In a previous post, I brought attention to Dr Fikru Maru, a heart specialist who fled Ethiopia’s brutal communist regime in the 1970s, and emigrated to Sweden, where he did his medical degree and trained as an interventional cardiologist:
An interventional cardiologist is a special and highly skilled type of heart doctor who performs life-saving and diagnostic procedures such as implanting pacemakers, checking arteries that feed the heart to see if they are blocked, and “opening up” such blocked arteries.
There are very few interventional cardiologists in Ethiopia, and Dr Fikru Maru went to Ethiopia after spending over 35 years in Sweden, and helped establish Ethiopia’s first specialist heart hospital. He is a pioneer who tried to bring high quality specialized medicine to his country of birth.
He should, rightly, be called The Father of Ethiopian Interventional Cardiology. He should be an Ethiopian hero, but for the past four years he has suffered as a prisoner of the Ethiopian government in one of Ethiopia’s unhygienic and crowded prisons.
Many people outside of Ethiopia are unaware of the sinister and oppressive nature of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which essentially makes most of the policies of the Ethiopian government, promoting self-interest, and controlling businesses, universities, the military, and oppressing the Ethiopian people.
Unfortunately, many peaceful and good people, including Dr Fikru, have been hindered from achieving great and wonderful things for the Ethiopian people, for various reasons: because they disagreed with the regime’s political ideology; because the regime targeted them due to their ethnicity; because the regime wanted to control their businesses; or because the government had other political motives to prevent them from achieving their well-intentioned goals.
It is said by many Ethiopians that the regime does not like heroes. And so, Dr Fikru Maru’s humanitarian intentions of bringing excellent heart procedures to his country of birth were prevented by having him imprisoned, with unethical and lengthy trials, and under ridiculous charges.
So, for the past four years and more, Dr Fikru Maru has been in an Ethiopian jail, prevented from doing what he is excellent at- saving lives as a doctor, prevented from helping Ethiopian citizens. But, even by the Ethiopian government’s admission, he has not committed a crime, despite those four years in prison. In May, 2017, he was cleared of all previous charges.
But now, instead of being released, he has, absurdly, been charged with a new crime: of inciting a riot and fire in the previous prison where he was incarcerated. Essentially, he is being charged with “terrorism.”
The legal system in Ethiopia is a disgrace, and contravenes the Ethiopian Constitution (Article 20, “Rights of a person accused”) and the UN Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 10 and 11), which require a fair and speedy trial. His new trial has already been delayed and prolonged. In May, only six of 85 witnesses were questioned, then a further hearing just recently, in August 2017, barely made any progress, and now Dr Fikru’s next court hearing has been delayed for another five months, until January, 2018. By then, Dr Fikru Maru will have been in prison for almost five years, without a conviction- all because he wanted to equip and run Ethiopia’s first heart hospital!
The following is a Swedish news source summarising his latest court hearing:
The translation is as follows:
“Continued delay for Fikru Maru.”
“Again, the trial against the Swedish-Ethiopian heart doctor, Fikru Maru, has been postponed, this time until January. The charges against him, claiming that he instituted a riot in the prison, seem to be unlikely. Maru’s Swedish lawyer says he should turn to the (Swedish Foreign Minister, and ask them to try to influence Ethiopia to speed up the process. Of course, Sweden will respect the legal systems of other countries, but somewhere, there is a limit to how Swedish citizens can be treated….”
A few months ago, I started a petition to bring awareness to Dr Fikru Maru’s terrible ordeal. The petition has received over 107,000 signatures from all over the world, supporting Dr Fikru. Please sign it if you can:
Despite the millions upon millions of dollars that Sweden has given, and continues to give, to help Ethiopia, in particular for health projects, the Ethiopian government shows no obvious intention to release Dr Fikru.
Dr Fikru is not the first Swedish citizen to be jailed in Ethiopia in recent years. In 2011, two Swedish journalists, Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson, were jailed for 11 years, but were released after over a year, for entering the Ogaden region of Ethiopia to investigate human rights abuse there.
They described the prison where they were incarcerated, and where government-endorsed torture was common, as being crowded, excessively hot, infested with rats, fleas, and having a high proportion of prisoners with HIV and tuberculosis.
Schibbye and Persson described how their trial was “a joke.” The country’s prime minister at the time, Meles Zenawi, announced on national TV that they were guilty, well before the trial ended. They were also forced, by government officials, to make a fictitious movie,” in which Ethiopian civilians (presumably paid by the regime) were “dressed up” as rebel soldiers, and the two journalists were ordered, at gunpoint, to be filmed alongside these fabricated “rebels” to document their guilt of conspiring with anti-government forces:
So we cannot expect evidence against Dr Fikru Maru to be authentic. In any case, he was in hospital with a serious illness at the time the prison riot took place, and human rights groups that have investigated the prison riot state that Ethiopian government guards at the prison shot and killed scores of prisoners during the riot. Many of these prisoners, by the way, were awaiting trial and had not yet been convicted.
So the good heart doctor, Dr Fikru Maru, in his late sixties, continues to suffer delay after delay in his new trial, and- like many other prominent individuals in Ethiopia, we have no idea when, or even if, he will be given his human rights and allowed to go free.
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