NAIROBI (Reuters) – Amnesty International accused Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers on Wednesday of killing 21 people, including an imam and several Islamic scholars, at a Mogadishu mosque and said seven of the victims had their throats slit.
The rights group said the soldiers had also captured dozens of children during the raid on the Al Hidaaya mosque in the north of the Somali capital earlier this week during operations against Islamist insurgents.
Ethiopia Woyanne has thousands of soldiers in neighbouring Somalia to bolster a Western-backed government against rebels fighting an Iraq-style insurgency in the Horn of Africa nation.
The Ethiopian Woyanne and Somali governments have not responded publicly to accusations of atrocities at the mosque. But they have frequently denied abusing human rights in the fight against groups they call al Qaeda-backed terrorists.
Amnesty said those killed at the mosque included imam Sheikh Saiid Yaha and several scholars of the moderate Tabligh group that operated there.
“Eye-witnesses report that those killed inside the mosque were unarmed civilians taking no active part in hostilities,” Amnesty said. “Seven of the 21 were reported to have died after their throats were cut — a form of extra-judicial execution practiced by Ethiopian forces in Somalia.”
Some moderate Islamist leaders have reacted to the mosque incident, and a recent upsurge of fighting in Mogadishu, by postponing plans to join U.N.-sponsored peace talks.
More than 100 people have been killed since the weekend in clashes in the coastal capital, and the takeover of several small towns by the Islamists’ militant al Shabaab wing.
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Amnesty urged the Ethiopian Woyanne military to release all 41 children it said were held after the mosque raid.
“Witnesses have told Amnesty International that Ethiopian Woyanne forces would only release the children from their military base in north Mogadishu ‘once they had been investigated’ and ‘if they were not terrorists’,” it said.
Some of the children — whose ages were as low as nine — were reported to have been freed, though the majority were still in custody, Amnesty’s statement added.
Various witnesses told Reuters they had seen beheaded bodies lying outside the mosque after the fighting.
Another four corpses showed up in Mogadishu on Thursday, at the compound of the SOS children’s hospital that had also been occupied by Ethiopian Woyanne troops during clashes at the weekend.
“The Ethiopian Woyanne troops who occupied SOS hospital since the weekend left last night taking the hospital’s food and cooking oil with them and they also damaged the properties of the hospital,” SOS security officer Abey Saney Osman told Reuters.
“There are four dead bodies, one inside and three others outside the gate of the compound. We are now inside the hospital and trying to sort all the mess,” he said by phone.
An SOS employee, laboratory technician Mohammed Faagte, told Reuters a colleague died and four others were wounded while trying to flee the hospital when the fighting began.
Civilians have borne the burnt of Somalia’s near-incessant violence since the 1991 toppling of a dictator.
About one million of the nation’s 9 million population live as refugees in their own land.
(Additional reporting by Abdi Sheikh and Aweys Yusuf in Mogadishu)
(Gulf Times) — Members of the Ethiopian community in Qatar yesterday said they hoped that political relations between Doha and Addis Ababa Woyanne would improve and ties return to normal as early as possible.
“We are here to earn our livelihood and were shocked to hear the announcement of Ethiopia Woyanne severing diplomatic ties with Qatar. Most of us learnt of it from the Ethiopian TV channel and it came as a big surprise to us,” they said.
Ethiopia’s government Woyanne had cited Qatar’s “strong ties” with Eritrea for the move. It also accused Doha of meddling in the affairs of the Horn of Africa region.
Qatar has termed Ethiopian Woyanne allegations as frivolous and baseless.
In Doha, a Qatari official dismissed Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s charges, saying it had always done its utmost to combat terrorism. “The Ethiopian charges do not deserve a reaction from us. Qatar’s foreign policy is clear. Qatar underlines the importance of peaceful settlement of all disputes between nations.”
There are an estimated 12,000 Ethiopian nationals in Qatar. Most of them are housemaids while the majority of the men are employed in private companies in different positions, ranging from drivers to technicians and executives. There is a big demand for Ethiopian housemaids in Qatar.
Some of them said they were worried about the turn of events. Joseph, who works in a premium Doha store said he was only interested in his job and not bothered about international or domestic politics. “Some of my friends called to ask about the latest news and the possible consequences of the Ethiopian government’s Woyanne’s decision. Everybody seemed to be worried,” he said.
The absence of an embassy in Doha has added to the confusion and worry. “In such situations, people generally turn to their diplomatic missions for guidance but we don’t know what is happening. I tried to contact our embassy in Kuwait (which looks after Qatar), but the number on their website turned out to be wrong,” a community member said.
“In the absence of a direct air link between Qatar and Ethiopia, we mostly depend on Emirates which operates direct flights between Dubai and Addis Ababa. We hope Qatar Airways begins a flight to our capital soon,” one of them said.
About half of the people of Ethiopia, a country located in the Horn of Africa, are Muslims, the remaining being Christians and animists. All the Ethiopians Gulf Times spoke to said there was absolute communal harmony in their country and Christians and Muslims lived in perfect peace.
The Horn of Africa is a peninsula of East Africa that juts for hundreds of kilometres into the Arabian Sea, and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. It is the easternmost projection of the African continent. The term also refers to the greater region containing the countries of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia.
An Ethiopian expatriate who has been working at a power project said the recent row was between two governments and not between the peoples. “It is a political development and we have nothing to do with it. We only want to focus on our jobs and make the best out of our stay in Qatar,” he said.
Nebiyou Gezhagne, a community leader, said Ethiopians were happy in Qatar and they wanted to live and work in this country. He said he came to know about the “development” from Gulf Times and later received some calls from community members who wanted to know the “consequences” of the Ethiopian decision.
While most of the Ethiopians in Qatar have been here for less than four years, Nebiyou is a veteran, having completed 10 years in this country. He said he had no clue as to what led his government to take such a decision nor about its consequences on Ethiopians living in Qatar. “This country is home to people from almost all countries in the world. Foreign workers are treated well here. Qatar has been very kind and considerate to expatriates. We hope the present difficult phase will pass and bilateral relations will bloom. We hope Ethiopians will continue to be welcome here,” Nebiyou, who works for a trading company said.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Eritrean embassy termed the Ethiopian Woyanne action a bilateral issue between Qatar and Ethiopia. The deputy head of the Eritrean mission told Gulf Times that he would not like to comment. The US embassy also declined comment.
(BBC) Addis Ababa — Ethiopia’s most popular pop singer, Teddy Afro, has pleaded not guilty to causing the death of a young man in a hit and run incident 18 months ago.
Thousands of young people mounted an impromptu protest after the High Court hearing, running through the streets, shouting, “Teddy is innocent”.
Unauthorised demonstrations are almost unheard of in Ethiopia and there was a heavy paramilitary police presence.
At a previous hearing, the noise of his fans almost drowned out proceedings.
This time the case was moved to a building at the back of the court area, well away from the crowd.
The singer appeared under close police guard, dressed in a pink t-shirt and looking subdued.
He spoke only to plead not guilty to negligent driving, driving without a licence, and failing to stop at the scene of an accident.
The incident in question took place in November 2006 and since then the singer, whose real name is Tewodros Kassahun, has been free on bail.
It is not clear why he was rearrested last week and has now been charged.
He was remanded in custody until next Tuesday.
As the news spread in the street that Teddy was going back to jail, the crowd erupted and a large group of youths started jogging past waving and shouting that the singer was not guilty.
The police chased them with batons until they finally dispersed into the surrounding streets.
This kind of demonstration has not been seen in Addis Ababa since the period after the elections in 2005 when Teddy Afro’s songs were playing everywhere and his music was the anthem of the anti-government protesters.
(VOA) – Residents in the Somali capital Mogadishu are expressing outrage and anger against Ethiopian Woyanne troops in the capital, whom they say massacred at least 10 people, including a senior religious leader, inside a mosque on Sunday. Human rights groups say they fear the incident could dramatically strengthen the 15-month-old anti-Ethiopian Woyanne insurgency and ignite more violence in a country that the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. VOA Correspondent Alisha Ryu has the story from our East Africa Bureau in Nairobi.
According to eyewitness reports, the victims inside al-Hidaya Mosque in Mogadishu’s Huriwa district were killed by Ethiopian Woyanne troops on the second day of intense fighting, which left more than 80 people dead in the war-ravaged capital.
The witnesses allege that Ethiopian Woyanne troops stormed the mosque on Sunday, shooting and killing Sheik Said Yahya, the mosque’s most senior religious leader. Eyewitnesses say several others were also shot and killed, and a handful had their throats slit, after the Ethiopians Woyannes accused them of supporting and training Islamist insurgents.
Mogadishu resident Mohamed Ali, 35, says the mosque killings have convinced him and many others that they must join the insurgency to end Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s occupation of Somalia. Ali says people now feel they must help in the fight against Ethiopian Woyanne troops no matter the cost. He says there is also rising anger at Somalia’s Ethiopia Woyanne-backed secular transitional government for doing nothing to protect the country and its people.
The director of the London office of U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, Tom Porteous, says even if Ethiopian Woyanne troops had nothing to do with the killings in the mosque, they have committed human rights violations in the past and that has destroyed Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s credibility with Somalia’s people.
“Certainly, we have documented in the past extrajudicial execution by both the TFG [transitional federal government] and Ethiopian Woyanne forces,” he said. “We have documented the aerial bombardment of parts of Mogadishu by Ethiopian Woyanne forces. All this, of course, simply increases the anger of residents of Mogadishu, and the impact of these abuses is that it has actually made the problem of the insurgency much worse.”
Ethiopia Woyanne denies its troops have committed atrocities. The Somali government says military operations are conducted in self-defense, noting that Islamist-led insurgents often cause numerous civilian casualties by launching attacks at Ethiopian Woyanne and government troops in heavily-populated areas.
Sources in Mogadishu say the Hidaya mosque, one of the largest in Mogadishu, may have been targeted by the Ethiopians Woyannes because it had long served as a base for different Islamic groups, including al-Ittihad al-Islami, a militant Somali group the United States has labeled as a terror organization.
But the sources say in recent years, the Hidaya Mosque has been a place of worship for adherents of a mystical branch of Sunni Islam called Sufism. Most Somalis belong to the Sufi order, which has no ties to the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi movement embraced by members of al-Ittihad and its successor, the Shabab.
(AFP) – A transatlantic flight from Germany to the United States was diverted to Ireland after a two-year-old girl died on board, police said late on Tuesday.
The Lufthansa flight was en route from Frankfurt to JFK airport in New York when it declared a medical emergency and landed at Shannon Airport in the southwest of the country.
The passengers were taken off the plane to be interviewed by Gardai (Irish police) in an effort to establish how the child died.
A police spokesman said the flight had originated in Addis Ababa and had arrived in Ireland via Germany but he refused to comment on reports that the child was Ethiopian.
“We always have to make the necessary inquiries to ensure there was nothing suspicious about the death. We are still trying to establish what the circumstances are,” the spokesman said.
The UN refugee agency and its partners expect to resume the repatriation of Sudanese refugees from Ethiopia on 15 December with a first group of 613 leaving Bonga camp in western Ethiopia for their homeland.
Organized repatriation of Sudanese refugees from Ethiopia started in March 2006 and more than 21,000 have been assisted to go home before the operation was temporarily halted in May this year due to the rainy season and swampy road conditions.
With the mud fully dried up and the roads becoming fairly passable at least on the route to the Kurmuk corridor, UNHCR, together with the government of Ethiopia, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the World Food Programme (WFP), has finalized preparations to send home a total of 1,800 refugees from Bonga camp to the Blue Nile State of south Sudan before the end of 2007.
Sherkole camp, which uses the same Kurmuk corridor, will soon restart the return operation. Repatriation from Fugnido and Dimma camps through the Pagak exit point is expected to resume at the beginning of 2008.
“With the resumption of the return movement at this point in time, we, together with our partners, expect to assist the return of approximately 30,000 Sudanese refugees between now and the whole of 2008,” said Mr. Ilunga Ngandu, UNHCR’s Regional Liaison Representative for Africa.
Mr. Ngandu added that this would enable UNHCR to close at least two of the four camps sheltering Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia before end of 2008.
Tomorrow’s convoy of 11 buses and four trucks is scheduled to cross into Sudan’s Blue Nile state, after an 820-kilometre-long journey. The returning refugees will have to spend three nights on UNHCR-built transit points on the road before reaching home.
Before leaving Bonga, a camp of more than 7,000 Sudanese refugees, the returnees will receive a reintegration package of blankets, jerry cans, sleeping mats, a water filter and a sanitary kit for girls and women.
They will receive more supplies at Kurmuk, including plastic sheeting, mosquito nets, plastic buckets, kitchen utensils and soap. Upon arrival in Sudan, a reintegration package comprising three months of food, seeds and agricultural tools will be provided by the World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization.
Close to 400 of tomorrow’s returnees are aged under 18 years, which indicates that most were probably born and raised in Ethiopia. The main influx of southern Sudanese to Ethiopia came in 1987.
Since January 2005, after the ex-rebel force SPLM and the government of Sudan signed an accord ending a two-decade war, the UNHCR has supported the return of some 70,000 to South Sudan from neighboring countries, including some 21,000 from Ethiopia. More than 90,000 are believed to have returned on their own.
At the moment Ethiopia hosts 36,850 Sudanese refugees in four camps. Some 20,000 Eritrean and more than 23,000 Somali refugees also reside in the country.
