BAIDOA, Somalia (Garowe Online) – Members of Somalia’s federal parliament have criticized the continued detention of ex-Mogadishu Mayor Mohamed “Dheere” Omar by Ethiopian regime troops, Radio Garowe reports.
MP Yusuf Mohamed “Gurow” told reporters in Baidoa Tuesday that a group of lawmakers have met and issued a call for the Ethiopian regime to release Mr. Mohamed Dheere.
“We condemn Mohamed Dheere’s arrest, which we see as unjustified,” MP Gurow said in Baidoa, seat of the country’s interim federal parliament.
Mohamed Dheere, a former warlord, was arrested by Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers on Dec. 31 in Mogadishu and Somali MPs now say the detained ex-mayor is now being held in Baidoa, under the guard of Ethiopian Woyanne troops.
Local reports have indicated that Somali Prime Minister Nur “Adde” Hassan Hussein ordered Mohamed Dheere’s arrest, after the latter refused to surrender his weapons over to the interim government.
Hear Ethiopia Reads founder and finalist for the CNN Hero 2008 AwardYohannes Gebregeorgis speak about his work in New York and New Jersey, This week.
New Jersey
Place: Maplewood Memorial Library
51 Baker Street
Maplewood, NJ 07040
Date: Saturday, December 13, 2008
Time: 7 – 8:30 PM
New York
Place: Cafe Addis
435 West 125 Street
New York, NY
Date: Saturday, December 13, 2008
Time: 2:00 PM
Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org) is a grassroots non-profit geared toward bringing literacy and literacy related resources to Ethiopia. Since Ethiopia Reads opened Ethiopia’s first free children’s library in 2003, thousands of children have experienced the joy of reading for the first time. Ethiopia is considered one of the three poorest countries in the world with a life expectancy of only 41 years.
Yohannes Gebregeorgis, a native of Ethiopia and children’s literacy advocate, has been named a Top 10 Hero of the Year by CNN. Mr. Gebregeorgis was selected from more than 3,000 individuals nominated by viewers throughout the year. Finalists were selected by a Blue Ribbon panel of judges that includes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jane Goodall and Deepak Chopra.
MEKELLE (IRIN) – The humanitarian situation in the drought-affected north and north-eastern Ethiopia continues to deteriorate as severe drought bites.
“Rainfall in October, which was unexpected, was not of great help to the crops that were planted in May; only the livestock benefited temporarily, now the people are facing a significant crop failure,” a humanitarian worker, who requested anonymity, told IRIN on 23 November.
The area has experienced successive failures of the Belg (short rains ending in May) and Meher (long rains, which start in late July) in the past few years, resulting in low crop yields in some parts and near-crop failure in others.
The aid worker, a member of an inter-agency assessment mission to Tigray in the Eastern Zone in the northeast, said signs were that the situation could deteriorate, with rising malnutrition rates, crop failure, water shortages, population movement to areas where drought was less severe, as well as greater dependency on relief aid.
The findings of the assessment, by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Disaster Management and Food Security Sector, the Tigray Regional Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Department, OCHA, the World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund and several NGOs, including Relief Society of Tigray, will be concluded by end-November. These results will determine how many people will require emergency food aid and non-food assistance in 2009.
The Ethiopian government Woyanne and its humanitarian partners issued an update on 14 October, seeking emergency aid for an estimated 6.4 million people across the country.
A multi-agency rapid assessment of the drought situation in Tigray at end-September, and included in the October requirement document, recommended the provision of emergency food aid to an estimated 600,000 in nine “hotspot” woredas (districts) countrywide.
Tigray authorities requested the multi-agency assessment team in November to cover 27 woredas out of 34 in the region, a sign that drought was spreading fast.
Some residents of woredas affected in the Eastern Zone, such as Kilte Awlaelo, Atsbi Womberta and Tse-se Tsada Ambat, told IRIN they were considering migrating to other parts of the country, while others were contemplating selling their livestock, despite falling prices, to survive.
Gebremedhin Gebregergis, a farmer in Kihen Tabia of Kilte Awlaelo woreda, said his one-acre Teff crop had almost failed and he expected to harvest less than one quintal (100kg) and leave the most stunted for his one oxen and one cow.
“To survive, I have to sell some of the livestock, mostly the sheep and goats; but this will not be enough as the animals don’t fetch much on the market,” Gebremedhin, who has eight children, said. “Already I cannot send one of my children to high school even though he has completed Grade Eight because I cannot afford it; the priority is to be able to feed my family.”
Malnutrition rising
A health extension worker in Kilte Awlaelo said malnutrition rates had increased compared with three months ago and the health ministry had intensified efforts to prevent increases in cases of diseases such as malaria, diarrhoea, eye ailments, worm infestation and pneumonia.
“In June, we screened 746 children under-five for malnutrition but the figure dropped to only 415 in October because some of the children had moved to other parts of the country with their parents while others were no longer attending school because of the drought,” the health worker said.
They were now planning to screen the children every month, instead of every three months, to capture those severely and moderately malnourished early. “We were also screening pregnant women and lactating mothers every three months but we will also shift to screening them on a monthly basis.”
Escape by migration
Birizaf Tsegay, 17, a resident of Wukro village in Atsbi Womberta woreda, said the drought had reduced the harvest from her mother’s two-hectare farm to such an extent that migration by some family members was inevitable.
“What we harvested recently is not enough for our family; it may not even last one month,” she said. “I dropped out of school from Grade Three because I was unable to buy exercise books, my elder sister is also out of school, only my two younger brothers are still in school; to survive, some of us, including myself, will have to move to look for work in other woredas so as to send money home.”
In its September Focus on Ethiopia report, OCHA reported that emergency aid in Tigray had been extended to November due to poor food security in the region.
“There is a limited supply of cereals in most markets compared to livestock availability,” OCHA said.
TORONTO, CANADA – Kemer Yousef, who escaped Ethiopia on foot with nothing 24 years ago, has scored an unprecedented video hit with Nabek, a seven-track DVD showing him singing from a yacht in Toronto Harbour and dancing on the steps of Casa Loma. Clamour for his return has become so great that the central government [a political ploy by the hated dictatorial regime] is helping to arrange a six-concert homecoming tour that opens Dec. 7 at Ethiopia’s largest indoor venue – Addis Ababa’s 20,000-seat Millennium Hall.
For Kemer Yousef the tour in Ethiopia means seeing his family for the first time since he escaped across the desert to Somalia at the age of 20. His mother is in her 70s. His father is 103.
The tour also means singing to former enemies.
Kemer belongs to the Oromo ethnic majority, long oppressed by successive ruling minorities, who are now as swept up by the pop phenomenon as anybody else. [What a crock!]
VIDEO: One of Kemer Yousuf’s latest songs that have made him popular. Nice music, but poor video and terrible choreography
“Ethiopia has more than 70 ethnic groups and languages,” tour co-producer Bumiden Abdul Wahab explains by phone from the city of Adama [Nazareth]. “Normally people only listen to their own music, follow their own traditions. [Not necessarily true.]
“Kemer shook up the country,” he says. “He broke the barrier. Every time you turn on the radio – in whatever language – you hear his music.
“If you ask 10 people, at least nine have his CD.”
Kemer is a broad-shouldered man with a magnetic grin and a warm, tender way of expressing himself.
He grew up in an oral and singing culture in the village of Golu, near the town of Deder, in east-central Ethiopia. Villagers had enough to eat, he says. The famine regions lay elsewhere.
But throughout his childhood, the successive governments of Emperor HaileSelassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam relentlessly persecuted the Oromo. [The current dictator, Meles Zenawi, is the worst of all. He has turned Ethiopia a large prison camp for Oromos, according to his own former defense minister. Kemer owes his fans to point out this tragic fact.]
“You cannot even call yourself Oromo,” Kemer says of the HaileSelassie period. “If you dress as Oromo, if you write Oromo language, you will be killed.” [This is a lie. HaileSelassie was not like that.]
Of the Mengistu period, he says: “I remember one night when they came and took my uncle and for no reason they shot him in front of the door. [The Meles dictatorship is committing genocide in some parts of the country. Why do you leave that out?]
“You cannot even grieve and not even scream,” Kemer says.
“If you scream, if you cry, they will kill you. Then they ask (your family) to pay for the bullet you get killed with.”
In 1984, Golu’s elders pooled their resources to help their young people escape. Thousands of people mobilized and with dozens of classmates Kemer caught a ride east to the rallying point of Jijiga.
He joined a camel caravan of about 200 people on a three-day march to the border. Most died on the way. Snakes killed some. Bandits killed many others, stole their animals, and raped and abducted many of the women, leaving 37 survivors.
In 1987, after much suffering, Kemer made it to Toronto. He now lives in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood.
“I have a song in my language,” he recalled several years ago on CBC Radio’s Global Village.
“I say, ‘Thank you, Canada, for wiping my tears, for listening to my cry, for reaching for me with a long hand, far away in Africa, and giving me this opportunity to be a human being, to be somebody, to sing again for others.'”
Throughout the hard times, music remained important to Kemer. In refugee camps, he made up songs about refugee life. At a transient center in Rome, he sang as he mopped floors.
In Toronto, after learning English and taking an electronics course, he assembled a band from musicians he met mostly in subway stations.
In 1993, he found a role model. Ali Birra, the only Ethiopian Oromo star of the 1960s and 1970s, moved to Toronto.
“Ali Birra is a reference singer for all Oromo people,” says French musicologist Francis Falceto, the brains behind Ethiopiques, a hit world-music CD series mining the best of that golden era.
“I didn’t give Kemer much help, really,” Birra says at home in Pickering, where he now lives.
“He’s a very good learner. He watches. He picks things up and improves them.”
Kemer developed a niche, playing Oromo political and social events in Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis, Dallas and Washington, D.C. He played in Australia and travelled to Amsterdam, Oslo, Frankfurt and Rome. He married an Oromo woman he met in Munich.
He constantly innovated. Instead of standing still like most Ethiopian singers, he danced and ran. To enhance melodies, he mixed pentatonic and diatonic scales – “like Kenny G,” he says.
For the homecoming tour, he trained three Caucasian Toronto female dancers – Jennifer Dallas, Elisha MacMillan and Yaelle Wittes – to dance Oromo-style and sing backup lines.
“People are so excited,” he says. “They want to see how Canadian girls can dance Shaggoyyee, Ragada, Gattumi and Skista.”
In 1997, Kemer’s brother Redwan escaped to Kenya. Kemer got him to Canada. Within weeks Redwan landed a job in a variety store at Weston Rd. and Lawrence Ave., and on his first day at the cash register two thieves walked in and shot him in the back. He survived but remains traumatized.
“The bullet followed me from Africa,” Kemer says fatalistically.
About five years ago, Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi opened a dialogue with expatriate Oromo communities in Europe and North America. [This is a lie. Within the past 3 weeks alone, over 94 politicians and journalists from the Oromo ethnic group were rounded up and thrown in jail by the Meles regime.]
“The system changed, the people changed, I changed,” Kemer says of his broader themes in recent years of love between men and women, love for humankind, and love for Ethiopian village life. [The system changed?]
The changes brought a new infectiousness and universality to his songs, and opened him to the new, mass audience.
John Goddard is accompanying Kemer Yousef on his homecoming tour to Ethiopia. Follow their journey in the Star’s Entertainment section.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a good propaganda piece for the Woyanne dictatorship by the Toronto Star reporter John Goddard. It is Shame on Kemer for allowing himself to play into that. He didn’t have to praise the blood thirsty Woyanne junta in order for him to go to Ethiopia and sing. The things he said about Atse HaileSelassie is far from the truth. HaileSelassie had many weaknesses, but being racist was not one of them. The fact that Kemer fails to point out any of the injustices that are being committed by the current tribal junta in Ethiopia tells a lot about him — that he has sold his soul to the Woyanne murderous thugs.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is done to eliminate the competition against Woyanne currency dealers, not to enforce the law. Foreign currency exchange is one of the businesses that the ruling party wants to monopolize.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (APA) – The Ethiopian police on Wednesday arrested eight people for being in possession of foreign currency (US dollars and Euro), which contravenes currency regulations, APA learns here.
The Ethiopian federal police [Meles Zenawi’s death squad] accused the eight for attempting to take the money to the border for illegal trading.
“They were caught after hiding the foreign currency in a vehicle for their illegal trading at the border,” said the police.
Since the past four months, the government banned black market foreign currency exchange and shut down a number of shops that were involved in a black market of foreign currency, especially US dollars and Euros.
The eight people were arrested with over $350,000 and over 16,000 Euros, according to the police.
It is illegal to use foreign currency for buying and selling activities. The police have advised the public to go to the bank for any foreign currency exchange transactions.
The presidential election and its drama have finally come to an end. The excitement and honeymoon is over. It is time for us all to get back to reality and lead life as we have always known it to be.
Now is the time for us all to start rethinking what we expect of a President Barack Obama. Now is the time to verify if the change he promised us he would bring to American politics and foreign policy is plausible or whether it is just a bag of hot air.
Having run all his campaign on a change platform, Obama’s recent move to appoint many of former President Bill Clinton’s officers does not in any way show Obama is committed to changing the way politics works in America. By keeping and surrounding himself with the Clinton people, Obama is now confirming the fears many Americans had about whether his talks for change was real or whether it was just another empty political verbosity.
Almost all the people he is rumored to be planning to appoint into his cabinet were part of the Clinton Administration. This is slap in the face of many Americans who voted for a new chapter in American politics and had no interest in creating a third term for Bill Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton.
Senator Clinton has emerged as the most likely candidate to become Obama’s Secretary of State. It will be very disappointing if Obama appoints Clinton because the Clintons were part of the problem that wrecked Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. For a man who ran his campaign completely on change, appointing Sen. Clinton would be a confirmation of the concerns that the Clintons have hijacked the Obama agenda. Obama’s choice for Secretary of State should be someone who has not been involved in the George Bush or Clinton Administrations.
In fact, a good choice for Obama’s Secretary of State should be someone who has expertise and experience on the Middle East. An Arab American would be the perfect candidate because the Middle East’s problems ranging from Palestine, Israel, Iraq, and Iran to Afghanistan will continue to dominate US foreign policy agenda. Getting someone with a natural connection to the region would bring a new dimension on how to address conflicts and US interests in the region.
The first casualty of the “talk change, but make no change” Obama Administration is going to be US-Africa policy. Obama has recruited and kept very closely individuals like Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico and former US Secretary for African Affairs, Susan Rice. Both Rice and Richardson oversaw the tragedies and wars that ravaged Africa, including the Rwanda genocide, but did nothing.
The Clintons just sat by and did nothing as people died in Rwanda, Liberia, Congo and Sierra Leon. Instead of stopping these deaths, they befriended some of these war criminals, armed them and motivated them to fight. In the case of Uganda and Rwanda, they trained Ugandan and Rwandan rebels who then invaded Rwanda, and thereby instigated the Rwanda genocide four years later. Again, the same Administration supported Ugandan and Rwandan troops to go and invade DR Congo leaving five million people dead and millions displaced. The residual effect of that invasion is currently unfolding in Eastern Congo.
In Clinton’s eight years in office, Africa saw some of the worse wars and atrocities in recent memories. And in many cases, the Clinton Administration either looked the other way or partnered with corrupt African leaders who used the Clinton support to suppress their citizens and instigate wars. This must come as a surprise for many who were duped by the Clinton charm to believe that Clinton had a good policy regarding Africa.
In reality, Clinton’s Africa Policy was abysmal, to say the least, and the impacts of this failed policy have led to current political, military, economic and social quagmire facing countries like Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and even Sudan.
In other words, the entire Great Lakes region of Africa has suffered. Even the International Court of Justice in 2005 found Uganda liable for mass killings and looting resources from the DR Congo and ordered Uganda to pay DR Congo $10 billion. Up to now, Uganda has not paid a dime. The US funded and supplied the Ugandan and Rwandan troops to invade DR Congo; the liability should have stretched beyond Uganda.
Clinton developed special relationships with African dictators like Yoweri K. Museveni of Uganda and leaders of Rwanda, Paula Kagame; Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi; and Kenya, then Daniel arap Moi. Clinton then coined a bogus term, referring to these men as a “new breed of African leaders.”
In Uganda, Museveni, who is America’s most reliable stooge in Africa, has been in power since 1986 and has even changed the country’s constitution so he can rule for life. Uganda’s economy is bailed-out every year by the U.S. and the U.K., underwriting more than 50% of the country’s budget. Corruption is at all time high in Uganda with Museveni and his cronies pocketing grants and donor funds into their own coffers; even money sent to fight HIV/Aids. Not a word about this is found in corrupt Western corporate media.
We all know that these shady African leaders have been anti-democratic and have used the US support to abuse their citizens, cause wars and enrich their personal bank accounts. Today, some of those leaders Clinton was palling around with are listed as the richest African leaders, and yet their countries are at the bottom of the poverty ladder.
Several years ago when the US supported the overthrow of dictator Mubutu Seseko of Zaire–now Democratic Republic of Congo—Bill Clinton sent his hawkish Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, to visit Uganda and instigate the invasion of Congo leading to genocidal conflict that has yet to end.
To address African affairs, Obama needs to appoint someone who has never had any working relations with the current African presidents in office and most especially presidents like [Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia], Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Joseph Kabila of DR Congo. The US needs to redesign its foreign policy in regards to Africa, especially for the Great Lakes, putting particular focus on addressing human rights, democracy, health and economic development.
The US policy on Africa during the Obama administration should be geared to punish poor leadership and behavior by oppressive and corrupt African leaders instead of rewarding them. The US should tie any economic assistance to democratic achievement and only fund programs that benefit poor people in African villages, including construction of roads, schools, hospitals; farming and environmental protection should also be promoted.
No aid should be given directly to the corrupt governments and officials. Instead, aid should be channeled through non-governmental and community organizations to implement the programs.
The cold war has ended a long time ago, but American foreign policy is still stuck in that era’s mentality. When will America and its leaders move into the 21st century regarding her approach to foreign policy?
Historic as Obama’s election might be, he should not miscalculate on foreign and domestic affairs. His success will depend on whether he will maintain his commitment to change or whether the same Washington insiders he campaigned against will be the ones running his White House.
Americans have invested heavily in Barack Obama; if he fails them will early poor choices he can later not rectify, the same voters are going to turn against him.
Obama should keep that in mind and should remember that the Clintons did not like him all along and they will not take the blame if Obama’s administration fails. Instead, they will reap from the failure and say, “I told you so” to not elect Obama. Clinton would welcome the post of Secretary of State, but the minute Obama stumbles, they will say: “I told you so.”
In Luo, a heritage I share with Obama, there is a saying that goes “Angee tyene lit,” meaning, “I wish I knew earlier, I would have not done it.”
Obama will live to regret any early bad moves he makes in his Administration.
(Black Star News contributing columnist Otika is an African Policy Advocate and a Social Entrepreneur based in North Carolina. He may be reached via email at [email protected])
