Group plans to beam free Internet across the globe from space (Raw Story)

"We believe that Internet access is a tool that allows people to help themselves - a tool so vital that it should be considered a universal human right," the website for Buy This Satellite stated. "Imagine your digital life disconnected. Without access to the 100 million man-hours that have been put into Wikipedia, how much do you actually know?".Read more...

How to bring down Meles Zenawi (Addis Voice)

By Abebe Gellaw

TPLF is a house of cards. It is fundamentally weak as it is founded on the ideologies of oppression, injustice, exploitation, domination, discrimination, corruption, thievery and fraud driven by a greedy colonialist mindset. The only reason why it is still riding roughshod over our people is because those who have stepped forward to be leaders of the freedom march have been preoccupied with their own infighting.

The time for self-promotion, empty promises and bravados must come to an end. Leaders as well as followers must focus on the real issues that really matter to ordinary Ethiopians. People who have resolved to change their destiny no longer need undemocratic leaders that preach about democracy and freedom. It is impossible to bring liberation without a clear vision. To be free of tyranny and oppression is a simple and powerful vision that can mobilize anyone suffering under the boots of Meles Zenawi and his cronies. Read more...

A Declaration in Defense of Human Rights in Ethiopia (Huffington Post)

In the history of oppression, tyrants have spared no effort to erode the natural courage of their people and force upon them a life of cowardice and submission, debilitate their natural instincts for bravery and valor and intimidate them into accepting servility, replace their yearning for liberty with false hopes and pretensions of freedom, trick them into bartering their desire to live in dignity for a life of shame and fear, subvert their natural sense of honor, duty and patriotism for vulgar materialism, and corrupt them into selling their fidelity to truth at the altar of falsehood....Read more..

RSS Feeds RSS Feed Ethiopia Says 2.8 Million People Need Emergency Food Aid (VOA)

"Two-point-eight-million still require relief food assistance," said Owusu. "And we also know an additional 956,000 require targeted supplementary feeding. An estimated 107,000 children may continue to require treatment for severe acute malnutrition, and 3.3 million people will require screening for more nutrition and Vitamin A supplementation."...Read more..

What about farting to protest? (Afrik)

A wind of change is blowing in many countries and encouraging a real people’s Revolution that augurs badly for tyrants. The fall of Saleh as well as the separation of South Yemen could be in the making. But above all, one hopes that whole process educates the oppressed African about the power of her or his voice. This is an opportunity to take our destiny into our own hands, rather than allowing those autocratic leaders the luxury of taking time off their plundering sessions to enact pathetic laws and edicts that compromise our self respect as individuals, nations and continent....read more..

America's Other Most Embarrassing Allies (FP)

Hosni Mubarak has plenty of company.

BY JOSHUA E. KEATING | JANUARY 31, 2011

ETHIOPIA

Leader: Meles Zenawi

Record: The 2010 election, in which Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's party won a remarkable 99.6 percent of the vote, was the culmination of what Human Rights Watch called "the government's five-year strategy of systematically closing down space for political dissent and independent criticism." This included attacks and arrests of prominent opposition figures, the shutting down of newspapers and assaults on journalists critical of the government, and doling out international food aid as an incentive to get poor Ethiopians to join the ruling party.

In addition to attacks on domestic media and NGOs, the government also jammed broadcasts by Voice of America and Deutsche Welle in the run-up to the elections. The U.S. NGO Freedom House downgraded Ethiopia to "Not Free" for the first time in its annual Freedom in the World survey this year.more....

Aid Should Not Sustain Repression in Ethiopia (Indepthnews)

Ethiopia is in fact one of the most aid-dependant countries in the world and received more than US$2 billion in 2009, but its major donors have been unwilling to confront the government over its worsening human rights record.Two months after the HRW report was released, executive director Kenneth Roth admonished the Addis Ababa based Development Assistance Group (DAG) -- comprising 26 bilateral and multilateral development agencies -- for its failure to "initiate a credible and independent inquiry" into "serious allegations about the misuse of donor-supported programs for repressive purposes by the government of Ethiopia".Also the European Union team, monitoring the May 2010 polls, criticized in its November report the ruling party's misuse of state resources during the election campaign. Ethiopia's ruling party won more than 99.6 percent of parliamentary seats in an election that, according to European observers, "fell short of international standards". Following are extracts from the interview: Read more...

Human rights group says democracies ignore abuses, opt for dialogue (Macleans)

Human Rights Watch's list of most abusive countries included Belarus, China, Colombia, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. Without outside pressure, Roth said, the list will grow.
"A dictator will weigh this cost-benefit analysis and decide that repression pays. The aim of the international community is to make repression not pay," he said.
The group also complained about what it called the West's "soft reaction to certain favoured African autocrats, such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia." ..read more..

Ethiopia: Talking Trash, Speaking Truth(Huffington Post_

The interesting thing about the EU EOM Report is that it is as balanced as any report compiled by an independent group of observers following specific guidelines could reasonably be. I concede that grudgingly because I have a lot of bones to pick with the Report. I could rattle off 41 objections to the report in one breath. For instance, I believe the Report could have been more resolute in its findings and conclusions about the rampant irregularities and illegalities on election day and the days immediately preceding that. The Report could have comprehensively documented the massive diversion of aid for political purposes. The Report could have responded more aggressively in verifying and pursuing opposition complaints of pre-election harassment and voter intimidation on election day, and so on....more...

Why Are We Supporting Repression in Ethiopia? (NYR)

Indeed, many aid officials interviewed in the Human Rights Watch report admit that they were aware of these abuses. As one western donor official said, “Every tool at [the government’s] disposal—fertilizer, loans, safety net—is being used to crush the opposition. We know this.” Yet the umbrella group representing 26 donors in Ethiopia (the Donors Assistance Group, or DAG), suggests that aid agencies intend to continue more or less with business as usual. Their overall response has been to reject the conclusions of the Human Rights Watch report, noting that, in their own research, they have not found “any evidence of systematic or widespread distortion.”...read more...

Is humanitarian aid bad for Africa? ( The Globe and Mail)

In 1991, the rebel army won the war and its leader, a polished tyrant named Meles Zenawi, took power. He soon became chummy with Mr. Geldof and many Western leaders. Bill Clinton hailed him as one of the “new breed” of African leaders. With Tony Blair, he co-authored a high-profile report in 2005, released at the time of the famous G8 meeting at Gleneagles, where Mr. Geldof and Bono cranked the heat up with their Make Poverty History campaign. Most people politely glossed over the recent election in Ethiopia, which featured massive fraud, violence, intimidation and imprisonment of political opponents. More recently, in 2008, the Meles regime brutally put down a Somali rebellion. Human Rights Watch accused government forces of torture, torching villages and other war crimes.
Mr. Meles has an explanation for all this. As he told Mr. Gill, Ethiopia will have to stay undemocratic until the important work of development is done. ..read more...

Ethiopia's Zenawi and the Willing Stooges ...(Nazret)

....If however you stay the course, and continue terrorizing opposition parties and their leaders, and keep the armed forces and the federal government as exclusive Tigrean entities diluted with few lackeys for good measure, if you keep masking your inner vulnerability by overreacting with disastrous consequences, if you keep using foreign aid, on the one hand, as a weapon against the poor and the peasants inside country forcing them to support your rule, and on the other hand, use the rest of the foreign funds to bribe the diaspora for image building and glorification purposes with fictional development and non-existent prosperities, you live in the land of fantasy. And you will deceive no one, but yourself!
So, Mr. Zenawi, the choice is yours. Either reverse the disastrous trend, or keep deceiving yourself. As we learned from the bleak history of so many tyrants, including Mengistu, your predecessor, time is not on your side!...read the whole article...

Ethiopia: Birtukan Unbound! (Huffington Post)

Birtukan is let out of prison, but tens of thousands of others remain imprisoned for their political beliefs. We must continue to work arduously for the release of so many other political prisoners whose names and faces are known but to their families and their torturers.
There are also other prisoners who are in dire need of help. These inmates inhabit a prison of their own making. They are the prisoners of hate "locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness", as Mandela would describe them. They live in a prison of the closed mind dwelling in a body with a stone cold heart. Our sister Birtukan has been to hell and back; but her tormentors still live there; or in the verse of Mark Spencer:
So here sits the prisoner,Shackled in his cell.Wrestling with the demons,Of his private hell.
In the right season and at the right time, I have no doubts that Birtukan and her generation will free those shackled in the cells of their private hell because they know all too well the wages of hate. Birtukan and her generation will rise up and declare in the words of Martin Luther King: "We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate." It is now the right time and right season to rededicate ourselves to Birtukan's "future country of Ethiopia." No more bitterness, no more hatred, no more cruelty and no more inhumanity. Read more..

Ethiopian Opposition Leader's Release: For Show? (Time)

Over the past several years, Ethiopia's government, which cherishes its role as a U.S. ally in the volatile Horn of Africa, has steadily chipped away at political freedoms, arresting the opposition and quashing the free press. So it was hard not to be skeptical about its move this week to release Birtukan Mideksa, the country's best-known opposition leader. Read more....

Mr. Zenawi Goes to College! (Huffington Post)

...

Since Prof. Stiglitz is interested in having a "conversation", here are a few topics he should ask Zenawi to talk about. How is it that Ethiopia, under his "seasoned" leadership, managed to rank:

138/159 (most corrupt) countries on the Corruption Index for 2010.

17 among the most failed states (Somalia is No. 1) on the Failed States Index for 2010.

136/179 countries (most repressive) on the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom.

107/183 economies for ease of doing business (investment climate) by The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 2010.

37/53 (poorest governance quality) African countries in the 2010 Ibrahim Index of African Governance.

101/128 countries in 2010 on the Bertelsmann Political and Economic Transformation Index, and

141/153 (poorest environmental public health and ecosystem vitality) countries in the 2010 Environmental Performance Index....read more..

Columbia’s invitation to Zenawi sparks outrage (Columbia Spectator)

“I hope PrezBo [University President Lee Bollinger] gives him the kind of welcome he did Ahmadinejad,” Odu said in an email, referencing Bollinger’s harsh introduction to the Iranian president’s speech in 2007. “I’m not a fan of the president of Iran, but at least he’s not pandering to Western governments while systematically terrorizing, disenfranchising, and stunting the development of his own citizens.”..read more..

Cry the Beloved Country: Ethiopians Criticize Columbia for Hosting Meles (AID WATCH)

...I am very happy to feature both sides to the debate, just as I want to also provide an alternative viewpoint to the support of Meles by Professors Stiglitz and Sachs at Columbia. Unfortunately, this debate cannot happen within Ethiopia because Meles suppresses dissent, and even this very blog post is almost certainly blocked from anyone trying to access it from within Ethiopia...Read full text here

Open Letter to President Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia University (The Huffington Post)

Petty and cruel dictators, Mr. President, have also infested the African continent and threaten the lives of African peoples on a daily basis. In Ethiopia, for nearly two decades, Mr. Zenawi has lorded over one of the cruelest dictatorships in the modern world. Let the facts speak for themselves:...Read more..

Oromsis' Open Letter to Columbia University (Oromsis)

As rightly stated, dubbed “the cradle of mankind” – Africa’s second most populous country, characterized by rich but complicated history, it suffices to say, Ethiopia is making strides in areas such as the economy and education, albeit overly exaggerated. However, it must be clear that under Meles Zenawi’s ever tightening grip, Ethiopia has jettisoned the path to democratic governance and the respect for human rights. With no free press to speak of and the once vibrant opposition effectively muzzled, Meles Zenawi has managed to set up a de facto one-party system in Ethiopia....read more...

EPRDF Conference: Reshuffling or Repositioning? (Oronsis)

So how about this talk about delivering “the country from dependence on food aid within five years”? The ruling party is an upright ghost of broken promises. From multiparty federal government structure to an admittedly “dominant party state”, the country have all but reverted back to the pre-1991 era. VOA’s Peter Heinlein writes, the next five years pledge “contrasts with the most recent five year period, when a protracted drought left one out of every six Ethiopians in need of food assistance, and the United States shipped in more than half-a-billion dollars worth of commodities in a single year.”..read more..