London, UK — Buckinghamshire NHS Hospitals NHS Trust has signed a memorandum of understanding to advise staff at Menelik II Hospital, in Addis Ababa.
Five senior staff members from the hospital visited the county to learn about ophthalmology services.
It came after staff from Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Aylesbury visited the Ethiopian hospital.
A trust statement said there is a “chronic shortage of skilled staff, with just one ophthalmologist for every one million population” in Ethiopia.
Poor nutrition and disease means four million are blind or visually impaired, the statement said.
Consultant ophthalmologist Consuela Moorman said: “Visiting the hospital in Addis Ababa certainly put things in perspective, and enhanced our understanding of what staff there face on an everyday level.
“Their staff are skilled but the issue is the sheer volume of patients needing treatment – it’s overwhelming.
“The infrastructure they work in lets them down too as conditions are sometimes very difficult to work in.”
Menelik dean Professor Milliard Beyene said: “It’s difficult when you are on your own to tackle a problem of this size.
“Here at Stoke Mandeville Hospital we have seen marvellous facilities and really good staff.
“We hope that this partnership can directly improve the services we offer and the training programme we can provide to our own staff.”
THE grass-roots protests that have engulfed Iran since its presidential election last week have grabbed America’s attention and captured headlines — unfortunately, so has the clamor from neoconservatives urging President Obama to denounce the voting as a sham and insert ourselves directly in Iran’s unrest.
No less a figure than Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, has denounced President Obama’s response as “tepid.” He has also claimed that “if we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail.”
Mr. McCain’s rhetoric, of course, would be cathartic for any American policy maker weary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hostile message of division. We are all inspired by Iran’s peaceful demonstrations, the likes of which have not been seen there in three decades. Our sympathies are with those Iranians who seek a more respectful, cooperative relationship with the world. Watching heartbreaking video images of Basij paramilitaries terrorizing protesters, we feel the temptation to respond emotionally.
There’s just one problem. If we actually want to empower the Iranian people, we have to understand how our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment, distract Iranians from a failing economy and rally a fiercely independent populace against outside interference. Iran’s hard-liners are already working hard to pin the election dispute, and the protests, as the result of American meddling. On Wednesday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry chastised American officials for “interventionist” statements. Government complaints of slanted coverage by the foreign press are rising in pitch.
We can’t escape the reality that for reformers in Tehran to have any hope for success, Iran’s election must be about Iran — not America. And if the street protests of the last days have taught us anything, it is that this is an Iranian moment, not an American one.
To understand this, we need only listen to the demonstrators. Their signs, slogans and Twitter postings say nothing about getting help from Washington — instead they are adapting the language of their own revolution. When Iranians shout “Allahu Akbar” from rooftops, they are repackaging the signature gesture of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading reformist presidential candidate, has advocated a more conciliatory approach to America. But his political legitimacy comes from his revolutionary credentials for helping overthrow an American-backed shah — a history that today helps protect protesters against accusations of being an American “fifth column.”
Iran’s internal change is happening on two levels: on the streets, but also within the clerical establishment. Ultimately, no matter who wins the election, our fundamental security challenge will be the same — preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. That will take patient effort, and premature engagement in Iran’s domestic politics may well make negotiations more difficult.
What comes next in Iran is unclear. What is clear is that the tough talk that Senator McCain advocates got us nowhere for the last eight years. Our saber-rattling only empowered hard-liners and put reformers on the defensive. An Iranian president who advocated a “dialogue among civilizations” and societal reforms was replaced by one who denied the Holocaust and routinely called for the destruction of Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran’s influence in the Middle East expanded and it made considerable progress on its nuclear program.
The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet.
Words are important. President Obama has made that clear in devising a new approach to Iran and the wider Muslim world. In offering negotiation and conciliation, he has put the region’s extremists on the defensive.
We have seen the results of this new vision already. His outreach may have helped to make a difference in the election last week in Lebanon, where a pro-Western coalition surprised many by winning a resounding victory.
We’re seeing signs that it’s having an impact in Iran as well. Returning to harsh criticism now would only erase this progress, empower hard-liners in Iran who want to see negotiations fail and undercut those who have risen up in support of a better relationship.
John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
SILENCE is complicity. Our president’s refusal to take a forthright moral stand on the side of the Iranian freedom marchers is read in Tehran as a blank check for the current regime.
The fundamentalist junta has begun arresting opposition figures, with regime mouthpieces raising the prospect of the death penalty. Inevitably, there are claims that dissidents have been “hoarding weapons and explosives.”
Foreign media reps are under house arrest. Cellphone frequencies are jammed. Students are killed and the killings disavowed.
And our president is “troubled,” but doesn’t believe we should “meddle” in Iran’s internal affairs. (Meddling in Israel’s domestic affairs is just fine, though.)
We just turned our backs on freedom. Again.
Of all our foreign-policy failures in my lifetime, our current shunning of those demanding free elections and expanded civil rights in Iran reminds me most of Hungary in 1956.
For years, we encouraged the Hungarians to rise up against oppression. When they did, we watched from the sidelines as Russian tanks drove over them.
For decades, Washington policymakers from both parties have prodded Iranians to throw off their shackles. Last Friday, millions of Iranians stood up. And we’re standing down.
That isn’t diplomacy. It’s treachery.
Despite absurd claims that Obama’s Islam-smooching Cairo speech triggered the calls for freedom in Tehran’s streets, these politics are local. But if those partisan claims of the “Cairo Effect” were true, wouldn’t our president be obliged to stand beside those he incited?
Too bad for the Iranians, but their outburst of popular anger toward Iran’s oppressive government doesn’t fit the administration’s script — which is written around negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
To Obama, his dogmatic commitment to negotiations is infinitely more important than a few million protesters chanting the Farsi equivalent of “We Shall Overcome.”
This is madness. There is no chance — zero, null, nada — that negotiations with the junta of mullahs will lead to the termination (or even a serious interruption) of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our president’s faith in his powers of persuasion is beginning to look pathological. Is his program of negotiations with apocalypse-minded, woman-hating, Jew-killing fanatics so sacrosanct that he can’t acknowledge human cries for freedom?
Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a better role model than Martin Luther King? It’s a damned shame that our first minority president wasn’t a veteran of our civil-rights struggle, rather than its privileged beneficiary.
An ugly pattern’s emerging in our president’s beliefs:
He’s infallible. This is rich, given all the criticism of the Bush administration’s unwillingness to admit mistakes. We now have a president with Jimmy Carter’s naivete, Richard Nixon‘s distaste for laws, Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to the wrong war, and Bill Clinton‘s moral fecklessness.
Democracy isn’t important. Our president seems infected by yesteryear’s Third-World-leftist view that dictatorships are essential to post-colonial development — especially for Muslims.
Look where Obama has gone and who he supports: the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, his groveling speech in Egypt, his embrace of Hamas, his hands-off approach to the gory regime in Sudan — and now his dismay at the protests in Iran.
Strict Islam is true Islam. This is bewildering, given Obama’s childhood exposure to the tolerant Islam practiced in most of Indonesia. The defining remark of his presidency thus far was his Cairo demand for the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress in the West — while remaining silent about their right to reject the hijab, burqa or chador in the Middle East.
History’s a blank canvas — except for America’s sins. Of course, we’ve had presidents who presented the past in the colors they preferred — but we’ve never had one who just made it all up.
Obama’s ignorance of history is on naked display — no sense of the brutality of Iran’s Islamist regime, of the years of mass imprisonments, diabolical torture, prison rapes, wholesale executions and secret graves that made the shah’s reign seem idyllic. Our president seems to regard the Iranian protesters as spoiled brats.
Facts? Who cares? In his Cairo sermon — a speech that will live in infamy — our president compared the plight of the Palestinians, the aggressors in 1948, with the Holocaust. He didn’t mention the million Jews dispossessed and driven from Muslim lands since 1948, nor the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians from the West Bank.
Now our president’s attempt to vote “present” yet again green-lights the Iranian regime’s determination to face down the demonstrators — and the mullahs understand it as such.
If we see greater violence in Tehran, the blood of those freedom marchers will be on our president’s hands.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Somalia’s national security minister and at least 24 other people were killed in a suicide attack Thursday, and an extremist Islamic group with alleged links to al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed accused al-Qaida of being behind the bombing, which also killed a senior Somali diplomat, but did not offer any evidence. In March, Osama bin Laden, the leader of the global terrorist network, urged Somalis to overthrow Ahmed, calling him a tool of the United States in an audiotape that outlined al-Qaida’s ambitions in Somalia.
“It was an act of terrorism and it is part of the terrorist attack on our people,” Ahmed told journalists in Mogadishu, his country’s capital. “Al-Qaida is attacking us.”
The bombing in western Somalia far outside Mogadishu raised concerns that Somali insurgents are aiming to take out leaders of security forces to further cripple the country’s weak, U.N.-backed government. Analysts say the insurgents have identified suicide attacks and assassinations as the best way to defeat the government.
National Security Minister Omar Hashi Aden was the second senior security official to be killed in as many days. Mogadishu’s police chief died during fighting with Islamic insurgents in the capital on Wednesday that saw at least 34 people killed.
“Omar Hashi Aden’s death is a huge blow to the government,” said Ali Said Omar, director of the Nairobi, Kenya-based Center for Peace and Democracy, an independent research organization that works in Somalia.
The national security minister had become an important figure in the government because he was successfully recruiting militiamen to fight anti-government forces in central and southern regions Somalia where it has few allies, Omar told The Associated Press.
BeletWeyne, where Aden was killed, is the capital of the central Somalia region of Hiran.
Diplomats had described a surge in violence in May as a major push by the insurgents, backed by foreign Islamic militants, to topple the government in Mogadishu. But government forces managed to hold on to the few blocks in the capital they control as well as the air and sea port that are guarded by African Union peacekeepers.
During Thursday’s suicide attack, witness Mohamed Nur said a small car headed toward the gate of the Medina Hotel in Belet Weyne, then drove into vehicles leaving the hotel and exploded.
Ali Mohamud Rage, a spokesman for Al-Shabab, an extremist Somali Islamic group, told local radio stations by telephone that his group carried out the attack and that one of its fighters died. “We killed the national security minister and the former ambassador to Ethiopia,” said Rage, speaking from an undisclosed location.
The U.S. State Department considers Al-Shabab a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaida, but al-Shabab has denied that.
Experts have expressed fears that foreign Islamic militants could use Somalia as a base for terror in the region.
Somalia has not had an effective government for 18 years after warlords overthrew Mohamed Siad Barre and plunged the country into anarchy and chaos. The lawlessness also has allowed Somali pirates to flourish, making the nation the world’s worst piracy hotspot.
Diplomats have said that up to 400 foreign Islamic militants backing local insurgents were involved in a surge of violence in Mogadishu in May that killed nearly 200 civilians. The U.N. says the conflict has displaced more than 122,000 people.
The United States accuses al-Shabab of harboring al-Qaida-linked terrorists who allegedly blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The United States has attempted to kill suspected al-Qaida members in Somalia several times with airstrikes.
Counterterrorism experts have long feared the nation is a haven for the terror network.
President Ahmed is a moderate Islamist who was elected in January under an intricate peace deal the U.N. mediated. His election split the Islamic insurgency trying to topple the government for two years but did not put off hardline elements, who want to form a strict Islamic state in Somalia.
Al-Shabab, the main hardline group, has found it difficult to dislodge the government from its strongholds in Mogadishu and is seeking other ways to defeat it, said Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist with the U.S. Congress. “The suicide attack and assassinations are now seen as the most effective method to disorganize and disorient the government,” Dagne told the AP.
Ahmed said the national security minister was on official business in Belet Weyne but did not elaborate. In recent weeks Aden had frequently gone to Belet Weyne, which is considered a strategic town because it is close to the Ethiopian border and is on a road that goes directly to Mogadishu.
Aden, a former police officer, had risen to the rank of colonel during dictator Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime, the last effective central government in Somalia before the country descended into chaos. Aden later became a player in Somali politics and more recently had become an ally of Ahmed.
(Associated Press writer Malkhadir M. Muhumed in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report.)
A group charged with conspiracy to overthrow Ethiopia’s government has asked a court for special protection, alleging their human rights have been violated during detention. Our correspondent reports relatives say some defendants have been tortured.
At a pre-trial hearing, attorneys and defendants in the so-called “Ginbot Seven” case indicated the accused had suffered physical and psychological abuse while being held in pre-trial detention.
Former army general Asamenew Tsige, one of five leaders of an alleged coup plot being held in solitary confinement, pleaded for special human-rights protection. An attorney for another defendant, businessman Getu Worku, asked that her client be allowed to see a private doctor for injuries suffered in detention.
Both requests were denied.
Getu Worku’s wife, Rakeb Messele, who is also an attorney and human rights activist, said her husband was told he could only be examined by prison doctors.
“He was told he can try to address those issues through the health personnel of the prison administration,” said Rakeb Messele. ” [They said] you cannot ask for a private doctor to examine the client because now he is at the custody of the prison administration. What she said that the report of the medical examination might serve as evidence for her client.”
Rights groups have expressed concern about the political implications of the arrest of the 32 Ginbot Seven activists. The organization is led by Berhanu Nega, who was elected mayor of Addis Ababa in 2005.
Berhanu was later jailed along with other opposition leaders in connection with violent post-election protests and sentenced to life in prison. He was pardoned in 2007 and went to the United States, where he founded Ginbot Seven, named for May 15th, the date of the disputed election. He has repeatedly stated the group’s goal is to oust Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government, which it considers illegitimate, but he denies the existence of any assassination plot.
Thirty-two accused conspirators appeared in court for pre-trial hearings. Berhanu Nega is among 14 others charged in absentia.
Most of those in custody are current or former military officers, including two generals. But the government has rejected suggestions that the group was planning a military coup.
Relatives of some of the defendants told reporters their loved ones had been subjected to harsh physical abuse during interrogation.
Government spokesman Shimelis Kemal rejected the charge, and pointed out that in three court appearances, the defendants had not filed any specific charges of abuse or torture. He said investigating officers never resort to what he called ‘third-degree measures’ to procure information from prisoners.
The case was adjourned for further study until June 30, when a bail request will be heard. The court also turned down a special bail request by the 83-year-old father of a top Ginbot Seven official. The official is living in Britain, and is among those charged in absentia.
Incense perfumes Habesha Restaurant as we’re seated near the large, dark wood bar that anchors the dimly lighted dining room. The musk scented smoke is so strong that it’s dizzying, but soon another more intoxicating aroma takes over.
A large shared platter of Ethiopian stews, spiced meats, and slow-cooked vegetables is set before a group of Ethiopians sitting near us. We greedily inhale the cloud of exotic spices that wafts over as they tear squares of thin injera bread, use it to gracefully pinch bites of food, and pop the mini bundles into their mouths, all while chattering in a pretty, sing-song language that must be Amharic.
With the help of two partners, Abeba Golum opened this Ethiopian restaurant in Malden in December. A native of Addis Ababa, she is a lifelong hobby cook and prefers to create from scratch. Really. She churns her own butter to “keep it Ethiopian style.” And her bread – oh, the bread.
Every bite of a traditional Ethiopian meal is eaten not with a fork but with injera bread, a spongy, crepe-thin sourdough bread. So the better the bread, the better the meal, and Golum’s injera is superb.
While some Ethiopian restaurants here make do with wheat flour, Golum uses traditional teff, a slightly nutty-tasting grain. She does add a touch of self-rising flour, but the key is that she ferments the dough long enough to develop a pleasing tanginess (a step some restaurants skip). The result is just the right sourness and earthy flavor to liven up every bite of the meal.
Injera is especially good wrapped around beef awaze tibs, chewy but flavor-rich bits of beef glistening in a savory sauce that is red with berbere spice blend (Ethiopia’s answer to curry). Doro wat ($10) is also a standout. This chicken stew is so complex you could spend a whole meal trying to guess the many spices that perfume this delicious, intense, brown sauce: nutmeg, cardamom, paprika, clove? And the kifto, steak tartar ($10) drizzled with the house’s fresh butter, is pure carnivorous joy.
Other standards like lamb tibs ($10) or chicken tibs ($8) and some of the vegetables are less interesting than versions elsewhere. But, again, the bread elevates them. Every meal should include the vegetarian combo ($12), a rainbow of mild to fiery sides, including addictive fried green beans.
The menu is brief: 11 entrees and a kid’s meal. In fact, the drink list, which includes Ethiopian pilsners, stouts, and many wines, is longer. But with injera this good, even one dish would be enough.
