The chigaram (beggar) regime in Ethiopia and its poverty-monger partners request $67.7 million for food. Is the money really to buy food? Didn’t Meles last week say his agricultural policy has been successful?
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Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
NEW YORK — The Ethiopian government and its humanitarian partners yesterday announced that a total of $67,737,459 is required to fund the country’s humanitarian response to the effects of the prevailing drought.
An estimated 2.2 million people are in need of emergency food assistance following inadequate rainfall in some parts of the country during the 2007 meher rainy season, which runs from June to October. In addition, about 947,000 vulnerable people will continue to receive assistance under the country’s Productive Safety Nets Programme – a relief-to-development project initiated by the government in 2005 in an attempt to end dependency on food aid.
Most of those affected by the effects of the dry weather conditions live in the Somali, the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s State (SNNP), Tigray and Oromia Regions.
‘Conditions in Ethiopia have improved since the beginning of the year. Nevertheless humanitarian situations of various kinds remain of great concern to all of us,’ said Vincent Lelei, head of OCHA, Ethiopia, speaking in Addis Ababa the launch of the Joint Government and Humanitarian Partners’ 2008 Humanitarian Requirement Plan.
‘The continued collaboration by all humanitarian actors in Ethiopia for the benefit of the most vulnerable in the country is highly appreciated, and we look forward to strengthening this collaboration,’ Mr. Lelei added.
The total food aid requirement for those in need is estimated at about 171,646 metric tonnes. Particular attention will also be paid to health and nutrition, water and sanitation, and agriculture to help address the adverse impact of the drought.
Drought in the Horn of Africa is also expected to lead to reduced crop harvests Djibouti, Eritrea, Djibouti, northern parts of Kenya and south-central Somalia.
For further information, please call:
Stephanie Bunker, OCHA-New York, +1 917 367 5126, mobile +1 917 892 1679;
John Nyaga, OCHA-NY, + 1 917 367 9262;
Elisabeth Byrs, OCHA-Geneva, +41 22 917 2653, mobile, +41 79 473 4570.
OCHA press releases are available at http://ochaonline.un.org or www.reliefweb.int.
By JODY FEINBERG, The Patriot Ledger
From a distance, the white bed is inviting, with its turned-down covers sprinkled with flower petals. Look closer, though, and you see that South African artist Ilona Anderson has embroidered the pillow case with a gun and floral holster and even pierced one with a bullet hole.
The intrusion of violence into daily life is a theme that connects the works in the exhibit”Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice,” which runs through May 11 at South Shore Art Center in Cohasset.
“This very common domestic object juxtaposes life and death and recalls the high level of violence in South African society,” said co-curator Edmund Barry Gaither of Anderson’s “Forced Removal.” “In every society that has been repressed, there is violence.”
The show also features painting, installation art, graphic design and video by Khalid Kodi of Sudan, Chaz Maviyane-Davies of Zimbabwe and Salem Mekuria and Ezra Wube, both of Ethiopia. In each work of art, the artists are responding to the poverty, displacement, political repression, fighting and, in the worst cases, rape and genocide of people in their homelands.
“The artists humanize these places,” said Abington artist Candice Smith Corby, who is co-curator of the exhibit.
“We hear horrible stories, but they seem abstract. When you see the art, you have an experience that links you to the actual place.”
By using universal objects like the bed and clothing, the artists seem to emphasize the connection between the viewer and the victims.
In “Violence Inscribed,” Khalid Kodi, an internationally known artist from Sudan, turns an ordinary clothesline strung with crusty, dirty clothes into an image of the torture and murder of his countrymen and women. Behind a torn colorful woman’s dress and a child’s T-shirt hangs an undamaged patterned shawl, an image of the vibrancy that has been lost.
On the wall commentary, Kodi wrote, “Violence and sadness are etched onto these garments forever. Will life ever be the same again? … For violence has been inscribed into our collective consciousness and memory.”
The installment is dedicated to a woman from Darfur whose six children were killed by the Janjawid militias.
Chaz Maviyane-Davies, a professor of design at Massachusetts College of Art who left Zimbabwe eight years ago, has created a series of ink jet print bold posters that are overtly political. The abuse of power is expressed by a military jacket festooned with medals of tiny skulls in “Medals of Dishonor.” In “Our Fear,” intense eyes look out beneath a red beret emblazoned with two guns. The black text reads: “Use your vote and be counted. Our fear is their best weapon.”
“They’re alarming images and you can’t deny what he’s trying to say,” said Corby, who also directs the Cushing-Martin Gallery at Stonehill College.
“Any time you use a human face it’s like looking into a mirror. He’s urging you to take a stand. The artists can’t sit quietly and let these things happen without people finding out about them.”
In his oil painting “Exodus,” Ezra Wube depicts masses of people moving back and forth, facing in different directions, as though they are searching for safety. Wube, who came from Ethiopia to study at Mass College of Art, paints with warm reds, oranges and golds and conveys a vitality and beauty despite the suffering.
Filmmaker Salem Mekuria of Ethiopia presents “Ruptures: A Many Sided Story” as a triptych, a reference to the Ethiopian Orthodox religion. Through old footage and recent images that run simultaneously on three screens, you sense the complexity of history and society in Ethiopia. After escaping colonialism, Ethiopia experienced the overthrow of an emperor, famine, imposition of a Marxist-Leninist state, and war with a separatist movement.
“There’s an endless variety of themes. … It’s a comment on urbanization in every big capital in the developing world,” said Gaither, who also is director of The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston, where the exhibit will run June 1 to July 27.
In Mekuria’s most recent images, women dig through clothing in a mass grave, looking for their disappeared loved ones, and women dig again through a massive dump, looking for anything to sell or eat. A single woman, with her face turned away from the camera, talks about the devastation and shame of AIDS; another woman speaks of looking for her murdered son. “Ruptures’ is a portrait that is both intimate and disturbing.
An associate professor of art at Wellesley College who has received many fellowships and awards, Mekuria returns to Ethiopia twice a year to continue documenting the lives of fellow Ethiopians.
“I don’t want to tell people what to think,” she said. “I present images so that they will respond and want to find out more.”
Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice at the South Shore Art Center, 119 Ripley Road, Cohasset, through May 11. Admission is free. Artists will participate in a free panel discussion at 2 p.m. April 13. For information, call 781-383-2787 or go to www.ssac.org.
By Barry Malone and Tsegaye Tadesse
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia’s [fake] opposition accused the government Woyanne of intimidation on Sunday as voters went to the polls for the first time since deadly post-election protests three years ago.
State radio said voters lined up peacefully from dawn to cast ballots. Prime Minister Dictator Meles Zenawi’s government is expecting a big win, having fielded 4 million candidates for some 3.8 million local council and parliamentary seats on offer.
All Ethiopia’s 32 opposition parties fools combined managed only to put forward a few thousand hopefuls.
Bulcha Demeksa, leader of the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDP), said most of his party’s candidates had been threatened and forced to pull out of the race.
“We could only run 2 percent of the 6,000 candidates we wanted to,” he said. “And there is a very low turnout today, there is no interest. This is very far from democracy.”
The biggest parliamentary opposition party, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF), had already withdrawn its 20,000 candidates before election day, saying many had been prevented from registering by the authorities.
Meles’ special adviser, Bereket Simon, denied there had been any political intimidation or harassment.
“The opposition’s complaints have been investigated by the National Electoral Board and none of them were valid,” he said.
“Despite what happened in 2005, Ethiopians have shown a high commitment to the democratization process,” he told Reuters.
Demonstrators took to the streets after polls in May 2005 that the opposition alleged were rigged. A parliamentary inquiry said 199 civilians and police were killed and 30,000 people arrested. The government denied rigging the ballot.
This week, a report on the current polls by U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said its researchers noted “systemic patterns of repression and abuse that have rendered the elections meaningless in many areas”.
Election officials said 26 million people — about a third of Ethiopia’s 77 million population — were eligible to vote.
Casting her ballot in the capital Addis Ababa, 27-year-old secretary Senait Yoseph said she was voting for the government.
“This government is the best we have ever had for development,” she said. “We’ll have no more violence.”
But Eshetu Tsegaye, a 58-year-old shop owner sat smoking outside a school being used as a polling centre, said he would not be venturing inside.
“I don’t support the government and we have no real opposition running this year,” he said. “Who can I vote for?”
(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Mary Gabriel)
By Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville
The Indypendent
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Dawn in the Merkato breaks over a tangle of streets jammed with shouting hawkers and towering pyramids of ripe produce from Ethiopia’s fertile countryside. Today it is a popular destination for sunburnt foreign tourists, expensive cameras poised to capture lively scenes from one of Africa’s largest open-air markets.
Few of them, unloading from tour buses today, know that less then three years ago these bustling streets were stained with the blood of murdered citizens who had flooded into the center of Ethiopia’s capital city to protest the contested re-election of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
“People were pissed off,” says Eskinder Nega, who was a columnist and publisher for several Ethiopian newspapers during the 2005 protests. “It was the first time we really had hope, and when the elections were stolen, people were angry. … It wasn’t planned — people just started pouring into the streets,” Nega said.
The government reaction was swift. According to Amnesty International, 187 civilians were killed during those demonstrations and thousands of others arrested.
Protesters, mostly young people and students, fell in the streets of the Merkato with bullets through their hearts and foreheads, a detail that led many to believe they were purposefully killed by specially trained military snipers, not regular riot police.
Ethiopian publications and journalists that covered these events, especially those that focused on mounting human rights abuses, didn’t escape the wrath of the government either. At least 14 journalists, editors and publishers were arrested and all private newspapers that criticized government actions during or after the elections were shut down.
When they first saw their photos on the news, Nega and his wife, Serkalem Fasil, went underground. They were in hiding for almost a month until the authorities finally caught up with them in the fall of 2005. For Fasil, who was one month pregnant at the time, it was her first trip to jail for journalism deemed seditious by the Ethiopian government. It would be Nega’s seventh.
THE TORTURE CHAMBER
The police were angry when they first captured the couple, explains Nega, sitting in an airy cafe in Addis Ababa nine months after their acquittal and release. Both of them were roughed up during their
capture.
Nega recalls even harsher treatment during previous stints as a political prisoner in Ethiopia. “I was in an isolation cell at that time. They came for me in the middle of the night,” Nega recalls, calmly explaining how one night he was blindfolded and dragged by his armpits into another room he can only refer to as the “torture chamber.” “They flip you over onto your back with your feet in the air, and then hit you on the bottom of your feet, and everywhere with an electrical cord. I couldn’t move for weeks afterward.”
Nega’s story echoes accounts of intimidation, arrests and beatings recounted by journalists in many parts of the world. Alarmingly, these accounts of iron-fisted censorship emerge not only from the notoriously repressive regimes that often make the news such as North Korea, Burma or Iran. Just as often they come from the political darlings of the United States’ foreign policy; places like Pakistan, Egypt and more recently Ethiopia.
The “War on Terror” has allowed U.S. leaders to re-introduce a Cold War-style paradigm, in which countries slip simply into the categories of democratic and undemocratic. But most of the world eludes these dogmatic categorizations — with many countries caught in a web of geopolitical forces and troubled histories manipulated by authoritarian leaders who are tolerated, if not supported by the “democratic world.”
These countries linger in the great swath of gray ignored by the black and white rhetoric of the “War on Terror”; leaders here are often seen as strategic to the Western world in ways that allow for a blurring of democratic expectations. A kind of collective squinting obscures some of the brutal realities that threaten to muddy the path on the way to larger strategic goals.
DEMOCRATIC DREAMS DASHED
“I want a democratic country for Ethiopia, I want to contribute to that. I am a child of the First Amendment,” says Nega, who spent his formative years in Washington, D.C., after his parents fled the communist Derg regime that ruled Ethiopia during the 1970s and 1980s.
When the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by current Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, drove out the Derg in 1991, Nega returned armed with democratic values he says he picked up in the United States, and began a career in journalism. But the end of communisim, it turned out, did not automatically signal the beginning of democracy.
“[Before the 2005 elections] we had press freedom not because the ruling party wanted it, but because we paid the sacrifice” says Nega, referencing his previous stints in prison as well as those served by scores of fellow Ethiopian journalists. Those who dared to ask for more from their government, using the press to push for reforms, representation and accountability, or even tried to amuse readers by poking fun of their leaders in political cartoons, would often receive a late-night visit from the police.
Over the course of seven years Faisal and Nega owned three different Amharic-language papers all of which were criticized for having an “anti-government bias” and later even inciting violence. Nega rebuffs these claims, saying their papers were independent, having no association with specific opposition parties, and that they attacked the government primarily for its human rights record, which he insists is a nonpartisan issue.
But any illusions Nega might have still held that his country was on a rocky but progressive march toward democracy were shattered after the 2005 elections.
With political alliances and development aid from Western countries on the rise, the Ethiopian government was under pressure to produce internationally-endorsed election results. Ninety percent of registered voters in the country showed up eagerly at the polls in May 2005 — but how they actually voted is still a matter of contention.
When early returns indicated a surprising amount of support for the opposition, the vote counting was disrupted and eventually the ruling party declared itself the victor. Angry voters responded in two waves of protests that shook Addis Ababa over the course of the next six months.
As the blood of protesters was spilled in the streets of Addis, and many of their colleagues were swept up in mass arrests, Nega and Fasil knew this wasn’t just another routine round of political intimidation.
They hid, watching their photographs flash on the government TV station as charges of genocide and high treason were leveled against them. In fear for their lives, they tried to flee to Kenya, but their location was given away before the proper travel plans could be made.
As horrified as Nega was with the actions of his own government, his disillusionment was only deepened by the reinforcement the EPRDF received from the leaders of a country he’d admired for so long. While the European Union decried widespread irregularities in the 2005 elections and condemned violence and arrests, The Carter Center (officially representing the United States) expressed concerns over alleged irregularities but supported the National Election Board’s declared results.
As Nega and Fasil sat in prison over the next 17 months, Ethiopia’s relationship with the United States was only strengthened. Today, a year after their release, the ties that bind the two governments are as strong as ever.
PROXY WAR IN SOMALIA
The rise of the “War on Terror” has turned a nation of 77 million people defined in the West by poverty and famine into a powerful military force strategically situated in the tumultuous Horn of Africa. While Ethiopia received only $928,00 in military aid from the United States from 1999 to 2001, it received $16.8 million in assistance from 2002 to 2004, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
When Islamist judges in neighboring Somalia emerged from a decade of warlord driven chaos as a unified force in the summer of 2006, the United States and Ethiopia found themselves with a common enemy.
For the United Sates, still smarting from its military misadventure in Somalia in 1993, the idea of an Islamist government in the Horn of Africa, and a possible safe haven for terrorists, was unacceptable. For Ethiopia, looking to solidify its regional hegemony, and already battling an insurgency by its own Somali population in the Ogaden region, the reunification of Somalia under the banner of Islam was equally unpalatable.
Even with alleged support from Egypt, Eritrea and foreign Islamist fighters, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government was easily driven out of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, within a matter of weeks by thousands of Ethiopian troops trained and supported by the U.S. military to an extent that neither government has disclosed to date. But in the year since, Ethiopia’s military dominance has proven susceptible to guerilla tactics in the same way American forces have in Iraq, and a continuing series of suicide bombings and insurgent attacks have led Mogadishu to be dubbed “Baghdad by the sea.”
Meanwhile, Ethiopian troops have also had their hands full on the other side of the border in the Somali region of their own country. Last April rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front attacked Chinese oil workers who were doing exploratory drilling in the region. In the ensuing military crackdown, Ethiopian forces have been accused of war crimes, including killing and raping civilians and burning villages thought to sympathize with the rebels.
But on the streets of Addis, it’s hard to imagine you’re in a country in the midst of two wars (and possibly on the verge of a third with neighboring Eritrea). Since the crackdown in 2005, the independent press has all but disappeared. The private newspapers that are left are careful to vet news of Ethiopia’s engagements in Somalia or Ogaden. Expatriate websites are blocked on the government controlled Internet server, so they can’t be accessed from inside the country without use of proxy servers.
A COUNTRY GRIPPED BY FEAR
But if Prime Minister Zenawi has been able to hide the realities of Ethiopia’s military entanglements, there is no mistaking that his is a country gripped by fear. In Addis Ababa, politics are spoken of in whispers, and many Ethiopians say they’d prefer to abstain from the topic entirely, at least for now.
Most attempts to engage Ethiopians in political conversations are rebuffed. The few willing to talk, such as a taxi driver who had been arrested during the 2005 protests or a young businessman trying to make enough money to start a family, did so only on repeated promises of complete anonymity.
Even once anonymity was guaranteed, their trepidation was palpable. In one case a young man reached for this reporter’s camera with shaking hands asking for reassurance that his picture had not been taken.
One of the elements most confounding to reporting on, or even just talking about, political issues in Ethiopia is determining how far the government’s reach really is into the private lives of citizens who disagree with its actions.
It’s unlikely that the government actually has the capacity to check up on random dissenting opinions, but, regardless, the effect is the same. Images of students shot dead in the streets and mass arrests have stifled political opposition in the population.
As one frustrated citizen admitted, “I don’t care for politics, politics is for only a few people in Ethiopia; 98 or 99 percent don’t have any say, so why should I extend my hand to politics?”
For Nega’s part, he says he still believes the United States could become a positive force in democratizing Ethiopia, and his unwavering faith in the democratic process strengthens his conclusion that he will see the pendulum swing back from the Bush administration’s hard-line “War on Terror” policies.
Still, he comes across as calmly disappointed with the political maneuvering that resulted in the double betrayal of being imprisoned by the country of his birth and overlooked by the country that nurtured his belief in democracy.
“The U.S. policy is a calculated complicity with tyranny because of the ‘War on Terror,'” he says. “Nothing matters except for the war. The democratic cause here is expendable.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa claims that the U.S. government is advocating press freedoms in Ethiopia through “ongoing human rights discussions with senior leaders.”
In the meantime Nega remains hopeful and sees signs that suggest the tide may be turning in America’s policy toward Ethiopia. A resolution calling for limited sanctions on Ethiopian officials involved in the 2005 killings has passed through the House, and is now under debate in the Senate.
Nega and Fasil’s tenacity stand in stark contrast to the disillusionment that hangs in the cool air of Addis Ababa. Following their eventual release from prison, they filed for a license to start two new papers, which was rejected by the government. Other Ethiopian newspapers won’t risk publishing their work. Fasil’s baby was born in jail in the summer of 2006, and their blacklisting has forced them to support the family on savings, as they refuse to be forced into exile.
To hear Nega tell it, speaking loudly in a café on Addis’ busy Bole Road, the struggle may be difficult, but the goal is inevitable: The people of Ethiopia will eventually win their freedom.
“Democracy is the destiny of all humans,” he smiles “That’s why I’m still here.”
Funding for this article provided by the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting, (pulitzercenter.org).
Photo by Alex Stonehill
