Kinijit Los Angeles has organized a public meeting to discuss the Ethiopia-Sudan border re-demarcation on Saturday June 14th 2008. Dr. Fisseha Abebe and Prof. Alemayehu Gebremariam will be guest speakers.
Click on the poster below for more details.
(telegraph.co.uk) — Britain will give at least £15 million in aid to fight starvation in Ethiopia as the situation in the drought-stricken country worsens, International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander has said.
A team of Department for International Development officials are due to arrive in Ethiopia on Tuesday to assess the situation and the Ethiopian government is expected to launch an emergency appeal this week.
Aid groups say the crisis in Ethiopia was the worst since 1984, when a famine captured the world’s attention and killed around one million people. The current drought, in a country where more than 80 per cent of its 79 million people live off the land, has been compounded by global food price rises.
Monday night’s announcement of a £10 million contribution – in addition to a £5 million pledge last month – came as John Holmes, the United Nation’s top humanitarian official, said despite international aid, Ethiopia was again facing hunger on a mass scale.
“The World Food Programme feeds some 8 million people already, together with the other (aid agencies) in Ethiopia,” he said. “But we may need to increase that, because of drought.”
Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, warned at least 126,000 children were in need of urgent care to prevent severe malnutrition and said £25 million was needed just to meet emergency needs.
“We’re overwhelmed,” said Margaret Aguirre, a spokeswoman for the International Medical Corps, a California-based aid agency. “There’s not enough food and everyone’s starving and that’s all there is to it. Older children are starting to show the signs of malnutrition when normally they might be able to withstand shocks to the system.
“What’s particularly concerning is that the moderately malnourished are soaring. It’s increasing so much that it means those children are going to slide into severe malnutrition.”
The famine comes as Ethiopian troops fight a bloody battle Somalia, backing the government against Islamic insurgents. Somalia on Monday signed a deal with the opposition alliance, calling for an end to the violence and the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces.
The opposition sees the Ethiopian troops as an occupying force and it international rights groups and aid agencies estimate that at least 6,000 civilians have been killed in fighting over the past year.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Britain’s government is partly responsible for the political and economic crises in Ethiopia by supporting the Woyanne tribal junta to stay in power. What Ethiopia needs is not frifari (crumbs). The best thing Britain can do for Ethiopia is to stop arming and financing the brutal dictatorship.
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — THE journey of three Ethiopian refugees from their homeland to Melbourne is the inspiration behind a city art exhibition.
Flemington’s Sutueal Bekele is one of the artists contributing to The Journey: From Ancient Ethiopia to Contemporary Melbourne, an exhibition about migration and settlement.
“The paintings represent me and my journey,” Bekele said. “It’s about my journey from Ethiopia through a few African countries that I lived in, to arriving here in Melbourne.”
Bekele, 34, left Ethiopia when he was 16 and spent time in Kenya before arriving in Australia in 1999.
“It was a long journey and it’s hard to leave your home country and your family and travel all the way here,” Bekele said. “But it was a journey with a lot of experiences, meeting people from different backgrounds and learning a lot of things every day.”
Bekele said it was hard to paint in the refugee camps.
“It was very challenging moving to a new area and it takes time to adapt but it does give you a new artistic expression,” he said.
In the late ’90s at a Kenyan refugee camp, Bekele’s work was seen by United Nations delegates and Kenyan politicians.
“They visited my studio in the refugee camp and they were quite impressed with my work,” he said. The UN commissioned a painting from Bekele which now hangs at its Geneva headquarters.
Bekele said he was grateful to settle in Melbourne.
“I don’t even look back, this is my home. I’ve got a partner and two children and now it’s all about them, the next generation,” he said.
Bekele said his artwork was important to him and a way of sharing his experiences.
“As an artist I always try to express my culture and the environment that I grew up in and share it with people,” he said.
“I’m very emotionally attached to my artwork and so I try not to sell much of it.”
By Cathy Nilbett, Moonee Valley Leader
Heated, but important, debates are currently raging inside the Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ) on the future course of the organization. There are major disagreements among the top leaders of UDJ, which is formed by leaders of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (Kinijit) after being forced by the Meles dictatorship in Ethiopia to change their name in order to be able to legally operate inside the country. Some outsiders try to characterize the disagreements as power struggle. But it is not as simple as that. According to ER sources, the debates evolve around the question of how to move the party forward, in light of its inability to freely operate inside Ethiopia.
Ethiopian Review’s recommendation to the UDJ leaders is to follow their secretary general’s lead and officially suspend all their operations inside the country. The head of finance, Dr Befekadu Degifie, has also resigned last week, since it is currently impossible to operate as a genuine opposition party in Ethiopia. Prof. Mesfin Woldemariam made it known this week that he will no longer be in the leadership of the party. More high level officials are expected to take the same measures. If the rest of UDJ leaders intend to continue to operate inside the country under the terms dictated to them by the Woyanne fascist regime, they would only be serving the interest of the Meles crime family, and not the people of Ethiopia.
Suspending operation doesn’t mean disbanding the party. The party can continue to exist, but until the Woyanne repression ends, it should suspend all its activities, as well as withdraw its application from the illegitimate Election Board. If UDJ engages in any activity, it should be trying to convince the other parties who claim to be opposition to also suspend their operation in protest of Woyanne’s repression. UDJ and the other opposition parties inside Ethiopia are not going to bring any change. Woyanne will continue to use brute force to stop them. In fact, their only use right now is to give Woyanne legitimacy. They are not serving the interest of the people they clam to stand for by giving legitimacy to the brutal dictatorship.
When Birtukan Mideksa and the other leaders of Kinijit (now named UDJ) returned to Ethiopia in September after their U.S. and European visits, they were widely popular. Right now, no body cares about what they say or do. They have not been doing much to begin with, other than holding endless meetings and begging Woyanne to give them legal status, in the process humiliating themselves and the people of Ethiopia. As a result, their popularity has now plummeted. They have expended all their political capital on a futile effort to get legal status from the Woyanne-controlled Election Board. If they think otherwise, they are only fooling themselves, not to mention insulting the intelligence of the Ethiopian people.
In addition to officially announcing their suspension of operations inside the country, the UDJ leaders need to inform their support groups abroad that all of them are free to decide what to do next. This will allow many of the Kinijit support committees around the world to rally around Ginbot 7.
Ethiopia is currently in extremely desperate situation. This is the time to think and act fast. This is the time to take drastic actions to save our country from falling apart, and her people from dying by the millions. This cannot be done without a strong and decisive political leadership.
Ethiopian Review urges all Kinijit supporters in the Diaspora who understand the extreme severity of the situation at home to join Ginbot 7 and help it become a strong force that will use any available means to remove the cancer that is eating away our country. Any thing short of doing that is failing the people of Ethiopia in this time of despair. The people of Ethiopia need a strong political leadership that will bleed and kill Woyanne, not beg and kneel down to Meles and Sebhat.
Our political leaders need to always put themselves one step ahead of Woyanne, instead of always reacting to what Woyanne does. Wzt. Birtukan and colleagues will be remembered as heroes if they outsmart Woyanne at its own game. What they are doing currently is not smart at all. If they continue on their current course, they will be totally discredited as political leaders.
Meanwhile, Ethiopian Review repeats its call to Ginbot 7 to take the following steps in the fight to save our country:
1) Form a transitional government in exile with OLF, ONLF, EPPF, and TPDM as soon as possible.
2) Bring the military forces of the OLF, ONLF, TPDM and EPPF under one military command that will operate as Ethiopian National Defense Forces.
3) Establish a diplomatic relation with Asmara without any further delay, which will send shivers down Woyanne’s spine. Don’t even waste time to explain to the fools why it is necessary to take such a step. Millions of our people are dying horrible deaths at this very moment and there are some dunderheads who still want to pick and choose who to work with to save our people in this hour of despair.
Smaller political parties, the media, and civic groups, such as Tatek, Hibre Hizb, Tegbar, Gasha, Kinijit support groups, Kinijit Youth League, and others need to come under the Ginbot 7 umbrella.
This is not a time for debate. It is a time for action to save our people from holocaust.
Hopefully Birtukan and friends will make the right decision this coming Saturday when they will meet to decide their party’s — and their own — future.
German Radio (DW) has extensive coverage about the displacement of Ethiopians as a result of the secret border re-demarcation agreement between Meles Zenawi’s regime of Ethiopia and al-Beshir’s Sudanese regime in exchange for railway access for the Tigray region to Port Sudan.
DW also interviews Ethiopians who were released last week after being taken away from their lands by Sudanese government troops and thrown in jail. The Ethiopians were released after paying 2 million birr.
The people whose land have been taken away by Sudan are not being attacked by Sudanese troops alone. According to the DW report, Woyanne troops using heavy weapons have attacked the local residents who resisted.
Click here to listen.
By ANITA POWELL
SHASHAMANE, Ethiopia (AP) — Like so many other victims of Ethiopia’s hunger crisis, Usheto Beriso weighs just half of what he should. He is always cold and swaddled in a blanket. His limbs are stick-thin.
But Usheto is not the typical face of Ethiopia’s chronic food problems, the scrawny baby or the ailing toddler. At age 55, he is among a growing number of adults and older children — traditionally less-vulnerable groups — who have been stricken by severe hunger due to poor rains and recent crop failure in southern Ethiopia, health workers say.
“To see adults in this condition, it’s a very serious situation,” Mieke Steenssens, a volunteer nurse with Doctors Without Borders, told The Associated Press as she registered the 5-foot-4 Usheto’s weight at just 73 pounds.
Aid groups say the older victims suggest there is an escalation in the crisis in Ethiopia, a country that drew international attention in 1984 when a famine compounded by communist policies killed 1 million people.
This year’s crisis, brought on by a countrywide drought and skyrocketing global food prices, is far less severe. But while figures for how many adults and older children are affected are not available, at least four aid groups interviewed by the AP said they noticed a troubling increase.
“We’re overwhelmed,” said Margaret Aguirre, a spokeswoman for the International Medical Corps, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based aid agency. “There’s not enough food and everyone’s starving, and that’s all there is to it.
“Older children are starting to show the signs of malnutrition when normally they might be able to withstand shocks to the system,” she added. “What’s particularly concerning is that the moderately malnourished are soaring. It’s increasing so much that it means those children are going to slide into severe malnutrition.”
Ethiopia is not alone in suffering through the worldwide food crisis, which is threatening to push the number of hungry people in the world toward 1 billion. Last week, a U.N. summit of 181 countries pledged to reduce trade barriers and boost agricultural production to combat rising food prices.
But in Ethiopia, food production is hampered by drought, meaning the country has been hit with a double blow. Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of people live off the land. Agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic production and 85 percent of exports.
Sending more food is one solution, but there already is a global crunch as rising fuel prices drive up the cost of fertilizers, farm vehicle use and transport of food to market. Biofuels, which are made from crops such as sugar cane and corn, are another contentious issue, with critics saying they compete with food crops.
The problem is echoed across Africa, from Kenya and Somalia and farther west. Exacerbating the global rise in food prices, which has sparked protests and riots in several West African nations, is an annual decline in food reserves across the high desert-like region called the Sahel, just below the Sahara Desert.
The so-called “lean season” that begins around June is marked by near-empty grain stores, with the next harvest not due until around September. Locust invasions and poor rains in recent years have only worsened the condition, which leads to deadly malnutrition among young children.
Aid agencies in Ethiopia are issuing desperate appeals for donor funding, saying emergency intervention is not enough. Ethiopia receives more food aid than nearly every other country in the world, most of it from the United States, which has provided $300 million in emergency assistance to relief agencies in the past year.
But despite the international help, the country is again facing hunger on a mass scale. Part of the reason, according to John Holmes, the top U.N. humanitarian official, is the country’s climate, chronic drought and the large population of 78 million people.
“The World Food Program feeds some 8 million people already, together with the others in Ethiopia,” he said. “But we may need to increase that, because of drought.”
The U.N. children’s agency has characterized this year’s food shortage — in which an estimated 4.5 million people are in need of emergency food aid — as the worst since 2003, when droughts led 13.2 million people to seek such aid. In 2000, more than 10 million needed emergency food.
Studies by the International Medical Corps in southern Ethiopia — the epicenter of the crisis — show that up to one in four young mothers is showing signs of moderate malnutrition.
Ethiopia’s top disaster response official, Simon Mechale, insists that the food situation is “under control” and will be resolved within four months. But in the countryside, there are signs that drought has taken a more serious toll.
At a recent food distribution in a village some 155 miles southwest of the capital, more than 4,000 people showed up for free wheat and cooking oil, but only 1,300 rations were available.
Harried health workers picked through the impatient crowd, sorting out the sickest children. Frantic mothers proffered their withered infants, hoping the children’s poor state would earn some food for the family.
Ayelech Daka said her 6-year-old son, Tariken Lakamu, has been living on one meal a day for the past three months.
“He was very fat three months ago,” said his mother, Ayelech said. “He was normal.”
Now, he’s skin and bones; he vomits just seconds after taking a bite of a ration offered by an aid worker.
“I’m weak,” the child said. “I feel sick. I don’t get any food.”
Another mother, Ukume Dubancho, rocked a listless infant, trying to squeeze out drops of breast milk for her children, ages 4 months and 4 years, both of whom show signs of severe malnutrition.
Villagers said they simply cannot afford the food on the market. The few mature ears of corn in the market were selling for about 11 cents an ear. Last year, when the rains were good, that money would buy six or seven ears.
“I am not able to walk, even,” Ukume said. “I walk for one kilometer and I have to rest.”
Associated Press writer Ed Harris in Lagos, Nigeria and John Heilprin at the United Nations contributed to this report.