PRESS RELEASE Exiled Ethiopian Trade Union Leaders
Release Anti-poverty Campaigners
Once again the verdict in the case of Ethiopian anti-poverty campaigners Daniel Bekele and Netsanet Demissie, which was expected on Thursday, November 22, 2007, has been postponed because one of the judges all in a sudden became ill. Not only the Kangaroo court judge, but the whole system is also sick as the country is in a crisis after the May 2005 national election. By terrorizing its citizens, the state and the system run by world class criminal gangs is sick and beyond recovery.
It is very sad and disturbing to hear again and again the lame excuses given by the failed legal system to postpone the verdict, to Friday November 30, 2007 which was long overdue. It is also an irresponsible act and disregard for the rule of law and the suffering of the two innocent young men, working for their country. The failed system has once again demonstrated its disregard for the rule of law and human rights as the fiasco prime minister is still clinging to power by intimidating and killing its citizens.
It has been repeatedly documented by various human rights organizations that the regime of the self crowned Prime Minster, Meles Zenawi, is synonymous sheer lack of justice or absence of semblance of due process. The courts are private chambers of Meles, prosecutors as his mouth pieces and the judges serving as his loyal butlers. Once again we witness and prove to the Democratic world, what has been said and happening continuously in the country.
Currently in our country Ethiopia, it is not the rule of law being upheld, but instead the gun culture is ruling over reason and logic as secret executions and detentions are common. Due process is never to be seen and framed up charges are order of the day through out the country.
In the mean time, the Addis Ababa criminal regime security forces and their hired armed thugs are attacking human rights activists, journalists, opposition party members and prominent citizens. They continue to deny the public to any independent information, except to their monopolized one sided false propaganda to enforce their act of evil. This refusal to allow the public to the basic freedom of expression and information is aimed at drawing an impregnable veil over human rights abuses and the disregard of the rule of law in the country and the crime they are committing by the hour.
It is long over due for the regime in Addis Ababa to account for its crimes, return to the rule of law and demand all those supporting and giving aid to the regime to halt their actions until it ceases its human right violations and respects the rule of law. To remain silent is to allow the forces of evil to flourish by every minute where millions are denied their rights by very few.
As a result, we appeal and call on world leaders and human rights organization as well as peace loving people of the democratic world to demand the release of the anti-poverty campaigners Daniel Bekele and Natsanet Demissie, which is long over due. The anti-poverty campaigners are hostages of the failed system, while the regime is the hostage of its false and failed system and propaganda. The democratic world has a moral and international responsibility to exert pressure for the release of the anti-poverty campaigners who continue to be under unbearable conditions for almost two years.
Thank you for supporting those whose rights are denied.
__________________
Exiled Ethiopian Trade Union Leaders
Email: [email protected]
Violence and sexual abuse within the home are among the main reasons children run away to live on the streets, according to a report, the State of the World’s Street Children, published by a coalition of charities.
In Ethiopia, an estimated 150,000 children live on the streets. The story of Genet, now living in a safehouse in Addis Ababa, is similar to those of many such children, especially girls.
No images of Genet are included to protect her identity.
My troubles began when I was 14 years old and my mother became too ill to care for my younger sister and me.
We were sent to live with a family as their domestic labourers.
We were both subject to frequent beatings and were not allowed to go to school.
A year later we were taken by our grandmother to live with a distant male relative elsewhere in Addis.
We were told our mother had died and this would now be our home.
It had been horrible with the family we had been living with before and I hoped the new family would be kinder to us now that our mother was gone.
But I was forced to go to bed with the male relative who we had been sent to live with and a woman in the household frequently beat us both.
I was pretty sure that the man was also sexually abusing my 11-year-old sister too. After two months I ran away but my younger sister was too frightened to come with me.
I ended up in the house of a family friend who took me in but they demanded that I pay my way by working as their domestic servant.
After being beaten and verbally abused, I decided to take my chances on the streets.
I find it very difficult to talk about my time on the streets of Addis. I survived there as best I could for over two months. I was often very hungry.
Other girls I met living and working on the street told me about the Drop-in Centre for street children operated by the Forum for Street Children.
It took a lot of courage to go there for help as I found it very difficult to trust adults.
But when I told the community workers there what had happened to me they immediately gave me a place in their safe home for girls.
I am now 16, I have started school again and I am being trained at a local health centre as a janitor so I will be able to support myself when the time comes to leave the safe home.
I am desperate to see my sister again. They tell me she has managed to escape from the abusive household we were in and is now living with our grandmother in her home village.
When I grow older I want to help other children in the same situation as me.
Ethiopian community leaders and social action groups will step up their fight this week against a government decision to wind down Ethiopian aliya in the coming months, as arguments for bringing thousands more Falash Mura immigrants currently unrecognized by Israel are presented to the Knesset’s State Control Committee on Wednesday morning.
According to representatives from the newly-formed Public Council for Ethiopian Jews, which includes such public figures as former Supreme Court Judge Meir Shamgar, Prof. Irwin Kotler, Ethiopian Chief Rabbi Yosef Adaneh, Geulah Cohen, Naomi Hazan and Hanan Porat, the government is reneging on its original promise to bring in all remaining Falash Mura – Ethiopian Jews whose ancestors converted to Christianity under duress a century ago.
They claim that sources inside the Interior Ministry have indicated that the process of checking eligibility of those still in Ethiopia will be stopped by the end of this year. This past summer, Jewish Agency for Israel officials based in Addis Ababa told The Jerusalem Post that aliya from the African nation would be over by the end of 2008, a sentiment reiterated by the Interior Ministry.
“We are not stopping our activities in Ethiopia; we are simply winding down an operation that has reached a natural conclusion,” Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabene Hadad said Tuesday. She confirmed that Interior Ministry operations in Gondar, where most of the Falash Mura are currently waiting to be processed for aliya, would be over sometime in the near future.
“What is important to highlight here is that the government is going back on its original commitment and is refusing entry to roughly 8,000 people who are eligible to make aliya according to criteria outlined in the past,” Avraham Neguise, director of Ethiopian advocacy group South Wing to Zion, told the Post. He was referring to a government decision from February 2003 permitting those Falash Mura willing to undergo an Orthodox Jewish conversion process to come to Israel under the Law of Entry.
“The government’s original decision did not talk about stopping the aliya on a certain date or at a certain point, but said rather that all those with a maternal link to Judaism were eligible to immigrate,” continued Neguise, adding that many of those who either were denied entry to Israel or had not yet been checked for eligibility had close family members already living here.
One such family is that of 24-year-old Telahun Tzegah, who made aliya with his mother seven years ago but left behind family members in Gondar, including half-siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.
“Their bags are packed and they are ready to come, but they [the Interior Ministry] refuse to process them,” he said Tuesday, adding, “They were originally told that they could make aliya, so they left their villages and moved to Gondar. Now they are stuck there with no help. They can’t go back to their villages, and they aren’t allowed to move here.”
Tzegah said that he was regularly forced to send the family a portion of the meager salary he earns as a security guard, “just so they can afford to eat.”
The Interior Ministry explained previously that it was simply working in compliance with the specifications of the 1999 Efrati census, which lists those Falash Mura with familial ties to Jews and hence eligible to come here.
However, Neguise pointed out that the Efrati list originally included three volumes – Falash Mura in Addis Ababa, in Gondar and in the outlying villages.
“The ministry has decided to ignore those people from the villages,” he said. “How can the government make the decision to split up families like this?”
Rabbi Menahem Waldman, director of the Shvut Am Institute and an expert on the Falash Mura conversion process, has joined forces with Neguise and also sits on the Public Council for Ethiopian Jews.
“These people are recognized as Jews according to Halacha and the State of Israel,” said Waldman, who helped to compile the Efrati census. “It is our responsibility as a Zionist state to bring these people here and welcome them with an open heart.”
He said that along with the hearing in the Knesset on Wednesday, the forum was also supporting a legal petition to force the government to honor its original commitment, and added that it would not give up until those 8,000 people were brought to Israel.
She was going to a world where there was said to be a pile of gold at every corner and a stash of money at every turn. She had heard rumors that the place was not much short of heaven. But that fantasy disappeared as soon as she got off the plane and took her first steps in the United States. America is nothing like what others in Ethiopia described it to be for junior Engidawork Kita.
Engidawork Kita and Selam Kabtiymer
[Photo by Gili Perl]
The lottery to another world
In 2000 Kita’s family won the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery that enabled them to make the move to the United States from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program annually makes 50,000 permanent visas available to a random selection of people who “meet strict eligibility requirements [and come] from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States,” according to the U.S. State Department web site.
Individuals who receive visas through the program are permitted to bring spouses and unmarried children under the age of 21 to the United States and are authorized to permanently live and work in the country, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services web site. “Since everyone wants to come to America, it’s a way of randomly picking people,” Kita’s friend, senior Selam Kabtiymer, says. Although Kabtiymer’s family had also won the DV lottery, she and her family were able to come to the United States without the lottery’s help. Kabtiymer’s mother was already residing in the United States and so the rest of her family was able to get visas through her. Kabtiymer’s father had applied for the DV lottery in the case they were not able to obtain visas this way.
Junior Engidawork Kita and Senior Selam Kabtiymer Photo by Gili Perl.
For Kita’s parents, as for most others in Ethiopia, the chance to move to the United States was a dream come true. A war had been raging between Ethiopia and Eritrea since 1998 over a border conflict. Even Kita was afraid when she heard news warning the country that Eritrea threatened to attack. “I used to get scared because I don’t want to die of course,” Kita says.
Still, Kita’s feelings towards the move were lukewarm – she wanted to experience America, but not at the expense of leaving her relatives, friends and culture behind. “You want to see what it’s like to be in America,” she says, but at the same time she did not want to leave.
Making the transition
The difficulties of the move were only compounded by Kita’s limited knowledge of English. “It was hard,” she says. But making Ethiopian friends in school and receiving support from teachers helped Kita adjust to the new environment. “[The teachers] were really helpful,” Kita says. In addition, Kita took ESOL from fourth to ninth grade to help her get past the language barrier.
Although there was no pile of gold waiting for her in the United States, Kita sees some clear benefits of living in the country. She finds that there are more opportunities to succeed in school because there is so much support available from the education system. Even though Kita went to a free public school in Ethiopia, students still needed to purchase books and other materials on their own. It was tough luck if you could not afford them; here, public schools provide the books as well as financial help.
Kita also feels that there are more facilities available in the United States, such as easy access to computers. “There [were] no such things as computers in my school [in Ethiopia],” she says.
Kita adds that American schools are more laid back. “School is easier here…compared to Ethiopia,” Kita says. She offers that this is not so much because the subjects are easier but more so because the teachers are comparatively lenient in this country.
Kabtiymer agrees that education is stricter in Ethiopia and there is much more pressure from teachers and parents. School rankings are taken very seriously and so students constantly compare themselves with others, according to her.
School here has helped Kita adapt to the American culture. But at the same time, she tries to maintain certain aspects of her Ethiopian heritage. She celebrates some of the Ethiopian festivals and eats Ethiopian food daily. Kita is also a member of the Ethiopian club at Blair and hopes to participate in the club’s big show in early June, which features traditional dances, a fashion show and a drama.
Kita still misses her country at times and though she realizes that money does not come easy no matter where you are, she does not want to move back permanently. “I want to stay here now that I am used to it,” Kita says. “I like it here.”
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — Ethiopia on Tuesday called for a quick deployment of peacekeepers in war-ravaged Somalia, an African nation increasingly running adrift in the face on an escalating insurgency.
Of the 8,000 peacekeepers the African Union pledged to send to bolster President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s weak government, only 1,500 Ugandan troops are actually on the round.
“The plan designed to deploy peacekeeping forces to Somalia should be materialised as soon as possible,” the Ethiopian foreign ministry said in a statement.
Ethiopian troops helped sweep aside Islamist militants from much of the country they had briefly governed in January, but have been embroiled in a deadly insurgency mainly in Mogadishu.
Rebels recently dragged through the streets, stumped and spat on the bodies of Ethiopian troops, a grisly reminder of a similar treatment of US special forces in 1993.
Burundi and Nigeria had given firm pledges to contribute soldiers, but are yet to make good their word.
The Ethiopian foreign ministry called on the international community to facilitate efforts to restore durable peace in Somalia, where the last functional government collapsed in 1991 after the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The escalating insurgency has seen UN chief Ban Ki-moon rule out sending any peacekeepers to the Horn of African nation, except for a “coalition of the willing.”
But on Monday, the UN Security Council said there was need to pursue contingency planning for the possible deployment of UN troops, side-stepping Ban, but giving no promises.
Previous peacekeeping forays by the United Nations and the United States ended disastrously in the mid-1990s and the world turned its back, abandoning the country at the mercy of armed gangs.
By Xan Rice, East Africa correspondent
Monday November 19, 2007
The Guardian
The Islamist-led resistance in Somalia is growing in scale and aggression, with insurgents openly taking on Ethiopian Woyanne troops and African Union peacekeepers in the capital Mogadishu, in fighting that has killed dozens, possibly hundreds, in the past three weeks.
Early on Saturday two groups of rebels fired grenades at Ugandan peacekeepers and briefly entered their post before being repelled. The attack, which coincided with an internet call by a Somali Islamist extremist, Adan Hashi Ayro, for peacekeepers to be targeted, came after two weeks of fighting and reprisals between insurgents and the allied Ethiopian Woyanne and government troops that caused a massive exodus from Mogadishu.
The UN estimates that 173,000 people have fled the city since October 27, adding to the 330,000 already displaced from the capital this year. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilians were killed, as both sides fired shells indiscriminately into residential neighbourhoods.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdullah, the UN secretary general’s special representative for Somalia, said last week that the huge displacement, coupled with high child malnutrition rates and extreme difficulty in delivering aid, had made this Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Few people believe that the situation is about to get better. Several experts interviewed by the Guardian say that the insurgents are becoming more powerful. A military analyst and a western diplomat to Somalia, neither of whom wished to be named, warned that the angry mood and conditions that allowed an Islamist movement to defeat a gang of warlords and take power in Mogadishu last year were returning. “We are on a merry-go-round and it’s back to 2006,” said the analyst. “The insurgents are gaining not only in physical strength, but in moral strength too.”
African Union commanders told diplomats last week that the insurgents were actively fighting in 70% of Mogadishu’s neighbourhoods. There are also signs that the resistance has spread beyond the capital. Islamic courts are reported to have taken control of two towns in the far south, while Hassan Al-Turki, a radical Islamist on the US terror list, is understood to be expanding his influence up the coast from his base near the Kenyan border.
Analysts say that the situation reflects a chronic miscalculation by the Ethiopian prime minister dictator, Meles Zenawi, who sent his troops into Somalia late last year, and by the US, which backed that decision. The goal was to rout the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC), which had brought a measure of calm to Mogadishu for the first time in more than a decade, but which was accused by Washington and Addis Ababa of close links to al-Qaida.
Ethiopian Woyanne troops easily swept through the Islamist fighters and installed the weak and unpopular Somali government in Mogadishu. The calm did not last long. Remnants of the SCIC’s military wing, the Shabaab, launched a low-scale insurgency, using hit-and-run tactics and remote-controlled bombs to target Ethiopian Woyanne and government troops. Many ordinary Somalis also resented the presence of tens of thousands of troops from Ethiopia. Soon warlords, clan leaders and businessmen were aiding the resistance with money, arms and their own militias.
