BIADOA, Somalia (Xinhua) — Heavily armed Ethiopian Woyanne troops have entered a district in south Somalia nearly a month after the troops left the war-torn country, witnesses said Wednesday.
Villagers in the southern Bakool region say the troops have crossed the border and set up bases in the village of Yeet, in Rabdhure district, 28 km south of the regional capital of Hudur.
Ethiopia Woyanne withdrew its forces from Somalia after two years of presence in the country following the defeat of the Islamists that run much of southern and central Somalia in the later half of 2006.
It is not clear why the Ethiopian Woyanne troops entered the region but there have lately been reports of troop movement by Somali government forces in Hudur in the Bakool regional backing officials who fled the southern town of Baidoa when it fell into the hands of the Al-Shabaab insurgent fighters last month.
Baidoa has been the seat of Somali parliament before its capture by the hardline Islamist group of Al-Shabaab which opposes the new Somali government leadership.
Residents in the villages around the border district of Rabdhuure say that the troops arrested a number of locals soon after entering the area.
In January, local officials charged that Ethiopian Woyanne troops crossed over into the other Somali border region of Hiran in central Somalia, two weeks after their withdrawal from the country but the Ethiopian Woyanne government denied the allegations.
The main gallery space at the Santa Monica Museum of Art has been marked off by tape, like an archaeological dig where {www:different} findings have been indicated. In fact, the objects do look unearthed, anthropological.
Here, dozens of hand-carved sticks the size of walking canes are neatly laid out on a tarp; there, several hundred lumps of earth mixed with straw, crude figurines in the form of small apes, frogs and boxy television sets, are jumbled. Several framed works — collages and stitchings on fabric — are propped against the walls, which are being sponge-painted with an earthen wash.
The artist who has created these works is the subject of an unusual retrospective, “Elias Sime: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart.” A quiet, burly man with a soft smile, Simé, 41, is from Ethiopia, where he is already well known. Three years ago he leapt onto the international scene when invited to participate in the New Crowned Hope Festival, organized by über-impresario Peter Sellars as part of Vienna’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Sime’s work often integrates recycled objects, not to make an environmental or economic {www:statement}, he says, but because “they have a story. Like the old buttons I use in my work, I can feel the people who wore them.”
“Every object is telling stories, has a history,” says Sellars. “He takes you into this micro-universe of intense experience.”
Last year Sellars convinced Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica museum, to do Simé’s first one-person show in this country. Longhauser praises the work as “all these things which hold a charge of life and are passed on from generation to generation. It’s very moving, very poignant.”
This afternoon, Sime and Meskerem Assegued, co-curator of the show along with Sellars, are in the gallery going over the first shipments — and there is more, far more to come, they say. Assegued both explains the work and helps {www:translate} for Sime.
She picks up several of the sticks and reveals that each “handle” has a face carved into it, some comical, some fierce. “This is what the farmers use for digging, and they specifically look for these kinds of branches,” she says, holding one by the long end and dipping the shorter section downward. How will these be displayed? “I’m thinking of tying together several at a time, then hanging them up in a corner,” she says. Simé nods, trusting her to best present his work.
Sime is a graduate of the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts and Design. He majored in graphic design, but when he graduated in 1990, he felt the artist inside straining to get out. Since childhood, he had done sewing, embroidery and furniture repair, and he gravitated toward collage work. The early pieces were illustrative — “Yedero Suk” (1997) depicts a movable general store that used to be common in Ethiopia. This, like much of his work, utilizes found or recycled material — yarn, cardboard and cloth in this case.
“I collect a lot of things; I collect everything,” Sime says. “Bottle caps, for instance, I have 20 big bags. I have also the same amount of old keys, buttons, horns, dolls, cans — I have a lot of old rusted cans. I feel they have people’s touch on them.” Thus, the fabric in his work may be from worn clothing, the buttons from salvage. He often visits the main open-air market in Addis Ababa, his hometown, scouring for material. Even his signature on framed pieces is a recycle — flattened metal bottle caps that he finds on the streets. “When people step on it, they put their mark on it,” he says.
Sime and Assegued met eight years ago, and he repeatedly asked her to visit his studio. When she finally went, she ended up staying for hours, as he showed her work upon work. The art, she thought, was astonishing enough, “but I was especially struck by his lack of ego.” She realized that he was someone she would want to work with, and she began putting him in exhibitions she was organizing. Sellars feels that that very modesty puts Simé “in a tradition of the sacred artist; he’s putting something larger forward.”
“He’s the most unpredictable artist,” says Assegued. “It’s contemporary art more than contemporary African art. Yes, it’s being done in Africa and addresses issues that concern us all, but he’s not in any movement. He doesn’t fit; that’s what makes his work unique.”
An anthropologist by training, Assegued is intrigued by indigenous pre-Christian culture and tradition, which is fast disappearing in Ethiopia, and she and Sime have traveled together to see traditional rites, artifacts and architecture.
“When we go out in the field, I document with writing and photographs,” she says. “When we come back, we don’t see each other for a month or so, and he does his own interpretations or feelings about what we’ve seen.” It was from one such trip at the end of 2002 that the first throne came about. In one village they had discovered a ritual to Bojje, the thunder deity. Weeks later, Sime showed her the fantastical throne he had built with a bovine skull and horns and cowrie shells on a carved wooden frame.
Real-life references
A week later, the exhibition is up, and this throne sits with a few others in the middle of the gallery. In April, in a procession yet to be determined, the thrones will be carried to Walt Disney Concert Hall for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final concerts, featuring Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and “Symphony of Psalms.” Around the thrones are dozens of goatskins filled with straw, arranged in groupings of two and three. (These skins were traditionally used as household containers.) The mud figurines are piled in a line along the back, and collages and stitched work have been arranged on the walls.
Although the recent stitched work looks more abstract, there are real-life references. In “Filega 1” (“filega” means “searching”), a hand emerges from a swirling ether created from pastel-colored yarn; the forefinger presses a circle that is on a panel with four points. Assegued suggests that since this was made after they had visited temples devoted to the thunder god, it might make reference to the altars they found there — which often had four points. In “Filega 2,” one hand in the lower right corner seems to be reaching up. “It’s like reading,” Simé says of that one, “like you’re turning a page of a book.”
Typically, Sime works from 6 a.m. till midnight. “Stitching takes a lot of time and patience. With patience you can do almost anything.” Then he adds, as an afterthought, “And that’s true in life as well.”
When asked whether he sketches or plans out his work, Sime reaches in his pocket and pulls out a stack of folded note paper. On them he has lightly sketched out various ideas — squiggles and grids, with the occasional note. In his sewn work, he starts out with only a rudimentary pencil sketch on canvas. “If I sketch everything, it limits me. It doesn’t allow me to go freely. I let my mind lead me.”
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The Woyanne high kangaroo court today reduced Teddy Afro’s 6-year prison sentence to 2 years, allowing him to go free in 5 months from now.
Teddy has been held in prison for the past 11 months after being falsely accused of vehicular manslaughter.
In December 2008, a Woyanne party hack acting as judge sentenced him to 6 years in prison for killing a homeless man, Degu Yibelte, in Addis Ababa with his BMW in what the prosecutor alleged as a hit-and-run accident.
A hospital record that showed Degu’s death one day earlier than the day Teddy had a car accident was ignored by the dumb judge.
The Beijing Olympics threw up a huge amount of statistics, too much in fact to take in at the {www:time} of the Games. Now we have had a chance to disseminate a unique set of readings taken during virtually all of the distance races.
For a decade we have seen distance runners register times from transponder mats at strategic lap and kilometer points in road and cross country races. In Beijing, a new system developed yielded times for every distance runner at every 100m.
Transponder antennae were laid under the track at 0m, 100m, 200m and 300m. Athlete wore chips on the inside of their front bib numbers, and when they crossed the transponder threshold, a time was registered.
So for instance we can now see 100 different times for Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele during his 10,000m triumph. From his 14.1 opening 100m to his blistering final lap including 13.0 down the final back straight. Arguably more impressive was the 14.0 timing by Tirunesh Dibaba during the bell lap of her 10,000m. For that section she was moving faster than any women in Beijing at any distance above 800m.
Of course these figures cannot tell the whole story of the race. We can’t tell for instance how wide an athlete was running around a bend between the transponder points. But they do help to show how the race was won.
For example Rashid Ramzi seems to have clinched the 1500m gold on the last bend which he covered in 12.2 in his heat and 12.6 in the final. Asbel Kiprop was quicker than Ramzi in the homestraight, but he appeared to lose too much ground in the previous 100.
Sadly, there was no study of the Beijing sprints, so hopefully Usain Bolt can do it all again once the next level of timing analysis is available.
Split times were also provided for the Olympic 4x400m relays where much the fastest times came from athletes who did not win individual golds in Beijing – Jeremy Wariner and Allyson Felix.
I do not understand what geared Kenyan belligerent first lady Lucy Kibaki to demand written explanations from a minister for Internal Security, George Saitoti. Mrs. Kibaki wanted to know why many people perished in the Molo inferno when they were self serving from a petrol tanker. To her, this was nothing but negligence and insensitivity! To add an insult to injury, she said that if the minister responsible were a woman, this wouldn’t have happened.
Azeb Mesfin, the wife of Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi
One thing Mrs. Kibaki does not get is the fact that the Molo deaths are but the signs of a very-corrupt-and-rotten country where a gang of goons self-helps and serves on public property. It is the society in which what matters is what you get but not how you get it. It is the society ruled by hyenas-turned rulers whose aim of being in power is to steal from paupers.
The Molo calamity was neither caused by insensitivity nor negligence. It is man-made poverty that has forced innocent people to wrestle to make ends meet. Regarding women in power, there are some living examples whereby women ministers failed their countries. Zakia Meghji, Tanzania’s former minister was booted out after it came to light that she illegally authorized payment to a dubious company known as Kagoda that stole over $ 40,000,000 from Central Bank of Tanzania (BoT). When it comes to graft, gender does not matter but personal integrity and probity.
If it were not for cliffhanger’s behaviour for African rulers, a good thing for Saitoti to do would be to relinquish his place in protest of the disgrace committed against him. But contrary, in Africa, power is sweeter than honey. The likes of Saitoti are ready to die in shame so as to keep their grip on power. What a shame!
Surprisingly, Saitoti was unable to do the right thing. Even to demand an apology became difficult for him. But again, looking at Saitoti’s record when he was vice president in the former autocratic regime, expecting him to do the right thing is as good as telling the ant to lift up the elephant. Indeed, Saitoti’s docility and naivety mark insults to our academic attainment. He was once misled by former dictator Daniel arap Moi and Kamlesh Pattni to ruin Kenya’s coffers. If a professor of mathematics can not calculate such simple political arithmetic, what of the common Kenyan in the street? However, it must be noted. Kibaki showed maturity for standing by his minister.
What Mrs. Kibaki did is not unique and distant in Africa. In neighbouring Tanzania, the former first lady, Anna Mkapa, is alleged to have amassed ill-gotten wealth, thanks to abusing her husband’s powers and office.
Ethiopia’s Azeb Mesfin, the wife of dictator Meles Zenawi, is the most corrupt of all. While falsely claiming that she is the first lady (the official first lady is the wife of the president, not the prime minister), Azeb has amassed enormous wealth through bribery, shakedown of businessmen, and other corrupt means. She is said to be the richest women in Africa.
While first ladies such as Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton are renowned for helping their husbands, African ones are known for tearing them down. It must be noted that the First Lady crisis in Africa is caused by lack of rule of law and people-geared constitutions.
It is time Africa stopped being ruled by thieves that, along with their families and friends, self-help and serve on whatever they are pleased without facing the music.
(Nkwazi Mhango is a Tanzanian living in Canada. He is a Journalist, Teacher, Human Rights activist and member of the Writers’ Association of New Foundland and Labrador. The reference to Azeb Mesfin is added by Ethiopian Review.)
In January 2007, after the Ethiopian invasion, and US bombing of Somalia, at least 85 different people from at least 25 countries, including the US, were part of Africa’s first mass rendition of prisoners. At least 18 of these were children under the age of 15. They were people trying to flee the fighting in Somalia by crossing into Kenya, and were arrested by the Kenyans. They were then held without charge. They were flown by Kenya to Somalia, and were taken on from there to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia they were subjected to lengthy interrogations by Americans, who also took DNA samples from them. They were questioned repeatedly, for months.
“A week after we arrived we were interrogated by whites – Americans, British, I was interrogated for weeks,” Salim says.
“They had a file which was said to implicate me in the Kenyan bombings. So I was taken away and was placed in isolation for two months – both my hands and legs were shackled.
“The interrogations went on for five months. Always the same questions about the Nairobi bombings.”
Former detainees have also told the BBC they were questioned by US agents. One said he was beaten by Americans.
Two others said they were threatened and told that if they did not co-operate they could face ill treatment at the hands of Ethiopian guards.
All said they believed it was the Americans and not the Ethiopians controlling their detention and interrogation.
Human rights groups in the region say this was a new form of extraordinary rendition.
The US did not play an overt role in the transportation or detention of suspects as it has in the rendition of other suspected terrorists, but it nevertheless controlled their interrogation and treatment.
Nobody know for certain how many people have been renditioned to Ethiopia. The number 85 above is based on the manifests of three flights out of Kenya on one night. The wife of Salim, quoted above was also arrested.
… part of the first mass “renditions” in Africa, where prisoners accused of supporting terrorists in Somalia were secretly transferred from country to country for interrogation outside the boundaries of domestic or international law.
Along with at least 85 others from 20 countries, she was flown back to Somalia – a war zone with no effective government or law – and on to Ethiopia. There, American intelligence agents joined the interrogations – photographing and taking DNA samples, even from the children.
On April 7, three months after her arrest, Ms Ahmed was released. Salim Awadh Salim, her husband and father of her unborn baby, is still in detention. So, too, are 78 of the other passengers aboard the three secret rendition flights. At least 18 are children under 15.
Ethiopia admits holding 36 other “suspected international terrorists” but has refused to give the Red Cross access to them. The rest of the “ghost plane” passengers are missing.
…
On April 7 Ms Ahmed was put on a flight to Kilimanjaro. Her escort promised that her husband and the others would be released with a week.
That was in April 2007. Her husband is still in prison in Ethiopia, he has not been charged, and has not appeared before a court. She was briefly able to talk to him when he got access to a cellphone:
“The conditions are really bad: we don’t have enough food, we don’t have enough access to medicine. The cell is wet,” he says.
“We sleep on the floor rather than the sodden mattresses. One of the other prisoners was beaten so badly he’s had his leg broken.”
Another person still languishing in an Ethiopian jail is Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal. His cousin has been working tirelessly to get him back, and to pressure the Canadian government to do something. So far the Canadian government seems to be dragging its feet. His cousin even created a website to keep people informed, and to try to free him, www.makhtal.org
Once in Addis Ababa, the detainees were interrogated by security officials, including agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. In April 2007, Ethiopia finally admitted having Bashir and the others, but refused to allow Canadian diplomats to see him. Bashir, however, said plenty through smuggled letters and messages. In his letter of May 2007, he says that he was beaten and forced to record a false confession to various crimes. Two months after that, according to Human Rights Watch, a fellow detainee saw Bashir briefly and reported that “he was limping. He had a deep cut in one of his legs. He looked weak. He looked so famished.”
“It was the most natural place to take anyone looking for a site to go and torture and to extract confessions. Ethiopia allows torture of detainees. And that is the modus operandi in renditions.”
More than a year and a half after the renditions, the US government still refuses to respond to questions on the alleged US role.
“I have no knowledge of it nor as official policy can I comment on such matters,” US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer told the BBC.
In 2006 a French woman who was living in Addis left Ethiopia. She had been friends with the opposition politicians. The leadership of the opposition party was jailed in 2005. She visited some of them in prison and took the pictures above. She describes the conditions:
Kaliti is a huge waste ground full of big shacks of iron sheet that look built at random. During the rainy season it is muddy, damp and cold. You are not allowed to check the conditions in which the prisoners are living. Yet some views from outside – see below [above] – give a disastrous impression.
…
According to my experience of stable manager iron sheet shacks are not suitable for horses, they are cold in winter, hot in summer and likely to bring contagious diseases. … where there are iron sheet and food, there are rats… and big ones … flees and parasites prosper.
…
I was surprised to hear than Woizero Birtukan, for example, was sharing a cell with 70 other female detainees.
There is a network of prisons in Ethiopia. She interviews a friend in Maeklawi prison:
AF: So, how was Maeklawi? Tell me how it looks like… inside…
AA: Conditions are terrible. We were more than 200 prisoners there and only one of us was allowed to go to the hospital daily.
AF: What kind of diseases detainees are suffering of?
AA: You know, coughing, diarrhea… The food is… Well, I have been traveling all around Ethiopia but never saw THAT kind of injera. I could not identify the place it came from. I did not eat it. I had my own food.
AF: I guess they need medical care for being beaten too, no?
AA: Oh yes, of course… broken legs, broken hands…
AF: Did they dare touching you?
AA: No, I was protected because you were coming but others were not that lucky. One of the prisoners even told me they used electric shocks.
And on leaving Ethiopia she writes that it is:
… a police state in which [to] freely express an opinion endangers your life or drives you to prison, a country where young protestors are beaten and shot. I left a jail. … A few days before my departure, a young man told me: “Tell them, tell them how it is to live here, tell them what we endure.”
Human Rights Watch has documented how Kenya and Ethiopia had turned this region into Africa’s own version of Guantánamo Bay, replete with kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons and large numbers of “disappeared”: a project that carries the Made in America label. Allowing free rein to such comprehensive lawlessness is a stain on all those who might have, at a minimum, curtailed it.
These people languishing in Ethiopian jails are caught in something large and evil. This week, on February 16, 2009:
In one of the most extensive studies of counter-terrorism and human rights yet undertaken, an independent panel of eminent judges and lawyers today presents alarming findings about the impact of counter-terrorism policies worldwide and calls for remedial action. The Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, established by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), has based its report “Assessing Damage, Urging Action” on sixteen hearings covering more than forty countries in all regions of the world.
“In the course of this inquiry, we have been shocked by the extent of the damage done over the past seven years by excessive or abusive counter-terrorism measures in a wide range of countries around the world. Many governments, ignoring the lessons of history, have allowed themselves to be rushed into hasty responses to terrorism that have undermined cherished values and violated human rights. The result is a serious threat to the integrity of the international human rights legal framework,” said Justice Arthur Chaskalson, the Chair of the Panel, former Chief Justice of South Africa and first President of the South African Constitutional Court.
The report illustrates the consequences of notorious counter-terrorism practices such as torture, disappearances, arbitrary and secret detention, unfair trials, and persistent impunity for gross human rights violations in many parts of the world. The Panel warns of the danger that exceptional “temporary” counter-terrorism measures are becoming permanent features of law and practice, including in democratic societies. The Panel urges that the present political climate may provide one of the last chances for a concerted international effort to take remedial measures and restore long-standing international norms. The change in US administration provides a unique opportunity for change.
“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats,” said Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, former President of Ireland and current President of the ICJ. “It is now absolutely essential that all states restore their commitment to human rights and that the United Nations takes on a leadership role in this process. If we fail to act now, the damage to international law risks becoming permanent”, she added.
The report calls for the rejection of the “war on terror” paradigm and for a full repudiation of the policies grounded in it.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The Woyanne high kangaroo court today reduced Teddy Afro’s 6-year prison sentence to 2 years, allowing him to go free in 5 months from now.
