By Mohamed Abdi Farah
(SomaliNet) The Ethiopian [Woyanne] forces raided one of the privately owned hospitals in the Somalia capital Mogadishu on Sunday taking out some suspected patients visitors.
Witnesses told Somalinet that Woyanne forces along with interim government troops encircled the Shifo Hospital in Wardhigley district, south of the capital arresting a number of in patients and others.
“I could see the soldiers storming the hospital and then extracting around ten people including wounded persons and their relatives, I was so scared and hid myself,” said Omar Salad, a local resident man.
One of the government soldiers told the hospital officials that the arrested people were insurgent members.
“They were involved in the attacks launched on the government positions in Bakar market two night ago and after investigation we found out that their wounded men are in this hospital,” said a local security official in condition anonymity.
Meanwhile, a Woyanne military truck has gone under attack this morning around former dairy factory in Mogadishu.
Residents told Somalinet that a roadside bomb destroyed the truck but no one knows the casualty there as the Woyanne soldiers sealed off the area.
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By Aie Zi Guo
To Kinjit leaders
In November 2006, I wrote an article indicating that true disciples of democracy should be free. Finally, eight months later you are free. Ethiopians and the international community are rejoicing your release. For the moment we don’t need to know the conditions of your release, because the wider world knows that you committed no crime. What is important for now is your safe exit from the dilapidated prison cells of Kaliti.
All of you suffered on our behalf and on behalf of democracy, human rights and rule of law. The mother of all illegal falsifications was made against you. Melese’s kangaroo court has passed consequential verdicts without an iota of proof and justification. A miscarriage of justice has been done on you and your families. It is time to leave all this behind and move forward. Your captors are slow learners of truth who do not know that truth and dawn shine by the hour, by the day and by the year. You are the true disciples of democracy, who should have been free yesterday and not today. The Ethiopian people and the international community owe you millions.
You need some space to regurgitate your memoirs. Celebrate your freedom with your loved ones. After that we will talk business. We have of a lot unfinished business. Ethiopians in Ethiopia and around the world await your sustained leadership and cooperation with enthusiasm.
From Merkato to Adigerat, Gondar to Gimbi, Metekel to Ogden, Dessie to Gambella, Bahir Dar to Yabelo, Emdibir to Dirdewa, Illubabor to Asmara, Arbamich to Assela, Jimma to Nekemit, Asseb to Metema, Addis Ababa to Europe, America, Asia, Oceania and Greenland all are delight. So welcome back.
The struggle for freedom and democracy continues.
The author can be reached at Aie Zu Guo [email protected]
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By Obang Metho
My Fellow Ethiopians: We’ve just won the Battle but not the Victory.
We Ethiopians are rejoicing, wherever we are—in or outside of Ethiopia, at the release on Friday of the Opposition leaders, journalists, human rights defenders, political activists and others from Kaliti prison.
July 20, 2007, will forever mark a great day, similar to May 15, 2005 that will go down in history books for all freedom loving Ethiopians, but please remember, as we are celebrating a beginning victory, it is only one battle in a war for justice, freedom, peace and liberty.
Until tens of thousands of other Ethiopian political prisoners who continue to languish in the prisons of Afar; Amhara; Benishangul/Gumuz; Dire Dawa; Gambella; Harari; Oromiya; Ogaden ; Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s; Addis Ababa; and Tigray are free, we are not free as a people and our victory cannot be claimed.
Until all our Ethiopian institutions, now being used against us instruments of repression, are released from the tight controls of the Woyanne, we can take hope and encouragement from this unexpected achievement, but it is only the beginning.
Until Ethiopians can live, breathe and move freely about within our society—without fear of reprisals for simply thinking for ourselves—we are not free!
So right now, let us pause to thank God, who has shown us clouds of rain in the sky, but we must keep working until He creates pools of water in the parched desert lands of Ethiopia. We must now increase the momentum of our struggle until it gains wings and flies.
Above all, I want everybody to give glory and thanks to God, through whom this has been accomplished. This victory today is about God and if we are patient and trust in Him, he has far more to give. God is not just watching—he is integrally involved in our dawn of freedom and will continue to help us if we are faithful and persevere.
I also want to thank our Opposition Leaders released and for those still stuck in prisons and detention centers throughout the country for being examples of courage for Ethiopia. It is you who have built a foundation for freedom that will fan the flames of fire within our hearts. Many of you are yet unknown by name to many of us, yet you have inspired all of us by your examples.
It is Ethiopian men and women like this of whom the rest of us are so proud. As people of principle, true to themselves and to what is right, they have been targeted as enemies of the ruling government. Their examples create serious problems to the Woyanne, while encouraging and motivating us in the Diaspora to carry on our advocacy work in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Yet, we remember, the real heroes of the struggle are these people and others standing up for truth, justice, equality, virtue, love and freedom that are living in all the corners of Ethiopia.
We must also give credit to those in the Diaspora who through their persistence from the beginning, have worked so diligently on making those in the international community aware of this crisis, even to the point where western governments have responded with action, like in the United States with HR#2003 and in Europe with other resolutions.
For instance, HR#2003 just passed the markup stage with unanimous backing in the US Congress Sub-Committee on Africa. The committee working on this bill is well aware that continued work is needed if it is to pass the next more difficult steps in the process. Many others in the Diaspora are working and contributing in varied ways and places and because of this concerted effort, our struggle all comes together as a more powerful front.
As we think about all of this, it is amazing what has happened. Due to God’s help and all of your contributions, the sentences went from death to life imprisonment to freedom with conditions to freedom without conditions—giving support to the groundless basis to the case from the beginning. However, it appears that Meles is attempting to block their voice. He stated on Ethiopian television on Friday July 20,2007 that they could not rejoin the Ethiopian Parliament because “they had been gone from political involvement for too long,” incredulously, as if they had spent the last twenty months in prison at their own choice!
Now, all of us, including Meles and our leaders can learn from Nelson Mandela, who after twenty-six years in prison, came out without hatred, hoping to reconcile with those who persecuted him. Both Mandala and the Apartheid leaders had to give up the things that would perpetuate the crisis and further destroy the hope of any reconciliation. Out of that came the South Africa of today, where they were able to avoid a civil war that could have wreaked years of havoc on the country.
Let us, including the any Woyanne, show the world our genuine appreciation of life and of one another as human beings. The leaders of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party are the Mandelas of Ethiopia and Meles is the leader of the Apartheid of Ethiopia. If they can act together to reconcile a country in crisis of imploding, we could become a country stronger than it ever was before.
So today, my fellows’ Ethiopian brother, and sisters do not focus on the pain and hatred inflicted on each other. We need unity and National reconciliation more than ever before. Three things are holding freedom from coming to Ethiopia. As I have said it before these three things are: Lack of our UNITY, the GUNS of Meles and the support of Meles by WESTERN COUNTRIES. The guns and the support of Meles from the players like the US, Canada and Europe, will dissolve if we have a truly unified movement based on respect, tolerance and inclusion.
The strategic goal of our Movement for a New Ethiopia is to reclaim Ethiopia from its tyrannical rulers and their associates. This is a movement of Ethiopians or Africans to reclaim the essence of Africa. We are not pursuing State sovereignty here but rather people sovereignty, to set our people free from oppressive rule. We are seeing a new dawn—are we ready for the new day! May God help us!
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The consequence, says the prophet, of a society’s greed, social injustice, and idol worship is a judgment that comes in the form of spiritual degradation, violence, and the breakup of community. The people turn on one another—“and they will fight, one against the other, neighbor against neighbor, city against city, kingdom against kingdom” Isaiah 19:2. The people’s “spirit” will be “emptied out.” Isaiah 19:3 __________________________________________
The International Herald Tribune
By Jeffrey Gettleman
NAIROBI — The government of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.
The Ethiopian [Woyanne] military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid, and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.
The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.
Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.
“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.
The Woyanne government says the blockade covers only strategic locations, and is meant to prevent guns and matériel from reaching the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the rebel force that the government considers a terrorist group. In April, the rebels killed more than 60 Ethiopian guards and Chinese workers at a Chinese-run oil field in the Ogaden.
“This is not a government which punishes its people,” said Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman.
But Western diplomats have been urging Woyanne officials to lift the blockade, arguing that the many people in the area are running out of time. “It’s a starve-out-the-population strategy,” said one Western humanitarian official, who did not want to be quoted by name because he feared reprisals against aid workers. “If something isn’t done on the diplomatic front soon, we’re going to have a government-caused famine on our hands.”
The blockade, which involves soldiers and military trucks cutting off the few roads into the central Ogaden, comes as Congress is increasingly concerned about Ethiopia’s human rights record.
Ethiopia is a close American ally and a key partner in America’s counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa, a region that has become a breeding ground for Islamic militants, many of whom have threatened to wage a holy war against Woyanne.
The country receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each year, but this week, a House subcommittee passed a bill that would put strict conditions on some of that aid and ban Ethiopian officials linked to rights abuses from entering the United States. The House also recently passed an amendment, sponsored by J. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican, that stripped Ethiopia of $3 million in assistance to “send a strong message that if they don’t wake up and pay attention, more money will be cut,” Forbes said.
Woyanne’s pardon on Friday of 30 political prisoners who had been sentenced to life in prison could ease some criticism. But Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is pushing ahead with measures to more closely vet assistance to the Ethiopian military. According to human rights groups and firsthand accounts, government troops have gang raped women, burned down huts and killed civilians.
American officials in Ethiopia said they were trying to investigate the situation but that the Ogaden was too dangerous right now for a fact-finding mission. American officials said they had heard persistent reports of burned villages and that the blockade was putting the area on the cusp of a crisis.
Villagers say that anyone who criticizes the government risks getting killed. According to Ogaden Online, a Canadian-based news service that has been highly critical of the Woyanne government and covers the region through a network of reporters and contributors, some equipped with satellite phones, four young men who were videotaped by The New York Times at a community meeting in an Ogaden village in May were later tortured and executed.
The claim could not be fully verified independently, but their identities may have been discovered by Woyanne soldiers who had arrested three journalists for The Times in the Ogaden and confiscated their notebooks, cameras and computers.
“The army is out of control,” said Jemal Dirie Kalif, the member of Parliament who defected.
The blockade has been in place since early June, and thousands of people have already fled on foot and by camel. Two weeks ago, Abdullahi Mohammed, a 17-year-old student, walked from his village deep in the Ogaden to the nearest town with a bus station. He carried with him a few pieces of bread. He said that when he stopped to ask villagers in the Ogaden for food, they asked him for some instead. “They had nothing,” he said.
Though good rains this year have fed the few crops in the area and provided a little cushion, “The most these people can last without facing serious problems is one month, maybe two,” said David Throp, country director for Save the Children UK.
Even if relief trucks are allowed in to all the critical areas, the food might not reach the people who need it. According to humanitarian workers and several former Woyanne officials, including Kalif, food aid is embezzled in two stages. First, soldiers skim sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of high-energy biscuits from food warehouses to sell at local markets.
“The cash is distributed among security officers and regional officers,” a former government administrator from the Ogaden region said in a recent telephone interview on condition of anonymity because he still works with government officials.
Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping them fight the rebels. The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which army officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of women whom their soldiers had raped, as compensation.
Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the donor countries’ food aid to the Ogaden — aid that last year was valued at more than $70 million — routinely disappears this way. To cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government administrators who work with them tell the aid agencies that the food has spoiled, or has been stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian officials said.
Relief workers in Ethiopia have known about these problems for several years, a humanitarian official said, and have tried to set up committees of local elders to oversee distribution. But that did not work either, and aid officials eventually concluded that as long as the majority of the food was getting through, they would not stop the shipments.
When informed about these allegations, Diab of the World Food Program said, “This is the first I’ve heard of them.”
Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that Ethiopian troops were pilfering or mishandling foreign aid. “We don’t do that,” he said.
As the food crisis looms, Western diplomats are also concerned about a separate plan by the regional government in the Ogaden to divert a share of its own budget for development projects — like schools and farming — to the Ethiopian military.
This seems to be part of the Woyanne government’s strategy to do whatever it takes to crush the rebels, who have deep popular support and, according to the government, are getting arms and training from neighboring Eritrea, Woyanne’s bitter enemy.
The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.
Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.
“Those Ethiopians are smart,” Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the governing party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.
He described a scheme with a United Nations polio program, which was corroborated by two former administrators in the Woyanne government and a Western humanitarian official, in which military commanders gave prized jobs as vaccinators to militia fighters, and in the end, much of the polio vaccine was never distributed.
“Army commanders are using the polio money to pay their people, who don’t pass out the vaccines, so the disease continues and the payments continue,” said Kalif. “It’s the perfect system.” United Nations officials in Geneva said they did not know whether that was happening, but that they would investigate.
When asked how he knew about the polio scheme, Kalif said: “Everybody out there knows. They’re just too scared to talk.”
“If I don’t get asylum and they send me back to my country, I’m dead,” he added. “But I was sick of being a parrot. I have no regrets.”
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