ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – U.N. aid officials and human rights investigators ended a week-long mission to Ethiopia’s troubled Ogaden region on Thursday and said they would present their findings to the government next week.
The mission primarily assessed the food, water and health needs in the remote area, said Paul Hebert, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ethiopia.
“Considering this was not an investigative mission, we gathered enough information to enable us to draw preliminary conclusions on the humanitarian situation in the region and on protection issues,” Hebert told Reuters.
The international community has increasingly focused attention on Ogaden, which borders Somalia, after rights groups accused Ethiopian soldiers of shooting civilians and burning homes there in a crackdown on separatist rebels.
By Donald N. Levine
When invited by the Ethiopian community of San Jose, California, to compose a short millennial piece celebrating something distinctive about Ethiopia’s heritage, I decided for a variation on the theme of many of my previous writings, where I emphasize the multiethnic character of historic Ethiopia. This concerns the extent to which the various peoples of the Horn have come from common ancestors and intermingled in so many ways– through intermarriage, commerce, shared festivals, cultural borrowings, and common political aspirations and activities, most notably in the defense of Ethiopia against external invasions from the Turks, from the Sudanese, and on those two terrible occasions, from imperialist Italy.
In this piece I shall celebrate an aspect of Ethiopia’s heritage that has rarely been accorded the attention it deserves. This concerns the character of her religious traditions. At least four features of religion in Ethiopia deserve special attention.
For one thing, Ethiopia became receptive to each of the three great Semitic world religions very early, earlier than nearly any other part of the world. Hebraic influence arrived at an extremely early period. This is attested by Hebraic words that were used in the translation of the New Testament into Ge’ez. Most remarkably, the chief indigenous surviving Judaic community – that of the Beta Israel – knew only of Jewish holidays prior to exile of the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. The adoption of Christianity as official religion in Aksum took place in the 4th century C.E., making Ethiopia, like Syria, Armenia, and Egypt, home to one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. And she gave refuge to followers of the Prophet Mohammed before Islam was officially established, protecting them when the nascent faith was endangered, a gesture that inspired Mohammed to declare Ethiopia perennially exempt from any sort of jihadic intervention.
Because these religions arrived so early, they took shape in Ethiopian soil in a way that enabled them to grow side by side from the outset. They intertwined in many ways. None of them became used as the basis for any sort of rabid exclusionary project. Judaism in Ethiopia was always part of the Ethiopian national culture, not–until the past century–a force that led her followers to reject Ethiopia as their national homeland. Neither Christianity nor Islam was used historically as a basis for persecuting other populations or massacring dissidents, as happened so often with both of those religions in other countries. (Ahmad Gragn’s jihad was instigated from outside Ethiopia by the Ottoman Turks. Emperor Yohannes’s strict Christianizing policy reflected a national political fear of being invaded by Mahdist Muslims, who did invade and finally killed him. Popular prejudices against the Beta Israelis, often called buda, did not reflect a studied persecution of them by the Orthodox Church.) Beyond that, Ethiopians of different Semitic religions could and often did intermarry, often took part in one another’s festivals, and shared certain special occasions together–most notably, the annual pilgrimage to the site of the Archangel Gabrael at Mount Kulubi.
Third, the relation to “pagan” Ethiopian religions was tolerant to a degree not shown much elsewhere–a subject that deserves a lot more study. Family resemblances between the properties of indigenous deity symbols, such as the Oromo Waqa, with the Semitic deities may have had some subliminal effect, even though resemblance of that name and other cognate names among peoples in the South–Waq (Afar, Somali, Burji, Konso, Dasensech, Gurage); Wak (Saho); Wa’a (Hadiyya); Waga (Gamu ); Waqaya (Majangir); Muqo (Tsamako); and Magano (Sidamo)–with Amharic wuqabi (guardian angel) may reflect common sound and not linguistic kinship. To be sure, the Christian and Muslim missionaries pressured followers of indigenous faiths to embrace one of those Semitic religions. But there are many instances where indigenous religionists held joint celebrations with Christians and/or Muslims.
Finally, I would mention the depth of religious sentiment that marks so many Ethiopians. This trait came to the fore during the Derg period, when systematic efforts to eradicate religious traditions were met by increased observance, including a remarkable increase in the practice of fasting.
These elementary facts should be known by every single Ethiopian at home and abroad. One good way to celebrate Ethiopia’s special millennium would be to promote awareness of these special features of her history and culture.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — A human rights organisation in Ethiopia said Wednesday that the government has been holding three of its members without charge for more than two weeks in the west of the country.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) said three members of its branch in Nekemte, 220 kilometres (135 miles) west of Addis Ababa, were detained on August 23 after police came to search their homes.
“Three of our members in Nekemte have been detained without an arrest warrant for 16 days,” Tesfaye Desalegn, the group’s public relations officer, told AFP.
“They were looking for arms and papers they claimed were used to incite violence, but even though nothing was found, they haven’t released or tried them yet,” he added.
Regional security officials have not responded to appeals, he added.
In a statement, the group urged the government to either release the three or press charges against them.
Nekemte lies in the Oromo region, where rebels have been battling the government for years.
By Xan Rice in Nairobi
The Guardian
A humanitarian crisis has developed in Ethiopia’s remote Ogaden region, where government [Woyanne] forces are trying to quell a rebel insurgency, according to a leading international aid agency.
Médecins Sans Frontières said 400,000 people, including thousands forcibly displaced when their villages were burned down, had little or no access to medicine due to a government-installed blockade.
MSF said that following an exploratory mission to Ogaden in July which revealed a “deeply precarious situation”, repeated requests to work in the worst hit areas have been denied by both regional authorities and the government in Addis Abada.
“We were told that we could only begin work once ‘operations’ were finished,” said Loris De Filippi, Ethiopia coordinator for MSF. “We said that humanitarian aid is not about putting flowers on graves, but they just ignored us.”
The government Woyanne denies creating no-go zones anywhere in the country. But six weeks ago it expelled the International Committee of the Red Cross from Ogaden and has refused to let the organisation resume its work. Journalists are barred from visiting “for their own safety”.
The army crackdown began in earnest in June, shortly after rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) attacked a Chinese-run oil exploration facility, killing 74 people, including nine Chinese workers.
The ONLF, described by the government as terrorists, says it is fighting for greater autonomy for the region’s people, who are mainly ethnic Somalis, and will not allow their natural resources to be exploited until this happens.
The raid and other attacks on civilians attracted international condemnation. But the Ethiopian government’s Woyanne’s response has drawn even more criticism. In early July, a Human Rights Watch report accused the army of forcibly displacing thousands of civilians, and included eyewitness accounts of soldiers torching homes, property and food stocks. The report said the government had imposed a trade blockade to force civilians from rural areas to larger towns, and so deny the rebels a support base.
Accounts from MSF staff, who held a press conference in neighbouring Kenya yesterday to protest about the Ethiopian government’s denial of access to Ogaden, appeared to corroborate the reports.
“We saw about 30 villages that had been burned by armed groups or simply abandoned,” Mr De Filippi said. “There were a few donkeys carrying water when normally there would have been hundreds of commercial trucks.”
Aid workers also reported seeing soldiers chasing women and children away from wells where they were drawing water. Mr De Filippi said the government Woyanne had refused even to allow MSF a window of 24 hours to take drugs to an area called Fiq, which has not received medical supplies for six months.
The United Nations has sent a fact-finding team to the region, but it remains unclear whether it will be allowed to visit the worst affected areas.
This captivating 13-page article in Amharic by Tegaye Yifter asks whose blood Zenawi’s “democratic revolution” will spill next.
የሚቀጥለው ደም…
ከጠጋዬ ይፍጠር
የመለስ ዜናዊ ነጻ አውጭ “አብዮት” — ደም የተገበረበት አብዮት — በእርግጥ አመለጣቸው:: ምክንያቱም የሚቀጥለው “ደም” የሌላ ሰው ሊሆን አይችልምና! … ለመቀጠል እዚህ ይጫኑ continue reading here.
