(DPA) MOGADISHU, SOMALIA — Six civilians were killed and four wounded when Ethiopian Woyanne troops opened fired on a minibus just south of this Somali capital, witnesses said Thursday.

They said the troops ‘opened fire indiscriminately’, shortly after a gun battle between Islamic insurgents and Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers protecting a convoy.

Yusuf Haji, a resident in the town of Walaweyn, told DPA that the minibus was attacked late Wednesday evening as it passed through an area near the scene of an earlier gunfight.

Militants have been waging a guerrilla war since Ethiopian Woyanne troops helped the government oust the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) in late 2006.

The interim government has been unable to achieve stability in the Horn of Africa country, which has been plagued by chaos and civil war since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991.

Aid organizations estimate that around 6,000 civilians have died and hundreds of thousands have fled Mogadishu in the last year of fighting.

A peace deal was agreed between moderate Islamists and the government in early June, but al-Shabaab, the armed wing of the UIC, has not signed the agreement.

Officials from both the government and opposition are due to meet this weekend in neighbouring Djibouti in an attempt to bring peace closer.

(Somaliweyn Media Center) — The Ethiopian Woyanne troops at Wanlaweyn district in the lower Shabelle region in southern Somalia opened fire randomly at civilian passengers.

So far 7 people were confirmed dead and 5 others seriously wounded, after these Ethiopian Woyanne troops opened fire on passengers bus which left Mogadishu and heading towards Wanlaweyn district in the lower Shabelle region.

These Ethiopian Woyanne forces encountered attack yesterday evening as they were traveling between Wanlaweyn district and Balidogle the former Somali air force base.

The reports from the area says that the passengers spent the night at a village called Yaq dhub and started their journey in the morning hours and meet accidentally with these vexed Ethiopian Woyanne troops and with suspicion they opened indiscriminate fire at these innocent passengers.

The deceased and the wounded ones were taken to Wanlaweyn general hospital for the dead ones to be burred and the wounded ones to be treated.

The Ethiopian Woyanne troops mostly travel along these road which links Mogadishu to Baidoa, and we can call it is the only route they can use when the need transfer troops from one destination to the other.

It is not some thing unusual for the Ethiopian Woyanne troops to open fire at passengers and as well other innocent people who have not committed any sort of crime against them.

By FOXNews.com

Sources say former Secretary of State Colin Powell will endorse Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol told FOX News exclusively on Wednesday.

“He may well give a speech at the Democratic convention explaining his endorsement of Obama,” Kristol, a FOX News contributor, said, citing inside sources.

“This is not an absolute done deal, but these people are very confident that Powell will endorse Obama,” Kristol said, adding that he thinks Powell, a Republican, still has “a high respect” for John McCain, Obama’s Republican rival.

Powell immediately denied the report.

“I do not have time to waste on Bill Kristol’s musings,” Powell told ABC News. “I am not going to the convention. I have made this clear.”

Roll Call executive editor Mort Kondracke, also a FOX News contributor, said he personally has spoken with Powell, who denied the report and said he has made no endorsement decisions, according to Kondracke.

An endorsement by Powell could go a long way to attracting moderates and wayward Republicans to the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.

Over the years, Powell himself has been touted as a potential presidential or vice presidential candidate. The former national security adviser served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He was secretary of state for the younger President Bush.

His tenure is most notable for presenting to the U.N. Security Council evidence that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. His presentation led to a resolution endorsing military action against that country, but he later described it as a “blot” on his record.

Powell has unofficially advised Obama and Republican candidate John McCain but had not endorsed anyone. A spokesman said in July that he was undecided.

In April, Powell praised Obama’s response to controversial remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had said the United States brought the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on itself by supporting terrorism and that the government created the AIDS virus to “destroy people of color.”

“I thought that Senator Obama handled the issue well,” said Powell, the nation’s first black secretary of state. “He didn’t abandon the minister that brought him closer to his faith, but at the same time he deplored the kinds of statements that the Reverend Wright had made.”

Obama later turned his back on Wright after the minister courted controversy again with additional comments in public.

Kristol said sources told him Powell will “quite possibly” speak at the Democratic convention on the same night as Obama’s vice-presidential selection and former President Bill Clinton.

“The Obama people are quietly trying to line up a pretty strong convention,” Kristol said. “I think the Obama campaign shouldn’t be underestimated. Obviously anyone would like to have Powell’s endorsement.”

Bill Clinton greets villagers during his visit to the Ethiopian highlands. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty images

Sarah Boseley, The Guardian

He dropped out of the sky and left, an hour or so later, the same way, helicopter rotor blades driving a gritty dust storm from the dirt playing field into the faces of hundreds of Ethiopian hill villagers. They waved and clapped and shook the hand of a white-haired man who used to hold the most powerful office on the planet and who has just failed to help his wife secure it in her turn. Yet the people of Rema had no idea who William Jefferson Clinton was or what he was doing in their village.

One man knew the name, though his wife looked blank. “Clinton,” said Awke Tiruneh, whose hut the president had been due to visit but didn’t, because of the tight schedule powerful men run to. “He is from Germany.” It is the only foreign country Tiruneh has heard of, because a German NGO is based on Rema’s doorstep, but he has not a clue where either Germany or America are. The outside world is the village on top of the next hill, a long, rocky walk down one mountain and up another.
Link to this audio

Yet Clinton came to put Rema on the map, hailing it as a model for the developing world and a place that could teach the US a thing or two. Rema, in the northern highlands, is now the first solar-powered village in Ethiopia – a cluster of 1,100 homes that shine in the dark evenings like white beads on a string. Every home has electric light from an energy-efficient LED bulb hanging from the straw ceiling. Children can do schoolwork after 6pm while women weave the gabi – a white cotton head-to-toe wrap that is worn in church and in the evenings to keep out the cold (now Clinton has one too). Night classes have started in the school for adults who want to learn to read, there is a solar-powered fridge at the health centre that cannot run out of fuel, and women no longer have to walk a mile to the well, thanks to a solar-powered pump. High-quality equipment has been installed that will last for 25 or 30 years. Villagers pay around 80p a month to cover the cost of maintenance and new batteries.

Rema has become a model for the future energy needs of developing countries, Clinton believes. Solar power could be a revolution for Africa. “It’s the energy equivalent of the cellphone movement,” he says.

Bill is not the only Clinton whose imagination has been caught by this project. His 28-year-old daughter Chelsea is there too, as are Clinton’s brother Roger and 14-year-old nephew Tyler. Chelsea took indefinite unpaid leave from her management consultancy job to help her mother’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination. “She wasn’t back at a new task yet so she wanted to come with me, and I love it,” her father tells me later in the presidential suite at the Addis Ababa Sheraton, whose marbled elegance and air conditioning would make a Rema villager’s eyes pop. “We like to travel together.”

The shade of Hillary’s momentous campaign travels with them. Clinton speaks of it with a sort of warm afterglow, in spite of the panning he personally received. “I’m immensely proud of Hillary,” he says. “Her performance in March, April and May, to June 3, was literally miraculous. If you’d told me, given the facts that existed on March 1, that she’d come back, win more popular votes, do as well as she did, I would never have believed it … I thought she learned, she grew and I think by the end she was running like a house on fire.

“I’m very grateful actually, personally, that I had a chance to get out and see so much of America, because her only option after she lost all those caucuses in February and knew she was going to be outspent was to raise this incredible grassroots campaign. And Chelsea made 450 appearances for her mother. In the last three months alone I went to 350 different communities. I got to see parts of America I never saw when I was running or serving, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”

Now, however, he is on a whistle-stop tour of his charitable foundation’s projects in Africa: today Ethiopia, tomorrow Rwanda, the next day in and out of Liberia and on to Senegal. Much of it is to do with health – Clinton’s influence, his ability to flatter, charm and persuade, has had great success in negotiating down drug prices for Aids and malaria for the developing world. He is pushing to increase dramatically the numbers of women with HIV given drugs in pregnancy to stop their babies becoming infected. But here in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, we are looking at ways to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“My whole theory about climate change is that the biggest problem in aggregate is the fact that India and China are about to pass the US in emissions and no country is going to agree to remain poor in order to avert climate change. We have to be able to show that there are economically viable options.

“I think it is really important that the vast mass of countries that are developing find ways to skip the carbon stage of economic development – ways that accelerate rather than undermine their wellbeing.”

Shouldn’t the US take steps to reduce its own emissions before it starts visiting its ideas on Africa? “I think that the United States does need to pass climate change legislation, we need to put a price on carbon, we need to set up a capping trade system and one that can’t be cheated on: I agree with all that. But when people say that most loudly, they are usually looking for an excuse to do nothing, and if we burn up the planet then no one will give you laurels for having come up with the best available excuse to do nothing. Your grandchildren won’t be proud of you. And we may have an irreversible situation,” he says.

“Secondly, because all these developing countries have to be worried about the problems at hand, feeding the people that are there, educating them, providing basic healthcare, having some near-term economic strategy, I think that people like me who care about this stuff have to find economically attractive options for them.”

Environmentally friendly energy policies can go hand in hand with economic growth, he says. It’s happened in the UK and Denmark, he says, two of only six countries – excluding “some former communist countries that, prior to 1990, were running very, very dirty carbon-based inefficient industrial economies” – that have been on course to meet their Kyoto target.

“The biggest problem with Kyoto was the United States bugged out on it, so it gave everybody an excuse to take a bath,” he says.

“I’m not a government and I don’t have access to vast amounts of money, and I’m frustrated that even when the Democrats are in, we still haven’t given a tax credit, for example, for wind energy that goes more than three years. Nonetheless, somebody needs to go out there and help people figure out how to do this stuff. That’s what I do.

“I just try to figure it out and I try to get other smart people around who figure out how to do this, because I was so struck by all these countries that won’t meet their Kyoto targets. Most of them were not led by people who were dishonest when they signed Kyoto. They aren’t lazy, they aren’t stupid and they aren’t corrupt. They’re well-meaning, hard-working people who are, like all political leaders, facing all kinds of competing pressures in an economy that is not organised for tomorrow’s energy – it’s organised for yesterday’s.

“One reason I went to that little village today is that that little village is now organised for tomorrow. I’ll go home now and I’ll be able to tell people that I went to the highlands of Ethiopia and saw a classroom with two LED lights – nobody will believe that – and that it works economically for them.”

The man who brought light to Rema was neither a former president nor a technology geek. Harald Schützeichel studied music and theology, he tells me. He started the Solar Energy Foundation because he wanted to help development. If there are environmental benefits, so much the better. He was completely astonished when he got an email saying Clinton wanted to visit. He is still not quite sure why, but he knows that the boss of Good Energies, the company that has donated 80% of his funding, is a friend of the former president.

What Schützeichel does not realise is that Marcel Brenninkmeijer, founder and CEO of Good Energies, who also jumps out of the Clinton helicopter, is shelling out cash – it took £240,000 to equip Rema – because he is part of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). It is a kind of networking with good deeds attached. Clinton brings together wealthy businessmen and government leaders for an annual jamboree and they promise action on global problems, not just talk. If they fail to carry out their promises, they don’t get invited again.

Schützeichel, though, is innocent of the politics of global philanthropy. Clinton invites him to give a presentation to the next meeting in September. Afterwards, Schützeichel confesses he has no idea what the CGI is. He wants help to expand his solar-powered villages across Ethiopia by setting up a microfinance bank that will allow villagers to borrow money for solar power installation and pay it off at a rate they can afford. “I need €10m [£7.8m],” he says, barely appreciating that he has just been handed his best-ever opportunity of getting it.

Rema had its installation for free, to show what could be done. Down the hill from the village, Schützeichel has built an International Solar Energy School, which has trained 24 technicians from all over Ethiopia. The plan is for them to return to their regions and set up their own businesses, equipping more villages, which will borrow the necessary funds from Schützeichel’s microfinance bank.

We’re thousands of miles away from the US, but not from its politics. Some of the foundation staff worked for Hillary’s nomination and they talk of it as something momentous, with a sort of awe-struck sadness that they were part of it and she lost. “I just want very much the country to change course,” says Clinton. “I want us to be on a different economic course, a different social policy course, a different course in the world. And we’re going to do what we can to be helpful.”

What about criticisms of his role in Hillary’s campaign? “It’s all part of the deal,” he says, laughing. “Look, what we were doing was working, so you had to assume there was going to be some blow-back. It’s a contact sport, politics … I would never have gotten back into politics if it hadn’t been for Hillary, but I felt so strongly that she should be elected and she needed all of us – she needed Chelsea and she needed me. Our bodies made up for the financial disparity a little bit. And so we threw ourselves into the fray and did our best and you just get up and go on.

“And I’m immensely proud of her, but I think she’s the political leader of our family now – I’m not in politics. And I’m going to do exactly what she says we should do and agree with her decision. I think she’s been big and positive and that’s what we should all be.”

And so he and Chelsea are in Africa to change the world in other ways. Rema’s name will be spoken of in high circles, as a byword for environmentally friendly development. More visitors may descend from the skies. A solar-powered cinema is mooted, where films on development will be shown, so that Rema’s people will understand what they can aspire to.

Awke Tiruneh and his wife Emaye Beyene are not the only couple who are faintly bemused. They are pleased with their two lightbulbs, one in the main room and a second in the kitchen annexe of their pristine mud hut, and with the radio that everybody in Rema tunes to get music, not news. But they say they don’t want anything else.

“When they have more money, they don’t know what to do with it in Rema,” says Samson Tsegaye, country director of the Solar Power Foundation. “They are happy. They don’t need a Mercedes or a television. When they have money, the men are always going to the bar.

The solar cinema is to show them what money can do – how opportunity can come to their lives. They have three meals a day but they don’t know what is going on in the world.”

Are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been at the centre of what is going on in the world, happier than the villagers of Rema? It’s an interesting question.

Israeli and American Jewish organizations grapple with the fate of thousands of Falash Mura remaining in Ethiopia.

By Michele Chabin, The Jewish Week

MEVASSERET, ISRAEL — After waiting almost a decade to emigrate from Ethiopia to Israel, Masaret Assafa, who, along with his wife and two children, received the green light eight months ago, tries to focus on his new life in this pleasant absorption village just outside Jerusalem.

Assafa, 32, attends the intensive Hebrew-language ulpan and Judaism classes intended to prepare him and other Israel-based Falash Mura for life as Israeli Jews, but says his heart is still in Gondar, where his recently orphaned sisters and brothers wait for an Israeli emissary who may never come.

As his wife, Asmar, serves spicy coffee and homemade injira, a fluffy Ethiopian bread, in their tiny but cheerfully decorated one-bedroom apartment, Assafa admits that “life isn’t so easy in Israel.

Being in a new culture, learning a new language is hard, but at least here we have food, clothing, a roof over our heads. I worry about my siblings every moment. Do they have enough to eat? Who is looking out for them? When will they be brought to Israel?”

The Israeli government’s announcement earlier this month that the Aug. 5 flight carrying Falash Mura out of Ethiopia would be its last has unleashed an outcry from some community activists and their supporters, who insist that thousands — even tens of thousands — of Ethiopians with Jewish roots should be brought to Israel.

But others within the Ethiopian community and outside say the vast majority of Falash Mura (Christians whose Jewish ancestors converted to Christianity a century ago) are merely opportunists who want to immigrate to Israel for a better way of life, not because they care about Judaism.

The debate, which will decide the fate of thousands of Ethiopians, many of whom have relatives in Israel, is also creating a dilemma for diaspora Jews, who must decide whether to support continued aliyah, even if it means going against the wishes of the Israeli government and many Ethiopian Jews.
Within the Ethiopian community in Israel “there is a lot of disagreement over whether or not to bring more Falash Mura,” concedes Avi Masfin, spokesman for the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews. “Some say the Falash Mura were forcibly converted, and now that they have the chance to live as Jews, we should bring them to Israel. Others view them as Christians, not returning Jews, and say their families are the same ones who made it difficult for us back in Ethiopia, so why bring them?”
One person who thinks Falash Mura aliyah should have ended years ago is Danny Adeno Abebe, an Ethiopian-Israeli journalist.

In a blistering JTA op-ed Abebe calls the Falash Mura “a collection of people looking for handouts trying to pass themselves off as Jews forced to forsake their Jewish faith.” He rejects as “nonsense” the claim that some Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity decades ago.

Other Ethiopian Jews as well as some American Jewish organizations share views closer to that of Yaffet Alemu, a Conservative rabbi who loudly advocates continued Falash Mura immigration. Sitting in the Assafa family’s living room, Rabbi Alemu insists that there has always been anti-Jewish feeling in Ethiopia and it continues to this day.

“Everyone in Ethiopia considers [the Falash Mura] Jewish because they left their villages believing Israel would bring them home and now they have nothing. They have nothing to go back to, and they would face persecution and death if they did.”

Micha Feldman, who was the Jewish Agency’s top expert on Ethiopian affairs for many years and who served as Israel counsel to Ethiopia, agrees that the Falash Mura are in a bind.

“They left their villages and their livelihoods to go to Gondar or Addis, almost always at the urging of family members in Israel, not the Israeli government, and are now dependent on Jewish organizations and the Israeli government,” Feldman says. “They made their own decision to leave, but since then their land has been taken by other families. There’s also the issue of the Ethiopian ‘Code of Honor’: You don’t return to a place you left. Doing so would be humiliating, and it’s not done.”

But Feldman flatly rejects claims that Israel is employing a racist double standard when it comes to the Falash Mura.

“The only group Israel went far beyond the Right of Return for is the Falash Mura,” Feldman says. “If a family converted to Christianity five generations ago and lived as Christians all those years, they cannot claim at least one Jewish grandparent,” the criteria for the Right of Return law. The fact that successive governments have tried to be sensitive to the Ethiopians’ all-encompassing view of what constitutes a family “proves that Israel is not racist,” Feldman says.

Acknowledging that Falash Mura immigration cannot go on indefinitely (“there will always be more who want to come”) Feldman, who works with SELAH, the Israel Crisis Management Center, says the Jewish Agency and other bodies that have supported Ethiopian aliyah have, in the past, discussed ways to help those left behind.

While Israeli officials, under intense criticism, have indicated some willingness — though no promises — to screen another 8,700 Ethiopia-based Falash Mura on a case-by-case basis, the United Jewish Communities (UJC) and other Jewish organizations are grappling with how to meet the needs of the group.

On Tisha b’Av, the Conservative movement launched a campaign to raise funds to feed the nearly 9,000 Falash Mura who relied on UJC food programs after these programs were discontinued on June 30, at the request of the Israeli government.

UJC officials say they are aware of the humanitarian problems exacerbated by their organization’s monthly $68,000 cutbacks, and are discussing the matter with their leadership.

While politicians and fundraisers debate the pros and cons, Masaret Assafa waits for his five orphaned siblings in Gondar.

“My mother died waiting for her dream to be fulfilled,” Assafa says forlornly, staring at a family portrait. “Will the same thing happen to my brothers and sisters?”

By Bret McCabe, CityPaper.com

Dutch punk outfit the Ex has been a globally aware and politically minded musical force of nature since the late 1970s, but since the late ’80s the band has fervently and organically intertwined that awareness into its musicmaking process. The band has explored folk music from Hungary, Turkey, the Congo, Eritrea, and Vietnam, and has recorded and toured with countless musical collaborators, from Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore and Dutch improviser/composer Ab Baars to vocalist Han Buhrs and a remarkably rich body of work with the late American cellist Tom Cora. More recently, a long-running interest in the music of Ethiopia, and especially saxophonist Getachew Mukuria, resulted in two tours of the East African country, the band extending an invitation to Mukuria to play at its 25th anniversary celebrations in 2004, and eventually ’06’s gorgeous Moa Anbessa recording of Mukuria tunes backed by the Ex plus a horn section.

This month, that group visits America for the first time, and City Paper spoke with the Ex guitarist Andy Moor by phone from his home in Amsterdam about the upcoming string of dates, which brings the big band to the Ottobar Aug. 14.

City Paper: How did you first discover Ethiopian music? Through the Ethiopiques series? I ask only because such music was often hard to come by in the States before compilations and labels such as Crammed Discs made such music more readily available.
Andy Moor: We were actually into the music long before the Ethiopiques series. I’ve been listening to African music for 20 years, but maybe about 15 years or 17 years ago I heard this record called Ere Mela Mela by Mahmoud Ahmed–it’s also in the Ethiopiques series now, it’s No. 7, but originally it was released as just an LP called Ere Mela, and that was the first record of that stuff that I heard. And then another one called Ethiopique Groove, which is also on that series now. It was actually put out by the same guy [Francis Falceto] who put out the Ethiopiques series, it was just released earlier. It was before he came up with this idea to do a series, he just put out two LPs through this Crammed Discs label.

So that’s how we first discovered it and really, really liked it when we heard that. And then we used to go to restaurants in Amsterdam because there’s about 10 here, Ethiopian restaurants. And we used to hear all these old, wobbly cassettes that they were playing, and there were all this stuff we didn’t know, so we were always asking the owner of the restaurant what it was. And they would say some unpronounceable name that we never remembered. It actually took a long time before the names actually stuck in our head and we got a bit of an idea of what it was all about. And then we discovered Getachew when we went to Ethiopia and we found a cassette of his music. It was a copy of a copy of a copy, but it really stood out. It was instrumental and it was quite unusual, because most of the pop music is always with vocals are so important to the music in Ethiopian life. Ethiopian people still ask us, “Why are you interested in this music when you don’t understand what the words are about?” And we explain to them that we love the music and we’re also musicians so we’re really listening to it in a slightly different way.

But from that we discovered who he was, and we decided when we our 25th anniversary, which was in 2004, that we would invite Getachew to play at the anniversary and play with the ICP. [Instant Composer’s Pool] So that happened, Francis Falceto, the guy who puts out the Ethiopiques series, he got us in contact with Getachew, and he came over and he played with the ICP. And then we went on tour together in this bus.

CP: The entire big band?
AM: Yeah. We did this crazy French tour of a week with about 35 musicians, and Getachew was one of them. And each night he played a solo, and at that time we weren’t playing with him. We were out playing our Ex set but we had one song in our set, which is actually called “Getachew,” and we invited him each night to come onstage to join us, because it was one of his songs that we were doing a version of. And I think he really, really enjoyed that one song every night playing with us. And it was him that suggested, after that, he said, “I want you,”–he called us, “the Ex band,”–and he said, “I want the Ex band to play my music.” So the great thing was that it was his idea, not ours. And then he sent us a CD with 10, just the melody on a saxophone, and we just went into the rehearsal room and tried to figure out how to put arrangements on them. And then he came over and we rehearsed together and played a few gigs and recorded. It’s great for him to be so open about that because he was really not used to our kind of music.

CP: So you didn’t record in Ethiopia?
AM: No, we recorded in Amsterdam, but we prepared quite a lot before hand. We listened to the CDs, ’cause quite a bit of the songs are on the CD, [Ethiopiques] No. 14, and we sort of figured out–we did a mixture of trying to sort of not copy but get a similar idea to what is on his CD but also our own sound and also our own ideas. And he was very open. Whenever we came up with a new idea for one of his songs, he was totally into it.

CP: How was it playing in Ethiopia when you went over there?
AM: Well, the first time we toured there was four or five years ago, and at that point we knew who Getatchew was but we had never met him. He was just this kind of legendary figure to us. So we didn’t really know him and we didn’t meet him on that trip either. But we did a kind of mixture of our songs and some Ethiopian songs, but we didn’t play with Ethiopian musicians on that tour. That was more us playing our own stuff to Ethiopian people. We did two tours like that, one time doing a circle in the north and one a circle in the south.

CP: How did audiences respond to the shows?
AM: A mixture of amusement, really excited, kind of, and I think very happy that we choose–this weird Dutch band–choose to come all the way over and also play some Ethiopian songs. It was like a celebration in a way, it felt a bit like a spectacle also. For them it must have been quite bizarre, but there was something quite real about it. And they way we played, I think they sensed our energy and enthusiasm–we really, really liked this music. We weren’t just doing it as a kind of show or something. For us it was really, kind of, you know . . .

CP: Sincere?
AM: Exactly. And we mixed it with our songs. And they actually really, really liked our songs. We were wondering a bit how they would react to our songs. We thought, Let’s choose the sort of more melodic songs in our set. But we did a few of the crazy ones, and the crazy songs were the ones they loved the most. They really went for the kind of energetic, rhythmic–I think they just liked the power and the energy of it. I guess the music was so bizarre for them anyway. But maybe not. Maybe they . . . I don’t know. It’s very hard to imagine how Ex music, that has evolved over 25 years at that point, how they’re going to respond to it. Because they haven’t had any history of punk ever get in there. I think they’ve had a bit of hip-hop, a bit of R&B, a bit of soul, and in the ’60s they had the whole James Brown thing and all that stuff, but I don’t think they ever heard a punky guitar band like that. So I think for them it was a new kind of sound but with a similar energy, a recognizable energy anyway.

CP: I imagine you weren’t playing in rock clubs anyway.
AM: No. We weren’t really playing in clubs at all. We were playing in public spaces more like. On the stairs of a theater we played. And, basically, on a giant podium in a big outdoor square, which is right next to a sort of service station, but where about three or four thousand people came. And then we played in a giant old cow barn, and then in a police community hall. [laughs] It was very odd, mostly not really set up at all for gigs. And actually we had a little sort of generator to power the amps and the PA–we brought our own PA and everything. It was really set up on the day when we arrived into town. We would have to go and meet the chief of police of the town and make a deal with them. We’d say, ‘We’d like to play here. Can you suggest a place?’ And they would suggest a place. That’s how we ended up in the police community hall once, because that was what the chief of police of that town offered. And sometimes they would ask for $50 for us playing, and other times they didn’t ask anything. And then we would drive around advertising the gig just with a megaphone and sticking posters up on the day of the show.

CP: Now that’s DIY.
AM: [laughs] Yeah. And the thing is, we didn’t charge any money for it. There was no point asking any money for this. We got a bit of help from the Dutch government, they helped fund it a bit. But basically, it would have been crazy to try and charge an admission. It would have been ridiculous.

CP: I read, I think inMoa Anbessa’s liner notes, that you also had cassette copies of the album made because CDs aren’t what people listen to in Ethiopia.
AM: Yes, in Ethiopia music is still mostly sold on cassette. So we just made 10,000 cassettes and pretty much sort of left them there and left it up to them a bit to see how it goes. But basically, if you want to buy music there, you go around to shops, and there are CDs for sale, but they’re a little bit too expensive. People still can’t really afford to buy them and CD players. And all the taxi drivers have cassette machines, so actually what we did was we went to the main taxi stand in the piazza and we just gave loads of the taxi drivers cassettes. So basically they drive around the whole city playing our cassettes, it’s a really nice.

CP: Do you still find copies of copies of cassettes in public markets there? I’ve still seen that–or CDR bootlegging–in places I’ve been to recently.
AM: When we were first there it was extreme. You had copies of sort of 10th generation, and they were beginning to sound pretty bad. All the cassette shops aren’t allowed to do that anymore. There are some copyright laws there, but it happens still. But basically, there’s 10,000 original cassettes there [of the album], and God knows how many copies. There’s nothing we can do about that, and that’s the whole point. That’s fine, that’s the way music gets spread there.

CP: Do you have any idea of how it’s been received in Ethiopia, what people think of it?
AM: Well, the thing is most of the songs that we played are very old songs by Getachew, and half of them aren’t even his songs, they come from traditional Ethiopian songs. They’re either a war song or a certain scale that he plays. It would be the equivalent of an Ethiopian band coming over and playing really, really old blues numbers. People know most of the songs anyway. This is another version, and that happens a lot in Ethiopia. A lot of the singers and the pop stars they sing a new version of an old tune. That tradition is still really strong there. And there’s some great tunes there.

CP: You joined the band in the early 1990s, correct?
AM: Yeah.

CP: That seems to be the time when–now, I’ve since become familiar with the band’s entire output, but I really didn’t start being that familiar with the Ex at all until the late 1980s–but it seems like over the ’90s the band really started broadening its ideas and sound through collaborations and exploring the music of other cultures.
AM: I think the Ex was always into playing with guests and other musicians, they’d always done that, and I think it just became wider and wider. As our access to different kinds of music from all over the world became easier and easier, we got exposed to much more music. And when I joined I was really into East European music and African music. I always had a lot of those records. So the great thing when I first joined [the band], the moment I joined also Tom Cora joined, and he was also into that sort of stuff. So it was a perfect chance to explore these areas.

It wasn’t so much that we had a strategy with that. I think it was more–again, when anyone has an idea and they throw it into the pot, we try in the rehearsal room and it either works or it doesn’t work. And when it works it ends up in a gig, and even in the gig we can try it a few times and we can lose it because it doesn’t get better. So that just grew from a very early stage.

CP: I was going to ask about access because, although there has always been a great deal of music from other cultures on LP, the availability of it now seems so much more vast, and I didn’t know if being in Europe has given you and the band better access to explore such music through travel or just proximity to so many different cultures. How did you first start getting into such music?
AM: I felt like I heard a lot of rock music and I kind of knew it. It wasn’t so easy to hear new stuff that I liked anymore. I remember at university I was studying anthropology and I suddenly was given access to the music library and hundreds of records of traditional music from all over the world, and I suddenly felt, ‘My god.’ First of all, I didn’t realize that people were actually recording music from all over the world–I didn’t know that existed. And then when I started listening to it, some of it was bizarre music. And I guess I don’t have one specific style of music that I’m interested in, and suddenly there was this whole area of music that I never heard. And that’s continued–it’s endless. In a way, now, especially, we have such incredible access to music. You can’t say that you’ve heard it all or that you can’t find any music out there that you like. That’s ridiculous, it’s impossible. I think I’ll never have enough time in my life to hear all the great music out there. Of course, a lot of it’s awful, also, so you sort of choose the stuff that you like.

But I think keeping that sort of openness, of looking out for stuff all over, is part of it and probably part of what keeps the Ex fresh. We’re not just a bunch of people sitting at home listening to punk records. We never listen to punk records anymore. Occasionally I’ll listen to an old Fall song or a Birthday Party song, because some of them are really amazing. But most of the music is either new stuff that is just coming out that I’m checking out or electronic music and dubstep or dub African music. All that stuff can go back into the band when we play without it having to sound like that. It’s more like influences that trickle in.

CP: Plus, it’s rather humbling and cool to realize there’s so much music out there that you haven’t heard or responded to before at all.
AM: Exactly. And with each area you can touch the surface or go really, really deep into it. And to go really deep, you need time. You need to listen to it again and again. It’s not something that you can just study. You’ve actually got to listen to the stuff and get to know it, and that takes your lifetime for one style or even one country of music. So, in a way, it’s endless. It’s great, it can be a bit overwhelming as well, but it’s also fantastic. We’ve been listening to Ethiopian music for a long time, and this project is in that area, but at the moment we’re planning a new project with a new bunch of musicians and we don’t know what we’re going to do. And that’s so great. Every time we go to the rehearsal room, it’s a bit of a mystery and a bit of an experiment, because we have no idea how we’re going to sound like the next time.

CP: That has to be a great feeling to share with bandmates.
AM: It is. You feel like you’re in a new band each time you make a new set.

CP: So is this the first time the Ex has brought this project to the States?
AM: With this group, yes. And it’s the first time Getachew has ever been in the States. And the great thing is we’re playing in Washington, where there’s a massive Ethiopian population. And we heard in Baltimore there’s quite a big Ethiopian population, so we’re hoping some of those people come. We went to Washington and we went to restaurants and put up leaflets and stuff, but we have no idea whether the people will actually go for it because it’s in a rock club and stuff. It’s hard to say. But that would be great if Ethiopians came. For some Ethiopians it’s old music, to the young kids, but when we told people about it they were really excited. Some people thought Getachew wasn’t even alive anymore, so to hear that he was alive and playing in their city, that was really good news.