Peacekeeping units from Jordan, Kenya and other countries began leaving Ethiopia in August. The state-run Ethiopian News Agency Monday said the last batch of peacekeepers, a battalion from India, left the city of Mekele on Sunday.
There was no immediate confirmation from the U.N.
The U.N. Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea watched the tense border between the two countries for seven and a half years. The Security Council shut down the mission in July, saying the countries had rejected options for a continued presence.
The U.N. withdrew its peacekeepers from Eritrea in February, after Eritrea stopped the mission’s supply of diesel fuel and threatened to shut down its electricity.
Ethiopia Woyanne and Eritrea have yet to resolve their boundary dispute, which spawned a war from 1998 to 2000 that killed some 70,000 people. Both countries have large numbers of troops on the border, although no new hostilities have broken out.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — Ethiopia on Tuesday condemned Human Rights Watch’s call on the country’s lawmakers to reject a draft law that would give government more control in the affairs of foreign aid groups.
The New York-based rights group on Monday said the Charities and Societies Proclamation to be debated by parliament this month would “criminalise human rights activity and seriously undermine civil society groups.”
Ethiopia’s information ministry said the group’s call “contravenes directly the sovereign power and rights of the Ethiopian people and government.
“Ethiopia’s internal affairs are within the sovereign power and rights of the Ethiopian people and government,” it said in a statement.
It added that HRW call was to “patronise the opinion of the international community” after it called on donor governments to warn Addis Ababa that the law would jeopardise funding.
The legislation would give the government greater control over foreign NGOs and ban them from work related to ethnicity, gender and children’s rights, HRW said.
It would also carry severe criminal penalties for violations, including three to five years of imprisonment for minor administrative violations, the group added.
A man robbed the Foggy Bottom Grocery at gunpoint Friday afternoon and left with more than $500, police and witnesses said.
FB Grocery owner Meseret Bekele
At about 1:35 p.m., a black male in his thirties attached a note to the door that said “Be Back in 10 Minutes” before placing a handgun on the counter and demanding money, said Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant John Mitchell and witnesses on the scene.
No arrests have been made in connection with the crime, MPD Public Information Officer Israel James said on Saturday. A University crime alert sent to members of the GW community Friday evening urged anyone who may have information on the crime to contact the University Police Department.
Jaime Molinelli, a veterinarian who lives in Baltimore, said she heard Foggy Bottom Grocery owner Meseret Bekel shouting from her shop’s door.
“I heard her screaming and I looked at him and said, ‘Hey, you!’ and he started running,” Molinelli said. “So I chased after him.”
Molinelli, the daughter of the late Foggy Bottom residents Jimmy and Lucille Molinelli, said she chased the robber from Foggy Bottom Grocery’s location at 2140 F St. to 22nd Street, but stopped when a bystander told her the man had a gun.
“I wasn’t going to catch him anyway,” she said.
Bekel sustained minor injuries, but she was otherwise unhurt, Mitchell said.
Kris Hart, a GW alumnus and owner of the nearby Relax tanning salon and spa, is in the process of buying the Foggy Bottom Grocery. He said Bekel, an Ethiopian immigrant in her 60s, was “shaken up.”
“It’s a terrible thing to happen to her,” said Hart, a former Student Association president. “She just doesn’t deserve it.”
Michael Akin, GW’s director of government and community relations, was also on scene and comforted Bekele.
“Meseret Bekele, the operator of the grocery, has been such an integral part of this neighborhood for so many years,” Akin said. “We are all so grateful that no one was injured.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The starvation in Ethiopia is caused by the corrupt, brutal dictatorship that spends hundreds of millions of dollars to buy weapons that are used to terrorize the people of Ethiopia and neighboring countries. It should be noted that the U.S.-backed Woyanne regime spends over a $1 million per day in its war with neighboring Somalia alone.
Ethiopia needs $266 million to help feed 6.4 million people suffering from food shortages due to drought, an increase of 1.8 million since June, the government said.
Millions of peasant farmers and pastoralists in the Horn of Africa country are struggling to cope with the affects of the failure of the short rains in February and March, known as the “belg,” Mitiku Kassa, the state minister for agriculture and rural development, said today in the capital, Addis Ababa.
“It is unprecedented, the failure of the belg,” Kassa said at a meeting with international donors. “We need additional resources.”
International relief agencies need 270,245 metric tons of food to meet aid needs from September to December of this year. Donors have pledged less than two-thirds of the aid requests made earlier this year, Kassa said.
About 80 percent of Ethiopians rely on rain-fed farming even though the economy has experienced double-digit growth over the past four years. Beyond the number of people needing emergency aid, another 7.4 million people depend on a donor- funded “safety-net” program that provides food to families for at least six months of the year.
Ethiopia, a nation of 78 million people, now has 50,000 tons of food in its emergency reserves, down from 400,000 normally.
Shortages of emergency food reserves hampered the response effort to the drought earlier this year, the agriculture ministry said in a report today.
Food Ration
In July, the monthly food ration to those in need was cut by a third due to shortages of aid, a situation worsened by spiking world food and fuel prices.
While farmers have begun to harvest crops from Ethiopia’s main rainy season from June to September, the government and aid agency officials say they are concerned about food shortages, particularly in eastern Ethiopia.
“We worry the situation remains very fragile in many regions,” said Marc Rubin, the emergency coordinator for the United Nations Children’s Fund in Ethiopia. “Acute watery diarrhea is still at an epidemic level.”
About 30 percent of pregnant and nursing mothers are malnourished in four major regions of the country, the agriculture ministry said in its report.
Ethiopia’s government and international aid agencies have quarreled in recent months about the severity of the drought, with the government accusing some relief organizations of exaggerating its severity in order to raise funds.
The Ethiopian government has increased its estimates of those in need twice since the failure of the rains.
The government in August reorganized the agency in charge of disaster assistance, replacing its director, Simon Mechale, and its spokesman, Sisay Tadesse, and putting the body under the authority of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at [email protected].
NAIROBI, KENYA (APA) – The Kenya police in the Eastern province on Tuesday arrested 65 Ethiopian youths along the Nairobi-Mombasa highway in a suspected human trafficking syndicate, the state owned television, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), reported.
The aliens who had no proper identification papers were packed in a 20feet container when police intercepted the trailer carrying the container at Machakos district in eastern Kenya, (70km south-east of Nairobi).
Police had been tipped about the illegal consignment by a member of the public who heard the yells of the aliens as they hit the walls of the container on the bumpy road, KBC reported.
The area police chief, Patrick Lumumba, was quoted saying that the youths were tightly packed amid the sweltering heat and they could be heard screaming inside the container meant for transit good every time the trailer hit a bumpy part of the road.
While questioned, the Ethiopians said that they were escaping from unemployment from their home country and were heading to South Africa en-route Kenya.
They revealed that another group of 200 Ethiopian youths had used similar tricks to migrate to South Africa, adding that relatives living there had helped them to get jobs in the country.
The youths aged between 20 to 28 years claimed they hail from Southern Ethiopia and were all jobless.
Police have launched investigations into the matter, saying it is unclear how they managed to cross over the border into Kenya without the necessary documents.
