More than 100 000 Ethiopian Orthodox Christians took part in a procession in Addis Ababa for the first major religious festival of the country’s third millennium.
Ethiopians on Thursday converged on Meskel square in the capital’s centre, in larger numbers than often before during a ceremony where they sing hymns and beat drums to commemorate what the faithful regard as the finding of cross on which Jesus was crucified.
According to Ethiopian Christian tradition, Meskel – Amharic for cross – the festival celebrates the finding of the “true cross” by Saint Helena in Jerusalem in the 4th century AD. She is believed to have found the hiding place where three crosses used during Jesus’ crucifixion and identified the holy one by a miracle.
The story has it that St Helena gave pieces of the cross to all Orthodox churches and Ethiopia’s church claims to still hold its own piece in a remote monastery.
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In Washington DC, where the largest number of Ethiopian immigrants live, there was a special prayer and celebration at St Gebriel Church last night in the presence of His Holiness Abune Merkorios, Ethiopia’s legitimate patriarch who is currently in exile after escaping assassination attempts. Abune Merkorios was joined by Abune Melketsediq, Abune Samuel, Abune Filipos and Abune Yacob, as well as hundreds of Ethiopians who participated in the celebration which included lighting bonfire, beating drums, and songs.
(AFP) — An Ethiopian rights group on Thursday accused [Woyanne] government security forces of widespread human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, torture and killings.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) issued a statement alleging that 17 people had been killed and 201 others held without charge by security forces in several regions over the past four months alone.
“We urge the government to respect ratified international conventions and refrain from violating such rights,” Tesfaye Desalegn, the independent group’s spokesman told AFP on the phone.
“We want the prevalence of justice in Ethiopia, we call on the international community to put pressure in order to avoid such circumstances,” he added.
EHRCO said some of the deaths from police torture and beatings. It added that 38 of the 201 arrested people had already been released.
The rights group said most cases occured in the Oromia region, the largest and most populous state in Ethiopia, where the secessionist rebel Oromo Liberation Front has waged a sporadic guerrilla against the government for more than two decades.
Government security forces were also accused of torturing, injuring, and destroying properties of dozens of others in different states including the Amhara, and Somali — or Ogaden — regions and in the capital.
The Ethiopian government Woyanne was not immediately available for comment.
AN Ethiopian refugee who found out two children were not his, stabbed his wife and then hung himself from a tree.
In sentencing the man yesterday, the judge condemned those in Tasmania’s African community who had shunned the wife after Berakhe Beyene’s violent attack on her.
The Supreme Court in Hobart heard that Beyene and his wife of 27 years had come to Tasmania in 2004 as political refugees.
Their marriage began to break down when Beyene, 59, suspected two of his children were not his. When DNA evidence confirmed his belief, the pair began arguing.
Attempts to repair the strained marriage were encouraged by Ethiopian elders, to no avail.
The couple even tried the ritual of sharing a drink with holy dust in it and agreed to forgive and forget.
On the day of the attack, Beyene had gone to the Migrant Resource Centre seeking help to move out of their Moonah home. He also discovered his wife was going to Adelaide the next day to see their older children.
The couple had dined with her mother and one of their children. While the wife was getting bread out of the oven Beyene stabbed her in the upper chest, the stomach and her leg with a 20cm-long knife.
Beyene then turned the knife on himself.
He went to the back yard where the mother-in-law found him hanging from a tree with a rope around his neck.
She grabbed the knife still in his hand and cut him down.
His lawyer, Rochelle Mainwaring, said Beyene was born in Ethiopia but had lived in Sudan since his late teens.
He raising herds and grew crops.
Beyene and his Eritrean wife had met in Sudan when she was 13 years old, and they had five children.
He had wanted to move to Australia to live a peaceful life after the instability of Sudan.
The marriage had been happy, she said, until Beyene discovered he had not fathered the two youngest children.
“He was unable to accept the children were not his,” Ms Mainwaring said.
He became depressed, upset and confused, and lived with the memory of what he did.
Justice Peter Evans said the attack had an appalling and long-lasting adverse impact on the 40-year-old wife, two children and mother-in-law.
“It has also had an adverse effect on their friendships within the local African community,” he said.
“Incredibly and, most deplorably, this is because of a view taken by some members of the community that the defendant’s wife should have accepted the violence and should not have taken him to court.”
But he said Beyene had been suffering from acute depression, was instantly remorseful and life in jail would be more difficult as he couldn’t speak English.
He sentenced Beyene to 18 months’ jail with eligibility for parole after nine months.
Beyene had pleaded guilty to three counts of committing an unlawful act intending to cause bodily harm to his wife at their Moonah home on July 14, 2006.
The following is a commentary by Woyanne ambassador Samuel Assefa that appeared today on Washington Times. Hodader Samuel accuses the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) of being a terrorist group. The fact, as reported by several credible human rights groups and media, is that Woyanne is committing unspeakable atrocities in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, including mass murder, rape, displacement of civilians, burning of villages, etc. In the Google Search, TPLF (Woyanne) is ranked first as a terrorist organization (search TPLF in Google). Here the opportunist ambassador (hodader) is just doing his job on behalf of the Woyanne tribal junta — tell lies.
Imagine for a moment that a military group — aligned with al Qaeda and supported by a bordering hostile nation — slaughtered 74 workers at a business in America or Europe.
How long would it take for this group to be declared a terrorist organization by Western governments and widely condemned in the media?
On April 24, 2007, my country, Ethiopia, suffered just such an attack. Yet Western governments have not labeled the perpetrators as terrorist and the media has been largely unsympathetic. Is there a double standard in what constitutes terrorism depending upon whether the victims are Western? Certainly there is no double standard under U.S. law. The Foreign Relations Authorization Act says “terrorism” is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”
In Ethiopia a group calling itself the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) has committed numerous acts of violence against civilians, Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians alike. The ONLF’s goal is to forcibly separate Somali-speaking Ethiopians from the rest of Ethiopia.
In April, the ONLF attacked a Chinese oil exploration facility in this region and proudly claimed credit. In this single attack the ONLF murdered 74 innocent Chinese and Ethiopian civilians, including a 3-year-old child, many as they slept.
The talents of the ONLF extend beyond slaughtering innocents. The group is remarkably adept at public relations and has romanced some Western journalists with the notion its members are modern-day Che Guevaras. The New York Times recently called them “Rebels with a Cause,” and its correspondent praised their boldness.
Yet they are, plain and simple, terrorists. The ONLF has killed local elders opposed to its policies, attacked people in markets and religious institutions, killed mourners at funerals of ONLF victims, bombed a stadium, planted bombs near a railroad, assassinated local businessmen and government officials and kidnapped foreign workers and staff of humanitarian organizations. Just recently, the ONLF threatened violence against any oil company that seeks to work in the Somali Regional State.
The ONLF has also allied itself with al Qaeda-aligned terrorist groups operating in Somalia. These groups have a common state sponsor in Eritrea. A recent United Nations report concluded that Eritrea has armed terrorists in Somalia with weapons including suicide belts and anti-aircraft missiles.
______ Click here for some information on the crimes of Meles Zenawi’s regime that Samuel Assefa is defending.
02:48 AM EST/11:48 PM PST
Kinijit leaders Wzt. Bertukan Mideksa, Dr Hailu Araya, Ato Gizachew Shiferraw and Ato Brook Kebede, have arrived at the Oakland Airport in Northern California. Their arrival was delayed, but several Ethiopians waited for 3 hours at the airport to welcome their leaders. The love and affection being shown to the popular Kinijit leaders is indescribable…
Kinijit delegates arrive in Oakland [photo: Yilma Bekele/Kinijit Oakland-San Jose]
TYRANTS tend to be oddly punctilious about recording their atrocities. But even by the standards of his peers, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia’s former dictator, was an incorrigible archivist. The security services of his regime, which took power in 1974, learned the habits of bureaucratic procedure from true masters, the East Germans, who sent Stasi agents to Ethiopia as consultants. When Mr Mengistu fell and fled in 1991, he left behind thousands of pages of memoranda, death warrants and even the minutes of a meeting in 1975 when his ruling committee, known as the Derg, voted to murder the imprisoned emperor, Haile Selassie.
These files form the basis for thousands of criminal cases brought by an Ethiopian special prosecutor since Mr Mengistu fell. The charge sheet and evidence for his trial in absentia for genocide run to some 8,000 pages. Though he remains a sheltered guest of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, a court sentenced him this year to life in prison, so ending the special prosecutor’s work. But what will happen to all that fragile and incriminating paper?
A woman named Hirut Abebe-Jiri has made it her mission to see that the historical record is preserved. Herself imprisoned and tortured during a purge known as the “Red Terror”, Ms Hirut has set up an organisation to archive, translate and index the Derg’s files, and make them available on the internet through a partnership with the University of North Dakota in the United States. A Canadian resident, she recently went back to Addis Ababa, which she fled as a refugee, and signed an agreement with the government that calls for the transfer of the documents into the hands of her Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation and Research Centre. Her model is Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Programme, which documents Khmer Rouge atrocities in the 1970s.
Despite many trials over the years, many Ethiopians still do not know what happened to family members who disappeared during the Red Terror. Ms Hirut hopes that her archive and its website will let Ethiopians—including those in the diaspora—learn the truth.
She knows the power of written words: they brought justice in her own case. During the Red Terror, Ms Hirut, then 17, was imprisoned and beaten up. Years later, she discovered that the man who had ordered her torture, a notorious Derg functionary called Kelbessa Negewo, had emigrated to the United States and was working as a bellhop at a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Along with two other former victims, she sued him in an American court. The most powerful evidence against him was his own memos to his superiors, in which he boasted about his “struggle to eliminate the anti-revolutionaries”. Last year, after more than a decade of legal battles, he was deported back to Ethiopia. He is now serving a life sentence for murder.
