The Week In The Horn of Africa
(13 July 2007)
· PM: New Millennium to be Ethiopia's Renaissance
· The Somali National Reconciliation Congress starts on Sunday
· An un-substantiated Human Rights Watch report
· Eritrea among the worst countries for religious freedom
· Speaking on Sunday at a rally organized to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the foundation of the City of Harar, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi expressed his confidence that the public and the government will join hands to achieve the renaissance both of Ethiopia and of Harar during the new Millennium. The government, he stressed, is committed to raising the quality of life of the people to enable Ethiopia join the community of middle-income nations during the first two decades of the third millennium. Prime Minister Meles said the new Millennium would usher in an era of peaceful coexistence, economic prosperity, democracy and good governance. We can all be proud, he said, that Harar is recognized as a city of peace, love and tolerance. It is a melting pot of diverse cultures and a centre of commerce, and has embarked upon a host of development activities that will speed up its economic growth. Thousands of Hararis from the Diaspora have been returning to celebrate the city’s millennium and to become involved in its development. Harar, with its famous walls, and over 90 mosques is one of the Holy Cities of Islam, and has been registered by UNESCO as a world heritage site. In the late nineteenth century, the famous French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, lived in the city, as a trader running guns; his house, beautifully restored, is one of the tourist attractions in the city. With the new Ethiopian Millennium (September 12, 2000) fast approaching, the build-up to the celebrations has been intensifying; under the Two Trees for 2000 project, millions of indigenous trees have already been planted round the country and the regional millennium parks are nearing completion.
· The Somalia National Reconciliation Congress (NRC) will open on Sunday, June 15, 2007. Most of the over 1,300 delegates, clan elders, traditional leaders and politicians from all clans and from all across the country have already arrived. They include members of the Hawiye who had earlier been critical of the Congress. President Abdullahi Yusuf appeared together with Hawiye leaders at a press conference on Thursday reiterating that an official pardon had been offered to all Islamic Court followers who had given up their resistance to the TFG. Delegates will assemble in the former police transport compound in Mogadishu where last minute preparations and finishing touches have been carried out this week. The government has also carried out a number of successful security operations this week, particularly in and around the Bakara market. The Congress was originally scheduled for mid-April and then for mid-June. Both times it was postponed following difficulties over finance and some concerns over security. On Wednesday, the EU’s Special Envoy to Somalia, George-March Andre led a delegation of diplomats from Norway, Italy, Belgium and Kenya and the military adviser to the AU. The delegation inspected security arrangements for the Congress and held talks with Hawiye clan elders and government officials. The delegation said it has received “good answers” to its questions, and said it would accept an invitation to the opening of the congress.
Meanwhile Eritrea has been attempting to bring together opponents of the Somali government in Asmara. Former leaders of the Islamic Courts, claiming there is no legitimate government in Somalia, have announced that they intend to hold a conference in Asmara in September. Those attending will include a dozen dissident and dismissed members of the transitional Somali parliament as well as former deputy Prime Minister Hussein Aydeed. It is not clear if the former speaker of the parliament, Sharif Hassan, currently in Dubai, will participate. The aim of the Eritrean government is apparently to try and form a coalition of Somali dissidents abroad to try and derail the internationally supported Somali National Reconciliation Congress, which according to the UN and the AU has opened up new opportunities for a Somali state to be re-established for the first time after 16 years.
· On July 4, Human Rights Watch issued a report containing a litany of allegations over the treatment of civilians in the Somali National Regional State. The Somali National Regional State, one of the nine states in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is the scene of operations by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). It was this organization that carried out the massacre of 76 civilian workers at an oil exploration installation in April. It subsequently attempted to justify this terrorist action on the basis of giving generalized prior warnings of possible attacks. It also recently carried out bombings causing numerous civilian casualties, and has committed numerous assassinations of those it claims were supportive of the government, as well as terrorizing villagers by beating individuals and burning whole villages down. Many of these are detailed in a recent internal government investigation into the activities of the ONLF in the region and the alleged activities of the security forces. Human Rights Watch appears to have made no effort to investigate the activities of the ONLF, preferring to rely entirely on ONLF allegations, hearsay and media reports to claim the burning of homes and property, the killing of civilians, arbitrary detentions, collective punishments and a trade blockade of the region. There is no evidence for these claims, and Human Rights Watch has made no attempt to contact officials in Ethiopia or in the Somali Regional State to try and ascertain their accuracy. The report, coupled with the recent, equally unsubstantiated, report by the New York Times, bears all the hallmarks of deliberate attempts to downplay the threat of terrorism that the region and the international community is facing.
· In a new study the US Hudson Institute's Centre for Religious Freedom has classified Eritrea among the most restrictive religious states in the world. The report measured the amount of government regulation, government favoritism toward a particular religion, and the amount of social pressures and constraints imposed by other faiths and organized groups in a country. These factors, together with linked economic correlations, led to the study identifying Eritrea as one of the "worst countries in the world for religious freedom". The report noted "excessive government manipulation of the Orthodox Patriarchy and the detention of more than two thousand evangelicals and Pentecostals - about one-tenth of the members of those religious sects in the country." In an interview, the Director of the Office of the President of Eritrea, Yemane Gebremeskel, downplayed the accusations of religious repression, denying that people had ever been denied the right to pray freely. He did, however, admit to problems with what he called a “handful of new faiths". He also referred to other small groups that had emerged in recent years, most of which, he alleged “were beneficiaries of secret or undeclared foreign funds”. These, he claimed, opposed national service and attempted to sow division within the traditional faiths. They had been asked to register and declare their sources of income. Reports of mass religious arrests, he said, were distorted and exaggerated, and arrests only occurred periodically “when members of these fringe groups assemble illegally”. There have been a number of reports of dozens of arrests taking places at services and weddings or funerals.
· Meanwhile, the UNHCR has announced that it has started processing the resettlement in the United States of some 700 ethnic Kunama refugees from Eritrea, flying out the first group of 29 after several years of exile in northern Ethiopia. UNHCR has determined that 700 Kunamas cannot return home 'in safety and dignity' and it concluded that resettlement was the most suitable solution for them. The Kunama who number over 100,000 live largely in the south-west of Eritrea, between the Setit and the Gash rivers. After June 2000, the Eritrean government, looking for scapegoats for its military defeat, blamed the Kunama for siding with Ethiopia. It accused the Kunama of betraying Eritrea, and nearly 5,000 Kunama felt obliged to seek safety in northern Ethiopia. An estimated 25,000 Eritreans have fled from Eritrea since the end of the 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian war "complaining of alleged persecution and harassment by the Eritrean government". They have been housed in a designated refugee camp in northern Ethiopia; numbers are continuing to grow.
· This week the Eritrean government reportedly arrested the Acting Director of the British Council in Asmara and refused a British diplomat permission to leave the country. The move followed a row over a satellite internet link, and the Eritrean authorities claimed the diplomat, a Technical Management Officer who is normally based in Ethiopia, was engaged in activities contravening his diplomatic status, by “trying to install communications gadgets”. According to Eritrean officials, the diplomat was interrogated before being allowed to leave the country, but the British Council’s Acting Director in Asmara is apparently still held.
· The British government has announced that the British Ambassador to Ethiopia, Mr. Robert Dewar, is transferring to Nigeria, and he will be replaced in Ethiopia by Mr. Norman Ling who will be arriving in January 2008. Mr. Ling who joined the Foreign Office in 1978, is presently Director of Business Change in the Foreign Office in London, and previously the British High Commissioner in Malawi. At various times he has headed the Aviation, Maritime, Science and Energy Department, served as head of section in the Falkland Islands and East African Departments, as well as been in Turkey (as deputy head of mission), Tehran and Tripoli. Mr. Dewar leaves British-Ethiopian relations in excellent shape, having played a very positive role during Britain’s chairmanship of the EU and of the G8 in 2005. During his tenure, Prime Minister Blair visited Addis Ababa in October 2004, and Prime Minister Meles participated in the Gleneagles G8 summit, and was one of the Commissioners for the Blair Commission for Africa. Mr. Dewar’s deputy, Mrs. Deborah Fisher has also left Addis Ababa recently, to retire from the Foreign Office. Her replacement in Addis Ababa is John Marshall.
· The 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies was held last week, 2-6th of July, in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. Sponsorship from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and various Norwegian bodies including the Research Council of Norway and the University of Tromso, the Norwegian Agency for Development for Cooperation and the Chr Michelsen Institute, enabled over forty scholars to attend from Ethiopia. In all nearly 200 papers were presented, 62 of them by Ethiopians, and with 28 from the US and from Germany; there were 19 papers from Japan testifying to the strength of Ethiopian studies there, with the remainder from Europe and Israel. The breadth of scholarship and of interest was impressive and there were fascinating papers in all areas, representing wide differences of opinion and politics: History and Archaeology; Anthropology; Politics and Development; Urban Studies, Children, Gender and Human Rights; Linguistics and Literature; Music and Fine Arts; and Islam, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Education. The conference was opened by the Norwegian deputy foreign minister, Raymond Johanssen, who took the opportunity, surprisingly, even inappropriately but not uncharacteristically, to be polemical.
· Over 1,900 vertebrate fossil specimens have been discovered in the Woranso - Mille area, in Afar regional state of Ethiopia. This enormous collection of hominid fossils will be of great importance in establishing the relationship between the earlier Australopithecus anamnesis hominids who lived between 4.2 and 3. 9 million years ago, and the well known but slightly later Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy), who lived some 3 million years ago. The announcement was made by Dr. Yohannis Haile Selassie, curator and head of Physical Anthropology at Cleveland Museum of Natural History who has been excavating in the region for years. The specimens will play a major role in testing the ancestor-descendant hypothesis which researchers believe explain the similarities between Australopithecus anamnesis and Australopithecus afarensis.