BIRTUKAN MIDEKSSA THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION PARTY UNITY FOR DEMOCRACY AND JUSTICE (UDJ)formerly(CUDP)HAS BEEN IMPRISONED FOR LIFE

Ms. Bertukan Mideksa, an opposition leader Ethiopians regard as a unifying force of their ethnically-fragmented country, may be sent to Kaliti, a notorious prison where the 34-year-old former judge spent nearly two years before her release last year.

A Clemency Board controlled by the ruling party on Saturday decided that the leader of the opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice Party (UDJP - Andinet) should be arrested for allegedly failing to give “adequate response” to police.

On Sunday, www.abugidainfo.com, a pro-democracy website based in Boston, broke the news that the Clemency Board was after the arrest of Bertukan, the first female leader of a major opposition party in the history of Ethiopia. The government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is incriminating Ms. Bertukan for telling support groups in Europe last November that she and other leaders of the former Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) were released thanks to mediation efforts by a group of prominent elders called shimagle.

The government wants the opposition leader to acknowledge that her release was dependent on taking responsibilities for the violence that followed the 2005 elections, and posting an apology to the government in exchange for clemency.

If the head of state, President Girma Woldegiorgis, approved the Clemency Board's request for the arrest of the opposition leader, Bertukan would end up behind bars, the report that appeared in Amharic on AbugidaInfo warned. Observers say the symbolic head of state has no executive power, and he would approve whatever the Clemency Board passed as a decision.

Police last week gave Bertukan a three-day ultimatum either to recant her remarks or go to jail for life. She said she had committed no wrongdoing.

“The relentless campaign of fear and intimidation targets not only me but also all law-abiding activists,” Bertukan warned in a statement.

Since the last several days, Ms. Bertukan has been the target of vitriolic attacks by the state-run media, while her daily life has been haunted by government security agents who check her movement in four cars.

Bertukan and her party, UDJP enjoy tremendous support at home and abroad.

Despite the threat of arrest in the spy-infested society, UDJP was able to draw over 5,000 enthusiastic supporters to its first ever meeting in Addis recently.

Following news of the government campaign of intimidation, Bertukan was able to draw a swift show of solidarity from the powerful association of UDJP support groups in North America.
The Zenawi regime, which has deliberately fragmented Ethiopia under an apartheid-look-alike system of misrule since 1991, is often denounced by human rights organizations as one of the most ruthless regimes in Africa.

BREAKING NEWS.....
The Ethiopian government IS THREATENING to re-arrest opposition party leader Ms. Birtukan Mideksa within three days if she refuses to publicly disavow statements she made while on a working tour in Europe this November, the government run media of Ethiopia has reported.

Gwynne Dyer: The U.S. and Ethiopia's blunder in Somalia

By Gwynne Dyer
Statesmen ought to have a special prize just for themselves, like fools have the Darwin Awards. The Darwin Awards commemorate very stupid people who did a service to human evolution by accidentally removing themselves from the gene pool. The statesman’s equivalent could be called something like the Cheney-Zenawi Award.
I mention this because the shining stupidity of the US Vice-President and the Ethiopian Prime Minister are on special display this week, as the Ethiopian army prepares to withdraw from Somalia two years after its foredoomed invasion, leaving the country in the hands of precisely the people whom they wanted to eliminate. We need negative role models too, and you couldn’t ask for worse than this pair.
I can’t actually prove that getting Ethiopia to invade Somalia was Dick Cheney’s brainchild, but it smells exactly like a Dick Cheney idea: crude, violent, and barking up entirely the wrong tree. Just like invading Iraq, in fact.
As for Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, he had already distinguished himself by becoming obsessed with the stupidest border war in modern African history. It wasn’t his fault to start with: Ethiopia was attacked out of the blue in 1998 by the insanely aggressive regime in Eritrea, but Ethiopian troops drove the Eritreans back. By the ceasefire in mid-2000, Ethiopia had recovered all the ground it lost at the start.
An international commission found Eritrea guilty of aggression, and another one arbitrated all the disputed stretches of border, granting Ethiopia most of its claims. Both sides said they would accept the rulings—and then Zenawi walked away from the deal. He has been getting ready for another war with Eritrea ever since.
Going to war with Eritrea again would mean defying the United Nations ruling, so Zenawi needed the backing of some great power that could protect him from the UN’s censure. Who better than the United States, which has assiduously ignored and belittled the UN under the Bush administration? Now what could Ethiopia do for the Bush administration in return?
Well, it could invade Somalia. Washington didn’t want to put American troops into Somalia again, having had its nose bloodied in 1993, but it did want to overthrow the civilian regime that was restoring peace in southern Somalia and put its favourite warlord in power instead. Ethiopian troops would do the job just as well.

I think I can see the self-satisfied smirk on Cheney’s face as he closed the deal: another triumph for the subtle master of geopolitics. I can’t make out the look on Zenawi’s face, but maybe he was smiling too. Too clever by half, as the saying goes.

The job was to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts, a mass movement funded by local merchants in Mogadishu who wanted to end the constant robberies and kidnaps that made life impossible in the Somali capital. The UIC mobilised the desire of ordinary Somalis for an end to the violence that had ravaged the country for fifteen years, and the peace they brought to Mogadishu soon spread over most of southern Somalia.
Unfortunately the courts were “Islamic” and they wanted to enforce sharia law, which in Washington’s book made them practically terrorists. They did have a few unsavoury allies, notably an extremist militia called al-Shebab, but they gave people in Mogadishu their first real hope of security and justice. They should not have been destroyed.

The Ethiopian army invaded Somalia in December 2006, drove the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu, and installed Abdullahi Yusuf, the president of the “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) of Somalia, in power. Well, not exactly in power, since the citizens and militias of Mogadishu immediately began attacking the hated Ethiopians, who only controlled whatever was in their gunsights. As for Abdullahi Yusuf, he only controlled a suite of rooms and some telephones.

He was originally chosen as president of the TFG, with ample US support, at a conclave of Somali warlords dignified with the name of “parliament” in Kenya in 2004. He would never have made it back to Mogadishu without the help of the Ethiopian army, and accepting that help made him deeply suspect in the eyes of most Somalis.
The resistance has driven the Ethiopian army out of most of southern Somalia in the past two years, and now the Ethiopians are going home. Abdullahi Yusuf will have to leave too, since he has no supporters except the Ethiopians and the Americans. Which will leave Mogadishu in the hands not of the Union of Islamic Courts, alas, but rather of the extremist militias that have pushed the UIC aside during their struggle against the foreign troops.
It’s almost as perverse as the Bush administration’s decision to eliminate Iran’s two great enemies in the Gulf, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ethiopia and the United States have not only plunged Somalia needlessly back into war. They have made it possible for the nastiest, craziest extremists, people who think it is their duty to kill other Muslims with “un-Islamic” haircuts, to take power in Mogadishu.
The world needs a Cheney-Zenawi Award for Gross Political Stupidity, and I know who the first nominees should be.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book, Climate Wars, has just been published in Canada by Random House.

Birtukan Mideksa questioned by Federal Police

In an effort to silence peaceful opposition in Ethiopia, the Zenawi regime is using all means possible. Today, the chairperson of UDJ party, Judge Birtukan Mideqssa was questioned by the notorious federal police for her speeches she made in Sweden. It looks black mailing Birtukan to make UDJ lenient if not loyal opposition.

When will the Daybreak Come?

WHEN WILL THE DAY BREAK COME???
WHEN WILL BE JUSTICE PREVAIL IN ETHIOPIA??????
Kristin Skare Orgeret
Abstract
Popular musical expressions are important for discourses of citizenship and belonging.
Focusing on popular music and political processes in Ethiopia today, this discussion uses
Tewodros Kassahun aka Teddy Afro’s music as an example. Teddy Afro is a popular voice
challenging the prevailing political discourse in Ethiopia. Several of Afro’s songs have been
banned by the government on radio and television in Ethiopia, but are found to provide
alternative sites of political and cultural resistance to the autocratic regime. Reasons for
censorship are discussed as well as how music can provide alternative sites of resistance.
The findings show that oppressing political expressions may not always kill the ideas, as
they may find alternative arenas in the face of obstacles.
Keywords: freedom of expression, popular culture, censorship, music, public sphere
Introduction
Popular culture may have a central role to play in societies where the mainstream media
do not allow for freedom of expression. The case in point here is Ethiopia, a country
that, throughout the past decades, has seen processes of politics and conflicts in which
individuals find themselves caught up, as they may have little or no say in these developments.
It is a common assumption that the present government – led by the Ethiopian
People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) that seized power through an
armed struggle in 1991 – does not reflect the people’s will or pursue common rights to
any great degree. The current Constitution’s Article 29 protects freedom of expression
without interference, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information,
as well as freedom of artistic creation (in Gebremedhin Simon 2006). Despite these
promising tenets, Ethiopia was recently listed among the ten nations worldwide in
which press freedom has deteriorated the most over the past five years (CPJ 2007).
Restrictions of freedom of the press are also underlined in the US State Department’s
report on human rights practices in Ethiopia (2007). During the political elections in
2005, Ethiopia became the second country in the world (after Turkey) in a ranking of
countries by number of imprisoned journalists (Solomon Gashaw 2007). In 2006 alone,
18 journalists were jailed for their work – several of them faced the possibility of the
death penalty, two foreign journalists were expelled, and the authorities banned eight
newspapers and blocked a number of critical websites. Furthermore, Ethiopia is the
only country in the world where the government has disrupted the possibility to send
and receive SMS messages.
232
Kristin Skare Orgeret
The present discussion will be centred on how popular musical expressions are important
for discourses of citizenship and belonging in Ethiopia today. The main research
question is: What is the value of popular culture in general, and popular music in particular,
as a vehicle for political resistance? Other questions of interest for the discussion
will be: Who has the right to interpret contemporary Ethiopian society and its history?
Who has the right to define reality and impose meanings? What forms of resistance can
popular music offer? What are the locations of and the routes for popular music and
what spaces does it open for transformation and change? What paths can popular music
and the reception of it take in the face of obstacles?
The situation of popular music in contemporary Ethiopia is approached through a
case study of Tewodros Kassahun aka Teddy Afro’s music and the reception of it. The
research questions will be discussed from the perspective of DJs on national radio,
owners of small, independent music shops in Addis Ababa, and a selected number of
listeners through questionnaires, interviews and reception analysis. In an attempt to
understand the space that music occupies in the listeners’ daily lives, central topics are
questions of language, music as opposition, identity, negotiation of meaning and control.
To exemplify how popular music can provide alternative sites of resistance, the article
proposes a close reading of two of Teddy Afro’s songs.
Teddy Afro became an important voice in the national exchange of ideas during the
period around and after the 2005 elections. Whereas national Ethiopian television and
radio refuse to broadcast several of Teddy Afro’s songs and videos, his music nevertheless
plays a vital role in constructing patterns of belonging and in processes of negotiating
identity, as the songs find other ways to reach their public.
Popular Music as Resistance and Field of Repression
Popular music, like popular culture in general, is a concept with a double-layered
meaning owing to the word popular. The first and most commonly used meaning of
‘popular’ views music as part of the culture industry in which popular is defined in terms
of commercial success. In Ethiopia, local popular music has outperformed its imported
rivals in terms of popularity. Whereas newspapers or news talk shows reach mostly an
elite section of the population, popular culture is successful in reaching a wide variety
of viewers and listeners. Second, the word popular literally means ‘of the people’, and
popular music hence can be referred to as music that concerns itself with issues to do
with the existence and survival of ‘the people’. Its production is understood as a social
interactive process in which the musician on one level speaks to ‘the people’ and on
another level speaks of and on behalf of them (Kwaramba 1997).
According to Stuart Hall (1994: 461), the popular can be defined as those forms and
activities in society that have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular
classes, which have become embodied in popular traditions and practices. Popular
culture is defined in relation to the continuing tension, influence and antagonism of
‘the people’ in the dominant culture. The definition treats the domain of cultural forms
as a constantly changing field. Experiences from other countries have also shown how
popular music can be a central part of political struggles. For instance, popular music
played a particularly important role in the resistance movement during the Apartheid
period (1948-1991) of South African history (Shoup 1997).
It should be noted that music has always played an important role in Ethiopian
culture. It is as important as it is diverse. In Ethiopia, music is part of all significant

Somalia: War Crimes Devastate Population

Outside Powers Exacerbate Crisis Through Failed Policies
December 8, 2008(Nairobi) - All parties in the escalating conflict in Somalia have regularly committed war crimes and other serious abuses during the past year that have contributed to the country's humanitarian catastrophe, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch urged the United States, the European Union, and other major international actors to rethink their flawed approaches to the crisis and support efforts to ensure accountability.
The 104-page report, "So Much to Fear: War Crimes and the Devastation of Somalia," describes how the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), the Ethiopian forces that intervened in Somalia to support it and insurgent forces have committed widespread and serious violations of the laws of war. Frequent violations include indiscriminate attacks, killings, rape, use of civilians as human shields, and looting. Since early 2007, the escalating conflict has claimed thousands of civilian lives, displaced more than a million people, and driven out most of the population of Mogadishu, the capital. Increasing attacks on aid workers in the past year have severely limited relief operations and contributed to an emerging humanitarian crisis.