By By MICHELLE FAUL and ANGUS SHAW | Associated Press
Ethiopia’s 20-year government announced a cap on basic food prices within days of President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia. Opponents said Saturday the government has rounded up some 200 opposition members in the past week “in a preemptive action to prevent the popular uprising that is sweeping through northern Africa.”
Angola’s ruler of more than 30 years, President Eduardo dos Santos, has used mass troop deployments and arrests to quash a planned pro-democracy protest. Opposition politicians and human rights lawyers in Angola, a virtual one-party state, have been receiving anonymous death threats and the cars of two lawyers were set ablaze.
In Djibouti, riot police moved against an estimated 6,000 people at an opposition political rally on Feb. 18, and opposition politicians said five people were killed and dozens wounded. A second rally planned for March 4 didn’t happen after security forces filled the streets. Opposition leaders have been jailed.
“There is no way anybody can win against him,” opposition leader Abdourahman Boreh said from exile in London, referring to President Ismail Omar Guelleh. “He uses all the power, all the police, all the government instruments and resources, and he uses brutality.”
Uganda’s Conservative Party leader John Ken Lukyamuzi said “it is very possible” the protests will spread to sub-Saharan Africa. In his own country, police fired tear gas against people protesting alleged rigging in last month’s presidential vote that saw incumbent Yoweri Museveni, 66, who has been in power since 1986, win again. He threatened his opponents.
“I will deal with them decisively and they will never rise again,” Museveni said, promising at one point to “bang them into jails and that would be the end of the story.”
In Zimbabwe, Jeenah said, people are held back from taking to the streets by fears of the beatings and torture meted out to dissenters, while Mugabe is sustained by the lack of criticism and even support demonstrated by other African leaders.
Ivory Coast threatens to slide back toward civil war since Laurent Gbagbo refused to accept that he lost November elections. As Gbagbo’s intransigence turns the commercial capital, Abidjan, into a war zone, African leaders have been hesitant to intervene militarily. Some who side with Gbagbo are themselves anti-democratic.
If Gbagbo prevails, he would be the third African leader to refuse to accept election results, following the lead of Mugabe and Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki.
It’s a dangerous precedent. More than a dozen presidential elections are scheduled across Africa this year. If winners of free and fair elections are prevented from taking office, the people’s discontent can only build.
(Faul reported from Johannesburg. Associated Press writers Jason Straziuso in Nairobi, Kenya; Godfrey Olukya in Kampala, Uganda; Divine Ntaryike in Douala, Cameroon; and Phathizwe-Chief Zulu in Mbabane, Swaziland contributed to this report.)
Residents in Addis Ababa and other Ethiopian cities have to wait over 8 hours in line to buy sugar, cooking oil and other food items, according to Ethiopian Review sources. The photos below show a sugar line at a store on Tewodros Street in Addis Ababa yesterday, March 21, 2011. Meanwhile, it is reported that dictator Meles Zenawi and wife Azeb Mesfin have began construction of their 80 million birr house at the Menelik II Palace compound, and the ruling party TPLF is spending millions of dollars to celebrate it’s 20th anniversary in power next May, 2011.
The Meles dictatorship in Ethiopia continues to displace people from their land and destroy ancient forests to grow crops and flower for export, as the video below shows:
VOA’s Peter Heinlein from Addis Ababa is reporting that Meles Zenawi’s regime in Ethiopia has changed its policy toward Eritrean to “actively advocate the overthrow of the government in Eritrea.”
News agencies quoted Ethiopean Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi as telling an Eritrean opposition radio station his government would work in a ‘diplomatic and military capacity’ to oust the regime in Asmara, the Eritrean capital. The reports gave no further details.”
In an interview Sunday with VOA, Ethiopian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Dina Mufti said the decision to take a tougher stance was made after the international community turned a deaf ear to pleas for more pressure on Eritrea.
“We have been hoping the international community will put pressure on it. However, we do not see that, therefore time has come for us to make sure that our sovereignty is protected and our people, our country, is saved. So these are the situations that have forced us to revisit our position,” he said.
This is obviously a desperate attempt by Meles to divert attention from the various opposition voices who are demanding an end to his regime. Some Ethiopian groups are using Facebook to call for the launching of protests on May 28, 2011, the 20th anniversary of Meles Zenawi’s coming to power. – VOA
The country’s United Nations ambassador, Abdullah Alsaidi, has resigned, Reuters reports. Alsaidi is the latest member of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government who has stepped down from their positions, in protest of the violence and killing of pro-democracy protesters. On Friday, both the country’s tourism minister and the head of the party’s foreign affairs committee quit. On Saturday, Nasr Taha Mustafa, head of the state news agency and a leading ruling party member, resigned from both his position and his party. Party member Mohamed Saleh Qara’a also quit over what he referred to as ‘”completely unacceptable”‘ violence.
SYRIA — Protesters in the city of Deraa burned the house of the ousted district governmor as well as the ruling party’s HQ and a local culture ministry office. Al-Arabiya also reported that Syrian army tanks arrived in the city on Sunday.
VIDEO
On Sunday, at least five people were killed and 60 were injured after Syrian officers used live ammunition to disperse protests.
Tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets as a governmental delegation arrived in Deraa to console families mourning for loved ones killed in previous demonstrations.
The officials promised to release 15 detainees but the protestors remained undeterred. The mourners later gathered at the al-Omari mosque in the old quarter of Deraa near the border with Jordan.
In Yemen, president Ali Abdullah Saleh has suffered a political setback, with his ambassador to Syria resigning and three top generals expressing their support for the anti-Government protesters.
Tanks took up positions around the capital Sana’a today as tens of thousands of people gathered for funerals for 50 demonstrators shot dead by loyalist forces. It’s been described as the biggest gathering of protesters against president Saleh’s 32 years of autocratic rule.
