I followed Ato Gebremedhin Araya’s interview on Tinsaye Radio (May 24) based on Abaye Tsehai’s recent interview with Dimtsi Woyane.
The claim by Abaye Tsehai that TPLF has been a fighting and business force that profited from business deal early in the struggle was exposed by Ato Gebremedhin Araya from his own account serving in the finance department of TPLF.
The drought of the time and the international aids and money was a God given fortune from heaven used by the leaders of the movement to collect and amass fortunes in the name of Tigray.
Gebremedhin confirmed to us that talk of business in Sudan before this drought was lie and TPLF top leaders used it to camouflage the properties they confiscated after they controlled power in Ethiopia.
EFFORT he said is a conglomerate of 80 companies under the control of the top TPLF leaders that is monopolizing the country’s business and it is Ethiopian people wealth.
Neither the The Tigray people nor ordinary member of TPLF are the owner of the EFFORT and Sibhat Nega told his host that Tigrayans and others should use the opportunity EFFORT give them to develop and do business in their regions.
Ethiopia is now run by individuals who robbed foreign food aids and converted into 100 million dollars according to Gebremedhin’s account and building a company in the name of Tigray and and enriching themselves and Gebremedhin also said these few millionaires also have accounts and investments in foreign banks under various names.
Have the World Bank demanded the book of EFFORT to be audited and tell poor Ethiopians who the share holders of this giant companies are or is this a question out of reach not to embarrass themselves?
Gebremedin confirmed that many African corrupt leaders amassed fortunes by stealing from their own people and from his first hand information none other than Sibhat Nega and his buddies EFFORT top the list.
Oil companies, both western and Asian, are hunting in earnest for oil and gas in East Africa, a still largely under-explored region, as energy nationalism in Russia, Venezuela and the Middle East closes off opportunities in more proven areas.
“East Africa, for a frontier area, is experiencing one of the highest levels of investment in the world right now — but we’re only seeing the beginning,” said Chris Matchette-Downes, vice president of business development at Black Marlin Energy, an oil service company based in Dubai and specializing in the region. About $500 million is being spent on research in the region but so far only about 479 wells have been drilled from Eritrea to Cape Town, including Madagascar, compared with as many as 20,000-30,000 in northern Africa and a similar number in western Africa, he said.
Significant discoveries of oil could help some countries in the region reduce their dependence on aid and expensive imported oil and help wean their residents from chopping down trees for household fuel. Exploitation, however, could be difficult and require costly infrastructure development. Except for a rickety rail network, not rehabilitated since colonial times, most of the region lacks pipelines and ports to export oil.
While some countries, like Sudan and Ethiopia, are showing early promise as oil and natural gas producers, Freedom House, a U.S. democracy monitoring group, rated these two countries as among the most repressive regimes in the world. Many countries in East Africa, moreover, are in only the early stages of setting up a regulatory and legal framework for the oil industry. Oil companies worry whether their contracts will be respected.
Still, even at this early stage, oil has recently been found in Uganda and in Madagascar. Gas has been discovered in Tanzania and Ethiopia. Oil production is rising steadily in Sudan. Seismic studies and drilling are proceeding steadily in Kenya, Mozambique, the semi-autonomous Somali province of Puntland, and in the waters surrounding the Seychelles. The shores of Zanzibar are attracting interest from international oil giants, like Royal Dutch Shell.
But the geology of East Africa is more complex than that of the western side of the continent, so oil deposits will be more challenging to find in the east, seismic experts say. At the same time, a commercially viable, world-class basin has yet to be discovered in East Africa to rival the world’s top 100 basins, like the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
Exploration and production in Sudan, the largest regional oil producer and an OPEC observer, which is pumping a modest 491,000 barrels a day, is dominated by China National Petroleum Company, Petronas of Malaysia and ONGC of India, since formal U.S. sanctions bar U.S. firms and deter western companies from operating there. Sudan’s future as a major oil producer will be determined by the country’s ability to stabilize the security situation and respect contracts, analysts say.
“Future production growth will depend on an aggressive exploration program in the south, which is stymied by the volatile security situation,” said Monica Enfield, Africa analyst for PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington.
The outcome of a tug of war over a contested oil block in southern Sudan is considered a bellwether for future foreign investment, Enfield said.
At the same time, a 2005 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan that would manage and split oil revenues equally between the two, leaves big uncertainties for oil and gas development, Enfield said. Uncertainties relate to mineral and land rights, the powers of a joint petroleum commission and whether the south will remain part of Sudan or secede in the next few years.
Because many ethnic groups in the south did not sign the agreement, the area remains dangerous; and tensions have been heightened by delays in the scheduled withdrawal of northern militias, said Egbert Hesselink, director of the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan, an observer group.
Meanwhile, Madagascar is expecting to pump its first oil this summer, when a Houston-based explorer, Madagascar Oil, will produce and store a small amount of heavy crude from the island’s Bemalonga onshore field, before a government decision on how best to use it, said Alex Archila, interim chairman of the company.
Madagascar Oil is evaluating the economic viability of producing oil from the field, which may hold as much as 10 billion barrels of heavy crude, he said. The company has also started a pilot study of how to produce heavy oil from beneath parts of the field that are being mined for bitumen.
Exxon Mobil is also drilling for oil off the island’s northwest coast.
In Uganda, oil production is expected to start in 2009 from a field on the shores of Lake Albert, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two independent oil producers, Heritage Oil of Canada and Tullow Oil of Britain, will produce about 6,000 barrels a day of light, sweet crude that will be used locally to produce kerosene and other fuels and to supply a small power plant, said Chris Perry, investor relations officer at Tullow.
Perry said that Tullow was also evaluating a series of recent oil discoveries to determine whether enough crude could be produced to justify construction of a $2 billion, 1,300-kilometer, or 800-mile, export pipeline to Mombasa, the Kenyan port which serves land-locked Uganda.
In the past two years, Tanzania has leased large swaths of its offshore area to exploration and production companies that include Petrobras of Brazil, Statoil of Norway, and Aminex, an Anglo-Irish company. Tanzania has sizeable reserves of natural gas, and a French exploration company, Maurel and Prom, announced a gas find there in January. But offshore exploration plans by oil majors, including Royal Dutch Shell, have been held up for years around the semi-autonomous islands of Zanzibar, until an agreement is reached on resource management with the mainland Tanzanian government.
Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya have started coordinating regional oil development through the East African Petroleum Conference, an intergovernmental association which held its third meeting in March in Arusha, the capital of Tanzania. In Kenya, China National Offshore Oil Corp. and Woodside Petroleum of Australia, among others, have committed to exploratory drilling programs, mainly offshore.
In Mozambique, one offshore well will be drilled this year in the Ruvuma basin, an area that straddles the border with southern Tanzania, said Matchette-Downes of Black Marlin. Eni of Italy, Anadarko of the United States, Petronas of Malaysia and Norsk Hydro of Norway signed up for offshore exploration acreage in the area last year.
In the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northern Somalia, Range Resources, based in Melbourne, Australia, has contracted for all mineral and hydrocarbon rights in the region, said Peter Landau, the company’s managing director. Range Resources has opened an office in the port city of Boosaso and will drill its first of four exploration wells this year onshore, he said.
“Puntland is considered a geological mirror image to Yemen,” Landau said. Yemen, already an oil producer, is located across the Gulf of Aden from Puntland.
Ethiopia — which has proven natural gas reserves of 4 trillion cubic feet, or 100 million cubic meters — is also in the sights of oil explorers, despite ethnic conflicts there. White Nile, Petronas and Lundin Petroleum, a independent Swedish oil company, have all signed on to drill in Ogaden province — where last month the Ogaden National Liberation Front, an ethnic Somali independence group, which claimed responsibility for a recent raid on a Chinese-run oil field which killed 74 people.
Throughout most of the region, however, civic unrest is not a major stumbling block, at least during the exploratory phase. Unconventional geology, heavy oil, and the need to factor in costly infrastructure developments may weigh on development decisions, but the explorers, at least are upbeat on East Africa. “What we’re seeing is just is the tip of the iceberg,” Matchette-Downes said.
Blink and you will miss the underground children in Ethiopia’s capital city.
They live in tunnels, sewers and drainage holes, hidden beneath Addis Ababa’s teeming streets.
They move from one makeshift shelter to the next, chased away by police or the rivers of water and refuse that flow when the rains come.
Growing up amidst the traffic, they learn to hustle at a young age seeking change or selling small
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Hidden
Across from the main post office, there is a sewage drain. It draws little attention.
Thousands of people walk across its steel bars every day without giving it a second thought. This is good for Mohammed and his friends. They do not want their home to be discovered.
The space is not more than half a metre high, and though it is five or six metres long, only one small portion is covered and unexposed.
When it rains, the boys huddle together among the rubbish and waste.
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Crowds
Encountering the street kids who live underground is not easy, but once we talked to a few, dozens appeared.
As we walked in the shadow of the city’s main buildings, the children emerged from dark side streets and from nowhere at all.
Soon we were surrounded by boys.
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Hustle
For the children who have found shelter, however destitute and impermanent, the difficulties truly begin when they come up from underground and face the realities of their daily life.
They must hustle for food scraps, avoid police, and beware exploitation and abuse.
Many children perform odd jobs for restaurants and cafés to get bread and leftovers. Sometimes shelters will give out food, and there are soup kitchens that serve cheap meals.
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Hana
There are fewer girls but they are there. Hana, a 15 year-old, comes from Ziway, a town south of Addis.
She left home and came to Addis after an incident in which she accidentally lost her family’s cattle and feared her father’s rage. She hopes to return one day.
“Here you don’t have much to worry about,” she said.
“If you get something to eat, that is good. When you don’t have any, you pass the time either sleeping or chatting with friends.”
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Sex
When they do have money, from begging or doing odd jobs, Hana and her friends often go to the cinema.
One of the girls described her attitude to se.x.
She said that to be safe from both pregnancy and HIV/Aids she always uses a condom. She claimed she did not face serious dangers in this regard, and said no-one had ever forced her to have sex.
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Henok
Henok Tesfaye came to the streets when he was 11 years old after losing his parents in a car accident. Ten years on, he is used to life on the streets.
He lives beneath a main road in an unused hole dug for telephone cables. The roof is made of concrete blocks placed side by side across a small opening.
To keep rain out, Henok and his roommate spread plastic sheets underneath old windscreens.
A small hole is both the door and the window to their tiny home.
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Numbers
Among the reasons for the high numbers of street children in Addis Ababa are extreme poverty, hunger, violent conflict and drought in rural areas.
Often, the children come without families, orphaned by disease, escaping abusive and neglectful parents, captivated by tales of wealth and opportunity in the big city.
An exact number is too difficult to pin down accurately, but various estimates put the total number of street kids in Ethiopia between 60,000 and 150,000.
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Dawit
As we were talking to Dawit, 12, he eyed a rubber wristband and we gave it him, but the next day it had gone.
“It was stolen last night,” he said, crestfallen. “When I was sleeping, someone grabbed my neck and started choking me. They said: ‘Give it to me or I’ll take your life.’ So I gave it them.”
He shrugged his shoulders and walked off with a friend down the busy street – unnoticed.
Ato Solomon Tekalegn declared himself a patriot when he arrived in Addis this week and was heard saying that the whole Addis is shaking on his victorious arrival.
On the thirty minutes video interview he gave on the EriTV two years ago, on his fact finding mission, reposted on ER, I realized a troubling body language.
I wish experts watch it again and educate us about changing personalities and if this is a disease what can we do about it ?
From Addis yesterday to his supporters in the Diaspora he was heard saying that many in the Diaspora are condemning him about going to Ethiopia and he was challenging us if not to Addis then to Mars ? and the paltalk host was laughing unstoppable.
I will not be surprised if this guy showed up in the Kaliti prison to visit the people leaders he called them in his previous songs as another round of fact finding mission and what he will not do is to sing in a public because people will disappoint him by singing
his ” Ande Belu Sewe Atemenu ” songs.
His trip to abandon the struggle and join the regime is financial according to the interview he gave here in USA and he is worried also being overshadowed by young Ethiopian singers.
Ato Solomon you know from your heart you are not a patriot and you are ” Beand Eras Hulet Melase ” and many will remember you for your previous famous songs which you are now running away from.
I wish if I had known such financial hardshsip will send someone to negate his own recent past I will be the first one to contribute a penny.
WASHINGTON — One dramatic act sets Ethiopia apart from the array of countries with poor human rights records that have become United States counterterrorism allies since the September 11, 2001, attacks: With U.S. backing, it invaded a neighboring country and overthrew a Taliban-like Islamist movement.
The country that Ethiopia invaded is its neighbor to the east in the Horn of Africa, the disintegrated state of Somalia, where the Islamist movement, called the Union of Islamic Courts, had taken over much of the country and was suspected of harboring al Qaeda members. Ethiopia remains militarily embroiled there today.
In its latest human rights report for 2006, the U.S. State Department painted a grim picture of the Ethiopian government’s human rights record, one that has changed little over the years. “Although the constitution and law prohibit the use of torture and mistreatment,” the report says, “there were numerous credible reports that security officials often beat or mistreated detainees. Opposition political parties reported frequent and systematic abuse of their supporters by police and regional militias.”Nevertheless, Ethiopia received a huge increase in military assistance from the United States in the three years after 9/11 — from $928,000 in the period 1999-2001 to $16.7 million between 2002 and 2004. In fact, in 2005 — a year of contested Ethiopian parliamentary elections when government forces detained, beat and killed opposition members, journalists and intellectuals — Ethiopia received $7 million in Foreign Military Financing funding, an amount nearly equal to the FMF total from the previous two years combined.
While both governments deny a quid pro quo, the increased military funding came after the largely destitute African nation became an early member of the “coalition of the willing” and a close ally of the United States in the global war on terror. Influential Washington lobbyists, including a former majority leader of the House of Representatives, worked on behalf of the Ethiopian government to secure the funding.
In the three years after 9/11, Ethiopia received increased funding from the FMF program (to buy U.S.-made weapons and services); the International Military Education and Training program; and the Pentagon’s new post-9/11 Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, which trains foreign forces in counterterrorism techniques.
In addition to the Somalia invasion, the role Ethiopia has played in the war on terror includes tightening border security, outlawing and restricting financial practices used by suspected terrorists and becoming a key intelligence partner of the U.S. in the Horn of Africa. It was in December 2006 that, with U.S. support and backing, it sent troops into Somalia and overthrew the Union of Islamic Courts; the United States suspects the UIC of harboring members of al Qaeda, including suspects associated with the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
In January 2007, in the midst of Ethiopia’s offensive against the Islamists in Somalia, the U.S. government allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea, The New York Times reported in April. The deal, a possible violation of United Nations restrictions imposed on North Korea in October 2006 because of the country’s unwillingness to cooperate with international nuclear weapons inspectors, appears to be another example of the difficult, and sometimes contradictory, compromises the Bush administration has had to make in the war on terror. The U.S. had been one of the most important sponsors of the North Korean sanctions at the United Nations.
Lobbyists to the rescue
The State Department’s continued negative human rights assessment could have threatened continued U.S. military assistance to Ethiopia under long-standing human rights restrictions enacted by Congress. But thanks to a concerted lobbying effort on behalf of the Ethiopian government and objections from the State Department, supporters of the Ethiopian government managed to stop a bill in Congress that would have cut off security assistance on human rights grounds.
The Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights Advancement Act, introduced by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., in June 2006, proposed to put limits on military aid to Ethiopia — with the exception of peacekeeping and antiterrorism programs — until the government released all political prisoners and provided fair and speedy trials to other prisoners held without charges.
The bill swiftly passed the House International Relations Committee with bipartisan support. That’s when both advocates and opponents of aid to Ethiopia became active.
The Ethiopian diaspora in the United States launched a letter and e-mail campaign to push the legislation in Congress. To counter that grass-roots effort, the Ethiopian government hired a well-established law and lobbying firm in Washington, DLA Piper, to quash the bill; DLA Piper says its work on Smith’s bill was only part of its $50,000 per month representation of the Ethiopian government.
The lobbying team included former House Republican majority leader Dick Armey and 12 other lobbyists. DLA Piper also produced and distributed a nine-page memo highlighting the Ethiopian government’s opposition to the bill.
In the memo, the lobbyists said that the bill compromised “the national security interests of both the United States and Ethiopia.” They also raised concerns about Somalia that Ethiopia and the United States shared. “The bill will prohibit critical security assistance to Ethiopia at a time when volatility in Somalia and instability in the Horn of Africa region more than ever demand that the U.S. make full use of the intelligence and defense cooperation of Ethiopia, its strongest and only democratic ally in the region.”
Mandatory lobbying disclosure records filed with the Department of Justice show that from April to August 2006, DLA Piper lobbyists talked on the phone and met numerous times with the staffs of the House International Relations Committee; Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Ethiopia and Ethiopian American Caucus; the congressional affairs section of the Department of State; and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and 2008 presidential candidate.
The bill never made it to the House floor. The Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department objected to the bill as being “too punitive” and getting in the way of U.S. foreign policy, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations surrounding the bill. “They did everything they could to sabotage it,” the source said.
A State Department spokesman, Steve Lauterbach, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that the bill was “prescriptive” and “limiting” on how foreign aid to Ethiopia should be spent.
One of the few actions the U.S. took in light of the disclosed human right abuses was to stop the sale of additional Humvee military vehicles to Ethiopia after the Ethiopian government used some Humvees to crack down on civilian protesters in the riots that followed the May 2005 elections. The United States had sold 20 of the vehicles to Ethiopia for use in counterterrorism operations.
Military maneuvers
Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia after the Union of Islamic Courts forces began to threaten the fragile United Nations-backed transitional government based in the southern Somali city of Baidoa. The Islamists had been backed by Eritrea, Ethiopia’s longtime bitter rival with which it went to war in 1998 in a still-unresolved border dispute. In addition, internal Ethiopian insurgent groups were operating from the area controlled by the UIC, according to Terrence Lyons, a George Mason University scholar on the region.
But there was much more to the cooperation between the U.S. and Ethiopia.
Besides providing intelligence assistance and satellite imagery to Ethiopian forces, American AC-130 gunships were allowed to take off from an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to target al Qaeda suspects fleeing with the retreating UIC forces, The New York Times reported in February 2007, quoting sources to whom it had granted anonymity. Ethiopian government officials strongly denied giving access to the gunships. American special forces units were also allowed to deploy to Kenya and Ethiopia, and from there they ventured into Somalia to try to confirm the identity of those killed in the AC-130 attacks, the newspaper reported.
The United States and the international community are providing diplomatic and economic support to the transitional Somali government, which is facing a guerrilla insurgency in the capital of Mogadishu despite Ethiopian forces having routed the UIC. More than 320,000 people have fled Mogadishu. “The transitional government had problems to begin with because it was connected to Ethiopia, the regional rival,” said Lyons, “and now has further problems because it’s connected to the United States.”
According to Lyons, the U.S. bombings in Somalia made the transitional government weaker. “From the global-war-on-terror framework and not from a peace-and-security-in-the-Horn-of-Africa framework, the attack made sense. Actually, it would make sense if they had in fact correctly targeted the [right] people,” he said (American officials told The New York Times that none of the top al Qaeda operatives in the Horn of Africa had been killed or captured since the invasion of Somalia began in December). “From the point of view of creating a stable government and building up a constituency … having a very powerful, very dramatic U.S. gunship come and attack did real damage to the transitional federal government.”
Cooperation between Ethiopia and the United States was not limited to the Somalia invasion. After weeks of outcry by local human rights groups, Ethiopian officials acknowledged that they had secretly detained 41 terrorism suspects from 17 countries who had been fighting with the Somali Islamists. It’s unclear whether Ethiopia acted unilaterally or in conjunction with the U.S. government in detaining the suspects, but American officials told the Times that its agents had interrogated the suspects in Ethiopian prisons. U.S. officials denied that the prisoners taken into Ethiopian custody were part of any “extraordinary rendition” program, under which terrorist suspects are detained outside of the rule of law and often transferred to third countries, many times those known to employ torture.
Back in Washington, human rights groups and the Ethiopian diaspora are continuing to press Congress on restricting military assistance to the Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi. The United States has been “giving too much to Ethiopia and asking too little from it,” Lynn Fredriksson, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for Africa, said in an interview with ICIJ. In November 2006, she testified at a congressional hearing, arguing that “Ethiopia is an important U.S. ally, but that does not give us the liberty to ignore egregious rights violations.”
Advocates of Smith’s bill say that the legislation will have a better chance of succeeding under the new Democratic-controlled Congress. Smith’s bill was re-introduced on May 9 while a very similar version was introduced by Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., on April 23.
Meanwhile, $2 million of new FMF funding for Ethiopia was requested in 2007 by the Bush administration. The United States also made the country eligible to receive used weapons and equipment for free or at reduced prices under the Excess Defense Articles program.
Meles, the prime minister, is “the victorious-against-terrorists United States friend,” said Lyons. “He is not worried if the [U.S.] ambassador says we are concerned about prison conditions. He would just laugh at us.”
Assistant Database Editor Ben Welsh contributed this report.
China’s funding to Africa is becoming increasingly controversial.
Chinese state companies have been expanding across the African continent in pursuit of raw materials at an accelerating pace and with apparently far less attention to risk than some of their western peers.Their push for minerals and mineral rights began in southern Sudan where the Chinese oil company CNOOC began building oil pipelines in the late 1990s – long before separatist rebels struck a deal with the Khartoum regime to end decades of civil war.
Despite the growing presence of Chinese workers in far-flung corners of Africa there have been relatively few reports of them falling victim to violence or becoming ensnared in localised conflicts.
The recent attack on an oil exploration site in eastern Ethiopia in which nine Chinese were killed was the deadliest incident to date involving the Chinese in Africa. At least 65 Ethiopians were also killed in the attack. It underlines the potential for a backlash against China’s dealings in Africa, especially where it is involved with regimes with poor rights records and which are under attack from armed opponents.
In recent years China has ploughed billions of dollars into Africa, mostly in its pursuit of raw materials to fuel its industrial boom. This year in Ethiopia alone, China had recently offered concessional loans worth $500m and a further $1.5bn towards telecoms infrastructure.
As elsewhere on the continent this funding is controversial. It has helped plug a shortfall in aid after western donors scaled back support to Ethiopia in response to human rights abuses following elections in 2005.
The Ogaden National Liberation Front, which carried out the recent attack, and has been fighting for independence for their remote region bordering Somalia for years, has repeatedly warned foreign oil companies to leave the area, where oil was first discovered in small quantities in the 1970s.
An ONLF official claimed that the Chinese workers who were killed were not specifically targeted. But he did say that the people of his region were disappointed at China’s failure to seek their permission to work in the area. “The Chinese used to be more populist. Now they are turning into colonialists,” he said.
Chinese companies have also been attacked in Sudan. Their response has sometimes been to send in their own armed men to reinforce protection by the host regime.
“The Chinese are like the west was 100 years ago. They come in, make deals with the local bosses and then bring the guns,” a foreign expert on Sino-African relations said.
