Ato Sebhat Nega’s interview on the Voice of America, Amharic Service, recently sounds like a play out of Orwell’s, Animal Farm, but it also speaks volumes about the mindset inside TPLF, and the groupthink the regime officials are possessed with. Like all people intoxicated with power and anything that comes with it, Ato Sebhat had no limits or inhibitions to stop him from making bold faced lies. Ato Sebhat belongs to a category of humans that Orwell describes as people who use ordinary language “to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
The voice of America Amharic service has also invited listeners to put questions to Ato Sebhat for a future airing. But what is the use of asking questions when you know the person who takes the questions thinks the sky is the limit for lying? This man didn’t even stutter for a second when he told us that his TPLF invented Ethiopia and introduced the Ethiopian people to one another for the first time in history.
An interesting part in the interview was also Sebhat’s elaboration on the nature and work of EFFORT, the so called Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigrai, the TPLF business conglomerate. Sebhat told us what Mussolini would tell any journalist in 1935 about his “civilizing” ventures in Ethiopia when he told us about the role of EFFORT in building the Ethiopian economy. Now that is very interesting in itself but the man’s idea of what capitalism is and his vision of how he intends to build it is even more troubling. This robber baron bragged about EFFORT being the biggest investment company in Ethiopia and wants us to be surprised by that achievement. What would have been surprising was if a company supported by a ruling party, that has unlimited capacity to crush all its competitors and one that has the privilege of getting as much as 3.2 billion birr debt written off by the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia by order of the ruling class, was to rank in second place. It is ironic that the Ethiopian people have to subsidize the same company which in the first place was set up with money and property looted from them. But I credit Ato Sebhat for inadvertently but bluntly telling us that his idea of building capitalism is preparing the Ethiopian people for apartheid-like serfdom.
Why make big lies?
Absolute power often makes absolutely delusional. Understandably, some of the lie has its source in Sebhat and his friends being delusional. There is a pervasive groupthink inside the opaque TPLF clique that is heavily powered by its narrow ethnic nationalism. Like all autocrats, they often manufacture their own facts and after repeating that for a while tend to accept them as truth. Once they accept a lie as truth they often stick by it even if evidence proves them wrong. Anyone presenting evidence to the contrary is often considered criminal or the enemy and punished. This is why every opposition in Ethiopia, weak or strong, and citizens who dare to ask fair and hard questions are subjected to merciless persecution. That is why Birtukan Mideksa is languishing in prison. That is why we hear a barrage of draconian decrees being promulgated every now and then. That is why entire villages in the Ogaden were burnt to the ground and people killed like flies. Isn’t their crime only asking questions and demanding to be consulted before they were forcibly evicted from their land to give way for foreign oil finders? It is the same reason that led to the genocide of the Agnuak in Gambella.
Many people I know were dumbfounded to hear Ayatollah Sebhat, say that his clique invented Ethiopia in 1991. It is unbelievable how a very old man of his age pulled the energy needed to put a bold face as his mouth puffed the mega lie that the Ethiopian people came to know one another for the first time after his group took power 18 years ago.
You may think this goon is off his medication when he spewed this offensive absurdity, but the truth is that this is right out of the talking points of the entire delusional TPLF cabal who are trying their best to rewrite history. There was a big public amazement about Ato Girma Woldegiorgis, the “President”, regarding a letter he wrote in condolences for Tilahun Gesesses death. Ato Girma is reported to have written thanking Tilahun Gesesse for breaking through a government ban of singing in Oromoffa. Many people cringed how this extremely old man of not so good health, and on his way to God, can make such a bold faced lie through his teeth. Ato Girma, I heard, is reported to have confided to people close to him, that he has not read the letter himself and that it was written in the Meles Zenawi’s office for him to sign and issue. I found Ato Girma’s explanation plausible. This is purely a TPLF kind of lie.
This self-serving clique thinks that Ethiopians don’t even know that the period between Menilik and Mengistu Hailemariam has seen a more ethnically diverse ruling class, than TPLF’s ethno-centered reign of the last 18 years. Sebhat, Meles and Bereket think that they have succeeded in hiding from us that, for the first time in modern Ethiopian history, since Menilik, there are no Oromo generals in any key position in the Ethiopian army. Sebhat and the whole clique think the Ethiopian people are not watching.
The assertion of Sebhat that the TPLF invented Ethiopia also tells us something more: this tribal clique thinks and acts as if it is still the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes) in Ethiopia. They deny the existence of time in between. As far as the TPLF is concerned, the most revolutionary proclamation that made land public property in 1974 and that fundamentally took away the key instrument of oppression of one group of people by another, has not taken place. If they admit that this actually happened, and that there was a revolution that transformed ethnic relations in Ethiopia, they know their colonial and apartheid look-alike tribal politics would fall apart. They have also convinced themselves that there was no parade of cultures of nations and nationalities during the dergue. They think they have invented that too. They don’t want to think the Institute of Nationalities in Addis Ababa was even set up under the dergue. They think the Ethiopian people spent sleepless nights trying to find out the ethnicity (nationality) of Mengistu and the rest of their rulers. History and time exist only when it agrees with the TPLF. Since they are stuck in time, they have not lived to see the early periods of Mengistu who at the time used language similar as theirs as reason to slaughter Amharas. Meles and Sebhat still keep calling Mengistu the protector of Amharas. Those of you who may have been amazed by Sebhat’s phantom assertions should know that these are the ingredients from which Sebhat’s sick and thick mind is made of.
Yes, if you see what looks like a colonial or an apartheid model of governance in Ethiopia today, where 93% of the leadership of the country’s army is from Sebhat’s ethnic group (Tigreans) and the security and bureaucracy is almost exclusively controlled by TPLF operatives, the reason is that Sebhat and Meles and Bereket think we cannot see reality for ourselves but take their words for everything they claim and read the history they have tried to rewrite for us.
It is obviously a futile exercise to ask questions of people like Sebhat Nega, Meles Zenawi or Bereket Simon in hope of getting a straight answer just as the VOA journalist tried hard on Ato Sebhat. These people have eaten up all sense of cultural inhibition and decency to stop them at anything. For example, you may want to ask them, as the VOA journalist, Ato Addisu Abebe, tried on Ato Sebhat, about the ever narrowing political space for opposition groups in the country, even give them a quantitative measure of how narrow it has gotten or compile testimonies from everyday people in Ethiopia who are disgusted with their rule, or show them research by respectable international human rights groups, and academics who tell us that the political space for building democracy in Ethiopia has diminished and human rights abuse is at its worst. Sebhat and Meles would simply tell you that democracy is flourishing in Ethiopia and people are happy. “There are no angry people in Ethiopia”, said Sebhat in the VOA interview. How much evidence you may have to the contrary does not matter. Even the people whose children are mowed down on the streets of Addis Ababa are happy and love the Agazi as far as Sebhat is concerned. Meles in a recent interview with the Financial Times was asked about the draconian civil society laws recently instituted in the country. He simply said, “some people would say this is clamping down, we would say this is an empowering law.” In TPLF-speak you can say “we killed them in order to let them live.”
Ato Sebhat, if you happen to read this I will live you with the following two lines hoping that you will let them permeate through your head.
1. Not all political conflicts in a country are ethnic conflicts or wars between nations and nationalities. Your characterization of conflicts in Ethiopia as a war between ethnic groups is too dumb even to people who have not read history. Rivalries and wars come in different packages including in the form of class conflicts. They even occur within the same ethnic group and there were many in Ethiopia. Even as they were struggling against their oppressive rulers, the Ethiopian people have often considered themselves Ethiopians who were not given a share of what their country should give them. This is a country where people across ethnicity rose up together to defend. Ato Sebhat, there in Adwa, near your village, you can find the bones of most nationalities in Ethiopia. And that your notion that we knew each other with the help of TPLF in 1991 exits only in your paranoid and tribal dense head.
2. Like every people who lived under tyranny, the Ethiopian people will rise up, most likely in your life time, to take back their country. Looking at it from where most of us stand, your government looks more like an apartheid establishment than anything else. Believe me, the people you have burnt their villages will rise up from the ashes soon. The people whose children you mowed down on the streets of Addis Ababa have not forgotten. The Amharas and Oromos and the rest of our people you despise and whose children you are packing your prisons with, are not far from the horizons of their freedom. Even the people of Tigrai in whose name you do your crimes will definitely rise up some day and will say enough already, get off my back and not in my name. You will find that you have left your children a pile of ash and thin air instead of the personal wealth and prosperity you accumulated.
3. Please spare the people of Tigrai from lying in their name. I have not seen anything to show me their ownership of EFFORT as you claimed. Sir, through your actions and your tribalization of loyalty and privilege you are buying hatred for the people of Tigrai. Tragically you have done this with some success. Please know that ethnicity as a political tool can be redirected in any direction and with relative ease. You have no monopoly of it, sir.
I wish you and the cabal can come back to your senses before it is too late. The silence of the people you subdued by force is fooling you. You have confused silence with agreement and happiness. You are sitting on a time bomb, sir. There are angry people all around you. You said they are not the people “they are individuals” but how many million individuals do you think constitute a people?
Ato Sebhat, if you have made your lies with some mix of truth, we would have engaged in a useful debate. It is sad that you limited my job to restating everyday observations, things that are as clear as the September sky over Ethiopia. In the words of the satirist I quoted above, “we have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men”.
As for VOA’s call for questions to Ato Sebhat, I have only one question that I ask you to put to him. I have the same question put to Senator McCarthy in the US senate at a hearing known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 by the head attorney of the US army – “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF) supporters in Texas have come together and formed a support chapter on Sunday, June 21, 2009, after holding a series of meetings.
The newly formed chapter has released a press statement, which is posted on the EPPF official web site, eppfOnline.org. Click here to read.
By BRETT ZONGKER and MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN | Associated Press
WASHINGTON – One Metro transit train smashed into the rear of another at the height of the capital city’s Monday evening rush hour, killing at least six people and injuring scores of others as the front end of the trailing train jackknifed violently into the air and fell atop the first.
Cars of both trains were ripped open and smashed together in the worst accident in the Metrorail system’s 33-year history. District of Columbia fire spokesman Alan Etter said crews had to cut some people out of what he described as a “mass casualty event.” Rescue workers propped steel ladders up to the upper train cars to help survivors scramble to safety. Seats from the smashed cars spilled out onto the track.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty said six were confirmed dead. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin said rescue workers treated 76 people at the scene and sent some of them to local hospitals, six with critical injuries. A search for further victims continued into the night.
A Metro official said the dead included the operator of the trailing train. Her name was not immediately released.
President Barack Obama sent his condolences to the victims of the crash.
“Michelle and I were saddened by the terrible accident in Northeast Washington, D.C., today,” Obama said in a statement issued Monday night. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends affected by this tragedy.”
The president also thanked rescue personnel who helped to save lives.
The crash around 5 p.m. EDT took place on the system’s red line, Metro’s busiest, which runs below ground for much of its length but is at ground level at the accident site near the Maryland border in northeast Washington.
Metro chief John Catoe said the first train was stopped on the tracks, waiting for another to clear the station ahead, when the trailing train, one of the oldest in the Metro fleet, plowed into it from behind.
Officials had no explanation for the accident. The National Transportation Safety Board took charge of the investigation and sent a team to the site. DC police and the FBI also had investigators at the scene to help search the wreckage for any overlooked injured or dead passengers and evidence.
Officials would not say how fast the train was traveling at the time of the accident. The crash occurred in an area with a sizable distance between rail stations in which trains are allowed to travel at higher speeds, Metro spokeswoman Candace Smith said.
Investigators are searching the wreckage for the trains’ devices that record operating speeds and commands, NTSB member Debbie Hersman said.
Each train had six cars and was capable of holding as many as 1,200 people. Hersman said the trains were bound for downtown. That would mean they were less likely to be filled during the afternoon rush hour.
The trains had pulled out of the Takoma Park station and were headed in the direction of the Fort Totten station.
More than 200 firefighters from D.C., Maryland and Virginia eventually converged on the scene. Sabrina Webber, a 45-year-old real estate agent who lives in the neighborhood, said the first rescuers to arrive had to use the “jaws of life” to pry open a wire fence along rail line to get to the train.
Webber raced to the scene after hearing a loud boom like a “thunder crash” and then sirens. She said there was no panic among the survivors.
Passenger Jodie Wickett, a nurse, told CNN she was seated on one train, sending text messages on her phone, when she felt the impact. She said she sent a message to someone that it felt like the train had hit a bump.
“From that point on, it happened so fast, I flew out of the seat and hit my head.” Wickett said she stayed at the scene and tried to help. She said “people are just in very bad shape.”
“The people that were hurt, the ones that could speak, were calling back as we called out to them,” she said. “Lots of people were upset and crying, but there were no screams.”
One man said he was riding a bicycle across a bridge over the Metro tracks when the sound of the crash got his attention.
“I didn’t see any panic,” Barry Student said. “The whole situation was so surreal.”
At Howard University Hospital, Dr. Johnnie Ford, an emergency room doctor, said a 14-year-old girl suffered two broken legs in the accident. A 20-year-old male patient “looked like he had been tumbled around quite a bit, bumps and bruises from head to toe,” Ford said.
Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said less than two hours after the crash that federal authorities had no indication of any terrorism connection.
“I don’t know the reason for this accident,” Metro’s Catoe said. “I would still say the system is safe, but we’ve had an incident.”
Monday’s crash was the third major subway or commuter rail crash in a big city in the past nine months. In the earlier accidents:
• In September 2008, a commuter rail train and a freight train crashed in Los Angeles, killing 25 people. The crash was blamed on an engineer on the commuter rail sending text messages on a cell phone.
• Last month about 50 people were injured in Boston when one trolley rear-ended another. The conductor admitted to sending a text message when the crash occurred.
No reason was given for the Washington crash, but some safety experts are concerned about the recent increase.
“I’m not sure if everyone in the safety system is paying the proper attention that needs to be paid,” said Barry Sweedler, a San Francisco-based safety consultant and former investigator and manager at the NTSB. “These things shouldn’t be happening.”
However, Robert Lauby, a former NTSB rail investigator, said the increase in accidents could well be mere coincidence.
“Just because you had them doesn’t mean there’s a specific issue that caused them,” Lauby said.
The only other time in Metrorail’s 33-year history that there were passenger fatalities was on Jan. 13, 1982, when three people died as a result of a derailment underneath downtown. That was a day of disaster in the capital — shortly before the subway crash, an Air Florida plane slammed into the 14th Street Bridge immediately after takeoff in a severe snowstorm from Washington National Airport across the Potomac River. The plane crash killed 78 people.
(Associated Press writers Brett J. Blackledge, Eileen Sullivan, Richard Lardner, Jim Kuhnhenn and Seth Borenstein in Washington and AP researcher Judith Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.)
[Ethiopia’s dictator] Meles Zenawi said on Friday that there is “zero” chance that opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa will be released from prison in time to compete in the elections scheduled for next May. He also said Birtukan’s jailing is not a pretext to eliminate political opposition.
Birtukan, a leader of the now-defunct Coalition for Unity and Democracy alliance, was first jailed along with more than 120 other opposition leaders, activists, and journalists after unrest following Ethiopia’s disputed 2005 elections.
Birtukan was freed under a government pardon in 2007, before being put back in jail under a life sentence in December after she denied requesting the earlier amnesty. Her supporters say she was jailed because of the growing popularity of her new party, Unity for Democracy and Justice.
The prime minister also defended local elections last year, in which opposition candidates won just three of 3.6 million seats, saying that “democracy is about process, it’s not about outcome.”
Ethiopia’s largest remaining opposition parties withdrew in advance of the poll, citing government intimidation.
“If the process is clean and you get zero, tough luck,” he said.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — Ethiopian Prime Minister warlord Meles Zenawi said the World Bank and international donors share the blame for nationwide power cuts that led the government to trim its economic growth forecast.
The Horn of Africa country’s economy may grow 10.1 percent in the fiscal year ending in July, compared with an earlier prediction of 11.2 percent, Meles said in an interview on June 19 in the capital, Addis Ababa. The World Bank underestimated electricity demand in previous years and failed to provide funding for new power-generation projects the government had wanted, leading to under-investment in the industry, he said.
“We could have avoided that mistake if we had the money or had we had the support of our donors,” Meles said.
A shortage of electricity in Africa’s second most-populous country led the state-run Ethiopian Electric Power Corp. to institute nationwide blackouts every second day this month. The outages, which began in March, are partly due to “unpredictable” factors such as rainfall shortages that left dams without enough water, and delays in building new hydropower plants, Meles said.
“The notion that because we didn’t finance power they have a problem, that’s bogus,” Kenichi Ohashi, the World Bank’s director for Ethiopia, said by phone today. “If we financed power that would come at the expense of something else”
Generator Dispute
Power cuts might also have been alleviated if the Washington-based multilateral lender had provided funding for a 60-megawatt diesel generator the government requested this year, Meles said.
The World Bank didn’t finance the generator because the government’s contracting process didn’t meet World Bank standards and wasn’t “open and transparent and competitive,” Ohashi said.
This is the second consecutive year Ethiopia has experienced nationwide blackouts in the months before July, when reservoirs begin to refill during the country’s rainy season.
Economic growth in “the last part of the year has not been as good as we thought it would,” Meles said. A reduction in coffee exports from Africa’s biggest producer of the beans also trimmed growth expectations, he said. The International Monetary Fund estimates Ethiopia’s economy will grow 6.5 percent or less this year.
Coffee Sabotage
Ethiopian coffee export revenue has declined by more than 30 percent this year. In March, Ethiopian authorities shut six of the country’s largest exporters’ warehouses after accusing them of hoarding beans bound for export.
“The transition from the traditional marketing network to the commodity exchange was not universally popular amongst the exporters and traders in the coffee market,” Meles said. “We felt that some were trying to sabotage the transition.”
Ethiopia’s coffee earnings have declined this year due to a smaller crop, lower world prices and exporters stockpiling beans in anticipation of a devaluation of Ethiopia’s currency, Eleni Gabre-Madhin, chief executive officer of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, said in March.
Shipments declined to 97,846 metric tons in the first 10 months of Ethiopia’s fiscal year that ends next month, compared with 133,423 tons a year earlier, according to data from the Trade Ministry.
Stepping Down
Meles, who is 54 and has been in power since 1991, reiterated an April 2008 pledge that he would like to step down after next year’s elections. He indicated he would stay for part of an additional five-year term if his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front requests it.
He said he would resign from the ruling party only as a matter of “fundamental principle” and not over a small difference in how long he should remain in office.
“My guess is this is going to boil-down to plus or minus a year or two,” he said. “I’m simply thinking aloud. Now if it were to boil-down to plus or minus a year or two, I would probably say this is not a matter on which I ought to leave the party.”
It’s also possible, “some would say very likely” that he will be succeeded as prime minister by a person from outside the Tigrayan ethnic group, Meles said.
Veterans of Meles’ Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a rebel group from northern Ethiopia that helped defeat Ethiopia’s Communist Derg government in 1991, form the core of the current ruling party. Though Tigrayans make up just six percent of the country’s population, they dominate the upper levels of Ethiopia’s civilian and military leadership.
Somalia declared a state of emergency amid increasing violence in the war-torn country as the leader of neighboring Ethiopia’s [tribal junta] threatened to invade if its security is threatened by Islamists seeking to take power.
Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s declaration came after three government officials, including Security Minister Omar Hashi Aden, died in separate incidents last week.
“I take this decision after we encountered many attacks from insurgents to remove the government,” Sharif told reporters at the presidential palace today in the capital, Mogadishu. “We decided to impose martial law in order to overcome the risky conditions that exist in the country.”
The United Nations said last month that al-Qaeda has sent as many as 300 fighters to Somalia to support Islamists and warlords seeking to topple Sharif. The foreigners are training members of the al-Shabaab rebel group and helping them mobilize funds and weapons, Nicolas Bwakira, the head of the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, said on May 22.
Somalia’s government called for foreign troops to enter the country to help fight the insurgents on June 20. A day earlier, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister warlord Meles Zenawi said he would reinvade Somalia if Hisbul Islam, led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, and its allies in the al-Shabaab militia pose a “serious threat” to his country.
U.S.-backed Ethiopian Woyanne troops invaded Somalia in December 2006, ousting the Islamic Courts Union government that had briefly captured southern Somalia. The army occupied the Mogadishu and the southern town of Baidoa in an effort to bolster the government, though the forces became bogged down in a guerrilla war with Islamist militias that now control most of the country’s south. They withdrew in January.
‘Existential Threat’
If Aweys is “a real threat, an existential threat to us and if he wants to be attacked then of course we will try to do what we did before,” Meles said in an interview in Addis Ababa. “If he poses a clear and present danger, then we will deal with a clear and present danger in any way we can.”
Aweys was previously based in Asmara, capital of Eritrea. Ethiopia fought a border war with the neighboring country from 1998 to 2000. Eritrea has denied it supports Aweys.
“We don’t like him, there is no pretension on our side that we like him or are comfortable with him,” said Meles. “We would like to see his back.”
Aweys said in a statement to reporters yesterday in Mogadishu that the rebels would oppose foreign troops deployed in Somalia “by any means.”
Al-Shabaab has been accused by the U.S. of providing safe-haven and logistical support to al-Qaeda, which aims to establish a caliphate, or Islamic government, in Somalia. The militia vowed to defeat any foreign troops that come to the aid of the government.
“Our cats and dogs are eager to eat the dead bodies of your boys if they will deploy to our territory,” Sheikh Ali Mohamoud Rage, a spokesman for al-Shabaab, told reporters in Mogadishu.
Somalia has requested assistance from the United Nations, the AU, the Arab League and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in East Africa to help deal with an emerging humanitarian crisis as thousands of people flee fighting in Mogadishu.
The AU Commission said in a statement late yesterday that Somalia’s government “has the right to seek support from AU member states and the larger international community, in order to protect the Somali people.”
Somalia is in its 18th year of civil war and hasn’t had a functioning central administration since the ouster of Mohamed Siad Barre, the former dictator, in 1991.
WASHINGTON – One Metro transit train smashed into the rear of another at the height of the capital city’s Monday evening rush hour, killing at least six people and injuring scores of others as the front end of the trailing train jackknifed violently into the air and fell atop the first.