EDITOR’S NOTE: These are opportunist cowards. Why don’t they speak up when the Meles dictatorship is turning the country into a vast prison camp for Oromos?
By Tsegaye Tadesse
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – An Ethiopian rebel group must listen to its people and start talks with the government to end a 15-year insurgency in the Horn of Africa nation, elders from the Oromo ethnic group said on Saturday.
Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi, the main U.S. ally in the turbulent region, is opposed by a range of rebel groups from remote regions, including the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) which has fought for autonomy for its southern homeland since 1993.
“We strongly demand that the OLF leadership heed the genuine desire of the Oromo people and enter into negotiations with the Ethiopian government without further delay,” a group of 125 Oromo elders said in a statement.
It said the guerrillas should respect a pact with Meles’ administration dictatorship reached in the Netherlands in January under which the rebels agreed to accept Ethiopia’s constitution in principle and start talks.
The government blames the insurgents for several bomb blasts targeting the capital, Addis Ababa, in recent years, and last week it said its forces had killed a senior OLF commander after luring him to a farmer’s house in the west of the country.
Ethiopia {www:Woyanne} accuses arch-foe Eritrea of backing the OLF and other rebels. Asmara denies it, and accuses Meles of oppressive policies that have triggered resistance movements. From 1998 to 2000, the two nations fought a border war in which 70,000 people were killed.
(Writing by Jack Kimball; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
QUEBECK, CANADA – The more willing you are to suspend disbelief, the more you will enjoy the improbable, but funny situation laid out in Operation Rimbaud, the latest novel by Jacques Godbout to appear in English translation.
The Quebec literary giant takes us to Ethiopia, a country he once briefly called home. It’s the late 1960s, and the emperor, HaileSelassie, turns to the Church of Rome for help transporting a holy relic: the Ten Commandments as engraved on stone by Moses.
This premise doesn’t seem entirely plausible: Even if one can buy the idea that such a secret treasure might exist, it’s difficult to imagine the Orthodox king assigning its care to a rival church. But how important is plausibility in an adventure story, especially a satire? If we accept that Godbout’s main goal is to poke fun at the religious establishment, then we can deem this book successful.
The man charged with saving the stones is Michel Larochelle, a young Jesuit from Montreal. Not long after arriving in the Ethiopian capital, he is roped by a superior into taking confession from his brothers at the local college. He later shows his lack of compassion and reverence by secretly nicknaming one of the men “the masturbator.” Never one to respect his vows, Michel’s mission to preserve “the Tablets of the Law that govern Occidental morality” finds him breaking more than one commandment.
It has been suggested that in addition to this kind of irony, there is another, more private humour to Operation Rimbaud, that it might be Godbout’s sweet revenge on the Jesuits who taught him in his youth here in Montreal.
I’d call this a tongue-in-cheek Da Vinci Code, but that wouldn’t be fair to Quebecer Godbout. Operation Rimbaud came out in its French original in 1999, a good four years before that other religious thriller.
Operation Rimbaud
By Jacques Godbout
Translated by Patricia Claxton
Cormorant Books, 161 pages, $21
Jacques Godbout will be at the Salon du livre in Place Bonaventure to sign his newly published book in French, Autos biographie, at Stand 482, Friday from 5 to 6 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 22, from 1:30 to 3 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 23, from 4 to 5 p.m.
By Dorothy H Crawford
Professor of medical microbiology
Edinburgh University
WHEN Aids first struck an unsuspecting American population in 1981, no-one had a clue what caused this lethal new disease, or where it came from.
As the disease spread at an alarming rate, scientists hurried to identify the cause. Two years later, French scientists Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, isolated a virus, later called the human immunode ficiency virus – HIV – that proved to be the cause of Aids. And just last month, more than 20 years after the event, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their monumental discovery.
By the time the French scientists identified HIV, thousands were suffering from Aids and, we now know, an epidemic of unprecedented magnitude was already under way in sub-Saharan Africa. But where did the virus come from? And when did it first infect humans?
HIV is very prone to mutation, meaning that it evolves rapidly – up to a million times faster than animal DNA. This allows the virus to foil attempts by the body’s immune system to eliminate it. It also allows the virus to develop drug resistance, and has so far prevented us making an effective vaccine. But the mutations are useful for tracking the virus back to its roots. By following the trail of genetic changes HIV has accumulated over time, molecular detectives traced it to west-central Africa, pinning down its launch pad to Kinshasa (previously Léopoldville), capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they found viruses with the greatest genetic diversity. Just one of these HIVs, carried by a single individual, jumped from Kinshasa to Haiti, and from there to the United States, thus spawning the pandemic in the US and Europe.
But where did the ancestral virus originally come from? For several years scientists searched for HIV-like viruses among captive African primates without success, but then a team headed by Beatrice Hahn at Alabama University found a chimpanzee (called Marilyn and trained for space flight by the US air force) of one particular subspecies, Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee, which carried a virus similar to HIV.
They suggested that HIV jumped from chimps to humans in Africa, perhaps during the bloody process of killing and butchering chimps for bush meat. To prove this they needed to isolate viruses from wild chimps, but these animals are reclusive, endangered and live in remote jungle areas, so taking blood samples was out of the question. Instead, scientists resorted to collecting chimp faeces from the forest floor at ten sites in south-east Cameroon known to be chimpanzee territory. After air-lifting some 600 samples to the US and analysing them for chimp subspecies as well as viruses, they pointed the finger unequivocally at chimpanzees in Cameroon as the origin of HIV.
Another part of HIV’s complex history fell into place last month when a group of US scientists compared the genetic material of two HIVs rescued from human samples taken in Léopoldville and stored since 1959.
The differences between them showed that even 50 years ago, HIV had been around long enough to accumulate a substantial number of mutations, and dated HIV’s transfer to humans to the beginning of the 20th century.
Now two questions remain: why did a chimp virus from Cameroon first appear in Léopoldville, 700km to the south-east, about 100 years ago? And if HIV first infected humans in the early 1900s, why did it go global only in the 1970s?
Firstly, in the early 1900s, rivers were the main thoroughfare out of the Cameroon forests, and since rivers in south-east Cameroon form part of the Congo River basin, all eventually lead to Kinshasa. So, spread by sexual contact, the virus must have travelled down-river, perhaps painstakingly slowly, from one village to the next, before it finally reached the city. Secondly, HIV spreads rapidly only in concentrated city populations. Thus the growth of Léopoldville in early 20th century colonial Africa was the key to its dissemination, giving the virus the opportunity to transform from a local to a global player that still kills 10,000 people every day.
PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA – A runner in the Algoa Bus Bay to Bay Challenge was stabbed and robbed in full view of horrified runners and spectators in Port Elizabeth‘s notorious Victoria Drive at the weekend.
Theresa Matthysen, 41, from Despatch, was stabbed three times in the back and robbed of her shoes and watch by two men while running the last leg of the 50km relay event on Saturday.
The attack on a stretch of a Walmer road in which numerous motorists have been stoned, has shocked race organisers, who now plan to change the route of the event next year.
“There was about 8km left of the race near the Walmer Township when I saw two guys coming towards me,” said Matthysen from St George‘s Hospital yesterday. “I tried to avoid them, but the one guy just grabbed me by the neck and I felt a funny feeling on my back.
“They dragged me off to the side of the road and grabbed my takkies, and the one struggled to get my watch off, so I helped him.”
Matthysen, who had just been passed the baton, said she was about 0,7km into the last leg of the relay race when the attack took place.
“It happened so fast. I thought they just punched me on my back. I only realised I was stabbed when two guys who saw it happening came to help me,” she said.
The two men who witnessed the incident alerted the organisers and called for an ambulance.
“I just heard them say: ‘Oh my goodness she‘s been stabbed; call an ambulance‘,” said Matthysen, who was rushed to hospital.
Her husband, Johan, and son, Ryno, were still in shock last night.
Johan said he was about 800 metres away from his wife when she was attacked.
“She was just given the relay baton and I was driving closer to where she was running when I got a phone call to say she had been stabbed,” said Johan. “I was so angry, but we just tried to make sure my wife was helped first.”
Matthysen is nursing serious damage to the left side of her vertebrae caused by the stab wounds on the left side of her back.
“She doesn‘t have full control of her left leg and will have to undergo physiotherapy,” added Johan.
Matthysen said her leg was still numb, but she knows she will be able to walk again.
“I don‘t know if I‘ll run anytime soon, but I believe my leg will get better,” she said.
One of the event‘s organisers, Michael Zoetmulder, said the attack took place near the Animal Welfare Society in Victoria Drive.
“We will change the route next year and use Mount Pleasant to avoid using that road,” said Zoetmulder.
“We wanted to bring the race closer to the people, but if this is what happens, we will have to change it.”
Roy Heine, chairman of the Charlo Athletics Club and race convener of the Bay to Bay committee, said he was “horrified and disgusted” by what had happened.
“It just spoils the fun of athletics. We were trying to bring sports closer to young people in previously disadvantaged areas, yet this is what happens,” said Heine.
“We are all absolutely shattered by it and will definitely change the route next year.”
There have been no arrests.
Matthysen has run in a number of competitive races, including last year‘s Bay to Bay Challenge and the Cape Peninsula‘s Two Oceans Marathon in 2004. She was also a regular participant in the popular Great Train Race that is the forerunner of the Bay to Bay Challenge.
“She‘s a dedicated runner and recently took part in the Kowie 27 in Port Alfred,” said Johan.
The Bay to Bay Challenge, from Jeffrey‘s Bay to Port Elizabeth, includes a 100km walk, a 100km ultra-marathon, a 50km marathon and the new 50km six-person relay.
The relay race started near Van Stadens, while the 100km run and 100km walk started in Jeffreys Bay.
The discovery in Ethiopia of a million-year-old female pelvis is forcing scientists to rethink what they thought they knew about the offspring, appearance and lifestyle of the earliest ancestors of modern humans.
The remarkably complete fossil’s shape indicates that females of the tool-using, wide-ranging Homo erectus species were able to give birth to babies with significantly larger brains than previously thought.
The pelvis’ features also raise questions about the prevailing idea that Homo erectus was specially adapted for long-distance running and hot climates.
“This [pelvis] clearly has to be a specimen to be reckoned with in terms of all future analyses,” said Case Western Reserve University paleontologist Scott Simpson, leader of the team that found the fossil and senior author of a paper today in Science announcing the find.
Simpson and his colleagues were scouring a chocolate-colored hillside in the wastelands of Ethiopia’s Gona region in 2001 when a tribesman helping with the expedition found a broken fragment of a human pelvis.
Paleontologists consider the pelvis important because its size and shape provide critical information about our ancestors — their body style, how well they moved on two legs and, if female, the size of the birth canal.
A quick search of the Gona site failed to turn up additional pieces. Political unrest in Ethiopia prevented the team from returning in 2002.
In 2003 the team uncovered pieces that constituted most of the rest of the pelvis.
Simpson and his co-authors determined that the fossil is between 900,000 and 1.4 million years old, and belongs to Homo erectus, the species that began the transition from the more primitive, chimplike australopiths to our own lineage. Homo erectus was starting to expand its brain and was the inventor of stone hand axes, and the first to travel widely outside of Africa.
Pelvis samples from this murky but crucial period of evolution are extraordinarily rare. Much of what scientists have concluded about Homo erectus’ body shape and characteristics is based on a 1.5 million-year-old skeleton from Kenya.
That specimen, nicknamed Turkana Boy, was a 12-year-old youth. The skull indicated he had a large brain, and limb bones showed he was humanlike in many ways and on his way to an adult height of 6 feet.
Although Turkana Boy was a juvenile male, some researchers used its narrow pelvis measurements and known relationships between male and female pelvis sizes to suggest that Homo erectus females were physically unable to deliver babies with brains the size of modern human infants.
That meant small-brained Homo erectus offspring must have been helpless for a time after birth, requiring substantial energy and care from their mothers or other elders to survive until their brains matured — a pattern similar to modern humans.
Some scientists also inferred from Turkana Boy’s long, thin torso that Homo erectus was evolved to efficiently shed body heat. That made sense considering the narrow hips and other features that suggested Homo erectus was capable of “endurance” running.
The ability to run down prey in the hot African grasslands would have given Homo erectus access to a diet that could support rapid brain enlargement, as well as explaining other physical changes.
But the new Gona pelvis seems to conflict with those conclusions.
Measurements show the capacity of the Gona pelvis is comparable to that of women today. It could accommodate a baby with a brain 30 percent larger than predictions based on the Turkana Boy pelvis. That implies Homo erectus grew much of its brain before birth, like modern infants do, but that its post-natal brain development rate fell somewhere between chimps and humans.
A bigger-brained baby would require less care than had been expected for Homo erectus.
“That doesn’t mean it popped out talking,” Simpson said, “but the period of postnatal development was probably reduced.”
Judging by the Gona pelvis’ dimensions, its owner was a stout, short (less than 5 feet) woman with wide hips. “It’s not a pelvis adapted for running or hot weather,” Simpson said.
He and his co-authors conclude that the main evolutionary force driving Homo erectus’ pelvic shape was the need to deliver big-brained babies, not endurance running or heat adaptation, which may have happened later.
Both Alan Walker, the co-discoverer of the Turkana Boy fossil, and Harvard anthropologist Dan Lieberman, a proponent of the endurance running hypothesis, say it’s possible the Gona pelvis belongs to a more primitive species of human ancestor, Australopithecus boisei.
If the Gona pelvis really is from Homo erectus, Lieberman said, why would females not have the heat-shedding and running adaptations present in Turkana Boy and other erectus specimens?
Simpson said the presence of hand axes used by Homo erectus make a strong case that the fossil is properly classified. Only more fossils will answer the criticism, and he’s returning to Ethiopia this weekend to look.
(To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: [email protected], 216-999-4842)
RANDOLPH TOWNSHIP, NEW JERSEY – Paul Michael Designs, 477 Route 10 East, will hold a holiday open house fundraiser to benefit Ethiopian orphans from 5 – 9 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13.
The event will feature jewelry made by the children of the Orphans and Vulnerable Children Program of the Medhan Social Center in Addis Ababa.
Sale proceeds will be donated to the program through the township-based Medhen Orphan Relieef Effort (MORE).
Founded eight years ago, the non-profit organization has raised over $100,000 for the program. For more information, call (973) 989-3993.
