Ethiopian Interview with Tegbar spokesperson Ato Tsegaye Shimeles. Click below to listen: Click here to listen

By SALAD DUHUL AND ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY
The Associated Press

MOGADISHU, Somalia — A radical Islamic group that was driven from power a year ago by a Western-supported offensive is making a significant comeback in Somalia, and the government can do little to stop it, officials said Thursday, as shelling and gunbattles in the capital killed at least 17 people.

Sheik Qasim Ibrahim Nur, director of security at Somalia’s National Security Ministry, said the government has no power to resist the Council of Islamic Courts, which the United States has accused of having ties to al-Qaida.

He said the fighters had regrouped and were poised to launch a massive attack.

Mortar rounds slammed into the biggest market in Mogadishu, killing 12 people and wounding more than 40 others. Five others were killed in a separate gunbattle in the city. The death toll was expected to rise from the latest bloodshed blamed on Islamic insurgents.

The Council of Islamic Courts has been waging an Iraq-style insurgency that has killed thousands of people this year.

“About 80 percent of Somalia is not safe and is not under control of the government,” Nur said. “Islamists are planning to launch a massive attack against the [government] and its allied troops.”

Nur appealed for international support, saying Islamic fighters “are everywhere.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged more African nations to send peacekeepers to Somalia, perhaps the most strategically located nation in the Horn of Africa. At a crossroads between the Middle East and Africa, Somalia dominates vital sea lanes, although rampant piracy has made the waters treacherous.

About 1,800 Ugandan peacekeepers are in Somalia, officially as the vanguard of a larger African Union peacekeeping force, although no other countries have sent reinforcements. Ethiopia, which sent soldiers to Somalia last year to back the government in its fight against the Islamic militants, is not part of the peacekeeping force.

The United States can do little by itself in Somalia. An intervention in the early 1990s left 18 U.S. servicemen dead, and the legacy of the “Black Hawk Down” battle still weighs heavily on both countries. But Western powers long have been concerned that the lawless country could become a breeding ground for terror.

Presidential spokesman Hussein Mohamed Mohamud also said that the Muslim fighters were regrouping, and said they have “a lot of weapons and foreign fighters.”

The Council of Islamic Courts was driven from power last year when Ethiopia Woyanne intervened, with the tacit approval of the United States, backing the government with soldiers and fighter jets.

Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service, the Congress’ research arm, said the Islamic leadership was never truly gone and merely went underground.

“The Somali and Ethiopian Woyanne governments may have underestimated the level of organization and determination on the part of the Islamic courts,” Dagne said in a telephone interview from Washington.

He added that many people look back on the group’s six months in power and conclude the country then “was relatively peaceful and gave hope to the people of Somalia that after over a decade of violence, they can live in peace.”

After the council was ousted, remnants launched an Iraq-style insurgency, causing more bloodshed and throwing this already-beleaguered nation into chaos.

President Abdullahi Yusuf is in London for what his aides described as a regular medical checkup. On Thursday, the 73-year-old president was said to be well, but uncertainty over his condition persists, adding to the tension in his homeland.

Officials from Ethiopia Woyanne , which has troops in Somalia backing the government, denied there is any Islamic resurgence.

“The facts on the ground tell you that they are in bad shape and having serious difficulties,” said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Woyanne dictator Meles Zenawi.

But there are increasing signs that the Islamic extremist group that controlled much of southern Somalia last year again is gaining power.

Members of the group and the feared Shabab — its military wing — have been spotted with increasing frequency throughout central Somalia.

In Kismayo, Somalia’s third-largest city and located about 310 miles south of the capital, a member of the Shabab said his group was sending soldiers to the capital daily to fight the Ethiopians Woyannes. The fighter asked that his name not be published for fear of reprisals.

Over the weekend, about 50 heavily armed militiamen briefly overran Bula Burte town in central Somalia, about 130 miles north of the capital, said the regional Gov. Yusuf Dabaged.

“The so-called insurgents are increasing in the region,” Dabaged said. “From now on we will fight them ruthlessly.”

The country faces what the United Nations says is the biggest humanitarian crisis in Africa, and a local aid group says 6,000 civilians have been killed in fighting this year. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes to squalid refugee camps.

Associated Press writers Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu, and Nasteex Dahir Farah in Kismayo, Somalia, contributed to this report.

SAN’A, Yemen (AP) – An international aid group said Sunday that it discovered the bodies of 56 men, women and children on Yemen’s southern coast who perished trying to emigrate illegally from Africa.
Medecins Sans Frontieres’ team in Yemen found the victims along a 5-kilometer (3-mile) stretch of coast near the town of al-Irqah on Saturday, along with 49 survivors who said they left the Somali port city of Bossasso three days earlier in an attempt to cross the Gulf of Aden.

The survivors said the 8-meter (26-foot) fiberglass boat set off with a total of 148 Somalians and Ethiopians on board, including some 40 women and five children _ the youngest eight months old. The group had no food or water, and at least four people died during the trip from the harsh conditions, MSF quoted the survivors as saying in a statement.

The boat arrived off the Yemeni coast in the middle of the night, and the passengers were forced to jump into the water or suffer a severe beating. During the ensuing panic, the passengers rushed to one side of the boat, and the vessel capsized. The fate of those not found dead or alive on the Yemeni coast is unknown.

The MSF team provided medical assistance and offered counseling to the survivors, many of whom had lost multiple relatives or friends.

One 25-year-old Somali man told MSF that he lost his wife, two children and two other close relatives.
Another Somali man said he understood the risk of the journey but had no choice.
«Even if I die in the sea, I need to get to Yemen,» MSF quoted him as saying. «Maybe I have a chance to survive, but if I go back to Mogadishu, I will die.

MSF has been providing medical and humanitarian assistance to refugees and migrants who arrive on the Yemeni coast since September 2007, the statement said. Since the beginning of 2007, 27,960 people have crossed the Gulf of Aden to land in Yemen, while 593 have died and another 659 have gone missing.

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Why did the EPPF International Committee fall apart?

To answer this and other related questions, Ethiopian Review interviewed Nigat Radio host Demis Belete Sunday, Dec. 16, 2007.

Ato Demis had witnessed every thing from the beginning — how the EPPF Int’l Committee was formed, its relations with the EPPF leadership in the field, what went wrong, who is responsible for what, etc.

What necessitated the interview is that some individuals and groups knowingly or naively are bent on destroying any effort by patriotic Ethiopians to help the people of Ethiopia defend themselves against the Woyanne fascist regime by creating alliances with friendly forces such as the Government of Eritrea.

Ethiopia is currently alone without friends. Even the U.S. Administration — the beacon of democracy and freedom — is fighting tooth and nail to stop a legislation in the U.S. Congress that would make Woyanne accountable for its crimes against the people of Ethiopia.

In a strange twist of fate, the Government of Eritrea is the only force that is currently willing and capable of supporting the Ethiopian people’s struggle against the Woyanne regime. Let’s remember from history that the successive U.S. administrations were working against the South African people’s struggle against Apartheid, while Libya was one of the main financiers of Mandela’s African National Congress. The U.S. foreign policy makers are blinded by temporary political gains to the detriment of America’s own security and economic interests.

Eritreans, on the other hand, understand that Woyanne is a source of instability and suffering in the whole Horn of Africa region. It is to the interest of Eritreans that a peaceful party such as Kinijit comes to power. They have correctly reached the conclusion that they can solve disagreements with a genuinely elected Ethiopian government on a mutually beneficial basis. They have also witnessed that the people of Ethiopia look at Eritreans as brothers and sisters, and when Woyanne displaced hundreds of thousands of Eritreans in 1999 and 2000 in an act of ethnic cleansing, it was the people of Ethiopia who sheltered and saved many Eritreans.

Concerned by this realization on the part of Eritrean authorities and some Ethiopian opposition forces, Woyanne, with the support of its opportunist supporters, as well as naive politicians, has launched a massive propaganda effort to derail alliances between Ethiopian pro-democracy and unity forces and the Government of Eritrea.

To clearly understand this issues, it is important to look at what had transpired inside the EPPF. There is no better witness to the whole thing than Ato Demis Belete, a professional journalist and the host of Nigat Radio.

Click here to listen the interview with Ato Demis Belete

PRESS RELEASE
Action for Unity and Democracy
ተግባር ለአንድነትና ዴሞክራሲ

Action for Unity and Democracy (AUD), a new political movement that was created after the merger of Ethiopian Democratic Action League (Tegbar) and Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF) Youth League, is preparing to engage the people of Ethiopia on a discussion about knowing the real enemey and what it takes to defeat it… Continue Reading Here >>

This historical video shows Journalist Demis Belete visiting with EPPF fighters in the field last year. Since then EPPF went through a difficult leadership crisis. Now it is regrouping with a new leadership and ready to bloody Woyanne nose.