EDITOR’S NOTE: The only reason the vampire regime in Ethiopia will not liberalize the telecom industry is that it wants to limit the people’s access to information.
By Jason McLure | Bloomberg
Ethiopia’s tribalist dictatorship will pursue membership of the World Trade Organization, though it has no plans to liberalize its telecommunications and financial-services industries to gain access, Trade Minister Girma Birru said.
Ethiopia is currently fielding questions about its trade policies from countries including the U.S. and Canada, as it attempts to negotiate entry into the global trade regime, Birru said in an interview on Feb. 17 in the capital, Addis Ababa.
The Horn of Africa nation, twice the size of Texas and with a population of 82.5 million, applied for membership of the Geneva-based trade arbiter in 2003. The country is counting on membership to open new markets to boost its $25.1 billion economy.
“Primarily we will join the WTO not to make others happy, but to make our economy work,” Birru said. “So to the extent it helps our economy we will liberalize things, but if it’s not going to assist our goals in trade and development we will not liberalize. Why do we have to?”
The country’s protected telecom and financial industries will be points of contention in the talks with WTO-member countries including the United States and United Kingdom, Tewodros Mekonnen, a researcher with the Ethiopian Economic Association, said in a phone interview on Feb. 19.
“I don’t see any plan” to break up or sell Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp. to private investors, Birru said. “If there are some problems it has nothing to do with ownership. It has only to do with management. Management and ownership don’t necessarily go together.”
Private Investors
Ethiopia has resisted pressure from the World Bank and trade partners like the U.S. to sell the telecommunications company to private investors.
Ethiopian Telecommunication’s monopoly enables it to charge $35 for a mobile-phone SIM card, which is required to obtain a mobile-phone number. In neighboring Somalia and Kenya, which have private mobile services, cards cost less than $5.
A 1-megabyte per second Internet connection costs more than $2,000 a month in Ethiopia. In South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy, a similar service costs between 600 rand ($59) and 760 rand, according to the http://www.mybroadband.co.za Web site.
“In Ethiopia, if there is any problem I don’t think it’s the price,” said Birru. “It’s the quality of the service. This has to be improved. And to improve this I don’t think it would be wise to privatize it.”
Ethiopia’s government is reluctant to sell the company because it is profitable and is expanding services to rural areas, Newai Gebre-Ab, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s top economic adviser, said yesterday in an interview.
Cash Generator
The company is “generating a lot of money and that money is being put to good use for development of infrastructure,” Gebre- Ab said.
Birru also said the Ethiopian central bank lacks the capacity to regulate large foreign financial institutions. The country is also unsure whether foreign banks would play a positive economic role in the country. As a result, the country is unlikely to liberalize the financial-services industry.
“At this stage, given the capacity that we have in terms of managing things and supervising them at the National Bank level, I don’t see why we’d allow that,” he said.
Ethiopia’s three state-run retail banks control about two- thirds of the capital in the country’s banking industry, according to the National Bank of Ethiopia. Until last year, no bank in Ethiopia could process MasterCard transactions. Banks in the country are also reluctant to lend to businesses that cannot provide real estate as collateral.
Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provision of international law be enforced.” – World War II Nuremberg Tribunal
Darfur is not the only case of international intervention in an African human rights dilemma. During the last two decades, Africa had several crises that needed international attention. The conflicts in Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Liberia devastated entire communities. Of particular concern to the international community was the widening conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which spilled over into the neighboring countries of the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia—several of which were already experiencing humanitarian emergencies of their own. Even after a shaky peace accord was signed in the DRC, humanitarian conditions did not improve significantly, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) had to deal with known human rights abusers.
While humanitarian emergencies continue to proliferate in Africa, a question with far-reaching implications arises: what is to be done regarding Darfur? Are there justifications for the Sudanese government’s position that no international organization can interfere in its own internal affairs? And if intercession is contemplated, what constitutes a sufficiently just cause to warrant intervention? All these depend on several factors: the intentions of the interveners, whether interventions are a last resort, who and what might be a legitimate target of intervention, reasonable prospects for success, and proper authorization.
The issue of just cause requires that severe suffering warranting help has arisen. These include such threats to vital interests as indiscriminate killings, torture, rape, and displacement of people. These would count as significant threats to human dignity and normal life. When such activities are widespread, and the state either perpetrates the injustices or does nothing appropriate to end the suffering of people, it would be reasonable to suggest the just cause threshold has been attained. These were undoubtedly present in ICC’s Darfur case.
Sudan has vehemently opposed what it considers intervention in its domestic affairs by the ICC. The Sudanese government has rejected the ICC’s request that war crimes suspects Ahmad Harun and Ali Kushayb be arrested and handed over to them. They consider the action an intrusion into their national affairs and have dubbed the ICC “a tool for [imposing] the culture of superiority.” But they could not stop the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) from publishing a notice for the arrest of Harun. Sudan’s Justice Minister Ali al-Mardi said that any attempts to arrest Harun and Kushayb through INTERPOL would be treated as “kidnapping and international piracy.”
This opposition to the ICC’s adjudication represents both practical and fundamental hurdles. On one level, there is no possibility for an international tribunal to operate without a state’s cooperation in turning over defendants and evidence and permitting investigation within its own territorial boundary. If the government of President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir shields its citizens from the ICC, the court would be hard pressed to carry out its prosecution.
On another level, criminal proceedings by international tribunals have rarely fulfilled victims’ expectations of universal justice. The international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia were both severely criticized as being too remote, too sluggish, and biased in their choice of defendants. The prosecutions were accused of sparing the most senior defendants from the local courts where they might be tried in accordance with local standards and within view of the local population that had witnessed the atrocities, and where, just like their subordinates, they could face the death penalty if convicted. This of course could not be expected in the Sudan, where the chain of command in the crime stretches up to President Bashir himself whom the ICC is now seeking to prosecute.
The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, after a through study of international law and conventions, determined that it may be appropriate for supranational bodies to intervene in what are normally considered the domestic affairs of a state for the purpose of protecting people who are at risk. The commission’s report pinpointed principles on which its prominent jurists reached consensus and which it believes to be “politically achievable in the world as we know it today.” The cardinal principles the commission considered legitimate were stated in the following words:
State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself… However, where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression, or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of nonintervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.
The report does not deny that sovereignty is important, but it calls attention to what sovereignty entails. For the jurists, sovereignty is not best conceived of in terms of control but rather in terms of responsibility. Government officials are responsible for assuring the safety of citizens and for advancing their welfare. The commission did not find genuine support for a view that sovereignty necessitates unlimited state power over its own citizens, but instead acknowledged that “sovereignty implies a dual responsibility: externally—to respect the sovereignty of other states—and internally—to respect the dignity and basic rights of all the people within the state.” The report noted in its conclusion that “sovereignty as responsibility has become the minimum content of good international citizenship.”
The general responsibility to safeguard peoples’ welfare requires the implementation of three specific tasks. In the first instance, it entails a responsibility to prevent or to contend with the root causes of conflict that puts people at risk of requiring humanitarian intervention. Contending with the root causes can mean putting to an end political repression. In the second instance, it entails a responsibility to respond aptly when there is a pressing human need. A fitting response may call for sanctions, international prosecutions, or military interventions. And last but not least, the responsibility to protect people in distress demands a responsibility to rebuild by providing the right kind of help with recovering, reconstructing, and setting in motion a process of national reconciliation.
Regarding the issue of proper type of authorization for interventions, there is no better or more appropriate body than the United Nations Security Council that charged the ICC to take up the Darfur crisis. By its very design, the Security Council bears a primary obligation to deal with all requests for emergency authorizations and it has to do that within an appropriate time period, particularly when they entail urgent, large-scale crises like Darfur. There is clear tension between the goals of nations shielding themselves from outside interference and international goals of responding to victims who suffer in humanitarian crises; but when it comes to respecting sovereignty and respecting the welfare of individuals who are in distress, the matter should definitely be resolved in favor of protecting the vulnerable individuals who suffer in humanitarian crises.
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Paulos Milkias, Ph.D., is a former Canada Council Doctoral Fellow, is Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Marianopolis College/Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Specializing in political science, he earned his MA and PhD from McGill University in Montreal and his BA from Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is currently co-editor of North-East-African Studies and associate editor of the journals Horn of Africa and the International Journal of Ethiopian Development Studies.
Ethiopia’s superstar distance runner Meseret Defar, who lost her 5000m world record to Tirunesh Dibaba last summer, evened the score tonight (Feb. 18, 2009) at the GE Galan meeting at the Ericsson Globe Arena in Stockholm, clocking a new world indoor record of 14:24.37. That eclipsed Dibaba’s 14:27.42 from the Reebok Boston Indoor Games in January, 2007.
Meseret Defar, 25, the reigning world 5000m champion, now holds both the world 3000m (8:23.72) and 5000m indoor records, and has also run the world’s best ever time for two miles indoors (9:10.50). The two-mile mark is not recognized by the IAAF as a world record distance.
Ethiopian women have now held the 5000m indoor record since Berhane Adere broke Romanian Gabriela Szabo’s 1999 mark of 14:47.35 in January, 2004, in Stuttgart (14:39.29). Tirunesh Dibaba first broke Berhane Adere’s mark in January, 2005, at the Reebok Boston Indoor Games, clocking 14:32.93, then broke her own record two years ago in January.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The Woyanne high kangaroo court today reduced Teddy Afro’s 6-year prison sentence to 2 years, allowing him to go free in 5 months from now.
Teddy has been held in prison for the past 11 months after being falsely accused of vehicular manslaughter.
In December 2008, a Woyanne party hack acting as judge sentenced him to 6 years in prison for killing a homeless man, Degu Yibelte, in Addis Ababa with his BMW in what the prosecutor alleged as a hit-and-run accident.
A hospital record that showed Degu’s death one day earlier than the day Teddy had a car accident was ignored by the dumb judge.
I do not understand what geared Kenyan belligerent first lady Lucy Kibaki to demand written explanations from a minister for Internal Security, George Saitoti. Mrs. Kibaki wanted to know why many people perished in the Molo inferno when they were self serving from a petrol tanker. To her, this was nothing but negligence and insensitivity! To add an insult to injury, she said that if the minister responsible were a woman, this wouldn’t have happened.
Azeb Mesfin, the wife of Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi
One thing Mrs. Kibaki does not get is the fact that the Molo deaths are but the signs of a very-corrupt-and-rotten country where a gang of goons self-helps and serves on public property. It is the society in which what matters is what you get but not how you get it. It is the society ruled by hyenas-turned rulers whose aim of being in power is to steal from paupers.
The Molo calamity was neither caused by insensitivity nor negligence. It is man-made poverty that has forced innocent people to wrestle to make ends meet. Regarding women in power, there are some living examples whereby women ministers failed their countries. Zakia Meghji, Tanzania’s former minister was booted out after it came to light that she illegally authorized payment to a dubious company known as Kagoda that stole over $ 40,000,000 from Central Bank of Tanzania (BoT). When it comes to graft, gender does not matter but personal integrity and probity.
If it were not for cliffhanger’s behaviour for African rulers, a good thing for Saitoti to do would be to relinquish his place in protest of the disgrace committed against him. But contrary, in Africa, power is sweeter than honey. The likes of Saitoti are ready to die in shame so as to keep their grip on power. What a shame!
Surprisingly, Saitoti was unable to do the right thing. Even to demand an apology became difficult for him. But again, looking at Saitoti’s record when he was vice president in the former autocratic regime, expecting him to do the right thing is as good as telling the ant to lift up the elephant. Indeed, Saitoti’s docility and naivety mark insults to our academic attainment. He was once misled by former dictator Daniel arap Moi and Kamlesh Pattni to ruin Kenya’s coffers. If a professor of mathematics can not calculate such simple political arithmetic, what of the common Kenyan in the street? However, it must be noted. Kibaki showed maturity for standing by his minister.
What Mrs. Kibaki did is not unique and distant in Africa. In neighbouring Tanzania, the former first lady, Anna Mkapa, is alleged to have amassed ill-gotten wealth, thanks to abusing her husband’s powers and office.
Ethiopia’s Azeb Mesfin, the wife of dictator Meles Zenawi, is the most corrupt of all. While falsely claiming that she is the first lady (the official first lady is the wife of the president, not the prime minister), Azeb has amassed enormous wealth through bribery, shakedown of businessmen, and other corrupt means. She is said to be the richest women in Africa.
While first ladies such as Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton are renowned for helping their husbands, African ones are known for tearing them down. It must be noted that the First Lady crisis in Africa is caused by lack of rule of law and people-geared constitutions.
It is time Africa stopped being ruled by thieves that, along with their families and friends, self-help and serve on whatever they are pleased without facing the music.
(Nkwazi Mhango is a Tanzanian living in Canada. He is a Journalist, Teacher, Human Rights activist and member of the Writers’ Association of New Foundland and Labrador. The reference to Azeb Mesfin is added by Ethiopian Review.)
In January 2007, after the Ethiopian invasion, and US bombing of Somalia, at least 85 different people from at least 25 countries, including the US, were part of Africa’s first mass rendition of prisoners. At least 18 of these were children under the age of 15. They were people trying to flee the fighting in Somalia by crossing into Kenya, and were arrested by the Kenyans. They were then held without charge. They were flown by Kenya to Somalia, and were taken on from there to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia they were subjected to lengthy interrogations by Americans, who also took DNA samples from them. They were questioned repeatedly, for months.
“A week after we arrived we were interrogated by whites – Americans, British, I was interrogated for weeks,” Salim says.
“They had a file which was said to implicate me in the Kenyan bombings. So I was taken away and was placed in isolation for two months – both my hands and legs were shackled.
“The interrogations went on for five months. Always the same questions about the Nairobi bombings.”
Former detainees have also told the BBC they were questioned by US agents. One said he was beaten by Americans.
Two others said they were threatened and told that if they did not co-operate they could face ill treatment at the hands of Ethiopian guards.
All said they believed it was the Americans and not the Ethiopians controlling their detention and interrogation.
Human rights groups in the region say this was a new form of extraordinary rendition.
The US did not play an overt role in the transportation or detention of suspects as it has in the rendition of other suspected terrorists, but it nevertheless controlled their interrogation and treatment.
Nobody know for certain how many people have been renditioned to Ethiopia. The number 85 above is based on the manifests of three flights out of Kenya on one night. The wife of Salim, quoted above was also arrested.
… part of the first mass “renditions” in Africa, where prisoners accused of supporting terrorists in Somalia were secretly transferred from country to country for interrogation outside the boundaries of domestic or international law.
Along with at least 85 others from 20 countries, she was flown back to Somalia – a war zone with no effective government or law – and on to Ethiopia. There, American intelligence agents joined the interrogations – photographing and taking DNA samples, even from the children.
On April 7, three months after her arrest, Ms Ahmed was released. Salim Awadh Salim, her husband and father of her unborn baby, is still in detention. So, too, are 78 of the other passengers aboard the three secret rendition flights. At least 18 are children under 15.
Ethiopia admits holding 36 other “suspected international terrorists” but has refused to give the Red Cross access to them. The rest of the “ghost plane” passengers are missing.
…
On April 7 Ms Ahmed was put on a flight to Kilimanjaro. Her escort promised that her husband and the others would be released with a week.
That was in April 2007. Her husband is still in prison in Ethiopia, he has not been charged, and has not appeared before a court. She was briefly able to talk to him when he got access to a cellphone:
“The conditions are really bad: we don’t have enough food, we don’t have enough access to medicine. The cell is wet,” he says.
“We sleep on the floor rather than the sodden mattresses. One of the other prisoners was beaten so badly he’s had his leg broken.”
Another person still languishing in an Ethiopian jail is Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal. His cousin has been working tirelessly to get him back, and to pressure the Canadian government to do something. So far the Canadian government seems to be dragging its feet. His cousin even created a website to keep people informed, and to try to free him, www.makhtal.org
Once in Addis Ababa, the detainees were interrogated by security officials, including agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. In April 2007, Ethiopia finally admitted having Bashir and the others, but refused to allow Canadian diplomats to see him. Bashir, however, said plenty through smuggled letters and messages. In his letter of May 2007, he says that he was beaten and forced to record a false confession to various crimes. Two months after that, according to Human Rights Watch, a fellow detainee saw Bashir briefly and reported that “he was limping. He had a deep cut in one of his legs. He looked weak. He looked so famished.”
“It was the most natural place to take anyone looking for a site to go and torture and to extract confessions. Ethiopia allows torture of detainees. And that is the modus operandi in renditions.”
More than a year and a half after the renditions, the US government still refuses to respond to questions on the alleged US role.
“I have no knowledge of it nor as official policy can I comment on such matters,” US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer told the BBC.
In 2006 a French woman who was living in Addis left Ethiopia. She had been friends with the opposition politicians. The leadership of the opposition party was jailed in 2005. She visited some of them in prison and took the pictures above. She describes the conditions:
Kaliti is a huge waste ground full of big shacks of iron sheet that look built at random. During the rainy season it is muddy, damp and cold. You are not allowed to check the conditions in which the prisoners are living. Yet some views from outside – see below [above] – give a disastrous impression.
…
According to my experience of stable manager iron sheet shacks are not suitable for horses, they are cold in winter, hot in summer and likely to bring contagious diseases. … where there are iron sheet and food, there are rats… and big ones … flees and parasites prosper.
…
I was surprised to hear than Woizero Birtukan, for example, was sharing a cell with 70 other female detainees.
There is a network of prisons in Ethiopia. She interviews a friend in Maeklawi prison:
AF: So, how was Maeklawi? Tell me how it looks like… inside…
AA: Conditions are terrible. We were more than 200 prisoners there and only one of us was allowed to go to the hospital daily.
AF: What kind of diseases detainees are suffering of?
AA: You know, coughing, diarrhea… The food is… Well, I have been traveling all around Ethiopia but never saw THAT kind of injera. I could not identify the place it came from. I did not eat it. I had my own food.
AF: I guess they need medical care for being beaten too, no?
AA: Oh yes, of course… broken legs, broken hands…
AF: Did they dare touching you?
AA: No, I was protected because you were coming but others were not that lucky. One of the prisoners even told me they used electric shocks.
And on leaving Ethiopia she writes that it is:
… a police state in which [to] freely express an opinion endangers your life or drives you to prison, a country where young protestors are beaten and shot. I left a jail. … A few days before my departure, a young man told me: “Tell them, tell them how it is to live here, tell them what we endure.”
Human Rights Watch has documented how Kenya and Ethiopia had turned this region into Africa’s own version of Guantánamo Bay, replete with kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons and large numbers of “disappeared”: a project that carries the Made in America label. Allowing free rein to such comprehensive lawlessness is a stain on all those who might have, at a minimum, curtailed it.
These people languishing in Ethiopian jails are caught in something large and evil. This week, on February 16, 2009:
In one of the most extensive studies of counter-terrorism and human rights yet undertaken, an independent panel of eminent judges and lawyers today presents alarming findings about the impact of counter-terrorism policies worldwide and calls for remedial action. The Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, established by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), has based its report “Assessing Damage, Urging Action” on sixteen hearings covering more than forty countries in all regions of the world.
“In the course of this inquiry, we have been shocked by the extent of the damage done over the past seven years by excessive or abusive counter-terrorism measures in a wide range of countries around the world. Many governments, ignoring the lessons of history, have allowed themselves to be rushed into hasty responses to terrorism that have undermined cherished values and violated human rights. The result is a serious threat to the integrity of the international human rights legal framework,” said Justice Arthur Chaskalson, the Chair of the Panel, former Chief Justice of South Africa and first President of the South African Constitutional Court.
The report illustrates the consequences of notorious counter-terrorism practices such as torture, disappearances, arbitrary and secret detention, unfair trials, and persistent impunity for gross human rights violations in many parts of the world. The Panel warns of the danger that exceptional “temporary” counter-terrorism measures are becoming permanent features of law and practice, including in democratic societies. The Panel urges that the present political climate may provide one of the last chances for a concerted international effort to take remedial measures and restore long-standing international norms. The change in US administration provides a unique opportunity for change.
“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats,” said Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, former President of Ireland and current President of the ICJ. “It is now absolutely essential that all states restore their commitment to human rights and that the United Nations takes on a leadership role in this process. If we fail to act now, the damage to international law risks becoming permanent”, she added.
The report calls for the rejection of the “war on terror” paradigm and for a full repudiation of the policies grounded in it.
Ethiopia’s superstar distance runner Meseret Defar, who lost her 5000m world record to Tirunesh Dibaba last summer, evened the score tonight (Feb. 18, 2009) at the GE Galan meeting at the Ericsson Globe Arena in Stockholm, clocking a new world indoor record of 14:24.37. That eclipsed Dibaba’s 14:27.42 from the Reebok Boston Indoor Games in January, 2007.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The Woyanne high kangaroo court today reduced Teddy Afro’s 6-year prison sentence to 2 years, allowing him to go free in 5 months from now.
