By Deirdre Mulrooney

The rather gruesome topic of female genital mutilation (FGM) came up at a dinner-party I was at last weekend, thanks to the Pamela Izevbekhai coverage lately (she’s applying for asylum in Ireland on the basis that her daughters will be subjected to FGM if she returns to Nigeria, and that another daughter of hers died as a result of FGM), and in particular Ruadhan Mac Cormac’s feature in last Saturday’s Irish Times. It’s simply unthinkable for us here in the West, but in Africa, they really need some extreme feminism to tackle this horrific manifestation of misogyny (hatred of women), and, of course, with that, immense fear of women. Right, see some photographs I took of Ethiopians in {www:Lalibela}, and Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. When I was in {www:Addis Ababa}, I had the extreme good fortune to meet an amazing Ethiopian woman who is succeeding in turning the tide on FGM. Bogalech Gebre’s Kembata Women’s Self-Help Group is a heartening story, of change from within (the only kind that will work in this culturally sensitive area, in my opinion).

The one thing that struck me on my 12 day trip Ethiopia was the plight of women. It just left me feeling a little uneasy. There they were, doubled over, lugging firewood, water, foodstuffs for miles and miles to the market and back. Something was just not quite right, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. One Irish Aid worker told me how ten years ago she was trying to convince rural village men to invest in donkeys to carry things for them. One asked ‘why would I buy a donkey when I have a wife?’ She says things have improved since then, but still Ethiopia is 142nd out of 146 countries in the UNDP gender-related index.

It wasn’t until the day I was leaving though, that I discovered the real story behind my uneasy feeling, when I visited Addis Ababa’s Fistula Hostpital, and Bougalech Gebre, who unusually was in the Addis Ababa Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Centre, which she founded in 2000.

This was when I heard about the things you don’t see, such as the fact that 9 out of 10 Ethiopian women are circumcised between the ages of 6 and 12, so they will be considered ‘marriageable’. I didn’t hear about it, because it’s taboo, and the women perpetrate it upon themselves. But there is hope, and change afoot.

Visionary women’s health activist Bogalech Gebre has ignited a cultural revolution 350 km south of Addis Ababa with her Kembatta Women’s Self Help Group. Not only has she broken the taboo on this sometimes fatal widespread practice known locally as ‘removing the dirt’; but she has also created consensus within her community that it is harmful, and must be stopped. The first girl in her village to get beyond grade four at school, she went on to be a Fulbright Scholar in the States where she became a Public Health expert, before eventually returning to her home community on a mission.

Flanked by Kembatta Women’s Self Help Group, the first marriage of an uncut girl took place on Ethiopian Television in 2002. The bridegroom wore a placard announcing ‘I am happy to be marrying a whole woman’. The bride’s read ‘I am happy to be married uncut’. During October, traditionally ‘harvest time’ when the communities celebrate the newly circumcised girls, instead men and women in their 100,000’s are now celebrating ‘the whole body’. Ready to upscale her mission, this tide is set now to sweep the country,

How did she do it? Exposing the myth that this harmful practice is condoned nowhere in the Bible or in the Koran, Gebre’s approach is to let the community build consensus themselves. ‘Those who practice female genital mutilation do so believing it is in the best interests of girls’, she says, as only someone who grew up in that community, and went through the procedure herself could. She was 6 years old, and her mother had to leave the room, as all mothers do. ‘This belief must be stopped’. But how?

Movies were shown in rural areas on the back of a pick-up truck on a generator-run video recorder showing an actual cutting. Men in the audience fainted. Schools were built for the education of boys and girls, incorporating awareness of FGM, alongside their regular education. Thus bit by bit, accessing the deep psychic life of the region, and letting them take ownership of their decisions themselves, Gebre worked, and works on the basis that what is good for women is good for everyone.

Aside from its monetary problems, if Ethiopia is to have half a chance at achieving its full potential, the whole empowered woman must be re-introduced to the equation. Thanks to Gebre, this is a process that is already underway.

By Jenny Higgins

All things considered, I’ve always thought Ethiopia ranks reasonably well for the position of women in society. I don’t have all the statistics or information, and I would never presume to speak for Ethiopian women so this is my own personal opinion, but women can work, they don’t have to cover themselves and at first glance, they are treated very respectfully.

But look a bit closer and the traditional roles and restrictions are still there. For instance, men don’t cook in Ethiopia – and it’s definitely not for lack of skill! I know many Ethiopian men in the UK who are fabulous cooks, much better than me! Admittedly, most middle class Ethiopians here have housemaids to prepare food, but still it is all down to the women – the men come home expecting their meals on the table.

As a white women, I escape a lot of the expectations of an Ethiopian woman (although obviously I have my own hassles such as small children following me down the road calling ‘you, you, you, you, you’ incessantly). However, it was only recently that an Ethiopian explained that the reason I often wait ages for someone to serve me in a café is not that Ethiopian service is slow (far from it, in fact!) but that as a woman on my own, I must be waiting for a man, so I can’t possibly be ready to order yet!

When you drive around, you do notice that the cafés and restaurants are full of men, even in the middle of the morning. When I mentioned this to Daniel, my cab driver, he said that it was changing slowly, but that still most women stayed in the house. The house is for women and the outside is for men!

He’s right, though, things are changing – albeit slowly. There are lots of twenty-something Ethiopians who have studied or lived in Europe or America, and have returned with different ideas about women and their place in the world. Previously, an Ethiopian women would never have gone to a bar unless she was a prostitute, and although bars are still full of prostitutes or ‘bar girls’, you now see groups of women going to clubs or having a drink together which is apparently something you did not see as recently as 8 years ago.

I still get jealous of male travelers, though, who can easily do things that are difficult for me, purely because they are men. For instance, when N was here, Daniel took us both to have some lunch at a tiny café on Ethio-China Road. It was barely a café, just a set of benches in an alley way, but the food was fantastic and very cheap. However, the place was full of Ethiopian men who spent their lunch staring at us, and both N and I acknowledged that we would not have felt comfortable coming in here on our own. A man, though, probably would have had no problem.

It was a similar situation when Ute and I went to Harlem Jazz one Saturday night. Although it’s a jazz club, on a Saturday night it has a fantastic reggae band from Shashmene playing. I really wanted to dance, so we decided we would go for a drink, then head to the club.

The minute we arrived, we were surrounded by Ethiopian men. We weren’t the only faranji’s in there, but we were the only women there on our own, and we were considered easy pickings. Okay, so it’s not unlike going out in London (well, for some people … I don’t generally have to bat away male attention!) but at least in the UK men generally take no for an answer, and they certainly don’t attempt to grope you before even speaking to you! One man came and sat with us, and I had to move his hand from my upper thigh THREE TIMES before I finally had to tell him to go away.

Going on the dance floor had the same problem. There was a white guy in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by Ethiopians, really getting into the music and properly dancing. That’s what I wanted to do, but the minute I moved from the edge of the room, I was pushing away groping hands and fighting to be allowed to dance on my own, without some Ethiopian man grinding behind me. It was exhausting.

The men I spoke to saw no problem with their actions – we were girls having a drink in a club on our own (never mind we were only drinking coke!), which meant we were ‘available’, not to mention the fact that we were white so therefore they consider us much easier to get than Ethiopian women. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that many faranji’s do indeed come to Ethiopia and have a fling with a local – some men even leaving local girls with a baby as a leaving present …

I wasn’t dressed provocatively (I had jeans on!), I wasn’t drinking alcohol and I wasn’t trying to pick anybody up. I simply wanted to dance and enjoy the music. However, my evening was completely different to the experience of the white guy dancing in the middle of the floor, purely because of my gender. And that makes me frustrated!

By Michaele Weissman

In late 2007 and early 2008 as I was writing “God in a Cup,” the Ethiopian coffee industry experienced what amounted to a market collapse. Vast amounts of coffee that had been purchased by buyers in the US, Europe and Asia were never shipped out of Ethiopia or were shipped many months late after the beans had lost much of their lovely fragrance, taste and freshness. These events are dramatically described in my book.

In 2008 sellers and buyers scrambled to put the broken market back together.

Now the Ethiopian government is in effect re-nationalizing its coffee industry–coffee is Ethiopia’s most important export. The re-nationalization appears to be slamming the door on specialty buyers who in recent years have roamed Ethiopia in search of small lots of super high quality coffee from small Ethiopian farms and cooperatives for which they have paid $3 a pound and up.

Under the new system private sellers are banned. These “privates” have had their licenses to operate taken from them. They are no longer legally allowed to buy, process and market small lots of super expensive coffee.

Instead, the government has created a controlled commodities market on which virtually all Ethiopian coffee will be sold. (Some large, government-friendly cooperatives will apparently continue to have some autonomy.) Under the new rules, coffees from 24 different geographic areas will be aggregated, cupped and graded together. All coffees from, say, Yirgacheffe Area A, Yirgacheffe Area B, Harar and so forth will be slotted into one of nine different quality grades and sold together. Which means that the farmers working in particular cooperatives will no longer be able to increase their earnings by adopting improved agricultural practices and growing better coffee.

This notion–that farmers who work harder and produce better coffee ought to be paid more is the core notion of the specialty coffee industry. Everything else that specialty buyers and roasters are attempting to accomplish flows from this basic premise.

Instead of super high prices for a small number of coffee farmers, the Ethiopian government has decided to focus on gaining higher prices for all its coffee. A similar strategy was adopted some years ago by the Colombians: coffee buyers tell me this strategy resulted in the lowering of standards at the very top of Colombian coffee quality pyramid, but it has significantly raised the price of the mass of Colombian coffee. Since Ethiopia has something like one million coffee farmers, this strategy makes a certain sense. But it it fails to address the most fundamental issue besetting Ethiopian coffee farmers: low productivity. When coffee is aggregated and sold in mass lots, it is hard to identify factors that will motivate farmers and cooperatives to improve agricultural practices –thereby increasing productivity. Perhaps this will come.

WASHINGTON — Senator Jim Inhofe is scheduled to visit five African countries this week, including ones he’s been to numerous times in the past 10 years.

Inhofe, Republican from the State of Oklahoma, was in Afghanistan earlier this week and is scheduled to go to Ghana, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Inhofe has been to Africa at least 20 times in the past 10 years.

He has described his trips to Africa as “a Jesus thing,” in which he meets with African leaders in a spiritual context, although he told The Oklahoman he also pursues humanitarian and national security causes on his taxpayer-funded visits. He last went to Africa in December. That trip also included a stop in Ethiopia.

Inhofe spokesman Matt Dempsey said Inhofe “is once again focused on his work as a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Senator Inhofe is in the pockets of DLP Piper lobbyists who receive $50,000 per month from Ethiopia’s dictator to lobby U.S. congressmen. Last year, he was instrumental in blocking the “Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights Advancement Act” in the Senate after it unanimously passed in the House.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The U.S. also knows about, and is in fact an accomplice in, the current slow-pace, systematic genocide in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia by its client regime.

By Scott Baldauf | The Christian Science Monitor

Johannesburg, South Africa – The Clinton administration and Congress watched the unfolding events in Rwanda in April 1994 in a kind of stupefied horror.

The US had just pulled American troops out of a disastrous peacekeeping mission in Somalia – later made famous in the book “Black Hawk Down” – the year before. It had vowed never to return to a conflict it couldn’t understand, between clans and tribes it didn’t know, in a country where the US had no national interests.

From embassies and hotels in Kigali, diplomats and humanitarian workers gave daily tolls of the dead, mainly Tutsis but also moderate Hutus who had called for tribal peace. The information came in real time, and many experts say that the US and the Western world in general failed to respond.

‘We knew before, during, and after’

“During World War II, much of the full horror of the Holocaust was known after the fact. But in Rwanda, we knew before, during, and after,” says Ted Dagne, a researcher at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, who has traveled to Rwanda on fact-finding missions. “We knew, but we didn’t want to respond.”

In an official letter written as late as June 19, 1994, the then-UN-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali showed exasperation at the numbers of peacekeepers that member nations were willing to provide.

“It is evident that, with the failure of member states to promptly provide the resources necessary for the implementation of its expanded mandate, UNAMIR (the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda) may not be in a position, for about three months, to fully undertake the tasks entrusted to it,” Mr. Boutros-Ghali wrote. Within a month of the writing of this letter, the genocide ended, as Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front took full effective control of Rwanda.

US support for a rapid-action force

Mr. Dagne, a Congressional aide at the time, says that if the Clinton administration had called for a rapid-action force to stop the killings in Rwanda, Congress would have supported him. Letters from bipartisan panels of Congress back this up.

“We are writing to express our strong support for an active United States role in helping to resolve the crisis in Rwanda,” wrote Rep. Bob Torricelli (D) of New Jersey, in a letter of April 20, 1994, signed by Republicans and Democrats alike. “Given the fact that approximately 20,000 people have died thus far in the tragic conflict, it is important that the United States endeavor to end the bloodshed and to bring the parties to the negotiating table.”

But time and again in that spring and summer, President Clinton replied with more pleas for the government and the rebels to stop the violence themselves, and suggested that the underarmed, overstretched UN peacekeeping mission on the ground was the right group to lead the way.

“On April 22 … the White House issued a strong public statement calling for the Rwandan Army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front to do everything in their power to end the violence immediately,” President Clinton wrote on May 25, 1994, to Rep. Harry Johnston (D) of Florida. “This followed an earlier statement by me calling for a cease-fire and the cessation of the killings.”

With Congress looking toward the president, and the White House looking toward the UN, nothing was done, and the genocide ran its course.

“At the end of an administration, they write a report, and Rwanda was at the top of the failures list for the Clinton administration, so this is something that they acknowledge themselves,” says Dagne.

If there is a lesson learned from Rwanda, Dagne says, it is that the international community needs to avoid giving the impression that it is willing or capable of rescuing civilians in a conflict. “It’s important to build the capacity of people to do the job themselves [of protecting themselves],” Dagne says. “We must not give the expectation that people will be saved.”