Ato Solomon Tekalegn declared himself a patriot when he arrived in Addis this week and was heard saying that the whole Addis is shaking on his victorious arrival.
On the thirty minutes video interview he gave on the EriTV two years ago, on his fact finding mission, reposted on ER, I realized a troubling body language.
I wish experts watch it again and educate us about changing personalities and if this is a disease what can we do about it ?
From Addis yesterday to his supporters in the Diaspora he was heard saying that many in the Diaspora are condemning him about going to Ethiopia and he was challenging us if not to Addis then to Mars ? and the paltalk host was laughing unstoppable.
I will not be surprised if this guy showed up in the Kaliti prison to visit the people leaders he called them in his previous songs as another round of fact finding mission and what he will not do is to sing in a public because people will disappoint him by singing
his ” Ande Belu Sewe Atemenu ” songs.
His trip to abandon the struggle and join the regime is financial according to the interview he gave here in USA and he is worried also being overshadowed by young Ethiopian singers.
Ato Solomon you know from your heart you are not a patriot and you are ” Beand Eras Hulet Melase ” and many will remember you for your previous famous songs which you are now running away from.
I wish if I had known such financial hardshsip will send someone to negate his own recent past I will be the first one to contribute a penny.
WASHINGTON — One dramatic act sets Ethiopia apart from the array of countries with poor human rights records that have become United States counterterrorism allies since the September 11, 2001, attacks: With U.S. backing, it invaded a neighboring country and overthrew a Taliban-like Islamist movement.
The country that Ethiopia invaded is its neighbor to the east in the Horn of Africa, the disintegrated state of Somalia, where the Islamist movement, called the Union of Islamic Courts, had taken over much of the country and was suspected of harboring al Qaeda members. Ethiopia remains militarily embroiled there today.
In its latest human rights report for 2006, the U.S. State Department painted a grim picture of the Ethiopian government’s human rights record, one that has changed little over the years. “Although the constitution and law prohibit the use of torture and mistreatment,” the report says, “there were numerous credible reports that security officials often beat or mistreated detainees. Opposition political parties reported frequent and systematic abuse of their supporters by police and regional militias.”Nevertheless, Ethiopia received a huge increase in military assistance from the United States in the three years after 9/11 — from $928,000 in the period 1999-2001 to $16.7 million between 2002 and 2004. In fact, in 2005 — a year of contested Ethiopian parliamentary elections when government forces detained, beat and killed opposition members, journalists and intellectuals — Ethiopia received $7 million in Foreign Military Financing funding, an amount nearly equal to the FMF total from the previous two years combined.
While both governments deny a quid pro quo, the increased military funding came after the largely destitute African nation became an early member of the “coalition of the willing” and a close ally of the United States in the global war on terror. Influential Washington lobbyists, including a former majority leader of the House of Representatives, worked on behalf of the Ethiopian government to secure the funding.
In the three years after 9/11, Ethiopia received increased funding from the FMF program (to buy U.S.-made weapons and services); the International Military Education and Training program; and the Pentagon’s new post-9/11 Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, which trains foreign forces in counterterrorism techniques.
In addition to the Somalia invasion, the role Ethiopia has played in the war on terror includes tightening border security, outlawing and restricting financial practices used by suspected terrorists and becoming a key intelligence partner of the U.S. in the Horn of Africa. It was in December 2006 that, with U.S. support and backing, it sent troops into Somalia and overthrew the Union of Islamic Courts; the United States suspects the UIC of harboring members of al Qaeda, including suspects associated with the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
In January 2007, in the midst of Ethiopia’s offensive against the Islamists in Somalia, the U.S. government allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea, The New York Times reported in April. The deal, a possible violation of United Nations restrictions imposed on North Korea in October 2006 because of the country’s unwillingness to cooperate with international nuclear weapons inspectors, appears to be another example of the difficult, and sometimes contradictory, compromises the Bush administration has had to make in the war on terror. The U.S. had been one of the most important sponsors of the North Korean sanctions at the United Nations.
Lobbyists to the rescue
The State Department’s continued negative human rights assessment could have threatened continued U.S. military assistance to Ethiopia under long-standing human rights restrictions enacted by Congress. But thanks to a concerted lobbying effort on behalf of the Ethiopian government and objections from the State Department, supporters of the Ethiopian government managed to stop a bill in Congress that would have cut off security assistance on human rights grounds.
The Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights Advancement Act, introduced by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., in June 2006, proposed to put limits on military aid to Ethiopia — with the exception of peacekeeping and antiterrorism programs — until the government released all political prisoners and provided fair and speedy trials to other prisoners held without charges.
The bill swiftly passed the House International Relations Committee with bipartisan support. That’s when both advocates and opponents of aid to Ethiopia became active.
The Ethiopian diaspora in the United States launched a letter and e-mail campaign to push the legislation in Congress. To counter that grass-roots effort, the Ethiopian government hired a well-established law and lobbying firm in Washington, DLA Piper, to quash the bill; DLA Piper says its work on Smith’s bill was only part of its $50,000 per month representation of the Ethiopian government.
The lobbying team included former House Republican majority leader Dick Armey and 12 other lobbyists. DLA Piper also produced and distributed a nine-page memo highlighting the Ethiopian government’s opposition to the bill.
In the memo, the lobbyists said that the bill compromised “the national security interests of both the United States and Ethiopia.” They also raised concerns about Somalia that Ethiopia and the United States shared. “The bill will prohibit critical security assistance to Ethiopia at a time when volatility in Somalia and instability in the Horn of Africa region more than ever demand that the U.S. make full use of the intelligence and defense cooperation of Ethiopia, its strongest and only democratic ally in the region.”
Mandatory lobbying disclosure records filed with the Department of Justice show that from April to August 2006, DLA Piper lobbyists talked on the phone and met numerous times with the staffs of the House International Relations Committee; Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Ethiopia and Ethiopian American Caucus; the congressional affairs section of the Department of State; and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and 2008 presidential candidate.
The bill never made it to the House floor. The Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department objected to the bill as being “too punitive” and getting in the way of U.S. foreign policy, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations surrounding the bill. “They did everything they could to sabotage it,” the source said.
A State Department spokesman, Steve Lauterbach, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that the bill was “prescriptive” and “limiting” on how foreign aid to Ethiopia should be spent.
One of the few actions the U.S. took in light of the disclosed human right abuses was to stop the sale of additional Humvee military vehicles to Ethiopia after the Ethiopian government used some Humvees to crack down on civilian protesters in the riots that followed the May 2005 elections. The United States had sold 20 of the vehicles to Ethiopia for use in counterterrorism operations.
Military maneuvers
Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia after the Union of Islamic Courts forces began to threaten the fragile United Nations-backed transitional government based in the southern Somali city of Baidoa. The Islamists had been backed by Eritrea, Ethiopia’s longtime bitter rival with which it went to war in 1998 in a still-unresolved border dispute. In addition, internal Ethiopian insurgent groups were operating from the area controlled by the UIC, according to Terrence Lyons, a George Mason University scholar on the region.
But there was much more to the cooperation between the U.S. and Ethiopia.
Besides providing intelligence assistance and satellite imagery to Ethiopian forces, American AC-130 gunships were allowed to take off from an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to target al Qaeda suspects fleeing with the retreating UIC forces, The New York Times reported in February 2007, quoting sources to whom it had granted anonymity. Ethiopian government officials strongly denied giving access to the gunships. American special forces units were also allowed to deploy to Kenya and Ethiopia, and from there they ventured into Somalia to try to confirm the identity of those killed in the AC-130 attacks, the newspaper reported.
The United States and the international community are providing diplomatic and economic support to the transitional Somali government, which is facing a guerrilla insurgency in the capital of Mogadishu despite Ethiopian forces having routed the UIC. More than 320,000 people have fled Mogadishu. “The transitional government had problems to begin with because it was connected to Ethiopia, the regional rival,” said Lyons, “and now has further problems because it’s connected to the United States.”
According to Lyons, the U.S. bombings in Somalia made the transitional government weaker. “From the global-war-on-terror framework and not from a peace-and-security-in-the-Horn-of-Africa framework, the attack made sense. Actually, it would make sense if they had in fact correctly targeted the [right] people,” he said (American officials told The New York Times that none of the top al Qaeda operatives in the Horn of Africa had been killed or captured since the invasion of Somalia began in December). “From the point of view of creating a stable government and building up a constituency … having a very powerful, very dramatic U.S. gunship come and attack did real damage to the transitional federal government.”
Cooperation between Ethiopia and the United States was not limited to the Somalia invasion. After weeks of outcry by local human rights groups, Ethiopian officials acknowledged that they had secretly detained 41 terrorism suspects from 17 countries who had been fighting with the Somali Islamists. It’s unclear whether Ethiopia acted unilaterally or in conjunction with the U.S. government in detaining the suspects, but American officials told the Times that its agents had interrogated the suspects in Ethiopian prisons. U.S. officials denied that the prisoners taken into Ethiopian custody were part of any “extraordinary rendition” program, under which terrorist suspects are detained outside of the rule of law and often transferred to third countries, many times those known to employ torture.
Back in Washington, human rights groups and the Ethiopian diaspora are continuing to press Congress on restricting military assistance to the Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi. The United States has been “giving too much to Ethiopia and asking too little from it,” Lynn Fredriksson, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for Africa, said in an interview with ICIJ. In November 2006, she testified at a congressional hearing, arguing that “Ethiopia is an important U.S. ally, but that does not give us the liberty to ignore egregious rights violations.”
Advocates of Smith’s bill say that the legislation will have a better chance of succeeding under the new Democratic-controlled Congress. Smith’s bill was re-introduced on May 9 while a very similar version was introduced by Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., on April 23.
Meanwhile, $2 million of new FMF funding for Ethiopia was requested in 2007 by the Bush administration. The United States also made the country eligible to receive used weapons and equipment for free or at reduced prices under the Excess Defense Articles program.
Meles, the prime minister, is “the victorious-against-terrorists United States friend,” said Lyons. “He is not worried if the [U.S.] ambassador says we are concerned about prison conditions. He would just laugh at us.”
Assistant Database Editor Ben Welsh contributed this report.
China’s funding to Africa is becoming increasingly controversial.
Chinese state companies have been expanding across the African continent in pursuit of raw materials at an accelerating pace and with apparently far less attention to risk than some of their western peers.Their push for minerals and mineral rights began in southern Sudan where the Chinese oil company CNOOC began building oil pipelines in the late 1990s – long before separatist rebels struck a deal with the Khartoum regime to end decades of civil war.
Despite the growing presence of Chinese workers in far-flung corners of Africa there have been relatively few reports of them falling victim to violence or becoming ensnared in localised conflicts.
The recent attack on an oil exploration site in eastern Ethiopia in which nine Chinese were killed was the deadliest incident to date involving the Chinese in Africa. At least 65 Ethiopians were also killed in the attack. It underlines the potential for a backlash against China’s dealings in Africa, especially where it is involved with regimes with poor rights records and which are under attack from armed opponents.
In recent years China has ploughed billions of dollars into Africa, mostly in its pursuit of raw materials to fuel its industrial boom. This year in Ethiopia alone, China had recently offered concessional loans worth $500m and a further $1.5bn towards telecoms infrastructure.
As elsewhere on the continent this funding is controversial. It has helped plug a shortfall in aid after western donors scaled back support to Ethiopia in response to human rights abuses following elections in 2005.
The Ogaden National Liberation Front, which carried out the recent attack, and has been fighting for independence for their remote region bordering Somalia for years, has repeatedly warned foreign oil companies to leave the area, where oil was first discovered in small quantities in the 1970s.
An ONLF official claimed that the Chinese workers who were killed were not specifically targeted. But he did say that the people of his region were disappointed at China’s failure to seek their permission to work in the area. “The Chinese used to be more populist. Now they are turning into colonialists,” he said.
Chinese companies have also been attacked in Sudan. Their response has sometimes been to send in their own armed men to reinforce protection by the host regime.
“The Chinese are like the west was 100 years ago. They come in, make deals with the local bosses and then bring the guns,” a foreign expert on Sino-African relations said.
Two Ethiopian rebel groups carried out a joint military operation against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (Woyanne) army in the eastern part of the country. A rebel statement alleged 157 soldiers were killed during the attack.
In a joint military operation, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and the Ogaden National Liberation Army (ONLA) have killed 157 Woyanne soldiers in various places in the Warder zone of the Ogaden region in eastern Ethiopia.
According to Voice of Oromo Liberation Front, between 10 and 15 May 2007, commando units of the OLA and ONLA conducted attacks in various places in the zone of Warder killing over 82 Woyanne soldiers and wounding over 75 others.
“The regular troops particularly badly suffered in a battle that occurred at a place called Biyo Daye. Following this battle various types of materiel and many hand grenades and ammunition were captured from the enemy.” The rebel radio said.
OLA, the military wing of the OLF and ONLA, the military wing of the ONLF said they would step up joint military operations against the Woyanne army.
The Ormo Liberation Front (OLF) and Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) are members of an opposition coalition (Alliance for Freedom and Democracy) formed on May 22, 2006. The other members of the AFD are the Sidama Liberation Front (SLF), the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (CUDP) and the Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF).
In several papers published in the current issue of the British Journal of Health Psychology, scholars from the US and the UK refuted the controversial study of Satoshi Kanazawa that attempted to link health to intelligence.
It may be recalled that Kanazawa’s paper, which was published in the November 2006 issue of the same journal, had trigged a universal uproar, especially for its use of questionable and dubious data about national IQs, including those of Ethiopia and many other African countries, to draw far-reaching conclusions concerning the relationship between intelligence and health.
Among the papers that appeared in the May 2007 issue of the journal is an article by Professors Demissie Alemayehu of Columbia University and Tilahun Sineshaw of Ramapo College of New Jersey, who argued, using extensive citations from evolutionary psychology and inferential statistics, that Kanazawa’s research was “bereft of the rigour” required to address the problem under consideration.
Maintaining that “… critical elements of his [Kanazawa’s] study violate fundamental principles of research methodology…,” Alemayehu and Sineshaw wrote:
“… the validity and robustness of the conclusions of the paper are compromised by fundamental problems, including failure to present competing views with fair balance, use of samples of convenience to draw conclusions about populations, performing tests of significance when there is no theoretical basis to do so and confusing association with causation.” [British Journal of Health Psychology, Volume 12, Number 2, May 2007, pp. 185-190(6)]
With reference to the dubious nature of Kanazawa’s data, the two scholars pointed out:
[T]he source of most of Kanazawa’s “macro-level” data is questionable at the best, and misleading at the worst. … A case in point is the national IQ figure used for Ethiopia which was based on a group of 14-15 year-olds who took the Progressive Matrices Standard (PMS) test one year after they had emigrated to Israel (Kaniel and Fisherman, 1991). Even if one accepts the idea that the PMS test measures what has been dubbed general intelligence, the Ethiopian data set, which Kanazawa claimed had been ‘directly measured,’ cannot be taken as a direct measure of the IQ of Ethiopians. The group of adolescents used in the study came from an isolated and desolate region of the country that had experienced a devastating war and famine at the time, not to mention the trauma of moving to a completely new urban environment and the experience of blatant racism once in Israel (Wagaw, 1993). As Kaniel and Fisherman (1991, p. 26) also acknowledged in their original article, ‘[I]n Ethiopia, Jews generally lived in small villages of 50-60 families, remote from urban centers. …prior to their exodus [to Israel], most had never seen electricity, a telephone, or any technological instruments… In Israel, they must adjust to climatic differences, life in urban centers, a new language…’ By any measure, data from a disadvantaged group of people, who had emigrated from a specific region of a country with the attendant social and physical deprivations, cannot be considered representative of a country of over 70 million people with complex historical, ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic diversity.”
They further noted:
“…. Kanazawa’s knowledge of the socio-historical circumstances under which the Ethiopian data were produced leaves much to be desired. The historical and sociological situatedness of empirical data and how much this contributes to or limits the accuracy of analyses and interpretations that follow have been well established (Cole, 1996). The fallacy of how the Ethiopian national IQ score was constructed certainly casts doubt on the credibility of the entire data and analysis and, by extension, the conclusions of the paper. Ironically, the data obtained from the Bete Israel, as the Ethiopian Jews like to call themselves, should have yielded, according to Kanazawa’s hereditarian view, an average IQ score closer to the Israel national score, since they are believed to be descendants of one of the lost tribes!”
Understandably, Kanazawa’s paper had generated a lot of discussion, both in the print media and in popular online forums. Among the media that gave the discredited theory much publicity was the UK-based paper, “The Observer,” which in its November 5, 2006 issue headlined, “Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer.” It would be interesting to see if those same news outlets would now give their readers the benefit of exposure to the opposing views expressed in the current issue of the journal.
Interested readers may get copies of the papers, including the aforementioned study by Demissie Alemayehu and Tilahun Sineshaw, directly from the journal publishers: [email protected]
In several papers published in the current issue of the British Journal of Health Psychology, scholars from the US and the UK refuted the controversial study of Satoshi Kanazawa that attempted to link health to intelligence.
It may be recalled that Kanazawa’s paper, which was published in the November 2006 issue of the same journal, had trigged a universal uproar, especially for its use of questionable and dubious data about national IQs, including those of Ethiopia and many other African countries, to draw far-reaching conclusions concerning the relationship between intelligence and health.
Among the papers that appeared in the May 2007 issue of the journal is an article by Professors Demissie Alemayehu of Columbia University and Tilahun Sineshaw of Ramapo College of New Jersey, who argued, using extensive citations from evolutionary psychology and inferential statistics, that Kanazawa’s research was “bereft of the rigour” required to address the problem under consideration.
Maintaining that “… critical elements of his [Kanazawa’s] study violate fundamental principles of research methodology…,” Alemayehu and Sineshaw wrote:
“… the validity and robustness of the conclusions of the paper are compromised by fundamental problems, including failure to present competing views with fair balance, use of samples of convenience to draw conclusions about populations, performing tests of significance when there is no theoretical basis to do so and confusing association with causation.” [British Journal of Health Psychology, Volume 12, Number 2, May 2007, pp. 185-190(6)]
With reference to the dubious nature of Kanazawa’s data, the two scholars pointed out:
[T]he source of most of Kanazawa’s “macro-level” data is questionable at the best, and misleading at the worst. … A case in point is the national IQ figure used for Ethiopia which was based on a group of 14-15 year-olds who took the Progressive Matrices Standard (PMS) test one year after they had emigrated to Israel (Kaniel and Fisherman, 1991). Even if one accepts the idea that the PMS test measures what has been dubbed general intelligence, the Ethiopian data set, which Kanazawa claimed had been ‘directly measured,’ cannot be taken as a direct measure of the IQ of Ethiopians. The group of adolescents used in the study came from an isolated and desolate region of the country that had experienced a devastating war and famine at the time, not to mention the trauma of moving to a completely new urban environment and the experience of blatant racism once in Israel (Wagaw, 1993). As Kaniel and Fisherman (1991, p. 26) also acknowledged in their original article, ‘[I]n Ethiopia, Jews generally lived in small villages of 50-60 families, remote from urban centers. …prior to their exodus [to Israel], most had never seen electricity, a telephone, or any technological instruments… In Israel, they must adjust to climatic differences, life in urban centers, a new language…’ By any measure, data from a disadvantaged group of people, who had emigrated from a specific region of a country with the attendant social and physical deprivations, cannot be considered representative of a country of over 70 million people with complex historical, ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic diversity.”
They further noted:
“…. Kanazawa’s knowledge of the socio-historical circumstances under which the Ethiopian data were produced leaves much to be desired. The historical and sociological situatedness of empirical data and how much this contributes to or limits the accuracy of analyses and interpretations that follow have been well established (Cole, 1996). The fallacy of how the Ethiopian national IQ score was constructed certainly casts doubt on the credibility of the entire data and analysis and, by extension, the conclusions of the paper. Ironically, the data obtained from the Bete Israel, as the Ethiopian Jews like to call themselves, should have yielded, according to Kanazawa’s hereditarian view, an average IQ score closer to the Israel national score, since they are believed to be descendants of one of the lost tribes!”
Understandably, Kanazawa’s paper had generated a lot of discussion, both in the print media and in popular online forums. Among the media that gave the discredited theory much publicity was the UK-based paper, “The Observer,” which in its November 5, 2006 issue headlined, “Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer.” It would be interesting to see if those same news outlets would now give their readers the benefit of exposure to the opposing views expressed in the current issue of the journal.
Interested readers may get copies of the papers, including the aforementioned study by Demissie Alemayehu and Tilahun Sineshaw, directly from the journal publishers: [email protected]
