LEWISBURG — Too often, American diplomacy opts for stability in the form of dictatorships rather than taking a chance on democracy, an Ethiopian scholar told a Bucknell University crowd Tuesday night.

Behanu Nega taught at Bucknell between 1990 and 1994 before returning to his home country, where he spent 18 months in jail after helping to form the Ethiopian Opposition Party.

Mr. Nega, arrested as a prisoner of conscience and released from prison a second time in July, recalled a time when a U.S. envoy and a French ambassador visited the prison and urged him to publicly support the ruling government, a military dictatorship.

“I was happy to see them at first,” he said. “I figured they might negotiate me out of prison. They wanted me to allow the government to replace me with a mayor of their own choosing.

“I would not do it. I could not believe my ears. What they were saying to me was not at all what I believed about America and what it stood for.”

Mr. Nega’s response was angry and not diplomatic.

“I’d rather die in prison” than give in to my principles, he recalled saying.

During his speech, titled “American Power and the Struggle against Poverty and Terror in Africa,” Mr. Nega analyzed U.S. diplomacy in Africa and how the United States supports dictatorships in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria.

“It’s almost as if the U.S. believes that Africa is not ready for democracy,” he said. “That’s cynical and possibly racist. But I believe the yearning for freedom is universal. And the African yearning for democracy is real.”

In 2005, he said, “During the elections in which I ran for mayor, we had more than 90 percent of the registered voters turn out. People stayed at the polls until 1 a.m. to vote. There was a true desire for democracy.”

A top priority in U.S. diplomacy is to fight terrorism, “and that is a legitimate and very justified policy,” he said. “The problem is that we are allying ourselves with governments that terrorize their own people.

“Empowering ordinary people is the real antidote to fighting terrorism,” Mr. Nega said. “Terrorists hide where people have lost hope. I believe that promoting democracy provides the best chance we have to be victorious against terrorism.”

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