JOHANNESBURG – Two aid workers, believed to be a Japanese woman and a Dutchman, working for the nongovernmental organization Medecins du Monde, were abducted Monday afternoon in the eastern region of Ethiopia, the group said Wednesday.
An armed gang is suspected to have kidnapped the two in the Ogaden region, which is close to the Somali border, while they were working. They are believed to have been taken to the central part of Somalia.
An administrator in Somalia’s central area sent security officials to a village there “to investigate an alleged sighting of a sport-utility vehicle with armed men and two white people, but the vehicle had left by the time they arrived,” according to an AP report.
The Paris-based aid group, which has been operating in the Ogaden region, has set up an emergency team.
The group said it is in close contact with the relevant authorities and is trying to help secure the pair’s release.
A video has emerged showing Sarah Palin playing a central role in a church service in Alaska in which witchcraft is denounced.
Thomas Muthee, a Kenyan who is a regular preacher at Palin’s local Pentecostal church in Wasilla, made a passionate plea to defeat witchcraft and other supposed enemies of Palin during a sermon three years ago.
The role of the witchfinder in the life of the vice-presidential candidate running mate raises new questions about how much his team investigated her background before naming her as John McCain’s running mate.
The video below shows Palin standing in front of him at the service, head bowed, her hands held by two members of the congregation.
Muthee, in the sermon, calls on church members to try to gain footholds in centres of influence, such as politics and the media, and praises Palin for her bid to become governor of Alaska. He spoke about the hindrances she faced from her enemies. “In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft is what you rebuke. In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, father make away now,” Muthee said.
In a video that emerged last week Palin, in a speech to the church on June 8, thanked Muthee for his help in getting her elected governor. She said his invocation was “very, very powerful”.
The Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, faced weeks of damaging reports this year over links to controversial Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright, who was accused of being unpatriotic. The links between Palin and Muthee have the potential to damage her.
The Christian Science Monitor reported that Muthee, while in Kenya, led a campaign to find the source of alleged witchcraft after a series of fatal car accidents in Kiambu. He blamed a local woman called Mama Jane, who is reported to have been forced to leave.
Muthee, in a promotional video, said: “We prayed, we fasted, the lord showed us a spirit of witchcraft over the place.”
McCain’s team has largely kept Palin away from the media. But she faces a debate with her opposite number, Joe Biden, next week.
In this video Ethiopian fashion model Gelila Bekele brings viewers into her kitchen for a look at different ways to care for your skin and hair using all natural ingredients from the pantry.
Like so many villagers from Kufansik, these young girls are beneficiaries of the developmental water project sponsored by CRS (Catholic Relief Services), USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) and the Ethiopian Catholic Church.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—Groggy from 24 hours of travel, I step outside into cool twilight in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. My nostrils fill with the pungent scent of what I learn are hundreds of small eucalyptus-fed cooking fires; my eyes fill with a crowd of people jamming the pedestrian entrance to the airport parking lot, praying, greeting, disputing, waiting or picking a path through visitors and vehicles.
Much of the language is unfamiliar to me. There are dozens of cultural groups and 12 official languages in this ancient country, which counts the Bible’s Queen of Sheba among its rulers and the oldest evidence of human life among its treasures.
Once in the hotel van, I peer over the driver’s shoulder to glimpse dissolving silhouettes of tall buildings and a ring of distant purple mountains, but it is what the headlights reveal in our stop-and-go progress that rivets my attention.
With few streetlights, the headlights become spotlights on an urban stage, illuminating people standing, crouching and reclining along the dusty streets as darkness falls. For a moment the beams pick out two women, covered head to toe in pale fabric, sitting side by side, their arms locked around each other, their faces buried in each other’s necks in a way that speaks of desperation and grief.
The morning light, and days of travel within Ethiopia, further illuminate the rich diversity and stark contrasts of this historic African country, where skinny sheep and goats crop bits of grass along the streets of the capital while, nearby, machine-gun carrying federal police stand guard on the verdantly overgrown perimeter of the presidential palace.
A boy stands in front of one of the characteristic mud houses found in the village of Kufansik. (Photos By Susan Stevenot Sullivan/Archdiocese of Atlanta)
A week in Ethiopia with a Catholic Relief Services (CRS) advocacy delegation becomes a baptism in the complex framework of resources and challenges which can mean life or death for families and communities. Beyond the sacramental sign is the stark reality that, for many Ethiopians, life or death is about water.
In the highland areas outside Dire Dawa, the country’s second largest city, the villagers of Kufansik gather to share dance, song, food and individual testimony about new life made possible by participation in a multifaceted development project sponsored by CRS, the Hararghe Catholic Secretariat and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). A village elder holds high a bottle of murky, algae-garnished water in one hand and a bottle of safe, clear water in the other—evidence of the transformation.
The dramatic highland vistas are steep, so torrents from two annual rainy seasons cascade down the slopes, eroding the soil and causing deadly floods in more densely populated lowland areas miles away. Terracing the slopes with local stones slows the runoff, allowing the moisture to sink in and benefit crops and shrubs, which further slows the erosion and retains more moisture.
A well, drilled years ago for Kersa Woreda, was designed so that water could be pumped to a site above Kufansik and then flow by gravity to common spigots. According to Bekele Abaire, CRS program manager for water and sanitation in Ethiopia, over the years the “recharging” of ground water due to terracing and land management has tripled the volume of water coming through the wellhead. The increased capacity has meant other villages could be added to the project, which includes education in sanitation practices, such as family latrine pits destined to become planting sites for fast-growing trees. Today, more than 27,000 people depend on this system for life-giving water.
The villagers of Kufansik testify to the benefits of these development initiatives in terms of healthy children, thriving livestock, and more food security through their ability to adequately feed their families and increase their resilience to rainfall variations which previously meant disaster.
This is critical in a country where most people live in rural areas on what they can grow from inadequate plots of ground. Ethiopia has one of the shortest life expectancies in the world at 46 years. More than half of Ethiopia’s children are stunted by inadequate nutrition; 600 die each day of hunger and preventable disease. In rural areas, 80 percent of residents have no access to safe water. Famine is an historic and contemporary reality and illiteracy limits livelihood for more than 80 percent of women and 60 percent of men.
So the bright baskets of Kufansik, piled with the national flatbread “injera” and heaps of juicy fruit, washed down with cups of rich milk by visitors, are not only a form of generous hospitality, but further evidence of new life and hope. Such transformation is possible when short-term emergency assistance is paired with long-term development projects and partnerships that reach from villages in Africa, through networks such as CRS, to neighbors in the United States.
Six of the 75-member CRS Ethiopian program staff stand in a conference room at their headquarters in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia.
During 50 years of work by CRS in Ethiopia, the same development principles have been used in the sandy, arid regions south of Dire Dawa, home to pastoralists seeking graze for their goats and sheep. Camels, and sometimes people, loaded with firewood and other goods for market are a common sight in this rugged, rocky terrain. Overgrazing accelerates the erosion and desiccation of the soil. Terracing and fencing off watershed and crop areas with thorny acacia branches allows the soil moisture to rebuild.
As visitors approach the village of Legedini and its development projects, taller trees, thicker scrub and patches of grass clothe the hills with life-giving green. A deep pond comes into view, its banks alive with sleek sheep, goats, donkeys and even cattle, slaking their thirst under the eyes of youthful herders.
Interconnected projects, addressing everything from water and soil management to seed, health and homemaking, have transformed life for the people of Legedini.
Nuria Umere confidently gives a tour of her neatly organized, one-room, stone and earth home. A neighbor describes the seeds and techniques which resulted in extra food, which he sold to buy animals to fatten, which he then sold to buy new seed and put money in the bank for the future. Now, he says, he does not spend all day searching for wood for his wife to carry miles into town to sell for whatever she can get for it; now there is food, and his children go to school instead of hiking to carry water.
In Ethiopia, Catholics are less than 0.5 percent of the population, which is predominately Orthodox Christian and Muslim, yet the dioceses of the Ethiopian Catholic Church play an outsized role, partnering to save lives and increase food security and health. Bishops, such as Woldetensae Ghebreghiorgis of Harar, must navigate challenging political situations, interfaith and ecumenical considerations and all manner of logistical and resource challenges to support this prophetic work of love for God and neighbor. The program staff of CRS and the dioceses travel rough roads, reaching out time and again to forge and maintain relationships which make engineering and agricultural know-how yield potable water and consistent crops.
A woman from the village of Kufansik holds a bottle of murky water in her left hand, a sample of villagers’ only form of drinking water in the past. In her right hand she holds a bottle of the clean, safe drinking water available to them today. Kufansik is in the highlands outside of Dire Dawa, the country’s second largest city.
The future of such vital initiatives includes partnerships of concept as well as that of resources and national policy. Emergency aid, from such U.S. legislation as the Farm Bill and PEPFAR, must be paired with development aid; local survival and self-determination must be accompanied by national and international concern and respect; military initiatives must not muddy the waters of humanitarian assistance; religious differences must not obscure a common understanding of the value of human life and dignity. Government funds are vital, but so is support CRS receives from parishioners all over the United States.
There is hope and heartbreak in this beautiful and difficult country. Both are visible in the faces of the orphans, some of the 800 to 1,000 destitute and dying people finding refuge in the Missionaries of Charity’s compound in Addis Ababa, one of 17 MOC centers in this country. Despite horrifying ordeals, the children eagerly stretch their arms out to strangers, beaming.
Sister Benedicta, MOC superior in Ethiopia, gives visitors a holy card with a prayer in Amharic on one side and a traditional Ethiopian-style painting of the crucifixion on the other.
Under the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ can be seen, in English, “I thirst” and “I satiate.” In the streets of Addis Ababa the smoke from eucalyptus cooking fires rises like incense, a prayer for hope and help.
Susan Stevenot Sullivan, the director of Catholic Relief Services for the Archdiocese of Atlanta, visited Ethiopia with a CRS delegation in August. She is also diocesan director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, JustFaith, Justice for Immigrants and Parish Social Ministry for Catholic Charities.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This could be the beginning of the end of the Woyanne vampire regime. The people of Ethiopia stand in solidarity with the brave Somali freedom fighters. Ethiopian freedom fighters such as EPPF, ONLF, OLF, and TPDM will finish off Woyanne once they get their acts together — hopefully soon.
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By Andrew Cawthorne
NAIROBI (Reuters) – Nearly two years after being driven from Mogadishu, Islamists have re-taken swathes of south Somalia and may have their sights again on the capital.
The insurgents’ push is being led by Al Shabaab, or “Youth” in Arabic, the most militant in a wide array of groups opposed to the Somali government and military backers from Ethiopia, an ally in Washington’s “War on Terror”.
“Shabaab are winning. They have pursued a startlingly successful two-pronged strategy — chase all the internationals from the scene, and shift tactics from provocation to conquest,” said a veteran Somali analyst in the region.
“Before it was ‘hit-and-run’ guerrilla warfare. Now it’s a case of ‘we’re here to stay’,” he added, noting Shabaab was “flooded with money” from foreign backers.
The Islamist insurgency since early 2007, the latest instalment in Somalia’s 17-year civil conflict, has worsened one of Africa’s worst humanitarian crises and fomented instability around the already chronically volatile Horn region.
Shabaab’s advances are galling to Washington, which says the group is linked to al Qaeda and has put it on its terrorism list. Western security services have long worried about Somalia becoming a haven for extremists, though critics — and the Islamists — say that threat has been fabricated to disguise U.S. aims to keep control, via Ethiopia, in the region.
Some compare the Somali quagmire to Iraq in character, if not scale, given its appeal to jihadists, the involvement of foreign troops and the tactics used by the rebels.
In August, in its most significant grab of a gradual territorial encroachment, Shabaab spearheaded the takeover of Kismayu, a strategic port and south Somalia’s second city.
This month, its threats to shoot down planes have largely paralysed Mogadishu airport. And in recent days, its fighters have been targeting African peacekeepers.
“The only question is ‘what next?” said a diplomat, predicting Shabaab would next seek to close Mogadishu port and take control of Baidoa town, the seat of parliament.
Analysts say Islamists or Islamist-allied groups now control most of south Somalia, with the exception of Mogadishu, Baidoa where parliament is protected by Ethiopian Woyanne troops, and Baladwayne near the border where Addis Ababa garrisons soldiers.
That is a remarkable turnaround from the end of 2006, when allied Somali-Ethiopian Woyanne troops chased the Islamists out of Mogadishu after a six-month rule of south Somalia, scattering them to sea, remote hills and the Kenyan border.
The Islamists regrouped to begin an insurgency that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians. Military discipline, grassroots political work, youth recruitment and an anti-Ethiopian Woyanne rallying cry have underpinned their return, analysts say.
With the Islamists split into many rival factions, it is impossible to tell if an offensive against Mogadishu is imminent. Analysts say Shabaab and other Islamist militants may not want an all-out confrontation with Ethiopian troops, preferring to wait until Addis Ababa withdraws forces.
WORLD “NUMB” TO SOMALIA
Ethiopian Woyanne Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is fed up with the human, political and financial cost of his Somalia intervention, but knows withdrawal could hasten the fall of Mogadishu.
The insurgents may also resist the temptation to launch an offensive on Mogadishu until their own ranks are united.
“Opposition forces at the moment are internally debating whether or not it’s time for a major push,” the diplomat said.
Meanwhile, the rebels attack government and Ethiopian Woyanne targets in the city seemingly at will. Of late, they have also been hitting African Union (AU) peacekeepers, who number just 2,200, possibly to warn the world against more intervention.
Estimates vary but experts think Ethiopia has about 10,000 soldiers in Somalia, the government about 10,000 police and soldiers. Islamist fighter numbers are fluid but may match that.
The Islamists’ growth in power has gone largely unnoticed outside Somalia by all but experts. For the wider world, Somalia’s daily news of bombs, assassinations, piracy and kidnappings has blurred into an impression of violence-as-usual.
Even this week’s horrors, including shells slicing up 30 civilians in a market, registered barely a blip outside.
“The world has grown numb to Somalia’s seemingly endless crises,” said analyst Ken Menkhaus.
But “much is new this time, and it would be a dangerous error of judgement to brush off Somalia’s current crisis as more of the same,” he said. “Seismic political, social, and security changes are occurring in the country.”
The United Nations has been pushing a peace agreement in neighbouring Djibouti that would see a ceasefire, a pull-back of Ethiopian Woyanne troops — the insurgents’ main bone of contention — then some sort of power-sharing arrangement.
Diplomats see that as the main hope for stability, and moderates on both sides support it in principle. But Islamist fighters on the ground have rejected the process, and negotiators failed to agree on details last week.
A U.S. expert on Somalia, John Prendergast, said the world had taken its eyes off the conflict at its peril.
“Somalia truly is the one place in Africa where you have a potential cauldron of recruitment and extremism that, left to its own devices, will only increase in terms of the danger it presents to the region, and to American and Western interests.”
One effect of the conflict impinging on the outside world is rampant piracy off Somalia. Gangs have captured some 30 boats this year, and still hold a dozen ships with 200 or so hostages.
The violence is also impeding relief groups from helping Somalia’s several million hungry. Foreign investors, interested in principle in Somalia’s hydrocarbon and fishing resources, barely give the place a second thought in the current climate.
HURUTA, ETHIOPIA – IT’S just not the same Ethiopia. Despite the recent predictions that famine in the south of the country will see five million people face starvation in the coming months, despite the impact of rocketing world food prices and inflation here soaring, despite the pleas on its behalf to foreign countries not to cut aid to Africa in light of the global recession, it is not the same old Ethiopia.
Slowly, but increasingly, the begging bowl is being seen as part of the problem.
Dr Awole Mela, who works for an Irish-based self-help agency in the country, says that more than 20 years after Bob Geldof brought the plight of starving Ethiopians to the world stage, it is time the handouts ended, to be replaced by hand ups.
“This country cannot survive by continually going to Europe and asking for grain,” the Africa director of Self Help Africa maintained. “That has created for us a dependency culture and it is not what is needed.
“Bringing in ‘relief food’ cannot keep you more than three or four months, but for how long are we going to continue getting it from Europe when there is a drought? In Ethiopia you have to expect drought every time and any time. The most important thing is to teach people to produce a variety of their own crops, teach them how to deal with the droughts when they come. Give them the right type of support to get started and they won’t need any support from anybody in the future.”
That may sound somewhat Utopian to an Irish audience. Whenever we think of Ethiopia, by and large, our stomachs rumble. We see little black babies with distended bellies from a lack of food and fly-covered faces from a lack of energy to swat them away. We hum the song about snow in Africa this Christmas, and our hands very probably move towards our pockets, re-tracing a journey made countless times before.
In Ethiopia itself, we imagine a scorched, dead countryside, akin to the surface of the moon, and with just as little water.
But the reality this week in the Huruta region, about 165km (100 miles) south east of Addis Ababa, could hardly provide a starker contrast.
Lush green fields, abundant with the local staple crop “teff” — as well as wheat and maize, onions, tomatoes and cabbage, banana and papaya, coffee trees and sunflowers, cattle and goats — surround the remote area for miles, despite a relatively dry rainy season, which has just ended. Self Help Africa has been running one of its nine Ethiopian programmes here for a number of years, taking in an area of 100,000 acres and about 110,000 people. To the naked eye, it is a success. More so, to the ear.
Ato Shita Woldesadik, a 55-year-old father of 10, had spent more than 20 years farming his six acres in Kakarssa village, with little success because of the notoriously erratic rainfall.
Dependent on the government for food to keep his family from starving for an average of three or four months each year, he decided to change his farming methods in 2006, despite his advancing years.
Self Help, which only employs Ethiopian natives and has been active here since 1987, provided him with the knowledge of a number of agricultural technologies — including how to build a rudimentary holding sump for water, dug into the ground, lined with cement and covered with thatch to prevent evaporation — through “contact” farmers in the locality it had already helped.
It also gave him access to, and knowledge about, seeds for various drought-resistant crops and crops that produce early. “With the surplus wheat and teff I produced, I was able to send some of my children to Arabian country to work,” Ato Shita told the Irish Independent through an interpreter. “And with the money they sent back I am able to send my seven youngest children to school.”
He calculates that he made approximately €1,750 extra last year, which is a heady sum in a country where huge numbers of casual construction workers on the sites in Addis Ababa take home less than €1 per day.
His success has been imitated by many others, with some of his neighbours telling how they can now pay up to €4,000 to build “modern” houses, with corrugated iron roofs.
In a country where up to 80pc of the people are reliant on agriculture for their livelihood, the figures are noteworthy. But they should also be noteworthy a little closer to home.
Last year, the Irish Government — through the taxpayer — gave €35m in aid to Ethiopia, with millions pumped into the country through non-government organisations like Goal and Self Help.
The notable aspect of the Self Help programme, however, is that the beneficiaries get nothing for free. The seeds for the new varieties of crops, for example, have to be paid for — 25pc up front with the remainder paid at the end of the help programme.
The farmers are given advice and encouragement to set up saving and credit cooperatives. There is an emphasis on social services and on health, especially HIV/AIDS prevention in a country where over five million are estimated to have the disease. After five years, any input from Self Help ends.
“These projects give people their dignity,” Mr Awole said. “They want to work, and they want to be a success, and they want their family and neighbours to work and be a success.”
Self Help, which, after its recent amalgamation with UK agency Harvest Help, now operates in nine countries across the continent, believes that Ethiopia can become an example to others of how it is possible to turn things around.
And Ireland may yet have more of a role in helping Ethiopia than the obvious markers of Sir Bob and donations for the starving.
“We’re unique in terms of where we are from because of our relatively recent famine and the conflict in the North,” group CEO Ray Jordan said. “We have effectively gone the full circle to end up as one of the most-developed and successful countries in the world.
“It was the Irish people themselves that turned around the country. Okay, we got assistance from the European Union, foreign direct investment and so on, but it was the people who worked their way from being incredibly poor to being well-educated and world beaters.
“It has to be exactly the same in the developing world. The local people know exactly what their daily struggles are, and who are we to come in from a top-down approach? We can support them though so that they can start taking the small steps needed for change.”
For more information, visit www.selfhelpafrica.com
