MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jul. 5, 2007 (AP) A roadside bomb exploded Thursday near a convoy carrying Mogadishu’s mayor, the second attempt on his life in two months, his spokesman said.
No one was hurt in the blast targeting Mayor Mohamed Dheere, said the spokesman, Mohamed Muhyadin Ali.
“It was an assassination attempt, but luckily he survived,” Ali said. In May, a bomb exploded near Dheere’s convey, killing two civilians.
Thursday’s explosion came an hour before the European Commission’s representative for Somalia arrived in Mogadishu to discuss security and humanitarian issues with President Abdullahi Yusuf.
The Somali capital has seen little peace since government troops backed by Ethiopian [Woyanne] forces drove an Islamic movement out of the city in December. Roadside bombs, attacks on government installations, assassination attempts and gunbattles have become common, and civilians are caught in the crossfire.
The Council of Islamic Courts ruled Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia for six months last year, during which they sought to impose an Islamic state. Insurgents linked to the Islamic group have vowed to launch an Iraq-style guerrilla war.
Battles in Mogadishu between March 12 and April 26 alone killed at least 1,670 people.
Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned against one another, defending clan fiefdoms. The government was formed in 2004 with the help of the United Nations, but has struggled to assert any real control.
The Afar people in Ethiopia live in the north-eastern part of the country known as the Afar Regional State. The pastoralist Afar of the area is mainly dependent on livestock rearing. The traditional Afar economy survived for centuries by adapting a lifestyle of pastoralist, being opportunistic and utilizing scarce resources by migrating from place to place. The Afars have strong ties to their ecosystem and have unique traditional values that promote harmony between human, livestock and nature.
Recently, the TPLF-led Government in Ethiopia is carrying out a huge irrigation project with aim to establish a big sugar cane plantation as well as two sugar factories both in lower and middle awash valley menacing the livelihood of over a half million people and fauna and flora. The project was established as a state company in its own right, taking responsibility from the Ethiopian Sugar Industry Support Centre. The project was launched under the joint auspices of the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Water Resources at the beginning of 2005. Out of five sub-regions (zones) of the Afar State, four southern sub-regions are directly affected by this project.
To support water supply of the project two huge dams are being built in Tandaho and Kassam-Kabana at Sabure. The land clearing activities is being carried out with intensity destroying the forest, livestock and animal life in the region. The shortage of grazing area due to clearing of the land for plantations and government-instigated investment, to get space for irrigation, has created serious tribal confrontations with detriment of lives. Moreover, the loss of grazing land, water sites and increased government backed investment meant greater poverty among the Afar pastoralists in the region. This irresponsible action is leading not only to the destruction of the Afar as pastoral society but also have a long-term and irreversible impact on ecosystem of entire Awash Basin. So far, no alternative livelihood is being thought for the Afar pastoralists except displacement.
The Kesem-Tendaho project is expected to cost over 20 billion Birr and to share 3 percent of the world sugar market. Up on completion, the project is expected to produce sugarcane through developing over 100,000 hectares of land. The project is expected to become fully operational in 2008 and is projected to produce over 900,000tn of sugar, 300,000tn of molasses and 200 million litres of ethanol annually at full capacity. Some of the Chemicals used in the plantation are threatening life in the region. About 200 000-300 000 labourers from the highlands, maybe imported from Tigrean militias, to acquire own Party base in the Afar region. The experience of the past party policy of labourers brought from other region has proved that the government has intentionally instigated -local conflicts between the Afars and the government-brought labourers which is usually an ample opportunity for repressive measures against the Afars. Furthermore, the environmental impact of the project is huge, since the Awash River is currently the most polluted river in the country, where industry wastage released and forbidden chemicals are used on state plantation without any restriction in the region. To support the project a huge armies are stationed in both the lower and middle Awash valley. Serious conformation between the Afar and the armies is taking place frequently. Pastoralists who question the project or do not remove their homestead from the project sites are threatened, imprisoned and killed, without even getting any formal charges against them. Although the opposition by the Afar people is growing by all means day by day the Afar did not get the due international attention yet.
What are lessons learned from previous projects with similar intentions? One, which had a great impact on the Afar, was the agricultural development in the Awash Valley. Seeing its great potential for irrigated agriculture already in 1962 the Awash Valley Authority (AVA) was established with a special Charter, which authorized it to monitor and advance the Awash Valley resources, during which time commercial farmers invaded the valley. While the agenda of AVA clearly stated the government’s objectives, obviously it contained nothing about the future of local Afar. The dergue applied a similar policy by introducing State Farms, took even more lands, leaving the Afar no place to go. The TPLF-led Government in Ethiopia has intensified its involvement too in the Valley through state-backed investors and directly government financed huge projects.
The TPLF-led government has decided to intensify the grip on the Afar land, where the party-affiliated Tigrean supremacy in the region has been systematically imposed. For instance, the Afdera salt lake investment, in the northern Afar, is solely dominated by state-backed Tigrean investors. In the same region of the Afar an oil exploration is going on without the consent of the Afar people. However, the question has been throughout who owned the land in the Afar region? In the Afar traditional society, land is a communal property, and therefore cannot be claimed by an individual or authority without the general public consent. Those who cultivate land, or graze it, do so by virtue of being members of the clan with corporate rights. The territorial extension of a clan is not exactly defined and the distribution of land among clans has never been necessary prior to the introduction of agriculture in the Awash Valley in 1960s. Nothing has more seriously threatened the Afar traditional rights than the individual freehold over land, introduced by commercial farms in the Awash Valley and consolidated by subsequent regimes in the county.
The Afar Human Rights Organisation (AHRO) believes that the lives of our people, fauna and flora of the region are in serious danger. Our Organisation setup a committee to support Afar pastoralists affected by the Sugar project. You can contact and support the committee through e-mail: “AFAR HUMAN”
* We call up on all human rights organisations in UN, EU, USA and others!
*We call upon international community to pressurise the TPLF-led government to withdraw its fatal project operation from the Awash Valley immediately!
*Stop all forbidden chemical use in the plantation of the Awash Valley!
*Stop all types of international assistance to the project in the Awash Valley!
*Boycott sugar and cotton production from the Awash Valley!
*Release all Afar pastoralists imprisoned without charges in connection to the project!
The Ethiopian Community Organization in Houston (ECOH) expresses its deepest concern over the apparent plan by the Houston Museum of Natural Science to exhibit Lucy (aka Dinknesh) in contravention of International protocol, and at a great risk to such fragile hominid fossil.
The Ethiopian Community after careful and thoughtful deliberation and in concurrences with many scientists including Smithsonian and other prominent museums has decided to oppose the Lucy Exhibitions for the following reasons:
* The exhibition violates the 1999 UNESCO International protocol on the transport of hominid fossils beyond the country of origin and it goes against the wishes of many prominent archeologists and paleontologists.
* Lucy is a great legacy to Ethiopia and mankind and no chance should be taken to put this priceless legacy and species at risk. We believe like many archeologists and paleontologists, the long and arduous journey poses dangers to Lucy.
According to National Natural History Museum spokesman Randall Kremer, Smithsonian scientists feel that certain artifacts, such as Lucy, “are too valuable for the stresses of travel and should remain in their homes”. He added, “this is one of the most important specimens relating to human origins in the world and it is too much of a risk to have it travel for the purposes of public viewing.”
Since its discovery in 1974, the Ethiopian public was allowed only twice to see the real Lucy remains. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in the nation’s capital, Addis Ababa, is a replica and the real remains are usually locked in a vault.
For Dirk Van Tuerenhout, curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which is arranging the tour it is about money. In news paper interview, he said, “If you are able to showcase an original fossil, then you have a story, then you have a point of attraction that will bring in the most number of people, and then you can tell them that story”
The current junta that the Museum transacted with has alienated the majority of Ethiopians by wrestling power by force, by continuing to rule by force, and like the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia by engaging in revisionist history to undermine the rule of law, and unity of the country through a Machiavellian divide and conquer scheme. For this and many other reasons, it has brought its legitimacy into question and probably its right to transact business on behalf of the 77 million Ethiopians. Since 1991, it engaged in massacres, election fraud, misallocation of resources, in unnecessary conflicts with neighboring countries, and looting of the national treasury by creating phony companies through relatives and cronies. The Lucy transaction is no exception to this reckless behavior of the regime to enrich its relatives, friends and lobbyists at any cost against the interest of the Ethiopian people.
Currently, the legitimately elected leaders of Ethiopia are in prison, including the Mayor of Addis Abeba, Dr. Berhanu Nega and Engineer Hailu Shawl, head of the largest opposition party. We therefore, ask the honorable Mayor, City Council, the Board and Officers of the Houston Museum of Natural Science to reconsider this risky undertaking against international protocol, and against the advice of many scientists.
NAIROBI, 4 July 2007 (IRIN) – Residents of Mogadishu, who had returned to the Somali capital after fleeing recent fighting between government forces and insurgents, are leaving the city again amid continuing violence, local sources said.
“There has been an increase in the number of displaced who have returned to the camp in the past 30 days,” said Hawa Abdi, a doctor, whose 26-hectare compound, 20km south of Mogadishu, is home to thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs).
“There were about 12,000 people sheltering in the compound in May, but there are now double this figure,” she told IRIN on 4 July.
“The property next to mine is now being turned into an IDP camp and as I am speaking to you, I can see a new family putting up a temporary shelter,” Abdi said. “In May, people had been returning to Mogadishu but in June we saw people coming [instead] to the camp.”
An estimated 1,000 families returned to the area in June alone, she said.
Despite the violence, at least 123,000 of the 400,000 people who fled Mogadishu between February and June have returned to the city, according to UN estimates. Many are from regions close to Mogadishu, such as Lower and Middle Shabelle.
But speaking in the Ghanaian capital of Accra on 3 July, Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi downplayed suggestions that daily violence in Mogadishu and other areas was so serious that it might even threaten a planned national reconciliation conference in mid-July.
“I am optimistic security forces will be able to secure the capital city for the reconciliation conference,” he told Reuters.
Aid workers said insecurity and violence had limited the population’s ability to survive, restricted humanitarian operations and led to increases of between 50 and 100 percent in the prices of basic necessities such as transport, water, food and non-food items.
In a situation report issued on 29 June, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said despite a curfew in the city, grenade and bomb attacks as well as assassinations had continued.
According to OCHA, 16 explosions went off in the first two nights of the curfew and on 26 June, a roadside bomb in Bakara market killed five women. The next day, two Ethiopian soldiers were killed as a military convoy hit a roadside bomb.
Local residents said many people had been caught up in daily violence. “When there is an explosion, security forces respond by firing indiscriminately and arresting anyone they can find,” a source said.
Dr. Mehret Mandefro, a medical resident, is the founder of TruthAIDS, a group devoted to HIV prevention among women.
Dr. Mehret Mandefro, a medical resident, is the founder of TruthAIDS, a group devoted to HIV prevention among women.
Even after Dr. Mehret Mandefro had repeatedly warned them to always use a condom, girls and women would return to her office with sexually transmitted diseases. She was deeply disturbed and wondered how she could get through to them.
“When I would talk about the need to use condoms, I would see a lot of glazed looks,” she recalls.
Then she started talking to them about their relationships.
“I would ask, ‘Were you in love? Were you not?'” she recalls. “These girls can be very smart and savvy; they under-stand, for instance, they may be sleeping with men to find the love they didn’t get from their fathers.”
At 30, Mandefro is a resident in internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and the founder of TruthAIDS, a nonprofit whose mission is to combat HIV infection among women. She is also the subject of “Mehret,” an upcoming documentary.
While working as a resident, her re-search has included interviewing women and girls both in the clinic at Montefiore
and in schools. Her drive is to better understand the spread of HIV, especially among black women – whose rates of infection are increasing more dramatically than those of other groups, most commonly through heterosexual sex.
“[When we talk solely about the importance of using condoms,] we’re abstracting sex from relationships, and that’s not how people live their lives,” she says.
Her research suggests psychological issues related to self-esteem, as well as domestic violence and cultural attitudes, factor into many females’ inability to protect themselves against HIV and other STDs.
“Society still favors male sexual autonomy over women’s,” says Mandefro, who is single and lives in East Harlem. “In many communities, you’re ‘bad,’ as a girl, if you carry a condom.”
The ultimate goal of her research
– which she will field-test next year as a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania – is to create school curriculums and media campaigns to build girls’ and women’s self-esteem.
“I want to see what we can do to change the power dynamics in relationships,” she says, “to make girls feel more comfortable, whether carrying condoms, talking about sex or confronting domestic violence.”
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and raised on the outskirts of Washington, Mandefro also has conducted re-search and worked with patients in Africa. “I never let go of my Ethiopian identity, and I still feel obligated to try to change things there,” she says.
Her family fled Ethiopia when a Communist regime came to power and tried to assassinate her father, Ayalew Mandefro, at the time the country’s minister of defense.
While still an undergraduate at Harvard, where she majored in anthropol
ogy, Mandefro spent summers in her homeland, as well as in Botswana, South Africa and Nairobi, Kenya.
In Botswana she worked as a liaison between Harvard scientists and local health care providers to help distribute medication. In Addis Ababa she conducted research on the stigma HIV-infected women faced.
Her work in Africa cemented her decision to attend Harvard Medical School, and later earn a Masters of Science in public health as a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
In London she struck a friendship with fellow Fulbright scholar and “funky New York filmmaker” Emily Abt, whose interests in health and public policy jibed with Mandefro’s.
The documentary, scheduled for independent release in the fall, follows Mandefro’s work and the stories of two HIV-infected women who had received treatment in Montefiore’s clinic, Chevelle Wilson and Tara Stanley.
Wilson, 40, of East Tremont Ave. in the Bronx, credits Mandefro with helping her secure employment as a public speaker for Love Heals, the Alison Gertz Foundation for AIDS Education, and for helping her tell her story on film.
“I feel in my heart it’s going to be a powerful film and open up a lot of people’s eyes,” said Wilson. “HIV/AIDS is not going anywhere, but it’s up to us to stop the spread of it.”
While she is off to the next stage of her career in Philadelphia, her patients will miss her.
“She’s a beautiful person, a caring person,” said Félix Colón, 53, of Highbridge, the Bronx, who came to her for sciatica.
“I couldn’t sleep at night, I had so much pain. Now I can sleep better and walk better. She’s like my angel. God is sending her to another place, so maybe they need her more there. But I will miss her.”
She has just accepted a seat on the New York City Department of Health’s HIV Community Advisory Board, which will bring her back to the city once a month or so.
“Oh, I’ll be back,” she says with a smile.
For additional information visit www.truthaids.org/index.php or www.purelandpictures.com.
