A new hydroelectric plant has been inaugurated in Ethiopia – part of a controversial project on the Omo River.
Ethiopia hopes the cascade of dams will turn it from a country suffering crippling power cuts to a major electricity exporter.
But critics fear there will be consequences for the environment and for people living along the river.
The latest phase, Gilgel Gibe II, has the capacity to generate more than 400 megawatts of electricity.
The plant gets its water through an underground channel from the first Gilgel Gibe hydroelectric project, which is fed by the Omo River.
This is the second plant to be inaugurated in almost as many months.
And a few more projects are in the pipeline to ensure that the power shortages of last year never recur.
The next stage, Gilgel Gibe III, is expected to generate about 1,800MW of power.
Ethiopia’s government wants the country to generate its own electricity and export it to the region.
The BBC’s Uduak Amimo in Addis Ababa says Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan have already agreed to buy power from Ethiopia.
She says if all goes according to plan, electricity will overtake coffee as Ethiopia’s biggest export within the next decade.
(Source: BBC News)
SARGODHA, Pakistan – Five Americans detained in Pakistan told a court Monday they intended to cross the border into Afghanistan to wage jihad against Western forces but denied any links to al-Qaida or plans to carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
The admission could be a prelude to possible U.S. conspiracy charges but might also draw sympathy from an increasingly anti-American Pakistani public. Such feelings have complicated U.S. efforts to persuade Pakistan to do more to crack down on militants carrying out cross-border attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan.
“We are not terrorists,” one of the five men, Ramy Zamzam, told The Associated Press as he entered the courtroom in the eastern Pakistani city of Sargodha, where they were arrested in December.
“We are jihadists, and jihad is not terrorism,” said Zamzam, a 22-year-old Egyptian American who was a dental student at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Jihad has several different meanings in Islam, but Zamzam seemed to be referring to the duty to fight against foreign forces viewed as occupying a Muslim country.
Zamzam and another member of the group, Ethiopian American Ahmed Minni, insisted the men had no links with al-Qaida and were focused only on Afghanistan, according to court documents.
“They said that they only intended to travel to Afghanistan to help their Muslim brothers who are in trouble, who are bleeding and who are being victimized by Western forces,” said the group’s lawyer, Ameer Abdullah Rokhri.
It was the first time the men, aged 19 to 25 and all from the Washington area, have addressed a court since their arrest. They arrived wearing a mix of Western clothes, such as jeans and tracksuits, and traditional shalwar kameez robes. They were handcuffed as they entered and exited the hearing, which was closed to media. A couple of them laughed and smiled as they left.
Pakistani police have not filed formal charges but say they plan to seek life sentences under the country’s anti-terrorism law.
“We have told the court that police have completed their investigation and have enough evidence against the five suspects to try them under anti-terrorism law,” said police officer Matiullah Shahani.
The court remanded the men to prison for 14 days Monday to give police time to prepare the case.
FBI agents have questioned some of the men and are working to see if there is enough evidence to charge any of them with conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, officials have said. Another possible U.S. charge — and one that could be more difficult to bring — would be conspiracy to maim or kill people overseas.
Besides Zamzam and Minni, the other members of the group are Pakistani Americans Umer Farooq and Waqar Hussain and Egyptian American Aman Yamar. Farooq’s father, Khalid, was also detained, but the court ordered him released Monday because of a lack of evidence that he committed any crime, said police officer Amir Shirazi.
The five young men were reported missing by their families in late November after one of them left behind a farewell video showing scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended. The case has sparked fears that Westerners are increasingly traveling to Pakistan to join militant groups.
Pakistani police accuse the men of using the social networking site Facebook and the Internet video site YouTube while they were in the U.S. to try to connect with extremist groups in Pakistan.
The Taliban recruiter the men contacted may have planned to take the men to Mianwali, a district near Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, where al-Qaida and the Taliban have proliferated, according to police.
“if you are stoppd and questnd by govt on ur way 2 miawali say that u r going 2 chesma atomic power plant visiting ur uncle who is a technical engineer,” said an e-mail from the Yahoo account which police said the men used to communicate with their militant contact.
“you should be wearing paki garments bright color 2 blend in,” said the e-mail, which was provided to the AP by police investigators Monday.
The message was apparently referring to the Chasma Barrage — a complex located near nuclear power facilities that includes a water reservoir and other structures. Pakistan has a nuclear weapons arsenal, but also nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.
Authorities say the five men had a map of the barrage in Punjab province about 125 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Islamabad.
They are alleged to have met representatives from the al-Qaida-linked Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group in the southeastern city of Hyderabad and from a related group, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, in Lahore, but were said to have been turned away because they were not trusted.
Their attorney, Rokhri, denied those allegations Monday, saying they didn’t “have any link with al-Qaida or any banned organization like Jaish-e-Mohammed.”
In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined comment on the possibility that the presence of U.S. forces across the border was the magnet that drew the men.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said staff from the U.S. Consulate in Lahore were present at Monday’s hearing and that consular officials have visited the men three times, most recently on Dec. 22.
“It’s my understanding that they have been treated well so far,” said Kelly.
Officials in both countries have said they expect the men eventually to be deported back to the United States, though charging them in Pakistan could delay that process. A Pakistani court ruled last month the men cannot be deported until judges review the case.
Ishtiaq Ahmad, a professor of international relations at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, said anti-American sentiment could complicate efforts to deport the five men, especially now that Pakistan has a democratically elected civilian government after nine years of military rule.
“When you have a non-democratic setup, issues which involve international cooperation are relatively simpler to handle,” Ahmad said. “If Pakistan delays any cooperation in instantly handing over these suspects to the United States as was the history before, it’s because we are in a qualitatively different political environment.”
(Source: AP)
By Elias Kifle
A holiday greetings that was posted here earlier this week from Prof. Ephraim Isaac, a world renowned Ethiopian scholar, has generated some harsh criticisms and even insults. Many of the criticisms point out that the professor has not been speaking out against the Woyanne junta’s brutality against the people of Ethiopia. Some have also expressed anger that Prof. Ephraim did not support HR 2003.
It seems a lot of Ethiopians have misunderstood Prof. Ephraim’s recent involvements in mediating the release of political prisoners in Ethiopia and his approach to finding solutions for the political crisis.
I have known Prof. Ephraim personally for over 16 years and known about him much longer than that. He is one of the most honorable Ethiopians I have ever met in my life. I disagree with him on how he approaches the problems in Ethiopia. I believe that good people must speak out against evil. It would have been great for a person of his caliber to expose the unspeakable crimes that are being committed by the Woyanne junta in Ethiopia. His approach is different and has been consistent through out his life. He believes in mediation and reconciliation than exposition of injustice. He believes that for mediation to work, mediators should not take side or criticize any one. In traditional Ethiopian mediation, shimagilwoch (elders) who engage in shimgilina (mediation) do not point out the wrong doings of either party to the other. Instead they focus on forgiveness and reconciliation.
Such elders among past generations of Ethiopians were highly respected citizens. Elders were able to prevent wars and clashes between ethnic and religious groups in Ethiopia for centuries.
From all the unfair criticisms directed at Prof. Ephraim, it seems that the role of elders (shimagilewoch) has no respect any more in today’s Ethiopia. That is a tragedy by itself.
What makes Prof. Ephraim uniquely qualified as an elder and mediator is that he never utters any negative word about any one. It is not in his nature to do that. He is in good terms with every government, political party and leader in the Horn of Africa.
Just because he doesn’t talk in public about the human rights abuse and political prisoners in Ethiopia, it doesn’t mean he is not concerned. His own brother died in Woyanne prison several years ago as a political prisoner. A close friend of the professor told me a while ago that when Woyanne officials asked him why he didn’t tell them about his brother, his response was “how can I talk about my brother when there are thousands of others like him who are also in jail? All of them are my brothers.” He appealed to them to release all those who are unjustly imprisoned.
Individuals like Prof. Ephraim Isaac have an important role in any society, but particularly in a traumatized nation such as ours. Every body cannot be an activist or a freedom fighter. I personally cannot be like the professor. The role I chose for myself is to expose injustice, not to try to reconcile with perpetrators of crimes against humanity. I believe genocidal criminals like Meles and Bereket should be hanged in a public square. Prof. Ephraim’s approach is different, but it is a necessary one. When we acquire more guns than Woyanne, we need a mediator to talk Meles and gang into signing our terms of surrender.
