The ruling Chinese Communist Party is a growing threat to freedom in the world. The MSNBC report in the video below about China bullying 19 countries not to attend the Nobel Peace Award and creating its own peace prize is an eye opener. China must be stopped before it is too late. Simply stop buying Chinese products until China starts respecting basic civil rights.
During the past five years, the Woyanne ruling junta has systematically taken over the Ethiopian Sports Federation in North America (ESFNA) through bribery and other scheme. As a result, the organization has become a tool for the ruling party and a source of embarrassment for the Ethiopian community in N. America. This year concerned members of ESFNA have started to take measures to take back their organization. They came up with a set of measures, including 1) hire an independent CPA to audit ESFNA finances, 2) invite Judge Birtukan Mideksa, a former prisoner of conscience, the first Ethiopian woman to head a major political party, and a prominent judge who fought to assert the independence of the judiciary in Ethiopia, as a guest of honor at the next annual event.
As expected, the individuals who have sold out ESFNA to Woyanne have violently opposed both plans. Apparently, having Birtukan, a person whom Woyanne tried to humiliate, as a guest of honor is unacceptable to the Woyanne servants. So after the majority of the board voted in favor of inviting Birtukan, they forced the chairman to try to invalidate the vote. They also threatened to physically attack board members who proposed the plan. The spineless chairman’s action angered the board members and many walked out in protest. A few hours later, Ethiopian Review reported what had transpired at the board meeting.
The Woyanne servants (ashkeroch) led by Eyaya Arega and Fassil Abebe went on a propaganda offensive to try to defuse the public anger that was caused by their attempt to void the board’s vote. Their action also opened the Pandora’s Box. The media has started to shine light on ESFNA. What is now being uncovered is appalling. Eyaya and gang not only sold ESFNA to Woyanne for crumbs, they have also made the organization their personal cash cow at the expense of the 27 teams that make up the association. (Ethiopian Review is continuing to investigate the corruption inside ESFNA.)
The heat is on
The ESFNA teams are considering to withdraw their association, and the next annual event that is scheduled to be held in Atlanta in July 2011 is facing an imminent boycott. The looming threat of losing ESFNA prompted Woyanne propaganda chief Berket Simon to intervene directly on behalf of his agents by publishing a 5-page attack piece on his recently launched web site, Ethiochannel.net.et (click here [or here] to read) and laugh.
[Update: Ethiochannel web site has crashed after Ethiopian Review posted this piece.We have saved Bereket’s article just in case, and it can be accessed or here.]
A recently published book titled “መለስ ዜናዊ እና የህወሓት የትግል ጉዞ” (Meles Zenawi and TPLF’s Journey of Struggle) that worships Ethiopia’s genocidal tyrant is being widely circulated in Ethiopia. The official author of the book is Col. Iyasu Mengesha, but the writing style and similarities with previous statements indicate that the actual writer is Meles himself, according to Aregawi Berhe, former head the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF). In short, Meles is the ghost writer of Col. Iyasu’s book.
Ato Aregawi also argues that the book can only be considered as fiction (click here to read). The following are some fiction presented as facts in the book:
Meles Zenawi
1. respects and defends freedom of speech.
2. is a respected and great leader!
3. is a founding member of TPLF (Aregawi says that Meles and Sebhat joined TPLF several months after it was formed.
4. doesn’t have a hand in the 1976 Greater Tigray Manifesto.
5. was a brave fighter [the book points out heroic battlefield acts].
Ethiopian Review’s 2010 Person of the Year choice will be announced this coming Friday, Dec. 31. Person of the Year choice has become a much anticipated annual Ethiopian Review tradition that some times creates intense public discussion. Stay tuned.
By Elias Kifle
In 1976, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (Woyanne) that is currently ruling Ethiopia crafted its Greater Tigray Manifesto. The manifesto called for transforming the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray in to an independent country through expansionist policies. For Greater Tigray to become a reality, Meles Zenawi and his Woyanne comrades decided that they have to take control of the central government in Ethiopia and systematically dismantle the country. They also appropriated lands from neighboring regions of Gonder and Wollo (see the maps below).
As the map below shows, the Woyanne junta claimed 20 percent of Gonder’s territory and a large area of northern Wollo.
Wollo lost almost half of its land, as the map below shows:
The Greater Tigray agenda suffered a setback when Woyanne went to war with Eritrea in 1998. Woyanne had to scramble and get Ethiopians to support the war by trying to falsely present itself as an Ethiopian nationalist group.
The Woyanne’s war with Eritrea caused split inside the organization’s top leadership, and Meles purged about half of the central committee members, putting the final nail on the coffin of Greater Tigray manifesto.
Currently, TPLF under Meles Zenawi’s leadership is not a cause- or ideology-driven organization any more. It is a business mafia that happens to wield political and military power.
As it turns out, Greater Tigray manifesto is having the unintended consequence of diminishing Tigrean nationalism:
1. A growing number of Tigreans do not want to be associated with TPLF or Tigrean nationalism any more.
2. Other than Mekele, the capital city of Tigray, most parts of the region, including Meles Zenawi’s hometown, Adwa, are still dirt poor and have yet to receive the dividends for TPLF’s political power, despite the enormous wealth the Meles crime family has amassed.
3. Currently, there are over 100,000 non-Tigrean troops in Tigray (a region with a population of 6 million). As a result, about 1 in every 10 child currently born in Tigray doesn’t have a Tigrean father. Tigreans are also migrating toward south in massive numbers.
4. Woyanne’s investment over the past 20 years has not produced tangible results, other than a few shiny high rise buildings in Mekele. The reason is that the investment was politically-driven, hence poorly studied and planned. The end result of a government-controlled investment or command economy is always a colossal failure. The Soviet Union comes to mind.
In recent days, we are witnessing an encouraging development. The Tigrean elite, the last refuge of Tigrean nationalism, is coming around to finally disowning the Meles dictatorship, although not as fast as we would like it to happen.
A lesson that can be learned from the failure of Greater Tigray Manifesto is that it is in the best interest of all Ethiopian ethnic groups to submit their parochial interest to Ethiopian nationalism. Tigray, Oromo, Amhara, and all the other ethnic groups can flourish under a strong and united Ethiopia.
It is time for all Tigreans to wake up and join other Ethiopians in the fight to remove the Meles vampire regime.
Several news agencies are reporting that WikiLeaks supporters have shutdown credit card company MasterCard and money transfer company Paypal today in retailiation for terminating WikiLeaks’ accounts.
Paypal has admitted yesterday that the U.S. State Department pressured it to cancel the account. But the State Department denied Paypal’s claim.
The U.S. Government’s overreaction to the leaks is igniting a worldwide cyberwar.
The following are reports by various news outlets.
(DailyMail newspaper) — Computer hackers have sent one of the world’s biggest credit card companies into meltdown in revenge for cutting off payments to the WikiLeaks website.
The attack was launched by a shadowy international group called ‘Anonymous’ which said MasterCard had been targeted for freezing the account of the whistleblowing site.
The devastating blow to MasterCard, as well as the online payment network PayPal and a Swiss bank, came on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.
There were reports this morning that the attacks had gone on through the night.
Yesterday, a six-hour stoppage is thought to have affected hundreds of thousands of shoppers worldwide and highlights how vulnerable the world’s computer systems are to attack.
It is thought just a few dozen ‘hacktivists’ launched the electronic onslaught, which was taken up by other supporters.
The ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attack involved around 2,000 computers bombarding the website’s host computers with requests for information, causing them to crash.
WikiLeaks has been publishing classified U.S. diplomatic cables, to the fury of Washington authorities.
They have lobbied to cut off all support for the website which they are desperate to shut down.
(The New York Times) — A group of Internet activists who took credit for attacks on the Web site of PayPal on Monday, and knocked a Swiss postal service bank offline later the same day, said they were behind attacks on MasterCard on Wednesday.
The group, which calls itself Anonymous, explained in a statement that the attacks were an expansion of what it calls Operation Payback, an anti-corporate effort that now includes taking revenge on companies that have suspended WikiLeaks accounts.
Early Wednesday morning, the group announced on Twitter: “WE ARE GLAD TO TELL YOU THAT http://www.mastercard.com/ is DOWN AND IT’S CONFIRMED!”
Later in the day the activists carried out a similar attack on Visa.com.
The group, which started Operation Payback in response to efforts to shut down file-sharing sites, said that it had carried out a distributed denial of service attack against MasterCard.com — essentially flooding the site with traffic to slow it down or knock it offline.
Just before 8 a.m. Eastern time, MasterCard released a statement that said:
MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service. There is no impact whatsoever on our cardholders ability to use their cards for secure transactions.
(The BBC) — MasterCard, which stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site, said the attack had had “no impact” on people’s ability to use their cards. But the BBC has been contacted by a payment firm that said its customers had “a complete loss of service.” In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as MasterCard’s SecureCode, had been disrupted.
Supporters of WikiLeaks were angered on Tuesday, when a spokesman for MasterCard, James Issokson, said in a statement, “MasterCard is currently in the process of working to suspend the acceptance of MasterCard cards on WikiLeaks.”
(The Washington Post) — Hackers rushed to the defense of WikiLeaks on Wednesday, launching attacks on MasterCard, Visa, Swedish prosecutors, a Swiss bank, Sarah Palin and others who have acted against the site and its jailed founder Julian Assange.
The online attacks are part of a wave of support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the Internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity for the group, while the site’s Facebook page hit 1 million fans.
Late Wednesday, Operation Payback itself appeared to run into problems, as many of its sites went down. It was unclear who was behind the counterattack.
MasterCard is the latest in a string of U.S.-based Internet companies – including Visa, Amazon.com, PayPal Inc. and EveryDNS – to cut ties to WikiLeaks in recent days amid intense U.S. government pressure. PayPal was not having problems Wednesday but the company said it faced “a dedicated denial-of-service attack” on Monday.
Meanwhile, a website tied to former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin came under cyberattack, she said. In a posting on the social networking site Facebook last week, Palin called Assange “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” An aide said staff moved quickly to secure the website and no data was compromised.
WikiLeaks’ extensive releases of secret U.S. diplomatic cables have embarrassed U.S. allies, angered rivals, and reopened old wounds across the world. U.S. officials in Washington say other countries have curtailed their dealings with the U.S. government because of WikiLeaks’ actions.
Undeterred, WikiLeaks released more confidential U.S. cables Wednesday.
The most surprising cable of the day came from a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia after a night on the town.
“The underground nightlife of Jiddah’s elite youth is thriving and throbbing,” the memo said. “The full range of worldly temptations and vices are available – alcohol, drugs, sex – but all behind closed doors.”
U.S. officials have directed their anger at Assange, but others have begun to ask whether Washington shares the blame for the diplomatic uproar.
“The core of all this lies with the failure of the government of the United States to properly protect its own diplomatic communications,” Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday, criticizing the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. government employees had access to the cables.