Insurgents in Somalia captured a town on the outskirts of the capital, Mogadishu, in at least the sixth incident this week in which the nation’s transitional government was unable to defend territory it controlled.
Elasha Biyaha, 17 kilometers (11 miles) southwest of Mogadishu, was seized late yesterday by members of al-Shabaab, the militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union, Faadumo Khali Siad, a resident, said by phone today. The town is strategically important because it is situated on a route that connects Mogadishu to Baidoa, seat of the nation’s parliament.
“Our forces took control of Elasha Biyaha last night after we received complaints from residents about insecurity there,” Sheikh Abdi Rihin Isse Adow, a spokesman for the Islamic Courts, said in a mobile-phone interview today. “We removed a checkpoint in the area from the regional administration.”
Yesterday, al-Shabaab captured the port of Marka, 90 kilometers southwest of Mogadishu. The town is used as an entry point for humanitarian agencies, such as the World Food Programme, that provide assistance in the country. The UN estimates as many as 3.25 million people, or 43 percent of the population, will need food aid until the end of 2008.
Towns Captured
On Nov. 11, the towns of Koryoley and Buulo Mareer, near Marka, were seized by al-Shabaab. Yesterday, the town of Janaale, 90 kilometers southwest of Mogadishu, was captured by the militia, Salad Ibrahim Muhiden, a local elder, said by phone. Awdheegle, 80 kilometers south of Mogadishu, was captured by Jabha al-Islamia, a faction of the Islamic Courts, Elmi Shino Farey, a local elder, said by phone from the town.
“Clearly the transitional federal government doesn’t have the capacity to defend its territory on its own,” Roger Middleton, Africa researcher at Chatham House, a London-based research group, said by phone today.
The transitional government, or TFG, was created in 2004 with a mandate to create a central administration. Last month, it completed a peace agreement with a splinter group of the Islamic Courts, known as the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia. The accord, which calls for power sharing between the two sides and for the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops, has been rejected by al-Shabaab.
`Lack of Capacity’
The government “has exhibited, since its creation, a lack of capacity in terms of defending territory and ability to establish itself as a significant force in Somalia,” Middleton said. “The government hasn’t brought stability, it hasn’t brought development.”
Al-Shabaab will impose Shariah in Marka, Sheikh Abubakar, a spokesman for the group, said in remarks broadcast today on Radio Shabelle. Shariah is a system that operates under a code of Islamic principles first established in the Arab world by the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.
“From now on, you have to close all business centers at prayer time,” Abubakar said. “We have to modify the behavior of the youth in the town.”
Ethiopia’s Woyanne Foreign Ministry spokesman Wahde Belay said the withdrawal of troops from Somalia would be done in accordance with last month’s peace agreement, which was signed in neighboring Djibouti.
“We will stick to the Djibouti agreement,” Belay said by phone from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. “There is not any change of policy on our side.”
Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi said in October his country would support any government that could bring stability to Somalia, as long as it didn’t include al-Shabaab.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – Nokia said Ethiopian market is strategic and promising to the company. “As Ethiopia is one of the strategies and promising market of Nokia, we will continue to enhance our customer service and a 12 month warranty that is all part of Nokia’s strategy,” said Gerard Brandjes, Nokia’s General Manager for East Africa.
Brandjes indicated that his company is planning to negotiate with Ethiopian authorities on tax issues in order to connect as many people as possible with affordable prices. He was speaking to journalists Thursday at the Sheraton Addis in Ethiopia during the launching of three new products of Nokia, which are especially designed to meet the needs of African market.
Nokia 5000 with 1.3 mega pixel camera, Nokia 1680 Classic and Nokia 7070 Prism are the three products that the company introduced to Ethiopian market with e-mail, video and radio service features. Before subsidies and taxes currently the company is selling Nokia 5000 model for $95, Nokia 1680 Classic for $65 and Nokia 7070 Prism for $60.
Mentioning the zero tax rate of Ghana on mobile phones as a good indicator of the correlation between mobile connectivity level and business growth, Brandjes hopes that the fact that the more people connected through mobile phones, the more people get the opportunity to do business or enhance and grow their existing business will also applies in the case of Ethiopia.
Nokia, which recently increased the number of its products distribution agent in Ethiopia from one to two, is the only company to introduce mobile phone with national language of Ethiopia- Amharic, a year ago. Currently, the company is selling nine Amharic Nokia mobile phone models.
With the industry’s largest portfolio of mobile phones and support for more than 80 languages, more than one billion people worldwide currently use a Nokia device. Brandjes declined to reveal the exact share of Nokia mobile apparatus users in Ethiopia. He indicated that the majority of Ethiopians prefer Nokia mobiles over other brands because Nokia is the pioneer to introduce apparatuses with Amharic language, integrated video camera and flash light features.
Currently there are a total of around two million people in Ethiopia connected through mobile phones. But, the Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation, which is the government monopoly telecommunication, is working on its plan of adding six million new mobile users within one year.
CHICAGO – Lake Countys Juvenile Probation and Detention Services will have foreign visitors later this week.
On Friday, two doctoral students from Ethiopia will be visiting and touring the juvenile facilities to learn more about how the systems operate, with the hopes of improving juvenile services in their home country.
The two students, who are enrolled at the Graduate School of Social Work at Addis Ababa University, are visiting Chicago as part of a one-month teaching and learning exchange, according to the 19th Judicial Circuit.
On Friday, the students, along with a professor from Addis Ababa, will be in Lake County to learn more about how juvenile courts and detention facilities operate and also develop an ongoing exchange of information and ideas in the area of children in conflict with the law.
Ethiopia has only one child detention facility and it is located in Addis Ababa, the capitol city, while children in other locations are incarcerated with adults.
Zimbabwe’s economy has all but collapsed, leaving it’s currency worth far less than the paper it’s printed on. The hyperinflation is now estimated at over a quintillion percent, although no one really knows.
Most Zimbabweans are switching to barter and the Zim dollar is virtually useless. The South African rand and the US dollar are now the most common forms of currency. For the many who are unable to access forex, this means they will be unable to survive. Purses and wallets have become redundant; people are now using shopping bags, suitcases, sacks and other large containers to carry cash.
Bank tellers are hidden from view by huge piles of the increasingly worthless currency. Nearly all businesses have stopped accepting cheques for payment – creating an absolute nightmare for everyone, because of the absurd cash withdrawal limits at the banks.
All these because one 80-year-old one greedy dictator and his parasite cronies what to loot the country a few more years. Meles Zenawi & Co. are doing the same thing to Ethiopia.
A group of promising Kenyan athletes, Britain’s Mo Farah and Sweden’s Mustafa Mohammed will lead the foreign charge at next month’s Toyota Great Ethiopian Race.
Gilbert Yegon, who finished third in the half marathon race at the Standard Chartered Nairobi Marathon with 1:02:43, will team up with Raymond Tanui in the men’s race. Tanui won the Bath Half Marathon in 1:05:21 in March.
In the women’s race, Kenyans’ hopes rest on Valentine Kipketer and Joyce Kandia.
Kipketer finished fifth (17:50) over 5.35km in the Diekirch Eurocross, IAAF Cross Country Permit meeting in Luxemborg in February. She won the 15km women’s race during the Chepkoilel Cross-Country meeting a fortnight ago with 53:47.83 reading on the clock.
Kandia won the 2006 Belfast Marathon (2:43:11) and last month, she breezed to the tape in 34:30 to take the Baxters River Ness 10km in Scotland.
The Kenyan quartet will try to go one better than their compatriots Nathan Naibei and Lineth Chepkirui who recorded second-place finishes in the race in 2005 and 2006.
European Cup 5,000m champion, Farah, is training in Addis Ababa in preparation for the European Cross-Country Championships in Brussels.
Farah arrived in Addis at the end of October and plans to return to Britain at the end of November.
With Deriba Merga (fourth at the Beijing Olympics) and Tsegaye Kebede (Olympic Marathon bronze) as winners of the race in 2006 and last year, the event has become an important development race for upcoming Ethiopian athletes.
Medallist
More than 400 top club runners are expected to confirm their entry in the next 10 days, alongside the 32,000 entered.
Meanwhile, a busy season awaits athletes in the North Rift region as Athletics Kenya released a calendar of events for the branch, adds Joseph Ngure.
The branch meeting was chaired by national assistant secretary, Ibrahim Hussein. The season kicks off this weekend with the Tegla Loroupe 10km road race at Makutano Stadium, Kapenguria.
The Tuskys Wareng Cross-country will be held at Huruma open ground in Eldoret on November 30 and the Baringo Half-Marathon, sponsored by Safaricom, on December 6 in Kabarnet.
Shoe For Africa, a women’s exclusive event, will be held on December 20 in Iten with Eldoret hosting the sixth Kenya Commercial Bank/AK cross-country on January 10 at Kazi Mingi.
Other events: Discovery Kenya Cross-country on January 25 (Eldoret Sports Club), Discovery Kenya Half-marathon February 1 (Eldoret Town) and District Cross-country championships February 7.
GOBA, ETHIOPIA – Carefully targeted humanitarian food interventions, supported by the Finnish and Austrian Red Cross and the Federation and implemented by the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, have helped alleviate a food-security crisis in Wolaita in the SNNPR region.
But those projects will soon be winding down, and all eyes there are on crucial harvests starting about now – of wheat, maize, barley and teff – which are almost certain to have been damaged in unseasonal heavy rain.
“Our work pulled people back from the brink earlier this year, but we cannot afford to relax,” says Kassahun Habtemariam, ERCS team leader for disaster preparedness and prevention.
“If the harvest is poor or fails altogether, then we could be back in an emergency situation very quickly,” according to Hannele Kankuri, the Addis Ababa-based Finnish Red Cross team leader, whose food-relief effort was funded by ECHO.
The paradox of Ethiopia’s food crisis is that as the eastern and southern lowlands suffer an acute drought, which is forecast to worsen in 2009, parts of the central highlands – including the capital – have seen torrential downpours almost daily, causing lethal flash-floods in places.
What both parts of the country have in common is that familiar weather patterns have gone haywire, making life especially difficult for subsistence farmers and pastoralists.
Crop prospects
A country bulletin from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) last week said harvests looked “promising” in the west. But crop prospects in the east, particularly in the lowlands, were “poor” due to inadequate rain.
The food-aid requirement in Ethiopia countrywide remains huge, according to experienced aid workers in Addis Ababa, and the drought effect is going to be worse next year, they say. The main challenge for humanitarian response remains available resources, with competing priorities for donors from countries like Afghanistan and now Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Emergency needs for the first half of 2009 are being worked out by an inter-agency assessment exercise that began earlier this month in Tigray and will be agreed with the government.
Ethiopia, meanwhile, is the latest stop for an interdisciplinary team from the International Federation, helping Horn of Africa National Societies plan ways to scale up efforts to address what many observers continue to regard as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
The team, which includes experts in nutrition, agriculture, health, relief, water and sanitation, and livelihoods, visited Wolaita and confirmed the general impression that the food emergency there had abated.
In June, more than 160 severely malnourished children a week were coming from surrounding villages for intensive feeding in the Damot Pulasa woreda (district), making it likely that up to 4,000 children across the district were suffering lower levels of malnutrition.
Adult hunger was also clearly in evidence.
Scorched lowlands
But the situation in Wolaita remains precarious, like many other parts of the country.
The two woredas chosen for the Red Cross projects were assessed by the Ethiopian Red Cross and the government to be among the worst affected in the zone: between them some 76,000 beneficiaries were assisted.
A further 20,000 were included in the Ethiopian government’s national “safety net” programme in the Finnish-assisted woreda, Damot Gale.
An attempt by the Federation team to get through to the parched lowlands to the east of Goba, in Bale zone, had to be abandoned when the road became completely impassable.
In Ethiopia, a descent of much more than 5,000 feet can encompass almost the full range of conditions from saturated ground and dirt tracks made impassable by heavy rain to extreme drought that drives struggling pastoralists in the other direction.
Over the past few years some small farmers in the mid-highland regions have been forced to commute to higher elevations, where the rain has been more plentiful to seek day-work after their own crops failed.
Farmers like Abdulahi Adem, 35, married with six children, who grows teff, maize and wheat in Keku village, Bale zone. “Before when we planted in a normal period we produced plenty of everything,” he says. “But due to the rains failing this year we were able to collect only four bags [200kg].
“The weather has been changing. But this year it seems better because there was rainfall and it might help us to produce more. In the past two years all we planted was lost because of a shortage of rain.”
At these elevations, at least, there are some alternatives. But down in the scorched lowlands, like Afar and the Somali region, pastoralists have little choice but to move further and further afield to find shrinking supplies of pasture and browse.
