Sources say former Secretary of State Colin Powell will endorse Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol told FOX News exclusively on Wednesday.
“He may well give a speech at the Democratic convention explaining his endorsement of Obama,” Kristol, a FOX News contributor, said, citing inside sources.
“This is not an absolute done deal, but these people are very confident that Powell will endorse Obama,” Kristol said, adding that he thinks Powell, a Republican, still has “a high respect” for John McCain, Obama’s Republican rival.
Powell immediately denied the report.
“I do not have time to waste on Bill Kristol’s musings,” Powell told ABC News. “I am not going to the convention. I have made this clear.”
Roll Call executive editor Mort Kondracke, also a FOX News contributor, said he personally has spoken with Powell, who denied the report and said he has made no endorsement decisions, according to Kondracke.
An endorsement by Powell could go a long way to attracting moderates and wayward Republicans to the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
Over the years, Powell himself has been touted as a potential presidential or vice presidential candidate. The former national security adviser served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He was secretary of state for the younger President Bush.
His tenure is most notable for presenting to the U.N. Security Council evidence that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. His presentation led to a resolution endorsing military action against that country, but he later described it as a “blot” on his record.
Powell has unofficially advised Obama and Republican candidate John McCain but had not endorsed anyone. A spokesman said in July that he was undecided.
In April, Powell praised Obama’s response to controversial remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had said the United States brought the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on itself by supporting terrorism and that the government created the AIDS virus to “destroy people of color.”
“I thought that Senator Obama handled the issue well,” said Powell, the nation’s first black secretary of state. “He didn’t abandon the minister that brought him closer to his faith, but at the same time he deplored the kinds of statements that the Reverend Wright had made.”
Obama later turned his back on Wright after the minister courted controversy again with additional comments in public.
Kristol said sources told him Powell will “quite possibly” speak at the Democratic convention on the same night as Obama’s vice-presidential selection and former President Bill Clinton.
“The Obama people are quietly trying to line up a pretty strong convention,” Kristol said. “I think the Obama campaign shouldn’t be underestimated. Obviously anyone would like to have Powell’s endorsement.”
Israeli and American Jewish organizations grapple with the fate of thousands of Falash Mura remaining in Ethiopia.
By Michele Chabin, The Jewish Week
MEVASSERET, ISRAEL — After waiting almost a decade to emigrate from Ethiopia to Israel, Masaret Assafa, who, along with his wife and two children, received the green light eight months ago, tries to focus on his new life in this pleasant absorption village just outside Jerusalem.
Assafa, 32, attends the intensive Hebrew-language ulpan and Judaism classes intended to prepare him and other Israel-based Falash Mura for life as Israeli Jews, but says his heart is still in Gondar, where his recently orphaned sisters and brothers wait for an Israeli emissary who may never come.
As his wife, Asmar, serves spicy coffee and homemade injira, a fluffy Ethiopian bread, in their tiny but cheerfully decorated one-bedroom apartment, Assafa admits that “life isn’t so easy in Israel.
Being in a new culture, learning a new language is hard, but at least here we have food, clothing, a roof over our heads. I worry about my siblings every moment. Do they have enough to eat? Who is looking out for them? When will they be brought to Israel?”
The Israeli government’s announcement earlier this month that the Aug. 5 flight carrying Falash Mura out of Ethiopia would be its last has unleashed an outcry from some community activists and their supporters, who insist that thousands — even tens of thousands — of Ethiopians with Jewish roots should be brought to Israel.
But others within the Ethiopian community and outside say the vast majority of Falash Mura (Christians whose Jewish ancestors converted to Christianity a century ago) are merely opportunists who want to immigrate to Israel for a better way of life, not because they care about Judaism.
The debate, which will decide the fate of thousands of Ethiopians, many of whom have relatives in Israel, is also creating a dilemma for diaspora Jews, who must decide whether to support continued aliyah, even if it means going against the wishes of the Israeli government and many Ethiopian Jews.
Within the Ethiopian community in Israel “there is a lot of disagreement over whether or not to bring more Falash Mura,” concedes Avi Masfin, spokesman for the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews. “Some say the Falash Mura were forcibly converted, and now that they have the chance to live as Jews, we should bring them to Israel. Others view them as Christians, not returning Jews, and say their families are the same ones who made it difficult for us back in Ethiopia, so why bring them?”
One person who thinks Falash Mura aliyah should have ended years ago is Danny Adeno Abebe, an Ethiopian-Israeli journalist.
In a blistering JTA op-ed Abebe calls the Falash Mura “a collection of people looking for handouts trying to pass themselves off as Jews forced to forsake their Jewish faith.” He rejects as “nonsense” the claim that some Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity decades ago.
Other Ethiopian Jews as well as some American Jewish organizations share views closer to that of Yaffet Alemu, a Conservative rabbi who loudly advocates continued Falash Mura immigration. Sitting in the Assafa family’s living room, Rabbi Alemu insists that there has always been anti-Jewish feeling in Ethiopia and it continues to this day.
“Everyone in Ethiopia considers [the Falash Mura] Jewish because they left their villages believing Israel would bring them home and now they have nothing. They have nothing to go back to, and they would face persecution and death if they did.”
Micha Feldman, who was the Jewish Agency’s top expert on Ethiopian affairs for many years and who served as Israel counsel to Ethiopia, agrees that the Falash Mura are in a bind.
“They left their villages and their livelihoods to go to Gondar or Addis, almost always at the urging of family members in Israel, not the Israeli government, and are now dependent on Jewish organizations and the Israeli government,” Feldman says. “They made their own decision to leave, but since then their land has been taken by other families. There’s also the issue of the Ethiopian ‘Code of Honor’: You don’t return to a place you left. Doing so would be humiliating, and it’s not done.”
But Feldman flatly rejects claims that Israel is employing a racist double standard when it comes to the Falash Mura.
“The only group Israel went far beyond the Right of Return for is the Falash Mura,” Feldman says. “If a family converted to Christianity five generations ago and lived as Christians all those years, they cannot claim at least one Jewish grandparent,” the criteria for the Right of Return law. The fact that successive governments have tried to be sensitive to the Ethiopians’ all-encompassing view of what constitutes a family “proves that Israel is not racist,” Feldman says.
Acknowledging that Falash Mura immigration cannot go on indefinitely (“there will always be more who want to come”) Feldman, who works with SELAH, the Israel Crisis Management Center, says the Jewish Agency and other bodies that have supported Ethiopian aliyah have, in the past, discussed ways to help those left behind.
While Israeli officials, under intense criticism, have indicated some willingness — though no promises — to screen another 8,700 Ethiopia-based Falash Mura on a case-by-case basis, the United Jewish Communities (UJC) and other Jewish organizations are grappling with how to meet the needs of the group.
On Tisha b’Av, the Conservative movement launched a campaign to raise funds to feed the nearly 9,000 Falash Mura who relied on UJC food programs after these programs were discontinued on June 30, at the request of the Israeli government.
UJC officials say they are aware of the humanitarian problems exacerbated by their organization’s monthly $68,000 cutbacks, and are discussing the matter with their leadership.
While politicians and fundraisers debate the pros and cons, Masaret Assafa waits for his five orphaned siblings in Gondar.
“My mother died waiting for her dream to be fulfilled,” Assafa says forlornly, staring at a family portrait. “Will the same thing happen to my brothers and sisters?”
Dutch punk outfit the Ex has been a globally aware and politically minded musical force of nature since the late 1970s, but since the late ’80s the band has fervently and organically intertwined that awareness into its musicmaking process. The band has explored folk music from Hungary, Turkey, the Congo, Eritrea, and Vietnam, and has recorded and toured with countless musical collaborators, from Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore and Dutch improviser/composer Ab Baars to vocalist Han Buhrs and a remarkably rich body of work with the late American cellist Tom Cora. More recently, a long-running interest in the music of Ethiopia, and especially saxophonist Getachew Mukuria, resulted in two tours of the East African country, the band extending an invitation to Mukuria to play at its 25th anniversary celebrations in 2004, and eventually ’06’s gorgeous Moa Anbessa recording of Mukuria tunes backed by the Ex plus a horn section.
This month, that group visits America for the first time, and City Paper spoke with the Ex guitarist Andy Moor by phone from his home in Amsterdam about the upcoming string of dates, which brings the big band to the Ottobar Aug. 14.
City Paper: How did you first discover Ethiopian music? Through the Ethiopiques series? I ask only because such music was often hard to come by in the States before compilations and labels such as Crammed Discs made such music more readily available. Andy Moor: We were actually into the music long before the Ethiopiques series. I’ve been listening to African music for 20 years, but maybe about 15 years or 17 years ago I heard this record called Ere Mela Mela by Mahmoud Ahmed–it’s also in the Ethiopiques series now, it’s No. 7, but originally it was released as just an LP called Ere Mela, and that was the first record of that stuff that I heard. And then another one called Ethiopique Groove, which is also on that series now. It was actually put out by the same guy [Francis Falceto] who put out the Ethiopiques series, it was just released earlier. It was before he came up with this idea to do a series, he just put out two LPs through this Crammed Discs label.
So that’s how we first discovered it and really, really liked it when we heard that. And then we used to go to restaurants in Amsterdam because there’s about 10 here, Ethiopian restaurants. And we used to hear all these old, wobbly cassettes that they were playing, and there were all this stuff we didn’t know, so we were always asking the owner of the restaurant what it was. And they would say some unpronounceable name that we never remembered. It actually took a long time before the names actually stuck in our head and we got a bit of an idea of what it was all about. And then we discovered Getachew when we went to Ethiopia and we found a cassette of his music. It was a copy of a copy of a copy, but it really stood out. It was instrumental and it was quite unusual, because most of the pop music is always with vocals are so important to the music in Ethiopian life. Ethiopian people still ask us, “Why are you interested in this music when you don’t understand what the words are about?” And we explain to them that we love the music and we’re also musicians so we’re really listening to it in a slightly different way.
But from that we discovered who he was, and we decided when we our 25th anniversary, which was in 2004, that we would invite Getachew to play at the anniversary and play with the ICP. [Instant Composer’s Pool] So that happened, Francis Falceto, the guy who puts out the Ethiopiques series, he got us in contact with Getachew, and he came over and he played with the ICP. And then we went on tour together in this bus.
CP: The entire big band? AM: Yeah. We did this crazy French tour of a week with about 35 musicians, and Getachew was one of them. And each night he played a solo, and at that time we weren’t playing with him. We were out playing our Ex set but we had one song in our set, which is actually called “Getachew,” and we invited him each night to come onstage to join us, because it was one of his songs that we were doing a version of. And I think he really, really enjoyed that one song every night playing with us. And it was him that suggested, after that, he said, “I want you,”–he called us, “the Ex band,”–and he said, “I want the Ex band to play my music.” So the great thing was that it was his idea, not ours. And then he sent us a CD with 10, just the melody on a saxophone, and we just went into the rehearsal room and tried to figure out how to put arrangements on them. And then he came over and we rehearsed together and played a few gigs and recorded. It’s great for him to be so open about that because he was really not used to our kind of music.
CP: So you didn’t record in Ethiopia? AM: No, we recorded in Amsterdam, but we prepared quite a lot before hand. We listened to the CDs, ’cause quite a bit of the songs are on the CD, [Ethiopiques] No. 14, and we sort of figured out–we did a mixture of trying to sort of not copy but get a similar idea to what is on his CD but also our own sound and also our own ideas. And he was very open. Whenever we came up with a new idea for one of his songs, he was totally into it.
CP: How was it playing in Ethiopia when you went over there? AM: Well, the first time we toured there was four or five years ago, and at that point we knew who Getatchew was but we had never met him. He was just this kind of legendary figure to us. So we didn’t really know him and we didn’t meet him on that trip either. But we did a kind of mixture of our songs and some Ethiopian songs, but we didn’t play with Ethiopian musicians on that tour. That was more us playing our own stuff to Ethiopian people. We did two tours like that, one time doing a circle in the north and one a circle in the south.
CP: How did audiences respond to the shows? AM: A mixture of amusement, really excited, kind of, and I think very happy that we choose–this weird Dutch band–choose to come all the way over and also play some Ethiopian songs. It was like a celebration in a way, it felt a bit like a spectacle also. For them it must have been quite bizarre, but there was something quite real about it. And they way we played, I think they sensed our energy and enthusiasm–we really, really liked this music. We weren’t just doing it as a kind of show or something. For us it was really, kind of, you know . . .
CP: Sincere? AM: Exactly. And we mixed it with our songs. And they actually really, really liked our songs. We were wondering a bit how they would react to our songs. We thought, Let’s choose the sort of more melodic songs in our set. But we did a few of the crazy ones, and the crazy songs were the ones they loved the most. They really went for the kind of energetic, rhythmic–I think they just liked the power and the energy of it. I guess the music was so bizarre for them anyway. But maybe not. Maybe they . . . I don’t know. It’s very hard to imagine how Ex music, that has evolved over 25 years at that point, how they’re going to respond to it. Because they haven’t had any history of punk ever get in there. I think they’ve had a bit of hip-hop, a bit of R&B, a bit of soul, and in the ’60s they had the whole James Brown thing and all that stuff, but I don’t think they ever heard a punky guitar band like that. So I think for them it was a new kind of sound but with a similar energy, a recognizable energy anyway.
CP: I imagine you weren’t playing in rock clubs anyway. AM: No. We weren’t really playing in clubs at all. We were playing in public spaces more like. On the stairs of a theater we played. And, basically, on a giant podium in a big outdoor square, which is right next to a sort of service station, but where about three or four thousand people came. And then we played in a giant old cow barn, and then in a police community hall. [laughs] It was very odd, mostly not really set up at all for gigs. And actually we had a little sort of generator to power the amps and the PA–we brought our own PA and everything. It was really set up on the day when we arrived into town. We would have to go and meet the chief of police of the town and make a deal with them. We’d say, ‘We’d like to play here. Can you suggest a place?’ And they would suggest a place. That’s how we ended up in the police community hall once, because that was what the chief of police of that town offered. And sometimes they would ask for $50 for us playing, and other times they didn’t ask anything. And then we would drive around advertising the gig just with a megaphone and sticking posters up on the day of the show.
CP: Now that’s DIY. AM: [laughs] Yeah. And the thing is, we didn’t charge any money for it. There was no point asking any money for this. We got a bit of help from the Dutch government, they helped fund it a bit. But basically, it would have been crazy to try and charge an admission. It would have been ridiculous.
CP: I read, I think inMoa Anbessa’s liner notes, that you also had cassette copies of the album made because CDs aren’t what people listen to in Ethiopia. AM: Yes, in Ethiopia music is still mostly sold on cassette. So we just made 10,000 cassettes and pretty much sort of left them there and left it up to them a bit to see how it goes. But basically, if you want to buy music there, you go around to shops, and there are CDs for sale, but they’re a little bit too expensive. People still can’t really afford to buy them and CD players. And all the taxi drivers have cassette machines, so actually what we did was we went to the main taxi stand in the piazza and we just gave loads of the taxi drivers cassettes. So basically they drive around the whole city playing our cassettes, it’s a really nice.
CP: Do you still find copies of copies of cassettes in public markets there? I’ve still seen that–or CDR bootlegging–in places I’ve been to recently. AM: When we were first there it was extreme. You had copies of sort of 10th generation, and they were beginning to sound pretty bad. All the cassette shops aren’t allowed to do that anymore. There are some copyright laws there, but it happens still. But basically, there’s 10,000 original cassettes there [of the album], and God knows how many copies. There’s nothing we can do about that, and that’s the whole point. That’s fine, that’s the way music gets spread there.
CP: Do you have any idea of how it’s been received in Ethiopia, what people think of it? AM: Well, the thing is most of the songs that we played are very old songs by Getachew, and half of them aren’t even his songs, they come from traditional Ethiopian songs. They’re either a war song or a certain scale that he plays. It would be the equivalent of an Ethiopian band coming over and playing really, really old blues numbers. People know most of the songs anyway. This is another version, and that happens a lot in Ethiopia. A lot of the singers and the pop stars they sing a new version of an old tune. That tradition is still really strong there. And there’s some great tunes there.
CP: You joined the band in the early 1990s, correct? AM: Yeah.
CP: That seems to be the time when–now, I’ve since become familiar with the band’s entire output, but I really didn’t start being that familiar with the Ex at all until the late 1980s–but it seems like over the ’90s the band really started broadening its ideas and sound through collaborations and exploring the music of other cultures. AM: I think the Ex was always into playing with guests and other musicians, they’d always done that, and I think it just became wider and wider. As our access to different kinds of music from all over the world became easier and easier, we got exposed to much more music. And when I joined I was really into East European music and African music. I always had a lot of those records. So the great thing when I first joined [the band], the moment I joined also Tom Cora joined, and he was also into that sort of stuff. So it was a perfect chance to explore these areas.
It wasn’t so much that we had a strategy with that. I think it was more–again, when anyone has an idea and they throw it into the pot, we try in the rehearsal room and it either works or it doesn’t work. And when it works it ends up in a gig, and even in the gig we can try it a few times and we can lose it because it doesn’t get better. So that just grew from a very early stage.
CP: I was going to ask about access because, although there has always been a great deal of music from other cultures on LP, the availability of it now seems so much more vast, and I didn’t know if being in Europe has given you and the band better access to explore such music through travel or just proximity to so many different cultures. How did you first start getting into such music? AM: I felt like I heard a lot of rock music and I kind of knew it. It wasn’t so easy to hear new stuff that I liked anymore. I remember at university I was studying anthropology and I suddenly was given access to the music library and hundreds of records of traditional music from all over the world, and I suddenly felt, ‘My god.’ First of all, I didn’t realize that people were actually recording music from all over the world–I didn’t know that existed. And then when I started listening to it, some of it was bizarre music. And I guess I don’t have one specific style of music that I’m interested in, and suddenly there was this whole area of music that I never heard. And that’s continued–it’s endless. In a way, now, especially, we have such incredible access to music. You can’t say that you’ve heard it all or that you can’t find any music out there that you like. That’s ridiculous, it’s impossible. I think I’ll never have enough time in my life to hear all the great music out there. Of course, a lot of it’s awful, also, so you sort of choose the stuff that you like.
But I think keeping that sort of openness, of looking out for stuff all over, is part of it and probably part of what keeps the Ex fresh. We’re not just a bunch of people sitting at home listening to punk records. We never listen to punk records anymore. Occasionally I’ll listen to an old Fall song or a Birthday Party song, because some of them are really amazing. But most of the music is either new stuff that is just coming out that I’m checking out or electronic music and dubstep or dub African music. All that stuff can go back into the band when we play without it having to sound like that. It’s more like influences that trickle in.
CP: Plus, it’s rather humbling and cool to realize there’s so much music out there that you haven’t heard or responded to before at all. AM: Exactly. And with each area you can touch the surface or go really, really deep into it. And to go really deep, you need time. You need to listen to it again and again. It’s not something that you can just study. You’ve actually got to listen to the stuff and get to know it, and that takes your lifetime for one style or even one country of music. So, in a way, it’s endless. It’s great, it can be a bit overwhelming as well, but it’s also fantastic. We’ve been listening to Ethiopian music for a long time, and this project is in that area, but at the moment we’re planning a new project with a new bunch of musicians and we don’t know what we’re going to do. And that’s so great. Every time we go to the rehearsal room, it’s a bit of a mystery and a bit of an experiment, because we have no idea how we’re going to sound like the next time.
CP: That has to be a great feeling to share with bandmates. AM: It is. You feel like you’re in a new band each time you make a new set.
CP: So is this the first time the Ex has brought this project to the States? AM: With this group, yes. And it’s the first time Getachew has ever been in the States. And the great thing is we’re playing in Washington, where there’s a massive Ethiopian population. And we heard in Baltimore there’s quite a big Ethiopian population, so we’re hoping some of those people come. We went to Washington and we went to restaurants and put up leaflets and stuff, but we have no idea whether the people will actually go for it because it’s in a rock club and stuff. It’s hard to say. But that would be great if Ethiopians came. For some Ethiopians it’s old music, to the young kids, but when we told people about it they were really excited. Some people thought Getachew wasn’t even alive anymore, so to hear that he was alive and playing in their city, that was really good news.
ROCHESTER, MN—“Why the hell are you messing with my country’s political affairs?” goes a typical e-mail from the dozens I’ve received this summer from readers living in Ethiopia, from immigrants living in Minnesota, and from throughout the Ethiopian diaspora.
And this was among the milder messages to ping my inbox.
To a degree I’ve never before experienced as a journalist, articles I’m publishing about human rights abuses in Ethiopia—based on interviews with Ethiopian immigrants living here in Minnesota—have triggered profusely grateful e-mails, and yet also a torrent of messages scorching me with bitter denunciations, extremely pungent abuse and amorphous threats.
“You are only spreading hate,” an Ethiopian reader snapped after reading an article about the Ethiopian army wiping out entire villages in the country’s Ogaden region. On Ethiopian web sites around the Internet, my articles are bashed as often as they’re lauded.
To admirers, my writings make me a “hero,” a “journalist of integrity” and “a voice for the voiceless.” But to others I’m a “very sad,” “naïve” and “mediocre” journalist who is “fed by propaganda” churned out by bitter Ethiopian refugees. To detractors my pieces are “nonsense,” “rubbish” and “eye-gouging lies.”
Sometimes, it’s scary to scan my inbox.
“I was shocked when I read your article,” one e-mailer wrote. “You will be held accountable for your lies.” And I’ve read Web site comments in which readers from various Ethiopian ethnic groups, responding to my articles, attack each other using language so violent that I won’t repeat it here.
How to respond to all this? On the one hand, I completely reject the notes that use language simply to slash, bash or stab another person as if with machetes, clubs and spears. These aren’t conversations, but armed assaults.
On the other hand, behind the frustrated tone in many of the notes, I discern eminently sensible and fair questions. These come from people who’ve grown cynical after decades of manipulation by their governments and by both the U.S. and Ethiopian media, and they deserve sincere answers.
Answers to questions such as: All right, why the hell do I mess with Ethiopia’s domestic affairs, anyway?
After all, I am not Ethiopian. I don’t speak any of Ethiopia’s six or seven major languages, or its several dozen smaller ones. I’m fascinated by the country’s complex history, politics and culture, but I’ve only travelled there once, in 2004, on a reporting trip, and stayed for less than a week.
Plus, as my aggrieved readers take pains to tell me, my own country is hardly a shining paragon when it comes to human rights.
So what gives me—a citizen of the nation that brought us the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other atrocities—the slightest right to parade Ethiopia’s human rights crimes before the world?
To those who’ve written to me in the spirit of a mutually respectful conversation, as opposed to a broken-bottle brawl, I’ll try to explain.
All right, why the hell do I mess with Ethiopia’s domestic affairs, anyway?
Basically, I believe that writing about human rights in Ethiopia, even while I remain living in Minnesota, is potentially useful and journalistically defensible for three main reasons.
First, Minnesota and Ethiopia are intricately linked by our cultures, histories, economics and politics. I don’t accept that they are distant or unrelated in any significant way. For example, take the simple fact that for the past several decades, Ethiopians have been immigrating to Minnesota to escape persecution by their own government. What is that if not a profound relationship?
Some 20,000 Ethiopian immigrants now live in the state, which has one of the largest and most politically active Ethiopian diasporas in the world.
So my articles, in a sense, simply report on what I see and hear right here in my home state of Minnesota. I talk to Ethiopian immigrants about what they are hearing from their friends and loved ones back home. Honestly, I not only hear stories about human rights abuses in Ethiopia in these interviews, but I feel the deep trauma that has followed immigrants all the way to Minnesota, as they rebuild their lives.
As for accounts of Ethiopian government oppression that I gather, I try to verify them through multiple interviews, through global e-mails and telephone calls, Internet research, and so on.
At the national level, too, America and Ethiopia are profoundly linked. For example, many of the same emailers who lecture me to “mind my own country’s business,” also take pains to remind me, correctly, that America is a major foreign aid donor to Ethiopia—including military aid to help build, support and train an army that enforces violent policies against Ethiopian citizens. This implicates every American citizen, I would argue, very directly in Ethiopian government policies that increase suffering.
Our two countries are also closely connected economically. Many U.S. corporations—including Mobil, Starbucks, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, Hilton Hotels, Eveready Batteries, and Ernst & Young—do business in Ethiopia. Ethiopian tourism benefits from American visitors, and the country’s main export, coffee, rests largely on sales to the gigantic U.S. coffee market.
I am a human rights journalist. By this I simply mean that I subscribe to the idea of human rights, that all human beings have the right to live free from abuse, cruelty and oppression.
With our two countries interdependent in so many ways, how could anyone sustain the argument for journalistic quarantine to my home state?
Second, I am a human rights journalist. By this I simply mean that I subscribe to the idea of human rights, that all human beings have the right to live free from abuse, cruelty and oppression. I try to create journalism that contributes to the support and expansion of global human rights.
I believe the development of human rights is one of the rare bright spots in recent human history. It offers precious evidence of mankind’s moral progress, against a great deal of evidence supporting the opposite view.
One way that journalists can help sustain human rights progress, I believe, is by morally engaging with people who live in countries at great distances from their own. Theoretically, this should be more possible than ever today, with so many new technological means to communicate across borders.
To a large degree, I view my journalism about Ethiopia as an effort to define, develop and refine the skills of global moral engagement.
But all that sounds very abstract.
The most important reason that I write stories about human rights abuses in Ethiopia isn’t about theories of interdependence or human rights.
As a journalist, I just feel it’s my job.
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Douglas McGill has reported for the New York Times and Bloomberg News—and now the Daily Planet. To reach Douglas McGill: [email protected]
BAIDOA (Garowe Online) — Fierce fighting erupted in parts of southern Somalia on Tuesday, as Ethiopian Woyanne occupation forces traveling along a key road were ambushed different times by Islamist guerrillas, Radio Garowe reported.
The fighting was concentrated in Lower Shabelle region, with locals near the Baledogle airstrip reporting of “heavy bombardment” and “many casualties.”
At least 10 people – including civilian bystanders, Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers and insurgents – have been reported dead so far and many more wounded.
Ethiopian Woyanne troop reinforcements were dispatched from Baidoa and Afgoye towns, with emerging reports indicating that an Ethiopian Woyanne convoy was ambushed separately in Burhakaba district, in Bay region where Baidoa is located.
An Ethiopian Woyanne occupation army truck hit a landmine and exploded in Burhakaba, according to local sources.
The ambushed force was traveling on the road that links the capital Mogadishu to Baidoa, where the country’s federal parliament is based.
Collectively Black Americans are the richest blacks in the world. But, only two Black Americans can claim a nine-figure income. Times are changing and Black Africans are making more money than Black Americans and have made it onto Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest billionaires. At the top of Forbes’ list, Warren Buffett’s $62 billion ranks him as the world’s richest man. Of the world’s 1125 wealthiest individuals, Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu ranks second with $60 billion. Despite being worth $58 billion, $2 billion more than last year, Microsoft’s Bill Gates is now just the world’s third-richest person.
Ethiopian-born Mohammed Al Amoudi is the richest Black person in the world with a total net worth of $9 billion [Some of it is stolen from the people of Ethiopia in partnership with the Meles crime family]. Al Amoudi is ranked 97th on the Forbes list and followed by billionaire Blacks such as Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote ($ 3.3 billion), America’s Oprah Winfrey ($2.5 billion), London-based Sudanese national Mohamed ìMoî Ibrahim ($2.5 billion) and South African Patrice Motsepe ($2.4 billion). BET founder Robert Johnson’s divorce dropped him to just a $1 billion fortune.
Al Amoudi made his fortune in construction and real estate before betting on Swedish and Moroccan oil refineries. His Svenska Petroleum conducts oil exploration from the Nordic shelf to the Ivory Coast. He is the largest private investor in Ethiopia, putting money into such diverse assets as a hotel, gold mines and a food processing plant.
At the age of 21, Aliko Dangote became a stock trader off a loan from his uncle. After he built his company, The Dangote Group, into a conglomerate with interests in sugar, flour milling, cement and salt processing, he struck gold when his sugar production company was listed on the Nigerian stock exchange last year. The Dangote Group dominates the sugar market in Nigeria and is the country’s largest industrial group. Dangote is ranked the 334th richest man in the world.
Oprah Winfrey is 215th on Forbes’ 2008 list. The queen of American media’s show will run through the 2010-11 season. She launched The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1986. It is now aired in 110 countries and draws 30 million viewers a week in the U.S. Oprah owns Harpo Studios and property in Hawaii, Illinois and Santa Barbara. She gives to needy women, children and families via Oprah’s Angel Network and her personal charity, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation.
Sudanese-born Mohamed “Mo” Ibrahim ranks 462 on Forbes’ 2008 list. A communications entrepreneur, Ibrahim founded Celtel, a mobile phone company that now serves 15 African countries. Sold it in 2005 for $3.4 billion, pocketing $1.4 billion. The London resident now spends his time on philanthropy and investing in Africa. He created Mo Ibrahim Foundation to award monetary prize to former African heads of state that have shown exemplary leadership in such areas as promoting political freedom, and awarded first $5 million prize in October.
Johannesburg mining magnate Patrice Motsepe is South Africa’s first Black billionaire. Born in the sprawling Black township of Soweto and then trained as a lawyer, Motsepe has grown in business and dubbed the ìprince of minesî by many because of the vast fortune he has amassed through his company African Rainbow Minerals (ARM). Motsepe bought low-producing gold mine shafts in 1994 and turned them profitable by using a lean, and mean, management style. Now, not only is he the executive chairman of ARM, but he also holds a 42 percent stake in the company.
The Robert Johnson everybody knows is now only the 1,062nd richest person in the world. Founder of Black Entertainment Television, Johnson became America’s first Black billionaire in 2001 by selling BET to Viacom for $3 billion. His ex-wife, Sheila, took a big chunk the following year in a divorce settlement. Johnson is rebuilding his fortune with hotel investments and now owns interest in 100 hotels. He is the first person of color to hold a controlling interest in an American professional sports team: basketball’s Charlotte Bobcats. Other investments include: recording studios (Three Keys Music), and restaurants (Posh). Johnson has pledged $3 million to jumpstart a $30 million investment fund for Liberia.
