By ARGAW ASHINE
ADDIS ABABA (NMG) — Ethiopia Prime Minster Head of the brutal tribal junta in Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, will run for a new five-year term, his ruling party announced on Tuesday.
The 54 year-old former [Marxist] guerrilla leader, who has been in power for 18 years, was convinced by party members to stay on. [Don’t laugh. This is not a joke!]
The Ethiopian People Democratic Front (EPRDF) council Tigrean People Liberation Front (Woyanne) underlined that the Ethiopian people and his party need Mr Zenawi for one more term at the end of a two day annual gathering.
“Meles is playing a key role in transforming Ethiopia….” EPRDF said in a statement.
In recent months, EPRDF’s chairman Woyanne junta leader Zenawi has said he plans to go in 2010 if his party accept his resignation.
The council extensively debated on the issue and agreed to keep Mr Zenawi in office for one until 2015.
Ethiopia’s next general election is scheduled for June 2010.
The PM has increasingly become a champion of African in international forums.
However, at home he is accused of a poor human rights record and oppression against opposition politicians and the media.
Last week, Mr Zenawi was elected [by his fellow thieves] to represent Africa in the climate change talks in Denmark, Copenhagen.
So how worried should you be about swine flu, and how do you prepare? Here, the mass of information is boiled down into 10 things you should know to be flu-savvy:
1 There’s no cause for panic. So far, swine flu isn’t much more threatening than regular seasonal flu. During the few months of this new flu’s existence, hospitalizations and deaths from it seem to be lower than the average seen for seasonal flu, and the virus hasn’t dramatically mutated. Still, more people are susceptible to swine flu and U.S. health officials are worried because it has hung around here so firmly during the summer.
2 Virus is tougher on some. Swine flu is more of a threat to certain groups — children younger than 2, pregnant women and people with health problems like asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Teens and young adults also are more vulnerable. Seasonal flu hits older people hardest, but not swine flu. Scientists think older people may have some immunity from exposure years earlier to similar viruses.
3 Wash your hands often and long. Like seasonal flu, swine flu spreads through coughs and sneezes of people who are sick. Emphasize to children that they should wash with soap and water long enough to finish singing the alphabet song. Also use alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
4 Get the kids vaccinated. People 6 months to 24 years old, pregnant women and health-care workers should be first in line for swine flu shots, especially if vaccine supplies are limited. Also a priority: Parents and caregivers of infants and people with those high-risk medical conditions previously noted.
5 Get your shots early. Millions of swine flu shots should be available by October. If you are in one of the priority groups, try to get your shot as early as possible. Check with your doctor or local or state health department about where to do this. Many children should be able to get vaccinated at school. Permission forms will be sent home in advance.
6 Immunity takes awhile. Even those first in line for shots won’t have immunity until about Thanksgiving. That’s because it’s likely to take two shots, given three weeks apart, to provide protection. And it takes a week or two after the last shot for the vaccine to take full effect.
7 Vaccines are being tested. Health officials presume the swine flu vaccine is safe and effective, but they’re testing it to make sure. The federal government has begun studies in eight cities across the country to assess its effectiveness and figure out the best dose. Vaccinemakers are doing their own tests as well.
8 Surrounded by swine flu? If an outbreak of swine flu hits your area before you’re vaccinated, be extra cautious. Stay away from public gathering places like malls, sports events and churches. Try to keep your distance from people. Keep washing those hands.
9 What if you get sick? If you have other health problems or are pregnant and develop flulike symptoms, call your doctor right away. You may be prescribed Tamiflu or Relenza. If you develop breathing problems (rapid breathing for kids), pain in your chest, constant vomiting or a fever that keeps rising, go to an emergency room. Most people, though, should just stay home and rest.
10 No swine flu from barbecue. You can’t catch swine flu from pork. Swine flu is not spread by handling meat, raw or cooked.
11 It rhymes with Woyanne, but the two diseases are totally different.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
By Douglas McGill | TC Daily Planet
Immigrants to Minnesota from eastern Ethiopia are being forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom payments to support an Ethiopian security force that tortures and kills thousands of innocent Ethiopians.
Under an extortion scheme run by the Ethiopian Woyanne tribal junta, soldiers in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia abduct men, women and teenage boys and girls, holding them without charge in one of scores of military jails in the region, which borders Somalia.
Knowing that many Ogaden families have relatives who live in Minnesota, the Ethiopian army tells the prisoners’ families that their loved ones can be freed upon payment of ransoms ranging from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
Hating to pay the money but having no other choice, the Minnesota refugees empty their personal bank accounts and pass the hat to raise ransoms to release their husbands, wives, sons, daughters and friends from overcrowded jails where torture, rape, beatings and killings are common.
Destruction of Villages
“It is a booming business for the Ethiopian Woyanne army,” said Mohamed, a Minnesota school teacher who immigrated from the Ogaden in 1993. “It happens every day in the Ogaden, and every day someone in Minnesota is sending money.”
Mohamed and other Ogaden immigrants quoted in this story declined to give their full names for fear that their families and friends living in the Ogaden would be jailed, tortured or killed in retribution for their openness.
In recent years, one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises has unfolded silently in the Ogaden region, where a vicious counter-insurgency campaign by the Ethiopian government has wiped out scores of villages, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced tens of thousands or more to refugee camps in Ethiopia and northern Kenya.
About 5,000 Ogaden refugees have found their way to Minnesota, which has one of the largest refugee populations from the Ogaden crisis in the world. They Ogaden refugees in Minnesota are settled mainly in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Willmar, St. Cloud and Faribault.
Frantic Calls
The ransoming of Ogaden refugees in Minnesota is exacting a disastrous economic, psychological and social toll within the Ogaden community and the broader society, Ogaden immigrants here say.
“I cry every night, believe me,” said Abdi, an Ogaden refugee who has sent $600 ransoms on two occasions. “You are forced to do what is not right, you are forced to do the wrong thing. It’s horrible. It lives with us, it lives with us everywhere. No matter where I am, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the living room, I cannot hold back my tears.”
Being forced to spend thousands of dollars to free their relatives from jail in Ethiopia slows down the Minnesota Ogadeni refugees’ attempts to learn English, to get an education and to successfully assimilate into U.S. society, they say.
“We get frantic phone calls day and night,” says Mustafe, an Ogaden refugee who works at Minneapolis employment agency. “Friends and family need money to be freed from jail. They say ‘Please send us money, please send us money!’ We send it, of course, but as a result we go into debt ourselves. I don’t even dream of going back to school to improve myself until the situation in Ogaden changes and improves.”
Financial Aid
In 2007, Mustafe sent $1,500 towards a $4,000 ransom collected in Minnesota to release a teenaged cousin who was jailed for three months, and was released after the ransom was paid. As a result of that and other ransoms Mustafe has paid, plus monthly support he sends back home to relatives, he is about $10,000 in debt.
The ransoming of Ogaden refugees is only one facet of an extreme humanitarian crisis involving countless crimes against humanity bordering on a full-scale genocide, that has been building in the Ogaden for more than a decade, but intensified sharply in 2007.
The roots of the Ogaden crisis lie in the fact that eastern Ethiopia is inhabited by ethnic Muslim Somalis at a time when the Ethiopian government has been waging war against Somalia. In December 2006, with financial aid and military training from the U.S., Ethiopia crushed the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist government that controlled Somalia.
In 2007, the Ethiopia-Somalia war intensified in Ogaden, where the Ethiopian Army launched an all-out counter-insurgency against a separatist militia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which it calls a terrorist organization.
Collective Punishment
The ONLF conducts deadly raids against Ethiopian Woyanne military, such as an April 2007 attack against a Chinese-run oil operation in the Ogaden which killed not only Ethiopian soldiers but several dozen Ethiopian citizens and nine Chinese nationals.
In retaliation for that attack, Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister butcher of Addis Ababa, launched a vicious crackdown on the ONLF, targeting not only ONLF fighters but their families, friends and other supporters throughout the region. In 2008, Human Rights Watch published a report, “Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region.”
The report documented hundreds of cases of torture, rape, executions and indeed the destruction of entire Ogaden villages on the mere suspicion that someone in the village was harboring an ONLF fighter. Human Rights Watch said the likely scale of the disaster was far larger than they were able to document in the report.
Since 2007 all foreign journalists and many aid organizations, including the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, have been forced by the Ethiopian government Woyanne junta to suspend operations in the Ogaden.
Virtually all of the ransoms paid by Minnesota Ogadeni refugees to the Ethiopian Woyanne military are to release friends and relatives who have been jailed on suspicion of knowing, sheltering, or aiding ONLF fighters.
Clan Elders
But in a region like Ogaden, where almost every village has at least one son or daughter who has joined the ONLF, to declare war on all people with even a slight relationship the ONLF is tantamount to declaring war on the entire Ogadeni people – on their society and culture. From an Ogadeni perspective, that is what has happened.
In Minneapolis over the past two weeks, I interviewed 18 Ogaden refugees. Every one confirmed knowledge of the frequent payment of ransoms by Minnesota Ogadenis to free imprisoned relatives held by the Ethiopian army in the Ogaden.
About half of the refugees I interviewed said they had personally paid ransoms to free relatives from jail, and some had done so many times.
The ransom amounts ranged from $300 to $1,500. In some cases those amounts were contributions to total collected ransoms of more than $10,000, which seems to be a typical amount needed to release Ogadeni clan elders who are held.
Here are four ransom stories I was told:
Abdi #1: “In 2002, in the city of Harare, Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers arrested my brother and beat him badly, tying a rope at the top of his elbows. For five nights they beat him. My Dad had to pay money to get him loose. He came back with marks on his arms above his elbows. Another time, my brother-in-law was arrested. On two occasions, his relatives called me in Minnesota to say he is alive in prison and asked us here to send money. So on two occasions since 2002 we sent $600, but my brother-in-law was never released and we still don’t know if he is alive or dead.”
Mustafe: “In 2007 my brother, who was in high school, was arrested and put in jail. They accused him of being a collaborator of the ONLF. They said he was buying khat [a chewed leaf that is a legal stimulant in Ethiopia and a major cash crop there] to give to the ONLF. But he was only a student with no money and he never did that. We collected $4,000 here in Minnesota to release him which they finally did after three months.”
Mohamed: “In 2005 they put my brother in jail. He is a tea shop owner and the Ethiopian army said he sold some food to the ONLF. My brother’s wife and cousins sold their sheep and goats to get the ransom money and he was released, but five months later they put him back in jail. This time, his wife called me and said ‘Mohamed, our sheep and goats are very thin and weak, it’s the dry season, and none of them can be sold. We need money. They will kill your brother if we don’t pay.’ So I sent what I could afford which was $700. Again he was released, but today, only a few hours ago, I got the bad news from my village that my brother and two others were taken by the Ethiopian army and no one knows their fate. So again I don’t know if my brother and the others are okay or if they are killed. If they aren’t killed, I will once again have to pay ransom, for the third time. They said my brother is a sympathizer of the ONLF, but he is only a tea shop owner. How can he discriminate if a customer who comes in who is ONLF? They don’t wear any uniform, how can he tell?”
Abdi #2: “My friend and cousin is named Hassan Ahmed, from the town of Jijiga. Last year he was jailed and sentenced to death for supposedly helping the ONLF. But he has asthma and was seriously sick and he needed to go to the hospital. So his mother called me here in Minnesota and said, ‘If we pay $500 they say they will take him to the hospital.’ So we managed to raise $500 which we sent to the family, and they gave it to the Ethiopian army. But he was never let out of prison and we don’t think he was taken to the hospital either. Instead, after they got the money they said, ‘This guy is sentenced to death, he will never get out.’”
Cell Phones
Mohamed, the Ogaden school teacher, has collected records of 182 separate instances of extortion and ransoming of Ogadeni civilians by the Ethiopian Woyanne Army. The total amount paid in these cases was $84,500, which Mohamed estimates is less than 1% of the total amount of money extorted and ransomed by the Ethiopian Army in the past two years.
“You cannot imagine how widespread this is,” said Mohamed, who collected the data through cell phone calls to contacts in the Ogaden and the global Ogaden diaspora.
As a result of the humanitarian aid and information blackout imposed by Ethiopia on the Ogaden, accounts given by the Ogaden refugees in Minnesota provide one of the richest sources of information about the crisis there.
Money, Army or Jail
Ogadeni shopkeepers and traders are also frequent targets for Ethiopian Woyanne army threats and shakedowns, Minnesota’s Ogaden refugees say.
“In the town of Gode,” said Mohamed, ‘the Army just last week gathered more than 100 business people recently and told them, ‘You have three choices: you can give us money, you can join the army, or you can go to jail.”
(Douglas McGill has reported for the New York Times and Bloomberg News– and now the Daily Planet. To reach Doug McGill: [email protected]. And visit The McGill Report at www.mcgillreport.org)
Selling citizens, selling children and selling land – Yilma Bekele
The late Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) commonly known as East Germany was a very sad country. It was a place where the state elevated the art of coercion into a science. The Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service) was the most potent weapon ever devised by a dictatorship.
The Stasi kept a close tab on all its citizens. The collapse of GDR, and the dismantling of the Berlin wall, gave us a clear look into the workings of a totalitarian state. It is said that Stasi had 91,000 employees and 350,000 collaborators in a country of 17 million. The Stasi infiltrated all associations, organizations, and clubs. The Stasi used blackmail to persuade citizens to inform on each other, including their own family. The Stasi was the most evil organization. The familiarity with Ethiopia is not a coincidence. The TPLF Internal Security is the new Stasi.
The TPLF’s security system is modeled after the Stasi. The regime might be clueless regarding the economic system, but it does not spare a penny when it comes to organizing a ruthless internal security system to blackmail, intimidate, and frighten the citizens of the country.
The GDR leaders constructed walls, buried land mines, and erected watchtowers to prevent their people from fleeing to the West. They also devised a clever way to profit from their hostages. They agreed to release political prisoners in exchange for money from their West German cousins. By the 1980’s, the payments we so large, that they became part of the GDR’s economic planning. Overall, 33,755 prisoners were released from the GDR, for a total amount of 3,436,900,755DM or $2.28 billion US dollars. As you can see, it was a very lucrative business.
Today we have the Ethiopian regime playing the same game with a different twist. Instead of political prisoners, the regime generates income by selling our children. We were famous for drought and famine, but now we are famous for the export of our children. It is true that the spread of HIV Aids, and other communicable diseases have decimated our population. Orphans are everywhere. For a poor country, without any safety net, the plight of our children is very sad indeed. On the other hand, the problem cannot be resolved by selling your precious resource. The minority regime has opened the door to unscrupulous individuals and organizations that have set up shop in Ethiopia. Their main concern is turning a profit rather than searching for a lasting solution. Reading ‘The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism’ report is experiencing a nightmarish situation while still awake. It makes you wonder if there is any thing sacred to the TPLF riffraff.
Well-informed sources have told the Schuster Institute that recent trends in Ethiopia’s international adoptions strongly suggest an increase in corruption. In the past, these have been signs that a country’s adoption system is shifting from “white” to “gray”—that is, from a well-regulated humanitarian effort dedicated to the children’s welfare, to a business that is taking children from living families in order to gain profits from Western adoption fees.
Once the regime figured out this is one area where an obscene amount of profit can be made, with little or no investment, there was nothing that would stop our gallant rulers. The Schuster Report goes on to say ‘For Ethiopia, the numbers of children sent in adoption climbed from a total of 262 in 2002 to more than 2520 in 2007—a tenfold expansion in five years.
When you consider that the average cost to adopt in Ethiopia is around twenty thousand US dollars (the cheapest in the world) the government took in over 50 million US dollars in 2007 alone. Based on the trend of the last eight years, the numbers for 2008 and 2009 must be considerably higher. The Woyane government that is passing laws to suppress the independent press, human right work, in addition to curtailing NGO activities, is all of a sudden very receptive to the idea of setting up ‘model orphan centers’ by non-regulated foreign adoption agencies. Schuster Report goes on to say,
· “Homes” for pregnant women that appear to have been created “strictly to provide infants for the adoption trade” (in the words of an observer).
· Fraud on the children’s documents about such facts as their real ages and whether they were abandoned or relinquished by families.
As you can see the TPLF regime in collusion with westerners was using the so-called “homes” as a baby factory designed for export of children who were treated like “another” commodity. Can you imagine the agony of a mother or a father who “gives” up their baby never to see him or her again? What is very alarming is the fact that some of the children who were put up for adoption are not orphans. Woyane agents falsified documents to show the children as orphans, while the birth parents were still alive according to Canadian parents that were swindled in Ethiopia.
As if selling children were not enough, the regime is also involved in signing long-term leases of our fertile land with foreign investors. An article by Michael Chebsi reads:
The Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has promised Saudi Arabia that his country will provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of unutilised agricultural land for growing cereals in the east African country. This is a follow up to an earlier pledge by Ethiopia to grant 5,000 hectares of land to the Djibouti government for large-scale commercial farming.
The Ethiopian agriculture ministry is identifying available land for such foreign investors; so far close to two million hectares of land have been identified in the regions of Oromia and Amhara, where almost all cereals in the country are produced.
Land is state property in Ethiopia. The regime uses its status as the landlord to control the life of the peasant farmer. Seventeen years of experimentation with voodoo economics have left the country unable to feed itself. Over fourteen million Ethiopians are in constant need of food handouts from foreign donors. Instead of changing a failed policy, the regime is trying to solve its balance of payment problem by leasing our land. The consequence of this action is to condemn millions of citizens into perpetual insecurity and forces them to need help from outsiders.
The Ethiopian Stasi strangle hold on our people is visible in every part of our country. The security services are part of the everyday landscape. They make it a point to be seen and felt. The idea is to intimidate and terrorize. They are in every office, in every coffee shop and bar on every street corner including places of worship. They do not try to blend in rather they like to stand out begging for recognition. The aim is to create mistrust and fear. The TPLF regime spends more money on security than education and health combined. Their presence is even felt by the Diaspora. Most of our people are afraid to have their picture taken during a protest, scared to sign their name and contribute money anonymously. I am sure there are a few that report back on the activities of the Diaspora but the fear factor is more than the reality. The TPLF regime is a fear factory.
Dictatorship is not sustainable. Despite all the effort by the leaders of GDR, they were not able to stop the spontaneous uprising by their people. Sooner or later the victims wake up. The East German dictator Erich Honecker fled to the old Soviet Union when his country withered away. Unfortunately for him, the Soviet Union went through some change itself and he was extradited back home. During the trial, he was found to be ill with terminal cancer, and the Germans government unceremoniously deported him to Chile where he died alone. His life was a total waste, but he also caused agony and hardship to his people.
Andenet Party Chairman Judge Bertukan Mideksa has been in jail two hundred and fifty days. Her crime is she stood up against the dictatorship. The regime is using Judge Bertukan to break the will of the people. It is a futile effort by those in power to get respect and recognition. It did not work for Mengistu Haile Mariam. It did not work for Erich Honecker. There is no reason to believe that it is going to work this time. All patriotic Ethiopians know Judge Bertukan is paying the price for our freedom. We know that Judge Bertukan is the reflection our dreams and our hope for our ancient kingdom. We share the sentiments of the late Senator Kennedy when he said ‘the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.’ Hear this .WAV 173K The dream of the righteous and just Ethiopia will never die. We, that is you, and I, we are the future. Never doubt that. Ethiopia will rise up again.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1920779/posts
http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/3/403\
http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/ethiopia.html
Numbers from AICAN (Australian Intercountry Adoption Network)’s Statistics page.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/03/19/f-ethiopia-adoption.html?ref=rss
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45100
http://ethio-governance.blogspot.com/
http://romania-forexportonly.blogspot.com/2009/03/solidarity-committee-for-ethiopian.html
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23026719-38200,00.html
