NAIROBI, KENYA – Sixty-five illegal migrants from southern Ethiopia were seized by police in a container on a Mombasa-bound truck on Monday evening.
One said they paid Sh15.6 million to agents who promised to help them look for jobs in South Africa, via Kenya.
Each paid Ethiopian Birr 24,000, raising questions as to why people who could afford Sh240,000 would be desperate for jobs in South Africa.
Their spokesperson Mesfin Markos, 25, praised the police, saying: “It was dark inside, with no ventilation and no space to move.
We gasped for air, the weak ones fainted. It was then that we started knocking on the container to be freed. We were dying.”
On Tuesday, 33 were taken to a Machakos court in the afternoon and pleaded guilty to being in Kenya illegally.
An Ethiopian conversant with Amharic was brought to help the suspects enter a plea. They appeared before the principal magistrate Julie Oseko, where the court heard their visas had expired.
An Immigration officer confirmed 28 suspects had valid travel documents. Four others who had no travel papers were also charged.
Ms Oseko fined the 33 of them Sh5,000 each or serve three months in jail, then directed that they be repartriated to Ethiopia after paying the fines or completing the jail terms.
Earlier, anti-terrorrrist detectives on Tuesday interrogating the suspects at the Machakos police station.
The arrest exposed what appears a larger syndicate. “Their passports, all stamped at Moyale, showed they entered Kenya between October 3 and 8,” said district police boss Lumumba. They have been in Nairobi as they awaited transport to Mombasa.
Listen the report: [podcast]http://www.voanews.com/english/figleaf/mp3filegenerate.cfm?filepath=http://www.voanews.com/mediaassets/english/2008_10/Audio/Mp3/LCR%20Heinlein%20ETHIOPIA%20NGO%20LAW%202350155%20%20329P%20gg.Mp3[/podcast]
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – Ethiopia’s government The Woyanne dictatorial regime in Ethiopia is coming in for fierce criticism over a draft law before parliament that would prohibit or criminalize many activities of foreign charities and NGOs. VOA’s Peter Heinlein in Addis Ababa reports the bill is almost certain to pass easily in a legislature overwhelmingly controlled by Ethiopia’s ruling party.
Ethiopian Woyanne officials have told western diplomats that parliament will approve a proposed Charities and Societies Proclamation within weeks. The bill would give the government supervisory powers over non-governmental organizations that receive at least 10 percent foreign funding, including money from Ethiopians living abroad.
The text before lawmakers prohibits such NGOs from promoting democratic or human rights, the rights of children and the disabled, and equality of gender or religion. Violators could face up to 15 years in prison and fines up to $10,000.
Foreign NGOs have reacted with alarm to the bill, saying it could make it impossible for them to operate in Ethiopia. A group of ambassadors in Addis Ababa recently warned Ethiopian Prime Minister Woyanne dictator Meles Zenawi that passage of the Charities and Societies Proclamation could mean the loss of untold millions of dollars in desperately needed aid.
The organization Human Rights Watch issued a statement urging Ethiopia’s lawmakers to reject the bill, calling it ‘repressive’. But the leader of an opposition parliament faction, Bulcha Demeksa, said he and like-minded lawmakers are powerless to stop it in the face of an overwhelming ruling-party majority. “The government is going to silence the NGOs and their leadership when they speak about human rights, when they spoke about democratic rights, when they spoke about giving democratic education to the citizens.”
He continued, “The government does not like it, that is why the government wants to silence them, and I am very sorry about it, I am very hurt about it. I wish I could do something about it, because practically all the NGOs are doing something good for this country.”
A senior adviser to the prime minister dictator, Bereket Simon, says NGOs will still be welcome to help fight poverty. But he says the bill is designed to prevent foreign interference in the country’s political affairs. “We need foreign NGOs to participate in poverty alleviation programs and to participate in development works, but we definitely believe the political realm must be left for Ethiopians. That is the prerogative of Ethiopians.”
Tom Porteous, the U.K. country director of Human Rights Watch says laws governing the behavior of foreign NGOs can be positive. But he says the draft before Ethiopia’s parliament is contrary to the country’s constitution. “NGOs should not be immune from accountability, and we would support efforts by the Ethiopian Woyanne government to increase the accountability of civil society organizations.”
Porteous added, At the same time, many other countries in Africa have managed to achieve this without criminalizing human rights activities for example, and in fact this law contravenes not only international and regional African treaties on freedom of association and so forth, but it actually violates Ethiopia’s obligations under its own constitution.”
Ethiopian Woyanne officials, however, say they see nothing repressive or unusual about the draft law. Bereket Simon says NGOs who stay out of Ethiopia’s internal affairs should have nothing to fear. “It is not repressive, because this is a matter that is between Ethiopia and foreigners, so foreigners have their domain, we have our domain. As a sovereign state which runs Ethiopia, we are designing our own law, and any foreigner who is ready to work in Ethiopia should come and see the law, and if it feels comfortable with the law, it can continue to work. If he does not feel comfortable, then we are not going to force them to work here.”
Bereket says the law is aimed partly at what he described as ‘NGOs collaborating with terrorist organizations’. He declined to elaborate.
There are an estimated 3,000 NGOs in Ethiopia. Their combined budgets are believed to be more than $1 billion a year.
Last year, Ethiopia’s Woyanne government expelled the International Committee of the Red Cross, charging its workers with providing assistance to rebels fighting for independence in the country’s Somali region known as the Ogaden. The ICRC dismissed the allegations.
Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous nation, and one of the world’s largest recipients of international aid. The United States is the largest single donor to Ethiopia Woyanne, with aid donations this year expected to top $800 million.
The Woyanne regime in Ethiopia has made an agreement with a retired British colonel to study better ways of training Woyanne thugs (death squads) to control riots. The study was done by Colonel Michael Dewar, who is a former Deputy Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and defense expert.
The colonel’s riot control expertise comes from his several tours of duty in Northern Ireland where the British had long experience in suppressing the civilian population by crackdowns on public meetings, parades, home searches, street harassment and detentions of IRA suspects for prolonged periods.
Dewar’s report says that the riot control troops in the country “at present spend most of their time waiting for riots to happen.” Colonel Dewar organized a think tank that met regularly at the Ethiopian Embassy in London. See Teferra Waluwa’s letter and Col. Dewar’s report here.
JERUSALEM – An unholy dispute over the rights to a rooftop section of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre could bring the entire structure tumbling down, destroying Christendom’s holiest site.
While renovations are needed across the Church, the small Deir Al-Sultan monastery on a part of the Church’s rooftop has reached an “emergency state”, according to engineers who completed an evaluation earlier this month.
The Times has learnt that the two chapels and 26 tiny rooms which comprise the monastery were pronounced in dire need of reinforcement in 2004. They have since deteriorated to the point where engineers now fear they will crash through the roof and into the Church, venerated by millions of Christians as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.
Yigal Bergman, the engineer who led the investigation, reported that the church, situated in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, was in “a dangerous state of construction. The structures are full of serious engineering damage that creates safety hazards and endangers the lives of the monks and the visitors. This is an emergency … also due to the immediate danger to the site that would damage other parts of the nearby churches.”
Local officials are pressing the Church to begin repairs before the autumn’s heavy rains begin, but have stopped short of directly interfering in the Church’s notoriously acrimonious affairs.
The Church has been vigilantly managed by six competing and often fractious Christian denominations — Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian – since an agreement reached under Ottoman law in 1757.
Rival denominations often battle for access or space and the congregation at the annual Easter service sometimes resembles the terraces of a boisterous football match. Under British rule soldiers with fixed bayonets had to separate brawling Christians. To this day the keys to the Church’s main entrance are held by a Muslim family, because the Christians do not trust each other.
The dispute over the the Deir Al-Sultan monastery is a more recent phenomenon dating back to Easter 1970. When the Coptic monks, who had controlled the area, went to pray in the main church and left the rooftop unattended, Ethiopian monks seized the opportunity to change the locks at the entrances before the Copts returned.
Relations between the two groups have remained tense ever since, with the Coptic church refusing to relinquish its claim to the monastery and posting a single monk there at all times. In the midst of a blistering heat wave in the summer of 2002, the Coptic monk on duty moved his chair from its agreed spot to a shadier corner. The move was taken as a hostile manoeuvre by the Ethiopians and eleven monks were hospitalized in the ensuing fracas.
The rest of the Church’s factions have been unable to mediate between the two groups, even in the case of minor repairs or renovations to the rooftop. Earlier this month, Archbishop Matthias, head of the Ethiopian Church in Jerusalem, wrote a letter to the Israeli Interior Ministry and the Bureau of Jerusalem Affairs describing the dire state of affairs.
The Archbishop stated in the letter that he did not recognise the right of the Coptic church in any part of the disputed area. He said, according to the Haaretz Hebrew daily, that it was “inconceivable that the implementation of emergency repairs at the holy site would be conditioned on the consent of the Coptic church.” The Archbishop added that he was turning to Israeli authorities, as a neutral party, to carry out the repairs.
Israel has offered to shoulder part of the cost of repairs, but will only do so if the Christian factions first come to an agreement among themselves.
“We are afraid that if we proceed with the renovations before the two sides come to an agreement themselves we will be accused of favouritism? we are trying to keep our hands clean of the politics here,” said an Israeli Interior Minister official.
The Copts, who are mainly of Egyptian origin, received preferential treatment during Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule. That changed after Israel took control of Jerusalem in the in the 1967 Six-Day war, fought against a combined Arab force, including Egypt. The Copts accused Israel of using its position in Jerusalem to aid the Ethiopians in 1970 in their takeover of Deir Al-Sultan. Nine years later, when Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David peace accords, Coptic officials hoped that rooftop monastery would be restored to them. But Israel is mindful of its sensitive relations with Ethiopia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian Jews lived and were brought to the Jewish state in the 1980s and 1990s.
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus III said: “There is a greater issue here, something that has to be addressed sooner or later. To be honest, so far the (Israeli) government has tried to keep out of the dispute. But now it seems that the government is under pressure to demonstrate concern in helping resolve the issue.”
He added, however, that the Israeli government ultimately had to wait until there was “an internal solution or agreement within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”
ADDIS ABABA (Xinhua) – Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi on Monday held talks with Alain Le Roy, United Nations under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, focusing on a joint peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s Darfur region.
During their talks, Meles reassured Ethiopia’s commitment to support peacekeeping operations undertaken by the UN across the world.
Ethiopia will continue to support continental and international efforts to ensure peace and stability in countries of the region, Meles added.
After the talks, Roy told journalists that the talks were on various continental and international issues of importance.
He said a thorough discussion was held especially on the security affairs of the region and problems in Sudan and Somalia in a bid to find long-term solutions.
The discussion further focused on the UN-African Union hybrid peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) in Darfur, Sudan, which, according to him, is becoming successful.
Roy said Ethiopia’s contribution to UNAMID is praiseworthy.
The two sides also discussed the United Nations Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), which ended its mission recently. Helauded Ethiopia’s cooperation with the mission.
The UN official said he has been visiting the Horn of Africa in a bid to familiarize himself with the region.
Roy was appointed in late June to oversee almost 110,000 personnel serving in 20 peace operations around the world.
Peacekeeping units from Jordan, Kenya and other countries began leaving Ethiopia in August. The state-run Ethiopian News Agency Monday said the last batch of peacekeepers, a battalion from India, left the city of Mekele on Sunday.
There was no immediate confirmation from the U.N.
The U.N. Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea watched the tense border between the two countries for seven and a half years. The Security Council shut down the mission in July, saying the countries had rejected options for a continued presence.
The U.N. withdrew its peacekeepers from Eritrea in February, after Eritrea stopped the mission’s supply of diesel fuel and threatened to shut down its electricity.
Ethiopia Woyanne and Eritrea have yet to resolve their boundary dispute, which spawned a war from 1998 to 2000 that killed some 70,000 people. Both countries have large numbers of troops on the border, although no new hostilities have broken out.
The Times has learnt that the two chapels and 26 tiny rooms which comprise the monastery were pronounced in dire need of reinforcement in 2004. They have since deteriorated to the point where engineers now fear they will crash through the roof and into the Church, venerated by millions of Christians as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.