UNITED NATIONS – Information about the Horn of Africa flowed Wednesday in the half-light outside the UN Security Council, after an uneventful session about Sudan and Guinea-Bissau. Unprompted, the representative of Saudi Arabia denied that his country has shipped arms into Somalia, while Sudan accepted a benign spin of Ethiopian shipments into South Sudan.
Inner City Press began by asking Sudan’s Ambassador, on the record, about reports of Ethiopian arms shipments to Juba and South Sudan, and that the tanks hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia were also headed for South Sudan. He said quickly that the tanks’ destination s being investigated and Ethiopia has provided clarification, ostensibly the weapons are meant for some exhibition in Juba, leaving Sudan’s relations with Ethiopia positive. The connection between this and positions on suspending the International Criminal Court’s proceedings against Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir remain to be reported, on the record.
Earlier in the week, Inner City Press asked Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Michele Montas for any UN response to reports that Sudan has arrested one of the two current Sudanese ICC indictees, Ali Kushayb. The first day, she said those were only reports. Then on Wednesday she said, “I’ve been asked about reports indicating that the Government of Sudan has detained Ali Khushayb for crimes committed in Darfur, which the Secretary-General has noted.If confirmed, this is a welcome step towards the vital need to end impunity and bring to justice those responsible for crimes in Darfur.” Video here.
Inner City Press asked Sudan’s Ambassador later on Wednesday to respond to this UN quote. “Who is she to comment on that?” he asked. “What business is it of hers?”
On Thursday, Inner City Press asked Ms. Montas if she, Ban or joint UN-African Union envoy Bassole had any comment on President Al-Bashir’s so-called “people’s initiative” convened in Darfur, without involvement of armed rebels.Ms. Montas said that Bassole is attending, and that any comment would be made only after the initiative is over. Video here. Sudan’s Ambassador’s review of Mr. Bassole was given, but on an off the record basis.
Just then coming down the second story hallway of the UN was Saudi Arabia’s representative / charge d’affaires, Abdullatif Sallam.“Ask him something,” it was suggested to Inner City Press. As a softball, Inner City Press asked, “What about Saudi Arabia’s role in the Somalia negotiations” — a process that like that in Darfur excludes the armed insurgents, but which has nonetheless been repeatedly praised by the UN.“It is not good,” the Saudi said enigmatically.
Moments later he doubled back and whispered in the Sudanese Ambassador’s ear.“Saudi Arabia denied it has been providing weapons in Somalia,” was the statement that emerged. Thou dost protest too much?
Footnote: the UN’s own press release about Wednesday’s Security Council resolution on Sudan says that 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur. Since many knowledgeable sources use the figure of 200,000 and controversy obtained to the UN’s John Holmes raising the figure to 300,000, one wonders where this 400,000 comes from — inflation?
UNIVERSITY OF HALIFAX, CANADA – Born in an Ethiopian prison, all Elias Mebrate knew by the age of 10 was how to clean the guards’ guns. By 14, he was learning to train his own rifle on the enemy.
“That was the only opportunity I had to survive,” he said Wednesday in Halifax. “Instead of just sitting and dreaming of bread, it’s better to go and fight and to get that bread.”
After spending his first decade behind bars, guards released him on the streets of Bahir Dar, a city in northwest Ethiopia. But they kept his mother, a political prisoner. So he slept in a church and “borrowed” coins people dropped in front of a saint’s statue.
Four years later, the homeless boy begged the Ethiopian army to let him enlist. He was told he was too young. “Then I asked them again and again.”
Persistence paid off, and a week later he was issued a uniform. “At least I got clothes to cover myself, food.”
Several times over the next four years, he fought rebels who attacked camps where he was training. Mortar fire and rockets rained around him.
“Compared with Canadian children, I didn’t see childhood at all. I’ve never played soccer outside on the field.”
At 18, he ran away from the military and made his way to Kenya. After working as a security guard for an international hotel chain, he wound up in a refugee camp and was sent to Canada a decade later for resettlement.
Mr. Mebrate, now 35, is in the final year of a management degree program at Dalhousie University. His route to the institution was anything but conventional.
At the refugee camp, a Canadian minister gave him a bag of old clothing for Christmas. One of the donated T-shirts said Dalhousie University across the front.
“So I was wearing it but I didn’t know what (it was),” he said. “After I came here, the first job I got was at the Purdy’s Wharf towers.”
He was cleaning an office when he noticed a Dal diploma on the wall and realized the university was in Halifax. “I said, ‘I am going to have one of these degrees before I die.’ ”
Mr. Mebrate applied as a mature student and was accepted on the condition of maintaining good grades.
He has an exam in corporate finance today but instead of studying on Wednesday, he participated in a Halifax workshop aimed at finding ways to end the use of children in war. The Child Soldier Initiative, which staged the event, hopes to have a small team working in Africa by next year.
“The best thing is just to give them the opportunity to be engaged, either in sport or education,” said Mr. Mebrate, who hopes to find a career with the United Nations refugee agency.
The UN estimates about 300,000 children are being forced to fight in wars around the world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We could be talking about eight-year-olds,” said Shelly Whitman, the deputy director of Dal’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, who teaches a course on children and war.
Ken Eyre of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre put it bluntly. “They’re cheap, they’re easy to manipulate and if they break, you don’t even need to fix them. You just get another one.”
Mr. Eyre, a retired Canadian Forces major, said recruiters use drugs to lure children into fighting. In Sierra Leone, he said, child soldiers sniffed a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine while watching Rambo movies.
Mr. Eyre recalled encountering several child soldiers during a trip to Rwanda in late 1994, after the genocide where an estimated 800,000 people were killed over 100 days.
“I met a friend at an airport and I was telling her that I’d been stopped at a roadblock by these young children early in the morning and they had these Kalashnikov automatic rifles and they were drunk, and I admitted to her that I was scared,” Mr. Eyre said.
“And she said to me: ‘You should be scared. They’d kill you for a Fanta.’ ”
Heavy fighting has broken out in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, leaving at least 18 people dead, many of them civilians.
The fighting began when insurgents attacked African Union Dictators-R-Us and Ethiopian troops Woyanne thugs Thursday, drawing retaliatory fire. During the battle, heavy artillery hit the populous Bakara Market.
The fighting also drew in forces from the transitional Somali government. The government is backed by Ethiopia TPLF, which is believed to have more than 10,000 troops in the country.
Thursday, Ethiopia’s prime minister the leader of TPLF dismissed opposition calls for a timetable to withdraw his country’s troops from Somalia.
Addressing parliament, Meles Zenawi Dictator Zenawi, said troops would remain in Somalia until a credible international force can take over and Somalia’s stability is assured.
Ethiopian troops TPLF Thugs entered Somalia in 2006 to help the government oust an Islamist movement that had seized power throughout much of the country.
U.N.-backed reconciliation talks between the Somali government and some of its opponents have achieved little, while a bloody Islamist insurgency rages on.
In New York Tuesday, a U.N. official said the Somali government and opposition groups would meet for a third round of talks October 25-26 in Djibouti.
The official, Amadou Oul Abdallah, also said the U.N. and World Bank are planning a donor conference to assist Somalia, where millions are in need of aid because of fighting and drought. He said a preliminary meeting for the conference will take place Monday in Stockholm.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, 16 October 2008 – Addis Ababa’s Maskal Square came alive in the spirit of handwashing yesterday as 1 million Ethiopian children united to wash their hands with soap and water in celebration of the first-ever Global Handwashing Day.
“The message is that the simple action of washing hands with soap saves lives,” said UNICEF Ethiopia Officer-in-Charge Marc Rubin.
“The top four messages,” he added, “are that washing hands with water alone is not enough, handwashing with soap can prevent diseases that kill millions of children needlessly every year, critical moments for handwashing are after using the toilet and before handling food, and handwashing is the single most cost-effective intervention.”
The half-day Global Handwashing Day national event held at Maskal Square featured over 300 schoolchildren from five elementary schools. They marched and sang to promote handwashing with soap as an important hygienic practice that reduces the prevalence of diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory illnesses, which together kill 3.5 million children worldwide each year.
Public-private partnership
With the goal of preventing such deaths, an estimated 120 million children observed Global Handwashing Day in 70 countries across five continents.
The celebration in Ethiopia was organized by UNICEF and the national WASH (for ‘water, sanitation and hygiene’) movement, along with private-sector partners. Across the country, schoolchildren washed their hands with soap and water at noon just before their lunch break. Soap was distributed to participating schools through regional education boards.
Global Handwashing Day also aims to raise the profile of the International Year of Sanitation, which is being observed worldwide throughout 2008. Globally, an estimated 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation. In Ethiopia, only 11 per cent of the population has access to improved sanitation.
QUINCY, FLORIDA – The suspected getaway car used in last week’s shooting of a BP gas station owner in Quincy has been found, said Quincy Police Department Chief Ferman Richardson.
The blue Mercury Grand Marquis was found Monday afternoon at Cascade Trailer Park in Tallahassee.
BP manager Wondwossen Gizaw, a native of Ethiopia, was shot three times a little after midnight Oct. 7. Three men robbed him as he was closing the Quincy store. He was shot in the arm, the leg and the chest.
He co-owns the BP gas station at 504 W. Jefferson St. in Quincy.
Richardson said the driver of the car was not found, but the vehicle is being analyzed at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s crime lab.
Richardson said Quincy police are still looking for the shooters and are soliciting community assistance.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Crime Stoppers hot line at 574-TIPS or (888) 876-TIPS.
“That was the only opportunity I had to survive,” he said Wednesday in Halifax. “Instead of just sitting and dreaming of bread, it’s better to go and fight and to get that bread.”
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, 16 October 2008 – Addis Ababa’s Maskal Square came alive in the spirit of handwashing yesterday as 1 million Ethiopian children united to wash their hands with soap and water in celebration of the first-ever Global Handwashing Day.