By Isaiah Thompson, citypaper.net

Last week, the Philadelphia office for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a proud statement to the press: Agents at a special mail facility in Philly had identified and seized 63 pounds of khat, a “leafy plant … that contains an amphetamine-like stimulant.” The press release included a picture of the khat (pronounced “cot” or sometimes “chot”), poking up out of a box.

Khat — sometimes written, as Scrabble players know, as “qat” — is a leafy shrub cultivated in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. The leaves can be boiled into a tea, but mostly it’s chewed. Fresh leaves are essential, because they contain the chemical cathonine, which has been illegal in the United States since 1993, when the Drug Enforcement Administration placed it on its list of Schedule 1 narcotics, in such ignoble company as PCP, Ecstasy and LSD. The cathonine is present only in fresh leaves, however; dried khat contains only cathine, a milder stimulant.

Once khat is intercepted, it’s the job of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to find out where it’s going. Whether ICE will actually follow the khat trail, however, isn’t clear. The agency didn’t respond to requests for comment on last week’s case, but when CBP seized 72 pounds of khat this past April, a spokesperson for ICE told the Inquirer that the agency “declined to pursue the intended recipients.”

Indeed, the war on khat seems to be mostly a cold one — especially in Philly.

Last year, CBP seized 2.5 tons of khat coming into Philly; they’ve found more than 800 pounds so far this year. Authorities agree that the plant is chiefly consumed by immigrants from countries where it’s still common and legal, primarily Yemen, Ethiopia and Somalia. Philly, according to CBP spokesman Steve Sapp, is a khat distribution hub.

And yet, last September, when Philadelphia Police raided a house in East Falls and found 740 pounds of khat there, no one was charged, says Deputy Commissioner William Blackburn. In fact, Cathie Abookire, spokeswoman for the District Attorney, confirms that the DA has never prosecuted anyone for using or selling khat.

“But [Lynne Abraham] is very, very well aware of the drug … and its power,” she says.

Statewide, only two khat cases have resulted in sentencing. And two years ago, when the DEA conducted the highest-profile khat bust ever, charging 44 people in New York and Seattle with trafficking, only three were convicted. Of those, one got off with a year.

Blackburn says he just doesn’t think there’s much khat around. “I haven’t come across it in any of our raids.”

Maybe there just isn’t much khat in Philly. Or maybe — unlike with some other substances — officials are just treating khat like the threat to the public well-being it isn’t.

Over a couple of Heinekens at the Abyssinia Ethiopian Restaurant in West Philly, Wondi and Tesfaye, two well-dressed Ethiopian-American men in their early 30s, look more bored than suspicious when asked about khat.

Sure, they know about it, they say. Plenty of people in Philadelphia chew it. Both men say they no longer do — but with as little vehemence as if saying they no longer do Jägerbombs.

“It makes you feel a little excited, ” Tesfaye says, shrugging.

“At home, nobody calls it a drug,” Wondi explains.

Tesfaye agrees: “In Germany, they drink beer with breakfast,” he says. “You tell Germans it’s a drug, and they tell you you’re crazy.”

There is no global consensus about khat. While some people have defended it as a cultural heritage, Yemeni officials fear that khat is replacing sustenance farming and draining the country of water resources. Some European countries where the plant is legal have considered banning it, fearing that heavy use is leading to mental health problems.

As for the U.S., both Wondi and Tesfaye say that while khat is present, there isn’t much of it. Anyway, they say, there’s a big distinction between khat and other drugs.

“You don’t see people chewing it all alone like this,” Wondi says, hunching over and pretending to smoke a crack pipe. Tesfaye starts chuckling. They laugh about it for a while.

Foreign maids in Lebanon are committing
suicide to escape cruel employers,
says HRW. [Photo: AFP]

(AFP) — Foreign maids are dying each week in Lebanon often by committing suicide to escape bad treatment by their employers, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

“Domestic workers are dying in Lebanon at a rate of more than one per week,” said Nadim Houry, a senior researcher at HRW, in the second damning report since April on the working conditions of foreign workers in Lebanon. “These suicides are linked to the isolation and the difficult working conditions these workers face in Lebanon,” including financial pressure due to earning below minimum wages, Houry said in the report.

According to HRW around 200,000 domestic labourers, mostly from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Ethiopia, are not protected by Lebanese labour laws.

Most of those who take their own lives or “risk their lives trying to escape” from the high-rise apartment buildings where they are employed, are women.

HRW said that at least 24 housemaids have died since January 2007 after falling from multi-storey buildings.

“Many domestic workers are literally being driven to jump from balconies to escape their forced confinement,” Houry said.

Interviews conducted by HRW with embassy officials and friends of domestic workers who committed suicide “suggest that forced confinement, excessive work demands, employer abuse and financial pressures are key factors pushing these women to kill themselves or risk their lives”.

Human Rights Watch urged the Lebanese authorities to guarantee the workers “the right to move freely, to work in decent conditions, to communicate with their friends and families, and to earn a living wage”.

It specifically asked the authorities to track down cases of deaths linked to suicide or other unnatural causes and “properly investigate them”.

“The high death toll of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, from unnatural causes, shows the urgent need to improve their working conditions,” HRW said.

Thousands of cheering Ethiopians have lined the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, to welcome home the country’s Olympic gold-medal winning athletes.

Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi was at the airport to greet the team, led by Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba, both of whom won two golds at Beijing.

The team was led from the airport in open-topped cars past ecstatic crowds.

Ethiopia traditionally excels at long-distance running and finished 18th overall in the Olympic medal table.

“Our athletes have placed the country among the elite of countries that excel in athletics,” Ethiopia’s Minister of Youth and Sport, Aster Mamo, said at the event.

“We, as a country and government, are very proud of the achievements,” she added.

Kenenisa Bekele described the ceremony as “a special moment”.

“The fans have repaid our success with their enthusiastic welcome,” he said.

Bekele won gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m at Beijing while his compatriot, Tirunesh Dibaba, won gold in the women’s 5,000m and 10,000m.

Legendary Ethiopian long-distance runner Haile Gebrselassie also drew loud applause from the audience, though he did not win any medals at this year’s games.

By Barney Jopson, Financial Times

ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia Woyanne would be prepared to withdraw its troops from Somalia even if the interim government they were sent in to install 20 months ago were still not stable or functioning, the country’s prime minister dictator has said.

Meles Zenawi told the Financial Times that Ethiopia was “not joined at the hip” with the Somali government as frustration in Addis Ababa grows over its perennial in-fighting and the financial cost of the occupation.

His comments mark a policy shift because Ethiopia Woyanne had previously indicated it would stay in Somalia until the transitional federal government (TFG) was firmly established and in control.

If Ethiopia Woyanne deserts it while Somalia remains lawless and violent, it could send the world’s most intractable failed state deeper into a crisis that aid agencies say has already left millions of people on the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

But while analysts in Addis Ababa say Ethiopia is closer to pulling out now than ever before, Meles remains caught in a dilemma between wanting Somali leaders to take responsibility for stabilising their country, and needing to guarantee Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s own security if they fail to do so. [Meles and his thugs cannot even feed their own people in Tigray region, let alone make another country stable.]

Ethiopia Woyanne invaded Somalia – which has not had a properly functioning central government since 1991 – with thousands of troops in the final week of 2006 to oust a group of Islamists that had taken control of the capital, Mogadishu, and which Addis Ababa Woyanne believed represented a threat to its security.

But after reinstalling the interim government of President Abdullahi Yusuf in a matter of weeks, Ethiopia’s Woyanne troops got bogged down as the regime struggled to establish a firm grip on power, intra-government quarrels escalated, and an insurgency led by Islamists and rival clans took hold.

Meles said Ethiopia Woyanne would do everything it could to help the interim government, whose power is limited to a few parts of Mogadishu, to become stronger and more effective. But he added “that is not necessarily a precondition for our withdrawal” and stressed that Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s commitment was not open-ended.

“Our obligation towards peace in Somalia is only one aspect. There are also requirements of our own, including financial requirements,” he said. “The operation has been extremely expensive so we will have to balance the domestic pressures on the one hand and pressures in Somalia on the other and try to come up with a balanced solution.”

Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s desire to curtail its military engagement in Somalia is driven to a large extent by its cost, which has been felt more acutely this year as the country is hit by a combination of soaring inflation and failed harvests caused by drought, which the United Nations says has left some 10m people in need of food aid.

Addis Ababa Woyanne refuses to say how many troops it has in Somalia, but independent analysts estimate there are 4,000-6,000, deployed mainly to protect senior Somali officials, government buildings and critical infrastructure.

The Ethiopian Woyanne government maintains that al-Shabaab, an Islamist insurgent group said by the US to be linked to al-Qaeda, has been critically weakened. But the pattern of violence suggests otherwise. Attacks on Ethiopian Woyanne troops and the Somali security forces they are training have spiked in the past month and last Friday, in a striking show of force, Islamists took control of the southern port town of Kismayo.

Civilians continue to be caught in the cross-fire: more than 50 died last week as a result of indiscriminate shelling” by Ethiopian Woyanne and government troops after a roadside bomb attack on their convoy, according to a UN situation report.

In total, 8,000 Somalis have been killed and 1m forced from their homes by fighting since the beginning of last year. Due to conflict, failed rains and inflation, the UN says that up to 3.5m Somalis – or nearly half the population – could need food aid later this year.

Asked where Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s original plan to stay in Somalia for a short time had gone wrong, Meles pointed the finger at the west. It has offered lukewarm political and financial support for an African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, which has mustered barely one quarter of its envisaged 8,000 troops.

“We didn’t anticipate the international community would be happy riding the Ethiopian Woyanne horse and flogging it at the same time for so long,” he said. “We had hoped and expected … that the international community would recognise that this was a unique opportunity for the stabilisation of Somalia and capitalise on it.”

One western diplomat in Addis Ababa said Ethiopia Woyanne never expected to find itself in a guerrilla war and probably overestimated its ability to “work the clan dynamics”, the web of kin-based rivalries that divides Somali society even though its people share the same language, culture and Muslim religion.

Last week Ethiopia Woyanne sequestered the president and Nur Hassan Hussein, the prime minister, in Addis Ababa for talks to make them address their differences. On Tuesday the two men signed a pledge to work together anew.

“Ethiopia Woyanne remains apprehensive because the TFG is not viable, it’s not functional and it’s not helping them, and the insurgency is gaining a new edge,” said Medhane Tadesse of the Center for Policy Research and Dialogue, a think-tank in Addis Ababa.