UNITED NATIONS – U.N. Security Council members said on Wednesday they may reconsider the future of a peacekeeping force on the Eritrean border with Ethiopia because of obstruction of the force’s work by Eritrea.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report earlier this month that if the peacekeepers abandoned the 620-mile (1,000-km) border, a new war could break out, although both countries have said they do not plan to renew hostilities.
Council members voiced anger last week at moves by Eritrea to force the U.N. peacekeeping mission to leave its border.
The United Nations has almost completely withdrawn some 1,700 troops and military observers from a buffer zone along the border between the two Horn of Africa rivals after Eritrea cut fuel supplies to the mission.
Eritrea said countrywide shortages had prompted the move, but President Isaias Afwerki has stated that the continued presence of U.N. peacekeepers on the Red Sea state’s border with Ethiopia, scene of a 1998-200 war, was illegal.
The peacekeeping force, known as UNMEE, had been stationed in a 15.5-mile (25-km) zone inside Eritrea.
Eritrea turned against UNMEE because of the United Nations’ inability to enforce rulings by an independent commission awarding Asmara chunks of Ethiopian-held territory.
South African Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, current Security Council president, said in a statement on behalf of the council that the continuation of Eritrea’s “obstructions” had reached a level that undermined the force’s mandate.
“The Security Council recalls its previous condemnation of Eritrea’s lack of cooperation,” Kumalo said.
He said the council stood ready to assist the parties reach an agreement but the responsibility to do so lay with the two Horn of Africa countries themselves.
“The Security Council will, in the light of consultations with the parties, decide on the terms of a future U.N. engagement and on the future of UNMEE,” he said.
Ethiopia Woyanne has offered to hold talks with Eritrea but Eritrea says it must must first withdraw from its territory. Both sides have amassed troops in recent months. (Editing by Chris Wilson)
The presence of Mr Ayro, whether his association with Al Qaeda is true or not, had been a liability to the Somali people’s fight against the fascist Woyanne occupation. As the report by the NYT indicates, it was Somalis from Ayro’s own clan who gave the U.S. military the necessary intelligence on his whereabouts. Now that the U.S. has accomplished its mission or eradicating Ayro, hopefully it will stop supporting Woyanne’s illegal and murderous occupation of Somalia.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Aden Hashi Ayro, long identified as one of Al Qaeda’s top operatives in East Africa and the leader of the Islamist comeback in Somalia, was killed Thursday morning by an American airstrike, according to American and Somali officials.
Mr. Ayro was one of the most feared and notorious figures in Somalia, a short, wispy man believed to be in his 30s who had gone from lowly car washer to top terrorist suspect blamed for a string of atrocities, including ripping up an Italian graveyard, killing a BBC journalist and planning suicide attacks all across Somalia.
He was a military commander for the Shebab, an Islamist militia which the American government recently classified as a terrorist group, saying it was linked to Al Qaeda.
Somalia officials said his death could be a key turning point in defeating the Islamists, who have seized several towns in recent weeks, and in bringing peace to the country.
“This will definitely weaken the Shebab,” said Mohamed Aden, consul for Somalia’s embassy in Nairobi, the capital of neighboring Kenya. “This will help with reconciliation. You can’t imagine how many Somalis are saying, ‘Yes, this is the one.’ The reaction is so good.”
Maj. Sherri Reed, a spokeswoman for the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., confirmed that the military had attacked “a known Al Qaeda target” in the central Somalia town of Dhusamareb, but declined to give more details of the pre-dawn strike.
“It’s significant,” said Major Reed, who said there was no evidence to suggest there were any civilian casualties from the attack.
But an American military official in Washington, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation, said that at least four Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a Navy ship off the Somali coast had slammed into a small compound of single-story buildings in Dhusamareb, a well-known hideout for Mr. Ayro and his associates. The official confirmed Mr. Ayro was dead, along with several top lieutenants.
“This was in the works for some time,” said the official. He said that American intelligence agents had been tracking Mr. Ayro for weeks, through a combination of communications intercepts, satellite imagery and other intelligence.
Human rights organizations have upbraided the American government for launching air strikes against terrorist suspects inside Somalia and killing civilians instead, which has happened several times in the past year. But this time the missiles seemed to find their mark.
Around 3 a.m. Thursday morning, residents of Dhusamareb were jolted out of bed by several large explosions. According to witnesses and a spokesman for the Shebab, more than 10 people were killed, including Mr. Ayro, Mr. Ayro’s brother and several other high-ranking Shebab commanders.
Some witnesses said as many as 30 people were dead and that residents were counting skulls to determine the precise number of casualties.
“Infidel planes bombed Dhusamareb,” a Shebab spokesman, Mukhtar Ali Robow, told Reuters. “Two of our important people, including Ayro, were killed.”
The American official said: “For the Horn of Africa, this is pretty significant. He’s certainly considered a leader in Al Qaeda’s effort there. This can be chalked up as a success.”
Dhusamareb, a town of about 100,000 people along one of the few highways in Somalia, is a stronghold of the Ayr clan, which Mr. Ayro belongs to. In the past few weeks, residents said, Islamist fighters had moved into the town, part of their strategy to wrest back control from the Transitional Federal Government, which is officially in charge of Somalia but wields little power on the ground.
In 2006, Mr. Ayro was one of the militia commanders of an Islamist movement that briefly ruled Somalia. That rule ended in December 2006 when Ethiopian troops, backed up by American intelligence and air power, ousted the Islamists.
Since then, American forces have launched several airstrikes inside Somalia, including one in January 2007 which was thought to have wounded Mr. Ayro.
In the past attacks, cruise missiles were often used, launched from American war ships in the Indian Ocean.
American officials have said they have been given permission by Somalia’s government to attack terrorist suspects on Somali soil. American officials have accused Mr. Ayro of protecting wanted Qaeda members, including some of the men thought to have planned the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Mr. Ayro’s life story is a bit sketchy. According to Somali intelligence agents, he dropped out of school at a young age to wash cars and join one of the street-gang type militias that was fighting for control of Somalia in the early 1990s after the central government collapsed.
He became friends with a leader of his clan, Hassan Dahir Aweys, who arranged for him to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against American forces in 2001. He then returned to Mogadishu and trained fellow fighters in explosives, according to the International Crisis Group, a research organization that specializes in analyzing conflicts.
In January 2005, Mr. Ayro desecrated the graves of dozens of Italians who had been buried in Mogadishu decades ago, when Somalia was an Italian colony. Mr. Ayro was essentially disowned by his clan after that. But his militant activities only increased, and in February 2005 he was blamed for gunning down a BBC news producer outside her hotel in Mogadishu.
Mr. Ayro had recently gone to Dhusamareb with a band of his fighters to help set up a local administration. But clan elders rejected him, said Mohammed Uluso, a leader of the Ayr clan, because the elders “didn’t want to mix up their legitimate goals with something suspicious.” That might have been part of Mr. Ayro’s undoing, because Somali officials said that people in Dhusamareb provided American forces with up-to-the-minute intelligence on Mr. Ayro’s movements.
Mr. Uluso said Mr. Ayro was small and thin and looked like “a high school student, not this big guy the Americans were after.”
Mr. Uluso said he thinks the Shebab will continue to be a potent resistance force even after Mr. Ayro’s death because many young Somalis see the Shebab as a “heroic cause” in terms of standing up to the Americans. (Shebab is the Arabic word for youth.)
“The Shebab won’t just disappear,” Mr. Uluso said. “But now that the hunt for Ayro is over, at least people will get their freedom back. So many people were hurt and oppressed in the effort to get him.”
—————
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington.
TEMPE, Ariz. — The man who found Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil, is never far from her. Just steps from Donald Johanson’s office at Arizona State University is a tiny skeleton made of plastic casts of the 3.2 million-year-old fossil. They’re wired together and propped inside a glass box.
Lucy souvenirs decorate Johanson’s office: an “I Love Lucy” button, a framed Lucy stamp issued in Ethiopia and porcelain Lucy salt-and-pepper shakers.
Single discoveries often define a scientist’s career, but nothing in Johanson’s field was as big as the Lucy find in 1974.
Lucy is the oldest, most complete skeleton of an adult ancestor of humans. A new ancestral species, Australopithecus afarensis, she prompted a controversial overhaul of the evolutionary tree. Scientists since have found older fossils, but none has matched Lucy’s fame.
In four decades, Johanson and colleagues gathered about 370 additional specimens, shedding further light on the species. As director of Arizona State’s Institute of Human Origins, Johanson oversees seven scientists who have generated their own recent headlines. He, though, will forever be identified with Lucy and will always wrestle with the riddles the fossil continues to pose.
Johanson sits in his office beneath replicas of famous cave paintings in Lascaux, France. His resonant voice quickens as he speaks of Lucy as if she were alive, recalling how “we found her.”
The 31-year-old paleoanthropologist had just finished his Ph.D. His team had chosen a remote area in northeastern Ethiopia, known as Hadar, because of the fossils regularly coughed up by the region’s shifting tectonic plates. Rare, heavy rains cut deep gashes into the hills and reveal ancient fossils to the sharp-eyed scientist.
That Sunday, Johanson felt lucky. The son of a widowed immigrant cleaning woman, he had been told by his high-school counselor that he wasn’t smart enough to attend college. He went anyway. And now, on this clear morning, he wrote the words “feel good” in his journal.
Accompanied by a graduate student, Tom Gray, they walked and looked for fossils in the heat of more than 100 degrees.
A brownish-gray object caught Johanson’s eye. The 2 1/2-inch fossil had a curved flare resembling a humanlike elbow. They quickly spotted more fossils: a piece of jaw with a molar, parts of a leg and arm, a shard of skull.
Johanson knew they had made a rare and special find.
They gathered up the pieces of jaw, marked the spot and jumped into a Land Rover for the half-hour trip back to camp.
They stayed up all night, drank beer and celebrated. The Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, played on a tape recorder.
Johanson’s girlfriend, Pamela, said, “Why don’t you call her Lucy?”
The name took hold.
For three weeks, the team scoured the hillside and gully, uncovering fossil fragments and pieces. Time and the elements had scattered Lucy over an area about the size of a living room. They found no two fossils the same, which reinforced Johanson’s theory that the fossils belonged to one individual.
Johanson spent the next five years intensely studying Lucy. The Ethiopian government agreed to let him borrow the fossils because the country had no sophisticated labs. To get her to the United States, he wrapped her in toilet paper, packed her in a yellow, foam-lined suitcase and carried her aboard a plane.
Lucy moved into a new home at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where Johanson worked as a curator. She was kept in a 5-foot safe in his office.
Analyzing Lucy took years. Johanson had to juggle research with his job at Case Western Reserve University, museum duties, other field expeditions and subsequent fossil finds. He enlisted the help of another scientist, Tim White, to help.
The pair would meet late at night in the museum’s lab. Using plaster casts of the fossils, they compared and measured the various features. They argued for months about whether the fossils represented a new species.
In the end, they decided the evidence was convincing. The species had walked upright and had a brain no bigger than a grapefruit. Its hands resembled human hands, with more curled fingers. Its estimated size ranged from 3 and a half feet to 5 feet tall and about 60 pounds to 100 pounds.
Their resulting 1979 paper in the journal Science announcing the new species drew worldwide attention. The paper challenged prevailing evidence that walking upright evolved along with an enlarged brain.
The paper drew harsh criticism from other scientists, including famous paleoanthropologists Mary Leakey and her son, Richard, who accused Johanson of being hasty in his conclusions. Johanson stood his ground.
In 1980, he returned Lucy to the Ethiopian government, knowing he could return to study her. He since has seen Lucy many times and never tires of the reunion, of seeing the 47 pieces that emerged to reshape his life.
The only difference between the World Bank and Al Qaeda is that Al Qaeda carries out its own terrorist actions, whereas World Bank commits its evil deeds through blood thirsty gangs such as Woyanne whose soldiers just today have gunned down 13 unarmed civilians in Somalia. The following press release, which is full of lies, makes any decent human being sick. Contrary to the WB’s claim, the only thing that is developing in Ethiopia is Woyanne’s pocket and the number of its victims. The WB’s blood money is fueling Woyanne’s state-sponsored terrorism in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.
——————————
World Bank launches new assistance strategy for Ethiopia
Press Release No:2008/289/AFR
WASHINGTON — The World Bank today launched a new Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) for Ethiopia. The strategy covers the period July 2008 – June 2011 and aims to help Ethiopia sustain its strong performance in economic growth and basic service delivery in recent years.
Ethiopia has entered the early stages of a ‘dual take-off’ in the provision of basic services and in economic growth. Over the past decade, its efforts to improve basic services have shown impressive results. Primary school enrollments have tripled, child mortality has almost been cut in half, and the number of people with access to clean water has more than doubled. Over the last four years, GDP growth has averaged over 11 percent per year. The percentage of Ethiopians living in poverty, which stood at 46 percent in 1996 and 44 percent in 2001, fell to 39 percent in 2006.
‘Ethiopia’s achievements on growth and basic service delivery are remarkable,’ said Ken Ohashi, World Bank Country Director for Ethiopia. ‘At the same time, sustaining this good performance will require addressing several looming challenges. The Bank will provide its full support to Ethiopia in this regard.’
These challenges in the near term, as outlined in the CAS, include managing macroeconomic risks (inflation and trade imbalances); stimulating private investment further; opening more economic opportunities for the disadvantaged groups, especially women, youth, and food-insecure households; and improving quality of services in line with the strong progress on access. In the longer term, Ethiopia must also address its fundamental vulnerability to drought, through environmental protection as well as further industrialization; continue to improve governance; and develop stronger cooperative ties with neighboring countries.
The Bank’s strategy will help address these challenges by supporting the implementation of key elements of the Governments’ Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP). Accordingly, the Bank’s support, both financial and analytical, is focused around four main pillars:
– Fostering economic growth. The Bank will support the country’s macro-fiscal stability as well as key sectors such as agriculture and infrastructure (roads, energy, water). It includes a focus on regional cooperation on large-scale infrastructure. A particular emphasis will be placed on strengthening supply responsiveness of the economy, leading to sustained growth and expansion in private investment.
– Improved quality of and access to basic services. The second pillar aims to help Ethiopia complete its move toward universal access to essential services in health, education, agriculture and water, and step up its efforts to enhance the quality of such services. It also includes support for enhanced citizens’ voice to improve quality of basic services through greater involvement of communities, citizens, and civil society in the decision making and monitoring processes.
– Reducing Vulnerability. The Bank will continue to support Ethiopia in addressing food insecurity. As part of a comprehensive approach to improving the lives of the poorest, it will seek to help address environmental degradation and population pressures and support greater economic engagement of women and youth.
– Fostering Improved Governance. The Bank will continue its strong emphasis on improving government effectiveness and quality of public administration, enhancing the accountability and responsiveness of government, and increasing empowerment and demand for accountability.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, is expanding its reengagement in Ethiopia to support the development of the private sector. IFC has recently approved an investment in the cement industry, which is the Corporation’s first investment project in Ethiopia in over 18 years.
Extensive consultations were carried out in the formulation of the strategy in order to obtain a wide range of perspectives from diverse stakeholders on the priorities, challenges and options for the Bank’s activities and role in the country. Stakeholder groups from the government, the private sector, civil society organizations, academia, opposition members of parliament, community groups, and other donors took part in the consultations.
The Bank’s program for Fiscal Year 2008 is based on an initial International Development Association (IDA) allocation of about $635 million at current exchange rates. The size of the lending program for the rest of the CAS period will depend on IDA’s 15th replenishment, which envisages significant funding increases for IDA borrowers. The annual allocation of IDA resources, however, will reflect a country’s policy and institutional performance relative to other countries, portfolio quality, per capita income levels, and population.
For more information on the World Bank in sub-Saharan Africa visit: www.worldbank.org/afr
For more information on the World Bank in Ethiopia visit: www.worldbank.org/ethiopia
(Associated Press) — ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Ethiopia swept the men’s 10,000-meter race Wednesday on the opening day of the African Athletics Championships.
Gebregziabher Gebremariam won in 28 minutes, 17 seconds after pulling away from the pack halfway through the race. Junior champion Ibrahim Jeylan finished second, and national champion Eshetu Wondimu was third.
The three Ethiopians linked arms after the race for a victory lap in front of about 25,000 fans.
Olympic champion and world record holder Kenenisa Bekele withdrew from the race earlier Wednesday for unspecified reasons.
“I will not run it,” Bekele told The Associated Press. “I can’t answer for you by telephone. It’s very difficult.”
Bekele’s withdrawal is not expected to affect his chances of running at this year’s Beijing Olympics.
Haile Gebrselassie, the former world record holder and two-time Olympic champion in the 10,000, was not selected to Ethiopia’s team for the event. But Gebrselassie is still hoping to run the 10,000 in Beijing after pulling out of the Olympic marathon.
(THE ASSOCIATED PRESS) MOGADISHU — Ethiopian Woyanne troops allied to Somalia’s shaky government opened fire on civilians in a street in southwestern Somalia, killing 13 on Wednesday after an explosion there killed two soldiers, witnesses said.
Witness Mohamud Ahmed Nur said an explosion apparently caused by a remote-controlled land mine killed the two Ethiopian Woyanne troops, who were patrolling the town of Baidoa.
The soldiers, he said, then opened fire in all directions, killing at least 10 civilian passers-by outright.
Mohamed Hussein Diriye, a doctor at the town’s main hospital, said three more people died later of their injuries and that seven others were still being treated at the hospital, he said.
“It was a horrific scene, blood scattered everywhere,” said witness Jamal Haji. “I saw the dead bodies of at least 10 people lying in the middle of the road.”
Baidoa is 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of the capital, Mogadishu, and is the headquarters for the Somali parliament. Several senior government officials also live there.
