Haile Menkerios (left) talking
to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
UN News Service – Haile Menkerios, Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, briefed Security Council members on the details of the deal, signed in Harare on Monday, which aims to end the political crisis that has gripped the Southern African country since the first round of national elections in March.
“This is a delicate compromise,” Mr. Menkerios later told reporters, stressing that the accord between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leaders Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara is not designed to immediately solve all of Zimbabwe’s problems.
Zimbabwe’s economic recovery will take time, he said, and international donors must remain engaged to help the country back on its feet, especially in priority areas such as agriculture, health care, and water and sanitation.
But the Assistant Secretary-General said he was confident that the main political forces in Zimbabwe can reach a compromise on the outstanding issues left remaining after the agreement.
He also said that the deal, even though it will be painful to fully implement, offers thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans the chance for a much better life.
Mr. Menkerios served as the UN representative on a reference group backing the efforts of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to mediate between Zimbabwe’s political forces, and he attended Monday’s signing of the agreement.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a good example of how the Meles regime is full of village idiots. The new doctors will leave the country as well if conditions in the country remain the same. The root cause of the economic crisis in Ethiopia is the repressive regime that doesn’t allow the people of Ethiopia to live and work in their own country freely.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (APA) – Ethiopia will train 1,000 medical doctors as of this academic year (2008) in four universities in the country to tackle the ever increasing doctors’ exodus from the country, APA learns here on Friday.
Ethiopia is among few African countries that are highly affected by the migration of doctors to various countries, particularly in the United States.
The Ethiopian ministry of Health said in its report that the government decided to increase the enrolment of students to train as medical doctors in various universities of the country to minimize the problem.
“Even though the government made a 70% wage increase for the doctors during the past few years, the problem still remains. Now, the government has decided to enrol 1000 students to study as medical doctors,” the ministry said.
According to the ministry, two years ago, the government enrolled only 100 medical students while the number increased to 250 last year, and the ministry is planning to increase the number in the coming years.
Even in big towns in Ethiopia, it is difficult to get qualified doctors to treat patients.
Now, the government is also training over 200,000 health extension workers to tackle the problem.
HARARE – The first meeting between the three leaders who signed Zimbabwe’s power-sharing agreement ended in a stalemate Thursday. The three failed to agree on the composition of a Cabinet for the new government. Tendai Maphosa in Harare has this report for VOA.
President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister-designate Morgan Tsvangirai and deputy Prime Minister-designate Arthur Mutambara met for the first time after the signing of the power-sharing deal earlier this week. It was hoped they would announce the members of the 31-member Cabinet at the end of their meeting but that did not happen.
Eddie Cross, policy coodinator general of the main Movement for Democratic Change faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai says agreement could not be reached because the ruling ZANU-PF is insisting on retaining control of all key ministries including defense and finance.
“They’ve got nobody who can really put the ministry of finance back together again, they’ve got nobody who is acceptable to the international community, anybody they that they might put up for the ministry of finance is still subject to international sanctions against the individuals so we are saying the ministry of finance has to come to the MDC and we don’t think that’s really negotiable,” Cross said. “They want defense and we are saying if you take defense we want home affairs, it’s only fair; they still want to hold on to home affairs, hold on to the police and we are saying absolutely not.”
Cross added that the ministry of local government is also a bone of contention. According to him, 80 percent of the councils in Zimbabwe are run by the MDC so the party must control the ministry.
He said the matter has now been referred to the three party’s mediation teams to try to reach a compromise. The teams are slated to meet Saturday. But even if the teams reach an agreement, Cross said, Zimbabweans will have to wait for Mr. Mugabe’s return from New York where he is going to attend the U.N. General Assembly until a government can be formed. Cross, however, dismissed media reports describing the lack of an agreement as a deadlock.
“It’s not a deadlock as such; it’s simply procrastination on behalf of ZANU-PF refusing to get to grips with the fundamentals,” he said. “We’ll sort this out and have a government hopefully by next Friday.”
The signing of the agreement follows seven weeks of talks that followed the June 27 run-off of the presidential election in which Mr. Mugabe was the sole candidate. Mr. Tsvangirai who had outpolled Mr. Mugabe in the first round election but failed to get the necessary majority to avoid a run-off, pulled out of the run-off citing violence against his supporters.
Analysts see the composition of the government as key to unlocking the assistance the international community has promised Zimbabwe to get its economy, once one of the strongest in the sub-Saharan region, working again.
More than 80 percent of the workforce is unemployed, inflation is the highest in the world and basics foodstuffs, fuel and power are in short supply.
The international community has cautiously welcomed the power-sharing agreement but stopped short of making any commitments to help pending the formation of the new government. They also want to see a tangible shift of power from Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ruler of 28 years, to Mr. Tsvangirai.
In Ethiopia, 57 percent of girls are forced to get married before they reach their 18th birthday. In this short documentary, Tiringo, married at age 6, explains how early marriage prevented her from attending school.
– Kim Haughton, photojournalist
At 49%, support for Obama is near his record high for the year
PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Tuesday through Thursday finds Barack Obama with a five percentage point lead over John McCain in the presidential preferences of registered voters, 49% to 44%.
This is the fourth consecutive day that Obama has inched forward in voter preferences since the start of the Wall Street financial meltdown beginning with the announcement on Sunday, Sept. 14, that Lehman Brothers was headed for bankruptcy. The overall effect has been to shift the lead back to Obama after McCain had moved ahead following the Republican National Convention.
Obama enjoyed one of his widest advantages over McCain of recent weeks in Thursday night’s interviewing. It will be important to see whether the stock market’s reaction today to aggressive government intervention in the crisis has an impact on the direction of the presidential race over the next few days.
(To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.) — Lydia Saad
(Click here to see how the race currently breaks down by demographic subgroup.)
Survey Methods
For the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008.
The general election results are based on combined data from Sept. 16-18, 2008. For results based on this sample of 2,796 registered voters, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
The Red Cross is providing emergency relief to more than 75,000 people in southern Ethiopia. We need your help so we can carry on distributing food and seeds to those who most need them. Please give whatever you can now by phoning 0845 054 7206 or visiting redcross.org.uk/foodcrisis.
Food, water and sheep: tackling Ethiopia’s food crisis
Source: British Red Cross Society – UK
www.redcross.org.uk/foodcrisis
The Red Cross is delivering immediate emergency food aid to tens of thousands of people suffering acute malnutrition; but staving off hunger through direct food distributions is just one part of a larger overall response.
In Damot Pulasa and Damot Gale, areas in Southern Ethiopia where Red Cross distributions are underway, flooding followed by failed harvests have left many unable to grow enough to feed themselves and their families.
With no food and no crops to sell, families have been forced to eat seeds kept aside for planting and sell livestock and tools to raise money to buy food.
“Unfortunately many of the strategies people are forced to adopt to feed themselves in the short term create conditions where the cycle of poverty and hunger is prolonged. Simply providing food aid helps keep people alive, but it is an unsustainable solution,” said Pete Garratt, British Red Cross relief operations manager.
“As well as providing emergency food aid we are also making sure people’s livelihoods are supported so that, for example, farmers have the seeds and tools they need to be able to produce food for themselves when the next harvest comes in November. Helping people to feed and support themselves means they will not be reliant on indefinite supplies of food aid”
As communities recover, 10,000 sheep will be distributed to farms whose herds perished during the drought, providing a sustainable source of food and income.
Access to water is another issue that, if left unresolved, can feed poverty, hunger and disease.
Currently, nearly half of Damot Pulasa’s 54 hand-dug wells and 13 of the 39 shallow wells are out of operation; people are forced to walk long distances to fetch water. This limited access seriously affects the health of the community – particularly children under five, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers.
The Red Cross is working to re-establish 22 wells and additional boreholes, ensuring reliable long-term clean water supplies, cutting the cycle of drought, poverty and illness that has made the impact of this food crisis so extreme.
“People have been unable to produce food for up to a year because of the floods and drought, as well as this food prices have risen dramatically so even if there is food in the markets very few people can afford it,” explained Lorenzo Violante, International Federation of the Red Cross head of operation in Ethiopia.
“The food distributions we have been carrying out are an immediate life-saving measure, but we are already combining that with a sustainable approach by distributing seeds.
“As the situation develops we’ll be distributing livestock and carrying out water and sanitation work, which not only helps recovery but also builds resilience within the communities; to really help people here for the long term, the solutions to this crisis must be as diverse as its causes.”
To donate to the British Red Cross Appeal visit: www.redcross.org.uk/foodcrisis
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Notes to editors AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW:
Lorenzo Violante, International Federation of the Red Cross head of operation in Ethiopia.
Pete Garratt, relief operations manager for the British Red Cross, based in the UK
