Fessehaye Yohannes

Fessehaye Yohannes was an Eritrean journalist who founded the weekly journal Setit and was a recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2002 International Press Freedom Award. Yohannes was imprisoned without charges in September 2001, and died in government custody.

Yohannes became a journalist in the early 1990s, after Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia. Previously, he had been a member of the guerrilla movement fighting for Eritrean independence. He founded the weekly journal Setit, now closed, which gained the largest circulation in Eritrea. The journal covered difficult and controversial topics, including poverty, prostitution, and the lack of resources for handicapped veterans of the Eritrean independence movement.

The courageous coverage provided by Setit angered Eritrean authorities, and in May 2001, Yohannes asked the Committee to Protect Journalists for help creating a journalists’ union to increase the freedom of the press and provide protection for Eritrean journalists. In September 2001, one week after the September 11 attacks, the Eritrean government closed every independent media outlet in the country under the pretext of fighting terrorism, and arrested a large number of journalists. Yohannes considered going into hiding, but decided that he could not abandon his fellow journalists.

Yohannes was arrested and imprisoned. In May 2002, Yohannes and nine other imprisoned journalists began a hunger strike to protest their imprisonment, and were transferred to a secret jail at an unknown location where they had no contact with the outside world. The date of Yohannes' death is disputed. While some sources claim that he died on January 11, 2007 following a prolonged illness, exiled opposition party leader Adhanom Gebremariam reported that Yohannes was found dead in his cell on December 13, 2002.

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