BOSTON – Designated pacesetter Haron Lagat pulled the nine-man 3,000-meter field through a 1:01.7 opening 800, a 2:01.7 800, and a 2:34.3 kilometer with Rupp tucked back safely in fourth. Another “rabbit,” Solomon Kandie, soon followed Lagat on the sideline.
With two 200-meter circuits left, it was a Bekana Daba-Rupp two-man battle.
And soon it became {www:clear} that the Ethiopian was too {www:strong} for the Oregon collegian.
As coach Alberto Salazar shouted “change your frequency” instructions from the sidelines, Rupp tried to make stride adjustments, but nothing worked.
Daba went on to a convincing 7:41.88 {www:victory} with Rupp a not-close second in 7:44.69 with another Ethiopian, Markos Geneti, third in 7:46.74.
“I heard Alberto and I was trying to loosen up, to relax, anything,” said Rupp. “But Daba was just out there, too far, there was no reeling him in.”
Next up for Rupp is the 5,000 meters in Fayetteville, Arkansas, next weekend.
The EU should have condemned one of world’s worst laws on NGOs. Instead, it gave Ethiopia €250 million.
On 30 January, European Union policymakers sent a {www:clear} signal to Ethiopia: no matter how repressive the government becomes, vast sums of aid will continue to flow. This is emerging as a case study in bad donor policy.
In January Ethiopia’s {www:government} passed a law that is an attempt to muzzle local activists and prevent them from scrutinising the government’s human-rights record. Among other things, the new law labels local activists as “foreign” if they receive significant funding from abroad and makes it illegal for these “foreign” Ethiopians to scrutinise the government’s {www:record} on human rights, policing, conflict resolution and a range of other issues – even gender equality, children’s rights and the rights of handicapped Ethiopians. It also provides the government with bureaucratic tools to shut down groups the government dislikes.
This anti-NGO law is among the worst in the world, comparable to those in Russia and Zimbabwe. When Russia passed its own repressive NGO law the EU responded sharply that the law could “have a serious impact on the legitimate activity of civil-society organisations in Russia”. The EU responded to Zimbabwe’s law with an even stronger warning that “if the bill is implemented immediately, the EU’s ability to provide assistance to Zimbabwe will be significantly affected.”
Private disquiet, public quiet
But EU policymakers have shown considerably less backbone about Ethiopia. When the Ethiopian law was first circulated, the EU, the United States – in fact nearly all of Ethiopia’s key donors – expressed great alarm privately. It stood to reason that Ethiopia’s government would take their concerns seriously. After all, Ethiopia is one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world, receiving well over $2 billion in foreign {www:assistance} every year. But Ethiopia’s leaders passed the law anyway, cynically assuming that donors would quietly accept it. And they were right.
The EU’s only reaction was a bland declaration urging the government to implement the law “in an open-minded and constructive spirit.” It is impossible to imagine what this might mean, given that the law’s dire intent and consequences are spelled out clearly on its face. The EU did not condemn the law, demand its repeal or even ask that its worst provisions be amended, and on the same day the European Commission announced plans to give Ethiopia €250 million in new assistance.
Public agreement, private complicity
Unfortunately this refusal to speak out against Ethiopia’s abuses has become the norm for the EU and Ethiopia’s other major donors, even though Ethiopia’s human-rights record has steadily deteriorated. Ethiopia’s leaders have done a remarkable job of convincing donors that they should be grateful for the opportunity to pour huge sums of assistance into the country. Privately many donor officials express fears that speaking out against government abuses could lead the government to discontinue their programs.
The result has been a dreary list of donor failures to speak out against repression and atrocities in Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s military committed war crimes in neighbouring Somalia in 2007 and 2008, shelling whole districts of Mogadishu, and donors said nothing. When prominent opposition supporters and businesspeople were arrested last year on trumped-up charges of terrorism, donors said nothing— the victims still languish in prison without charge today. Even when Ethiopia’s government used donor-funded food aid as a weapon of war to fight an insurgency in the country’s arid Somali Region, donors said nothing. They failed even to press the government to allow independent inquiries into what was happening to the food.
Of course, donors cannot and should not dictate policy to Ethiopia’s government and there is no question that Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries, needs support. But this does not mean that donors should ignore the reality that their important material {www:support} to that government carries with it a responsibility to insist on respect for Ethiopians’ basic human rights. And the EU is legally obliged to do just this. The Cotonou Agreement, signed almost ten years ago, expressly requires the European Commission to condition its aid to Ethiopia and other countries on governmental respect for basic human rights. But the EU, like Ethiopia, is choosing to behave as though the Cotonou Agreement does not exist.
The EU has real leverage to push back against repression in Ethiopia, and it should do so instead of valuing chummy relations with Ethiopia’s leaders above all else. Anything less makes donors like the EU member states and the European Commission complicit through their silence in these abuses.
(Lotte Leicht is the EU director for Human Rights Watch.)
BIADOA, Somalia (Xinhua) — Heavily armed Ethiopian Woyanne troops have entered a district in south Somalia nearly a month after the troops left the war-torn country, witnesses said Wednesday.
Villagers in the southern Bakool region say the troops have crossed the border and set up bases in the village of Yeet, in Rabdhure district, 28 km south of the regional capital of Hudur.
Ethiopia Woyanne withdrew its forces from Somalia after two years of presence in the country following the defeat of the Islamists that run much of southern and central Somalia in the later half of 2006.
It is not clear why the Ethiopian Woyanne troops entered the region but there have lately been reports of troop movement by Somali government forces in Hudur in the Bakool regional backing officials who fled the southern town of Baidoa when it fell into the hands of the Al-Shabaab insurgent fighters last month.
Baidoa has been the seat of Somali parliament before its capture by the hardline Islamist group of Al-Shabaab which opposes the new Somali government leadership.
Residents in the villages around the border district of Rabdhuure say that the troops arrested a number of locals soon after entering the area.
In January, local officials charged that Ethiopian Woyanne troops crossed over into the other Somali border region of Hiran in central Somalia, two weeks after their withdrawal from the country but the Ethiopian Woyanne government denied the allegations.
The main gallery space at the Santa Monica Museum of Art has been marked off by tape, like an archaeological dig where {www:different} findings have been indicated. In fact, the objects do look unearthed, anthropological.
Here, dozens of hand-carved sticks the size of walking canes are neatly laid out on a tarp; there, several hundred lumps of earth mixed with straw, crude figurines in the form of small apes, frogs and boxy television sets, are jumbled. Several framed works — collages and stitchings on fabric — are propped against the walls, which are being sponge-painted with an earthen wash.
The artist who has created these works is the subject of an unusual retrospective, “Elias Sime: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart.” A quiet, burly man with a soft smile, Simé, 41, is from Ethiopia, where he is already well known. Three years ago he leapt onto the international scene when invited to participate in the New Crowned Hope Festival, organized by über-impresario Peter Sellars as part of Vienna’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Sime’s work often integrates recycled objects, not to make an environmental or economic {www:statement}, he says, but because “they have a story. Like the old buttons I use in my work, I can feel the people who wore them.”
“Every object is telling stories, has a history,” says Sellars. “He takes you into this micro-universe of intense experience.”
Last year Sellars convinced Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica museum, to do Simé’s first one-person show in this country. Longhauser praises the work as “all these things which hold a charge of life and are passed on from generation to generation. It’s very moving, very poignant.”
This afternoon, Sime and Meskerem Assegued, co-curator of the show along with Sellars, are in the gallery going over the first shipments — and there is more, far more to come, they say. Assegued both explains the work and helps {www:translate} for Sime.
She picks up several of the sticks and reveals that each “handle” has a face carved into it, some comical, some fierce. “This is what the farmers use for digging, and they specifically look for these kinds of branches,” she says, holding one by the long end and dipping the shorter section downward. How will these be displayed? “I’m thinking of tying together several at a time, then hanging them up in a corner,” she says. Simé nods, trusting her to best present his work.
Sime is a graduate of the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts and Design. He majored in graphic design, but when he graduated in 1990, he felt the artist inside straining to get out. Since childhood, he had done sewing, embroidery and furniture repair, and he gravitated toward collage work. The early pieces were illustrative — “Yedero Suk” (1997) depicts a movable general store that used to be common in Ethiopia. This, like much of his work, utilizes found or recycled material — yarn, cardboard and cloth in this case.
“I collect a lot of things; I collect everything,” Sime says. “Bottle caps, for instance, I have 20 big bags. I have also the same amount of old keys, buttons, horns, dolls, cans — I have a lot of old rusted cans. I feel they have people’s touch on them.” Thus, the fabric in his work may be from worn clothing, the buttons from salvage. He often visits the main open-air market in Addis Ababa, his hometown, scouring for material. Even his signature on framed pieces is a recycle — flattened metal bottle caps that he finds on the streets. “When people step on it, they put their mark on it,” he says.
Sime and Assegued met eight years ago, and he repeatedly asked her to visit his studio. When she finally went, she ended up staying for hours, as he showed her work upon work. The art, she thought, was astonishing enough, “but I was especially struck by his lack of ego.” She realized that he was someone she would want to work with, and she began putting him in exhibitions she was organizing. Sellars feels that that very modesty puts Simé “in a tradition of the sacred artist; he’s putting something larger forward.”
“He’s the most unpredictable artist,” says Assegued. “It’s contemporary art more than contemporary African art. Yes, it’s being done in Africa and addresses issues that concern us all, but he’s not in any movement. He doesn’t fit; that’s what makes his work unique.”
An anthropologist by training, Assegued is intrigued by indigenous pre-Christian culture and tradition, which is fast disappearing in Ethiopia, and she and Sime have traveled together to see traditional rites, artifacts and architecture.
“When we go out in the field, I document with writing and photographs,” she says. “When we come back, we don’t see each other for a month or so, and he does his own interpretations or feelings about what we’ve seen.” It was from one such trip at the end of 2002 that the first throne came about. In one village they had discovered a ritual to Bojje, the thunder deity. Weeks later, Sime showed her the fantastical throne he had built with a bovine skull and horns and cowrie shells on a carved wooden frame.
Real-life references
A week later, the exhibition is up, and this throne sits with a few others in the middle of the gallery. In April, in a procession yet to be determined, the thrones will be carried to Walt Disney Concert Hall for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final concerts, featuring Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and “Symphony of Psalms.” Around the thrones are dozens of goatskins filled with straw, arranged in groupings of two and three. (These skins were traditionally used as household containers.) The mud figurines are piled in a line along the back, and collages and stitched work have been arranged on the walls.
Although the recent stitched work looks more abstract, there are real-life references. In “Filega 1” (“filega” means “searching”), a hand emerges from a swirling ether created from pastel-colored yarn; the forefinger presses a circle that is on a panel with four points. Assegued suggests that since this was made after they had visited temples devoted to the thunder god, it might make reference to the altars they found there — which often had four points. In “Filega 2,” one hand in the lower right corner seems to be reaching up. “It’s like reading,” Simé says of that one, “like you’re turning a page of a book.”
Typically, Sime works from 6 a.m. till midnight. “Stitching takes a lot of time and patience. With patience you can do almost anything.” Then he adds, as an afterthought, “And that’s true in life as well.”
When asked whether he sketches or plans out his work, Sime reaches in his pocket and pulls out a stack of folded note paper. On them he has lightly sketched out various ideas — squiggles and grids, with the occasional note. In his sewn work, he starts out with only a rudimentary pencil sketch on canvas. “If I sketch everything, it limits me. It doesn’t allow me to go freely. I let my mind lead me.”
The Beijing Olympics threw up a huge amount of statistics, too much in fact to take in at the {www:time} of the Games. Now we have had a chance to disseminate a unique set of readings taken during virtually all of the distance races.
For a decade we have seen distance runners register times from transponder mats at strategic lap and kilometer points in road and cross country races. In Beijing, a new system developed yielded times for every distance runner at every 100m.
Transponder antennae were laid under the track at 0m, 100m, 200m and 300m. Athlete wore chips on the inside of their front bib numbers, and when they crossed the transponder threshold, a time was registered.
So for instance we can now see 100 different times for Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele during his 10,000m triumph. From his 14.1 opening 100m to his blistering final lap including 13.0 down the final back straight. Arguably more impressive was the 14.0 timing by Tirunesh Dibaba during the bell lap of her 10,000m. For that section she was moving faster than any women in Beijing at any distance above 800m.
Of course these figures cannot tell the whole story of the race. We can’t tell for instance how wide an athlete was running around a bend between the transponder points. But they do help to show how the race was won.
For example Rashid Ramzi seems to have clinched the 1500m gold on the last bend which he covered in 12.2 in his heat and 12.6 in the final. Asbel Kiprop was quicker than Ramzi in the homestraight, but he appeared to lose too much ground in the previous 100.
Sadly, there was no study of the Beijing sprints, so hopefully Usain Bolt can do it all again once the next level of timing analysis is available.
Split times were also provided for the Olympic 4x400m relays where much the fastest times came from athletes who did not win individual golds in Beijing – Jeremy Wariner and Allyson Felix.
GENEVA (AFP) – Some 4.9 million more Ethiopians are in {www:urgent} need of food aid, the U.N. said Tuesday, bringing the total number of people in Ethiopia who need relief aid to 12 million, or 15% of the population.
“In addition to the 7 million that continue to be assisted, 4.9 million people need {www:emergency} food assistance,” said Elizabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The latest figure is based on an assessment conducted by U.N. agencies in November and December, which concluded that some $454.3 million was needed to fund aid in Ethiopia during the first half of 2009.
Poor rainfall and harvests are hurting many in the east of the country, said Byrs.
“Concerns are high over continuing food insecurity, in the coming months, in parts of the country,” she said.
Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous {www:country}, with around 80 million inhabitants, and has been badly affected by droughts, civil conflict and rising food prices.
Despite the tough conditions, the country is hosting increasing numbers of asylum seekers crossing over from Somalia into eastern Ethiopia’s Somali Region.
Byrs said that about 10,000 asylum seekers had arrived this year and 150 more people were crossing the border daily.
“In Somali Region, malnutrition and food insecurity will likely exacerbate during the coming dry season from January to mid-April,” she said.
