ADDIS ABABA, July 26 (Reuters) – Ethiopian opposition leaders accused the government on Thursday of waging an “intensive propaganda campaign” against them through state media, less than a week after being freed in a clemency deal.
Thirty eight opposition members and activists were freed from jail last Friday after a nearly two-year trial that rights groups and donors complained was an attempt to dismantle the opposition after it made strong gains in 2005 elections.
The defendants were found guilty of inciting violence, treason and trying to topple the government, and 35 of them were given life sentences.
“It is also our belief that the people understand the true nature of the intensive propaganda campaign that the government is waging through the mass media after the conclusion of the agreement,” the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) said in a statement.
“We are also fully confident that the propaganda barrage will not, in any way, reduce the strong support that the people have for CUD.”
Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Since the pardon, announced by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, state-owned Ethiopian television has aired several interviews with lawyers who said the trial and the convictions were just.
In a broadcast on Saturday, the chief prosecutor in the case, Shimeles Kemal, said the opposition leaders’ crimes justified the death penalty.
The defendants were arrested after two bouts of violence following disputed 2005 elections in which 199 civilians and police were killed, 800 people wounded and 30,000 arrested according to a parliamentary inquiry.
The CUD said it would continue to “struggle for democracy” and pledged to resolve its differences with the government through a reconciliation process initiated by the same elders that negotiated their release.
The group was freed after the government made public a letter it said CUD leaders sent to Meles admitting their guilt and promising to respect the law.
The CUD said a government statement on the clemency agreement was different to what they agreed to, but gave no details.
“It is our belief that the elders will make public the true content of the agreement at a time and in a manner that is convenient to them,” the statement said.
ADDIS ABABA, July 26 (Reuters) – Ethiopian opposition leaders accused the government on Thursday of waging an “intensive propaganda campaign” against them through state media, less than a week after being freed in a clemency deal.
Thirty eight opposition members and activists were freed from jail last Friday after a nearly two-year trial that rights groups and donors complained was an attempt to dismantle the opposition after it made strong gains in 2005 elections.
The defendants were found guilty of inciting violence, treason and trying to topple the government, and 35 of them were given life sentences.
“It is also our belief that the people understand the true nature of the intensive propaganda campaign that the government is waging through the mass media after the conclusion of the agreement,” the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) said in a statement.
“We are also fully confident that the propaganda barrage will not, in any way, reduce the strong support that the people have for CUD.”
Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Since the pardon, announced by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, state-owned Ethiopian television has aired several interviews with lawyers who said the trial and the convictions were just.
In a broadcast on Saturday, the chief prosecutor in the case, Shimeles Kemal, said the opposition leaders’ crimes justified the death penalty.
The defendants were arrested after two bouts of violence following disputed 2005 elections in which 199 civilians and police were killed, 800 people wounded and 30,000 arrested according to a parliamentary inquiry.
The CUD said it would continue to “struggle for democracy” and pledged to resolve its differences with the government through a reconciliation process initiated by the same elders that negotiated their release.
The group was freed after the government made public a letter it said CUD leaders sent to Meles admitting their guilt and promising to respect the law.
The CUD said a government statement on the clemency agreement was different to what they agreed to, but gave no details.
“It is our belief that the elders will make public the true content of the agreement at a time and in a manner that is convenient to them,” the statement said.
LAMU, Kenya, July 25 — United Nations officials and the Ethiopian government appear to have reached an agreement to allow emergency food aid into a conflict-ridden area that the Ethiopian military has been blockading for several weeks, both sides said on Wednesday.
But Ethiopian officials expelled the Red Cross from the same area after accusing its workers of being rebel spies.
According to Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman, food deliveries will soon begin to most parts of the eastern Ogaden region, which the Ethiopian military has recently sealed off in an apparent effort to squeeze a growing rebel movement there.
“The food distribution has started from the center to different areas,” Mr. Mohammed said. “I think it will reach most places soon. But where there is no security, there will not be deliveries.”
Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the United Nations’ World Food Program, said that United Nations officials had been meeting with the Ethiopian government for several weeks about access for food aid and that teams had reached most parts of the conflict region to determine how much aid was needed.
“The food is still not there in all the zones, but there is a process under way,” Mr. Smerdon said. “We are working with Ethiopian officials and others on exactly how the food will be dispatched.”
Mr. Smerdon said that with food prices rapidly rising, local markets empty and the flood season beginning next month, there could be a “humanitarian crisis” in some areas unless the military lifted restrictions on food aid and commercial traffic.
The Ogaden is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest countries, and also the site of an intense insurgency and counterinsurgency.
The most active rebel group in the area, and possibly all of Ethiopia, is the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The government considers it a group of rebel terrorists, especially after members attacked a Chinese oil field in the area in April, killing more than 60 soldiers and Chinese workers. At the same time, human rights groups and villagers say that Ethiopian troops have gang-raped women, burned down villages and tortured civilians.
Several former administrators from the area and a member of Parliament who recently defected have accused the Ethiopian military and its proxy militias of skimming food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to fighters. The Ethiopian government has denied the accusations and said it was the Ogaden rebels who were stealing food aid and abusing the population. The government has also accused the Front of getting arms and training from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s enemy.
Western diplomats and lawmakers in Congress have expressed concern about Ethiopia’s human rights record. Several measures are moving through the House and Senate that would place strict conditions on assistance to Ethiopia, which receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each year.
Western diplomats in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, said their biggest issue was the military blockade, which they said was putting hundreds of thousands of impoverished nomads at risk of starvation. Several humanitarian officials have said that they need to temper their criticisms or not speak publicly so as to prevent their organizations from being permanently blocked from the area.
On Tuesday, regional government officials, who oversee the Ogaden, expelled the Red Cross.
“They were spies,” Mr. Mohammed said. “They were following regional officials and relaying information to the rebels.”
Red Cross officials declined to comment, saying they were still negotiating with the government to find a way to stay. The regional government has given the Red Cross, which runs water and livestock projects in the Ogaden, seven days to leave; its projects in other parts of the country would not be affected.
It seems that the Ethiopian government is increasingly suspicious about foreign involvement in the Ogaden, a desert on the Somali border where most residents are ethnic Somalis and where a separatist movement has brewed for decades.
Mohamed Abdi, an Ethiopian-American working as an interpreter for the American military in the Ogaden, has been held incommunicado and without charges in a prison in eastern Ethiopia since he was arrested in early May. Relatives and American Embassy officials said Mr. Abdi, 45, was working on humanitarian projects in the Ogaden when Ethiopian troops detained him and two American soldiers, who were soon released.
Despite spending 21 months in prison with a life sentence looming, former Norfolk State University professor Yacob Hailemariam said Wednesday he has no regrets about his activism in his home country Ethiopia.
“Believe me, it is one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life,” Hailemariam said in a telephone interview from his apartment in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.
The Ethiopian government pardoned and released him and 37 other opposition leaders Friday, four days after sentencing them to terms of up to life in prison for inciting violent protests after disputed 2005 elections.
Hailemariam and others denied the charges and declined to defend themselves, calling the trial a political sham. Human rights groups and members of Congress agreed. Amnesty International called the accused “prisoners of conscience.”
Hailemariam, who turned 63 on Saturday, had returned to Ethiopia in late 2004, anxious to help move it toward democracy when elections were announced. That remains his goal, he said.
“I went to law school on the backs of poor peasants who have starved to death,” he said, referring to his free education. “I feel I am indebted. I came back to pay that debt. Of course, things have happened, but I did my best. I have absolutely no regrets.”
Since his release five days ago, he said, about 2,000 well-wishers have visited his apartment. They have left food and gifts – including 50 bottles of scotch – for the soft-spoken former business law professor and United Nations special envoy.
Hailemariam said he left prison physically and mentally healthy. He and his colleagues typically rose at 6:30 a.m. and exercised for two hours – doing calisthenics, push-ups and sit-ups. He read more books and magazines – newspapers weren’t allowed – than when he taught at Norfolk State. Writing was forbidden, which was his biggest frustration, but he managed to sneak out one long protest letter that was posted on Web sites.
Other prisoners showed the opposition leaders respect by washing their dishes and clothes. Saturdays and Sundays – visiting days – brought lines of people, often strangers, bearing food and gifts and, most importantly to Hailemariam and the others, showing support for their cause.
“Prison becomes very light if you know why you are in prison,” he said.
For eight months, Hailemariam and five others elected by fellow prisoners used intermediaries to negotiate with the government for their release. At 10 a.m. Friday, he and the others were given 30 minutes’ notice that they were being freed.
Escorted home, he entered his apartment to a ringing phone. It was his wife, Tegist, who lives in Virginia Beach with their son, who had already heard the news.
“It was really welcome, a welcome gesture,” Hailemariam said of his release. “But the most important issue was what could we do next.”
He’ll return to the United States in three weeks to visit family and friends. He wants to thank them, the Norfolk State community and local members of Congress for their support. And then after a month he wants to go back to Ethiopia. He has unfinished business, he said: The Ethiopian community that elected him in 2005 has no roads, electricity or water.
“I’m going to go back and represent people in any way I can,” he said. He’s hoping his wife and married daughter and grandchildren will accompany him for a while.
Democracy remains a hope, although he’d have to consult with his family before running again for office, he said. “People are so grateful for what we have done, but we haven’t done much,” he said. Still, he said, he and fellow leaders “have ignited a thirst for democracy, and nobody can extinguish that.”
26 July 2007, ICRC (Geneva) The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) deplores the decision by the authorities of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, where it has been present for over 12 years, to give it seven days’ notice to leave. This measure jeopardizes the ICRC’s work to assist people affected by the non-international armed conflict in Somali Regional State, work it carries out impartially and on strictly humanitarian grounds. A suspension of ICRC activities will inevitably have a negative impact on the population concerned, whose access to basic services will be reduced.
“All ICRC activities in Ethiopia are conducted in strict accordance with the principles of independence and neutrality,” said Daniel Duvillard, the organization’s head of operations for the Horn of Africa. “That is why we regret that the dialogue with the state authorities and the security forces has deteriorated to a point where issues of contention were not discussed in depth with the ICRC before this decision was taken. The ICRC firmly rejects the accusations made against it.” If confirmed, he said, the decision to expel the ICRC would heighten more than ever its concern about the fate of the people affected by the non-international armed conflict in the Somali Regional State.
The ICRC stands ready to discuss these and any other matters through bilateral dialogue with the Ethiopian authorities in order to continue its humanitarian activities in the Somali Regional State.
In 2007 a large portion of the Somali Regional State’s population benefited from ICRC rural water and sanitation projects, including the construction and installation of hand pumps and the digging of wells and boreholes. The ICRC also conducted eight training sessions for over 200 livestock owners on animal health and livestock management. Delegates carried out 37 detention visits to assess conditions and treatment. In addition, the organization monitored the situation of civilians affected by the conflict, striving to ensure they were respected and protected in accordance with international humanitarian law, and restored family links by forwarding Red Cross messages (brief personal messages to loved ones made otherwise unreachable by conflict).
The ICRC reminds all the parties concerned of their obligation to comply with international humanitarian law, in particular with that law’s prohibition of attacks against people not or no longer taking direct part in hostilities and the right guaranteed by that law to civilians to receive the humanitarian assistance essential to their survival.
For further information, please contact:
Anna Schaaf, ICRC Geneva, tel. +41 22 730 2271 or +41 79 217 32 17 or visit the ICRC website: www.icrc.org
By J. Peter Pham, Ph.D. World Defense ReviewTwo weeks ago a “national reconciliation congress” that Somalia’s ineffectual “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG), under pressure from international donors who are its only means of support, convened in a bullet-riddled Mogadishu garage finally got underway – and promptly adjourned after mortar fell nearby. Despite this inauspicious start, four days later at the State Department in Washington, Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey tried to put the best spin the deteriorating situation by choosing to not acknowledge the ignominious dispersal of gathering:
The United States welcomes the opening of the Somalia National Reconciliation Congress in Mogadishu on Sunday, July 15, and looks forward to continued deliberations over the coming weeks. We are encouraged by the remarks from President Abdullahi Yusuf stating that the Congress will address key political issues, such as power sharing and transitional tasks mandated by the Transitional Federal Charter, and that the Transitional Federal Government will implement the outcomes of the Congress. We urge all Somali stakeholders to participate constructively in the Congress and use this opportunity to establish a roadmap for the remainder of the transitional process leading to elections in 2009.
There is little likelihood of any of these benchmarks, much less all of them, being met. For one thing, the TFG is, at best, a notional entity whose day-to-day physical survival is due to the continuing presence of the Ethiopian intervention force which rescued it last December from certain collapse in the face of an assault by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which at the time controlled Mogadishu and majority of the territory of the former Somali Democratic Republic and were threatening to overrun the provincial outback of Baidoa, the only Somali town where the interim “government” even had the pretense of running. For another, even if the TFG were able to hold elections, it would have little incentive to do so given that the only certain result is that a poll would result in “President” Abdullahi Yusuf, a Majeerteen subclansman of the Darod clan from northeastern Puntland, being repudiated by Hawiye clan which predominates in the country’s sometime capital of Mogadishu.
In fact, the “national” conference – the first for the TFG since it was set up in late 2004 as the fourteenth attempt at an interim government – has been repeatedly postponed (three times since April alone) and only got underway this time because the European Union’s special envoy for Somalia, Georges-Marc Andrea, together with Mario Raffaelli, the special envoy from the former colonial ruler, Italy, went in person to Mogadishu the week before to ensure that it did. Most of the delegates who showed up openly admitted that they did so because the international community was paying an extravagant cash per diem allowance equal to month’s wages (originally over 3,000 clan elders and other notables were invited, but the number had to be pared down to just over 1,300 because funding shortfalls meant that there was only enough money to assure that many six weeks’ worth of the dole). Excluded from this largesse were leaders of rival clans as well as Islamists, moderate and otherwise (the TFG did make a show of extending a late invitation to the foreign secretary of the ICU, Ibrahim Hassan Adow, now living in exile in Qatar, but he could hardly have been expected to travel to Mogadishu while the same Ethiopian troops who drove him and his allies out six months ago are still present).
In any event, the formal agenda for the “reconciliation congress” was limited to mainly clan issues with no real political questions on the table. The TFG “president” was not about to allow a discussion of his position to occur, much less in a city dominated by his clan rivals (the Hawiye ran most other Darod out of town in the early 1990s after the collapse of last real government, the Siyad Barre dictatorship). Nor was the position of its prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, open to be filled since the incumbent enjoys close ties with the TFG’s chief supporter, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who employed Gedi’s father as a glorified valet in the 1980s. Likewise precluded was any real debate about allocations of the TFG’s only source of revenue other than international mendicancy, fees collected at the port of Mogadishu. The latter, however, have been treated as little more than a privy purse by the president and prime minister, both of whom are proud owners of new villas in the capital of neighboring Kenya.
In this context, it is not particularly surprisingly that the TFG, its Ethiopian defenders, and the pathetically undermanned African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) find themselves facing a growing armed resistance which, as I predicted in a column nearly five months ago, is “repeating almost step-by-step the tactical and strategic evolution of the Iraqi insurgency.” Spearheading the insurgency is al-Shabaab (“the Youth”), an extremist group which I reported last year emerged within the ICU’s armed forces and is led by a kinsman and protégé of ICU council leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir ‘Aweys, Adan Hashi ‘Ayro, who trained in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda before returning to Somalia after 9/11. Recent intelligence indicates that Shabaab efforts have been coordinated by Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, the reputed leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa who is on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list with a $5 million bounty on his head for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi , Kenya. Fazul, who is said to have been the target of the guided-missile destroyer USS Chafee‘s shelling of a stretch of the Somali coast last month, is reportedly working directly as intelligence chief for the Shabaab campaign.
Things had gotten so bad by early July that Mogadishu’s famed open-air Bakara Market was shut down for the first time in living memory (the sprawling bazaar was open for business even through the madness of the battle captured in Black Hawk Down) as insurgents and TFG supporters, backed by Ethiopian soldiers, have turned the commercial center into daily battlefield – just on Sunday, at least one person was killed and several more wounded in clashes there. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at least 10,000 people fled the sometime capital city last week alone, bringing the net emigration figure to an estimated 275,000 since the beginning of the year. In addition, last week UNHCR had to reopen the closed refugee camp at Teneri Ber in eastern Ethiopia for another 4,000 refugees from southern Somalia. While African leaders went through the motions of renewing AMISOM’s mandate for another six months, given the rapid spiral of violence from drive-by shootings to artillery and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire to improvised explosive devices (IED) to suicide bombings, it is understandable why no one is eager to join the 1,600 Ugandan peacekeepers who have been keeping a low profile since they deployed several months ago (see my April 12 column, “Peacekeepers with No Peace to Keep”).
To make matters worse, the TFG’s ham-fisted ways have not only driven potential Somali constituents into the arms of the insurgents, who are increasingly embracing a broad spectrum ranging from radical Islamists with foreign ties to irate members of sidelined clans, but have also succeeded in alienating international nongovernmental organizations. As the Voice of America’s Alisha Ryu reported earlier this month, TFG officials have been harassing and intimidating humanitarian organizations that refuse to work under its control, including SAACID, a women’s NGO involved in the largest demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration program in central southern Somalia, whose country director and her husband were briefly arrested on charges of being “Hawiye terrorists” (see SAACID-Somalia’s press release on the incident). Meanwhile, as Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times wrote poignantly last week, “piracy off of Somalia’s 1,880-mile coastline is a serious issue again, threatening to cut off crucial food deliveries to a population that is often just a few handfuls of grain away from famine.”
There is only one way to escape the downward spiral and that is by summoning the clarity of vision and mustering the political courage to squarely confront the facts on the ground and come to the following realizations which I outlined in this space four months ago and which bear repeating:
The recent escalation in violence cannot be interpreted other than as the wholesale rejection by Somali clans of the TFG as well as any foreign forces which are viewed as shoring up the that pretender government. The danger is that, since Somalia’s homegrown Islamists were defeated but not eliminated as I called for in January while the Ethiopian campaign was in progress, the clansmen will align themselves with the ICU/PRM much like the Pashtun tribes backed and, in many cases, continue to back the Taliban in Afghanistan. Stop wasting time, money, political capital, and, now, lives on the TFG.
There is no hope of outsiders being able to reconstitute a unitary Somali state. Somalilanders – roughly half of whom have been born after the northwestern republic reclaimed its sovereignty upon the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991 and have never even known themselves as Somalis – will never agree to turn back the clock and reenter into a union with the rest of the country. The inhabitants of the semi-autonomous northeastern region of Puntland which, while not as politically advanced as the Republic of Somaliland, is nonetheless making significant progress on its own, are likewise unlikely to want to chain themselves to the anarchic rest of the former state. As for the other Somali regions, their clans show little inclination to surrender their traditional freedoms, reasserted in the decade and a half since the collapse of the Siyad Barre dictatorship, to a new central regime. Consequently, short of employing overwhelming brutal force – and, even then, the odds of success are not good – there is little likelihood that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again.
Given that the international community is both unlikely to use force to compel unity and unwilling to support extensive nation-building efforts, its primary strategic objective must therefore be to prevent both outside actors from exploiting the vacuum left by the de facto extinction of the entity formerly known as Somalia and those inside the onetime state from spreading their insecurity throughout a geopolitically sensitive region. On a secondary level the international community might also be interested in facilitating progress inside the failed state; however the outsiders’ chief interests will be allocating their scarce resources where they can achieve some effect.
The last point about security and scarce resources is particularly important since it was only last month that a “dangerous terror suspect” by the name of Abdullahi Sudi Arale had been transferred to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This detainee who served as a courier between the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and their affiliates in the Horn of Africa, was captured in Somalia where, since he returned from South Asia last September, he has been part of the leadership of the Islamic Courts Union which he assisted by acquiring weapons and explosives and providing false documents for foreign extremists traveling to join their fight.
When I put forward my proposal earlier this year, I acknowledged its limits:
A policy like the one I have outlined may strike many as minimalist, to date the international community has shown little inclination to do much more than proffer empty words. Furthermore, my approach buys Somalis themselves the space within which to make their own determinations about their future while at the same time allowing the rest of the world, especially the countries of the Horn of Africa, to realize most of security objectives. In short, this strategy has offers the most realistic hope of salvaging a modicum of regional stability and international security out of an increasingly intractable situation.
If last week’s botched congress is any indication, the only thing that has changed is that we have wasted several more months and several more million dollars even as the insurgents gathered strength from the accumulating grievances of those marginalized by the TFG. If a foreign-funded kaffeeklatsch by the handpicked (and paid) invitees of a “government” with no grass-roots support is the most creative solution the international community’s Africa policymakers can come up with, it is going to be a very long, very hot, and very violent summer in Mogadishu.
– J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.
Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online’s military blog, The Tank.
