Ato Gebremedhin (formerly Aba Paulos, also commonly knows as Aba Diabilos), who claims to be the patriarch of Ethiopia, has just erected a massive statue for himself in the center of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. Aba Diabilos builds statue for himself — like Saddam Hussein — while ancient Ethiopian monasteries and churches are currently falling apart due to lack of funds. This is indeed one of the saddest moments in the history of Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
The following is a commentary regarding the statue and other developments in the Church.
The Washington-based DLA Piper, a law firm specializing in representing genocidal dictators, looters and terrorists around the world, is once again trying to silence Ethiopian Review on behalf the drunkard Ethiopian/Saudi billionaire Al Amoudi who is looting Ethiopia in collaboration with the ruling tribal junta. It is puzzling that Al Amoudi makes such an effort to silence any story about Sara Al Amoudi while he is accused of so many other serious misdeeds and he rarely reacts to any of them. It seems Sara is getting under his skin.
The following is a letter by Mary E. Gately, a lawyer for DLA Piper:
Mr Elias Kifle
Publisher, Ethiopian Review
Re: July 15, 2010 Online Article Entitled: “Mohammed Al Amoudi’s daughter back in the news
Dear Mr Kifle:
We act for Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi and family.
We have seen the article on the website www.ethiopianreview.com dated 15 July 2010 and titled ‘Mohammed Al Amoudi’s daughter back in the news’ (“Article”).
The woman referred to in the article is not the daughter of our client, and the claim made by the Ethiopian Review that the woman in question is the allegedly estranged daughter of Ethiopian billionaire businessman Mohammed Al Amoudi is entirely false.
Further, the Article is defamatory.
The Ethiopian Review was put on notice by this firm earlier this year that the allegations that “Sara Al Amoudi” is our client’s daughter were false. At that time we requested that you remove those false and defamatory allegations from the Ethiopian Review website which you initially refused to do, although we note that the publication was subsequently removed by your internet service provider. Accordingly, the current publication by the Ethiopian Review of further false allegations that “Sara Al Amoudi” is the daughter of our client is entirely unacceptable and is malicious.
We hereby reserve all of our client’s rights and remedies in relation to the publication of the Article. As an interim measure, however, and without prejudice to our client’s rights, we require that you:
1. immediately cease and permanently desist from publishing the Article and/ or any part of it that alleges or suggests that the woman referred to in the Article is our client’s daughter.
2. immediately remove the Article from the Ethiopian Review website; and
3. Provide an undertaking not to further publish or disseminate in the future any thing that alleges or suggests that the woman referred to in the Article and/ or the “Sara Al Amoudi” identified in the Article, is our client’s daughter.
We await your urgent response.
Very truly yours,
Mary E. Gately
DLA Piper, LLP
500 Eighth Street, NW
Washington DC 20004
www.dlapiper.com [email protected]
Tel: 202 799 4507
Fax: 202 799 5507
Note: This is my sixth and final commentary on the theme “Where do we go from here?” following the rigged May 2010 elections in Ethiopia in which the ruling dictatorship won by 99.6 percent [1]. In this piece, I emphasize the importance of individual commitment and effort to help establish democracy, protect human rights and institutionalize the rule of law in Ethiopia. I argue that there is today a struggle between a host of hummingbirds trying to save Ethiopia’s soul and a voracious wake of vultures that have devoured her body. I predict ultimate victory for the hummingbirds following Gandhi’s timeless exhortation that “There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always.”
The Hummingbird and the Forest Fire
In March 2007, I wrote an allegorical commentary during our grassroots advocacy efforts to pass H.R. 5680 (later H.R. 2003 “Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act of 2007) entitled “The Hummingbird and the Forest Fire”.[1] It was a tale which took creative license on a story once told by Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Prize laureate for peace. In Dr. Maathai’s story,
One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest – a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging wild fire. Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest. As they came to the edge of a stream they stopped to watch the fire and they were feeling very discouraged and powerless. They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes. Every one of them thought there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird. This particular hummingbird decided it would do something. It swooped into the stream and picked up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire. Then it went back to the stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again. All the other animals watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, ‘Don’t bother, it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you can’t put out this fire.’
In my version of the story, the hummingbird never stopped humming. Indeed, my hummingbird is miraculously multiplied into battalions of young forest firefighters putting out the flames of oppression and dousing out the smoldering ambers of ethnic hatred and division in Ethiopia, while planting the seeds of freedom and democracy. My young hummingbird firefighters take on a single mission: Help build a new democratic society guided by a national vision which embraces the indivisible unity of the Ethiopian people, the territorial integrity of the Ethiopian nation and governance based on democratic principles, the rule of law and protection of human rights. My hummingbirds totally and completely reject the bankrupt and deceitful ideas of those who claim that Ethiopia is no more than a mishmash of competing and antagonistic ethnic, tribal, linguistic, religious and regional groups who must be kept corralled in their own Bantustan-style homelands or “kilils”.
Can Hummingbirds Really Stop the Forest Fire?
It is often heard in some Ethiopian circles that the efforts of a few individuals or groups will not amount to much in bringing about political change. They say the dictatorship is too rich, too powerful and too entrenched to oppose. Some have given up hope having surveyed the systematic looting of the country over the past two decades. Others argue for the violent overthrow of the dictators in the belief that those who seized power through the barrel of the gun can be removed only through the barrel of the gun. In other words, fight a forest fire with fire. It is an age-old idea with a predicable outcome: Everybody gets burned in the ensuing conflagration. But suum cuique (to each his own).
History shows that hummingbirds not only can stop fires, they can also start them. The chief architects of the current dictatorship in Ethiopia were originally formed as a small group of “ethno-nationalist” students who were inflamed by what they believed to be injustice and oppression. They were young hummingbirds long before they became old buzzards. As Dr. Aregawi Berhe wrote in his recent book[2]: “On 14 September 1974, seven university students… met in an inconspicuous cafe located in Piazza in the center of Addis Ababa… The aim of the meeting was to (a) wrap up their findings about the nature and disposition of the Dergue’s regime with regard to the self-determination of Tigrai and the future of democracy in Ethiopia, (b) discuss what form of struggle to pursue and how to tackle the main challenges that would emerge, (c) outline how to work and coordinate activities with the Ethiopian left, which had until then operated according to much broader revolutionary ideals.” They set out to “dispose” of the Derg (military junta that rules Ethiopia after the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie) and replaced it with a one-man, one-party dictatorship. In other words, tweedle dee replaced tweedle dum!
World history shows that individuals and small groups — the hummingbirds — do make a difference in bringing about change in their societies. The few dozen leaders of the American Revolution and the founders of the government of the United States were driven to independence by a “long train of abuses and usurpations” leading to “absolute despotism” as so eloquently and timelessly expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Their vision was founded not only on the need for independence from the yoke of British colonial rule but also the necessity of perfecting the unity of the American people after independence. They formed a constitution for one nation to be governed under one constitution of the United States of America (which had some significant imperfections), which has endured for 223 years. The Bolsheviks won the Russian Revolution arguably defending the rights of the working class and peasants against the harsh oppression of Czarist dictatorship. They managed to establish a totalitarian system which thankfully swept itself into the dustbin of history two decades ago.
Gandhi and a small group of followers in India led nationwide campaigns to alleviate poverty, make India economically self-reliant, broaden the rights of urban laborers, peasant and women, end the odious custom of untouchability and bring about tolerance and understanding among religious and ethnic groups. He launched the Quit India civil disobedience movement in 1942 culminating in Indian independence in 1947. Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo led ANC’s Defiance Campaign and crafted the Freedom Charter which provided the ideological basis for the long struggle against apartheid and served as the foundation for the current South African Constitution. In the United States, Martin Luther King and some 60 church leaders formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, becoming the driving force of the American civil rights movement.
Social change depends a great deal on the circumstances of social forces in a given society. Political change in Ethiopia today seems improbable not because of the invincibility of the dictatorship but because of the lack of unity and commonality of purpose among the opposition. This calls for the establishment of a new political culture of cooperation, collaboration and coalition-building among anti-dictatorship elements, who now seem to have retreated into passive spectatorship of the dictatorship. The political history of contemporary Ethiopia could best be summarized in the words of V.I. Lenin: “One man with a gun can control 100 without one.” There is no doubt that the handful of core leaders of the dictatorship will cling to power at any cost. Though Lenin may be partly right, his empirical observation is countered by the irrefutable logic of the old Ethiopian saying: “The gathered strands of the spider’s web could tie up a lion.” (Dir biaber anbessa biasir.) If one hundred unarmed hummingbirds could come together as one with a commonality of purpose and determination, they could overcome one vulture no matter the width of his wingspan or the sharpness of his claws. In the absence of such a ratio of hummingbirds to vultures and the widespread disillusionment with the dictatorship and disarray in the opposition, the self-empowerment of individuals and action by small committed groups of individuals as one of the most viable means of effecting change and bringing about democracy, human rights and the rule of law in Ethiopia. Simply stated, to bring about change, citizens as individuals must be active by being active citizens.
Hummingbirds Must Keep on Humming
The morality tale of the hummingbird is instructive to all Ethiopians. Despite the ferocity of the forest fire, the hummingbird did not stop carrying its droplets of water. Dictatorships are analogous to a forest fire. They consume everything in their societies. Like the raging forest fire, they also seem unstoppable. But as Gandhi taught, the fires of dictatorship are always stopped by the waterfall of truth and love: “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won.There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always.” The reasons are simple[3]. In the end tyrants always fail because though they have guns and tanks, they lack ideas and vision. They lose because they live in a world of darkness and ignorance. They are incapable of transforming themselves or their societies because they are trapped in their own cycle of repression that feeds off their ignorance and wickedness. And like Dracula, the legendary bloodsucker, they can only live on the blood — and sweat and tears — of their victims. They can not survive otherwise. Dictatorships use brutality because they can not convince their people with the strength of their political or philosophical arguments, the persuasiveness of their logic or the abundance of their good will. They fail because they can not withstand the force of truth and always slip and fall on the pile of lies and deceit that is their foundation.
Though dictators are destined to the dustbin of history, they will delay their inevitable rendezvous by proclaiming to be anointed by the masses. They put themselves out as the saviors of the very masses they oppress ruthlessly. They claim to have special qualities that give them the right to rule the masses forever and exhort the “herd” to follow them blindly and unquestioningly. In concluding his May 2010 “election” victory speech (a/k/a a public demonstration against Human Rights Watch for its critical report), dictator Meles Zenawi expressed gratitude effusively to the Ethiopian people for re-appointing him and his party to complete a quarter century on the throne. “Once again we, over five million EPRDF members, on behalf of our martyrs and our selves solemnly express our gratitude to day, standing before you, the Ethiopian people, who have the sovereign right and power to appoint or dismiss your leaders. We salute you!” An old Ethiopian saying teaches us to beware of a “wolf priest praying in the midst of a flock of sheep.” No doubt the wolf will “salute” and “express gratitude” to every sheep he devours. But do the sheep return the salutation and gratitude?
All of us committed to democracy, human rights and the rule of law in Ethiopia have choices to make and actions to take as individuals. That choice is between good and evil; that is between joining the host of hummingbirds that carry droplets of water to put out the fires set by a ruthless dictatorship, or siding with the wake of vultures that use their enormous wings to fan the flames of ethnic hatred and division to perpetuate themselves in power. Those who play with the fires of ethnic politics to cling to power should beware the backdraft.
FREE BIRTUKAN MIDEKSSA ANDALL POLITICAL PRISONERS IN ETHIOPIA
Alemayehu G. Mariam is a professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and an attorney based in Los Angeles. He writes a regular blog on The Huffington Post, and his commentaries appear regularly on pambazuka.org, allafrica.com, afronline.org and other sites.
Prof. Chojnacki was a teacher and friend to a generation of Ethiopians
Stanislaw Chojnacki was a librarian, professor, historian and horiculturalist, but his friends will remember him as the kindest and gentlest person they have known.
“He never tolerated anything, he always celebrated what nature gave and that’s the lesson that I learned and that I will take with me to my grave,” said close friend Meron Yeshoa.
Chojnacki passed away peacefully on the weekend at Sudbury Regional Hospital at the age of 95. St. Casimir’s Church will hold a Funeral Mass on Saturday at 10 a.m. He will be buried in Poland. Many friends and family members survive him, including wife Grace and sister Zofia Pratkowska.
The former professor and library director at the University of Sudbury accomplished much in his 95 years and his efforts have not gone unnoticed. After spending more than 25 years in Ethiopia, he was recognized as an active member of the Polish and Ethiopian communities in Sudbury.
Born in Riga, Latvia Oct. on 21, 1915, he obtained a law degree at Warsaw University before serving in the Polish Army in 1937 and 1938. According to Chojnacki’s book, 25 years of service at the university college and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa from 1950 to 1975, the series of events that led him to Ethiopia began during the Second World War.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. “My nine days of warfare was followed by close to five years as a prisoner of war in Germany,” wrote Chojnacki.
Once released, he worked four years in Rome before relocating to Canada in January 1950. In September 1950, Dr. Lucien Matte offered Chojnacki the position of Librarian at the University College of Addis Ababa, which Dr. Matte had recently founded. Chojnacki humorously recalled asking where in Canada Addis Ababa was located.
Not long afterward he discovered that the school was in Ethiopia and soon enough he moved overseas once again.
The University College was Ethiopia’s first attempt to establish a university in the country. It was inaugurated by the emperor in 1951.
Chojnacki fell in love with his work and the people of Ethiopia and founded the University College Museum of Addis Ababa in 1963. The librarian was a close friend of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
After 25 years in Ethiopia, Chojnacki decided to leave. He had lost many friends after the overthrow of the Ethiopian Dynasty in 1974, including the Emperor. He returned to Canada in 1976.
However, Chojnacki never forgot the people of Ethiopia.
Yeshoa recalled a touching memory of him. “I remember the first time I asked him if he had any children, he ran to his bedroom and he said, ‘Yes, of course. I have pictures to show you.’ He brought me an album and in [it] he was showing me pictures of very young and very very poor children in the poorest parts of Ethiopia.”
Chojnacki knew all the children by first and last name and would say, “This is my son so and so, this is my daughter,” said Yeshoa.
His love for plants, animals, insects and all people, regardless of colour, race or wealth made Chojnacki an inspiring person, said Yeshoa.
“What really touched me about him is the fact that he didn’t want to put [the children] out of their life. He went into their life. Almost every year he went back and he actually gave them love and support,” she added.
Yeshoa, who is from Ethiopia, met Chojnacki when a roommate, also from Ethiopia, was in search of a cultural community here. The roommate’s parents found one Ethiopian family, but they were leaving, so they put her in touch with Mr. Chojnacki. “He [was] just like an Ethiopian person,” said Yeshoa.
The professor was her roommate’s connection to Ethiopian roots and soon became an important part of Yeshoa and later her husband’s life.
“He was like a father to me,” said her husband, Gouled Hassan. Chojnacki’s kind heart and inspiring work touched Hassan deeply.
Another close friend, Andrzej H. Mrozewski, also had warm thoughts to share. Mrozewski was Chief Librarian at Laurentian University when Chojnacki became Library Director at the University of Sudbury.
The two shared an interest in fine arts and Chojnacki often worked in the garden with Mrozewski’s wife, Janina.
Mrozewski will remember him as a world-renowned specialist in Ethiopian art and doer of charitable work, for which he was named Knight of the Order of Malta.
Chojnacki’s academic works include Ethiopian Crosses: A Cultural History and Chronology, Ethiopian Icon: Catalogue of the Collection of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies Studies Addis Ababa University and Major Themes in Ethiopian Painting: Indigenous Developments, the Influence of Foreign Models and Their Adaptation.
EDITOR’S NOTE: By supporting and covering up for Meles Zenawi’s genocidal dictatorship, the American embassy in Ethiopia remains one of the main sources of misery in the Horn of Africa. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reports about a recent finding by the U.S. State Department’s Inspector General about administrative problems that have plagued the embassy.
More than a dozen top American diplomats have come and gone at the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia, a front-line nation in the battle against Islamic extremism, in less than a year, the State Department’s inspector general reported Monday.
The problem starts at the top, the auditors said.
“This situation reflects, in part, questionable personnel decisions by the previous leadership in the Bureau of African Affairs (AF) that also have impacted negatively on the political/economic section,” their report said.
With the added burden of an impending move to a new embassy and a sharp growth in personnel, the auditors said, the embassy operates “too often in crisis mode.”
The report was signed by Harold W. Geisel, the State Department’s deputy inspector general.
Blame for the spinning door in Addis Ababa seemed to be levied at Jendayi E. Frazer, a former assistant secretary of state who headed the Bureau of African Affairs under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, although she was not mentioned by name.
Now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, Fraser could not be reached for comment.
The latest American ambassador to Ethiopia, Donald E. Booth, a career foreign service officer and longtime Africa hand, arrived in Addis Ababa in April.
Despite the leadership turmoil, the senior embassy staff is doing a pretty good job, the auditors found.
“Executive direction at Embassy Addis Ababa is good for a front office in prolonged transition,” they said, “with seven chiefs or acting chiefs of mission, five deputy chiefs of mission (DCM), and several office management specialists since July 2009.”
Morale has been helped by love bombs from the home office in Foggy Bottom, the report suggested, citing “evident Washington interest and a strong sense of task.”
Morale “has remained good, surprisingly so, given local conditions,” the auditors found during their inspection trip in February
“Employees work out of a dilapidated embassy in a construction zone, commute in chaotic traffic, fight a fusty bureaucracy to get cars, household effects, and consumables shipments delivered, and go without reliable Internet service at home,” the report said.
But help is on the way.
“A stellar project director overseeing the construction of a new embassy building has achieved exemplary coordination with Embassy [personnel],” the auditors said.
“This will facilitate the moving-in process scheduled for September 2010.”
To a casual observer, the tens of thousands of people who poured into the central square of Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on May 25 to peacefully celebrate the country’s elections might have been mistaken for a massive symbol of democratic progress in a poor and troubled part of the world. In fact it was quite the opposite.
The demonstrators were there to denounce Human Rights Watch for criticizing the victory of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front and its allies, who claimed 545 out of 547 seats in Parliament following a massive campaign of intimidation against opposition supporters. Many of the protesters were paid the equivalent of a day’s wage for a few hours of shouting against Human Rights Watch. They were emblematic not only of Ethiopia’s return to a one-party state, 19 years after the fall of a communist regime, but also of a growing trend away from democracy in wide swaths of Africa. The trend includes not only pariah states such as Sudan, but key Western allies and major recipients of foreign aid such as Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which offers the world’s richest prize package to African leaders who both help their countries and peacefully leave office, decided not to offer an award each of the last two years.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has become a darling of the West for leading an economic renaissance in a nation traumatized by the 1990s genocide. But in upcoming August elections, Kagame looks set to duplicate his implausibly high 95 percent victory in the last vote and is pressing charges against an opposition leader for “divisionism,” namely downplaying the genocide. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who denounced dictatorship in Africa when he took power in 1986 and was seen as another great democratic hope, has said he’ll try to extend his 24-year tenure in presidential elections next year. In Gabon and Togo, the deaths of long-serving autocrats Omar Bongo and Gnassingbé Eyadéma has meant elections in which power was smoothly transferred—to their sons. Disastrous polls in Nigeria and Kenya in 2007 were worse than those countries’ previous elections, and current trends show little hope for improvement. Mauritania, Guinea, Madagascar, and Niger have all had coups since 2008, while Guinea-Bissau has been effectively taken over by drug cartels.
Africa’s own institutions have been unable to halt the trend, which has gained speed since a period of openness following the end of the Cold War. “The democratization process on the continent is not faring very well,” says Jean Ping, the Gabonese chairman of the African Union Commission, which has overseen a host of Pan-African agreements on democracy and human rights that many member states have either ignored or failed to ratify. “The measures that we take here are taken in a bid to make sure that we move forward. The crises, they are repeating themselves.” In country after country, the recipe for the new age of authoritarianism is the same: demonization and criminal prosecution of opposition leaders, dire warnings of ethnic conflict and chaos should the ruling party be toppled, stacking of electoral commissions, and the mammoth mobilization of security forces and government resources on behalf of the party in power. “The really powerful governments learned how to do elections,” says Richard Dowden, director of the London-based Royal African Society. That’s not to say the continent doesn’t retain some bright spots. In Ghana, presidents have twice stepped down to make way for leaders from the opposition. Democracy has flourished in Botswana and Benin, while regional giant South Africa continues to have a vibrant opposition and free press despite the African National Congress’s dominance of post-apartheid politics.
But backsliders have them outnumbered, a shift that hasn’t gone unnoticed in the West. Political freedoms declined in 10 countries on the continent in 2009, while they improved in just four, according to an annual report by Washington, D.C.–based Freedom House, which dropped three African countries from its list of “electoral democracies” last year. “Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty,” President Obama told Ghana’s Parliament last year. His top diplomat for Africa, Johnnie Carson, took office last year listing the continent’s democratization as his top priority.
Yet despite the rhetoric, the Obama administration and its European allies, which spent $27 billion on African development aid in 2009, according to the OECD, have largely acquiesced to the shift away from open politics on the continent. In some cases the rise of China means oil exporters such as Nigeria and Gabon have alternative markets for their production, thus reducing Western leverage to push for political reforms. In others, the refusal to challenge autocratic regimes has been driven by security—Ugandan, Burundian, and Ethiopian troops have functioned as de facto Western proxies in battling radical Somali Islamists in Mogadishu.
“The expectation was that this administration would give greater weight to issues of democracy and governance,” says Jennifer Cooke, an Africa analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But this tepid response to Ethiopia’s ruling party’s 99.6 percent victory and the pre-cooking of the upcoming polls in Rwanda and Uganda show the boundaries of its willingness to push key allies.
Beyond security and the scramble for resources, a third factor in the West’s acceptance of Africa’s political retrenchment is the increasing influence of aid groups like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.K.’s Department for International Development over their countries’ foreign policies. International pressure to get closer to the U.N. goal of giving 0.7 percent of their gross national income to development has led to steadily increasing aid budgets—even if there is evidence that aid is easily manipulated by authoritarian governments to suit their own ends.
“The aid departments are saying, ‘Don’t upset the politics of these countries because we’ve got all this aid to push out,’?” says Dowden of the Royal African Society. “But I would say these states need development work because the governance is so bad. You’ve got to put the politics first.”
Take Inderaw Mohammed Siraj, a 60-year-old Ethiopian opposition candidate who lost a finger after being beaten by ruling-party cadres in 2008. Last year, he says, he was kicked out of a food-aid program funded by the U.S., the World Bank, and the European Union when a local official from his village in a remote corner of northeast Ethiopia told him: “We will not feed opposition members.”
With virtually no opposition representation in Parliament, the independent press and local human-rights groups now closed or under attack, and the prospect of his children begging for food, he has realized life would be easier if he gave up politics. “I decided to stop being part of the opposition,” he says. “The party couldn’t help me. Foreigners didn’t do anything. Democracy isn’t working here.”
But cutting aid to authoritarian states like Ethiopia means not only halting some programs that help the poor but also losing influence in the region, a move that could haunt Western policymakers in future crises. “In Pakistan we cut the ties for the military in the 1990s,” says J. Peter Pham, a professor at James Madison University who was an Africa adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “As a result, today the officers coming up to flag rank weren’t trained in U.S. institutions. We don’t have their mobile-phone numbers. Our diplomats rue not having that influence.”
Similarly with the U.S. and its European allies reluctant to send their own forces to halt African crises in Darfur, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, good relations with local strongmen like Museveni, Kagame, and Meles is a must. Today’s dictators may not be as cruel as Zaire’s Mobutu or other Cold War despots, nor Western aid so overt. But the strategy of backing nasty allies to influence events in a tough part of the world remains the same. That just means Obama’s next African speech on democracy may be greeted with more skepticism on the continent than last year’s delivery in Accra. “If this is their representation of democracy and human rights, they shouldn’t talk about it anymore,” says Hailu Shawel, an Ethiopian opposition leader. “They should shut up.”
(Jason McLure a correspondent for NewsWeek and Bloomberg in Addis Ababa.)
Ato Gebremedhin (formerly Aba Paulos, also commonly knows as Aba Diabilos), who claims to be the patriarch of Ethiopia, has just erected a massive statue for himself in the center of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. Aba Diabilos builds statue for himself — like Saddam Hussein — while ancient Ethiopian monasteries and churches are currently falling apart due to lack of funds. This is indeed one of the saddest moments in the history of Ethiopian Orthodox Church.