EDITOR’S NOTE: He deserves it. G8 leaders rightly think that his place is outside the door begging for crumbs.
(RTTNews) — The G-8 leaders have sparked outrage after it was revealed they feasted on sumptuous food consisting of a six-course lunch followed by an eight-course dinner at the G-8 summit where the global food crisis was one of the topics high on the agenda.
Just hours after stressing that they were “deeply concerned” over rising food prices and supply shortages, and urging the world to reduce the “unnecessary demand” for food, the leaders of the eight industrialized nations were served 24 different lavish dishes by their Japanese host during their first day at the summit.
Ironically, leaders from Africa — where some of the world’s poorest nations exist — including the heads of Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal, who had taken part in the talks, were excluded from the feast organized by the Japanese government in Hokkaido, according to media reports.
The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses, including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a “G8 fantasy dessert”. Five different wines from around the world, including champagne, a French Bourgogne and sake accompanied the banquet.
The dinner came just hours after a “working lunch” consisting of six courses, including white asparagus and truffle soup, crab and a supreme of chicken.
British opposition politicians and charities have lashed out at the extravagant dishes served out amid growing concern over rising food prices triggered by a shortage of many basic commodities that have led to food riots in many countries.
Dominic Nutt, of Britain’s Save the Children, said Tuesday it is deeply hypocritical of G-8 leaders that they should be indulging in such lavish feast when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal to eat in a day.
Andrew Mitchell, the shadow International Development Secretary, also acknowledged the G-8 has got off to an inappropriate start to its summit, with excessive cost and lavish consumption.
“Surely it is not unreasonable for each leader to give a guarantee that he will stand by their solemn pledges of three years ago at Gleneagles (Scotland) to help the world’s poor.”
by RTT Staff Writer
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EL-ARISH, Egypt (AFP) — Egyptian police shot and wounded an Ethiopian man on Wednesday as he tried to cross the border illegally into Israel, a security official said.
The 28-year-old man was shot in the foot by police south of the border town of Rafah. He had failed to stop following police warnings, the official told AFP.
“He was taken to El-Arish hospital (in north Sinai) for treatment and his condition is stable,” the official said.
This year, Egyptian forces have killed at least 16 people among groups trying to cross into Israel from the Sinai in search of work. The latest casualties included a Sudanese girl aged 7 who was shot dead last month.
Dozens of illegal immigrants, mostly Africans, have also been arrested in the past year.
The 250-kilometre (155-mile) frontier between the two countries is notoriously porous and is often used by drugs smugglers and people traffickers.
Last Monday, gunmen trying to smuggle a group of African immigrants into Israel shot dead an officer in Egypt’s border police.
In February, human rights group Amnesty International slammed Egypt’s use of force at the border.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — The Meles dictatorship in Ethiopia on Wednesday denied Sudanese accusations it had launched a cross-border attack against a police base killing 19 people.
“This simply isn’t true,” Prime Minister the fascist dictator Meles Zenawi’s spokesman, Bereket Simon, told AFP.
On Tuesday, Sudan’s army spokesman claimed Ethiopian forces had attacked a police base 17 kilometres (11 miles) inside Sudanese territory, killing 19 people, including one police officer.
“It is a very long border between the two countries, lots of people cross the border, sometimes minor incidents between locals can happen,” the propaganda chief said.
The Sudanese army spokesman provided no reason for the attack in the Jabal Hantub area of Gedaref state, which lies on the northern part of the long international border.
Bereket said both countries enjoyed good relations. “We maintain good neighbourliness. We don’t know why they are accusing us,” he said.
By Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
The on-going, American-backed atrocity continues to rage in Somalia, where George W. Bush has launched a third “regime change” front in his global Terror War, with the help of one of his many pet dictators, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia.
This week the head of the UN Development Program in Somalia, Osman Ali Ahmed, was shot dead as he left evening prayers at a mosque near his home in Mogadishu. The Bush Administration immediately blamed insurgent factions fighting against the Ethiopian-imposed government; insurgent leaders immediately denied the charge: “All the Mujahedeen are not behind his killing and it is not becoming of them to kill important persons who help the Somali people on whose behalf we are fighting,” said a spokesman for one of the Islamist factions opposed to the Ethiopian-imposed government. Whoever carried out the killing was obviously trying to foment more chaos in the shattered land and derail the fraught and fragile peace process, which has as one of its ultimate goals the withdrawal of Bush’s Ethiopian proxy army.
The brutal conflict in Somalia – which has seen the U.S. bombing of fleeing civilians, “renditions” of innocent refugees to Ethiopia’s torture dens, the usual “collateral damage” from botched “targeted assassinations” by American forces and the cheerfully admitted use of American death squads to “mop up” after covert ops – has been almost entirely ignored by the U.S. media and political establishments. [For copious links to these and other aspects of the U.S. involvement in Somalia, see Willing Executioners: America’s Bipartisan Atrocity Deepens in Somalia.] It has not figured in the U.S. presidential contest at all; neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is in the least bit troubled by this killing spree on the imperial frontier.
Why should they be? After all, both men have pledged to continue the even larger Terror War atrocity in Iraq – McCain more forthrightly, Obama by stealth. The Democratic nominee’s pledge to “end the war” is based on a “withdrawal” plan that could leave a “residual force” of up to 80,000 American troops in the conquered land, training Iraqi security forces, carrying out “counter-terrorism” operations, and providing “force protection” for American interests. Obama has also noted that “we’ve got to make sure that Iraq is stable” before any large-scale pullout: a stance which is a virtual guarantee of a long-term, major American military presence, given the vast societal, cultural and civic ruin the American war of aggression has wrought in Iraq. Thus we can see that despite all the partisan rhetoric and heated disputes over this or that detail, there is, at bottom, a bipartisan consensus in Washington for prolonging the war crime in Iraq in one form or another. How then can we expect anything different for the scorned and abandoned people of Somalia – dying by the thousands and displaced by the millions in a “sideshow” not worth mentioning?
Mike Whitney has an excellent round-up of recent developments in Somalia, along with relevant background, in a very important article that has appeared at CounterPunch and at one of our associated websites, Pacific Free Press. Among many chilling facts and sharp insights, Whitney notes:
Heavy fighting and artillery fire have reduced large parts of Mogadishu to rubble. More than 700,000 people have been forced to leave the capital with nothing more than what they can carry on their backs. Entire districts have been evacuated and turned into ghost towns. The main hospital has been bombed and is no longer taking patients. Ethiopian snipers are perched atop rooftops across the city. Over 3.5 million people are now huddled in the south in tent cities without sufficient food, clean water or medical supplies. It is the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa today; a man-made Hell entirely conjured up in Washington.
Just weeks ago, Amnesty International reported that it had heard many accounts that Ethiopian troops were “slaughtering (Somalis) like goats.” In one case, “a young child’s throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of the child’s mother.”
In another Democracy Now interview, Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, had this to say:
The Ethiopian invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population have built without the government for the last fifteen years. And the militia that are supposed to protect the population have been looting shops. For instance, the Bakara market, which is the largest market in Mogadishu, has been looted repeatedly by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by Ethiopian troops. And the new prime minister of Somalia, Mr. Hassan Nur Hussein, has himself announced in the BBC that it was his militias that—who have looted this place. So what you have is a population that’s hit from both sides: on one side, by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government, which is recognized by the United States, and on the other side, by the Ethiopian invaders who seem to be bent on ensuring that they break the will of the people to resist as free people in their own country…. What you have is really terror in the worst sense of the word, a million people have been displaced that the Ethiopians have been denying humanitarian aid, and the United States which seems to just watch and let it happen.
It’s like there’s has been a calculated decision made somewhere in the world, maybe in Washington, maybe in Addis Ababa, maybe in Mogadishu itself, to starve these people until they submit themselves to the whims of the American military and the Ethiopians, who are acting on their behalf.
Calculated decisions have indeed been made to consign the Somali people to perdition. And they are still being made, in Washington, Addis Ababa – and in Chicago and Arizona, where the two would-be presidents have made it clear that in their administrations it will be business as usual for Somalia – the blood-soaked business of empire.
And that’s no-change you can believe in.
NICHOLAS BENEQUISTA, Globe and Mail
GUBA LAFTO, ETHIOPIA — Berzeghin Hailu answers questions about her life as patiently and thoroughly as a dutiful witness might describe a crime, but she grows silent as neighbours gather to eavesdrop on the conversation. She does not want to unsettle a tacit agreement with other residents of her village that preserves her dignity.
Each day Ms. Berzeghin visits the home of a different neighbour under the pretence of a social call. While they chat in the cool dampness of a mud hut, Ms. Berzeghin patiently waits for a politely offered meal or a care package for her two youngest sons. Increasingly, though, she returns empty-handed.
“I am used to sleeping on an empty stomach, but my youngest boy still cries at night from the hunger,” she says, faintly smiling as her eyes begin to tear.
For years, Ms. Berzeghin has relied on the generosity of others – on the thinly veiled charity of her neighbours and on emergency aid from foreign countries – to narrowly avoid starvation. During the biblically proportioned famine of the 1980s, international aid rescued her from hunger, and though she does not know it, foreign relief this year will again provide what her neighbours cannot. In response to the failure of the spring harvest and the rising price of food globally, the international community will bankroll at least $500-million in emergency relief to Ethiopia, the largest aid effort here in five years.
Fantahun Abate irrigates a field of green peppers in northern Ethiopia. Behind him, sugar cane and banana trees thrive on a collective farm he formed with his neighbours after receiving training and seeds from the Ethiopian government, part of program that receives no foreign assistance.
Like the 10 million other Ethiopians who will benefit from foreign donations this year, her dependency underscores a failing of international aid: Resources are available for emergencies but not for rural development. Now Ethiopia’s recurrent plight and the global food crisis are raising questions about whether donors such as the United States and Canada have had their priorities straight.
“I think we may see a string of humanitarian crises of which Ethiopia is the first,” said David Beckmann, president of Washington-based Bread for the World. “It’s bad in itself, but it’s also illustrative of a period we’re entering into; we’re in for a really rough ride.”
The World Bank has said that part of the solution to the global food crisis must come from greater foreign contributions to agriculture in poor countries such as Ethiopia, where farmers are still dependent on rainfall, still working the same tiny plots of emaciated soil, still sewing the same low-output seeds. Indeed, countries such as Ethiopia must not only feed themselves but produce a surplus in order to meet the 50-per-cent rise in global demand in food expected by 2030.
So far, Canada has responded to the food crisis by offering an additional $50-million in food aid for next year and by removing the last remaining restrictions on how its aid can be used to provide relief, meaning more efficient spending in humanitarian operations. The Canadian International Development Agency, however, has not followed its counterparts in the United States, Britain and France in boosting its assistance for agriculture, which has fallen to about 6 per cent of the aid budget from 20 per cent before 1990, according to a September, 2007, report by the Canadian Food Security Policy Group.
“In light of this seemingly diminishing place for agriculture in CIDA’s current priorities, the FSPG is concerned that CIDA’s agriculture and rural development strategy is being abandoned, ignoring the essential contributions that Canada should be making to reducing rural poverty in achieving the Millennium Development Goals,” the report said.
CIDA spokespeople and Minister of International Co-operation Beverley Oda did not respond to requests for comment.
When Susan Whelan was minister of international co-operation in 2003, she unveiled a policy that would have increased CIDA’s spending on agricultural development to $500-million by 2008. When she was replaced the following year, the policy was dropped.
Ms. Whelan’s inspiration for the policy came partly from a visit to Ethiopia.
“What struck me most about Ethiopia and my visit was that we had not done much to change the way they were producing and dealing with agriculture,” she said.
Becoming a net exporter of food may seem an unattainable goal for a country such as Ethiopia, repeatedly beset by drought, but Ms. Berzeghin and her family testify to how little help they actually require.
Ms. Berzeghin’s daughter, Engocha Asheberow, who lives two hours away by foot, does not ask her mother to perform any charade for help; she gives her mother a few dollars each month, even if that means feeding her own family just once a day.
“I will keep helping her until I have no more to give,” she said while breastfeeding her youngest.
Ms. Asheberow’s small plot has not produced food in months, but she is still able to help her mother because her husband is one of 12 men hired locally by a co-operative of other small farmers who have become more successful since irrigating their land. The 10 hectares are a verdant oasis in the desiccated highlands, with lush banana trees and plump green pepper seedlings sprouting from the dark, muddy soil.
The group of farmers received only training and a few sugar cane plants from the Ministry of Agriculture two years ago. The Ethiopian government spends about $200-million on the program, or 6 per cent of its own revenue, with no assistance from international donors.
When asked what they hope for, most farmers in the northern highlands of Ethiopia will simply answer “rain.”
Ms. Asheberow and her family, however, have seen the possibility of a life less vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather. When asked the same question, she answers, “That there be work, even when there is no rain.”
