These wicked nations who waged genocide on black Africans in Libya — and who are selling Africans again as slaves like they did thousand years ago — should never be supported. To support a draft resolution rejecting President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, set for a General Assembly vote Thursday is a huge shame, and a crime against Africans.
Turkey and Yemen requested the urgent meeting of the 193-nation forum on behalf of the Arab group of countries and the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) after the US vetoed the measure in the Security Council. The two countries circulated a draft resolution that mirrors the vetoed measure, reaffirming that any decision on the status of Jerusalem has no legal effect and must be rescinded.
Egypt had put forward the draft, which was backed by all 14 other Security Council members in a vote on Monday. Like the Egyptian draft, the text before the assembly does not explicitly mention Trump’s decision but expresses “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem.”
There was once a very large and intelligent, because it focused on small-scale, doable projects, aid effort by Israel in black Africa. It was the most successful of all such foreign aid efforts. It was widespread. It was widely welcomed. But it came to an end, after the Six-Day War, under Arab pressure, and bribery – the same bribery that caused several dozen African states, under Arab command, to break diplomatic relations with Israel.
Not only are European governments aware of the “systematic abuse” and “appalling conditions” that migrants are exposed to by Libyan authorities, they are also involved in these crimes, Amnesty International has claimed in a recent report.
In an attempt to contain the influx of sea-borne migrants and refugees, the EU member states “actively” contribute to “a sophisticated system of abuse and exploitation of refugees and migrants by the Libyan Coast Guard, detention authorities and smugglers”, Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
Tortured. Raped. Sold.
Rescued? No.
“Hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya are at the mercy of Libyan authorities, militias, armed groups and smugglers, often working seamlessly together for financial gain,” said Amnesty’s Europe Director, John Dalhuisen. An estimated 20,000 people are currently kept in “these overcrowded, unsanitary detention centers,” where “torture is rife,” the group reports.
Held in detention for three months, a man from Gambia told Amnesty about the suffering he endured: “In the center they don’t give food. They beat me with a rubber hose, because they want money to release me. They call the family while beating [you] so the family send money”.
Another man, from Nigeria, named “Victor”, described the fear he felt before setting off from Libya. “I had heard stories of Libyans arresting people at sea and taking them to prison, and from there asking them to call their families to make them send money; and stories of people who had died in the sea. But I feared Libya more; in Libya they treat anyone with a dark skin as an animal…”.
People are tortured.
People are raped.
People are sold.
The EU is “complicit in these abuses”, Amnesty claims, singling out Italy. The EU governments provide support to Libya, train and equip the country’s coastguard with boats and other assistance, and clamp down on rescue efforts by the NGOs, Amnesty reports, in ‘Libya’s Dark Web of Collusion’.
“By supporting Libyan authorities in trapping people in Libya, without requiring the Libyan authorities to tackle the endemic abuse of refugees and migrants or to even recognize that refugees exist, European governments have shown where their true priorities lie: namely, the closure of the central Mediterranean route, with scant regard to the suffering caused”, Dalhuisen charged.
The European policies have proved efficient, resulting in a significant drop of sea crossings compared to last year’s figures and even to the first six months of 2017, Amnesty reports. While nearly 84,000 migrants arrived in Italy by sea in the first half of the year, some 33,288 disembarked there between July and November.
Meanwhile, 3,091 didn’t make it to the shore, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) statistics estimate.
Amnesty has urged the EU to “realize the horrific consequences of their policies of containment, recognize their unlawful nature, and reset their co-operation with Libya”, as well as to “enable people to get to Europe through legal pathways”.
The North African nation, ravaged by civil war, has turned into a launch pad for those fleeing persecution, war and poverty and making a perilous journey to Europe. The IOM identified more than 400,000 refugees in Libya, Amnesty says.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 16, 2017
A new CNN investigation has uncovered a network of slave markets operating in warehouses in various cities across Libya six years after NATO-led intervention in the country toppled the government of Muammar Gaddafi in support of US and UK backed rebels. And not only did CNN confirm the presence of slave auctions where human beings are being sold for as little as $400 in “liberated” Libya, but CNN’s crew was actually able to film a live auction in progress, while also gathering the testimonies of multiple victims.
Though CNN’s footage and accompanying report is shocking, such practices have been quietly documented for years, and clear warnings were issued starting in early 2011 that Libya’s black as well as migrant population would be the first to fall victim at the hands of the Islamist Libyan rebels that NATO’s war empowered. From the outset critics of Western intervention in Libya loudly sounded the alarm of a genocide against black Libyans in progress committed by the very rebels the US, UK, France, and Gulf allies were arming – a fact so well-known that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally briefed and warned on the matter.
The Dangerous Myth of Gaddafi’s “African Mercenaries”
Among the foremost of these early critics at the time, Maximilian Forte, Associate Professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, published a 2012 book which exhaustively documented racially motivated crimes which came early and often during the armed uprising. His book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, contains essential summary context laying out the role that international media played in 2011 and after, including CNN itself, in fueling the xenophobic campaign to scapegoat Libya’s over one million strong black population as “pro-Gaddafi mercenaries”.
Racial fear and xenophobia were at the very crux of the first public calls for Western military intervention, and were the basis for the first utterance of the need for a “no-fly zone” … The myth of the “African mercenary” was useful for the Libyan opposition, the NTC [National Transitional Council] and the militias, to insist that this was a war between “Gaddafi and the Libyan people,” as if he had no domestic support at all…
As Patrick Cockburn explained, the insurgents’ “explanation for the large pro-Gaddafi forces was that they were all mercenaries, mostly from black Africa, whose only motive was money.”
Gaddafi’s ‘pan-Africanist’ policies such as aggressive support for the creation of the African Union (in 2002), and a relatively open immigration policy allowing for the influx of sub-Saharan African migrants to work on Gaddafi’s massive building projects, stirred resentment and discontent within broader Arab Libyan society in the decade leading up to the 2011 war. This was the historical background which set the stage for the anti-Gaddafi rebels’ extraordinary claim that sub-Saharan “foreign mercenaries” were being used en masse by Gaddafi to target protesters (later proven false).
QADHAFI in 1998 adopted a decade-long pan-African policy that enabled large numbers of sub-Saharan migrants to enter Libya without visas to work in the construction and agricultural industries. Although sub-Saharan Africans provided a cheap labor source, they were poorly treated and were subjected to periodic mass expulsions. By the mid-2000s, domestic animosity toward African migrants…
Similar to later developments in Syria, the media would uncritically echo whatever the “freedom fighting” rebels would feed it, thus this black foreign mercenary trope became an unquestioned realityspread from rebel propagandists to the Western public. Libyan opposition members even began claiming to be victims of wild attacks by roving bands of machete-wielding pro-Gaddafi blacks wearing tell-tale yellow hard hats – a symbol which also falsely began to be associated with “Gaddafi’s savage mercenaries” – resulting in subsequent mass arrests and executions of innocent black migrant construction workers.
CNN Spread the “Black Mercenary” Lie
The end result would of course be the widespread targeting and scapegoating of an entire ethnic population within Libya. This is demonstrated, for example, in the most well-known example of Tawergha, an entire town of 30,000 black and “dark-skinned” Libyans which vanished by August 2011 after its takeover by NATO-backed NTC Misratan brigades.
But it is important to remember that CNN itself at the time regularly promoted the false “black mercenary” narrative which helped fuel and excuse such atrocities, even though it is now much belatedly investigating and decrying Libya’s current migrant slave auctions, while leaving out the essential context which enabled such horrors in the first place. For example, the following February 2011 CNN reporting relied on unnamed opposition sources during the earliest days of the conflict to say:
Residents said hundreds of mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa had been killed or captured while fighting for Gadhafi, but much of the army appears to have gone over to anti-government forces.
And a separate CNN article from the same month – though acknowledging that no CNN journalists were even inside the country – still uncritically reported:
Clashes broke out between a large crowd of demonstrators and people who appeared to be African mercenaries in the center of the city, according to an activist.
Yet another broadcast segment from February 2011 – the clip of which appears to have since been deleted from CNN’s site (but which is available on YouTube), asks the question: in Libya “just who is doing the dirty work?” – while answering that Gaddafi imported Chadian and Sudanese mercenaries to crack down on civilian protesters.
And those few examples are but a tiny sampling of CNN’s consistent spreading the dangerous myth throughout the early stages of the conflict – to say nothing of how ubiquitous the false rebel claims became among mainstream media generally.
US-backed Rebels and Ethnic Genocide
One of the few international correspondents to actually report the truth in real time while writing from inside Libya was The Independent’s (UK) Patrick Cockburn. In an August 2011 story he wrote as if attempting to warn the world about the future war crimes to come at the hands of the US-backed rebels:
The rotting bodies of 30 men, almost all black and many handcuffed, slaughtered as they lay on stretchers and even in an ambulance in central Tripoli, are an ominous foretaste of what might be Libya’s future. The incoming regime makes pious statements about taking no revenge on pro-Gaddafi forces, but this stops short of protecting those who can be labelled mercenaries. Any Libyan with a black skin accused of fighting for the old regime may have a poor chance of survival.
If reporters like Cockburn and even prominent human rights organizations (see Human Rights Watch, September 2011, Libya: Stop Arbitrary Arrests of Black Africans) understood what was happening months prior to height of NATO’s military campaign in support of the rebels, which ended in the brutal torture and field execution of Gaddafi, then what did one of the prime US architects of the war, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton know and when did she know it?
The answer lies in a March 27, 2011, intelligence brief on Libya published by WikiLeaks. The brief, which was made public in 2015 as part of a large batch of Hillary emails released by the State Department, was sent by long time close adviser to the Clinton family and Hillary’s personal intelligence gatherer, Sidney Blumenthal, and contains clear reference to rebels summarily executing “all foreign mercenaries” – which had already become the common euphemism for black Libyans then being targeted by the US-supported rebels.
Under attack from allied Air and Naval forces, the Libyan Army troops have begun to desert to the rebel side in increasing numbers. The rebels are making an effort to greet these troops as fellow Libyans, in an effort to encourage additional defections.
Source Comment: Speaking in strict confidence, one rebel commander stated that his troopscontinue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting…
Hillary Emails show UK, French, Egyptian special forces were secretly in Libya providing arms to “protestors” https://t.co/SyRhaYeLGI
And further interesting is that the line immediately following the acknowledgement of war crimes against “foreign mercenaries” indicates that a long time CIA supported Libyan exile was then taking command of the very militants committing those summary executions.
At the same time Colonel Khalifa Haftar has reportedly joined the rebel command structure, in an effort to help organization the rebel forces.
Khalifa Haftar has since 2011 become a mainstay in Libya’s post-Gaddafi chaos, heading up one of the three to four governments (at any given time) claiming authority in the war-torn country. Haftar has been widely acknowledged as the “CIA’s man” during his two decade long exile in the US, as a BBC profile explained: “His proximity to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley hinted at a close relationship with US intelligence services, who gave their backing to several attempts to assassinate Gaddafi.”
CIA’s Khalifa Haftar and Mass Executions
Meanwhile, Haftar is currently being eyed by international prosecutors for continuing to commit war crimes in Libya. One month ago The Guardian reported, “Ex-CIA asset Khalifa Haftar, due to meet Italian officials in Rome, ordered soldiers to kill prisoners, according to legal experts.” The Guardian cites video evidence which proves he continues to be “complicit in calling for extrajudicial killings.”
And yesterday Al Jazeera reported that a formal suit has been filed against Haftar at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “carrying out mass executions and torture.” Another recent Guardian report which details torture and rape being carried out against prisoners held under Haftar’s militia alliance, includes the following eyewitness account of the torture of African migrant detainees:
“There was a black man, a migrant. In the evening, they threw him into one of our cells: ‘You rape this guy, otherwise, you’re dead!’”
Then Secretary of State Clinton understood in early 2011 what was happening concerning the rebel genocidal targeting of black Libyans and African migrants, yet pushed to arm the rebels and overthrow Gaddafi anyway. She was given the intelligence brief which gave evidence this was happening on March 27, 2011. But even without such a classified intelligence report personally delivered to her, such war crimes were so well known that a full month prior on February 28, 2011, Al Jazeera could publish the following story entitled, African Migrants Targetted in Libya:
As nations evacuate their citizens from the violence gripping Libya, many African migrant workers are targeted because they are suspected of being mercenaries hired by Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader.
Dozens of workers from sub-Saharan Africa are feared killed, and hundreds are in hiding, as angry mobs of anti-government protesters hunt down “black African mercenaries,” according to witnesses.
“No Regrets”
But even years later, as such race-based war crimes have now been exhaustively documented, Hillary has consistently indicated that she has no regrets. Though her beloved Libyan rebels, legitimized and empowered through broad support from the West, were literally killing people based on the color of their skin, not a single one has ever been convicted in a court of law or punished for their crimes.
Moreover, Hillary has never so much as hinted at the problem, though her public stature would allow her a world-wide platform to speak against atrocities at any time, possibly preventing further crimes. Instead, she has simply chosen to conclude her role in the tragic story of Libya with her crazed and gleeful declaration of “we came, we saw, he died.”
My Note: Another perfect example of the Esau & Ishmael alliance for the endless African and Christian genocide. They will all burn in hell! Shame on those Africans who, in any manner, collaborate with these demonic evils!
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 10, 2017
Migrants Are Being Sold At Open Slave Markets In Libya
‘It is better to die than stay in Libya:’ Libya’s Slave Markets Remind Us of Flaws in EU Migration Plans
Migrants from West Africa are being openly traded in “public slave markets” across Libya.
I was horrified when I read the International Organization for Migration (IOM) report last week on sub-Saharan Africans being sold and bought in open markets in Libya—but I was not surprised.
During a recent visit to Italy, I spoke with dozens of men and women from East and West Africa who recently arrived in Sicily from Libya. They recounted extreme acts of cruelty at the hands of human smugglers, members of the Libyan coastguard, state-run detention center workers and locals.
“I was sold twice,” a young man from Guinea told me on the tiny island of Lampedusa, just days after he arrived by boat from Libya. “I was sold to an Arab man who forced me to work and told me to call my family so they would send money. He sold me to another Arab man who forced me to work for him, too.” The young man was only able to leave once his family sent enough money to free him.
The slave trade affects women, too. A young woman from Nigeria told me: “As a female, you can’t walk alone in the street. Even if they don’t shoot you, [if] you’re black, they’ll just take you and sell you.” One man, also from Guinea, said that women are more expensive to buy than men.
Women also face shocking levels of sexual abuse. A United Nations official told me that of the migrants and asylum seekers in Libya, “almost every woman” has been sexually abused.
In this context, it is astounding that the European Union is working hard to keep people off its shores, even if it means leaving them in Libya. As outlined in a declaration in Malta in February, EU heads of state have promised to train and equip the Libyan coastguard and are hoping to “ensure [there are] adequate reception capacities and conditions in Libya for migrants.”
With summer weather approaching—bringing better conditions for crossing the Mediterranean—the EU and its member states are working with a sense of urgency that is palpable.
Training the Libyan coastguard is a welcome move if it contributes to saving lives and treating those rescued with humanity and respect. But the question of what happens after they are rescued is key: People are currently taken to detention centers where they are held in inhuman conditions.
Describing such centers, asylum seekers and migrants told me they had been beaten and forced to ask their relatives for money, that sometimes those who could not pay were shot, and that they were hardly fed at all. In addition, the collusion between smugglers and people running some detention centres is no secret.
Absent from the EU plan is what happens to people who fled their homes because of violence or persecution. Many of those arriving in Italy via Libya are in this category, among them Eritreans, Somalis, Sudanese, and people fleeing other countries because it is unsafe for them, often because of their political activities or sexual orientation.
The EU is focused on increasing the number of people returning from Libya to their country of origin, but there does not seem to be any consideration for those who cannot do so safely.
Despite the ongoing chaos and violence in Libya there is an absence—with very few exceptions—of international staff, including those from the EU, the U.N., and humanitarian organizations on the ground. As such, the idea that the situation for migrants and asylum seekers will dramatically improve in the coming months is utterly unrealistic.
One Eritrean man told me that “it’s better to die in the sea than to stay in Libya.” Smugglers had chained him to the ground by the ankles for three days when he was unable to pay the money they demanded. It is little surprise that for people like him, risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean seems like the only option.
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” Haile Selassie
While Europeans targeted men in West Africa, the Arab slave trade primarily targeted the women of East Africa to serve as domestic slaves, wet nannies and sex-slaves in the infamous harems.
This trade trickled over millennia is estimated to have taken more than 10 million African via the Swahili coast to India, Saudi Arabia, China, and Turkey,
The trans-Saharan slave trade commenced late in the 7th century when Abdallah Ben Said, the King of Islamised Egypt, conquered via Jihad the Sudan – “the land of infidels” – and in 652 imposed on Sudanese King Khalidurat a treaty known as Bakht.
One of the clauses of the treaty was the compulsory annual supply by the Sudanese king of hundreds of African slaves to the Muslim king of Egypt. The European trans-Atlantic slave trade took off 10 centuries later, in 1693.
while the trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted for four centuries (1693-1884), the trans-Saharan slave trade continued for 17 centuries (652-1960).
While there is a lot material of the trafficking of African slaves to Europe and the Americas, there is little to nothing about an earlier trade – the sale of African slaves in the Arab Middle East.
One reason for that is that there are very few descendants of African slaves in Arab Middle East (and most are not influential), so there’s no one to fight to keep their memory alive.
Even leading African scholars like East Africa’s own Prof. Ali Mazrui tend to say little about this sale of Africans to Arab Middle East – in his case, because it raises awkward personal questions.
The question then is, why did African slaves perish in the Arab Middle East? One reason is that while in Europe and the Americas African slaves were taken to work in plantations and industries, in the Middle East they were mostly domestic labor.
There were similarities between the slave trades. Some Arab scholars, such as Ibn Khaldun, justified the trans-Saharan slave trade by interpreting some sections of the Koran that ‘authorized’ the enslavement of African ‘infidels’ by Arab slave merchants, the ‘chosen race’.
The perpetuation of African slaves was fundamentally assured by women slaves who were indiscriminately coupled to men without their consent. Some women stolen from Africa were stolen to serve the infamous Arabian harems (exploited as sex-slaves); their children were born to Arab fathers, and thus would serve to purify the week Arabian genetic makeup, as Arabs mostly interbreed within close family members and relatives.
Partly for that reason, the African slaves were castrated. As eunuchs, they couldn’t have sex with their “masters’ wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, and cousins. Some (not all) of their owners had another vested in turning them into eunuchs – the slaves became rounded like women. So in the night the Arab chiefs would be in the embrace of their wives or mistresses, and in between they would be perched on the backs on the eunuchs.
The even more tragic thing about eunuchs, it that to create one, according to some accounts, you needed 20 men. The other 19 perished after castration, from infections and bleeding to death!
Thirdly, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the one to the Middle East included very few women. Thus even if the African slaves in the Arab world weren’t castrated, they would not have been able to reproduce, because it would have been nearly impossible to find a female companion.
Castration of numbers of male slaves by Arab merchants was a prominent feature of the trans-Saharan slave trade.
The castration exercise resulted to widespread of homosexuality as well. But the Arabs noted that black male slaves lack self-control and steadiness of mind and they are overcome by fickleness, foolishness and ignorance.
Castrated male slaves were purchased by rich Arab kings and princes and employed as security agents to protect harems where their wives and concubines were caged. The castration process described in the book of Senegalese historian and anthropologist, Tidiane N’Diaye, “Le Genocide Viole”, is barbaric and inhumane.
The Conspiracy to Destroy Ethiopia: The Role of Arab States
By Tecola Hagos December 24, 2001
Starting with the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Islamic nations of the Middle East have tried to destroy Ethiopia several times. One such challenge that nearly succeeded in such effort was the Ottoman Turks sponsored Ahmed Gragn’s devastating overthrow of the Christian Ethiopian Kingdom of Libna Dengel. It is not clear whether or not Ahmed Gragn saw himself as subject of the Ottoman Turks. I believe he did. The name Ahmed Gragn was a corruption of his real name “Imam Ahmed bin Ibrahim Al Ghazi,” and might suggest that Ahmed Gragn might have originated from Gaza of a Palestinian extraction; furthermore, he was not left-handed either as his Amharized name indicated. [32] Ahmed Gragn was provided with weapons, military personnel et cetera by the Ottoman Turks.[33]
The Turks had failed repeatedly in the past in their effort to occupy the lowlands of Ethiopia up to that period. In fact, Ethiopia never suffered in her entire existence of thousands of years a devastation on the scale Ahmed Gragn caused in his twelve years of rampage, looting and burning of churches, random killing of tens of thousands of Christian men, women, and children. On the other hand, despite the belligerency of some of the Ethiopian emperors and kings, one can say that Ethiopian soldiers usually were engaged in defense of the nation against attacks by armies of foreigners including armies of Moslem nations, or chasing out marauders such as nomadic Bejas mostly from the Sudan attacking settled Christian villages, Monasteries, Churches et cetera in the Northern part of Ethiopia (Eritrea).
In the recent past, soon after Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in 1952, he concentrated his effort to control the Nile Basin, first he aimed to create some super state made up of Ethiopia (Eritrea), Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda, with Egypt in control.[35] The real target was Ethiopia and the Blue Nile. The Arab governments in North Africa and the Middle East have played a crucial and destructive role in the weakening, sabotaging, and finally in the dismantling of Ethiopia.[36] Egypt has a long standing hostility towards Ethiopia from the time of the Pharaohs.[37] The source of the problem is the water of the Blue Nile or “Tikur Abaye” in Ethiopic/Amharic meaning the “big black father” that is the life blood of Egypt and the Sudan as well. Without water and silt taken from Ethiopia by the Blue Nile, Egypt and the Sudan would not have sustained any significant population. For example, in 1875 an ex-Confederate General in the service of the Egyptian Khedive, Ismail (Pasha), wrote in his memoir that the center of Egypt’s fear and interest was the control of the Blue Nile. “The khedive himself, when taxed with the intention of absorbing or annexing Abyssinia in whole or in part, referred to this, when he said that, as nature already was sending him down the best part of Abyssinia, he had no desire for the residue.”
What is remarkable and often overlooked is the fact that Ethiopia never attempted to divert the waters of the Blue Nile or any other water body that flows into the Nile despite repeated provocation by Egypt. Ethiopia had sought only peaceful coexistence with neighboring countries. If Ethiopia goes to war, it was always for the right reasons: defending itself, and its people from foreign aggression. As we shall observe in the following paragraphs, Egyptian antagonism towards Ethiopia never ceased, nor diminished in its intensity during the last fifty years. If at all, it has become more perverse and open.
In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, the most blatant and open attack against Ethiopia was spearheaded by Egypt starting with Ali Mohammed, followed by Ismail Pasha, then Gamal Abdel Nasser and on to the present leader Mubarak. Buotros Ghali, a nominally Coptic Christian, in the best tradition of his family’s service to Moslem leaders of Egypt, has excelled them all because he succeeded in dismembering Ethiopia, weakening its sovereignty, checkmating its development prospect, and insuring the exclusive use of the great bounty of the Blue Nile for Egypt. Gamal Nasser, a megalomaniacal leader, who came into power through a coupe d’etat, through his government controlled Radio Cairo launched the most perverse attack on Haile Selassie’s government trying to instigate the Moslem population of Ethiopia who were living a far more integrated life within Ethiopia than was the case in Egypt with Egyptian Coptic Christians let alone other Christians living in Egypt. Furthermore, WoldeAb Wolde Mariam, the ex-President of the Eritrean Labour Unions, was given a special radio program as part of Radio Cairo to broadcast into Eritrea his vehemently anti-Ethiopia diatribe. Incidentally, WldeAb is from Axum, Tygrie, with a violent hatred of Shoan Amharas that drove him to extreme views. People who claimed far superior indigenous family root to “Eritrea” finally pushed him out of power in the skirmish within the liberation movement. The family of Boutros Ghali, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, were well known for their anti-Ethiopian activities starting from the time of Fuad I with sustained denigrating pieces in newspaper and pamphlets. In particular the control of Asseb and thus the entire Red Sea was one other great motivating factor for Egypt. For Ethiopia having an outlet is not just a political strategy but defines its very existence.
The activities of those Arab nations were not limited to providing airtime for self-styled broadcasters. For Example, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt provided training, weapons, and money to the nascent Eritrean liberation movement, especially after the office of Eritrean Liberation Front, ELF was opened in Cairo in the 1960s. The Arab world interfered in the internal affairs of Ethiopia despite the fact that the Arab world has not been able to solve both its economic and political problems for years. All of the activities of these Arab nations and Pakistan included violated numerous principles of international law, resolutions, conventions, and treaties of the United Nations. In fact, some of these violations would even be considered as violations of “peremptory norms of international law.” Judge Schwebel summarized the principle and norm of international law that “…it is not lawful for a foreign State or movement to intervene in that struggle with force or to provide arms, supplies and other logistical support in the prosecution of armed rebellion.”
Agreements were entered between Britain and Egypt, Egypt and the Sudan allocating the waters of the Nile – the Blue Nile – without regard to the rights of Ethiopia the only source country whose water is being apportioned by third parties.[42] It is to be recalled that 85 % (during the dry seasons) and over 95% (during the rainy seasons) of the water of the Nile that finally reaches the Mediterranean Sea originates from the highlands of Ethiopia. In addition, millions of tons of rich fertile Ethiopian soil is yearly delivered by the Blue Nile to Egypt and the Sudan. There is no question that this bounty of Ethiopia is the center of the problem of all this posturing, and century old effort on the part of Egypt to destroy Ethiopia. This is a clear case of a dog biting the hand that feeds it. Judge Schucking in his dissenting opinion in the Wimbledon Case stated that a treaty signed by two nations that affects the legitimate rights of third parties is invalid in regard to such third parties. Judge Schuking was simply affirming a norm of international law, and his dissention was on other grounds.
What is tragic in all of this is the fact that a number of Ethiopian and Eritrean Moslems did not fully grasp the great morality, sociability, and tolerance of Christian Ethiopians. By contrast, if you consider the utter bigotry and intolerance of Arab leaders and to a great extent ordinary Arabs have for Christians and non-Arabs in their communities, and in neighboring nations, one is left with great dismay and disgust. For example, no Church is to be found in Saudi Arabia, a country of utterly anachronistic political, social, and cultural system, and often with primitive and barbaric practice of penal law.[44] One must not forget the fact that the Arabs were the major (maybe even the only) slavers in that part of the world who benefited from enslaving Africans in huge numbers bringing in death and destruction to millions of Africans for centuries all the way down to our time. [The irony of all that dehumanization resulted, centuries later, in established aristocratic dynasties made up of descendants of children of African Slaves in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait et cetera.]
Even in Egypt, a country presumed to have a more “enlightened” government and population, Coptic Christians are abused, their daughters kidnapped and raped, their sons subdued, disfranchised, economically controlled, and politically oppressed.[45] No one will find in Egypt a comparable quality and depth of freedom of religion as one finds in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Christians in Egypt or even Egyptian Coptes in Egypt do not have a fraction of the freedom enjoyed by Moslems in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Moslems in Ethiopia build Mosques anywhere they please some times they even build Mosques right next to Churches, unheard of event anywhere in the Arab world–just try to build a church next to a Mosque any where in Cairo or Alexandria, Mecca or Medhina, and see what happens. By contrast, Ethiopian Moslems practice their religion openly anywhere in Ethiopia without restriction either from the Ethiopian government or the community. Such is the bounty of a mother country that has been a target for destruction by these Arab nations. It is not a favor to Christian Ethiopians that Moslem Ethiopians should defend Ethiopia against Arab nations, but it is in their own best interest and national duty to do so in order to maintain such a tolerant, bountiful, and great nation prosper and be self sufficient.
No one molests, abuses, kidnaps, or enslaves any Moslem any where in Ethiopia. Other than abusing their own women, turning them into either some form of subhuman reproductive machine or subservient silent victims, most of these Arab nations practice a modern form of slavery on people from other parts of the world who are lured to work in the Middle East. And all other Arab nations such as, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria et cetera are all closed systems with oppressive systems of governments, and specially obnoxious to non-Moslems. The types of religious oppression and ethnic bigotry that exist in these Arab nations may be the worst in the world. Most human rights declarations, resolutions, covenants, and conventions are routinely discarded and violated in such Arab countries. The reports of international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch et cetera are replete with horror stories of religious persecution, oppression, abuse, and human rights violations. Even governments such as that of the United States could not turn a blind eye to the human rights violations and religious persecution of Christians going on in Arab countries.
Ethiopia is like a precious jewel that one ought to defend and protect. For Ethiopian Moslems there is no better society where they can live with their human dignity intact and share in the political, cultural, and economic life of a nation as an integral and important part thereof. Ethiopian Moslems have always lived with relatively better economic strength compared to Christian Ethiopians. Ethiopian Moslems must not think in terms of religious solidarity with Arabs against their own fellow citizens (Ethiopians), when in reality they will also be treated no better than a “slave” in Arab nations because of their color. One must remember that Arabs in general were the first organized slavers and slave owners of African people in history. Millions of Africans suffered in the hands of Arab slavers outside of Africa. Ethiopians were also victims of Arab slavery to this day.
This is where (The League of Arab States) Issaias Afwerki is trying to take the people of “Eritrea” of whom at least 50% are Orthodox Christians sharing the same religious tradition as their brothers and sisters in the rest of Ethiopia. He already has his foot in the door; Eritrea is listed as “Other Countries of Interest/Importance.” Should not Ethiopia be worried, as it always has done through out its thousands of years of history, about the welfare of its Christian family members of the people of Akale Guzi, Hamassen, Serie and else where in “Eritrea”? Of course, it must. After all both Issaias and Meles are passing mirages, what endures is Ethiopia. One must take into account the fact that Issaias is a “kenisha” meaning a protestant, and Meles is an atheist; neither seem to appreciate the great contribution of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to the national unity, sovereignty, and freedom of the people of Ethiopia.
Haile Selassie, Mengistu, and now Meles failed to promote the enviable record of the religious tolerance that exists in Ethiopia. Leaders of Ethiopia’s successive governments were too timid and did not effectively counter the propaganda war waged against the people of Ethiopia and their nation. Those leaders were more interested in brutalizing and violating the rights of Ethiopian citizens more than facing up to real enemies that were openly undermining Ethiopia and attempting to destabilize its governments. Just in the last few months, the government of Saudi Arabia has cracked down on Christians form different countries including some Ethiopians, who live and work in Saudi Arabia, for worshiping in their own private homes. The action of the Saudi government violated numerous human rights conventions, covenants, and resolutions of the United Nations, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nothing has been done by the government of Meles Zenawi about such intolerable action of the government of Saudi Arabia.
Ethiopia is faced with religious movements or movements based on Islamic religion in the Ogden, Bali, Arisi, Afar, and Eritrea bankrolled by oil money from neighboring Arab nations that have become very destructive. In most instances these movements are inadequate, their vision shallow, and their goals anachronistic. Why would anyone from Ethiopia want to join a group of nations whose human rights record is dismal, and whose government structure is dictatorship of the worst kind, and whose national economic wealth is treated as a private estate? Just recently, the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States at an interview with MSN Reporter in connection with the September 11th, catastrophe, when asked about corruption in the Kingdom, (he) answered bluntly and with his usual I-know-it-all arrogance, “So What? We did not invent corruption.” Such are the leaders of the Arab world. All I wrote about in this section is not due to hate or animosity I harbored against Arabs and Egyptians, but to remind all concerned to be aware of the type of neighbors we have and to be on our guard against our historic enemies and those who wish us ill, and in fact, who have caused us a lot of problems. It is the duty of all responsible governments to inform fully their respective citizens all serious dangers. The government of Meles Zenawi is, in fact, engaged in actively suppressing information on the issue of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Western nations in recent times seem to see Ethiopia as a disposable entity. Ethiopia lost considerable prestige and influence with the military takeover of the 1974. The fact that the military dictatorship forged close relationship with the Soviet Union made the situation even worse. Other than the open lust of Italy to colonize Ethiopia, England, France, even Tsarist Russia, all had entertained some colonial fantasy. So-called “friends” of Ethiopia such as England and the United States are wolves disguised as sheep. In both nations racism is still well and alive; it now manifests itself more vividly in their dealings with far off countries such as Ethiopia. Since the Second World War, both the United States and England consistently have abused the hospitality, good will, hope, and friendship of Ethiopia. And now these two countries in collaboration with Arab nations are trying to destroy an ancient and proud people by forcing on them some unjust and illegal demarcation of boundaries that will bottle up over seventy million people and promote violence and conflict in the region for a long time. What the governments of the two nations are doing is particularly insidious considering the fact that England is an island with thousands of miles of coast, and the United States even has incorporated in one of its national songs the fact that it boasts not one coastal territory but two: “from sea to shining sea.”
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 