Addis Ababa will host the fifth India-Ethiopia Joint Trade Commission meeting from 6th and 7th October, 2008.
Minister of State for Commerce & Power, Jairam Ramesh, will lead the Indian delegation at the meeting where number of important bilateral agreements is expected to be signed.
Among them are pacts to (i) expand the supply of raw skins and hides that are abundantly available in Ethiopia for India’s growing leather manufacturing industry; (ii) to set up an apparel fashion design institute in Ethiopia with the assistance of the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC); and (iii) to set up a 38 Mw hydel project by BHEL/IL&FS.
In addition, bilateral agreements on standards, small and medium enterprises and agricultural research are on the anvil. The two countries are also in the advanced stages of finalizing a trade agreement to replace the earlier trade agreement signed in November 1982.
India is the single largest foreign investor in Ethiopia with approvals crossing $ 3.5 billion. Of this, $ 2 billion is in the agriculture and floriculture sector alone. A number of Indian private companies are using Ethiopia as a base for the export of flowers to Europe.
In the context of India emerging as the single largest foreign investor in Ethiopia, the two countries are negotiating a double taxation avoidance agreement which is expected to be clinched in the next three months.
India enjoys a huge trade surplus with Ethiopia (exports in 2007/08 were over $ 400 million and imports around $ 14 million).
The seizure of a Ukrainian vessel with military shipment to the Kenyan army is the latest in a spike of attacks on shipping by pirates on the Somalia ocean front who since January have ransomed close to three dozens of ships.
The Gulf of Aden that sits strategically in the Arabian sea, sandwiched between Yemen and Somalia, is an important waterway and its strangling by insurgents will have international trade as the first culprit.
The lawlessness experienced in Somalia is part of the legacy of inaction and miscalculation in the horn by comity of states, in the belief that, rather than employ diplomatic means to a conflict that has ravaged for close to two decades now, military might is a cheaper option in eliminating the problem. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
With the lifting of the UN imposed embargo, the coast was clear for the Ethiopian troops TPLF with an implicit backing by Washington- to march into Mogadishu and dismantle the fleeting hold by Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) on southern Somalia that had returned a semblance of order: rival warlords had been banished, piracy at the Somalia coast was unheard of, and business was running in Somalia towns.
CIA’s folly of financing rival warlords against the radical ICU (with alleged links to al-Qaeda) to dislodge the ICU from power and the continued US air raids that have claimed more civilians lives than their targets in Somalia villages have served to violently radicalise Somalis against the US.
Had Washington empowered moderates across rival camps, while at the same time ratcheting up pressure on rogue sponsors of warlords and kept military strikes as the last resort, the ouster of radical ICU would not have had such naked outcomes.
Good campaign
The recent UN sponsored ‘Djibouti Agreement’ was a good campaign of rallying moderates to prevail upon their camps to lay down arms, but it did not achieve real success because it did not at the same time talk down the ‘real patrons’ of these militia groups who exercise real control and supply them.
The al-Shabaab (for youth in Arabic) have since the beginning of this year emerged as a potent force against the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and their Ethiopian Woyane backers in the Horn of Africa nation where the world has succeeded very much in looking the other way as Somalia disintegrates into total chaos.
Still, their blacklisting by the US State Department as a terrorist organisations has maddened them into an insurgency that can only be likened to Iraq.
Writing just before the ouster of ICU, John Prendergast and Thomas-Jensen of International Crisis Group warned the US of lionising military intervention over robust diplomacy and applying of pressure on the backers of ICU to stop supplying them with ammunition.
A recent International crisis Group report clearly pinpoints the consequence of that folly: ‘defence and intelligence operations intended to make the US more secure from the threat of terrorism may be increasing the threat of jihadist attacks on American interests.’
Their chickens have come home to roost. As they wrote, ‘the hyenas have closed in.’ Interested States; not less than 10 of them,, with Ethiopia Woyane and Eritrea at the head have been successful using Somalia as satellite State; pumping weaponry into their respective militia, to square out their grouses in Somalia soil further adding gasoline to the fires of an already worse situation.
This has further driven Somalia drown the drain, aggravating the fundamental problem of lack of a functional government hence creating a fertile ground for al-Qaeda cells to mobilise support and stage potential attacks on US interests. Piracy has primed on the Gulf of Aden due to this.
For security to prevail in Somalia, we have to develop Somalia. Elections slated for 2009 as per the 2004 agreement that established the TFG look improbable in the current environment.
The TFG alone has lost all muscle and credibility before their subjects. Legislators had long ago defected en masse and the TFG is regarded as alien itself as long as it continues to piggyback its power on the back of Ethiopians Woyane.
As a matter of urgency, international players must own the Somalia problem.
If I had a nickel for every time some pundit has opined about Barack Obama and the dreaded “Bradley effect,” I could rescue Wall Street.
How many of those yakkers really know about the Bradley effect 1.0, the original, back in 1982, when Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles — whom polls put ahead of his rival for California governor right up to voting day — lost by barely 52,000 votes out of 7.5 million cast?
The Bradley effect has come to mean this: Voters lie to pollsters about black candidates, and enough of them lie to create a huge gap between poll results and election results. The Bradley effect asserts that when Americans finally get into the voting booth and see the black candidate’s name on the ballot, they flinch.
But is that really all that happened in 1982?
Bradley was a UCLA graduate, a former cop and City Council member, and he regarded himself not as a black politician but as a politician who happened to be black. Philip Depoian worked with Bradley for about three decades, and he told me that Bradley’s “was probably the most integrated mind-set I’ve ever come across — he never looked at anybody from an ethnic point of view.” When a student visiting City Hall in 1979 asked the mayor whether L.A. voters had gotten “a black Gerald Ford rather than a black John Kennedy,” Bradley replied, “I’m not a black this or a black that. I’m just Tom Bradley.”
He’d been mayor for nine years when he ran for governor, blowing away the competition in the Democratic primary and cruising toward becoming the nation’s first elected black governor. Six weeks before the election, Bradley was 14 points ahead. Three weeks before the election, his opponent’s campaign manager declared that a hidden anti-black vote could make a difference of five points: “It’s just a fact of life. If people are going to vote that way, they are certainly not going to announce it for a survey taker.” A week later, Bradley’s lead had dropped to seven points.
Below Bradley’s name on the California ballot was Proposition 15, requiring the registering of handguns. On election day, Proposition 15 flushed out voters in rural precincts, places where politicians didn’t campaign and pollsters didn’t poll. And as long as they were in the booth, why not also vote against that black big-city mayor who was just the kind of liberal who’d love to take their guns away?
But it wasn’t guns alone that sank Bradley; two white Democrats also running for statewide office won by double digits.
I’m inclined to think the Bradley effect was born earlier, during Bradley’s 1969 run for mayor. Incumbent Sam Yorty’s race-baiting campaign accused the ex-LAPD lieutenant of being the puppet of “black militants and white radicals.” Three days before the election, The Times’ poll had Bradley 15 points ahead. On election day, he lost 45% to Yorty’s 55%.
Has anything changed for the election that’s about to test the Bradley effect 2.0?
Bradley, the grandson of slaves, barely acknowledged race in his political life. The half-white Obama, with his quips about not looking “like all those other presidents on the dollar bills,” has confronted race forthrightly and tried to put it behind him, and us.
Also, in 1982, Depoian said, voters would look at Bradley and tell themselves, ” ‘I didn’t like the color of his tie that day on the TV news.’ Whatever in their hearts they could justify for not voting for a black man, they found.”
Today, people tell pollsters outright that they won’t vote for a black candidate. In Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, one voter in six said race influenced his vote. The blogs are awash in racist bile, not all of it anonymous. An Associated Press-Yahoo poll found that 40% of white Americans have some negative attitudes toward blacks. The AP story quoted John Clouse in an Ohio coffee shop with his friends, saying flat out, “We still don’t like black people.”
This is progress? Sure, at least to Depoian. “When someone admits, ‘I can’t vote for him because he’s not of my ethnic group,’ that’s progress, because [candidates] know how to handle it,” he said. “And more important, they know how to poll for it.”
Are we better off with this devil we know rather than a devil we don’t?
I called up Charles Henry, who teaches African American studies at UC Berkeley. In 1983, he was the first to measure the Bradley effect. Yes, perceptions of race are changing, but still, for Obama now, as for Tom Bradley then, Henry calculates that it will take “a double-digit lead to feel confident come election day.”
It grieves me to say so, but he may be right. Good polls don’t change bad attitudes. If America 2008 hasn’t changed much from California 1982, by next year pundits will be calling it the “Obama effect.”
MOGADISHU (Xinhua) – A Somali insurgent group Thursday urged the pirates holding a Ukrainian ship carrying military hardware to destroy the ship and its cargo.
Sheik Muqtar Robow, spokesman for Al-Shabaab Islamist movement said that his group believes the Ukrainian ship hijacked last week off the coast of Somalia last week is carrying the 33 Russian-madeT-72 tanks and other small arms to Ethiopian Woyanne military currently deployed in Somalia.
“We know that the tanks are for the enemy (Ethiopian Woyanne troops) in Somalia, so we call on those holding the Ukrainian ship to bury it and destroy all the military hardware,” Robow told Xinhua by phone.
The Al-Shabaab is one of the hard-line insurgency groups that have been waging deadly attacks on Ethiopian Woyanne troops backing Somali government forces since the allied forces ousted an Islamist administration in southern and central Somalia in December 2006.
An Ethiopian journalist accompanying Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi defected to seek asylum.
Shewangizaw Kassahun, special journalist at the Prime Minister’s office, national palace and parliament, who was also head of the Audio Visual department at the Ethiopian News Agency (ENA), came to the US with premier to attend the annual global initiative of the Clinton Foundation and UN general assembly.
The journalist has attended the six days meeting with the premier and finished his final mission before leaving the group for good. Anonymous sources at the News Agency say Shewangizaw was a photo journalist and web editor very close to the palace. His defection has stunned the premiers group including his fellow journalists who never suspect him of failing to return home. His reason of defection is yet not known.
It is known that journalists working for government owned media ENA, ETV, Ethiopian Radio and Ethiopian Press Agency fail to return home if they get the chance to go abroad. This year alone not less than 10 journalists sought asylum in South Africa, Japan, England and USA. Shewangizaw adds the immigrating journalist number to over a dozen.
At the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, the African Union [of thieves and murderers] reaffirmed its opposition to issuing an arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court for Sudan’s president, in connection with crimes committed in the conflict in the country’s Darfur region. Some observers have raised concern that the episode could create difficulty for future cooperation between Africa and the ICC, but other supporters of the court attribute less significance to the dispute. Derek Kilner has more from VOA’s East Africa bureau in Nairobi.
Since even before the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in July that he would seek an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese government has been working to rally diplomatic support against such a move, and in favor of the U.N. Security Council issuing a deferral of the warrant request, a provision allowed for under article 16 of the International Criminal Court’s charter.
Sudan had already secured the support of the African Union, as well as the Arab League, but the Sudanese delegation gave the move for a deferral a high profile at the recent General Assembly meeting. The country’s vice-president, Ali Osman Taha, called the attempt to pursue President Bashir “a failed attempt at political and moral assassination.”
Following a meeting on September 22, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council issued a second communique, reiterating its support for deferring the warrant.
Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, the chairman of the African Union, conveyed the group’s position in his address to the General Assembly the following day. “It is the considered view of the African Union that the indictment of President Omar al-Bashir at this point in time will complicate the deployment of UNAMID and the management of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. It is for this reason that the African Union sees deferment as the most expedient thing to do now. We are simply concerned with the best possible sequencing of measures so that the most immediate matters of saving lives and easing the sufferings of the people of Darfur are taken care of first,” he said.
So far, the Security Council has taken no action. Deferral of the warrant request requires the approval of nine of the 15 members of the UN Security Council. Permanent members China and Russia have been supportive of Sudan’s position, as have nonpermanent members from Africa, including South Africa, Burkina Faso, and Libya. But attaining the remaining required votes may prove difficult.
A vote for deferral will also have to escape a veto by one of the permanent members of the council. Western human rights activists have pounced on recent statements from France and Britain, indicating that they would support a deferral, but both countries have said this would require substantial changes in Sudan’s behavior. The United States has expressed a similar position, but with harsher rhetoric towards Sudan.
Some observers have cautioned that the pursuit of President Bashir, in the face of African resistance, could threaten future African cooperation with the court.
One concern is that the court is giving the impression that it is unfairly targeting Africa. The cases it has taken up to date: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, and Sudan are all in Africa. The head of the AU’s Peace and Security Council Jean Ping, complained in an interview with the BBC this week that the court seemed to
be singling out Africa. Benin’s President expressed a similar sentiment to Radio France International.
But Priscilla Nyokabi, the acting executive director of the Kenya chapter of the International Commission of Jurists, a human rights organization, rejects such reasoning.
“We think it’s just a historical coincidence rather than a targeting of African states,” she said. “Recently the ICC newsletter also said they are looking at Georgia and other countries. So it’s not a deliberate attempt, so we human rights groups don’t feel that way. And also in terms of human rights violations, you can’t say if we get to you as a violator, you cannot say we should get other violators as well, you should answer to the violations that speak to you and not worry about who other people have been gotten by the ICC. So we don’t think that that is a valid argument.”
While there have been reports of some African countries threatening to pull out of the International Criminal Court, Issaka Souaré, a researcher on international law with the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, says the African Union has gone out of its way to signal its support for international justice, while raising problems with the particular issue of a warrant for Mr. Bashir.
“If you look at the facts, of the 106 members of the ICC, 30 are from Africa, the largest single region in that regard. So I would not read much into such arguments unless they have been officially and expressly stated as such. African countries are not against the ICC. Even in its communique. The Peace and Security Council reiterates the AU’s commitment to combating impunity. No one condones this. The issue is about the timing and the implications for this move on the peace process so there is no antagonism per se against the ICC,” Souaré said.
Some observers have also warned that the case of Sudan will make those African countries that have not yet signed on to the ICC, Ethiopia and Rwanda, for example, even less likely to do so in the future. But Souaré points out that cases can still be brought in the ICC against countries that are not members of the court. “For this to prevent other African countries to join, it might, in the case of some countries, but it doesn’t make much difference for you to be a signatory or not, because Sudan after all is not a signatory,” Souaré said.
Nyokabi says that the leaders of such countries, many of whom have been accused of rights violations in their countries, were already hostile to the court, and would have been unlikely to join regardless of President Bashir’s indictment.
“As to the leadership, they have their own individual reasons why they don’t support the ICC. And each African country I believe has its own historical concerns. And you can give examples of them. You can give, say, the examples of President Kagame, or Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, the political elite, it is not even a case of losing confidence, they just did not want the ICC from the beginning.”
Perhaps of more concern is the possibility that African countries that have joined the court will be less inclined to actively support it in the future. Nyokabi says that there are challenges to getting Kenya, which has joined the court, to implement the legislation in Kenyan law, but says these have little to do with the case of Sudan. “The speed with which we are getting into the ICC jurisprudence needs to improve, but we are not sure that the Bashir case is going to slow it in any way. Kenya was slow even before [Mr.] Bashir, we are still slow. So it is not the Bashir case that is making us any slower.”
Nyokabi points out that Kenyan rights activists are particularly concerned about keeping the International Criminal Court as a viable option in Africa, given the rights violations committed in the aftermath of last year’s disputed presidential election, and the potential for future ethnic and political violence.
Shewangizaw Kassahun, special journalist at the Prime Minister’s office, national palace and parliament, who was also head of the Audio Visual department at the Ethiopian News Agency (ENA), came to the US with premier to attend the annual global initiative of the Clinton Foundation and UN general assembly.