Addis Ababa, Ethiopia- The list of honours Ethiopian runner Tirunesh Dibaba has earned in her short, but illustrious career already has many of her rivals running for minor positions when they line up against the double Olympic 5000m/10,000m champion: double World 5000m and 10000m champion; world indoor and outdoor 5000m record holder; and three-time World Cross Country long course champion.
The latest addition to Dibaba’s incredible CV came yesterday evening when her club, the Prisons Police, bestowed the rank of Chief Superintendent for her services to club and country.
Aged just 23, Dibaba, who will this year marry long-time fiancée and fellow club mate Sileshi Sihine, has not only amassed major titles and World records, but has also quickly risen up prisons police ranks.
She may be nicknamed the Baby Faced Destroyer, but there was nothing “baby faced” about the manner in which Dibaba received her latest honour.
Dibaba marched all the way from her seat to the podium at a ceremony held on Thursday evening saluted Maeregu Habtemariam, State Minister for Federal Affairs, who bestowed the new rank on her shoulders. She then saluted Habtemariam and marched back to her seat to the amusement of guests and the media.
She has now surpassed distance running ace Haile Gebrselassie, who is a Major with the Omedla Police club, and is equal in rank with Derartu Tulu, who is also a chief superintendent. Sihine, meanwhile, also moved up a rank going up to Major Officer. She has also achieved more in six years than both Tulu and Gebrselassie managed in careers spanning two decades.
Also included in the awards were other athletes who represented the Prisons Police club at the 29th Beijing Olympics. African 1500m champion Gelete Burka rose to Deputy Officer, African 3000m steeplechase silver medallist Mekdes Bekele and Yacob Jarso, fourth in the men’s 3000m Steeplechase final in Beijing, both move up to Warden. Their club coach Hussein Shebo, who is also the assistant coach of the national team, moved up to Superintendent.
A week earlier, Tsegaye Kebede, bronze medallist in the Olympic marathon and winner of this year’s Paris Marathon, earned the military rank Deputy Sergeant from his club, Defence forces.
In a busy week of awards and commemorations, Ethiopia’s Olympic double 5000m/10,000m champion Kenenisa Bekele had an avenue in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa named after him by the city’s administration. “The Kenenisa Avenue” will run in one of the city’s major sections and will bear his name for visitors.
On the other hand, Dibaba has a hospital on the outskirts of the city named after her. “The Tirunesh Dibaba Hospital” is currently under construction in a joint collaboration between the Ethiopian and Chinese governments and is located in the Akaki-Kaliti sub-city in the suburbs of Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia’s Beijing medallists have also been raking up cash prizes and gifts over the past week. Both Bekele and Dibaba received a Toyota Corolla 2000 (current market value USD 40,000) each from the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi two weeks ago. In addition, Bekele was awarded ETB 100,000 (USD 10,000) from his club Muger Cement for his outstanding services to the club.
The awards ceremonies are expected to continue with regions and regional administrations across the country also awarding the athletes.
Concerned Ethiopians in Seattle have forced the cancellation of an event at the Seattle University where Woyanne ambassador and full time drunkard Samuel Assafa was scheduled to speak. It was rumored dictator Meles Zenawi might also appear at the event.
The event, which was named “Understanding Ethiopia,” was scheduled to coincide with the exhibition of Lucy (Dinknesh).
The University has canceled the meeting after Dr Shakespear Feyissa, a prominent Ethiopian attorney in Seattle, demanded a meeting with the president and other high level officials of the university to lodge a complaint. Shakespear, on behalf of the Ethiopian community in Seattle, informed the university about the atrocities of the Woyanne regime and appealed that the prestigious Seattle University should not provide a forum to mass murderers.
The University agreed and has canceled the meeting as shows below.
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Source: World Affairs Council
Understanding Ethiopia Today – Cancelled!
His Excellency Dr. Samuel Assefa, Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States
This event has been cancelled.
What ties exist between the Northwest and Ethiopia and how are they changing? What role is Ethiopia playing in the War on Terror? What is the significance for Ethiopia of the exhibit “Lucy’s Legacy: Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia” on display at Pacific Science Center? In what ways are trade and investment between the Pacific Northwest and Ethiopia making us more connected?
The World Affairs Council presents His Excellency, Dr. Samuel Assefa, Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States. Dr. Samuel Assefa, a well-known academic and public figure in Ethiopia, was Vice-President of Addis Ababa University, the country’s leading institution of higher education, prior to his appointment as Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States on January 9, 2006.
Dr. Assefa pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in the United States. He taught at Williams College and Rutgers University before returning to Ethiopia in 1994, where he held teaching and leadership positions at Addis Ababa University. In 1993, shortly after the fall of the military regime, he took a leave of absence from his teaching duties and returned to Ethiopia to work closely with the Chair of the Constitutional Commission in deliberations toward the framing of the new Ethiopian Constitution. In 1996, Dr. Assefa also helped found the African Institute for Democratic Deliberation and Action (AIDDA), a non-government organization dedicated to research and public deliberation on the problems and possibilities of transitional democracy in Africa.
A Private Members-only reception will be held at 6:00 pm. Location information will be sent to reception attendees prior to the event. Registration for the reception includes admission to the evening lecture.
Co-sponsored by Seattle University, Pacific Science Center, PATH.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — After nearly 20 years of violent chaos, Islamic extremism and failed peace talks, impoverished Somalia might seem to have hit rock-bottom. But things are getting worse. The crisis is exceeding even the direst scenarios laid out nearly two years ago, when troops from neighboring Ethiopia arrived to oust a radical Islamic militia and support the Western-backed government.
The troops, whom many Somalis consider an occupying force, are seen by some as a catalyst for the violence rather than a cure.
“The nature of the crisis is much more dangerous now,” Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College in North Carolina, told The Associated Press. “The level of indiscriminate violence is worse than at any time.”
The Meles regime in Ethiopia says that it wants to withdraw, but its opponents say it has calculated that an open-ended occupation of Somalia is better than having an Islamist regime next door.
“The Ethiopians Woyanne will make it impossible for the Islamists,” said Daud Aweys, a Nairobi-based Somalia analyst. “The Ethiopians Woyannes are more powerful, and they have more weapons.”
Meanwhile, the result is a stalemate, seemingly impervious to U.N.-brokered peace talks, international pressure and even the daily carnage in Mogadishu, the capital. The Somali government would likely crumble without Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s muscle, but al-Shabab, a radical group at the heart of the insurgency, refuses to negotiate as long as the Ethiopians remain.
The United States worries that Somalia could be a terrorist breeding ground, particularly since Osama bin Laden declared his support for the Islamists. It accuses al-Shabab of harboring the al-Qaida-linked terrorists who allegedly blew up the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
The U.S. sent a small number of special operations troops with the Ethiopian Woyanne forces in 2006 and in early 2007 conducted several airstrikes in an attempt to kill suspected al-Qaida members. But the fact that Ethiopia Woyanne is a key U.S. ally, and most Somalis loathe America, doesn’t help matters.
Al-Shabab, which means “the Youth,” mounts almost daily mortar attacks, suicide bombings and ambushes.
The result is civilians streaming out of Mogadishu, the capital, many of them gravely wounded, and sheltering on roadsides or fleeing the country. A local human rights group says the insurgency has killed more than 9,000 civilians to date.
The streets of Mogadishu, once a beautiful seaside city, are now bullet-scarred and stained with blood. On Monday 30 people were killed in fighting in the capital and at least 11 civilians died during an overnight attack on an African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu.
Al-Shabab has taken over the port town of Kismayo, Somalia’s third-largest city, and effectively closed Mogadishu’s airport by threatening to attack any plane using it.
Al-Shabab’s attacks look likely continue indefinitely, with the goal of simply crippling and humiliating the government. Reprisals by government and Ethiopian Woyanne forces are swift and heavy-handed, but have not eradicated the insurgency.
“If your principal interest is quelling the political violence, then an Ethiopian a Woyanne withdrawal will help,” Menkhaus said. “That will take away the principal grievance.”
The African Union has sent about 2,600 peacekeepers to Somalia. But their mandate is limited to protecting key sites such as the airport and seaport, and they generally are confined to the airport for their safety.
The U.N. has tried to push peace talks between the government and the opposition, but a recent deal with a more moderate faction of the Islamic group seems only to have worsened the violence.
“We have started building up our military strength because some of our fellow insurgents seem to have been corrupted by the enemy, like those who signed the so-called deal with the puppet government,” said Sheik Muhumed, an al-Shabab commander.
(Elizabeth Kennedy has covered East Africa since 2006.)
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Judges at the International Criminal Court have summoned the chief prosecutor for a first hearing next week on his request to charge Sudan’s president with genocide in Darfur, the prosecutor said.
In July, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accused Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of launching a campaign in 2003 that has killed 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through starvation and disease and forced 2.5 million from their homes. Sudan says 10,000 died.
The African Union, Arab League and other alliances have urged the U.N. Security Council to block moves to indict Bashir to avoid shattering the fragile peace process.
It is unclear when the judges will make a decision on Moreno-Ocampo’s application, which he said was the ICC’s biggest and most complex case to date. However, they invited him to an initial hearing to explain the case next Wednesday.
“They called us for the first hearing on Oct. 1,” Moreno-Ocampo told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. “Normally in the past they call for hearings to request clarifications, some other documents, to (ask) questions about the case.”
U.N. diplomats following the case have said the judges might not make a decision until November.
Earlier this week French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that Paris could support a suspension of the investigation if Khartoum ended the killings and removed a minister indicted by the ICC.
Moreno-Ocampo declined comment, saying his job was to uncover and present the facts.
Under Article 16 of the ICC statute, the U.N. Security Council can suspend investigations and indictments for up to one year at a time.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have issued strong statements against intervening in the Bashir probe, saying that doing so would give him impunity.
Although the bulk of the deaths in Darfur may have taken place years ago, the prosecutor said his investigation shows people are still being killed.
“It’s a more subtle genocide, but it’s ongoing. And because it’s more subtle, we are (accustomed) to being used to it,” he said. “The weapons of the genocide are not machetes, not gas chambers, but hunger and rape.”
“That’s what we have to stop,” he said.
A joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force has only some 10,000 of the 26,000 soldiers and police in Darfur that were promised in a Security Council resolution from July 2007.
Meanwhile, rebels accuse Sudanese government forces of stepping up attacks on civilians and villages. Khartoum says it is restoring law and order to rebel enclaves in Darfur.
Once again, the twin spectres of drought and starvation stalk the land of Ethiopia. UN sources suggest that four million Ethiopians now need what they call “emergency assistance,” while another eight million need what is more vaguely described as “food relief.”
Already, thousands of people are dying. The first to expire are the very young and the very old. In some areas of the country, people are dying of starvation and malnutrition while their goats and sheep get fat eating crops that will not be harvested until late September.
Few saw this coming. Two years ago, Ethiopian officials boasted that food surpluses would allow their country to sell corn to neighbouring Sudan. The government has been investing more than a sixth of its budget in agricultural development, far above the average in other African countries. Child mortality has been reduced by 40%, and the agricultural sector has been growing by 10% annually over the last few years.
But in this part of the world, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said, “one unexpected weather event can push us over the precipice.” Only 1% of Ethiopia is irrigated, meaning that a lack of rainfall can produce catastrophic results for the five-out-of-six Ethiopians who eke out a living through subsistence agriculture.
Famine-relief food distribution is never a straightforward affair in an African country. Those (mostly southern) regions where voters did not support the regime in recent elections typically complain that they are cheated of food aid at the expense of more “loyal’ parts of the country in the north.
Inter-regional friction is no stranger to Ethiopia. Five hundred years ago, Cushitic-speaking Muslim tribesmen from the desert plains of (what is now) southeastern Ethiopia and the borderlands of Somalia declared a jihad and attacked the Semitic-speaking Christian highland kingdoms whose emperors claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba. With the timely help of Portuguese musketeers under the leadership of the son of Vasco da Gama, the southerners were repelled. The next 400 years of Ethiopian history led to a gradual domination and conquest of these southern tribes, who were vanquished once and for all by the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Hailie Selassie.
Selassie himself was overthrown by a group of Marxist revolutionaries, who plunged Ethiopia into a brutal civil war. Then came the famous drought of 1984, which brought us We Are the World.
One of the reasons so many people starved in Ethiopia during that time was that the ruling regime would not let food from food-rich areas go to food-poor areas — because the latter were dominated by opponents of the government. Nor would they allow people to migrate from food-poor to food-rich districts. “Starve or submit” became the watchword of this new regime.
The Derg, as this new regime called itself, was then ousted by a coalition of central and northern Semitic-speaking Ethiopians who considered themselves Marxists. But when they came to power, the Berlin wall had fallen already — so they made peace with the West, joined the war on terror, and started taking baby steps toward liberal democracy and the liberalization of their economy.
Nevertheless, the country remains riven by old conflicts. The governing elites are suspicious of the southerners, especially their newfound interest in radical Islam.
It comes as no surprise that, in the current crisis, some of the worst-affected and most neglected areas are in the southeast corner of the country, where Muslim peasants have been in open rebellion for over a decade.
According to “Radio Freedom” — operated by the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Army — on July 4, 2008, at least 13 Ethiopian government soldiers were killed; 15 others were reportedly killed in an attack in the Galalshe district. The Ethiopian government claims these rebels get support from sympathetic Arabs, and has accused Qatar of meddling in Ethiopia’s internal affairs. (Qatar, for its own reasons, supports the neighbouring Red Sea state of Eritrea, which just a few years ago fought a border war with Ethiopia and expresses support for Ethiopian rebels of Somali ethnicity in the southeast of the country.)
Ethiopia has neither confirmed nor denied that such attacks have taken place on its soldiers. But either way, it is understandable that Ethiopian government employees may be less than enthusiastic about personally overseeing food aid in the southern parts of the country.
Exacerbating these regional frictions, and this year’s extreme weather events, are what may be considered the two root causes of the famine: population growth and land tenure.
In 1984, during the height of the drought and civil war, Ethiopia had just under 34 million inhabitants. The population now stands at 77 million: In just more than one generation, the population of the country has doubled. Despite the government’s investment in agriculture, overall investment in education has gone down, which stifles the possibility of rural innovation. And, although overall food production has increased, the World Bank has noted that per capita production has declined. That is to say, each peasant produces less food than he once did. Even during good years, 6% of the rural peasantry is supported by government-and donor-delivered food relief.
After the murder of Hailie Selassie by the Derg in the early ’80s, the government revolutionized the land-tenure system by giving peasants enough land to till according to the number of children they then had. This simplistic tenure system has been kept intact by the present government. Peasants do not have title to their own plots, and there is an incentive to get more land by having more children to till it. But there is little incentive to make that land more productive: Farmers are fearful that if they invest in any aspect of land improvement they could lose their plots to local elites with political connections.
As peasants do not own their own land, they cannot use it as collateral to get loans they need to buy seed or fertilizer, which could in turn be used to create a food surplus to be used in case of drought. They also are denied the right to sell their land and move somewhere else– to a more fertile region or to the city to try their luck in urban occupations.
More food aid will help prevent mass starvation in Ethiopia in the short term. But in the long-run, it needs something else: a peasantry with the same right to own and control their land that most farmers in the world take for granted. Freed from government shackles, they will unleash a green revolution that will feed their families.
(Geoffrey Clarfield, a Toronto-based writer, can be reached at [email protected])
Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ), the heir to the former CUDP, wishes to announce to the local and international media community that it is officially ready to operate as a duly registered national party and to launch its programme of activities for the year 2001 (E.C). UDJ has pledged to pursue the goals, objectives and the inspiring vision of CUDP with a new spirit and greater determination.
To achieve its objectives successfully, UDJ needs the support of many sectors of the national society and international community. One of these sectors is the local government and private as well as the international media community. UDJ believes that seeing democracy take root and flourish in Ethiopia is the wish of the government, private and international media. Therefore, it hopes that in its endeavor to contribute its share to the fulfillment of this common cause, it will enjoy the support and cooperation of the media.
The purpose of this first get-together is to share views on how, through concerted efforts, we can complement each other’s contribution to the common cause and avoid communication and interaction problems experienced in the past.
. In view of the fact that working together for mutual benefits and resolving communication problems through dialogue takes time, UDJ has worked out a programme of regular meetings with the media. Today’s meeting is the beginning of the continuous and regular dialogue that UDJ wishes to maintain with the media.
UDJ will contribute its share to enabling multiparty system to flourish in Ethiopia. Even though recent legislations affecting political parties, the press and civil societies threaten to further narrow the political space severely, UDJ believes strongly that if we worked diligently and with determination and patience, it is possible to widen the political space that, we believe, is deliberately being narrowed and to revive the hope of the Ethiopian people to see democracy flourish in their country. UDJ calls upon the Government to contribute its share to the fulfillment of this hope by broadening the political space in a manner that demonstrates responsible leadership.
UDJ wishes to see the media as a true mirror through which it looks at itself and as a cause for continuously correcting and improving itself. It is ready to learn from your insightful editorials and reportings and to be your steady partner in your endeavors to bring reliable information to the people.
