By CPJ
New York, June 11, 2007— Ethiopia’s High Court today convicted four editors and three publishers of now-defunct weeklies of anti-state charges linked to their coverage of the government’s handling of disputed parliamentary elections in 2005, according to local journalists.

Two of the editors were convicted of charges carrying life imprisonment or death.
The journalists were arrested after a  massive government crackdown on the media and opposition groups in November 2005. The media was targeted for its coverage of how the government handled disputed elections the previous May. More than 190 people were killed when authorities crushed post-election protests contesting the ruling party’s victory.

The Committee to Protect Journalists last month named Ethiopia the world’s worst backslider on press freedom.

 “We condemn this verdict which falls within the government’s pattern of judicial harassment to intimidate and silence the private press,” said Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director. “The severity of the sentences in these cases compounds our outrage. We call on the authorities to abandon criminal prosecutions of journalists.”

Those convicted worked for Amharic-language weeklies shuttered after the crackdown. Editors Andualem Ayle of Ethiop and Mesfin Tesfaye of Abay, who were convicted of “outrages against the constitutional order,” face possible execution or life in prison. Editor Wenakseged Zeleke of Asqual could get up to 10 years in prison on similar charges.

Deputy editor Dawit Fassil of Satanaw, who had been released on bail in April after 16 months in prison, was returned to Kality prison today on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. He faces up to three years in prison on charges of “inciting the public through false rumors.”

The Addis Ababa court also convicted three publishers on related charges: Serkalem, which owns Asqual, Menelik and Satanaw newspapers; Sisay, publisher of Ethiop; and Fasil, which puts out the Addis Zena newspaper. The companies could face heavy fines or be dissolved, defense lawyer Weneawake Ayele told CPJ. All the newspapers involved in the court proceedings were forced to shut down after the crackdown.

The ruling follows the acquittal in April of eight editors and publishers on similar charges, including award-winning publisher Serkalem Fassil, sister of Dawit Fassil and owner of the Serkalem publishing house.

Ethiopia remains Africa’s second leading jailer of journalists, behind only Eritrea, according to CPJ research.

Posted in Oil Gas Jobs : Oil & Gas News

PETRONAS, Malaysia’s national petroleum corporation, has been awarded the exploration Block G in Ethiopia, marking its entry into the upstream sector of the African country. The award of the block also paves the way for PETRONAS’ further investment in the African continent.

The Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) for the block was signed today in Addis Ababa between PETRONAS and Ethiopia’s Ministry of Mines. PETRONAS was represented by its Vice President of Exploration & Production Business Dato’ Shamsul Azhar Abbas, while the Ethiopian Government was represented by Minister of Mines Mohamoud Dirir Ghedi.

Block G, which covers an area of 15,356 square kilometres, lies within the Gambela Basin and is located in the western part of Ethiopia.

Under the PSA, PETRONAS Carigali Overseas Sdn Bhd (PCOSB), the overseas exploration and production arm of PETRONAS, will conduct geological and geophysical studies on the block, acquire 800 kilometres of 2D seismic data and drill one exploration well during phase one of the block’s exploration stage.

PCOSB’s financial commitment for this initial exploration stage is US$5 million. Under the terms of the PSA, PETRONAS will also provide technical training to a group of Ethiopians in Malaysia in the area of upstream operations and related fields.

At the PSA signing ceremony, PETRONAS and the Ministry of Mines also inked a Heads of Agreement (HOA) where PCOSB will conduct geological and geophysical studies on the Ogaden Basin, another gas-prolific area in Ethiopia. The basin covers an area of about 350,000 square kilometres and is known to have considerable gas deposits, including a discovered field with a reserve of 2.7 trillion standard cubic feet that is not part of the area specified in the HOA. The HOA will provide PCOSB exclusive rights to acquire exploration acreage in the basin after the completion of the study.

The award of the contract for Block G and the signing of the HOA were the results of direct negotiations between PETRONAS and Ethiopia’s Ministry of Mines early this year. The award of the block adds to the PETRONAS asset portfolio in line with its growth strategy in Africa. In other parts of Africa, PETRONAS is already operating in Algeria, Angola, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Sudan and Togo.

Issued by
Media Relations & Information Department

A meeting organised by Woyanne embassy was cancelled after Ethiopians demanded to express their views

A public meeting that was organised by the Ethiopian embassy in the Netherlands was cancelled yesterday due to demands from the participants for an open meeting.

The organisers of the meeting had invited only hand-picked Woyanne/EPRDF supporters, but other Ethiopians joined the meeting.

When the public meeting started, Deputy Ambassador Brook Kebede and First Secretary Zenebe Kebede tried to silence some Ethiopians who tried to ask questions and explain the reality in Ethiopia under the Woyanne rule.

When the participants persisted with their demand to ask questions, Ambassador Brook Kebede called security and tried to forcibly expel the Ethiopians from the Hotel where the meeting was held. The hotel security, however, refused to expel the participants, who were conducting themselves peacefully.

Instead of continuing with the meeting and listening to concerned Ethiopians, Brook cancelled the meeting and left.

The desperate Woyanne regime is currently sending its officials to Europe and North America to misinform Ethiopians in the Diaspora in an attempt to repair its badly tarnished image.

The touring delegates want to only talk and spread their propaganda. They refuse to entertain challenging questions from participants.

Two weeks ago, when Ethiopians in Atlanta posed challenging questions, some Woyanne supporters turned violent. One Woyanne thug, in fact, tried to physically attack a prominent Ethiopian businessman in Atlanta, Ato Cheru Terefe.

Where ever these Woyanne delegates travel, they are facing similar challenges from angry Ethiopians whose fellow citizens at home are being brutalized by the tribal junta.

Ethioguardian.com is used as one of the sources for this report.

ASMARA (shabait.com) — In a live interview he conducted with the Eritrean media last night regarding the objective situation in Ethiopia and regional issues, President Isaias Afwerki underscored that the TPLF clique’s strategy of creating enmity among the people and ethnic polarization in a bid to prolong its stay in power has aggravated the Ethiopian people’s bitterness to the highest level.

Pointing out that the TPLF clique’s program right from the onset was “The Independence of Tigray”, the President underlined that when this proved to be unacceptable, it developed into the twin idea of the “Independence of Tigray and Ethiopia”. Moreover, when this same idea did not rest on a single platform, the clique on assuming power adopted the strategy of so-called “federalism” which in essence aimed at “divide and rule policy”.

President Isaias went on to indicate that over the last 16 years, the TPLF clique committed three historic blunders, namely trying to control the Ethiopian people through resorting to a policy of ethnic polarization, looking for external victims so as to cover up its internal problems and searching for external supporters as it did not have trust in the people. Even the intrigue it resorted to in the name of the people of Tigray has only led to hatred of the latter on the part of the rest of the Ethiopian population, though for no fault of the Tigray people, he added. The President elaborated that “the TPLF’s wrongdoings have rendered the people of Tigray victims.”

As regards the outcome of the May 2005 elections and its consequences, President Isaias pointed out that as far the TPLF were concerned the elections represented a drama of buying a 5-year ticket for staying in office. He further asserted that the outcome witnessed the aggravation of the Ethiopian people’s bitterness to the highest level, and as its suddenness was shocking the clique was compelled to introduce basic change in the way it has been handling things in different domains.

Explaining that the Ethiopian economy relies on relief assistance and external subsidy, President Isaias indicated that the poor-rich gap in the country keeps on widening with each passing day. Talk of “the Ethiopian economy has shown growth” is for mere propaganda consumption, he underlined. The President further noted that the so-called millennium hullabaloo is but a futile drama designed to cover up one’s utter failure.

President Isaias underscored that TPLF clique’s baseless accusation against Eritrea, at one time under the pretext of terrorism and at another “supporter of opposition forces”, attests to the clique’s diversionary campaigns as well as its bankruptcy, cheapness and state of acute worry. He went on to indicate that the clique is heading to the abyss.

Furthermore, the President gave in-depth briefings regarding the Somali and Darfur issues, Eritrea’s stance on these issues and the efforts being made to resolve them.

Listen Part I – Part II – Part III

Spiegel
06.11.6007

Terror suspects have been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were detained, interrogated and then released without charge.

The CIA’s system of unlawful kidnappings of terrorist suspects known as “extraordinary renditions” appears to have been extended to the Horn of Africa. New cases have emerged of the transfer of terror suspects to prisons in third countries, where they have been questioned and allegedly mistreated — this time in East Africa. In total more than 100 terror suspects are thought to have been arrested in Somalia and Kenya and transferred to Ethiopia to face interrogation by US officials.

In the chaos of the Ethiopian operation in Somalia that began in December 2006, a number of men and women were arrested, including at least four Britons, two Swedish citizens and one Canadian.

Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was only released three weeks ago, told DER SPIEGEL that he had travelled with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish citizen, to Mogadishu in December. He says that after the Ethiopian troops invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia and US soldiers and sent to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Awad claims that they were held on a military base and interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time or longer, and were not given access to a lawyer. He says that they were accused by the Americans of being al-Qaida fighters. DNA samples were taken and they were questioned about Swedish Muslims. He says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.

In a related case, the Sunday Times of London reported on Sunday that the 25-year-old British student Reza Afsharzadagen, who was among refugees forced to flee the battles in Somalia in December, was also arrested as a suspected al-Qaida member in Kenya and sent back to Somalia. He said he was handed over to Ethiopian soldiers but a British diplomat intervened and took him home. According to the newspaper, flight records show that 85 other prisoners were transferred to Ethiopia for interrogation, and that these included 11 women and 11 children.

The government in Washington confirmed to DER SPIEGEL that “in the past few months a number of prisoners have been questioned in Ethiopia.” Up to 200 agents of the CIA and FBI are thought to be currently based in Addis Ababa.

The US government is apparently making sure that it is the Ethiopian authorities rather than US officials who are running the prisons in Addis Ababa. “They’ve concealed their role but you can assume the Americans were behind all these renditions,” a senior western diplomat based in Kenya told the Sunday Times. “By sending prisoners to Ethiopia, they had a convenient place to interrogate people.”

Somalia has been in a state of virtual anarchy since 1991 when warlords first overthrew the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then began fighting each other. The radical Union of Islamic Courts drove out the warlords from the capital in 2006 and ruled the city for six months but they in turn were driven out by Ethiopian forces who invaded in December, along with a small number of US special forces troops. The US suspected the Islamic Courts of harbouring international terrorists linked to al-Qaida, who were allegedly responsible for the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The UN-recognized Somali government declared victory over the Islamic insurgents in the capital in April, but they are now fighting a new front against the militants in the semi-autonomous north east of the country.

Meanwhile last Friday, Council of Europe special investigator Dick Marty released his second report, saying he had “enough evidence to state” that the CIA had operated secret prisons in Poland and Romania. The illegal deportation of suspects by CIA kidnapping teams in Europe amounts to a “massive and systematic violation of human rights,” the report says.

smd/spiegel/ap

Fiche, Ethiopia (ENA) – The renowned athlete Kenenisa Bekele here on Friday signed an agreement providing for constructing a 9.9 million Birr sport complex in Sululta Woreda with the North Shoa Zone Investment Office
Kenenisa Bekele

According to the signed agreement, the complex that would be constructed in stated woreda would provide various services.

The complex would be constructed on 50 hectares of land.

The complex comprises a football and golf fields, a swimming pool, athletics track as well as modern hotel that would give quality service for Ethiopians and foreigners, among others.

Kenenisa told Ethiopian News Agency that the complex would serve the local communities to spend their spare time playing various sport games.

Kenenisa said and the complex would create 125 jobs when goes operational after two years.

Chief of the North Shoa Zone administration, Tesfaye Tulu on the occasion said Kenenisa’s initiative would lure athletes and investors to engage in the sector.

Some 400 investors with an aggregated capital of 8.5 billion Birr are operating are undertaking various development projects, he said.