Secretary general of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit), Ato Muluneh Eyoel, gave a press conference to Ethiopian Review, Ethiopian Media Forum, Addis Dimts Radio and Netsenet LeEthiopia Radio yesterday. During the 1-hour press conference, Ato Muluneh discussed the scheduled working visits by Kinijit high-level delegations to the United States and other countries.

Ato Muluneh said that the delegates who are travelling to the U.S., Europe, Australia and South Africa have all obtained their visas. Ato Muluneh himself will lead a delegation to Europe, while vice president Bertukan Mideksa will arrive in Washington DC on Sunday [see poster] leading a delegation of five.

Originally, the delegation to the U.S. was to be headed by Kinijit president Ato Hailu Shawel, but this week he informed the executive committee that he will not make the trip due to poor health. Instead, Ato Hailu will travel to Germany on Friday to get medical treatment, according to Shaleqa Getachew Mengiste who will depart for South Africa on Monday.

A Kinijit splinter group led by Shaleqa Yoseph Yazew has issued a false statement saying that the reason Ato Hailu is not coming to the U.S. is because the embassy refused to give him a visa. The American Ambassador in Addis Ababa, Donald Yamamoto, denied that today saying that Ato Hailu’s visa is ready. The shaleqa group also warned that if Ato Hailu cannot travel to the U.S., the other leaders should also not come. The question is, who empowered these crooks to warn or order around the Kinijit executive committee?

There is a lot to criticize about the American embassy in Addis Ababa, such as its see-no-evil-hear-no-evil attititude toward the Woyanne regime. But making false accusations against the embassy is harmful to Kinijit’s own credibility. Here it must be made clear that no Kinijit official has accused the American embassy of denying visa to Ato Hailu, including Ato Hailu himself. The false accusation and misinformation have been coming from the shaleqa group, which is not a surprise. The shaleqa and his rogue group are leaving no stone unturned to block the Kinijit delegation’s visit to the United States. They have a reason for doing that — one of the delegation’s primary objectives in coming to the U.S. is to investigate the alleged corruption by the shaleqa and take appropriate measures.

It is not a secret that Ato Hailu has changed his mind about coming to the United States after being pressured by Shaleqa Yoseph and Dr Taye Woldesemayat. Although the Kinijit executive committee has requested both individuals to cease and desist from acting on behalf on Kinijit, they have refused to do so, and this week they have organized a fund rasing event in Washington DC in the party’s name. This is in clear defiance of the executive committee’s order.

Shaleqa Yoseph, who has cleverly befriended Ato Hailu Shawel and developed very close family ties, is counting on that friendship to save him from being investigated. To help him with his strategy of creating diversions in a desperate attempt to cover up his corruption, he has also brought to his side some of the most implacable opponents of Kinijit. This unholly alliance include Dr Taye (who had proudly declared that he didn’t vote for Kinijit), the EPRP crew (who consider Kinijit more of a threat to their discredited party than Woyanne), Woyanne web sites, and a former abiyot tebaqi who has been spewing anti-Kinijit diatribes on his radio program for the past two years. The shaleqa’s fund raising event this weekend and his other activities are being promoted by… guess who? EPRP and Woyanne media outlets, such as Aiga Forum, EthioLion, Debteraw, Assimba… Just check their web sites. These are the forces that are currently aligned with Shaleqa against Kinijit as a party and its executive committee.

The shaleqa had also sent a stern message to Ato Hailu Shawel recently saying that “betraying” him will have a grave consequence. This warning (blackmail?) was posted on Aiga Forum. So Ato Hailu could be in a quandary, and it is understandable he decided not to come to the U.S. As a matter of fact, it is a good thing that he is not coming, since the delegation will now be led by Wzt. Bertukan Mideksa, a highly respected former judge who can do a better job of conducting a thorough investigation into the shaleqa’s corruption.

A note to Ato Hailu Shawel:

We admire you to no end for your contribution to the anti-Woyanne struggle. It is also an admirable quality to be loyal to your friends. But Kinijit is a political party that promotes honesty, transparency and accountability. You are presented with a mountain of evidence about the corruption of your friends Shaleqa Yoseph Yazew, Ato Moges Brook and others. Ignoring all these evidences, if you try to cover up or put under the rug their crimes, you would be undermining the party you helped build and the pro-democracy struggle you helped lead this far. If your friendship with the shaleqa group would not allow you to conduct an investigation, then recuse yourself from the investigation. But please do not take part in a cover up. We are confident that you will not betray Kinijit, yourself and, most important of all, the people of Ethiopia, in order to cover up for and protect a gang of crooks who have brought shame and dishonor to the party while you and your colleagues were languishing in Woyanne jail. We trust you not to repeat Lidetu Ayalew’s mistake.

(eitb24) – Police officials could not be reached for comment and repeated calls to other government officials went unanswered. Ethiopian law provides that any one arrested should appear in court within 48 hours and be charged.

Ethiopia the Woyanne regime has detained 107 of its citizens over the past two months without charge, according to an opposition lawmaker who said he believed the detainees were suspected of links to a southern insurgency.

Opposition lawmaker Bulcha Demeksa said Wednesday he had compiled the figure of those detained since July in Addis Ababa and southern Ethiopia from reports from family members.

Ethiopian law provides that any one arrested should appear in court within 48 hours and be charged.

Federal police officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday and repeated calls to other government officials went unanswered.

Bulcha said his total of 107 included three staff members of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council in Nekemte, 220 kilometers (137 miles) west of the capital, that the council said were arrested on Aug. 23 and had not been taken to court since.

Hiwot Emishaw, an official of the group, said, “They were allegedly arrested for disseminating papers to incite violence. Our organization is saying they have not been engaged in such an act.”

Bulcha told The Associated Press he suspected the detainees have been held on suspicion of belonging to the Oromo Liberation Front, which has been fighting for greater autonomy in southern Ethiopia. One of the detainees, he said, was a 63-year-old man.

The Oromo make up a third of Ethiopia’s 77 million people, and have been the center of dissent against the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front.

Bulcha, whose Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement party is a minority in parliament, said that he had complained to government officials, but has not received any response.

The Somali State Regional government said Wednesday that an aid agency’s observations about human rights violations in eastern Ethiopia were “distorted.”

On Tuesday, officials of Doctors Without Borders said they had seen Ethiopian soldiers chase women and children from wells in the desert and block civilians from getting medical care in the Ogaden region, where a rebellion is brewing.

“These distorted and unrealistic reports are certainly in violation of the code of ethics they are committed to in their line of duty as neutral bodies,” the regional state government said in a statement posted on the Foreign Affairs Ministry Web site.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – U.N. aid officials and human rights investigators ended a week-long mission to Ethiopia’s troubled Ogaden region on Thursday and said they would present their findings to the government next week.

The mission primarily assessed the food, water and health needs in the remote area, said Paul Hebert, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ethiopia.

“Considering this was not an investigative mission, we gathered enough information to enable us to draw preliminary conclusions on the humanitarian situation in the region and on protection issues,” Hebert told Reuters.

The international community has increasingly focused attention on Ogaden, which borders Somalia, after rights groups accused Ethiopian soldiers of shooting civilians and burning homes there in a crackdown on separatist rebels.

By Donald N. Levine

When invited by the Ethiopian community of San Jose, California, to compose a short millennial piece celebrating something distinctive about Ethiopia’s heritage, I decided for a variation on the theme of many of my previous writings, where I emphasize the multiethnic character of historic Ethiopia. This concerns the extent to which the various peoples of the Horn have come from common ancestors and intermingled in so many ways– through intermarriage, commerce, shared festivals, cultural borrowings, and common political aspirations and activities, most notably in the defense of Ethiopia against external invasions from the Turks, from the Sudanese, and on those two terrible occasions, from imperialist Italy.

In this piece I shall celebrate an aspect of Ethiopia’s heritage that has rarely been accorded the attention it deserves. This concerns the character of her religious traditions. At least four features of religion in Ethiopia deserve special attention.

For one thing, Ethiopia became receptive to each of the three great Semitic world religions very early, earlier than nearly any other part of the world. Hebraic influence arrived at an extremely early period. This is attested by Hebraic words that were used in the translation of the New Testament into Ge’ez. Most remarkably, the chief indigenous surviving Judaic community – that of the Beta Israel – knew only of Jewish holidays prior to exile of the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. The adoption of Christianity as official religion in Aksum took place in the 4th century C.E., making Ethiopia, like Syria, Armenia, and Egypt, home to one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. And she gave refuge to followers of the Prophet Mohammed before Islam was officially established, protecting them when the nascent faith was endangered, a gesture that inspired Mohammed to declare Ethiopia perennially exempt from any sort of jihadic intervention.

Because these religions arrived so early, they took shape in Ethiopian soil in a way that enabled them to grow side by side from the outset. They intertwined in many ways. None of them became used as the basis for any sort of rabid exclusionary project. Judaism in Ethiopia was always part of the Ethiopian national culture, not–until the past century–a force that led her followers to reject Ethiopia as their national homeland. Neither Christianity nor Islam was used historically as a basis for persecuting other populations or massacring dissidents, as happened so often with both of those religions in other countries.  (Ahmad Gragn’s jihad was instigated from outside Ethiopia by the Ottoman Turks.  Emperor Yohannes’s strict Christianizing policy reflected a national political fear of being invaded by Mahdist Muslims, who did invade and finally killed him. Popular prejudices against the Beta Israelis, often called buda, did not reflect a studied persecution of them by the Orthodox Church.) Beyond that, Ethiopians of different Semitic religions could and often did intermarry, often took part in one another’s festivals, and shared certain special occasions together–most notably, the annual pilgrimage to the site of the Archangel Gabrael at Mount Kulubi.

Third, the relation to “pagan” Ethiopian religions was tolerant to a degree not shown much elsewhere–a subject that deserves a lot more study. Family resemblances between the properties of indigenous deity symbols, such as the Oromo Waqa, with the Semitic deities may have had some subliminal effect, even though resemblance of that name and other cognate names among peoples in the South–Waq (Afar, Somali, Burji, Konso, Dasensech, Gurage); Wak (Saho); Wa’a (Hadiyya); Waga (Gamu ); Waqaya (Majangir); Muqo (Tsamako); and Magano (Sidamo)–with Amharic wuqabi (guardian angel) may reflect common sound and not linguistic kinship. To be sure, the Christian and Muslim missionaries pressured followers of indigenous faiths to embrace one of those Semitic religions. But there are many instances where indigenous religionists held joint celebrations with Christians and/or Muslims.

Finally, I would mention the depth of religious sentiment that marks so many Ethiopians. This trait came to the fore during the Derg period, when systematic efforts to eradicate religious traditions were met by increased observance, including a remarkable increase in the practice of fasting.

These elementary facts should be known by every single Ethiopian at home and abroad. One good way to celebrate Ethiopia’s special millennium would be to promote awareness of these special features of her history and culture.

By Donald N. Levine

When invited by the Ethiopian community of San Jose, California, to compose a short millennial piece celebrating something distinctive about Ethiopia’s heritage, I decided for a variation on the theme of many of my previous writings, where I emphasize the multiethnic character of historic Ethiopia. This concerns the extent to which the various peoples of the Horn have come from common ancestors and intermingled in so many ways– through intermarriage, commerce, shared festivals, cultural borrowings, and common political aspirations and activities, most notably in the defense of Ethiopia against external invasions from the Turks, from the Sudanese, and on those two terrible occasions, from imperialist Italy.

In this piece I shall celebrate an aspect of Ethiopia’s heritage that has rarely been accorded the attention it deserves. This concerns the character of her religious traditions. At least four features of religion in Ethiopia deserve special attention.

For one thing, Ethiopia became receptive to each of the three great Semitic world religions very early, earlier than nearly any other part of the world. Hebraic influence arrived at an extremely early period. This is attested by Hebraic words that were used in the translation of the New Testament into Ge’ez. Most remarkably, the chief indigenous surviving Judaic community – that of the Beta Israel – knew only of Jewish holidays prior to exile of the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. The adoption of Christianity as official religion in Aksum took place in the 4th century C.E., making Ethiopia, like Syria, Armenia, and Egypt, home to one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. And she gave refuge to followers of the Prophet Mohammed before Islam was officially established, protecting them when the nascent faith was endangered, a gesture that inspired Mohammed to declare Ethiopia perennially exempt from any sort of jihadic intervention.

Because these religions arrived so early, they took shape in Ethiopian soil in a way that enabled them to grow side by side from the outset. They intertwined in many ways. None of them became used as the basis for any sort of rabid exclusionary project. Judaism in Ethiopia was always part of the Ethiopian national culture, not–until the past century–a force that led her followers to reject Ethiopia as their national homeland. Neither Christianity nor Islam was used historically as a basis for persecuting other populations or massacring dissidents, as happened so often with both of those religions in other countries.  (Ahmad Gragn’s jihad was instigated from outside Ethiopia by the Ottoman Turks.  Emperor Yohannes’s strict Christianizing policy reflected a national political fear of being invaded by Mahdist Muslims, who did invade and finally killed him. Popular prejudices against the Beta Israelis, often called buda, did not reflect a studied persecution of them by the Orthodox Church.) Beyond that, Ethiopians of different Semitic religions could and often did intermarry, often took part in one another’s festivals, and shared certain special occasions together–most notably, the annual pilgrimage to the site of the Archangel Gabrael at Mount Kulubi.

Third, the relation to “pagan” Ethiopian religions was tolerant to a degree not shown much elsewhere–a subject that deserves a lot more study. Family resemblances between the properties of indigenous deity symbols, such as the Oromo Waqa, with the Semitic deities may have had some subliminal effect, even though resemblance of that name and other cognate names among peoples in the South–Waq (Afar, Somali, Burji, Konso, Dasensech, Gurage); Wak (Saho); Wa’a (Hadiyya); Waga (Gamu ); Waqaya (Majangir); Muqo (Tsamako); and Magano (Sidamo)–with Amharic wuqabi (guardian angel) may reflect common sound and not linguistic kinship. To be sure, the Christian and Muslim missionaries pressured followers of indigenous faiths to embrace one of those Semitic religions. But there are many instances where indigenous religionists held joint celebrations with Christians and/or Muslims.

Finally, I would mention the depth of religious sentiment that marks so many Ethiopians. This trait came to the fore during the Derg period, when systematic efforts to eradicate religious traditions were met by increased observance, including a remarkable increase in the practice of fasting.

These elementary facts should be known by every single Ethiopian at home and abroad. One good way to celebrate Ethiopia’s special millennium would be to promote awareness of these special features of her history and culture.