BAIDOA, Somalia (Reuters) – Heavily armed Somali rebels have attacked the presidential palace and key installations in the Somali government’s Baidoa headquarters, killing at least four soldiers, officials said on Tuesday.
Witnesses said mortar bombs fired by the insurgents late on Monday also hit the airport and a large refurbished warehouse that serves as the parliament of the Western-backed interim administration.
“Several mortar shells landed on us, killing three troops,” Ibrahim Ali Isak, a guard at Baidoa’s high-walled presidential palace, said by telephone.
Seven of his colleagues were injured and taken to hospital, where medical sources said one of them died.
A spokesman for the rebels, Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, told Reuters their target was the presidential guards and Ethiopian Woyanne forces supporting the interim government.
Somali Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein told reporters in Addis Ababa on Monday that the international community must deploy U.N. peacekeepers in his country without delay, or risk worsening insecurity across the Horn of Africa.
He said the U.N. troops were needed to replace Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers, under the terms of a tentative peace deal reached with some of the opposition last month at U.N.-led talks in Djibouti.
DENIAL
The latest high profile victim was Osman Ali Ahmed, local country director of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), who was killed by unidentified gunmen in Mogadishu on Sunday.
Robow told Reuters al-Shabaab fighters were not to blame.
“We strongly condemn the killing of important people in our community and declare that we are not behind it,” he said. “We believe Ethiopian Woyanne troops and the government are behind it.”
Government officials and the Ethiopian Woyanne military could not immediately be reached for comment.
The assassination of the U.N. official has raised fears among aid workers, who say worsening insecurity has stopped them from reaching many victims in a humanitarian crisis that may be the worst in Africa.
Fighting has killed more than 8,600 civilians since early last year, local rights activists say, and a million people out of population of 9 million have been forced from their homes.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This could be a fabricated news by Sudan and Woyanne in order to divert attention from the secret land deal. This has all the marks of Woyanne propaganda artist Bereket Simon (BS).
KHARTOUM (AFP) — Sudan on Tuesday accused neighbouring Ethiopia of launching a cross-border military raid against police in which 19 Sudanese people were killed.
“The Ethiopian army attacked a police base 17 kilometres (11 miles) from the Sudan-Ethiopian border killing 19 people, including a police officer. Ten people were injured,” said army spokesman Othman Mohammed al-Agbash.
A joint committee between the Sudanese government and Addis Ababa has been established to investigate the matter, Agbash told state news agency SUNA.
The army spokesman provided no reason for the attack in the Jabal Hantub area of Gedaref state, which lies on the northern part of the long international border.
Sudan says Ethiopia attacked military base
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan’s army accused Ethiopian troops on Tuesday of attacking a military camp in northern Sudan and killing about 19 people.
A senior Ethiopian official played down the allegation, saying any “minor incident” on the border could be easily resolved.
Sudan’s military spokesman said the attack took place early on Monday in the Jabel Hantub area of Sennar state.
“They hit a camp belonging to the central reserve police and they killed about 19 people,” the Sudanese army spokesman said. He did not know how many people were injured.
The central reserve police are a heavily armed military unit and are often deployed along border areas or to defend the capital Khartoum.
“This was an attack and we don’t know the reason — we have no problem with Ethiopia and there are no border disputes or tribal clashes in that area,” the army spokesman said.
Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, told Reuters in Addis Ababa the problem was that the long frontier was not properly demarcated.
“Sometimes locals from both sides trespass and minor incidents do happen,” he said, denying troops were involved.
“If there was a minor incident involving local inhabitants … Ethiopia is confident both governments will solve the problem in accordance with the prevailing peaceful norms we maintain.”
Sudan signed a north-south peace deal in 2005 which ended Africa’s longest civil war and also improved relations with its east African neighbours.
One Sudanese security source and another government official said the attack may have been because Sudan had given refuge a to local Ethiopian officials few weeks earlier and had refused to hand them over to Addis Ababa.
It was not clear why the officials sought refuge in Sudan. Ethiopia is fighting rebels from the Oromo region which borders Sudan and who want greater autonomy for their areas.
The Sudan army spokesman said a joint Ethiopian-Sudanese committee had been formed to investigate the attack.
Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa; Editing by Matthew Tostevin
Prof. Mesfin Woldemariam says Woyanne is
not the enemy of Ethiopia
Professor Mesfin Woldemariam, who is currently in Washington DC representing Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ, said at a meeting today (Sunday afteroon) that “we should not call a ‘political opponent’ like Woyanne an enemy.” It’s like a Jewish professor asking Israelis not to call Hitler or the Nazi party their “enemy.”
In ridiculing those groups that have raised arms against Woyanne, Prof. Mesfin said at the meeting, which was held at the Marriott Hotel in Washington DC, that these organizations are sacrificing young Ethiopians just so that their leaders can come to power, arriving in Addis Ababa by plane.
Prof. Mesfin said that Woyanne will never give up power because 1) it has the blood of many innocent Ethiopians on its hands, and 2) it has amassed a great deal of wealth. Therefore, the professor explained, we must be able to forgive Woyanne for shedding the blood of innocent Ethiopians and that it needs to be allowed to keep the wealth it illegally amassed (plundered) if we want to see change in Ethiopia.
The professor was not done yet. He said we must be considerate to Woyanne. We have to try to understand the fears and concerns of the Meles gang.
Woyanne could not ever have done a better public relations job than what Prof. Mesfin did today to weaken the resolve of Ethiopians in the Diaspora against the fascist regime. He gave DLA Piper lobbysts and those Senators who are blocking H.R. 2003 a tool to use it against us. How is it possible now for the U.S. Senators to pass a law cutting aid to Woyanne when a prominent member of the opposition refuses to say that the Meles crime family is not the enemy of Ethiopia?
This is the very reason why Ethiopian Review wrote two weeks ago that the party Prof. Mesfin represents, UDJ, is a fake opposition party. UDJ is undermining the struggle by portraying Woyanne as a legitimate regime, at the same time campaigning against freedom fighters who are shooting back at Woyanne. UDJ turns out to be even worse than Beyene Petros’s UEDF. At least Dr Beyene never attacks other opposition parties as Prof. Mesfin continues to do in every opportunity he gets.
Prof. Mesfin is a great scholar in the field of geography and a genuine and respected human rights advocate. For that we hold him in high esteem. But it is clear that he has no clue about politics or how to bring about political change in Ethiopia. Even worse, with all due respect, he has unknowingly become a tool for Woyanne. Meles, Azeb and gang can stop paying DLA Piper $50,000 per month since they now have a much more effective lobbyist in the person of Prof. Mesfin who is providing a free service.
In the next several weeks, Prof. Mesfin will visit several cities in the U.S. repeating the same messages to Ethiopians in North America. Those of us who support the brave Ethiopians who are shedding their blood to remove the Woyanne cancer from Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa will just ignore him.
The prosecutor’s case against popular Ethiopian singer Teddy Afro is falling apart. According to EthiopianReview.com sources, the date of the alleged car accident involving Teddy and the actual date of the man who died in an accident are found to be conflicting.
According to the prosecutor, Teddy crashed his BMW in Addis Ababa killing a homeless man named Degu Yibeltal on October 23, 1999 (Eth. Cal). But the original hospital record shows that Degu had died one day earlier, on October 22, 1999 (Eth. Cal) and an autopsy was performed at Menilik Hospital on October 23, 1999.
But the prosecutor would not stop there. He forced the hospital to produce the “correct” (fabricated) document that states the accident had occurred on October 23, one day after Degu had died. A new doctor who did not perform the autopsy Degu signed on the document that agrees with the prosecutor.
On Friday, July 4, Teddy Afro’s attorney asked the court to dismiss the case in light of of this new evidence, but the Woyanne judge ordered an investigation and sent Teddy Afro back to jail. Justice Woyanne style.
Federal Police savagely attacked a female reporter named Tsigereda Hailu on Friday at the court house in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa.
Tsigereda, a reporter for Rose, an entertainment newspaper, was at the court to cover singer Teddy Afro’s court appearance.
After beating up the reporter, the police to her and a male journalist named Abrham Begizew, a reporter for Addis Neger newspaper, to jail. Both were released the same day after posting bail.
According to ER sources, the police attacked Tsigereda after accusing her of hiding an audio recorder in her purse.
The savage attack took place in front of other people who were at the court to attend Teddy’s court appearance. Tsigereda was seen crying after the beating.
The court told Teddy Afro to return to the court next Friday.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The World Bank and U.K. are well aware that the money doesn’t go to ‘cut poverty’. It goes to subjugate and terrorize the people of Ethiopia and Somalia.
ADDIS ABABA ( Reuters) — Donors funding Ethiopia’s programmes to cut poverty said on Friday they would provide $847 million in 2008/09 for projects such as free education and distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets.
The World Bank and the UK Department of International Development (DFID) jointly gave the money to Ethiopia’s Protection of Basic Services (PBS) programme. Last year, they gave $573 million.
“After reviewing the results of PBS implementation since 2006, both the government and development partners are of the view that the programme has been successful and will be crucial in supporting Ethiopia’s plan towards poverty alleviation,” said Paul Ackroyd, head of DFID in Ethiopia.
Keniche Ohashi, the World Bank head said the PBS was the largest single development assistance in Ethiopia and that it would help the poor country achieve universal goals to halve poverty by 2015.
Under the PBS programme, an extra three million children and 65,000 teachers were now in school since 2006, Ackroyd said.
A total of 24,000 insecticide-treated bed nets have been distributed so far in 2008 compared with 2,700 in 2006 and as a result, new malaria cases have dramatically dropped to 370,315 in 2007 from 780,019 in 2006, he said.
Donors had also raised an extra $200 million out of the $420 million that the government says it requires for humanitarian needs. Efforts were also underway to raise a further $150 million, Ackroyd added.
The fund will distributed to the U.N. World Food Programme and other agencies and will be used to purchase food, fertilizers and for other humanitarian purposes, he said.
World Bank’s Ohashi said his organisation was considering helping Ethiopia with additional resources to mitigate against the external shocks of rising oil prices.
