Ginbot 7 strongly Condemns the Appalling Crime against humanity Perpetrated by the Meles Zenawi Dictatorial Regime in the Ogaden region.
Human Rights Watch, a respected and credible human rights advocacy group, in its well-documented report has accused the tyrannical regime of Meles Zenawi to have had committed crime against humanity in the region of Ogaden on a report issued June the 12th 2008.
According to the report, many villages have been burned down. Children, elderly women and men have been brutalized by the Meles Zenawi army. Women have been raped, people have been forcibly displaced and their properties confiscated. Human Rights Watch clearly states that Meles and his cohorts should be held responsible for grave violations of human rights and crime against humanity.
For a number of years, such despicable crimes have been committed against the people of Ogaden and still continued unabated. It should also be noted that the brutal regime of Meles Zenawi has in the past committed and continues to commit similar crimes in other regions of Ethiopia. The crime committed by the regime in the Oromo, Gambella, Amhara, Southern Ethiopia, Afar regions and the city of Addis Ababa and many towns is well documented
Where as we all have suffered the indignity of brutalization by Meles’ regime and have been victims of it’s brutal acts of savagery, we have been handicapped to act together and rise against this evil. One main reason for our failure is our inability to work against the ethnically divisive politics of the regime and remove the seeds of discord the regime has sown among Ethiopians, in order to maintains its hold to power unchallenged.
Our deliverance from the difficult and tormenting situation that we all find ourselves lie only in our resolution to fight back this dangerous and venomous politics of division and incitement and to unite against the regime’s brutal army and its intelligence forces. It is only through sharing the pain and the suffering of individuals and communities anywhere in the country as the pain and suffering of all of us and generate within us the burning desire to do whatever it takes to stop it. The collective battle cry against tyranny should be “Injustice anywhere in Ethiopia is injustice every where in Ethiopia”
The time has come that we take the first step of building solidarity by condemning, in one voice and in the strongest term, the despicable crime being perpetrated on the people of Ogaden. This also goes to demonstrating to our compatriots in the Ogaden that we stand beside them in their hours of distress and sufferings.
Ginbot7 Movement for Justice, Freedom and Democracy strongly condemns this crime committed against the people of Ogaden. The Movement affirms its commitment to help in whatever way it can the struggle waged by the people of Ogaden to resist this appalling carnage unleashed against them by the regime of Meles Zenawi.
Similarly Ginbot7, calls upon political parties, members of the civil society, institutions and individuals to stand up and condemn the criminal acts of Meles’s regime in Ogden. We also reiterate our call to Ethiopians to take any wrong committed in any corner of the country as a crime committed against all the people of Ethiopia.
Only such act of unity and solidarity in our part will in the end abort the malicious plot by Meles Zenawi and co. to divide and rule us. It is only when we act with shared purpose and mission that we can stop the wanton destruction of lives and communities by the Meles’s regime and force this regime to account for the crimes and treason it has been committing against the Ethiopian people and the security of our country.
Ginbot7 uses this opportunity to urge the international community to stop the financial, military and material support it provides to a regime that is committing crime against humanity in its own country and beyond. In fact we would like to inform the international community that the close relation it has established with the most brutal regime in Africa is playing a huge part in prolonging the misery and the suffering of the Ethiopian people. It has to be noted that such practice has been generating serious resentment amongst the vast majority of Ethiopians. If the international community will not be forthcoming with reviewed polices that make the interest of the Ethiopian people, not the interest of a handful tyrants, the linchpin of its relation to our country, the consequence will be that it would end up being seen as an accomplice to evil in Ethiopia. In the long run, the spread and entrenchment of such extreme attitude amongst Ethiopians, will not be beneficial to both the interest of the people of Ethiopia and the international community.
Hence, Ginbot7 particularly calls upon Western governments to revise their hitherto distorted policies on Ethiopia and rally behind the struggle of Ethiopians for justice, freedom, democracy and the respect of human rights.
EDITORS NOTE: It is true that Mugabe is another bloodsucking African dictator. But the British are worse. They have done more harm to Zimbabawe, and Africa, in general, than 100 Mugabes could possible have done. Take a look at what they are doing in Ethiopia and Somalia through their mercenaries Meles Zenawi and Abdullahi Yusuf [See this]. ER is not the only one that is saying this. Just watch this video in which a British Member of Parliament makes the same argument.
HARARE (By Cris Chinaka, Reuters) — Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was quoted on Sunday as saying he would be willing to hand power to a ruling party ally when he was sure the country was safe from “sellouts” and from British interference.
But the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper said he gave no time-frame and again vowed to stop the opposition from ending his rule, which Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband described as sadism.
Mugabe, 84, is fighting for re-election in a June 27 run-off against Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The opposition leader won the first round in March but not with enough votes to take the presidency.
The veteran Zimbabwean leader, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, has threatened to go to war to stop a Tsvangirai victory.
The Mail said Mugabe told a rally on Saturday that his “leadership was prepared to relinquish power to those (ZANU-PF officials) that uphold the country’s (independence) legacy”.
“This country cannot be sold at the stroke of a pen,” he added, repeating a vow not to let the MDC, whom he has branded as British puppets, rule the country.
The Mail said Mugabe urged supporters to concentrate on defending his government’s land nationalisation and black economic empowerment policies, and not on complaints by what he called “sellouts” that ZANU-PF has been in power for too long.
Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector, once one of Africa’s most prosperous, has collapsed, and shortages of bread, milk and meat are common. Inflation is 165,000 percent and unemployment 80 percent.
“We are the custodians of Zimbabwe’s legacy. We will pass this on to those we know are fully aware of the party’s ideology, those who value the country’s legacy,” the newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying.
“I WILL NOT GROW OLD”
Mugabe has previously said he did not want to name an heir over fears he or she would become a target of other officials nursing ambitions to succeed him as ZANU-PF leader.
The president gave no timetable for his possible retirement and added: “But as long as the British still want to come here, I will not grow old; until we know we no longer have sellouts among us.”
Mugabe this week threatened that he and his independence war veterans will take up arms again to stop the MDC taking power.
The MDC and rights groups say ZANU-PF have launched a brutal campaign of violence which has killed at least 66 MDC activists, wounded hundreds others and displaced tens of thousands since the March 29 election.
Britain’s Miliband said South Africa had a responsibility to do more to bring pressure on its neighbour, and condemned the violence that has marred the run-up to the election.
“The first thing is to be clear about the sadism, and I use that word advisedly, that’s going on … in Zimbabwe,” he told BBC television.
“People being killed, people being tortured, people being beaten. Election observers being stripped out, election officials being stripped out.”
The African Union expressed concern over reported violence and said it planned to send “a sizable” team of observers to monitor the run-off poll.
Tsvangirai says he is confident of victory despite the intimidation campaign in which he has been detained several times this month. (Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa, editing by Gordon Bell)
The conscience of the world is challenged once again by the outrageous crimes of Meles Zenawi, who is using famine as a weapon of mass destruction and economic exploitation against the very people that he has ruled with an iron fist for almost two decades.
Without regard to repeated calls for action by humanitarian groups about the looming human tragedy, Zenawi and his repressive machinery have been running a campaign of misinformation and deception about the true cause, nature and severity of the famine.
The measures taken by Zenawi relative to the famine and other public tragedies have been consistent with a policy intended to use these calamities for political and economic gains. More precisely, the famine has been exploited as an instrument of revenge for the humiliating loss the despot suffered in the 2005 elections, as a continuation of the ethnic cleansing he has officially embraced, and as an economic opportunity for his immense financial enterprise that has unlimited control over every major economic activity in the country.
Zenawi and his ruling clique grudgingly acknowledge the tragic situations in the country only if they perceive that the relief efforts add business value to their economic monopoly or if they feel that leaked reports of the famine would jeopardize the flow of the billions of dollars of donors’ money to their private bank accounts.
In his book, Development as Freedom (Oxford, 2001; p.16), the winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Amartya Kumar Sen, wrote: “…no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy …”.
Indeed, no dictatorship has exemplified the correlation between dictatorship and famine more affirmatively than the tyrannical rule of Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi.
In its June 13, 2008 issue, The Economist squarely placed the current human tragedy in Ethiopia on the failed policies of the autocratic government of Zenawi.
Pointing to the greedy economic agenda of the dictator, the paper argued:
After several good harvests since the last big famine, in 2003, Ethiopia had a chance to progress. Instead, it dithered over reforms to promote private business and overhaul the country’s sclerotic banking system and mobile-phone sector. …. Ethiopia is one of Africa’s very few countries that still has virtually no serious private business—and thus few jobs—outside the state sector. Almost three-quarters of the population may be under- or unemployed.
With regard to the viciousness of the dictatorship imposed on the people of Ethiopia, the report further noted:
The government’s lack of enthusiasm for private enterprise is matched by its lack of enthusiasm for competition in politics. Mr Zenawi has already splintered the … opposition parties with the liberal use of torture and imprisonment.
Earlier, the world reacted with compassion and held accountable the government of Emperor Haile Selassie and that of the tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam for the famines of 1973 and 1984/85, respectively.
Tragically, the human disasters that shocked the world in the 1970’s and 1980’s pale in comparison to the horrifying situations under Zenawi’s autocratic rule.
* According to a July 28, 2003 report of the New York Times, while a million people died in the famine of 1984 and 1985, in 2003 more than 12 million were at risk, half of those children under 15.
* Based on a recent report of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), eight million Ethiopians are chronically food insecure and at least 3.4 million Ethiopians are in need of emergency food relief.
* The Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), an independent research and media group, disclosed: ”… several million people in the most prosperous agricultural regions have … been driven into starvation. …. This time, as eight million people face the risk of starvation, we know that it isn’t just the weather that is to blame.
* A recent report of Concern Worldwide confirmed that the present drought has severely affected people in Ethiopia’s rural south, forcing many to eat the seeds that they would have planted for this year.
The measures that the dictator took to deceive the world about the famine, and its exploitation for political and economic ends, include numerous instances of misinformation, diversionary propaganda, and blatant intimidation of foreign and domestic observers:
1. In an address to his rubber-stamp parliament on March 18, 2008, Zenawi mendaciously and brazenly declared that reports of drought-related deaths were “false.”
2. Zenawi has “… denied that pastoralists in the south are losing livestock to the drought or that the rates of malnutrition elsewhere are at all close to what foreign aid workers claim.” [The Economist, June 13, 2008]
3. Recently, he ordered his Deputy Prime Minister to denounce reports of the current famine. In a bizarre press conference, Addisu Legese blamed the messengers by declaring:
“….. some institutions engaged in relief work consider the decline in the number of the needy as a threat to their existence. They therefore have been suggesting to report inflated figures so as to get huge assistance…”
4. As reported by international humanitarian agencies, he has greedily impeded steady flow of foreign relief supplies to affected regions by charging exorbitant fees and requiring exclusive use of the transportation system controlled by his financial empire.
5. Zenawi has proposed a new law on charities and NGOs to essentially paralyze the activities of groups “working to improve human rights and encourage press freedom.” [The Economist, June 13, 2008]
6. “The government has banned photographs of the starving and has told field workers not to give information to foreign journalists.” [The Economist, June 13, 2008]
7. Earlier in 2007, his government refused to declare a cholera outbreak that killed hundreds of people and infected more than 60,000. Despite U.N. tests showing that the epidemic was indeed cholera, Ethiopian officials insisted on calling it “acute watery diarrhea”.
In view of the unfolding human tragedy in Ethiopia,
* We call upon the world community to condemn the systematic starvation of millions of Ethiopians under the cruel and genocidal policy of Meles Zenawi and his ethno-fascist regime.
* We urge all organized groups inside and outside the country to coordinate their efforts and bring an immediate end to Zenawi’s egregious use of famine as an instrument of repression.
* We particularly call on the armed forces in Ethiopia to question their allegiance to a vicious dictator, who has repeatedly demonstrated lack of basic human decency and subjected the vast majority of the citizens to perpetual misery, hunger, ignorance and destitution.
* And lastly, we ask international organizations, donor countries, and religious institutions to actively engage in preventing a human catastrophe perpetrated by one of the most vicious dictators of our time.
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The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Many Ethiopians, especially those in the Diaspora community have been and still are puzzled by two contradictory phenomena regarding the Ethiopian economy. On the one hand, the ruling party, the EPDRF, has been reporting record-breaking growth rates of the Ethiopian economy, year-after-year. Year after year, we have been informed that the state of the Ethiopian economy was on a higher growth trajectory, “thanks to the policies of the ruling government.” As of this writing, a rosy forecast is provided by the government for both this year (2008) and the next one, while at the same time, the United Nations humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF are reporting, as did the Voice of America on its June 6th broadcast, that “Ethiopia Faces Worsening Food Shortage…” Nearly a month ago, the prime minster, Mr. Meles Zenawi told the parliamentarians the rampant inflation rate that has engulfed the country was due to the “empowered” peasants1 asking for higher prices for their produce and due to a growing economy.
On the other hand, Ethiopians, including those of the members of the Diaspora experience increased squalor, disease, unemployment (known to be way over 50% in urban areas), hopelessness, unnecessary deaths, chronic poverty, these same filth and misery and chronic poverty increasing over time. Every time the members of the Diaspora visit their country of origin, they observe that the people they used to know and their own families are growing into abject poverty. Most importantly, they read Ethiopia being listed at the bottom of the world country rankings. They read, among other things, Ethiopia being one of the poorest and highly indebted nations in the world. They know that the country’s human poverty index is ranked as 98 out of 102 countries, and its human development index is 169 out of 177 countries, and so on. The rosy forecasts and actual growth rates were given to us while, at the same time, the CIA World Fact Book states, on a yearly basis, that “Ethiopia’s poverty-stricken economy is based on agriculture, which accounts for half of GDP, 60% of exports, and 80% of total employment. The agricultural sector suffers from frequent drought and poor cultivation practices…” They also hear the existence of perennial food deficits and watch on worldwide TV networks pictures of starving Ethiopians. They hear, read, and watch video clips of their fellow Ethiopians being swept away by the currents of the Indian Ocean while trying to flee poverty and dictatorship. They also hear their compatriots being massacred by religious extremists. They read and hear on the news that their country men and women languish in the jails of neighboring countries after
escaping the unbearable hardships within their own country. They know that their sisters are being abused by their modern slave masters in the neighboring countries, some speculating the human trafficking masterminded by the TPLF members. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to hear Ethiopian women, who are abused by both the modern slave owners and their jealous wives. For some of them, when the abuse becomes unbearable, some of the abused Ethiopian women have been reported to have lost their minds and become totally crazy. In some situations, the modern slaves are reported to have killed the wives of their modern slave owners. It has also been reported that, no matter the psychological circumstances of the Ethiopian women, the courts have ruled against them… Continue reading >>
Ato Gizachew Shiferraw, chairman of the UDJ general assembly organizing committee, told Kinijit North America officials that the Meles regime’s security forces have dispersed the party’s delegates on Saturday.
First, the delegates, about 400 of them, went to the Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa Saturday morning. When they were told they cannot hold a meeting there, they went to the UDJ office by several buses provided by UDJ executives. They put up a tent on the front yard of the office and tried to convene the assembly there. After waiting until they finished setting up the tent, two Woyanne security agents (only 2 of them) came and told them to disperse. They did so without any argument. Even sheep and goats put up more resistance. The UDJ leaders and the 400 delegates acted like well-tamed slaves. This is not peaceful struggle. This is a joke. Even worse, this is a willful submission to slavery.
According to Ato Gizachew, there will be another attempt to hold the meeting Wednesday, after making appeals to Woyanne authorities on Monday and Tuesday.
Ato Gizachew, ER has at most respect for you, Wzt. Birtukan Mideksa, and all your colleagues at UDJ. You are real heroes in the struggle for democracy and freedom in Ethiopia. But what part of NO don’t you understand? Woyanne told you in so many words NO you cannot operate freely in Ethiopia. So please for the sake of the people you are trying to help, do not waste your time, energy, and scarce resources on a futile attempt to organize an opposition party inside Ethiopia.
This week alone, you spent over $20,000 trying to hold a meeting even though Woyanne made it absolutely clear to you that you cannot do it. You have tried enough. You paid enormous sacrifices. It did not work. So please follow the decisions made by many of your colleagues in the UDJ and suspend your operations in Ethiopia. Don’t make a joke of yourself.
Moving on, the best thing UDJ can do for the struggle is to release all Kinijit branches and support groups around the world from their obligation to the party. The Kinijit support groups then can decide what course to follow next. The best thing to do is to rally around Ginbot 7 as Kinijit support groups. Some of them may decide to become full-fledged members.
Every day and every hour we waste hesitating, day dreaming about Woyanne’s intention, analyzing problems to death is the precious time we could use to save our people from holocaust.
There is a tested leadership that is willing to utilize all means necessary to fight the Woyanne cancer and kill it, in collaboration with other organizations. Many of these leaders, such as Berhanu Nega, are elected representatives of the people of Ethiopia. Let’s all rally around these leaders.
A few years ago, Meklit Hadero was doing a 9-to-5 administrative gig at the Haas Foundation here and taking private vocal lessons on the side. The sweet-voiced, Ethiopian-born Yale graduate wasn’t figuring on a singing career. But after an unforgettable night at the funky little Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street, music became her life and the day job tapered away.
Walking into the little Mission District room for the first time, she found two guitar players in opposite corners, a drummer in a third and a guy playing the oud, an ancient North African lute, up in the tiny loft. “It was an incredible experience. You were surrounded by the music,” Hadero says. “They were playing a groove, and everyone was kind of bopping, then suddenly this guy Fernando started signing a call-and-response, and everything just sparked. The whole room became like one. It’s very rare to feel that connected to one person, let alone a whole room full of people. I thought, ‘Wow, what is this place?’ ”
Smitten, she eventually started singing at the multidisciplinary art house, where you can learn to draw or dance flamenco, and where some of the most creative young musicians in town play for receptive crowds. It’s now home base for Hadero, an artist in residence, who’s cropping up in a number of interesting settings these days, playing solo dates here, around the Northwest and elsewhere, and with Nefasha Ayer, a cross-cultural band that riffs on dancing grooves and floating melodies.
Simple tunes
Tonight at Epic Arts in Berkeley, Hadero performs the simple tunes on her first CD, “Eight Songs,” on a triple bill with two other “black women and their guitars,” as she jokingly puts it: Cristina Orbe and Akosua. On Sunday, Nefasha Ayer gets down at Amnesia on Valencia Street.
A few Saturdays ago, the band, whose name means “the wind that travels” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, stirred up the crowd packed into the Red Poppy. A loose-limbed group that stitches ragas and reggae, Ethiopian jazz and Congolese grooves, the band was formed by Hadero and guitarist Todd Brown, a painter who started the art house in 2003 with tango dancer Alexander Allende and now directs the nonprofit with Hadero. The music aims to explore the longing of people caught between countries and cultures, “the space of in-between,” where the sounds of Africa, India and the Americas connect. The players include classical Indian and jazz saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan, master Afro-Peruvian percussionist Lalo Izquierdo on the box drum called the cajón, bassist Miles Jay, Abdi Jibril from Kenya on congas and maracas, and Keenan Webster playing the West African marimba called the balafon and the lute-like kora.
“What was so joyous that night was that we were all from different cultural backgrounds. But we were expressing it with the music, without having to say a thing,” says Hadero, 27, who was born in Addis Ababa but grew up in Iowa and Brooklyn. Her parents are both doctors who left Ethiopia in the violent years following the 1974 revolution, going first to East Germany, then, after making it across to West Berlin, to the United States, with the help of Catholic Charities. They landed in Iowa, where they had a friend. Her father got a residency in New York, where the family lived for many years. (Now divorced, her father lives in Florida, her mother in Seattle, where Hadero’s cousin, noted rapper Gabriel Teodros, also lives.) A bright, soft-spoken woman who wears flowing clothes and a flower in her hair, Hadero sings in English and Amharic. She projects an inner glow as her gentle voice moves in and out of the sound like a jazz instrumentalist – and her hands do a few Hindu-like waves – rather than calling attention to itself.
Flowers in her hair
“I always wanted to be a singer, I just didn’t know if I could do it,” says Hadero, sitting on a stool at the Red Poppy, sipping coffee from a mug bearing van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” She’s wearing an orange sundress and a white silk orchid in her hair. She’s been wearing a flower, real and fake, since college and can’t seem to shake it. “It expresses some very basic part of who I am,” she says, smiling. “It’s pretty direct.”
Hadero sang in choirs in grade school – she was 12 when a piano teacher turned her on to Billie Holiday – and in high school, and occasionally sang a tune a cappella in a performance series she started at Yale, where she studied political science. After moving here, she studied voice with David Babich and other local teachers and took songwriting, musicianship and guitar classes at Blue Bear School of Music. She took the leap after Brown urged her to sing at one of the shows the Mission Arts & Performance Project puts on at the Red Poppy and other neighborhood spots. Brown had never heard her, but sensed she had something. She sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” and Brown was sold.
“I did it on a leap of faith,” says Brown, who paints and teaches workshops at the Red Poppy, where his expressionist canvases hang on the walls, a printing press sits in the bathroom and wooden chairs, gauzy white curtains and a rainbow-striped hammock dangle from the ceiling. “Sometimes that really doesn’t work out. This time it did.”
Brown and Hadero, who are not romantically involved, write the music for Nefasha Ayer. Next year they’re doing a residency at the de Young Museum, and this fall are putting on a series of Red Poppy performances and exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of its Bay Area Now show. Hadero will start work soon on a commission from Brava Theater to write music for a new play by Brian Thorstensen about dissidents and artists who disappear in times of political upheaval.
Writing music for Nefasha Ayer, Brown, who has a feel for Congolese and other guitar-based African music, cooks up a groove and a simple harmonic structure. Hadero listens and begins to picture images; she creates the melody and lyrics that tell the story.
“The music I come up with tends to be very rhythmic, and her tendency is to float, to have a melody that really circles the rhythm,” Brown says. “The two fall in together, and people love the feeling.”
Influences
Hadero has listened to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Virginia Rodrigues, who inspired her pretty version of the Brazilian song “Negrume da Noite” on the CD, whose covers she and artist friends hand-painted in a homemade way that reflects the music. She cites Nina Simone and Mexican singer Lila Downs as big influences. Simone’s emotional intensity gets her, and she loves the way Downs changes the color and texture of her voice, “from small and delicate to expansive to gravelly to sweet. I really try to do that.”
Hadero writes spare songs about love and longing, sung over basic guitar chords. “I wouldn’t call myself a guitarist. I use the guitar,” Hadero says. Her solo work “has a kind of preciousness to it, but it’s changing as I grow in my musicianship. The solo music is kind of letting people into my world a little bit. Nefasha Ayer is going out into something greater together. It has this grander intention. It’s a larger canvas.” Working with these musicians, Hadero has become more comfortable with improvisation, “which is the real juice. You may not know where you’re going, but everybody’s right there with you. It’s a glorious thing.”
Meklit Hadero performs solo at 8:30 p.m. today at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $7. (510) 644-2204, www.epicarts.org. She performs with Nefasha Ayer at 9 p.m. Sunday at Amnesia, 853 Valencia St., San Francisco. $7. (415) 970-0012, www.amnesiathebar.com.
To hear samples of Meklit Hadero’s solo music, go to meklithadero.com. To hear Nefasha Ayer’s music, go to www.nefashaayer.com.
