Africa: World Bank Group President in Japan for TICAD IV

World Bank (Washington, DC)

26/05/08

Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, will visit Japan from May 27-30 to participate in the 4th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD IV), where he will address the Plenary Session.

Japan is the host of TICAD IV and the chair of the G8 Summit at a time when the world’s poorest people face major challenges due to increased food prices and the impacts of climate change.

Japan is a key World Bank partner in the global fight against poverty and is taking a leadership role in assisting sub-Saharan Africa meet its development challenges. The World Bank President has recognized Japan for its important contribution to IDA15 – the World Bank fund that supports the poorest people.

Zoellick will be in Tokyo and Yokohama during his visit and is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Fukuda, Finance Minister Nukaga, Foreign Minister Koumura and other senior representatives of the Japanese government.

Zoellick will also meet with heads of state from several African countries and participate in a meeting on the global food crisis jointly-organized with the African Union, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. This meeting will focus attention on the immediate and medium-to-long term actions needed to tackle the global food crisis.

 

Ethiopia makes arrests over blast: report

 ADDIS ABABA(AFP)

26/05/08

Ethiopia has arrested suspects linked to last week’s near the foreign ministryblast near the foreign ministry in Addis Ababa that killed six people, including a US national, state media reported Sunday.

Ethiopian police did not specify the number of arrests, but blamed the rebel Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and its arch-foe Eritrea for last Tuesday’s blast in a minibus near the entrance to the foreign ministry. Seven people were injured.

“Some of the alleged terrorists that blew a minibus taxi with an explosive on May 20 in Addis Ababa were put under custody,” Ethiopian News Agency quoted police and security officials as saying.

Evidence indicates “that the terrorist act was coordinated by the Eritrean regime and the anti-peace group ‘Oromo Liberation Front’ which is an instrument of the regime,” it added.

The US victim was believed to be a teacher at the University of Addis Ababa, from which the minibus had originally departed.

Three people were killed and 18 wounded in bomb blasts at petrol stations in Addis Ababa on April 14.

The authorities routinely accuse OLF, the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front and Eritrea, for such attacks.

Ethiopia’s ‘Red Emperor’ sentenced to death

Many Ethiopians still remember Mengistu, with his dark skin and big moustache, haranguing crowds at Revolution, now Meskal, Square, in the heart of Addis Ababa.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia

26/05/08

Ethiopia’s exiled former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who was sentenced to death Monday, oversaw the 1977-78 “Red Terror” when tens of thousands were tortured, murdered and disappeared.

Now 71 and living a comfortable life in exile in Zimbabwe, the man who came to be known as the Red Negus (“emperor” in Amharic) was convicted in December 2006, after a marathon trial, of genocide, homicide, illegal imprisonment and illegal confiscation of property.

The purge of politicians, intellectuals and other perceived foes came as his regime began trying to transform imperial Ethiopia with its ancient Christian heritage into a Soviet-style workers’ state.

Mengistu, a lieutenant colonel in the army, was a member of the Derg, the military junta which ran the country after the fall of emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

Three years later he became head of the Marxist regime in a bloody coup which saw head of state General Teferi Bante assassinated.

Mengistu became the de facto ruler, running the cabinet and the military council, and instituted the Red Terror, which saw numerous arrests and thousands of killings across the Horn of Africa nation.

Already chief of the armed forces and secretary general of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia (WPE), Mengistu was in September 1987 officially confirmed president of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.

Seriously threatened from February 1991 by a coordinated offensive by the separatist Tigre People’s Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe the following May.

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, an old ally of Mengistu, offered him political asylum and has since refused to extradite him to Ethiopia. In 1996, he escaped an assassination bid in the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

Born in 1937 at Wallayata, Mengistu Haile Mariam became a career soldier like his father, graduating from the officer training college at Holetta in 1966 and doing a brief spell of further training in the United States.

After taking part in an uprising against Haile Selassie in 1960, he was a delegate in the armed forces coordinating committee at the time of the February 1974 revolution.

Many Ethiopians still remember Mengistu, with his dark skin and big moustache, haranguing crowds at Revolution, now Meskal, Square, in the heart of Addis Ababa, along with the interminable military parades he organised.

Considered as the brain behind the revolution and a leading member of the Derg from the start, Mengistu in seven months put an end to the world’s oldest surviving empire.

In his rise to power, he showed considerable political skills and was brutally intransigent regarding his opponents.

As well as the Red Terror, Mengistu and his former top aides were also accused of the murders of Haile Selassie and Orthodox Patriarch Abuna Tefelows.

Backed by the pro-Soviet socialist movement during a conflict with Somalia over the eastern Ogaden region, then faced with a nationalist rebellion in Eritrea, Mengistu signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1978 and created the Marxist-Leninist WPE in 1984.

He held the rotating presidency of the Addis-Ababa based Organisation of African Unity (today’s African Union) in 1983-84.

In May 1989, Mengistu crushed a coup attempt and executed 12 generals. The following year, he announced more liberal policies aimed at pulling Ethiopia out of economic disaster and civil war. He took accompanying steps to woo the West after renewing diplomatic ties with Israel.

Hundreds celebrate Africa Day in PE

Mawande Jack

POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

26/05/08

HUNDREDS celebrated Africa Day in Port Elizabeth yesterday with a pledge to unite all the African people on the continent and combat xenophobia in all its manifestations.

For the first time, representatives from Nigeria, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique joined South African citizens at the Red Location Museum in a show of solidarity and African unity.

The day‘s spirit of unity among Africans was captured by Nelson Mandela Bay constituency co-ordinator, councillor Nohle Mohapi, who said “a few rogue elements” who commit criminal acts, and not South Africans, were behind all the violence and instability in the country.

Mohapi urged communities to display a collective spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood with their fellow Africans in other parts of the continent.

“Our continent has survived the worst and our people will never give up,” she said.

Schoolgirls were unanimous in calling for love, African pride, and the need to share education for Africans to know each other better.

Several church leaders, ward committees, councillors and sports leaders made their own vows to be united against criminals who wanted to disturb the peace among the communities.

There were also sad recollections about Africans being made outcasts while having to face hostile treatment in Europe and the Middle East.

Pastor Alwell Ifebi, who represented Nigerian nationals, said it pained him deeply for his fellow countrymen be given the same treatment on their own continent.

“When I came to Port Elizabeth, I came home, and in this place people understand the unity of Africans. Despite my accent, I‘m truly the son of the soil,” Ifebi said to a roaring applause.

While various cultural and entertainment groups contributed to the celebrations, the Anti-Xenophobia Forum announced that it was planning a protest march on Friday. It also envisaged a soccer tournament, unity sports games and festivals to be held as part of building African unity.

Africa Day traces it routes back to May 25, 1963, when 32 independent African states came together in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to create the organisation of African Unity (OAU) to complete the independence and the unity of the continent.

After decades in existence, and following the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the OAU changed its name to the African Union (AU) with president Thabo Mbeki leading efforts to end civil wars and conflict in places like the DRC and Sudan.

45 Years On – African Unity Still Relevant

AllAfrica.com, Washington

26/o5/08

THE African Liberation Day was celebrated yesterday. It honours the 1963 signing of the Charter establishing the Organisation of African Unity OAU), now the African Union. It pledges solidarity for the liberation of Africa.

The OAU was criticised for “doing nothing” or being ineffective in living up to the mandate of uniting Africa and responding to its various challenges. Many of the criticisms were understandable though not all of them were deserved.

The OAU was set up to finish the anti-colonial struggle of 1960’s and also unite Africa. It was successful on the liberation agenda in its support for the liberation of Southern Africa from racist settler regimes and former Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique

The OAU mobilised human and material resources across Africa in support of these struggles and also won diplomatic and political support internationally. The weaknesses of the OAU, now AU, should not cloud some of its successes.

In becoming African Union, the OAU still has an important role, with a constitutive Act that removed non-interference on sovereign states. This article had allowed some African dictators to kill their citizens, but now African Union can intervene in a sovereign state on abuse of human rights.

The Charter signed in 1963 was a compromise between the radical Casablanca states led by Nkrumah of Ghana and Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who wanted immediate political union, the moderate and conservative alliance represented by the Monrovia and the group of states who found a credible spokesperson in Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

Though Nyerere was not a conservative, he was opposed to Nkrumah’s fast-tracking and argued for functional unity (that is economic unity before political union).

The division was superfluous because the economic co-operation did not happen largely due to lack of political will. It would have been a complimentary process of concrete political and economic programmes to advance a shared vision of unity.

The political compromise on the Charter also included agreement that the colonial borders inherited from colonialism remain inviolate, which was absurd.

Probably the situation on the ground dictated, because of having interstate conflicts and wars, sustaining colonial borders and the issue of non-interference rendered us prisoners of our Liberation(the Wambezi elite of Uhuru governments).

The OAU emerged as the most important trade union of ‘dictators’ backed by personal armies and militia. Consequently, the organisation was unable to sanction any of its members like the late Idi Amin Dada, chairman of OAU 1975 from summoning the late Mobutu Seseko of Zaire now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This was because oppression of African peoples by their governments became internal affairs in which dictators had “sovereignty.”

The international environment of bitter cold war and the emergence of neo-colonialism in Africa also constrained the room for manouvre for the various groups to achieve the total unity.

Thus, what mattered most then was whether regimes were pro-east or pro-west and not their Pan Africanists credentials.

The latter became victims of economic and political conspiracies as evidenced in the fate of Tom Mboya, Patrice Lumumba, Nkurumah, Modibbo Keita, Abdel Nasser and Ben Bella.

Today, the African Union, although a lame duck, the organisation, has managed to contain the conflicts on the continent although issues of Darfur, Somalia and northern Uganda are some of its challenges.

As we celebrate 45 years of the OAU now, African Union, we have reasons to smile, look forward to the future with optimism. Some of the constraints are being addressed.

‘Eritrea Stops Spliting the ARS Members’ Islamist Leader Said

AllAfrica.com, Washington 

26/05/08

The chairman of the alliance of the liberation of Somalia sheikh Sharif Sheikh has revealed that Eritrea government carries process wants to break up the alliance he chairs.

Speaking at a news conference he held in Djiboutian capital Djibouti he declared that that Eritrea is accountable for the pitch-black relations between the senior leaders of the alliance after some of the officials in the coalition have accused some members of the groups those took part the failed talks in Djibouti that they were not representing the alliance.

“I am apologetic about the speech that some of the alliance’s members told to the Somali people saying that there were differences in the group” he said in the news conference.

He called for the other members in the group to preserve the common sense of Somalia people and to steer clear of the divergences they are provoke in the umbrella as he put it.

“Thanks to Eritrea for its help on the establishment of the group, but we see something “bad” from them” Sharif said.

He also hailed the UN’s remarks to Somali government and Ethiopian troops about that they’ve violated the law of Somalia’s arms ban was imposed by the United Nation on 1990 after Somali lacked central government.

“Ahhhh I was overwhelmed Meles Zenawe’s remarks( Ethiopian Prime minister) saying that he wouldn’t withdraw his forces from Somalia until the Jihadists are defeated, but they will leave by force” Sharif said.

The remarks from Sheikh Sharif come as the last days there were intensifying speculations about disagreements stuck between the senior leaders of the Reliberatoion of Somalia alliance.