The Kangaroo court of Ethiopia has delivered yet another unmerited verdict. This time, it is against the most popular singer Teddy Afro, who was falsely, based on the evidence submitted by the prosecutor, accused of a hit and run crime. The singer has been accused of hitting and killing a homeless man and has been imprisoned without a bail for close to a year.
As the trial clearly demonstrated, the prosecutor of the case was unable to prove the crime of the accused without a reasonable doubt. The witness against the accused and the evidence submitted in the trial contradict that the date the reported crime took place and the deceased date of the victim on the hospital death certificate were divergent. Moreover, the accused constitutional rights were violated and some of the evidence that were permitted in the trial were fabricated.
In light of the clear incapability of the prosecutor to prove the accused crimes, the court, with its premeditated plot, gave emphasis to circumstantial evidence, which was false hypothesis submitted by the prosecutor.
The court knows that the accused has neither guilty mind (Mens rea) nor the guilty act (Actus reus) he was falsely accused for was evidently proved. The court knows that the crime was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The court also knows that more rigorous test was needed to determine whether the evidence submitted by the prosecutor was sufficient to convict the accused.
It is an apparent fact that Teddy’s trial was influenced by politics as he was deprived of his constitutional rights from the very beginning. He was accused and arrested without bail based on fabricated evidence, and now convicted while there is a reasonable doubt. Teddy is known for criticizing the government through his music’s. He was patriot, kind and a loyal citizen. The court had no other cause for the false conviction rather than Teddy’s different political view and patriotism.
What the biased judges did to him, however, is another unambiguous proof that there is no impartial judiciary system in Ethiopia. Obviously, that implies that there is no justice at all.
This poses near-term dangers not only for long-suffering Somalis, whose plight is barely recorded, but for the world. Somalia is a failed state that has been without effective government now for 17 years. International trade is already hampered by the surge in piracy off its coast. If the al-Shabaab militia are able to seize the opportunity to gain more ground, they could turn Somalia into the breeding ground for international terrorism that the US feared it was becoming back in 2006, although there was little evidence for this at the time.
In the longer term, Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s withdrawal could take the wind out of Somali jihadist sails. The al-Shabaab derived legitimacy at home from nationalism, and further afield from their battle against essentially Christian invaders. Once these are gone, Somalis, Islamists included, are all too likely to resume fighting among themselves.
Blame for this debacle is not only Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s. Burnt by the UN intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s, western powers were reluctant to back a large-scale peacekeeping operation that would have allowed the Ethiopians Woyannes to withdraw sooner. If there is any hope, it is that the Somalis can now unite against an extremist form of Islam anathema to their own, and that fellow Muslim states will help them do it.
Before Ethiopia Woyanne invaded with Washington’s blessing, Somalia barely registered on the global jihadi radar. Two years later, the conflict is a significant mobilising force. Videos seeking recruits and financing for Islamist militias fighting the Ethiopian- Woyanne-backed transitional government have proliferated on jihadi web sites. Fighters from Zanzibar, the Comoros islands and as far away as Pakistan have been drawn to the insurgency. Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s intervention has bolstered extremist elements that the US and other western powers hoped – against the advice of most experts at the time – that it would contain.
In recent months, hardline al-Shabaab militias have gained control over much of southern Somalia. By contrast, the transitional government that Ethiopia Woyanne stepped in to install can claim influence over the town of Baidoa and only parts of the capital, where roadside bombs explode daily. Ethiopian troops are bogged down fighting an insurgency that gains strength from their presence, while the government they support shows no signs of becoming more effective. It is a familiar scenario for the US and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ethiopia Woyanne however, has announced its decision to cut its losses and withdraw by the end of the year.
If you believe that Barack Obama will pursue a policy in the Horn of Africa that is substantially different than that of George Bush, you are in for a deep disappointment. Only weeks after Ethiopian regime’s U.S.-instigated invasion of Somalia almost two years ago, Susan Rice, Obama’s choice for Ambassador to the United Nations, endorsed the aggression – an atrocity that has resulted in the displacement of 1.5 million Somalis and impending starvation of 3.5 million more.
Rice is a proponent of so-called “humanitarian military intervention” – but supports a U.S. Somalia policy that created “Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis,” according to the United Nations.
There is every reason to believe she will counsel the next president to continue George Bush’s policies in the Horn of Africa. In January, 2007, while Ethiopian regime troops attempted to crush Islamists who had brought a brief period of relative peace and stability to Somalia, and U.S. air and sea forces pounded the countryside with missiles and bombs, Rice revealed herself to be an apostle of George Bush’s War on Somalia (and the so-called War on Terror in general). Rice told the PBS News Hour that U.S. collaboration with the Ethiopian invaders was justified by what she called America’s “counterterrorism imperatives,” which she said “really are real in the context of Somalia.” In Rice’s words, “We have to go after the terrorist cells where we find them.”
The Bush regime gave no estimate of how many persons with ties to Al Qaida were operating on Somali soil, but the number appears to have been very small. The main goal of the Americans and their Ethiopian allies was to crush the government that had been created by Somali Islamists. The Islamic Courts regime, as Abukar Arman writes in the journal Global Politician, operated “schools, hospitals, and for six months before the occupation removed every checkpoint in Mogadishu and brought a semblance of peace.” Two years after the invasion, the Islamists have retaken much of southern and central Somalia, and the Ethiopians appear poised to withdraw – after killing, starving and displacing millions in partnership with the United States.
“On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush.”
The “humanitarian” component of Susan Rice’s militarism is quite selective.
She has long been a super-hawk on punishing Sudan for its behavior in Darfur. Back in October, 2006, Rice declared, “It’s time to get tough” with the government in Khartoum.” In a Washington Post column, she advised the Bush regime to give Sudan “an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences.” (explain China and oil and Israel)
On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush. She sees no contradiction in calling for military action against Sudan, supposedly to end a “humanitarian crisis” in Darfur, while simultaneously backing a savage U.S.-Ethiopian assault that causes an even larger humanitarian calamity in Somalia. Rice claims to seek safety for civilians in Darfur, while supporting a total absence of security for Somali civilians. Darfur is a military/political convenience for “real-politic” operatives like Susan Rice. As Bruce Dixon wrote in his November 2007 BAR article, “If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?” (See “Ten Reasons Why ‘Save Darfur’ is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa.“)
“Her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means – or pretext – that is available.”
Rice’s behavior in Africa has always been morally inconsistent. She was a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi minority. Later, she “swore” she would go “down in flames” if necessary to prevent future genocides. But after her promotion to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, she failed to publicly advocate action against U.S. allies Uganda and by then Tutsi-ruled Rwanda – the main perpetrators in an ongoing war that his killed millions
Susan Rice’s brand of “humanitarian intervention” is a farce, a pretext to justify military aggression under the guise of preventing human suffering. She has amply demonstrated that her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means – or pretext – that is available.
Rice embraces a policy that causes mass death and starvation in Somalia and ongoing genocide in Congo. Although she’s no blood relative of Condoleezza Rice, on African issues she seems headed in the same direction as the current Secretary of State.
(BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected]This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Inside a Scientist’s Mission to Study HIV in Ethiopia
Some HIV patients suffer from terrible neurological disease. Then, there are others that never have any cognitive problems at all. The same virus, but very different responses. That’s why most days you can find Dianne Langford working in a lab on Temple University’s campus, researching how HIV affects the brain. But once a year, her research takes here around the world to Ethiopia. It’s a country ravaged by HIV with little capacity to treat those infected, including infants born to HIV positive mothers.
“An Ethiopian baby is born with an immune cell count as high as any other baby, but as they become adults, their cell count drops significantly below anybody else’s in the world and we don’t know why,” says Langford, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience and neurovirology at Temple University School of Medicine. “It’s a population with unique characteristics not found in other African populations or any other population in the world tested so far.”
It is also a population suffering because of HIV. Federal figures show nearly one million people are living with HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia. And while AIDS killed 67,000 Ethiopians last year, it’s most devastating toll is on the children, leaving some 650,000 as orphans. Researchers trying to learn more about the killer disease are hampered since, for cultural and religious reasons, autopsies are rare.
That’s why little is known about HIV-1C, a subtype of the virus which accounts for more than 50 % of HIV infections all over the world. It is the most dominant form of the virus, yet it is only found in Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa and India. And it is very different from subtype B, the form of the HIV found in this country. HIV-1C may be different in its progression and how it affects the brain, which is why Langford focused on Ethiopia. For the past five years, she’s volunteered through the non-profit People To People, a non-governmental organization dedicated to easing the burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ethiopia and other sub-Saharan countries, but it’s a mission that happened more by chance than choice.
“I was at an international NIH meeting in Baltimore in 2003 and people were giving power point presentations using all kinds of fancy graphics,” says Langford. “Then, a soft-spoken Ethiopian woman stood up and spoke about HIV in her home country. No presentations; just her own experiences and I was so impressed.”
Minutes after that woman’s presentation, Langford met the head of People To People, Dr. Enawgaw Mehari. She doesn’t know what made her say yes, but she found herself agreeing to go to Ethiopia. Three months later, she was on a plane for her first trip there to see in person the effects of HIV. And in the five years since that fateful encounter, she has worked with scientists at Addis Ababa University School of Medicine in Ethiopia to secure a $250,000 NIH grant to study what HIV-1C does to the brains of Ethiopians. As she has crossed continents, she has also lifted taboos. Government officials in Ethiopia agreed to allow her team to perform 200 autopsies to date.
“There was a lot of legal wrangling and delays, but we finally did the autopsies and we’re on the right track to finding out more about this devastating disease,” says Langford. “It mutates from patient to patient, within a patient and even as it travels around the globe and that’s why it’s so hard to find a vaccine.”
It may be hard, but Langford and her fellow researchers are determined to learn how and why HIV-1C is different from other subtypes. Their work could make a difference in how doctors treat the virus. Until then, Dianne Langford will continue on her life’s mission, one inspired by one woman’s story.
PETERBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE (USA) – On Dr. Fletcher R. Wilson’s first trip to Ethiopia, he decided he wouldn’t let it be his last.
Wilson, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Monadnock OB GYN Associates in Peterborough who lives in Hancock, traveled to Ethiopia the first time more than a year ago to adopt his now-3-year-old daughter.
During the trip, he was shocked to see the condition of medical care available in the country and contacted Wide Horizons For Children, the Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization through which he was adopting that has also built schools and clinics in the country.
By April, Wilson and another local doctor, Dr. Steven W. Coffman, a surgeon at Monadnock Surgical Associates in Peterborough, were headed to Ethiopia on a fact-finding mission to assess medical needs in the East African nation of 82.5 million people.
“They (Wide Horizons) had money and wanted to build hospitals and health clinics, because they have a humanitarian aid arm,” Wilson said. “But they didn’t have medically trained people to guide them. So that’s where we fit in.”
The country lies in a region of the African continent that is a hotbed of instability — bordered by Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan and Eritrea, which it was embroiled in a border war with until signing a peace treaty in 2000 — but is relatively peaceful.
It remains, however, an impoverished agricultural nation that suffers from frequent droughts, with more than 1.5 million people infected with AIDS or HIV. The average life-expectancy is 55 years old, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook Web site.
Wilson, who said he’s been interested in practicing medicine in developing countries for years, enlisted Coffman’s help because the surgeon had extensive experience on international medical trips, having been to Haiti, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Brazil and Peru.
The doctors are planning to start a project in Ethiopia that will focus primarily on promoting women’ and children’s health in Ethiopia, especially expectant mothers and infants, although Wilson said an influx of medical care and improved facilities will benefit the general population.
The ultimate goal is to decrease the need for adoptions by making child-birth less risky in a country where two-thirds of mothers die in labor, Fletcher said.
Because of the malnutrition that plagues the country, many women’s bodies are not fully developed when they become pregnant, and often they are too small for a baby to pass through the birth canal.
“It was just staggering to see,” Wilson said. “Only about five percent of births take place in a hospital with trained professionals.”
In one region of the country, women who need Cesarean sections, or surgery to remove the baby, are sent to walk 27 kilometers, roughly the distance from Keene to Jaffrey, to the nearest hospital for treatment.
If they are too weak to finish the trip, they will return home and die after days of unsuccessful labor, Wilson said
Fletcher’s own daughter was orphaned this way. As the youngest of nine children, when her mother died in child birth the family gave her up for adoption because they could not support her, he said.
When Wilson and his wife, Holly, adopted her, their daughter was more than 2 years old and weighed only 17 pounds.
In a report detailing their findings about the country’s medical care that they submitted to Wide Horizons after their visit in April, Wilson and Coffman say they hope to bring at least two ambulances into the country to relieve the necessity of walking to medical care.
Not surprisingly, Wilson said, what they found during their April trip, and a second visit earlier this month, was a lack of available medical care in rural parts of the country. But the reality of the situation was much more sobering than the doctors had expected.
In the southern part of the country Wilson and Coffman visited two hospitals and a clinic recently built by Wide Horizons. In a the southern-most hospital, which serves about 2 million people, there were two surgeons, two obstetrician and gynecologists, an eye doctor, a nurse anesthetist and 10 general doctors.
But conditions in the north, a rugged, mountainous area were more desperate, Wilson said. At one of the region’s two hospitals, one doctor serves about 1.5 million patients.
Seeing how much need there was in the country encouraged Wilson and Coffman to continue their work there.
“This was one of the most rewarding trips I’ve been on because of the need,” Coffman said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
When they returned this month, along with Dr. Joseph V. Lupo Jr., an anesthesiologist at Monadnock Community Hospital, and his wife Mary Jo Lupo, a post-surgical nurse, the doctors performed several surgeries with their Ethiopian counterparts and taught them some new procedures.
Wilson and Coffman say that type of training will be a major piece of their project.
They plan to focus on teaching lower-level medical professionals to do basic procedures such as sewing vaginal tears, which are common in natural childbirth.
Part of the problem they face is that it is hard to retain doctors at hospitals, since they can find better paying jobs with international nonprofit agencies, Wilson said.
Doctors in Ethiopia make a salary of about $200 a month, or about $2,400 per year, but they can make close to $10,000 working for a nonprofit agency in the country, according to Wilson.
“It’s understandably a draw in a country where people are so poor in general,” Wilson said.
Hospitals and clinics are also staffed with mid-level health care providers who do daily inpatient care, similar to the work of a nurse practitioner in the U.S, and “field surgeons,” who receive only three to nine months of training and learn how to do basic surgeries, such as appendectomies and Cesarean sections.
Most women deliver babies at home with the help of traditional birthing aides, who, unlike mid-wives in the U.S., don’t have standard training and are not regulated by the government.
Wilson and Coffman hope to design a program in Ethiopia that can be managed by a local doctor or administrator. They plan to make four trips a year back to the country with other doctors to perform procedures and train local medical professionals.
“I think that by teaching the doctors and professionals there we can begin to see things turn around,” Wilson said.
Casey Farrar can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1435, or [email protected].
KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudanese politicians claimed Barack Obama as one of their own on Saturday as they belatedly celebrated his election as U.S. president, hailing his family roots in their country.
Much has been made of Obama’s father’s origins in Kenya. But he acknowledged his distant Sudanese roots in his autobiography ‘Dreams From My Father’.
“His father came from the Luo (tribe), who are from the Nile. The Luo originally moved from Sudan to Kenya,” said Yasir Arman, a senior member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, former southern rebels who are now in a coalition government with the north.
Hundreds of SPLM supporters crammed into their headquarters for a belated party marking Obama’s victory.
Many held up banners marked ‘New Sudan Yes We Can’ – a message that merged an SPLM slogan with Obama’s rallying cry.
Arman said members were inspired by Obama’s election as the United States’ first black president.
“It is giving a message to our society that Sudan can do the same, that Sudan can recognize its own diversity,” he said.
“We hope he will be able to give more attention to all of Africa, not just Sudan.”
The United States has had a troubled relationship with Sudan’s Khartoum-based government. It has imposed trade sanctions on Khartoum, included it on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, and accused northern troops and militias of committing genocide in the Darfur conflict.
The south has been exempted from most of the sanctions.
The SPLM fought the north for more than 20 years in a conflict that pitted the Islamist Khartoum government against mainly Christian and animist rebels. The war ended with a 2005 peace agreement.
