(ST) BERLIN – An Ethiopian rights group based in Berlin, Germany has accused the United Nations refugee body (UNHCR) of delivering Ethiopian refugees in Khartoum to the Sudanese authorities.
Different rights advocacy groups denounced in the past months the narrow collaboration between the Sudanese and Ethiopian authorities against the political opponents to Addis Ababa government.
“Ato Dereje Ayele, a refugee who refused to open his door, was taken out by the UNHCR officials called in by other refugees but was handed over to the Sudanese police by the UNHCR officials,” said Solidarity Committee for Ethiopian Political Prisoners (SOCEPP) on Saturday. It is not known where he has been taken, SOCEPP added.
The same fate has fallen on Weizero Almaz Mitiku and At Genanaw Mengistu. The acting chairman of the Refugees’Association, Wondimagegn, is still being held in an unknown prison, the group claimd.
There is a serious and legitimate fear that the detained refugees and others may all be deported back to Ethiopia to be victims of repression there.
The Sudanese authorities have stepped up their harassment of Ethiopian refugees, especially in Khartoum. Recently, police have raided at night the houses of refuges and taken away a number of them.
On 27 September 2007, the Sudanese authorities forcibly returned 15 recognised refugees to Ethiopia. They were handed into the custody of Ethiopian security personal at the Ethiopia-Sudan border. Amnesty International said last year.
(ENA) – On Monday, March 17, 2008, the Federal President of Ethiopia, H.E. Mr. Woyanne puppet Girma Woldegiorgis will be received in Berlin, Germany by the Federal President of Germany, H.E. Mr. Horst Köhler.
The Ethiopian President is off to Germany after an official invitation from the President inviting him to Berlin to converse on issues of mutual concern for both nations.
It is to be recalled that President Köhler visited Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on December 12, 2004 and also visited the African Union. Furthermore, German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel also visited Addis Ababa on October 4, 2007.
Diplomatic relations between Germany and Ethiopia are 104-years-old, from the first diplomatic communications to the establishments of embassies in Addis Ababa and Bonn (later to Berlin).
The current Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ethiopia in Berlin is H.E. Mr. Kassahun Ayele; likewise H.E. Dr. Claas Dieter Knoop is the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Germany in Addis Ababa.
I originally intended to send this paper to a professional journal. I changed my mind because its message deserves to be read by a wider public. And since the best way to reach a wider public is through the Web, I sent the paper to popular Ethiopian websites without altering its academic form and diluting its contents, except for some theoretical ramifications.
In many ways, the ideas that Aleqa Aseres Yenesew develops in the book that I am analyzing directly deal with the problems that Ethiopia and Ethiopian society face today. The book is highly interesting because it suggests that the mess we are in now has its seed in the adoption of a wrong educational policy since the end of the Italian war. Asres proposes solutions in which he discloses the elementary fact that the heritage of a legacy and the assumption of a common destiny define a nation rather than its ethnic or linguistic oneness. He shows this in his defense of Ge’ez language: for him, this Tigrean legacy is the essence of Ethiopian identity. Consequently, what makes you Ethiopian is less your identity as Amhara (he himself is an Amhara of Gojjam) than the heritage of Ge’ez legacy. Unity lies in the acceptance of a common heritage and destiny.
But what about the southern peoples of Ethiopia who do not trace their identity back to Ge’ez? Here Asres advances a bold assertion by questioning the Western qualification of Ge’ez as a Semitic language that invaders from South Arabia brought with them. He emphatically argues that Ethiopians are black and that Ge’ez is an African language. For him, the Semitic thesis is a Western machination intended to create a divide between northern and southern Ethiopia. The direction of history is clear: the torch of Ge’ez––which is then an idea, a divine mission, and not an ethnic identity––must pass to southern peoples. And it cannot do so unless Ethiopians present themselves as the descendants of Ham.
The objection that Asres’s reasoning lacks scientific credibility because it is filled with biblical references and argumentations would miss the important point that what matters in this case is not that facts justify the discourse, but whether the discourse is empowering, whether it organizes the world in such a way that it gives us strength, unity, and historical destiny. Besides, one can take away the biblical content and only retain the logic of national unity and empowerment. When I wrote my book, Survival and Modernization, I was not even remotely aware of Asres’s works. Yet what a delightful surprise when I discovered that many of my findings reproduce Asres’s thought! I take this opportunity to thank Aleme Tadesse for introducing me to Asres’s writings.
Introduction
The opposition of traditional scholars to the proliferation of modern schools is a fact known to all those who are familiar with the difficult beginning of Ethiopia’s modernization. Besides the opposition of the nobility and the church hierarchy, traditional scholars known as debtera had used all their influence to convince the country of the perilous nature of Western education. Emperor Haile Selassie and those who supported him often had to battle energetically to neutralize their opposition. To the youngsters sent to Western schools before and soon after the Italian invasion of 1935, the opposition of the debtera appeared as a pathetic attempt to stop what was unstoppable, namely, the march of the long-awaited modernization of Ethiopia. They easily figured out that the debtera’s ignorance of the modern world and the anger against the loss of their traditional influence aroused the resistance. To them, the defense of the traditional schooling betrayed the most stubborn form of traditionalism, which was nothing else but a wrong-headed endeavor to shield Ethiopia from the benefits of modernization in the name of tradition and the status quo.
Ethiopian hospitals are currently causing more suffering and death than healing. People who go to hospital for minor ailments end up gravely sick or dead. It is common to see patients, even infants, die in hospital emergency rooms unable to get treatment. Health workers are overwhelmed, and many of them do not care any more. Physicians in Ethiopia do not face malpractice lawsuits as in the U.S. and are becoming too careless in treating their patients. Private clinics are more concerned about making profit than treating their patients since there is no supervision by the government. Led by the Woyanne-appointed incompetent Minister, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Ministry of Health is a non-functioning government department whose officials are busy enriching themselves instead of carrying out their responsibilities. Government officials do not care because they and their families go to Western countries to get the treatment they need if they get sick.
Under the Woyanne regime, for example, malaria has reached an epidemic level. Malaria has returned to Ethiopia when Woyanne came to power. Under the Haileselassie regime, the Ethiopian Malaria Prevention Center had succeeded in completely eradicating malaria. In 1992, the Woyanne tribal junta dismantled the center saying that each region (killil) should have its own Malaria Prevention Center. But what Woyanne did was simply move the Center to Mekele and ignore the other regions. As a result, malaria now kills tens of thousands of Ethiopians each year in Amhara, Oromia, and other regions.
Although tens of millions of dollars donated from other countries are allocated for combating HIV/AIDS, the number of individuals contracting the virus and the death toll from the disease have not decreased. The reason is that there is no political will to focus on the problem. Under the Woyanne regime, government officials are busy acquiring personal wealth and transferring it out of the country. They are not public servants. They are parasites that suck the life blood of the people of Ethiopia.
Once these ‘public servants’ think they made enough money, they go to Western countries and seek political asylum claiming persecution. It is becoming common for members of the Tigrean People Liberation Front (Woyanne) to seek political asylum in the United States. Some claim that they are members of Kinijit or OLF, the same organizations whose members they torture and kill in Ethiopia. Fabricating the necessary evidence for their political asylum cases is easy for them for the obvious reason.
Dental care is in a worse state. Ethiopians dentists should be named deathtists. We are hearing cases where people who receive a simple dental treatment end up terribly sick, disfigured, or dead because of infections that can easily be prevented. The dentists don’t even use anaesthesia when they treat their patients. Getting dental treatment in Addis Ababa is as traumatic as being tortured by Workneh Gebeyehu’s sadistic thugs at the Federal Police headquarters.
One of the most notorious dentists (deathtists) in Ethiopia who is known for deadly incompetence is Dr. Asheber Woldegiorgis. Yes, it is the same guy who was recently fired from his position as chairman of the Ethiopian Football Federation. This Russian-educated dentist makes tones of money from his private dental clinics. According to ER Research Unit, none of Dr Asheber’s clinics has ever been inspected by the Ministry of Health. Dr Asheber himself is too busy playing soccer and exploiting teenage girls with his friend Al Amoudi to properly run his dental practice. His close friendship with Al Amoudi makes Dr Asheber immune from any accountability for his malpractice. His patients (victims) have no recourse for being made sick and disfigured from severe dental infections that result from poor or careless treatment. In some cases, the infection spreads to lung through the sinus and kill the patient after horrible suffering.
It is reported that there are more Ethiopian doctors in eastern United States alone than in Ethiopia. Who can blame these physicians? The Woyanne tribal junta has made the country unlivable to all Ethiopians, except those who are members and affiliates of the ruling class. What these physicians who are currently in Western countries are accountable for is for ignoring the plight of the poor people they left behind. Many of them go back to Ethiopia for visits, flash their dollars on the poor, stay at Sheraton and come back to their luxurious life — made possible by those who bled and died to make the U.S. a free country.
It is not unusual for a lot of Ethiopians to say “I don’t want to get involved in politics.” What these people do not realize is that when they go to get a simple dental treatment, for example, and instead get sick from it, they have no recourse because those politicians who are in power do not care for politics, too, and there is no body to make any body accountable. In the final analysis, the responsibility for the endless nightmare in our country falls on the lap of every Ethiopian who puts his/her head in the sand.
Meles Zenawi was preaching about the need to expand telecommunications technology in Africa at a recent conference, while his regime is known as one of the worst obstacles for the growth of technology in Ethiopia, as the report below shows.
“From now on, we will organise activities every 12 March to condemn cyber-censorship throughout the world,” Reporters Without Borders said. “A response of this kind is needed to the growing tendency to crack down on bloggers and to close websites.”
“Today, the first time this day is being marked, we are giving all Internet users the opportunity to demonstrate in places were protests are not normally possible. We hope many will come and protest in virtual versions of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Cuba’s Revolution Square or on the streets of Rangoon, in Burma. At least 62 cyber-dissidents are currently imprisoned worldwide, while more than 2,600 websites, blogs or discussions forums were closed or made inaccessible in 2007.”
The press freedom organisation added: “Our list of ‘Internet Enemies’ has also been updated with the addition of two countries – Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. And we are offering an new version of our Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.”
Reporters Without Borders learned last night that UNESCO has withdrawn its patronage for today’s Online Free Expression Day (read our press release).
To denounce government censorship of the Internet and to demand more online freedom, Reporters Without Borders is calling on Internet users to come and protest in online versions of nine countries that are Internet enemies during the 24 hours from 11 a.m. tomorrow, 12 March, to 11 a.m. on 13 March (Paris time, GMT +1). Anyone with Internet access will be able to create an avatar, choose a message for their banner and take part in one of the cyber-demos taking place in Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, North Korea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.
There are 15 countries in this year’s Reporters Without Borders list of “Internet Enemies” – Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. There were only 13 in 2007. The two new additions to the traditional censors are both to be found in sub-Saharan Africa: Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.
“This is not at all surprising as these regimes regularly hound the traditional media,” Reporters Without Borders says in the introduction to its report.“Internet penetration is very slight, but nevertheless sufficient to give them a few nightmares. They follow the example of their seniors and draw on the full arsenal of online censorship methods including legislation, monitoring Internet cafés and controlling ISPs.”
There is also a supplementary list of 11 “countries under watch.” They are Bahrain, Eritrea, Gambia, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Unlike the “enemies,” these countries do not imprison bloggers or censor the Internet massively. But they are sorely tempted and abuses are common. Many of them have laws that they could use to gag the Internet if they wanted. And the judicial or political authorities often use anti-terrorism laws to identify and monitor government opponents and activists expressing themselves online.
“The hunting down of independent thinkers online is all the more effective as several major western companies have colluded with governments in pinpointing ‘trouble-makers’,” the reports says. “US company Yahoo! apologised in 2007 for a ‘misunderstanding’ which ended in journalist Shi Tao being sent to prison for ten years. The company has been responsible for the imprisonment of a total of four Chinese cyber-dissidents. It was apparently willing to ‘obey local laws’ that forced it to identify Internet users deemed to be dangerous.”
Finally, a new version of the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is available in French and English on the Reporters Without Borders website (www.rsf.org). It offers practical advice and techniques on how to start up a blog, how to blog for anonymously and how to circumvent censorship. It also includes the accounts of bloggers from countries such as Egypt and Burma.
The cyber-demonstration was devised and produced by the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency.
While almost all of its heroic journalists living currently in exile in the four-corners of the globe, the Ethiopian Free Press Journalists Association (EFJA) is again obliged to mark its anniversary in the wilderness!
EFJA is today 16 years old! We therefore raise our voice louder to congratulate all our members at home and in exile for their fortitude and forbearance in the face of the state-instigated, ceaseless harassments and persecutions during the last decade and half!
EFJA’s role of guiding and coordinating the tasks of the free press journalists in Ethiopia had already been brought to an absolute standstill! The free press, which is the most vibrant, alternative voice of the masses in Ethiopia, was throttled in July 2005 by the violent actions of the tyrannical government of Meles Zenawi.
The dictator then did put more than 23 Free Press Journalists behind bars, charged them with crimes whose convictions include life sentence and death penalties, and in addition abolished the free press publications with a stroke of pen!
We, the Free Press Journalists in exile, are today taking ourselves the solemn duty of breaking a sunder the deadly silence which the myopic, ethno-centered Dictator has imposed on us!
We shall break apart deadly silence not only with our objectively recognizable existence as one of dynamic agents of democracy in Ethiopia. But also as still alert and active journalists of the free press by organizing a concretely functioning, Alternative Media of Information for the people of Ethiopia (AMIE)!
We take this opportunity to call upon all members of EFJA and IFJ, upon all professional colleagues and associations, to renew their traditional help and cooperation to enable us, the EFJA-members to launch a short-wave-radio- broadcasting service in Europe and to reach with it, the heart and minds of our people in Ethiopia and in Diaspora.
The iconic representation of Ethiopians in the wake of the widespread famines of the 70’s is the shocking picture of the emaciated children on the lapses of the yet starved, skinny mothers! Those gruesome images of the cruelest economic deprivations of the people of Ethiopia, however, do not speak the whole truth! They do not reveal the equally most shocking other deprivations, in particular, near-total gagging of the people, and the complete absence of an alternative media information for the citizens of Ethiopia.
The free press, which dozens of committed and courageous journalists and publishers pioneered, existed in Ethiopia for over a decade as an alternative media of the people, presenting alternative news, information, opinions and aspirations of the citizens.
The state-owned, controlled, managed and all-reaching media either deliberately ignored or distorted most of the information they are delivering. They were in the past as they are today, for that reason alone, ignored by the general public.
In contrast, the free press weeklies and monthlies are craved for by the public, obtained with a cost at least 300% higher than that of the overtly subsidized state-media, and are perused with great alacrity. The content of the free press are valued greatly by the audience. Their comments and editorials actually guide the public as attested to by the huge turn-out of the 15th may 2005 national elections, and also from the lists of the endless persecutions which the regime in power lavishly meted out against the free press journalists!
There has never been a day in the year since august 1993, when a number of free press journalists were not continued to prison cell! International media and human rights organizations condemned and re-condemned the government of Meles Zenawi for its arbitrary arrest and wanton persecutions of the free press journalists. Instead, it was the incessant reports and condemnations of the international media and human rights organizations that kept Meles Zenawi for more than a decade now among the list of top ten enemies of the press!
EFJA is a member of international federation of journalists, IFJ. Independently and through the later, we are also affiliated with several international media and human rights organizations, among which some manifested their appreciation of our professional works by giving us distinguished awards! Among the many others who closely follow our efforts to enable freedom of expression, and the right to publish free press, have root in Ethiopia, we are citing today by name and offer them our deepest gratitude to the following:
o International Federation of Journalists, IFJ, Brussels, Belgium
o International Press Institute, IPI, Vienna, Austria
o Amnesty International, AI, London, UK
o Reporters Sans Frontiers, RSF, Paris, France
o PEN International, PEN, London, UK
o Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, New York, USA
o International Federation of Freedom Exchange, IFEX, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
o Human Rights Watch, New York and Washington DC, USA
o UN Higher Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, NY, USA
o The German Federation of Journalists Union, Germany.
We, the Ethiopian Free Press Journalists have also been obtaining immensely valuable and most relevant, concrete supports from countries and organizations such as the European Union.
We are, therefore, highly appreciate the eloqant representation which the EU Parliament Election Observation Team under the leadership of Madam Ana Gomes presented on the state hipped sabotaged May 2005 National Elections of Ethiopia, and of the subsequent resolutions of the 22 July 2007 in which the EU parliament called on the commission and the member states to support the Development of Free Media Broadcasting in Ethiopia.
Democracy and Press Freedom shall prevail in Ethiopia!
The Ethiopian President is off to Germany after an official invitation from the President inviting him to Berlin to converse on issues of mutual concern for both nations.