ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — Thousands of people have participated in the 9th annual Great Ethiopian Run that was held Sunday in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. World marathon record holder Paula Radcliffe and Ethiopian long distance star Derartu Tulu launched the race as guests of honor.

Today’s overall winner was Tilahun Regassa, while Koreni Jelila won the women’s race. Each received $2,100 award.

The Great Ethiopian Run, which was started by Haile GebreSelassie in collaboration with Toyota Motor Company, is the biggest road race in Africa attracting tens of thousands of runners.

Today’s run was broadcast live for the first time by major international sport channels, according to event organizer Haile GebreSelassie.

Since 2006, the Great Ethiopian Run has been used by Addis Ababa residents to voice their anger and frustration at the Woyanne regime, as they have no other outlet. Public meetings and opposition rallies are prohibited by the U.S.-backed brutal regime of Meles Zenawi.

Today’s event was a little different. The Woyanne regime was not the only target. The 76-year-old opposition party leader Hailu Shawel was the focus of protest. He was condemned by the runners for signing an agreement with Meles Zenawi on the upcoming general election without any tangible change on the part of the Woyanne regime, such as the release of political prisoners, including Birtukan Mideksa, leader of one of the main opposition parties. (Read more in Amharic by Awramba Times here.)

United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, Michele Bond, expresses concern over the sharp increase in adoption from Ethiopia.

QUESTION: Which countries do you see the sharpest increase in children ready for adoption? Is it related to conflict or poverty such as Zimbabwe?

MS. BOND: Well, the – one country that I could point to that had a sharp increase this year is Ethiopia, where the numbers that – it was up about 30 percent, and let me just – the – it was just over 2,200 children who were adopted this year from Ethiopia. That is not related to conflict. By and large, conflict is not one of the issues that tends to lead to a spike in adoptions, because children may be separated from their families but haven’t necessarily permanently lost those families as a result of population movements.

So we are watching adoptions and examining the situation in Ethiopia very carefully, because it’s a very serious concern when you – if you see the number of adoptions start to increase sharply, you want to be sure that the infrastructure if that country is equipped to monitor and carefully vet every one of those cases. Rapid growth isn’t necessarily a good thing.

QUESTION: You are mentioning experiences from other continents. How is the experience here in the Western Hemisphere between Latin American countries and the U.S.?

MS. BOND: When the United States joined The Hague Convention in April 2008, that made us a Hague partner for quite a few countries which prefer to limit their adoption interchanges with fellow – to fellow Hague countries. So there are some countries where we – American are now eligible to adopt that they might not have been before. And developing those contacts and those relationships is not something, again, that happens overnight. But I think that we may see a shift in some countries of more interest in looking for homes for children in the United States if they haven’t been able to have them adopted locally.

More generally, we have Guatemala, which is a country in which new adoptions cannot begin at this point. Guatemala is a Hague country and they are working to establish Hague-compliant procedures —

QUESTION: In Mexico?

MS. BOND: Mexico is a country where there are surprisingly few adoptions to the United States, and that is – it’s surprising in the sense that we have – we share such a long border. But there is a pretty strong reluctance in Mexico to allow children to be adopted by foreign families, even Mexican American families. And so by and large, the majority of the adoptions that we see are intra-family adoptions, not adoptions by people who are unrelated to the child.

QUESTION: On Ethiopia, you’re not entirely clear what’s causing the spike of adoptions?

MS. BOND: Well, I think what’s causing the spike of adoptions is that there are, first of all, many children in the country who are homeless and/or living in institutions and need homes. And there are people who are working to try to identify those children and match them with people in the United States and in other countries who are interested in adoption. Our concern about it is that you can easily find yourself in a situation where it’s difficult to tell the difference between children who genuinely don’t have a family and those who have been documented to look like they don’t.

And unless you have the host government with – well equipped to investigate itself, to document, to lock in the identity of these children, then it can be very hard to prevent the missed documentation of children, and situations where, for example, birth parents are coerced or persuaded to relinquish their children for money or not, but – when it’s something that they wouldn’t have considered doing if someone hadn’t been pressuring them to do it. Obviously, that’s not something that we want.

QUESTION: So there are some suspicions maybe that there’s a racket going on or –

MS. BOND: It’s something that the Ethiopian Government is carefully looking at and so are we and so is every other government whose citizens are adopting there. Ukraine, as it happens, is another country where we saw a 30 percent increase in adoptions last year. In the case of Ukraine, however, that’s not – it’s not something that we see as a trend. The numbers tend to go up and down a bit. So it can be hard to know whether you’re definitely seeing a movement in one direction or the other.

QUESTION: Let me just follow on quickly, if you don’t mind, please. What we want to know clearly, not just from one particular country (inaudible), let’s say from around the globe. As far as criteria for – like it’s a conflict or poverty or what causes or brings those children for adoption basically to the U.S.? Is it the regional conflicts? You are saying (inaudible) or elsewhere, war or homeless or the parents are dying and that – I mean, what are the major causes of the adoption of people (inaudible) of people, or children coming here?

MS. BOND: All right. The question is what are the typical reasons that children are placed for inter-country adoption. And when you talk about countries around the world, including the United States, which also has children that are adopted by foreign families and leave here to go and live in a foreign country —

QUESTION: Yeah. I’m sorry, let’s say India or let’s say sometimes they say – they seek asylum. What’s the difference between asylums or other adoption for children, let’s say? Are there children also in that category or for —

MS. BOND: Okay. Let me get to that question in a moment, if I may. The reasons that children are available for adoption by foreign citizens vary in different countries. In China, typically the reason has been that there were children, little girls, who were born and placed for adoption by families who were hoping that they might have a son.

And the fact is that – there was a reference in one question to age requirements and other requirements being imposed on adopting parents – the number of children available for adoption in China has diminished. And the number of people who are interested in adopting in China is much higher than the number of children that are – that need homes. And that’s one reason that the Chinese Government imposed the changes and the requirements for adopting parents. They were simply trying to reduce the pool of all well-qualified people who were applying to adopt. They had many more than they could vet and many more than they needed.

In some other countries, the children are in care because of local poverty. But what’s important is that in some countries, children may be placed in institutions by their families because the families know that’s a place where the children will be fed and cared for and educated. And there are countries where the families then anticipate that the children will return home when they’re a little bit older, maybe 10 or 12, old enough to contribute to the family and help their parents.

And so that’s one of the things that we have to be on guard against. The fact that a child is in an orphanage and has been there for some time doesn’t make him an orphan in the sense – well, in any sense, he’s not a child who needs a home. He has a family.

I think – I hope that that’s helpful in terms of the —

QUESTION: Yeah, only about asylum, if – if you had any case of the child or somebody had asked asylum for a child rather than adoption.

MS. BOND: The question is about whether children also come into the United States as asylees, as people who are seeking asylum from our government as opposed to adoption. Getting asylum is a very different sort of process. And in order to apply for asylum, a person has to show that he is facing some sort of persecution or threat in his own country. Typically, unaccompanied children would not be likely to apply for asylum. That would be rare.

MR. TONER: We have time for just one more question.

QUESTION: Can I just ask very quickly for you to speak in a little more detail about your comment that some other countries are approaching the United States about adopting American children? Who are those countries and how many American kids are adopted overseas?

MS. BOND: Since we joined The Hague, so since April of 2008, there are 71 American children who have been adopted by foreign families. Thirty-seven of those were adopted under The Hague, so that means that they were adopted to Hague partner countries and the adoption began after April 1, 2008 – the work on it, because as you know, it takes months to complete these things. So we’re still at a stage where the majority of outgoing adoptions are non-Hague, but we anticipate that they’re going to be primarily Hague.

The typical countries – Canada, Western Europe, Australia, countries that are our Hague partners and where local adoption opportunities are very limited, they’re very – relatively few children available for adoption. To their credit, several of the governments that have approached us have said that they are particularly interested in identifying waiting children in foster care as candidates for adoption by their citizens. They are not trying to compete for healthy newborn infants.

MR. TONER: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

QUESTION: Thank you.

(The above is part of the briefing by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond on National Adoption Day on November 20, 2009. Read the full transcript here)

Except one, all members and officials of Lidetu Ayalew’s Ethiopian Democratic Party (EDP) in Tigray have resigned en mass protesting the deal Lidetu signed recently with Meles Zenawi on the conduct of the May 2010 general elections in Ethiopia.

In an interview with the VOA, Ato Tekle Bekele, chairman of EDP in Tigray and member of the party’s central committee, said that EDP has turned itself into a supporter of the TPLF/EPRDF regime, instead of a genuine opposition party.

Click here to listen: [podcast]http://www.ethiopianreview.com/audio/voa-november-20-2009.mp3[/podcast]

Ato Tekle said that he and his comrades decided to take a stand and resigned after repeated discussions with the party’s leadership failed to bring result.

Lidetu is not the only surrenderist who is facing rebellion inside his organization over the traitorous deal with Woyanne. Ethiopian Review sources in Addis Ababa are reporting that trouble is also brewing for Hailu Shawel inside his All Ethiopian Unity Party. Two weeks ago, a senior member of AEUP, Major Argaw Kabtamu, has resigned after expressing disgust over the agreement of surrender to the Woyanne tribal junta.

By Lemma Nathan

“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” – Matthew 2:18

His name was Herod, but latter they called him Herod the Great. The contemptuous referred to him formally, as Herod I. He was born in Jericho. His father was a high-ranked {www:Idumaean} officer. At the age of 25, he was already appointed Governor of Galilee. Although “gentile” by origin, he publicly confessed to adhere to Judaism. But most never considered him as a true Israelite, specially the scribes; and that created in him a consuming feeling of rejection with which he had to fight all his life – half a century ago, the Edomites were forced to Judaism (or leave their place) when the Maccabean John Hyrcanus conquered their regions. Since then, it was never easy to judge whether an Edomite had truly converted.

In 43 BC, his father conspired to murder Caesar. The young Herod, a shrewd mathematician, decided to collaborate with the Romans and poisoned his own father -– with a professional aloofness. His own life had been sought by so many, by friends and by enemies alike, but he plied the troublesome tides of Near Eastern politics with uncanny success. Josephus describes him as a mad man, “a man … of great barbarity towards all men equally, and a slave to his passion … for from a private man he became a king; and though he were encompassed with ten thousand dangers, he got clear of them all.” [F. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book 17, chapter 7].

Perhaps he was notoriously known to mankind as the monster of the first Christmas -– for the murder of the children of Bethlehem, according to Matthew 2:16. But in his record of murder, the list is endless -– his wife, her mother, her grandfather, two brothers-in-law, three of his own sons, and uncountable foes as well as subjects.

Among his people, he was vicious and lonely, often depressed and paranoid. But for the Romans, Herod was an extraordinary leader, a crucial bridge between the Jew and the gentiles; an indispensable ally…

But Herod was also a colossal and passionate builder of highways, fortresses, palaces, temples, and aqueducts — in Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, and beyond the river Jordan. He built the magnificent port of Caesarea; and renewed the great temple of Jerusalem (Herod’s temple).

It will be unfair to compare this monstrous figure with contemporary tyrants, including our own Meles Zenawi. To do so will be an overstatement. But I have been reading lately a book written by W.H. Auden [W.H. Auden, For the time being, Faber and Faber, 1964]. In this book, Auden tries to fathom what threads of reasoning were woven in the mind of Herod at the eve of the Massacre of the Children of Bethlehem. To my own great surprise, and quite involuntarily, I was unable to discard the image of our own “Prime Minster,” the present day tyrant of Ethiopia…

On this fateful day, Herod begins his reasoning thus:

“Because I am bewildered, because I must decide, because my decision must be in conformity with Nature and Necessity…”

Then Herod, as if to clear the way for a clean confrontation with his own ambition, begins to honour the people who were most significant in his life – his father, his mother, his nurse, his brother, his professors, and his secretary.

Why should someone die tomorrow? Remarkably, thoughts flow like a river. Herod sums up the situation soberly, like a seasoned politician, I mean, like our Meles, when he was confronted by the decision to kill innocent people with live bullets and sharpshooters. Herod counts his achievements, not to praise himself, of course, but to justify his case for staying on power.

“…The highway to the coast goes to straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since any one stole the park benches or murdered the swans…” [W.H. Auden, For the time being, Faber and Faber, 1964].

Then he tries to imagine what will happen if he let go of power:

“…if this rumor is not stamped out now… Reason will be replaced by Revelation …Idealism will be replaced by Materialism… Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish.” [W.H. Auden, For the time being, Faber and Faber, 1964]

Herod does not stop there. He knows that fear of disorder, real or imagined, is not a necessary prerequisite to hold fast to power. This time, he tries to count the unfinished work. If everything were accomplished, then there would be no need for a transformer:

“In twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches. There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the finger of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise…”

Unfinished work gives him purpose in office. And an excuse not to process one’s own guilt. But in the end, Herod has to return to himself.

“I have worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I have taken elocution lessons. I have hardly ever taken bribes. … I have tried to be good. … I am a liberal. I want everybody to be happy…” [W.H. Auden, For the time being, Faber and Faber, 1964].

As much as I dislike comparing Prime Minster Meles with Herod the Great, I cannot escape the images I picture in my mind as the Prime Minster stares out of the window on the eve of the massacre of Addis in that fateful November Day, 2005. Besides, I find great and irresistible parallels between the two men. It is common knowledge that many Ethiopians do not consider Meles as one of them. Secondly, Meles feels rejected by the intelligentsia, notably by the Addis Ababa University.

The unconcealed bitterness reveals itself in his manifest contempt to and rejection of the intelligentsia. As if to compensate the void, the last two decades have seen world class intellectuals and Nobel laureates in Addis giving lectures and seminars at a high cost to our leaders. Several American and British scholars have been invited to drop by just for tea on their way to India or South Africa.

Josephus tells us Herod was choleric in temperament. Any one who has been with Prime Minster Meles for a while knows his choleric temperament. Moreover, psychologists tell us that many tyrants are choleric in temperament. According to Tim Lahay, choleric leaders have a remarkable ability to see their destination, but they don’t know how to reach there [T. Lahay, Spirit controlled temperament, Tyndale House Publishers (Revised edition), September 7, 1994]. Well, one needs little to add to this statement, as far as the leadership in Addis is concerned.

The {www:TPLF} leadership has been, and deservedly, proud of its construction. For the killing of the innocents; the imprisonment of the multitudes; and the ruthless dealing with opponents, the relentless justification is its hard work. And this has been most gladly and thankfully taken by our diplomats in Addis.

Most important of all, Herod had no real friends. The people he counted as friends were remote, in Rome, and he sees them only occasionally. As if to purchase their love, his gift to them was always expensive and rare. But truly speaking, these were not his friends. Once a friend who knew our Prime Minster well told me that he has no real friend. He has his {www:TPLF} comrades, for certain. And he has his “friends” in the West. But “ordinary” Ethiopian friend, he has none. That is unfortunate and that is the cost of the road he chooses to go through.

Josephus tells us that Herod was suffering from an excruciating pain. He describes his illness as “fire glowing”, “which did not so much appear to the touch outwardly, as … inwardly”, “ulcer”, a pain in the “colon”; “an aqueous and transparent liquor… in his feet and at the bottom of his belly”, “his genitals were rotting, and produce worms”, etc.

Based on these descriptions, some medical experts believe that Herod had chronic kidney disorder, potentially complicated by Fournier gangrene. Others report that the visible worms and putrefaction are likely to have been scabies, a contagious ectoparasite skin infection characterized by superficial burrows and intense itching [H. Ashrafian, Herod the Great and his worms. Journal of Infection, Volume 51, Issue 1, Pages 82-83]. Scholars also believe that Herod suffered throughout his lifetime from depression and paranoia.

Since we have little access to the private life of Our Prime Minster, it is hard to say much about his illness. But recent report about repeated treatments to different counties cannot be ignored. For many are longing for change.

“Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.” Matthew 3:20.

Should this be the only way we Ethiopians in the Diaspora get back home?

(The writer can be reached at [email protected])