Ethiopia Zare reports that the Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ) has been prevented from printing fliers that announce a public meeting scheduled to be held in Addis Ababa on December 6.
UDJ is a party that is daydreaming about being able to operate as a genuine opposition party in Ethiopia under the rule of the fascist regime of Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (Woyanne).
While UDJ is prevented to print a flier in Ethiopia that announces a simple meeting, its chairperson, Birtukan Mideksa, is currently visiting European countries to talk about (misinform) how it is possible to conduct peaceful political activity in the country. Birtukan’s party also condemns those Ethiopians who try to defend themselves by picking up guns as ‘primitives’ and ‘chauvinists’.
Sydney, Australia – Ethiopian running maestro Haile Gebrselassie could capture his 27th world record at the inaugural HBA Great Australian Run in Melbourne, organizers said Saturday.
Sunday’s 15-kilometre race around the streets of Australia’s second-biggest city is his first outing since breaking two hours and four minutes in the 42.2-kilometre marathon. He improved his own world record with a time of 2:03:59 in Berlin in September.
The 10,000-metre gold medallist at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is convinced more world marks are his.
“My plan is to at least reach 30 world records,” Gebrselassie, 35, said. “I don’t know which one I’ll break next – maybe the marathon or the half-marathon.”
He set his first world record in 1994, running 12:56:96 for the 5,000 metres. He was sixth in the 10,000 metres at the Beijing Olympics.
In Melbourne, he is taking on Commonwealth Games marathon champion Samson Ramadhani and Kenyan half-marathon specialist Patrick Makau. Also on the grid at Albert Park, where the F1 Australian Grand Prix motor race is held, will be local boy Craig Mottram and reigning world marathon champion Luke Kibet of Kenya.
Mottram, whose previous longest race was 12 kilometres, said his best chance was if the pace was slow and it came down to a sprint for the line.
The race, part of a series that also runs in England, Ireland and Ethiopia, has attracted more than 4,000 entries.
The favourite among the women is Olympic marathon champion Constantine Dita of Romania. Challenging her are Kenya’s Catherine Ndereba, twice an Olympic marathon silver medalist, and Australia’s Benita Johnson.
The 15-kilometre world record in the men’s division is 41:29. It was set by Kenyan Felix Limo in 2001.
The phone call from a mobile in Ethiopia was vague: did I have resilience, a sense of humour, journalism experience? I was in my English garden at the time, and getting a phone call from the UN in Addis Ababa while I was deadheading the dahlias in the early summer of 2004 was surreal. The previous June I had applied for a public information and media job with the United Nations in Namibia, got it, but then turned it down. Presumably my name was floating on a database somewhere. I was sent a job description of the Ethiopia proposal: vague sentences about knowledge of information management and training, the ability to write copy. But it sounded interesting, and having lived and worked all over Africa in the last 14 years, and with dual South African-British nationality, I was desperate to get back to the continent I love and know.
The first shock on arrival in Addis Ababa a little more than a year later was the weather. It rained and rained and rained. I had been employed to ‘work’ on the famine, yet how could a country with this much rain possibly experience famine? Surely, if it rained so much — during two months, the road outside my office was often a river — the water could be stored, relocated, channelled to those that needed it? A look at the aerial picture of Ethiopia, with so many visible lakes, made the possibility of famine in November even harder to imagine.
Most of the country is rural, with more than 90 per cent of the population living outside the cities in areas served poorly by roads, telephone lines, internet access or electricity. Eighty-five per cent of the Ethiopian workforce depends on agriculture. Not the sort of agriculture with which we are familiar in Europe. You never see a tractor, combine harvester or grain silo — it is totally unmechanised. All the ploughing, tilling, planting and harvesting are done by hand and with oxen. If seedlings get no rain or, conversely, far too much, that’s the end of the village’s crop. The majority of villages are too poor to have enough reserves of seeds to start again. Villagers don’t own their land, so they are all equally poor and the incentives to diversify or try something new are restricted by deficient, over-used soil (dung from cows is burnt as fuel). Communities have become used to depending on imported U.S. grain, which comes via handouts from the World Food Programme (WFP). These handouts are delivered by the WFP through international charities working in Ethiopia, and also by the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission, or DPPC (since renamed as an Agency: DPPA) in Addis Ababa, where I was based.
For the first two months I felt my way, studied the Government’s website and tried to fathom the impenetrable jargon surrounding famine and food security, and remember the basics of Ethiopian geography. The practicalities of finding out where the hungry people were, and how many, proved difficult. I would wait for weeks for even the tiniest bit of information about whether the seasonal rain — enabling villagers to plant — had arrived, essential knowledge necessary to be able to judge whether we needed to start informing donors and the WFP that problems were likely, if not imminent.
Situation Kafkaesque
By the August I began to work out what my job actually was (‘consultant’ was supposed to cover it), to whom I was accountable (nobody other than myself, it seemed), and how little the Ethiopian Government actually wanted a foreigner inside the DPPC. Especially, they did not want an investigative journalist, which is what I am. Sure, I could re-jig the Government website, run training sessions on how to write a press release, and even re-train a few senior managers how to make their reports a little more readable, but to ‘promote’ a famine, and ‘improve’ communications strategies and information flow — no chance.
One of my jobs was supposed to be to create information systems and to monitor that everyone involved in famine was getting the information they needed. But at the DPPC, the idea of establishing basic facts — what’s happening, where, to whom, and why? — became Kafkaesque in its difficulty. Once, over a business lunch, trying to get these foundations in place, I was told by Ato Sisay, the senior Government official responsible for co-ordinating information for famine relief donors: “You really work too hard, you mustn’t worry about things like this. And, anyway, information is power.” So just how was I to ‘promote’ the famine? By finding out the numbers of hungry, and to track systematically exactly who was hungry, their location and why the problem persisted? Or to report shamefacedly, and blatantly lie about the ‘success’ stories of the Government — a new type of peasant irrigation system, or well-digging in one small area?
I went to endless meetings in tiny wooden-floored rooms with little or no lighting. For eight whole months I watched plastic flowers grow dusty, and computers, paid for by the American Government, never even get turned on. I organised endless questionnaires, training sessions and meetings for Ethiopian colleagues at the DPPC where we could, potentially, talk about the key issues and hurdles and obtain consensus. People rarely turned up. What use is free discussion in a military society riddled with spies? It took me a long time to get to grips with just how undemocratic Ethiopia really is.
With the regional DPPC offices mired in fighting, pay disputes and resignations, the fact that there was often no telephone or fax contact became the focus of my frustration. Local charities were often able to supply the necessary knowledge; unlike many of their senior Government counterparts, they had both the resources and the willingness to undertake unpleasantly bumpy, hot journeys into remote areas to find out how villagers were faring and, in some cases, whether the villagers were alive or dead. But four of my own requests to visit famine-affected areas were rejected by superiors, one an hour before I was due to board a local plane. Morale at the DPPC was lousy, a word the Ethiopian English-speakers used often. It was as if managers were doing their best to prevent information getting out, not to circulate it. In desperation I spent my lonely nights studying the local language, Amharic, in the hope of breaking the ice and perhaps discovering the reasons for the absenteeism and the consuming lethargy and lack of direction of my colleagues. Occasionally I risked visiting the local expatriate hangouts, where hardened Africa hands would dismiss my attempts to do my job as a pointless waste of time.
The key clue eventually came in February 2004 when a senior colleague — a journalist and military man before moving into PR — unhappily thrust under my nose a Government newspaper article concerning a UK Channel 4 programme about Ethiopia, Living with Hunger. The Sub-Saharan Informer spent two whole pages lambasting Channel 4 journalist Sorious Samora for “tricking and manipulating the Ethiopian people.” His trip had been ‘facilitated’ by non-governmental organisations (the significance of this came only later) and his attempt to live for a month on what the majority of rural Ethiopians — more than 40 million people — live on during the leaner seasons every year was scorned. More crucially, the paper nit-picked at Samora’s motives for making the film, concluding that he was egotistical, had interrogated Ethiopians, remained aloof and ultimately made the documentary simply to win another media award. It concluded that the programme would harm foreign investment and tourism and portrayed Ethiopians as eating things they would have the good sense to know were inedible. Whether the programme was accurate and informed journalism, which I believe it was, became irrelevant. The Informer article was suffused with a sense of hurt pride, of refusal to acknowledge that ultimately Samora may have done Ethiopia a favour by focusing world attention on the practicalities of survival in such a harsh environment. Having lectured to students in London on the portrayal of Africa in western media, it was fascinating for me to witness first hand the denial, anger and sense of being let down felt by some of my colleagues.
Work became even harder
Meanwhile, there was the pressing issue of 1.3 million Ethiopians living in the Somali region who had somehow gone missing from official figures. Someone had ‘forgotten’ to include them in estimates of the hungry. After a long conversation with a colleague at the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), the truth dawned on me that the majority of members of the Government belonged to the Tigray ethnic group and that only certain tribal groups actually mattered to them. It became even harder to do my job as I uncovered some grim facts, such as the obvious prior knowledge of famine — there is one most years — by almost everyone concerned, from the World Food Programme and UNOCHA to the various foreign embassies and international charities. Peter Gill’s excellent 1984 book, A Year In the Death of Africa, outlined the business of famine, including the sheer number of meetings, memos and reports involved. Here I was in 2004, living through exactly the same scenario he chronicled, with trucks being hijacked, food failing to reach its destinations, and charities frustrated beyond belief as many of their efforts to sort out problems were blocked by bureaucratic hurdles — agreements reneged upon, requests for vehicles turned down or stuck in a labyrinthine system, and visas for foreign national workers taking months to sort out. Every day there were always at least five women and their numerous children knocking on my house door, begging for clothes, food, scraps, money, firewood. It was very sad.
That’s the thing about Ethiopia: there are just so many sad, ill, poor, desperate and not particularly resourceful people living absolutely on the edge, not just in rural areas but on your own, middle-class street. So the frustration of wanting to improve information exchanges and to be honest about what was happening under our noses was even more acute. But questions about water and food storage, the appalling state of the roads and the reason for the enormous amount of ‘lost’ food in certain parts of the country remained unanswered. The focus constantly remained on the obscure, such as ‘metric quintals of food’, ‘early-warning systems’ and ‘normative vegetative indices’. The logistics of whether there was enough money to buy food and enough trucks to shift it from point A to point B were prevalent — and a week or so before the actual famine became ‘official’, the head of information and a scary military crony would put together an ‘appeal’, stating how much money they needed from western donors. Then it became everyone’s job to try to get increasingly-cynical foreign office and embassy staff to commit large sums.
When Tony Blair and Bob Geldof turned up in Addis, everything shifted up a gear. We listened as Blair talked of Ethiopian ‘countryside’, a term so bizarrely inappropriate in a country where the rural areas are swathes of unmanageable moistureless scrub, highly eroded plateaux, or beautiful mountains, all of which are un-farmable and used only by nomads. Blair made it all sound so easy: if the West just gave more, if journalists reported how hard the people were working to improve the situation, then all would be well. Inside the main organ of the famine, the DPPC, the Ethiopian Government and the UN were arguing about the actual numbers of hungry people. Too low a figure and the Government wouldn’t get enough foreign aid; too high and it would look as if they weren’t solving the problem. Blair avoided the thorny subject of tribalism and ethnic divisions in a country where the most important government posts are all held by Tigrayans. Several senior ministers and other functionaries were all Tigrayans. Blair also appeared to avoid asking whether the allocated food substitutes, grain etc, actually ever reached the intended recipients, and he seemed unaware that Oxfam, Save the Children, Farm Africa and GOAL, the international humanitarian organisation, all of which work there, risk being thrown out of the country should they ask if aid pledged to victims of the famine actually ever arrives.
The gossip was that Bob Geldof was angry there hadn’t been enough change, and the tensions in the DPPC government office at this point were palpable. Surely someone would break the silence and reveal the emperor had no clothes? I waited to hear one of the international charity reps point out that for the last several years the Ethiopian Government had actively carried out a blatant propaganda campaign against them, destabilising them with allegations of fraud and corruption. In a recent Government newspaper spread, a prominent minister had explained to citizens why charities were the enemy of the people. Nobody said anything, of course. It was simply too dangerous — we all lived in fear of being PNGd (made persona non grata) and thrown out of the country within 24 hours.
To their credit, a handful of local and international journalists in Ethiopia did their best. One particularly colourful character was asked to leave, and Ethiopian television had to retract publicly the UN figures he had used in an article about projected numbers of hungry people. In the goldfish bowl of the ex-pats, everyone had an opinion on whether he was right to refuse. The point was, however, that the Government was watching him and his family. Another friend, a local journalist, was beaten up several times, called into ministers’ offices and not so subtly told to retract an article about industrial corruption. He decided to seek asylum in Britain.
Something was seriously wrong
My own life became harder. I felt terribly depressed — it seemed to me that the Ethiopian Government increasingly was only going through the motions of being accountable or transparent. I decided to send emails to journalists and friends in London, telling them what was going on. The only computers I could use were at the UN, as all others went through the Government’s server and were monitored. In February of last year my innocuous request for a press pass to interview Bob Marley’s widow, Rita, about a forthcoming Marley remembrance concert to be staged in Addis was turned down. I knew something was seriously wrong. Then my landlord suddenly decided I needed to be evicted, with a week’s notice, and he conducted a smear campaign in my neighbourhood, suggesting that I was a drug dealer or prostitute. And I knew my phone was being bugged. At night I was rung at home by junior Government ministers and quizzed about exactly what I was doing. My handbag, with mobile phone and contacts book, vanished and Ethiopian friends were convinced it had been stolen. In late March 2005, homeless, without a telephone, and having resigned from the DPPC, I decided to leave. In order to do so I had to get an Ethiopian friend with good connections in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to remove any checks from my file, so I wouldn’t be detained at the airport and prevented from leaving. I’m very grateful to her.
Last June I returned to make a BBC documentary. The situation had reached the crescendo that to me had seemed inevitable. The populace was sick of being bullied and lied to and wanted fair elections. They had reached breaking point. In a riot in which 36 people were killed and hundreds injured and imprisoned, I was inadvertently caught in the gunfire between Government soldiers and unarmed students. This was a completely unprovoked attack, outside a training college near the British Embassy. I felt very scared, but vindicated in my view that the political and economic situation during the previous year had been repressive and unjust. The harassment of journalists continued. In January this year Anthony Mitchell, latterly the Associated Press correspondent who had been reporting from the country for four years, was expelled at 24 hours’ notice for ‘disseminating information far from the truth about Ethiopia’. Despotism brooks no criticism.
Britain gave Ethiopia 73 million in aid in 2003-04, of which $45 million was paid direct to the Ethiopian treasury, and in June last year the G8 Summit agreed to cancel the $40 billion owed by 18 countries, including Ethiopia, to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank. But Britain’s generous aid began to draw criticism as police continued to suppress anti-Government demonstrations and Blair’s Government suspended a proposed $20million increase after the death of the students. Then, in February last year, international development secretary Hilary Benn decided to cut off direct budget support to Meles’s government worth around $50million, describing the ‘breach of trust’ since the imprisonment of more than 100 people, and the death of more than 80 people in various protests. In January last year Benn said: “We are looking with Government and other donors to develop a new protection of basic services grant to deliver education, health and water to the poor. This would mean tighter financial reporting and stronger local accountability so that the funds reach the poorest people.” The money will now be channelled through aid agencies and local organisations in the hope that it will reach the people who desperately need it, rather than being siphoned off by the Ethiopian Government. It’s a start.
After 14 years of living and working in Africa, I have mixed feelings about aid, although you can never generalise on the experience of one country. Ethiopia, undoubtedly, is hampered by unfair trade agreements and the restrictions of having a hugely under-developed infrastructure. The solution is not simply aid, but better human rights, the promotion of free speech, and crucially, local and international structures that promote equality. This includes the protection of local and international journalists. If we are to send British aid money and skilled British people to work in Africa, then the host country must value us in the same way as it must start valuing all its citizens. At the very least we need to listen to local, African experts, journalists and commentators, who often speak from more informed, critical and realistic perspectives. We need to start rigorous debate about aid and democratic principles and the amount of local budgets spent on arms, health, education. Otherwise it is simply a feel-good exercise for the UN and the governments involved. It is not enough to ‘feed the starving’: we have to know that the poor, the vulnerable, wherever they are, are getting the food and money we give and their human rights, and have not become merely political pawns to their own governments. Here in Britain, it’s time to face up to some unpalatable truths about the regimes we support.
– British Journalism Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 51-58
Ethiopia, Africa’s biggest coffee producer, has halted daily auctions and will begin trading the beans on the national commodity bourse from Dec. 2 to reduce fraud and help reassure buyers of quality.
The Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, which began trading corn and wheat this year, opened eight warehouses in growing areas and will take control of the country’s grading and quality control system. Traders other than large growers and co-operatives that sell directly to international buyers will be forced to use the bourse, exchange director Eleni Gabre-Madhin said today.
“This is an important signal to the world that Ethiopia’s domestic market is trying to clean up its act,” she told reporters in the capital Addis Ababa. “Ethiopia loses a significant premium on international markets because of its inability to meet certain standards.”
Under a coffee law passed in August, the country is seeking to regulate an industry that employs 1.2 million growers and accounts for 35 percent of export earnings. While Ethiopia, on the Horn of Africa, shipped $525 million of coffee abroad last year, its beans aren’t used in setting benchmark international prices because of inconsistent quality, Gabre-Madhin said.
Top-grade coffees from the regions of Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harar sell for almost twice as much as some other areas, and samples of traded lots are often fraudulently switched, she said.
“Exporters faced the risk that what they bought wasn’t what they paid for,” Gabre-Madhin said. “There has been a lot of adulteration of coffee” and “leakages from one region to another. All of this is designed to address that.”
The new law includes jail terms of three to five years and fines of almost $5,000 for those rigging coffee quality.
The changes also seek to strengthen the position of farmers over middlemen who have more information about coffee prices, Gabre-Madhin said. “Ethiopia’s farmers get the lowest percentage share of the export price of almost any country,” she said.
“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” was the order given by the first American Admiral, Admir. David Glasgow Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay. The entrance to the Bay was heavily guarded when he ordered his fleet to steam ahead. Despite heavy loses; he took over New Orleans leaving the Confederacy with no port on the Gulf of Mexico. Loss of a port was a strong blow to the Confederacy. Loss of a port in no small matter.
Senator Mc Cain’s decline in the polls started when he uttered these fate full words “the fundamentals of the economy are strong!’ It showed that the candidate was clueless. Things were falling around him and he was in his own bubble. That morning in Florida started his melt down. It was clear that this was not a “Full Speed Ahead!” moment.
President Bush took a note of this and adjusted his response accordingly. His administration shouted ‘the sky is falling’ in unison. We all agreed with this assessment. Gas was $4.60 a gallon, home values were dropping, lay-offs were common and the stock market was tanking. Yes, for a change Mr. Bush was right. Mind you his failed policies caused this catastrophe, but he was decent enough to warn people of the predicament he got them into.
The Bush administration suggested a $700 billion rescue package. Congress rejected the proposed solution. After a lengthy discussion both the Senate and the House approved it with some amendments. The jury is still out regarding its effects on the economy. Big problems require constant adjustments.
President elect Obama is smart enough to admit that the situation does not look good. His advisors are floating different ideas to gauge citizen’s reaction. He is surrounding himself with highly skilled and diverse advisors. Party affiliation is not an issue. Race, color or gender is not a factor. Personal achievement and character are the defining points.
The President elect is faced with myriad of problems. He is meeting the challenge head on. As a true leader he is uniting his people. He is asking for some sacrifice and a lot of ingenuity. He is working hard trying to rally the people behind his ideas and actions. He is aware that without their consent and cooperation there is no solution. He knows that he has four years to deliver what he promised. The clock has already started ticking.
Thus the whole planet is in the midst of an economic recession verging on depression and governments all over the world are trying all kinds of cures and solutions and what do you think the Ethiopian government is doing? This is what Ato Meles have to say about it in a speech to his kangaroo Parliament.
“…In general, we don’t expect drastic effects on our economy, our financial structure is not as liberalized as those of affected countries and the economy is not intertwined to Western economies to face a crisis…..the whole situation goes hand in hand with economic recession, which could lead to a decrease in foreign investment and aid. On the other hand, we could benefit from a decrease in petrol price.” (Source: AFP).
As a layperson I have a few problems with this assessment. First of all we live in an integrated world. World economy is intertwined as never before. Ethiopia is not some isolated island floating all by itself. In fact when the west sneezes we catch the flu. Regardless Ethiopia is a welfare state. What this means is that the Ethiopian budget cannot stand on its own with out foreign assistance. Development assistance by European Union, UN agencies, Nordic countries or foreign investment is dependent on the health of International economic situation. Surely there will be a decrease in aid and economic activity. (http://www.ethiomedia.com/aurora/9121.html)
One of the biggest incomes enjoyed by the government is remittance by the Diaspora. It is a billion dollar bonanza. But again the decrease in economic activities is definitely going to impact the amount and frequency of remittances. Who is going to build all those concrete behemoths littering the country?
We are a raw material exporter while others manufacture it and make more money than us. We sell our coffee to Starbucks for pennies and they roast and brew it and make a buck. World recession will negatively affect that. Who is going to buy those flowers grown on farmlands after displacing the poor peasants?
Furthermore Banks are ground zero of this catastrophe. They are not lending, not even to each other. Ethiopia depends on loans and grants from World Bank and the IMF and other private banks to finance all those projects the TPLF regime is proud of. It is definite that the cost of borrowing will skyrocket. Isn’t the additional finance cost going to impact us negatively?
As for the ‘not liberalized financial sector’ the chickens are in the process of coming home to roost. The whole fiasco regarding the missing 4 billion Br is both sad and comical. The line of demarcation is very blurry when it comes the pockets of the Ethiopian National Bank and the TPLF endowment companies. (http://www.geocities.com/~dagmawi/Zebenya/Zebenya.html)
The decrease in the price of gas is seen as a silver lining in this dark picture. It is difficult to see why? We need petrol to transport goods to foreign markets to earn foreign exchange so we can buy food and other products. On the other hand if there are fewer foreign buyers we will not have enough currency to buy oil even if the price plummets further down. In other words it is conceivable that even free is nothing to celebrate.
We are in the midst of our recurring famine. The official inflation is nearing 60%. The war in Somalia is draining our resources and creating enmity with our Somali brethren. The no war no peace situation with Eritrea is costing a lot of money in troop deployment along the so-called border. The imposed one party rule is causing economic stagnation, rampant corruption and is paving the road towards a failed state status.
Surely it is very clear that this is not a “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” moment. In my humble opinion this is a complete stop and reassess your options situation. The problem calls for the assembly of a wide range of learned persons to recommend a cure before the disease reaches a point of no return. Both the host and the parasite will suffer. The parasite will not survive.
Singing, dancing and reveling in the fulfillment of years spent yearning for a return to Jerusalem, thousands of Ethiopians from all over the country descended on the capital’s Haas promenade in Armon Hanatziv Thursday to celebrate Sigd, the annual Beta Israel festival commemorating the revelation on Mt. Sinai and the acceptance of the Torah.
Young and old, secular and religious Ethiopian-Israelis from as far off as Haifa and Ashdod arrived on chartered buses just before noon, passing by make-shift booths which sold everything from ice cream to books of psalms written in Amharic, their native tongue. The Kesim, or Ethiopian rabbis, led the crowd in communal prayers, bestowing blessings upon the masses as the crowd responded by continually twitching their hands – bringing the air of holiness towards them.
Older men with white turbans walked past high-school age youths, their hair done up for the occasion in spikes and large afros. The girls, also dressed to a T, sauntered back and forth, chatting and giggling with their friends.
“We’re here to celebrate the Sigd,” said one girl, Tehilla, shy and smiling. “But it’s not just about Sigd, it’s also about unity. Look around: Today all the Ethiopians in Israel are standing together as one.”
In addition to the holiday’s theme of receiving the Torah, Sigd is also seen as a time of personal reckoning for the Ethiopian community, as members fast and use the holiday for introspection.
Before their arrival in Israel, Ethiopians had also looked upon Sigd as a time for reflecting on the ultimate goal of returning to Jerusalem.
But with over 80 percent of the Ethiopian Jewish community – more than 120,000 – living in Israel today, the holiday has taken on a more national undertone.
“It’s true that this is a holiday that celebrates the Torah and the holiness of Jerusalem,” said Yisraela, who was dressed in a long skirt, her hair covered by a sequined purple scarf. “But because we’re here now, the spirit of the holiday has changed for us.
“When we were in Ethiopia, part of Sigd was to pray that we would merit coming to Jerusalem. Now that we’re here, we’re living in Israel, the soul searching that I think we need to do is about how we can succeed in Israeli society, and how we can truly fulfill the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in its fullest sense.”
While many of the people milling around on Thursday afternoon told The Jerusalem Post that the dream of immigrating to Israel had now been fulfilled, their commentary on the Ethiopian experience in Israel differed greatly.
“It goes both ways,” said Dago, a soldier in uniform who had arrived from Netanya. “The fact that I’m in the army means that on some level, I’ve already been accepted into Israeli society,” he said. “But it depends on the situation. I grew up around Ethiopians, but when I wasn’t around them, sometimes I felt like an outsider. You’re always in your group, you know, Morrocans are Morrocans, Russians are Russians, and Ethiopians are Ethiopians. But in the army, there’s none of that,” he said. “There’s no Ethiopian and there’s no Russian. You’re a soldier and a warrior, and that’s were it ends.”
But Rami, sitting nearby, said the younger generation felt more accepted because they’d grown up here. “I came here when I was a small boy,” he said in smooth, fluent Hebrew. “But my parents, they’ve been here for more than 10 years, and they still struggle with the language and the mentality. For them, their generation, I’m afraid it’s going to be hard here for the rest of their lives.”
Still, as some measure of the Beta Israel’s acceptance inside the Jewish State, this year’s Sigd was the first to be recognized as a national holiday, after the Knesset added it to the list of official state holidays in July.
The rigors of immigration and acceptance weren’t showing on the faces of Thursday’s revelers. Smiles, shouts and cries of joy, along with the steady beat of bongo drums, lent a carefree air to the atmosphere as the eclectic mix of Ethiopian society mingled and danced.
“Finally there’s a coming together of the young and the old,” said Rabbi Joseph Schonwald, as he strolled through the crowd with his wife Rolinda. Schonwald, who had been on a mission to Ethiopia in the late 1990s, explained that that the enthusiastic participation seen on Thursday had not always been a given in previous years.
“Now you see the young kids taking part in the prayers, giving respect to the elders, to the Kesim,” Schonwald said. “That’s what’s different today. The youth used to use the Sigd as a social gathering, and they would sit back and smoke cigarettes or drink beer while the older generation took part in the religious services.
“Now, with the increased involvement of religious leaders in the development towns and Bnei Akiva, the youth are more interested in the spiritual side. Just from looking around, you can see the Bnei Akiva kids have increased two-fold.”
As he was speaking, a young woman approached Schonwald and touched his shoulder. “Kes Yosef,” she said, eyes gleaming. “Do you {www:remember} me? You worked with my family when we were still in Quara.”
“I do,” Schonwald replied, turning back towards his wife. “The last time I saw her she was just a little girl. I remember standing on top of an anthill and telling her and her family that we wouldn’t rest until they were in Jerusalem. Now,” he continued, fighting back tears, “It’s finally come true.”
As the {www:celebration} continued, throngs of revelers danced up and down the promenade, banging drums and singing songs. The colorful umbrellas of the Kesim were visible atop the crowd, and a sanitation worker, Manzar, from the Muslim Quarter in the Old City, gazed on in wonder.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It’s amazing to me that we have so many different people in this city, and they all love it because it’s so close to God.”
By Thembi Mutch