Thousands of Ethiopians gathered in the capital on Sunday to remember victims of a brutal Marxist junta, weeping at the sight of flower-covered coffins with remains from mass graves across the country.
The service marked the anniversary of the downfall of the junta’s leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam — known as “the butcher of Addis Ababa” — who is living in exile in Zimbabwe.
Some experts say 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in a nationwide purge by Mengistu’s Marxist regime, the Dergue, though no one knows for sure.
Even those who were young during the 1974-1991 regime carried dark memories of the Red Terror, the 1977-78 siege when the government killed and imprisoned thousands of people.
Ahmed Hussein said that three decades ago police brought his younger brother home from jail and asked the family to gather outside.
“They shot him in front of us,” Ahmed said, his eyes welling with tears. “We were not allowed to cry.”
Elderly women clutched black-and-white photographs of loved ones and wailed during the ceremony.
“I used to see dead bodies on the street when I went to school,” said Michael Melake, 35, an environmental activist. “It was like a kind of Holocaust for Ethiopia,” he said.
The government is planning to erect a monument, library and museum in the capital to commemorate the victims.
Muluadem Assefa, 39, clutched a photo of her father, Assefa Casa, whom she believes was killed in jail in the 1970s. She never saw her father again after he was taken to jail.
Ethiopia, which has a long history of human rights abuses, will not see another Red Terror, said Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legese, who attended Sunday’s ceremony.
“This will never, never happen again,” he said. “We have fought for that.”
Ethnicity as the main cause of the problems following the period 1991
By Abeje Tesfaye
I wrote this piece after the religious crisis in Jimma last year. It appears to me that more of such a crisis will happen now and then in the near future. After all that is what the ruling EPRDF wanted to hang on power. These who committed the crimes got the arms from government and run away with it. In this brief piece, I will discuss ethnicity as the main cause of the problems following the period 1991.
The introduction of ethnic based federal form of government in Ethiopia in 1991 has marked a new chapter in the nation and created new forms of identity in the nation’s political history. Since then federalism has been an issue of political significance employed both to justify and to criticize the idea of government and its intention to represent ethnicity.
For some the development and increased participation of different ethnic groups since 1991 is welcomed as a positive change that erodes the previous patterns of domination and facilitates aspects of local expression that were previously impossible. What happened after the introduction of federalism was that the country went through more than 20 different forms of conflicts. The factors encouraging conflicts come from different directions and the causes and the scope of these conflicts are many and complex.
The dramatic and fundamental transformation in to a federation based on ethnicity however was not subject to public debates and it was simply imposed by EPRDF. Government indicated its euphemism for the systematic, deliberate isolation of different ethnic groups to participate in matters affecting their life. Political appointment and commitment from ethnic groups calculated by loyalty to the party or the person in charge and meant only for symbolic purposes.
For many reasons, the assumption that ethnic federalism provides a cure for the problems created by the existence of ethnicity proves to be in contentious. Arguments in favour of ethnic federalism focus on the concept of identity. By strengthening identity it is hoped that members of various linguistic groups can come to feel more strongly identified with the central state, thus reducing the likelihood of violence and ethnic conflicts. Arguments against ethnic federalism however states that there is substantial hostility and resentment felt both for rational and irrational reasons.
The use of language as a structure for organizing society, for example is inherently problematic because individuals do not necessarily fit neatly into linguistic categories. Geopolitical units once established are far from stable and are subject to constantly evolving processes of redefinition. At times it may not even be the inhabitants who are concerned about whether they belong to a particular geopolitical unit or another.
In the past two decades, we have witnessed the bitter fact that the establishment of ethnically defined federalism resulted but not limited to creating fresh forms of identity, which increases on potential damage in perpetuating and creating separate formulations of identity, up to destroying the unity of the Ethiopian State. Then these translated in to severe problems of low income and pricing, revenue, and shortage of capital and persistent debt due to engagement on agrarian in nature.
The constitution protects fundamental rights and freedoms and specifically guarantees self determination. However, those guarantees are less ironclad in practice. The government exerts subtle pressure on groups that ask for the attainment of the constitutional provisions. The constitutional guarantees have fallen short due to ingrained social prejudices, weak judicial system, and underperforming government social assistance agencies. The government’s heavy-handed dismissal of the political agenda of large segments of the Oromo population is seen as ingrained bias by many.
To hold on to state power, to hold the states together, and to defend its interest, the government used ethnic cleansing as an instrument of warfare against opponents. Terror was justified by its security forces and appeals to maintain “the constitutionally established Governmentâ€Â. Attack and description of opposition as ‘unconstitutional and illegitimate’ led to further breakaway away of groups from the national politics. The government brands those who propose alternative policy approaches as illegitimate, if not terrorists.
If peace is to become real in Ethiopia, it is indispensable to work to rebuild the relationship with different ethnic groups in the country. The central challenge to this exercise does not lie in the repair of the physical and institutional devastation, nor in the repatriation and reintegration of refugees. The primary challenge in rebuilding a society that has been torn apart by ethnic lines has to do with mending relations and restoring trust. If people do not trust each other, and lack confidence in any political arrangement put in place and in the conflict prevention mechanisms process in general, then the best rebuilding strategies are likely to fail.
Despite it is a current structural limitation, if federalism is properly coordinated and consulted with history, culture, tradition and way of life of the different groups, ethnic federalism will address the concurrent social, political, economic and cultural conflicts in the country. One concrete way to help in peace building is to provide informal mechanisms, in which the main actors can meet, talk, share their differences and points in common, and build confidence.
In making peace to happen in Ethiopia, EPRDF can and must be ready to sacrifices its interest to the benefit of all the different groups. Flexible approaches that aim to accommodate diversity are the most likely means to achieve coherent and functional federalism, whether it is ethnic in character or not.
A 24-year-old New Jersey man who traveled to Somalia to help establish an Islamic state there but was instead imprisoned by three different nations, was released Friday and returned home yesterday, his father said.
“Everything is fine,” said Mohamed Meshal, the father of Amir Mohamed Meshal.
When Mr. Meshal, of Tinton Falls, N.J., left for Somalia in December 2006, the African nation was on the edge of chaos.
Ethiopian troops, with backing from the United States, were preparing to invade Somalia to restore to power a transitional Somali government that had been forced from the capital, Mogadishu, by militants who wanted to establish a strictly Islamic state. The invasion threat prompted the insurgent Islamists to call on Muslims around the world to help defend Somalia by fighting a jihad against Ethiopia.
During his four-month odyssey, Mr. Meshal was imprisoned in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
“It’s been quite an ordeal,” Jonathan Hafetz, Mr. Meshal’s attorney, said yesterday.
“The Meshal family is thrilled that their son Amir is free after four months of detention without due process,” the family said in a statement. “They look forward to spending time with their son, who they love very much.”
A spokesman for the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry declined to comment last night about Mr. Meshal’s release or to provide other details. Calls to the F.B.I. were not immediately returned.
United States officials have said in the past that Mr. Meshal is not wanted by American authorities.
In January, a few weeks after Mr. Meshal arrived in Somalia, fighting broke out and he fled south, along with a cadre of Islamist leaders and fighters. In late January, he reached neighboring Kenya.
While trying to enter Kenya illegally, he was detained by Kenyan authorities and put in jail. He was interrogated by F.B.I. agents, who concluded that he had no ties to terrorist organizations, American officials said.
Mr. Meshal told the F.B.I. that he had been in Somalia to help rebuild that country as an Islamic state, an American official said.
During his detention in Kenya, the State Department and the F.B.l. told Mr. Meshal’s family that once they sent an airline ticket, he would be released from prison.
Instead, in February, Mr. Meshal was blindfolded, shackled and put on a plane to Somalia. By then much of the country was controlled by Ethiopian soldiers. He was placed in a Somali jail.
The United States said then that it had no role in deporting Mr. Meshal to Somalia and that Kenya had done so without notifying the American Embassy.
However, the Kenyan government defended the deportation and dozens of others because it said the detainees had been engaged in a guerrilla war against a democratically elected government, referring to Somalia.
In late February, Mr. Meshal was taken from Somalia to Ethiopia, where he remained imprisoned until yesterday.
Mr. Hafetz said yesterday that after Mr. Meshal was released Friday, he was flown first to Germany and then arrived in the United States yesterday afternoon.
I followed Ato Gebremedhin Araya’s interview on Tinsaye Radio (May 24) based on Abaye Tsehai’s recent interview with Dimtsi Woyane.
The claim by Abaye Tsehai that TPLF has been a fighting and business force that profited from business deal early in the struggle was exposed by Ato Gebremedhin Araya from his own account serving in the finance department of TPLF.
The drought of the time and the international aids and money was a God given fortune from heaven used by the leaders of the movement to collect and amass fortunes in the name of Tigray.
Gebremedhin confirmed to us that talk of business in Sudan before this drought was lie and TPLF top leaders used it to camouflage the properties they confiscated after they controlled power in Ethiopia.
EFFORT he said is a conglomerate of 80 companies under the control of the top TPLF leaders that is monopolizing the country’s business and it is Ethiopian people wealth.
Neither the The Tigray people nor ordinary member of TPLF are the owner of the EFFORT and Sibhat Nega told his host that Tigrayans and others should use the opportunity EFFORT give them to develop and do business in their regions.
Ethiopia is now run by individuals who robbed foreign food aids and converted into 100 million dollars according to Gebremedhin’s account and building a company in the name of Tigray and and enriching themselves and Gebremedhin also said these few millionaires also have accounts and investments in foreign banks under various names.
Have the World Bank demanded the book of EFFORT to be audited and tell poor Ethiopians who the share holders of this giant companies are or is this a question out of reach not to embarrass themselves?
Gebremedin confirmed that many African corrupt leaders amassed fortunes by stealing from their own people and from his first hand information none other than Sibhat Nega and his buddies EFFORT top the list.
Oil companies, both western and Asian, are hunting in earnest for oil and gas in East Africa, a still largely under-explored region, as energy nationalism in Russia, Venezuela and the Middle East closes off opportunities in more proven areas.
“East Africa, for a frontier area, is experiencing one of the highest levels of investment in the world right now — but we’re only seeing the beginning,” said Chris Matchette-Downes, vice president of business development at Black Marlin Energy, an oil service company based in Dubai and specializing in the region. About $500 million is being spent on research in the region but so far only about 479 wells have been drilled from Eritrea to Cape Town, including Madagascar, compared with as many as 20,000-30,000 in northern Africa and a similar number in western Africa, he said.
Significant discoveries of oil could help some countries in the region reduce their dependence on aid and expensive imported oil and help wean their residents from chopping down trees for household fuel. Exploitation, however, could be difficult and require costly infrastructure development. Except for a rickety rail network, not rehabilitated since colonial times, most of the region lacks pipelines and ports to export oil.
While some countries, like Sudan and Ethiopia, are showing early promise as oil and natural gas producers, Freedom House, a U.S. democracy monitoring group, rated these two countries as among the most repressive regimes in the world. Many countries in East Africa, moreover, are in only the early stages of setting up a regulatory and legal framework for the oil industry. Oil companies worry whether their contracts will be respected.
Still, even at this early stage, oil has recently been found in Uganda and in Madagascar. Gas has been discovered in Tanzania and Ethiopia. Oil production is rising steadily in Sudan. Seismic studies and drilling are proceeding steadily in Kenya, Mozambique, the semi-autonomous Somali province of Puntland, and in the waters surrounding the Seychelles. The shores of Zanzibar are attracting interest from international oil giants, like Royal Dutch Shell.
But the geology of East Africa is more complex than that of the western side of the continent, so oil deposits will be more challenging to find in the east, seismic experts say. At the same time, a commercially viable, world-class basin has yet to be discovered in East Africa to rival the world’s top 100 basins, like the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
Exploration and production in Sudan, the largest regional oil producer and an OPEC observer, which is pumping a modest 491,000 barrels a day, is dominated by China National Petroleum Company, Petronas of Malaysia and ONGC of India, since formal U.S. sanctions bar U.S. firms and deter western companies from operating there. Sudan’s future as a major oil producer will be determined by the country’s ability to stabilize the security situation and respect contracts, analysts say.
“Future production growth will depend on an aggressive exploration program in the south, which is stymied by the volatile security situation,” said Monica Enfield, Africa analyst for PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington.
The outcome of a tug of war over a contested oil block in southern Sudan is considered a bellwether for future foreign investment, Enfield said.
At the same time, a 2005 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan that would manage and split oil revenues equally between the two, leaves big uncertainties for oil and gas development, Enfield said. Uncertainties relate to mineral and land rights, the powers of a joint petroleum commission and whether the south will remain part of Sudan or secede in the next few years.
Because many ethnic groups in the south did not sign the agreement, the area remains dangerous; and tensions have been heightened by delays in the scheduled withdrawal of northern militias, said Egbert Hesselink, director of the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan, an observer group.
Meanwhile, Madagascar is expecting to pump its first oil this summer, when a Houston-based explorer, Madagascar Oil, will produce and store a small amount of heavy crude from the island’s Bemalonga onshore field, before a government decision on how best to use it, said Alex Archila, interim chairman of the company.
Madagascar Oil is evaluating the economic viability of producing oil from the field, which may hold as much as 10 billion barrels of heavy crude, he said. The company has also started a pilot study of how to produce heavy oil from beneath parts of the field that are being mined for bitumen.
Exxon Mobil is also drilling for oil off the island’s northwest coast.
In Uganda, oil production is expected to start in 2009 from a field on the shores of Lake Albert, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two independent oil producers, Heritage Oil of Canada and Tullow Oil of Britain, will produce about 6,000 barrels a day of light, sweet crude that will be used locally to produce kerosene and other fuels and to supply a small power plant, said Chris Perry, investor relations officer at Tullow.
Perry said that Tullow was also evaluating a series of recent oil discoveries to determine whether enough crude could be produced to justify construction of a $2 billion, 1,300-kilometer, or 800-mile, export pipeline to Mombasa, the Kenyan port which serves land-locked Uganda.
In the past two years, Tanzania has leased large swaths of its offshore area to exploration and production companies that include Petrobras of Brazil, Statoil of Norway, and Aminex, an Anglo-Irish company. Tanzania has sizeable reserves of natural gas, and a French exploration company, Maurel and Prom, announced a gas find there in January. But offshore exploration plans by oil majors, including Royal Dutch Shell, have been held up for years around the semi-autonomous islands of Zanzibar, until an agreement is reached on resource management with the mainland Tanzanian government.
Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya have started coordinating regional oil development through the East African Petroleum Conference, an intergovernmental association which held its third meeting in March in Arusha, the capital of Tanzania. In Kenya, China National Offshore Oil Corp. and Woodside Petroleum of Australia, among others, have committed to exploratory drilling programs, mainly offshore.
In Mozambique, one offshore well will be drilled this year in the Ruvuma basin, an area that straddles the border with southern Tanzania, said Matchette-Downes of Black Marlin. Eni of Italy, Anadarko of the United States, Petronas of Malaysia and Norsk Hydro of Norway signed up for offshore exploration acreage in the area last year.
In the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northern Somalia, Range Resources, based in Melbourne, Australia, has contracted for all mineral and hydrocarbon rights in the region, said Peter Landau, the company’s managing director. Range Resources has opened an office in the port city of Boosaso and will drill its first of four exploration wells this year onshore, he said.
“Puntland is considered a geological mirror image to Yemen,” Landau said. Yemen, already an oil producer, is located across the Gulf of Aden from Puntland.
Ethiopia — which has proven natural gas reserves of 4 trillion cubic feet, or 100 million cubic meters — is also in the sights of oil explorers, despite ethnic conflicts there. White Nile, Petronas and Lundin Petroleum, a independent Swedish oil company, have all signed on to drill in Ogaden province — where last month the Ogaden National Liberation Front, an ethnic Somali independence group, which claimed responsibility for a recent raid on a Chinese-run oil field which killed 74 people.
Throughout most of the region, however, civic unrest is not a major stumbling block, at least during the exploratory phase. Unconventional geology, heavy oil, and the need to factor in costly infrastructure developments may weigh on development decisions, but the explorers, at least are upbeat on East Africa. “What we’re seeing is just is the tip of the iceberg,” Matchette-Downes said.
Blink and you will miss the underground children in Ethiopia’s capital city.
They live in tunnels, sewers and drainage holes, hidden beneath Addis Ababa’s teeming streets.
They move from one makeshift shelter to the next, chased away by police or the rivers of water and refuse that flow when the rains come.
Growing up amidst the traffic, they learn to hustle at a young age seeking change or selling small
—————————
Hidden
Across from the main post office, there is a sewage drain. It draws little attention.
Thousands of people walk across its steel bars every day without giving it a second thought. This is good for Mohammed and his friends. They do not want their home to be discovered.
The space is not more than half a metre high, and though it is five or six metres long, only one small portion is covered and unexposed.
When it rains, the boys huddle together among the rubbish and waste.
———————
Crowds
Encountering the street kids who live underground is not easy, but once we talked to a few, dozens appeared.
As we walked in the shadow of the city’s main buildings, the children emerged from dark side streets and from nowhere at all.
Soon we were surrounded by boys.
—————————————
Hustle
For the children who have found shelter, however destitute and impermanent, the difficulties truly begin when they come up from underground and face the realities of their daily life.
They must hustle for food scraps, avoid police, and beware exploitation and abuse.
Many children perform odd jobs for restaurants and cafés to get bread and leftovers. Sometimes shelters will give out food, and there are soup kitchens that serve cheap meals.
————————
Hana
There are fewer girls but they are there. Hana, a 15 year-old, comes from Ziway, a town south of Addis.
She left home and came to Addis after an incident in which she accidentally lost her family’s cattle and feared her father’s rage. She hopes to return one day.
“Here you don’t have much to worry about,” she said.
“If you get something to eat, that is good. When you don’t have any, you pass the time either sleeping or chatting with friends.”
——————————-
Sex
When they do have money, from begging or doing odd jobs, Hana and her friends often go to the cinema.
One of the girls described her attitude to se.x.
She said that to be safe from both pregnancy and HIV/Aids she always uses a condom. She claimed she did not face serious dangers in this regard, and said no-one had ever forced her to have sex.
—————————————
Henok
Henok Tesfaye came to the streets when he was 11 years old after losing his parents in a car accident. Ten years on, he is used to life on the streets.
He lives beneath a main road in an unused hole dug for telephone cables. The roof is made of concrete blocks placed side by side across a small opening.
To keep rain out, Henok and his roommate spread plastic sheets underneath old windscreens.
A small hole is both the door and the window to their tiny home.
—————————————————————
Numbers
Among the reasons for the high numbers of street children in Addis Ababa are extreme poverty, hunger, violent conflict and drought in rural areas.
Often, the children come without families, orphaned by disease, escaping abusive and neglectful parents, captivated by tales of wealth and opportunity in the big city.
An exact number is too difficult to pin down accurately, but various estimates put the total number of street kids in Ethiopia between 60,000 and 150,000.
——————————————-
Dawit
As we were talking to Dawit, 12, he eyed a rubber wristband and we gave it him, but the next day it had gone.
“It was stolen last night,” he said, crestfallen. “When I was sleeping, someone grabbed my neck and started choking me. They said: ‘Give it to me or I’ll take your life.’ So I gave it them.”
He shrugged his shoulders and walked off with a friend down the busy street – unnoticed.
