CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA — On November 9, 2009, a crowd of over 120 gathered for a book signing event at the Double Tree Hotel in Crystal City, Virginia.
Ato Neamin Zeleke, the lead organizer and publisher, opened the event with a remark that highlighted the import of preserving the legacy of heroic Ethiopians who served their nation with honor and dignity and who sacrificed life and limb for their nation and people.
The event featured speeches by distinguished guests as well as family members of the late General Demissie Bulto.
Among those who spoke were the wife of Maj. Gen. Demissie, Wzr. Aster Adamu, his brothers Ato Kibebrew Bulto and Ato Berhanu Bulto, and Capt. Mamo Habtewold, an old friend of Gen Demissie and the most decorated Ethiopian war hero during the Korean War.
Capt. Mamo, who received the highest medal of honor from Atse HaileSelassie, Silver Star from the US Government, and King Leopold’s Star from the Belgium Government, and the highest medal from the Korean Government, spoke about his early days with Gen. Demissie at the Royal Honor Guard Military Academy and at the Korean War.
Wzr. Aster’s remarks focused on the hardship military families face on a daily basis and the struggles she faced and overcame in raising a family while her husband was fighting in the war against Somalia in the South and East and later against in Eritrea.
Those who spoke following her praised Wzr. Aster for preserving her late husband’s war dairies for over twenty years and leading a successful effort to unearth the remains of her late husband and other officers — who were killed by Mengistu Hailemariam loyalists and buried en masse in Eritrea — and conduct a proper burial in Addis Ababa.
Gen. Wubetu Tsegaye, who was imprisoned by Col. Mengistu Hailemariam following the May 1989 coup also spoke about his encounters with Gen. Demissie during one of the major battles in the North.
Gen. Wubetu described Gen. Demissie as an officer with an amazing skill as a strategic military thinker and planner in drawing up the most complex and largest military maneuver during the battle to free Barentu that included air born (several thousand that was dropped by a parachute), Heliborn troops (Troops dropped from Helicopter), amphibious landing with the Ethiopian Navy, mechanized and ground troops.
Brig. Gen. Tesfaye Habtemariam, who received the highest medal for his heroic leadership in a daring rescue mission in the Nakfa Mountains, also spoke eloquently about the time when he met Gen. Demissie for the first time when he was sent to Ethiopian Airborne in the 1960s to receive commando training. He singled out Maj. Gen. Merid Nigussie and Gen. Demissie Bulto as two officers who were highly capable army leaders. He said “I see the two of them as very similar, almost as two sides of the same coin. I recall many instances when they would show up at the battlefield and inspect the tiniest detail that one may overlook. They would look at a freshly dug foxhole and would ask the soldier to try to sit and move around in it. Then would ask the soldier how he is going to sleep in it, sit in it, relax in it. ‘You may be pinned down here by enemy fire for days,’ they would caution.”
Gen. Tesfaye added, “some times the soldiers would leave behind some of the ammunition that we would distribute for the given mission. The amount distributed depended on the nature of the mission but some soldiers would leave some of it behind to lighten their load. I have witnessed these two Generals conduct random checks of the soldiers’ sacks before sending us off to a mission. The two were the most detail oriented leaders who deeply cared about the welfare of their soldiers.”
Gen. Tesfaye also recalled an instance during the much-celebrated victory at Barentu when Gen. Demissie showed up at the front lines in Algena to encourage the troops: “He was not supposed to expose himself like that. However, he was a kind of leader who believed a general should inspect every movement and encourage his troops even when doing so posed grave dangers to his own life. The soldiers did not expect to see a senior commander at the battlefront and his presence gave us a moral boost.”
Brig. Gen Gezmu, Capt. Getachew Woldemariam, Lt. Ayal-Sew Dessie, Ato Asteway Merid — the son of the late Maj. General Merid Negussie, Ato Ayleneh Ejigou, and Ato Samson Demissie also spoke before the Q&A session.
Gen. Gezmu said he remembered the late general in particular for his unique effort to improve the welfare of his soldiers and staff. He recalled the general as a man who would try to help alleviate personal problems of officers and soldiers under his command. Capt. Getachew reminisced about his days with Gen. Demissie as a cadet at the Royal Guard Militay Academy.
An old friend of the author of the book, Ato Samson, recalled the time some fifteen years back when the author began writing the book. Samson remarked that the book has inspired him to record his own father’s story and held the book as an example of how each of us can contribute to the preservation of the history of our people.
A documentary video directed by Artist Tamagne Beyene was shown followed by a Q&A session with the author.
Artist Alemtsehay Wodajo read a poem dedicated to members of the former armed forces who gave the ultimate.
Distinguished guests present include Amb. Imiru Zeleke, Amb. Ayalew Mandefro — former Defense Minister, and journalist Ato Mulugeta Lule.
Gen. Demissie served in the Ethiopian army for a total of 38 years, 23 years during Emperor HaileSelassie and 15 years during the Derg regime. He received a total of 17 medals, 15 of which he received from Emperor HaileSellase including first level medal for battlefield heroism for his heroic deeds leading an airborne battalion at the battle of Degehabour during the first Somalia war in 1963.
ADDIS ABABA (VOA) — Ethiopia’s Prime Crime Minister Meles Zenawi says failures in the U.S. financial system are largely to blame for Africa’s economic crisis, and pointed to China as a possible key to recovery. Our correspondent in Addis Ababa has details of the Ethiopian leader’s keynote address to the annual African Economic Conference.
Speaking to an audience of academics and policymakers, Ethiopia Prime Minister the khat addicted dictator Meles Zenawi painted a gloomy picture of Africa’s economic outlook. He said the theme of the conference, fostering development in the current economic climate, may be impossible.
“The first question that comes to my mind is: Is it possible to foster development when we have a whole era of economic crisis ahead of us? I am going to suggest today that while it is probable that Africa will not be able to foster development in the current era, it is nevertheless possible to do so,” said Meles Zenawi.
Mr. Meles, a former Marxist rebel leader, launched a blistering attack on what he called “discredited neo-liberal economic policies” imposed on Africa from outside. He said unsustainable consumption by the United States when times were good had condemned Africa to a protracted period of low growth ahead.
“The United States has hitherto served as the consumer of last resort and helped to maintain the unsustainable division of labor and division of production and consumption,” he said. “It is no longer able to do it, and this is the main cause of the current crisis.”
Mr. Meles suggested Africa’s best hope might be a massive infusion of cash from China and other countries that have amassed surplus savings by producing goods for the consumers.
“It is possible to imagine that the Chinese will decided to redirect some of their surplus savings to infrastructural development in Africa,” said Meles Zenawi. “It is possible to do so because to some extent it is already happening. Such a shift would mean tens of billions of dollars per annum invested in African infrastructure, again opening the opportunity for the transformation of the overall economy. Indeed, it is not only possible but highly probable that the Chinese will take steps that would widen the window of opportunity for Africa.”
The Ethiopian prime minister, who will lead the African delegation to next month’s Copenhagen climate summit, expressed doubt the world is serious about tackling global warming. But he said a climate deal could be a boon to Africa, with its sources of renewable energy.
Some experts say Africa stands to receive as much as $100 billion a year from rich countries to offset the effects of climate change.
The three-day African Economic Conference is being held against a backdrop of low-growth forecasts for the near future. The 2009 growth estimate for sub-Saharan Africa is just 1.3 percent, with a prediction of an increase to four or five percent next year.
African Development Bank chief Donald Kaberuka, said prospects for recovery remain fragile. He said a full recovery would not occur until the continent returns to seven-percent growth, possibly within a few years.
BAKO, Ethiopia — For centuries, farmers like Berhanu Gudina have eked out a living in Ethiopia’s central lowlands, tending tiny plots of maize, wheat or barley amid the vastness of the lush green plains.
Now, they find themselves working cheek by jowl with high-tech commercial farms stretching over thousands of hectares tilled by state-of-the-art tractors — and owned and operated by foreigners.
With memories of Ethiopia’s devastating 1984 famine still fresh in the minds of its leaders, the government has been enticing well-heeled foreigners to invest in the nation’s underperforming agriculture sector. It is part of an economic development push they say will help the Horn of Africa nation ensure it has enough food for its 80 million people.
Many small Ethiopian farmers do not share their leaders’ enthusiasm for the policy, eying the outsiders with a suspicion that has crept across Africa as millions of hectares have been placed, with varying degrees of transparency, in foreign hands.
“Now we see Indians coming, Chinese coming. Before, we were just Ethiopian,” 54-year-old Gudina said in Bako, a small farming town 280 km (170 miles) west of Addis Ababa. “What do they want here? The same as the British in Kenya? To steal everything? Our government is selling our country to the Asians so they can make money for themselves.”
Xenophobia aside, a number of organizations — including the foundation started by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates — argue that Africa should support its own farmers.
“Instead of African countries giving away their best lands, they should invest in their own farmers,” said Akin Adesina, vice president of the Nairobi-based Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). “What’s needed is a small-holder, farmer-based revolution. African land should not be up for garage sale.”
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Both sides of the debate agree on this much: a stark reality — underlined by last year’s food price crisis — looms large over Ethiopia and beyond. The world is in danger of running out of food.
By 2050, when its population is likely to be more than 9 billion, up from 6 billion now, the world’s food production needs to increase by 70 percent, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
In Africa, which for a variety of reasons was bypassed by the Green Revolution that transformed India and China in the 1960s and 1970s, the numbers are even more bleak. The continent’s population is set to double from 1 billion now.
In all, the FAO says, feeding those extra mouths is going to take $83 billion (50.2 billion pound) in investment every year for the next four decades, increasing both the amount of cultivated land and how much it produces. The estimated investment for Africa alone is $11 billion a year.
For deeply impoverished Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s second-most populous nation after Nigeria, even a fraction of those sums is unthinkable.
Yet with 111 million hectares — nearly twice the area of Texas — within its borders, the answer, in the government’s eyes, is simple: Lease ‘spare’ land to wealthy outsiders to get them to grow the food. One unfortunate consequence of that thinking is Gudina and his little plot of maize are painted as part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.
“The small-scale farmers are not producing the quality they should, because they don’t have the technology,” said Esayas Kebede, head of the Agricultural Investment Agency, a body founded only in February but already talking about offering foreign farmers 3 million hectares in the next two years.
“There are 12 million households in Ethiopia. We can’t afford to give new technology to all of them,” he said, sitting in an office adorned with maps showing possible sites for commercial farms.
Indian agro-conglomerate Karuturi Global, whose involvement in Ethiopia so far has been exporting cut-flowers to Europe, has taken the hint, branching out into food production with a sprawling maize farm in Bako. Unlike with similar land deals elsewhere in Africa, the company insists crops will be exported only after demand is met in Ethiopia — where 6.2 million people are said to be in need of emergency food aid because of poor seasonal rains.
“Our main aim is to feed the Ethiopian people,” Karuturi’s Ethiopia general manager, Hanumatha Rao, told Reuters, sitting under an awning at the Bako farm as hundreds of labourers harvested maize in the fields stretching up nearby hillsides. “Whatever we produce will go to the stomachs of the Ethiopian people before it goes to the international market.”
ANOTHER AFRICAN REVOLUTION
While many governments have been busy courting foreigners, in most cases from Asia or the Middle East, to increase Africa’s food output, small farmers like Gudina are not totally without friends.
An initiative backed by the Melinda and Bill Gates and Rockefeller foundations is aiming to kick-start an African Green Revolution, carefully avoiding the pitfalls that had engulfed previous such attempts.
In particular, Africa boasts a dazzling array of soil types, climates and crops that have defied the one-size-fits-all solution of better seed, fertilizer and irrigation that worked in Asia half a century ago.
Its perennial tendency to corruption and official incompetence has also played its part in keeping average grain yields on the continent at just 1.2 tons per hectare, compared with 3.5 tons in Europe and 5.5 tons in the United States.
AGRA’s Adesina says sub-Saharan governments are slowly realizing the importance of small farmers, who account for 70 percent of the region’s population and 60 percent of its agricultural output. But he urges governments to make good on a pledge six years ago to raise farm spending to 10 percent of their national budgets.
For its part, AGRA is pouring money into research institutes from Burkina Faso in the west to Tanzania in the east to breed higher yielding and more drought- and pest-resistant strains of everything from maize and cassava to sorghum and sweet potato.
“We’ve been studying African agriculture for several decades and the message we keep getting back from farmers is: ‘It’s the seeds, stupid,'” said Joseph DeVries, director of AGRA’s seed improvement division. “What you’re planting is what you’re harvesting.”
As yet, the work — carefully packaged as “Africans working for an African solution” — involves only conventional breeding techniques, such as cross-pollination and hybridization, as genetically modified seeds remain prohibitively expensive for farmers subsisting on one or two dollars a day.
However, AGRA does not rule out a future role for GM food crops, a stance that has stoked fears it will inadvertently pave the way for U.S. seed companies into the continent beyond South Africa, the only country that allows widespread commercial use. It also accepts a need for chemical soil additives — a source of concern to environmentalists — although it stresses the importance of “judicious and efficient use of fertilizer and more intensive use of organic matter.”
After 10 years of research, DeVries said, AGRA has developed, among other things, a cassava variety with double its previous yield and a hybrid sorghum strain that is producing 3 to 3.5 tons per hectare, compared with 1 ton before. It is also giving grants to rural shop-keepers to try to create seed distribution networks in countries that remain too small or inaccessible to attract interest from established commercial suppliers.
“There’s huge demand for these new varieties, but there’s just not nearly enough investment. It’s logistics, and it’s also capital,” DeVries said.
CASH FOR CROPS
As ever in Africa, money — or, rather, a lack of it — is a major problem. According to AGRA’s Adesina, only 1 percent of private capital on the continent is made available to farming, due to banks’ concerns about loan collateral and a reluctance to deal with farmers who in many cases are barely literate.
However, the Green Revolution push has begun to attract some serious financial players.
With AGRA providing $10 million in loan guarantees, South Africa’s Standard Bank, the continent’s biggest bank, has earmarked $100 million over three years for small farmers in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. The pilot scheme suggests the bank is buying an argument slowly gaining traction: That Africa, a continent more renowned for war, famine and disasters, could and should evolve into the breadbasket of the world.
With less than 25 percent of Africa’s potential arable land under cultivation, according to many estimates, and its current levels of yield at rock-bottom, it is a compelling, if distant, vision.
“The first step is improving the efficiency of small farmers in Africa,” said Jacques Taylor, head of Standard Bank’s agricultural banking arm in Johannesburg, seat of the gold on which most of South Africa’s wealth has so far been based. “Can we get them to increase their yields from just over 1 ton to 3 tons to 5 tons? That’s possible. It’s not a dream. It’s a reality.”
LAND-GRABS AND GM’S TROJAN HORSE?
Even though Standard Bank says it is keen to expand the funding, if all goes well, there is a very long way to go before such financing makes a dent in the $11 billion the FAO says has to be invested in Africa each year.
“Do we need more of this? For sure. $100 million is really a drop in the ocean when you look at the funding needs,” Taylor said. “But we’d like to think this is a step in the right direction.”
As such, it seems inevitable Africa will have to adopt a dual-track approach to its looming food crisis — rolling out the red carpet for more Karuturis, but also making life easier for Berhanu Gudina and his colleagues in central Ethiopia.
While it is hard to fault the thinking behind either strategy, critics of both abound.
Across the continent, foreign deals have been condemned as “land-grabs” negotiated between barely accountable administrations and outside companies or governments who care little about poverty or development.
In one notable case, in Madagascar, a little-reported million-hectare deal with South Korean conglomerate Daewoo contributed heavily to a successful popular uprising in March against President Marc Ravalomanana.
Elsewhere, from Sudan and its numerous Gulf farmer-investors, to Republic of Congo and a group of white South African commercial farmers, to Ethiopia and its Indians, land has become a hot political potato.
The prevailing view outside governments is that the little guys are being forced to make way for the mega-deal.
“It cannot just descend on them from the sky. It has to be done in consultation with the people who occupy the land,” Ethiopian opposition leader Bulcha Demeksa told Reuters. “But the government is not doing that. It is just going ahead and signing agreement after agreement with the foreigners.”
Similarly, AGRA’s detractors look to unintended consequences of India’s Green Revolution — particularly the environmental damage caused by widespread fertilizer use and drying up of water tables — to argue Africa should look before it leaps.
Furthermore, says Mariam Myatt of the Johannesburg-based African Centre for Biosafety, if India’s experience is anything to go by, a Green Revolution would leave Africa’s farmers as dependent on banks and seed and fertilizer companies as they are now on seasonal rains.
“The Green Revolution, under the guise of solving hunger in Africa, is nothing more than a push for a parasitic corporate-controlled chemical system of agriculture,” she said.
With Bill Gates also pumping funding into biotech research at bodies such as the African Agriculture Technology Foundation, Myatt said, AGRA might end up as the unwitting Trojan horse that eases GM crops — and Western corporate interests — into Africa.
“It will go a long way towards laying the groundwork for the entry of private fertilizer and agrochemical companies and seed companies and, more particularly, GM seed companies.”
(Source: Reuters. Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Jim Impoco and Walter Bagley)
CHARLOTTE, NC (Charlotte Observer) — Staying in Ethiopia was a death sentence for the pretty, thin 17-year-old girl with a heart defect.
Tigist Yemane was weak. She couldn’t walk more than a few steps without passing out.
Without an operation, doctors told her in 2004, she would be dead in six months.
In the United States, the operation to fix her mitral stenosis is relatively simple and involves an overnight hospital stay. In her native Ethiopia, the operation was out of her reach.
Yemane had become the woman of the house after her mother died when she was nine. Her father, she told friends, was an alcoholic and mostly out of the picture. She cooked and cleaned and looked after her younger siblings. And as her ailment progressed, Yemane got weaker and weaker.
John Cederholm, a Charlotte heart surgeon visiting a missionary friend in the Addis Ababa slum, thought he could help. He and Brian Davidson, who runs a sports-based outreach program in Ethiopia, convinced authorities there to give Yemane a temporary visa, telling them they’d ensure her return. For the first time, Yemane had hope for living beyond her teenage years.
But nearly six years later, Yemane is dead – the 45th homicide victim this year in Charlotte, the city where she floundered for a foothold in America.
‘This is your opportunity’
In 2004, Yemane flew to Charlotte where Dr. Cederholm performed surgery at the Sanger Clinic, replacing one of the valves in her heart.
The Ethiopian teen stayed in the Cederholm’s Charlotte home and absorbed American culture as she healed and got stronger.
“She came over with a little bit of broken English,” Cederholm said. At first, “she didn’t know how to turn on a shower. She didn’t know how to turn on a stove.”
When she was better, Cederholm fulfilled his promise to Ethiopian authorities and put Yemane on a plane back to her native country. But her visa was still valid and people close to her in Ethiopia saw it as her ticket out of the slums.
“They told her, ‘This is your opportunity for a new life. This is your chance to escape,'” Cederholm said.
Family and friends collected money to pay for another flight to the U.S.
Cederholm and Davidson are unsure when Yemane returned to the United States.
They do know she arrived in Washington D.C. with little money and the phone number of a family she hoped to stay with.
“It’s only human and natural to want something better,” Davidson said. “Unfortunately, the reality of the fact is (the U.S.) is not what it looks like in the movies.
“Her life, it was a hardship.”
Back in the U.S., but alone
Yemane made the phone call but the family said they didn’t have the money or space to take her in, Cederholm said.
Yemane was homeless and alone.
For three years, she flitted from home to home, staying with Ethiopian families who took her in, sometimes sleeping on the streets or in shelters. She was married briefly to a man who friends said abused her, but she managed to get away.
Her compass always pointed to Charlotte, the only real home in the United States she knew. Around 2006, Cederholm said his family took her in once again for about a month.
In 2007, she met Loretta Caldwell, who runs a Charlotte ministry that takes in homeless women. The police were trying to take Yemane to a homeless shelter on the westside, but she’d been there before and didn’t want to go back.
“She started running up to my car saying ‘Lady, help me, help me, please help me,'” Caldwell said.
“And I pulled off looking back at her and said ‘She’s so beautiful. What happened to her?'”
Caldwell took her in.
Over the next two years, in a stable and permanent home, Yemane thrived. Caldwell helped her get a visa and a job. She used pink paint on the walls of her room, which was larger than the apartment she shared with her siblings in Ethiopia. She set up profiles on Facebook and MySpace, and her accent became fainter as she burned through calling cards talking to her siblings in Ethiopia.
One of her brothers just had a baby, and she was collecting baby clothes to send to him.
She called Caldwell “mother,” and the older woman began to think of Yemane as her daughter.
‘Are you OK? Are you safe?’
Caldwell says she was overprotective of her surrogate daughter. Even though Yemane was 23, Caldwell ran criminal background checks on the men she would date, and set a curfew.
She said she trusted Yemane’s latest boyfriend, Davon Thomas, because she knew his mother, and they seemed like “good, Christian people.”
Caldwell said she last spoke with Yemane on Friday night. Yemane had called to say she might break curfew.
“Are you OK?” Caldwell asked. “Are you safe?”
Yemane said “yes” to both, and Caldwell said she was going to bed.
The next morning, Yemane’s pink room was still empty.
“I started calling her. And I started calling him. And then I called around to find her,” Caldwell said.
“Within 30 minutes … the detectives were at my front door.”
Police say Thomas shot Yemane to death early Saturday morning inside his parents’ house in the Reedy Creek Community. Police called it a domestic homicide and searched for Thomas for two days before he turned himself in.
Thomas, 27, is in Mecklenburg jail, charged with Yemane’s murder. And the Charlotteans who helped bring a sick teenager over from Ethiopia six years ago were raising money to send her body back.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It seems the mental condition of Ethiopia’s khat addicted tyrant is deteriorating by the day. He doesn’t have food to feed 6 million people and yet he talks about giving the world clean energy.
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia’s Prime Minister tribal warlord Meles Zenawi, who will represent Africa at next month’s Copenhagen climate change talks, said on Thursday it was unlikely the world was serious about tackling global warming.
[Meles Zenawi is too incompetent to feed his own province of Tigray, let alone contribute any thing on climate change. To invite him to Copenhagen must be a sick joke by European politicians.]
The United Nations summit in Denmark will try to agree on how to counter climate change and come up with a post-Kyoto treaty protocol to curb harmful emissions.
“It is highly improbable … the world is serious about climate change and (will decide) to take effective measures to tackle it,” Meles told an economic conference in Addis Ababa. “But no one can say such an outcome is completely impossible.”
Meles has become Africa’s most outspoken leader on climate change and has argued that European pollution may have caused his country’s ruinous 1984 famine.
Aid workers say a five-year drought, worsened by climate change, is afflicting some 23 million people in seven east African nations, with Ethiopia worst affected.
Meles has demanded the rich world compensate Africa for the impact of global warming, and says the funding would help develop the continent’s agro-industries.
“Such a revival of the bedrock of Africa’s economies would revitalise our strategy for managing chronic poverty in the short-term while laying the basis for overall economic transformation in the long-term,” the prime minister said.
“POTENTIAL ENERGY NICHE”
Poor nations want rich countries to cut emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst effects of climate change. But many industrialised nations fear such cuts are out of reach, especially in an economic downturn.
Some climate experts have called for rich countries to pay up to $100 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.
Meles, who also represented Africa at G8 and G20 summits of rich nations this year, said investment could help the continent provide clean energy to the world.
“If the decision to tackle climate change effectively were to be made, then Africa with its vast resources of renewable energy — solar, wind, hydropower, bio-energy — would have an important niche in the global market,” Meles said.
Power shortages are common in African countries, costing economies billions of dollars and hindering investment, even though natural resources are abundant.
Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is forecast to be hardest hit by its impact.
The Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum says poor nations bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change.
The 50 poorest countries, however, contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say are threatening the planet, it says. (Editing by Daniel Wallis and Jon Hemming)
The events of the last two week in Ethiopia has been painful, but a great example of political betrayal and opportunism of the worst kind. I watched on video the depiction of an open platform of November 1, 2009 attended by Ministers, Dignitaries, Ambassadors from all over the World, and the throng of journalists, at a signing ceremony presided by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the public humiliation and the betrayal of the people of Ethiopia in the person of Hailu Shawel, Lidetu Ayalew, and Ayalew Chamiso, who claim to represent the opposition interest of the Ethiopian people. I ask myself what happened to common decency, sense of self-worth, and communal responsibility for those individuals in attendance of the staging of the signing of the Code of Conduct to stoop so low as complete pawns in the hands of a power-crazed puppet-master.
I cannot afford to lose all faith in my fellow Ethiopians, thus I conjectured the possibility of blackmail by the Government of Meles Zenawi of Hailu Shawel, and to a lesser extent Lidetu Ayalew and Ayalew Chamiso, with some hitherto unknown horrible corruption charges or some sordid video record in order to force them play their dubious role becoming gatekeepers to ward off other opposition parties and groups, such as the Medrek group. I tried also some other explanation to justify such action by the three gentlemen, namely the question of the national interest. But when I examined closely each of the above excuses I was willing to entertain on their behalf to avoid unfounded allegations, I realized that the record of those individuals, in the past several years, indicate deliberate opportunistic and predatory activities. The signing of the Code of Conduct is simply the fulfillment of long drawn processes of marriage with the EPRDF.
I recall Engineer Hailu Shawel coming to see me in 1992 at the new office complex built during the time of Mengistu’s administration at the Menilik’s Palace grounds. What he wanted was to inform me his desire to cooperate with EPRDF, and he gave me the impression that he was seeking some appointment. [In those days, I was perceived to be some kind of king-maker.] I tried to inform him that the time was not conducive for me to talk about such personal issues and I pointed to him the fact that I was moving to a new office. I talked with him in a temporary little office that I simply used for the moment in order to accommodate his insistence to see me. Trying to cooperate with ones government is not per se evil; however, it is the motive that indicates the character flaw or strength of an individual. My assessment of Hailu Shawel in that brief moment of encounter was that of a person of opportunistic character—I am vindicated and proven right several times over in the course of the last fifteen years.
During the same period in the 1990s, I watched the birth of the AAPO led by the highly principled Professor Asrat; I witnessed the establishment of the Human Rights Commission, and the infighting of the OLF for political parity with the EPRDF. I am contrasting those developments to point out the fact that Hailu Shawel’s interest right from the start was a highly personal one compared to the activities of the leaders of such different political and civic groups I had a chance to know about due to my proximity to the center of power and due to personal acquaintances with many of the players in those organizations. Hailu Shawel played a highly personal political game. He is the quintessential Mahel Sefari. He used the frustration and hatred a number of Addis Ababean feel for EPRDF to his personal advantage by projecting himself as a man-of-the-people to the leadership of EPRDF, and not to be trifled with. When he started his All Ethiopians Unity Party, Hailu Shawel was doing that with an approval wink from EPRDF leaders because Professor Asrat’s All Amhara organization was gaining tremendous support and was becoming a real threat to the very survival of EPRDF even when the Professor Asrat was in detention. The leaders of the EPRDF needed an organization that will divide and dilute such concentrated challenge to their power.
No matter how hard one may try to change an old donkey into a stallion, it is an impossible task to achieve such fete. Just like nature, society cannot be that easily fooled. Such silly effort to fool society was amply demonstrated to the entire world to see by the event of November 1, 2009 at the Sheraton Hotel. Almost six months ago, on June 4, 2009, I wrote predicting such situation.
As he has done countless times in the past, Meles Zenawi will try all kinds of trickery dividing the opposition and driving wedges in between opposition leaders. It is no secret that Meles and his group have effectively divided and weakened the opposition in the past; for example, AAPO, OLF, CUD et cetera were all victims of the divisive schemes of launching leaders against each other. Thus, it will not surprise me if Meles Zenawi would offer Hailu Shawel the Presidency of Ethiopia in exchange for Hailu’s docility and political betrayal of the opposition.
What is well camouflaged and effectively hidden from everyone else’s scrutiny is the ambition of Hailu Shawel to be Meles Zenawi’s Ye Elfign Askelkai—a power broker position that is most favored and desired by Mahel Sefaris. The political evolution of Kinijit and Hailu Shawel’s role in the final political skirmish after the aborted election of 2005 leading to the arrest and conviction of Kinijit leaders was a situation where activities went out of control and dragged many of the leaders including Hailu Shawel into such a situation. However, the moment the Leaders of Kinjit were released from prison the split started with Hailu Shawel disassociating himself and separating his own group from the rest of Kinjit Members.
In 1991 to 1993 when I was advising the Transitional Government of Ethiopia, Ledetu Ayalew was too junior a person for me to know at all, so was Ayalew Chamiso. In fact, I never met those two gentlemen, I only know of them from reports, newspaper articles, videos, and pictures since my second exile (after 1993 to date) in the United States. Based on such reports and documentation, I wrote in a couple of articles expressing my admiration for Lidetu Ayalew as an individual who came to prominence through his own native wits and smarts without the help of any ethnic based hegemonic structure or help from academia or anybody else for that matter. It is no little achievement in a society that is densely stratified in tight hierarchical structure based on ethnic exclusivity, family prominence, and wealth, for a simple born peasant man from Lasta to make such inroad into the power structure of Ethiopia, especially an Ethiopia being ruled by the most rigid and closed Government in the history of this ancient land.
I have pointed out above the diverse personalities and interests of the three leaders who signed the Code of Conduct. Often people have pointed out to me and others that one should not focus on individual personalities when dealing with the political life of a nation. I respectfully differ from such high standard, for Ethiopian politics is driven completely by focusing on the personality of the leaders of Ethiopian political parties. It would be unrealistic for anyone to try to do politics in Ethiopia without first focusing on Ethiopian political personalities.
The Game Plan
It is imperative to understand the mind of Meles Zenawi and his close associates in order to understand why the group decided to form close alliance with Hailu Shawel. It is no surprise to me that such scheme would come about at this point. Over ten years ago, in my book Demystifying Political Thought, Power, and Economic Development (1999), I predicted the breakup of AAPO, and that fractured group in time would join forces with the faction of the TPLF corrupt leadership and would continue the repressive Government of the EPRDF under the leadership of Meles Zenawi.
The Amharas will continue in their present status, disorganized and ineffective, incapable to counter or regain the political clout they presumably had lost if the present fracturing continuous… moreover recent development indicate that AAPO officials in Addis Ababa are working together with the EPRDF undermining the very Amhara movement they were elected to lead and promote. [Referring to Qegnazmatch Nekatibeb leading AAPO and the continued detention of Professor Asrat] It is only a matter of time before the national office of AAPO in Ethiopia fractures and joins the EPRDF corrupt structure. In keeping with such trend, a faction from the TPLF with a section from AAPO, and exofficials of Mengistu’s government and the camp started by One Ethiopia will metamorphosis into a support group for Meles. (84-5)
[Tecola W. Hagos, Demystifying Political Thought, Power, and Economic Development (1999), pages 84-5. (Emphasis added)]
Meles Zenawi has perfected the art of “divide and rule” and raised it to new heights. Recent books, articles, and book reviews by former members of the TPLF have given us a glimpse of the sordid and corrupt inner workings of the TPLF. We have now a clear picture of the organizations administration and finance, more importantly the names and roles played by the core leaders responsible for the day to day functioning of the TPLF. Meles Zenawi, Sebhat Nega, Seyoum Mesfine, Abay Tsehai, Abadi Zemu, Brehane Gebrekristos, Tewodros Hagos et cetera played major roles in all the corrupt schemes hoodwinking major international humanitarian organizations and their star fund raisers whereby millions of dollars was deposited in accounts established by such individuals allegedly for the starving people of Tigray and vicinity. There was neither public auditing nor proper accounting ever to this day of all the hundreds of millions of dollars donated and received through charitable fund raising from the West and others. The individuals who had intimate knowledge of the finance and administrative process at the time, such as Gebremedhin Araya, Aregawi Berhe et cetera, have exposed the diabolical secret of the TPLF leaders diversion of donated funds into private accounts that was never audited by the organization.
Those TPLF leaders distributed a minuscule amount to the starving Tigrayan refugees in the Sudan, and kept the rest for their own use in accounts controlled by them. Because of such meager assistance most Tigrayan refugees in the Sudan tried to return to their home base even though it was under the administration of the Military Regime. The attraction was that Regime was providing sustenance far in excess of what was provided by TPLF Leaders even though the donated fund the TPLF Leaders were in charge of was far in excess of the donations that the Ethiopian Government had acquired from international donors. Furthermore, Meles Zenawi as the leader of that pack outmaneuvered Western governmental security and spying agencies by portraying himself and his close supporters as democratic and honorable leaders. The fact is that by the time the EPRDF reached Addis Ababa overrunning the Military Regime, the leaders of the TPLF were already Millioners. They all have tasted the forbidden golden apple from the tree of wealth. By then they were infested like Gollum with obsessive and insatiable appetite for wealth.
The only agenda they had was how best they could use their guerrilla forces to establish and run a puppet government in order to control the resources of a defeated country, and how best to loot it blind. We all have been wrong to a great extent in believing that they were interested in the fracturing of Ethiopia because of their hatred of the very idea of an Ethiopia and the fact that they were against the military dictatorship then in power. Some of us also wrongly believed that they were partial in their love and commitment to see an independent Eritrea. They would not have cared an iota for Eritrea if it were not in their best interest to do so in order to exploit and loot Ethiopia by themselves. In that shameful criminal activity of looting and robbery, they found Al-Amoudi, an individual who taught them a thing or too how to move huge amount of money around the world. He also might have personally facilitated the international web of investment and banking of the hundreds of millions of dollars and other hard currency thus stolen effectively hiding such fabulous looted wealth from Ethiopia including gold mined in mines allegedly owned by Al-Amoudi. In short, we are dealing here with a different breed of men unseen in the history of Ethiopia or the World before who held a nation hostage for one purpose only—to loot its wealth.
The true nature of the activities of the Leaders of the TPLF has become far more clearer now than a decade ago, since former TPLF leaders such as Gebremedhin Araya (responsible for the finance of TPLF), Aregawi Berhe (former Leader and Commander of the TPLF guerilla forces) and others have finally started writing and publishing their memoire. It is absolutely clear from such accounts that the main goal of the TPLF Leadership had shifted since 1984 from fighting for the liberation of the people of Tigray/Ethiopia to the acquisition of wealth by using the guerrilla structure that was in place to control the state structure. Meles Zenawi and his select tiny support group having tested of the forbidden golden apple born out of the famine of 1984 and after were simply dedicated to make as much money as possible looting and confiscating the wealth of a nation. They were in fact a group of mercenaries similar in their operation like the Mafia.
They used as their foot soldiers naïve peasant boys and girls from Tigray and a few from adjoining Provinces, young men and women who believed in a nationalist cause, to fight the deadliest war against a brutal military regime for seventeen years. Setting aside those patriotic naïve fighters, the leaders of the TPLF were just common criminals then as they are now.
The bond that held tight Meles Zenawi and his group is not patriotism; it is not concern for the people of Tigray; it is not the desire to help Eritreans. The bond is made of gold chain called “Money.” The interest born of money and wealth creates the most enduring and highly exclusive bonding. That is literally what we see in the current leaders of the TPLF. Opposition supporters writing endlessly ascribing the current disastrous Ethiopian government administration to narrow ethnic interest are totally wrong. Any mention of “Woyane” as the target of dissent and derision is like barking up the wrong tree. The people of Tigray are primary victims of the TPLF even worse than the rest of Ethiopia. The affinity between Meles Zenawi and the Mahel Sefaris is obvious.
The losers in the current game of the signing of the Code of Conduct and realignment of the EPRDF with its newest Member Hailu Shawel (AEUP) are the people of Ethiopia, not Hailu Shawel and his Party, not Medrek or anybody else. Meles Zenawi has gained another day to prepare for far longer and devastating fight against all those who are concerned about the vital interest of Ethiopia, the Opposition et cetera. He has extended his life to do more damage to the state of Ethiopia entrenching his divisive Killel system, alienating Ethiopian territory, selling/leasing huge chunk of Ethiopian land to foreign investors and states while millions of Ethiopians starve to death. He will keep looting Ethiopia’s gold in collaboration with Al-Amoudi.
The incorporation of new Satellite organizations, such as AEUP replacing the old ones, such as ANDM, OPDO et cetera that have atrophied over the last ten years, due to serious marginalization of the leaders of such organizations by Meles Zenawi. Starting from the arrest and imprisonment of Tamrat Layne, all Satellite organizations of the EPRDF lost their political luster. In the guise of the signing of a Code of Conduct, which is a meaningless document in itself, Meles Zenawi is putting in place a blue print for his future. There is some other subterranean purpose in the game that was fully displayed for the World to see on November 1, 2009. The bottom-line is that Meles Zenawi is replacing his old cronies wholesale with the quintessential Mahel Sefaris, who had worked diligently as shadow advisors and yes men of incredibly loyalty to Meles Zenawi in the last eighteen years. The current political development of Meles Zenawi’s budding friendship with Hailu Shawel spells doom for the old comrades of Meles Zenawi, such as
Adissu Legesse, Teferra Walwa, Kassu Illala et cetera who will soon be retired and replaced by the technocrats that Hailu Shawel would organize after the election of 2010, such technocrats are salivating right now to join the new administration with “Emperor” Meles Zenawi on the Throne for the next twenty years. This is the likely and disgusting outcome of the game plan that could only be conjured up by a sick mind.
In the United States, the operation to fix her mitral stenosis is relatively simple and involves an overnight hospital stay. In her native Ethiopia, the operation was out of her reach.