NOVEMBER 25/2000

UNDERGROUND SECRET PRISONS EXPOSED

 SOCEPP had been calling on international prison observatory bodies to check on the secret (so called "ghost) prisons that the EPRDF government maintains all over Ethiopia, including the capital Addis Abeba where private residential villas have been turned into secret and dark prisons. Furthermore, SOCEPP had highlighted the ruling party's (EPRDF/TPLF) practice of maintaining underground prisons (literally underground as he "cells" are dug deep down and the prisoners kept apart and incommunicado and in the dark) specially in rural areas with its own Tigrai area being the foremost. A high-level government security official who recently defected to Eritrea,Fiseha Haile Mariam, has confirmed the SOCEPP claim and revealed that the EPRDF maintains such hell holes in ADET (Axum area,Tigrai) and in AGBE (Tembien area, Tigrai). This is in addition to ZWAI where hundreds of political prisoners are kept and KALITI where many have died from the bad detention conditions and lack of medical treatment. 

The government maintains such prisons in the HUMERA region, in DUKEM (where an arms depot dug into a mountain by the former regime has been turned into a secret prison with prisoners kept in dark rooms in isolation), and other places. Many of the prisoners in such secret prisons re political prisoners on whose fate the government continues to refuse any comment. Members of opposition organizations like the OLF, EPRP and other opposition organizations as well as dissident members of the TPLF/EPRDF itself are the victims in these prisons. SOCEPP calls on the Red Cross and other prisons observatory bodies to demand to visit these prisons and to expose the violation of rights by the government in Addis Abeba.

SOCEPP