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Ogaden online
Friday, 22 January 2010
Reports reaching the Ogaden Online service desk from the city of Diridhaba in the province of Shiniile confirm the existence of a recent pitched battle that took place between the Tigrian People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) militias stationed in the area and the local citizenry.
It is reported that towards the end of last week, the civilians held an area wide demonstration to protest the recent confiscation by the TPLF militias of a fertile agricultural land estimated at 60,000 hectares. There were rumors within the city and its surroundings that the confiscated land was being given to Ethiopians migrating from the highlands. However, reliable sources within the TPLF militias and in Addis Ababa intimated that the land was clandestinely sold to a Chinese consortium.
Eyewitnesses reported that the TPLF militias instead of letting the citizens vent their bent up anger and frustration through the peaceful demonstration started shooting everyone on sight. Ogaden civilians once they realized what was going on immediately dispersed. However, Ogaden Online reporters in the area confirmed that instead of waiting out the TPLF militias to return to their barracks, as used to be the norm, the civilians many of whom were nomads who have firearms for protecting their livestock from wild animals in the area went back to their homes and came back armed and ready to fight the TPLF militias.
Eyewitnesses reported that the TPLF militias were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of armed civilians from all corners of the city. As a result, the TPLF militias were quickly overrun by the local civilians who appeared determined to face off the TPLF militias. It is reported that the TPLF militias left five of their own dead in the area and went back to their barracks. It is unknown how many they may lost or their number of injured militia members.
The civilians were said to have lost one, but there many injuries sustained by the civilian side. The city is still tense. There are reports that the TPLF militias have consulted with their bosses in Addis Ababa on what to do next. It is said they are awaiting further instructions. Many of the civilians are said to have sworn that rather than vacate their fertile land, they would die facing off the TPLF militias and any other group that attempts to confiscate their land.
Last Updated ( Friday, 22 January
http://www.ogaden.com/hornnews/ethiopia/616-tplf-militias-and-civilians-fought-a-pitched-battle-in-shiniile?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=
http://mathaba.net/news/print26.shtml?cmd[40]=i-42-12fbf17bce3711cfec9aeb13eb65d322
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Ethiopian forces burned the town of Budle.
Saturday, 23 January 2010
One of the Ogaden Towns burned by Ethiopian forces/ File Photo
Reports reaching the Ogaden Online News Desk confirm the burning down of the town of Budle, Shabelle province by the Woyane army. Eyewitnesses indicate that the Woyane militias first looted all valuables in the town. Prior to torching the town, the marauding Woyane militias also took two young girls with them. We couldn't confirm the names of the two young girls.
It is reported that the Woyane militias who torched Budle were fleeing the area after having been soundly defeated by the Ogaden National Liberation Army (ONLA).Last Updated ( Saturday, 23 January 2010
http://www.ogaden.com/hornnews/106-ogaden/621-ethiopian-forces-burned-the-town-of-budle-shabele-province?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=
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Oromo Human Right and Relief Organisation
Ijaarsa Mirga Namoomaa fi Gargaarsa Oromoo
Oromo Menschenrechts- und Hilfsorganisation (OMRHO e.V.)
20/01/2010 - No.001/01/2010
Urgent Action
As the Ethiopian national election is approaching, another mass arrest is foiling in various parts of Oromia region. According to OHRRO’s correspondents, right from Oromia, the scale of the mass arrest is an all out action all over the region. But, first, precisely because of the widely spread nature of the mass arrest and, secondly, because of the extremely tight control and monopoly of information by the regime, OHRRO’s sources of information couldn’t come up even with a reasonably partial lists of the arrested.
It is generally reported that the arrest campaign is largely concentrated in eastern and central part of Oromia.
Alone in Hararge it is estimated that more than 500 people have been arrested in only two consecutive dates 14th and 15th January. The arrested are from all walks of life, with no discrimination of age, gender or occupation. About 350 of the aressted are from Haroomaaya locality, while the rest are reported to be from Kombolcha, Dadar, Karroo, Dhangaggoo and Qarsaa villages of the Hararge region. Among those from Haroomayaa, two senior university students of computer science were mentioned in their first names as Gaadisaa and Beekamaa both of whom were reportedly abducted by the regime’s security forces from the university campus under extremely confidential circumstances. It is also reported that a 7th grade pupil named Caalaa was shot dead by the local security forces in the local town known as Qarsaa. Other two more students named Toofiq Aliyyii and Abdujabbaar Aliyyii, most likely brothers, were also shot and severely wounded. Their where about is not yet known, because they have been taken away by the TPLF authorities in order to keep the incident secret from the public under the pretext of medical treatment. It is reported that these shooting cases have caused uproar and a serious social unrest in the community as this have been testified by an escalating confrontation between government forces and the community at large.
This being the situation in Hararge, two other students from Awaasaa University, with names Jaataniin and Dhaabaa (a female and male respectively), were also secretly abducted and reportedly sent to the notorious central prison of the federal government known as Ma`ikelawi.
As already mentioned, the mass aresst campaign is not limited to the Hararge region. Many Oromos in eastern Shoa were also victims of the campaign in mass. Here most of the victims were reported to be school teachers and pupils.
Accordingly, the following are few names OHRRO received so far as arrested, alone from the locality known as Dugdaa in eastern Shoa, as a part of the mass-abduction-campaign in Oromia:
1. Daraaraa Baqqalaa – a school teacher
2. Maaramaa Mulugeetaa – a school teacher
3. Dhugaa Miidhagsoo – a school teacher
4. Gabbisaa Doorii finance officer
5. A person only with first name Isheetu and two other students whose name are not yet disclosed were all abducted together.
6. Magarsaa Bultoo from Dukam town at Aqqaqi district abducted while he was on teaching duty in the local school
7. A person with only first name Tamirat – a teacher at Odaa Nabee secretly abducted
8. Gamachuu Baqqalaa – a student at Bishooftu (Debrezeit) high school abducted from home early in the morning before he was awake by the regime’s police force.
9. Bulbulaa Takkaa – a student also from Bishooftu (Debrezeit) abducted under similar circumstances
These are the few names disclosed so far among hundreds of Oromos herded into prison. As it has always been, their circumstance is extremely precarious. No one can tell about their final fate. It is highly probable that they will be liable to physical torture, long imprisonment or even death without due jurisdiction. As most of the arrested are likely family heads and communally important individuals, the further humanitarian consequence of their arrest would be immense both in terms of quantitative and qualitative dimensions. Therefore this indiscriminate action of the TPLF/EPRDF regime is tantamount to declaring a war against the Oromo people at large.
Given such over all flagrant human right abuse, the Oromo Human Right and Relief Organization (OHRRO) is gravely concerned about the devastating humanitarian consequences and its socio-political aftermath. It appeals therefore to all freedom and peace loving governments and non-governmental organizations to react and put the necessary pressure on the TPLF/EPRDF regime before things go out of every one’s control.
The Oromo Human Right and Relief Organization, OHHRRO, better known as OMRHO e.V., after its German acronym for Oromo Menschens Recht and Hilfs Organisation, is a non political and non profitable organization. It was founded in 2005 in Hannover, Germany as a legally registered human right organization.
The executive board of OMRHO e.V
Source: OromiaTimes
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Focussing Towards Common Enemy will Expedite Victory
By maamule on January 16
ONLF - It is imperative that the oppressed peoples who are under the domination of dictatorship and tyranny will need solidarity and cooperation among themselves to release themselves from tyrannical rule imposed upon them. Unless we focused on the deception and intrigues fabricated by our enemy to create mistrust among our peoples, sow seeds of conflicts between them or create fear and hatred towards each other and exposed these wicked acts of the enemy the success of our struggle will fall under question.
There are many nations, nationalities and peoples who are struggling against the Wayyane tyrannical dictatorship in Ethiopia. Amongst them the Ogadeni and Oromo peoples can be mentioned as the foremost peoples fighting the century old unjust system of the Ethiopian regime. These neighborly and brotherly peoples have many features in common, which we may point as follows:
1- The Oromo and Ogadeni peoples passed many years of misery and subjugation under the ruthless Ethiopian domination. In the same manner at present, they are denied of their right of ownership of their country. The fact that their country, their wealth and property fell under the control of the present minority dictatorship of the TPLF and caused their respective populations exposed to severe famine and hunger made them believe that they do not have a government that represents them and take care of them during bad time.
2- The two peoples are familiar by the fact that they are/were struggling against their common enemy in order to end the century old foreign domination and attain their freedom. The struggle they waged for years in order to live as free nation in their own country made them similar. The other point that indicates their similarity is that both of them struggle to empower their population as decision makers in their affairs and to make sure that they are in control of the wealth of their country.
3- Because of their political attitude the Oromo and Ogadeni people are considered by Ethiopian government as a primary enemy and harassed in their villages, imprisoned, or killed without due process of law. The two peoples are denied of human rights in their own countries and dislocated, forced to flee their country and sought a refugee status in foreign land, and all these made them people of the same fate.
4- The two peoples have adjacent settlements, they have similar culture and tradition with which they use to settle disputes whenever they arise. They have customs of resolving societal problems without allowing the intervention of aliens into their affairs; and these made them, basically they are people with similar culture and customs.
5- In spite of the fact that the Ogadeni and Oromo people are despised and looked down upon by the Ethiopian government they are, on the other hand, considered and feared as their enemy number one.
6- Today as the Oromo people is being allegedly accused of being sympathetic or supportive to the OLF, the Ogadeni people is also being accused, imprisoned, harassed and killed because of their political stand towards the ONLF.
7- Depending on their lifestyle, peoples who depend on cattle raising and farming for their livelihood will support each other when bad harvest or draught occurs to pass the bad days. This good neighborlihood and brotherly nature of our two peoples is one of the common features that must be maintained and not to be misused to the advantage of our enemy.
8- The mindset of the Ethiopian despotic rulers is built upon the mentality that anyone whose political stand is not in parallel with theirs must be eliminated. Because of this it is unfortunate that the Oromo and Ogadeni peoples could not get the right to support the political organization of their choice or organize themselves under one of the organizations of their preference. They are obliged to organize themselves only under the TPLF affiliated political organizations.
9- Above all, the fact that these peoples have a common enemy, made them that they are peoples of similar problems and that of the same aspirations.
In general the points mentioned above and others still did not mentioned, indicate that the two peoples share many common features than differences. However, it is obvious to the two peoples that, being aware of these facts the enemy is perpetrating intrigues in order to create discords in the relations of the two peoples to prolong its life. Among the plots intricated by the enemy is fabricating border disputes between the neighboring populations and thereby create obstacles to their peaceful and harmonious livelihood. Conscious of this, the OLF/ONLF confirms that the two peoples; specially the elderlies, the students and the traditional leaders must tirelessly work in exposing the intrigues perpetrated by our enemy and take an immediate and necessary measures.
In addition to these the Ethiopian government intentionally makes the neighboring peoples quarrel over water wells and grazing land, whereby they create conflicts among the local population in order to prolong their stay in the political power. The oppressed peoples must understand that it is themselves who are directly affected by the deception created among them by the enemy; therefore it is important than anything that what is prolonging the domination of the repressive regime of the TPLF is their being prey to the intrigues of the regime. Being aware of this the ONLF/OLF reiterate that the oppressed peoples in general, the Ogadeni and Oromo peoples in particular, must leave aside petty conflicts created and fanned among them by the enemy and work hard to remove mistrusts and misunderstandings among themselves. Lastly, it is the intention and will of the OLF/ONLF to direct the two peoples to focus on constructing harmonious relations among themselves that leads to victory.
ONA. http://www.ogadennet.com/english/print.php?type=N&item_id=156
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Jangling nerves: Meles Zenawi will probably win the election. But that may not bring calm
Thursday, 21 January 2010
WORRIES about Ethiopia’s election, due in May, are growing. Aid-giving Western governments hope it will pass off without the strife that followed the last one, in 2005, when 200 people were killed, thousands were imprisoned, and the democratic credentials of Meles Zenawi, despite his re-election, were left in tatters.
Though poor and fragile, Ethiopia carries a lot of weight in the region. A grubby election could worsen things in neighbouring Sudan, where civil war threatens to recur. The borderlands near Kenya, where cattle raiding, poaching and banditry are rife, would become still more dangerous. A renewal of unrest in Ethiopia would be exploited by its arch-enemy, Eritrea, which already backs sundry rebel groups in an effort to undermine the country’s government. And it could make matters even worse in Somalia, where jihadist fighters linked to al-Qaeda want to weaken “Christian” Ethiopia, where a third of the people are in fact Muslim. Foreign intelligence sources have long feared a jihadist attack in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia is a country of contradictions. With its present population of around 82m growing by 2m a year, it is poised to overtake Egypt as Africa’s second-most-populous country after Nigeria, with around 150m. It hosts the seat of the African Union. It runs one of Africa’s biggest airlines. This year its economy is predicted to grow by 7%, one of the fastest rates in the world. It is wooing foreign investors with offers to lease 3m hectares of arable land. It is expensively branding its coffee for export.
Yet the grim side is just as striking. Hunger periodically stalks the land. Some 5m people rely on emergency food to survive; another 7m get food aid. Few people benefit from the country’s free market. Ethiopia has one of Africa’s lowest rates of mobile-phone ownership. Income per head is one of the most meagre in the continent.
All this is the responsibility of Mr Meles’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which has run the show since 1991. The party is dominated by former Marxist rebels from Tigray, even though Tigrayans, among them Mr Meles, make up only 6% of Ethiopia’s population. Not that Tigrayans want to cling to power, says Mr Meles brusquely. It is just that Ethiopia needs consistency to pursue a long-term development agenda. And the EPRDF can point to some successes. Since Mr Meles came to power, infant mortality has fallen by half, school attendance has risen dramatically and life expectancy has increased from 45 to 55 years.
Nourishing a liberal democracy or upholding human rights, however, has never been central to that agenda, even less so after Mr Meles clobbered the opposition in 2005. Some Western diplomats insist, implausibly, that politics has got better since. The government and some opposition parties have, for instance, signed a code of conduct for the coming election. Some of the opposition groups are genuine, but others are in hock to the EPRDF. In any case, the main opposition grouping, Forum, refused to join the talks, arguing that the EPRDF would exploit any agreement for its own ends. The government has been smothering potential sources of independent opposition, such as foreign and local NGOs. It insists it does not censor the press, but newspapers continue to close and independent journalists are moving abroad. Some farmers allege they are being denied food aid for political reasons.
Forum is demanding the release of one its leaders, Birtukan Mideksa, from prison. She was jailed with other opposition figures after the 2005 election, later pardoned, then arrested again. She is unlikely to be let out again before the poll as she could, some say, pose a real threat to the EPRDF in Addis Ababa and other cities.
Yet most Western governments seem keen to downplay Mr Meles’s human-rights record, hoping his re-election will keep his country stable. America is to disburse $1 billion in state aid to Ethiopia this year, more if covert stuff is included. Ethiopia can expect a similar amount from the European Union, multilaterally and through bilateral arrangements with Britain and others. And climate-change deals may bring Mr Meles even more cash.
Source: http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15332024
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Dagaal aad u wayn oo Tigreega iyo ONLF ku dhexmaray magaalada Ma’ayso
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Warar hordhac ah oo naga soo gaadhaya magaalada Diridhaba ayaa waxa ay sheegayaan in maalin sadexaad uu dagaal adagi ku dhexmaray xoogagga ONLF iyo Tigreega magaalada Ma’ayso oo dhanka Koonfur Galbeed kaga beegan magaalada Diridhaba. Dagaalkan oo aan si dhab ah loo soo xaqiijinin khasaasihiisa ayaa waxa ay wararku sheegayaan in uu ahaa dagaal aad u wayn oo siwayn u gilgilay magaalada Diridhaba.
Dagaalkan ayaa waxaa laxaqiijinayaa in Tigreega loogu gaystay khasaare aad u badan, iyadoo dagaalka kadib ay Tigreegu halkaas isugu keentay ciidan aad u tira badan oo ka kala yimid dhanaca Addisababa iyo dhinaba Diridhaba.
Ma'aha dagaalkii ugu horeeyay ee ay jabhadda ONLF iyo Tigreega ku dhexmara dhulka istaraatijiga ah ee ay maraan wadada isku xidha Diridhaba iyo Addisababa iyo wadada treenka.
Dagaalka u dhexeeya ONLF iyo Tigreega ayaa waxaa hadda la saadaalinayaa in uu saamayn ku yeelan doono magaalooyinka waawayn ee Itoobiya oo uu khatar galin doono isu socodka magaalooyinka Diridhaba iyo Addisababa.
Wixii war ah ee kasoo cusbaanaada dagaalkaas dib ayaan idiinka soo sheegi doonaa
http://www.ogaden.com/wararka/ogaden/613-dagaal-aad-u-wayn-oo-tigreega-iyo-onlf-ku-dhexmaray-magaalada-maayso?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=
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Agency licenses over 2000 projects in six months
Saturday, 23 January 2010
By Hayal Alemayehu
The Ethiopian Investment Agency (EIA) has licensed some 2077 projects during the first half of the current fiscal year with a registered capital of over 35.9 billion birr, the agency’s latest data indicated.
According to the agency’s data, the manufacturing sector has attracted the highest number of projects registered during the reported period where some 507 projects were licensed with a combined registered capital of over 18.8 billion birr.
Real estate, renting and business activities, categorized as one of the thirteen major investment areas, was the second major sector that attracted 360 projects with a combined registered capital of over 4.5 billion birr.
The agricultural sector was the third largest area of investment for both foreign and local investment projects licensed during the reported half year. Some 351 projects were registered with an aggregate capital of over 4.1 billion in this sector during the reported period.
Of the 2017 projects licensed during the reported period, some 27 projects have become operational while the rest have yet to finalize preparations to commence operation.
http://en.ethiopianreporter.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2182&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=26
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News Item: : Ethiopia: Re-tooling the 2010 election as a weapon of democracy
Thursday 21 January 2010 -
By Maimire Mennasemay, Ph.D.
What to do with the 2010 election?
Whatever one’s position on the 2010 general election, a number of things are certain. First, the election will take place. Second, the democratic forces are fragmented and at loggerheads with each other, but almost all of them—those who signed the Code of Conduct and those who did not -- are participating in the election. Third, the history of the TPLF/EPRDF makes it certain that it will use fraud, intimidation, arrest, imprisonment, and violence to win the elections.
A cursory examination of the current debate on the 2010 election shows a wide and contradictory range of views. Not surprisingly, those who support the TPLF/EPRDF assert that the 2010 election is as democratic as they come and accuse its detractors of all the political ills one could imagine. Those who support the parties that signed the Code of Conduct seem to have divergent but overlapping answers. Some seem to imply that democracy will emerge only if they work within the system. Others seem to believe, rather faintly, that the democratic victory of 2005, crushed by the TPLF/EPRDF, could be re-enacted. Still others argue that even if it is certain that the TPLF/EPDRF will win the election, the electoral exercise will have pedagogical benefits for the democratic struggle against the current authoritarian regime. Finally, those who are opposed to the signing of the Code of Conduct consider the 2010 election a sham. For the latter, participating in the election will do nothing else but misleadingly legitimize the TPLF/EPDRF dictatorship as a democratic regime.
Though these answers express contradictory sentiments and values, there is a grain of truth in most of them. Since the democratic forces seem unable to coalesce into a single democratic movement for the purpose of the election, the challenge for them now is to allow their divergent approaches to converge, without formal cooperation, so that a tapestry of political actions emerges that point in the same direction; to wit, the goal of de-legitimizing the current authoritarian ethnic state. Such an approach will not require the various democratic parties to change their specific political commitments. However, it requires that they look at their specific programs from the perspective of the alternative Ethiopia -- democratic, prosperous, and just -- that all Ethiopians yearn for. By eschewing the practice of denigrating each other, and by committing their intelligence, courage and effort to a relentless critique of the disastrous policies and actions of the regime, they could open a new political horizon that could make the victory of the TPLF/EPDRF a defeat in victory, thus paving the way for its eventual exit. The question then is how to transform the 2010 election into a weapon for making the forecasted TPLF/EPDRF’s electoral victory the womb of its own defeat.
“Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right”
An idea from our own culture suggests an approach that could help the pro-democratic parties to achieve this end. A Gurage /Chaha saying runs: “The cure for the evil eye is in the evil eye”. This profoundly dialectical Guarge saying draws our attention to the important fact that we could find the answers to our questions in the errors we make and have made in the past as well as in the evils we combat. Such quests for answers that will help us overcome the adversities we confront require changes in the way we see and use the opportunities at hand. In other words, as Angela Marie Difranco puts it,
for every lie I unlearn I learn something new I sing sometimes for the war that I fight 'cause every tool is a weapon - if you hold it right
First, elections are political tools, and like any tool, every election could become a tool for democracy if we “hold it right”, which means that if we hold the 2010 election right, it could become a powerful weapon for effectively de-legitimating the TPLF/EPDRF regime. Second, as the poem suggests, to “learn something new” is the payoff of “every lie I unlearn”. That is, we could transform the 2010 election into a weapon for democracy only if we “unlearn” a certain number of values and habits that have doomed the Ethiopian struggle for democracy since its beginning. The most destructive lie that the democratic forces have to unlearn—one that has plagued the Ethiopian democratic struggle for almost a century -- is the lie of “purism”: the belief that only my party, only my leader, or only I have the only true answer to the question of how democracy could be achieved in Ethiopia. Since the 1960s, such purism has cost Ethiopians untold opportunities, efforts and lives. Many political organizations and individuals—despite the fact that they were sincerely committed to democracy in Ethiopia—resorted to destructive confrontations, character assassinations, self-defeating divisions, and even violence rather than pursue the goal of democracy in their own way without ostracizing those who have a different approach to the same goal. Purism is still the political beast that is wrecking havoc within the Ethiopian democratic family. Purism also gives an excellent opportunity to the TPLF/EPRDF regime to infiltrate and sow discord among the democratic forces. Laying purism to rest will undoubtedly facilitate the retooling of the 2010 election into a weapon for democracy; it will increase the likelihood of the eviction of the current authoritarian regime and make brighter the prospects of democracy in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was not build in a day, nor through a single method. From the Kingdom of Axum to that of Lalibela, from Ahmad Gragn to the Zemene Mesafint, from Twedros to the present, Ethiopia was built through diverse and contradictory means, drawing on the labours, talents, courage and cultures of the Tigreans, Amharas, Oromos, Somalis, the peoples of the South, East and West, Moslems and Christians, peasants, pastoralists and workers. The complexity of Ethiopian history suggests that there will always be differences on how to build democracy and that no single perspective on democracy could ever adequately mobilize all the Ethiopian social forces. However, all the diverse perspectives could contribute to it. Like the many streams that flow into the Abay to form the formidable and life-giving Blue Nile, the various democratic approaches, if allowed to pursue their path, could eventually conjoin and form a powerful democratic current as irresistible as the Abay river when it receives the full complements of its tributaries. In other words, to render the Ethiopian democratic forces irresistible, it is imperative to recognize the right to exist and act of organizations such as MEDREK, AEUP, EDP, GINBOT 7, and other members of the Ethiopian opposition, provided that they pursue the goal of a democratic alternative to the present ethnicized and exploitative regime. As long as political organizations espouse this goal, they should be able to follow their own path without being crucified for entertaining a different perspective. Signing or not signing the Code of Conduct, working within or outside the country, participating or not participating in the election, being a former member or supporter of the TPLF/EPDRF, should not be used to discredit and destroy members of the Ethiopian democratic family. If this kind of political tolerance were to become the code of conduct among members of the Ethiopian democratic family, the possibility of making the 2010 election an effective weapon for subverting the current authoritarian ethnic regime and for laying the foundations for a democratic regime in Ethiopia will be enhanced. The question then is: What issues could contribute to retooling the 2010 election into a weapon for democracy?
The Code of Conduct as a Code of Exclusion
Each pro-democratic party has probably ideas on how to convert the 2001 election into an arsenal for democracy. Nevertheless, one could elicit some crucial answers to the above question by applying the spirit of the Gurage saying and the idea that “every tool is a weapon if you hold it right”. To do so, one could start with the Code of Conduct (COC) that the EPRDF and three opposition parties -- the Ethiopian Democratic Party, All Ethiopia Unity Organization, and the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party -- signed recently but that organizations such as the UDJ and MEDREK have rejected.
The COC is made up of innocuous sounding but deeply insidious statements governing the conduct of political parties during the election. One should not consider the COC as a document that floats above the existing Ethiopian conditions. Its very existence is proof that the present Ethiopian conditions are not democratic, for such a document would not have been necessary if there were democracy in Ethiopia. The very existence of the document expresses the need for the TPLF/EPRDF to mask its oppressive nature and thus demands that the context that called for the document’s elaboration be injected into the electoral process. Using the COC as a political boomerang that comes back to its originating context and knocks it open to expose what it tries to hide— the anti-democratic and exploitative nature of the TPLF/EPDRF regime—is an action that those who signed and did not sign the COC, and those who participate and do not participate in the election, could take. Though each pro-democracy organization could choose to emphasize the issues that it considers important, there are a number of crucial elements that are part of the context of the COC, and that the COC tries to occlude, that need to be exposed. In reality, the COC functions as a Code of Exclusion of issues that are crucial for democracy in Ethiopia. Injecting these issues into the 2010 election could transform it into a transgressive event that effectively subverts the legitimacy and political power of the TPLF/EPDRF. Let me then identify at least five of these issues.
First, the COC masks a lie that needs to be exposed. History shows that for democracy the route we follow is infinitely more important than the roots we claim. It is thus universally recognized that democratic sovereignty is founded on the separation of powers and not on the separation of ethnies. And yet, this universal principle is scotomized in the 1994 Constitution and is replaced by the lie that democratic sovereignty is based on the separation of ethnies. This lie allows the regime to claim democratic legitimacy while in practice Meles (and the TPLF politburo) control the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. It is to cover up this lack of the separation of powers that the COC presupposes as a given the existence of the separation of powers (article 18). Since there cannot be democracy without separation of powers, all transgressions of this principle such as the subordination of parliament and the subjection of the judiciary to the interests and whims of the TPLF/EPRDF ruling clique, and other practices that flout the democratic principle of the separation of powers, need to be brought to the fore. These are crucial issues for all Ethiopians irrespective of their ethnic origin and faith.
Second, the TPLF/EPDRF regime claims that Ethiopia’s GDP real growth rate is above 11% . It may well be true. And yet, according to the World Food Programme, hunger threatens currently more than six million Ethiopians. In other words, in light of the government’s claim of high GDP growth rate, it follows that the hunger and the malnutrition that currently afflicts Ethiopians cannot but be man-made; it cannot be the result of the absence of economic growth. The main reason for the poverty-ridden living conditions of the vast majority of Ethiopians is the obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of the TPLF/EPRDF elites. Banking, import-export, manufacturing, mining, construction, transport and communication, publishing and entertainment industries are all concentrated in the hands of these elites. Possessed by an insatiable greed, these elites are investing heavily in cash-crop production and are leasing away millions of hectares of fertile land to foreign countries and companies for the purpose of exporting food. In the meantime, millions of Ethiopians are reduced to the humiliating life of being recipients of international food charity. According to the Save the Children report (September 22, 2009), “Three million children in Ethiopia urgently need food amid [the] worst crisis in decades.” In the mean time, the ruling elites enjoy living conditions that would make many a rich American green with envy. The COC masks three fundamental issues related to this situation. First, it hides the fact that the regime has instrumentalized hunger for buying political support from peasants by denying food aid to those who do not submit to its political will. Second, it masks the present economic injustice that calls urgently for the liberation of the economy form the iron-grip of the TPLF/EPRDF elites. Third, it tries to hide the glaring absence of social justice that allows the existence of wide-spread grinding poverty side-by-side with the opulent life-style of the ruling elites, an injustice that demands to be exposed during the election. These are issues about which the great majority of Ethiopians care, irrespective of their ethnic identity.
Third, the pro-democracy parties cannot pass in silence the havoc and destruction that the Meles regime has inflicted on the Ethiopians of the Ogaden. The Somalis are massacred and their habitat destroyed because they reject the TPLF/EPDRF definition of “ethnic self-determination” as being the tool of the economic aggrandizement of the TPLF/EPDRF elites. In light of the scorched-earth policy that the regime pursues in the Ogaden, one cannot but conclude that the COC, in its article 10, tries to mask the regime’s abhorrent use of the “Ethiopian defense forces” to implement and defend the interests of the TPLF/EPDRF elites. It is precisely the TPLF self-serving definition of democratic sovereignty in terms of the separation of ethnies rather than in terms of the separation of powers that gave the TPLF/EPDRF regime a free hand to exploit “ethnic self-determination” as a tool for extracting wealth and use in the process the “Ethiopian defense forces” as the private army of the ruling elite. Given this context, no Ethiopian, in any region of Ethiopia, is immune from being subjected one day to the fate of the Ethiopians of the Ogaden, if the interests of the TPLF/EPDRF require it. This is an issue then that is of interest to all Ethiopians, whatever region they hail from.
Fourth, the COC embodies another lie—that Ethiopia belongs to all Ethiopians. Its mention of “the Ethiopian citizens’ centuries struggle” (article 13) masks the fact that the TPLF/EPDRF has blatantly betrayed these “centuries of struggle” by creating a regime where not only the overwhelming wealth of the country is appropriated by the TPLF ruling elite, but also a state whose upper echelons of the armed, police and security forces as well as of the bureaucratic, judiciary and diplomatic offices are almost entirely in the hands of the ethnic group that the TPLF claims to represent. Never in the history of Ethiopia has a single ethnie so thoroughly monopolized the upper ranks of the armed, police and security forces, the commanding heights of the state bureaucracy, the economy and the judiciary as under the TPLF/EPDRF regime. This is an issue that concerns all Ethiopians. In the Ethiopia of TPLF/EPDRF there are two classes of Ethiopian citizens -- the “golden” citizens (to cite Meles’s intentionally divisive epithet) who have access to political, economic, social powers and the commanding heights of the state apparatus, and the “others”, who, though constituting the majority, are recognized as “citizens” only if they submit to the will of the regime. Ethiopians, including those who Meles abusively reduces to being only his ethnic kin and kith, ignoring the historical record that Tigreans are the kin and kith of all Ethiopians, reject this abominable conception of citizenship.
Finally, article 1 of the COC pays lip-service to the “imperative of the realization of the human and democratic rights” of Ethiopians. But the fact of the matter is that Ethiopians are subject to serious human, political and civic rights violations before the signing of the COC, and are still subject to the same indignities and oppressions after the signing of the COC. The shining symbol of the persistence of this repression is the continued incarceration of Judge Burtukan. Her “crime” was to be the authentic voice of the deep yearning of Ethiopians for democracy. The injustice inflicted on the thousands of Ethiopians who are harassed and imprisoned for no other reason than their conviction that Ethiopians have the right to speak and associate with each other freely cannot be elided over in the 2010 election. What the COC tries to do in its cynical assumption that “human and democratic rights” are currently respected is to exclude the violation of these rights as an issue.
There is still Sufficient Time
Bringing to the fore the above issues -- all occluded by the COC through phrasings that assume that these issues do not exist and that bringing them up is tantamount to misconduct—will surely transform the 2010 election into a weapon for democracy that will de-legitimate and thus undermine the TPLF/EPDRF’s hold on power. But this is possible only if the members of the Ethiopian democratic family abide by a democratic code of conduct, implicit or explicit, based on mutual respect and tolerance.
The TPLF/EPDRF penned Code of Conduct is in reality a Code of Exclusion that tries to put out of bounds precisely those issues that are of concern to all the members of the Ethiopian democratic family: to those who signed the COC and those who rejected it, to those who participate in the election and those who do not, and to all those who, whatever their particular political approach may be, share the goal of a democratic Ethiopia. There is still sufficient time left for the democratic opposition forces to successfully convert the 2010 election into an arsenal of powerful causes and retool it into a formidable weapon that could transform TPLF/EPDRF’s predicted victory into a womb that gestates the regime’s defeat, thus facilitating the birth of a democratic Ethiopia. This opportunity should not be wasted.
The writer can be reached at -email-.
http://www.ethioguardian.com/print.php?news.3486
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Abyssinian Puppet Riyaale's Targets Exposed by Somali Patriots
22. Jan, 2010
Destroy the education of a country, and you destroy the country. The statement is valid allover the world. If applied in the breakaway state of Somaliland, which serves the evil Amhara and Tigray Monophysitic Abyssinian plans of extermination of the Somali Nation, the statement looks like … governmental policy of the unrecognized pseudo-state’s educational institutions and the ‘Ministry of Education’.
Somalis in Awdal, Ogaden, Abgal or any other place are a highly cultured, open-minded nation with a great youth which is eager for study, knowledge, and science. In brief, like the Oromos, the Sidamas and the other Kushitic and Nilo-Saharan nations, they are at the antipodes of the uneducated, uncultured, ignorant and barbaric Amhara and Tigray Monophysitic Abyssinians, and this hinges at the epicenter of the 700 years old opposition between Enlightened Somalia and Obscurantist Abyssinia.
As a matter of fact, it is all a matter of tyrannical Amhara Monophysitic rule, imposed by an uneducated, uncultured, ignorant and barbaric elite; before the Oromos, the Sidamas, the Afars, the Ogadenis and the Somalis, the first victims have been the Tigray and the Amhara Monophysitic Abyssinians themselves.
As the monstrous elite, which had for centuries ruled a tiny, isolated circumference until the middle of the 19th century, expanded in Eastern Africa, colonizing the subjugated nations of the Oromos, the Afars, the Sidamas, and others, a racist effort has been systematically deployed by them to destroy the indigenous higher cultures, to plunge the invaded nations into a darkness of obscurantism, and to effectively amharanize them.
In fact, the racist Amhara elite cannot accept the co-existence and the co-habitation (within the context of the greater Eastern Africa) of other more civilized and better educated nations. Enlightenment and Humanism are precisely the forbidden notions for the Abyssinians ? due to the political ideology of that elite; how could they then feel possibly comfortable with the subjugated nations’ intention to preserve their Culture, Education, Faith, Enlightenment and Humanism?
Like in every other place, colonization is the ultimate barbarization.
The evil Abyssinian plan to destroy Somalia in revenge of the Somali invasion and destruction of the African pariah state of Gondar before 500 years did not only involve the early occupation of a sizeable part of Somalia (Ogaden), the fomentation of fratricidal strife, conflict, antagonism and hatred among Somalis, the formation of useless, unrepresentative, tyrannical, breakaway state (Somaliland, Puntland) and the recent military occupation of another part of the Somali national territory (in the South). It also involved the extraction, expropriation and usurpation of Somalia’s resources (Ogaden’s Oil being just one example). Above all, it presupposed an effort to destroy the educational and cultural background of the Somalis.
Of course, targeting the education in Somalia means automatically primary effort to destroy the education in Somaliland, the unrecognized territory of the Abyssinian stooges, the tyrant Riyaale and his most despised gang. The first Abyssinian priority.
In fact, a deceitful system of pseudo-education has been imposed in Somaliland in order to promote the treacherous, racist, anti-Somali plans of the Abyssinian elites. The high traitors around Riyaale have done their ingenious best to implement them; they created an unattractive and at times repellant environment within which not a single youth wants to study in Somaliland’s pseudo-universities and bogus colleges. In these pseudo-Somali ‘educational;’ institutions, the historical truth is modified and/or eliminated in order to make the Northern Somalis forget their incomparable historical superiority in terms of Culture, Arts, Sciences, Letters, Theology, Literature, Architecture, Economy, Politics, and Folklore vis-
http://travelholidayhotels.com/abyssinian-puppet-riyaales-targets-exposed-by-somali-patriots/
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