ADDIS ABABA, Feb 18, 2008 (AFP) — Over 300 police officers suspected of links with rebels have been arrested in Ethiopia’s restive Ogaden region as part of a government crackdown, state-media reported on Monday.
Regional police commissioner [Woyanne mercinery] Yussuf Mohammed was quoted as saying: “309 police officers suspected of having links with the anti-peace elements of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) have been apprehended.”
Yussuf did not give a time span but said “rebel hideouts” and communication avenues had been “wiped out” by government forces. [He said the same thing some 3 months ago].
“We are in a position to completely destroy the ONLF in a very short period of time,” he said.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has denied Wzr. Nigist Gebrehiwot her request for political asylum. The ER Research Unit has learned that the USCIS rejected Wzr. Nigist’s application saying that the Woyanne regime in Ethiopia has given her a pardon and that when other members and leaders of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit) returned to Ethiopia from a working visit to the U.S. they did not face any problem. Wzr. Nigist has appealed the USCIS decision to the immigration court.
The tourist resorts that are planned to be built by these millionaire Arab sheiks are nothing more than their personal whorehouses where they take advantage of poor and desperate Ethiopians. Al Amoudi and his Arab friends see Ethiopia under Woyanne as nothing more than one big brothel of easily exploitable underage girls and boys.
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UAE investors to build over $1 billion tourist resort in Ethiopia
Addis Ababa (APA) — Investors from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday launched in Addis Ababa a $1.2 billion investment bid to build a tourist resort in Ethiopia, APA learns here.
The investors have signed an agreement with the Ethiopian Oromia State administration to establish the tourist resort, to be located about 175 kilometres east of Addis Ababa.
The Oromoia Regional Commissioner Alemu Semi told journalists on Thursday that the investors have been making preparations to start construction. He said the Enjaz Business group of companies signed the agreement with the Oromia administration since 2007 to establish the resort around the lakes of Abayata and Shala in West Arsi Zone.
According to the agreement, the investors were allocated 38,000 hectares of land to construct the resort.
“Currently, a master plan is being prepared for the resort. Soil research and selection of sites was carried out to start the construction,” Semi said.
The investors received additional 4000 hectares of land to establish a factory meant for manufacturing prefabricated housing units. The construction of the factory will commence in May, the official said.
The proposed modern resort, which will have residential units, schools, sports facilities, recreational and business centers, health institutions and a modern airport, among others, will radically augment the nation’s tourism industry.
Ato Bedru Adem, the notorious member of the Hailu Shawel gang, is back in Ethiopia after Ato Hailu pushed him out of his inner circle for being too demanding and asking t.o many sensitive questions of financial nature. He is now threatening Ato Hailu’s group in Addis Ababa led by Abayneh Berhanu with exposure of their secrets if they do not comply with his demands. Reportedly, Ato Bedru’s demands include: 1) A position in the executive committee of AEUP, Hailu’s former party that has now been revived; 2) report on the financial activities of the group; and 3) fat salary.
Meanwhile, the Shawel gang itself is disintegrating after Ato Hailu started to distance himself from Ato Moges Bruck and Shaleqa Yoseph Yazew who stole or diverted hundreds of thousands dollars of Kinijit’s funds. Solomon Bekele, Mirchaw Sinishaw and several other members of the gang have also left angry over the way they were being treated by Hailu Shawel and the EPRP mafia that has surrounded him — Dr Taye Woldesemayat, Mesfin Mekonnen, and Assefa Dires.
Yesterday, Sunday, the Shawel gang had held a public meeting in Washington DC at the Convention Center. Members of the gang from several cities were in town. According to ER sources who were inside the hall, there were about 150 people attending the meeting — most of whom from out of town. The meeting was ignored by every Ethiopian media. Even a small idir gets more attention than the totally discredited Shawel gang that continues to make news only because Woyanne is using them against Kinijit.
Reviewed by by Deanne Sole for PopMatters
It must be a great thing to play the mèssengo. The breadth of Ethiopian music made available by the Éthiopiques is one of the series’ great strengths. In 23 albums we’ve crossed from the rustic songs of farmers strumming bluntly on handmade guitars to mid-century pop singers in sharp shirts. Armed with this set of discs we can jump from a thoughtful pianist nun to a set of 12 songs dedicated to a specific instrument, the square-angled, 10-stringed begena harp. Not many countries get such a sustained examination of their musical output unless they are able to fund it wholly themselves, and few of those examinations are as popular outside the source nation as the Éthiopiques have come to be.
Éthiopiques 23 is devoted to Orchestra Ethiopia. It arrives with a lengthy biographical piece from one of the Orchestra’s past leaders, an American Peace Corps volunteer named Charles Sutton who describes the development of the band. Sutton says that he became interested in the group’s brand of southern Ethiopian folk when he stumbled on a room of musicians performing down an Addis Ababa alleyway in 1966. “It must be a great thing to play the mèssengo,” he remembers himself thinking afterwards as he walked back to his hotel.
The mèssengo is a fiddle with a soundbox shaped like a diamond and he did indeed get to play it, as we find out on this album in “Shègitu”. He sings too. We can hear the crowd breaking into waves of applause every time this tall, thin foreigner with his curved flop of hair manages to get his lines out in their native language. His voice is less sure of itself than those of the Ethiopian singers who appear in the rest of the disc, but you can hear that he was up for the challenge, a determined man in spite of the critics who labelled him with the insulting word ferenj, meaning white outsider.
A number of these old tracks have a muffled sound, as if they were recorded in the open air and it drew away some of their precise edges. This muffledness affects some tracks more than others, and some instruments more than others. The beating of drums in “Tennesh Mèkèdda” sounds distant, but the noises of flutes and strange winding instruments on the same track are very clear. The result is like the sound effects from a short cartoon, full of knocks, squeaks, and whees, the noise of unsuspecting animated cats being blattered on the head.
Other songs are more obviously folk-based. “Goraw” is a reworking of the traditional shellèla boasts exchanged by competing warriors before a fight. The boasts here have a ring of formality that in a European would sound mediaeval: knights calling to their rivals. The singer is accompanied by a washent flute and a punctuating rumble of threatening strings from a krar harp. “A discussion of shellèla may be found in Éthiopiques 14,” the liner notes for “Goraw” tell us in case we want to follow our exposure to this war song by learning more. This series has grown so dense that the notes habitually refer backwards as if they were part of an extensive library, which in fact they are. “Other fine Tezetas, as well as a discussion of the genre, may be found on Éthiopiques 10,” they point out in the information for “Tezeta,” while the details for “Kèto Ayqèrem Motu” state that the technique of the harpist on the song “differs, both texturally and melodically, from that of begenist Alèmu Aga, presented in Éthiopiques 11.”
Even if you don’t own all of the albums they’re referring to, you should still come away from these asides with the impression that you’re walking into a musical world that can expand indefinitely, one CD opening out into another, a musician on one disc reminding you of something that happened ten discs before. The out of kilter combination of voice and begena in “Kèto Ayqèrem Motu” harks back to the strangely similar sound of Alèmayèhu Eshèté from the album before it, Éthiopiques 22. It’s as if Eshèté with his fashionable suit and dreamboat hair had pulled this older, slower sound out of a bog where it had been preserved in situ like Tollund Man and sexed it up for a nightclub audience. That wobble swells out and establishes itself as a presence.
Like Eshèté and every other musician in Ethiopia, the Orchestra suffered with the arrival of the dictatorial Derg junta in 1974. In ‘75 the group fell apart. The legacy it left behind, as presented by Buda, is an eerie-sounding one, sitting partway between the countryside folk music atmosphere of Éthiopiques 12 and the modern professionalism of an Eshèté, between trained singing and artless strum. A good, solid folk group—in other words, talented musicians who were willing to tweak the old sounds and not take themselves too seriously while they were doing it. In the photographs that come with the CD almost all of them are smiling.
(AFP) – Ethiopia distance-running great Kenenisa Bekele added to his collection of notable landmarks by setting a new world-best performance mark in the two miles at the international indoor meeting here Saturday.
The reigning Olympic 10,000 metres champion, on the same track where compatriot Haile Gebrselassie achieved the previous fastest time, shaved 0.34 seconds off his fellow Ethiopian’s mark when finishing in a time of 8 minutes 04.35 seconds.
Bekele, a second off the required pace to set a new world-best time at one stage, rallied with an especially quick final 200 metres lap.
And there was more long-distance success for Ethiopia in the women’s 3,000 metres, won in front-running style by Gelete Burka in 8:31.94 – the third-fastest time in history.
Sweden’s Olympic heptathlon champion Carolina Kluft came out on top ahead of Kelly Sotherton in the three-event challenge.
Home favourite Sotherton won the 400 metres race in 52.47 secs, the fastest time by a British woman this year, but Kluft did enough to defeat Sotherton, in a competition also featuring the 60m hurdles, by 18 points.
Meanwhile Britain’s Commonwealth champion Phillips Idowu warmed-up for next month’s World Indoor Championships in Valencia by winning the triple jump with an effort of 17.21 metres.
Idowu was the only man to jump more than 17 metres in a competition where Dmitrij Valukevic of Slovakia was the runner-up, with third place going to the United States’s Kenta Bell.
