The Ethiopian Student Association at West Virginia State University will host its third annual “Taste of Ethiopia” from 5 to 8 p.m. Sunday in the Student Union Grand Hall.
Community will have the opportunity to taste injera (Ethiopian bread), doro wat (chicken stew), siga wat (beef stew), teqele gomen (cabbage) and other dishes, while enjoying fashion, music and other elements of Ethiopian culture.
Proceeds from the dinner will assist university students in Ethiopia, and allow the ESA to continue supporting two orphan children in their homeland. This is the ESA’s major fundraising event for the year.
Admission is $15 for adults, $5 for children and $10 for students.
Amid the current media frenzy about Somali pirates, it’s hard not to imagine them as characters in some dystopian Horn of Africa version of Waterworld. We see wily corsairs in ragged clothing swarming out of their elusive mother ships, chewing narcotic khat while thumbing GPS phones and grappling hooks. They are not desperate bandits, experts say, rather savvy opportunists in the most lawless corner of the planet. But the pirates have never been the only ones exploiting the vulnerabilities of this troubled failed state — and are, in part, a product of the rest of the world’s neglect.
Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia’s last functional government in 1991, the country’s 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country’s at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international “free for all,” with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country’s own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country’s coastline each year. “In any context,” says Gustavo Carvalho, a London-based researcher with Global Witness, an environmental NGO, “that is a staggering sum.”
In the face of this, impoverished Somalis living by the sea have been forced over the years to defend their own fishing expeditions out of ports such as Eyl, Kismayo and Harardhere — all now considered to be pirate dens. Somali fishermen, whose industry was always small-scale, lacked the advanced boats and technologies of their interloping competitors, and also complained of being shot at by foreign fishermen with water cannons and firearms. “The first pirate gangs emerged in the ’90s to protect against foreign trawlers,” says Peter Lehr, lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and editor of Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism. The names of existing pirate fleets, such as the National Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia or Somali Marines, are testament to the pirates’ initial motivations.
The waters they sought to protect, says Lehr, were “an El Dorado for fishing fleets of many nations.” A 2006 study published in the journal Science predicted that the current rate of commercial fishing would virtually empty the world’s oceanic stocks by 2050. Yet, Somalia’s seas still offer a particularly fertile patch for tuna, sardines and mackerel, and other lucrative species of seafood, including lobsters and sharks. In other parts of the Indian Ocean region, such as the Persian Gulf, fishermen resort to dynamite and other extreme measures to pull in the kinds of catches that are still in abundance off the Horn of Africa.
High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says. They often fly flags of convenience from sea-faring friendly nations like Belize and Bahrain, which further helps the ships skirt international regulations and evade censure from their home countries. Tsuma Charo of the Nairobi-based East African Seafarers Assistance Programme, which monitors Somali pirate attacks and liaises with the hostage takers and the captured crews, says “illegal trawling has fed the piracy problem.” In the early days of Somali piracy, those who seized trawlers without licenses could count on a quick ransom payment, since the boat owners and companies backing those vessels didn’t want to draw attention to their violation of international maritime law. This, Charo reckons, allowed the pirates to build up their tactical networks and whetted their appetite for bigger spoils.
Beyond illegal fishing, foreign ships have also long been accused by local fishermen of dumping toxic and nuclear waste off Somalia’s shores. A 2005 United Nations Environmental Program report cited uranium radioactive and other hazardous deposits leading to a rash of respiratory ailments and skin diseases breaking out in villages along the Somali coast. According to the U.N., at the time of the report, it cost $2.50 per ton for a European company to dump these types of materials off the Horn of Africa, as opposed to $250 per ton to dispose of them cleanly in Europe.
Monitoring and combating any of these misdeeds is next to impossible — Somalia’s current government can barely find its feet in the wake of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. And many Somalis, along with outside observers, suspect local officials in Mogadishu and in ports in semi-autonomous Puntland further north of accepting bribes from foreign fishermen as well as from pirate elders. U.N. monitors in 2005 and 2006 suggested an embargo on fish taken from Somali waters, but their proposals were shot down by members of the Security Council.
In the meantime, Somali piracy has metastasized into the country’s only boom industry. Most of the pirates, observers say, are not former fishermen, but just poor folk seeking their fortune. Right now, they hold 18 cargo ships and some 300 sailors hostage — the work of a sophisticated and well-funded operation. A few pirates have offered testimony to the international press — a headline in Thursday’s Times of London read, “They stole our lobsters: A Somali pirate tells his side of the story” — but Lehr and other Somali experts express their doubts. “Nowadays,” Lehr says, “this sort of thing is just a cheap excuse.” The legacy of nearly twenty years of inaction and abuse, though, is far more costly.
Criminal Colonialism
Ethiopia 1935-1941: Voyage to the shadowy heart of Italy
“Looking back on the war in Ethiopia today means having to deal with the way we are today: with the myth that is the popular saying, “the Italians are good”, always useful whenever there is an aggressive foreign war; with those prejudices that exist against anyone different which are also a product of a colonial past that has never been properly criticised; with the arrogant return of patriarchal ideas and the separation of the roles of the sexes. But if we deal with this, we must deal with it fully, seeking to understand it from the point of view of those Ethiopians, both men and women, who opposed the barbarity that called itself civility.”
Speakers:
* Mulu Ayele (Ethiopian community): Ethiopian women in the resistance to the Fascist colonialism;
* Loredana Baglio (Corrispondenze metropolitane): Colonialism and women;
* Nancy Aluigi Nannini (anthropologist): The colonial origin of prejudices.
Photographic exhibition (photos by A. Imperiali)
Portions of the films “Fascist legacy” and “Tempo di uccidere” will be shown.
DATE: Friday 24 April 2009 – at 5.00pm
PLACE: The Università La Sapienza, Faculty of Physics (old building), Rome
Organized by:
Laboratorio Sociale “La Talpa”
Corrispondenze Metropolitane
Comunità etiopica in Italia
Exodus (Ethiopian Cultural Service)
Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici
Unione Sindacale Italiana
MALAWI (Nyasa Times) — Just under a month after police arrested over 100 Ethiopians for trying to illegally flee the country, another contingent of 62 Ethiopians has been nabbed in Mwanza district as it attempted to do likewise.
Mwanza Police Station Officer Joel Makomwa confirmed that police arrested the 62 refugees on Sunday as they headed for the Mwanza border.
He said the Ethiopians had fled from Dzaleka Refugee camp in Dowa and were on their way to South Africa via Mozambique.
The station officer explained that police were surprised with the foreigners as they walked towards the boarder.
“When approached they could not speak English so we arrested them and took them to our station,” he said.
The group is believed to be part of the over 100 Ethiopians who were arrested two weeks ago in Dedza as they headed for Dedza Boarder Post on their way to South Africa through Mozambique.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The self-proclaimed ‘first lady’ of Ethiopia, Azeb Mesfin, did not attend the meeting even though she is the vice chairwomen of “African First Ladies for Against HIV”. Azeb is worse than the HIV. She and her husband are responsible for more deaths than all the diseases in Ethiopia combined. The evil witch is now busy solidifying her position in EFFORT that will enable her to steal more money.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A group of African first ladies began a two-day meeting in Los Angeles on Monday to forge U.S. partnerships to try to improve health and education of women and girls in African communities afflicted by AIDS.
The wives of the presidents and prime ministers of Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, Zambia, Cameroon and 10 other nations teamed up with U.S. health experts, nonprofit groups and a clutch of celebrities to promote their work.
“Nowhere before in the United States has such a large group of African first ladies come together to talk as one,” Ted Alemayhu, founder of the Los Angeles-based U.S. Doctors for Africa, told a news conference.
Hollywood actresses Diane Lane, Maria Bello, Robin Wright Penn and Camryn Manheim were among the celebrity women who attended an opening day luncheon.
Singer Natalie Cole, daughter of the late Nat King Cole, will perform at a fund-raiser by oil company ExxonMobil, while Sharon Stone is due to moderate a panel aimed at transforming words into action.
The meeting hopes to raise awareness in Hollywood of various projects in Africa to supply clean water, fight malaria and combat AIDS.
The charitable group of 22 first ladies was formed in 2002 and is called African Synergy Against AIDS and Suffering. It was set up to highlight the vital role of women in education and healthcare in the world’s poorest continent.
Women in sub-Saharan Africa account for 57 percent of HIV infections and young African women are three times more likely to become infected than men of comparable age in the region, according to a 2006 United Nations Development Program report.
“As an African woman, this is really exciting and unprecedented,” said “CSI: Miami” actress Megalyn Echikunwoke, whose father is Nigerian. “For me this is really about finding out how we can support the first ladies.”
Oil giant Chevron, one of the meeting sponsors, announced a $5 million contribution to help fight malaria in Angola as part of its outreach programs in Africa.
Sarah Brown, wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, while former U.S. first lady Laura Bush will make a video address.
ATLANTA – Defense attorneys for Quincy Jackson argued Tuesday that a popular premise of modern-day prosecution is flawed: It’s wrong, they said, to convict a man based on evidence that his cell phone was at the scene of a crime.
“There should be evidence that puts the phone in the man’s hands,” attorney David Fife said in closing arguments.
Jurors are tasked with deciding whether to side with Fife, or with prosecutors who say Jackson – and, by extension, his phone – was the conduit for a wave of robberies that culminated in murder.
Superior Court Judge Timothy Hamil released jurors to deliberate after 5 p.m., capping more than a week of testimony in Jackson’s murder trial. The Riverdale man is accused of participating in a robbing crew that terrorized two Gwinnett (a suburb of Atlanta) families in three robberies leading up to the suffocation death of Tedla Lemma, 51, in March 2008. Tedla is an immigrant from Ethiopia.
Though no physical evidence ties Jackson to the scenes, Assistant District Attorney Christa Kirk said witness testimony, cell phone records and wire-tapped phone conversations between Jackson and a key co-defendant are enough to implicate him.
“In this case, by planning it, getting the muscle and getting in that house, Quincy Jackson is just as responsible as anybody else,” Kirk told the jury.
The state’s star witness, Lorna Araya, an acquaintance of Jackson’s from college, testified this week she masterminded the hits, but only after Jackson had asked her to. Prosecutors have dropped the possibility of a life sentence in exchange for Araya’s cooperation. Lorna is also an immigrant from Ethiopia.
Jackson waived his right to testify earlier Tuesday.
Fife argued that prosecutors could have crafted a plea bargain with Araya prior the trial, but were too “ashamed” that jurors might learn of her potentially forgiving sentence. Her sentence, Fife said, will be contingent on her “performance” in court.
Fife contends that Araya has repeatedly lied to investigators and prosecutors in an attempt to cover for her boyfriend, Gerald Rhines, who Fife said spearheaded one robbery.
“We know that she’s lied many times to protect herself,” Fife said. “Her personal credibility is very low.”
Kirk pointed out that Lemma’s wallet and other items were found at Jackson’s Riverdale home. That home, however, is shared by Marshae Brooks, who Fife said admitted to robbing Lemma and could have possessed the wallet.
Jackson, who worked at home as a Web page designer prior to his arrest, pleaded not guilty to the charges in his 17-count indictment and has never admitted to being involved, Fife said. He faces life in prison.
Jury deliberations are expected to resume this morning.
“Looking back on the war in Ethiopia today means having to deal with the way we are today: with the myth that is the popular saying, “the Italians are good”, always useful whenever there is an aggressive foreign war; with those prejudices that exist against anyone different which are also a product of a colonial past that has never been properly criticised; with the arrogant return of patriarchal ideas and the separation of the roles of the sexes. But if we deal with this, we must deal with it fully, seeking to understand it from the point of view of those Ethiopians, both men and women, who opposed the barbarity that called itself civility.”
MALAWI (