EDITORS NOTE: It is true that Mugabe is another bloodsucking African dictator. But the British are worse. They have done more harm to Zimbabawe, and Africa, in general, than 100 Mugabes could possible have done. Take a look at what they are doing in Ethiopia and Somalia through their mercenaries Meles Zenawi and Abdullahi Yusuf [See this]. ER is not the only one that is saying this. Just watch this video in which a British Member of Parliament makes the same argument.
HARARE (By Cris Chinaka, Reuters) — Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was quoted on Sunday as saying he would be willing to hand power to a ruling party ally when he was sure the country was safe from “sellouts” and from British interference.
But the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper said he gave no time-frame and again vowed to stop the opposition from ending his rule, which Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband described as sadism.
Mugabe, 84, is fighting for re-election in a June 27 run-off against Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The opposition leader won the first round in March but not with enough votes to take the presidency.
The veteran Zimbabwean leader, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, has threatened to go to war to stop a Tsvangirai victory.
The Mail said Mugabe told a rally on Saturday that his “leadership was prepared to relinquish power to those (ZANU-PF officials) that uphold the country’s (independence) legacy”.
“This country cannot be sold at the stroke of a pen,” he added, repeating a vow not to let the MDC, whom he has branded as British puppets, rule the country.
The Mail said Mugabe urged supporters to concentrate on defending his government’s land nationalisation and black economic empowerment policies, and not on complaints by what he called “sellouts” that ZANU-PF has been in power for too long.
Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector, once one of Africa’s most prosperous, has collapsed, and shortages of bread, milk and meat are common. Inflation is 165,000 percent and unemployment 80 percent.
“We are the custodians of Zimbabwe’s legacy. We will pass this on to those we know are fully aware of the party’s ideology, those who value the country’s legacy,” the newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying.
“I WILL NOT GROW OLD”
Mugabe has previously said he did not want to name an heir over fears he or she would become a target of other officials nursing ambitions to succeed him as ZANU-PF leader.
The president gave no timetable for his possible retirement and added: “But as long as the British still want to come here, I will not grow old; until we know we no longer have sellouts among us.”
Mugabe this week threatened that he and his independence war veterans will take up arms again to stop the MDC taking power.
The MDC and rights groups say ZANU-PF have launched a brutal campaign of violence which has killed at least 66 MDC activists, wounded hundreds others and displaced tens of thousands since the March 29 election.
Britain’s Miliband said South Africa had a responsibility to do more to bring pressure on its neighbour, and condemned the violence that has marred the run-up to the election.
“The first thing is to be clear about the sadism, and I use that word advisedly, that’s going on … in Zimbabwe,” he told BBC television.
“People being killed, people being tortured, people being beaten. Election observers being stripped out, election officials being stripped out.”
The African Union expressed concern over reported violence and said it planned to send “a sizable” team of observers to monitor the run-off poll.
Tsvangirai says he is confident of victory despite the intimidation campaign in which he has been detained several times this month. (Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa, editing by Gordon Bell)
Ato Gizachew Shiferraw, chairman of the UDJ general assembly organizing committee, told Kinijit North America officials that the Meles regime’s security forces have dispersed the party’s delegates on Saturday.
First, the delegates, about 400 of them, went to the Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa Saturday morning. When they were told they cannot hold a meeting there, they went to the UDJ office by several buses provided by UDJ executives. They put up a tent on the front yard of the office and tried to convene the assembly there. After waiting until they finished setting up the tent, two Woyanne security agents (only 2 of them) came and told them to disperse. They did so without any argument. Even sheep and goats put up more resistance. The UDJ leaders and the 400 delegates acted like well-tamed slaves. This is not peaceful struggle. This is a joke. Even worse, this is a willful submission to slavery.
According to Ato Gizachew, there will be another attempt to hold the meeting Wednesday, after making appeals to Woyanne authorities on Monday and Tuesday.
Ato Gizachew, ER has at most respect for you, Wzt. Birtukan Mideksa, and all your colleagues at UDJ. You are real heroes in the struggle for democracy and freedom in Ethiopia. But what part of NO don’t you understand? Woyanne told you in so many words NO you cannot operate freely in Ethiopia. So please for the sake of the people you are trying to help, do not waste your time, energy, and scarce resources on a futile attempt to organize an opposition party inside Ethiopia.
This week alone, you spent over $20,000 trying to hold a meeting even though Woyanne made it absolutely clear to you that you cannot do it. You have tried enough. You paid enormous sacrifices. It did not work. So please follow the decisions made by many of your colleagues in the UDJ and suspend your operations in Ethiopia. Don’t make a joke of yourself.
Moving on, the best thing UDJ can do for the struggle is to release all Kinijit branches and support groups around the world from their obligation to the party. The Kinijit support groups then can decide what course to follow next. The best thing to do is to rally around Ginbot 7 as Kinijit support groups. Some of them may decide to become full-fledged members.
Every day and every hour we waste hesitating, day dreaming about Woyanne’s intention, analyzing problems to death is the precious time we could use to save our people from holocaust.
There is a tested leadership that is willing to utilize all means necessary to fight the Woyanne cancer and kill it, in collaboration with other organizations. Many of these leaders, such as Berhanu Nega, are elected representatives of the people of Ethiopia. Let’s all rally around these leaders.
A few years ago, Meklit Hadero was doing a 9-to-5 administrative gig at the Haas Foundation here and taking private vocal lessons on the side. The sweet-voiced, Ethiopian-born Yale graduate wasn’t figuring on a singing career. But after an unforgettable night at the funky little Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street, music became her life and the day job tapered away.
Walking into the little Mission District room for the first time, she found two guitar players in opposite corners, a drummer in a third and a guy playing the oud, an ancient North African lute, up in the tiny loft. “It was an incredible experience. You were surrounded by the music,” Hadero says. “They were playing a groove, and everyone was kind of bopping, then suddenly this guy Fernando started signing a call-and-response, and everything just sparked. The whole room became like one. It’s very rare to feel that connected to one person, let alone a whole room full of people. I thought, ‘Wow, what is this place?’ ”
Smitten, she eventually started singing at the multidisciplinary art house, where you can learn to draw or dance flamenco, and where some of the most creative young musicians in town play for receptive crowds. It’s now home base for Hadero, an artist in residence, who’s cropping up in a number of interesting settings these days, playing solo dates here, around the Northwest and elsewhere, and with Nefasha Ayer, a cross-cultural band that riffs on dancing grooves and floating melodies.
Simple tunes
Tonight at Epic Arts in Berkeley, Hadero performs the simple tunes on her first CD, “Eight Songs,” on a triple bill with two other “black women and their guitars,” as she jokingly puts it: Cristina Orbe and Akosua. On Sunday, Nefasha Ayer gets down at Amnesia on Valencia Street.
A few Saturdays ago, the band, whose name means “the wind that travels” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, stirred up the crowd packed into the Red Poppy. A loose-limbed group that stitches ragas and reggae, Ethiopian jazz and Congolese grooves, the band was formed by Hadero and guitarist Todd Brown, a painter who started the art house in 2003 with tango dancer Alexander Allende and now directs the nonprofit with Hadero. The music aims to explore the longing of people caught between countries and cultures, “the space of in-between,” where the sounds of Africa, India and the Americas connect. The players include classical Indian and jazz saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan, master Afro-Peruvian percussionist Lalo Izquierdo on the box drum called the cajón, bassist Miles Jay, Abdi Jibril from Kenya on congas and maracas, and Keenan Webster playing the West African marimba called the balafon and the lute-like kora.
“What was so joyous that night was that we were all from different cultural backgrounds. But we were expressing it with the music, without having to say a thing,” says Hadero, 27, who was born in Addis Ababa but grew up in Iowa and Brooklyn. Her parents are both doctors who left Ethiopia in the violent years following the 1974 revolution, going first to East Germany, then, after making it across to West Berlin, to the United States, with the help of Catholic Charities. They landed in Iowa, where they had a friend. Her father got a residency in New York, where the family lived for many years. (Now divorced, her father lives in Florida, her mother in Seattle, where Hadero’s cousin, noted rapper Gabriel Teodros, also lives.) A bright, soft-spoken woman who wears flowing clothes and a flower in her hair, Hadero sings in English and Amharic. She projects an inner glow as her gentle voice moves in and out of the sound like a jazz instrumentalist – and her hands do a few Hindu-like waves – rather than calling attention to itself.
Flowers in her hair
“I always wanted to be a singer, I just didn’t know if I could do it,” says Hadero, sitting on a stool at the Red Poppy, sipping coffee from a mug bearing van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” She’s wearing an orange sundress and a white silk orchid in her hair. She’s been wearing a flower, real and fake, since college and can’t seem to shake it. “It expresses some very basic part of who I am,” she says, smiling. “It’s pretty direct.”
Hadero sang in choirs in grade school – she was 12 when a piano teacher turned her on to Billie Holiday – and in high school, and occasionally sang a tune a cappella in a performance series she started at Yale, where she studied political science. After moving here, she studied voice with David Babich and other local teachers and took songwriting, musicianship and guitar classes at Blue Bear School of Music. She took the leap after Brown urged her to sing at one of the shows the Mission Arts & Performance Project puts on at the Red Poppy and other neighborhood spots. Brown had never heard her, but sensed she had something. She sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” and Brown was sold.
“I did it on a leap of faith,” says Brown, who paints and teaches workshops at the Red Poppy, where his expressionist canvases hang on the walls, a printing press sits in the bathroom and wooden chairs, gauzy white curtains and a rainbow-striped hammock dangle from the ceiling. “Sometimes that really doesn’t work out. This time it did.”
Brown and Hadero, who are not romantically involved, write the music for Nefasha Ayer. Next year they’re doing a residency at the de Young Museum, and this fall are putting on a series of Red Poppy performances and exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of its Bay Area Now show. Hadero will start work soon on a commission from Brava Theater to write music for a new play by Brian Thorstensen about dissidents and artists who disappear in times of political upheaval.
Writing music for Nefasha Ayer, Brown, who has a feel for Congolese and other guitar-based African music, cooks up a groove and a simple harmonic structure. Hadero listens and begins to picture images; she creates the melody and lyrics that tell the story.
“The music I come up with tends to be very rhythmic, and her tendency is to float, to have a melody that really circles the rhythm,” Brown says. “The two fall in together, and people love the feeling.”
Influences
Hadero has listened to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Virginia Rodrigues, who inspired her pretty version of the Brazilian song “Negrume da Noite” on the CD, whose covers she and artist friends hand-painted in a homemade way that reflects the music. She cites Nina Simone and Mexican singer Lila Downs as big influences. Simone’s emotional intensity gets her, and she loves the way Downs changes the color and texture of her voice, “from small and delicate to expansive to gravelly to sweet. I really try to do that.”
Hadero writes spare songs about love and longing, sung over basic guitar chords. “I wouldn’t call myself a guitarist. I use the guitar,” Hadero says. Her solo work “has a kind of preciousness to it, but it’s changing as I grow in my musicianship. The solo music is kind of letting people into my world a little bit. Nefasha Ayer is going out into something greater together. It has this grander intention. It’s a larger canvas.” Working with these musicians, Hadero has become more comfortable with improvisation, “which is the real juice. You may not know where you’re going, but everybody’s right there with you. It’s a glorious thing.”
Meklit Hadero performs solo at 8:30 p.m. today at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $7. (510) 644-2204, www.epicarts.org. She performs with Nefasha Ayer at 9 p.m. Sunday at Amnesia, 853 Valencia St., San Francisco. $7. (415) 970-0012, www.amnesiathebar.com.
To hear samples of Meklit Hadero’s solo music, go to meklithadero.com. To hear Nefasha Ayer’s music, go to www.nefashaayer.com.
At about 4:00 PM today, the police told Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) — former CUDP — that it cannot hold its Founding Congress which was scheduled to be held at the Imperial Hotel tomorrow, Saturday, June 14, 2008. Their excuse is that we do not have prior permission for holding a public gathering.
Peaceful assembly is guaranteed by the Ethiopian Constitution. There is no law that requires obtaining prior permission for indoor gathering. The hotel reservation was made over two weeks ago. The Hotel Management had informed the relevant authorities on the details of the gathering –- a usual practice -– over a week ago and were told that it could go ahead as scheduled. Then, suddenly, there came this ban on a Friday, at the end of the day’s working hours, followed by a weekend.
We believe that this was a deliberate measure calculated to prevent the Congress from taking place. It is an illegal measure that violated our constitutional right.
Over 400 delegates were to attend the Congress at the Imperial Hotel. Two-thirds of these delegates have come from the Regions. The rest are from Addis Ababa. UDJ had spent over four months painstakingly preparing for this Congress. The preparation started with the gathering of founding-members signatures from throughout the country, the preparation of documents such as the Programme and Bylaw and the selection of delegates.
We started our preparations with the full knowledge of the National Electoral Board. We have invested about 300,000 birr on this Congress and on various preparations leading to it.
We are examining several options on what to do next. One of the options is to hold the Congress in-house: on the premises of our office. The space available is very limited, weather condition is not favorable.
We may have to make drastic adjustments in our programme such as limiting activities, without affecting vital ones, and extending the meeting by a half day. We see the present obstacle before us as a challenge. The Congress will be held, if not tomorrow, then soon.
Unity for Democracy and Justice
June 13, 2008
Addis Ababa
The Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa told leaders of Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ) today that they cannot hold their meeting tomorrow because the Woyanne regime has ordered them to cancel it.
UDJ has been planning to hold its General Assembly meeting Saturday and Sunday at the Imperial Hotel in Addis Ababa where it would decide on the party’s future course of action and elect its leades. Over 400 UDJ representatives, as well as guests have been expected to attend the meeting.
UPDATE FROM KINIJIT NORTH AMERICA >>
General Assembly of UDJP
The leaders of Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJ) were told today by the Imperial Hotel that they cannot conduct their meeting tomorrow . Clearly the Woyanne regime has ordered the hotel to cancel it. Listen to the following interview with Ato Gizachew Shiferaw with Kinijit North America PR on this matter here
EDITOR’S NOTE: Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister Addisu Legese says figure of needy is deliberate exaggeration by some institutions. There are only 4.5 million people who are hungry, according to Addisu. Read more about what this sick heartless Woyanne says below as reported by WIC (Walta Woyanne information Center).
Addis Ababa, June 13 (WIC) – Institutions that exaggerate the food shortage in Ethiopia and report inflated figures of the needy are intent on belittling the economic growth of the country and calculating their interests, Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse said.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development told journalists yesterday that some institutions engaged in relief work consider the decline in the number of the needy as a threat to their existence.They therefore have been suggesting to report inflated figures so as to get huge assistance, he added.
According to Addisu, the number of people facing food shortage due to the shortage of Belg rains in some areas of the country stands at 4.6 million and the government has been providing assistance for them.
The food shortage has occurred in some woredas of SNNP, Oromia, Somali, Amhara and Tigray states, it was indicated.
Though various institutions have been reporting exaggerated figures of needy people, a study carried out by the government has ascertained that the number stands at only 4.6 million, he reiterated.
The figure includes people living belg growing regions as well as households embraced under the safety net program of the government, the Deputy Prime Minister added.
Of the stated figure, the number of children under the age of five and in need of follow up and support is just 75,000, it was pointed out.
Some 775,000 quintals of food has so far been apportioned to the people since last February, he said, adding that medical care was also given by earmarking 50 million birr budget, according to him.
The government would further enhance the support it has been rendering to the people needy in collaboration with partners, the Deputy Premier concluded.
Addis Ababa, June 13 (WIC) – Institutions that exaggerate the food shortage in Ethiopia and report inflated figures of the needy are intent on belittling the economic growth of the country and calculating their interests, Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse said.