ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia will import 150,000 tonnes of wheat to stabilise grain prices amid rising world commodity costs, the prime minister said on Wednesday.
Higher prices for staple foods and fuel have hit developing nations hard as government of some food-growing countries impose export curbs because of worries about domestic shortages.
“The government has signed an agreement to import 1.5 million quintals (150,000 tonnes) of wheat within the next one and half months to stabilise food grain prices,” Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told parliament.
“Food grain price stability was not achieved in some communities due to illegal practices by traders operating outside the law,” he said.
The leader of sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous country did not say where the grain would come from nor how much it would cost.
The Ministry of Finance says inflation stands at 19 percent, mostly due to high petrol prices.
Meles said the government will take action against black market operators. Last week, police arrested 45 traders.
Food shortages are worse in sub-Saharan Africa because per capita production has fallen in recent years. Drought-prone Ethiopia was one of the most-affected African countries.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Monday that Ethiopia should tap low-interest loans or grants to help it deal with rising food prices.
A U.S.-funded early warning system, FEWSNET, has said that up to nine million Ethiopians may need food assistance in 2008 due to drought.
(Reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse, editing by Jack Kimball and Peter Blackburn)
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit http://africa.reuters.com/). ([email protected]; +254 20 2224 717)
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – An Ethiopian [kangaroo] court sentenced eight people to death for a grenade attack that killed five people last year in the Horn of Africa nation’s restive Somali region, local media reported on Thursday.
The assault at a packed ceremony in 2007 was blamed on the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), a separatist movement in the remote eastern area. A stampede after police fired over the crowd killed another six people.
“The Somali state high court sentenced to death the eight people after evidence presented by the prosecution proved that the accused killed and wounded civilians,” the state-run Ethiopian News Agency (ENA) quoted the court as saying.
The eight have a right to appeal to higher courts under Ethiopian law. Death sentences must also be approved by the state president.
The ONLF says it is fighting for autonomy of the ethnic-Somali region. Both the government and the rebels accuse each other of human rights abuses.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told parliament that the rebel group has been largely “neutralised” by a military offensive going on for the past year.
The ONLF denies this, saying it still has operations in the countryside. Addis Ababa says its neighbour Eritrea is training and supplying the ONLF, but Asmara denies that.
EDITORS’S NOTE: Meles Zenawi admitted yesterday in the parliament that he signed a border agreement with Sudan, but as usual he lied that no body was displaced as a result. Members of the fake parliament did not dare to point out to him that agreements with foreign countries must be approved by them. We wonder what explanation Woyanne cadres and sympathizers will come up with now after telling us that there is no border deal with Sudan.
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APA-Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) The demarcation of the Ethiopia-Sudan border will not displace anybody on either side, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zewani told parliament on Wednesday.
He said Sudan and Ethiopia have agreed that the border demarcation, to start in the near future, will not displace any individuals from the land they occupy.
“We, Ethiopia and Sudan, have signed an agreement not to displace any single individual from both sides to whom the demarcation benefits,” he said.
The border between Ethiopia and Sudan dates back to 1907 when Sudan was under British colonial rule.
The two countries have so far been unable to physically identify their borders.
Recent reports said that Ethiopian farmers were displaced by Sudanese troops at two border areas but Meles told the parliament that this was land that was occupied by Ethiopia in 1996, which was given to two investors by the Ethiopian government, and Sudan complained about it.
“We have given back this land, which was occupied in 1996. This land before 1996 belonged to Sudanese farmers. There is no single individual displaced at the border as it is being reported by some media,” Meles said.
ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi said on Wednesday he would keep troops inside neighbouring Somalia until “jihadists” were defeated.
In a move supported by the United States but providing a target for militants, Meles sent thousands of troops into Somalia in late 2006 to help the nation’s struggling government topple an Islamist movement that had captured most of the south.
Since then, allied Ethiopian Woyanne-Somali troops have faced near-daily attacks in an insurgency drawing comparisons with Iraq and undermining stability across east Africa.
“When we exit from Somalia, it will be at the time when we are convinced that there is no imminent danger to our country,” Meles told [the fake] parliament. Ethiopians are anxious about the financial and human cost of their intervention.
Both Ethiopia, which is the Horn of Africa’s main military power [with 6 million starving children] and sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous nation, and Washington say Somali insurgents have links to al Qaeda.
“Ethiopian Woyanne forces did not enter Somalia to control the country, but to make sure that extremist forces will not be in power in that country,” Meles added lied.
“The Islamic Courts Union in Somalia declared jihad against Ethiopia twice along with all sorts of anti-peace forces… It was our responsibility to resolve the huge wave of jihadists.”
Meles, and U.S. officials, say foreign militants have poured into Somalia to join the conflict. The Ethiopian leader has in the past said Ethiopia has about 4,000 troops in Somalia, but locals say the real number is far higher.
REBELS “NEUTRALISED”
During a question-and-answer session in the Ethiopian legislature, Meles made no reference to an explosion that killed five people late on Tuesday in Addis Ababa.
Authorities said the blast on a minibus, the latest in a string of such explosions in the Ethiopia capital, was caused by “terrorists” but did not elaborate.
In the past, it has blamed neighbour and foe Eritrea for fomenting trouble inside Ethiopia, an accusation Asmara derides as a smokescreen to distract attention from internal problems.
Meles said Ethiopian Woyanne troop presence in Somalia was enabling the government to negotiate with clan leaders and hopefully bring reconciliation to a nation mired in conflict since the 1992 toppling of a military dictator.
Turning to domestic affairs, he said Ethiopian rebel group the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), which operates in a region on the border with Somalia, had been largely “neutralised” by a military offensive going on for a year.
“There is no organised ONLF operation in the Somali region. It has been neutralised,” he said. “There may be a few individuals and we are picking them one-by-one.”
The ONLF denies that, saying despite a campaign of terror in the region, the army has not defeated it.
(Editing by Andrew Cawthorne) (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on th e top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/) ([email protected]; +254 20 2224 717)
To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice (Proverbs 21: 3).
Do Western donors know that their donated money to help the hungry in Ethiopia and other poor nations has been used to buy sophisticated weapons ‘to fight terrorism’ instead of preventing hunger, to buy bullets instead of medicine, and to build military barracks instead of shelters for the homeless?
Famine, poverty, and disease have gone rampant in Ethiopia but never terrorism. Ethiopia is blessed for not having foreign terrorism, but cursed for producing famine, poverty, disease, and home-grown terrorists such as Meles, a self-declared dictator who is terrorizing the Ethiopian people for almost twenty years.
Meles Seitanawi (Zenawi) has turned the good intention of the donors into evil acts by misappropriating the donated money into his personal use to buy weapons and to bully his neighbors and his own people. For this reason, donors must be aware of the evil act of Meles Seitanawi before they send their donation to help the Ethiopian hungry children.
The hungry children of Ethiopia may get only a fraction of the donated money, but the rest is gone to buying weapons and military gadgets to maim and kill or destroy the opposing parties. The donors do not understand what I and others have told them what their donated money is doing in Ethiopia: It is killing innocent Ethiopians instead of helping the hungry and the sick.
It is my hope these donor nations will read Dr. Loretta Napoleoni’s books, Terror Inc: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism and Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zareqawi and the New Generation, on the economics of terrorism. Donors must stop donating money to Ethiopia unless they are hundred percent sure that the children of Ethiopia get all the donated money without being siphoned off the government.
At this critical time, one cannot distinguish the difference between the donated money and the money given to a particular church at certain times. On both cases, auditing is lacking, and that is why we see extremely wealthy preachers in some churches and ruthless dictators in some countries like Ethiopia, Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Every Sunday, millions of Christians pour their money into the offering plates, but most of them do not really know where their money goes. In the same way, many celebrities and wealthy nations like the United States, Canada, England, and others donate their tax payers’ money to help the people of Ethiopia and other poor nations, but their money has become a deadly poison that has killed hundreds of innocent people Ethiopians in Somalia, Ogaden, Oromo, and the Amhara regions. Meles Seitanawi is using the donated money to buy weapons to destroy his opponents so that he could stay in power unopposed for ever and ever.
Ethiopia needs help from the West to overthrow dictator Meles Seitanawi, who has misused the donated money for his political survival instead of helping needy Ethiopians. For sure, Meles’ superficial government will collapse if the West and the World Bank stop supporting him, and instead turn their attention to helping Ethiopians to have a democratically elected government.
When Ethiopians tried to oust dictator Meles from his office by the ballot box at the 2005 elections, the West helped Meles by supporting him financially and politically, instead of condemning him publicly for over turning the people’s choice.
Even now, after Meles has slaughtered hundreds of Ethiopians, the fake election board has declared him a winner of last month’s local elections, which were boycotted by all opposition parties because of the rampant fraud. The West, I’m afraid, is going to repeat the same mistake by accepting the result of this farcical election.
In conclusion, the more money Meles gets from the West, the more harm he will continue to cause on the people of Ethiopia and people of the region.
Sources inside the regime of Tigrean People Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia have disclosed that a secret military court has passed a death sentence on four air force pilots who sought political asylum in 2006 while on a training mission in Israel.
According to the sources, a TPLF-appointed court at the Air Force has passed a “guilty” verdict and a death sentence in absentia on Capt. Samuel Getachew, Lt. Himanot Gebre Mariam, Lt. Fikresleasie Feleke, and Lt. Yitabrek Takele.
The TPLF regime’s military is currently plagued with a series of defections. During the past few years, senior officers, including generals and colonels, as well as scores of junior officers and privates have defected to other countries seeking asylum.
It is also to be recalled that a few weeks following the May 2005 fraudulent elections, Lt. Behailu Gebre and Lt. Abiyot Manguday fled to Djibouti flying a military helicopter. Ethiopians around the world made a vigorous effort to rescue those officers from being handed over to Meles Zenawi’s regime while they remained in Djibouti. Reversing the initial promise it gave to provide them with protection, the Government of President Omar Gulleh sent them back to Ethiopia, to certain torture and death, in flagrant violation of international conventions and protocols that accord protection for political refugees. After their forcible return to Ethiopia, Lts. Behailu and Abiyot have disappeared without a trace. It’s believed that they have been executed.
Other Air force pilots who fled the country, including veterans such as Captain Teshome Tenkolu and eight pilots who were on a training mission in Belarus, have managed to resettle in European countries where they are protected and far away from the sad and cruel fate befallen Lts. Behilu and Abiyot.
Withing the past year, General Alemshet Degefe, head of the Air force, and his deputies were summarily dismissed after a fall out with officials of the ruling party, TPLF, and replaced with party loyalists from Tigray region, including, General Molla Hailemariam, head of the air force; General Tadesse Worede, head of Military Staff School; General Seyoum Hagos, chief for eastern command; and General Yohannes Gebremeskel, chief of central command. General Samora Yunus, a TPLF Central Committee member, remains Chief of Staff.
The TPLF regime’s military continues to face serious discontent and low morale, in part, due to lack of a merit-based system and professionalism. The crisis facing the military is compounded by the quagmire in Somalia.
