If Woyanne starts war, the people of Ethiopia, Somalia, and all people of the Horn of Africa will stand with the Eritrean army and crush the tribal junta.

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By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Eritrea’s U.N. envoy said on Thursday he saw no need for U.N. peacekeepers to remain on its border with Ethiopia, despite U.N. fears that a total withdrawal could spark a new war in the Horn of Africa.

“We don’t need UNMEE anymore,” Eritrean Ambassador Araya Desta told Reuters in a telephone interview. He was referring to the U.N. mission on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border.

“The UNMEE issue is a dead issue,” he said.

Responding to fears of a repeat of the two countries’ 1998-2000 war, Desta said Eritrea was not planning to attack Ethiopia. But he warned Addis Ababa Woyanne that his country was prepared to fend off any invasions into Eritrean territory.

“If the Ethiopians Woyannes invade us, we’ll be forced to defend ourselves,” Desta said. [Ambassador Araya, please don’t call these Woyannes “Ethiopians.” You know they hate Ethiopia.]

UNMEE has already withdrawn nearly 1,700 troops and military observers who for the past seven years had been trying to prevent another war between the Horn of Africa neighbors.

Some 164 peacekeepers are left in Eritrea to guard equipment, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a new report circulated to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.

The 1,700 peacekeepers had been stationed in a 15.5-mile (25-km) buffer zone inside Eritrea. But Asmara turned against UNMEE because of U.N. inability to enforce rulings by an independent commission awarding chunks of Ethiopian-held territory, including the town of Badme, to Eritrea.

UNMEE pulled most of its troops out of Eritrea after the government cut off access to fuel and restricted deliveries of food and other essential supplies. Asmara denies this and accuses UNMEE of enabling Ethiopia to occupy its territory. that a total withdrawal of UNMEE could lead to a new war.

Most UNMEE troops have been sent home temporarily, Ban said in the report, obtained by Reuters.

There are also still a few peacekeepers on the Ethiopian side of the border, though Addis Ababa Woyanne had indicated that it does not want to be alone in hosting U.N. troops.

Ban’s report said Eritrea was refusing to discuss the issue of the future status of UNMEE and accused Asmara of a “military occupation” of the official buffer zone between the countries established under the cease-fire agreement.

Desta said his government had not prepared an official response to the report but he vehemently denied that Eritrean forces had illegally seized the territory, which he said was land that belonged to Eritrea.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

By Anshel Pfeffer, haaretz.com

ADDIS ABABA – In the old Falasha village of Ambober, 15 kilometers outside Gondar, there are only Christians living today. All the village’s original inhabitants left for Israel at least 17 years ago. The old ORT school which used to serve the Jewish community is now a government school. Opposite is the compound of the local synagogue. In the Beita Israel custom, there are two separate buildings, and while the women’s synagogue is still the original tuckul, made from lathe walls of mud and wood, someone has made a donation and redone the men’s synagogue as a sturdy, stone-walled building. No one prays there but it is one of the main stops on the routes of Jewish and Israeli groups who tour the Gonder region. Inside, there is a wooden bookcase that contains the siddurim (prayer books) and Hebrew books that served the community decades ago. They all bear the stamp of the religious services department of the World Zionist Organization. Among the dusty and time-eaten prayer books, bibles and Hebrew primers, I found one slim tome that seemed a bit out of place. It was a treatise on the laws of shehita printed by the famous “Brothers and Widow Rohm” Printers of Vilnius, in 1896. The incongruity of finding such a title in a Falasha village, a community with its own distinct laws of ritual slaughter, so different from those practiced by Orthodox Jews in late 19th Century, is incredible. The owners’ scrawl inside the cover leaves little doubt this book used to reside in the private library of a religious Jew somewhere in Eastern Europe before the Second World War. How did it find its way to the Horn of Africa?

The most likely answer is that many holy books that, unlike their owners, somehow survived the destruction of the Holocaust, were sent to organizations like the WZO in Jerusalem in the hope that someone might find use for them. It probably lay in storage for years until someone assembled a shipment of books for the Falashas, and without thinking also chucked in the shehita book. It is unthinkable that anyone in Ambober ever found any use for the book — it probably lay there unopened until the Jews left for Israel — but just think about the passage it made. From the devastation of Jewish life in Europe, to Jerusalem and from there to Ethiopia, only to be forsaken again when another Jewish community ceased to exist. No one has read it for at least 70 years, but what a romantic voyage.

One has only to spend 24 hours in Ethiopia to understand that logic simply does not apply when trying to understand the Jewish story of this land. You can only comprehend it from a romantic perspective. When you review the serious research done on the origins or the Beita Israel, it is almost impossible to escape the fact that there is no real historical evidence connecting this group with the scattered branches of the people of Israel. It is just as much, if not more, plausible that they were simply a sect of the ancient Ethiopian Christian civilization, one of the oldest churches in the world, who believed at the same time that they were the children of King Solomon’s first-born son Menelik. The last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the “Lion of Judah,” believed himself to be a direct descendant.

The Star of David with a cross in its center is ubiquitous on buildings throughout Addis Ababa, and the Ethiopian “Bible,” Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), which chronicles Menelik’s voyage to his father in Jerusalem and back to Ethiopian carrying the Ark of the Covenant, contains entire chapters that directly paraphrase the Old Testament. Seeing the Falashas as an outcropping of this culture – believing that instead of Zion moving to the ancient city of Aksum, the children of Israel should return to the original Zion – makes much more sense than imagining a section of the tribe that got lost for a millennium or two in Africa.

And yet the idea is so romantically appealing that normally levelheaded politicians, academics and rabbis just want to believe in it. After all, we are such a small and urban people, just imagine if there were indeed primitive tribes, scattered in exotic places around the globe. It would make being Jewish feel a lot less claustrophobic. That’s why Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, whose Halakha (Jewish law) rulings are usually based on a wealth of evidence, recognized the Beita Israel’s Jewishness in 1973 as the lost tribe of Dan, on the basis only of a ruling of a 16th-century rabbi who in turn based his on the writings of a mystical ninth-century figure, Eldad Hadani, a man who probably never existed, and even if he did, it is highly questionable whether Eldad had anything to do with the Falashas anyway.

In the same way, the current Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar, widely seen as Yosef’s anointed successor, ruled that the Falashmura, the members of Beita Israel who converted to Christianity, were “definitely” Jews. But how could he make such a sweeping ruling? Surely this should be a matter for individual judgment. Jewish leaders and activists were quick to sound the alarm on threats facing the Jews of Ethiopia, even when these were far from certain, out of real concern but also because a generation still traumatized by the Holocaust wants to feel as if this time around, it is saving Jews from the jaws of mortal danger.

Israel airlifting 14,000 Jews from Addis Ababa in 1991, at the height of the Ethiopian civil war, felt for many like the closing of the circle. The Jews of the world had been powerless to help their brothers in Poland 50 years earlier, but now had an air force and sufficient funds and influence to organize the airlift overnight. Whether or not the rebel army posed a threat to the Jews is immaterial. However, for the last 17 years, the question of the Falashmura has been anything but romantic. The lack of a clear government policy, combined with the machinations of various lobby groups and unhealthy measure of political interests has abused the whole process of bringing the Falashmura to Israel.

The government now wants to stop them from arriving, in two months. But if they are eligible according to previously-agreed criteria, why can’t the thousands of Falashmura in the Gondar compounds come to Zion? And if this is not enough for them to eventually become Israeli citizens, then why has Israel allowed at least 26,000 of them in so far, at a huge financial and social cost? Shouldn’t someone be called to account? It is about time reality intruded on the romantic dream.

Harvard University
April 13-14, 2008

Conference program
SUNDAY EVENING
8:00-10:00 Keynote Presentations
(Tsai Auditorium S010, CGIS-South Building,1730 Cambridge Street)

Welcoming Remarks:
Jacob Olupona, Chair, Committee on African Studies
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Chair, Dept. of African and African American Studies and Acting Director, W.E.B. DuBois Institute

Keynote speeches by Dr. Getatchew Haile and Rebecca G. Haile

“Unto the Second Generation: Dual Perspectives on the Ethiopian Diaspora.”

Session Moderators: Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Steven Kaplan

MONDAY MORNING
(All Monday daytime sessions will take place at the Barker Center, Thompson Room 110, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge)

Monday Morning Session #1:
2000 E.C., Dawn of the Ethiopian Diaspora?
Welcoming Remarks: Diana Sorensen, Dean of the Humanities and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

Solomon Addis Getahun, Jon Abbink, Kay Kaufman Shelemay

Session Moderator and Commentator: James McCann

9:00-10:30
10:30-11:00 Break

Monday Morning Session #2:
Reading and Discussion by Dinaw Mengestu from his novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Session Moderator and Commentator: Francis Abiola Irele

11:00-12:00
12:00-1:30 Lunch Break

MONDAY AFTERNOON
Monday Afternoon Session #1:
Diaspora Links: Networks for Communication Among Ethiopian Americans
Nancy Hafkin, Mahdi Omar, Elias Wondimu

Session Moderator and Commentator: Emmanuel Akyeampong

1:30-3:00
3:00-3:30 Break

Monday Afternoon Session #2:
The Visual Arts in Ethiopian Diaspora Life
Marilyn Heldman, Achamyeleh Debela, Leah Niederstadt

Session Moderator and Commentator: Ingrid Monson

3:30-5:00
Monday Afternoon Session #3:

Summary Discussion:What Does the Ethiopian Case Study Teach Us About New African Communities in the United States?

Donald Levine, Terrence Lyons, Steven Kaplan

Session Moderator and Commentator: Jacob Olupona

5:00-6:00

MONDAY EVENING
(Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge)
MULATU ASTATKE AND THE EITHER/ORCHESTRA CONCERT

Works of Mulatu Astatke, performed by Mulatu Astatke and the Either/Orchestra, with premieres.

8:00-10:00

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Jon Abbink, Professor of African Studies, VU University, Amsterdam, and senior researcher, African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands

Abbink has carried out fieldwork with Beta Israel in Israel, with various ethnic groups in Southern Ethiopia, and on political culture and religious relations in Ethiopia. He is the author of some 150 articles, several monographs and edited works, among them (with I. van Kessel) Vanguard or Vandals. Politics, Youth and Conflict in Africa (2005). _The recipient of various research grants, e.g., from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, CNRS, and various Dutch academic foundations, in Spring 2007 he was a visiting professor at the Asia-Africa Institute of Hamburg University, Germany.

Emmanuel Akyeampong, Harvard College Professor and Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

Emmanuel Akyeampong is a social historian with research and teaching interests in environmental history, disease and medicine, and comparative slavery and the African Diaspora. Akyeampong is also the President of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (US), a non-profit organization of academic researchers, and African broadcasters and producers dedicated to research and the production of development-oriented programming for broadcast in Africa via television, radio and the Internet.

Mulatu Astatke, Composer and Performer, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)

Mulatu Astatke is a virtuoso vibraphonist and keyboardist known as a composer and the innovator of Ethio-jazz. Trained in Ethiopia, England, and at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he has lived a transnational musical life engaged with musical performance, research, and media work at home in Ethiopia and as a composer and performer in musical circles internationally. In 2005, Mulatu’s music was featured in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers and he received the 2006 SEED (Society for Ethiopians Established in the Diaspora) Award.

Achamyeleh Debela, Professor of Art, North Carolina Central University

Achamyeleh Debela specializes in multi-media arts, as well as computer graphics and painting. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa, as well as in Nigeria and the United States, he recently collaborated with curator Rebecca Martin Nagy in researching, curating, and publishing a catalogue for an exhibition titled Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists at the Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida.

Solomon Addis Getahun, Assistant Professor of History, Central Michigan University

Trained both in Ethiopia and at Michigan State University, Solomon Addis Getahun’s research spans African and African diaspora history, including contemporary African refugee and immigrant communities in the U.S., urbanization, identity politics in the Horn of Africa, and U.S. foreign policy towards the Horn. His recent publications include The History of Ethiopian Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S. (2007) and The History of the City of Gondar (2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Currently, he is collaborating on two book projects: Culture and Customs of Ethiopia with Prof. Hakeem Tijani and History of Ethiopian Refugees in Seattle with Professor Joseph W. Scott.

Nancy J. Hafkin, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa, ret. and Director, Knowledge Working

Nancy Hafkin worked for UNECA in Addis Ababa for 25 years, establishing the program to promote information technology for African development. Since her retirement, she has been writing on information technology in developing countries, with particular emphasis on gender issues. Recent publications include Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study (USAID, 2001), Cinderella or Cyberella: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society (Kumarian Press, 2006) and Engendering the Knowledge Society: Measuring the Participation of Women (ORBICOM, 2007). In 2000 the Association for Progressive Communication established an annual Nancy Hafkin Prize for creativity in information technology in Africa.

Getatchew Haile, Curator of the Ethiopian Study Center and Regents Professor of Medieval Studies at St. John’s University

Getatchew Haile is a scholar of Ethiopian literature and history who arrived in the United States in 1976. A MacArthur Fellow and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Dr. Getatchew is a former member of the Ethiopian Parliament and a leading figure in the Ethiopian diaspora. Among his recent scholarly publications are his editions and translations of The Ge’ez Acts of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende (2006) and The Mariology of Emperor Zär’a Ya’eqob (Tomarä Tesbet) (1992).

Rebecca G. Haile, Attorney and Author

Rebecca Haile is a graduate of Williams College and the Harvard Law School. Born in Ethiopia in 1965, she came to the United States at age 11 in the wake of the Ethiopian revolution. She is the author of Held at A Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia (2007).

Marilyn Heldman, Adjunct Professor of Art History, American University

An art historian, curator, and expert on Ethiopian painting, architecture, and manuscript illumination, Marilyn Heldman’s work has revealed the dialogue of Ethiopian arts with traditions abroad, including those of the Eastern Mediterranean world and of Europe. She is the author of African Zion: the Sacred Art of Ethiopia (1993) and The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre Seyon (1994), as well as numerous articles. Heldman has been a Fellow at the Harvard Center of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, and the recipient of foundation grants, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Francis Abiola Irele, Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures

Irele is the editor of many collections of African and Caribbean literature in English and French, and has published two collections of his own essays: The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora. He was President of the African Literature Association in 1992-1993 and is currently a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.

Steven Kaplan, Professor of Comparative Religion and African Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)

Steven Kaplan is a scholar of Christianity and Judaism in Ethiopia. His books and articles span a wide range of topics including the history of Ethiopian monasticism, studies of Ethiopian historical and religious texts, the Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia, as well as extensive fieldwork among the large Ethiopian (Jewish) community in Israel. Kaplan is currently researching Ethiopian Christian cultural adaptation in the United States.

Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago

Donald Levine is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (1965) and Greater Ethiopia (1974; 2nd ed, 2000), in recent years Levine has turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, in 2004 Professor Levine was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University.

Terrence Lyons, Associate Professor at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies, George Mason University.

Terrence Lyons specializes in comparative politics and international relations with particular emphasis on conflicts and transnational politics in Africa. He has authored and edited a number of academic and policy-oriented studies, including Conflict-Generated Diasporas and Transnational Politics in Ethiopia (2007) and The Ethiopian Extended Dialogue: An Analytical Report 2000-2003 (2004).

James McCann, Professor of History, Boston University

James McCann is an historian who has published books and articles on a wide range of subjects in Ethiopian history and environmental studies. A former fellow of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University (2005-2006), McCann recently won the George Perkins Marsh Prize for his book Maize and Grace (2005). He has just completed a book manuscript titled Stirring the Pot: African Cuisine and Globalization, 1500-2000.

Dinaw Mengestu, Author

Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Dinaw immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1980, where he attended Georgetown University and received an MFA from Columbia University. He has published the acclaimed novel, named a 2007 New York Times notable book, about the Ethiopian diaspora titled The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Dinaw Mengestu has been the Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University, and is the recipient of the National Book Foundations “5 Under 35 Award,” a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, and the 2007 Guardian First Book Award.

Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Supported by the Time Warner Endowment, Department of Music, and Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Ingrid Monson is Chair of the Harvard Music Department and both a scholar and accomplished performer of jazz. The author of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, which won the Sonneck Society’s Irving Lowens Award for the best book published on American music in 1996, she has edited The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000), and recently published Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967 (2007). Monson has also carried out fieldwork in Mali, where she specializes in the music of the balafon and of balafon virtuoso Neba Solo.

Leah Niederstadt, Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, Art History and Curator of the College’s Permanent Collection, Wheaton College

A 1994 Rhodes Scholar from the University of Michigan, Niederstadt completed graduate work in Anthropology at the University of Oxford (England) and in Museum Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She specializes in contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia and is particularly interested in the production and consumption of painting and sculpture and of HIV/AIDS-related performance. A contributor to Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw and Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists, Niederstadt will serve as co-editor for a forthcoming special edition on Ethiopia for the journal African Arts.

Jacob Olupona, Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard University

Jacob Olupona chairs the Committee on African Studies at Harvard. His publications include Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals (1991) and the forthcoming The City of 201 Gods. Olupona has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and many other agencies, and in 2000, received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Mahdi Omar, The African Television Network

Mahdi Omar is the founder and producer of The African _Television Network of New England, an innovative community-based network that brings African news, interviews, music and _information to Greater Boston neighborhoods.

Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago

Donald Levine is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (1965) and Greater Ethiopia (1974; 2nd ed, 2000), in recent years Levine has turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, in 2004 Professor Levine was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)

Kay Kaufman Shelemay is an ethnomusicologist who has carried out fieldwork in Ethiopia, and with Ethiopians in Israel and the United States. She has published numerous books and articles on Ethiopian music, including the award-winning Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986/1989) and the three-volume Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant, An Anthology (1994-1997, with Peter Jeffery). A member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences and the 2007-2008 Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center, she has recently received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Elias Wondimu, Publisher

Elias Wondimu is the founder and head of Tsehai Publishers and Distributors in Los Angeles, which issues monographs and the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies. Former editor of the Ethiopian Review, Elias Wondimu arrived in the United States in 1994.

Failure to Report: How did the D.C. Jail let two troubled inmates kill themselves in their cells? Don’t ask the D.C. Jail

By Brendan Smith, Washington City Paper

No one noticed when Thomas Alemayehu killed himself in Cell 43 of the D.C. Jail by twisting a torn piece of a bed sheet around his neck and tying it to the top bunk.

By the time someone checked on him, his body already was cold and stiffening; rigor mortis doesn’t occur until approximately two hours after death.

Alemayehu, a 28-year-old Ethiopian cab driver with a history of mental illness, died two days before Christmas in 2006, but he might have survived if corrections officers had done their job. Two corporals claim they completed mandatory inmate counts every 30 minutes, but surveillance cameras show no one had set foot on the cell block tier for more than two hours, according to a recently released internal-affairs investigation by the D.C. Department of Corrections.
Thomas Alemayehu

“There is a strong possibility that Mr. Alemayehu was hanging in a position between his bunk and toilet during the times that security checks and official counts were supposed to have been conducted,” the DOC report states.

During his initial health screening at the jail four days before his suicide, Alemayehu told medical staff he had tried to kill himself before, which should have triggered a mental-health assessment by a psychiatrist from jail medical-services contractor Unity Health Care.

However, Alemayehu never received the mental-health assessment, and he wasn’t placed on suicide watch. Instead, he was forgotten and died alone in a single cell. The internal-affairs investigation found that Unity Health Care’s policy for referring inmates for mental-health assessments was “considered nonexistent.”

Unity had never worked in a jail before winning a three-year contract in 2006 from the DOC, which didn’t seek any other bidders. Under the $83 million contract, Unity provides medical services for inmates and ongoing treatment for former inmates at its local network of community health clinics.

Three months after Alemayehu’s suicide, Alicia Edwards, 32, also hanged herself with a bed sheet in a single cell. During her health screening two days earlier, she told Unity medical staff she had attempted suicide before. She said she needed a prescribed psychotropic medication for bipolar disorder to stop the dangerous swings from major depression to mania that haunted her mind.

Like Alemayehu, Edwards never received a mental-health assessment, and she wasn’t placed on suicide watch. She also didn’t get the medication that could have prevented a relapse of her mental illness.

On March 31, 2007, after cutting her body down from the makeshift noose, corrections officers found a piece of paper lying near Edwards’ body. It was a medical request form. Edwards was asking again for the medication she needed, the internal-affairs report states.
D.C. Jail’s Central Detention Facility (Darrow Montgomery)

Alemayehu and Edwards weren’t hardened criminals. They faced relatively minor charges when they killed themselves. Their suicides exposed major problems with the diagnosis, treatment, and supervision of mentally ill inmates in the D.C. Jail, which holds, on average, more than 3,200 inmates per day.

The Department of Corrections, headed by Director Devon Brown, fought for 10 months to prevent the release of its internal-affairs reports on the suicides. The reports were recently released after several appeals to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s office through the D.C. Freedom of Information Act.

Brown has good reason to want to keep the reports secret. The investigations reveal widespread misconduct by corrections officers and medical staff from Unity Health Care that directly contributed to the deaths of Edwards and Alemayehu. Fenty’s office allowed the redactions of the names of all of the employees from the reports, although some names slipped past the black pens of the censors… Continued on next page >>