Museveni, Gaddafi clash in Ethiopia

President Yoweri Museveni on Tuesday night openly clashed with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, after the two disagreed over the direction of the formation of a single government for all African states.

According to sources at the summit, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe reportedly helped Mr Museveni take on Col. Gaddafi, who besides mooting the single African government plan, also sought to be bestowed the title “King of Kings”.

Col. Gaddafi reportedly clashed with Mr Museveni over his calls for speeding of the single African government plan. Whereas Mr Museveni calls for strengthening of regional blocs, a position he reiterated in Addis Ababa, Col. Gaddafi wants an immediate fast track to form the United States of Africa.

In what looked like a parliamentary debate characterised by points of order, the two leaders also disagreed on the involvement of traditional leaders by Col. Gaddafi in his pursuit of the United States of Africa dream.
Col. Gaddafi sponsored Mr Museveni’s National Resistance Army guerilla war that brought the Ugandan leader to power in 1986. Click on 'Read More.'
Their current disagreements could bring one of the longest political relationships to an end. At the AU summit, Mr Museveni reportedly warned that he would arrest any traditional leader in Uganda who claimed to speak for Col. Gaddafi.

The Ugandan government last month cancelled a summit of traditional leaders across the continent convened in Kampala and funded by Col. Gaddafi, saying the leaders had discussed politics.

The Ugandan Constitution bars traditional leaders from participating in partisan politics. In Col. Gaddafi’s proposal for the single government, Africa is to have a president, a vice-president and secretaries handling various portfolios such as foreign affairs, research and the battle against pandemics.

However, with much opposition from the other African leaders, Col. Gaddafi stormed out of the meeting at about 2am and a few minutes later, all the leaders filed out.

Asked why Col. Gaddafi had stormed out, Tanzanian Foreign Affairs Minister Bernard Membe said Gaddafi ‘’may have felt unwell”.
The summit ended yesterday with no concrete agreement on the way forward over a single government.

Col. Gaddafi said a special meeting of the group’s Council of Ministers would meet in three months’ time to iron out what powers its newly created African Union Authority should have.

This came after the 53-member group’s marathon talks that failed to agree on ways to transform the current Africa Union Commission into an authority, a process that will end with the creation of the “United States of Africa.”

Yesterday, at a meeting with journalists, Col. Gaddafi struck a conciliatory figure, talking of his vision for a “continent that relies on itself and which is a key player in world affairs.’’

He added that the continent has adopted a “step by step’’ approach to “this historic effort’’ on a single government. But, AU Commission chairman Jean Ping said ‘the whole process may take years.’’

According to Mr Ping, amending the AU Charter is not a simple task and two thirds of the 53 states must accept to proceed with the amendment.(Henry Owour & Argaw Ashine, Daily Monitor Correspondents)

US Diplomat found dead in Ethiopia

A GW alumnus working for the State Department was found dead in Ethiopia this week and U.S. government officials say his death is being investigated as a homicide.

Brian Adkins, who graduated in 2007, worked for the State Department as a Foreign Service officer stationed in Ethiopia's capital city, Addis Ababa. Representatives from the State Department said Wednesday that Adkins died on Saturday, but would not give further details because it was an ongoing homicide investigation. Click here to read more.

Rally for Policy Change Towards Ethiopia

Tedla Asfaw

The new Obama administration acting Secretary of African Affairs, Mark Philips , is currently travelling to Ethiopia. Mrs. Clinton, the Secretary of State will officially be to State Department next Monday and we would like to welcome her. On Monday February 9 Ethiopians will come together to denounce the last eighteen years of failed USA policy and call for the resignation of Meles Zenawi and his racist party TPLF immediately.

The protest in front of the State department in D.C. at 10 am is our first in the new Obama administration and all Ethiopians are welcome. The mobilization of Ethiopians in the diaspora is the only option available to help our people realize the May 2005 hope that was squashed by the Meles killing squads.

Moreover, our people are currently living under military decree and can not come out and show their disgust to the ruling mafia for its financiers, Europe and America. We would like the new Obama administration help our people exercise their God given rights of free speech and assembly to be respected and not to listen to our tormentors in power for the last eighteen years..

If we do not see tangible policy of change immediately we will expose this administration like we did in the past by organizing continuous protests until change comes and we are ready for that. Some who discourage us not to participate in anti- TPLF rally by bringing flimsy excuses about who organized the protest and nothing will come out from protest, I will remind them that such excuses are not accepted especially this time when the grass movement of Americans succeeded in putting African American for the first time while many including myself were thinking otherwise.

Yes we can influence Obama's policy towards mother Ethiopia and what we need is mobilization taking example from Obama himself, yes our people have shown their readiness like Americans. We would like to remind also President Obama that if he had to run in office in Ethiopia by now he would have been in jail or killed. We hope he will be with the Ethiopian people not with the unelected killers.

Celebrations at Lalibela

BBC

As part of a series looking at religious pilgrimagesaround the world, photographer Karoki Lewis recorded the all night ceremony at Bet Maryam (Church of the Virgin Mary) in Lalibela, Ethiopia, as they celebrated Orthodox Christmas in early January. Click here for the audio slideshow.

Mengistu's Extradition Likely- Times

Times online reported that the former Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Hailemariam's extradition will be among the first on the to-do list of the soon-to-be-formed administration in Zimbabwe. Click on 'Read More' for the full version of the story.

The former Ethiopian dictator who slaughtered opponents on an industrial scale in the so-called "Red Terror" is to face justice after 17 years being sheltered by Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe.

With the country's opposition Movement for Democratic Change due to enter a unity government with Zanu-PF next week, The Times has learnt that the extradition of Mengistu Haile Mariam is to be given priority. He faces the death penalty in his home country for his crimes.

Today Nelson Chamisa, the MDC’s chief spokesman, told The Times that Mengistu’s case would be “high on the agenda” of the new administration. “Zimbabwe should not be a safe haven or resting place for serial human rights violators like Mr Mengistu. We can’t shelter purveyors of injustice,” he said.

Last year an Ethiopian court sentenced the "Butcher of Addis" to be executed after convicting him of genocide in absentia, but Mr Mugabe flatly refused to extradite the man who helped to arm Zanu-PF’s guerrillas during Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation war
Instead Mengistu continued to live in Zimbabwe as Mr Mugabe’s honoured guest, dividing his time between a heavily guarded villa in a comfortable Harare suburb, a farm near the capital and a retreat on glorious Lake Kariba.

Suddenly, the future of one of Africa’s worst tyrants looks rather less assured. The MDC plans to use its Cabinet ministers, parliamentary majority and popular support to fight President Mugabe’s inevitable resistance. At stake was “the image and integrity of our country. We have to restore our glory and our dignity among the family of nations,” Mr Chamisa said.

Few Zimbabweans would shed tears if Mengistu, 71, was sent home to the gallows. Mr Mugabe has spent millions of dollars providing his fellow dictator with a government villa in a barricaded cul-de-sac in the suburb of Gun Hill, with round-the-clock protection by armed soldiers and any number of other benefits including the payment of substantial telephone bills — $15,000 in one instance.

In return Mengistu has advised the President on security issues and was allegedly the mastermind of Operation Murambatsvina in 2006 when security forces and Zanu-PF thugs razed the homes of 700,000 slum-dwellers regarded as MDC supporters.

Mengistu has plenty of experience in that field. He seized power after a military coup in 1974 that ended Emperor Haile Selassie’s 44-year rule and ushered in one of the bloodiest regimes Africa has known. In 1976 he mounted the "Red Terror" campaign against opponents of his Derg regime by standing in the centre of Addis Ababa, shouting: “Death to the counter-revolutionaries”, and smashing bottles filled with pigs’ blood to demonstrate the fate that awaited them.

Over the next few years more than half a million people are thought to have been killed in what Human Rights Watch called “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder ever witnessed in Africa”. Hit squads carried out summary executions. Militias strung opponents up from lampposts. Relatives had to pay a tax called “the wasted bullet” to retrieve the bodies of the dead. The victims included the former Emperor and numerous members of the Royal Family and Mengistu is said to have executed some of them himself.

He turned Ethiopia into a Marxist state, backed by the Soviet Union, and earned the sobriquet the "Black Stalin". He created giant collective farms that had the same ruinous effect on agricultural production as Mr Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe and that helped to cause terrible famine.

His Soviet-armed military sought to crush an independence war in Eritrea and an uprising in Tigray province, but when the Soviet Union collapsed Mengistu lost his sponsors. In 1991 he fled to Zimbabwe as the Tigre People’s Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front surrounded Addis.

Washington asked Mr Mugabe to accept him to end the bloodshed.

In 1995 Mengistu narrowly survived an assassination attempt by two Eritreans as he took an afternoon stroll with his wife near Garvin Close, his Harare home. In court the men showed the scars of their torture by Mengistu’s henchmen, but both were imprisoned.

Otherwise Mengistu has maintained a low profile. Early on he was occasionally spotted in a shopping centre or restaurant, surrounded by guards and armed with a pistol. In 1998 he told a reporter who reached him by telephone that he was a “political refugee” who spent his time reading, writing and watching television.

In 1999, using a Zimbabwean diplomatic passport, he flew to Johannesburg for medical treatment and gave a rare interview to a South African newspaper in which he claimed that his socialist revolution had been necessary to remove Selassie’s “backward, archaic and feudalist system” and that millions of peasants had benefitted. More recently he has vanished from sight.

Mengistu’s armed guards were nowhere to be seen in Garvin Close today and The Times was able to drive past the barrier and right up the cul-de-sac before the soldiers suddenly appeared from behind a wall and ordered the intruder to leave. The half-dozen villas all looked abandoned.

As Mr Mugabe’s popularity has plunged in recent years, Mengistu was rumoured to have made contingency plans to move to North Korea. Now might be the time to dust them off — if he has not done so already.

AU summit extended amid divisions

BBC NEWS

An African Union (AU) summit in Ethiopia has been extended to a fourth day amid disagreements on the issue of creating a United States of Africa.

Many leaders said the proposal by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi would add a layer of bureaucracy that the continent does not need.
But they did agree on changing the name of the AU Commission to AU Authority.
Col Gaddafi had used his inaugural address as rotating head of the AU to push his long-cherished unity project.
The Libyan leader said closer integration between African states should start immediately.
In the long grass?
He envisages a single African military force, a single currency and a single passport for Africans to move freely around the continent. But other African heads of state said the Libyan leader's plan was not practical.
African leaders said they would study the legal implications of the unity proposal, make a report and meet again in three months time.
In other words, says BBC's Mark Doyle in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, they are kicking the ball into the long grass to slow it down.
He says the outcome is a political fudge, as no member wishes to alienate the leader of oil-rich Libya. Click on 'Read More.'

One participant in the closed-door meeting of the 53-country union said the Libyan leader appeared to admit defeat and laid his head on the table in despair.
Our correspondent says waiting reporters next saw the Libyan leader sweep out of the room accompanied by his protocol man, who had a uniform like that of an airline pilot - but with more gold braid.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said: "He didn't walk out, he just got tired."
She denied to the BBC that the outcome was a fudge and said it was a step on the path to a United States of Africa.
Legal implications
Leaving the talks in the early hours of Wednesday, Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade said leaders had had a "very rich" discussion that they would resume later in the day.
South African President Kgalema Motlanthe appeared upbeat, telling AFP news agency: "A day will be arrived at where there will be a single authority in charge of Africa." The BBC's Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa says changing the name of the AU Commission - which is the administrative branch of the organisation - to the AU Authority sounds like a mere formality and a change of notepaper.
But, she says, it has legal implications as the commission is written into the constitution of the AU.
Our correspondent understands that any amendment to that charter would have to be agreed by two thirds of AU leaders and ratified by their national parliaments.
Before arriving at the summit, Col Gaddafi circulated a letter saying he was coming as the king of the traditional kings of Africa.
Last August, he had a group of 200 traditional leaders name him the "king of kings" of Africa.
The summit's main agenda - to boost Africa's energy and transport networks - has been pushed largely to the fringes, weighed down by the grim realities of the global economic downturn.

Ethiopian opposition leader Bekele freed on bail

ADDIS ABABA, Feb 4 (Reuters) - A leading Ethiopian opposition politician was freed on bail on Wednesday after he was jailed last November when the government accused him of working with rebels, his party said.

Bekele Jirate, 54, a top official with the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM), was accused by the authorities of working "hand-in-glove" with insurgents like the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF).

"I am very happy because not only is he important for our party, he is innocent," OFDM leader Bulcha Demeksa told Reuters. He said no date had been set for Bekele's trial. The OFDM said another leading opposition politician remains in solitary confinement.

The OLF is one of several rebel groups in the Horn of Africa nation and has been fighting for independence for the southern Oromo region since 1993.

Opposition groups accuse Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's government of harassment, and the OFDM says the security forces have jailed hundreds of ethnic Oromos in recent months. The government denies it.

Bulcha called for the immediate release of Birtukan Mideksa, a former judge who heads the newly created Unity for Democracy and Justice party. She has been in solitary confinement since December and went on hunger strike for 13 days last month. Click on 'Read More'.
Regional analysts consider the 34-year-old to be the country's foremost opposition figure.

"She has been jailed because she is a very strong and serious contender to Prime Minister Meles," Bulcha said.

Birtukan was first jailed after elections in 2005 ended in street violence that killed 199 civilians. She was pardoned in 2007 after she agreed, along with other opposition leaders, to take responsibility for the unrest.

She was rearrested after refusing to retract a speech made in Sweden last year in which she denied she was involved in the talks that led to her release.

The OFDM accused the government of intimidation as voters went to the polls last April for the first time since the 2005 bloodshed. It said almost all its nominees for the local elections had been threatened and forced to pull out of the race. Ethiopia will hold parliamentary elections next year. (Editing by Daniel Wallis and Matthew Jones)