Ethiopian hospitals are currently causing more suffering and death than healing. People who go to hospital for minor ailments end up gravely sick or dead. It is common to see patients, even infants, die in hospital emergency rooms unable to get treatment. Health workers are overwhelmed, and many of them do not care any more. Physicians in Ethiopia do not face malpractice lawsuits as in the U.S. and are becoming too careless in treating their patients. Private clinics are more concerned about making profit than treating their patients since there is no supervision by the government. Led by the Woyanne-appointed incompetent Minister, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Ministry of Health is a non-functioning government department whose officials are busy enriching themselves instead of carrying out their responsibilities. Government officials do not care because they and their families go to Western countries to get the treatment they need if they get sick.
Under the Woyanne regime, for example, malaria has reached an epidemic level. Malaria has returned to Ethiopia when Woyanne came to power. Under the Haileselassie regime, the Ethiopian Malaria Prevention Center had succeeded in completely eradicating malaria. In 1992, the Woyanne tribal junta dismantled the center saying that each region (killil) should have its own Malaria Prevention Center. But what Woyanne did was simply move the Center to Mekele and ignore the other regions. As a result, malaria now kills tens of thousands of Ethiopians each year in Amhara, Oromia, and other regions.
Although tens of millions of dollars donated from other countries are allocated for combating HIV/AIDS, the number of individuals contracting the virus and the death toll from the disease have not decreased. The reason is that there is no political will to focus on the problem. Under the Woyanne regime, government officials are busy acquiring personal wealth and transferring it out of the country. They are not public servants. They are parasites that suck the life blood of the people of Ethiopia.
Once these ‘public servants’ think they made enough money, they go to Western countries and seek political asylum claiming persecution. It is becoming common for members of the Tigrean People Liberation Front (Woyanne) to seek political asylum in the United States. Some claim that they are members of Kinijit or OLF, the same organizations whose members they torture and kill in Ethiopia. Fabricating the necessary evidence for their political asylum cases is easy for them for the obvious reason.
Dental care is in a worse state. Ethiopians dentists should be named deathtists. We are hearing cases where people who receive a simple dental treatment end up terribly sick, disfigured, or dead because of infections that can easily be prevented. The dentists don’t even use anaesthesia when they treat their patients. Getting dental treatment in Addis Ababa is as traumatic as being tortured by Workneh Gebeyehu’s sadistic thugs at the Federal Police headquarters.
One of the most notorious dentists (deathtists) in Ethiopia who is known for deadly incompetence is Dr. Asheber Woldegiorgis. Yes, it is the same guy who was recently fired from his position as chairman of the Ethiopian Football Federation. This Russian-educated dentist makes tones of money from his private dental clinics. According to ER Research Unit, none of Dr Asheber’s clinics has ever been inspected by the Ministry of Health. Dr Asheber himself is too busy playing soccer and exploiting teenage girls with his friend Al Amoudi to properly run his dental practice. His close friendship with Al Amoudi makes Dr Asheber immune from any accountability for his malpractice. His patients (victims) have no recourse for being made sick and disfigured from severe dental infections that result from poor or careless treatment. In some cases, the infection spreads to lung through the sinus and kill the patient after horrible suffering.
It is reported that there are more Ethiopian doctors in eastern United States alone than in Ethiopia. Who can blame these physicians? The Woyanne tribal junta has made the country unlivable to all Ethiopians, except those who are members and affiliates of the ruling class. What these physicians who are currently in Western countries are accountable for is for ignoring the plight of the poor people they left behind. Many of them go back to Ethiopia for visits, flash their dollars on the poor, stay at Sheraton and come back to their luxurious life — made possible by those who bled and died to make the U.S. a free country.
It is not unusual for a lot of Ethiopians to say “I don’t want to get involved in politics.” What these people do not realize is that when they go to get a simple dental treatment, for example, and instead get sick from it, they have no recourse because those politicians who are in power do not care for politics, too, and there is no body to make any body accountable. In the final analysis, the responsibility for the endless nightmare in our country falls on the lap of every Ethiopian who puts his/her head in the sand.
There has been a deadly explosion in a bus on the disputed border between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Ethiopian [Woyanne] officials said at least seven people were killed and 10 wounded when the bus exploded in the Ethiopian-controlled town of Humera.
They said they believed an explosive device had been attached to the bus.
The blast happened just before the United Nations Security Council met to discuss the future of the UN force stationed in the disputed border zone.
The UN peacekeepers were sent eight years ago to monitor a border security zone, after the war which killed tens of thousands of people between Eritrea and Ethiopia in the late 1990s.
The explosion took place on a crowded bus just as it was leaving the bus station at Humera at the western end of the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.
———————— Associated Press
Ethiopia [Woyanne] blames Eritrea after explosion kills 8
Eight people have been killed in an explosion Thursday in northwestern Ethiopia, government officials said, and Ethiopia [Woyanne officials] said rival Eritrea was responsible.
Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu told The Associated Press dismissed Ethiopia’s accusation as: “total rubbish.”
Tigray State Vice President Abadi Zemo said a bomb attached to a bus exploded in Humera, about 370 miles northwest of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Humera is in Tigray State and borders Sudan.
Why doesn’t BBC investigate the illegal shipment of tones of gold bars from Ethiopian gold mines directly to London by Al Amoudi, in collaboration with his business partners, Azeb Mesfin, Sebhat Nega and other members of the Woyanne crime family?
By Elizabeth Blunt
BBC News, Addis Ababa
Ethiopia’s national bank has been told to inspect all the gold in its vaults to determine its authenticity.
It follows the discovery that some of the “gold” it had bought for millions of dollars was gold-plated steel.
The first hint that something was wrong reportedly came when the Ethiopian central bank exported a consignment of gold bars to South Africa.
The South Africans sent them back, complaining that they had been sold gilded steel.
An investigation revealed that the bank had bought a consignment of fake gold from a supplier, who is now under arrest.
Other arrests followed, including business associates of the main accused; national bank officials; and chemists from the Geological Survey of Ethiopia, whose job it is to assay the bank’s purchases of gold and certify that they are real.
But what has clearly now got the [fake] government even more worried is that another different batch of gold in the bank’s vaults has also been found to be fake, and this time it was gold which had been there for several years, after being seized from smugglers trying to take it to Djibouti.
Mining
Ethiopia’s [fake] parliament ordered the inspection of all gold in the national bank’s vaults.
A report from the [fake] auditor-general on the affair is expected to be presented to [fake] parliament during its current session.
Gold is mined in Ethiopia in considerable quantities, and a trader selling gold to the central bank has to have it tested and certified by the Geological Survey.
Whether the bank bought fake gold in the first place, or whether real gold from the vaults has been swapped for gilded steel, the fraud has cost the bank many millions of dollars, and it must have involved collusion on a considerable scale.
Meles Zenawi was preaching about the need to expand telecommunications technology in Africa at a recent conference, while his regime is known as one of the worst obstacles for the growth of technology in Ethiopia, as the report below shows.
“From now on, we will organise activities every 12 March to condemn cyber-censorship throughout the world,” Reporters Without Borders said. “A response of this kind is needed to the growing tendency to crack down on bloggers and to close websites.”
“Today, the first time this day is being marked, we are giving all Internet users the opportunity to demonstrate in places were protests are not normally possible. We hope many will come and protest in virtual versions of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Cuba’s Revolution Square or on the streets of Rangoon, in Burma. At least 62 cyber-dissidents are currently imprisoned worldwide, while more than 2,600 websites, blogs or discussions forums were closed or made inaccessible in 2007.”
The press freedom organisation added: “Our list of ‘Internet Enemies’ has also been updated with the addition of two countries – Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. And we are offering an new version of our Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.”
Reporters Without Borders learned last night that UNESCO has withdrawn its patronage for today’s Online Free Expression Day (read our press release).
To denounce government censorship of the Internet and to demand more online freedom, Reporters Without Borders is calling on Internet users to come and protest in online versions of nine countries that are Internet enemies during the 24 hours from 11 a.m. tomorrow, 12 March, to 11 a.m. on 13 March (Paris time, GMT +1). Anyone with Internet access will be able to create an avatar, choose a message for their banner and take part in one of the cyber-demos taking place in Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, North Korea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.
There are 15 countries in this year’s Reporters Without Borders list of “Internet Enemies” – Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. There were only 13 in 2007. The two new additions to the traditional censors are both to be found in sub-Saharan Africa: Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.
“This is not at all surprising as these regimes regularly hound the traditional media,” Reporters Without Borders says in the introduction to its report.“Internet penetration is very slight, but nevertheless sufficient to give them a few nightmares. They follow the example of their seniors and draw on the full arsenal of online censorship methods including legislation, monitoring Internet cafés and controlling ISPs.”
There is also a supplementary list of 11 “countries under watch.” They are Bahrain, Eritrea, Gambia, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Unlike the “enemies,” these countries do not imprison bloggers or censor the Internet massively. But they are sorely tempted and abuses are common. Many of them have laws that they could use to gag the Internet if they wanted. And the judicial or political authorities often use anti-terrorism laws to identify and monitor government opponents and activists expressing themselves online.
“The hunting down of independent thinkers online is all the more effective as several major western companies have colluded with governments in pinpointing ‘trouble-makers’,” the reports says. “US company Yahoo! apologised in 2007 for a ‘misunderstanding’ which ended in journalist Shi Tao being sent to prison for ten years. The company has been responsible for the imprisonment of a total of four Chinese cyber-dissidents. It was apparently willing to ‘obey local laws’ that forced it to identify Internet users deemed to be dangerous.”
Finally, a new version of the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is available in French and English on the Reporters Without Borders website (www.rsf.org). It offers practical advice and techniques on how to start up a blog, how to blog for anonymously and how to circumvent censorship. It also includes the accounts of bloggers from countries such as Egypt and Burma.
The cyber-demonstration was devised and produced by the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency.
Ethiopians for Obama is reaching out to the Ethiopian community and looking for volunteers to drive to Philadelphia this Sunday March 16th to help register Ethiopian-Americans to vote in the Pennsylvania Primary, which is being held on April 22nd. The Pennsylvania deadline to register is March 24th. Anyone who is not registered on or before the 24th of March is not eligible to vote in the Pennsylvania Primary. In addition, those voters who are not registered as Democrats are also not eligible to vote in the Democratic Primary as it is a closed primary.
The good news is that we have a week and a half to register as many Ethiopians-Americans and other citizens as we can. The key is to make sure that they are registered, and if they support Barack Obama, to make sure that they are registered as Democrats. If we are able to get enough participation, the plan is to drive from Washington DC at 7:30 AM on Sunday March 16th and arrive in Philadelphia in time to set up a booth at the various Ethiopian churches in Philadelphia. We will bring our laptops and empower Ethiopians to register to vote right on the spot—you can register on-line in Pennsylvania.
There is a large community of Ethiopian-Americans in Philadelphia, it is vital that we galvanize and organize our community in Pennsylvania so that we can have an impact on the outcome of the Pennsylvania Primary.
If you are interested in volunteering to make this trip to Philadelphia, please email [email protected] and put “Trip to PA” in the subject header.
If you do not have a ride, please state that so we can try to work out accommodations for everyone. The plan is to drive back to DC by 4:00 PM Sunday.
