By Linda Young
New York, NY (AHN) – A United Nations-backed operation is resettling ethnic Eritreans in the United States. About 700 ethnic Kunama refugees from Eritrea who spent years in exile in northern Ethiopia will begin a new life in the United Nations. The refugees were flown out of Ethiopia on Wednesday and are being resettled in several cities in Georgia, Florida, Washington and Nevada.
The Kunama refugees have been in Shimelba camp in Ethiopia. They were displaced in the 1998-2000 border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. . They come from a primarily rural ethnic group of only about 100,000 people who live along the disputed border. They said they entered Ethiopia because they were being persecuted and harassed by the Eritrean government.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is giving assistance to the refugees until September. The refugees will be resettled in several U.S. cities including Atlanta, Orlando, Seattle and Las Vegas.
One refugee headed for Atlanta with his family of five explained why he was immigrating to the United States instead of trying to return to Eritrea. His youngest daughter is 7-years-old and was born at the Shimelba refugee camp, according to a U.N. statement.
“I opted to go further afield not because I do not like my country, but because I cannot return at this point,” said Nagasi Gorado Becho, 45, before boarding his flight in Ethiopia.
His wife said that they had friends who had resettled in the U.S. and appreciated their opportunities for work and learning there
The 700 refugees are also being resettled because the UNHCR says that they can’t return safely return home to Eritrea. It has arranged for extensive orientation programs to help the refugees adapt to life in America.
There are 1,300 Kunama refugees left in Ethiopia, but not all of them will be resettled in the United States. Many of them want to wait for a political solution that will allow them to return to Eritrea.
By Kelly Lecker and Meredith Heagney
The Columbus Dispatch
Melake Selam Sisay Ayele faced many challenges when he came to Columbus almost 20 years ago. He had a new home and was learning a new language.
Still, the Ethiopian priest’s concern was for the thousands of other refugees who also call Ohio home.
In 1992, he founded the Ethiopian Medhane-Alem Cathedral of Columbus, an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Victorian Village, and worked to make life easier for refugees.
“It was very difficult for him. He was already an old man and didn’t know English well, and he left some of his family behind,” said Seleshi Asfaw, director of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church Social Services. “But he had spiritual sons and daughters here.”
Ayele, who was 80, died June 29, and people are coming to Columbus from across the United States as well as Canada and Australia this week for funeral services. The final service will be Saturday at the cathedral.
His youngest child, Birhanelem Ayele, 24, of the East Side, said his father’s death is devastating for him and the wider community.
Ayele had seven children, four daughters and three sons, whose ages range from 24 to 50. Two live in Sudan, one in Australia and the youngest four in Columbus.
Ayele’s caring nature went beyond his immediate family, his son said.
Ayele was always a leader. He was a priest in Ethiopia, and ministered to many people through border wars, oppressive governments, famine and clashes between ethnic groups.
He was fearless through all his trials, his son said.
“He was never scared of death,” Birhanelem Ayele said. “I think it has to do with religion.”
Like many Ethiopian refugees, he ended up in Sudan where he started about 20 Christian churches, Asfaw said. Times were hard there, too. Food and water were sometimes scarce, and Ayele was leading a Christian congregation in a largely Islamic country.
“They saw him as Moses,” Asfaw said.
Ayele eventually came to Columbus, where some of his family already was living.
He quickly founded the church, which Asfaw said has about 700 members, and led the congregation until his death.
He was active in the social services organization that Asfaw leads and worked extensively with children at the church.
“It is a great loss for all the Ethiopians here in Columbus,” Asfaw said. “He was really a magnet, a center. He brought us together.”
Ayele hadn’t been back to Ethiopia for more than 30 years. When his son visited in 2005, he came back and showed his father video he took in the country.
All he could do was cry, Birhanelem Ayele said, because he missed his homeland so much.
Now his son is left to cope with his own heartbreak.
“Everything I had was taken away,” he said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it. He’s in the best place you could ask for.”
There were several services this week for Ayele. The final wake will be at 9 a.m. Saturday at the cathedral at 610 Neil Ave., followed by a eulogy. A burial ceremony will follow at St. Joseph Cemetery, 6440 S. High St.
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APA-Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) Visiting Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday launched in Addis Ababa a pan-Africa e-network pilot project for tele-medicine and tele-education.
The $50 million pilot project will cover 17 other African countries.
“This is an initiative by India to use Indian expertise in information technology to bring benefits of healthcare and higher education to all countries of Africa, which aims at bridging the digital divide among 53 countries of the African continent,” Mukherjee said.
The project is funded and implemented by India in collaboration with the African Union.
The project will be used to network over 21 universities established in various parts of the country.
Source: DT/pm/APA
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 5 (IPS) – An intensified counter-insurgency campaign against Somali rebels and their suspected civilian supporters in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region is drawing growing criticism by human rights groups and concern from the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, a staunch ally of Addis Ababa.
The campaign, which some experts date to an April attack by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) on a Chinese oil installation in which 74 people were killed, including nine Chinese, is causing immense suffering by the local Somali population, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) which released a statement on the situation Wednesday.
“Ethiopian troops are destroying villages and property, confiscating livestock and forcing civilians to relocate,” according to Peter Takirambudde, HRW’s Africa director. “Whatever the military strategy behind them, these abuses violate the laws of war.”
But the campaign is also putting additional pressure on Ethiopia’s army at a moment when, much like U.S. troops in Iraq, it appears increasingly bogged down in a low-level guerrilla war in neighbouring Somalia and faces growing tensions along its still-contested border with Eritrea with which it fought a bloody conflict from 1998 to 2000.
Even Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi conceded last week that his government “made a wrong political calculation” when it intervened in Somalia late last year, driving the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) from power in Mogadishu and most of the rest of the country.
Since then, neither the transitional federal government (TFG) nor an African peacekeeping force — for which only about 1,500 Ugandan troops have been deployed so far — has been able to exert control over the capital, leaving an estimated 10,000 Ethiopian troops to maintain order in what most observers see as a deteriorating security situation in which anti-Ethiopian forces are steadily gaining strength.
“Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia has led to more instability and chaos in Somalia, and made Ethiopia more vulnerable in different fronts,” according to Ted Dagne, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service here. “When your forces deployed on multiple fronts, it definitely weakens your strategic position.”
The Bush administration, which backed Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia and even carried out several attacks against specific “terrorist” targets in the country since the invasion, has declined to publicly criticise the ongoing counter-insurgency campaign in Ogaden.
At the same time, however, U.S. officials have privately expressed concern about the serious rights abuses, including murders, rapes, and the burning of villages, committed by the army and the possibility that its continuation could attract ICU, which Washington has accused of harbouring al Qaeda militants, and other anti-Ethiopian forces to the Ogaden, effectively transforming what are currently two distinct conflicts into a broader, regional war.
The Meles government has long insisted that links between ONLF and the ICU already exist, but that charge is questioned by independent experts here and strongly denied by the ONLF itself.
“The ONLF wishes to make clear to the international community that we are not, have not been and will not be a party to the ongoing conflict in Somalia as a matter of policy and principle,” it said last month.
The State Department has also rejected Ethiopian requests that it list the ONLF as an international terrorist organisation.
The Ogaden, which is dominated by the Somali Dorad clan and came under Ethiopian rule only in the mid-19th century, has been the scene of a near-constant tug-of-war between Somalia and Ethiopia since the former became independent in 1960. The conflict emerged into open warfare in the late 1970s when then-President Siad Barre tried unsuccessfully to realise a “Greater Somalia” by invading the region.
Barre was eventually forced from power in 1991, the same year that his Ethiopian nemesis, Haile Mengistu Mariam, was ousted in Addis Ababa and replaced by Meles and his Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front.
At the time, the ONLF joined the government but then left it when the Meles government launched its crackdown against the group in 1993 for advocating substantial autonomy or independence, both of which were permitted under Ethiopia’s new constitution.
Since then, it has waged a low-level guerrilla campaign that, until its attack on the Chinese installation this year, has gained almost no international attention, in part due to the remoteness of the region and obstacles placed by the government to human-rights monitors and journalists who wanted to travel there.
“The Ogaden is the forgotten tragedy,” according to Dagne, who noted that Ogadenis have remained loyal citizens under successive Ethiopian governments who have long suffered discrimination by Addis Ababa.
In recent weeks, Ethiopia’s counter-insurgency efforts in the Ogaden have intensified dramatically, according to HRW, which said thousands of civilians have been displaced, even in places where there is no known ONLF presence.
In tactics reminiscent of Sudan’s counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur, witnesses told HRW’s investigators that Ethiopian troops have burned homes and property, including the recent harvest and other food stocks, confiscated livestock and, in a few cases, fired on and killed fleeting civilians. In addition, they have arrested dozens of people in the larger towns, particularly family members of suspected ONLF members.
Bombing by Ethiopian warplanes has also been reported.
The government has also imposed a trade and food blockade on the region in an apparent effort to force thousands of people in rural areas to move to larger towns and thus deny the ONLF a support base, according to HRW, which also criticised abuses by the ONLF, including the attack on the Chinese installation and the killing of at least 28 civilians on a nearby farm.
“At this point, the question whether this is similar to Darfur is very difficult to say because of the inability of international human rights monitors, the press, and others to get full access to the region and find out exactly what’s going on,” Georgette Gagnon, a regional specialist at HRW, told IPS.
“But for the people suffering in the Ogaden, the situation is incredibly serious, and the government needs to rein in its troops and stop attacking civilians and burning them out of their homes,” she added.
The HRW report was anticipated by a lengthy, front-page article in the New York Times from the Ogaden three weeks ago which described a “reign of terror” by Ethiopian troops and depicted the ONLF as an indigenous movement with strong popular support.
The Times reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, and two of his colleagues who contributed to the article were imprisoned for five days by the Ethiopian authorities after it was published and had all of their equipment confiscated.
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The Meles dictatorship this week has agreed to give Sudan a large tract of fertile land near Atbara River in the Gonder region, northwestern Ethiopia. The agreement was not reported by any of the state- controlled media in Ethiopia. Even the rubber-stamp parliament was not informed about it, let alone give its consent. Ethiopians in the Gonder region were also unaware of this major development.
This is the second time for Gonder to lose a large fertile land. When the ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front (Woyanne) came to power in 1991, it appropriated the Humera farmland to the Tigray region. That decision continues to be highly controversial.
The latest land giveaway is even more significant both politically, economically and historically to Gonder, and Ethiopia, in general. The fact that it was done secretly without the consultation of even the rubber-stamp parliament may later on cause sever problems for the Meles regime.
According to observers, the give away Gonder’s fertile land to Sudan is intended to bribe the Sudanese government not to allow Ethiopian freedom fighters to operate in its territory.
