On the front line of an invisible Ethiopian famine, government forces stand between the dying tribes scattered across a closed hinterland and outside aid.
The restrictive Ethiopian {www:Woyanne} security regime hiding the worsening crisis in the country’s southern Somali region has infuriated important donors. Western officials privately warn that a damaging stand-off with the country is unfolding.
[It is these same shameless U.K. and other Western officials who are bankrolling the unpopular regime of Meles Zenawi to steal elections and stay in power by committing unspeakable atrocities against the people of Ethiopia and Somalia.]
International relief agencies should be celebrating notable breakthroughs in the rush to stop a fresh wave of mass starvation in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa this week conceded that 6.4 million people were on the brink of death and agreed to open up the worst hit parts of the country to shipments of outside assistance.
But hard-won access to the bleak garrison town of Kebri Dehar in the Somali region, also known as the Ogaden, has unveiled the harsh realities of a regime determined to crush a rebel army.
The government strives to proclaim it has the upper-hand against the vicious insurgency waged by the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The desert raiders have waged a war of ethnic separation from Christian-dominated highlands since peace talks broken down in 2005.
In efforts to bolster its claims to have crushed the group, the government has staged Potemkin scenes in Kebri Dehar. Half-filled hospitals are marshalled by clean but uncrowded schools with plasma screen televisions. Meanwhile the streets appeared to have been emptied.
“The groups have been eradicated and the food is now moving freely,” declared local administrator, Bashir Ahmed Abdi.
Nothing rings true in the boast. Two aid workers were kidnapped near Kebri Dehar just this month and are thought to have been spirited over the border to Somalia. British officials in the town reported it was flooded with Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers as recently as Wednesday. Skirmishes between the army and rebel fighters take place with regularity in the surrounding bush.
Five brigades of the Ethiopian army are based in Kebri Dehar’s garrisons. Those caught in the middle of the war are too afraid to speak out against the government line.
School teacher Abdi Wahadi tried vainly to hide his embarrassment that his class size had been reduced to just six pupils, claiming that 70 were expected to enrol by the end of the week, even though the year started in September.
At the hospital the reluctance to acknowledge the impact of the war was clear in the maternity ward. One lone woman sat with a baby. An aid worker shamefacedly explained that two other women with far more malnourished children had disappeared.
“The others must be taken out,” she said. “I’m not sure where they could have gone because the children are severely malnourished. I hope they are within the city limits.”
A UN official went further. “The people’s movements are severely restricted by the government,” the official said. “If they are starving they get past the roadblocks to get into town; if they have any goats left they don’t go to the watering hole because the army targets these; if they are ill they can’t get into the hospitals to be treated.”
In the town’s market, there are hardly any goods. A diplomat in Addis Ababa said the overstretched Ethiopian army, which maintains an expeditionary force in neighbouring Somalia, has indiscriminately blocked movements in the region.
A government ban on truck has stopped food distribution efforts, according to World Food Programme officials. But it has also cut off supplies of consumer goods and durables that used to be imported from Somalia. “It’s difficult to come here,” said nomad Mohammad Farah, “when we get here we have nothing to sell and nothing to buy.”
Oxfam reported this week that two million people are on the brink of starvation in Ethiopia’s Somali region and that the long-term prospects of recovery were blighted by the loss of 60 per cent of cattle and 50 per cent of goats.
Frustrations over the Ethiopian government’s refusal to throw open the doors to foreign assistance threaten a schism between Addis Ababa and its Western allies. “The events in Somali demonstrate too clearly the flaws in Ethiopia’s willingness to engage with us as government and its actions on the ground,” said a European diplomat. “A lot of governments are awkward on both fronts but by mixing its messages Ethiopia has got away with too much, for too long.”
KEBRE DEHAR, ETHIOPIA – Britain is to withhold future aid commitments to Ethiopia over concerns that its Government is obstructing efforts to help millions at risk of famine in the drought-stricken Somali region in the east of the country.
Douglas Alexander, the Minister for International Development, flew to Ethiopia on Thursday with a proposal committing millions in funds to the vast African nation over several years.
After visiting the Somali region and hearing the testimony of aid organisations as well as evidence of attempts by the authorities to hide the scale of the crisis, Mr Alexander told the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, that he had reconsidered. “In light of our continued concerns, I said I was now not prepared to make a multi-annual commitment,” Mr Alexander said.
At the moment Britain gives Ethiopia £130 million a year in aid.
He characterised the Government’s reaction to the crisis as “deny and delay,” fuelled in part by Ethiopia’s extreme sensitivity to its global image as a famine-stricken nation, which the Government views as an impediment to foreign investment.
Mr Alexander saw the sensitivity at first-hand on his trip to Somali when he was taken to the infant malnutrition ward in Kebri Dehar hospital to see seriously ill mothers and babies being treated.
Aid workers were surprised to find that the most severely malnourished babies and their mothers had vanished from the ward where they had been for several days, leaving only one mother and her fast-recovering child.
The health worker who had taken them to the hospital expressed fears that the children had been spirited away before the minister’s arrival to avoid “embarrassing” press pictures of starving Ethiopian babies.
“I come here every day and they are always here,” the health worker said. “I don’t know where they are now.”
“They’ve hidden them,” an international aid worker with a lot of experience in the region said.
“The Government doesn’t want to acknowledge this crisis because it’s bad for their image. It’s not the image of Ethiopia they want to project. It doesn’t encourage investment.”
Mr Alexander raised the incident later in his meeting with Mr Zenawi. “If it’s true that they moved severely malnourished children, that is unconscionable,” he said. Mr Zenawi promised to investigate, calling the incident “despicable”.
In Kebri Dehar, Mr Alexander also heard concerns from local and international aid workers that the Ethiopian Government was actively frustrating efforts to reach the worst-affected areas of the region, using the insurgency as an excuse – an allegation that Mr Zenawi denied.
Aid agencies are unable to conduct surveys into the scale of need in the region because they require government permission and military escorts, which the Government is failing to provide.
Sometime late Wednesday, a man flagged down a cab, ordered the driver, Tekola Bekele, an immigrant from Ethiopia, to a quiet street, shot him in the back of the head, pulled his body to the pavement and drove away, police said yesterday.
At first, Prince George’s officers had no suspect in the homicide, the county’s 102nd this year, just the body of the cabbie.
But yesterday morning, county police say, an alert patrol officer six miles away spotted a cab matching the description of the one missing from the crime scene. When the officer tried to stop the car in Suitland, the driver fled and a high-speed chase ensued.
With the help of a woman who awoke to the sounds of a man breaking into her home, police caught Christian E. Brooks of Landover in a wooded area nearby.
Brooks, 25, of the 7700 block of Merrick Lane, was wanted on first-degree assault and attempted-murder charges in a recent shooting in the District, police said. He is charged with first-degree murder in Wednesday’s slaying.
Yesterday, cabdrivers and the manager of District Cab Associates, where the taxi driver had worked since 1982, remembered him as a friendly, responsible man who drove his silver 1996 Crown Victoria around Northwest Washington almost every night.
Ariel Emata said Tekola Bekele was the victim, adding that he last saw him Tuesday morning at the company’s Benning Road office, when he stopped by to pay his weekly $48 insurance charge — early, as usual.
“He came in and said, ‘My man, my man,’ ” Emata said. “He called all of us ‘my man, my man’ because he doesn’t know all of our names,” Emata said, chuckling as he recalled his brief visits with Bekele, 53, of Silver Spring.
“Shorty,” as he was known to fellow drivers, had trawled Georgetown and Dupont Circle for fares for more than 25 years.
Emata said Bekele owned his cab and was never required to report where he was working. Prince George’s police say they don’t know where the driver picked up his last customer Wednesday night, but they think the customer was carrying a black and silver semiautomatic handgun when he slid into the back seat. They recovered it when they arrested Brooks and planned to test whether it was used to kill the taxi driver.
Law enforcement sources said that about 11:23 p.m. Wednesday, along the 700 block of Avanti Place, a quiet residential street in Landover not far from FedEx Field, Brooks shot the cabdriver in the head at close range and then left his body on the street. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
Prince George’s Officer Patrick Marron spotted the cab six miles away in Suitland and gave chase. According to police, Brooks bailed out of the cab in the 3600 block of Maywood Lane and fled into a wooded area.
About 1 a.m., a 911 call came from a woman who awoke and found a glass panel of her front door shattered. Luckily, she said, the deadbolt held.
“I heard a noise and thought my cats were creating some kind of commotion,” said the woman, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal. “Honestly, I must have been brain-dead. I didn’t even think about burglary.”
The woman said she thought one of her three cats had gotten outside.
“I was about to go outside, where the guy was,” she said. “It was terrifying. When my brain kicked in, I called 911. ”
It was unclear yesterday whether a public defender had been appointed for Brooks. Attempts to locate family members were unsuccessful.
District and Maryland court records show a number of arrests for Brooks from 2001 to this year on drug and firearm possession, assault and theft counts.
Douglas Wood, an attorney for Brooks when he was acquitted in Prince George’s in May on charges of possessing a handgun, PCP and marijuana, said the case against his client then was weak.
Brooks had been arrested when police responded to a call of someone selling drugs, Wood said. Police did not see the activity but frisked Brooks and found keys to a car in a parking lot nearby. In the glove compartment, which Woods said was searched without a warrant, police found the handgun.
“They took DNA tests from the gun but never bothered testing it,” Wood said.
Said Obama: “Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-el, to save the planet Earth,” a reference to Superman.
McCain joked that Democrats had already begun attacking Joe the Plumber, the Ohio man whom he referred to in Wednesday night’s debate, and claimed “that this honest, hardworking small businessman could not possibly have enough income to face a tax increase under the Obama plan.”
“What they don’t know is that Joe the Plumber recently signed a very lucrative contract with a wealthy couple to handle all the work on all seven of their houses,” McCain said, drawing laughter with the reference to his property holdings.
The two men spoke at the 63rd annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a charity event organized by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York for the benefit of needy children. An estimated $4 million was raised.
The event often draws politicians as speakers and, by long tradition, presidential candidates appear as headliners every four years. In this case, the evening of humor came one night after an intense final debate of the presidential campaign.
McCain lampooned Obama’s primary opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as himself.
“Even in this room full of proud Manhattan Democrats, I can’t shake the feeling that some people here are pulling for me,” he said, before adding: “I’m delighted to see you here tonight, Hillary.”
UNITED NATIONS – Information about the Horn of Africa flowed Wednesday in the half-light outside the UN Security Council, after an uneventful session about Sudan and Guinea-Bissau. Unprompted, the representative of Saudi Arabia denied that his country has shipped arms into Somalia, while Sudan accepted a benign spin of Ethiopian shipments into South Sudan.
Inner City Press began by asking Sudan’s Ambassador, on the record, about reports of Ethiopian arms shipments to Juba and South Sudan, and that the tanks hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia were also headed for South Sudan. He said quickly that the tanks’ destination s being investigated and Ethiopia has provided clarification, ostensibly the weapons are meant for some exhibition in Juba, leaving Sudan’s relations with Ethiopia positive. The connection between this and positions on suspending the International Criminal Court’s proceedings against Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir remain to be reported, on the record.
Earlier in the week, Inner City Press asked Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Michele Montas for any UN response to reports that Sudan has arrested one of the two current Sudanese ICC indictees, Ali Kushayb. The first day, she said those were only reports. Then on Wednesday she said, “I’ve been asked about reports indicating that the Government of Sudan has detained Ali Khushayb for crimes committed in Darfur, which the Secretary-General has noted.If confirmed, this is a welcome step towards the vital need to end impunity and bring to justice those responsible for crimes in Darfur.” Video here.
Inner City Press asked Sudan’s Ambassador later on Wednesday to respond to this UN quote. “Who is she to comment on that?” he asked. “What business is it of hers?”
On Thursday, Inner City Press asked Ms. Montas if she, Ban or joint UN-African Union envoy Bassole had any comment on President Al-Bashir’s so-called “people’s initiative” convened in Darfur, without involvement of armed rebels.Ms. Montas said that Bassole is attending, and that any comment would be made only after the initiative is over. Video here. Sudan’s Ambassador’s review of Mr. Bassole was given, but on an off the record basis.
Just then coming down the second story hallway of the UN was Saudi Arabia’s representative / charge d’affaires, Abdullatif Sallam.“Ask him something,” it was suggested to Inner City Press. As a softball, Inner City Press asked, “What about Saudi Arabia’s role in the Somalia negotiations” — a process that like that in Darfur excludes the armed insurgents, but which has nonetheless been repeatedly praised by the UN.“It is not good,” the Saudi said enigmatically.
Moments later he doubled back and whispered in the Sudanese Ambassador’s ear.“Saudi Arabia denied it has been providing weapons in Somalia,” was the statement that emerged. Thou dost protest too much?
Footnote: the UN’s own press release about Wednesday’s Security Council resolution on Sudan says that 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur. Since many knowledgeable sources use the figure of 200,000 and controversy obtained to the UN’s John Holmes raising the figure to 300,000, one wonders where this 400,000 comes from — inflation?
International relief agencies should be celebrating notable breakthroughs in the rush to stop a fresh wave of mass starvation in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa this week conceded that 6.4 million people were on the brink of death and agreed to open up the worst hit parts of the country to shipments of outside assistance.