The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) reports that the brutal {www:Woyanne} regime in {www:Ethiopia} has arrested 80 Oromo students who are attending Bahir Dar university.
The Woyanne gunmen took the action following a protest by Oromo students against ethnic slurs by supporters of the regime.
A report by OLF said that the Woyanne regime’s Federal Police are currently hunting down more Oromo students in Bahir Dar, the capital city of the Amhara killil (region).
It has to be noted that almost all of the Oromo students who are now assigned to the Amhara regional state for university education were educated in Afan Oromo and English alone, and hence do not speak Amharic at all, and even those who can barely speak Amharic can easily be identified and are seen as aliens in the Bahir Dar town and in the entire Amhara regional state, according to the OLF News. Consequently, the students have nowhere to escape and are being brutalized by the regime’s security forces.
(BBC) – The {www:Ogaden National Liberation Front} (ONLF) said it had seized the town of Mustahil and was also fighting for the towns of Wardheer and Khalavo in eastern {www:Ethiopia}.
It said at least 80 Ethiopian {www:Woyanne} regime soldiers had been killed.
An Ethiopian A Woyanne government spokesman told the BBC the reports were absolutely false and the ONLF was on the run.
On Saturday, the Ogaden rebels said they had killed more than 20 Ethiopian Woyanne troops in recent fighting, a report also denied by the Woyanne authorities in Addis Ababa.
By DESMOND TUTU
THE expected issuance of an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan by the International Criminal Court tomorrow presents a stark choice for African leaders — are they on the side of justice or on the side of injustice? Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor? The choice is clear but the answer so far from many African leaders has been shameful.
Because the victims in Sudan are African, African leaders should be the staunchest supporters of efforts to see perpetrators brought to account. Yet rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.
In response to news last July that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court’s chief prosecutor, was seeking an arrest warrant for President Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the African Union issued a communiqué to the United Nations Security Council asking it to suspend the court’s proceedings. Rather than condemn the genocide in Darfur, the organization chose to underscore its concern that African leaders are being unfairly singled out and to support President Bashir’s effort to delay court proceedings.
More recently, the Group of 77, an influential organization at the United Nations consisting of 130 developing states and including nearly every African country, gave Sudan its chairmanship. The victory came after African members endorsed Sudan’s candidacy in spite of the imminent criminal charges against its president.
I regret that the charges against President Bashir are being used to stir up the sentiment that the justice system — and in particular, the international court — is biased against Africa. Justice is in the interest of victims, and the victims of these crimes are African. To imply that the prosecution is a plot by the West is demeaning to Africans and understates the commitment to justice we have seen across the continent.
It’s worth remembering that more than 20 African countries were among the founders of the International Criminal Court, and of the 108 nations that joined the court, 30 are in Africa. That the court’s four active investigations are all in Africa is not because of prosecutorial prejudice — it is because three of the countries involved (Central African Republic, Congo and Uganda) themselves requested that the prosecutor intervene. Only the Darfur case was referred to the prosecutor by the Security Council. The prosecutor on his own initiative is considering investigations in Afghanistan, Colombia and Georgia.
African leaders argue that the court’s action will impede efforts to promote peace in Darfur. However, there can be no real peace and security until justice is enjoyed by the inhabitants of the land. There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative — allowing accountability to fall by the wayside — is worse.
The issuance of an arrest warrant for President Bashir would be an extraordinary moment for the people of Sudan — and for those around the world who have come to doubt that powerful people and governments can be called to account for inhumane acts. African leaders should support this historic occasion, not work to subvert it.
(Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.)
SANA’A – Yemeni police in Haradh border region has seized four Ethiopians, aged 34-39 years, who have sneaked into Yemeni lands illegally through the Saudi border in Haradh.
The security officials in Haradh border said that the four Ethiopians crossed Saudi border in an attempt to enter into Yemen, pointing out that it arrested them and referred them to migration authorities to deport them to their country.
It is worth mentioning that the Yemeni security agencies arrested last February about 500 Ethiopians who attempted to enter via the sea to Yemen and deported them back to their country.
(AFP) – The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) claimed it killed 24 Ethiopian {www:Woyanne} soldiers in the Ogaden’s eastern region of Degah Bur and added that the fighting was ongoing.
“24 Woyanne troops have been killed in this latest round of fighting since March 4, with dozens wounded,” it said in a statement.
The {www:ONLF} said the troops it was combating had recently been redeployed inside {www:Ethiopia} from southern Somalia, where they were part of the occupation forces the Woyanne regime finished withdrawing earlier this year.
It also said it captured an army weapons depot near Degah Bur.
The {www:Woyanne} military denied the ONLF’s claim and insisted it was not involved in fighting in that region.
“It is not true. We have seen what they said, but according to the information we got from Somali region officials, there is fighting between local people and their militias and local terrorists,” state secretary for information Ermias Legesse told AFP.
“Among these terrorists, one leader and two members of the ONLF have been killed by the militias. The Ethiopian Woyanne army is not involved,” he added.
By MICHELLE FAUL
JOHANNESBURG (AP) – The International Criminal Court’s decision to pursue a sitting head of state on war crimes charges puts others around the world on notice, but it’s also raising questions about which leaders are being targeted.
International human rights organizations accuse Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi of crimes against humanity
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African and Arab nations say they will support Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, fearing the warrant issued against him Wednesday will bring even more conflict in Darfur, where up to 300,000 people have died since 2003, and further destabilize Sudan.
And they question why only Africans have been charged since the ICC — branded “the white man’s court” by Sudan’s information ministry – began its work six years ago. A temporary court, the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, indicted Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 while he was still president of Yugoslavia.
The chairman of the 52-state African Union has accused the court of “double standards,” asking why no cases have emerged from conflicts in the Caucasus, Iraq or Gaza.
“The African states were the strongest supporters of establishing the ICC. It wouldn’t have been possible without them. But there has been a significant shift in the past year,” said Christopher Hall, senior legal adviser to Amnesty International.
Outside Africa, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo is investigating possible cases in Colombia, Georgia and Afghanistan as well as a Palestinian request for charges against Israel for its actions in Gaza.
In Africa, those considered possible targets of the court are leaders in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Chad, Ivory Coast, Rwanda and Central African Republic.
Even among the Africans, the court’s choices are questioned. Why is it prosecuting former Congolese warlord and vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba for alleged crimes his fighters committed in Central African Republic, and not the ousted Central African leader who invited Bemba’s forces?
Why not the many other Congolese warlords whose forces all are accused of gross atrocities, including those of President Joseph Kabila? And what about the leaders in Rwanda, Uganda and other African countries that sent troops to Congo?
“It’s a very uneven path,” said Reed Brody, legal counselor for Human Rights Watch. “We’re still in a situation where if you are powerful or protected by the powerful you can avoid a reckoning.”
South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said African leaders are behaving shamefully and dismissed concerns that the court’s action would impede promoting peace.
“Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor?” Tutu asked in a column in The New York Times. “Rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.”
Al-Bashir’s presidential adviser, Mustafa Osman Ismail, branded the world’s first permanent international court to investigate war crimes “one of the tools of the new colonization” aimed at destabilizing the sprawling oil-rich nation.
Sudan is Africa’s biggest country, covering an area the size of Western Europe and bridging the continent’s northern Muslim Arabs and southern Christian and animist Africans in a union riven with conflict since independence from Britain in 1956.
In Darfur, the war began in 2003 when rebel ethnic African groups, many of them Muslim, took up arms against the Arab-dominated government they accuse of discrimination and neglect. Up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have been forced from their homes in what the United States calls a genocide.
Those who argue that amnesty is a more powerful weapon for peace, though, point to Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, who defaulted on a peace agreement after the court issued an arrest warrant against him.
In recent months, Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is accused of killing more than 1,500 civilians in northeast Congo and driving some 100,000 from their homes.
“There is a balance between attaining justice and sustainable peace,” Uganda’s Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa said Wednesday.
While another rebel leader, Bosco Ntaganda, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, Congo chose rather to treat with him and integrate his fighters into the national army. The move appears so far to have diminished the most powerful rebel threat in eastern Congo.
Sudan has reportedly said that African nations opposed to al-Bashir’s arrest warrant would pull out of the ICC in protest, but none had done so as of Thursday.
Thirty of the court’s 108 member states are African. And every indictment it has brought acted on requests from African members â Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic. Al-Bashir’s arrest warrant is the exception, initiated by the U.N. Security Council.
That in itself shows hypocrisy, critics say, given that three of the council’s five permanent members — China, Russia and the United States – refuse to join the international court.
The precedent set by the court Wednesday could extend to former U.S. President George W. Bush, amid charges his officials were the architects of criminal detention policies that led to torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo detention center in Cuba. But that is an extremely remote prospect. The Security Council is unlikely to order that while Washington is a veto-wielding permanent member.
“The world’s justice looks with one eye,” complained Taher Nunu, spokesman for Hamas, the Islamic militant group that Israel has been battling in Gaza.”
(Michelle Faul is the AP’s chief of African news.)
