New York, July 9, 2007—A prominent broadcaster covering public reaction to a large-scale government security crackdown in the commercial district of the capital, Mogadishu, was raided four times over the weekend by Somali government troops, according to news reports and the National Union of Somali Journalists.
In four separate raids since Friday, troops searched the offices of Radio Shabelle, a leading independent station, according to the same sources. Troops searched for weapons, threatened staff at gunpoint, and disrupted live broadcasts, but the searches did not yield any weapons, journalists at the station told CPJ. Last month, authorities confiscated guns carried by the station’s security personnel after conducting a search, according to CPJ research.
The station had aired recent interviews in which merchants and local residents alleged abuses by joint Somali-Ethiopian military forces in and around Mogadishu’s main Bakara market, local journalists told CPJ. Authorities launched a massive security sweep of the market last week in response to a spate of deadly attacks in the area, according to news reports.
Thousands of people have been killed or wounded in grenade attacks and roadside blasts set off by armed groups, and in counter-attacks by security forces since Ethiopian-backed Somali forces ousted an Islamist group from control of Mogadishu late last year. Battles in Mogadishu between March 12 and April 26 alone killed at least 1,670 people, The Associated Press reported.
“The repeated raids on the premises of Radio Shabelle and the death threats against its staff are in direct response to its independent coverage of the volatile situation in Mogadishu,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “The Somali transitional government must restrain its security forces and stop harassing the radio station immediately.”
The station was first raided on Friday afternoon when about eight soldiers entered the studios, interrupting a live broadcast from newscaster Abdinur Mohammed Kadie, according to sources at the station who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. Soldiers searched the station room to room, threatening to kill staff, including sports producer Abdi Rashid Abdi Ahmad, if any weapons were found. They also detained a staff security guard for an hour.
Separate groups of soldiers respectively returned on Friday evening, Sunday morning, and Sunday afternoon, forcing staff out of the studios and conducting more searches, the sources said.
It was the fourth time this year Radio Shabelle had been harassed, according to CPJ research. Last month, the station’s coverage of another government security crackdown led authorities to shutter the station for four days on accusations of fomenting unrest.
Somalia has had no effective central government since the fall of dictator Siad Barre in 1991. Rival Somali factions are scheduled to participate in a key reconciliation conference next week, according to news reports.
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Reacting to today’s court proceedings in Ethiopia in which the prosecutor demanded death sentences for all 38 defendants in a 14-month-long political trial, Amnesty International expressed shock and called for the court to reject the prosecutor’s demand.
The court told the defendants to submit pleas of mitigation in the next three days. Sentences are expected to be passed on 16 July.
The group of 38 includes two women, journalists, a prominent human rights defender, and leaders of the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) party. All have been in prison since November 2005. During the prosecution case they had refused to submit a defence on the grounds that they did not expect a fair trial. After the judges ruled that they had a case to answer, they considered submitting a defence. However, on 11 June the judges reportedly cut short their requests concerning preparing a defence, and convicted them as charged.
The 38 had been convicted of “outrages against the Constitution” and “impairing the defensive power of the state,” with five of them also convicted of “leading, preparing or inciting armed opposition.” They had earlier been acquitted of “treason” and “attempted genocide,” but the prosecutor has appealed against this earlier court decision.
Amnesty International said that it is shocking that the defendants are now facing the possibility of execution. On the basis of the information available to Amnesty International, most — if not all — are prisoners of conscience imprisoned on account of their non-violent opinions, who have not used or advocated violence. Amnesty International has been calling for their unconditional release.
There have been several unconfirmed reports that the Ethiopian government is considering releasing the 38 on certain conditions — as well as some other CUD members still on trial — in the coming days.
For several months during the trial, the imprisoned CUD leaders had been reported by various sources to have been engaged in private communications with government representatives through an Ethiopian mediator.
It has been unofficially reported that they may be granted a “pardon” and released in exchange for having signed a statement, along with other CUD members still on trial, that is said to be an admission of some responsibility for the violence that took place during demonstrations in June and November 2005 following disputed elections. During the protests, 193 demonstrators were shot dead by the security forces and six police officers killed by demonstrators.
A government official has said that any such pardon could only be granted through the presidential amnesty or pardon process after the end of the trial.
Ten other defendants in the same trial who are presenting a defence are due to appear in court on 12 July. They include civil society activists Daniel Bekele and Netsanet Demissie, who are prisoners of conscience.
Another separate trial of CUD members — including Kifle Tigeneh, an elected CUD Member of Parliament — has been adjourned to 29 October. The defendants in this trial also face possible death sentences.
Amnesty International has been monitoring the trial to assess whether it is consistent with recognized international standards of fair trial. The trial has also been observed by the European Union. Amnesty International plans to attend the sentencing hearing and defence case.
Background
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases and without exception believing it to be a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The death penalty legitimizes an irreversible act of violence by the state and will inevitably claim innocent victims. Amnesty International therefore demands unconditional and worldwide abolition of the death penalty.
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Yeharwork Gashaw, an Ethiopian human rights advocate, was gingerly allowed to take the stage for 5 minutes to speak about her organization, Ethiopian Women for Democracy, at the Ethiopian Sports Federation in North America event in Dallas, Texas, on July 6.
During her brief speech when she started talking about political prisoners, the microphone was unplugged and the whole stadium went quiet.
After a brief commotion — some thought it was a deliberate sabotage, others said it was a technical glitch or an accident — the microphone became live again. Although her main aim was to introduce Ethiopian Women for Democracy, she, like everyone, was probably confused and probably scared by the commotion even her mild appeal for prayers was not welcomed by ESFNA leaders because her time was cut short and was escorted of the stage. Her two companions, who were on the stage left without saying anything.
It appears ESFNA officials panicked or some equipment malfunction took place. Nonetheless, the audience was taken aback by the incident, because none of the speakers during the ‘Ethiopia Day’ experienced such
microphone problem or interruption.
Was this an accident or deliberate attempt to silence Ethiopians of different view while giving the stage and great accolade to the likes of Mohamud Ahmed?
Families and Children are also a victim of ESFNA
ESFNA continues to abuse Ethiopian of all sectors including mothers and children and by ignoring the wishes and the interest of the majority. Fetya, a mother of three beautiful children is a good example.
During the long wait for ‘Ethiopia Day’ as it never started on schedule, Fetya was getting desperate because of her three kids were becaming restless. To give her some solace, I opened a conversation, as she was sitting straight across from me.
She said she has been in the stadium in this blazing Texas sun for the whole day because the ESFNA website claimed that there is activity for children in the morning and for adult entertainment in the afternoon.
On Friday, July 6, Fetya brought her 3 children to watch and participate in the children soccer. According to ESFNA website, Friday, July 6, 2007, schedule includes two programs for Children Soccer at 8:30 AM and 10:00 AM. Fetya said, she checked the website in the morning to make sure there was no change. When she arrived, there was nothing. When she asked two ESFNA officials about Children Soccer, they told her that they knew nothing about it.
After paying $15 dollar entrance fee, she decided to wait for ‘Ethiopia Day’ that was also scheduled to start at 5:30 PM according to their website. Fortunately, it started, but almost two hours late at 7:20 PM. Even after that, despite 3 months of planning according to the MC, technical glitches abounded. The sound quality was poor and a great commotion took place among the organizers.
One of the singers decided to stop in the middle of the song because the sound system was too bad. The MC, after a few minutes, decided to explain what was going on, cancelled the whole show and ordered the
staged cleared. After a brief hoopla, ESFNA officials decided to start the program again.
Fetya, a petite Ethiopian and her children endured a small ordeal. She said she cancelled school for her children to be with Ethiopian children, because as she explained that they live quite a distance from Dallas and they don’t get a chance to see other Ethiopians.
For Fetya, none of her expectations were met. ESFNA is about money, said said. Like many Ethiopians, her conclusion was on the mark.
MIAMI — A man visiting Miami on a youth mission is in critical condition after being struck by lightning on Sunday.
Hailu Kidanemariam, 40, was struck while going door-to-door, handing out children’s books in a northwest Miami-Dade County neighborhood.
Resident Maria Martinez said she had just received one of the books when Kidanemariam was hit.
“We heard like a gunshot,” she said. “When we turned around, I saw a cloud of smoke and this guy jumping, like basically being slammed on his feet. He just fell back and laid there.”
Lt. Elkin Sierra of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said paramedics brought Kidanemariam back from death.
“He had no heartbeat. He had no respirations,” Sierra said. “Our units intervened the way any emergency room doctor would intervene — we carry the same equipment — and brought back the pulse.”
Kidanemariam was airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where members of his youth group were awaiting his recovery.
“He is originally from Ethiopia,” friend Francisco Perez said. “He’s studying theology and nursing in Puerto Rico. He was here working for his scholarship. He could go back to school in August.”
Perez said the weather did not look threatening when lightning struck his friend.
“It wasn’t even raining,” he said.
According to Jim Lushine, an NBC WeatherPlus severe weather expert, more people are struck by lightning before it starts raining or after it stops. (More Lightning Facts)
“If the interval between thunder and lightning is 30 seconds or less, definitely stay inside,” Sierra said. “Don’t let the bright conditions fool you and think that it’s OK to be outside during lightning strikes.”
JIJIGA, Ethiopia — The gray-faced young man lying in bed number 15 of the run-down local hospital wasn’t much of a talker. In truth, few people are these days in Jijiga, a desert town whose tense streets are patrolled by swarms of Ethiopian police.
But Nur Omar Ali, 25, whose neck was patched with dingy bandages, had a particularly good reason for being silent. His throat had been cut. He’d been attacked and left for dead nine days earlier at his remote village. When he was asked to identify his assailants, the camel herder’s eyes shined with hate. “”Ethiopian soldiers,” rasped Nur, clamping a hand to his stitched-up neck.
Then, scowling, he rolled over and turned his back on his hospital visitors. After all, one was a reporter from the United States, a nation closely allied with the Ethiopian government that is conducting a fierce anti-insurgency campaign in the Ogaden Desert — a civil war in Ethiopia’s impoverished Muslim east that appears to be worsening thanks, at least in part, to the global confrontation between the U.S. and Islamic radicalism.
Human-rights groups and media reports accuse Ethiopia — a key partner in Washington’s battle against terrorism in the volatile Horn of Africa — of burning villages, pushing nomads off their lands and choking off food supplies in a harsh new campaign of collective punishment against a restive ethnic Somali population in the Ogaden, a vast wilderness of rocks and thorns bordering chaotic Somalia.
Ethiopia’s regime angrily denies the charges, which it blames on propaganda spread by the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front.
“We don’t see any basic violations of human rights,” said Bereket Simon, an adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. “Abusing the people doesn’t make sense. You abuse people and they look to the subversives. It’s counterproductive.”
Yet in Jijiga, the only town in the embattled region still open to journalists, residents told of the secret arrests of prominent ethnic Somali businessmen with purported links to the rebels — hotel owners, construction contractors and traders in qat, the intoxicating plant chewed by millions in the region.
One man in that raw frontier outpost described walking eight days through the bush to escape a war-ruined zone called Fik, where he claimed he saw torched and depopulated villages. And a displaced camel herder told how his village close to the Somalia border had been emptied by the Ethiopian army and its residents trucked to garrison towns such as Shilabo, a counterinsurgency tactic once used by the U.S. in Vietnam, and meant to deprive the rebels of their civilian support base.
“They loaded people into trucks and just abandoned them there,” said Farah, 60, who like most people in Jijiga refused to give his full name for fear of police reprisal. “They treated us like animals.”
‘People are actually starving’
Mostly, though, the whispered talk was about hunger.
The Ethiopian army has locked down immense swaths of the Ogaden, blocking all roads and smuggling trails to commercial traffic, and thus triggering desperate food shortages in a desert already prone to famines. A teacher from the central Ogaden town of Kebredehar said most shops in that area had closed for lack of stocks. The prices of remaining foodstuffs such as rice, he said, had rocketed 400 percent — far out of reach of ordinary Ogadenis.
“We’re forbidden to talk about it, but there is a big problem,” said a worker with the Ethiopian Red Cross. “It’s not just hunger anymore. People are actually starving.”
Humanitarian groups met Friday with the Ethiopian military to appeal for reopening the roads, several aid workers in Jijiga said. The army agreed — hinting that the current crackdown on the troubled region may be winding down, possibly due to the start of the rainy season.
Nobody, however, expects the lull in fighting to last. Indeed, most people expect the killing to accelerate.
Ogaden has been bloodstained by more than a century of Ethiopian conquest, revolts against European colonial rule, Cold War proxy battles and abortive independence movements. The current cycle of violence began early this year, soon after Ethiopia decided to invade neighboring Somalia to topple an emerging Islamist regime — with the blessings of the U.S.
As in Afghanistan and Iraq, that blow against a perceived terrorist threat yielded unexpected fallout.
In the case of Christian-dominated Ethiopia, it helped reignite the quiescent rebel movement in the Muslim hinterland of the Ogaden, experts say.
Emboldened by Ogadeni sympathy for their co-religionists across the Somalia border, and taking advantage of the Ethiopian army’s preoccupation with taming Mogadishu, the ONLF rebels began successfully attacking towns.
The insurgents have long accused the “colonial” Ethiopian military of mass rapes and summary executions in the isolated villages of the Ogaden. But the rebels have come under some scrutiny too. Recent grenade attacks blamed on ONLF sympathizers killed a handful of civilians in Jijiga. And a devastating rebel assault on a Chinese-run gas and oil exploration project in the Ogaden in April left 74 dead, many of them unarmed workers.
‘I played dead for two hours’
“They came and ordered us out of our tents, then lined us up and shot us,” said Eskedar Demissw, 27, a driver at the oil camp and the only survivor from his team of 12 laborers. “It took five minutes. I was shot three times in the back. I played dead for two hours.”
The ONLF claims that the oil workers were gunned down by confused Ethiopian army guards.
“What the Ethiopian regime is doing in the Ogaden is a catastrophe,” said Qamaan Hersi, a rebel spokesman. “As far as the U.S. is concerned, what better way is there to create [Islamic] extremism than to oppress people the way the Ethiopians are?”
In fact, Ethiopia’s crackdown in the Ogaden has put the U.S. in an awkward position. Washington is still resisting Ethiopia’s request to list the ONLF as a terrorist group. And last week, the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa convened a large meeting of humanitarian organizations to discuss ways of getting aid into the war zone.
American civil affairs soldiers once built schools and drilled water wells around Jijiga. In the Ogaden, all those hearts-and-minds programs are on hold.
“I’m not sure the Americans would be very welcome anymore,” said Kassahun Gebregioris, an independent human-rights worker in Jijiga. “The Ogadeni clans associate them too much with the Ethiopians. And they don’t forget.”
Woyanne prosecutors demanded the death penalty on Monday for opposition officials and journalists convicted of trying to overthrow the government, treason and inciting violence.
“Since they have been found guilty on all counts, they should be punished with the highest penalty,” prosecutor Abraham Tetemke told the court.
The prosecutor also requested the court to confiscate all the properties of the journalists and publishers who were convicted along with the opposition leaders.
The court is expected to issue a sentence on July 16.
The accused, who have chosen not to defend themselves, did not speak during today’s session, but will have a chance to do so during next week’s court session. “They have not shown any sign of regret in the court, and they have not accepted the sovereignty of the court,” said prosecutor Abraham Tetemke.
“Therefore we request that they should be punished with capital punishment.” “The accused conspired to overthrow the government. In the process, they have created havoc, destroying state and private proerty. They are also responsible for the deaths of security forces and because of this we request the death penalty,” the prosecutor added.
The court gave the accused a week to provide any mitigating evidence. The judge had been due to pass sentence but he adjourned the hearing for a week to allow those convicted the chance to respond to the prosecutor’s statement.
The opposition leaders continue to hold a position that they do not recognize the legitimacy of the court and will not submit any document or evidence.
The courtroom was packed with relatives of the accused, who sobbed as they heard the prosecutors’ demand.
One woman sitting among the friends and relatives laughed derisively when the prosecutor demanded the death sentences. Judge Adil, thinking that the person who laughed was Ato Abayneh Berhanu’s wife, told her to leave the court. When she said that he is mistaking her for another person, [firde gemdil] Adil said that he will hold her in contempt unless she leaves the court room. He stopped the proceedings until she was escorted out.
The BBC’s Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa says the constant delays are hard for some of the prisoners’ families to bear.
Some women were visibly upset; others said bitterly that the government was deliberately delaying the case and playing with their lives.
After court adjourned, family members of the accused shuffled out silently, some with shocked looks on their faces, others wiping away tears.
Mulatu Teklu, 67, walked dazedly out of court after he learned that his youngest son, 32-year-old Yenene Mulatu, could die for his actions.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m very sorry.”
Others were more optimistic. Asrat Tassie, a former defendant and opposition politician who was among 25 defendants released from jail in April, said he was sure that a deal to pardon the leaders would come to fruition.
The officials were convicted last month of charges relating to violent protests over disputed elections in 2005 which the opposition says were rigged.
Nearly 200 people were killed in clashes between protesters and security forces over the vote that altered the political landscape in the Horn of Africa country of 81m people, handing the opposition a vastly increased share of parliamentary seats.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said he regretted the post-poll violence, but blamed it on opportunistic rioters and an opposition conspiracy to topple him by force.
Last month, he condemned calls by Western diplomats for the 38 to be released as “shameful and wrong”.
BBC reporter says that the sentences may not be the end of the story. The Meles regime has repeatedly said it cannot interfere in the judicial process. However once sentence has been passed, then there may be the possibility of clemency or pardon.
Some of those close to the prisoners now feel that talk of possible pardon is a false hope that comes from non-government sources and that the rumors could be a ploy by the Meles regime to minimize public anger. The latest talk is granting commutation of sentence from death penalty to prison term rather than full pardon. That may explain the prosecutor’s request for the death penalty.
Hailu Kidanemariam, 40, was struck while going door-to-door, handing out children’s books in a northwest Miami-Dade County neighborhood.