By Barry Malone
Gen. Asaminew Tsige is one of the 41 suspects who are in jail without charge in Ethiopia
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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Reuters) – A group accused of plotting to overthrow the Ethiopian regime were remanded in custody on Monday again after spending more than one month in prison without any charges or visitation rights, relatives said.
Ethiopian Woyanne regime security forces are holding 41 former and current army personnel from a “terror network” the government says was formed by Berhanu Nega, an opposition leader now teaching economics at a university in the United States.
“They will be held for another two weeks,” a relative who did not want to be named told Reuters outside the court in Addis Ababa. “They were not even charged today.”
The 41 are accused of planning to assassinate senior government figures and blow up public utilities to provoke street protests and overthrow the government.
“The investigation was now complete,” one lawyer said.
Security forces killed about 200 protesters after parliamentary elections in 2005 when the opposition disputed the victory of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government.
More than 100 relatives and supporters were gathered outside the courtroom. Ethiopian authorities have named only two of the prisoners despite calls from international rights groups that they name and charge all 41 detainees.
Neither family members nor lawyers have been able to visit the accused in prison, relatives said.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — Ethiopedia.com, an online encyclopedia of Ethiopia, is pleased to announce that world renowned Ethiopian scholar Prof. Ephraim Isaac has joined its team as an editorial adviser.
Ephraim Isaac is a founder and the first professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University when the Department was created in 1969. He is author of numerous scholarly works about the Late Second Temple period and Classical Yemenite Jewish and Ethiopic religious literature. He is currently Director of the Institute of Semitic Studies, Princeton, NJ, Chair of the Board of the Horn of Africa Peace & Development Committee, and President of the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America. He has taught at Princeton University, Hebrew University, University of Pennsylvania, Bard College, and other institutions of higher learning. He has received many honors including the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding’s 2002 Peacemaker in Action Award, honorary degrees from John J. College of CUNY, Addis Ababa University of Ethiopia, NEH Fellowship, among others. He knows seventeen languages, and lectures widely on the subject of “Religion & Warfare”, “Religion and Hate”, etc. and sits on Boards of some twenty-five international religious, educational, and cultural organizations.
Ethiopedia, which is based in Addis Ababa, strives to make knowledge about Ethiopia easily and freely accessible to any one in the world.
Ethiopedia is a collaborative project involving several volunteers from various field.
For more info
Ayda Million, Editor
Email: [email protected]
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (The Reporter) — The Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) party dismissed its plan to hold a public meeting at Meskel Square on Saturday, 23 May 2009, as it was not able to secure permission to hold the event from the City Government of Addis Ababa.
In a letter issued by Markos Bizuneh, officer of Peaceful Demonstration and Public Meeting Notification of the City Government, the party was told that it can only hold its meeting in halls of the party’s choosing.
Dr. Hailu Araya, UDJ’s public relations head and vice president, said that the demonstration notification office told them that they can only make facilities available for the party to hold its meetings in a hall.
Although the party notified the city administration on Monday, the response came after three days which, according to him, contravened the law.
Article 6 (2) of Proclamation No. 3/1991 which provides for the establishment of the procedure for peaceful demonstration and political meeting says, “Where the municipal or Awraja administrative office is of the opinion that … it is preferable for the peaceful demonstration or public political meeting to be held at some other time or place, it shall so notify the organizers by giving reasons, in writing, within 12 hours of the time of submission of their notice.”
”We submitted our request on Monday but they responded on Thursday. Here you can see the law had been breached,” Dr. Hailu said.
Denying the party a space to hold its activities has its own danger, Dr. Hailu said.
“In many places, especially in Amhara and Oromia regions, many of our offices have been closed, party members detained and intimidated,” he added.
Despite the problems that the party is facing, they will continue the peaceful political struggle, according to him.
By Barry Malone
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopian coffee exports will fall by 30-40 percent in 2009/2010, but the country hopes to become the world’s biggest sesame seed exporter this year, the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) boss said on Friday.
Ethiopian officials have blamed bad weather for near total crop failure in some southern growing zones this season, and ECX chief executive Eleni Gabre-Madhin said the global economic slowdown was also hurting overseas sales.
“This year we’re likely to see a 30 to 40 percent shortfall in coffee export earnings relative to last year,” she told Reuters in an interview at her office in Addis Ababa.
“But we are projecting to export 225,000 tonnes of sesame, earning about $250 million, which is likely to make us the world’s largest exporter.”
The ECX began trading sesame for the first time last month and potential investors in the sector from China and India have already visited the Horn of Africa nation, Eleni said.
Africa’s biggest coffee exporter is also the world’s fourth-largest sesame exporter after China, India and Myanmar, exporting 124,291 tonnes of sesame last year.
Eleni said Ethiopia could set the benchmark price for sesame in the future. “It’s a big ambition for a little country, but we have that potential,” she said.
Coffee accounted for some 60 percent of Ethiopia’s foreign exchange revenue in the 2007/2008 (June/July) season, when it earned more than $525 million from exports of 170,888 tonnes of mostly high quality arabica beans.
But Eleni said the cash-strapped nation would only make about $300 million from its biggest hard currency earner this year, partly due to the global economic slowdown.
“It’s not insignificant that some of the higher-end premium coffee outlets are scaling back,” she said. “Starbucks closing 600 stores around the world has implications for demand for the type of premium coffee that Ethiopia exports.”
Ethiopia has been suffering from a shortage of foreign currency as commodity prices have fallen worldwide and demand for its mostly agricultural exports has slipped.
DIRECT IMPACT ON EARNINGS
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi warned last month reserves stood at just $850 million versus a target of at least $1.2 billion.
The government has said it expects economic growth of 11.2 percent in 2009. The International Monetary Fund has predicted growth of 6.5 percent for Ethiopia this year.
“The global coffee market has had a direct impact on our foreign exchange earnings and our economy is having to face that at the moment,” Eleni said.
The ECX was set up to replace a murky auction system. But some Ethiopian exporters have been reluctant to sell their beans through the new exchange, which began trading coffee in December.
The government seized 17,000 tonnes of the crop in March and revoked the licences of six exporters it accused of hoarding their stocks and waiting for prices to rise.
When a state-owned body then exported the seized stock, some in the industry accused the government of nationalising its most valuable export business. The government denied that.
“It was a one-time corrective action,” Eleni said. “An attempt to send the signal that we have to keep export earnings going because the country is in a crisis.”
Exports have also been shaken by Japan’s insistence on testing Ethiopian coffee beans on arrival after it found some last year that were contaminated with pesticides. That effectively halted exports to a country that once bought about 20 percent of Ethiopia’s beans.
Ethiopia prides itself as the birthplace of coffee. Some 15 million smallholder farmers grow the crop, mostly in the forested highlands in the huge country’s west and southwest.
(Editing by Daniel Wallis)
Most parts of Addis Ababa are currently out of electric light three days a week, according to Ethiopian Review sources. Several business are forced to shut down their operations.
Addis Ababa is also hit with shortage of water. Tens of thousands of houses are with out tap water. People are seen carrying water jugs in the streets.
Ethiopia’s capital is run by Meles Zenawi’s puppet named Kuma Demeksa who is busy doing his own business and taking money out of the country rather than administering the city. He is too dumb to administer a city any way.
We hope translation of the interview with President Isaias Afwerki will be completed by next Monday or Tuesday. The interview is 4 hours long and we want to make sure that the translation is as accurate as possible. Until then, here are more photos from the beautiful city of Asmara, the cleanest city in Africa. It is more clean and safe than Washington DC. By contrast, the savage Woyannes turned Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s once beautiful and vibrant capital, into the 6th dirtiest city in the world, according to Forbes Magazine.
Roma Cinima, Asmara. It is amazing how clean Asmara is, even by Western standard
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Asmara’s Merkato
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Despite the military preparedness due to the ongoing state of war with the Woyanne regime in Ethiopia, there is a massive residential housing development in Asmara. This construction site is at the outskirt of Asmara. Many of the houses are being built by Eritreans residing in Europe and the U.S. and some of them look like mansions.
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More housing development.
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Elias Kifle of Ethiopian Review (middle), Sileshi Tilahun of EPPF (left), and Arbegna Mengistu of EPPF Radio (right) at a cafe in Asmara, May 12, 2009. Arbegna Mengistu joined EPPF 5 years ago as a fighter. Before that, he was a reporter for Wonchif Newspaper in Addis Ababa. He joined EPPF when Woyanne tried to arrest him for reporting about EPPF activities. After serving as a fighter and political officer for several years, he was recently transferred to the EPPF press office to work on producing a radio program. In one of the many gun battles with the Woyanne army he was hit with a bullet that now causes him to limp when he walks. EPPF is full of patriotic Ethiopians like Arbegna Mengistu who are shedding their blood to free Ethiopia from the Woyanne fascist regime.
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