STRASBOURG, France — Ana Gomes, Member of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, invites her colleagues to a meeting with Dr. Berhanu Nega, Mayor-elect of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and former senior leader CUD, who was released from prison one year ago.
The meeting, aiming at discussing the current political and human rights situation in Ethiopia, will take place on 25 June, at 18.30, in room ASP 5G 305.
Berhanu Nega was a founding member of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD). Dr. Nega played an important role in the 2005 Ethiopian general elections. At the time, he was elected as mayor of Addis Ababa but could not serve since he was arrested during the political persecution that followed the elections.
Dr. Berhanu Nega is currently one of the leaders of Ginbot 7 Movement for Justice, Democracy and Freedom.
Some of the leaders of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit) have gathered 300 people and formally created a new party named Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) today in Addis Ababa. See details at Kinijit North America’s web site here.
Let’s go straight to the crux of the matter: UDJ by its actions and positions had demonstrated itself to be a political party without a popular base. It is a fake party without popular constituency — like Beyene Petros’s UEDF, Lidetu Ayalew’s EUDP, and the many other useless political groupings whose only benefit is to make Woyanne look legitimate or democrat.
UDJ, in particular, is a great disappointment, because it had a potential to position itself as a genuine opposition party by doing things such as:
1) Keeping its former name Kinijit.
2) Not accepting the legitimacy of the Woyanne-dominated Election Board.
3) Ignoring Woyanne’s ban on public meetings.
4) Speaking out against Woyanne atrocities through out Ethiopia, particularly the wholesale massacres of Ethiopians in Ogaden.
5) Demanding the resignation of Meles Zenawi and all Woyanne top leaders…
They may risk arrest and other dangers by doing the things mentioned above. But if they present themselves as leaders, what else do they expect? If they are afraid of arrest, they should stay home. How many times other leaders of ‘peaceful struggle’ were jailed, beaten up, and killed? How many times Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela, San Suu Kyi, and others were arrested, beaten up, and assassinated because they refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the tyrannical system that brutalized and enslaved their people. San Suu Kyi of Burma gets arrested almost every other week. On the other hand, take a look at what the UDJ leaders are doing:
1) When Woyanne told them that they cannot use Kinijit as their name, they said, ‘yes, master’ and changed their name, submitting themselves to the illegitimate regime.
2) After they changed their name, Woyanne still refused to give them legal status. But they continued to beg the dictatorship through Western diplomats.
3) When Woyanne security agents banned their meeting, they run to U.S. and U.K. ambassadors for help. Woyanne said yes to its puppet masters, U.S. and U.K. diplomats, and allowed UDJ to meet, but only inside their office. Without any hint of resistance, they accepted Woyanne’s condition and held their meeting in their office today.
4) In the past 10 months, when millions of our people faced death from starvation as result of Woyanne’s mismanagement of the country’s resources, when tens of thousands of fellow Ethiopians were slaughtered in Ogaden, when a neighboring country, Somalia, was pillaged by Woyanne occupation forces in the name of Ethiopia, when high commodity prices caused so much suffering, when large tracts of land were given away to Sudan in a secret deal, not a word of concern was expressed by the UDJ leaders. The only criticism we hear coming out of the mouths of UDJ leaders these days is directed at freedom fighters who raised arms to defend themselves and their people from the Woyanne brutal dictatorship.
It is because of all these reasons and more that Ethiopian Review believes UDJ is another fake party by any measurement.
Let’s call a spade ‘spade’. UDJ is Fake.
NOTE TO KINIJIT NORTH AMERICA: Not a penny of the money collected in the name of Kinijit from Ethiopians in the Diaspora should be given to UDJ, because UDJ is not Kinijit and doesn’t stand for the principles that Kinijit upheld. It would be a betrayal of public trust on the part of Kinijit North America to give any of the money under its controls to UDJ.
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Drought-ravaged Ethiopia should improve its “backward” farming systems to curb acute food shortages, which have left millions of people in need of urgent humanitarian aid, a top World Bank official said on Wednesday.
About 4.5 million Ethiopians need emergency food aid due to poor seasonal rains and high food prices in the vast east African country, according to the United Nations.
“Ethiopia has registered commendable economic growth over the last three or four years,” Justin Lin Yifu, chief economist and senior vice-president of the World Bank, told reporters on a visit to Addis Ababa.
“However, some parts of the country have been experiencing drought due to the backward farming system in the country.”
Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous nation, needs $325 million to provide 400,000 tonnes of food, especially in the country’s hard-hit south and south eastern regions bordering Somalia and Kenya, according to the United Nations.
About 85 percent of Ethiopia’s 81 million population rely on subsistence farming and “this needs to be revisited,” he said without elaborating.
“Given good weather conditions, diverse natural resources and huge labour in Ethiopia, I don’t think it would be difficult to bring about a real change in the country”, he said.
Reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse; Editing by Wangui Kanina
The few newspapers that are struggling to survive in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa under constant harassement from security forces of the Meles dictatorship have found a way to thrive in the past few weeks: Put Berhanu Nega’s photo on their front page.
Last week’s editions of Fitih, Awramba and Enbilta newspapers were sold out the same day they were printed. Each of them had published photos of Dr Berhanu and reports about the newly launched organization, Ginbot 7 for Movement for Justice, Freedom and Democracy.
According to ER sources, the newspapers will double their printed copies this week and all of them will have extensive coverage of Dr Berhanu’s ongoing European tour.
The newspapers’ circulation is limited to Addis Ababa. They are not allowed to distribute any copy outside of the Addis Ababa area. On top of that, every week, the reporters and editors of these few newspapers, who are carefull not to criticize the Meles dictatorship, are harassed, detained, and verbally abused by Woyanne security forces. Through all this they have found a way to survive, even thrive — that is until Woyanne decides to shut them all down again.
EPRP web sites have reported today that the discredited former chairman of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit), Ato Hailu Shawel, held a meeting with Addis Ababa’s youth and women. It is reported that some 200 people attended the meeting on Sunday, June 15.
Where are the youth? Where are the women?
As the photo below shows, there were only one person under 60 years old and only three women in the meeting. [Photo is provided by mahder.com, an EPRP web site.]
More revealing as to how much of a joke Ato Hailu made out of himself is that while Woyanne police was dispersing UDJ meeting a short distance away on the same weekend, no body bothered to even notice that he was holding a public meeting. It is too obvious now that even the paranoid Woyanne is not taking Hailu Shawel seriously any more.
Meanwhile, some of those who are partly responsible for Ato Hailu’s downfall, including Ato Moges Brook of Los Angeles, have now turned their back on him. They find him useless, too, after he aligned himself with the EPRP reactionaries. The web site that was hijacked by Ato Moges, Kinijit.org, has stopped reporting any thing about him for several weeks. Currently, Hailu Shawel relies on trashy web sites that are run by retired communists (EPRP) to get his message out. Even among those repeat losers, many are abandoning him after observing that he has no more use to them.
The rise and sudden fall of Hailu Shawel must be carefully studied by all Ethiopian political leaders, so that they do not repeat the same mistake. It is a self-caused down-fall by a person whom we all once held in high esteem.
In his interview with Ethiopian Current Affairs on Sunday, June 15, Ethiopia’s most distinguished human rights activist Prof. Mesfin Woldemariam has made some assertions that Tegbar for Unity and Democracy (Tegbar) respectfully disagrees with.
Issue 1: Prof. Mesfin said: “Ethiopians have not yet started the ‘peaceful struggle’.”
Following the 2005 elections, Woyanne had rounded up 80,000 Kinijit supporters and detained them in Nazi-type, disease-infested concentration camps. Thousands were brutalized and killed. All of Kinijit’s top leaders were thrown in jail. What more does the professor wants from the people of Ethiopia after he and the other Kinijit leaders had abandoned the struggle when they were led to jail without making any contingency plan on how the struggle can continue in their absence? The people of Ethiopia did not fail to struggle or to follow their leaders. It is Prof. Mesfin and colleagues who failed to lead. Now after tens of thousands of Ethiopians paid all that sacrifice, many of them with their lives, the professor tells us that the “peaceful struggle did not start yet.” Tegbar rejects that assertions.
Issue 2: Prof. Mesfin said: “Woyane canceling the recent UDJ meeting in Addis Ababa was a victory for Ethiopians.”
The professor, while failing to acknowledge the huge sacrifices being paid by the people of Ethiopia, now tries to tell us that getting dispersed by two police officers without any argument or semblance of resistance is a victory. What the professor and his colleagues at UDJ are currently engaged in is not peaceful struggle. It is submission to tyranny.
The professor also said in the same interview: “The fact that Woyanne prevented the UDJ meeting from taking place over the weekend will expose it to the world.”
We found this statement to be less than convincing because every one knows about Woyanne’s crimes against the people of Ethiopia and Somalia. Two policemen illegally and arbitrarily dispersing 400 delegates of an opposition party without any hint of resistance exposes the weakness of UDJ’s leadership more than it exposes Woyanne’s lawlessness. Because the world has already witnessed Woyanne as it engaged in mass murder of civilians, including recent satellite photos that show entire villages burned down by Woyanne troops. How much more Woyanne can be exposed?
Issue 3: Prof. Mesfin tried to explain that 400 people taking orders from two Woyanne security agents to shut down their meeting is “Ethiopiawi Chewanet.”
Our forefathers who fought tooth and nail to keep Ethiopia, the oldest independent nation in the world, must be rolling in their graves to hear such a statement from a senior leader of an opposition party.
Issue 4: Prof. Mesfin said: “People and organizations that don’t participate or only follow the peaceful and non-resistance path come from the neftegna culture.”
The professor is telling us that self-defense is a “neftegna culture.” By his definition, OLF, ONLF and other freedom fighters are “neftegnoch.” We disagree. It is a natural right for people to defend themselves against tyranny using any means available to them.
Issue 5: Prof. Mesfin said: “Ethiopia’s feudal culture is an obstacle to the process of fighting Woyanne.”
We find this statement to be off base since a large portion of Ethiopia’s population is under 40 and has not lived through the feudal regimes of the past. In addition, it is this young demographic group that is paying the most sacrifice in the fight against Woyanne.
The professor further explained that organizations that don’t participate or only follow the peaceful or non-resistance path want to take Ethiopia back to the old feudal governance.
One should then ask the professor the following questions: Is self-defense feudalism? Are freedom fighters such as OLF, EPPF, ONLF, TPDM and Genbot 7 fighting to bring feudalism back?
According to Prof. Mesfin, the reason freedom fighters in Ethiopia are chasing Woyanne from all corners is because they want to bring feudalism back. Not because Woyannes are massacring Ethiopians; Not because Woyanne is stealing from Ethiopia’s children and making them hungry to then turning around and use them to beg from its masters.
As much as we respect Prof. Mesfin, we strongly disagree with a series of statements he has made during his interview on Sunday denigrating the sacrifices of Ethiopia’s freedom fighters. The professor can continue with his non-resistance, but when he goes out of his way to label those who are paying sacrifices with their lives as fuedals and neftegnas, we are obligated by our conscience to speak up.
We urge the professor to focus his criticism on Meles Zenawi’s terrorist regime, not the freedom fighters who are fighting to liberate our country from it.
