Ato Gizachew Shiferraw, chairman of the UDJ general assembly organizing committee, told Kinijit North America officials that the Meles regime’s security forces have dispersed the party’s delegates on Saturday.
First, the delegates, about 400 of them, went to the Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa Saturday morning. When they were told they cannot hold a meeting there, they went to the UDJ office by several buses provided by UDJ executives. They put up a tent on the front yard of the office and tried to convene the assembly there. After waiting until they finished setting up the tent, two Woyanne security agents (only 2 of them) came and told them to disperse. They did so without any argument. Even sheep and goats put up more resistance. The UDJ leaders and the 400 delegates acted like well-tamed slaves. This is not peaceful struggle. This is a joke. Even worse, this is a willful submission to slavery.
According to Ato Gizachew, there will be another attempt to hold the meeting Wednesday, after making appeals to Woyanne authorities on Monday and Tuesday.
Ato Gizachew, ER has at most respect for you, Wzt. Birtukan Mideksa, and all your colleagues at UDJ. You are real heroes in the struggle for democracy and freedom in Ethiopia. But what part of NO don’t you understand? Woyanne told you in so many words NO you cannot operate freely in Ethiopia. So please for the sake of the people you are trying to help, do not waste your time, energy, and scarce resources on a futile attempt to organize an opposition party inside Ethiopia.
This week alone, you spent over $20,000 trying to hold a meeting even though Woyanne made it absolutely clear to you that you cannot do it. You have tried enough. You paid enormous sacrifices. It did not work. So please follow the decisions made by many of your colleagues in the UDJ and suspend your operations in Ethiopia. Don’t make a joke of yourself.
Moving on, the best thing UDJ can do for the struggle is to release all Kinijit branches and support groups around the world from their obligation to the party. The Kinijit support groups then can decide what course to follow next. The best thing to do is to rally around Ginbot 7 as Kinijit support groups. Some of them may decide to become full-fledged members.
Every day and every hour we waste hesitating, day dreaming about Woyanne’s intention, analyzing problems to death is the precious time we could use to save our people from holocaust.
There is a tested leadership that is willing to utilize all means necessary to fight the Woyanne cancer and kill it, in collaboration with other organizations. Many of these leaders, such as Berhanu Nega, are elected representatives of the people of Ethiopia. Let’s all rally around these leaders.
A few years ago, Meklit Hadero was doing a 9-to-5 administrative gig at the Haas Foundation here and taking private vocal lessons on the side. The sweet-voiced, Ethiopian-born Yale graduate wasn’t figuring on a singing career. But after an unforgettable night at the funky little Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street, music became her life and the day job tapered away.
Walking into the little Mission District room for the first time, she found two guitar players in opposite corners, a drummer in a third and a guy playing the oud, an ancient North African lute, up in the tiny loft. “It was an incredible experience. You were surrounded by the music,” Hadero says. “They were playing a groove, and everyone was kind of bopping, then suddenly this guy Fernando started signing a call-and-response, and everything just sparked. The whole room became like one. It’s very rare to feel that connected to one person, let alone a whole room full of people. I thought, ‘Wow, what is this place?’ ”
Smitten, she eventually started singing at the multidisciplinary art house, where you can learn to draw or dance flamenco, and where some of the most creative young musicians in town play for receptive crowds. It’s now home base for Hadero, an artist in residence, who’s cropping up in a number of interesting settings these days, playing solo dates here, around the Northwest and elsewhere, and with Nefasha Ayer, a cross-cultural band that riffs on dancing grooves and floating melodies.
Simple tunes
Tonight at Epic Arts in Berkeley, Hadero performs the simple tunes on her first CD, “Eight Songs,” on a triple bill with two other “black women and their guitars,” as she jokingly puts it: Cristina Orbe and Akosua. On Sunday, Nefasha Ayer gets down at Amnesia on Valencia Street.
A few Saturdays ago, the band, whose name means “the wind that travels” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, stirred up the crowd packed into the Red Poppy. A loose-limbed group that stitches ragas and reggae, Ethiopian jazz and Congolese grooves, the band was formed by Hadero and guitarist Todd Brown, a painter who started the art house in 2003 with tango dancer Alexander Allende and now directs the nonprofit with Hadero. The music aims to explore the longing of people caught between countries and cultures, “the space of in-between,” where the sounds of Africa, India and the Americas connect. The players include classical Indian and jazz saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan, master Afro-Peruvian percussionist Lalo Izquierdo on the box drum called the cajón, bassist Miles Jay, Abdi Jibril from Kenya on congas and maracas, and Keenan Webster playing the West African marimba called the balafon and the lute-like kora.
“What was so joyous that night was that we were all from different cultural backgrounds. But we were expressing it with the music, without having to say a thing,” says Hadero, 27, who was born in Addis Ababa but grew up in Iowa and Brooklyn. Her parents are both doctors who left Ethiopia in the violent years following the 1974 revolution, going first to East Germany, then, after making it across to West Berlin, to the United States, with the help of Catholic Charities. They landed in Iowa, where they had a friend. Her father got a residency in New York, where the family lived for many years. (Now divorced, her father lives in Florida, her mother in Seattle, where Hadero’s cousin, noted rapper Gabriel Teodros, also lives.) A bright, soft-spoken woman who wears flowing clothes and a flower in her hair, Hadero sings in English and Amharic. She projects an inner glow as her gentle voice moves in and out of the sound like a jazz instrumentalist – and her hands do a few Hindu-like waves – rather than calling attention to itself.
Flowers in her hair
“I always wanted to be a singer, I just didn’t know if I could do it,” says Hadero, sitting on a stool at the Red Poppy, sipping coffee from a mug bearing van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” She’s wearing an orange sundress and a white silk orchid in her hair. She’s been wearing a flower, real and fake, since college and can’t seem to shake it. “It expresses some very basic part of who I am,” she says, smiling. “It’s pretty direct.”
Hadero sang in choirs in grade school – she was 12 when a piano teacher turned her on to Billie Holiday – and in high school, and occasionally sang a tune a cappella in a performance series she started at Yale, where she studied political science. After moving here, she studied voice with David Babich and other local teachers and took songwriting, musicianship and guitar classes at Blue Bear School of Music. She took the leap after Brown urged her to sing at one of the shows the Mission Arts & Performance Project puts on at the Red Poppy and other neighborhood spots. Brown had never heard her, but sensed she had something. She sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” and Brown was sold.
“I did it on a leap of faith,” says Brown, who paints and teaches workshops at the Red Poppy, where his expressionist canvases hang on the walls, a printing press sits in the bathroom and wooden chairs, gauzy white curtains and a rainbow-striped hammock dangle from the ceiling. “Sometimes that really doesn’t work out. This time it did.”
Brown and Hadero, who are not romantically involved, write the music for Nefasha Ayer. Next year they’re doing a residency at the de Young Museum, and this fall are putting on a series of Red Poppy performances and exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of its Bay Area Now show. Hadero will start work soon on a commission from Brava Theater to write music for a new play by Brian Thorstensen about dissidents and artists who disappear in times of political upheaval.
Writing music for Nefasha Ayer, Brown, who has a feel for Congolese and other guitar-based African music, cooks up a groove and a simple harmonic structure. Hadero listens and begins to picture images; she creates the melody and lyrics that tell the story.
“The music I come up with tends to be very rhythmic, and her tendency is to float, to have a melody that really circles the rhythm,” Brown says. “The two fall in together, and people love the feeling.”
Influences
Hadero has listened to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Virginia Rodrigues, who inspired her pretty version of the Brazilian song “Negrume da Noite” on the CD, whose covers she and artist friends hand-painted in a homemade way that reflects the music. She cites Nina Simone and Mexican singer Lila Downs as big influences. Simone’s emotional intensity gets her, and she loves the way Downs changes the color and texture of her voice, “from small and delicate to expansive to gravelly to sweet. I really try to do that.”
Hadero writes spare songs about love and longing, sung over basic guitar chords. “I wouldn’t call myself a guitarist. I use the guitar,” Hadero says. Her solo work “has a kind of preciousness to it, but it’s changing as I grow in my musicianship. The solo music is kind of letting people into my world a little bit. Nefasha Ayer is going out into something greater together. It has this grander intention. It’s a larger canvas.” Working with these musicians, Hadero has become more comfortable with improvisation, “which is the real juice. You may not know where you’re going, but everybody’s right there with you. It’s a glorious thing.”
Meklit Hadero performs solo at 8:30 p.m. today at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $7. (510) 644-2204, www.epicarts.org. She performs with Nefasha Ayer at 9 p.m. Sunday at Amnesia, 853 Valencia St., San Francisco. $7. (415) 970-0012, www.amnesiathebar.com.
To hear samples of Meklit Hadero’s solo music, go to meklithadero.com. To hear Nefasha Ayer’s music, go to www.nefashaayer.com.
At about 4:00 PM today, the police told Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) — former CUDP — that it cannot hold its Founding Congress which was scheduled to be held at the Imperial Hotel tomorrow, Saturday, June 14, 2008. Their excuse is that we do not have prior permission for holding a public gathering.
Peaceful assembly is guaranteed by the Ethiopian Constitution. There is no law that requires obtaining prior permission for indoor gathering. The hotel reservation was made over two weeks ago. The Hotel Management had informed the relevant authorities on the details of the gathering –- a usual practice -– over a week ago and were told that it could go ahead as scheduled. Then, suddenly, there came this ban on a Friday, at the end of the day’s working hours, followed by a weekend.
We believe that this was a deliberate measure calculated to prevent the Congress from taking place. It is an illegal measure that violated our constitutional right.
Over 400 delegates were to attend the Congress at the Imperial Hotel. Two-thirds of these delegates have come from the Regions. The rest are from Addis Ababa. UDJ had spent over four months painstakingly preparing for this Congress. The preparation started with the gathering of founding-members signatures from throughout the country, the preparation of documents such as the Programme and Bylaw and the selection of delegates.
We started our preparations with the full knowledge of the National Electoral Board. We have invested about 300,000 birr on this Congress and on various preparations leading to it.
We are examining several options on what to do next. One of the options is to hold the Congress in-house: on the premises of our office. The space available is very limited, weather condition is not favorable.
We may have to make drastic adjustments in our programme such as limiting activities, without affecting vital ones, and extending the meeting by a half day. We see the present obstacle before us as a challenge. The Congress will be held, if not tomorrow, then soon.
Unity for Democracy and Justice
June 13, 2008
Addis Ababa
British Member of Parliament George Galloway calls to question the U.K. and U.S. support to the dictatorship in Ethiopia and the over all policy on Africa. It is a must watch video.
Tim Russert, the Democratic operative turned NBC commentator who revolutionized Sunday morning television and infused journalism with his passion for politics, died this afternoon.
Russert, 58, collapsed while recording voiceovers for his Sunday morning interview program, NBC reported. He was initially reported to have suffered a heart attack while working in his office on Washington’s Nebraska Avenue, but the network said later only that he was “stricken at the bureau” and subsequently died. Further details were not immediately available.
Russert served as NBC’s Washington bureau chief and the host of “Meet the Press,” the top-rated Sunday talk show, which had an enormous influence on politics and was marked by his aggressive style of interrogation. As a frequent commentator on the “Today” show, “NBC Nightly News” and other shows, Russert wielded such clout that when he declared that Sen. Barack Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination last month, his pronouncement was treated as a news event in itself.
Russert’s television career was marked by a voracious appetite for politics and a shrewd understanding of how politicians interact with the media. He also wrote a book about his father, titled “Big Russ and Me.” Last week, he moved Big Russ to a nursing facility.
Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw gave MSNBC viewers the news of Russert’s death at 3:40 p.m.
“He worked to the point of exhaustion so many weeks,” Brokaw said, adding: “This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice.”
Brokaw said Russert had just returned from a family trip to Italy with his wife, writer Maureen Orth. They were celebrating the graduation of their son, Luke, from Boston College this spring, Brokaw said.
Russert served as host of “Meet the Press” longer than any other person and was “one of the premier political analysts and journalists of his time,” Brokaw said. He began hosting “Meet the Press” in 1991.
Tributes to Russert began pouring in as news of his death circulated.
President Bush said in a statement from Paris, where he is on a European tour, that he and first lady Laura Bush “are deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Tim Russert.” Bush continued: “As the longest-serving host of the longest-running program in the history of television, he was an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades. Tim was a tough and hardworking newsman. He was always well-informed and thorough in his interviews. And he was as gregarious off the set as he was prepared on it.”
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican candidate for president in the November elections, called Russert “truly a great American who loved his family, his friends, his Buffalo Bills, and everything about politics and America.” In a statement, McCain added: “He was just a terrific guy. I was proud to call him a friend.”
Obama (D-Ill.) issued a statement in which he described himself as “grief-stricken with loss.” The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who met Russert in Boston in 2004 when Obama addressed his party’s national convention, said, “There wasn’t a better interviewer on television, a more thoughtful analyst about politics.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said: “Tim was a warm and gracious family man with a great zest for life and an unsurpassed passion for his work. His rise from working-class roots to become a well-respected leader in political journalism is an inspiration to many. Tim asked the tough questions the right way and was the best in the business at keeping his interview subjects honest.”
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said Russert’s reputation was such that when Kerry announced his decision to run for president in 2004, “the only place to do it was on “Meet the Press.” Kerry said Russert “loved to hold the big guys accountable, and in the original, intelligent, studied way he did it, he emerged as the biggest guy of all.”
One of Russert’s competitors, Bob Schieffer of CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, said the two delighted in scooping each other, the Associated Press reported. “When you slipped one past ol’ Russert, you felt as though you had hit a home run off the best pitcher in the league,” the agency quoted Schieffer as saying. “I just loved Tim, and I will miss him more than I can say.”
“There was no one who studied, prepared and worked as hard on a story as Tim,” said Albert Hunt, a close friend and executive editor for Washington at the Bloomberg news service. “His only agenda was to inform and educate his millions of viewers,” Hunt told the agency. “There was no one more generous or supportive of friends and colleagues; there was no one more fun to talk politics with, or just to be with.”
Michael A. Newman, Russert’s internist, said efforts to resuscitate Russert were begun immediately and continued at Washington’s Sibley Memorial Hospital, to no avail, AP reported. An autopsy is pending, Newman said.
Russert was born May 7, 1950, in Buffalo, N.Y., the son of Irish American parents. His father was a World War II veteran who worked two blue-collar jobs while raising four children in a working-class neighborhood in South Buffalo. Russert attended Buffalo’s Jesuit Canisius High School and went on to study law at Cleveland State University.
He got his start in New York Democratic politics, working on the political campaigns of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo. He served as chief of staff to Moynihan from 1977 to 1982 and was a counselor in Cuomo’s Albany office from 1983 to 1984.
Russert was hired by NBC at its Washington bureau in 1984 and became the network’s Washington bureau chief four years later.
The Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa told leaders of Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ) today that they cannot hold their meeting tomorrow because the Woyanne regime has ordered them to cancel it.
UDJ has been planning to hold its General Assembly meeting Saturday and Sunday at the Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa where it would decide on the party’s future course of action and elect its leades. Over 400 UDJ representatives, as well as guests have been expected to attend the meeting.
UPDATE FROM KINIJIT NORTH AMERICA >>
General Assembly of UDJP
The leaders of Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ) were told today by the Imperial Hotel that they cannot conduct their meeting tomorrow . Clearly the Woyanne regime has ordered the hotel to cancel it. Listen to the following interview with Ato Gizachew Shiferaw with Kinijit North America PR on this matter here
