Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and insurgents in the north of the country are expected to meet at the same table in Tanzania by the end of June.
After the truce, peace? While humanitarian aid trucks have been flowing to the rebel province of northern Ethiopia since March, the government of Abiy Ahmed and the insurgents of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) are now reportedly considering negotiations. According to several African and Western diplomats, discussions could begin at the end of June in Tanzania, probably in the city of Arusha, known for hosting the Rwandan peace process in 1993.
At the origin of this rapprochement, Olusegun Obasanjo, the special envoy for the Horn of Africa of the African Union (AU), has in recent months increased the number of return trips between Addis Ababa and Makalé, the provincial capital of Tigray. Backed behind the scenes by Western chancelleries, the 86-year-old former Nigerian president has been advocating a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire between Ethiopian federal authorities and rebels since September 2021. The war, launched in November 2020, has already killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and plunged northern Ethiopia into a serious humanitarian crisis.
As they take shape, the negotiations behind closed doors should bring together two delegations, of five members each. If the signing of a ceasefire, an agreement on humanitarian deliveries and the resumption of basic services (electricity, banking, fuel) are clearly on the table, territorial issues should not be addressed.
Training and recruitment
According to a diplomat stationed in Addis Ababa, “the Tigrayan leadership gives the impression of gradually abandoning its claims to Wolqayt”, a hotly contested territory located in western Tigray. The Amhara militias, who took control of this 12,000 square km strip of land border of Sudan, in November 2020, would have pushed more than 720,000 Tigrayans to the departure, according to a report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Forced displacement and violence that the United States described in March 2021 as “ethnic cleansing”.
For the time being, the two camps are discreet about possible talks. But the change in tone is palpable in the halls of the federal government. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, said on Monday June 6 that the government “adopted a peaceful posture » and that he was “fully committed to the African Union peace initiative”. A voluntarism displayed not devoid of mistrust. According to Billene Seyoum, the TPLF “continues to forcibly conscript combatants into its ranks”.
Several observers who recently visited Tigray confirmed to Le Monde that extensive training and recruitment was taking place in the city and in the countryside, without being able to attest to the forced nature of conscription. According to Ethiopian and international analysts, Tigrayan rebels are now “looking north,” that is, towards Eritrea.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s allies during the first phase of the conflict, Eritrean troops occupied the entire Tigrayan territory between November 2020 and June 2021. They are accused, by an investigation by the United Nations and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, of rape and executions of civilians, and of looting the region. Clashes continue today between Tigrayan and Eritrean forces. In particular, skirmishes have taken place since late May in Sheraro, on the border. The area was already at the heart of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia from 1998 to 2000.
Crucial moment
An outbreak of violence on Ethiopia’s northern border is all the less excluded because the alliance sealed at the beginning of the war between Abiy Ahmed and his Eritrean counterpart, Isaias Afwerki, is beating the wing. Addis Ababa does not welcome Asmara’s rapprochement with the nationalist forces in the Amhara region, who are determined to continue the war and eradicate the TPLF.
To undermine this understanding, the Ethiopian federal authorities arrested at the end of May more than 4,500 Amhara politicians, military and militiamen suspected of taking part in “illegal activities” and “sowing chaos.” Among them is former Amhara Special Forces Chief General Tefera Mamo. “He was apprehended because he was quietly meeting with senior Eritrean officials,” said an expert on Ethiopian politics. Abiy Ahmed feared an Amhara uprising by Eritrea. “
The moment is crucial for power in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian economy suffocated because of a lack of foreign currency, and the Government must pledge goodwill to the international community. “Engaging in a peace process is meeting the Western expectations that have been repeated by the European Union and the United States for several months,” one diplomat said. The World Bank has just released $300 million (€280 million) for Ethiopia. At the end of June, it will be the turn of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council to discuss the cooperation and financial assistance it intends to provide to the country of the Horn of Africa.
💭 STARVATION AND RELIEF OPERATIONS IN THE NIGERIA/BIAFRA WAR: The Role of Religious Organizations and the Local Population
The Nigeria-Biafra civil war was a complex interplay of political, economic, ethnic, religious and diplomatic conflict. The ethno-religious aspects of the conflict cannot be overlooked. The failure of political and diplomatic agreement led to the economic blockade of the South-Eastern region, mostly dominated by the large Christian Igbo population. This policy of economic blockade created a situation of human-made famine in which millions of Igbo people faced death by starvation and disease. The high media coverage of the conflict and its humanitarian disaster provoked an unprecedented international outcry for relief operations. The operations of international relief agencies were often caught up in the debate on the issue of the priority of humanitarian over political considerations. Religious bodies and the local population played a significant part in the relief operations. Their intervention were often the last hope of saving the lives of thousands of people who could not be reached by the international relief organizations, bounded by Article 23 of 1949 Geneva Convention on refugees and relief operations.
😢😢😢500,000 Christians in Tigray Massacred or Starved to death, in just a year! 😠😠😠
💭 Dr. Timnit Gebru was the keynote speaker at the UC Berkeley School of Information May 2022 Commencement on May 16, 2022 – and at the Center for African Studies.
It takes courage to speak truth to the most powerful technology companies in the world. Timnit Gebru is a truth teller.
Gebru was the most senior Black woman to lead a team of AI ethicists at Google, hired to find issues and improve the technology. She was ultimately fired after co-authoring a paper that did just that; it exposed racial discrimination and environmental harm in large-scale artificial intelligence systems at the company. Her ousting sparked protests by scholars and Google employees around the world.
Gebru is one of the world’s leading researchers helping us understand the limits of artificial intelligence in products like facial-recognition software, which fails to recognize women of color, especially Black women. Her work shines a light on racial disparities in the tech industry, from worker mistreatment to discriminatory product design.
She now leads the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and is a fierce voice of clarity about both the limits and the possibilities of AI, warning us about what can go wrong when power goes unchecked in the tech industry. She offers us hope for justice-oriented technology design, which we need now more than ever.
💭 A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of the rare disease monkeypox in developed countries as “a random event” that might be explained by risky sexual behavior at two recent mass events in Europe.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO’s emergencies department, said the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission among gay and bisexual men at two raves held in Spain and Belgium. Monkeypox has not previously triggered widespread outbreaks beyond Africa, where it is endemic in animals.
“We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission,” said Heymann.
That marks a significant departure from the disease’s typical pattern of spread in central and western Africa, where people are mainly infected by animals like wild rodents and primates and outbreaks have not spilled across borders.
To date, WHO has recorded more than 90 cases of monkeypox in a dozen countries including Britain, Spain, Israel, France, Switzerland, the U.S. and Australia.
Madrid’s senior health official said on Monday that the Spanish capital has recorded 30 confirmed cases so far. Enrique Ruiz Escudero said authorities are investigating possible links between a recent Gay Pride event in the Canary Islands, which drew some 80,000 people, and cases at a Madrid sauna.
Heymann chaired an urgent meeting of WHO’s advisory group on infectious disease threats on Friday to assess the ongoing epidemic and said there was no evidence to suggest that monkeypox might have mutated into a more infectious form.
Monkeypox typically causes fever, chills, rash, and lesions on the face or genitals. It can be spread through close contact with an infected person or their clothing or bedsheets, but sexual transmission has not yet been documented. Most people recover from the disease within several weeks without requiring hospitalization. Vaccines against smallpox, a related disease, are also effective in preventing monkeypox and some antiviral drugs are being developed.
The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly, festering sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped its image.
❖❖❖ [Romans 1:26-27] ❖❖❖
“For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”
💭 On Friday, Dr. Li-Meng Yan was on with Joe Hoft and she discussed her research of COVID beginning in late 2019 from Hong Kong where she was a virologist working as a Ph.D. at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Yan fled China after providing evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory.
Dr. Li-Meng Yan was one of the first to research the emerging coronavirus and previously revealed she was forced into hiding after accusing Beijing of a cover-up.
Now, as international leaders finally focus on her Wuhan lab-leak theory, the scientist told Newsmax that Fauci’s emails contain “a lot of useful information” suggesting he always knew more than he revealed.
“They verify my work from the very beginning, even from last January, that these people know what happened, but they choose to hide for the Chinese Communist Party and for their own benefits”.
Dr. Yan on Friday discussed her upbringing and then her studies and how she landed in Hong Kong. She began looking into COVID-19 in late 2019 in Hong Kong. She shared that she came to five conclusions related to COVID-19:
Claims that COVID-19 could not travel between humans were false
China government was covering it up and it was terrible in Wuhan and the WHO was involved
There was no animal host for COVID-19 – the seafood market was just a smokescreen
If not caught on time the outbreak could get big and out of hand
The origins of COVID were gain of function – lab-created – backbone was bat virus
She then shared the following when asked whether this was intentional or not:
So it’s definitely not from nature and it’s definitely not an accident come out in a lab. Also, it starts from Wuhan and the Wuhan Institute of Virology get involved but I need to tell people that this is not an accident. Because I work in that lab I know how safe it is and the lab actually can never cause big pandemic world-wide and this is intentionally bring out of the lab and released in the community. And there are a lot of motives behind that but the most important thing is Chinese Communist Government develop this and they want to use it to destroy the world order. And I think that because it’s out of control we never saw it out of control in Wuhan.
“Moderna signs deal with Kenya to build a Covid-19 vaccine facilityGiant pharmaceutical to invest Ksh57B in the venturePres. Kenyatta says facility to help Africa meet demand for vaccines”
Denmark has become the first country to halt its Covid vaccination program, saying it is doing so because the virus has been brought under control.
“Spring has arrived, vaccine coverage in the Danish population is high, and the epidemic has reversed,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement Wednesday.
“Therefore, the National Board of Health is now ending the broad vaccination efforts against Covid-19 for this season,” it said. People will not be invited for vaccines from May 15, it said, although everyone will be able to finish their course of vaccination.
Denmark’s Covid vaccination campaign began soon after Christmas in 2020. Some 4.8 million citizens have been vaccinated, the health authority said, with more than 3.6 million people receiving a booster shot.
At the same time, many people have been infected since the omicron variant became the dominant strain of the virus, it said, meaning immunity levels among the population are high.
“We are in a good place,” Bolette Soborg, unit manager at the National Board of Health, commented.
“We have good control of the epidemic, which seems to be subsiding. Admission rates [to hospitals] are stable and we also expect them to fall soon. Therefore, we are rounding up the mass vaccination program against Covid-19.”
💭 As much of the world’s attention is focused on the bloodshed in Ukraine, the head of the World Health Organization saya there is ”nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat” than Ethiopia’s Tigray region..
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the situation in Tigray from where he hails was “catastrophic,” saying the region had been “sealed off from the outside world” for about 500 days.
“No food aid has been delivered since the middle of December,” Tedros told a press briefing, adding that about three quarters of health facilities assessed by WHO in the region had been destroyed. He said there was no treatment for about 40,000 people with HIV in the region.
“Yes, I’m from Tigray and this crisis affects me, my family and my friends very personally,” Tedros said. “But I, the director general of WHO, I have a duty to protect and promote health wherever it’s under threat,” he said. “And there is nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat than Tigray.”
Tedros said the U.N. health agency had now documented 43 attacks on health care workers and facilities in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began last month.
WHO has now opened supply lines to many cities in Ukraine, but some access challenges remained. The agency continued to call for attacks on health workers and facilities to stop.
But Tedros said the crisis in Ukraine was “far from the only crisis to which WHO is responding,” citing ongoing problems in Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia.
Earlier this year, the government of Ethiopia sent a letter to the World Health Organization, accusing Tedros of “misconduct” after his sharp criticism of the war and humanitarian crisis in the country.
😈 Wherever Evil Abiy Ahmed Goes, He Leaves a Path of Death & Destruction
😈 ጂኒው አብይ አህመድ በሄደበት ሁሉ የሞት እና የጥፋት መንገድን ጥሎ ይሄዳል
⏰ It’s The Year 2022 ⏰
The Felicity Ace caught ablaze on Wednesday and 22 of its crew members were airlifted to safety
There are 4,000 cars on board the ship including 189 Bentleys, 1,100 Porsches and multiple Lamborghinis
The cargo ship was carrying vehicles from Emden, Germany, to Davisville, Rhode Island
Lithium-ion batteries in the electric cars have caught fire and require specialist equipment to extinguish
None of 22 crew members hurt after vessel with almost 4,000 VW group cars onboard caught fire
A burning ship carrying almost 4,000 cars – including 1,100 Porsches – has been drifting in the mid-Atlantic after the vessel’s 22 crew members were evacuated, the Portuguese navy has said.
The ship Felicity Ace, which was carrying a number of Volkswagen Group vehicles from Germany to the US, caught fire near the Azores on Wednesday evening, a VW spokesperson said on Friday.
None of the crew members evacuated on Wednesday were hurt, Portugal’s navy said.
About 1,100 cars were on board, according to a Porsche spokesperson. Audi said some of its vehicles were also on the specialised car-transport vessel but did not state how many.
An internal email from Volkswagen US said the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported.
An automotive enthusiast website, The Drive, reported the ship was carrying 189 Bentleys. The luxury British carmaker is owned by Volkswagen.
Volkswagen did not confirm the number of cars and said it was awaiting further information.
A picture shared by the Portuguese maritime authority on its website on Wednesday showed clouds of smoke billowing from the ship.
Felicity Ace was travelling from Emden,where Volkswagen has a factory, to Davisville, Rhode Island, according to the website Marine Traffic.
The fire is active but under control, the captain of the port of Horta on the Azorean island of Faial told the Portuguese news agency Lusa on Thursday night.
Azorean authorities were not immediately available for comment.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 