had last heard from her partner. “He’s on the phone and I’m like, ‘Where are you?’ He says, ‘I’m still there,’” Hailemariam, 48, tells Newsweek . “You can imagine how stressful it was.”

The “there” that Tsege was referring to was a secret location in Ethiopia, the country where he was born, where security forces had taken him after Yemeni officials detained him at the international airport in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on June 23, 2014. A British citizen and an active voice in Ethiopia’s political opposition in exile, Tsege, now 62, remains in a notorious Ethiopian prison, facing a death sentence. An Ethiopian court tried and convicted Tsege, along with several other political accomplices, of plotting a coup against the country’s government in 2009, and sentenced him to death.

That Sunday morning, Hailemariam was given no explanation as to why Tsege was finally allowed to call her after so many months. After passing the phone to her three children, who had tearful conversations with Tsege, Hailemariam—aware that her partner was probably under observation as he spoke—cautiously told him that the family had not given up on getting him back. “I said, ‘We are working so very hard to get you home.’” But her longtime partner simply replied by telling her not to let their children get their hopes up, in case the worst happened.

But after almost three years away, Hailemariam is hopeful that her partner may return home soon. Earlier in February, three top British legal officials penned a letter to British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, urging him to push for Tsege’s release from detention, which they say is “in violation of international law.” This development, along with what Hailemariam believes is the Ethiopian government’s fatigue at holding him—the country is dealing with other problems, including a wave of anti-government protests since November 2015, while Tsege’s ongoing detention is likely straining ties with the U.K., a major donor to Ethiopia—has renewed the family’s hope of getting Tsege back. “[But] I don’t know if I’m being too much of an optimist,” she says.

Andargachew Tsege, center, is pictured with his partner Yemi Hailemariam, left, and family. Tsege has been on death row in Ethiopia since 2014. Yemi Hailemariam 

 

Born in Addis Ababa in 1955, Tsege left Ethiopia in the late 1970s: The country’s military government, known as the Derg, had initiated a mass crackdown on political opposition, killing hundreds of thousands of opponents—including Tsege’s younger brother—in a brutal repression known as the Red Terror. He sought asylum in the U.K., but returned briefly to Ethiopia following the 1991 revolution, in which the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the Derg. Tsege hoped the new government would establish a democratic state in Ethiopia, but he was quickly disillusioned at the ethnocentric policies of the EPRDF, an ostensibly multi-ethnic coalition but which was dominated by, and consequently favored, the Tigrayan ethnic minority. He returned to London within two years, where he became an outspoken critic of the Ethiopian government: Tsege spoke before the U.S. Congress in 2006 and the European Union’s Committee in the same year on Human Rights on Ethiopia’s poor human rights record, according to Reprieve, a U.K. charity campaigning for his release. In the early 2000s, Tsege also met Hailemariam, who had grown up in Ethiopia and the United States; the couple have been together for around 15 years and have 10-year-old twins, Yilak and Menabe. Hailemariam also says that Tsege has been like a father to her elder daughter, Helawit, 17. Read more here