STILLWATER, MN (Stillwater Gazette) — Tabor Wolde stepped up — the fifth kicker in a shootout for Mahtomedi High School in the Class A Minnesota soccer semi-finals earlier this month — and confidently struck the ball low and fast, past the goalkeeper to give his team a 5-4 shootout victory. His team went on to win the state championship, where he scored another goal.
Seven years ago, he didn’t know the Minnesota High School soccer tournament existed. At just 10 years old, Wolde, his sister Addis, then 12, and their mother fled Ethiopia to the United States.
They escaped in the shadow of the death of their father, Mamo Wolde, an Ethiopian world champion runner and Olympic Gold medalist.
They were able to come to the United States with the help of Joel and Marty Button, of Stillwater. Joel, then the head of a boarding school in eastern Iowa, read about the two in a Runner’s World article about their father, and helped the two children secure visas to come to his school, while their mother came to Minnesota and worked to get political asylum.
Their father, Mamo Wolde [wearing #70 on the photo], won gold at the marathon during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. He was a national hero in Ethiopia, and the story of his gold medal became legend there.
But when he returned, the government went through terrible turmoil, during which a new regime took over. Years later, when the government shifted again, Wolde was accused of murder and imprisoned without charge for more than a decade. The case had little ground, so little, in fact, that Amnesty International demanded his release.
His case became a passion of fellow Olympian and sportswriter Kenny Moore, who wrote about the case several times and was able to create political pressure for Ethiopia to free Wolde, which they finally did in 2002. But just months after he was released from prison, he died from a variety of ailments, including bronchitis and liver problems, according to his obituary in the New York Times.
Today, living in Stillwater, Addis and Tabor are flourishing. Tabor has excelled in soccer at Mahtomedi High School. Addis, now a freshman at Bethel College, has decided to study medicine.
Addis’ acclimation to the U.S. has gone well, but her biggest test since moving to the United States wasn’t a cultural but a health issue.
In April 2008, Addis, who ran cross-country in high school, started to feel sluggish and tired after every run.
“Before that, when I ran, I felt so good and refreshed,” she said. “After, when I’d run, I’d be exhausted and then sleep.”
She went to the doctor, who told Addis, then a junior, that she was pregnant. But more tests found a mass, a malignant tumor. It was ovarian cancer. The next day, she was in surgery, and for the next three months, she underwent chemotherapy.
“She was the star of Children’s Hospital,” said Marty Button. “The politest, and she looked the best in a gown.”
Addis says the experience helped her grow.
“I learned a lot from it,” she said. “I think it happened for a reason. It made me stronger.”
While it gave perspective to a then 17-year-old who had already been through a great deal, it gave her an interest in medicine.
“When I was sick, the nurses and the doctors were wonderful,” she said. “I thought, ‘Maybe I want to be a nurse and make people who are sick feel better and feel happier.'”
Tabor, 17, is much more focused on soccer, something he’s done all his life.
“I’ve played since I could walk, I just kicked around outside in street soccer,” he said. Outside of high school he plays with the St. Croix Celtics club, and he hopes to play in college or on an academy soccer team.
The two say they are used to life in the U.S. now, they’ve been trick-or-treating on Halloween, they’ve gotten used to ice cold winters, and even taken on snow blowing chores.
But there were definitely adjustments.
“Back home we are very close. If you are friends there, you walk with each other holding hands, even guys do it,” Addis said. “Here its a different story. It’s like ‘Whoa, you’ve got your space and I’ve got my space.’ It was very different.”
While they’ve embraced life here, there are still a longing to return to Ethiopia, at least for a visit.
“I miss it – definitely,” she said. “The people, I still have my whole family back there, my cousins, my aunts, my older brother.”
They are in touch by phone, but they’ve not gotten to see that part of their family since coming to the U.S.
The two would like to return to Ethiopia, but they are still a few years off from becoming U.S. Citizens.
“We don’t know what would happen,” said Joel Button. “Because they are here because they are here via political asylum, if they go back (to Ethiopia), their country won’t look too favorably on them. So, they aren’t going to go over until they get citizenship.”
While its hard, the siblings say that’s for the best.
“It’s tough, but its OK,” Addis said. “When holidays come, like for Christmas or new years we used to do a lot of stuff there and the whole family would gather.”
The family of Bashir Makhtal, a Canadian citizen, continue to face persecution in Ethiopia. “This isn’t just something personal with respect to Bashir Makhtal, although he clearly is one of the figures at the center of this drama,” said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, which has monitored Mr. Makhtal’s case since his arrest. “It’s family-based persecution, and I think that also underscores the nature and the severity of the repression the Ogadeni population is experiencing in Ethiopia.”
KENYA — During the first month of her imprisonment in Ethiopia, Rukiya Ahmed Makhtal was blindfolded and beaten. “You are Makhtal’s family,” she recalled her persecutor saying. “If you are Makhtal’s family, that means you are one of the problems.”
Ms. Makhtal, 53, is the older sister of Ethiopian-born Bashir Ahmed Makhtal, the Canadian citizen and former Toronto information technologist who has spent the past three years in Ethiopian prisons. Convicted of terrorism-related charges, he was sentenced in August to life in prison, but is scheduled to appear before an appeal court today. His family, who maintain his innocence, say they have been persecuted because of the actions of his grandfather.
After spending 14 months in various Ethiopian prisons where she says she was bound, blindfolded and badly beaten, thrown in isolation, raped and told she would be executed, Ms. Makhtal was at last transferred to a crowded low-security prison where family scrounged for 1,000 birr (roughly $80) and paid the guards to look the other way while she walked through the prison gates and, like so many of her kin, away from Ethiopia for good.
For two days, she trudged across the Ethiopian desert, struggling from poor health and the wounds on her body, trying to blend in with a train of nomads and fearful she might be spotted before reaching the border.
During the past year, others in Bashir Makhtal’s family have trickled into Hagadera, a notoriously squalid and overcrowded refugee camp at Dadaab in Kenya’s North Eastern Province.
Ms. Makhtal, who is asking for resettlement in Canada as a refugee and whose case is being followed by Amnesty International, is now among 16 people sleeping in the sand under scant shelter, all of whom say they are related to Bashir Makhtal and the victims of persecution in Ethiopia.
Bashir Makhtal and his sister, Rukiya, are the grandchildren of a founding member of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a separatist movement in the ethnic Somali region of eastern Ethiopia, though both deny having been involved in the group.
“He was my grandfather,” Ms. Makhtal says. “We didn’t even know him.”
After an April, 2007, ONLF attack on a Chinese oil field at Abole in eastern Ethiopia that left 70 Chinese and Ethiopian workers dead, Ethiopia drastically stepped up a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the region.
A 2008 Human Rights Watch report accuses Ethiopian soldiers of burning down entire villages, mass detentions and even demonstration killings, “with Ethiopian soldiers singling out relatives of suspected ONLF members,” and of conducting widespread “military attacks on civilians and villages that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Abdi Mohamed Ahmed, 29, who says Ms. Makhtal is his aunt and who denies ever being involved with the ONLF, remembers the night in late 2007 the Ethiopian National Defence Forces came for his family, circling his house before dragging out his entire family, beating them and hauling them off to different jails.
“They used to tie our eyes, torturing and beating. They used to tie our hands and legs together and they hang us up from the ceiling. And everybody was alone.”
This was when Bashir Makhtal’s sister, his older brother Hassan Ahmed, and several of their children were also arrested.
Last Thursday, Hassan Ahmed Makhtal, who had been imprisoned for 22 months and was serving a life sentence, died in the Ethiopian capital after being released early to receive medical attention. A press release issued by the Ogaden Human Rights Commission claims he “died from wounds sustained during his detention,” though the cause of his death could not be independently verified.
According to several family members, two of Hassan Makhtal’s children – a 27-year-old son and a 25-year-old daughter – were beaten to death in military prisons less than a month after their arrest in 2008.
“They are not targeting ONLF. Our army is very strong now,” said Abdirahman Mahdi, a central committee member of the separatist group, who spoke during a recent interview in Toronto. “What they do is they target the weak spot, the civilians, the women and children.”
“This isn’t just something personal with respect to Bashir Makhtal, although he clearly is one of the figures at the centre of this drama,” said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, which has monitored Mr. Makhtal’s case since his arrest. “It’s family-based persecution, and I think that also underscores the nature and the severity of the repression the Ogadeni population is experiencing in Ethiopia.”
Mr. Makhtal was arrested by Kenyan authorities in December, 2006, as he attempted to flee the suddenly rising violence in neighbouring Somalia, where friends and family say he had travelled for business.
He was among 90 prisoners, including American, British and Kenyan nationals, who were forcibly deported, in violation of both Kenyan and international law, first to Mogadishu and then to Ethiopia. While every other Western country managed to secure the release of its citizens, Mr. Makhtal, the only Canadian arrested, alone remains in Ethiopian custody.
Said Makhtal, Mr. Makhtal’s cousin in Hamilton, Ont., says he’s optimistic about tomorrow’s outcome, but added: “I don’t know how much more I can count on the Ethiopian court system.”
In the meantime, many of Mr. Makhtal’s family are left to wait in the refugee camp while Amnesty International Canada puts forward their case to the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi.
“The life of Hagadera is too difficult,” Mr. Ahmed said. “There is no life, there is no health. There is not even enough water, the air of that place is not even good.”
“And still this moment we live under fear because there may be Ethiopian security,” he added, pointing out that Kenya already delivered his uncle, Mr. Makhtal, to Ethiopian authorities.
“Obviously, Canada continues to face difficulties in ensuring the safety of Mr. Makhtal himself,” Mr. Neve said. “At least we do have the opportunity to try and ensure safety for these other family members.”
Freweini Hadera, a construction management graduate student from Ethiopia, is crowned as Miss International at the Oklahoma State University International Student Organization’s annual Mr. and Miss International pageant.
By Danielle Davis
Oklahoma, USA (OSU) — It was a full house for the International Student Organization’s annual Mr. and Miss International pageant Wednesday night.
Students, families and friends gathered in the OSU Student Union Little Theater to support the contestants of this year’s pageant.
With charismatic hosts, Brittnee Cooks and Joseph Jones, the atmosphere was thick with excitement and eagerness to see who would be crowned OSU’s Mr. and Miss International.
The hosts introduced the four judges before the contestants took the stage for their opening dance.
The opening dance, which Nash McQuarters choreographed, was a montage of three Michael Jackson songs; “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Remember the Time” and “Black or White.”
On an overhead above the stage, the video for “Black or White” played as each contestant performed a brief dance symbolizing his or her culture.
Following a performance of a three-man team of Malaysian drummers, each contestant shared a traditional outfit with a brief explanation of its symbolism.
Contestants performed with traditional and contemporary music.
Miss India Neetha Sindhu started the talent portion with a dance called Dashavatar, which displayed India’s elegant traditions. Mr. India Bharathwaj Gopalakrishnan played a fusion of classical Indian and Western music on an Indian bamboo flute.
Mr. China Zongkai Tian displayed his Chinese calligraphy and the delicate and powerful art of Kung Fu.
Mr. Nepal Bigyan Koirala and Miss Nepal Preety Mathema gave separate energetic customary and modern dances.
Mr. Vietnam Danh Pham Phan ended the talent section with an acoustic guitar and vocal performance of “Winter Lady.”
The last round before crowning Mr. and Miss International required each contestant to answer questions such as, “How can you help incoming students with culture shock?” or “How would you showcase your culture among the vast international population at OSU?”
Mr. and Miss India were second runners-up. First runners-up Miss Nepal and Mr. Vietnam were each rewarded with a scholarship check for $150 and a glass plaque for their achievements.
Crowned as Mr. and Miss International were Miss Africa Freweini Hadera, a construction management graduate student, and Mr. Nepal, a media management graduate student.
Hadera and Koirala each received a scholarship check for $350 and a glass plaque for their new titles as Mr. and Miss International.
Hadera said she was exceedingly happy with her win, proud to represent her country and looks forward to putting her new title to good use.
“I am so happy,” Hadera said. “I look forward to being on ISO’s side to help international students achieve whatever they want and also help international students battle their challenges.”
Koirala had some of the same aspirations but with a slightly broader view.
“What I see here at Oklahoma State is that we need to gather up more people to come to events like this,” Koirala said. “I saw a few empty seats. We need to reach out to more professors, more students. We’ve got 32,000 people all across the state that are apart of OSU. We can bring them all together.”
WASHINGTON DC (VOA Editorial) — The United States is committed to helping people in need all over the world, and it takes this mission very seriously. With billions of dollars spent on humanitarian, economic and other forms of assistance every year, the U.S. wants to be sure that the aid is properly and effectively distributed. So it is that U.S. officials are concerned about recent reports that the Ethiopian government may be politicizing humanitarian assistance ahead of next year’s national elections.
Amid wide-spread food shortages caused by a long-running drought across much of East Africa, Ethiopia receives considerable aid from the U.S. and other nations. It is estimated that more than 6 million of the country’s 80 million people rely on aid to survive, with another 7 million relying heavily on on the Productive Safety Net Program, a food-for-work program administered by the government and supported by foreign assistance.
A spokesman for the major opposition political coalition, the Forum for Democratic Dialogue, recently complained that the government was allowing only ruling party members to take part in the Productive Safety Net Program. To eat, he said, desperate people are forced to join the ruling party. A top government spokesman, however, flatly denies the charge.
Though unproven, the allegations echo a similar charge by the opposition that in 2005 officials in Oromiya denied food aid from international donors to residents of some communities that had voted for opposition candidates in elections that year.
The U.S. Government is aware of the recent complaints. All U.S. government humanitarian assistance agencies have monitoring systems in place to prevent or expose such activity which we are continually reviewing and working to improve. Discussions are also taking place with nongovernmental partners to ensure full compliance with the U.S. strict monitoring standards. USAID personnel in Ethiopia are increasing field visits to observe distribution dynamics with specific attention to these allegations.
The U.S. is committed to the people of Ethiopia and ensuring that its humanitarian aid does reach those most in need.
(The McGill Report) — Okwa Omot is sleeping safely in a warm bed at his home in Washington, D.C. this week. That is something of a miracle considering that only a week ago –- and for 107 days before that -– he was sleeping on freezing cold concrete floors in Ethiopian prisons, accused of treason and threatened with execution.
The 32-year-old hotel housekeeper and U.S. citizen had traveled to Ethiopia in July to visit family members he hadn’t seen for nine years.
Instead, he was arrested for inciting revolution and shut away in prison.
He was released last Tuesday after friends in Minnesota and U.S. Embassy officials in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, worked for weeks to convince Ethiopian authorities that Omot posed no threat to their government.
The prison system of Ethiopia is one of the world’s great, dark secrets.
The Ethiopian government denies that systematic human rights abuses occur there, even as , with support from the U.S. State Department, claim that Ethiopia runs one of the most brutal penal systems on earth – a system that is a linchpin in a dictatorship that rules Ethiopia through raw fear under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
Omot’s experience supports that bleak view of Ethiopia’s prisons, and the story of his three-month ordeal offers a rare inside glimpse into that world.
Ethnic Cleansing
On July 26, Omot was arrested near the village of Dimma, Ethiopia, by nine Ethiopian police who grabbed him under a tree where he was resting.
“We heard you were coming,” the police told him. “We know that in America you plot against Ethiopia, but we have our supporters in America too, and they told us to expect you.”
Omot is a member of the Anuak tribe, whose indigenous territory straddles southeast Sudan and western Ethiopia. Since 1991, when the present Ethiopian regime took power, the Anuak have been the target of intense ethnic cleansing by the Ethiopian government according to Human Rights Watch and other groups.
Omot fled that ethnic cleansing in 1992, spending three years in refugee camps in Kenya before settling in the U.S. in 1995. He became a U.S. citizen last year.
Never politically active, Omot raised suspicions on his recent trip by entering Ethiopia not through airport customs in Addis Ababa, but rather by the traditional Anuak way, which is walking across the border from an Anuak village in Sudan, to the Ethiopian Anuak village of Dimma.
Old-Timers
Omot feared for his life every moment in prison.
‘“You will die like a dog now there is no one to defend you,”’ Omot recalls his jailers in Dimma taunting him. “They said, ‘In America, black people are treated like slaves and there are no white people who will come from America to save your life.’ I told them, ‘Did you see that in America we now have a black president?’ They said ‘Shut up!’”
After five days in Dimma, Omot was moved to a bigger prison in the town of Gambella, the capital of the western state of the same name, and the heart of the Anuak’s indigenous homeland.
The Gambella prison has for many years housed hundreds of Anuak men accused of plotting against Ethiopia.
Although Omot was not able to count the number of prisoners himself, old-timers in the prison told him there were 475 prisoners being held there, of whom only 20 or so were not Anuak.
“One night a group of soldiers came to me and said ‘We are going to teach you something,’” Omot recalls. “They blindfolded me and shoved me into a pickup truck. When they took off my blindfold they pushed me to the ground and I was surrounded by dead bodies. They were mostly skeletons but with pieces of clothing still stuck on.
“The soldiers told me, ‘Unless you confess you will look like those bodies. You will die just like they did. We will kill you right now.’”
Independent Reports
Instead of collapsing, Omot became calm.
“‘A man can never live to 200 years,’” Omot told his captors. “‘Life comes to an end for everyone. I have nothing to tell you. If you want to kill me, kill me.’ They put the blindfold back on and drove me back to the prison.”
Another day in Gambella, Omot was snatched from his cell and taken to the office of Omot Olom, the governor of the region.
Olom is deeply feared among the Anuak as a planner of one of the worst massacres ever carried out against their tribe, on Dec. 13, 2003, when uniformed Ethiopian soldiers moving door to door executed some 425 Anuak men and boys in Gambella on a single day.
The fact of the massacre, and Olom’s involvement in it, have been corroborated by independent reports including a 2004 report by Genocide Watch, and a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch connecting Olom to “crimes against humanity” committed against the Anuak.
Now meeting Olom face-to-face, Omot again feared for his life.
“He called me an American terrorist,” Omot said. “He said, ‘Omot, we know your history. You killed Ethiopian people before you left to live in America, and you have been sending money from America to kill Ethiopians. And now you are coming back to support terrorists living in Gambella. We are either going to kill you or destroy your passport.’”
Maekelawi Prison
A ray of hope appeared for Omot when a consular official from the U.S. embassy, who had been alerted to Omot’s arrest by Anuak friends living in Minnesota, flew from Addis Ababa to visit him in the Gambella prison.
That visit saved his life, Omot said. Thanks to the embassy’s intervention, he was transferred to the Maekelawi federal prison in Addis Ababa, where U.S. embassy officials were able to visit him more often.
But his trials were not yet over, as Maekelawi is an infamous dungeon of horrors.
Tales of torture, extrajudicial execution, solitary confinement in shackles, and brutal conditions at Maekelawi are legion in Ethiopia.
Tens of thousands of street protesters, journalists, and opposition politicians over the years have spent long stretches in Maekelawi – sometimes never leaving.
Lights Off
At Maekelawi, Omot was thrown into a dark basement cell, which he shared with another inmate.
“It was cold as a refrigerator,” Omot said. “I thought I was going to die from the cold. I had one thin blanket but I needed much more to stay warm.”
In his 17 days underground, the dim overhead lights mysteriously went off on four different occasions, after which each time he heard shuffling sounds in the darkness.
His cellmate told him that when a person died in prison, the lights were turned off while the body was picked up and taken away.
Michael Gonzales, a U.S. embassy spokesman in Addis Ababa, confirmed that Omot is a U.S. citizen and that a consular official in Addis Ababa met with him in Gambella and the Maekelawi prison in Addis, to win his release last week. Senior U.S. embassy officials also contacted Ethiopian officials on Omot’s behalf, Gonzales said.
Apee Jobi, an Anuak American who lives in Brooklyn Park, MN first alerted the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia about Omot’s arrest in early August, and worked with embassy officials towards his release.
Jobi said Omot’s arrest and imprisonment was standard operating procedure today in Ethiopia, as part of the system of fear that supports the regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
Many ethnic groups in Ethiopia are suppressed using these tactics, Jobi said.
“From the point of view of the government, loyalty means innocence,” Jobi said. “But if you are a stranger, you are guilty. But it doesn’t mean you have committed a crime.”
አውራምባ ታይምስ (አዲስ አበባ)፡- በ1994 ዓ.ም. የተጀመረው ታላቁ ሩጫ በኢትዮጵያ ለ9ኛ ጊዜ በዛሬው እለት ተካሄደ፡፡ ውድድሩን እንግሊዛዊቷ አትሌት ፓውላ ራድክሊፍ ከደራርቱ ቱሉ እና ከኃይሌ ገ/ሥላሴ ጋር በመሆን አስጀምራለች፡፡ 
They escaped in the shadow of the death of their father, Mamo Wolde, an Ethiopian world champion runner and Olympic Gold medalist.
Freweini Hadera, a construction management graduate student from Ethiopia, is crowned as Miss International at the Oklahoma State University International Student Organization’s annual Mr. and Miss International pageant.
(The McGill Report) — Okwa Omot is sleeping safely in a warm bed at his home in Washington, D.C. this week. That is something of a miracle considering that only a week ago –- and for 107 days before that -– he was sleeping on freezing cold concrete floors in Ethiopian prisons, accused of treason and threatened with execution.