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June 14, 2008 - Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia's Somali Regional State This report by Human Rights Watch, a respected international human rights organization was released this week and supported by technical analysis by scientists from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It is a very well prepared report. For most Ethiopians, this report adds to the shame of being an Ethiopian under the TPLF-controlled government. For TPLF supporters who worship Meles it is irrelevant. EPLF supporters who worship Isayas Afeworki dismiss human rights reports in exactly the same way. The Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is the most incompetent foreign ministry of any country in the world, has put out a childish diatribe in response to HRW's report. I'd like to give these TPLF servants some advice: SHUT UP. This HRW document is going to be part of the folder to prosecute TPLF officials once they are removed from power in Ethiopia. Staff in the Foreign Ministry should abandon the regime now or risk incriminating themselves in the crimes the TPLF is committing. In October 2007, a war crimes suspect from the Congo was arrested and flown to the Hague for trial. This is now a plausible scenario for people such as the TPLF's Abay Tsehaye - who is mentioned in the HRW report as likely the one who directly organized this campaign.
Why does famine occur in Ethiopia over and over and over again? According to Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics:
Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence (the last famine, which I witnessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before independence), they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press. Other researchers have refined this thesis by noting that although famines may occur in democracies, they are quickly addressed and death rates are greatly reduced as compared to autocracies (such as TPLF-controlled Ethiopia). Award-winning scholar and author Jared Diamond notes that one of the reasons societies fail to solve the problems facing them is that the ruling elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Thus the TPLF land policy, telecom monopoly, fertilizer trade monopoly, etc... has zero impact on whether the TPLF/EPRDF ruling class will have enough food to eat. A famine in Bugna wereda has no impact on the TPLF's control of the area because they have imposed the repulsive Bereket Simon as the parliamentary representative of that area. Bereket Simon has nothing to do with Bugna wereda. He owes his position to constant servility to Meles Zenawi not to service to the people of Bugna wereda. Today, millions of Ethiopian children in the Oromia region face death each night because they have no food. At this exact moment, Kuma Demeksa, an Oromo high official who supposedly represents the people of Oromia, will be gorging himself along with hundreds of other servile ethnic nationalists at a state dinner hosted by Meles Zenawi. All Revolutionary Democrats of Ethiopia will be feasting over the next few days to celebrate their control of power. That what the UN calls a "catastrophic" famine is underway in parts of Ethiopia has no impact on the food available to these people. They will gain weight and loosen their belts because they are fully insulated (for the moment) from the consequences of their misrule. The ethnic nationalism represented by Kuma Demeksa and other servile ethnic politicians is referred to as "Castrated Nationalism". The organization of society into ethnic nations and its top down control via castrated ethnic parties was the governing strategy in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. This technique, which was partnered with a vicious campaign against the emergence of civic democratic parties, only served to aggravate ethnic tensions and lead to the violent breakup of those societies. The TPLF is following exactly this technique. Castrated ethnic parties are cultivated while emerging civic parties are persecuted. On top of this we have the extreme poverty of Ethiopia. If the relatively advanced Yugoslavia and Soviet Union failed, what will be the result in Ethiopia?
ANGRY CHINA Economist, May 1, 2008
Comment: The Chinese Communist Party is rubbish. A recent bestseller book about Mao (Mao -The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday; "an atom bomb of a book" according to Time Magazine) has revealed a lot of the secret history of this nasty organization. Communist party policies left China far behind its neighbors like S. Korea, and Taiwan. We now know the secret history of these hustlers, and their betrayals during the war against Japan (1930s), how they were totally controlled from Moscow for many years, how Mao traveled comfortably - hand carried on a chair - during the Long March when thousands died. We know about the totally fake agricultural production during the 1950s and the export of grain while tens of millions of chinese peasants were dying. The list goes on and on. THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY. The Chinese Communist Party has never been held to account for this. Most of the officials belong in jail. Many deserve to be executed. ... But the TPLF praises them... The current development in China is due to massive foreign investment and to the hard work of the chinese people. Foreigners invest in China because, thanks ot decades of revolutionary democracy, it is a poor country with very cheap labor. It is also a huge market located in an economically active part of the world. The corrupt actions of the Chinese Communist Party are leading to ecological disasters and horrible structural problems that would have been prevented in a country where people control their own government. But in China the priority of government officials is to engage in various "get rich quick" schemes. Now China has an extreme super-rich class heavily populated with cadres and other government officials. This wealth should have remained in the hands of the farmers and the workers. The chinese communist party does not deserve any credit for anything. If they had not existed, China would be similar to Taiwan now. ... How many current and former TPLF/EPRDF cadres are engaged in a miniature version of what the Chinese communist party cadres are doing? CHINA - Inside the dragon National Geographic Special Issue, May 2008
If you look below the surface, you will find signs that a new consciousness is beginning to seep like rainwater through the layers of Chinese society. Not only are people coming to accept that the country's prosperity is bound up with caring for the environment, but they're now also aware that efforts at environmental protection are in turn bound up with improving systems of law and government. Good laws mean nothing when, as is often still the case, leaders don't have the will or means to enforce them, so some Chinese — those desperate enough — are testing the limits of political constraints through acts of civil disobedience. The TPLF wants Ethiopia to be like China. Why would a political group that claims to believe in democracy, copy the corrupt, rotten, COMMUNIST party of China? Its obvious. The TPLF has never believed in democracy and never will. The y believe in control. There are other developing countries that could be better models. How about democratic, multicultural, federal India? How about trying just to catch up to our richer, democratic developing African countries like Ghana? No. TPLF doesn't believe in the Ghana model or the India model, or any model where the people are empowered. Read the following perceptive quote from the current National Geographic magazine and compare to the situation in Ethiopia:
In China though, new cities are strictly business: factories and construction supplies and cell phone shops. Local governments focus on profiteering and the Communist party has always discouraged the kind of organizations that contribute in other societies. It's the lack of institutions that actually hurts most Chinese. Workers are left to fend for themselves: no independent unions, no free press, few community groups. The above quote shows how the TPLF's ideology of Revolutionary Democracy is the same as the ideology of the Communist Party of China. The TPLF has a systematic program to cripple every single independent organization that emerges from society. The TPLF views the lawyers, traders, bankers, journalists etc who are not members of the EPRDF as bourgeois exploiters that need to be prevented from achieving leadership positions in the community. It has stopped people all over Ethiopia from building their own community organizations. No humans like being controlled and told what to think. Tigreans dont like it. Oromos dont like it. Afaris dont like it. Humans have a strong desire for freedom. This means the TPLF is following an UNSUSTAINABLE path and it is in the process of actually destroying itself. It is a rotten decaying organization, just like the Chinese communist party. Even though the Chinese communist party appears powerful on the outside, its legitimacy is fragile, and its control is collapsing because of the incredible amount of corruption by the communist party cadres.
Corruption has so undermined the Communist party from within that even the orders from Beijing arent being followed anymore! Protests against the corrupt, brutal, repressive and absolutely nasty Revolutionary Democratic (COMMUNIST)system are increasing at a rapid pace. Thousands of incidents are reported every year. For Ethiopians who are fed up with TPLF propaganda about land tenure policy, it is encouraging to see Chinese farmers starting to STAND UP for themselves and take the first steps in overthrowing TPLF-style control. Hopefully this will happen in Ethiopia soon.
The broad, flat fields surrounding Changchunling belong to the farmers who work them, they declared, and not to the local government. The farmers then began dividing up the village's collective holdings, with the goal of making each family the owner of a private plot. "There is no justification for taking the land away from the farmers," said one of the participating peasants. The redistribution exercise at Changchunling was not an isolated incident. Rather, it marked what appears to be the start of a backlash against China's system of collective land ownership in rural areas. The uprising began here in the frigid, snow-covered soybean fields around Fujin city, 900 miles northeast of Beijing in Heilongjiang province, close to the Russian border. In a few weeks, it had spread to half a dozen other areas around the country, raising fundamental ideological questions for a government that still describes itself as Marxist-Leninist after 30 years of economic reforms. Although much of the communist system has been jettisoned over the years, all of China's rural land is still owned by the state. Farmers have usually been allowed to lease plots for 30 years at a stretch, after which they can renew the lease. But ownership -- and the right to sell -- has remained in the hands of village-level leaders and party secretaries. Here in the jurisdiction of Fujin, more than 70 villages have tried to privatize their lands over the past month, according to local farmers. As word of their movement spread on the Internet, they said, farmers to the south, in Jiangsu and Shaanxi provinces and in the Chengdu and Tianjin regions, followed suit. Farmers in 20 other locations have discussed doing so but have been afraid to come out with a public declaration, activists said. The Fujin farmers focused on 250,000 acres that had been taken over by local officials in the 1990s for sale to private agriculture companies. Only part of the land was in theory redistributed last month, they said, because police moved in and prevented further allocations. But the farmers have since moved beyond the issue of the seized land and asserted the right to own all the collective farmland that they currently work under lease. "The encroached-upon collective land should be divided evenly by households and possessed by us farmers," said a statement issued in the name of the Fujin villages and posted on the Internet. "Our farmers' land rights should include the right to use the land, the right to make income from it, the right to inherit it and dispose of it and the right to negotiate over it and set the price of it with developers. . . . So-called collective ownership has actually deprived farmers of their rights as landowners for a long time." The nascent movement, although tiny within a peasant population of 700 million, has confronted the Chinese Communist Party with a difficult challenge: If the experience of the past 30 years has shown the wisdom of privatizing state-owned industry and moving toward a market economy, why would it not be wise to privatize the land and bring it into the market economy, as well? "In the industrial sector in cities, ownership of the means of production is clearly defined, but in rural areas, the relationship between farmers and their land, their basic means of production, is not clear," said Zhong Dajun, who runs the nongovernmental Dajun Center for Economic Observation and Study in Beijing. "So this has generated protests from farmers. This shows their attitude toward the land-ownership system. They are not satisfied with the current system of collective land ownership." That is not the kind of issue the party wanted to address as China enters a period of intense international scrutiny leading up to the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer. Its initial reaction has been to dismiss the whole idea, saying history shows that peasants were exploited by private landlords before the communist takeover in 1949. "It is a historic lesson," Zhen Xinli, deputy director of the Communist Party Central Committee's policy research office, said at a news conference Dec. 26. "China's socialist system and the constitution have ensured collective ownership for rural land." The issue has long been key in Chinese communist ideology. During China's civil war, Mao Zedong's forces gathered millions of peasants to support his movement against the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek on the strength of promises to rid the country of hated private landlords and give the land to those who farmed it. Because of what appears to be a firm party stand, the farmers' current efforts to change the system might not survive China's repressive security apparatus. In Changchunling, dozens of police officers burst in and tried to break up the Dec. 19 meeting half an hour after it began, farmers recalled. Yu Changwu, who had helped organize a similar meeting 10 days earlier at nearby Dong Nan'an village, was imprisoned almost immediately, they said. Liu Zhenyu, a fellow activist also taken into custody, was recently released, associates said. "We are risking our lives to divide up our land," said a Changchunling farmer. "We have stuck out our necks. But no matter what happens to us, no matter what price we have to pay, we must get our lands back." The Fujin city propaganda department dismissed the farmers' claims as meaningless statements by people who do not represent their villages. The declaration, it said, was "a distortion of the facts, deviating from the facts and intentionally spreading rumors." Farmers in the Fujin area have become cautious in talking about their movement, demanding anonymity and cloaking visitors from police or possible informers along the snow-blown lanes that connect their low-lying villages. In their view, the police have been ordered to protect not only the socialist system of land ownership but also corrupt officials in Fujin city who have profited from sales of farmland to developers. "More than half the officials in Fujin city should get the death penalty, they are so corrupt," said a farmer standing in the snow at the main intersection of Dong Nan'gang. Because many of China's 700 million farmers similarly distrust officials, the idea of private land ownership has found a ready audience. Land sales by local officials have been the main cause of peasant riots that have erupted frequently across China over the past several years. But here in the Fujin area, farmers have not just exploded in anger, but have taken on the system that gives officials their power over the land. Moreover, they have coordinated with other farmers via the Internet and sought tactical advice from democracy advocates in Beijing who see an opportunity to advance their political agenda. "It is a frontal challenge," one activist said. The activist, who discussed his work on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that he had written the communique issued by the Fujin farmers and influenced their decision to declare private ownership of their land. In the declaration, he sought to turn the Communist Party's historical recrimination against landlords on its head, saying that local officials abuse farmers in the same way as landlords did before 1949. "They have actually become landlords," the farmers' declaration said. "And farmers have been forced to become serfs. We decided to change the structure of land ownership and protect the land rights of farmers through family or individual ownership." The activists' hope is that the Fujin privatization movement can turn out like a celebrated farmers' revolt at Xiaogang village in Anhui province in 1978. After the farmers rebelled against the communal system then in force and demanded their own plots of land, the Beijing government undertook changes that led to the current system of 30-year leases on family plots. Some scholars and researchers with party-affiliated institutes have also suggested that giving farmers some kind of ownership rights is the only way to resolve recurring unrest in the countryside. When riots break out, they have noted, the main reason often is farmers' frustration with local officials who want to sell village land to developers. "This is the only way we can protect our land against the corrupt officials," said a farmer who participated in the attempt to redistribute Changchunling's land. Farmers Rise In Challenge To Chinese Land Policy Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2008 ALSO READ: China's farmers protest a key Mao tenet CSM, Jan. 22, 2008 WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF TPLF WISDOM ? ELECTION RESULTS - RUSSIA - November 1917:
One month after the October Revolution in which Lenin and his Bolsheviks overthrow the transitional Kerensky government and seized power, they allowed a free and fair parliamentary election to proceed. The results were not favorable to Lenin. His Bolsheviks received less than one-fourth of the votes. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, a non-Marxist populist party, received far greater support. What did Lenin do? He invented REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY. "He declared that his form of government represented a higher stage of democracy than an elected assembly. The Assembly was allowed to meet for one day – 5 January 1918 – then it was closed down and the deputies told to go home."
Lenin had no intention of seriously including other parties. He was not prepared to see his vision diluted by other socialist parties. Also he feared that he may be sidelined in a coalition government. So, he deliberately made sure that talks with other socialist parties collapsed. He wanted the Bolsheviks to rule alone.
The election of November 1917 was the last free and fair election ever held under the Bolsheviks. After 1917, the doctrine of Revolutionary Democracy restricted full civic rights only to the leaders of the Bolshevik Communist Party. Lenin created a separate parliament packed with his own people. He harassed, imprisoned, and eventually outlawed all the other parties. He shut down the independent media. In Ethiopia today, there is a party that OPENLY and UNASHAMEDLY calls itself a REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC party. This party is led by one of the greatest disciples of Lenin the world has ever seen. The elections of 2005 and 2008 can be easily understood by looking at what happened in Russia 90 years ago. The suppression of the Ethiopian people is a direct application of REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY - a political philosophy invented by Lenin and applied in only a few backward, unfortunate places in the world today. Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? New York Times, April 13, 2008
- A furious pace everywhere EXCEPT in TPLF-controlled Ethiopia
- Good news for people needing healthcare in rural areas of the world EXCEPT in TPLF-controlled Ethiopia where the government has blocked private investment in telecoms.
- Technology leads to more efficient markets, lower consumer prices, and higher producer income. But in TPLF-controlled Ethiopia the government responds to high consumer prices with Stone Age technology - attacking traders, and private businesses and setting up corrupt, politically manipulated subsidy programs that were first used in Ethiopia by Mengistu and the Derg.
- We are all happy for those individuals in the world able to improve their lives with this technology. We are sad for the lower income people of Ethiopia who are forced to endure the corrupt, incompetent, unreliable, censored, blocked and TPLF-controlled telecommuniations systems in Ethiopia.
It’s also the precursor to a potentially widespread formalized system of mobile banking. Already companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or purchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator. With their phones, they can then make purchases and payments or withdraw cash as needed. Hammond of the World Resources Institute predicts that mobile banking will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor. "If you’re in Hanoi after midnight," Hammond says, "the streets are absolutely clogged with motorbikes piled with produce. They give their produce to the guy who runs a vegetable stall, and they go home. How do they get paid? They get paid the next time they come to town, which could be a month or two later. You have to hope you can find the stall guy again and that he remembers what he sold. But what if you could get paid the next day on your mobile phone?" - WOW! A whole new world of finance, trade and growth with world-class technology accessible to the poor. Notice how this is happening without the need for government cadres, government subsidies, government bureaucrats. Notice this is happening without guidance from 800-page documents about Revolutionary Democracy, ADLI, and Bonapartism. You can't do this in most areas of TPLF-controlled Ethiopia. There is simply no telecoms access and no one is allowed to provide the service. The TPLF model of development is top-down and the idea that people develop themselves and empower themselves is strange to the TPLF aristocrats.
- A billion mobile banking customers in five years and not a single one in Ethiopia. This is the economic cost to the people of Ethiopia when the TPLF imprisons, beats, and kills members of the opposition, they are also killing the opportunity for poor Ethiopians to share in the the global technology revolution. Imagine if TPLF-control of the economy had been broken five years ago... 4.13.2008: A NEW ERA OF HUNGER -- International agencies, NGOs, and responsible governments are expressing alarms at rising food prices: "Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program and one of the conference speakers, recently warned the world was entering "a new era of hunger." What is the TPLF-controlled government of Ethiopia doing? Nothing. Meles recently dismissed worries expressed by the opposition about NINE MILLION ETHIOPIANS needing food aid this year - and its not even a drought year! Let us look at one of the major policies of the TPLF and how it affects investment in rural areas:
CONCLUSION (my own): Getting rid of the TPLF is the essential first step to allow Ethiopia's farmers to develop themselves and liberate themselves from hunger. Policy Research Institutions and Democratization: Recent Experience and Future Challenges Dessalegn Rahmato, March 2008. (pdf file) - draft document - "do not quote" so no quote here. In a normal country Dessalegn Rahmato would be a valuable advisor, planner, technical expert or even minister. In TPLF-controlled Ethiopia he and most other capable, knowledgeable, Ethiopian professionals have no role whatsoever in shaping or influencing government policies. That role is reserved exclusively for badly-educated TPLF aristocrats and their servile, ethnic allies. 4.4.2008: WAITING -- The TPLF.EPRDF experiment in creating a neo-socialist, ethnic pyramid type government is dead. The last chance for the TPLF.EPRDF was in the aftermath of the Eritrean War in 2000. Meles had an opportunity to broaden his base of support and to transform the TPFL.EPRDF into a dynamic new organization. But instead Meles focused on his own political interests and struck a corrupt, materialistic bargain with select ethnic allies. The "tehadiso" of the TPLF.EPRDF was cosmetic. Nothing fundamental changed. Same people - only fewer of them. Same excuse of Amhara chauvinism to perpetuate eternal TPLF rule. The revolution that will overthrow the TPLF.EPRDF has already occurred in the minds of most Ethiopians. The revolution only awaits the moment when it becomes a concrete reality.Throughout history, revolutionary moments are often linked to global changes in climate, culture, technology etc. This is why they tend to occur in many countries simultaneously. The powerful global forces shaping the world today are building towards what could be a dramatic convergence of demographic, cultural, economic, and even climate trends. Big changes usually happen at these times and many governments are likely to become extinct. One wonders how Ethiopia will survive the coming crisis-point. That the TPLF.EPRDF will be destroyed is a given. But will Ethiopia also be destroyed? Once the TPLF's control is broken, the subservient ethnic parties will try to legitimize themselves by ethnic scapegoating. Will Ethiopians slaughter each other or will they build a better, more humane future? April 1, 2008: The club of African dictators may lose a member soon. MUGABE WEAKENING IN ZIMBABWE New York Times Note how the TPLF/EPRDF supporters are eerily quiet on this dramatic African news story. They openly supported the dictators of Ukraine and Georgia and mocked the peoples movements that brought democracy to those countries. The peoples uprising in Burma must have scared the TPLF/EPRDF but they were surely relieved when the monks and students were crushed. But Zimbabwe? Did the TPLF aristocrats think Mugabe would crack so soon!? Yes the powerful global currents are unstoppable. Meles's turn is coming... 
March 30, 2008. Kenenisa Bekele delivers an incredible performance at the World Cross Country Championships at Edinburgh UK. His shoe stripped off, he lost 30 meters while stopping to put it back on. But like Tirunesh Dibaba - who fell in Japan last year yet came from way behind to triumph - Kenenisa shows again the heart of a true champion. Tirunesh also won today despite the recurrent stomach cramps that have been bothering her. Urban Labour Markets in Ethiopia: Challenges and Prospects World Bank, March 2007. - This report describes a different Ethiopia than the one TPLF/EPRDF cadres and supporters are living in. The report describes the large expansion of relatively well-paid government bureaucrat jobs. This has greatly benefited thousands of unqualified TPLF/EPRDF supporters and cadres. How about the vast majority of Ethiopians? Read the quote below:
But although the vast majority of Ethiopians are barely surviving, the TPLF/EPRDF is building a "training center" (or "palace") in Sendafa costing 80 million birr:
"We expect to secure financing for the construction from our supporters as we did for the design," top brass of the party told Fortune. - Addis Fortune, March 2008Yes, the TPLF/EPRDF supporters have the money to build these luxury suites for the aristocratic elites, which shows how far they are drifting from the people and how much corruption is becoming institutionalized. Corruption in Ethiopia is guaranteed to get worse for three reasons: 1. The TPLF/EPRDF party is the same as the state. Its the same people. They control everything in the country. There is no separate or independent branch of government. There is no other political organization that has any influence on what the government does. Countries like this become extremely corrupt. Look at Mexico before 2000. Look at China - an incredibly corrupt country that Meles wants to copy. Look at the Arab Kingdoms. 2. The subservient ethnic parties working under TPLF direction lack legitimacy. They have only two options for survival - (a) Ethnic fear/hate mongering (b)"Bribing" people using resources they control: land, gov't jobs, contracts, etc.
3. The TPLF itself is not viewed as a legitimate national ruler and consequently "operates as if under seige" as an observer has noted. Thus to keep itself in power, it must control the economy. Seventeen years after they entered Addis Ababa, the TPLF still keeps Ethiopia as a socialist state where most business and industry is owned by the government or by government-affiliated organizations (According to the World Bank 50 percent of industrial output is from State-Owned Enterprises (June 2007). Add in the "endowments" and the Al-Amoudi empire, and its clear that independed business in Ethiopia is operating in a difficult environment). This creates huge structural incentives for corruption in any business dominated by the gov't - cement, sugar, finance, transport, import/export (particularly fertilizer import and export of goods from state farms) etc... Read below and try to guess who these people are. Who gets cement at below-market prices from the Muger state-owned factory and the TPLF-owned factory in Mekele and sells it for huge profit on the black market:
The largest corrupt transaction in Ethiopian history is the loans taken by the TPLF/EPRDF "endowment" firms from the Commerical Bank of Ethiopia to establish their businesses. The TPLF cement factory in Mekele was built by a loan taken from the CBE (in other words a loan from the people of Ethiopia). These loans are not being paid back. These "non-performing" loans were so great that they threatened the health of the CBE. Several years ago these loans were "assigned" to the Development Bank of Ethiopia and quietly forgotten. As noted by the World Bank (2007): "A write-off of debt owed by party-affiliated enterprises to state-owned banks would constitute a transfer of wealth from the state to the endowments." Some of the endowment firms are extremely profitable:
The World Bank (2007) compares Taiwan's ruling party (KMT) to the TPLF/EPRDF:
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Michelin Map - South Somalia (220K) Somali News Sources Garowe Online
OGADEN CRISIS Is the ONLF Struggle an Asset or a Liability? WardheerNews, Dec 6, 2007 Who does the ONLF represent? Awdal News Network, Nov 25, 2007 Child hunger 'crisis' in Ogaden BBC, Oct 30, 2007. - Ethiopia's own disaster agency declares the situation is critical The Political Roots of the Current Crisis in Region 5 T. Hagmann, Wardheer News, Sep 25, 2007 23-PAGE REPORT OF UN OCHA MISSION to Ogaden Sep 19, 2007 Tales of horror from Ogaden AFP, Sep 7, 2007 Conflict in the Ogaden and its Regional Dimension Chatham House Report, Sep 7, 2007 Meles, Time Magazine Sep 6, 2007) - - not a single hut has been burned
MSF Press Release: Urgent Appeal to Government of Ethiopia Despite repeated appeals the Gov't of Ethiopia has denied MSF access Sep 4 2007
Eyewitness Report of Ogaden Crisis
Villages deserted, burned in Ethiopia's Ogaden - MSF Reuters, Sep 4, 2007
US Announces Emergency Aid to Ethiopia's Ogaden Region
VOA News, Aug 24, 2007.
An elderly goat herder, beside himself with indignation, launching a diatribe in front of a senior local official. He had lost two sons, he said, fighting for Ethiopia against Eritrea. And now the soldiers come to his village, chase everyone out and burn their houses, and then have the effrontery to tell him he is not a true Ethiopian.
BBC Report from Jijiga , Aug 14, 2007.
Red Cross confirms pull-out from Ethiopian region Reuters, Aug 2, 2007.
ICRC deplores expulsion from Somali Regional State Intl. Cmte. of the Red Cross, Jul 26, 2007
Red Cross rejects Ethiopian accusations AP, Jul 26, 2007.
The Ethiopian gov't is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade... hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation... New York Times, July 21, 2007
Ethiopian troops burned or ordered civilians to vacate at least a dozen villages around the towns of Degehabur, Kebre Dehar and Wardheer.
Human Rights Watch, Jul 4, 2007
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Theory of TPLF Ethiopian Chauvinism November 14, 2007 Children die in Somalia violence CNN, Nov 11, 2007.
Comment: The TPLF/EPRDF has no public relations policy. It only has a propaganda program directed at the population internally. Externally, it gets confused and doesn't know how to talk to people who are outside its control. The public relations advisor to Meles, Bereket Simon, is fiercely devoted to the TPLF/EPRDF. He is hostile, aggresive, dismissive and insulting to anyone who asks questions. This is not an intelligent person (likely borderline retarded), so this is why public relations in Ethiopia is an embarrassment. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently put out a press release about a "Boarder War." Obviously english is not their first language, but does the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ethiopia have an English Dictionary? Have they heard of a concept where they hire competent English-speakers to check their press statements so that they don't make a fool of themselves? Foreign Minister Syeoum Mesfin - appointed for life - is a nice person it seems, but is simply incapable of doing this job. He suffered no consequences for badly damaging the country with his unacceptably substandard performance during the Eritrea conflict. This all proves the TPLF/EPRDF is an emerging aristocracy; not a meritocracy. Hard working, intelligent, capable Ethiopians (even Tigrean-Ethiopians) are not wanted. All the positions were filled 17 years ago by unqualified members, friends, and relatives of the TPLF/EPRDF. So this is why Ethiopia always looks stupid in the foreign press; the TPLF/EPRDF can't even speak up and explain or defend itself properly. Boarder: A person, especially a lodger, who is supplied with regular meals - (Webster's Dictionary) Excerpts from Rep. Smith's Newmakers Speech on Ethiopia and Human Rights Congressman Smith's Website, Oct 22, 2007.
I was struck by his all-knowing tone. Guilty! They're all guilty simply because Meles says so? No trial? Not even a Kangaroo court? Comment: Why is Meles keeping files on opposition leaders? Doesn't he understand the basic concepts of separation of power, constitutionalism, and justice? Why is this Dergist practice continuing? In his book "Consilience", E. O. Wilson describes the dyadic instinct: "the proneness to use two-part classifications in treating socially important arrays. Societies everywhere break people into the in-group versus out-group, child versus adult, kin versus non-kin..." This dyadic instinct and other mental processes such as essentialism and reification were very useful to stone age tribes. They help solidify group identity, and promote in-group cooperation. But they can be "maladaptive" i.e. harmful to the success of the diverse societies that we currently inhabit. Meles has a strongly developed dyadic instinct and this makes it hard for him to appreciate the diversity and sincerity of Ethiopians who oppose him. Ethiopian politics consists of the EPRDF vs. the traitors. In-group vs out-group. The in-group exhibits noble sentiments, the outgroup is driven by base motivations. A brittle Western ally in the Horn of Africa - While things are getting better in much of Africa, Ethiopia risks getting left behind Economist, Nov 1, 2007.
Just as the government is slowing the pace of economic expansion for fear that individuals may accumulate wealth and independence, so it is failing to move fast enough from a one-party state to a modern, pluralist democracy. Again, the reason may be that it is afraid to. TPLF/EPRDF is afraid because the villa-and-landcruiser lifestyle its members enjoy in Addis Abeba is directly tied to TPLF control of the government. Yes, the life of the average person in Tigray has improved marginally. But look at how the lives of TPLF members, friends, and relatives has improved. The primary purpose of the TPLF is to ensure the best possible life for TPLF members and ensure the best future for their children. Their children will be marrying into the multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, wealthy elite of Ethiopia. This is why they need to live the elite, high-status lifestyle in Addis Ababa. This is why they arrest, kill, suppress, harrass, and intimidate Ethiopian citizens. This is why they cannot spend their time worrying about the problems of the common people of Tigray. This is why they are so enraged by HR2003.
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Somalia JNA Document Repository
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IDEOCOSM Ideas and their role for Ethiopian Democratization (A Research Agenda) Dangerous Ideas: Five Beliefs That Propel Groups Toward Conflict Papers Presented at the 4th International Conference on the Ethiopian Economy Catechism for Ethiopian Nihilism The Course Of True Nationalism Never Did Run Smooth Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Propaganda and Practice "Never forget that the person on the other side is human" |
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Small Michelin Map of Southern Somalia
Larger (211K) Michelin Map of Southern Somalia
Map of Somali Clans
Southern Somalia
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