(AFP) — An Ethiopian rights group on Thursday accused [Woyanne] government security forces of widespread human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, torture and killings.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) issued a statement alleging that 17 people had been killed and 201 others held without charge by security forces in several regions over the past four months alone.
“We urge the government to respect ratified international conventions and refrain from violating such rights,” Tesfaye Desalegn, the independent group’s spokesman told AFP on the phone.
“We want the prevalence of justice in Ethiopia, we call on the international community to put pressure in order to avoid such circumstances,” he added.
EHRCO said some of the deaths from police torture and beatings. It added that 38 of the 201 arrested people had already been released.
The rights group said most cases occured in the Oromia region, the largest and most populous state in Ethiopia, where the secessionist rebel Oromo Liberation Front has waged a sporadic guerrilla against the government for more than two decades.
Government security forces were also accused of torturing, injuring, and destroying properties of dozens of others in different states including the Amhara, and Somali — or Ogaden — regions and in the capital.
The Ethiopian government Woyanne was not immediately available for comment.
AN Ethiopian refugee who found out two children were not his, stabbed his wife and then hung himself from a tree.
In sentencing the man yesterday, the judge condemned those in Tasmania’s African community who had shunned the wife after Berakhe Beyene’s violent attack on her.
The Supreme Court in Hobart heard that Beyene and his wife of 27 years had come to Tasmania in 2004 as political refugees.
Their marriage began to break down when Beyene, 59, suspected two of his children were not his. When DNA evidence confirmed his belief, the pair began arguing.
Attempts to repair the strained marriage were encouraged by Ethiopian elders, to no avail.
The couple even tried the ritual of sharing a drink with holy dust in it and agreed to forgive and forget.
On the day of the attack, Beyene had gone to the Migrant Resource Centre seeking help to move out of their Moonah home. He also discovered his wife was going to Adelaide the next day to see their older children.
The couple had dined with her mother and one of their children. While the wife was getting bread out of the oven Beyene stabbed her in the upper chest, the stomach and her leg with a 20cm-long knife.
Beyene then turned the knife on himself.
He went to the back yard where the mother-in-law found him hanging from a tree with a rope around his neck.
She grabbed the knife still in his hand and cut him down.
His lawyer, Rochelle Mainwaring, said Beyene was born in Ethiopia but had lived in Sudan since his late teens.
He raising herds and grew crops.
Beyene and his Eritrean wife had met in Sudan when she was 13 years old, and they had five children.
He had wanted to move to Australia to live a peaceful life after the instability of Sudan.
The marriage had been happy, she said, until Beyene discovered he had not fathered the two youngest children.
“He was unable to accept the children were not his,” Ms Mainwaring said.
He became depressed, upset and confused, and lived with the memory of what he did.
Justice Peter Evans said the attack had an appalling and long-lasting adverse impact on the 40-year-old wife, two children and mother-in-law.
“It has also had an adverse effect on their friendships within the local African community,” he said.
“Incredibly and, most deplorably, this is because of a view taken by some members of the community that the defendant’s wife should have accepted the violence and should not have taken him to court.”
But he said Beyene had been suffering from acute depression, was instantly remorseful and life in jail would be more difficult as he couldn’t speak English.
He sentenced Beyene to 18 months’ jail with eligibility for parole after nine months.
Beyene had pleaded guilty to three counts of committing an unlawful act intending to cause bodily harm to his wife at their Moonah home on July 14, 2006.
The following is a commentary by Woyanne ambassador Samuel Assefa that appeared today on Washington Times. Hodader Samuel accuses the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) of being a terrorist group. The fact, as reported by several credible human rights groups and media, is that Woyanne is committing unspeakable atrocities in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, including mass murder, rape, displacement of civilians, burning of villages, etc. In the Google Search, TPLF (Woyanne) is ranked first as a terrorist organization (search TPLF in Google). Here the opportunist ambassador (hodader) is just doing his job on behalf of the Woyanne tribal junta — tell lies.
Imagine for a moment that a military group — aligned with al Qaeda and supported by a bordering hostile nation — slaughtered 74 workers at a business in America or Europe.
How long would it take for this group to be declared a terrorist organization by Western governments and widely condemned in the media?
On April 24, 2007, my country, Ethiopia, suffered just such an attack. Yet Western governments have not labeled the perpetrators as terrorist and the media has been largely unsympathetic. Is there a double standard in what constitutes terrorism depending upon whether the victims are Western? Certainly there is no double standard under U.S. law. The Foreign Relations Authorization Act says “terrorism” is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”
In Ethiopia a group calling itself the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) has committed numerous acts of violence against civilians, Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians alike. The ONLF’s goal is to forcibly separate Somali-speaking Ethiopians from the rest of Ethiopia.
In April, the ONLF attacked a Chinese oil exploration facility in this region and proudly claimed credit. In this single attack the ONLF murdered 74 innocent Chinese and Ethiopian civilians, including a 3-year-old child, many as they slept.
The talents of the ONLF extend beyond slaughtering innocents. The group is remarkably adept at public relations and has romanced some Western journalists with the notion its members are modern-day Che Guevaras. The New York Times recently called them “Rebels with a Cause,” and its correspondent praised their boldness.
Yet they are, plain and simple, terrorists. The ONLF has killed local elders opposed to its policies, attacked people in markets and religious institutions, killed mourners at funerals of ONLF victims, bombed a stadium, planted bombs near a railroad, assassinated local businessmen and government officials and kidnapped foreign workers and staff of humanitarian organizations. Just recently, the ONLF threatened violence against any oil company that seeks to work in the Somali Regional State.
The ONLF has also allied itself with al Qaeda-aligned terrorist groups operating in Somalia. These groups have a common state sponsor in Eritrea. A recent United Nations report concluded that Eritrea has armed terrorists in Somalia with weapons including suicide belts and anti-aircraft missiles.
______ Click here for some information on the crimes of Meles Zenawi’s regime that Samuel Assefa is defending.
02:48 AM EST/11:48 PM PST
Kinijit leaders Wzt. Bertukan Mideksa, Dr Hailu Araya, Ato Gizachew Shiferraw and Ato Brook Kebede, have arrived at the Oakland Airport in Northern California. Their arrival was delayed, but several Ethiopians waited for 3 hours at the airport to welcome their leaders. The love and affection being shown to the popular Kinijit leaders is indescribable…
Kinijit delegates arrive in Oakland [photo: Yilma Bekele/Kinijit Oakland-San Jose]
TYRANTS tend to be oddly punctilious about recording their atrocities. But even by the standards of his peers, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia’s former dictator, was an incorrigible archivist. The security services of his regime, which took power in 1974, learned the habits of bureaucratic procedure from true masters, the East Germans, who sent Stasi agents to Ethiopia as consultants. When Mr Mengistu fell and fled in 1991, he left behind thousands of pages of memoranda, death warrants and even the minutes of a meeting in 1975 when his ruling committee, known as the Derg, voted to murder the imprisoned emperor, Haile Selassie.
These files form the basis for thousands of criminal cases brought by an Ethiopian special prosecutor since Mr Mengistu fell. The charge sheet and evidence for his trial in absentia for genocide run to some 8,000 pages. Though he remains a sheltered guest of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, a court sentenced him this year to life in prison, so ending the special prosecutor’s work. But what will happen to all that fragile and incriminating paper?
A woman named Hirut Abebe-Jiri has made it her mission to see that the historical record is preserved. Herself imprisoned and tortured during a purge known as the “Red Terror”, Ms Hirut has set up an organisation to archive, translate and index the Derg’s files, and make them available on the internet through a partnership with the University of North Dakota in the United States. A Canadian resident, she recently went back to Addis Ababa, which she fled as a refugee, and signed an agreement with the government that calls for the transfer of the documents into the hands of her Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation and Research Centre. Her model is Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Programme, which documents Khmer Rouge atrocities in the 1970s.
Despite many trials over the years, many Ethiopians still do not know what happened to family members who disappeared during the Red Terror. Ms Hirut hopes that her archive and its website will let Ethiopians—including those in the diaspora—learn the truth.
She knows the power of written words: they brought justice in her own case. During the Red Terror, Ms Hirut, then 17, was imprisoned and beaten up. Years later, she discovered that the man who had ordered her torture, a notorious Derg functionary called Kelbessa Negewo, had emigrated to the United States and was working as a bellhop at a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Along with two other former victims, she sued him in an American court. The most powerful evidence against him was his own memos to his superiors, in which he boasted about his “struggle to eliminate the anti-revolutionaries”. Last year, after more than a decade of legal battles, he was deported back to Ethiopia. He is now serving a life sentence for murder.
Berlin, Germany – When Haile Gebrselassie travelled to Berlin recently for a press conference staged by one of his sponsors, he said: “I am here for my next goal.” This Sunday the 34 year-old Ethiopian will run the real,- Berlin Marathon as the defending champion. But apart from winning his goal is obvious: Gebrselassie intends to break the World record, held by his big rival and friend Paul Tergat. The Kenyan ran 2:04:55 hours four years ago in Berlin.
“I have chosen Berlin, because this is the best course and there are incredible spectators – Berlin is great,” said Gebrselassie, who is a two-time Olympic and four-time World 10,000m champion and who has broken 23 World records and World bests so far. Last year he had won the Berlin Marathon in what remained the fastest time of the year. Clocking 2:05:56 he missed Tergat’s time by just 61 seconds.
“I had problems on the final three kilometers last year. That was because I had worked hard keeping the pace very high between 30 and 35 k, which was a mistake.” Still Gebrselassie clocked the seventh fastest time ever and became the fifth fastest Marathon runner in Berlin 2006.
Fast follow-up in Fukuoka
Little more than two months later he achieved another novelty of which there are so many in his unique career. He took the Fukuoka Marathon in 2:06:52. Never before had a marathon runner clocked two sub 2:07 times within such a short period of time. In 2005 Gebrselassie had been the fastest marathon runner of the year as well with his 2:06:20 win from Amsterdam. If he should be again number one at the end of this year this would be a rare triple as well. So far this year the world’s fastest time stands at 2:07:19 from Mubarak Shami (Qatar), who had won Paris.
This spring Gebrselassie had a true nightmare marathon experience, when he dropped out of the start-studded field in the London Marathon. “Suddenly I could not breathe properly and had to give up. That was very sad. I could not sleep at all the night after that – and this experience still follows me until today,” he said. Later on a pollen allergy was diagnosed. “I had a number of allergy tests in the past months. But the good thing about Berlin is – there will be no pollen at this time of the year here.”
Impressive outings on the track
Already in the early track season Gebrselassie bounced back from the London flop. In Hengelo he clocked a world class time in the 10,000m with 26:52.81. “At the age of 34 no one has ever run under 27 minutes,” Gebrselassie is quick to point out. A few weeks later in Ostrava he went on to improve the World record in the one hour race (21,285 meters) and on the way broke the 20,000m mark as well (56:25.98 minutes). Those two track races he ran without spikes to protect his Achilles tendon, which makes his achievements even more remarkable.
Central Park cruise
At the beginning of August Gebrselassie ran his final test before Berlin, winning the New York Half Marathon in a world class time of 59:24 minutes. “Taking into account the tough course it was a great time. The first 11 kilometers are hilly in Central Park – honestly, if it would have been a flat course, I would have run 58 minutes flat.” The half marathon world record stands at 58:33. “Fortunately Berlin is not Central Park.”
‘You always have to aim high’
“I feel that I can achieve something outstanding in Berlin,” said Gebrselassie, who increased his weekly mileage in the surroundings of Addis Ababa during the buildup to Berlin to 250km (156 miles). “To become stronger in the last part of the marathon I increased my speed in the final part of my training runs.”
During much of the press conference Haile Gebrselassie remained cautious regarding a time goal. But at the end he was asked to start a marketing campaign for adidas, in which runners are asked to show their motivation for running by a drawing. Haile Gebrselassie did a line drawing, showing himself and then wrote underneath it: ‘2:03:00 – I will show you.’ Then he explained: “Well, 2:04 would be okay as well. You always have to aim high.”
