(Garowe Online) — Islamist rebels ambushed an Ethiopian Woyanne army convoy in Somalia’s Lower Shabelle region, Radio Garowe reported Sunday.

At least 8 people, including four Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers, were killed after the rebels ambushed soldiers on foot.

Three rebels and one villager were also killed during the fighting, witnesses said.

Muse Ibrahim, a villager who fled after the fighting started, told Radio Garowe that the battle started slowly but intensified quickly.

“Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers who left [the town of] Burhakaba were attacked,” Muse said.

The troops were guarding Ethiopian Woyanne army trucks that left bases in Burhakaba and were reportedly heading towards the capital, Mogadishu.

The ungoverned area etched between Bay region, where Somalia’s parliament sits, and neighboring Lower Shabelle region has been the scene of insurgent ambushes at least three times in recent weeks.

By Peter Heinlein, Voice of America

Shashemene, Ethiopia – Humanitarian agencies are rushing emergency aid to drought-stricken central Ethiopia, where a sudden deterioration in food supplies has led to surge of child mortality. At least 23 children have died at hospitals and emergency feeding centers during the past three weeks, and authorities say countless others have died at home for lack of treatment. In this first of two reports from the hardest-hit area around the town of Shashemene 250 kilometers south of Addis Ababa, VOA’s Peter Heinlein reports conditions are expected to worsen over the coming months.

It is bedlam inside a tent on the grounds of the Shashemene hospital. Thirty severely malnourished children, their mothers, and assorted other siblings are scattered over the bare ground, with nothing to do but wait for the next feeding.

Three-year-old Chemeni is a tiny wisp of bony flesh with black eyes wide as saucers. Her mother, Buqre Hussein softly strokes Chemeni’s face, a younger daughter strapped to her back. She says her children are among the fortunate ones.

“I am glad my children are recovering,’ she said. ‘And I expect they will recover. I am glad to see this.”

Every four hours, each child in the tent receives a red cup filled with a high-nutrition supplement known as F-75. But Shashemene’s regional health officer, Dr. Abebe Megerso says many more malnourished children are having to be turned away.

“The supply is not enough because we did not know the problem is this much overwhelming,’said Megerso. ‘And now as the people with problem are appearing, the supply we have at hand is becoming short, and even now, we do not have F-100 and F-75, particularly F-75 is very scarce now.”

This makeshift therapeutic feeding center was erected nearly three weeks ago when health officials realized they had an emergency on their hands.

Dr. Megerso says regional health officials tried to prepare for the effects of the drought, but could not imagine the shortages, and the flood of malnourished children, would be this bad.

“It is unusual,’ he said ‘We have never had problem before because this zone is known by surplus production. We are simply admitting the severely malnourished ones, and we are referring the children with high complications to hospital. But we cannot refer all of them to hospital because we can create high overcrowding in hospital and we are not well prepared.”

Ethiopian officials last month issued an international appeal for enough emergency food aid for two-point-two million people. But U.N. agencies say at least three-point-four-million people, and possibly many more, are already severely affected by the drought.

Viviane Van Steirteghem, deputy country director for the U.N. Children’s Agency, UNICEF, says tens of thousands of children are in danger of starvation.

“We estimate now, and this is a best estimate, that 126,000 children over the country are in immediate need of this therapeutic care to avoid mortality,’ said Viviane Van Steirteghem.

The United States provides the bulk of the food aid to Ethiopia. The U.S. Congress approved an additional $100 million of aid this month, boosting the total for the year to more than $300 million.

But the U.N. World Food Program estimates 395,000 metric tons of food will be needed to get through the immediate crisis. That will cost $147 million more than is currently available.

The WFP’s Lisette Trebbi says the way conditions are deteriorating, the month of June is going to be especially difficult.

“We have new donations coming in, but it is a question of timing,’ said Lisette Trebbi. ‘And we therefore foresee we will have some shortfalls… during the month of June, which will be a critical month, for the population, because they will still not have recovered, we anticipate the crisis to get worse, so we are taking every measure that we can, we are short and will probably have to prioritize the worst and most affected area.”

There has been some rain in central Ethiopia in recent weeks; not enough to produce the desperately needed bumper harvest in September, but enough to spark fears of an outbreak of water-borne diseases among a weak and vulnerable population.

Officials here are predicting many difficult months ahead.

EDITOR’S NOTE: World Bank, for example, is the chief financier of Africa’s mass murderers. One hundred al Qaedas, or Talibans, or bin Ladens combined cannot do as much damage on a nation as the World Bank did to Ethiopia and eastern of Africa through its blood money that is fueling bin Zenawi’s terrorist regime. This year so far the World Bank rewarded the Butcher of East Africa with $635 million.

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By Linda Herrick, The New Zealand Herald

Billions of dollars raised for African famine relief by celebrities Bono and Bob Geldof have instead funded civil war across the continent, says terrorism expert Dr Loretta Napoleoni.

London-based Napoleoni, in Auckland to appear at the Writers & Readers Festival, has written two books, Terror Inc: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism and Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, on the economics of terrorism.

Her latest book, Rogue Economics, studies the destabilising effect of economic globalisation, focusing in part on why more than half a trillion dollars worth of aid sent to Africa since the 1960s failed to reach the intended destination – developing the nations’ economies.

That huge amount of aid, which includes money from the United Nations and donations generated by Live Aid for Ethiopia, organised by Geldof, and the Live 8 concert in 2005, organised by Bono, has instead “served as a rogue force, notably as an important form of terrorist financing” in countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya. Ethiopia, for example, received $1.8 billion in foreign aid between 1982-85, including a large contribution from Live Aid; $1.6 billion of that, she points out, was spent on buying military equipment.

“The money has ended up making Africa poorer and more violent because the money has been diverted towards warlords, weapons and armed invasions,” she says. “The problem of Africa is corruption.”

Napoleoni says there are parallels with Burma in the aftermath of the cyclone as aid organisations appeal for donations. “What is happening in Burma is a good example. You can have the best intentions but getting the money to the people in need is very hard because you have to go through the bureaucracy. The problem is the governance. You also need expertise. What the international relief organisations are saying is, you should send people from our team who know exactly what to do in these circumstances.”

The cult of celebrity means that people who are famous for nothing more than being pop or movie stars speak out on issues they don’t fully understand. “People like Bono and Bob Geldof are not ill-intentioned,” she says. “But the simple fact that being a celebrity puts you in a position above everybody else is unacceptable.

“These people don’t realise they are being manipulated by politicians and others. That is the case in the relationship between Bono and [American economist] Jeffrey Sachs, who is among the people who caused the chaos of the transition of the former communist countries into free-market economics. Sachs has been trying to relaunch himself as a sort of economist celebrity so he has been linking himself to Bono.

“Bono is repeating what he has been told about Africa. I am sure Bono hasn’t got a clue about economics.”

Napoleoni, who knows Geldof as a neighbour in the London suburb of Battersea, says he told her the first Live Aid was the “worse experience of his life because he found it very difficult to control where the money went. He suddenly realised it’s easy to put famous musicians together to make money but to bring the money to the people in need is another matter.”

Napoleoni adds that there is a certain amount of hypocrisy among stars linked to good causes. Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Bono and the other members of U2 were last year outed as tax-evaders for diverting their funds to the Netherlands, circumventing their democratic responsibilities to their home country of Ireland.

And Brad Pitt, Napoleoni points out, may drive a hybrid car, but he and Angelina Jolie use a private jet. Their trip to Namibia a couple of years ago, she notes, burned up enough fuel to take Pitt’s hybrid all the way to the moon.

* www.writersfestival.co.nz

By Ethiopians for Obama

We are Ethiopians who immigrated from our birth land and arrived in America in search of a dream. There are hundreds of thousands of us who live in this great country; working hard and sacrificing so that our children can have a better life than we did. The young generation of Ethiopians who either grew up in American or were born here have benefited from the labor of our parents and have worked hard and studied assiduously to realize the American dream. We have doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, engineers and accountants who have leveraged the sacrifice of their parents to seize the day. More amazing are the thousands upon thousands who work in stores, coffee shops, taxi cabs, and parking lots–Ethiopians whose dedication to their family is the quintessential story of the American dream.

We all have different stories on why we left Ethiopia, but we all have one thing in common as to why we arrived in America—hope. This wonderful country gives us the chance to live our lives freely and the possibility to accomplish anything if we work hard for it. We have the privilege of benefiting from the sacrifices of the many that came before us so that we can pave the way for the next generations’ ascendancy to heights we have yet to imagine. However, this privilege comes with responsibilities. We have a responsibility to be involved politically–to vote–and to take part in the political process that influences our lives here and the lives of millions throughout the world. So it is not only important that we vote, it is incumbent upon us to do so.

There are millions throughout the world that would abandon their earthly possessions to have an iota of the freedoms we take for granted here. Chief upon these is the freedom to elect the officials who work on our behalf. The ballot we cast in the booth has the power to influence the policies—domestically and internationally—that is enacted by our government. Voting is a sacred responsibility that we should all take seriously and take part in emphatically. “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” (Lyndon Baines Johnson)

So why vote? What’s in it for us? This question is asked every time and at every place. The answer—because change starts with us. Ethiopian who live in America are a dichotomy; we are everywhere while being no where at the same time. Ethiopians form one of the largest community of expatriates from Africa, yet there is no reliable data that shows the extent of our numbers in America . When it comes to politics, we are passionate; yet when it comes to voting, collectively we are ambivalent. We march by the thousands in cities around the world, yet the one apparatus that has the most power—the ballot—collects dust as we ignore its ability to deliver change. Senator Obama believes in building a movement from the bottom-up; a profound change is never implemented from the top-down, it metamorphosizes from the desires of the mass to change our circumstances.

So the question is not what can Obama do for us, it is what can we do for ourselves. Ethiopians–like all folks in every corner of the world–have more in common than the insignificant divides that separate us. We share a history that dates back centuries and common heritage that binds us as one. We are not condemned to eternal strife; we have the choice of throwing off the yolk of divisions based on ethnic, religious, or regional differences and coming together to work for the common good. We have the choice to change, we have the choice to unite.

We are presented with a unique opportunity to elect a man who values the value of unity. Barack Obama does not preach unity as a slogan, he lived it throughout his life. He is a man with a Kansan mother and a Kenyan father; a man who lived in almost every corner of the world and has a keen intellect that espouses dialogue on the basis of mutual understanding and respect. He bypassed the chance to earn a handsome living to become a community organizer in the streets of South Chicago making less than $30,000 after graduating from Harvard Law School . He worked with local churches to organize the neglected masses. Barack Obama knew of the importance of organizing people so that they could have a voice in the political process—we, too, should heed this lesson.

The importance of organizing politically extends beyond elections. Our ability to unite and quantify our voice has implications that impact issues concerning health and socio-economic matters. If there is a health issue that impact the Ethiopian community disproportionately, our ability to point to a reliable and quantifiable segment of the population will enable us to lobby congress in order to seek relief. Our ability to unite will enable us to bring light to issues of social and economical concerns that impact our communities. We live in a country that encourages and fosters communities of all stripes and backgrounds to organize and lobby congress to address issues of concern to communities everywhere. This is what is in it for us, the ability to move out of the periphery of relevancy into a posture of note. Our inability to organize will relegate us to the shadows of this great country; our voices muted while living as invisible citizens in the greatest country on earth.

This is a unique opportunity for Ethiopian-Americans to fully take part in the political process. There are many reasons why most in our community do not readily embrace the idea of being involved politically. Most immigrated to the United States to escape the clutches of politics. Most reflexively avoid politics, leery of being labeled one way or the other. For many, organizing politically was a foreboding topic that would only lead to trouble or worse. However, this is America , we are in a land that values a civic responsibility of those who are involved politically. The very fabric of this nation is interwoven with a sense of political participation. In this great nation, friction is resolved through dialogue and disagreements assuaged by discussion. We stand at the precipice of a new era where we see each other not with suspicion borne out of differences but with a purpose based on commonalities. This is what is in it for us, we can continue to squabble and pass on to our children a legacy of derision or we can embark on a new road where we value our differences and respect our viewpoints as we work together for the betterment of all. This is our choice, it is up to us to choose.

Please join Ethiopians for Obama at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiansforobama/