ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (AFP) — African nations dictators will walk out of climate change talks in Copenhagen if their demands, including hefty compensations from the West, are not met, Ethiopian Prime Minister warlord Meles Zenawi said Thursday.
[Meles, who has just returned from Belgium where he received medical treatment, must be hallucinating.]
One of the key demands that the world’s poorest most looted continent is making is billions of dollars in compensation to help it cope with the effects of climate change to line up the pockets of Africa’s thieves, rapists and genocidal killers like Meles.
However a panel representing the continent at the talks is yet to come up with a figure. [Meles and Azeb must have come up with the figure after an afternoon of khat chewing.]
“If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threatens to be another rape of the continent,” said Meles, who leads the panel.
“While we reason with everyone to achieve our objective we are not prepared to rubber stamp any agreement by the powers,” he told African officials and experts from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development at a meeting in Addis Ababa.
“We will use our numbers to delegitimise any agreement that is not consistent with our minimal position.”
According to a study by the UK-based Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, global warming could cost the continent around 30 billion dollars a year by 2015.
That figure could rise to between 50 billion and 100 billion dollars by 2020 due to increasing costs to cope with climate change effects such as frequent and more severe floods, droughts and storms, as well as extreme changes in rainfall patterns, the group said.
African Union chairman Jean Ping urged rich nations not to renege on their financial commitments.
“It is my expectation that such financial resources must be from public funds and must be additional to the usual overseas development assistance,” he told the gathering.
African countries will also demand that industrialised nations take measures to limit global warming to two degrees celsius and cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020.
“What we are not prepared to live with is global warming above minimum unavoidable levels,” Meles said.
“We will therefore never accept any global deal that does not limit global warming to the minimum unavoidable level, no matter what levels of compensation and assistance are promised to us.”
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters ) – An Ethiopian [kangaroo] court has sentenced six members of the Benishangule-Gumuz community ethnic group to death and another 97 to prison terms for the massacre of Oromo villagers last year, a state agency reported on Thursday. [The Woyanne tribal junta that is in charge of the kangaroo court massacres Oromos every day. It is likely that the massacre was carried out by Meles Zenawi’s death squads and is being blamed on innocent people.]
The 103 had been charged with genocide for killings that took place in May 2008. They gunned down or speared to death 93 members of the Oromo tribe, the state Woyanne-run Ethiopian News Agency (ENA) reported.
The two groups have for centuries lived side by side in western Ethiopia.
“The court found guilty the 103 members of the Benishangule-Gumuz after examining documents, pictures and video tape evidence presented by the prosecution and after the accused failed to exercise their right to defence,” ENA said.
Those that escaped the death sentence were handed prison terms ranging between six years to life imprisonment with hard labour.
(Reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse, editing by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura)
ADDIS ABABA (MSF) — Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health has also reported patients suffering from acute watery diarrhea in several other regions of the country.
Since August 19, joint Ministry of Health and MSF teams have been providing medical care to patients with acute watery diarrhea in and around the capital city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
In collaboration with Ethiopian health authorities, MSF has set up a total of eight treatment facilities within Ministry of Health structures in the city. These treatment facilities are located in Yekatit 12 hospital, Ras Desta hospital, Zewditu hospital, Sint Petros hospital, Akaki health centre, Kaliti health centre, Bole and Kotebe Youth centre.
In total 5,178 patients have been cared for by medical teams from August 19 to 31 in Addis Ababa, of whom five have died. This very low mortality rate has been achieved thanks to the quick mobilisation of the Ethiopian health authorities and MSF. Over the last few days, the number of daily admissions to these treatment facilities has been decreasing.
People suffering from acute watery diarrhea have contracted the disease mostly by drinking unclean water. If left untreated, they run a risk to become dehydrated. While most severe cases need to be hospitalised and receive intravenous therapy, people who are moderately sick can be treated with oral rehydration salts only.
Since the beginning of July, MSF has also been responding to a watery diarrhea outbreak in the northeastern region of Afar. In two months, the team, in collaboration with the health authorities, has provided care to 570 patients in two treatment facilities.
Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health has also reported patients suffering from acute watery diarrhea in several other regions of the country.
Additional staff have been sent to Ethiopia to augment the MSF teams on the ground.
LEBANNON, PA (LDNews) — Two Ethiopian doctors visited several local medical facilities as part of an ongoing partnership with a Lebanon-based charity.
Since arriving in the United States on Monday, Dr. Abraham Asnake and Dr. Abiye Mulugeta visited the Hershey Medical Center, Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon and Physicians Surgical Center in North Cornwall Township.
“We are really fascinated by the facilities,” Mulugeta said Wednesday during a visit to the Alley Center for the Blind in North Lebanon Township.
Asnake said there are no facilities in Ethiopia like the ones they toured here.
“It’s very hard in our country,” he said. “Hopefully one day.”
Asnake, a general surgeon and administrator of Ras Desta Hospital in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, and Mulugeta, an ophthalmologist and chairman of the ophthalmology department at Ras Desta, arrived in the area Monday. They are scheduled to spend six days in the area as guests of the World Blindness Outreach and Sunrise Rotary Club of Lancaster.
The WBO, which is based in Lebanon, is a humanitarian organization that supports eye missions to treat correctable blindness and preventable eye diseases among indigent peoples throughout the world. Since 1990, the WBO has performed more than 5,000 eye surgeries on 50 missions to 20 countries.
Dr. Robert Alley, a Lebanon ophthalmologist and founder and president of WBO, said he invited Asnake and Mulugeta to come to this country for several reasons.
“I wanted to extend our
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hospitality to them because we have been there three times, and they have extended their hospitality to us, and they made us feel so much at home, and I feel very close to both these gentlemen, so I invited them here as friends,” said Alley, the namesake of the Alley Center for the Blind.
Alley said the goal of the visit was to give the doctors an overview of medicine in this country.
“I would hope they see some things they can apply when they get back home,” he said.
The Lancaster Sunrise Rotary Club has partnered with WBO on three surgical eye missions to Ethiopia in the past six years, during which 600 successful eye surgeries were performed on patients at Ras Desta. Another mission is scheduled for April 2010.
Asnake and Mulugeta were also guests at Monday’s WBO banquet in Hershey. At the banquet, they received awards in recognition of their support for three WBO surgical eye missions to their hospital.
ADDIS ABABA (Daily Nation) — Ethiopia’s government ruling tribal junta has defended its plan to offer 2.7 million hectares of farmland to foreign companies despite millions of citizens who need food aid from the international community.
According to Ethiopia’s Agriculture Ministry officials, the country delineated around 2.7 million hectares of land, available for foreign companies from Middle East and East Asia countries.
The government will hand over 1.7 million hectares of arable land to the foreign investors before the coming harvest season.
World’s top oil producing countries including United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and giant economies like India, China and South Korea are queuing in Addis Ababa to start big commercial farming to feed their own people.
The competition among “land grabber” states has become fierce, with the overall number of companies applying for land in Ethiopia reaching 8,000. However, only 2,000 foreign companies, including medium size agricultural projects, have already secured farmland.
India leads the “land grabbing” race and so far Indian agricultural investment has been more than $2.5 billion. India’s total investment in Ethiopia was $300 million three years ago and has now grown to $ 4.3 billion. It is double the amount of Western aid offered to Ethiopia.
Departing Indian Ambassador to Ethiopia, Gurjit Singh, believes Indian investment will reach eight to 10 billion dollars in the coming few years.
“I don’t think this is the end of the story, but just the beginning,” he added.
Currently, more than 5.2 million people need emergency food aid from the international community in the southern and eastern parts of the country. Another eight million rural poor are being supported through a regular productive safety net aid scheme.
Esayas Kebede, Director of Agriculture Investment Support office argued that large scale foreign commercial farming is a way to end poverty and hunger.
“We have abundant land and labour but we don’t have a finance and technology to feed our people” Esayas said.
West Bethlehem, PA (mcall.com) — When he fled his native Ethiopia with images of dead bodies in the streets burned into his mind, Abraham Zegeye thought he’d never return.
But nearly 30 years later, the Lehigh Valley businessman has rekindled his connection to his homeland. He built a well two years ago to bring fresh water to farmers and cattle herders in his father’s native village. And his latest effort is to raise $80,000 to build a new school to replace the windowless stick-and-mud shack where about 150 children now learn.
”This country gave me a second chance to make something of myself,” Zegeye said, recalling how he was fortunate to find opportunity in America. ”A lot of people don’t get that second chanceÂ…Now it’s time for me to return and give something back. It’s about other people and how I can make their lives a little bit easier.”
Zegeye, who owns Abe’s Six Pack Shop in West Bethlehem, was raised in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa. His father worked as a hospital administrator, so they had food and schooling and other comforts of city life, but civil war and strife ravaged his homeland.
He recalls going to the bus stop to find friends and neighbors dead in the streets. They were victims of the Derg regime that ruled the country in the 1970s and ’80s and abducted, imprisoned and executed those suspected of resistance. The dead were put on public display, with banners stating why they were killed to frighten the group’s opposition.
Like several of his siblings before him, Zegeye fled the country in 1982, at age 18, for the stability of the United States. He finished high school, attended college, became a businessman and had a family. Zegeye and his family members contributed $5,000 to build a well for the roughly 2,000 villagers. Clean water now flows from spigots atop concrete bases instead of bubbling up through a muddy ditch.
And now he wants to bring them a new schoolhouse to accommodate more children.
He will run a half-marathon in Philadelphia next month to raise money, and is seeking pledges as well.
