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Artist Hilena Getachew arrested
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Astaraki Ethiopian movie
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Full program veteran EPRDF talk about Ethiopia protest
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Dana drama part 39
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Kebad Mizan Ethiopian movie
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Menalachew Semachew about EPRDF claim of new reform
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Journalist Sisay Agena speaks about current situation in Ethiopia
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23 killed in Ethiopian prison fire, local media reports
Fana Broadcasting Corporate cited a government statement saying 21 inmates at the Kilinto prison died from stampede and suffocation and two died trying to escape.
By MICHAEL ATSBEHA
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA—Twenty-three people have died in a prison fire in Ethiopia over the weekend, a state-affiliated broadcaster reported Monday.
The Kilinto prison on the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa, is where many opposition figures and journalists are held. Activists first raised concerns about the fire on Saturday, and some local media reported that gunfire was heard.
Fana Broadcasting Corporate cited a government statement as saying 21 inmates died from stampede and suffocation. The other two were killed while trying to escape.
The government originally said only one person died in the fire.
The latest government statement gives no details on how the fire began. It says an investigation has begun.
This East African country has seen months of sometimes deadly protests calling for wider freedoms, while the government has been accused by opposition activists and rights groups of killings, beatings and internet blockages.
The Oromia and Amhara regions have held protests in recent weeks that residents and rights groups say have left many dead. Regional concerns that sparked the demonstrations have broadened into anti-government protests.
Ethiopia’s government, a close security ally of the West, is often accused of silencing dissent. Recent video obtained by The Associated Press showed Ethiopian security forces beating, kicking and dragging several protesters during a rare demonstration in the capital.
On Sunday, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said her country has raised “grave concerns” about what it calls excessive use of force against protesters in Ethiopia.
Ambassador Samantha Power called the recent violence in Ethiopia “extremely serious” and called for a transparent and independent investigation. She said the U.S. has asked the government to allow people to protest peacefully.
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Kebad Mizan Ethiopian movie
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Veteran EPRDF leaders respond to Ethiopia Protest
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Yehunie Belay –“SEKEN BEL”ሰከን በል! Single Music
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“The current Ethiopian government is widely recognized as a criminally organized group, Tedros Adhanom should not be considered to lead WHO”
Jerusalem Post (JPost.com)
By SHMUEL LEGESSE
Ethiopia lacks a model of leadership
In January, 2016, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom was nominated as Africa’s candidate for director general of the UN World Health Organization.
Just this past week, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was named global ambassador for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) by the WHO, a position in which he will serve under whoever is ultimately appointed as the WHO’s director general. While Bloomberg, with his impeccable record of public health advocacy and international philanthropy, is clearly over-qualified for this role, what frightens me is the potential appointment of Adhanom as his superior. A rudimentary comparison of these two men’s records highlights the latter’s extreme unfitness for the office he seeks to assume and the absurdity of his even being considered.
During his unprecedented three-term tenure, mayor Bloomberg took direct control of the troubled New York City school system and oversaw a marked increase in children’s test scores; he banned smoking in restaurants, bars, parks and other indoor and outdoor public arenas; he partnered with and empowered citizens of the city by calling upon them to notify authorities of suspicious happenings they observed; he established a comprehensive information hotline that provides vital factual data to city dwellers and visitors in more than 170 languages; he banned trans-fats and mandated the posting of calorie counts in New York restaurants, measures that have since been adopted in major cities throughout the nation toward combating rising obesity rates in both adults and children; he used his own private funds to pay for a Super Bowl ad promoting stricter gun control.
And this is a mere sampling of his contributions to the quality of life of the people he governed. Now that his terms as mayor have ended, he has expanded his health, well-being and justice initiatives to the broader global community and continues to work tirelessly, and to donate generously, to promote causes at the core of human flourishing.
No model of leadership could be more divergent from Bloomberg’s than the one Ethiopian Foreign Minister Adhanom, along with his political associates, represents. The current Ethiopian government is widely recognized as a criminally organized group with high rates of human rights abuses. According to The New York Times and Human Rights Watch, tens of thousands of peaceful protesters against the government have been incarcerated, and over 700 have been killed, in recent months. The Ethiopian athlete Feyisa Lilesa made a powerful public gesture in solidarity with his oppressed countrymen at the Summer Olympics in Rio last month and was warned not to return home afterward.
The International Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Ethiopia is among Africa’s leading jailers of journalists and has destroyed its own independent civil society. The UN Commissioner for Human Rights has requested an independent evaluation of the deaths of hundreds of peaceful civilian protesters in recent months at the hands of the Ethiopian army. However, Foreign Minister Adhanom and his government have refused external evaluation of human rights abuses complained of by large numbers of citizens.
THE LOCAL independent Ethiopian citizens’ news agencies are reporting outside the country that there is a huge popular mobilization against the government.
The local citizens are demonstrating peacefully, with the following complaints: that the government is killing them indiscriminately and robbing the country of power and economic resources, which are being funneled to one small, elite tribal group (known as the Tgria Peoples Liberation Front), and that their land is being sold to the Tgrian tribe, or that this tribe is selling their land to foreign investors.
On the day that the athlete Lilesa showed his support at the Olympics in Rio, there was a demonstration planned in the capital city of Addis Ababa, but the government deployed military force to put down the peaceful citizens who organized it. Only Lilesa could make his statement, safely insulated, for the moment, from the army’s threatened violence, by a couple thousand miles.
His fellow citizens at home were not so fortunate. Just this past week, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn announced on national television that all military personnel would be ordered to open fire on peaceful demonstrators, which, on the first day following, resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
Britain Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond recently warned, in a meeting with Adhanom, that Ethiopia’s “repeated failure to deliver on our basic requests” regarding an Ethiopian-born English citizen being held on death row simply because he is the opposition party leader had led him be begin “looking carefully at the bilateral relationship” between the two nations. This is yet another example of the current Ethiopian government’s pervasive corruption and lawlessness.
As a chief agent of this depraved, bloody government body, how can Adhanom be considered as a prospective director general of the WHO? How does his candidacy reflect on the WHO itself, or, more broadly, the UN’s role as the world’s moral anchor and arbiter? Clearly, there is no just way forward but for the UN to investigate the current Ethiopian government’s reported abuses and to renounce the candidacy of its foreign minister for the position he seeks at the WHO.
It is perhaps in the values that underlie the actions of Bloomberg and Adhanom, respectively, that the starkest contrast between these two men might be drawn. Bloomberg has often been quoted as saying, “The thing about great wealth is that you can’t take it with you,” by way of explaining why he is choosing to give so much of his private fortune away – a total of $4.3 billion thus far, including $510 million distributed by his philanthropies in 2015 alone. Adhanom, on the other hand, is a prominent member of the Ethiopian government whose former leader, Meles Zenawi (the man who appointed Adhanom to his position), had a reported net worth of over $3b., having amassed this amount entirely during his years in office.
He took power in 1991 with an officially listed salary of $220 per month, and had no private financial resources to his name at that point. Today, all the top leaders of the TPLF are billionaires, though their nation remains an impoverished member of the Third World. Sadly, the source of these leaders’ newfound wealth is not too hard to surmise.
I have lived, for years, under the governance of both mayor Bloomberg and Finance Minister Adhanom and can thus attest, on a personal level, to the disparate impact of their leadership on the people they’ve ruled. I know, first hand, what it has been like to live under the policies of Bloomberg’s and Adhanom’s administrations, and how each has affected the daily life of his constituency.
More than all the facts and figures I have cited above, these real-life, on-the-ground experiences have shaped my conviction that Adhanom and his cronies must go if my native land is ever to prosper as my adopted city has in the past few decades. The WHO’s recent appointments, within the broader context of rising unrest in Ethiopia, where my family resides, and my own relatively secure life in New York, have brought this realization home to me as never before. I can only hope that the world will begin to see things in kind.
The author, a social activist on behalf of the Ethiopian Jewish community, served in the Israel Police. He holds a master’s degree in community leadership and philanthropy from Hebrew University and is currently pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership and administration, while studying for rabbinic ordination.
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[Part 3] Veteran EPRDF leaders talk about Ethiopia protest
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Nhatty Man [አሁን ተነካው] Ahun Tenekaw new Ethiopian music 2016
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Tikur Fikir drama part 111
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Tikur Fikir part 112
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Filega drama part 26
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Filega part 27
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Ethiopia’s political protests are escalating with a fire at a major prison [Quartz Africa]
WRITTEN BY
Tensions in Ethiopia escalated over the weekend when 23 people were killed after a fire erupted at the Qilinto prison in the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa. The jail reportedly holds high political prisoners, some of them from the Oromo community, who have been protesting against the government for almost a year now.
Citing a government statement, the state-controlled Fana Broadcasting Corporate said that 21 inmates died from stampede and suffocation, while two others were killed trying to escape the prison. The blaze also damaged two buildings as well as recreational facilities used by the prisoners. Local media outlets however disputed the account, citing eyewitnesses who said that armed prison guards “indiscriminately” shot at prisoners, and put the death toll at 20. Family members say they are yet to receive information on their loved ones who were in the prison.
The fire comes at a time when the Oromo and the Amhara, the country’s two largest ethnic groups, are protesting against the Tigray-dominated government. The demonstrations have been going on since last November, with protestors calling for wider economic, political and social freedoms. Human rights organizations estimate that more than 500 peaceful protestors have been killed since then by security forces.
The violence has also affected businesses, with the burning of flower farms and foreign commercial properties worth millions of dollars. Land reform is one of the demands of the protestors, and government-sanctioned foreign projects face a high risk of attacks, says Emma Gordon, senior Africa analyst at global risk consultancy, Verisk Maplecroft.
“This is most likely to affect agribusiness investments, which are concentrated in Oromia region due to its status as Ethiopia’s most fertile region,” Gordon says. “If further attacks on foreign assets occur and more companies seek to divest, it will most likely force the government to reconsider its approach to the protests.”
The unrest is gradually gaining global attention, with the United States government and the African Union commission both expressing concern. Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, called the violence in the country “extremely serious,” and called for an independent investigation into the protests while on a trip to South Sudan on Sunday (Sept. 4). Eleven months since the protests started, the AU in early September also called for restraint and dialogue among all stakeholders.
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Efeta Program September 6, 2016
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