In its latest issue, Voice of Ginbot 7 has accussed the Meles regime of treason for giving away undisputed land to Sudan. Before the news broke out about the border re-demarcation deal with al-Bershir’s regime, Sudan had never been heard claiming the area that Meles gave away.
Ginbot 7 also sends a message to members of the armed forces not to be part of the Meles region’s treachery. Click here to read Voice of Ginbot 7
NAIROBI (AFP)–Ethiopia’s Ogaden rebels Friday scoffed at government statements they were losing their battle and said that Addis Ababa was attempting to divert world attention from a spiraling famine.
Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi Wednesday said that 95% of rebels in the Ogaden, an oil-rich region populated by ethnic Somalis, had been killed or captured.
However, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, or ONLF, laughed off the assertion as “a sign of the level of desperation the current regime has reached in dealing with the realities in the Ogaden.”
“ONLF is stronger and more effective than ever and is capable of launching operations at will, when and where it wants,” the rebel group said in a statement received by AFP in Nairobi.
The Ethiopian Woyanne army launched a crackdown in Ogaden after ONLF rebels attacked a Chinese oil venture in April 2007 that left 77 people dead.
Access to the area has been largely denied to humanitarian groups and journalists, sparking international concern over the fate of its estimated 4 million inhabitants.
“These utterances of Meles are PR exercises intended to divert attention from the fact that millions of Ethiopians are facing famine and hunger,” the ONLF said.
According to the U.N., 3.4 million Ethiopians require food aid in southern and central regions as a result of a devastating drought.
InDevelop Uppsala Ab is a Swedish consultancy company specialising in health and social sector reform and private sector development worldwide. On behalf of the Nordic Embassies in Ethiopia and Mozambique respectively, InDevelop operates two medical clinics; one in Addis Ababa and one in Maputo.
The clinics provide outpatient health care services to expatriate personnel, and InDevelop is now looking to recruit a medical doctor on a two year basis to the clinic in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. The recruitment is under the condition that the contract with the Embassy of Sweden will be prolonged for another two year term.
Besides medical responsibility, the doctor will also be in charge of the clinic including administrative, financial and managerial responsibilities.
The qualifications required are, in short:
– Experience as a general practitioner, with an extensive medical background.
– Experience in tropical medicine.
– Managerial experience.
– Languages: English and either Swedish, Danish or Norwegian.
For further information, please contact:
Anders Wikman, InDevelop Ab, Biblioteksgatan 24, SE- 114 35 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
Cellphone +46 (0) 70 714 50 85. Fax No.: +46 (8) 678 72 17.
To apply, please send a cover letter and CV via regular mail or e-mail to the above address.
Closing date: 20 June, 2008.
NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA — A 10-year-old boy is on a fundraising quest in memory of the care received by his dying mother.
In 2006, young Fikreab Mekonnen and his older brother left their home in Ethiopia and arrived in Truro, Nova Scotia. They had come to be with their father, Mekete Gebrehanna, who arrived here in 2003 to attend the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. Their mother, Senait Manahele, arrived in 2004 after being diagnosed with breast cancer in Ethiopia, where there was little chance of receiving the medical care she required.
“I wanted to come here to see mom because she was sick,” explained Fikreab.
Senait died last Oct. 19 but Fikreab believes the attention she received here —especially in palliative care — allowed them more time with her then they might otherwise have had.
“(Palliative care) was very important because they helped mom … and I just want to pay them back,” he said. “If she could not have come here and get that help she would have died earlier.”
The youngster’s way of offering thanks is to raise $1,000 for the needs of the area’s palliative care. He has saved about $170 that will go toward the goal and is hosting a bake and plant sale this weekend as well.
“I think I can make a difference. Every year I want to try to raise $1,000 to help people,” said Fikreab, who aspires to a career as a scientist/researcher.
“Mom died of breast cancer and I don’t want other people to die of it. I would say mom would be very proud of me,” he said, adding he hopes the community will support his cause.
“(Palliative care) is still helping people even if it’s not helping you.”
Mekete is thrilled his son is taking an active role in the community they have come to love. He hopes his family can remain here but that will depend on whether he finds employment.
“I feel I owe this community for everything it has done for Senait,” he said. “And I am proud of my son. He doesn’t want to have money but wants to raise it and give it away. He’s a good member of society and he doesn’t take his health for granted.”
By Monique Chiasson, The Truro Daily News
[email protected]
WADE STEPHENS, The Tampa Tribune
For 30 days in January, Wade Stephens III and his 20-year-old daughter, Annie, traveled in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They shared writing, audio and photography duties as they absorbed the culture conflicts in Egypt, Tunisia, the Sinai, Ethiopia and unfolding events in Gaza, Kenya and Somalia. Annie Stephens also did an independent study project for her college’s international studies curriculum.
ADDIS ABABA – The Great Rift Valley stands out from space. It’s a 3,100-mile gap that runs from Syria in Asia Minor to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It’s 8 million years old, but the American trekkers are on their way to a small dark green basement room that is home to fossils dug from the Horn of Africa.
The old-man father and college-student daughter were going to see an exhibit of real fossils in the state museum of natural history in the capital of Ethiopia, and to track down “Lucy,” whose 1974 discovery revolutionized theories of early man
There is a question where the real Lucy is. Is she in residence in Ethiopia, or off at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science on a controversial six-year tour of America? It depends on who is believed, but it’s certain that her name came from a Beatles song that was playing at the time of her discovery in 1974.
This much is known about Lucy these days: Without public announcement and under the cover of darkness in August 2007, the 3.3 million-year-old fossil, or her replica, was shipped to America to earn money for the Ethiopian government. It will be exhibited publicly in America, but in Ethiopia it is kept in a vault and Ethiopians view a replica.
Lucy’s so-called child, Dikika (da-KEE-ka) Baby, is in Germany with Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who painstakingly nudged her out of the hard sandstone of a hillside in Ethiopia’s Dikika Valley in 2000. The site above the Awash River is one of the most remote on Earth, full of lions, warring tribes, malaria, flash floods, high heat, invaders from neighboring countries and hyenas. At the Horn of Africa are the counties of Ethiopia, Chad and Kenya, which most likely are the birthplaces of Man.
The nearly intact Dikika fossil followed by 30 years the discovery of the adult Lucy in a hill six miles away, connecting the “baby” to Lucy. But the baby actually lived 100,000 years before Lucy. The 3-year-old juvenile most likely was buried by a flood in a pile of protective pebbles and sand that time turned into rock.
Addis Ababa attorney Kine Arega (CQ) told The Associated Press that “she is a national treasure. “How come the public has no inkling about this?” said Zelahem Assefa, an Ethiopian who works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “Money cannot be a justification to export original specimens.”
Citing ethical problems and a conviction that Lucy’s fragile remains should not travel, The Smithsonian refused an exhibition. Richard Leakey, a renowned fossil scientist, said “It’s a form of prostitution … it’s a gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity.”
The real Lucy remains in its vault here, the consensus goes in Addis Ababa, and a replica was sent to America. The final word rests with a tall thin museum guard in a green semi-uniform who said in the Amarigna language to the trekkers’ translator, “Who would be so stupid to take that risk?”
The Dikika fossil is remarkable for its implications of development of society. At some point, our human ancestors lost the opposable big toes of chimpanzees and other apes, which were used by a baby to grip its mother with all four limbs, allowing the mother to forage, travel and escape.
The biological loss of opposable toes is momentous. The mother would have had to limit her mobility because now she had to carry her baby. That meant she would have had to limit her ability to provide for herself. And that meant depending on others, and others depending on her.
That is a social bonding that leads to large social groups and monogamy. There were friends and mates along the Great Rift Valley before the hominins started the first migration out of Africa.
Dikika’s big toe is still locked in sandstone awaiting the excavation that will reveal its structure, and a significant evolutionary advance.
The student and old man tried to visit the site, but even the people who charter helicopters into the Afar declined to actually land in the Dikika Valley – a matter of being mistaken for a military craft of area combatants. Dikika and her relatives are safe in the rocks, and Lucy is in the sky with diamonds.
Wade Stephens III is a former Tribune editorial writer.
GENEVA — A former Ethiopian political prisoner, who made a new life for himself in Ottawa after arriving as a refugee in 1992, is the new head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Bekele Geleta’s new position as secretary-general of the world’s largest humanitarian organization was announced late Wednesday.
The organization co-ordinates the relief efforts of more than 186 member Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.
Geleta, 64, is currently the general manager of international operations for the Canadian Red Cross. He spent five years in prison in Ethiopia.
After coming to Canada as a refugee, he started to build a career in humanitarian work.
Source: Canwest News Service