Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran.
I don’t know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution’s symbolic martyr, as some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran over the past week and the women’s rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past several years.
In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook revolution,” as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women’s groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.
Since 2006, the One Million Signatures Campaign has been circulating a petition, online and in print, that calls for an end to laws that discriminate against women and the enactment of laws that provide equal rights for women in marriage, equal rights to divorce, equal inheritance rights and equal testimony rights for men and women in court. Though based outside the country, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, founded by a pair of sisters, translates and publishes online fundamental human rights documents; it maintains an online database of the names of thousands of victims of the Islamic Republic as well. In the past decade, Iranian women have participated in student strikes as well as teachers’ strikes, and in organizations of Bahai, Christian and other religious groups whose members are deemed “heretics” by the regime.
Not Obama, not Bush and not Twitter, in other words, but years of work and effort lie behind the public display of defiance and, in particular, the number of women on the streets — and their presence matters. Their presence could strike the deepest blow against the regime. For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic Republic is its claim to divine inspiration: Its leadership is legitimate, as is its harsh repression of women, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the past weekend but over the past decade, has to weaken the Islamic Republic’s claim to invincibility, in Iran and across the Middle East. The regime’s political elite knows this well: It is no accident that the two main challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian presidential campaign promised to repeal some of the laws that discriminate against women, and it is no accident that the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used his wife, a political scientist and former university chancellor, in his campaign appearances and posters.
The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority, too: As the activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to brutally repress dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a peaceful, unarmed young woman in blue jeans — unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.
The regime may succeed. Violence usually succeeds, at least in the short term, in intimidating people. In the long term, however, the links, structures, organizations and groups set up by Iranian women, not to mention the photographs of the past week, will continue to gnaw away at the Iranian regime’s legitimacy — and we should take note. I cannot count how many times I’ve been told in recent years that “women’s issues” in the Islamic world are a secondary subject: Whether the discussion is of the Afghan constitution or the Saudi government, the standard line among most commentators has always been that other things — stability, security, oil — matter more. But regimes that repress the civil and human rights of half their population are inherently unstable. Sooner or later, there has to be a backlash. In Iran, we’re watching one unfold.
Ato Sebhat Nega’s interview on the Voice of America, Amharic Service, recently sounds like a play out of Orwell’s, Animal Farm, but it also speaks volumes about the mindset inside TPLF, and the groupthink the regime officials are possessed with. Like all people intoxicated with power and anything that comes with it, Ato Sebhat had no limits or inhibitions to stop him from making bold faced lies. Ato Sebhat belongs to a category of humans that Orwell describes as people who use ordinary language “to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
The voice of America Amharic service has also invited listeners to put questions to Ato Sebhat for a future airing. But what is the use of asking questions when you know the person who takes the questions thinks the sky is the limit for lying? This man didn’t even stutter for a second when he told us that his TPLF invented Ethiopia and introduced the Ethiopian people to one another for the first time in history.
An interesting part in the interview was also Sebhat’s elaboration on the nature and work of EFFORT, the so called Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigrai, the TPLF business conglomerate. Sebhat told us what Mussolini would tell any journalist in 1935 about his “civilizing” ventures in Ethiopia when he told us about the role of EFFORT in building the Ethiopian economy. Now that is very interesting in itself but the man’s idea of what capitalism is and his vision of how he intends to build it is even more troubling. This robber baron bragged about EFFORT being the biggest investment company in Ethiopia and wants us to be surprised by that achievement. What would have been surprising was if a company supported by a ruling party, that has unlimited capacity to crush all its competitors and one that has the privilege of getting as much as 3.2 billion birr debt written off by the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia by order of the ruling class, was to rank in second place. It is ironic that the Ethiopian people have to subsidize the same company which in the first place was set up with money and property looted from them. But I credit Ato Sebhat for inadvertently but bluntly telling us that his idea of building capitalism is preparing the Ethiopian people for apartheid-like serfdom.
Why make big lies?
Absolute power often makes absolutely delusional. Understandably, some of the lie has its source in Sebhat and his friends being delusional. There is a pervasive groupthink inside the opaque TPLF clique that is heavily powered by its narrow ethnic nationalism. Like all autocrats, they often manufacture their own facts and after repeating that for a while tend to accept them as truth. Once they accept a lie as truth they often stick by it even if evidence proves them wrong. Anyone presenting evidence to the contrary is often considered criminal or the enemy and punished. This is why every opposition in Ethiopia, weak or strong, and citizens who dare to ask fair and hard questions are subjected to merciless persecution. That is why Birtukan Mideksa is languishing in prison. That is why we hear a barrage of draconian decrees being promulgated every now and then. That is why entire villages in the Ogaden were burnt to the ground and people killed like flies. Isn’t their crime only asking questions and demanding to be consulted before they were forcibly evicted from their land to give way for foreign oil finders? It is the same reason that led to the genocide of the Agnuak in Gambella.
Many people I know were dumbfounded to hear Ayatollah Sebhat, say that his clique invented Ethiopia in 1991. It is unbelievable how a very old man of his age pulled the energy needed to put a bold face as his mouth puffed the mega lie that the Ethiopian people came to know one another for the first time after his group took power 18 years ago.
You may think this goon is off his medication when he spewed this offensive absurdity, but the truth is that this is right out of the talking points of the entire delusional TPLF cabal who are trying their best to rewrite history. There was a big public amazement about Ato Girma Woldegiorgis, the “President”, regarding a letter he wrote in condolences for Tilahun Gesesses death. Ato Girma is reported to have written thanking Tilahun Gesesse for breaking through a government ban of singing in Oromoffa. Many people cringed how this extremely old man of not so good health, and on his way to God, can make such a bold faced lie through his teeth. Ato Girma, I heard, is reported to have confided to people close to him, that he has not read the letter himself and that it was written in the Meles Zenawi’s office for him to sign and issue. I found Ato Girma’s explanation plausible. This is purely a TPLF kind of lie.
This self-serving clique thinks that Ethiopians don’t even know that the period between Menilik and Mengistu Hailemariam has seen a more ethnically diverse ruling class, than TPLF’s ethno-centered reign of the last 18 years. Sebhat, Meles and Bereket think that they have succeeded in hiding from us that, for the first time in modern Ethiopian history, since Menilik, there are no Oromo generals in any key position in the Ethiopian army. Sebhat and the whole clique think the Ethiopian people are not watching.
The assertion of Sebhat that the TPLF invented Ethiopia also tells us something more: this tribal clique thinks and acts as if it is still the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes) in Ethiopia. They deny the existence of time in between. As far as the TPLF is concerned, the most revolutionary proclamation that made land public property in 1974 and that fundamentally took away the key instrument of oppression of one group of people by another, has not taken place. If they admit that this actually happened, and that there was a revolution that transformed ethnic relations in Ethiopia, they know their colonial and apartheid look-alike tribal politics would fall apart. They have also convinced themselves that there was no parade of cultures of nations and nationalities during the dergue. They think they have invented that too. They don’t want to think the Institute of Nationalities in Addis Ababa was even set up under the dergue. They think the Ethiopian people spent sleepless nights trying to find out the ethnicity (nationality) of Mengistu and the rest of their rulers. History and time exist only when it agrees with the TPLF. Since they are stuck in time, they have not lived to see the early periods of Mengistu who at the time used language similar as theirs as reason to slaughter Amharas. Meles and Sebhat still keep calling Mengistu the protector of Amharas. Those of you who may have been amazed by Sebhat’s phantom assertions should know that these are the ingredients from which Sebhat’s sick and thick mind is made of.
Yes, if you see what looks like a colonial or an apartheid model of governance in Ethiopia today, where 93% of the leadership of the country’s army is from Sebhat’s ethnic group (Tigreans) and the security and bureaucracy is almost exclusively controlled by TPLF operatives, the reason is that Sebhat and Meles and Bereket think we cannot see reality for ourselves but take their words for everything they claim and read the history they have tried to rewrite for us.
It is obviously a futile exercise to ask questions of people like Sebhat Nega, Meles Zenawi or Bereket Simon in hope of getting a straight answer just as the VOA journalist tried hard on Ato Sebhat. These people have eaten up all sense of cultural inhibition and decency to stop them at anything. For example, you may want to ask them, as the VOA journalist, Ato Addisu Abebe, tried on Ato Sebhat, about the ever narrowing political space for opposition groups in the country, even give them a quantitative measure of how narrow it has gotten or compile testimonies from everyday people in Ethiopia who are disgusted with their rule, or show them research by respectable international human rights groups, and academics who tell us that the political space for building democracy in Ethiopia has diminished and human rights abuse is at its worst. Sebhat and Meles would simply tell you that democracy is flourishing in Ethiopia and people are happy. “There are no angry people in Ethiopia”, said Sebhat in the VOA interview. How much evidence you may have to the contrary does not matter. Even the people whose children are mowed down on the streets of Addis Ababa are happy and love the Agazi as far as Sebhat is concerned. Meles in a recent interview with the Financial Times was asked about the draconian civil society laws recently instituted in the country. He simply said, “some people would say this is clamping down, we would say this is an empowering law.” In TPLF-speak you can say “we killed them in order to let them live.”
Ato Sebhat, if you happen to read this I will live you with the following two lines hoping that you will let them permeate through your head.
1. Not all political conflicts in a country are ethnic conflicts or wars between nations and nationalities. Your characterization of conflicts in Ethiopia as a war between ethnic groups is too dumb even to people who have not read history. Rivalries and wars come in different packages including in the form of class conflicts. They even occur within the same ethnic group and there were many in Ethiopia. Even as they were struggling against their oppressive rulers, the Ethiopian people have often considered themselves Ethiopians who were not given a share of what their country should give them. This is a country where people across ethnicity rose up together to defend. Ato Sebhat, there in Adwa, near your village, you can find the bones of most nationalities in Ethiopia. And that your notion that we knew each other with the help of TPLF in 1991 exits only in your paranoid and tribal dense head.
2. Like every people who lived under tyranny, the Ethiopian people will rise up, most likely in your life time, to take back their country. Looking at it from where most of us stand, your government looks more like an apartheid establishment than anything else. Believe me, the people you have burnt their villages will rise up from the ashes soon. The people whose children you mowed down on the streets of Addis Ababa have not forgotten. The Amharas and Oromos and the rest of our people you despise and whose children you are packing your prisons with, are not far from the horizons of their freedom. Even the people of Tigrai in whose name you do your crimes will definitely rise up some day and will say enough already, get off my back and not in my name. You will find that you have left your children a pile of ash and thin air instead of the personal wealth and prosperity you accumulated.
3. Please spare the people of Tigrai from lying in their name. I have not seen anything to show me their ownership of EFFORT as you claimed. Sir, through your actions and your tribalization of loyalty and privilege you are buying hatred for the people of Tigrai. Tragically you have done this with some success. Please know that ethnicity as a political tool can be redirected in any direction and with relative ease. You have no monopoly of it, sir.
I wish you and the cabal can come back to your senses before it is too late. The silence of the people you subdued by force is fooling you. You have confused silence with agreement and happiness. You are sitting on a time bomb, sir. There are angry people all around you. You said they are not the people “they are individuals” but how many million individuals do you think constitute a people?
Ato Sebhat, if you have made your lies with some mix of truth, we would have engaged in a useful debate. It is sad that you limited my job to restating everyday observations, things that are as clear as the September sky over Ethiopia. In the words of the satirist I quoted above, “we have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men”.
As for VOA’s call for questions to Ato Sebhat, I have only one question that I ask you to put to him. I have the same question put to Senator McCarthy in the US senate at a hearing known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 by the head attorney of the US army – “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — Crops in large swathes of Ethiopia risk being destroyed by swarms of locusts coming from northern Somalia, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Tuesday.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) “reports that locust swarms have been confirmed in seven regions in the country, including in areas where there is no previous record of infestation,” a statement said.
“The government is expected to present a response plan specifying immediate and medium-term actions to be taken during the week,” OCHA said.
It added that 1,390 hectares of land in several regions, mainly in southeastern Ethiopia had been sprayed in ground and air operations.
The vast majority of Ethiopia’s 77 million inhabitants depend on subsistence agriculture and have been badly hit by successive infestations of voracious locusts that destroy every plant in their path.
(CNN) — Somalia’s transitional government has the right to request military help from its neighbors against armed militants, the African Union said Monday, but Kenya was quick to reject the idea of sending troops and suggested the AU should spearhead such a move.
Somali parliament speaker Sheikh Adan Madowe on Saturday called on Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen to send in their military forces to help government troops stop hardline Islamist militants from taking over.
“Militants are wrestling the power from the government and so we call for military help from neighboring countries,” the speaker said at a news conference in Mogadishu. “Please send your military to help in 24 hours’ time.”
But Alfred Mutua, spokesman for the Kenyan government, told CNN that “Kenya doesn’t engage in military support to our neighbors.” He said that any such support would be under the umbrella of the African Union.
However, he did say that “different types of support can be given, not just military, and Kenya’s options are open.” He said that the government should announce by Wednesday how it will move forward.
Jean Ping, chairman of the African Union Commission, said in a communique issued Sunday that the transitional government, as Somalia’s legitimate government, “has the right to seek support from AU Member States and the larger international community.”
Ping also said that the AU would “continue to do its utmost to assist the Somali people and its authorities in their lasting quest for peace and reconciliation.”
Somalia’s call for help came hours after a third top politician was killed in ongoing fighting in the capital.
Mohamed Hussein Adow, a powerful member of parliament who was leading the fight against the Islamists, was slain Friday in the north of the city.
His death came two days after Islamists killed Internal Security Minister Omar Hashi Adan in a suicide attack in central Somalia. The nation’s former ambassador to Ethiopia, Abdikarin Farah Laqanyo, was also killed, along with at least 11 others, government officials said.
Madowe said a Pakistani militant who is a high-ranking official in al Qaeda is leading the fighting in Somalia against the government.
He warned that militants will spread fighting into the rest of the region if they topple the government in Somalia.
The Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF) supporters in Texas have come together and formed a support chapter on Sunday, June 21, 2009, after holding a series of meetings.
The newly formed chapter has released a press statement, which is posted on the EPPF official web site, eppfOnline.org. Click here to read.
The following is a list of 50 great software applications that you can download and install for free. The list is originally compiled by TechVivo and edited by Elias Kifle.
1. Audacity – Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows
2. VirtualDub – VirtualDub is a video capture and video processing application for Windows
3. Avidemux – Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering, and encoding tasks.
4. K-Lite Mega Codec Pack – K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codes, needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video formats. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play most of the popular audio and video formats, even the rare ones.
5. SUPER – If you need a simple, efficient, and ugly tool to convert any of your multimedia files into any other format, then SUPER is all you need
6. FormatFactory – If you need a simple, efficient, easy-to-use, and a not-so-hideously-ugly tool to convert any of your multimedia files into any other format, then FormatFactory is all you need
7. Mozilla Sunbird – Sunbird is an open-source, cross-platform calendar application.
8. VLC Media Player – VLC Media Player is a multimedia player that can play most of the audio and video formats out there, including DVDs and CDs, without the need of a codec.
9. WinAmp – WinAmp is a fast and flexible music and video player for Windows
10. Media Player Classic – Media Player Classic looks like Windows Media Player 6, but with additional features, such as AVI subtitle support, QuickTime and RealVideo support, and a few built-in codec. And it doesn’t have the bloat the Windows Media Player 11 has.
11. KeePas – KeePas is an opensource password manager which helps you manage your passwords in a secure way
12. MemoKeys – MemoKeys allows you to create shortcut key combinations (hotkeys) and associate them with any text information of your choice.
13. AutoIt – AutoIt is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI
14. AutoHotKey – AutoHotKey is a free keyboard macro program. It supports hotkeys for the keyboard, mouse, and joystick.
15. PeaZip – PeaZip is an open-source file and archive manager
16. 7Zip – 7zip is an open-source file archiver predominantly for Microsoft Windows OS
17. GMail Drive – GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium
18. Mozy – Mozy is the industry-leading solution for online backup. Its offers 2GB storage for free.
19. Recuva – Recuva is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentaly deleted from your computer
20. Windows Live Writer – Windows Live Writer is a desktop blog-publishing application that has many features.
21. BitTorrent – BitTorrent is a BitTorrent client and a good alternative to uTorrent.
22. ZoneAlarm Free – ZoneAlarm Free is one of the best and well know free firewall software in the market.
23. Ashampoo Burning Studio Free – If you’re looking for a fast, responsive, and high-quality burning software that does not cost a dime, then Ashampoo Burning Studio Free is for you.
24. DeepBurner – DeepBurner is a free CD and DVD burning tool
25. Defraggler – Defraggler lets you defrag individual files, without having to process the whole drive, and it allows you to schedule runs
26. CCleaner – CCleaner is a system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused temporary files from your system, allowing it to run faster, more efficiently, and giving you more hard disk space.
27. Startup Delayer – Startup Delayer allows you to setup how many seconds after Windows has started, to load each program.
28. RevoUninstaller – RevoUninstaller can be used to uninstall programs, and scan for leftover registry keys, files, and folders.
29. Eraser – Eraser is a secure data removal tool for Windows
30. SUMo – With SUMo, you’ll be able to keep your PC up-to-date by detecting required updates for your software.
31. RadarSync – Stop searching for drivers and app updates, update your PC for free with RadarSync
32. FileHippo Update Checker – The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions, and then send this info to FileHippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.
33. Launchy – Launchy allows you to launch programs with just a few keystrokes
34. FileZilla – FileZilla is a powerful FTP client that is easy-to-use, has many features, and is fast and relaible.
35. Kompozer – WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor derived from Nvu
36. HTML-Kit – HTML-Kit is a full-featured and customizable HTML text editor that can be used to create and edit web pages.
37. Ades Clr Picker – AdesClrPicker is a very easy-to-use, yet powerful color picker application for web designers.
38. Notepad++ – Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.
39. Internet Download Manager – Internet Download Manager is a tool that can increase download speeds, resume, schedule, and manage downloads.
40. FlashGet – FlashGet is a free download manager that allows you to spit the files you’re downloading into different sections.
41. GIMP – The GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool. It’s suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.
42. Paint.NET – Paint.NET is an image and photo manipulation software. It’s meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems.
43. CamStudio – CamStudio records screen into standard AVI files. It’s an ideal tool for creating software demonstations.
44. Mozilla Thunderbird – Thunderbird is a great email client from the same people who brought you the Firefox browser
45. PDFCreator – PDFCreator can create PDF files from almost any Windows app
46. Gadwin PrintScreen – Gadwin PrintScreen is an easy-to-use utility that allows you to capture any portion of the screen, and save it to a file, copy to Windows clipboard, print it, or email it to a friend.
47. Skype – Using Skype, you can make telephone calls over the Internet, and calls to other people using Skype.
48. SAM – SAM is a simple voice answering machine for Skype users
49. OpenOffice – OpenOffice is an open-source, multi-platform, and multi-lingual suite comparable with MS Office.
50. AbiWord – AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word and is rapidly becoming a state-of-the-art word processor.
