EDITOR’S NOTE: In the case of Ethiopia, the Woyanne dictatorship is purposely impeding Information Technology development in the country by outlawing private sector ownership of Internet services. The state-run Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation (ETC) that is the sole provider of Internet services in Ethiopia is led by an illiterate Woyanne cadre named DebreTsion GebreMikael who knows nothing about technology. His main assignment as head of the ETC is to hire Chinese engineers to jam short wave radio programs such as the VOA and block access to web sites such as EthiopianReview.com. As long as Africa continues to be ruled by World Bank-financed thugs like Woyannes, there will be no progress.
NAIROBI, KENYA – Africa’s lack of appreciation of the internet and web technology is a key impediment to the realization of e-commerce, delegates attending an e-commerce conference here said Monday. This is second to poor ICT infrastructure, blamed for the poor connectivity in the continent, currently standing at a mere 5.3 per cent for the 955 million Africans.
This has in turn worsened the ever widening digital divide even as countries suffer from the lack of proper online inventories of products for key sectors like a griculture and tourism.
E-commerce is also still illegal in most African countries that do not have proper legislation with the exception a handful of countries like South Africa, Rwanda and Egypt, the participants said.
The conference is the second in a series of four e-tourism conferences and train ing seminars organized by e-tourism Africa.
It drew students, tour operators and government players from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Seychelles and Ethiopia and follows a similar one held in Johannesburg in September 2008.
Kenya Tourism Minister Najib Balala, while opening the two-day event, lamented that it was a shame that Kenya’s legislative framework on e-commerce was not yet in place.
This is despite the fact that e-commerce was now the key economic driver of tourism sectors globally attracting more than Sh 110 billion (72 Kenya Shillings = US $ 1) in online revenues from the potential over 1 billion internet users.
“Online shopping is the world’s main activity with travel and destinations being the best selling commodity on the internet,” Said Damian Cook, Managing Directo re-tourism Africa.
“He revealed that up to 70 percent of all travellers admit to using the internet as their primary source of information, making the management of such information more important than just its provision.
The e-commerce framework is among issues addressed in the pending Kenya ICT Bill, which is awaiting second reading in Parliament.
The bill is needed to, among others, provide laws to regulate online transactions and electronic banking services critical to growth of key sectors like tourism .
“If all fails, we will consider petitioning the president to decree the law in order to hasten the passing of the bill and fast track the adoption of e-commerce in the country,” said the minister.
If need be, he added, the two ministries would push for a separate e-Transactions bill to hasten the process.
“Tourists can at the moment check our products and choose destinations online but we need to take this a step further by allowing price negotiations and booking right away,” he said.
The Tourism ministry, he said, was fast integrating new markets into the country’s promotion strategies to attract more arrivals.
“We are investing heavily in internet dynamics such as having our website available in a number of languages and making it linkable to local and international operators’ sites,” said Balala.
The country, he revealed, was now marketing to new source markets in Russia, the Middle East, India and China in a bid to beat competition from Asia and the Caribbean.
“We are also keen to increase our domestic potential such as South Africa where regional and domestic tourists number 7 million out of the 9 million arrivals annually.”
With a marketing budget of Sh 1.5 billion, Balala said the ministry had earmarked Sh 400 million in shoring up its traditional source markets in Europe such as United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland.
“Some 500 million will also go to developing new markets in Russia, the Middle East, India and China with a similar amount being spent on France, Spain and Italy,” he said, adding that the ministr y was also in the process of re-classifying hotels in the country to address the waning standards in the sector, while seeking to create a tourist data pool with the ministry of immigration.
“We intend to install data collection IT tools at entry points to provide up to date information for future planning.”
Among other projects, he said, the government had purchased a two-acre plot of land at sh 45 million to relocate beach traders at the coast, alongside seeking investors to develop viable public beach market.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a glorious moment for the people of Somalia. A job well done for kicking Woyanne invaders out of your country. Ethiopian Review sends heartfelt congratulations to Somali freedom fights who stood up and fought the Woyanne fascist forces. The same fates await Woyannes in Ethiopia. They will be kicked out of our country too soon by EPPF, OLF, ONLF and other Ethiopian freedom fighters.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — SOMALIA’S FRAGILE government appears to be on the brink of collapse. Islamist insurgents now controls large parts of southern and central Somalia – and are continuing to launch attacks inside the capital, Mogadishu.
Ethiopia Woyanne, which launched a US-backed military intervention in Somalia in December 2006 in an effort to drive out an Islamist authority in Mogadishu, is now pulling out its troops.
Diplomats and analysts in neighbouring Nairobi believe the government will fall once Ethiopia Woyanne completes its withdrawal, and secret plans have been made to evacuate government ministers to neighbouring Kenya.
That may happen sooner rather than later. A shipment of Ethiopian Woyanne weapons, including tanks, left Mogadishu port last month as part of the withdrawal. Bringing the equipment back to Ethiopia by land would have been impossible – analysts believe Ethiopian Woyanne troops and their Somali government allies control just three small areas in Mogadishu and a few streets in Baidoa, the seat of parliament. There are now estimated to be just 2500 Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers left inside Somalia, down from 15,000-18,000 at the height of the war.
Somalia’s overlapping conflicts go back, at the very least, to 1991, the year the country’s last recognised government was overthrown. Men and women who were children then have since given birth to a second generation of Somalis who have known only war.
But analysts believe Somalia is now in the midst of its worst ever crisis. The ongoing conflict, which has claimed the lives of at least 9000 civilians and forced more than 1.1 million to flee their homes, has combined with devastating droughts and rocketing food prices to create one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.
Almost half the population – 3.2m people – are in need of emergency aid (the figure has almost doubled in the last 12 months). One in six children is thought to be malnourished.
“This crisis is broadening as well as deepening,” said Mark Bowden, the head of the UN’s humanitarian effort. “It is now the world’s most complicated crisis.”
Violence and insecurity have made it almost impossible for aid to get through, and 24 aid workers have been killed in Somalia so far this year. A recent shipment of food aid needed a military escort to navigate Somalia’s pirate-infested waters. But within hours of the food being unloaded in Mogadishu’s port most of it was stolen by gun-toting gangs.
Oxfam, Save The Children and 50 other aid agencies working in Somalia last week said the international community had “completely failed Somali civilians”.
As the crisis worsens thousands are trying to leave the country every week. Around 6000 people are now crossing the border into Kenya every month – despite the Kenyan government’s decision to close the border. Some are arriving at the overcrowded Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya, which is now one of the largest refugee camps in the world with nearly 250,000 people.
Others try to leave by sea, travelling to the northern town of Bosasso and paying $100 to people smugglers who ram more than 100 people onto a small fishing boat and set sail for Yemen.
Many do not make it. Smugglers last week forced 150 people off the boat three miles off the Yemeni coast. Only 47 made it to shore.
Attempts to find a political solution have stalled. The UN claims progress has been made, citing an agreement signed in neighbouring Djibouti by the Somali government and the opposition Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS).
But the deal has been signed only by the moderates on each side: Prime Minister Nur Adde and the ARS’s Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
President Abdullahi Yusuf, a former warlord who controls the government’s security forces, has refused to get involved. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the hardline Islamic leader of another faction of the ARS, has denounced the deal, as have the leaders of the insurgents, a group called Al Shabaab.
Since the deal was struck in June, the level of violence has increased.
Few Somalis will weep if the government falls. In most respects it is a government in name only. Few ministries have offices, let alone civil servants to fill them. There are no real policies – and no real way to implement any.
Worst of all, this government, which is backed by the United Nations and funded by Western donors including Britain and the EU, has been accused of committing a litany of war crimes. Its police force, many of whom were trained under a UN programme part-funded by Britain, has carried out extrajudicial killings, raped women and fired indiscriminately on crowds at markets. Militias aligned to the government have killed journalists and attacked aid workers.
The government’s fall would mark the end of a disastrous US-backed intervention. For six months in 2006, Somalia was relatively calm. A semblance of peace and security had returned to Mogadishu. The reason was the rise of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a loose coalition of Islamist leaders who had driven out Mogadishu’s warlords.
Hardline elements within the UIC vowed to launch a jihad against Somalia’s traditional enemy, Ethiopia. The US viewed the UIC has an “al-Qaeda cell” – a belief not shared by the majority of analysts and diplomats.
Ethiopia Woyanne, with the support of the US, sent thousands of troops across the border to drive out the UIC. It took just a few days to defeat them. Their leaders fled towards the border with Kenya, while many of the fighters took off their uniforms and melted into Mogadishu.
Within weeks, an Iraq-style insurgency had begun, targeting Somali government and Ethiopian troops. Al Shabaab began laying roadside bombs and firing at Ethiopian troops from inside civilian areas.
The Ethiopians Woyanne responded by bombarding residential areas. Hundreds were killed and hundreds of thousands fled Mogadishu. Human rights groups accused Ethiopia Woyanne of committing war crimes.
The US must now be wondering whether it was all worth it. Western backing for the unpopular Somali government and US support for the Ethiopian Woyanne intervention has created a groundswell of anti-West sentiment in Somalia.
The Islamist leaders they were so keen to oust are the same ones they are now engaged in negotiations with. US officials have met both Sheikh Sharif and the more hardline Sheikh Aweys in an effort to find a peace deal.
Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamists taking control of towns and villages across the country are considered far more extremist than Aweys. “They are real international jihadis,” said one Nairobi-based diplomat. “The Americans’ fear of al-Qaeda in Somalia is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
NAIROBI, KENYA – Sixty-five illegal migrants from southern Ethiopia were seized by police in a container on a Mombasa-bound truck on Monday evening.
One said they paid Sh15.6 million to agents who promised to help them look for jobs in South Africa, via Kenya.
Each paid Ethiopian Birr 24,000, raising questions as to why people who could afford Sh240,000 would be desperate for jobs in South Africa.
Their spokesperson Mesfin Markos, 25, praised the police, saying: “It was dark inside, with no ventilation and no space to move.
We gasped for air, the weak ones fainted. It was then that we started knocking on the container to be freed. We were dying.”
On Tuesday, 33 were taken to a Machakos court in the afternoon and pleaded guilty to being in Kenya illegally.
An Ethiopian conversant with Amharic was brought to help the suspects enter a plea. They appeared before the principal magistrate Julie Oseko, where the court heard their visas had expired.
An Immigration officer confirmed 28 suspects had valid travel documents. Four others who had no travel papers were also charged.
Ms Oseko fined the 33 of them Sh5,000 each or serve three months in jail, then directed that they be repartriated to Ethiopia after paying the fines or completing the jail terms.
Earlier, anti-terrorrrist detectives on Tuesday interrogating the suspects at the Machakos police station.
The arrest exposed what appears a larger syndicate. “Their passports, all stamped at Moyale, showed they entered Kenya between October 3 and 8,” said district police boss Lumumba. They have been in Nairobi as they awaited transport to Mombasa.
Listen the report: [podcast]http://www.voanews.com/english/figleaf/mp3filegenerate.cfm?filepath=http://www.voanews.com/mediaassets/english/2008_10/Audio/Mp3/LCR%20Heinlein%20ETHIOPIA%20NGO%20LAW%202350155%20%20329P%20gg.Mp3[/podcast]
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – Ethiopia’s government The Woyanne dictatorial regime in Ethiopia is coming in for fierce criticism over a draft law before parliament that would prohibit or criminalize many activities of foreign charities and NGOs. VOA’s Peter Heinlein in Addis Ababa reports the bill is almost certain to pass easily in a legislature overwhelmingly controlled by Ethiopia’s ruling party.
Ethiopian Woyanne officials have told western diplomats that parliament will approve a proposed Charities and Societies Proclamation within weeks. The bill would give the government supervisory powers over non-governmental organizations that receive at least 10 percent foreign funding, including money from Ethiopians living abroad.
The text before lawmakers prohibits such NGOs from promoting democratic or human rights, the rights of children and the disabled, and equality of gender or religion. Violators could face up to 15 years in prison and fines up to $10,000.
Foreign NGOs have reacted with alarm to the bill, saying it could make it impossible for them to operate in Ethiopia. A group of ambassadors in Addis Ababa recently warned Ethiopian Prime Minister Woyanne dictator Meles Zenawi that passage of the Charities and Societies Proclamation could mean the loss of untold millions of dollars in desperately needed aid.
The organization Human Rights Watch issued a statement urging Ethiopia’s lawmakers to reject the bill, calling it ‘repressive’. But the leader of an opposition parliament faction, Bulcha Demeksa, said he and like-minded lawmakers are powerless to stop it in the face of an overwhelming ruling-party majority. “The government is going to silence the NGOs and their leadership when they speak about human rights, when they spoke about democratic rights, when they spoke about giving democratic education to the citizens.”
He continued, “The government does not like it, that is why the government wants to silence them, and I am very sorry about it, I am very hurt about it. I wish I could do something about it, because practically all the NGOs are doing something good for this country.”
A senior adviser to the prime minister dictator, Bereket Simon, says NGOs will still be welcome to help fight poverty. But he says the bill is designed to prevent foreign interference in the country’s political affairs. “We need foreign NGOs to participate in poverty alleviation programs and to participate in development works, but we definitely believe the political realm must be left for Ethiopians. That is the prerogative of Ethiopians.”
Tom Porteous, the U.K. country director of Human Rights Watch says laws governing the behavior of foreign NGOs can be positive. But he says the draft before Ethiopia’s parliament is contrary to the country’s constitution. “NGOs should not be immune from accountability, and we would support efforts by the Ethiopian Woyanne government to increase the accountability of civil society organizations.”
Porteous added, At the same time, many other countries in Africa have managed to achieve this without criminalizing human rights activities for example, and in fact this law contravenes not only international and regional African treaties on freedom of association and so forth, but it actually violates Ethiopia’s obligations under its own constitution.”
Ethiopian Woyanne officials, however, say they see nothing repressive or unusual about the draft law. Bereket Simon says NGOs who stay out of Ethiopia’s internal affairs should have nothing to fear. “It is not repressive, because this is a matter that is between Ethiopia and foreigners, so foreigners have their domain, we have our domain. As a sovereign state which runs Ethiopia, we are designing our own law, and any foreigner who is ready to work in Ethiopia should come and see the law, and if it feels comfortable with the law, it can continue to work. If he does not feel comfortable, then we are not going to force them to work here.”
Bereket says the law is aimed partly at what he described as ‘NGOs collaborating with terrorist organizations’. He declined to elaborate.
There are an estimated 3,000 NGOs in Ethiopia. Their combined budgets are believed to be more than $1 billion a year.
Last year, Ethiopia’s Woyanne government expelled the International Committee of the Red Cross, charging its workers with providing assistance to rebels fighting for independence in the country’s Somali region known as the Ogaden. The ICRC dismissed the allegations.
Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous nation, and one of the world’s largest recipients of international aid. The United States is the largest single donor to Ethiopia Woyanne, with aid donations this year expected to top $800 million.
The Woyanne regime in Ethiopia has made an agreement with a retired British colonel to study better ways of training Woyanne thugs (death squads) to control riots. The study was done by Colonel Michael Dewar, who is a former Deputy Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and defense expert.
The colonel’s riot control expertise comes from his several tours of duty in Northern Ireland where the British had long experience in suppressing the civilian population by crackdowns on public meetings, parades, home searches, street harassment and detentions of IRA suspects for prolonged periods.
Dewar’s report says that the riot control troops in the country “at present spend most of their time waiting for riots to happen.” Colonel Dewar organized a think tank that met regularly at the Ethiopian Embassy in London. See Teferra Waluwa’s letter and Col. Dewar’s report here.
JERUSALEM – An unholy dispute over the rights to a rooftop section of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre could bring the entire structure tumbling down, destroying Christendom’s holiest site.
While renovations are needed across the Church, the small Deir Al-Sultan monastery on a part of the Church’s rooftop has reached an “emergency state”, according to engineers who completed an evaluation earlier this month.
The Times has learnt that the two chapels and 26 tiny rooms which comprise the monastery were pronounced in dire need of reinforcement in 2004. They have since deteriorated to the point where engineers now fear they will crash through the roof and into the Church, venerated by millions of Christians as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.
Yigal Bergman, the engineer who led the investigation, reported that the church, situated in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, was in “a dangerous state of construction. The structures are full of serious engineering damage that creates safety hazards and endangers the lives of the monks and the visitors. This is an emergency … also due to the immediate danger to the site that would damage other parts of the nearby churches.”
Local officials are pressing the Church to begin repairs before the autumn’s heavy rains begin, but have stopped short of directly interfering in the Church’s notoriously acrimonious affairs.
The Church has been vigilantly managed by six competing and often fractious Christian denominations — Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian – since an agreement reached under Ottoman law in 1757.
Rival denominations often battle for access or space and the congregation at the annual Easter service sometimes resembles the terraces of a boisterous football match. Under British rule soldiers with fixed bayonets had to separate brawling Christians. To this day the keys to the Church’s main entrance are held by a Muslim family, because the Christians do not trust each other.
The dispute over the the Deir Al-Sultan monastery is a more recent phenomenon dating back to Easter 1970. When the Coptic monks, who had controlled the area, went to pray in the main church and left the rooftop unattended, Ethiopian monks seized the opportunity to change the locks at the entrances before the Copts returned.
Relations between the two groups have remained tense ever since, with the Coptic church refusing to relinquish its claim to the monastery and posting a single monk there at all times. In the midst of a blistering heat wave in the summer of 2002, the Coptic monk on duty moved his chair from its agreed spot to a shadier corner. The move was taken as a hostile manoeuvre by the Ethiopians and eleven monks were hospitalized in the ensuing fracas.
The rest of the Church’s factions have been unable to mediate between the two groups, even in the case of minor repairs or renovations to the rooftop. Earlier this month, Archbishop Matthias, head of the Ethiopian Church in Jerusalem, wrote a letter to the Israeli Interior Ministry and the Bureau of Jerusalem Affairs describing the dire state of affairs.
The Archbishop stated in the letter that he did not recognise the right of the Coptic church in any part of the disputed area. He said, according to the Haaretz Hebrew daily, that it was “inconceivable that the implementation of emergency repairs at the holy site would be conditioned on the consent of the Coptic church.” The Archbishop added that he was turning to Israeli authorities, as a neutral party, to carry out the repairs.
Israel has offered to shoulder part of the cost of repairs, but will only do so if the Christian factions first come to an agreement among themselves.
“We are afraid that if we proceed with the renovations before the two sides come to an agreement themselves we will be accused of favouritism? we are trying to keep our hands clean of the politics here,” said an Israeli Interior Minister official.
The Copts, who are mainly of Egyptian origin, received preferential treatment during Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule. That changed after Israel took control of Jerusalem in the in the 1967 Six-Day war, fought against a combined Arab force, including Egypt. The Copts accused Israel of using its position in Jerusalem to aid the Ethiopians in 1970 in their takeover of Deir Al-Sultan. Nine years later, when Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David peace accords, Coptic officials hoped that rooftop monastery would be restored to them. But Israel is mindful of its sensitive relations with Ethiopia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian Jews lived and were brought to the Jewish state in the 1980s and 1990s.
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus III said: “There is a greater issue here, something that has to be addressed sooner or later. To be honest, so far the (Israeli) government has tried to keep out of the dispute. But now it seems that the government is under pressure to demonstrate concern in helping resolve the issue.”
He added, however, that the Israeli government ultimately had to wait until there was “an internal solution or agreement within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”
The Times has learnt that the two chapels and 26 tiny rooms which comprise the monastery were pronounced in dire need of reinforcement in 2004. They have since deteriorated to the point where engineers now fear they will crash through the roof and into the Church, venerated by millions of Christians as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.