MEKELE, TIGRAY (Walta Woyanne Information Center – WIC): Tigray Regional State of northern Ethiopia sets free 2167 prisoners with official pardon yesterday.
Meseret Gebremariam, Regional Security and Administration Bureau Head, disclosed that the prisoners are released owing to the nations and nationalities day celebrated on November 29 E.C. every year.
Of the individuals freed, 512 have satisfied the preconditions that enable them to reconcile with the people against whom they inflicted harms, the head added.
The Constitution does not allow pardon for individuls who committed crimes in connection with corruption, causing fire and destruction of forests, he underlined and went on to add, those who destroyed telephone and power infrastructures have not received pardon.
The prisoners were released to give them the opportunity to pay back the harm they caused through development efforts on their part, the head said and went on to call upon the public to extend their usual cooperation in facilitating the gesture.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (APA) – The African Union Commission will hold a ground-breaking ceremony on Monday for the construction of its new conference centre and headquarters that will cost over $100 million.
China, currently involved in development activities in many African countries, is building this new center as part of its goodwill relations with Africa.
Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China chairperson Wu Bangguo, AU Commission chairperson Jean Ping and his deputy Erastus Mwencha, Ethiopia Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin and Addis Ababa mayor Kuma Demeksa will be among those invited to the ceremony.
TEHRAN (FNA)- Djibouti Foreign Minister Osman Saleh Mohammed asked Iran to help mediate in the talks between Eritrea and Djibouti aimed at ending border conflicts between the Horn of Africa nations.
Osman made the remarks in a joint press conference with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran on Tuesday.
Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a 1998-2000 war over their frontier, and tensions between the two nations remain high. The fighting along the Djibouti-Eritrea border broke out in the Mount Gabla area, also known as Ras Doumeira, which straddles the Bab al-Mandib straits.
During the press conference, Mottaki said Iran is prepared to help resolve the prolonged conflict, Tehran Times reported.
Djibouti hosts French and US military bases and is the main route to the sea for Eritrea’s arch-foe Ethiopia. Africa’s youngest nation, Eritrea has fractious ties with the West, which accuses it of backing Somali insurgents and impeding UN peacekeepers on the Ethiopia border.
Djibouti says the fighting began after Eritrean soldiers fired on some deserters, prompting Djibouti to return fire.
Analysts say Eritrean-Ethiopian hostility is fuelling the spat.
Latest clashes between the two countries killed at least nine people and wounded 60 others.
“The policy of looking to Africa is atop Iran’s foreign policy agenda. This policy requires Iran to deepen ties with African countries,” Mottaki noted.
He said the ground is fertile for further cooperation between Tehran and Djibouti in the fisheries, health, trade, and energy sectors.
Osman also expressed satisfaction over the friendly relations between Djibouti and Iran. He expressed hope that his visit will pave the way for further expansion of bilateral ties.
The Bush administration had eight years to run our country’s reputation on human rights into the ground. It succeeded not only in tarnishing America’s image, but also in derailing the entire international human rights movement. As a professor of human rights who has studied the opportunities and challenges for the White House in transition periods, I know that the window of opportunity for distinguishing yourself from your predecessor is open now, but you must act quickly and decisively if you are to get human rights back on track.
Here are four steps that you can take:
Step one: Create a relationship with U.S.-based human rights organizations.
The Bush administration treated human rights advocates as enemies and shrugged off their reminders of international standards as inconvenient roadblocks. The Obama administration should consider these same groups to be allies and even partners in promoting human dignity and freedom at home and worldwide. Reaching out to human rights activists can be accomplished by calling to the White House a broad range of human rights advocates for regularly scheduled dialogues on human rights. Listen to the advocates. They know their constituencies, and many have fresh knowledge and experience from human rights frontlines and fault-lines. The kind of information they can provide is so central to the creation of your foreign policy strategies that you may wish to launch the dialogue before you take office.
Step two: Repair your relationship with human rights bodies at the United Nations.
Instead of seeking solutions to problems within UN structures designed to unify countries in a common quest for peace, President Bush took a “go-it-alone” approach. This “you’re with us or against us” mantra was designed to separate and divide. The Obama administration can publically reaffirm its commitment to the UN human rights framework and reassert its interest in taking part in the Human Rights Council, the new centerpiece of the UN human rights system. The Bush administration pulled out of the running for a seat on the body because it feared being subjected to review. (The Council reviews its own members first and, thus, would have subjected the United States to review just as it was being criticized for its practices on torture). Although the Council is a deeply flawed institution, the United States has the responsibility to work with those who are trying to get it right. It would be exceedingly helpful if the new appointments of Americans to UN bodies shared a concern with making human rights mechanisms work. That would be a tremendous difference from the Bush administration appointees, who ranged between being skeptical to being openly hostile toward human rights.
Step three: Do something that unequivocally demonstrates that the United States will no longer act as if it is above international law.
A good start would be the creation of an independent body to investigate the role of military and civilian authorities, acting with direct or implicit approval of the U.S. government, in the torture and abuse of detainees. The investigation can start with Guantánamo, but its mandate should be broad. The Bush administration played one legal game after another to advance a distorted view of the proper usage of military courts and to assert a legally incorrect definition of torture. You can count on support from military lawyers on this one. During the first Bush administration, (especially during the Gulf War), U.S. military lawyers played a key role in overseeing the legality of the actions of not only the U.S. military, but also its allies. The second Bush administration, however, marginalized and ignored those same military lawyers. (George W. Bush’s administration didn’t like the legal answers it was getting from military experts on torture, so it turned elsewhere for lawyers willing to follow the administration’s script). Your administration can reaffirm White House respect for military lawyers by hearing and valuing their analysis of the missteps in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Step four: In your first week in office, get out your pen and begin signing some long overdue international human rights treaties.
President Bush’s scorn of international treaties went so far as to lead him to take the unprecedented move of “unsigning” the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court and the Vienna Convention on Treaties. You might begin by re-signing these, as well as signing on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a convention signed by every country in the world except for the United States and Somalia, and the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, a convention modeled largely on American disability law. These are no-brainers. As to the rest of the human rights treaties that are not signed and/or not ratified, or that are signed and largely ignored, you should appoint an independent board of experts to study and report on the likely outcome of greater American engagement in the treaty processes.
Instead of being viewed as a magnanimous human rights leader, the United States is today considered to be an arrogant human rights cheater. Rebuilding the reputation of the United States and reestablishing its role as a global leader on human rights will take time. But these four steps will give your administration a good start.
Sincerely yours,
Julie Mertus
Julie Mertus is a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, a professor at American University, and the author of the award-winning book Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy (2nd ed. 2008)
Ibrahim Hussein says his faith in the American dream was reaffirmed Tuesday night when Barack Obama won the race for the White House.
The executive director of the East African Community of Orange County, a nonprofit group that helps refugees get resettled here, says community members are jubilant about Obama’s victory. A celebration is planned at 10 a.m. on Saturday at Heritage Park in Irvine.
“We’re happy and what I am hearing from my own children and other groups is that it’s great to be American and great to be here. People are feeling that the American dream is a reality and is reachable. We just have to work hard for it,” Hussein says.
Himself an immigrant who came to the United States some 19 years ago, Hussein was born in Ethiopia to a Kenyan mother and a Somali father. Four of his seven children are American born; three of them voted along with him and his wife on Election Day.
He says he now believes that Obama’s story could be the story of his children.
“We feel very much blessed that we’re here within this community and we have been given a lot,” Hussein says. “We are so happy that one of our own became a U.S. president in our own lifetime and I feel very much that my kid can be like him tomorrow … It’s only possible in the United States. This is just a great land.”
He estimates that there are about 8,000-9,000 East African refugees in Orange County, including about 1,200 from Kenya, the country from which Obama’s father hailed. Kenya observed a national holiday today to mark Obama’s victory.
MOGADHISHU (Reuters) – Somalis expressed hope on Thursday that Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. presidency would help end anarchy in the Horn of Africa nation which Washington views as an important front in its ‘war on terror’.
Somalia has suffered 17 years of civil conflict, the latest manifestation a two-year Islamist insurgency against the Western-backed government and its Ethiopian military allies.
Kidnappings and assassinations are rife and there was no word on Thursday on the fate of six foreigners — two Kenyan pilots and four European aid-workers — seized in central Somalia the day before.
Ethiopia is the main U.S. ally in the region, and its intervention in Somalia since 2006 is viewed by some analysts as a proxy action for U.S. President George W. Bush’s government.
“We are very happy because we think Obama will eliminate Bush’s pressure and mistreatment of the Muslim world and Somalia,” said Mohamud Hussein, a local elder in Mogadishu.
“We believe he will help Somalis make their country peaceful and financially assist them. We were extremely happy to hear of his victory because he is an African.”
Obama faces a complex situation in Somalia, which some people dub an “African Iraq” and where a series of U.S. air-strikes have been targeting alleged al Qaeda suspects.
If the United States encourages Ethiopia to withdraw its troops, that may give ground to hardline Islamists who want to topple the government. But it may also encourage a U.N.-brokered peace deal under consideration between moderate Islamists and the government which hinges on Ethiopia’s exit.
HOSTAGES
Mother-of-six Hawa Aden, in Afgoye town outside Mogadishu, said she hoped the United Nations would intervene in Somalia, replacing the Ethiopians and a 3,000-strong African Union force.
“We hope he will withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and deploy a U.N peacekeeping force in Somalia so that we can enjoy peace like other human beings in the world,” she said.
Mindful of its disastrous intervention in Somalia in the mid-1990s, the U.N. Security Council is reluctant to go in again, though it is studying options.
Somali government spokesman Abdi Haji Gobdon said President Abdullahi Yusuf’s administration was “very happy” with Obama and urged him to seek peace across the Horn of Africa.
He said the U.N.-brokered peace efforts, including a ceasefire the government and moderate Islamists signed in Djibouti last month, had created a good atmosphere.
An Islamist spokesman, Abdirahim Isse Adow, however, ruled out external intervention. “It is the Somalis themselves that create peace and not America,” he said.
Adow said his group, the Islamic Courts Union, was not behind Wednesday’s kidnapping of six foreigners at an airstrip near the town of Dusamareb and would help secure their release.
Two French women, a Bulgarian woman and a Belgian man working for Action Contre La Faim charity were captured along with two Kenyan pilots, sources say.
Aid workers in Nairobi and Somalia fear the militant Islamist group al Shabaab (Youth in Arabic) may be behind the seizure, the latest in a series of abductions, assassinations and attacks on aid workers in Somalia this year.
They were giving little information on the situation, for fear of jeopardising efforts to release the six.
“We know and saw the group that kidnapped the two pilots and the four aid-workers, but mentioning the identity of the kidnappers will mean another problem,” said nervous local resident Mohamed Aden.
“I understand that they slightly injured a French lady who hesitated when the armed men took them at gunpoint.”
Kidnapping can be a lucrative business in Somalia, with hostages generally treated well in anticipation of a ransom.
