US Assistant Secretary of State
for Human Rights and Labour David
Kramer in Addis Ababa
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The United States denied Tuesday accusations that its officers tortured terror suspects detained in Ethiopian jails after Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia.
Rights groups said US and other intelligence services interrogated several people detained by Kenya’s forces on its border with Somalia and transferred to Ethiopia, as they fled Ethiopia’s war with Somali insurgents.
Several detainees, including eight Kenyans released early this month, said they were denied access to legal counsel and their consular representatives as well as tortured by US interrogators.
“The US takes every effort to ensure that any treatment of prisoners is handled in a humane way and any extraditions not be done for people who are subject to torture,” US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labour David Kramer told journalists in Addis Ababa.
“We stress the importance of transparency and the respect of human rights,” he added.
Addis Ababa has also denied claims it tortured the suspects while in its custody.
Ethiopia has released many of the at least 150 people who were in detention there, rights groups say. They include women and children from more than 18 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Separately, Kramer expressed concern over shrinking freedom in Ethiopia and draft legislation which, if enacted, would severely restrict aid groups’ operations.
The Ethiopian army invaded Somalia in late 2006 to rescue Somalia’s embattled transitional government and oust the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which controlled of much of the country’s central and southern regions.
Since then, ICU fighters have waged a deadly insurgency against the Ethiopian and the transitional government forces.
But Ethiopian troops’ retaliations have caused many casualties among Somali civilians.
Since the Ethiopian invasion, about one million Somalis have fled their homes. An estimated 6,500 civilians have been killed.
Aid workers estimate 2.6 million Somalis need assistance. That number is expected to reach 3.5 million by the end of the year if the humanitarian situation does not improve, according to the UN.
In May 2008, Amnesty International accused the Ethiopian troops in Somalia of increasingly resorting to throat-slitting executions, highlighting an “increasing incidence” of gruesome methods by Ethiopian forces that include rape and torture.
Senior official of the Ethiopian People Patriotic Front’s (EPPF) International Council, Ato Sileshi Tilahun, has returned to Asmara after visiting the freedom fighters and their commanders in the field.
Ato Sileshi held talks with EPPF commander Meazaw Getu and several other top leaders of the resistance group, as well as the fighters, at various military camps. He also met with newly arrived troops who have defected from the Woyanne army in Ethiopia.
Arbegna Meazaw informed Ato Sileshi that his fighters have successfully chased away some of the Sudanese troops who have occupied parts of Gondar after the recent give away of land by the Meles regime to Sudan in exchange for security collaboration.
Upon his arrival in Asmara two weeks ago, Ato Sileshi was warmly received by high-level Eritrean officials and held several hours of talks. The discussion included how to further improve the people to people relationship between Ethiopians and Eritreans in view of the long term stability and prosperity of the Horn of Africa region.
During the talks, Ato Sileshi thanked the Eritrean government for providing shelter to tens of thousands of Ethiopians who have fled their country after being brutalized by the Woyanne tribal junta that is controlling the government in Ethiopia.
Ethiopian Review spoke with Ato Sileshi earlier today on the phone from Eritrea’s capital Asmara about his field trip, which he described as successful. Because of some remaining items on his agenda, he has extended his tour by one more week.
PRINCETON, NJ — Barack Obama maintains a lead over John McCain in the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update from Saturday through Monday; the size of the lead varies between seven and 10 percentage points among likely voters, depending on turnout assumptions.
Among all registered voters, there has been fairly little variation in recent days, with Obama receiving between 50% and 52% of the vote over the last five reports and McCain in a range between 41% and 43%. In the current three-day rolling average of registered voters Obama remains ahead by 52% to 41%, exactly the same as Monday’s update. (To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.)
Gallup’s modeling of likely voters indicates the race is slightly tighter if we assume that voter turnout patterns will be similar to those seen in most presidential elections from 1952 through 2004. Using this “traditional” definition of likely voters, which takes into account respondents’ history of voting, as well as their current interest in the campaign and self-reported likelihood to vote, Obama leads McCain by seven points, 51% to 44%. This is tied for Obama’s largest lead among this group since Gallup began reporting likely voters in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.
An alternative, expanded likely voter model shows what would happen if turnout reflects voters’ self-reported likelihood to vote and campaign interest, but is not assumed to be dependent on their voting history. Under these assumptions, Obama leads by 10 points, 52% to 42%. — Frank Newport
(Click here to see how the race currently breaks down by demographic subgroup.)
Can we trust the polls this year? That’s a question many people have been asking as we approach the end of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is yes — with qualifications.
To start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can reach. So they weight the results of respondents in different groups to get a sample that approximates the whole population they’re sampling.
Another problem is the increasing number of cell phone-only households. Gallup and Pew have polled such households, and found their candidate preferences aren’t much different from those with landlines; and some pollsters have included cell-phone numbers in their samples. A third problem is that an increasing number of Americans refuse to be polled. We can’t know for sure if they’re different in some pertinent respects from those who are willing to answer questions.
Professional pollsters are seriously concerned about these issues. But this year especially, many who ask if we can trust the polls are usually concerned about something else: Can we trust the poll when one of the presidential candidates is black?
It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated the margin for the black Democrats who were running — Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder. The theory to account for this is that some poll respondents in each case were unwilling to say they were voting for the white Republican.
It’s not clear that race was the issue. Recently pollster Lance Tarrance and political consultant Sal Russo, who worked for Bradley’s opponent George Deukmejian, have written (Mr. Tarrance in RealClearPolitics.com, and Mr. Russo on this page) that their polls got the election right and that public pollsters failed to take into account a successful Republican absentee voter drive. Blair Levin, a Democrat who worked for Bradley, has argued in the same vein in the New York Times. In Virginia, Douglas Wilder was running around 50% in the polls and his Republican opponent Marshall Coleman was well behind; yet Mr. Wilder won with 50.1% of the vote.
These may have been cases of the common phenomenon of the better-known candidate getting about the same percentage from voters as he did in polls, and the lesser-known candidate doing better with voters than he had in the polls. Some significant percentage of voters will pull the lever for the Republican (or the Democratic) candidate even if they didn’t know his name or much about him when they entered the voting booth. In any case, Harvard researcher Daniel Hopkins, after examining dozens of races involving black candidates, reported this year, at a meeting of the Society of Political Methodology, that he’d found no examples of the “Bradley Effect” since 1996.
And what about Barack Obama? In most of the presidential primaries, Sen. Obama received about the same percentage of the votes as he had in the most recent polls. The one notable exception was in New Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton’s tearful moment seems to have changed many votes in the last days.
Yet there was a curious anomaly: In most primaries Mr. Obama tended to receive higher percentages in exit polls than he did from the voters. What accounts for this discrepancy?
While there is no definitive answer, it’s worth noting that only about half of Americans approached to take the exit poll agree to do so (compared to 90% in Mexico and Russia). Thus it seems likely that Obama voters — more enthusiastic about their candidate than Clinton voters by most measures (like strength of support in poll questions) — were more willing to fill out the exit poll forms and drop them in the box.
What this suggests is that Mr. Obama will win about the same percentage of votes as he gets in the last rounds of polling before the election. That’s not bad news for his campaign, as the polls stand now. The realclearpolitics.com average of recent national polls, as I write, shows Mr. Obama leading John McCain by 50% to 45%.
If Mr. Obama gets the votes of any perceptible number of undecideds (or if any perceptible number of them don’t vote) he’ll win a popular vote majority, something only one Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, has done in the last 40 years.
In state polls, Mr. Obama is currently getting 50% or more in the realclearpolitics.com averages in states with 286 electoral votes, including four carried by George W. Bush — Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and Virginia. He leads, with less than 50%, in five more Bush ’04 states with 78 electoral votes — Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. It’s certainly plausible, given the current state of opinion, that he would carry several if not all of them.
Of course, the balance of opinion could change, as it has several times in this campaign, and as it has in the past. Harry Truman was trailing Thomas E. Dewey by 5% in the last Gallup poll in 1948, conducted between Oct. 15 and 25 — the same margin by which Mr. Obama seems to be leading now. But on Nov. 2, 18 days after Gallup’s first interviews and eight days after its last, Truman ended up winning 50% to 45%. Gallup may well have gotten it right when in the field; opinion could just have changed.
We have no way of knowing, since George Gallup was just about the only public pollster back then, and he decided on the basis of his experience in the three preceding presidential elections that there was no point in testing opinion in the last week. Now we have a rich body of polling data, of varying reliability, available.
And we will have the exit poll, the partial results of which will be released to the media clients of the Edison/Mitofsky consortium at 5 p.m. on Election Day. These clients should, I believe, use the numbers cautiously for the following reasons.
First, the exit polls in the recent presidential elections have tended to show the Democrats doing better than they actually did, partly because of interviewer error. The late Warren Mitofsky, in his study of the 2004 exit poll, found that the largest errors came in precincts where the interviewers were female graduate students.
Second, the exit polls in almost all the primaries this year showed Mr. Obama doing better than he actually did. The same respondent bias — the greater willingness of Obama voters to be polled — which apparently occurred on primary days could also occur in the exit poll on Election Day, and in the phone polls of early and absentee voters that Edison/Mitofsky will conduct to supplement it.
The exit poll gives us, and future political scientists, a treasure trove of information about the voting behavior of subgroups of the electorate, and also some useful insight into the reasons why people voted as they did. And the current plethora of polls gives us a rich lode of information on what voters are thinking at each stage of the campaign. But political polls are imperfect instruments. Reading them right is less a science than an art. We can trust the polls, with qualifications. We will have a chance to verify as the election returns come in.
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Michael Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics 2008” (National Journal Group). From 1974 to 1981 he was a vice president of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, a polling firm.
GENEVA (Reuters) – The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is seeking clarifications from Yemen over a decision to bar Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees from entering the country, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
The UNHCR also said it was concerned about the fate of 112 Ethiopian refugees believed to have been detained in Yemen over the past two weeks.
Ethiopian refuge-seekers rest on a roadside near the
southern Yemeni village of al-Khabar after they arrived on
a smugglers’ boat from Somalia 29 Sep 2008 – Reuters
The UNHCR said the Yemeni Interior Ministry has announced that Ethiopians and Eritreans would be denied entry to the country, which still grants immediate refugee status to Somalis fleeing their war-torn homeland.
“While recognising the generosity already shown by Yemen to refugees and asylum seekers, we are seeking clarification from the government on any changes in policy,” UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told a news briefing in Geneva.
The agency also said that some 87 Ethiopians were known to have been detained in Yemen over the past two weeks, while Yemeni authorities removed a further 25 Ethiopians from a vehicle transporting them to the UNHCR reception centre of Ahwar on Monday.
“We don’t know where they are but fear they were arrested and are being detained somewhere,” UNHCR spokeswoman Astrid Van Genderen Stort told Reuters.
The UNHCR urged Yemen, a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, to maintain access to asylum procedures for all those in need of international protection.
The poor Arab country is struggling to cope with an growing number of asylum seekers smuggled from the Horn of Africa in risk-filled voyages across the Gulf of Aden.
A total of 37,333 people have arrived in Yemen so far this year on smugglers’ boats, and 616 died or were reported missing, according to the UNHCR. The current total is already more than 50 percent higher than in 2007, when 23,000 made it to Yemen.
POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK. – Marist High School senior Girma Segni (Bronx, N.Y.) was named the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Men’s Cross Country Co-Runner of the Week on Monday afternoon. This marks the second time Segni has been given the honor in the 2008 season.
Segni, a native of Ethiopia who immigrated to the U.S. 7 years ago, was the overall winner of the UAlbany Cross Country Invitational on Saturday, running past a field of 186 runners. The senior ran a course record 24:35.2 over the 8K course at the University at Albany, leading Marist to the team title. Marist compiled 23 points, beating Brandeis by 68 points. He shares the honor with Iona’s Andrew Ledwith. Segni also was named MAAC Runner of the Week on September 22 when he shared the award with Iona’s Mohamed Khadraoui.
The Marist men’s and women’s cross country teams will next compete at the 2008 MAAC Men’s and Women’s Cross Country Championships, which will be held on November 1st at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Ethiopian Immigrant Dominates On The Track And In School
Girma Segni travels from his home in the Bronx to Brooklyn every day to attend a Brooklyn High School. But that journey is nothing compared to the one he made in 2001, when he and his three siblings emigrated to the United States from Ethiopia, escaping civil warfare and the political and financial hardships they once endured.
His parents are deceased, so an older brother is now supporting Girma and two other siblings.
“If I work hard I think, ÎI will make him happier because he paid the price for it,’” says Girma.
“To have come from where he’s come from and to have been through what he’s been through and to still succeed at such a high level and persevere, I mean, those are the utmost qualities for success in the future,” says internship advisor Daria Witt.
When Girma first moved to New York, he didn’t speak any English, but he was determined to excel in academics and sports. Today he has a 92.1 grade point average, and is a member of his high school’s track teams.
For the last two years, Girma has been ranked as the city’s fastest high school long distance runner.
“When you’re out there running those miles, your mind is wandering and you want to stop, but you never see that in him,” says track coach Marc Cinamon, “All you see in him is he wants to go further.”
Girma’s also gone far as a leader to his peers. He’s captain of his high school’s cross country team, and he co-founded the African Club.
Girma is also involved with student government, and is a member of the National Honor Society.
“He works harder than almost any student I’ve ever seen in my life,” says math teacher and cross country coach Jay Mellstron.
Girma hopes to become an international civil rights lawyer so he can someday help Ethiopians who are still suffering from political persecution, and he’s already on the right track. He’s interned at the Immigration Defense Fund and was a member of the City Hall Academy, where he acted as a liaison between Ethiopian immigrants and City Hall officials.
He also volunteers as a peer educator, where he helps to increase HIV and AIDS awareness.
“His commitment to the immigrant community and the Ethiopian and African community is very, very strong and apparent in everything he does,” says Witt.
Girma says no matter which college he attends, he knows he’ll achieve his dream of becoming a civil rights lawyer. And he’ll also do his best to achieve his other goal, representing the U.S. in the 2012 Olympics.
“I want to run for America because it’s a free county. It’s my country,” he says.
So, for persevering though personal hardships, going after his dreams, and giving back to his community in New York and Ethiopia, Girma Segni is our NY1/Health Plus Scholar Athlete of the Week. hey
POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK. –