Wikileaks.org has released 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic dispatches on Sunday, which is said to be the biggest intelligence leak in U.S. history. The following are some excerpts from the dispatches that were sent to the State Department by U.S. embassies around the world regarding various leaders.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe: A minister in the South African government calls Mugabe “a crazy old man.” U.S. Ambassador Christopher W. Dell writes: “Mugabe is “more clever and more ruthless than any other politician in Zimbabwe… To give the devil his due, he is a brilliant tactician and has long thrived on his ability to abruptly change the rules of the game, radicalize the political dynamic and force everyone else to react to his agenda.” Mugabe also seem to believe that his 18 doctorate degrees give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics, including supply and demand. Ambassador Dell goes on to explain: “The regime has become so used to calling the shots and dictating the pace that the merest stumble panics them. Many local observers have noted that Mugabe is panicked and desperate about hyperinflation at the moment, and hence he’s making mistakes. Possibly fatal mistakes. We need to keep the pressure on in order to keep Mugabe off his game and on his back foot, relying on his own shortcomings to do him in.” He added: “Mugabe and his henchman are like bullies everywhere: if they can intimidate, you they will. But they’re not used to someone standing up to them and fighting back.”
[Most of the above description about Mugabe can be also be said about Ethiopia’s tyrant Meles Zenawi. There are 1,623 dispatches from Ethiopia to be released by Wikileaks. We will post them when they become available. Read more about Mugabe here.]
North Korea’s Kim Jong-il: Flabby old chap who suffers from ‘physical and psychological trauma.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel: Risk aversive and rarely creative.
Russia President Dmitry Medvedev: A pale, hesitant figure who plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi: Cannot travel without what one diplomat described as his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse. The report, from the US embassy in Tripoli, disclosed that Colonel Gaddafi appeared to be afraid of staying on upper floors and disliked flying over water. He enjoyed horse racing and flamenco dancing and was upset when he was refused permission to pitch his Bedouin tent in New York City.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy: Emperor with no clothes; thin-skinned, authoritarian with a tendency to rebuke his senior team repeatedly for their alleged shortcomings.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel: Avoids risks and is rarely creative.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh: Saleh was viewed by U.S. diplomats as “dismissive, bored and impatient” during a meeting he held with John Brennan, a senior adviser to the US President on national security. In a meeting with former American commander in the Middle East General David Petraeus, Saleh reportedly said: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”
In 1620, one hundred and two prospective settlers left England and set sail for over two months to come to the New World. They landed in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. Nearly one-third of them were religious dissenters escaping persecution. A group of English investors had provided the voyagers transportation, provisions and tools in exchange for 7 years of service upon arrival at their destination. The settlers’ principal concern in the New World was potential attacks by the Native American Indians, who proved to be peaceful and accommodating. Their first winter proved to be wickedly cold. Unable to construct adequate habitation, sick and hungry, nearly one-half of the settlers died in the first year. The following year the settlers had a successful harvest and were living harmoniously with their Indian neighbors. They celebrated their good fortune and good neighbors with prayers of thanksgiving establishing that tradition.
Three and one-half centuries later, thousands of Ethiopians made their “pilgrimage” to America. In the early 1970s, many came to pursue higher education. In the late 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands fled escaping political persecution. That trend continued in the 1990s with the entrenchment of one of the most ruthless dictatorships on the African continent. By the beginning of the new century, America had not only become a destination of choice for any Ethiopian who could manage to get out, but also the dream country of a new generation of Ethiopians.
Regardless of our reasons for coming to America, we have much to be thankful. If we exert ourselves, few of us have to worry about our daily bread or a roof over our heads. If we are determined to improve ourselves, the opportunities are readily available. Our children have more opportunities in America than anywhere else in the world. Above all, we should be thankful for living in a free country. We don’t have to fear the wrath of vengeful dictators. Our liberties are protected; and we have the means to defend them in the democratic process and in the courts of the land. To be sure, we should be thankful not because we live a dreamland, but because we are free to seek and make true our own dreams.
Reflecting on the meaning of the Thanksgiving in America, the question for me is not whether Ethiopians in America have reason to be thankful for the blessings of liberty and the opportunities they have to make material progress. The question for me is whether they should be thankful to America for providing billions of dollars to a repressive dictatorship that has its crushing boots pressed against the necks of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends living in their native land.
Ethiopia is Africa’s largest recipient of foreign aid. It received well over $3 billion in handouts in 2008. According to U.S.AID statistics, the “FY 2008-09 USAID-State Foreign Assistance Appropriations” for Ethiopia was $969.1 million in 2008 and $916.1 million in 2009. The latest U.S.AID brag sheet reports that U.S. aid money in Ethiopia has “helped build the capacity of institutions such as the Parliament and National Election Board to democratize and improve governance and accountability” and “strengthened judicial independence through legal education training for judges and students, and promote greater understanding of and respect for human rights among police and the courts.” U.S.AID claims that in 2009 it “led advocacy efforts that contributed to pardons for 15,600 prisoners who had been languishing in federal and state prisons.” U.S.AID reports that “about 450,000 [Ethiopian] children die each year, mainly from preventable and treatable infectious diseases complicated by malnutrition. One in three Ethiopians has tuberculosis, and malaria and HIV/AIDS contribute significantly to the country’s high rates of death and disease.” Among the major U.S.AID projects in Ethiopia today include an “integrated health care program [which] focuses on improving maternal and child health, family planning and reproductive health, preventing and controlling infectious diseases, and increasing access to clean water and sanitation.” U.S.AID is one of the major participants “in Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program, a donor-government partnership to reduce the economic and environmental causes of chronic food insecurity that affects 7.5 million Ethiopians.”
Such is the “newspeak”, the glossy, rose-colored narrative, of the U.S. aid bureaucracy. The most recent evidence paints a different picture: American tax dollars have done little to help the people of Ethiopia, and much to strengthen the dictatorship of Meles Zenawi. As the Economist Magazine noted this past July, “there is no escaping the fact that Ethiopia remains almost as fragile and underdeveloped as it was when an Irish musician, Bob Geldof, set up the first global pop concert, Live Aid, to help the drought-benighted nation 25 years ago.” Stated plainly, billions of American (and Western European) tax dollars later, Ethiopia is in no better shape than it was a quarter of a century ago despite the construction boom in glitzy buildings with few utilities in the capital begging for occupancy and the comic display of economic development that is skin deep.
The fact of the matter is that U.S. tax dollars in Ethiopia, combined with aid from other donors, is doing harm to the Ethiopian people by “financing their oppressors.”[1] Summarizing the evidence in the recent Human Rights Watch Report on Ethiopia, the renowned development economist, Prof. William Easterly of the New York University wrote :
Human Rights Watch contends that the government abuses aid funds for political purposes–in programs intended to help Ethiopia’s most poor and vulnerable. For example, more than fifty farmers in three different regions said that village leaders withheld government-provided seeds and fertilizer, and even micro-loans because they didn’t belong to the ruling party; some were asked to renounce their views and join the party to receive assistance. Investigating one program that gives food and cash in exchange for work on public projects, the report documents farmers who have never been paid for their work and entire families who have been barred from participating because they were thought to belong to the opposition. Still more chilling, local officials have been denying emergency food aid to women, children, and the elderly as punishment for refusing to join the party.
Prof. Easterly concluded:
This blatant indifference to democratic values is particularly tragic since there are many ways the aid community might help Ethiopians rather than their rulers. First and foremost, donors could insist that investigations into aid abuse be credible, independent and free from government interference, and then cut off support to programs they find are being used as weapons against the opposition. They could speak out forcefully against recent legislation that smothers Ethiopian civil society. They could also seek to bypass the government altogether, channeling funds through NGOs instead, or giving direct transfers or scholarships to individuals… For not only is foreign aid to Ethiopia not improving the lives of those most in need, by financing their oppressors, it is making them worse.
U.S.AID and Aid Without a Moral Compass
In his inaugural address in 1961, President John Kennedy set the moral tone of American aid policy, which now seems to be a distant historical echo: “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required, not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” The Kennedian sense of altruistic morality in foreign aid is probably forgotten or unknown by those managing America’s foreign aid programs today. President Kennedy set a great ideal to guide America’s hand in helping others who need help. It was a simple and powerfully principled message: We should help the poorer nations of the world because helping our fellow humans is the morally right thing to do. Stated differently, if we cannot help “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery”, we should not hurt them in the name of helping them.
Today, it seems the one measure of all things in U.S. foreign policy, including aid policy, is the “war on terror.” Any regime or dictator who claims to be an ally of the U.S. in the war on terror can expect to receive not only the full support of the U.S., but full absolution for all sins committed against democracy and human rights. Last December, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said:
First, a commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves… By holding ourselves accountable, we reinforce our moral authority to demand that all governments adhere to obligations under international law; among them, not to torture, arbitrarily detain and persecute dissenters, or engage in political killings. Our government and the international community must counter the pretensions of those who deny or abdicate their responsibilities and hold violators to account.
The fact is that the U.S. has stood by passively and idly witnessing elections being stolen in Ethiopia time and again in broad daylight. It has turned a blind eye to repeated gross violations of human rights by Zenawi’s regime. Though the U.S. has substantial evidence that its aid money is being used, misused and abused for political purposes, it has chosen not to hold Zenawi accountable. For the U.S., it is all business as usual: Give out the blank checks to the grinning and palm-rubbing panhandlers standing outside the gates of U.S.AID.
I am appalled by the lack of moral criteria in U.S. aid policy because I believe states have moral obligations, ethical standards and legal duties to uphold, contrary to what is taught in the school of realpolitik. I believe it is the lack morality in U.S. aid policy that has contributed significantly to the triumph of tyranny and dictatorship in Ethiopia. It is self-evident that over the past five years the U.S. has shown little willpower and moral power in its dealings with the Zenawi dictatorship. Zenawi has taken advantage of this psychological weakness and simply finessed the U.S. into silence and policy paralysis. He has in fact cunningly turned the tables on the U.S. Just as the U.S. has made Zenawi its principal ally on the war on terror in the Horn, Zenawi has made the U.S. his principal ally in his war against democracy, freedom and human rights in Ethiopia.
The morality of aid to me is not some metaphysical abstraction but a practical expression of the accountability of recipient countries and the U.S. itself of which Secretary Clinton often talks about in her speeches. I frame the moral issue along two questions: Should American taxpayer money be used directly or indirectly to support a repressive dictatorship in Ethiopia? Does the U.S. Government have a moral and legal duty to make sure American tax dollars are not used to repress “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery”, as President Kennedy so eloquently articulated it?
In pursuit of the war on terror, the U.S. has gone to extremes of subservience to Zenawi’s regime to ignore these two questions. Instead of standing up for American bedrock principles of democracy and human rights and promotion of economic growth and poverty reduction through good governance, the U.S. has adapted its principles to fit the dictates of dictatorship and tyranny. The U.S. continues to pour billions as elections are stolen, the independent press shuttered, constitutions trashed, political parties and opposition leaders persecuted and civic society institutions and leaders criminalized. The U.S. denies facts about poor farmers who are held in perpetual dependence on aid doled out based on a political litmus test. For the U.S., development is operationally defined as dumping aid money into a kleptocratic economy. The “success” of U.S. aid in Ethiopia is measured not by evidence of the right things that have been done (good governance) to promote political and economic freedom and protect human rights, but by how much money has been handed out with no questions asked.
In its aid policy in Ethiopia, the U.S. seems to be more interested in generating “newspeak” and photo ops than producing the right results (good governance). As I reflect upon it, I am more convinced than ever before that U.S. aid is in good part responsible for keeping Ethiopia “almost as fragile and underdeveloped as it was when an Irish musician, Bob Geldof, set up the first global pop concert, Live Aid, to help the drought-benighted nation 25 years ago.” The evidence assembled by Dambissa Moyo, William Easterly, Peter Buaer and others compellingly show that in Africa foreign aid corrupts; and in Ethiopia, the largest recipient in Africa, aid has corrupted governance absolutely.
For U.S. aid policy to succeed in Ethiopia and Africa in general, it must have a moral imperative which requires holding the corrupt leaders and institutions in recipient countries accountable for their past and present actions. U.S. aid policy must also insist on future compliance with high standards of financial and ethical accountability. The U.S has the tools to convert aid-driven public corruption in Ethiopia into a shining example of public integrity for all of Africa. It is called the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (as amended). Section 116.75 of that law provides:
No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or de-grading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.
U.S. aid today does not “directly benefit the needy people” of Ethiopia. It benefits directly, indirectly and massively the dictatorship that denies the “needy people” of Ethiopia basic human rights. The U.S. helping hand no longer heals the “needy people” of Ethiopia; regrettably, it has become the brass knuckle of ironfisted dictators. So, I will just say, “Thanks for the thought U.S.A(ID), but no thanksgiving.”
Land seizures by the Ethiopian regime, with the pretext of modernizing the country, is really intended to tear down the foundation of the Ethiopian society. Today, entire communities in Ethiopia are being forced out of their land and neighborhoods, and pushed into internal displacement and exile. Land and property owners are evicted by governmental decrees, and often paid only a fraction of what their properties are worth in compensations. Others are relocated at distant sites, far away from public transportation and commercial centers; or are housed in ill-designed urban concrete slums. In the rural areas, millions of subsistence farmers are resettled from one part of the country to another, with devastating economic, social, and environmental results.
Villages and communities are more than simple living spaces, serving the citizens as access to means of livelihood, community interaction, and as nucleus of family and social support systems. Systematically, these centers of culture and history are being destroyed by the Meles regime. In the current wild, frantic and desperate atmosphere of land grab, whole villages and districts are wiped out overnight. In Addis Abeba, the old communities of Piazza, Kazanchis and Lideta have already been bulldozed over. Not even old church cemeteries, like Kedus Yosef, have escaped destruction. Poor farmers from Harar are being actively settled in Wellega, where the new settlers are destroying what little remains of the natural resources of the country, aggravating the already severe environmental degradation of the Ethiopian landscape.
The regime’s current land policy schemes render the people needier than they were before their evictions from their homes and communities. The regime’s assertions that resettlement and evictions are necessary to bring modernization and improvement in public health, transportation, schools, agricultural, and so forth are unsubstantiated. The fact is that all resettlement plans, including the Derg’s villagization programs, have been utter failures in Ethiopia.
Notwithstanding these facts, and in lock-step with the Derg, the current regime has made property ownership in Ethiopia restrictive. The state owns the land, and the citizens own only the improvements made on the land. By design, ownership of the improved property is ambiguous, because the government can remove anyone off a property at any time, and at will. The pretext of the removal is a decree by officials that a certain property or a neighborhood is necessary for “investment.” Since the ruling party cadres have strong incentive to make money from investors, they often use militant and brutal tactics to force the people off their land, or to remove them out of their buildings.
At the heart of this inequity lies in the fact that the Ethiopian people do not have the right of land ownership. By default, regime officials enjoy easy access to the land, enabling widespread corruption and arbitrary land seizures. In the cities, there hangs an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and fear that ones’ property could be snatched away at any time. In the country sides, the regime is in the business of leveraging and selling hundreds of thousands of hectares of farm lands, virgin forests, fertile valleys, highland meadows and floodplains, often for as little as US$1 per acre. The beneficiaries of this largess are Pakistanis, Turkish, Indian, Israeli, Saudi and Ethiopian Diaspora investors, all in cohort with the officials.
Today, among regime and ruling party officials, reaching to the highest echelons of power, and including the wives and relatives of those in high places, there prevails a sense of harried entitlement, unrestrained corruption, and nepotism that is hastening the process of land seizures and evictions. Since the evictions in Ethiopia are of massive scale, implemented in a rushed time frame, and made without adequate planning and resources, thousands of years of tradition, culture, history, and the natural environment of the country are being obliterated. The result is that whole populations of dispossessed, landless, and impoverished citizens are scattered all over the entire country.
Regime officials and their cronies, at all levels, vie with each other trying to get as much of the land as possible, turn quick profits for themselves and families, and move on to the next piece of land. As a rule, the regime offers a small fraction of the property value as compensation, and hardly ever any adequate relocation assistance to tens of thousands of citizens affected by evictions. When citizens receive any payment, it is often very little. Besides, contrary to the regime’s assertions, there is never any consideration given to the loss of income, loss of businesses, lack of adequate transportation, access to markets, proper schools for children, public health, or care for the elderly.
Land is often confiscated by ruling party officials for dubious investment schemes. In Dejen, atop the Abay River, the otherwise pristine and clean mountain air is now polluted by a cement factory spewing toxic dusts into the air. This cement plant is a Pakistani investment scheme, built on confiscated land. The cement plant, imported in disassembled parts from Pakistan, is entirely run by Pakistani workers, except for a few local day laborers.
To the West, whole stretches of the fertile valley of the Baro River, vast swathes of the arable land, are given to Pakistani and Saudi investors. To the east, there are scheme to build sugar factories in Metehara with borrowed money from India, using Indian equipment, and Indian skilled labor. In this particular case, even before these sugar projects were ever launched, there are lawsuits currently underway in Indian courts. The Indian courts are hearing allegations of corruptions, implicating senior officials of the Ethiopian regime.
In the highland meadows of the central region, there are large tracks of fertile farm lands, confiscated from poor farmers, and now fenced off for various investment schemes. Dotting the hills and plateaus of the plains, huge, empty flower producing warehouses are found stretched for miles on end. In the south and the northwest, there are large scale mining and timber concessions given to Saudi investors, where heavy machinery are actively plowing away the virgin soils, and lying to waste hundreds of thousands of acres of hardwood forests. The ancient lowland bamboo forests of Beneshangul-Gumuz are given away at fire-sell prices to dubious companies from India, funded by borrowed money from the state-owned banks.
The Awash Basin has been rendered toxic by industrial spillage and chemical run-offs, all related to ill-conceived investment schemes; the ancient rain forests of the South and Northwest are being decimated by logging and mineral extractions; the Omo and the Boro Rivers are severely threatened by large-scale industrial farms, and ill-designed water projects; the highland meadows of the central regions have been depleted by soil erosion; and there continues the obliteration of our villages, cities, communities and neighborhoods. Even our cemeteries have become fodders to the prevailing greed and avaricious grabbing.
Most science students may have already seen the video below, but it is the first time for me today and I am captivated by it. Learn about the universe from the macro to the micro in just 10 minutes. Very interesting and educational at the same time. – Elias Kifle
The film begins with an overhead image of a man reclining on a blanket; the view is that of one meter across. The viewpoint, accompanied by expository voiceover by Philip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across (or 101 m in standard form), revealing that the man is picnicking in a park with a female companion. The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), to a view of 100 meters (102 m), then 1 kilometer (103 m), and so on, increasing the perspective—the picnic is revealed to be taking place near Soldier Field on Chicago’s lakefront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 1024 meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the man’s hand, to views of negative powers of ten—10−1 m (10 centimeters), and so forth—until the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at 10−16 meter.
The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.
In 1998, “Powers of Ten” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” according to Wikipedia
Ethiopia’s beggar despot who survives on Western handouts is provoking Egypt by throwing accusations that Mubarak’s government is supporting Ethiopian rebel groups, according to Reuters (see below). We are accustomed to seeing dictators pick fights with external “enemies” when ever they feel the heat from domestic troubles. It is thus not surprising that Meles is going after Egypt since he is currently facing growing public anger and simmering tension that could explode any time. Meles uses the Nile issue only as a political tool, not as a matter of Ethiopia’s national interest. It is to be remembered that when Meles came to power he went to Cairo and signed an accord (read here) with Mubarak that gives Egypt a veto power over any agreement on Nile. Regarding his chest beating, let’s not forget that it took only 3,000 Somali ragtag fighters to kick his 20,000 troops out of Somalia. If war erupts between Egypt and Woyanne, which is highly unlikely, Ethiopians will be neutral spectators. — Elias Kifle
Ethiopian PM warns Egypt off Nile war
By Barry Malone
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Egypt could not win a war with Ethiopia over the River Nile and is also supporting rebel groups in an attempt to destabilize the Horn of Africa nation, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in an interview.
Egypt, Ethiopia and seven other countries through which the river passes have been locked in more than a decade of contentious talks driven by anger over the perceived injustice of a previous Nile water treaty signed in 1929.
Under the original pact Egypt is entitled to 55.5 billion cubic meters a year, the lion’s share of the Nile’s total flow of around 84 billion cubic meters, despite the fact some 85 percent of the water originates in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya signed a new deal to share the waters in May, provoking Egypt to call it a “national security” issue.
Meles said he was not happy with the rhetoric coming from the Egyptians but dismissed the claims of some analysts that war could eventually erupt.
“I am not worried that the Egyptians will suddenly invade Ethiopia,” Meles told Reuters in an interview. “Nobody who has tried that has lived to tell the story. I don’t think the Egyptians will be any different and I think they know that.”
The five signatories of the new deal have given the other Nile Basin countries one year to join the pact before putting it into action. Sudan has backed Egypt while Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi have so far refused to sign.
“The Egyptians have yet to make up their minds as to whether they want to live in the 21st or the 19th century,” Meles told Reuters in an interview, referring to the fact the original treaty was negotiated by colonial administrators.
“So the process appears to be stuck.”
“FISH IN TROUBLED WATERS”
Stretching more than 6,600 km (4,100 miles) from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean, the Nile is a vital water and energy source for the nine countries through which it flows.
Egypt, almost totally dependent on the Nile and threatened by climate change, is closely watching hydroelectric dam construction in the upstream countries.
Ethiopia has built five huge dams over the last decade and has begun construction on a new $1.4 billion hydropower facility — the biggest in Africa.
Meles accused Egypt of trying to destabilize his country by supporting several small rebel groups but said it was a tactic that would no longer work.
“If we address the issues around which the rebel groups are mobilized then we can neutralize them and therefore make it impossible for the Egyptians to fish in troubled waters because there won’t be any,” he said.
“Hopefully that should convince the Egyptians that, as direct conflict will not work, and as the indirect approach is not as effective as it used to be, the only sane option will be civil dialogue.”
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in July called for a scheduled November meeting of the nine countries to be attended by heads of state. Meles said that would not happen now.
The last meeting of all sides ended in stalemate and angry exchanges between water ministers at a news conference in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
“Ask the Egyptians to leave their culture and go and live in the desert because you need to take this water and to add it to other countries? No,” Egyptian Water Minister Mohamed Nasreddin Allam told Reuters at that meeting.
The photo below is incorrectly reported as showing destroyed trees in Ethiopia. However, the report about trees being cut in a massive scale to clear lands for flower farm is correct. Not only trees, according a VOA report yesterday, close to a million people are being uprooted from their land in 4 regions of Ethiopia. Their land is being leased by the ruling party Woyanne to foreign corporations. Listen here:
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Nov. 23, 2010
The Meles ethnic apartheid regime has given a land in western Ethiopia that is the size of the State of Rhodes Island (765,000 hectares) to an Indian corporation named Karuturi Global. Thousands of Ethiopians who used to live and earn their living on the land have been displaced, and a few of them are hired by Karturi at meager salaries.
The photo below shows how the forest in south western Ethiopia is being destroyed to make space for flower farming for export to Europe. When asked about the impact of clearing trees to grow flowers in such a massive scale, Woyanne minister of agriculture Abera Deressa said: We in the Ministry of Agriculture are developing an environmental code of practice for the private sector… We are advising them not to cut trees, they have to manage soil erosion.”
Obviously the stupid minister doesn’t know what he is talking about. Trees are being cleared as shows above and the impact on the environment, as well as the people in the region, is incalculable. Every independent study also indicates that after a few years of growing flower, the land will be useless.
